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Hello Reader,
Freedom House released two reports last week: its annual global freedom rankings and its Q4 China Dissent Monitor. The headline on the first is grim — global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year. The second captures something China's censors are working overtime to suppress. We cover both below.
54 countries got worse. 35 improved. A major driver of the decline: Africa's accelerating coup belt — nine military takeovers since 2019, with two more last year. It's why two of this week's stories cover it. Not covered this week is the year’s greatest African success story: Malawi.
One number deserves its own episode: the U.S. recorded the steepest freedom decline of any country still rated "Free" over the past 20 years. Worth noting: the verdict comes from a US -based organization partly funded by the U.S. government. That score gets the scrutiny it deserves in a coming Friday edition.
In the meantime, a few of the stories behind the numbers:
The Global Fight for Freedom
- Zelenskyy Takes His Revenge—Magnanimously
- Global Freedom's Most Stunning Rebirth
- Global Freedom's Most Stunning Collapse...
- ...and Its Second-Most
- China's Workers Are A-Rising
Country names are followed by their newly released 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.
On August 18th in the Oval Office, Donald Trump delivered his verdict on Volodymyr Zelenskyy. "You don't have the cards!" J.D. Vance piled on, lecturing the wartime president on his disrespect. Ukrainian soldiers thousands of miles away reportedly wept watching their president absorb the humiliation.
The tears dried fast.
Vance has since been sidelined — frozen out of the Iran conflict by the man whose “respect” he was performing for.
That same August, Ukrainian officials handed U.S. defense officials a PowerPoint with a prophetic warning: "Iran is improving its Shahed one-way-attack drone design." They proposed drone combat hubs in Turkey, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf. Trump told his team to follow up. Nothing came of it.
Seven months later, seven U.S. service members are dead — killed by the same Shahed drones Ukraine had spent years learning to destroy. Many Gulf nations that refused to condemn Russia's invasion have been pummeled by the same weapons. Now they're calling Kyiv, hats in hand.
Tell me again, mainstream media, how Putin is the Iran war's undisputed winner.
Zelenskyy’s ace: An American Patriot interceptor costs $3 million. A Shahed, less than $50,000. As Rep. Jim Himes noted, the U.S. "is pretty good at taking missiles down" — drones are an entirely different beast. Ukraine now destroys 87% of Russian attack drones using cheap interceptors. The Pentagon is scrambling to deploy Merops — a counter-drone system backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's company, Perennial Autonomy — as emergency relief.
This is another Hegseth-era miscalculation — perhaps not catastrophic, but the same blind spot that decommissioned Navy anti-mine vessels months earlier.
When Epic Fury launched, the U.S. military quietly asked Ukraine for help. Trump publicly denied it: "the last person we need help from is Zelensky". Zelenskyy offered his experts anyway, magnanimously saying "Ukraine helps partners who help ensure our security."
The nature of cards, as the Wall Street Journal observed, is that they always end up changing hands.
Operation Epic Fury has shaken Tehran. The shockwaves have reached Damascus.
When U.S. and Israeli jets struck Iran on February 28, Egypt cut the natural gas pipeline feeding Syria's power grid. Jordan followed. Within hours, fuel stations ran dry. Panic buying spiked demand 300% above normal. Hezbollah — Iran's proxy — began shelling Syrian border towns in retaliation for al-Sharaa's support for Lebanon's disarmament effort.
The paradox is sharp: Iran propped up the dictator al-Sharaa toppled, treated Syria as a proxy battlefield for decades — and now its destruction is hitting him hardest.
Fifteen months ago, Ahmed al-Sharaa — a former jihadist warlord once wanted by the U.S. with a $10 million bounty — ousted Bashar Assad and became president. Yet Freedom House just awarded Syria the world's largest single-year freedom gain. Independent media can report. Civil society is organizing. Assad's torture state is gone. For a region defined by its worst actors, that’s huge.
But who exactly is al-Sharaa? No figure in global politics has confounded me more — and after 15 months, we're closer to an answer.
He is a Sunni Islamist whose stated long-term vision has always been governance rooted in Sharia — Islamic law as supreme authority, not popular will.
Yet, there has been significant liberalization. When asked whether he'd ban alcohol, he declined to "interfere in personal freedoms in a deep way." Bars in Damascus stayed open. His former al-Qaeda comrades are furious, accusing him of trading jihadist principle for Western favor. And a third peace deal is now in place with the Kurds — the most substantive yet, recognizing Kurdish as a national language and allowing the SDF to retain dedicated brigades.
His critics on the other side see something different: a man who talks pluralism while filling every ministry, governorship, and military post with HTS loyalists. Who launched a military offensive against Syria's Kurds when peace talks became inconvenient. Who drafted a constitution concentrating power entirely in his hands. Two prior deals with the Kurds also collapsed, and roughly 15,000 to 20,000 ISIS-linked individuals escaped detention during the chaos.
Is his end goal national unity, or the management of minorities under centralized Islamist authority?
That question — and the challenges arising from the Iran war — will define his presidency.
But in a region this dark, each fragile step away from the abyss is a victory.
Few Americans have ever heard of Guinea-Bissau. Freedom House just granted it a bit of notoriety.
Its rankings recorded this year’s single largest freedom score (8 points) collapse here — a Maryland-sized nation of 2.2 million people wedged between Senegal and Guinea on Africa's Atlantic coast. Most survive on cashew farming and fishing. But Guinea-Bissau earned a grimmer title decades ago: Africa's original narco-state. South American cocaine cartels discovered that its porous Atlantic coastline, desperate officials, and near-total lack of radar or patrol boats made it the perfect relay point for product headed to Europe.
The drugs flowing through annually carry a wholesale value that exceeds the country's entire GDP. When narco money saturates every institution — military, judiciary, electoral commission — democracy rots from the inside out.
In November, armed soldiers wearing balaclavas burst into the electoral commission headquarters, one day before results of a tightly contested presidential election were due to be announced. They arrested the commission president and five Supreme Court judges, confiscated all computers, destroyed the servers, and seized every tally sheet from every region except one.
Guinea-Bissau is now the ninth African country to fall to a coup since 2019. That tally keeps climbing as Western disengagement accelerates the rot.
The Trump administration’s gutting of USAID eliminated democracy assistance programs that were, however flawed, among the last external pressure points keeping fragile institutions breathing.
The continent that will be home to a quarter of the world’s population by 2050 continues its descent into autocracy.
Sourced from the aforementioned Freedom House report.
Three weeks ago, we reported the global Gen Z revolution's first real win in Bangladesh. Now we add another to the loss column.
When Gen Z Malagasies took to the streets last September — waving One Piece flags, chanting against a president who had fled to New York for a UN speech while their taps ran dry — they thought they were making history.
They were. It was just on repeat.
The protests that toppled President Andry Rajoelina were fueled by legitimate grievances. Water shortages. Power blackouts. A government rotting from within. Madagascar — an island nation of 30 million, 80% poor — had enough. Within weeks, an elite military unit called CAPSAT switched sides, and Rajoelina fled. Colonel Michael Randrianirina seized power and promised elections in 18 to 24 months.
The problem: CAPSAT is the same unit that put Rajoelina in power in 2009. Madagascar's sixth political crisis since independence has produced the same solution as the fifth — a military strongman who promises to hand back power eventually.
Since then, Randrianirina has dissolved his cabinet without explanation, prompting Gen Z activists to issue a 72-hour ultimatum demanding his resignation. He flew to Moscow, declaring a "new era of cooperation" with Putin. Then to Paris, announcing a "renewed partnership" with France. The man the revolution made is now courting the world's strongmen.
Freedom House recorded a 5-point decline. The kids who sparked the revolution are now watching from the sidelines. The generals are in charge.
Sourced from the aforementioned Freedom House report.
"Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves." — Opening line, Chinese national anthem
In Tonghua, a factory city in northeastern China, a group of construction workers stood outside a China Railway office in the January cold and used their bodies to spell out four characters: "Give me my wages."
Nobody filmed it for long. Two-thirds of protest videos posted to Douyin — China's domestic TikTok, with 800 million users — are deleted by censors within days. The government moves fastest on footage showing police violence against demonstrators. The message, apparently, is too dangerous to leave up.
Freedom House recently released its Q4 China Dissent Monitor, and what's happening beneath the surface is extraordinary. Acts of dissent surged 44% in 2025. Workers led more than half of all protests last quarter. The trigger is often the same: companies that simply stopped paying people.
This isn't a rogue private sector problem. China Railway, China State Construction, and China Communication Construction — three pillars of Xi Jinping's state-directed economy — saw protests against them jump 79% in a single year. The same industrial subsidy model Xi uses to flood global markets with cheap goods is now starving its own workers of paychecks. Wage disputes have exploded 510% since 2007 — even as China's workforce shrank.
As the pressure builds, so does the crackdown. Xi's security forces documented repressing at least one in four protests last year, double the rate from two years ago.
China's workers are arising alright — just not for the party that wrote their anthem.
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