Analyses
United States
The LA Protests Are What Donald Trump Has Been Waiting For
Hussein Ibish 16 June 2025
It’s a real-life film noir in the City of Angels. U.S. President Donald Trump is once again hurling Americans through the looking glass, this time – fittingly – in Los Angeles. It feels lifted from 1930s hard-boiled pulp fiction in which nothing is as it appears and everything is the inverse of what powerful men assert. It’s genuinely shocking, while also seemingly inevitable, that U.S. military forces are being deployed to major cities with the express purpose of trying to intimidate, quash, and, ultimately, violently confront Americans who dare raise their voices against Mr. Trump’s policies and practices. It is one of the most significant inflection points since the last election took America on the road away from constitutional democracy and towards the kind of repressive lawlessness this President admires in other leaders and is seeking to emulate in the U.S.
  • Trump’s Full Gulf Agenda: From the Houthis to Gaza.
    And the Trump Golf Club
    Hussein Ibish 12 May 2025
    From May 13-16, President Donald J. Trump will repeat the opening gesture of his first administration by making the initial major diplomatic travel of his second term to Saudi Arabia (excluding his unanticipated visit to Rome for the funeral of the late Pope Francis) but this time also including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. This trip comes at a highly significant moment in U.S.-Gulf Arab relations, and all parties will have specific agendas and deliverables at stake. Overall, Trump’s trip reinforces the centrality of these partnerships for all sides and signals that he continues to view Gulf Arab countries as important partners, not just for the United States but for his personal and political goals.
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    The “Regime Change” of Trump’s Second Presidency: Political Messianism vs. Rule of Law
    Massimo Faggioli 7 May 2025
    In the history of the United States, this is the era of Donald Trump. The transition from Joe Biden to Trump does not represent a normal transition of power, but rather a regime change. It marks the rise of charismatic leadership and, in the eyes of many, even a form of political messianism, often at odds with the constitutional rule of law. Trump’s second presidency steers America onto a path few – especially in Europe – had anticipated or even imagined, opening up unpredictable scenarios both domestically and internationally.
  • Trump is Erecting a Police State in America
    Hussein Ibish 18 April 2025
    In the increasingly surreal second Donald Trump administration, a 29-year-old Salvadoran named Kilmar Abrego Garcia now embodies the most fundamental restructuring of the US constitutional order, arguably in its history. Mr Garcia is being used as a test case for the Trump administration to decouple Americans from the rule of law and protection of courts. His case may be operating at the margins of American society, but its implications potentially represent a redefinition of the relationship between the individual and the US government.
  • Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land and the Dark Utopia
    of the New Radical Right
    Editorial board in collaboration with AI 17 April 2025
    A galaxy of intellectuals, theorists, entrepreneurs, and cultural agitators is rewriting the language of the American right. In place of old conservatism, a new vision is taking shape—anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal, and post-democratic—one that looks to both the feudal past and the digital future to imagine a new order: hierarchical, technical, algorithmic. At its center stands the enigmatic figure of Curtis Yarvin.
  • Obama: Core Principles of Democracy Are Eroding
    Under Trump’s Agenda
    Editorial Board 10 April 2025
    “It is up to all of us to fix this.” In his first public speech since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, Barack Obama urged Americans to defend democratic values and called on institutions—particularly universities and law firms—to resist the administration’s attacks. “I have deep differences of opinion with my most immediate successor—who’s now president once again,” Obama told students of Hamilton College, without naming Trump directly, “but at least for most of my time, I’d say the post-World War II era, there was a broad consensus between Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals around a certain set of rules where we settle our differences—[…] bonds that transcend party, region, or ideology.”
  • Tulsa Confronts Its History: Reparations, 100 Years After the Massacre
    Matteo Muzio 20 March 2025
    Tulsa was the site of the 1921 massacre, the largest racially motivated mass killing in U.S. history. The attack led to the destruction of Greenwood, one of the very few affluent, majority-Black neighborhoods in the entire country at the time. Out of its 11,000 residents, some had accumulated wealth equivalent to a million dollars; six families even owned private planes. Greenwood was known as “Black Wall Street.” Today, under the leadership of Tulsa’s Democratic mayor Monroe Nichols – elected in 2024 – there are plans to rebuild the neighborhood and restore its legacy.
  • Trump’s Old-World Vision Clashes with China’s 21st-Century Rise (p. II)
    Seán Golden 3 March 2025
    It is extremely difficult to accurately predict what will unfold in Trump’s relations with China or their effects on the rest of the world, but it may be possible to identify and analyze some of the major scenarios in which they will unfold, including the emerging post-Bretton Woods world order, world trade, the role of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in a global setting, and security issues.
  • Redrawing International Cooperation: The Impact of Freezing USAID Funding
    Matias Xerxes Gonzalez Field 3 March 2025
    USAID has provided resources to over 130 nations, accounting for 42 percent of the humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations. Until 2023, its funding averaged around 40 billion dollars per year. After cuts to positions and resources, the agency’s budget has now been reduced to approximately 100 million dollars. The freezing and blocking of USAID’s domestic workforce have had the most evident and severe consequences abroad. While the number of workers fired in the US amounts to just over 1,500 employees, the agency employs over 10,000 people around the globe.
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