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Hello Reader,
An Historic Opportunity for Global Freedom
For two decades, the forces of authoritarianism have been winning.
Freedom House has measured liberty across the globe for over half a century. Last year, it documented the 19th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. Nineteen years. Not a recession — a slow-motion rout. It was one of the reasons I started this newsletter — to promote the resistance, celebrate the fighters, and refuse to accept that the arc of history bends inevitably toward tyranny.
In these pages, we've tracked how authoritarian powers weren't simply failing to liberalize. They were building an alternative world order — and actively exporting their model. China's Belt and Road Initiative funneled over $1 trillion into infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, purchasing political leverage. Chinese advisors coached authoritarian leaders on how to monitor dissidents, control information, and neutralize opposition — the operating manual of modern tyranny, franchised across continents. Iran kept Venezuela's Maduro regime alive with oil expertise and security assistance as it crumbled under its own economic incompetence. What united them was not common ideology, but a shared hatred of American power and the model of freedom it represents.
Now, two of the architects of that coalition are gone.
I still struggle to comprehend how anyone who genuinely cares about individual liberty, mass poverty, women's rights, LGBT rights, human rights, or the simple dignity of self-determination cannot see the fall of Khamenei — and Maduro — as a profound victory for humanity. And how anyone who opposed it can look at the North Korea alternative — a brutal, entrenched, nuclear-armed dictatorship the world cannot dislodge — and offer no answer for what they would have done instead.
None of this forecloses legitimate questions about whether the threat was truly imminent, whether Congress should have been consulted, or whether the cost in American lives was justified. Those are serious arguments, made by serious people.
But the critics who argue against this action owe us an answer to one question: what was the alternative? Six UN Security Council resolutions demanded Iran halt its nuclear enrichment program. It defied them all. For two decades, Western governments offered negotiations, sanctions relief, and diplomatic face-saving — every off-ramp imaginable. Iran took none of them.
I want to live in a world where UN resolutions can check evil. Where Tennyson's "parliament of Man" can deliver justice to rogue regimes. But we don't live in that world. We live in this one — where only power can stop a regime that murders over 30,000 of its own citizens in two days.
Khomeini and Khamenei's Islamic Republic was the mother of modern radical Islamism. Just as Lenin's Soviet state transformed socialist theory into totalitarian reality, the 1979 revolution transformed Islamist ideology into a governing template — one that energized al-Qaeda, Assad’s war on Syrians, Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS. Overthrowing it doesn't just remove a regional threat. As Bill Maher — no defender of Trump — put it: "You cannot name one horrible thing that has happened in the Middle East in the last 50 years and not connect it to this fascist theocracy."
I want to be precise about America's role as a symbol in all of this. The United States is an imperfect beacon — a nation that has supported dictators when convenient, launched wars on false pretenses, and failed, repeatedly, to live up to its own founding ideals. That imperfection doesn't erase the ideal.
Which brings me to the paradox I've asked readers to hold before: A president growing more authoritarian by the day has created — for reasons that have little to do with love of liberty — the most consequential opening for global freedom in a generation.
Trump's illiberal reign will end. America's democracy will survive — we just saw his worst instincts meet their limits in the streets of Minneapolis, where democracy fought back and won. But hold the paradox: Trump did what Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden all refused to do — he applied overwhelming force against an enemy that defied every attempt to curb its nuclear ambitions and spent 47 years chanting "Death to America," meaning every word of it. No country has killed more American soldiers in that time.
Perhaps not since Teddy Roosevelt has an American president understood so intuitively how power works on the world stage — and how to apply it. That adversaries confronted only through meek resolutions grow bolder, that strength deters, that the moment you project hesitation, you invite aggression. Trump read that correctly. He acted when no one else would.
And now he may throw it all away.
Wasted Opportunity?
When CNN asked whether he was concerned about democracy taking hold in Iran, Trump said it did not matter to him. When they pressed him on what kind of leader he wanted, he said it "doesn't necessarily have to be a democratic leader in Iran. It just has to be somebody who treats the U.S. and Israel fairly."
That word — leader — is doing enormous work. It exposes a governing philosophy Trump has revealed consistently: in Venezuela, he called Maduro's own deputy "a wonderful leader doing a fantastic job." He has lavished similar praise on Hungary's Orbán, El Salvador's Bukele, and even Putin.
The pattern reveals a worldview: great leaders make great countries.
This is precisely wrong. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson spent careers studying why some nations flourish and others fail. Their answer was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics: nations thrive when they build inclusive institutions — rule of law, property rights, separation of powers, checks on executive authority — that distribute opportunity broadly and prevent any single person from capturing the machinery of the state. Nations fail when elites concentrate power, because concentrated power, without constraint, always serves the few at the expense of the many.
James Madison understood this two centuries earlier. In Federalist No. 51: "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
America did not prosper because of its great leaders. It prospered because its leaders were constrained from impeding the creative power of the American people.
Iran's supreme leader faces no such limits — commanding the judiciary, the military, the IRGC, and the right to determine who governs. The office is structurally designed to produce tyrants. Swap Khamenei for a friendlier face and you have not changed Iran. You have delayed the inevitable.
The Stakes
Consider what is now within reach. 90 million Iranians now have a chance at freedom. More than 20 million Venezuelans living in poverty — in a country that once held the largest oil reserves on earth — may now have a chance to prosper. That is extraordinary. What an extraordinary waste it would be to settle for a friendlier jailer.
Trump knows how to wield American power better than most. He comprehends its source less than nearly all.
Coming March 27th: Paid Subscriptions
A reminder: starting March 27th, Friday deep-dives move behind a paywall.
Thank you for being here from the beginning. As a founding subscriber, I wanted to give you early access to the introductory rate: $75 per year or $8 per month. That offer closes April 10th.
A More Perfect Union
A More Perfect Union is back — for good. American democracy doesn't exist in isolation. The stories in this section are the ones where domestic politics intersect with the most profound questions facing free societies everywhere. The kind of analysis you won't find in a Tuesday roundup.
Trump Under FIRE
On February 27th, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth canceled Anthropic's $200 million Pentagon contract. His reason: the AI company refused to allow its models to power fully autonomous weapons without a human in the decision loop. "We will not employ AI models that won't allow you to fight wars," he had declared.
Believe it or not, Hegseth was right.
Fully autonomous warfare means drones, sensors, and weapons — air, ground, and sea — coordinating strikes at machine speed, with algorithms replacing human judgment in real time: no commander deliberating, no pilot confirming, no pause between identifying a target and destroying it. It doesn't fully exist yet. But as Generals David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan wrote in a fascinating Foreign Affairs piece this week, it's coming fast.
"The side that waits for human approval before acting will lose," they wrote.
China already understands this, having published explicit doctrine on "intelligentized warfare"—fully integrating AI into command, targeting, and force coordination. Beijing will not pause for ethics debates. Anthropic's concerns weren't irrational—Petraeus himself writes that in democracies, decisions about when to escalate and whether a strike serves political objectives "will need to remain irreducibly human." But Anthropic is a private company trying to impose guardrails on a military fighting an adversary with no separation whatsoever between business and state.
But this is not a story about Pete Hegseth doing the right thing.
Anthropic became the first cutting-edge AI deployed on classified military networks. In January, Claude was channeled through defense contractor Palantir in the mission to capture Nicolás Maduro. From there, a conflict grew: Anthropic refused to allow Claude to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon wanted authority for "any lawful use." That principle matters—elected officials, not private contractors, govern military deployments. You can’t build a missile, then tell the Defense Department when and where to use it. The Pentagon was free to cancel and move on.
Instead, the administration designated Anthropic a "supply-chain risk"—a classification typically reserved for adversaries. Trump thundered on Truth Social that "EVERY Federal Agency" must "IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology," branding the company "some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company." Full government-wide blacklist. Six months to phase out. The designation is more punitive than anything applied to DeepSeek—the Chinese AI with documented ties to the People's Liberation Army.
The legal fallout has been swift—and complicated. The Cato Institute and FIRE—organizations I deeply respect—filed an amicus brief raising First Amendment concerns. Their argument: a supply-chain designation, rather than a simple contract cancellation, constitutes targeted punishment for refusing government demands, and the Supreme Court has established that government cannot condition benefits on the surrender of constitutional rights. It is more substantive than the companion claim that AI model architecture constitutes protected editorial expression. But it rests on disputed facts and untested legal theory—courts have never established that a supply-chain designation triggers First Amendment retaliation doctrine.
It remains a nebulous case. This is not a story about free speech.
On March 9th, Anthropic filed two lawsuits—one challenging the supply-chain designation before a federal appeals court, a second in the Northern District of California arguing the administration exceeded statutory authority. Thirty-seven AI researchers from Anthropic competitors Google and OpenAI—led by Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean—warned that the blacklist would devastate "the United States' industrial and scientific competitiveness." Anthropic executives said it could slash 2026 revenues by billions.
Yet in a free society, the government ultimately is free to contract with whomever it chooses. This is not a story about government oppression of private business.
Here is what this action actually cost. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — America's sharpest operational edge against China — was a "premier user" of Anthropic's tools, now stripped away. Claude yielded efficiencies across the entire government. Despite "woke" claims of bias, Anthropic voluntarily walked away from Chinese Communist Party contracts. It was the only AI company trusted on classified military networks. The supply-chain designation wielded against that record is more severe than anything Washington has imposed on China's DeepSeek model. It could cost Anthropic billions and cripple its capacity to train next-generation models — punishing one of America's most consequential technology companies at the precise moment China is racing to achieve AI supremacy. As the WSJ observed, in the Trump administrations battle against Anthropic, China is the clear winner.
This is not a story about a threat to our democracy.
This is a story about epic stupidity.
Counterstrikes
Where lazy media narratives, political spin, and conventional wisdom get challenged. They have opinions. They just bury them in the language of objectivity. We don’t.
To wit:
Tyranny Laundering, CNN Style
CNN ran a deeply flawed video on Iran’s government structure wrapped in the warm sheen of a friendly civics lesson. Correspondent Kylie Atwood, fawning with delight over her own explainer, breathlessly declared that Iran's political system is "a government structure unlike any other in the world!" Her tone: a kindergarten teacher unveiling something wonderful.
What followed was a masterclass in omission. Atwood noted that Iran's constitution "distributes power throughout different layers of government so it's not centralized"—as if decentralization equals a balanced system of balanced power. She announced "the president is elected by the people, as is parliament," without mentioning that the Supreme Leader hand-selects every eligible candidate before a single vote is cast. That is not an election.
Never in the piece was the word "dictatorship" used. The segment did admit the Assembly of Experts—88 clerics—is a rubber stamp, yet displayed a graphic showing an arrow from it pointing toward the Supreme Leader, implying oversight. The Guardian Council, Atwood explained, is half appointed by the Supreme Leader, half by the judiciary. What went unmentioned: the Supreme Leader exclusively appoints the judiciary—making the entire arrangement perfectly circular.
This is the media's reflexive need to launder authoritarianism through the language of institutional complexity—treating theocratic tyranny as merely another governing philosophy. Further evidence of the Western media’s moral equivalence.
A network that cannot bring itself to call Iran the brutal dictatorship it is has no business positioning itself as a defender of democratic ideals.
CNN's Version of Reality
Objective Reality (10 Minute Sketch Version)
Iranian Voices
For most stories, I synthesize multiple, often competing sources to deliver full historical context, adjudicate rival narratives, and present the complete picture. But occasionally, a writer brings such direct, personal experience to a story — with such precision and moral force — that I can only step aside.
This week, that writer is Iranian historian Ali Ansari, whose Wall Street Journal piece deserves a wide audience. It is behind a paywall, so I'll summarize his sharpest arguments.
One caveat: Ansari is an opposition voice from the diaspora — I could credibly be accused of cherry-picking. But consider his estimates that only 10 to 20% of Iranians remain loyal to the Islamic Republic.
Ansari invokes Hannah Arendt to counter the Western media consensus on the impossibility of regime change: revolutions are impossible before they happen, inevitable after. He chronicles the theocracy's comprehensive failure: "The vast majority of people are struggling. The political system is hated. The economic system isn't delivering." He then dismantles the Tiananmen comparison — Deng Xiaoping could offer his people economic progress as compensation for political repression. The ayatollahs can only offer paradise.
On the January massacre, where the regime executed over 30,000 protesters — including patients shot in hospital beds — Ansari argues the scale backfired: kill enough people randomly, and you don't extinguish the rebellion, you fuel it.
He saves his sharpest blade for Western analysts who insist Iran never really meant "Death to America" and reflexively blame U.S. sanctions for Iran's economic collapse: "We fail to give the Iranians agency in what they do." Iranians were increasingly going hungry. Incompetent water management has become a crisis.
His conclusion is a crushing indictment of those blaming the West for Iran's intransigence : "If there is now an opening for regime change, it is because U.S. policymakers for once were able to turn from the mirror and see what the Iranian people know well: The problem is in Iran."
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