Author: nick

Beijing’s influence now extends well beyond the Indo-Pacific and reaches into Europe in ways Washington cannot ignore, writes Alexander Korolev. It’s been quite a week for Beijing, with back-to-back visits by the leaders of the United States and Russia. Chinese President Xi Jinping has had his hands full with hosting duties, gun salutes, photo opportunities and high-level talks. Each visit was important in its own way. U.S. President Donald Trump’s state visit was his first to Beijing since 2017. It came at a moment of strained China-U.S. relations, with the U.S. at war in the Middle East and its foreign policy…

James Gilray, Monstrous craws, at a new coalition feast. 1787. Photo: Library of Congress. The recent U.K. election The political gloom lifted here just a bit this week, when it became clear there will soon be a leadership contest in the British Labour Party. Last week’s municipal and “devolved” (Scottish and Welsh parliament) election results were like a 16-ton weight dropped on Britain’s hapless Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Labour received the worst drubbing in its history: 1400 municipal council seats lost, including 450 in London; loss of control of the Welsh Senedd (the quasi-independent, unicameral legislature); and an equally large…

On Thursday, the Court DIG’d Hamm v. Smith, a messy death penalty case that has been going on for three decades. Several things are unusual about this ham-handed DIG. Indeed, it is possible that Justice Alito lost the majority opinion. First, more than five months elapsed between oral argument in December and the DIG in May. This is an exceptionally long time for a DIG. Usually when a case presents vehicle problems, there are questions at oral argument about it. But I didn’t see any clear signs at OA that a DIG might be in the cards. Moreover, these sorts of…

On an evening at the end of December 2025, a woman in Switzerland opened a grocery-delivery app on her phone. She filled a basket and typed in a delivery address in Brussels—a flat she had visited many times, whose owner could no longer leave Belgium and could no longer pay for anything from within it. She entered her Swiss card at checkout. The payment declined. She tried again. It declined again. The man waiting for the groceries is Jacques Baud, seventy years old, a retired colonel of the Swiss Army and a former officer of the Federal Intelligence Service who…

“In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.” -Thomas Szasz In the beginning, there were shamans; wild eyed wiseman communing with the ancestors, drawing down the moon, and swapping genders like loincloths. They were strange and mystical creatures born with a downright uncanny connection to forces beyond the veil of the seen world and every village had one. Then progress began and spiritual diversity got in the way of profit. Villages became cities, tribes became governments, and individuals became citizens. A handful of shamans were rebranded as prophets and messiahs, but they ultimately proved too unruly to…

Iuliia Mendel was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s press secretary in 2019–2021. She says she “departed on good terms.” Others say her falling out with Zelensky was very bad. Earlier this month, Mendel gave an extensive interview to Tucker Carlson. She made many explosive remarks, questioning Zelensky’s character and his commitment to democracy and fighting corruption. But her most significant comments were on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and the negotiations in Istanbul in the early weeks of the war. Mendel claims to have been present at a 2019 meeting in Paris during which Zelensky, she says, privately promised Putin “that Ukraine will…

Who should be exempt? Why does Jeff Bezos think teachers in Queens making $75,000 a year shouldn’t be expected to pay taxes? “I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday. OK, uncontroversial. “You have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling—struggling to pay rent, groceries.” “A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays 12—more than $12,000 a year in taxes,” continued Bezos—the veracity of which is…

Horrifically deadly and widely implemented on a global scale, landmines continue to speckle the landscape of current and past battlefields. And while effective in a passive sense, the hardware planted beneath the soil persists long after the inevitable conclusion of war. Innocents and combatants who survive the barrage of bullets and bombs are left with a sadistic game of whack-a-mole – including the wild and domesticated animals. Rudimentary explosives first appeared in China as early as the Song Dynasty. Continued development eventually gave rise to the modern pressure-activated landmine, which appeared on the battlefields of the American Civil War. Seen…

The intelligence communities of all nations are marked by amateur blunders, misadventures, or clownishness yielding nothing of intelligence value. China’s spying on the United States is exemplary. A front page story in the May 11, 2026 issue of the New York Times disclosed a Chinese overture to pay modest sums to a staff member of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to share information or conjectures commonplace among reporters or scholars in the field.  Among other things, the Chinese spy sought the Trump administration’s plans for post-Maduro Venezuela. But any…

Daniel McCarthy—The American Conservative’s own former editor and current board member, current editor of ISI’s occasional publication Modern Age, and also now something to do with the Heritage Foundation—has decided that Thomas Massie had it coming. He feels so strongly about it that he has written his thoughts at length in two separate publications, the Spectator and Compact. The nub of the argument is that Massie was insufficiently imbued with partisan spirit: In his opposition to the administration’s foreign policy and his efforts to publicize the Epstein files, he antagonized Trump, who is popular with Republicans, and interests supportive of…