A year ago this week, my Quadrant column, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – written before this Substack launched – asked a question that irritated more people than it persuaded: How could so many thoughtful conservatives, people who once championed limited government and constitutional norms, support a president whose actions so plainly contradicted those principles?

The answer drew on Jonathan Haidt’s research into moral psychology. Trump, the column argued, had tapped into something deeper than policy preference – loyalty, authority, sanctity – the moral foundations conservatives weight more heavily than liberals. Facts that contradicted the tribal narrative would be reinterpreted or dismissed. “Short-term pain for long-term gain,” supporters would say. Or: “He’s playing four-dimensional chess.”

The words were written before the next twelve months had run their test. The “Freedom day” tariffs, cited as the case study, was still unfolding at the time. Markets were plunging. Elon Musk had broken ranks over trade policy. Republican senators were speaking out. The question posed was whether reality could burst the tribal bubble.

The answer, a year on, is: only partially, and only briefly. Republican approval of Trump, which stood at around 90 per cent when the original essay was written, has dipped but never broken – hovering in the mid eighties through the tariff carnage, the Iran war, and everything in between.

The tariff retreat produced no sustained reconsideration. The pattern the essay described – cognitive dissonance resolved through rationalisation, policy failure reframed as a necessary sacrifice – has been confirmed rather than confounded.

What the essay perhaps underestimated was the durability of the tribal bond – even as the material costs mounted. It argued that “reality can occasionally pierce the bubble.” That was too optimistic. Reality has not so much pierced the bubble as bounced off it.

Part of the explanation lies in what conservatives can and cannot see. The war on woke is real, and Trump has fought it with a conviction that the mainstream centre-right lacked for years. Many conservatives can see that front of the battle clearly – the DEI capture of universities, the progressive takeover of institutions, the assault on traditional values.

What they seem unable or unwilling to see are the other dimensions of liberalism’s architecture that Trump is simultaneously dismantling: the rule of law, the separation of powers, free markets uncorrupted by cronyism, civil liberties, and the epistemic institutions on which open democratic debate depends. Nor, it seems, can they see that Trump’s foreign policy adventurism is undermining the very American interests the president’s America First movement claims to champion.

Tribal attention is not merely selective. It is structurally blind to threats that come from the same direction as the victories.

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky adds a sharper edge to this picture. Humans are hard-wired for in-group and out-group distinctions. When tribal identity is activated, moral standards shift. We become more forgiving of our own side’s transgressions – and less able to see them clearly. This is not hypocrisy. It is how the mind works.

Consider the reaction when Trump posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as a Christ-like healer. Conservative Christians recoiled. “There is no context where this is acceptable,” one evangelical activist wrote. “God shall not be mocked,” said another. Within days, the objection had vanished. The sanctity instinct – which Haidt identifies as central to conservative moral psychology – flickered and went dark. When loyalty and sanctity collide, loyalty wins.

The Iran war reveals a related dynamic. Years of rhetoric about invasion, carnage, and civilisational threat have primed supporters to accept extraordinary measures when danger feels acute. A regime-change war launched without congressional authorisation, is reframed not as constitutional overreach but as necessary boldness. When survival seems at stake, constitutional constraint feels like a luxury. Supporters are not abandoning their principles. They are reordering them.

The constitutional picture is darker than the original column suggested, too. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Trump’s tariffs – a 6-3 decision joined by two of his own appointees – was a genuine act of institutional courage.

But the more telling story has been Congress. Republicans who spent decades invoking Madison and the separation of powers against Democratic presidents have found almost nothing to say about a war launched against a country of 93 million people without congressional authorisation.

Committee chairs declined to schedule hearings. Yet Trump’s own former White House counsel, Ty Cobb, publicly suggested the Cabinet should be considering the 25th Amendment. Republican senators expressed unease in private. In public, the silence was deafening. Congress was not simply bypassed on the Iran war. It has stood aside.

The palace is in a worse state than it looked a year ago. But loyalty and authority turn out to be stronger than evidence.

Victor Orbán's defeat in Hungary last Sunday is a reminder that the bubble is not indestructible – it eventually yields when the cost of living inside it becomes too high.

In the meantime, to American conservatives, the emperor’s clothes are still looking fine.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing in Persuasion, Quadrant, Quillette and on Plain Thinking is collected here.

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In 1633, the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo for heresy. His offence was to argue that the Earth moves around the Sun.

The Church was not acting out of malice. It was protecting a politically approved consensus against what was considered to be dangerous nonsense. The theologians and philosophers who condemned Galileo were not fools. They were defending what every educated person knew to be true.

They were also wrong. And being wrong with institutional authority behind you is far more dangerous than being wrong alone.

One of the unfailing truths of human history is that we get things wrong. Not occasionally – routinely. The authorities who silence heretics are not reliably better informed than the heretics they silence – and sometimes they know it. They are simply more powerful.

We do not need to reach back four centuries for examples. When scientists first suggested that Covid-19 might have originated in a laboratory, they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, denied publication, and labelled purveyors of misinformation. Social media platforms removed their posts. Journalists who took the hypothesis seriously were accused of racism. Yet, by 2023, the FBI and the US Department of Energy had assessed it as the most likely origin.

Philosopher Karl Popper warned that scientific knowledge advances not by confirming what we believe but by subjecting our beliefs to the most rigorous challenge available. The platforms that removed posts about the lab leak hypothesis were doing the opposite: treating a testable scientific proposition as too dangerous to test.

The case for free speech begins here. Not with arguments about the right to offend, but with a darker observation: the people who hold the power to suppress are wrong often enough that society cannot afford to let them use it.

Beyond Natural Rights

Most defences of free speech rest on claims about rights. The tradition runs from Milton through Mill to the First Amendment: speech is a natural liberty, prior to government, which the state may not infringe. On this view, the case is closed before it begins – free expression is simply what we are owed as human beings.

This is stirring but ultimately unsatisfying. Rights-based arguments assert rather than argue. They tell us that free speech matters, not why it matters. And when rights conflict – when one person's expression threatens another's life, liberty, or good name – natural rights provide no mechanism for resolution. The assertion meets a counter-assertion, and we are left with a collision of intuitions.

A deeper problem is that contested claims require contested arguments. In a plural society, appeals to natural law persuade only those who already accept the premises. Those who believe community, tradition, or religious authority take precedence will not be moved by invocations of individual liberty. The argument needs firmer ground.

That ground is consequentialist. The case for free speech does not depend on metaphysical commitments about what humans are owed. It depends on what happens – demonstrably, historically, measurably – when societies protect open inquiry versus when they suppress it. The evidence is clear enough that it can persuade even those who reject the philosophical premises of individual rights.

This essay makes that case. Free speech is not defended here as a sacred right. It is defended as an institution that works – and works better than the alternatives.

What Free Speech Enables

The great puzzle of economic history is not why the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe. It is why they did not happen elsewhere.

China had gunpowder, the compass, movable type, and the most sophisticated civil service in the world. Rome built roads, aqueducts, and legal systems that endured for centuries. Mughal India produced architectural and administrative achievements unmatched in their era. The Maya developed writing, astronomy, and mathematics independently of the Old World. If technological sophistication or administrative capacity determined scientific and industrial take-off, any of these civilisations might have got there first.

None did. The economic historian Joel Mokyr argues in A Culture of Growth that the difference was institutional. These civilisations shared a common feature: centralised authority that could enforce orthodoxy. One buyer in the market for ideas. Heterodox views could be suppressed empire-wide. When the Emperor, or the Caliph, or the priesthood decided an idea was dangerous, it was dangerous everywhere.

Europe had the opposite problem: it could not suppress ideas even when it tried. Political fragmentation meant no single authority could enforce orthodoxy continent-wide. When Galileo was silenced in Catholic Italy, his ideas circulated in Protestant Europe. When Spinoza could not publish in one jurisdiction, he found another. Heretical thinkers could always find sanctuary somewhere.

Mokyr calls this the market for ideas. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, a transnational community of thinkers known as the Republic of Letters freely circulated discoveries and theories across borders. No king, no church, no academy could monopolise truth. Ideas competed, were tested, and the best survived. This institutional arrangement – not any inherent European genius – explains why the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions occurred in Europe rather than elsewhere.

Free speech does not guarantee that truth will prevail. What it guarantees is that falsehoods can be challenged. The value is not mystical. It is practical. Open societies develop faster feedback loops. They spot problems sooner. They try more solutions. They abandon failures faster. Silence does not prevent harm. It delays its discovery.

The pattern persists today. School closures during Covid were presented as following the science. Sweden was denounced as reckless for keeping schools open. The evidence now shows catastrophic learning loss, severe mental health damage, and minimal public health benefit – particularly for younger children who were never at serious risk. The people who questioned closures in 2020 were closer to the truth than the people who dismissed them. Wherever institutions have the power to silence critics, errors persist longer than they should.

What Silencing Costs

Suppression harms societies. It also harms the people it silences.

Think of the scientists who endured the suppression of the lab leak hypothesis – and said nothing. The standard account treats this as a failure of inquiry – a missed correction, a delayed discovery. That is true. But something else is also true: the scientists bore a personal cost that no improvement in social outcomes can fully compensate. They were denied the basic human capacity to speak their mind and have their views count.

As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued in Development as Freedom, political freedoms – the freedom to speak, to be heard, to participate in the debates that shape one’s community – are not merely instrumental to human development. They are constitutive of it. A life in which these capacities are foreclosed is a diminished life, regardless of whether the person is materially comfortable. Suppression is not merely an epistemic failure. It is a harm visited on persons.

The distinction matters. Speech restrictions do not only risk producing bad social outcomes. They also silence people: real individuals whose capacity to speak their convictions, contest authority, and participate in public life is curtailed by the law’s reach. The person who learns not to speak has lost something. Something no settlement, no apology, no policy reversal restores.

Sustained suppression does something worse still. It doesn't just silence people – it conditions them. The person who learns not to speak eventually loses the habit of forming thoughts worth saying.

Practical Limits

For all this, free speech has never been absolute. The question is where to draw the line – and how to tell whether the line is drawn well.

The common law developed three categories of speech restriction, each protecting a specific interest against a specific action.

Defamation protects reputation against damaging statements of fact or opinion about an identifiable person. Truth is a complete defence for statements of fact; for opinion, the defence requires only that the opinion be genuinely held. Incitement protects physical safety against speech that directly causes imminent violence. The US Supreme Court drew this line in Brandenburg v. Ohio: abstract advocacy is protected; direct incitement to imminent lawless action is not. Fraud protects economic interests against deliberate deception. The listener relies on a false statement and suffers material loss.

What unites these categories is that they address setbacks to interests – resources, opportunities, capacities – not offence or distress. As legal philosopher Joel Feinberg, one of the leading liberal theorists of the harm principle, observed: offence is a transitory unpleasant state that does not impede interests and is not harm in the relevant sense. The victim is identifiable. The damage is traceable to a false statement or harmful act. Courts adjudicate against objective standards, not subjective feelings. That is why they work – and why liberal democracies spent much of the twentieth century abolishing blasphemy and sedition laws that didn’t.

Modern hate speech laws risk making the same mistake. They treat offence as harm, viewpoints as conduct, and discomfort as danger.

Three problems follow. The first is who decides? Every speech restriction creates a new form of power – the power to define the boundary. That power attracts capture. Once restrictions exist, they are routinely interpreted expansively – from incitement to insult to merely normalising attitudes. They are enforced asymmetrically – the powerful use them against the powerless more often than the reverse.

Former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen has documented case after case of dissidents and minority advocates prosecuted under laws designed to protect them. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance – the body responsible for monitoring hate speech laws across Europe – has warned that these laws risk being used to silence minorities and suppress political opposition, and has expressed concern that vulnerable groups may have been disproportionately prosecuted. The power to define “hate” does not stay where its creators intended.

The second problem is that invisible costs outweigh visible ones. The harm from offensive speech is usually local and visible: a person insulted, a group demeaned. The harm from suppressed speech is diffuse, cumulative, and invisible: the policy error unchallenged, the grievance that festered, the scientist who saw problems with the modelling but knew that saying so publicly would end grant funding and collegial standing.

Surveys consistently find large majorities self-censoring on contested topics. Specific cases reveal the cost: the Rotherham grooming scandal went uninvestigated for years while investigators feared being called racist. Suppression does not produce harmony. It produces brittleness – dissent driven underground, grievances radicalising in echo chambers, trust collapsing when the public sphere feels managed rather than authentic.

The third is that the evidence shows these laws fail. Anti-Defamation League surveys have repeatedly found higher levels of anti-Semitism in most European countries with hate speech laws than in the United States without them. The case most often invoked to justify these laws – Weimar Germany – makes the point even more sharply: it actually demonstrates the opposite. The Nazis were prosecuted repeatedly under group libel laws. They used the courtroom as a propaganda platform. Hitler shouted defiance from the dock, generating headlines that spread his message further than any rally could. The decisive problem was not speech, but the failure to confront violence and lawlessness. Courts punished words while tolerating paramilitary terror.

The pattern is not confined to Weimar. Researchers studying the hate speech conviction of Geert Wilders found that prosecution damaged support for the legal system and democracy among those who broadly shared his views – with effects accumulating across a nine-year panel study. Prosecution of hate speech, the authors concluded, risks damaging the democratic system it is designed to protect.

What does work? Experimental evidence shows that empathy-based counterspeech on social media can reduce hate speech: in a large Twitter field experiment, empathy-based messages made users more likely to delete hate speech and less likely to repeat it – though effect sizes are modest and the most prolific offenders prove harder to reach. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance has likewise concluded that counterspeech and related measures are much more likely to prove effective than relying on criminal sanctions alone.

Engagement works. Suppression backfires.

Revealed Preference

There is a simpler test than academic studies. Where do people go when they can choose?

Freedom House data shows that the vast majority of asylum seekers come from countries rated Not Free or Partly Free. People flee toward societies with robust speech protections, not away from them.

Migration correlates with poverty, of course. But the clearest cases run the other way. After Hong Kong’s National Security Law criminalised political expression in 2020, hundreds of thousands left one of the world’s wealthiest cities for the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia – accepting lower incomes in exchange for the freedom to speak. The economic logic ran in reverse.

The migration patterns of the twenty-first century are an emphatic verdict on which institutional arrangements people actually prefer. The theorists who advocate speech restrictions will never bear the costs of getting it wrong. The migrants who choose free societies are betting their lives and their children’s futures. Revealed preference on this scale is not easily dismissed.

The Question Remains Live Here

This is not abstract. The question remains live here.

After the Christchurch attack, successive Justice Ministers ultimately resisted the pressure to legislate. Kiri Allan made the decisive call in 2022, concluding that the reforms would be “more corrosive than protective.” The current coalition government went further, ruling out hate speech legislation altogether – it is explicit in the coalition agreement.

Then came Bondi. Following the massacre of fifteen Jewish Australians at a Hanukkah celebration in December 2025, Australia passed new hate speech legislation within five weeks. Those laws are already being cited as a model for New Zealand – and a general election later this year could return a Labour government with unfinished business on this issue.

The problem is not that harassment and violence motivated by hatred are trivial – they are not, and the criminal law already addresses them regardless of motivation. The problem is that hate speech laws go further: they target expression, not conduct, and consistently fail that test.

New Zealand faces a particular risk. We are a small society that prizes consensus and deference to expertise – virtues in many contexts, but vices when they suppress the diversity of viewpoint that complex problems require. The pressure to agree can become the power to silence. And enforced consensus does not produce social cohesion. It produces the brittleness that shatters when tested.

The Christchurch attacker was radicalised online, in spaces beyond New Zealand law. Domestic restrictions would not have made New Zealanders any safer.

The Function of Freedom

What, then, is free speech for?

Not for the pleasure of giving offence. Not because all opinions are equally valid. Free speech is the error-correction mechanism of an open society – and something more besides. It is the condition under which people can speak their minds, challenge authority, and participate in the life of their community. Both matter.

Every expansion of human freedom began as heresy. Religious toleration, the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, civil rights for racial minorities – all were championed by people whose speech was considered dangerous by the authorities of their time. We cannot know in advance which of today’s heresies will prove to be tomorrow’s common sense. That is precisely why we cannot afford to let the powerful decide which ideas may be heard.

The case for free speech is not sentimental. It is institutional. Societies that protect open inquiry outperform those that do not – scientifically, economically, and in the dignity they afford their members. The market for ideas is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism that made the modern world.

The confident censor is always certain they are protecting the public good. Galileo’s judges were sure. The Inquisition was sure. The platforms that suppressed the lab leak hypothesis were sure.

The pattern never changes. The powerful are certain, and the heretics are silenced – until, sometimes, the heretics turn out to be right.

An open society is not one that has found the truth. It is one that remains capable of correcting its mistakes. That is what free speech is for.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing in Persuasion, Quadrant and Quillette is collected here.

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Peter Smith asks a fair question. In Trump and the Paradox of American Power, I wrote that I had long favoured taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities – but not like this. Peter wants to know what “not like this” means. What was the alternative? He deserves a straight answer.

But first, a word about his Harry Truman analogy.

Peter invokes the atomic bombing of Japan to frame his challenge. President Truman, he notes, faced two coherent alternatives to the bomb: invade Japan island by island, or negotiate a peace short of unconditional surrender. The existence of those alternatives is what made Truman’s decision a genuine choice rather than mere necessity. By implication, anyone who says “not like this” about Iran must be able to name a comparable alternative – or stay quiet. It is a good analogy. But it does not work in the direction Peter intends.

Apply the same logic to Iran. What were the coherent and comprehensible alternatives available to Trump on 27 February 2026? There were two: continue the diplomacy that was producing results, or pursue strikes confined to nuclear facilities. The first was already delivering. On that very day, Oman’s Foreign Minister announced that a breakthrough had been reached: Iran had agreed in principle never to stockpile enriched uranium and to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Talks were expected to resume on 2 March. The second was surgical strikes on nuclear facilities specifically – precisely the option Israel and America had already demonstrated was achievable when it conducted targeted strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in the Twelve-Day War of June 2025.

Trump chose neither. He launched a full regime-change war against a country of 93 million people while Oman’s mediators were still counting what they believed was a historic diplomatic victory. That is what “not like this” means. It is the distinction between a limited operation with a defined objective and an open-ended war with three shifting justifications – self-defence, non-proliferation, and regime change – none of which shows any signs of producing the outcome it promised.

The Truman analogy is nonetheless instructive in a second way – because of what Truman prepared for. He had a plan for the morning after: MacArthur, the occupation, the reconstruction of a society that had just been devastated. A military decision must answer for what comes next, not only for the objective it sets out to achieve. Trump had no such plan. Indeed, the White House appears not even to have taken the prior step: serious scenario-planning for what would happen if Iran did not follow the script.

The non-proliferation objective – the most compelling justification for action – remains unmet: Iran’s nuclear material has not been accounted for, and the regime, far from collapsing, has elevated Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead Supreme Leader’s son, to his father’s chair. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed four weeks into the conflict, with crude oil above $110 a barrel. And over the weekend, the president issued a 48-hour ultimatum to obliterate Iran’s power plants if the Strait is not reopened – a threat that, if carried out, will plunge 93 million people into darkness and prompt Iranian retaliation against Gulf desalination infrastructure serving tens of millions more.

Iran’s strategy is not to defeat American forces – it cannot. It is to widen the war horizontally, striking Gulf energy infrastructure, drawing in neighbouring states, and multiplying the arenas of cost until Washington is forced to negotiate on Tehran’s terms. It is precisely the logic of Vietnam – an adversary raising the price of staying rather than trying to win. General Westmoreland’s assurances that the light was visible at the end of the tunnel were followed by the Tet Offensive; Trump’s declaration that the operation was “very complete, pretty much” was followed within 48 hours by an ultimatum to destroy Iran’s power grid.

But this is Vietnam with features that make the exits narrower: a closed global energy chokepoint, a regional war already drawing in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, strikes exchanged near Dimona and Natanz, and an Iranian ballistic missile programme that America’s own ambassador to the United Nations warns can now reach much of Europe. Vietnam was a tragedy of geopolitical overreach. This has the potential architecture of something categorically worse.

Peter argues that Iran’s regime is evil, and that evil regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction should be stopped if at all possible. On the first point he is correct, and no serious person disputes it. The regime’s massacre of thousands of protesters in January and February – the stated catalyst for Trump’s ultimatum – was a moral obscenity. But detecting “evil” is not a strategy. It is a description. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were evil, as Peter notes – and they were stopped by evidence, due process, and conviction. The method of stopping evil matters enormously, because methods establish precedents, and precedents outlast the individuals who set them.

Those who dismiss such concerns as Trump Derangement Syndrome might pause to consider that the complaint here is not about Trump’s character but about a specific decision made at a specific moment when a specific diplomatic alternative was actively in play. Disagreeing with one consequential choice is not a syndrome. It is a judgment about evidence.

Here is what the evidence now shows. The non-proliferation goal was real and legitimate – but it was severable from the method. Surgical strikes on nuclear facilities had already been shown to work. The regime’s savagery toward its own people strengthened, rather than weakened, the humanitarian case for a targeted operation with international support.

Instead, the administration launched a regime-change war without congressional authorisation, without consulting its closest ally, Britain, and without a plan for what follows the bombs. For conservatives who claim to revere Madison’s constrained republic rather than Wilson’s executive state, that sequence should be a red flag, not a footnote.

The answer to Peter’s question has been in plain sight since June 2025: targeted strikes on nuclear facilities – with allied consultation, with congressional authorisation, with diplomatic channel kept open rather than discarded, and with an honest account to the American people of what the objective was and what it was not. That is not wishy-washy. It is the difference between a surgeon who removes a tumour and one who operates without diagnosis, anaesthetic, or a plan for the recovery ward.

Four weeks of rising oil prices, a closed strait, a martyr’s son in a martyr’s chair, a regional war spreading across the Gulf, and a 48-hour ultimatum to destroy civilian power infrastructure suggest that the question Peter asks – if not Trump’s way, what? – deserves a better answer than the one currently unfolding.

The voters who sent Trump to Washington to end military adventurism are living inside one.

The alternative was not nothing. It was not like this. To be clear: the alternative does not rule out bombing. It rules out turning a narrow non-proliferation problem into an open-ended bid to remake Iran by force.

This column was first published in Quadrant on 24 March 2026.

On 9 March 1776, a Scottish moral philosopher published the most powerful attack on trade protectionism ever written. Two hundred and fifty years later, the world’s largest economy has returned to the policy his great book was written to dismantle. The U.S. President now justifies tariffs as instruments of national prosperity. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was written to explain why they are not.

But current economic debate suffers from a deeper problem with Adam Smith. He is dismissed as the prophet of greed – the philosopher who licensed selfishness and left the poor to fend for themselves. Two passages above all others have shaped that reputation. The first is the most quoted line in the history of economics:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

The second gave economics its most famous metaphor:

“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Both are genuine Smith – and both have been almost universally misread. The portrait of Smith as a thinker who licensed greed and left the poor to fend for themselves is a caricature. And because it has stuck, the tradition he founded has been easier to dismiss than it deserves.

Smith used the invisible hand phrase exactly three times across his entire published work – a deliberately sparing deployment of a brilliant insight. The doctrine now built in its name – that unregulated self-interest automatically serves the public good – is not Smith’s argument. It is almost the opposite.

When Smith invoked the image, his broader target was the system under which the state granted exclusive trading rights, guild protections, and mercantilist tariffs to favoured interests. The invisible hand was never a licence for greed. It was a claim about what happens when the right conditions are in place – a moral culture of honest dealing, the rule of law, and open competition. Under those conditions, the butcher who wants your custom has to serve you well, not because he is virtuous but because competition leaves him no better option. Self-interest, properly channelled, becomes the engine of prosperity rather than its enemy.

But those conditions do not maintain themselves. States are always tempted to intervene and restrict competition – to grant monopolies, award licences, protect favoured industries. It is an attractive power: it generates revenue, rewards allies, and can always be dressed as the national interest. Once that power exists, self-interest will find a way to capture it – and the cost falls on everyone else. Behind the invisible hand stands a thinker far more interesting, and far more relevant to our present difficulties, than the caricature allows.

The man behind those words had spent twelve years at his desk. He was fifty-two, a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow – not an economist in any modern sense, since the discipline barely existed. Four months before the American colonies declared independence, he published The Wealth of Nations. He had spent those years observing something in the most ordinary transactions that would change how the world thought about prosperity. What he saw was not greed. It was something at once more surprising and more hopeful.

Smith was a systematic moral philosopher who turned his attention to the question of how a society could generate widespread prosperity without collapsing into corruption. That question was not narrowly economic. It was about justice, institutions, incentives, and the conditions under which ordinary human beings could lead decent lives. It was, in short, the questions that still challenges society today – questions that inform the contest between left and right, though neither side acknowledges the debt.

Smith’s answer, stated simply, is this: he did not defend greed. He defended a moral and legal order in which freedom, justice, and competition turn self-interest away from predation and toward general prosperity. That difference – between prosperity and predation – was what Smith spent his career trying to explain. And the explanation depends entirely on institutions.

Half a portrait

Smith’s intellectual project was unified and sequential. His first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, appeared in 1759 – seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations. The Theory is a work of moral philosophy. Its central question is how human beings, who are not angels, manage nevertheless to build moral communities. Smith’s answer turns on what he called the “impartial spectator”: an internalised judge whose approval we seek, and whose imagined perspective allows us to evaluate our own conduct as others might see it. Sympathy – the capacity to enter imaginatively into another person’s situation – is the foundation of moral life. We are social creatures before we are economic ones.

The Wealth of Nations was an extension of that project into political economy. It was not a separate book by a different thinker; it was the next chapter. Smith himself kept revising both works simultaneously until his death in 1790, expanding and refining each in light of the other. The Lectures on Jurisprudence he delivered at Glasgow during the 1760s, now available from his students’ notes, provide the bridge: they show a mind working through a connected account of law, justice, and economic life as a single moral and institutional problem.

The separation of the two books – and the reduction of The Wealth of Nations to a manifesto for unfettered self-interest – came two centuries after Smith’s death. George Stigler, the Nobel laureate Chicago economist, captured something real about Smith’s analytical focus when he claimed that The Wealth of Nations was built “on the granite of self-interest.” Self-interest is indeed central to Smith’s economic mechanism. But the phrase, taken in isolation, invites a reading that sets aside the institutional architecture Smith considered equally foundational – the rule of law, the requirement for robust competition, and the moral culture of honest dealing.

Tyler Cowen, one of the sharpest Smith readers in the classical liberal tradition, has been blunt about the lazy version of this story – the idea that The Wealth of Nations covers the selfish side of human behaviour while the Theory covers the empathetic side. That framing, he argues, is “an attempt to claim a bland centrist middle ground, to snidely distance oneself from capitalism and selfishness, and reduce Smith to a series of empty clichés.” Smith’s portrait of human nature in The Wealth of Nations is rich and multi-dimensional. And in the Theory, the sympathy Smith describes is often partial, local, and self-serving. Neither book is what its reputation suggests.

The moral philosopher the economists forgot

Smith’s impartial spectator – the judge within us that he introduced in the Theory of Moral Sentiments – is not a sentimental add-on to his system; it is structural. The capacity to see ourselves as others see us – to internalise a standard of conduct that is not merely self-serving – is what makes exchange possible in the first place. We trust strangers enough to trade with them because we have internalised norms of honesty and fair dealing. We honour contracts when it would be convenient to break them – when a customer cannot sue, when a supplier could quietly cut quality – because we care about the judgment of an imagined observer. Markets, on Smith’s account, are not mechanisms that bypass our moral lives; they are institutions that work best when our moral lives are functioning. But Smith also understood that competition could discipline behaviour even where virtue was absent – that the right institutional structure rewards honest dealing and punishes fraud without requiring saints. Strip out the institutional framework itself – the sympathy, the reciprocity, the internalised sense of justice, the rule of law – and what remains is not a market. It is a racket.

The same self-interest that drives honest commerce also drives the pursuit of state-granted privilege. That was Smith’s central institutional insight – and the one that made The Wealth of Nations as much a political as an economic treatise. Under competitive markets with the rule of law, self-interest generates productivity, innovation, and rising living standards. Under monopoly and political capture, the identical impulse generates rent-seeking, corruption, and the extraction of wealth from those least able to resist. Smith spends enormous sections of The Wealth of Nations on precisely this contrast: guild restrictions, trading monopolies, mercantilist tariffs – each a case study in what happens when the well-connected rewrite the rules in their own favour. Smith had a name for the governing principle behind it: “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind” – all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.

Smith did not trust the state to manage the economy because he did not trust the state to manage itself. Merchants would capture regulators. Ministers would protect incumbents. The “man of system” – Smith’s phrase for the confident reformer who believes he can arrange society like pieces on a chessboard – would mistake his own interests for the public good. The invisible hand was never a claim that markets regulate themselves without institutional support. It was a warning about what happens when they don’t.

What Smith actually argued

Markets are moral achievements, not moral accidents. Smith’s system of natural liberty works through three elements that reinforce each other: wide individual freedom, the rule of law, and open competition. Remove any one of them and the system does not produce the results Smith predicted. A commercial society of the kind Smith defends channels self-interest into productive activity through competition under the rule of law, and depends on justice, open rivalry, and citizens capable of moral judgment. That is quite different from the claim that greed is good.

Which means the design of institutions determines the direction of self-interest – and this is Smith’s most radical claim, the one that makes him as much a political thinker as an economist. Self-interest is not inherently productive or destructive; it takes its character from the rules under which it operates. The merchant who competes on price and quality in an open market is expressing the same impulse as the merchant who lobbies for a monopoly charter. What differs is not human nature but institutional structure. This is why Smith’s sustained attack on mercantilism – on trading monopolies, guild restrictions, and the conspiracy of manufacturers against the public – is not a digression from his main argument. It is the main argument.

And because institutions are what matter, Smith’s case rests on evidence, not ideology. He was not claiming that free markets were just by definition, or that property rights were natural and therefore inviolable. He was asking which institutional arrangements allow ordinary people to flourish – and answering empirically. Smith came out of the Scottish Enlightenment, a tradition committed to the experimental method as applied to human affairs. His arguments were to be assessed by evidence, not metaphysical decree. Michael Munger of Duke University, writing for the 250th anniversary, puts it precisely: Smith’s system is more robust and effective at coordinating self-interest with the common good than any alternative – and that is an empirical claim, not a philosophical one.

That empirical claim rests, finally, on something no authority can replicate: the price system. This is perhaps Smith’s most enduring analytical insight – one that Friedrich Hayek would later formalise but that Smith saw first. Prices carry information dispersed across millions of individual circumstances that no central planner could ever gather or process. The merchant who adjusts prices in response to a shift in supply transmits knowledge about scarcity, demand, and opportunity to everyone in the market – without anyone directing him, and without anyone else needing to understand why. This spontaneous coordination is what Smith’s system of natural liberty makes possible. It is also what monopoly, regulatory privilege, and political direction destroy – not by making people less virtuous, but by replacing a mechanism that works with one that cannot.

The 250-year test

That empirical claim has now been running for two and a half centuries. The verdict is not subtle.

The great enrichment that followed the spread of liberal institutions – competitive markets, the rule of law, property rights, free exchange – represents the most dramatic improvement in human welfare in recorded history. In 1776, the vast majority of humanity lived on the edge of subsistence. Life expectancy in England was around thirty-five years. Child mortality was catastrophic. Smith’s prediction – that a system of natural liberty would produce prosperity extending to “the lowest ranks of society” – was, by any objective measure, vindicated.

As I argued in Everything Is Not Relative, the natural experiments of the twentieth century provided something close to controlled conditions. East and West Germany shared a language, a culture, a history, and a starting point. They differed in institutional design – in the rules governing competition, property, and political power. Within a generation, the results were visible from space. North and South Korea began from roughly equivalent positions in 1953. Seven decades later, the gap in living standards, life expectancy, and human capability is one of the most dramatic in recorded history. None of this happened in pristine laboratory conditions – history is always entangled with culture, geography, and security. But the consistency of the pattern, repeated across cultures and continents, is precisely what an empirical argument requires. What the experiments tested was not a vague preference for freedom. They tested Smith’s specific institutional claim: that competitive markets under the rule of law produce better outcomes for ordinary people than monopoly, command, and political capture. The answer, delivered at scale and across cultures, was unambiguous. South Koreans do not try to escape north.

Smith would not have been surprised. He would, however, have been troubled by the return of the very pathology he spent his career diagnosing: the fusion of concentrated private interest with state power. The state-granted protections of today’s managed economies – monopoly licences, exclusionary regulations, Trump’s tariff walls – are mercantilism in modern dress, and they carry the same cost Smith identified: ordinary consumers pay. Smith warned about merchants capturing the state. He might not have anticipated a president imposing mercantilism on reluctant merchants instead – though his portrait of the “man of system,” certain he can rearrange society like pieces on a chessboard, comes close. Governments keep finding new ways to re-enact the error.

Why the caricature matters here

New Zealand’s policy conversation has a particular relationship with the Smith caricature. The reforms of the 1980s were labelled “Rogernomics” and then “neoliberalism” – terms that became bywords for markets without morals, efficiency without equity, and the indifference of the powerful to everyone else. The caricature is unfair, and Smith’s own words expose why. Sir Roger Douglas framed his entire programme as the removal of privilege – the import licences, tariff protection, and subsidies that had allowed a select few to enrich themselves at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. That argument runs through his 1993 book Unfinished Business and drew on a recognisably Smithian case. Douglas was not embodying Smith’s “vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” He was dismantling it. By conflating his programme with indifference to the poor, the neoliberalism label made it harder to defend – and harder to have – the debate New Zealand actually needed.

The genuine Smithian position – the one the caricature makes inaccessible – holds that competitive markets, embedded in strong institutions and a culture of honesty and justice, are the most reliable mechanism yet discovered for improving the material and social conditions of ordinary people over time. It accommodates market failures, demands institutional design, and insists that the alternatives, when tested, have done worse. That is a claim about comparative institutional performance: that command, monopoly, and political capture have consistently produced worse outcomes for the people they promised most to help.

That is the argument the greed caricature forecloses. Not a defence of selfishness. Not indifference to the poor. A case, grounded in evidence and two and a half centuries of institutional experiment, that the arrangements Smith described produce better lives for ordinary people than the alternatives his critics have proposed.

The project Smith began

There is one more thing worth recovering from Smith’s actual legacy. His project was not finished. He envisioned a further work on law and government – the missing link between his moral philosophy and his political economy. He never completed it. Shortly before his death in 1790 he ordered most of his unpublished manuscripts destroyed, leaving only fragments and his earlier lectures to show what the project might have become. That a thinker of his stature remained unsatisfied with his own system is not a footnote. It is a clue. Smith knew the institutional question was harder than the mechanism – that the laws and forms of government which keep self-interest productive rather than predatory were the unresolved part of the problem. Others would take it up: Hayek in his Constitution of Liberty, Karl Popper on the open society and the institutions that make error-correction possible. But Smith had seen the problem first. His deepest fear was that self-interest, finding its way to the ear of the state, would turn commerce into something closer to a racket.

What he left behind was not a completed system but a method: empirical, comparative, alert to the difference between what interest groups claim and what institutions actually produce and committed to the proposition that the right question is always what arrangements make human life go best.

That is a better inheritance than the caricature. Two and a half centuries on, Trump’s tariffs are the mercantilist error Smith spent his greatest work dismantling – dressed, as always, as in the national interest. The argument he made then is the argument that needs making now. And it is precisely the kind of argument that a sceptical public – one that has seen both uncritical market triumphalism and well-intentioned central planning fail in their different ways – is most likely to find persuasive.

Smith did not argue that freedom is good because it is natural, or sacred, or the will of God. He argued that the right institutional arrangements – competitive, rule-bound, resistant to capture – produce better lives for ordinary people than the alternatives. The two hundred and fifty years since he made that case have not refuted it. They have run the experiment at a scale he could never have imagined, and returned the same answer.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing in Persuasion, Quadrant and Quillette, is collected here.

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Trump promised the Iranian people their hour of freedom had arrived. Ten days later, the dead Supreme Leader’s son sits in his father’s chair, the Revolutionary Guard is still fighting, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, oil spiked above $100 a barrel and seven Americans are dead. This is what liberation looks like when there is no plan for what follows the bombs. I have long favoured taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities. But not like this.

Consider what happened through the eyes of the movement that elected the President. The America First coalition was forged in revulsion at foreign entanglements. Trump himself called the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake.” He campaigned against regime change, against nation-building, against the arrogance of a Washington establishment that believed American military power could remake the Middle East. In 2011, Trump accused President Obama of planning to start a war with Iran because he had “absolutely no ability to negotiate” and saw conflict as his only path to re-election. Two years later, he warned that attacking Syria without congressional approval would be “a big mistake.” Yet he has now launched a regime-change war against a country of 93 million people, with nuclear material, in the most volatile region on earth, announcing he would be involved in selecting Iran’s next Supreme Leader.

In a month when the administration faced political turbulence at home – from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling to disappointing jobs numbers – the eruption of war inevitably dominated the news cycle. Whether the timing was coincidence or calculation is beside the point. The strategic consequences are what matter.

But this essay is not about Iran, though I will return to it. It is about the foreign policy of a President who has spent a year treating constraints – domestic and international – as obstacles rather than assets. Last month, I examined how that instinct has eroded constitutional constraints at home. This month, I turn to Trump’s exercise of power abroad, where the consequences may prove even more dangerous. In March 2025, I warned in Quadrant that Trump was liquidating the assets that made American geopolitical power effective. This essay examines whether the President’s record vindicates that concern or counters it.

Power, properly understood

The America First narrative is built on a presumption about power – that it flows from dominance, from the willingness to act without apology or restraint. Intimidation is power. Unilateral action is strength. Constraints are weakness. It is an intuitive view. It is also incomplete. Real power is the ability to shape outcomes without having to threaten or coerce every time.

Since 1945, American power rested on something historically unusual: a dominant state that deliberately bound itself with rules, institutions and alliances – not out of weakness, but because self-restraint made its dominance more effective. This was not charity. It was leverage. Dwight Eisenhower called it enlightened self-interest. Arguing for American leadership of NATO in 1951, he made the case not on idealistic grounds but on hard strategic ones: American security depended on European stability, and European stability depended on American commitment. The costs of engagement were real. The costs of withdrawal would be greater. When Washington spoke, it spoke with the weight of a coalition. Adversaries faced not one nation, but a system. Every dollar spent on NATO bought more security than the same dollar spent on unilateral defence.

But the alliance system worked for a deeper reason than efficiency. Countries accepted American leadership not just out of fear but because America stood for something larger – a world where law trumped force, where prosperity came through cooperation, not conquest. America’s moral authority as champion of constitutional democracy gave it diplomatic influence far beyond its military reach.

Trump treats this inheritance as a burden. Alliances become protection rackets. Gratitude is demanded. Loyalty is transactional. Threats are deployed casually – against adversaries, but increasingly against allies as well. That might work for a poker player. It is disastrous for the guarantor of global security.

The destruction of alliance credibility

Trump’s second term opened not with diplomacy but with tariffs. Within days of his inauguration, he imposed sweeping levies on Canada and Mexico – the United States’ closest trading partners and treaty allies – and threatened the same treatment for the European Union. The message to every allied capital was unambiguous: no relationship was exempt, no history of cooperation a shield. Alliance destruction through the customs house had begun.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. A year later, the war grinds on – and Putin has lost none of his leverage.

In February 2025, barely a month into his second term, Trump publicly berated President Zelensky in the Oval Office – demanding gratitude while a war of aggression raged. Six months later, having sought advice from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he met Putin in Anchorage. Putin dismissed his ceasefire proposal without ceremony. Trump returned empty-handed – then praised Putin’s “goodwill” without identifying a single Russian concession. By simply showing up, Trump gave Putin what months of pressure had denied him: the end of diplomatic isolation.

In January this year, Trump threatened Denmark – a founding NATO ally – with tariffs and refused to rule out military force to seize Greenland. Denmark’s defence committee chair responded: “You are the threat. Not them.” When Norway’s prime minister urged de-escalation, Trump’s reply was revealing: he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace” because Norway had failed to give him the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian government does not award the Nobel Prize. But the exchange laid bare the truth: American foreign policy is now hostage to one man’s grievances.

At Davos, Trump launched a “Board of Peace” – naming himself chairman for life, with veto power over all decisions and a billion-dollar entry fee. The membership list told its own story. Those who signed: Hungary, Belarus, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. Those who refused: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway and New Zealand. Australia, to its credit or its embarrassment, is still reviewing the invitation. When Macron declined, Trump threatened 200 per cent tariffs on French wine. Putin offered to pay Russia’s fee from assets frozen by the West. Trump did not comment on the offer. For the first time since 1945, the United States was not proposing to lead a rules-based institution but to replace one with personal rule.

Trump’s defenders reply that he has ended decades of European free-riding, and they have a point. At The Hague summit, NATO allies agreed to reach 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035. NATO’s Secretary General acknowledged at Davos that without Trump, “this would never have happened.” But Reagan’s alliances multiplied American power because allies trusted American leadership. Trump’s coercion produces spending designed to replace it. European governments now speak openly of “strategic autonomy.” In Asia, once-taboo debates about indigenous nuclear weapons have resurfaced in South Korea.

The unravelling of American credibility does not require a dramatic rupture. It requires only that commitments appear revocable. A superpower that must coerce its allies is already paying a premium for its leadership.

Iran: the reckoning

The world may be better off without Khamenei. He presided over a theocratic tyranny that sponsored proxy wars across the region, crushed domestic dissent with extraordinary violence, and drove Iran toward nuclear weapons. The protests that swept more than a hundred Iranian cities in January and February, and the regime’s savage response, demonstrated that this was a government ruling by terror, not consent. The strategic logic was not absurd: intelligence agencies identified a rare window – multiple senior leadership meetings occurring simultaneously – and Iran’s proxy network had already been degraded. If there was ever a moment to strike, this was it.

Nobody watching the operation can doubt American military dominance. The strikes were a display of intelligence, precision and reach that no other power on earth could replicate.

The early results seemed to confirm the neo-conservative instinct: swift decapitation, stunned adversaries, a people told their hour had come. For a moment, the liberation narrative held. It did not hold long. The IRGC has proved more resilient than Venezuela’s broken military. Rather than laying down its arms, it has launched a sustained counteroffensive against Gulf energy infrastructure and American positions across the region. Mojtaba Khamenei was elevated as Supreme Leader within days – the son of the man whose killing was supposed to end the theocracy, elevated precisely because his father’s family had been killed. The polls captured the deflation in real time: 59 per cent of Americans opposed the military action within the first week, and Trump’s approval on Iran – at 36 per cent – was worse than his numbers after the Soleimani strike in 2020. The sugar rush of the opening strikes had met the long hangover of an adversary that had not read the script.

In an earlier essay in this series, I explored the question of when force is legitimate. Iran is its first live test – and a harder one than Venezuela. The regime’s savage crackdown on protesters, with a death toll estimated in the thousands, pushed Iran closer to the threshold of just cause than Venezuela ever did. But Trump did not primarily make a humanitarian case. He made three cases simultaneously – self-defence, nuclear non-proliferation and regime change – shifting between them depending on the audience and the news cycle. He acted without congressional authorisation, without consulting allies and while diplomatic negotiations mediated by Oman were still underway. The shifting justifications and unilateral method undermine whatever legitimate case existed.

But the more critical issue for Americans is what follows. H.R. McMaster, who served as National Security Advisor in Trump’s first term, sees the range of outcomes running from a weakened theocracy that survives to outright civil war. Nearly two weeks into the conflict, with seven Americans dead and Gulf energy infrastructure ablaze, Trump described the operation to a House Republican conference as “a short-term excursion” and told CBS News it was “very complete, pretty much.” American and Israeli officials are more measured but not pessimistic: Central Command reports missile and drone volumes down by more than 80 per cent, and both governments speak of weeks, not months, to complete the operation. But the critical question is not whether the strike delivered tactical gains – it did – but whether those gains are durable enough to justify the costs now compounding against them.

Three historical analogies compete for what happens next. Trump’s supporters reach for Desert Storm – swift, decisive, over. The more honest comparison may be Suez: in 1956, Britain and France achieved every military objective and lost everything else, forced into humiliating retreat by consequences they had not anticipated. Trump may risk the same: a dominant power not knowing its limits, or choosing to ignore them, and discovering too late that winning the battle is not the same as controlling what follows.

But there is a third possibility, darker than Suez. Iran’s strategy is not to defeat the United States militarily – it cannot. It is to widen the conflict horizontally: hitting Gulf energy infrastructure, pressuring allied governments, driving oil prices into triple figures, multiplying the arenas of cost until Washington is forced to negotiate on Tehran’s terms. Every declared victory that proves premature, every “very complete, pretty much” that is followed by another Iranian strike, tightens the trap. Trump wants a hit-and-run. Iran is designing a Vietnam.

The economic cost of the Iran operation is mounting by the hour. Tankers have diverted from the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply ordinarily flows. Brent crude has broken $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022, up roughly 50 per cent since the strikes began. Gasoline is approaching $4 a gallon domestically. Structural damage to Gulf oil fields means the supply shock will outlast the shooting even if the Strait reopens tomorrow. Economists are warning of a fresh bout of 1970s-style stagflation – and the Federal Reserve, with core inflation already above its target for five consecutive years, has limited room to respond. Trump’s reply to questions about the oil spike was that it was “a very small price to pay.”

According to Ukrainian officials, in three days, the United States expended more Patriot missiles than Ukraine has received in total since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 – a fact not lost on Moscow, Beijing, Seoul or Taipei. The rapid consumption of these weapons is a reminder that American military dominance is formidable but not bottomless; industrial capacity to replenish stockpiles lags badly behind the rate at which modern warfare depletes them.

The strikes were sold as a blow against Iranian tyranny. Their most immediate strategic beneficiary may prove to be Vladimir Putin – and not merely because of weapons depletion. Russia is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent its revenues soaring. Within ten days of the bombs falling on Tehran, the Trump administration was weighing whether to ease sanctions on Russian oil – the principal economic lever the West has held against Putin’s war machine since 2022. Whether the full relaxation proceeds remains uncertain, but the fact that it is being contemplated – that the logic of the situation has pushed Washington toward rewarding the Kremlin as a consequence of striking Tehran – tells us something important about how interconnected these threads are. That is leverage transferred – away from America.

Having the strength to destroy is not the same as having the wisdom to build – or the patience to finish – what follows. Oil markets do not stabilise even if American troops leave; they stabilise when there is a functioning government capable of guaranteeing passage through the Strait.

The danger is not one thing. It is two: that America walks away and the world learns what that means – or that America finds it cannot.

Counting the cost

Iran is the most dramatic entry on the ledger. But the costs of Trump’s foreign policy began accumulating long before the bombs fell on Tehran.

Threats, humiliation and war are Trump’s diplomatic weapons. Tariffs are his economic complement – and one with a domestic price his supporters prefer not to count. He insists they are paid by foreigners, revive domestic industry and deliver growth without inflation. Growth has continued. His defenders take victory laps. But macro aggregates obscure incidence. The Kiel Institute analysed 25 million shipments and found Americans pay 96 per cent of tariff costs. The Yale Budget Lab puts the median household cost at $1,400 annually – a regressive tax that hits those who can least afford it hardest. Celebrating equity indices while dismissing cost-of-living pressures is not America First. It is selective accounting.

When the Supreme Court struck down his IEEPA tariffs in February, Trump signed replacements under different statutory authority within hours and resisted refunding the estimated $133 to $175 billion already collected. The tariffs, in one form or another, remain – and so do the costs.

The dollar’s reserve status is often treated as immutable. It is not. With public debt exceeding $36 trillion, a persistent increase of just 25 basis points in borrowing costs adds roughly $90 billion annually to debt-service payments. Stanford researchers found that European investors, who during the 2008 financial crisis willingly accepted lower returns for the safety of holding American debt, now demand higher returns to hold it – a reversal the scholars described as unprecedented. The willingness of the world to subsidise American borrowing is fading. A foreign policy sold as restoring sovereignty risks making Americans more dependent on the patience of bond markets.

The relationship between America First and Chinese power is less straightforward than it appears. Venezuela and Iran have imposed real costs on Beijing – disrupting a client network it spent years building and closing the strait through which much of its oil flows. The deeper consequence, however, runs the other way. China does not need American allies to defect. It merely needs American alliances to fray. When partners hedge, China gains bargaining power in multilateral forums. When coordination weakens, Chinese preferences face less resistance. When the United States withdraws from institutions or treats them with contempt, Beijing fills the vacuum – in trade forums, in technology standards, in the rules that will govern the digital economy for decades. Trump has handed Xi Jinping a gift he could never have won on merit: the fracturing of the West.

The double demonstration

Trump’s strikes on Iran and Venezuela have sent a signal to BRICS countries and China’s other clients: their patrons cannot protect them. But democratic allies have drawn the same lesson in reverse: the American guarantee is only as good as one man’s mood.

Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, warned against tearing down institutions in fits of passion. He knew that what takes centuries to build can be destroyed in months – and that the destroyers always believe they are saving what they ruin. America’s alliance system was not collapsing under its own weight; it was delivering unmatched influence.

America may have looked stronger in the immediate aftermath of the strikes on Iran. Now, the evidence is not so clear – and the costs of being wrong are irreversible.

At home, an unconstrained president trains institutions to stop trying. Abroad, he trains allies and adversaries alike to doubt American promises. The two essays in this series describe the same instinct operating in two domains – and the damage compounds in both.

Great powers do not fall to foreign conquest. They fall when leaders mistake bullying for strategy. The house is the civilisation. Trump is not renovating it. He is removing the load-bearing walls.

The choice facing Americans is not between strength and restraint. It is between power that compounds and power that decays – between an America that leads and an America that pays ever more for ever less.

America First – or America Last?

This essay was originally published in Quadrant on 12 March 2026.

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On 5 February 2026, Donald Trump stood before the National Prayer Breakfast. The room was full of the faithful – pastors, politicians, and conservative leaders who had long believed that America’s renewal required a strong hand. Trump was asked about accusations that he had weaponised the Department of Justice against political opponents. His reply was disarmingly candid. “I don’t,” he said, “but wouldn’t I have a right to?”

The audience laughed. Some applauded.

Trump won more than 77 million votes in 2024. Some of those voters could not stomach another Democratic administration. Some believed Washington needed a genuine shake-up – that the federal bureaucracy had grown beyond democratic control, that activist judges had legislated from the bench, that Congress seemed incapable of restraining either spending or the administrative state it had created. Apart from a core of MAGA ideologues, most wanted reform. Not revolution. Not retribution. Reform.

A year ago, in these pages, I warned that Trump’s methods threatened the very constitutional order that conservatives claim to defend. Critics dismissed the warning as alarmist. American institutions, they insisted, would hold. Last night, in his State of the Union, the president called his first year “a turnaround for the ages.” The ages may yet have their say.

A republic, if you can keep it

Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what form of government the delegates had created. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” One year into Trump’s second term, Franklin’s answer is no longer historical trivia. And the evidence of the past twelve months is not reassuring.

On 7 January 2026, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Seventeen days later, another agent killed Alex Pretti, also 37, an intensive care nurse and also an American citizen. In both cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed exclusive federal jurisdiction and blocked Minnesota state officials from obtaining evidence. Three thousand federal personnel had been deployed to the city. Trump publicly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.

On 12 February, the administration withdrew. After two citizens’ deaths, $203 million in economic damage in a single month, and protests that grew to number 100,000, border czar Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge would end. But the withdrawal was not compelled by courts – it was compelled by political cost. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz had found that federal agents violated nearly 100 court orders in Minnesota. Not one of those orders stopped the operation. What stopped it was the weight of civic resistance that no administration could sustain on the evening news. In a functioning constitutional republic, it should not take 100,000 people on the streets to enforce a court order.

The precise facts of the shootings will be litigated. But the institutional response that preceded it reveals a method. Over twelve months, the administration refined three techniques that explain how a constitutional republic arrives at this point. The first is normalisation – the conversion of the extraordinary into the routine. The second is the discovery that constitutional constraints are voluntary. The third is the weaponisation of law itself.

Normalisation

Trump’s crowning achievement has been converting the constitutionally outrageous into the politically routine. The pace is itself the strategy. More than 228 executive orders. Emergencies declared on the border, in the energy sector, in trade – all on his first day. Asylum rights suspended. Tariffs imposed without congressional approval. Courts struck down several of these actions. But the policies remained in effect during appeals, and new orders arrived before the old ones could be adjudicated. When everything is scandalous, nothing shocks. By the end of 2025, emergency governance had become ordinary governance – not because anyone voted for it, but because the sheer volume of executive action had overwhelmed the capacity of courts, Congress, and the press to respond.

The growth of ICE followed the same logic – and offers the most vivid illustration. A decade ago, the agency’s budget was less than $6 billion. By January 2025, it had crept to $10 billion. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on 4 July 2025, handed ICE $75 billion on top of its base funding. Its projected spending for 2026 – roughly $30 billion – would rank it among the top fifteen military budgets on earth, exceeding that of Italy, Israel, and the Netherlands. It is now larger than all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined.

Personnel doubled in a single year – from 10,000 to 22,000, with a target of 30,000 that would exceed the entire FBI. Training was cut from thirteen weeks to eight to speed deployment. Nearly 33,000 employees from other federal agencies – including close to 40 per cent of Drug Enforcement Administration staff – were quietly redeployed to assist. FBI agents were pulled from counterterrorism to help with immigration raids.

No single step looked like the creation of a domestic army. But that is what normalisation produces: outcomes that would have been unthinkable at the outset, arrived at by increments that seemed unremarkable along the way. For a conservative movement that has spent decades warning about federal overreach – from Ruby Ridge to Waco to the militarisation of police – this should be the most alarming development of all. The federal leviathan the right always feared has arrived. It just wears a different badge. And it answers to one man.

The institutional bluff

Over twelve months, the administration discovered that the architecture of checks and balances rests, in the end, on voluntary compliance. The structure looks solid. It is not.

Federal judges across the country issued injunctions against administration actions. A Washington Post analysis found that in roughly 35 per cent of cases where courts ruled against the administration, agencies delayed, evaded, or simply failed to comply. In Minnesota, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz found systematic non-compliance – orders issued, acknowledged and ignored. Courts can issue orders, but lack the means to enforce them when the executive branch refuses to cooperate. The U.S. Marshals who would enforce contempt proceedings ultimately answer to the president. The bluff was called. The institution kept its form but lost its force.

The same discovery played out across every oversight mechanism the republic possesses. In January 2025, seventeen Inspectors General were fired in a single night – the “Friday Night Massacre.” A federal judge ruled the dismissals “obviously” violated the Inspector General Reform Act but declined to order reinstatement. The administration then defunded the coordinating body for all federal watchdogs.

Independent regulators met the same fate. A February 2025 executive order required the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to submit draft regulations and strategic plans to the White House for approval. “Liaisons” were installed inside them to ensure compliance. Congress had designed these bodies to operate at arm’s length from presidential politics. That arm was amputated.

Not every institution has capitulated. In perhaps the most significant institutional act of resistance since Trump’s inauguration, on 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs in a 6-3 ruling. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by two Trump appointees – Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the president to impose tariffs – a power the Constitution reserves to Congress. The decision was unambiguous. It was also the most significant judicial check on this administration to date.

This matters. Six justices, including three conservatives, reasserted a foundational constitutional principle. The separation of powers is not merely decorative.

But the president’s response was revealing. Within hours, Trump called Justices Gorsuch and Barrett “an embarrassment to their families” and “disloyal to our Constitution.” He then signed an executive order imposing new tariffs under a different statute – the Trade Act 1974. The legal pivot was unremarkable; any administration might seek alternative authorities. What was not unremarkable was a president treating a constitutional ruling as an act of betrayal.

This is the pattern that matters more than any single ruling. Courts, inspectors, regulators, congressional oversight – each turns out to depend on the same fragile assumption: that the president will respect its authority. When that assumption holds, as it did in the tariffs case, the system works. When it does not, as in Minneapolis, the architecture is revealed as decorative. And even when the system succeeds, the response is to attack the institution that delivered the check and treat constitutional rulings as provocations rather than constraints. The beams bear weight only when the executive chooses to let them.

The weaponisation of law

On her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi signed a memo telling Department of Justice lawyers that their job was to “zealously advance, protect and defend the policies of the United States as set by the president.” Any attorney who refused to sign a brief or appear in court on grounds of personal judgment would face discipline or termination. That directive is not a description of overreach. It is a theory of governance – one in which the rule of law becomes rule by law, the legal apparatus redirected rather than dismantled.

The consequences were dramatic. Some 9,000 DOJ employees – approximately eight per cent of the workforce – left the department in a single year, according to Justice Connection, a network of department alumni. Many were career prosecutors who had served under administrations of both parties. As Peter Keisler, a senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department, observed, this was “completely unprecedented in both its scale and scope and underlying motivation.” What remained was not a leaner department. It was a more compliant one.

The department pursued investigations against a growing list of the president’s political opponents: former law-enforcement officials, elected Democrats, sitting members of Congress, even the Federal Reserve Chair. Federal judges threw out cases against James Comey and Letitia James for lack of evidence. Yet the investigations continued. Reuters reported that more than 470 people, organisations, and institutions were targeted for retribution in the administration’s first year – an average of more than one per day.

The system no longer distinguishes between law enforcement and political punishment. When the attorney general defines her role as serving the president rather than the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion becomes presidential discretion. The 470 targets are not a scandal. They are a system.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, he claimed the “right” to use the Justice Department for personal vengeance. The mask, such as it was, had dropped.

Taken individually, each of these actions might be explained, qualified, or defended. Taken together, they form a pattern that no amount of qualification can obscure. The method is not chaos. It is the systematic discovery and exploitation of every weakness in the constitutional order.

This is what I described last as “authoritarianism in all but duration.” The evidence of twelve months does not point in a single direction. The tariffs ruling proves that the constitutional order still has the capacity to say no. Minneapolis proves that when it does not, civic resistance can fill the gap. But the overall trajectory – the volume of constraints tested, the proportion overridden, the systematic response to every check – confirms that the institutions designed to prevent the concentration of power are being weakened faster than they can hold.

The payoff: personal rule for personal gain

Every fired inspector, every subordinated regulator, every ignored court order clears the ground for something. The enrichment record reveals what. When the guardrails fall, self-dealing follows – not as a side effect but as the point.

Consider the Qatar jet. In early 2025, the Qatari government offered Trump a Boeing 747-8 valued at $400 million – a “gift” to the United States, to be used as Air Force One during his term and then transferred to his presidential library foundation. The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent. No consent was sought. Attorney General Bondi declared the arrangement legal under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority. Some Republicans objected – Senator Rand Paul said he “wouldn’t take it”; even Ben Shapiro called it “skeezy” – but the gift proceeded. As I observed in a satirical column in these pages last May, the Qatar jet is less a diplomatic gesture than a masterclass in applied emolument theory.

Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures tell the same story. Days before the inauguration, the Trump family launched a meme coin, $TRUMP, which soared from $6.50 to $73 before crashing – netting the family a reported $148 million. Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, a Trump-linked crypto venture, attracted half a billion dollars from an Emirati-backed firm linked to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – the UAE’s national security adviser and manager of its largest wealth fund. The Wall Street Journal reported that $187 million went directly to Trump family entities. The same Tahnoon was simultaneously lobbying Washington for access to advanced AI chips.

This is not reform. This is the monetisation of captured institutions. And it is enabled by every constraint that has been removed – every Inspector General fired, every regulator subordinated, every congressional check bypassed.

Why this is authoritarian, not merely aggressive

The instinctive defence is that Trump is simply a more forceful president – that he is doing what others lacked the courage to do. This misses a fundamental distinction.

Reform strengthens institutions for successors. What Trump has done is the opposite. He has weakened every constraint that would bind a future president – of any party. A progressive president who wished to weaponise the DOJ, deploy troops to red states, or rule by executive decree would now find the path cleared and the precedents set.

The post-Watergate generation understood this. After Nixon’s abuses, both parties rebuilt the guardrails: independent counsels, Inspector General offices, strengthened congressional oversight, norms of prosecutorial independence. These reforms were not progressive or conservative. They were constitutional. They existed to ensure that no president – of any ideology – could place himself above the law.

Trump has dismantled them in a single year. Not completely. The tariffs ruling demonstrates that the demolition is not yet total. But the direction is unmistakable, and the pace is accelerating.

Conservatism without constitutional restraint ceases to be conservative. It becomes something else entirely: the exercise of power for its own sake, legitimised by popular mandate, unmoored from the principles it claims to serve.

The pattern, not the personality

It is tempting to make this about Trump – his character, his impulses, his evident enjoyment of dominance.

But what matters is not the personality but the structure. Trump has created a system of incentives that rewards loyalty over competence, punishes dissent, and concentrates authority in the executive. That system will outlast him. Precedents, once set, outlive their authors. The officials who learned to ignore court orders will not forget how. The prosecutors who brought political cases will carry that precedent forward. The agencies stripped of independence will not rebuild themselves overnight.

The pattern is familiar from other democracies that have travelled this path. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán captured the judiciary, packed regulatory bodies, and subordinated media – all while holding regular elections and maintaining the formal architecture of democracy. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used emergency powers to purge the civil service and politicise law enforcement – then made the emergency permanent. Neither leader abolished democracy. Both hollowed it out.

Trump is not Orbán or Erdoğan. America is not Hungary or Turkey. But the methods rhyme. Modern authoritarianism does not abolish constitutional forms. It preserves their shape while draining their force. Elections continue. Courts sit. Congress meets. Sometimes those institutions push back – and when they do, the response is to delegitimise the institution and find another route. That is not the system working. That is the system being trained to stop trying.

What is lost

Return to the National Prayer Breakfast. Return to the 77 million who voted for reform.

What did they get? Not a smaller federal state, but a larger and more aggressive one, answerable to one man. Not judges faithful to the Constitution, but a Justice Department that prosecutes the president’s enemies and drops investigations into his friends. Not the end of government overreach, but its perfection – executive power freed from every constraint that once made it tolerable. Not reform, but the monetisation of public office on a scale that would have embarrassed a Gilded Age machine boss.

And at the Prayer Breakfast, something uglier still. An audience of the faithful laughing as the president claimed his “right” to wield the Justice Department as an instrument of personal vengeance. When faith becomes a licence for power rather than a check upon it, both faith and freedom are diminished.

The conservative who voted for Trump wanted the house repaired. What they got was a president who stripped it for parts and sold the fixtures.

Franklin’s republic was designed to prevent exactly this: the concentration of power in a single pair of hands, unbound by law, unrestrained by institutions, answerable to no one. The question is no longer whether American institutions can survive Trump’s presidency. It is whether they can recover the force being drained from them – ruling by ruling, norm by norm, institution by institution – before the damage becomes permanent.

First published in Quadrant, 26 February 2026, as "Taking Liberties."

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If there’s one thing every humanities student learns, it’s that everything is relative. Morality is culturally constructed. Truth is a matter of perspective. Values are power dressed in philosophy. To claim that one political system or way of life is better than another is naïve at best, imperialist at worst.

Except, of course, for that claim itself – which is treated as unquestionable.

This self-refuting orthodoxy has become the West’s intellectual auto-immune disease. In seminar rooms from Auckland to New York, students learn that to judge another culture is to oppress it.

But here’s what the relativists cannot explain: while Western intellectuals insist that no culture or system is superior, the rest of the world votes with its feet. Migration flows are a vast, uncoordinated referendum on institutional quality. And the results are unambiguous. People risk death crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe, not the reverse. Cuban rafts head for Florida, not Venezuela. Before the Berlin Wall rose, over three million East Germans fled west.

This isn’t cultural chauvinism. It’s data. And it suggests that everything isn’t relative after all.

The Relativist Orthodoxy

Modern relativism began with good intentions. The anthropologist Franz Boas, writing in 1887, argued that “civilisation is not something absolute, but... is relative” – that our ideas are true only “so far as our civilisation goes.” Boas and his students championed cultural relativism as a methodological stance: to combat Western ethnocentrism, one should suspend judgment and appreciate other cultures’ values in context. This was a progressive move in its time, undermining scientific racism and colonial presumptions of superiority.

But methodological humility gradually became metaphysical conviction. After the horrors of Nazism – itself built on claims of absolute truth – relativism gained wider popularity as an antidote to dangerous certainty. By mid-century, the American Anthropological Association was cautioning the United Nations that an international human rights declaration might impose Western values on diverse cultures. The very concept of universal rights was suspect.

The post-1960s academic landscape carried relativism to new heights. Postmodernist thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard – attacked the idea of objective knowledge and universal narratives. Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: a sceptical stance toward any overarching truth claims, whether Enlightenment ideals or Marxism. In this view, all knowledge is socially constructed and power-laden. No culture’s beliefs about science, morality, or politics can claim privilege over another’s. “Truth isn’t outside power,” Foucault declared. “Truth is a thing of this world.”

Postcolonial theory added a political charge. Edward Said argued that Western claims to universal knowledge often masked imperial domination. Others urged that non-Western epistemologies are equally valid, and that terms like “development” or “reason” merely encoded Eurocentrism.

By the 1990s, a generation of students had been taught that asserting universal values or objective facts was naïve at best, oppressive at worst. Progress itself became suspect – seen as a narrative the West told about itself. Truth became “truths,” always plural, situated in identity and perspective.

This orthodoxy is now institutionalised. Surveys suggest that 64 percent of American adults – and 83 percent of teenagers – believe truth is relative to each person and situation rather than objective. Among college-age adults, three-quarters embrace moral relativism.

Yet the orthodoxy contains fatal contradictions. The statement “there are no universal truths” purports to be a universal truth. If all truth is relative, then relativism itself is merely one culture-bound opinion – in which case, why should anyone accept it? There is also the tolerance paradox: relativists value tolerance highly, yet pure relativism would require tolerating even the intolerant or the abhorrent. How can one condemn genocide or gender apartheid if no culture’s values can be judged by outsiders?

Perhaps the most potent argument against unqualified relativism is empirical reality. Some institutions demonstrably prevent suffering and allow human flourishing better than others. To refuse to acknowledge this – for fear of being “judgmental” – is not humility. It is moral abdication. And it carries a price: a civilisation that cannot articulate why it is worth defending will not, in the end, be defended.

Migration as Revealed Preference

If relativism were true – if no political system were genuinely superior – we would expect migration flows to be random, or at least symmetrical. They are neither.

The Cold War provided the starkest test. Prior to the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961, as many as four million East Germans – over 20 percent of the population – fled to West Germany. The exodus was so severe that East Germany was haemorrhaging its workforce. The Wall itself was a brutal admission: the communist system could only retain its citizens by force. Between 1961 and 1989, some 5,000 East Germans still managed to escape across the Wall, while another 5,000 were captured and at least 191 were killed trying. The traffic was entirely one-way. Before the Wall fell, nobody walked east.

Cuba tells a similar story. Over decades, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have braved shark-infested waters on makeshift rafts to reach Florida. The 1980 Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 refugees to the United States in a matter of months. In 2022, worsening conditions sparked a new exodus: nearly 200,000 Cubans reached the United States that year alone. The risk of drowning, dehydration, or shark attack did not deter them. The direction is always the same.

The Mediterranean migrant crisis of 2015 saw an estimated 1.3 million people – primarily Syrians, Afghans, and Africans – risk dangerous sea crossings to reach Europe.

Every barrier erected to prevent citizens from leaving in the twentieth century – from the Berlin Wall to the minefields along the Korean border – was built by the unfree side. Liberal democracies build no walls to keep their people in. They don't need to.

Economists confirm what the migration data suggest. People move not only for higher incomes but for safety, rule of law, and freedom. Episodes of democratic backsliding trigger emigration even when economic conditions remain constant – illiberalism itself becomes a push factor. And refugees, when given choices, overwhelmingly head for liberal-democratic states, often bypassing nearer countries to reach more open societies further away.

Cultural relativists may claim all systems are equal, but the migrations of millions tell a different story. Given the freedom to choose, human beings consistently choose freedom.

Human Flourishing and Institutional Quality

The same verdict emerges when we move from border crossings to long-run development. Historical evidence overwhelmingly links the rise of liberal-democratic and market institutions to dramatic improvements in human flourishing.

The natural experiments of divided nations are particularly striking. After World War II, West Germany’s GDP per capita rapidly pulled away from East Germany’s. By the late 1980s, West Germans were roughly twice as prosperous as their Eastern counterparts – despite the two states sharing the same people, the same language, and the same starting point. The divergence was purely institutional.

The Korean Peninsula provides an even starker comparison. South Korea, after decades of market-driven growth and democratisation after 1987, transformed from a war-torn agrarian society into a high-income, technologically advanced nation. North Korea, under totalitarian command, delivered chronic poverty and periodic famine. Today, South Korean GDP per capita is roughly 25 to 30 times that of the North. Life expectancy in the South exceeds the North by more than a decade. Southern children are on average several centimetres taller, thanks to far better nutrition. The North Korean famine of the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands, even as South Korea’s supermarkets overflowed. Satellite images of the peninsula at night tell the story at a glance: the South blazes with light; the North is almost entirely dark.

Economist and Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen observed that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.” Democratic governance prevents famines not through superior benevolence but through feedback: citizens can complain, journalists can report, and governments that fail to act can be replaced. Authoritarian secrecy enables mass starvation.

The pattern holds across continents and cultures. Nearly all countries with very high human development scores are liberal democracies. The bottom ranks are dominated by authoritarian rule, conflict, or command economies. Higher scores on Freedom House political rights indices and Fraser Institute economic freedom indices are consistently associated with better health outcomes and higher incomes. The correlation between liberty and human welfare is not Western projection. It is empirical regularity.

Yet in the seminar rooms where these facts might be examined most rigorously, they are often the hardest to state. Relativism may be the purest example a “luxury belief” – a conviction that costs nothing to hold because the person holding it already lives under the institutions it refuses to defend. The professors who teach that no culture is superior enjoy independent courts, uncensored newspapers, and hospitals practising evidence-based medicine. They deploy logic and evidence to argue that logic and evidence are merely Western ways of knowing. Their students nod, then check their phones – on networks that work because engineers treat physics as universally true. Nobody applies for a transfer to the philosophy department at Pyongyang University. The refugees on the raft have no access to luxury beliefs. For them, the question of which institutions are better is not academic. It is mortal.

The China Complication

The obvious objection is China. If liberal democracy is the key to human flourishing, how has an authoritarian state delivered the most dramatic poverty reduction in history? By World Bank estimates, over 800 million Chinese escaped extreme poverty in the four decades after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – accounting for three-quarters of global poverty reduction in that period. Life expectancy soared from about 62 years in 1978 to 78 by 2020. On these metrics, China represents perhaps the greatest improvement in human welfare in history.

But the most revealing comparisons are not between China today and China before Deng. They are between China and societies that share its cultural inheritance – South Korea and Hong Kong – where similar people, starting poor, made different institutional choices and arrived at very different destinations.

All three began the post-war era impoverished. All three embraced markets. All three drew on Confucian traditions of education, family cohesion, and respect for hierarchy. Only two embraced liberal institutions. Today, South Korea is roughly twice as rich per person as China; Hong Kong nearly three times. Culture did not determine that outcome. Institutions did.

The question is whether markets without democracy can complete the journey. South Korea democratised in the late 1980s at roughly the income level China has reached today – and then crossed into stable, high-income prosperity. Virtually every country that has made that crossing (excluding petro-states) either was already a democracy or became one during the transition. China is testing whether authoritarian capitalism can break the pattern.

Hong Kong offers the reverse experiment. For decades it demonstrated what Chinese society could achieve under British common law and open institutions: one of the richest places on earth. Since Beijing tightened political control after 2020, capital, talent, and young people have begun leaving – the verdict delivered in real time. When China loosened economic controls, Hong Kong-style prosperity followed. When it tightened political control, Hong Kong-style confidence evaporated.

China is not a refutation of liberal universalism but a partial confirmation of it. Same culture. Different institutions. Different outcomes.

Not so relative

To say that liberal democracy is better is not a claim of Western cultural supremacy. It is a claim about consequences – about what actually happens to human beings under different institutional arrangements.

The needs are universal: physical security, material sufficiency, political voice and the credible expectation that one’s children will have at least as good a life as their parents. They need institutions that embed trial and error into governance itself, so that bad policies can be challenged and bad leaders replaced without bloodshed. They need institutions that hold power accountable and that allow individuals to build lives of dignity and meaning. Liberal democracy and market economies, whatever their local variations, have shown an unrivalled capacity to meet those needs.

This does not mean Western countries are perfect, or that non-Western cultures have nothing to offer. It means that the core institutional framework – political freedom, rule of law, economic openness – taps into universal human aspirations. It outperforms alternative systems by revealed preference and by measurable outcomes.

Cultural relativism, for all it has reminded us about humility, cannot obscure these facts. The reflexive relativism of contemporary academia has hindered honest appraisal of why liberal institutions work so well. It has left a civilisation unable to defend its own foundations – even as those foundations continue to attract the world’s migrants, refugees, and strivers.

Everything isn’t relative. Some things are better than others. And in defending liberal democracy as universally preferable – while always improvable – we stand not in ethnocentric hubris but in solidarity with generations of humans who, when free to choose, have chosen freedom.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing in Persuasion, Quadrant and Quillette, is collected here.

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Economic historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Niall Ferguson declares that Donald Trump “won Davos, hands down.”

Writing in The Free Press, Ferguson’s argument runs as follows. European leaders genuinely feared Trump might use military force to annex Greenland. They invoked international law and the rules-based order. Then Trump arrived, delivered his usual improvisational performance, and called the whole thing off. No new tariffs. No military action.

Ferguson’s conclusion: Trump was bluffing all along – “maskirovka” to distract Europeans while his envoys negotiated with Putin over Ukraine. A further reassurance follows: Trump carries out only about half his social media threats. This is “a feature, not a bug” – a sophisticated strategy keeping counterparties uncertain.

Ferguson’s work has shaped my thinking about how liberal institutions flourish or fail. We share philosophical ground – on the importance of individual freedom, property rights and the rule of law. But his sanguine view of Trump’s assault on democratic institutions prompted me to challenge his thinking in an earlier essay for Persuasion. His more recent celebration of Trump’s Davos performance is equally troubling.

Ferguson frames Trump’s performance through the lens of the Melian Dialogue – the famous passage from Thucydides in which Athens tells the small island of Melos that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Ferguson celebrates this as vindication of Trumpian realpolitik. Trump dominated the World Economic Forum, forced European leaders to discuss Greenland instead of substantive policy, and extracted their anxiety before backing down. Victory.

There are several problems with this – beginning with the history Ferguson omits.

Hubris and Nemesis

Athens won at Melos. The Athenians besieged the island, and when the Melians surrendered, they executed the men and enslaved the women and children. “The realists won an emphatic victory,” Ferguson notes approvingly.

What he neglects to mention is what happened next. The Melian massacre occurred in 416 BCE. The very next year, Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition – an act of imperial overreach that destroyed the Athenian fleet and army. Within twelve years of telling Melos that might makes right, Athens had surrendered to Sparta. Its walls were torn down. Its fleet was confiscated. Its democracy was replaced by oligarchy.

Thucydides presented the Melian Dialogue not as a celebration of power politics but as a moral indictment – hubris preceding nemesis. More than that, he used the Dialogue to dramatise the moment when Athens stopped making arguments and simply issued threats. Reasoned discourse gave way to raw power. The parallel to Trump’s negotiating style writes itself.

The professional historian appears to have forgotten his own source material.

The Contradiction with Ferguson’s Own Work

Puzzling, too, is that this enthusiasm for Trumpian “nineteenth‑century” politics sits uneasily with Ferguson’s earlier scholarship. In Colossus, he argued that the United States was already a de facto empire and urged it to shoulder that role responsibly: globalising free markets, the rule of law, and representative government, while sustaining its commitments rather than posturing and retreating. The book warned about imperial myopia, denial, and overstretch – an “empire with an attention deficit disorder” whose colossus had “feet of clay.” Ferguson drew explicit parallels with British decline.

Now the same historian celebrates Trump tearing that order apart. The intellectual trajectory from Colossus to this Davos column is not evolution. It is abandonment.

Domination Is Not Victory

The analytical confusion runs deeper. Conflating domination with victory and intimidation with diplomacy mistakes the nature of power itself.

Trump “owned” Davos by threatening tariffs, mocking allies, and forcing everyone to discuss his demands. This is not statecraft. It is the logic of the playground bully.

The playground bully also “wins” every lunchtime confrontation. Other children hand over their sandwiches. But he has not built alliances, earned loyalty, or created anything durable. He has merely demonstrated willingness to inflict costs. The moment his targets find alternatives – or band together – his power evaporates.

Consider what Trump’s Davos “victory” actually achieved. America already enjoys military access to Greenland. Denmark continues paying for the island’s subsidised inhabitants. The only concrete outcome is that European allies now view the United States as an unpredictable threat rather than a reliable partner.

This is the difference between transactional dominance and strategic success. Trump extracted attention and anxiety. He won the news cycle while degrading the relationships that underpin American security.

Ferguson presents all this as sophisticated strategy. The actual diplomatic communications tell a different story. In the days before Davos, Trump sent Norway’s prime minister a letter complaining that he had been denied the Nobel Peace Prize and therefore no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace.” He questioned Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland because “a boat landed there hundreds of years ago,” adding “we had boats landing there, also.” This is not strategic ambiguity; it is grievance dressed up as statecraft.

Ferguson’s classical framing launders conduct that no previous president of either party would have contemplated.

Why This Matters

American power since 1945 has rested on something historically unusual: a dominant nation that deliberately bound itself with rules and institutions. Call it the Madisonian logic of international order. Just as the Founders understood that domestic liberty required constitutional constraints on power, the architects of the post-war system understood that durable cooperation required the strong to limit themselves. America did not bind itself out of weakness. It bound itself because self-restraint made its power more effective and more legitimate.

Allies provide forward bases, intelligence sharing, burden sharing, and collective legitimacy. When they view America as unreliable, they hedge – building independent capabilities, making side deals with rivals, refusing to coordinate when Washington needs them. This is already happening. European leaders now openly discuss strategic autonomy. Asian allies wonder whether American guarantees mean anything when the president threatens friends and praises dictators.

The dollar’s reserve currency status, favourable borrowing rates, and global investment flows all rest on trust in American institutions and predictability. When America becomes systematically unpredictable, capital seeks stability elsewhere. The privilege is not guaranteed. It must be maintained.

The reassurance that Trump bluffs half the time does not help. Imagine a surgeon who performs unnecessary operations half the time, or a banker who honours contracts at the flip of a coin. Predictability is not weakness. It is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of durable relationships. Individual confrontations may be won while the capacity for sustained cooperation drains away.

The Real Lesson

The History of the Peloponnesian War is a tragedy. Athens begins as the champion of Greek liberty. It builds an empire. It grows arrogant. It treats allies as subjects and neutrals as enemies. It tells Melos that justice is irrelevant between the strong and the weak. And then it destroys itself through imperial overreach, internal division, and the accumulated resentments of those it bullied.

Thucydides wrote his history as “a possession for all time” – a warning about how great powers destroy themselves. The Melian Dialogue is not the lesson. It is the setup. The lesson comes after.

The liberal international order was built by Americans who remembered what the alternative looked like. They had lived through two world wars and understood that unconstrained great-power competition produces catastrophe. The rules they built were not naive idealism. They were hard-won wisdom about how to prevent the strong from destroying themselves along with the weak.

Ferguson knows this history better than most. He helped to teach a generation of readers why hubris, contempt for allies, and impatience with rules are the prelude to decline, not its antidote. The question now is not whether he has misread Thucydides. It is whether conservatives are willing to forget the constitutional and institutional restraints that once made Western power effective and legitimate – and to call that forgetfulness realism.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing is collected here.

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Events in Iran provide a useful lens through which to assess the arguments advanced here. As this revision goes to press, two American carrier strike groups are converging on the Persian Gulf. President Trump has given Iran ten to fifteen days to agree to a nuclear deal – or face consequences. Iran is a harder case than Venezuela, and may even be a justified one. But if intervention is to be in America’s enlightened self‑interest, the conditions must be genuinely met – not manufactured, not accelerated by domestic political need, and not driven by one leader’s unchecked impulse.

“If not military intervention, then what? And when is intervention justified?” Those were the challenges from readers of a recent essay arguing conservatives should not be too quick to praise President Trump’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

My objection was not that Maduro did not deserve his fate – he did. It was that methods matter. The Venezuela operation was unilateral, without congressional authorisation or allied support. Its justification was openly transactional – oil, drugs, the Monroe Doctrine. There was no plan for what follows. The historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, praised Trump as a “nineteenth-century figure” returning to the politics of 1900. But that is not a compliment. The politics of 1900 produced 1914, and then 1945. A rerun with nuclear weapons will be worse.

It is easy to say “not like this.” It is harder to say when intervention is justified – and why.

“If not military intervention, then what? And when is intervention justified?” Those were the challenges from readers of a recent essay arguing conservatives should not be too quick to praise President Trump’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

My objection was not that Maduro did not deserve his fate – he did. It was that methods matter. The Venezuela operation was unilateral, without congressional authorisation or allied support. Its justification was openly transactional – oil, drugs, the Monroe Doctrine. There was no plan for what follows. The historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, praised Trump as a “nineteenth-century figure” returning to the politics of 1900. But that is not a compliment. The politics of 1900 produced 1914, and then 1945. A rerun with nuclear weapons will be worse.

It is easy to say “not like this.” It is harder to say when intervention is justified – and why.

Under international law, the use of force is permitted only in self-defence against armed attack, or with authorisation from the UN Security Council. There is no general right to invade another country – even to protect its civilians from their own government. That prohibition has been violated often enough — from Hungary in 1956 to Crimea in 2014. But a rule that is sometimes broken is not the same as no rule at all. The question is whether, and when, exceptions can be justified.

Trump has made the question urgent. Venezuela was not a one-off. Trump has already warned Cuba to “make a deal before it’s too late.” Colombia has been threatened over drug policy. And European allies now face escalating tariff threats designed to force Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States – with the president linking his demands, in part, to having been denied the Nobel Peace Prize. The “Donroe Doctrine,” as Trump styles it, is the announcement that the Western Hemisphere is America’s sphere of influence, where Washington decides which governments are acceptable and removes those that are not.

This essay attempts an answer. Not a complete theory of humanitarian intervention, but a framework for thinking about the question – one grounded in a single idea that has been missing from the conservative debate.

Enlightened Self-Interest

Implicit in the question of when to intervene is the question of why. The narrow answer is: only when it serves the national interest. Dwight Eisenhower gave a better one when he argued for American leadership of NATO in 1951. He called it ‘enlightened self-interest’ – the recognition that American security depended on European stability, and European stability depended on American commitment. The costs of engagement were real. The costs of withdrawal would be greater.

The key word is enlightened. It has two dimensions. The first is systemic. Narrow self-interest asks: what serves my power now? Enlightened self-interest asks: what sustains the order that serves me over time? That is a genuinely different question, and it yields different answers. A leader acting on narrow self-interest can justify unilateral action whenever it delivers an immediate gain. A leader guided by enlightened self-interest cannot – because unilateral action undermines the system of mutual constraint that serves everyone’s long-term security, including America’s.

The second dimension is moral. The concentric circles of moral obligation do not stop at the border. They thin as they extend outward – from family to community to nation to humanity – but they do not vanish entirely. The case for intervention rests on both pillars: the defence of an international order that serves the security of liberal democracies, and the recognition that human suffering matters – particularly on a mass scale, and especially when it occurs in regions with which those democracies are deeply entangled by history or values.

Enlightened self-interest has limits. It explains why Western democracies intervened in Kosovo, where instability in the Balkans threatened European security, and why they did not act in Rwanda, where the strategic stakes were lower and the concentric circles of moral obligation had thinned. But it does not excuse the result. Eight hundred thousand people died. The obligation had not reached zero – it had merely fallen below the threshold that produced action. Most Western leaders later called Rwanda a failure, not a success. That discomfort is the point. A framework grounded in enlightened self-interest will not demand intervention everywhere. But it should never be comfortable with inaction in the face of genocide. That residual discomfort – the recognition that moral obligation persists even where strategic interests do not compel action – is precisely what distinguishes this account from naked self-interest.

But enlightened self-interest is not naïveté about costs. Modern history offers ample evidence that even well-intentioned interventions can harden resistance, prolong conflict, and impose burdens that far outlast the original justification. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya differ in context and cause, but they share a lesson: once force is used, control over outcomes is quickly lost. The risks of acting fall not only on those intervened against, but on the interveners themselves – and on the order they are trying to protect. That is precisely why prudential thresholds must be high, and why frameworks matter.

Three Conservative Positions – and What Is Missing

Eisenhower was a Republican president and Supreme Allied Commander. But his insight has no obvious heirs in today's conservative landscape. Rather, three positions dominate conservative thinking on military intervention. Yet, measured against the standard of enlightened self-interest, each falls short.

The first is realism. John Mearsheimer and his disciples view humanitarian justifications as window dressing for great-power competition. States pursue interests, not principles. The rules-based order was always a fiction maintained by American hegemony, and now that hegemony is fraying. This diagnosis has force. But realism sees only narrow interests. It does not recognise that maintaining the order is itself an interest – that the system of rules and alliances built after 1945 delivers security returns that no amount of unilateral power can replicate. Nor does it accept that the concentric circles of moral obligation are genuine. For the realist, states act from interest and humanitarian motives are always pretence. Enlightened self-interest disagrees on both counts – and because realism denies both, it has no criteria for the cases where intervention might be necessary.

The second position is neoconservative interventionism. In 1996, William Kristol and Robert Kagan called for a ‘neo-Reaganite foreign policy’ based on ‘benevolent global hegemony.’ American power was good for America and good for the world. The United States should use that power confidently to promote democracy and confront hostile regimes. This vision animated much of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, culminating in Iraq. Neoconservatives grasped something the realists missed: that the liberal order matters and is worth defending. But they offered no limiting principles. Their framework could justify almost anything – and Iraq showed what happens when enthusiasm outruns constraint. Unconstrained interventionism destabilises the very order it claims to defend.

The third position is Trumpian transactionalism. This dispenses with both realist caution and neoconservative idealism. Trump does not pretend to be spreading democracy. He does not invoke humanitarian principles. He simply asserts American power in pursuit of immediate American interests, openly and without apology. Ferguson finds this ‘refreshingly honest’ compared to the hypocrisy of liberal internationalism. But honesty about abandoning principles is not a virtue. Transactionalism is the narrowest possible conception of self-interest – the opposite of Eisenhower’s insight. ‘We intervene when we want to’ is not a framework. It is the absence of one. And it actively dismantles the order that serves American security.

What is missing from this landscape is a classical liberal account – one grounded in enlightened self-interest, that takes seriously both the case for intervention and the case for constraint. Classical liberals are not pacifists. They recognise that force is sometimes necessary to defend the conditions under which free societies can flourish. But they also understand that unconstrained power is dangerous – whether exercised at home or abroad. That is the entire case for limited government, separation of powers, and the rule of law. The same logic applies to the international order.

A Framework for Justified Intervention

The question of when military intervention is justified is not new. The just war tradition runs from Thomas Aquinas through to Michael Walzer. But the starting point for any modern answer is the post-1945 settlement. Under international law, there is no general right to invade another country – even to protect its civilians from their own government.

After the Cold War, atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo exposed the gap between that prohibition and the moral revulsion democracies felt at mass killing. States were intervening anyway – often in ad hoc coalitions and with contested legality – yet without any agreed standard for when force might be justified.

In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty sought to develop a principled exception. The Commission developed what became known as the Responsibility to Protect. R2P was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 and remains part of the international vocabulary.

R2P sets out six criteria: just cause (large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing), right authority (Security Council authorisation or, failing that, General Assembly or regional bodies), right intention (the primary purpose must be to halt suffering), last resort (diplomatic options must be exhausted), proportional means (the scale of intervention must match the objective), and reasonable prospects of success (intervention should not make things worse).

These criteria represent the distilled wisdom of centuries of thinking about the morality of war. They are also, viewed through the lens of enlightened self-interest, intensely practical. Each one serves to protect the international order from exploitation. Just cause prevents adventurism. Right authority prevents sphere-of-influence politics. Proportional means limits escalation. Reasonable prospects guard against the failed states and power vacuums that destabilise entire regions. The criteria are not merely moral aspirations. They are structural protections for the system that keeps democracies safe.

The problem is not the principles but the machinery designed to apply them.

The first problem is institutional. R2P channels intervention through the UN Security Council, which is now paralysed by great-power rivalry. Russia and China will veto anything that resembles Western regime change after the Libya intervention in 2011, which they saw as a bait-and-switch – authorised to protect civilians, used to topple Gaddafi. The Security Council route is blocked, and it is not coming unblocked.

The second problem is political. R2P has been championed primarily by liberal internationalists, wrapped in UN-centric language that alienates conservatives and leaves the centre-right without a framework of its own. If the only vocabulary for justified intervention is the vocabulary of the UN, then those who distrust the UN have no vocabulary at all – and default to either paralysis or raw assertion of power.

What follows is not a rejection of R2P but an adaptation of it – a framework for a world in which the Security Council cannot function as gatekeeper. It keeps what R2P gets right and adjusts what no longer works, grounding each criterion in the logic of enlightened self-interest.

Just cause remains essential. There must be an ongoing atrocity, not merely bad governance. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass atrocities in real time. The intervention aims to stop killing that is happening, not to punish past misrule or secure resources. This is a high threshold – and should be. Plenty of regimes are brutal, corrupt and authoritarian. That does not make them legitimate targets for military action. A low threshold would invite the adventurism that destroys the order. There are slow-motion catastrophes – like Venezuela’s collapse – that inflict enormous suffering but do not meet this threshold. That is precisely why they are not obvious candidates for military intervention.

Right authority needs revision. If the Security Council is blocked, the alternative is not unilateral action but collective action among democracies, arrived at through deliberation. Nineteen NATO members debating for months is different from one president acting on impulse. Collective action constrains adventurism. It forces leaders to justify their plans to sceptical allies. It builds legitimacy and shares burdens. The authority comes not from a UN resolution but from the consent of free states acting together. This is not a loophole. It is what enlightened self-interest looks like in practice – the discipline of persuading others before acting, rather than acting alone and daring others to object. The same logic applies domestically: a president who bypasses Congress on war is doing abroad what those who believe in limited government would never tolerate at home – concentrating power in the executive and escaping the discipline of deliberation.

Right intention asks whether the intervener’s motives are genuinely humanitarian. That matters, but motives are hard to verify. The real work is done by the other criteria – particularly just cause and manifest loss of legitimacy. If those are met, mixed motives are tolerable. If they are not, pure motives cannot save the intervention. What matters for the order is not purity of heart but whether the intervention strengthens or weakens the system of constraints.

Last resort and proportional means remain sound and need no revision.

Reasonable prospects of success should be strengthened into a requirement for a credible plan for what follows. International administration, supervised transition, regional integration as a goal. Regime change as part of a political settlement, not regime change as spectacle. The hardest part of any intervention is not the military operation but the aftermath. Without a plan, you create a vacuum that is often filled by forces worse than what you removed – and a failed intervention damages the order more than no intervention at all. R2P gestures at this with ‘reasonable prospects,’ but the historical record – Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan – suggests the criterion needs teeth.

To these I would add a sixth criterion not explicit in R2P: manifest loss of legitimacy. There should be strong evidence that the regime has lost the consent of its people – stolen elections, mass population flight, systematic repression. This matters because it shapes the prospects for a stable aftermath and distinguishes intervention from conquest. A regime that retains genuine popular support, however distasteful its policies, is a poor candidate for intervention – and removing it would look to the world like exactly the kind of imperial overreach the order was designed to prevent. A regime that rules only by terror and fraud is a different case.

These criteria are an appeal to prudence – to the recognition that even justified ends can be undermined by unjustified means, and that means which undermine the order undermine the security of everyone who depends on it.

What About Everything Short of Force?

None of this implies that democracies are powerless short of military intervention. The tools available – targeted sanctions, Magnitsky laws, financial restrictions, support for secure communications, asylum for dissidents, diplomatic isolation, support for civil society – are not nothing. They are slow. But the comparison should not be with the satisfying speed of a raid. It should be with the decades of patient pressure that eventually brought down the Soviet bloc. That took forty years.

The rules-based order was never designed to topple dictators on demand. It was designed to prevent great-power war and to give smaller states space to develop without being devoured. Regime change was always the hardest case. The honest liberal position may be that some dictators fall only when internal conditions change – and that outside intervention often makes those conditions worse rather than better. Libya is the cautionary tale.

None of this is as satisfying as watching a dictator hauled off in handcuffs. But satisfaction is not the test.

Two Cases

How does the framework apply in practice? Consider two cases: Kosovo in 1999 and Venezuela in 2025.

NATO’s intervention in Kosovo lacked UN Security Council authorisation. Russia would have vetoed any resolution. Critics at the time called it illegal. But examine it against the criteria.

There was an ongoing atrocity. Slobodan Milošević’s forces were engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. Refugees were streaming across borders. Mass graves were being dug. The intervention aimed to stop killing that was happening.

There was multilateral consensus. Nineteen NATO democracies reached a consensus before acting. The decision was collective, not unilateral. Allies shared the burden and the risk.

The justification was principled. NATO explicitly invoked humanitarian grounds. The intervention was framed as protection of civilians, not acquisition of territory or resources.

There was a plan for what followed. Kosovo came under UN administration, then supervised independence, with European integration as the long-term goal. The aftermath was imperfect, but there was a theory of the case.

And the regime had manifestly lost legitimacy. Milošević’s brutality was documented and undeniable.

Kosovo met the criteria. Most in the West supported the intervention despite its lack of UN authorisation. And crucially, because it was multilateral and principled, it strengthened rather than weakened the norms that sustain the order.

Now consider Venezuela. One president acted alone, without congressional authorisation, without allied support, without international mandate. The humanitarian situation was dire – economic collapse, mass emigration, stolen elections – but it fell short of genocide or mass slaughter. By design, the bar here is high. Trump’s justification was openly transactional: oil, drugs, the Monroe Doctrine. There was no plan for what follows beyond Maduro’s removal. Maduro had certainly lost legitimacy – he stole an election, drove a quarter of his population into exile, and crushed all opposition. But that is one criterion out of five. The operation fails on the other four. And because it was unilateral and transactional, it set a precedent that damages the order rather than defending it.

The contrast is not an embarrassing inconsistency. It is the framework working as intended.

Why Constraints Matter

The realist will object: constraints are for the weak. If America has the power to remove a dictator, why not use it? Who cares about frameworks and criteria when the result is one fewer tyrant?

The answer comes from enlightened self-interest itself.

First, the symmetry problem which I explored in that earlier essay. If America claims a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, where it decides which governments are acceptable and removes those that are not, it validates identical claims by other great powers. A precedent of seizing oil and toppling a neighbour in the name of a nineteenth-century doctrine will not be read as an exception; it will be read as a model. Russia gets Eastern Europe. China gets the South China Sea and Taiwan. The rules-based order was built precisely to prevent this – to create a system in which even powerful states are bound by constraints, and smaller states have room to breathe. Dismantling that order does not serve American interests. It serves the interests of those who want a world without rules – and America will not always be the strongest player in such a world.

More fundamentally, those who believe in limited government should understand better than anyone that unconstrained power is dangerous. That is the entire case for constitutionalism, for separation of powers, for the rule of law. The point is not to trust concentrated power even when it is wielded by allies, because power corrupts and precedents outlast the individuals who set them.

The constraints that liberals built after 1945 – the UN Charter, the prohibition on aggressive war, the architecture of alliances and treaties – were not sentimental gestures. They were hard-won lessons from two world wars. They reflected the recognition that a world in which great powers do whatever they can get away with is a world that tends toward catastrophe. They were, in other words, the ultimate expression of enlightened self-interest – the recognition that binding yourself to rules serves you better than reserving the right to break them.

Trump is now dismantling those constraints. His defenders say the old order was hypocritical, inconsistently applied, often ignored. They are right. But the answer to imperfect rules is not no rules at all. The answer is to improve the rules while maintaining the principle that rules matter.

The framework also matters because Venezuela will not be the last case. The question will not be whether regimes are loathsome, but whether the conditions for justified intervention are genuinely met.

Maduro deserved his fate. But ‘he deserved it’ is not a framework. This essay has tried to offer one – grounded in the idea that maintaining the order is itself the interest, that constraints protect the order, and that criteria for intervention are how we distinguish defence of the order from its destruction.

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There was something deeply satisfying about watching Nicolás Maduro being hauled from his palace and deposited in a Brooklyn jail cell.

The man was a monster. Under his rule, Venezuela’s economy contracted by roughly three-quarters – the largest peacetime economic collapse in the Western Hemisphere’s modern history. Nearly eight million Venezuelans fled, more than a quarter of the population he inherited. The country that once boasted Latin America’s highest living standards became a humanitarian catastrophe. In 2024, election observers believe he lost his bid for a third term by more than 30 points. He declared victory anyway.

So, when American special forces extracted him in a surgical operation with minimal casualties, when the dictator who had crushed Venezuelan democracy found himself facing American justice, the temptation was to cheer. One fewer tyrant in the world. What is not to like? Especially when removing Maduro may weaken other regimes that depended on him, unsettle authoritarian governments across the region, and remind America’s adversaries that power can still be used. These are not trivial gains.

But what happened in Caracas on 3 January was not simply a victory over tyranny. It was the clearest demonstration yet that the United States has abandoned the international order it built after 1945, an order designed to prevent great powers from treating smaller nations as objects to be seized, coerced, or remade at will. That order was a liberal achievement, built on the premise that even the strong should be bound by rules. When the leading liberal power abandons it, the system that protects all smaller states, including liberal democracies, begins to unravel.

The Case Against the Liberal Order

An argument now common on the right and among foreign policy realists holds that Venezuela is not a crisis but a correction. The historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, is perhaps the most articulate exponent of this view. He described the Venezuela operation as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 assertion that the Western Hemisphere belongs to America’s sphere of influence. Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary went further, claiming the right to intervene wherever Washington judged a government unstable.

Ferguson characterised Donald Trump as a “nineteenth-century figure” who is “refreshingly honest” about economic motives. Where previous administrations cloaked their interventions in the language of democracy promotion, Trump openly discusses seizing Venezuelan oil. Ferguson finds this candour preferable to liberal hypocrisy.

This argument deserves serious engagement. It appeals to a weariness with liberal internationalism’s failures – from Iraq to Libya to the inability to stop Putin in Ukraine. If the rules-based order cannot deliver results, why maintain the pretence?

Ferguson’s case rests on a comparison. When America has not intervened against leftist regimes in Latin America, he argues, the results have been terrible for a very long time. Cuba has suffered under authoritarian rule for more than six decades. Venezuela endured a quarter century of Chavista misrule. By contrast, Chile under Pinochet, despite its brutality, transitioned to democracy and now boasts the strongest economy in the region. The implication: decisive American action, even when it violates international norms, produces better outcomes than hand-wringing adherence to rules that dictators ignore anyway.

There is a version of this argument with genuine intellectual pedigree. The political scientist John Mearsheimer has spent decades arguing that the liberal international order was always a delusion, “bound to fail” because great powers inevitably seek regional hegemony and because nationalism will always trump liberal universalism. In this framework, the Monroe Doctrine is not imperialism but prudent statecraft. Every great power does the same.

Ferguson and Mearsheimer are serious thinkers, and their arguments cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. But if their vision sounds persuasive, it is worth asking what it actually entails.

The Template Problem

Trump has made clear that Venezuela is not a one-off but a template. In the days since Maduro’s capture, he has threatened Colombia, predicted Cuba’s government would be “next to fall,” renewed his demands for Greenland, and mused about annexing the Panama Canal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned on Sunday that Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” adding: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Senator Lindsey Graham said Cuba’s “days are numbered.” The administration’s National Security Strategy explicitly commits to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

The “Donroe Doctrine,” as Trump styles it, is the announcement that the Western Hemisphere is America’s sphere of influence, where Washington decides which governments are acceptable and removes those that are not.

Consider what this means in practice. Trump has appointed a special envoy for Greenland, the Governor of Louisiana, whose state gave its name to one of America’s largest territorial acquisitions. The envoy has stated openly that his mission is to make Greenland “part of the United States.” Denmark, a NATO ally, has pointed out that it has no intention of selling sovereign territory. Trump’s response has been to refuse to rule out military force. On Monday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that if the United States attacks Greenland, “everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” Greenland’s Prime Minister was blunter: “No more pressure. No more hints. No more fantasies about annexation.”

Greenland is not governed by a dictator. Its 57,000 inhabitants live under Danish constitutional democracy. If America can pressure Denmark into surrendering the island, the justification cannot be removing a tyrant or fighting drugs. It can only be that America wants Greenland’s resources and strategic position, and America is strong enough to take them.

This is where Ferguson’s “refreshing honesty” becomes something darker. What replaces liberal hypocrisy is not honesty. It is the frank assertion that might makes right.

The Symmetry Problem

Here is the difficulty that the new realism must confront. If America is entitled to a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, then by the same logic Russia is entitled to one in Eastern Europe and China is entitled to one in East Asia.

This is not a hypothetical. It is precisely the argument Vladimir Putin made when he seized Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russia, he claimed, was simply doing what great powers do: protecting its near abroad from hostile encroachment.

Mearsheimer, to his credit, is consistent on this point. He has argued for years that the West bears responsibility for the Ukraine war because it failed to respect Russia’s legitimate security interests. This position has made him controversial, but it follows logically from his premises. If spheres of influence are how the world works, then Russia’s sphere is as valid as America’s.

Ferguson cannot have it both ways. He cannot celebrate America’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine while condemning Putin’s assertion of Russian prerogatives in Ukraine. The logic is identical. The only difference is which great power is doing the asserting.

And if spheres of influence become the organising principle of world politics, then Taiwan falls within China’s sphere. So do the South China Sea, the Philippines, and perhaps Japan and South Korea. The entire architecture of American alliances in Asia rests on the premise that China does not get to dominate its neighbours simply because it is the regional power. Abandon that premise and the alliances collapse.

The Donroe Doctrine is an invitation to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to press their own claims with equal vigour. If Washington no longer believes in the rules-based order, why should Beijing or Moscow? And if those rules no longer protect smaller states, those states will hedge accordingly. Some will seek new patrons. Others will seek new capabilities. The lesson drawn from Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for security assurances that later failed, will not be lost on them.

The Historical Record

There is a reason the post-1945 order was built the way it was. The people who built it remembered what came before.

The politics of 1900 that Ferguson invokes with apparent nostalgia were the politics of competing great powers, spheres of influence, and the treatment of war as a normal instrument of statecraft. That world produced 1914. A regional dispute in the Balkans triggered a cascade of great-power commitments that killed more than sixteen million people. The war happened not because anyone wanted it but because the system of alliances and spheres of influence made escalation automatic.

The lesson the survivors drew was that the great-power system was too dangerous to maintain. They built the League of Nations to replace it. It collapsed within two decades, and the world learned the lesson again at the cost of sixty million more lives. And that was before nuclear proliferation.

After 1945, the architects of the post-war order tried to build something better. The United Nations Charter prohibits aggressive war. NATO and other alliance systems were designed not to carve up spheres of influence but to deter aggression through collective commitment. These were liberal achievements in the deepest sense: institutions built on the premise that even powerful nations should be bound by rules, and that smaller nations have a right to exist free from domination by their larger neighbours. The system was imperfect, often hypocritical, and frequently violated. But it rested on a principle: that the strong should not simply devour the weak.

The principle worked. As Steven Pinker and others have documented, the post-1945 era produced the longest stretch without great-power war in modern history. Deaths from interstate conflict fell by more than ninety per cent compared with the first half of the twentieth century. The number of democracies expanded dramatically. Global poverty declined faster than in any previous period. These gains were not automatic. They rested on institutions, alliances, and norms that constrained the strong and protected the weak. The system was far from perfect. But it delivered results that the politics of 1900 never could.

Trump’s Venezuela operation violated every element of this framework. He acted without congressional authorisation, without UN sanction, without consulting allies, and without any recognised legal basis. His Secretary of State called it a “law enforcement operation,” a justification so thin that it invites any future president to transform any war into an arrest.

Amnesia as Enabler

As David French observed, the ethics of restraint in warfare faces two corrosive forces: raw power and historical amnesia. He is right about both. But his concern points to a danger that extends beyond any single military action.

Restraint is easier to justify when people remember what unrestrained great-power competition actually produces. The generation that built the United Nations and NATO had lived through two world wars. They built the rules-based order not out of naive idealism but out of hard-won understanding that the alternative was worse.

We are now governed by people with no such memory. The catastrophes of the early twentieth century are historical abstractions, material for nostalgic invocations of the “politics of 1900” rather than warnings about where those politics led. This is a strange amnesia for Ferguson in particular. His own books – especially The Pity of War and Colossus – anatomise how great-power competition and imperial overreach produce catastrophe. In an earlier essay I challenged his sanguine view of Trump’s assault on American democratic institutions. I share substantial philosophical ground with Ferguson: a commitment to liberal democracy, individual freedom, and the rule of law. Which makes his enthusiasm for the “politics of 1900” all the more puzzling.

The danger is not that Trump will start a world war next week. It is that he is reconstructing a system in which world wars become possible again. He is not building a new Concert of Europe to manage great-power competition. He is simply demolishing the old structure and asserting American dominance in the rubble. Venezuela is the proof of concept: quick, successful, satisfying. The template is now established. The costs are not yet visible. But the costs of the pre-1914 system were not visible in 1900 either.

Resisting Temptation

Defenders of liberal democracy must resist the temptation to celebrate Maduro’s removal. Not because he did not deserve it. He did. Not because the operation failed. It succeeded. But because methods matter. Methods become precedents. Precedents become templates. And templates become systems.

The rules-based international order was built by people who understood that even flawed rules are better than no rules at all. It was built by people who remembered what happens when great powers compete without constraint.

The question is not whether Maduro deserved his fate. The question is what kind of world we are building when we cheer the method that delivered it.

This column first appeared in Quadrant on 10 January 2026.

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Last month, Dame Anne Salmond issued a public challenge to the very idea of reason – the commitment to shared standards of inquiry that has delivered unprecedented human flourishing over the past three centuries.

Salmond is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated public intellectuals. She was writing in Newsroom on 18 November – the same day legislation requiring universities to protect open debate and remain “institutionally neutral” received royal assent. Salmond opposes the reform. For her, neutrality is a fiction: there is no common ground – only competing worldviews.

Salmond’s argument is stark: what she calls “universal reason” – the idea that claims can be judged using common standards of evidence and logic – does not exist. Different cultures, she says, see the world through incompatible lenses – all with their own “ways of knowing.” And anyone who claims otherwise is exhibiting closed-minded arrogance masquerading as openness.

Salmond’s is an attractive position. It sounds inclusive, modest and humane. It invokes cultural openness and rejects intellectual arrogance. But it is also profoundly wrong. And when such ideas gain institutional power, the consequences are serious – as New Zealand’s universities have demonstrated.

How New Zealand’s universities drifted from openness

The ideas Salmond champions – that knowledge is inseparable from identity, that marginalised perspectives have privileged access to truth, and that neutrality is oppressive – have reshaped Western universities over the past three decades.

Starting in American universities during the 1990s and 2000s, the ideas became institutionalised practices. Curricula shifted toward “lived experience,” diversity statements became hiring prerequisites, and an expanding bureaucracy began policing speech. What began as argument became policy. And what became policy soon shaped careers.

The shift accelerated after 2020. Following George Floyd’s death, DEI bureaucracies expanded across many American campuses, enforcing new orthodoxies on race, gender, and colonialism.

The bubble burst in late 2023. After Hamas’s October 7 attack, Harvard President Claudine Gay’s legalistic congressional testimony about students’ calls for genocide drew bipartisan condemnation. When Gay resigned on 2 January 2024, the costs of institutional capture had become undeniable.

By May, Harvard and Stanford adopted institutional neutrality policies based on the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report. This holds that a university’s mission is knowledge, not political advocacy. Over 100 institutions followed their lead.

Trump’s election initially appeared to reinforce this voluntary reform movement. But, as I argued in Quadrant earlier this year, his administration simply replaced one form of institutional capture with another.

Trump aside, New Zealand’s experience has followed a similar pattern – perhaps without the furore, but with the same logic. In 2018, Massey University Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas cancelled a student event featuring former National leader Don Brash. In leaked emails, Thomas called Brash’s views “dangerously close to hate speech.” In 2019, AUT cancelled a Tiananmen Square commemoration following a complaint from the Chinese Vice-Consul-General.

But the consequences run deeper than deplatformed speakers. In 2021, the Royal Society investigated University of Auckland academics over a letter to The Listener defending science against being treated as “just another way of knowing,” retreating only after international backlash.

In 2025, Auckland University made courses including Te Ao Māori compulsory for all first-year students. Staff and students objected that the courses were politically loaded and irrelevant to their disciplines. After one semester, the Senate recommended that they be made voluntary, but the courses remain compulsory for all professional degrees.

The New Zealand Initiative’s 2024 report Unpopular Opinions shows how pervasive the chill has become. Half of academic respondents felt unfree to discuss colonialism; more than forty percent felt unable to question accepted views on sex and gender. At the University of Auckland, only 49 percent of staff agreed they could “respectfully voice their views without fear of any negative impact.”

As one respondent put it: “The strategy for many academics is to voice no position unless it is conformist.” When this becomes normal, a university stops being a place where arguments are tested – and becomes a place where they are managed.

New Zealand’s legislative response

The National-led coalition government responded with legislation. Section 267 of the Education and Training Act 2020 already guaranteed individual academics “the freedom… to question, and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions.”

However, universities had been ignoring these obligations. The Education and Training Amendment Act 2025 (No. 2) tries to address this gap between law and practice. Passed in November 2025, it requires university councils to adopt explicit freedom-of-expression statements (s 281A), establish complaints procedures for breaches of academic freedom (s 281B), and, crucially, to refrain from taking institutional positions “on matters that do not directly concern their role or functions” (s 281A(2)(d)). In other words, the Act supplements the existing protections in section 267 by adding institutional neutrality and procedural accountability.

In legislating for institutional neutrality, New Zealand has chosen a middle path between voluntary reform – which has proved toothless – and the risk of executive overreach.

Just how effective this prohibition will prove remains to be tested – the proviso allowing positions on matters that “directly concern their role or functions” leaves considerable room for interpretation. But the provision sends a clear signal: universities are to be forums for contested ideas, not advocates for them.

The debate surrounding the Act’s passage was fierce. The Free Speech Union welcomed the Act’s requirements for institutional neutrality and explicit protection for dissenting scholars.

Salmond disagreed. In her Newsroom column, she argued that these reforms rested on a narrow, culturally specific idea of “universal reason” and risked suppressing alternative ways of knowing. Her critique gave philosophical voice to the resistance, casting the defence of academic freedom itself as an attempt to impose a dominant worldview.

What Salmond is really arguing

Salmond’s case rests on three explicit claims.

First, she denies there is any such thing as universal reason. As she puts it, “there is no such thing as a single ‘universal reason’ to be accepted into education or society.” From this perspective, every culture views the world through its own irreconcilable lens, rendering it impossible to establish shared standards for evaluating knowledge.

Second, she argues that appeals to neutrality mask the dominance of a particular worldview. “Universal reason,” she writes, “suggests there is only one right way to think.” What looks like a shared method of inquiry is, she argues, an attempt to impose a culturally specific way of knowing.

Third, she claims that defenders of academic freedom apply free speech selectively. The FSU and “fellow travellers,” she writes, show a “fixed belief in the virtue of their own convictions,” while claiming to defend open inquiry. This, she suggests, forecloses the very humility they demand of others.

Her position draws on three strands of contemporary philosophy.

The first is critical theory, developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that Enlightenment reason had been corrupted into a tool of domination. The second is postmodernism, associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, which goes further, claiming there are no neutral, universal standards – only competing cultural discourses.

The third strand is standpoint epistemology, developed by feminist theorists such as Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins. They claim that marginalised groups have privileged access to truth through lived experience, and that their knowledge cannot be grasped by outsiders.

Salmond blends all three. From critical theory, she inherits the suspicion that free speech is domination. From postmodernism, the denial of shared standards. From standpoint epistemology, the idea that cultural perspectives produce truths inaccessible to outsiders.

The outcome of these strands is Salmond condemning closed minds while insisting that universities adopt her epistemological framework as orthodoxy. The irony is perfect: she demands intellectual openness through philosophical closure.

But there is a more fundamental problem with these ideas. And it is not that they are ironic. It is that they collapse when applied.

Why Salmond’s epistemology collapses

When defenders of academic freedom invoke what Salmond calls “universal reason,” they are not claiming a single worldview holds across all cultures. They are defending shared standards of evidence and argument – including the scientific method – that allow any culture to test its claims and learn from others.

When physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a postmodernist journal in 1996 with a paper of deliberate nonsense, he demonstrated that without such standards, discourse cannot distinguish sense from gibberish. The point is easiest to see through everyday examples.

Consider aircraft maintenance. A jet engine obeys the same physical laws regardless of who designed it or services it. When engineers inspect a turbine blade, they are not practising a “Western way of knowing.” They are applying universal principles of physics and materials science.

The same applies in medicine. Cardiologists reading an ECG are not relying on a cultural worldview. They are interpreting electrical signals produced by the human heart – signals which behave the same in Oslo, Lagos or Wellington. The cultural meaning of illness varies, but the biochemistry does not.

In engineering, bridges remain standing due to their tensile strength and effective load distribution, not due to any cosmological belief.

In law, courts evaluate evidence according to standards of logic and credibility, as justice requires stable criteria.

None of this denies cultural insight. It simply shows that the world pushes back. Some claims can be tested. Some explanations outperform others. The tools we use to discover those differences – reason, evidence, criticism – are not cultural impositions. They are the means by which cultures exchange knowledge and learn from one another.

This is why Salmond’s postmodern relativism collapses under its own weight. If all knowledge is culturally bounded, then her argument has no authority outside her cultural frame. If reasoning is merely constructed, then her invitation to “openness” offers no reason to accept it. And if disagreement is arrogance, she is doing what she condemns.

Salmond attempts to soften her position by affirming that “knowledge claims should be based on rigorous research and tested against evidence by those with relevant expertise.”

This sounds reasonable. But it contradicts her central claim that no shared standards for evaluating knowledge exist. Terms like “rigorous,” “evidence,” and “expertise” presuppose precisely the universal criteria she rejects. Her argument relies on the very evaluative framework it denies. If evidence and rigour matter, then there are shared standards. And if there are shared standards, her critique of “universal reason” collapses.

These contradictions might be harmless in a philosophy seminar. But when they shape university governance, the consequences are real.

Consider again Auckland University’s now partially abandoned compulsory course. If all frameworks are equally valid “ways of knowing,” on what grounds could one be mandated over others?

The claimed answer draws on standpoint epistemology. Because Western knowledge has historically dominated, proponents argue that mandating indigenous perspectives is not imposing a worldview but correcting an imbalance. Marginalised ways of knowing deserve institutional priority precisely because they have been marginalised.

But this deepens the contradiction. Claims about historical injustice and the need for correction are themselves knowledge claims. They require the very evaluative standards – evidence, argument, shared criteria – that Salmond’s framework denies to critics. The justification for compulsion relies on tools the framework has delegitimised.

The result is a framework that disarms resistance while enabling imposition. Critics who appeal to shared standards are dismissed as culturally arrogant. Yet those same standards are quietly invoked to mandate a particular worldview.

Salmond’s epistemology does not restrain institutional power. It immunises it from challenge.

This matters far beyond campus. A society relies on its universities for the knowledge that informs public decisions: how we teach children, treat illness, build bridges, assess risk, or respond to crises.

When universities no longer believe in shared standards of evidence and argument, the boundary between expertise and ideology collapses. Citizens lose any reliable way to judge competing claims. Organisations lose the capacity to correct error. Governments lose trustworthy sources of analysis.

What disappears is not just academic freedom, but the public’s ability to know anything with confidence.

The open university: a moral duty

Academic freedom is not a courtesy extended to scholars. It is a duty the institution owes to society. It is the principle that allows universities to function as critics and consciences. Without it, scholarship becomes performance.

Salmond’s critique is not merely a philosophical mistake. It is an invitation to intellectual retreat. The result would be a university where cultural narratives cannot be questioned, scientific claims cannot be challenged, and academic inquiry becomes a performance of approved truths. This is not openness. It is conformity.

An open-minded university requires three commitments. First, academic freedom – the right of scholars to question and test received wisdom. Second, institutional neutrality – the refusal of universities to declare official truths on contested matters. Third, shared standards of evidence and argument – a method, not a worldview, that allows cultures to learn from one another.

What makes universities open is not agreement on conclusions but commitment to these shared standards – the willingness to test any claim, from any tradition, against evidence and argument.

Salmond calls for open minds. On this point she is right. But an open mind is not one that refuses to evaluate claims. It is one that is willing to have its own claims evaluated. It is not one that protects ideas from criticism, but one that welcomes criticism as the price of progress.

If we want universities capable of genuine openness, we must defend the principles that make openness possible. Without them, we may have polite campuses, harmonious campuses, even orderly campuses. But they will no longer be open.

And a closed university cannot teach anyone to think.

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Jordan Peterson says no. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference he argued that only individual commitment to a “transcendent other” can save the West from moral drift. When I challenged this in The Australian, defenders rallied to his cause.

My response came in Quillette. In “Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods” I argued that Peterson and others calling for a return to the strong gods of religion and nationalism have misdiagnosed liberalism’s ills.

I recently spent an enjoyable hour unpacking that argument with Rob Forsyth, former Anglican Bishop for South Sydney, on the Centre for Independent Studies’ Liberalism in Question podcast (links below).

I argue liberalism’s crisis is real, but the diagnosis of Peterson and others is wrong:

• Liberalism isn’t failing because it’s too open – it’s drifting because we stopped defending its foundations

• The meaning crisis comes from civic neglect and institutional failure, not metaphysical emptiness

• Denmark proves cohesion doesn’t require sacred authority – it requires civic architecture that works

If you’ve followed my Persuasion essays on liberalism, this podcast centres on the core of the debate.

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When my colleague Dr Michael Johnston took the stage at a national education conference late last month, he didn’t expect applause. Johnston, a cognitive psychologist and senior fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, chaired Education Minister Erica Stanford’s Ministerial Advisory Group reviewing the primary-school English, maths and statistics curricula. He continues to serve on the Ministry’s Curriculum Coherence Group. He was speaking at UpliftEd, a conference organised by the Aotearoa Educators Collective.

Johnston went hoping for a genuine discussion about how to lift student achievement. Instead, he met resistance – not to his data or logic, but to what they implied. He was challenging dogma that has come to rule the education establishment like a faith – beyond question and immune to evidence.

Another colleague, economist and teacher Briar Lipson, faced similar hostility after publishing Education Delusion: How Bad Ideas Ruined a Once World-leading School System in 2020. The report exposed how progressive teaching fashions hollowed out what New Zealanders once took for granted – a world-class education built on knowledge.

Over two decades, New Zealand’s student outcomes have plummeted from world-leading to barely mediocre. Our Year 5 pupils now rank near the bottom among English-speaking countries in reading. Year 13 students stumble over the meaning of everyday words like “trivial.”

When the Labour Government piloted new literacy and numeracy standards in 2022, the results were sobering: only about two-thirds of students met the reading and numeracy benchmarks, and barely a third met the writing standard.

Stanford has launched two major reforms to reverse the slide. The first is structured literacy – systematic phonics and explicit teaching for Years 1–8. The second is replacing New Zealand’s National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA) with clear, coherent qualifications that employers and universities can trust – ending the credit-chasing that rewards fragments of knowledge over subject matter mastery.

Stanford’s reforms echo those led in Britain by Education Secretary Michael Gove and Schools Minister Sir Nick Gibb a decade ago. By mandating phonics, publishing detailed knowledge-rich curricula and insisting that exams reward substance over coursework, they turned England’s long decline in literacy into sustained improvement. New Zealand is now attempting a similar rescue.

I attended the August launch of Stanford’s proposed NCEA replacement. The people behind it are hardly extremists. The Minister’s Professional Advisory Group was chaired by Patrick Gale of Rangitoto College and included David Ferguson, former principal of Westlake Boys’. Distinguished educators from the mainstream of schooling, not radicals.

Yet they too have met hostility. Why? Because these reforms expose that our education decline is not a mystery. It is the predictable result of a philosophy that sounded humane but has proved disastrous.

That philosophy – constructivism, the idea that children learn best by constructing knowledge for themselves through exploration rather than being explicitly taught – didn’t appear out of nowhere. It descends from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher who imagined the child as a natural learner corrupted by adult imposition.

Then came John Dewey, the early-20th-century American educator, whose book Democracy and Education (1916) recast schooling as a social experiment in freedom and experience. And then Paulo Freire, the Brazilian theorist, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) turned teaching into a moral struggle against hierarchy.

Over a century, these ideas fused into what has become education orthodoxy in New Zealand: the teacher as “guide on the side,” the student as discoverer, curriculum as experience.

Constructivist approaches began as humane correctives to rote learning, born of a desire to make classrooms more engaging and inclusive. It sounds liberating because it borrows the language of respect – child-centred learning, student agency, discovery and creativity. Who could object? But a classroom is not a philosophy seminar. It’s a place where novices must become knowers. And here, romance meets the limits of cognitive reality.

The attraction of the romance is obvious. After all, children do learn to speak their first language naturally, so it feels intuitive that they should learn to read and write the same way. But speech is hard-wired into the human brain; writing is not. Reading is a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, and the brain has to be painstakingly retrained to link visual symbols with sounds and meaning. As neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has shown, those connections form only through explicit, systematic teaching.

Cognitive science is unsentimental. Working memory – the short-term memory system we use for thinking – has a very small capacity. It’s easily overloaded. We reason by drawing on what’s stored in long-term memory. That’s why novices don’t think like experts: they don’t yet know enough. For beginners, the most reliable route to understanding is explicit, cumulative teaching: show, explain, practise, check, then connect and apply.

E.D. Hirsch – author of Cultural Literacy and The Knowledge Deficit – put it bluntly: reading comprehension is domain-specific, you can’t “strategise” your way through words and references you don’t know. Dan Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist best known for Why Don’t Students Like School?, translated the research for teachers: skills ride on knowledge; “critical thinking” isn’t a free-floating technique. And cognitive-load theorists Kirschner, Sweller and Clark showed why minimally guided instruction fails novices: it collides with the limits of working memory.

None of this outlaws inquiry. In fact, inquiry remains essential when it’s built around the disciplines themselves. Students practise applying knowledge through experiments – but only after they’ve been taught it.

If the romantic model were only a style preference, we could shrug. But it defines what our children learn, or don’t. For twenty years, New Zealand has staged education like a play with no script – plenty of direction on “how to perform,” nothing about “what to say.”

The 2007 Curriculum enshrines “key competencies” such as “managing self” and “relating to others” but leaves teachers to decide what content to teach. The entire document runs to just 67 pages. For Years 12-13 history—two full years of senior secondary education – it offers just two bullet points: understand that historical events “are complex and contested,” and that “trends reflect social, economic, and political forces.”

What students actually learn – and how deeply they learn it – is a classroom lottery, dependent entirely on individual teachers and schools. In that vacuum, NCEA’s atomised credits have become the de facto curriculum for senior secondary students. Schools inevitably teach to discrete standards, each with its own assessment, encouraging short-term coaching and credit-collection over deep learning. We credential fragments and call it education.

The results are visible in every dataset and every classroom. When schools whisper content and shout competencies, affluent homes fill the gap and others cannot. Students from less advantaged backgrounds – disproportionately, though not exclusively, Māori and Pasifika – pay the highest price.

Lipson’s 2018 report, Spoiled by Choice: How NCEA hampers education, and what it needs to succeed, showed how NCEA’s credit-chasing design widened those gaps, rewarding fragmentation over mastery. We told ourselves we were being progressive. We were entrenching inequality.

It’s a classic example of what the sociologist Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief” – an idea that flatters the educated classes while harming those who can least afford it.

So why the fury when evidence-based reform finally arrives? Because the debate is existential. Faculties of education, research agencies and unions have built careers and identities on the romance. To admit that novices need explicit teaching and a knowledge-rich curriculum would mean admitting that decades of teacher training and professional development were misguided.

Institutions rarely self-indict. And so technical reforms – phonics checks at twenty weeks, an hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths; a qualification that prizes mastery over accumulation – are met with cries of “Back to the 1950s!” and “Drill and kill!”

Strip away the noise and the reforms are unromantic in the best sense – they tell the truth about learning. Structured literacy doesn’t make readers; it makes reading possible. It teaches every child the code instead of assuming they’ll guess it. Comprehension then grows as knowledge grows. An hour-a-day on reading, writing and maths isn’t regression; it’s time on task for what unlocks the rest of life.

In secondary schools, replacing a blizzard of micro-credits with fewer, deeper assessments isn’t cruelty; it’s respect – for subjects, teachers, and students. One substantial internal task and one proper exam per subject, both marked to national standards, tell parents and employers something clear: this is what I know; this is what I can do. It also returns teaching time to teachers.

And teachers are not the villains here. They are the victims of bad training and worse ideas – expected to perform miracles in open-plan spaces with vague curricula and endless assessment. Give them a coherent map, evidence-based methods, practical materials, and honest assessment, and they’ll do what professionals do: they’ll deliver.

None of this is a right-wing crusade – as many of Stanford’s critics now claim. The knowledge-rich model is progressive in its effects, even if some of its champions sit on the centre-right. Insisting that every child, in every postcode, be deliberately taught the knowledge and vocabulary of the wider world is the most egalitarian demand you can make. When we stop treating knowledge as elitist, disadvantaged children stop being the ones locked out of it.

What’s truly reactionary is the status quo: a romance that flatters adults, feels kind, and leaves too many children unable to read fluently, write clearly, or handle basic algebra. We tried the experiment. It failed. The courageous act now is not to defend our priors but to face reality and change.

There will be pain. Change on this scale always brings disruption. When teacher education must include the science of learning and subject expertise, some programmes will need overhaul. Baselines may sting before they heal.

But the alternative is worse – to continue quietly wrecking futures. The victims don’t write op-eds. They just leave school without the words and numbers modern life demands. If your home can’t compensate for what school fails to teach, romanticism isn’t a kindness. It’s a sentence.

This is not a defence of any minister, and it’s not a policy manual. It’s an argument about reality. Children aren’t miniature adults. Novices can’t reverse-engineer literacy or calculus by discovery. Working memory is narrow; knowledge frees it. When schools teach content explicitly and cumulatively, curiosity expands rather than shrinks. When assessment rewards mastery instead of fragments, teachers teach and students learn.

New Zealand’s education establishment is fighting because these reforms expose that their romantic ideology – the idea that kids learn naturally without explicit teaching – has systematically failed. And the ones who paid were the children who needed school most.

That’s not a culture war. It’s a moral reckoning.

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Writing after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Hoover Institution’s Sir Niall Ferguson offers comforting reassurance. Warnings of America’s democratic collapse are overwrought. The United States, according to Ferguson, remains “a very long way from Italy in 1927 or Germany in 1938.”

What Ferguson is thinking of is not just the fulminations of Trump’s progressive critics. Even conservative Andrew Sullivan wrote this summer in The Weekly Dish: “I think this is how a republic dies.”

In response, Ferguson catalogues a seemingly impressive list of institutional safeguards still operating. Courts issuing injunctions. The Republicans’ wafer-thin majorities in Congress. Lawyers with “a vested interest in preserving the rule of law.” His message is clear: those sounding alarms about institutional collapse suffer from “Windrip Syndrome” – a term Ferguson adapts from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here to describe mistaking contemporary political turbulence for fascist takeover.

I have long admired Ferguson’s work. Empire, Civilization, and Colossus have shaped my thinking about how liberal institutions flourish or fail. We share philosophical ground – a commitment to competitive markets, individual freedom, property rights and the rule of law. Which is precisely why his reassurances trouble me.

Ferguson is clearly right on one level. America has experienced nothing like the Night of the Long Knives. But that misses the real test: Are the checks and balances of constitutional democracy being so hollowed out that democracy is at real risk? The evidence suggests this to be the case. Trump’s systematic capture of law enforcement, regulatory agencies, and emergency powers achieves tyranny in all but duration – authoritarian control operating through constitutional forms.

The president’s crowning achievement since taking office has been transforming the constitutionally outrageous into the contemporary routine. The relentless cascade of norm violations creates its own anesthesia. When everything is scandalous, nothing shocks. Across multiple domains—law enforcement, regulation, press freedom, and emergency powers – Trump has systematically converted democratic institutions into instruments of personal will. The result weaponises federal powers to punish opponents and reward loyalty. The methods may be legal in form. But the function remains authoritarian.

Ferguson’s analysis overlooks this reality in three ways. He focuses on the relative absence of fascist imagery and misses the significance of Trump’s regulatory authoritarianism. He sees routine power-stretching where there is systemic presidential overreach. And he treats litigation volume as health rather than as a symptom of executive defiance.

The Fascism Fallacy

Ferguson’s first misstep is foundational: measuring threats against 1930s fascist imagery rather than democratic norms. The fascist yardstick obscures how effectively American institutions have been captured. The question isn’t whether Trump’s America resembles Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts. It’s whether law enforcement and regulatory agencies now operate as instruments of presidential will rather than neutral arbiters of law.

Consider the capture of law enforcement. At the Justice Department, dozens of officials linked to January 6 prosecutions have been fired or reassigned, replaced by loyalists, including former Trump defence lawyers. The acting deputy attorney general ordered FBI personnel lists targeting those who worked Capitol riot cases. This move facilitated retaliation against law enforcement professionals who simply did their jobs. The administration stripped Secret Service protection from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, Trump critics who served during his first term, despite active Iranian assassination threats. Personal vindictiveness now drives personnel decisions involving life and death.

Ferguson might note that presidents have legal authority to dismiss Justice Department officials who serve “at the pleasure of the president.” He would be correct about the legality. But his focus on legal procedures misses the constitutional point: when law enforcement becomes an extension of presidential will rather than an independent check on it, you no longer have the rule of law. You have law by rulers – a distinction Ferguson’s procedural focus obscures.

The pattern of capture operates in press intimidation. After Jimmy Kimmel’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr warned Disney they could “do this the easy way or the hard way.” The threat worked immediately – affiliates dropped the show, Disney suspended it indefinitely. When ABC reinstated Kimmel days later, Trump threatened the network again: “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back… I think we’re going to test ABC out on this.” The Kimmel episode followed an all-too-familiar pattern, beginning with the Associated Press being barred from briefings for refusing to adopt White House terminology about the “Gulf of America.” Trump made his intent clear when he told reporters late last month that networks giving “only bad publicity” should “maybe” have their licenses revoked.

Step by step, regulatory intimidation moves towards what jackbooted censors accomplished in the 1930s – journalism operating at the government’s pleasure rather than by constitutional right. Major outlets still publish critical coverage daily, but their persistence obscures how the structural foundations are being undermined. Critical journalism now operates under the shadow of regulatory threats rather than being protected by institutional independence. The absence of 1930s theatre doesn’t provide comfort; it provides camouflage for more sophisticated methods of control.

Ferguson’s historical lens thus becomes counterproductive. By conjuring up dramatic fascist imagery, he overlooks regulatory capture that systematically undermines press independence through different means.

The Normalisation Trap

Ferguson’s second shortcoming lies in treating Trump’s systematic coercion as routine presidential power-stretching. He argues that the “imperial presidency” stretches back generations, citing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “a power grab by the executive branch” and Barack Obama’s use of “legally dubious threats to yank federal funds from universities.” This historical framework suggests constitutional friction represents normal political weather, not democratic breakdown.

But Ferguson’s normalisation obscures a crucial distinction. Testing constitutional boundaries differs from methodically demolishing them. Roosevelt’s New Deal ultimately survived judicial review, and his court-packing threat was abandoned in the face of political opposition. Obama’s university funding threats operated through existing legal frameworks with congressional oversight. When universities challenged the policy, his administration negotiated rather than escalated. Both presidents tested boundaries but accepted institutional pushback.

Trump, by contrast, has articulated a philosophy that dispenses with limits altogether. In February he pinned a message to Truth Social and X declaring: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This was no casual boast but a statement of principle, echoing the Napoleonic doctrine that sovereignty lies in deciding when law no longer binds. In Trump’s formulation, the test of presidential legitimacy becomes not fidelity to the Constitution, but the leader’s self-proclaimed mission to “save” America.

Trump has put this philosophy into practice through an unprecedented blizzard of executive orders. In his first months, he attempted to strip birthright citizenship by decree, barred asylum rights under a declared “border invasion,” imposed “Liberation Day” tariffs without congressional authorisation, and ordered nominally independent regulators like the Federal Election Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Trade Commission to submit budgets and rules to the White House for clearance. Each measure has been challenged in the courts, but the pattern is unmistakable: executive orders are no longer used to implement law but to supersede it.

Previous presidents tested executive boundaries, but within constitutional frameworks and subject to institutional correction. Trump’s approach differs fundamentally: the sheer volume and constitutional audacity of his orders overwhelm the system’s capacity to respond. By the time courts rule on birthright citizenship or regulatory independence, executive action has already reshaped reality on the ground. Emergency deployments continue despite adverse rulings. Regulatory changes proceed whilst appeals drag on. The legal process becomes reactive theatre rather than effective constraint: courts can vindicate rights in theory whilst failing to constrain power in practice.

Meanwhile, the president uses regulatory power as a shakedown mechanism. The White House cleared Nvidia’s and AMD’s China chip licenses on the understanding the government would take 15% of those sales – a license-for-revenue toll. An executive order stripped law firm Paul Weiss of clearances and federal work until they offered concessions and publicly disowned a former partner. And Paramount paid to settle a 60 Minutes suit while seeking administration sign-off on its Skydance sale. The message to boardrooms is plain: compliance buys protection; resistance invites pain.

The pattern extends beyond regulatory coercion. What began as a promise to strip politics out of universities receiving federal funding has mutated into something far more dangerous. It’s now a federal power grab that tells institutions whom they may admit, what they may teach, how they may govern, and even which student groups may exist. Harvard filed federal lawsuits challenging the administration’s constitutional authority, while others capitulated entirely. The pattern reveals organised coercion: resist and face annihilation; comply and surrender autonomy.

Meanwhile, the transformation of the presidency into a personal profit centre operates in plain sight. The Trump family launched cryptocurrency ventures, attracting $2 billion from an Abu Dhabi firm and $75 million from Chinese-connected investors. This happened just as crypto regulatory oversight was dismantled. Qatar “gifted” a $400 million jumbo jet destined for Trump’s presidential library. It’s Plunkitt’s “honest graft” for the influencer age – the fusion of public power and private brand until the distinction barely matters.

Scholars and pundits have an obligation to recognise the severity of what is occurring—and to see it as unprecedented in American history, at least outside of wartime. By treating systematic coercion as familiar power-stretching, analysis like Ferguson’s delays recognition of institutional capture even as it accelerates. When democratic erosion operates through legal processes rather than dramatic rupture, the window for effective resistance narrows rapidly – making scholarly reassurance counterproductive.

Institutional Theater

Ferguson is also on shaky ground when he equates institutional survival with democratic health. He celebrates that courts are “grappling with close to 400 cases involving the Trump administration.” He notes that America retains “1.3 million practising lawyers” with “a vested interest in preserving the rule of law.” These metrics suggest institutional resilience – democracy’s immune system responding to authoritarian infection.

But Ferguson is not sufficiently differentiating form from substance. The sheer volume of litigation against Trump’s policies doesn’t demonstrate judicial constraint; it reveals executive defiance requiring constant legal intervention.

Military deployments demonstrate this institutional theatre perfectly. National Guard troops have remained on the streets of U.S. cities whilst courts issue injunctions that are promptly stayed on appeal. What once would have triggered a constitutional crisis now passes as routine public safety. Ferguson might note that federal courts ruled Guard operations unlawful under the Posse Comitatus Act – evidence of judicial independence checking executive overreach. But when injunctions are stayed on appeal and hundreds of troops remain deployed after their authorisation dates have expired, the legal system becomes performative rather than protective.

The same pattern operates with universities. Ferguson could point to Harvard’s federal lawsuit challenging funding freezes. He might see this as proof that institutional independence survives. But institutions now align their policies in advance to avoid prolonged litigation. Legal remedies become irrelevant to practical outcomes. The threat of funding cuts achieves compliance without formal enforcement.

Ferguson’s confidence in institutional forms reveals the limitations of historical analogy. Europe’s 20th-century fascists abolished democratic institutions outright. They dissolved parliaments, shuttered courts, and banned opposition parties. Contemporary authoritarians preserve institutional forms but drain their constraining power. Normalisation through exhaustion makes oversight impossible.

The Perils of Reassurance

Ferguson’s approach underestimates the dangers of the erosion we are experiencing. When a respected historian assures the public that institutional forms guarantee democratic substance, it can become harder to see the erosion for quite the menace that it is.

Public understanding shapes political response. If voters believe safeguards remain robust, they demand less protection. If journalists accept that press freedom persists because some criticism continues, they miss how methodically their independence is being gutted. If politicians hear that courts check executive power, they see less urgency in defending legislative prerogatives.

Ferguson is technically correct that America hasn’t become Mussolini’s Italy. But so what? Trump’s concentration of regulatory, judicial, and emergency powers achieves authoritarian control without the historical theatre. The rule of law doesn’t require jackboots to die.

As James Madison warned in Federalist 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Trump’s systematic concentration of power through regulatory coercion and institutional capture realises Madison’s warning – the accumulation of all powers accomplishing what the Founders defined as tyranny. Reassurances like Ferguson’s risk offering false comfort while this reality unfolds behind the preserved forms they celebrate.

An edited version of this essay was first published in Persuasion on 16 October 2025.

This month’s Nobel Prize in Economics arrives at an opportune moment. The award to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for having explained innovation-driven economic growth provides a salutary reminder about what drives prosperity. And what does not.

It is rare for an economic historian to win the Nobel Prize. A professor at Northwestern University, Mokyr’s books The Lever of Riches, The Enlightened Economy and A Culture of Growth explain how the Industrial Revolution happened. He shares the prize with Aghion and Howitt, whose theoretical work explores capitalism’s “creative destruction.” The shared prize signals something important. The committee is directing our attention to the deep structures that underpin prosperity.

Mokyr’s contribution centres on a deceptively simple insight: sustained economic growth requires useful knowledge, and useful knowledge comes in two forms. The first is propositional knowledge – understanding why things work. The second is prescriptive knowledge – knowing how to make them work. Think of propositional knowledge as the laws of thermodynamics; prescriptive knowledge as the technical manual for building a steam engine.

For most of human history, these two types of knowledge developed separately. Craftsmen knew recipes and techniques without understanding underlying principles. Scholars developed theories with no thought to practical application.

What changed? The Industrial Revolution happened when Britain created institutions that brought these two kinds of knowledge together. Scientific societies, journals, encyclopaedias and improved postal services created what Mokyr calls “the Republic of Letters” – a transnational community where knowledge flowed freely across borders and between practitioners.

Crucially, this was not a government programme. The Republic of Letters was voluntary, decentralised and international. It emerged from a culture that valued curiosity, tolerated dissent and rewarded innovation. Britain’s open society meant people were free to experiment. Its property rights and patent system meant they could profit from success.

Ming dynasty China, in Mokyr’s telling, shows the opposite path. China had led the world technologically for centuries. Yet sustained growth never emerged. Successive emperors halted geographical exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries, cutting their subjects off from the rest of the world. Without openness to new ideas and foreign knowledge, innovation withered. Centralised control, however well-intentioned, strangled the very dynamism it might have hoped to foster.

For New Zealand, Mokyr’s work offers vital lessons. Not about what government should do, but about what conditions allow prosperity to emerge.

First, education must transmit useful knowledge. Both propositional and prescriptive knowledge matter. We need citizens who understand why things work – the scientific literacy to grasp thermodynamics, genetics, probability. We also need skilled tradespeople who know how to apply that knowledge – the engineers, technicians and craftsmen who turn theory into practice.

New Zealand’s education system has drifted from this purpose. Our curriculum emphasises competencies over content, process over knowledge. Yet without a rich base of factual knowledge, critical thinking is impossible. You cannot solve problems in fields you know nothing about. Fortunately, the current Minister of Education is changing this.

Second, we must remain radically open. Mokyr shows that Britain succeeded partly because it drew on knowledge from across Europe and beyond. The Republic of Letters was international by design. Ideas and skilled people must flow freely.

This has obvious implications for New Zealand’s restrictive foreign investment regime.

Like Ireland, we should be treating foreign capital as a prize to be won, not a privilege to be rationed. But openness means more than investment. It means welcoming skilled migrants. It means universities collaborating internationally. It means businesses and government adopting global best practice, not insisting on homegrown alternatives.

Third, the state must resist the temptation to direct innovation. This is perhaps Mokyr’s most pointed lesson. The Industrial Revolution succeeded because no one was in charge of it. Knowledge emerged from competitive, voluntary exchange among thousands of participants. Scientists, inventors and craftsmen collaborated because it served their interests, not because a ministry coordinated them.

The modern temptation is to place government at the centre. Create agencies to attract investment. Reform research institutes to focus on commercialisation. Pick winners.

Yet Mokyr’s work suggests this is precisely backwards. Sustained growth comes from removing obstacles, not from state entrepreneurship. It comes from protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, maintaining competitive markets and ensuring the free flow of knowledge. It comes from a culture that celebrates innovation and tolerates the disruption it brings.

The great risk is that governments, armed with confidence and public resources, imagine they can engineer prosperity. They cannot. At best, they can remove the barriers that prevent it from emerging. At worst, they smother it with direction and control.

Mokyr’s Nobel reminds us that prosperity is a discovery process, not a planning process. It emerges from freedom – the freedom to experiment, to fail, to learn and to try again. It requires institutions that allow knowledge to flow and reputations to be built on contribution rather than credential. It demands tolerance for the creative destruction that sees old products and companies displaced by better ones.

New Zealand’s challenge is resisting the seductive belief that the right minister with the right agency can unlock growth. Mokyr’s work shows otherwise. The role of government is not to lead the orchestra but to ensure the concert hall has good acoustics, the doors are open to the audience, and the players are free to perform.

This column was first published in the New Zealand Herald on 23 October 2025.

When Tomáš Suchomel, editor of the conservative Czech journal Kontexty, contacted me in June asking if they could translate and republish my Quillette essay, “Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods,” I was delighted.

By coincidence, my wife and I were in Prague when Tomáš reached out to me. I wasn’t previously aware of Kontexty, but Tomáš explained that one of the journal’s co-founders was Petr Fiala, the current Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. The journal had grown out of the work of the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who helped the cause of freedom by secretly teaching in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia. As an avid reader of Scruton’s work, I was honoured by the connection and delighted to agree to the translation.

The timing of the essay’s publication this week could hardly be more pointed. It coincides with populist billionaire Andrej Babiš winning the Czech parliamentary elections with a resounding 35% of the vote, positioning himself to form a coalition with far-right parties.

Babiš is a self-described “Trumpist” who wants to end military aid to Ukraine, roll back EU powers, and promises a “Czechs first” approach. He defeated the centre-right coalition government led by Fiala. Viktor Orbán immediately hailed the result: “Truth has prevailed. A big step for the Czech Republic, good news for Europe.”

The politics are unusual. Fiala’s government has brought inflation down to around 2% and maintained unemployment at just 2.6% – among the lowest in the EU. It has strengthened NATO commitments and led international efforts to arm Ukraine. Yet voters chose change.

The reasons appear less economic than cultural and geopolitical: concerns about Ukrainian refugees and war-weariness over Ukraine aid – concerns amplified, it seems, by Russian disinformation.

When Tomáš emailed me this week to tell me about my essay’s publication, I’d just been reflecting on Babiš’s victory. From this distance, it looks rather like voters chose a strongman’s promises over liberalism’s open society.

When Theory Meets Reality

My essay argues that critics on the populist Right misdiagnose liberalism’s current malaise when they call for a return to “strong gods” – shared sacred commitments to religion or nation they hope will bind societies together. But the real problem, I suggest, isn’t that liberalism is too open or too pluralistic. It’s twofold: we’ve neglected the civic, institutional, and cultural foundations that give openness depth, and policy failures – especially in education and housing – have left too many behind, eroding trust in liberal institutions.

The Czech election offers a sobering case study. Babiš isn’t explicitly offering religious certainty. But he’s providing exactly what the “strong gods” advocates promise: simple answers, nationalist identity, strongman leadership. His campaign pledged higher wages and pensions, lower taxes, and an end to “austerity.” Plus freedom from the exhausting work of liberal citizenship. No more agonising over aid to Ukraine. No more navigating EU complexities. Just a billionaire businessman who promises to put “Czechs first.”

This is the seductive appeal my essay warned about. Karl Popper understood what he called the “strain of civilisation.” It’s the psychological burden that freedom places on individuals who must think and choose for themselves rather than submit to authority. Liberal democracy demands individual judgment, tolerance of dissent, and restraint of power. These run counter to our evolutionary inheritance, which favours conformity and deference in small tribal groups.

Reports suggest Russian propaganda played a significant role in the campaign. The Czech Online Risks Research Centre found that Czech-language TikTok accounts reaching millions of viewers “systematically spread pro-Russian propaganda and support anti-system parties.” The European Commission held an emergency meeting with TikTok in the days leading up to the election. The platform then removed “several bots.”

This matters because humans are tribal creatures. Our deepest intuitions are shaped by loyalty and shared identity. When disinformation exploits these instincts, it doesn’t just spread falsehoods. It makes the demanding work of liberal citizenship feel unnecessary, even naive.

Scruton’s Legacy, Tested

There’s something particularly poignant, then, about Kontexty publishing a defence of liberalism at this moment. The journal’s intellectual lineage runs directly through Scruton’s underground resistance to communist totalitarianism. Scruton understood both the fragility of liberal order and the human hunger for belonging and purpose.

Yet Scruton also understood what today’s authoritarians ignore: that tradition and belonging cannot be manufactured by state decree. Imposed unity, whether religious or nationalist, carries dangers that organic civil society was meant to avoid. We’ve seen this pattern before – and we see it repeating today. In Erdoğan’s Turkey. In Orbán’s Hungary. And in Trump’s increasingly sectarian rhetoric.

The Czech voters haven’t chosen totalitarianism. But they’ve chosen a leader whom Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico celebrate as one of their own. A leader who may draw the Czech Republic into their orbit of EU mavericks refusing support for Ukraine.

What It Means

My essay wasn’t a prediction. It was a warning. Liberal societies don’t fail because they’re too open. They fail when bad policy makes liberal promises ring hollow, and when their beneficiaries neglect the foundations that make openness work: civic education, institutional maintenance, cultural confidence, and the simple willingness to defend liberal norms when they come under pressure.

The Czech election reminds us that the liberal project is never complete, never secure. It must be defended and renewed in every generation. Sometimes in every election.

I’m illustrating this post with a photo from my June trip. It’s taken from the Hanavský Pavilion in Letná Park – the iconic vantage point for Prague’s five bridges panorama overlooking the quiet sweep of the Vltava river. The city’s beauty makes it easy to understand why people fought so hard for its freedom at the end of the Cold War. One generation later, that freedom is being tested again.

My essay “Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods” can be found at Quillette or in the “Liberalism and the West“ section of this Substack.

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters did something unusual at the UN General Assembly last week: he chose discipline over gesture.

While Australia, the UK, and Canada announced recognition of Palestinian statehood with the solemnity of nations doing Important Things, Peters told the General Assembly that New Zealand would not follow. Not because we oppose a Palestinian state – we explicitly support it – but because recognition now “would serve as little more than an existential act of defiance against an unalterable state of affairs.”

That phrase deserves attention. It’s a rare admission that much of what passes for foreign policy in modern democracies is theatre: gestures designed to signal virtue to domestic audiences rather than achieve outcomes in the world.

Peters’ speech is worth studying not for its position on Palestine, but as a case study in resisting the gravitational pull of performative politics.

The Psychology of Symbolic Gestures

New York University professor Jonathan Haidt’s research on moral psychology helps explain why symbolic foreign policy feels so compelling. When we witness distant suffering – whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan – our emotional mind (Haidt’s “elephant”) demands we do something. The rational mind (the “rider”) then constructs justifications for whatever action makes the elephant feel better.

Recognising Palestinian statehood checks every box for satisfying the elephant: it’s unambiguous, it signals which side we’re on, it costs us nothing materially, and it allows us to feel we’ve acted on our values. The fact that Palestine doesn’t control its territory, that Hamas remains in power and still holds hostages, that recognition might actually entrench the conflict – these are rider-level objections that bounce off the elephant’s hide.

Peters made the rider’s case: recognition now is “open to political manipulation by both Hamas and Israel,” could prove “counterproductive,” and comes at a moment with “no obvious link between more of the international community recognising the State of Palestine and the claimed objective of protecting the two-state solution.”

But he also spoke to the elephant, invoking the “harrowing images of famine in Gaza” and Israel’s “grossly disproportionate response.” He didn’t deny the moral intuition; he channelled it toward a different conclusion: that New Zealand’s recognition matters most when it can actually advance peace, not when it simply makes us feel better about ourselves.

The Social Media Amplification

Twenty years ago, foreign policy operated in relative obscurity. Diplomats negotiated, ministers announced positions, and most citizens remained blissfully unaware unless their own country was directly involved.

Social media changed the game entirely. Now every conflict arrives in our feeds with curated images designed to trigger maximum emotional response. The Gaza war plays out through Instagram infographics, the Ukraine conflict through TikTok videos, and Sudan’s catastrophe through carefully cropped photographs.

Each platform rewards tribal certainty over nuance. You’re either #StandingWithIsrael or #FreePalestine, with no room for the complexity that actual diplomacy requires. Politicians feel this pressure acutely. Complex realities get flattened into binary choices: pick a side or be condemned for your silence.

The result is foreign policy by referendum of the perpetually online. And the perpetually online are the worst possible cohort to design foreign policy, because their elephant is constantly triggered, their rider is drowning in partisan talking points, and their only measure of success is how the gesture feels, not whether it works.

The Pattern Across Conflicts

This isn’t unique to Palestine. Consider the Western response to Ukraine: overwhelming initial solidarity, fierce rhetoric about defending democracy, then gradual fatigue as the actual costs became clear. The elephant was fully engaged in February 2022; by 2024 it wanted to think about something else.

Or Myanmar, where 3.5 million people are displaced and 22 million need humanitarian aid – the worst crisis in Southeast Asia – yet barely registers in Western consciousness because it doesn’t slot neatly into existing tribal categories. No elephant engagement, no policy response.

Or Sudan, where 30 million people need urgent aid, 13 million are displaced, and sexual violence is endemic. Peters mentioned it in his speech. When did you last see a social media campaign about Sudan? The elephant doesn’t even know it exists.

The Peters Test for performative foreign policy is simple: If the action would make exactly the same sense whether or not it changes anything on the ground, it’s probably performance.

What Non-Performative Foreign Policy Looks Like

Peters’ speech offers an alternative model: acknowledge the moral weight of the situation, resist the pressure for premature gestures, preserve your leverage for when it might actually matter, and focus resources where they can do immediate good (hence the additional Gaza humanitarian funding).

This is harder than it sounds. It requires politicians to tell the public that feeling good about our foreign policy isn’t the same as doing good through our foreign policy. It means disappointing the activists who want their government to “do something” – anything – now.

But for a small country like New Zealand, whose security depends on a functioning rules-based international order, performative gestures are a luxury we can’t afford. Every time we devalue the currency of diplomatic recognition by using it as a mere signal, we weaken the tools we might need when our own interests are at stake.

Peters is right that New Zealand will likely recognise Palestinian statehood eventually. But he’s also right that we should do so when it might actually help create the conditions for peace, not when it merely makes us feel we’ve sided with the angels.

That’s not cowardice. It’s strategy. And in a world where foreign policy has increasingly become performance art, strategy is what we most desperately need.

Popper also recognised what he called the “strain” of civilisation – the psychological burden that freedom places on individuals who must think and choose for themselves rather than submit to authority. This burden reveals another paradox: liberal values run counter to humanity’s evolutionary inheritance. We evolved in small groups where conformity and deference to authority aided survival. Liberal democracy demands the opposite – individual judgment, tolerance of dissent, and restraint of power.

These paradoxes reveal something crucial: liberal society does not survive by default. It achieves unprecedented peace, prosperity, and freedom by trusting citizens rather than commanding them. But the same qualities that make freedom precious also make it fragile: liberalism liberates human potential, yet only by demanding more vigilance and responsibility than instinct alone provides.

Critics like theologian R.R. Reno see this vulnerability as proof of the open society’s shortcomings. Reno argues that Popperian openness cast out the very ideals that once gave liberalism cohesion – the so-called “strong gods” of religion and nationalism. The result, Reno argues, is a hollow society, adrift because its openness is morally empty. Formerly pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons makes a similar case, arguing that the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods have led to “civilisational dissolution and despair.”

In my essay, Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods, I argued that these criticisms are misdirected. Liberalism is not failing because it is too open but because its beneficiaries have neglected the civic, cultural, and institutional foundations that give openness depth. Postmodern scepticism about truth and shared values has compounded the problem. The consequence has been societies that are liberal in name but hollow in practice.

But there is a deeper question I left largely unspoken: who is responsible for keeping the open society open? When democratic institutions are under pressure – when norms erode or are challenged outright – do liberals have obligations to act?

The Contemporary Challenge

Today’s threats to liberal democracy are more subtle than those Popper had in mind in the 1930s and 40s, but no less real. They come from two directions: populist authoritarianism on the right and progressive illiberalism on the left.

Populist strongmen no longer arrive in uniform

m, but hollow out democratic institutions from within. They advance not through revolution but through what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism”: regimes that maintain the forms of democracy while steadily destroying its substance. This pattern is visible across the globe, from Viktor Orbán’s systematic dismantling of press freedom in Hungary to President Trump’s efforts to rewrite constitutional norms by decree.

Progressive illiberalism poses a second corrosive challenge to democratic norms. This manifests in the systematic suppression of debate on university campuses, the weaponisation of social pressure to enforce ideological conformity, and the redefinition of disagreement as harm.

In both cases, liberal norms erode through everyday accommodation as much as through dramatic confrontation. This reveals liberalism’s essential vulnerability: it is not a self-perpetuating system but a series of active choices made by individuals in positions of responsibility. When university administrators surrender to activist pressure rather than defend free inquiry, they choose institutional peace over academic freedom. When journalists prioritise narrative over accuracy to avoid social media backlash, they trade professional safety for informed debate. When politicians abandon constitutional restraints because their opponents have done the same, they opt for short-term political gains over democratic stability.

Each choice may seem small, defensible, even reasonable. But the cumulative effect is the erosion of the liberal culture that makes democracy work.

A Consequentialist Case for Civic Duty

This erosion is not inevitable. Liberal democracy has survived previous challenges because enough people recognised they had a stake in defending it. That stake creates responsibility – not as a matter of abstract duty or metaphysical rights, but because of what happens when liberalism’s institutions are neglected.

Liberal institutions exist because people built them, defended them, and passed them on. But they persist only as long as people continue to do so. There is no natural law that protects freedom of speech, no invisible hand that maintains the rule of law. These are human achievements that require human maintenance.

Liberal democracy cannot function without a critical mass of citizens who are willing to uphold its norms, resist its erosion, and transmit its habits to the next generation.

This civic responsibility to speak out is not one that can be legally enforced. But nor is it merely a matter of private virtue. It is more like the duty to vote, to speak the truth in public, or to keep a social promise – a moral responsibility grounded in the consequences of inaction. Without active engagement, the conditions that protect individual rights and liberal institutions will inevitably deteriorate.

John Stuart Mill understood this logic perfectly. In his 1867 inaugural address at St Andrews University, Mill delivered one of the most direct statements of civic responsibility in the liberal canon: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Mill did not appeal to divine command or abstract virtue. Rather, he made a utilitarian calculation: the modest cost of civic engagement was far less than the catastrophic cost of losing freedom to those who would destroy it.

The Problem of Collective Action

So, why don’t good people act, even when they see the danger? The answer lies partly in the logic of collective action. Democratic defence is a public good: everyone benefits from it, but no individual captures enough of the benefit to justify the personal cost of providing it.

Speaking up against illiberal trends carries real risks. Social opprobrium. Professional consequences. Personal stress. The temptation is to assume that someone else will do it – that the institutional guardrails will hold, that the crisis will pass, that normal politics will resume.

But this logic, multiplied across thousands of individuals, produces precisely the collective passivity that enables democratic erosion. Everyone waits for someone else to act. Meanwhile, those seeking to undermine liberal norms face no such coordination problems. Their incentives align. Their actions reinforce each other.

This is a classic “free rider problem.” The benefits of defending liberal democracy are diffuse and long-term. The costs are immediate and personal. Without some mechanism to overcome this imbalance, the system tilts toward those willing to pay the costs of political action – often those seeking to tear the system down rather than build it up.

Yet, if liberal democracy produces better outcomes than the alternatives – creating more prosperity, protecting more freedom, enabling more human flourishing – then those who benefit from it bear a responsibility for its upkeep. Not because of abstract duty, but because of practical necessity.

And that responsibility must fall most heavily on those with greater influence, education, or awareness of liberalism’s fragility.

What Defence Requires

What does defending liberal democracy actually require? The specifics differ by context, but the underlying logic remains the same: liberal democracy rests not just on laws, but on habits – practices of citizenship that reinforce its norms from below.

First, it requires intellectual honesty. Liberal democracy depends on the possibility of reasoned debate between people who disagree. This means resisting the temptation to excuse illiberal behaviour when it serves your preferred outcomes. It means calling out demagoguery on your own side as well as the other. It means acknowledging uncomfortable facts and rejecting convenient fictions, even when truth-telling comes at personal or political cost.

Second, it requires civility. When partisans treat political opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens, they undermine the foundation of democratic politics. It means defending the rights of people you disagree with, because rights that apply only to allies are not rights at all.

Third, it requires civic engagement. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires informed participation by ordinary citizens. This means more than voting, though it includes that. It means staying informed about public issues. It means participating in civic organisations. It means treating citizenship as an active responsibility rather than a passive status. As Mill wrote in On Liberty, “the worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

Fourth, it requires defending institutional norms even when they produce outcomes you dislike. The rule of law, separation of powers, and protection of minority rights are not obstacles to democracy – they are preconditions for it. Weakening these constraints to achieve short-term political goals damages the system that makes peaceful political competition possible.

Finally, it requires confronting illiberalism wherever it appears. Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance applies here: unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance. A liberal society must be prepared to defend itself against those who would destroy it.

As Popper warned in The Open Society and Its Enemies: “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society... then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

This does not mean abandoning persuasion for coercion. It means understanding that persuasion works only with people prepared to be persuaded. Those who reject the basic norms of democratic participation – who use violence, suppress opposition, or refuse to accept electoral defeat – place themselves outside the boundaries of legitimate political competition.

Liberalism’s challenge

Liberal democracy will endure only if those who benefit from it are willing to defend it. The costs of vigilance are modest compared to the alternative: societies that abandon liberal norms become poorer, less innovative, and less free.

Mill’s warning remains as relevant today as it was in 1867. The price of the open society is eternal vigilance. But the alternative is a society that is neither open nor worth defending.

A version of this piece originally appeared in Persuasion on 10 September 2025 as part of their Why Liberalism series.

In November 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali stunned many of her long-time admirers. Once an icon of atheist defiance, she announced her conversion to Christianity. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she explained. As Peter Savodnik has documented, Hirsi Ali is far from alone. This conversion trend spans figures from Jordan Peterson to tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Even podcaster Joe Rogan recently declared, “We need Jesus.”

The most visible manifestation of this shift came in February 2025, when nearly 4,000 conservatives gathered in London for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London. Peterson, who now openly embraces Christianity as “the reality upon which all reality depends,” spoke alongside Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, and others making the case that liberal societies require deeper foundations than mere individual rights to survive. These formerly secular voices now embrace religion as a bulwark against both extreme progressivism and other radical ideologies. Their message is clear: individual rights and procedural liberalism are not enough. Without shared sacred commitments to god or nation, the social fabric frays.

This critique goes beyond cultural observation. At its heart is a philosophical and political challenge to the foundations of postwar liberalism – especially the “open society” vision articulated by Karl Popper in his 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies. In the decades since the publication of Popper’s book, the “open society” has become synonymous with the post-World War II political and moral order grounded in freedom, pluralism, and critical inquiry. Popper contrasted it with the “closed society,” in which conformity, dogma, and tribal loyalties dominate. Open societies thrive on individual rights and peaceful disagreement, not on shared religious or ethnic identity.

Yet in the wake of declining religious participation, rising political polarisation, and deepening institutional distrust, many on the political right now question whether such openness can still sustain cohesion or meaning. Critics like R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, and pseudonymous essayist N.S. Lyons argue that Popperian openness offers no deeper sense of belonging or purpose. Both argue that the postwar liberal consensus dismantled traditional sources of meaning – such as religion and nation – and replaced them with emotionally thin norms like tolerance and procedural openness. Both see a return to shared sacred commitments – whether to religious faith or nation – as essential to restoring cohesion and purpose in liberal societies.

But must liberal societies choose between meaning imposed through frameworks of authority, whether religious or nationalistic, and moral drift? Or is there a way to restore and preserve social cohesion and cultural depth without retreating to the premodern certainties the “strong gods” advocates demand?

The “strong gods” thesis and its appeal

In his 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, Reno argues that the West’s postwar elites made a tragic overcorrection. Determined to avoid the ideological fanaticism that led to fascism and communism in the early 20^th century, they embraced a civic creed of openness, proceduralism, and scepticism toward unifying ideals.

This “postwar consensus,” Reno writes, “taught that strong loves – of God, of country, of truth – were inherently dangerous.” In their place, elites installed the so-called “weak gods”: tolerance, pluralism, individual rights, and economic integration. The result, he contends, is a spiritually hollow society: “Our time begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness. We need a home. And for that, we require the return of the strong gods.”

Where Reno laments the retreat from shared devotion, Lyons sharpens the critique. In his 2025 essay American Strong Gods, Lyons argues that Popper’s open society gave rise to a “crusade for openness” that dissolved traditional bonds – faith, family, and nation – and replaced them with proceduralism and technocratic management. In his telling, the postwar liberal consensus sought not only to constrain authoritarianism but to neutralise moral conviction, weaken inherited norms, and displace thick communal identities in favour of a borderless managerial order.

In Love of a Nation, Lyons warns that “a man cannot love a special economic zone.” Nations, like families, rely on particular loyalties and obligations – bonds that are “covenantal, not contractual.” Without leaders who feel responsibility toward their own people, or citizens who are permitted to cherish their home as theirs, the liberal state becomes a hollow apparatus: efficient, but unable to command sacrifice or sustain solidarity.

This critique resonates for a reason. It reflects real phenomena: declining church attendance, rising mental illness, ideological fragmentation, and an ambient sense of drift in liberal democracies.

It also connects to a deeper psychological insight. Humans are tribal creatures, hard-wired for belonging. We evolved in small moral communities. Our deepest intuitions are shaped by loyalty, sanctity, and shared identity. When liberal societies focus exclusively on autonomy and individual rights, they risk ignoring these “binding foundations.” In the words of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “morality binds and blinds.” It unites groups, but also shuts them off from one another. That tension sits at the heart of the “strong gods” appeal.

What Reno and Lyons offer is not just nostalgia but an emotionally compelling diagnosis. They argue that liberalism’s strength – its openness – is also its weakness.

A misdiagnosis of the unmaking of liberalism?

The “strong gods” thesis is compelling because it identifies real symptoms: spiritual dislocation, political polarisation, and moral incoherence. But the remedy it proposes – a return to sacred unifying frameworks — risks misdiagnosing the disease and underestimates the dangers in its own prescription. It also overlooks other potential causes of today’s malaise, including postmodern relativism, civic neglect, institutional fragility, and economic insecurity. The problems with liberalism’s current condition may not be just philosophical – but institutional, economic, and cultural.

The “strong gods” critique begins by misrepresenting the intellectual foundations of liberalism. Reno and Lyons frequently cast Popper as the high priest of a morally hollow worldview – one that elevates individual autonomy and technocratic governance while rejecting tradition, community, and sacred purpose.

Reno accuses The Open Society and Its Enemies of promoting an “anti-metaphysical” order that blinds liberal societies to the moral costs of openness. Lyons likewise portrays Popper as a source of cultural relativism, claiming he sought to “relativize truths,” dismantle loyalties, and replace collective purpose with technocratic neutrality.

But this caricature misunderstands Popper’s essential thesis. The Open Society and Its Enemies was written not as a plea for relativism, but as a defence of civilisation against dogma and authoritarianism.

Popper’s open society rests not on moral indifference but on epistemic humility: the recognition that no one holds a monopoly on moral truth, and that values must remain open to criticism and revision. Popper captured the contrast crisply when he wrote, “What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.” For Popper, to “moralize politics” was to apply ethical standards to political action: to reduce suffering, expand freedom, and promote human dignity. But to “politicize morals” was to enshrine one moral code as unchallengeable law – a move he believed led directly to repression.

This distinction is critical. Popper did not deny the existence of objective truths. What he denied was the state’s right to impose perfectionist ideals as metaphysical necessities. In this, he offered not relativism, but a humble and open ethic – one grounded in fallibility, not indifference.

Popper’s position belonged to a liberal tradition stretching from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Friedrich Hayek: thinkers who saw liberty not as moral emptiness but as the space in which truth could be tested, errors corrected, and better ways of living discovered. Mill insisted in On Liberty that, “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth [is] produced by its collision with error.”

The alternative – societies built on infallible truths – had already produced gulags, gas chambers, and purges. Liberalism is not politically restrained because it is metaphysically thin. It is politically restrained because it is morally serious. That same moral seriousness explains liberalism’s metaphysical modesty: it does not presume to resolve questions of meaning, belief, or identity. Instead, it builds the framework in which they can be contested – freely and without coercion.

The “strong gods” thesis also obscures the corrosive impact of postmodern relativism on Western societies. The shift from liberal pluralism to postmodern scepticism did more to erode shared meaning than anything Popper or Mill ever proposed.

Where liberalism saw reason and open discourse as tools to pursue truth, postmodernism – beginning – rejected the premise altogether. It questioned whether objective truth exists, treated moral values as culturally contingent, and dismissed grand narratives—of progress, liberty, or human dignity—as instruments of power. “[T]ruth isn’t outside power… truth is a thing of this world,” Michel Foucault declared. Universal values were rebranded as instruments of oppression. Moral judgement gave way to identity affirmation.

To many, this perspective may have seemed liberating. It exposed hidden power structures and challenged oppressive traditions. It promised greater freedom and inclusion. But over time, its corrosive scepticism undermined more than just injustice. It eroded belief in shared moral foundations and social purpose.

Writers like Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch saw the consequences coming. In The Closing of the American Mind Bloom explained that when everything is relative, people no longer feel responsible for contributing meaningfully to society. Relativism fragments society and disconnects individuals from shared values: “America is experienced not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone... [the forces that gave them a place in the whole] have… lost their compelling force.”

Hirsch added a cultural dimension. In Cultural Literacy, he warned that the erosion of shared knowledge threatens not just education, but the social glue of democratic life. When schools fail to transmit a common base of knowledge, he observed, “it would be hard to invent a more effective recipe for cultural fragmentation.”

Taken together, Bloom and Hirsch anticipated a society in which those common frameworks would dissolve, leaving individuals unmoored from shared cultural and moral frameworks. In their absence, identity has increasingly filled the void. Almost inevitably, religion, nationality, even biological sex ceased to function as stable reference points and became contested sites of recognition – battlegrounds where individuals sought meaning in the absence of broader civic or moral frameworks.

This cultural transformation has not been confined to theory or intellectual debate. As Andrew Sullivan argues in his 2018 essay, We All Live on Campus Now, the values and sensitivities that once defined elite universities have spread into journalism, corporations, and government – reshaping societal norms far beyond academia.

The institutional consequences followed the cultural logic. As postmodern scepticism gave way to identity-based moral certainty, the liberal norms of truth-seeking and reasoned disagreement were displaced by new imperatives: emotional safety, deference to subjective experience. University policies on microaggressions and trigger warnings began to codify this shift, reflecting a new moral framework in which harm is measured subjectively and debate can itself be construed as aggression. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt observe, many students now interpret words as violence, and view disagreement as a form of disrespect or invalidation.

These trends are not just cultural – they are measurable. In the United States, FIRE’s 2024 campus free speech survey found that 27% of students reported feeling pressure to self-censor in class. Meanwhile, Gallup reported in 2023 that confidence in higher education had fallen to just 36%, down from 57% in 2015.

The resulting landscape offers unprecedented freedom, but struggles to answer basic civic questions. What constitutes the good life? What do citizens owe each other? What gives purpose in a pluralistic society?

The “strong gods” thesis is right to perceive a crisis of meaning – but it misreads the cause. What looks like liberalism unbound is, more accurately, liberalism unmoored – its institutions shaped by ideas that reject its core commitments to truth, pluralism, and rational inquiry. The result is not freedom’s triumph but its erosion. Liberal societies now drift not because they honoured openness too much, but because they ceased to defend the moral and cultural architecture that once gave openness coherence.

Another failure lies in the weakening of the civic infrastructure that once gave liberal societies moral depth. Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that 19th-century America’s strength lay not just in its Constitution, but in its habits – voluntary associations, town meetings, and schools of public spirit. Citizens learned cooperation by practising it.

Today, this fabric is fraying. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam demonstrated that the institutions that once sustained civic life – neighbourhood associations, local clubs, religious communities – have steadily weakened since the mid-20th century. Trust in others has eroded as participation in local organisations has declined, and newer generations are less likely to form the long-term civic bonds that enable democratic self-government.

This decline in civic participation has been compounded by bureaucratic centralisation, displacing local initiative and weakening community-level self-government. As Yuval Levin observes about America in The Fractured Republic, a nationalised political culture has increasingly crowded out the “middle layers” of society – families, congregations, local associations – that once formed the bedrock of American civil life. Instead of empowering these institutions to solve problems, modern government often bypasses or displaces them, leaving individuals isolated and society fragmented.

In the United Kingdom, over-centralisation has had similar effects. Local authorities now raise only a fraction of the revenue they spend, leaving them heavily dependent on central government transfers and limiting their scope for local innovation or accountability. As Philip Blond argued in Red Tory, “the state and the market have conspired to hollow out civil society, leaving individuals atomised and communities fragmented.” A 2022 report by Centre for Cities concluded that Britain has become “one of the most fiscally centralised countries in the developed world.”

Education has also played a part in this civic decline. As civic life has fragmented and local initiative has waned, schools have also retreated from their traditional role of transmitting shared civic knowledge. Curricula have shifted toward identity, well-being, and emotional literacy – often at the expense of historical understanding or constitutional reasoning.

The result has been a generation often unable to explain the institutions that protect their freedoms or the norms that sustain public life. In Australia, the latest National Assessment Program – Civics and Citizenship revealed that only 28% of Year 10 students met the proficient standard in 2024, a decline from 38% in 2019. In the United States, the 2023 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey found that only 66% of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial – an improvement, but from a low base.

Civic education is not just about knowledge. It provides a moral grammar. It teaches young people how to participate in a pluralistic democracy, how to resolve disagreements peacefully, and why liberal institutions matter. It provides a shared vocabulary about the common good – without requiring a shared theology or ethnicity.

Hirsch warned of this dynamic decades ago. In Cultural Literacy, he argued that true civic enfranchisement depends on a shared base of knowledge and language. Without it, democratic deliberation breaks down. This erosion of civic education has contributed to the very vacuum into which the “strong gods” now march. But the gods did not drive out liberal order. We allowed our liberal institutions to rust.

The erosion has not merely been institutional. It has also been cultural. As Charles Murray documents in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, the breakdown of marriage, workforce participation, and civic engagement is not simply the result of economic change or personal failure. He argues that a reluctance to publicly affirm traditional civic norms has contributed to broader cultural fragmentation – creating the very vacuum into which the “strong gods” now march.

Policy design has compounded the damage. Welfare systems in the United States and United Kingdom have long imposed effective marriage penalties – reducing benefits when low-income couples formalise their relationships. Heritage Foundation analysis found that a low-income couple with children can lose thousands of dollars in support simply by getting married. Meanwhile, tax systems in Australia and the UK often favour dual-income households while undervaluing unpaid caregiving, placing single-earner or stay-at-home parent families at a relative disadvantage. These structures do not prohibit family formation, but they discourage it – subtly shifting incentives in ways that make stability harder to achieve and sustain. As with so many liberal failures, the outcome was not imposed from above. It emerged from neglect: no one meant to punish families, but the effect has been to erode them.

The “strong gods” thesis also downplays the role of economic insecurity and state failure in undermining liberal legitimacy. What the critique misreads as moral or spiritual drift may, in part, be frustration with liberal institutions that no longer deliver. When families are priced out of housing, trapped in failing schools, or blocked from upward mobility by bureaucratic sclerosis, disillusionment grows – not because people have rejected liberal values, but because they no longer believe the system works.

Take housing. In both the United States and Australia, home ownership has shifted from a middle-class expectation to a speculative privilege. Median house prices in Sydney now exceed ten times median income. In the U.S., nearly half of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and one in four spend over 50%. The causes are well known: restrictive zoning, NIMBYism, and planning regimes that constrain supply. Liberal democracies have tolerated these distortions for decades – often in the name of community control or environmental balance – while undermining the very mobility they promise.

These trends are not merely economic. They naturally shape people’s sense of fairness, opportunity, and membership in a shared project. A system that offers procedural rights but delivers unaffordable homes, failing schools, stagnating wages, and inaccessible healthcare will struggle to command loyalty – no matter how well it performs in abstract indices of freedom.

What looks to Reno or Lyons like spiritual exhaustion is more likely disenfranchisement. If liberal societies feel hollow, might that not be because their institutions have stopped functioning? Not because liberty has gone too far, but because liberalism has stopped delivering?

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the “strong gods” thesis promises unity – but delivers only illusion. Its leading figures gesture toward the sacred, but in divergent and often contradictory directions. Reno seeks a revival of Christian orthodoxy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali frames her conversion as a civilisational defence against Islamism and secular nihilism. Peter Thiel blends cultural Christianity with technological futurism. Niall Ferguson swings between admiration for national tradition and discomfort with populist excess. Joe Rogan offers a folk-theological yearning for rootedness. What unites them is not a coherent philosophy but a shared anxiety about liberal drift.

As James R. Rogers has pointed out, this internal incoherence is the movement’s Achilles’ heel. Specific appeals to thick religious or national identity alienate pluralistic societies; vague gestures toward transcendence lack the emotional power to bind. The result is a strategic contradiction: to inspire unity, the gods must exclude; to preserve peace, they must be diluted. Either way, the project fails on its own terms.

Worse, when the strong gods do consolidate political power, the consequences are often authoritarian. Sacred unity can become sacralised violence. Moral belonging can degenerate into persecution. And gods, once enthroned, rarely stay within democratic bounds.

These dangers are not hypothetical. In Turkey, Erdoğan’s blend of Islamic revival and nationalist pride has steadily eroded judicial independence and press freedom over two decades. In Hungary, Orbán’s “illiberal democracy,” built explicitly on appeals to Christian heritage, has centralised power and marginalised minorities.

Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has followed a similar path, embracing religious and nationalist rhetoric as cover for undermining constitutional norms. He increasingly frames his presidency in religious and nationalist terms, casting political opponents not as democratic adversaries but as enemies of God and country. As conservative writer Peter Wehner has warned, Trump’s “appetite for revenge” now threatens to turn democratic institutions into tools of sectarian punishment.

These real-world examples show how appeals to strong gods can transform democratic systems into authoritarian regimes that suppress liberty in the name of national or religious purpose. This is the strongest indictment of the “strong gods thesis:” it offers no serious answer to the realities of religious and cultural pluralism in modern societies. Short of coercion or exclusion, it cannot deliver the unity it promises.

What are Liberal Societies to Do?

If “strong gods” critique asks the right questions about belonging and meaning, but its answers are historically dangerous and ill-suited to pluralistic societies, what does a liberal alternative look like?

The answer may begin with recognising how liberal societies have always generated meaning – not by imposing shared beliefs, but by enabling people to build them together. As Tocqueville observed, the strength of liberal democracy lies not in the unity of creed but in the vitality of voluntary association. That insight remains crucial today.

The model Tocqueville observed in 19^th century America still works. The evidence is particularly striking in Denmark. Despite being one of the world’s most secular nations, 78% of citizens express trust in strangers they have never met. According to Danish political scientists Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen and Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, this trust accounts for approximately 25% of Denmark’s national wealth – a substantial economic advantage derived from reduced transaction costs and lower bureaucratic overhead.

This trust is not rooted in religious uniformity: Denmark is one of the world’s most secular countries and increasingly diverse. Its cohesion stems instead from strong civic networks and a culture of association, supported by public institutions that are transparent, responsive, and widely trusted.

More than 100,000 associations serve a population of just 5.7 million. Most Danes belong to several over their lifetimes. These associations span everything from volunteer fire brigades and choirs to hobby clubs and trade groups – strengthening both local identity and trust in institutions.

Denmark consistently ranks among the world’s most cohesive and high-trust democracies. It places near the top of both the OECD’s Better Life Index and the World Happiness Report, scoring highly for life satisfaction, trust in government, and civic engagement.

Denmark suggests cohesion does not require sacred dogma. But it does need the civic architecture that facilitates human connection. If liberal societies are to meet the challenge of meaning, the task is not to retreat from openness but to rebuild the civic, institutional, and economic foundations that make openness work.

Constitutional Patriotism as a Framework for Civic Belonging

Liberal societies might benefit from what political theorist Dolf Sternberger called “constitutional patriotism.” Rather than binding citizens through shared ancestry, religion, or ethnic identity, this form of belonging is rooted in a shared commitment to liberal democratic principles – principles such as equality before the law, freedom of conscience, and democratic governance.

Sternberger argues that this commitment is not merely rational but also emotional, stating that over time, the constitution evolved from a set of regulations into a living entity that citizens could emotionally identify with: “To the extent that it came to life... a new, second patriotism formed imperceptibly, one founded upon the constitution.”

But shared commitments do not emerge spontaneously. They must be transmitted – and that requires deliberate institutional effort. Most importantly, they need to be taught. Shared commitments require transmission across generations, and that task falls to civic education in schools.

Universities also play a crucial role in civic formation. Yet many have abandoned this responsibility. As I recently argued in Quadrant, there is much the state can lawfully do to nudge state-funded universities towards preparing citizens for democratic life. Most importantly, they must foster reasoned disagreement, intellectual openness, and a commitment to truth that transcends partisan boundaries

Liberal societies also need civic rituals and public symbols that give emotional expression to their commitments. Events like Australia’s Anzac Day or the U.S. Fourth of July are powerful precisely because they affirm shared societal experience – moments of collective sacrifice and national purpose – rather than shared ancestry or religious belief.

Robert Bellah’s theory of civil religion holds that shared public rituals offer a sense of belonging that reinforces democratic ideals across diverse populations. These civic rituals can be modernised, pluralised, and even secularised – but they should never be abandoned.

Narrative matters too. Nations need stories they can tell about themselves that are forward-looking, inclusive, and cohesive. Liberal societies can relearn how to remember critically and aspire confidently at the same time. A society paralysed by shame will not survive. Research by More in Common has found that Americans still converge around core historical symbols, heroes, and holidays – suggesting that shared civic narratives remain a key source of unity, even across partisan divides.

Sport plays a similar role. Few other arenas bind a nation together across race, class, or religion as powerfully as a shared sporting culture. When Australia plays a cricket Test match, or America pauses for the Super Bowl, civic fracture lines are momentarily suspended. These moments may be fleeting, but they point to something enduring: the human hunger for collective striving, and for rituals that affirm shared belonging without requiring ideological consensus.

A recent U.S. survey found that 90% of Americans believe sports bring people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds together – making it one of the few arenas of widespread cross-demographic agreement. Liberal democracies should cherish sport and resist its politicisation. It is one of the few remaining sites of spontaneous national unity.

Liberal societies should also recover the civic power of local communities. Excessive centralisation has weakened the “middle layers” of society – displacing voluntary institutions and disempowering citizens. One remedy is subsidiarity: shifting decision-making closer to those affected by it. Switzerland exemplifies this, with a federal system that gives substantial autonomy to cantons and communes and engages citizens directly through referenda. Denmark, too, maintains high levels of civic trust in part because of its strong municipal governance, which fosters responsiveness and local accountability.

These decentralised models offer a way to restore civic belonging without resorting to top-down cultural unity. They allow pluralism to thrive while grounding citizens in institutions they can shape.

In short, constitutional patriotism can be more than a theory. It can live in story, education, ritual, and shared public life. These civic forms can help liberal societies meet the human need for belonging – not through blood or belief, but through shared institutions and voluntary participation. In this way, liberal democracies can foster cohesion without succumbing to the exclusionary certainties of the so-called “strong gods.”

Uphold Civic and Moral Boundaries to Protect Pluralism

Liberal societies may also need clearer moral and civic boundaries that protect pluralism. Tolerance is not a suicide pact. A society committed to free expression, freedom of religion, and equal treatment must also be willing to defend those norms against ideologies that seek to dismantle them. Immigration, for instance, can enrich liberal societies – but only if newcomers understand and accept core liberal principles.

Denmark offers a compelling example. Immigrants are expected to learn Danish, participate in civic education, and affirm democratic norms. These are not ideological loyalty tests but civic guardrails – basic commitments that make pluralism possible. New citizens must sign a Declaration on Integration and Active Citizenship, pledging support for gender equality, freedom of expression, and mutual respect.

Douglas Murray contends that Western states have too often feared articulating their values for fear of sounding exclusionary. But inclusion requires clarity. The price of admission to a liberal democracy is respect for the rules that make peaceful coexistence possible. That includes rejecting efforts – from any quarter – to impose religious orthodoxy, racial essentialism, or ideological loyalty tests. Liberal societies may need to rediscover the confidence to say not only what they stand for, but what they will not tolerate: forced conformity, political violence, and illiberal creeds that reject mutual respect. Clearer legal boundaries may be needed. But if governments, civil society leaders, and educators are willing to name liberal values explicitly – and to defend them without apology – this moral clarity may be enough.

Confront Policy Failures to Restore Trust in Liberal Institutions

Liberal societies should respond to rising disillusionment by confronting the policy failures that have made the promise of freedom feel increasingly out of reach.

When younger generations cannot afford homes, start families, or progress in their careers, who could blame them if they begin to drift toward nihilism? Not because freedom has failed, but because the institutions that once made it meaningful no longer function.

In too many Western democracies, the state has done a poor job in areas where it has claimed a virtual monopoly. Education, housing regulation, health, and welfare are common examples. All are critical to the good life – yet all show signs of acute failure.

Too often, liberal democracies have failed not by allowing too much freedom, but by mismanaging key institutions. Yet some countries have shown that better outcomes are possible.

In housing, Tokyo has maintained affordability by allowing density and minimising zoning restrictions. In education, charter networks like Arizona’s Great Hearts Academies have delivered academic excellence to diverse communities. And in welfare, the 1996 U.S. reforms, which tied support to work, led to sharp reductions in dependency and child poverty, especially among single mothers. In the decades since the 1996 U.S. welfare reforms, political will may have faded, enforcement weakened, and funds diverted, eroding the reform’s original intent. Still, the episode remains one of the clearest examples of liberal societies delivering on their promises: restoring dignity through work and expanding opportunity without coercion.

Failures in education, housing, and welfare are not abstract. They shape lives, limit opportunity, and corrode trust. Liberalism need not promise transcendence. But it must deliver the conditions for flourishing: security, opportunity, and a path upward for those willing to take it. This is not a call for more government, but for government that works. Nor is it a call for perfection – only for systems that reward effort, protect dignity, and enable self-reliance.

Strengthen Family Stability to Support Civic Engagement

Liberal societies cannot restore family life by decree, nor should they try. But they can recognise its value – and stop undermining it. They should remove barriers inadvertently created: like welfare systems that penalise marriage and tax codes that undervalue caregiving. Targeted reforms – those that reward responsibility without prescribing ideals – can help rebuild the foundations of civic life. Families do not need “strong gods.” But they do need societies that stop punishing those who try to build something lasting.

Moral Ambition to Inspire Collective Purpose

Finally, liberalism may need to reclaim its moral ambition. Since the days of President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher extolling economic freedom as indispensable to “human dignity and to a more just, more honest society,” liberalism has too often ceded the language of meaning and purpose to its critics. In doing so, it has come to be seen as technocratic and rootless – more focused on process than purpose, more fluent in rights than in the common good.

Meanwhile, as elites drifted leftwards toward relativism or identity-based theory, they have actively disavowed the institutions they inherited. Into this void have stepped challengers – from religious nationalists to populist authoritarians who promise strength without principle and belonging without liberty.

Yet liberalism at its best is not morally indifferent. It is a tradition that believes dignity is discovered through freedom, character is formed in voluntary association, and solidarity is built through reciprocity, not coercion.

From Disillusionment to Renewal

The current turn toward strong gods – from Hirsi Ali’s leap of faith to Peterson’s new orthodoxy – reflects not only disillusionment with liberalism, but a fear that open societies can no longer compete for meaning. That fear is misplaced. Liberal societies need not imitate sacred authority to inspire belonging. But they must stop outsourcing meaning to the very forces that threaten them. The open society will only endure if it is made again into something people can believe in – because it delivers not just rights, but prosperity; not just institutions, but ideals worth committing to.

The real question is not whether liberalism should resurrect the religious or nationalist certainties of the past, but whether it can rebuild the civic and cultural foundations on which meaning and freedom can endure together.

At last, America is catching up with global democratic standards. For too long, it has been constrained by the quaint prohibitions of the 18th century — blinkered by a Constitution that takes a dim view of high-value gifts from foreign rulers. But now, thanks to President Trump’s pioneering jurisprudence, the republic has finally entered the modern diplomatic age. The Qatari jet is not a constitutional violation. It is a breakthrough in applied emolument theory.

Once Trump leaves office, the aircraft will become the prized possession of his presidential library — technically owned by his foundation rather than personally, because that makes all the difference. Attorney General Pam Bondi has issued a memo declaring the arrangement legal under an expansive interpretation of the phrase “not technically his” — like handing a Rolex to an intern and asking them to hold it for their boss until he retires.

Still, one or two constitutional lawyers — obviously still flying commercial — have expressed concern. The U.S. Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits any federal officeholder from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent.

“This is a textbook violation,” said Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault (admittedly a Democrat Party donor). The Qatari aircraft meets every element of a prohibited foreign gift: a “present of any kind,” from a “foreign state,” conferring obvious “personal benefit” — three ticks on the Founders’ “Please Don’t Do This” checklist. But such narrow thinking explains why American democracy has lagged behind other powerful political systems – like Russia’s.

Indeed, historical precedents reveal how primitive past administrations were in handling foreign generosity. When President Martin Van Buren received lions and Arabian horses from foreign rulers in 1839, Congress forced him to surrender them to zoos and museums. How refreshingly quaint that approach seems now. Similarly, when President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize’s $1.4 million award, he donated the entire sum to charity. Everyone can surely see that this was unnecessary virtue-signalling compared to Trump’s confident acceptance of Qatar’s meaningful gesture.

Federal law may require gifts over $480 to become government property. But a $400 million aircraft operates under different mathematics. The contrast between the legal threshold and Qatar’s generosity merely demonstrates how unworkable gift regulations have become.

The administration estimates retrofitting could cost hundreds of millions — potentially approaching the value of Qatar’s original gift. But as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained, “You can’t put a price on friendship,” especially when taxpayers cover the conversion costs.

Critics fret about America’s international reputation, but such concerns reflect outdated thinking about global leadership. The Qatar arrangement only strengthens the U.S. position among nations that understand diplomacy as a reciprocal exchange of gestures — preferably meaningful ones. Granted, these nations may not belong to the OECD. But neither, at this rate, may the United States. Banana republics have long grasped the wisdom of bypassing legislative friction in favour of executive efficiency. Why waste time with congressional approval when all it takes is a memo — and a runway?

The Founders who crafted the Emoluments Clause were clearly overthinking the issue. They worried that foreign gifts might corrupt republican officials, having witnessed how European monarchies undermined governments through strategic generosity. But they failed to anticipate how sophisticated modern leaders could separate personal benefits from policy decisions. Trump’s arrangement proves that a truly confident president can accept a $400 million aircraft from an absolute monarchy without any risk of compromised judgment — a level of self-discipline the Framers simply couldn’t have imagined.

Sure, national security experts have raised some tedious objections about foreign surveillance equipment. But this paranoia reflects outdated Cold War thinking. After all, what better way to drain the swamp than with a gift from the country that simultaneously rents hangar space to U.S. CENTCOM and hosts the political leadership of Hamas? The Qatari government: proof that in foreign policy, you really can be all things to all people.

Conservative reaction has ranged from misguided purism to proper understanding of modern governance. Some Republicans, apparently still trapped by constitutional literalism, have expressed concern. Senator Rand Paul declared he “wouldn’t take it,” demonstrating the kind of rigid thinking that has held American diplomacy back for decades. Senator Susan Collins worried about “compliance with the gift law” — clearly missing the sophisticated legal framework Attorney General Bondi has established.

Even some traditionally supportive conservative commentators have momentarily lost their bearings. Ben Shapiro called the arrangement “skeezy,” apparently forgetting that strategic alliance-building requires flexibility. Laura Loomer’s alarm over “jihadists in suits” marks a regrettable failure to appreciate Qatar’s nuanced contribution to presidential infrastructure. Such reactions demonstrate how constitutional fundamentalism can cloud practical judgment.

Fortunately, more enlightened Republicans understand the realities of contemporary leadership. Senator Tommy Tuberville grasped the essential point: “Free is good... If it’s legal for him to accept that gift and be able to fly on that for the next four years, I think it’s great.” Senator Markwayne Mullin dismissed the controversy as the “stupidest” issue, while Steve Daines captured the pragmatic conservative position perfectly: “You can’t beat free.”

When schoolchildren tour Trump’s library and see Qatar’s Boeing 747 on the runway, they’ll witness tangible evidence of how far American constitutional arrangements evolved under the Trump presidency. Trump himself has already shared his vision for the aircraft’s ultimate destiny: “Someday, when they land this beautiful aircraft on the front lawn of my library — the greatest library, by the way, probably ever built — people will say, ‘This man knew how to lead. And how to fly first class.’”

The Qatari jet is a fitting monument to Trump’s presidency. Real Trump supporters understand the trade-offs. Yes, accepting luxury aircraft from an Arabian prince might once have raised eyebrows. But when a president is waging the culture war conservatives have long demanded, what’s a foreign gratuity or two? Even if it has a $400 million price tag.

True, Trump may be dismantling the American-led world order, trampling on the constitution, and taking an approach to ethics laws that would make a banana republic blush.

But at least he’s taking it to Harvard.

This article first appeared in Australia’s Quadrant magazine on 26 May 2025. To read it on the Quadrant website, please click here.