Today, Victor Davis Hanson argues Iran is still losing its war with the US and its partners, but the Trump administration ultimately controls whether that will culminate in a US and allied victory. Arvind Krishnamurthy estimates the value to the US economy of the fact that the US dollar remains the global reserve currency. And Orin Kerr unpacks what a recent Supreme Court ruling will mean to future cases that deal with the Fourth Amendment.
Iran
On his website, Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson writes about all the ways he says Iran is slowly losing the confrontation with the US, Israel, and the Gulf Cooperation Council states. Its military is shattered, its economy and currency are in freefall, and its oil-producing neighbors are slowly but steadily adapting to a world where their crude has to reach global markets in ways that don’t involve the Strait of Hormuz. Should all-out hostilities resume, Hanson argues, the Iranian Air Force is outnumbered approximately 1,300 combat airframes to none. Whatever happens, Hanson says, the fate of Iran rests in the hands of the Trump administration. “Iran is losing whether it is being bombed, sanctioned, or embargoed—or all three. Its ultimate fate now rests with the Trump administration, which apparently has not yet decided what, exactly, that fate will be.” Read more here.
Freedom Frequency
The status of the US dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency creates what a world leader once called an “exorbitant privilege” benefiting the United States, writes Arvind Krishnamurthy in Freedom Frequency. The dollar is a safe-haven asset that investors flock to in times of crisis, and its value to those investors who demand safe dollar debt translates into a substantial transfer from the rest of the world to US borrowers. Data show that if the dollar were to lose its reserve currency dominance, the results would include a weaker dollar (eroding purchasing power abroad), higher interest costs for mortgages and government borrowing, and an end to the substantial revenue flow derived from foreigners paying a premium for US debt. The impact of higher interest rates alone, under this scenario, would cost the US economy $33 trillion. Dollar dominance is not about to collapse, but the effects of sanctions, new currency arrangements, and an erosion of US credibility all sound warnings. Read more here.
Thomas Paine, author of the legendary pamphlet Common Sense (1776), wielded the power of rhetoric to explain freedom to the common man. Distinguished Visiting Fellow Norman Naimark tells the story of how Paine, an English emigrant to the American colonies, blossomed into a writer whose persuasive abilities still resonate today. Six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Paine’s phrases shaped the colonists’ search for sovereignty, democratic institutions, and a “strong union” with which to face the world—though he warned that government was a “necessary evil.” Paine also foresaw a tide of freedom spreading outward from the Americas, which in his later years led to trouble with authorities in France and England. In one of his many unforgettable phrases, this one written to rally Washington’s troops, Paine would point out, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” Read more here.
State and Local Governance
The Code of Federal Regulations has expanded from fewer than 10,000 pages in 1950 to more than 100,000 pages today, imposing costs that accumulate through higher prices, reduced innovation, and slower economic growth, argues Research Fellow Patrick A. McLaughlin in the latest episode of Intellections. Because the regulatory system is designed to keep expanding, lasting reform requires more than periodic deregulation. Congress should approve the least costliest rules, agencies should conduct rigorous cost-benefit analyses, and a permanent office should keep regulatory reform on track across administrations. Watch the video here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
At SSRN, Senior Fellow Orin S. Kerr writes of the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Chatrie vs. United States. In this case, the Supreme Court held that the government’s acquisition of Google’s location history data through a geofence warrant in a robbery investigation constituted a Fourth Amendment search because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to their historical cell phone location information. Kerr says the case “is now the most important Fourth Amendment case on new technology, and it throws into question a wide range of existing surveillance practices.” Read more here.
The Environment
Also at SSRN, Senior Fellow Dominic Parker and Ngoc Ha Do write about how journal authors use subjective and emotional language when describing environmental or climate change–related issues more often than when writing about other topics. Looking at 170,000 articles published between 1990 and 2023, they find that “subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12 percent in economics and by 42 percent in science.” They also find articles that use subjective language receive more citations than those that do not. Read more here.
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