President Trump is reportedly considering abandoning America’s longstanding role commanding NATO forces as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), changing the U.S. combatant command structure, and canceling modernization plans for U.S. Forces Japan. While it’s true that Europe needs to step up to the plate on its own defense needs, abandoning the SACEUR position would place U.S. troops under foreign command, give Washington less leverage over our allies, and weaken deterrence. How can Trump better advance his goal of boosting European defense spending? And where can the Defense Department make cuts that bolster deterrence?
Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Before joining AEI, Kori was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London; a professor at West Point, University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University; and worked in the State Department, National Security Council, and Department of Defense. She is the author of Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony, and a contributing writer at the Atlantic, War on the Rocks, and Bloomberg. Her upcoming book is The State and the Soldier: The History of Civil Military Relations in America.
UK residents are currently paying some of the highest prices in the world for electricity. How did Brits go from being an energy superpower to showering in the gym because it’s too expensive to heat water at home? Perhaps because both Labour and Tory politicians are banning the production and use of cheap hydrocarbons in the pursuit of a “Net Zero future.” How is Net Zero irreparably damaging Britain’s economy? And what does the UK example mean for other states attempting to permanently phase out hydrocarbons?
Robert Bryce is an author, speaker, and film producer. He has been writing about energy, power, politics, and innovation for more than three decades and is the author of six books on the subject. His most recent book is A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations (PublicAffairs, 2020). Bryce is also the executive producer of the documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, and the co-producer of the docuseries Juice: Power, Politics & The Grid. He frequently writes on his popular substack robertbryce.substack.com.
The fundamentals of the economy are strong. So why is the Dow Jones down and fears of a recession up? Perhaps because President Trump is rocking the economic boat by threatening tariffs on historic trading partners, only to rescind them the same day; taking a chainsaw to government expenditures when he should be using a scalpel; and talking about structurally changing the U.S. economy. Will Trump’s disruptive approach to the international economy enrich Americans in the long run? Or are the tariffs, and the flip-flopping, going to backfire?
Michael Strain is the director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the Professor of Practice at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a research fellow with the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a research affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Dr. Strain also writes as a columnist for Project Syndicate.
Canada’s economy is in the toilet, has an electorate that is overwhelmingly left wing, and a healthcare system that encourages physician assisted suicide over basic treatment. Canada’s systemic problems have meant that Canadian voters were slowly starting to wake up, and were on track to deliver a blow-out for the conservative party in the next elections. But while Trump’s tariff threats have been omnipresent, his threat to make Canada the “51st state” rallied Canadians around the flag and around the governing Liberal Party. How has Trump’s rhetoric hurt conservative chances of victory? And why would Canada make a terrible 51st state?
Colin Dueck is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and has served as a foreign policy adviser on several Republican presidential campaigns. Colin is the author of four books on American foreign policy and national security and the AEI report True North: Canadian Politics, the Tory Alternative, and the United States.
Partisans believe that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “ambushed” in the Oval Office. The story is rather different. In fact, President Trump was genuinely enthusiastic about signing a minerals deal with Zelensky that would enrich both nations and vest the United States in Ukraine’s future. But Zelensky, acting on poor advice or out of his own stubbornness and exhaustion, used the Oval Office meeting to challenge Trump and Vice President Vance in front of American media, leading to a public spectacle that may permanently damage U.S.-Ukraine relations and Ukrainian security. Is the U.S.-Ukraine relationship salvageable?
Read Marc’s article, Zelensky must mend the breach with Trump — or resign, in the Washington Post here.
Read Dany’s latest commentary on the Trump-Vance-Zelensky meeting here.
California has invested tens of billions of dollars in preventing climate change, billions more than California’s investment in adapting to the effects of climate change and directly preventing disasters. And now, the devastation of the recent Los Angeles wildfires is further proof that governments need to focus on protecting citizens through cheap and simple investments in climate adaptation rather than expensive and inefficient investments in climate change prevention.
Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute, and the author of the best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). He has been named one of Time’s 100 most influential people and one of the UK Guardian’s “50 people who can save the planet.” His latest book is Best Things First: The 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World’s Poorest and Our Global SDG Promises (Copenhagen Consensus Center, 2023).
Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have been beyond busy. With a flurry of executive orders and other actions, he is remaking the federal government and American society writ large at lightning speed. In this special WTH episode, Megyn Kelly shares her feelings about Trump 2.0, the direction of the country under his leadership, and how his approach the second time around differs from the first. How is Trump remaking the country in his own image? And how durable will his legacy be once he leaves office?
Megyn Kelly is the founder of Devil May Care Media and hosts The Megyn Kelly Show. She was a journalist at Fox News from 2004 to 2017 and moderated five presidential debates, including the 2015 Republican primary debate. From 2017 to 2018, she worked at NBC News. Kelly has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and her memoir Settle for More became a #1 New York Times bestseller. Before her media career, she practiced law for nine years.
China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, normalizing trade relations with the PRC, was billed to the American public as a rising tide that lifts all boats. But decades later, many of the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs to cheaper Chinese goods have not recovered. And while the first “China shock” left millions of textile and low-skill manufacturing workers without a job, Chinese trade practices are now targeting sectors crucial to American prosperity and national security. How can the U.S. protect vital industries from unfair trade practices? And why is it so difficult to help those who lose their job to trade find new work?
David Autor is the Daniel and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics and co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program and the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. Autor is also an elected Fellow of the Econometrics Society, the Society of Labor Economists, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. In 2019, the Economist labeled Autor “The academic voice of the American worker.”
For decades, police, politicians, and community leaders alike covered up what is likely the largest peacetime organized crime spree in British history: The sexual grooming, exploitation, and trafficking of minors by predominantly Pakistani Muslim migrant communities. While new light is now being shed on this scandal by Elon Musk and brave journalists in Britain, there is an untold number of victims who will likely never see proper justice. How did British fixation on community relations lead to the sexual exploitation of minors? And what does the uncovering of this story, and the corruption that allowed it to occur, mean for the rest of the Western world?
Dominic Green is a fellow at the Royal Historical Society, a Wall Street Journal contributor, and a Washington Examiner columnist. He was previously a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and editor-in-chief of The Spectator’s U.S. edition. Dr. Green is the author of five books about British history and society.
On President Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” attempting to change the current understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment by declaring that the children of illegal immigrants or people on temporary visas born in the United States are not granted citizenship. While many Americans may agree that the unfortunate realities of “birth tourism” and “anchor babies” in the U.S. need to be curbed or stopped, Trump’s executive order has been criticized as unconstitutional and the wrong way to approach the issue. How are presidents of both parties subverting Congress in their pursuit of legislative goals? And how did President Obama’s action on DACA and President Biden’s declaration on the Equal Rights Amendment help create precedent for Trump’s actions today?
Adam White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.