This Friday, Niall Ferguson examines the prospects for a peace deal for Ukraine; Victor Davis Hanson offers an explanation and appraisal of President Trump’s foreign policy; and Samuel Helfont explains the significance of debates underway in the Middle East regarding how—and where—to build an alternate to the Strait of Hormuz for a trade route.
Russia’s War Against Ukraine
“From the outset, this war has been a contest between David and Goliath,” Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson writes at The Free Press, fresh off a trip to Kyiv. While Russia’s economy is also struggling, “the strain is greater in Ukraine,” he reports. “Last winter was bitter in Ukraine. This one will be worse.” Ferguson sees some indicators that a deal may be in play, including the Trump administration’s need to relieve energy markets and broadcast a diplomatic breakthrough before the midterms. After chronicling the latest in US and European diplomacy, Ferguson concludes with doubt that “a compromise peace can be signed and successfully implemented.” Putin will aggress as long as he believes he can succeed, the historian writes, while Zelenskyy “would surely not survive politically if he relinquished territory Ukraine has succeeded in defending.” Still, he says, some sort of peace announcement would not come as a surprise. Read more here. [Subscription required.]
US Foreign Policy
“A popular critique of Trump’s foreign policy over his two administrations is that it has been supposedly conducted with too much uncertainty, if not chaos,” Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson writes for The Caravan. Yet this and related criticisms, he argues, “imagine that Trump’s communications are failed attempts at being persuasive rather than calibrated tactics focused on obtaining what America needs.” Hanson offers a comprehensive account of the Trump foreign policy across both presidential terms, maintaining that it is “predicated on a realist assumption that nations gravitate toward perceived strength, but keep distant from hesitant or weak leadership.” Acknowledging that Trump’s “Jacksonian policies” are largely “devoid of protocol and manners,” Hanson maintains that an evaluation of their effectiveness should center outcomes over perceptions. To that point, Hanson sees a weakened Iran (also a blow to its partner China), favorable changes in governance in Latin America, and an empowered Israel as among the global accomplishments of the administration. Read more here.
“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz during Operation Epic Fury exposed the fragility of the Middle East’s strategic geography,” Visiting Fellow Samuel Helfont argues in The Caravan. The war has pushed states in the Middle East to a decision point on how to build alternatives to the Strait as a trade route that are less vulnerable to disruption. One of two primary options “runs through Israel and would consolidate an American-backed order running through India, the Gulf, Israel, Cyprus and Greece, and through them to Europe,” the military historian writes. “The other runs from the Gulf through Syria and Turkey to Europe, potentially organizing a rival coalition of nominal American partners whose interests often diverge from Washington’s most reliable regional allies.” While Washington “probably does not need to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in order to secure the preferred first option, Helfont concludes, “it would almost certainly need enough movement toward accommodation to give Saudi Arabia and other Arab states political cover for an Israel-centered corridor.” Read more here.
Freedom Frequency
George Mason refused to sign the newly drafted Constitution in 1787, insisting that it did not sufficiently protect the rights of the people. As told by Distinguished Visiting Fellow CQ Brown Jr., Mason has come down in history as a Patriot whose principled dissent helped the other Founders refine the American charter. When Mason spoke truth to power, it was not mere performative complaint—he had done the work of collaborating toward an ideal but insisted the Constitution could still be improved. Brown points out that Mason’s example showed something else: that interrogating the principles of a leader or an organization could also require challenging oneself. This is because Mason was a slaveowner, and despite endorsing the Revolution’s ideals of equality and opposing the slave trade, he continued to benefit from enslaved labor. This contradiction, writes Brown, shows that the Founders were imperfect individuals and that dissent, while taking courage, also demands humility and candor. Read more here.
In this essay for the Founders & Fellows series, Visiting Fellow Russ Roberts reminisces about the Battle Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, the town where he went to school. The Revolutionary War memorial there is simple and its story short: The outnumbered Patriots refused to back down before the British soldiers, and the war began. Roberts wonders at the courage of the few dozen colonists as they faced the world’s most powerful military. As he explains, those Americans were brave because they were fighting for their home—and for their freedom to live in that home. The British, by contrast, “died to keep the past on its throne,” in the words of a famous poem. The Patriots lost that battle, but it was just the first act of a great drama that is still unfolding, Roberts writes. Read more here.
Education
What impact will artificial intelligence have on students’ intellectual curiosity and teachers’ ability to do their jobs?
Get the Story: Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek joins Bill Whalen on Matters of Policy & Politics to discuss his recent essay “Artificial Intelligence: Students, Jobs, and the Future.” In that article, Hanushek points out that AI entered classrooms years into a longer-running decline in student achievement. He argues that “AI magnifies the existing need for improving the schools.” Watch or listen here.
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