There’s only one way to describe President Trump’s fixation with seizing Greenland: madness.
It’s a preoccupation that’s untethered from reality and lacks any rational justification. Indeed, none of the shifting rationales offered by the Trump administration makes any sense — particularly the supposed national security grounds for annexation.
It’s impossible to say what the United States might gain from such a move because the country would not gain anything from it. The U.S. military already possesses extensive access to Greenland, thanks to the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen. The U.S. Space Force maintains a base at Pituffik in the territory’s far north that helps monitor for ballistic missile attacks.
Moreover, America is already committed to defending Greenland against aggression via Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Per that provision — invoked only once in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States — an armed attack on Greenland, an autonomous and self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty, would be considered an attack on the United States itself.
Ukrainians are freezing and dying in the dark this winter as Russian missiles and drones relentlessly pound their power plants and other civilian targets. You’d expect Americans, who fought for eight long years to win their independence from another colonial power, would side instinctively with Ukraine.
And they do. Most — now including a majority of Republicans — favor sending more U.S. military assistance to Kyiv. Yet President Trump seems less moved than peeved by Ukraine’s stubborn resistance to Russia’s savage war of conquest and refuses its defenders weapons they desperately need to even the odds.
It seems the president values his unrequited man-crush on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin more than the trivial matter of Ukrainians’ freedom. This week, Trump made a mockery of his own “Board of Peace” for Gaza by inviting the Kremlin warlord to join.
Perhaps to impress his bellicose pal, Trump has turned to war. He’s attacked Venezuela. He threatened to bomb Iran again if it doesn’t stop killing protesters. And in a fit of pique over not winning a Nobel Peace Prize, he vowed to seize Greenland by force before backing off in a bizarre speech to world leaders Wednesday in Davos.
Congress is moving swiftly ahead on legislation that would require smartphone apps to verify the ages of their users in order to protect children’s safety online. But with full markups on several bills scheduled for the coming weeks, lawmakers face an important choice between competing approaches.
Among the leading bills, H.R. 6333, the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) introduced by Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) stands in strong contrast to H.R. 3149, the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) introduced by Rep. John James (R-Mich.). Though both bills aim to safeguard kids through requirements on app stores, POPA stands out as a more practical, privacy-forward, and parent-aligned approach. Here are four key policy areas where the two bills differ.
Shared Responsibility
Checking an app users’ age is a complex task, and responsibility for it should fit with the actual roles of app developers and stores. While both bills enlist mobile app stores in the age assurance process, ASAA establishes onerous requirements that would require them to collect government IDs from all users — minors and adults alike — regardless of what kind of app they want to download.
While app stores may be well-positioned to use basic age information to limit the apps younger people can download, they have little control or knowledge of what happens once an app is installed. The ASAA would make the point of download the only major check on online safety, with app developers holding minimal responsibility for providing safer experiences after their product is loaded onto a child’s phone. This strategy could inadvertently lead to poorly applied restrictions with content minimally tailored to be age appropriate and little control of how apps are actually used.
By contrast, POPA proposes a shared responsibility across the ecosystem, requiring app stores to conduct age checks at the point of download and developers to do the same when consumers use certain parts of their apps. As PPI wrote last month, parents believe strongly that verification should go beyond a one-time check.
Consent Fatigue
For parental consent to be meaningful, it must be sustainable: Too many requests lead users to accept terms without reading them, much the way most of us now automatically click through the ubiquitous cookie consent banners websites started displaying following enforcement of Europe’s GDPR. This phenomenon, known as consent fatigue, should be carefully considered in the design of an age verification framework.
POPA gives parents tools to manage kids’ access without becoming overly frequent or demanding. For example, parents are able to restrict access by category or age rating, rather than at every app download. Giving parents these tools means they still can still make meaningful decisions about their kids’ activity without being inundated by routine approvals that might cause them to tune out.
Though designed with good intentions, ASAA’s approach is much more likely to overwhelm parents. The bill would require app stores to receive parental consent during each and every download request. Even if parents decide that their kids are ready to download some kinds of apps independently, ASAA does not provide a mechanism to let them do so. And with requirements to receive additional parental consent after “significant changes” are made to any app, requests are likely to be frequent.
Parental Control & Data Sharing
When handling sensitive personal information, privacy and choice should be foundational priorities. The age assurance process should strive to minimize data collection and sharing, obtaining only the information needed for age assurance and nothing beyond. While POPA gives parents the agency to decide when and where their child’s age is shared, ASAA mandates broad sharing without consent.
ASAA requires all new users to undergo age verification, and developers of all apps – even those without age restricted content — to receive information about all users’ ages by default. This approach violates the principle of data minimization and puts all users at risk. Even if a user wishes to download an app that does not include age-restricted content, like a notetaking app or their favorite coffee shop’s app, they will still be required to undergo the age verification process. Parents and other users have no choice over the collection and sharing of their information.
POPA takes a narrower approach, allowing users to declare their age and giving parents the ability to choose to share age information with developers. While the bill encourages app stores to use techniques like age estimation to provide age assurance, it does not require it.
Legal Considerations
Crucially, the concerns over scope and applicability considered in this piece are not purely speculative. Last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked Texas’s state-level age verification law on the grounds that it was “exceedingly overbroad” and “unconstitutionally vague.” If Congress is serious about protecting children and giving parents choice, it should pursue a legally durable approach that can withstand the same first amendment challenges that the Texas law faced. POPA’s measured scope, with a defined set of covered applications and focus on parental consent and choice, appears up to this legal scrutiny. As markup approaches, lawmakers now have an opportunity to advance legally durable and practically designed age assurance legislation. Congress should choose POPA.
A report by a left-of-center think tank being released Thursday reviewed three years of articles in the discipline’s flagship journal and characterized the scholarship as distorted, one-sided and “unrelentingly negative.”
“The analysis by the nonprofit Progressive Policy Institute reviewed 96 papers in American Quarterly published from 2022 through 2024. The authors determined 80% were critical of America, 20% were neutral and none was positive. American Quarterly is the flagship journal of the American-studies field.
“American Quarterly essentially erases virtually anything positive about the American experience,” the report says. “Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.” […]
The Progressive Policy Institute, which launched the project, is a public-policy think tank founded by centrist Democrats in 1989. It houses the American Identity Project, which tries to help schools and colleges promote a common American identity.
Richard Kahlenberg, an education analyst who has advocated against racial and legacy preferences in college admissions, leads the project. David Brooks, an author and columnist, and William Galston, an opinion columnist at The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages operate independently from the news department, are members of the American Identity Project’s advisory group.
“There is nothing wrong with being critical of America; I’m critical of America,” said Kahlenberg, who co-wrote the report. “But the ultimate goal of American studies is to pursue the truth about America, the good and the bad.”
The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.
On the one hand, America’s is a story of greatness: The U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. Its founders created what is now the world’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. The Declaration of Independence put forth revolutionary ideas about human freedom and equality that ushered in a new era for the world. At the same time, the American experience is complicated. Our history includes the mistreatment of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and high levels of economic inequality that persist to this day.
Yet we found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.
The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”
We were generous in tagging articles as neutral. Virtually every one of these 19 articles raised at least one critique (racism, sexism and the like), but they also typically described the ways in which members of marginalized communities were able to resist. Implicit in the articles is the sense that there may be a kernel of something good in a society that enables individuals to rise above oppression.
WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report warning that American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, presents an overwhelmingly critical and unbalanced view of American society, failing to reflect the nation’s full historical and cultural complexity. As cultural and historical debates intensify, the report finds that a leading academic journal is shaping the understanding of America’s story through a consistently negative and ideologically narrow lens.
“In the same way Donald Trump whitewashes America’s flaws, this journal effectively erases its virtues,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, Director of PPI’s American Identity Project and co-author of the report. “Academic inquiry should be honest and wide-ranging, not ideologically blinkered. When one of the field’s most influential publications excludes virtually any acknowledgment of American progress or ideals, it does a disservice to students, educators, and the country itself.”
Authored by Kahlenberg and PPI Policy Research Fellow Lief Lin, the report warns that this imbalance in scholarship risks undermining civic cohesion, fueling public mistrust in higher education, and distorting curricula across universities and K–12 classrooms. While rigorous critique is essential to understanding America’s past and present, the authors argue that academic institutions must also highlight the values, ideas, and movements that have driven American progress.
Key findings from the report include:
Of the 96 essays reviewed, 77 were coded as “critical,” 19 as “neutral,” and zero as “positive.”
The most common critiques involved racism, imperialism, and classism, while discussions of American innovation, democratic development, or cultural influence were notably absent.
Even “neutral” articles often described America as oppressive before highlighting individual resistance or critique.
The journal frequently used inaccessible jargon, limiting broader engagement and reinforcing ideological gatekeeping in the academy.
The worldview promoted by American Quarterly is already influencing curricula at elite institutions and seeping into K–12 instruction through works like the 1619 Project.
Rather than calling for government intervention, the report urges reform from within the academy. It highlights the importance of a balanced and pluralistic approach to scholarship, one that embraces honest debate, intellectual rigor, and a full accounting of America’s failures and triumphs.
“A fair and complete American studies curriculum should reflect the civil rights movement as much as slavery, democratic ideals as well as political failings, and cultural exports alongside cultural critiques,” said Kahlenberg. “That full picture matters, not just for intellectual integrity, but for sustaining the democratic project itself.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi.
The American story is extraordinary. The United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet and the number one destination of immigrants from across the world. Its founders created what is now the globe’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. At the same time, the American experience contains numerous dark chapters: the conquest and decimation of Native American populations; the enslavement of Black people, followed by decades of Jim Crow; and the internment of Japanese Americans. America’s rates of gun violence and incarceration, and its level of economic inequality, are among the highest in the developed world today.
President Donald Trump has notoriously sought to erase the negative components of American history. The Washington Post found, for example, that since Trump’s inauguration, the National Park Service has “softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened.” Trump’s one-sided approach should be, and has been, widely denounced. His critics are right to ask: How can he tell only half the story?
While Trump is a politician who often engages in demagoguery, one would expect serious scholars who study America — its history, literature, and culture — would provide a much more balanced and nuanced approach. To assess that hypothesis, we examined almost 100 articles over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, American Quarterly is considered the country’s premier journal of American studies, the publication in which the nation’s top scholars vie to have their work appear. Disappointingly, we find that the scholarship in the journal, as a whole, engages in the same sort of distortion as Trump does, only in reverse. If Trump erases the negative chapters in American history and takes a boastful stand about America today under his leadership, American Quarterly essentially erases virtually anything positive about the American experience. Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.
In this report, we begin with background on the history and purpose of American studies and outline some ideas about the types of questions and observations a fair-minded account of American studies might entail. In the second section, we outline our methodology for coding articles in American Quarterly as positive, critical, or neutral. In the third section, we present our findings about the mix of stories found in the journal. We also outline the varying prevalence of different types of critiques of America; recount the critical key words that appear most frequently; and discuss the type of prose that is found in American Quarterly’s pages. In the fourth section, we outline areas for future research; and in the fifth section, we conclude with suggestions for internal reforms to fend off the threat of government interference. The paper also includes an appendix of abstracts of the articles we reviewed (where available) and representative quotations from those articles.
Rachel Canter is Director of Education Policy for the Progressive Policy Institute; and Founding Executive Director of Mississippi First. She joins Megan Lynch ahead of the Fourth Annual Education Town Hall – 2025 Missouri MAP Results today at 11am at the Knight Center at Washington University. What did Mississippi do to turn their rates around? ‘We dramatically increased the rigor of our learning standards,’ says Canter, ‘we expect our students to learn more.’
10% tariffs on goods from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and the U.K., rising to 25% by summer.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump threatened to impose tariffs of 10% on February 1, rising to 25% by summer, on goods from eight historic allies — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — over their unwillingness to support his strange ambition to acquire Greenland. So far, the White House has published no actual decree or other document giving this threat any force, and — as with last October’s threat for a similar 10% tariff on Canadian goods, meant to retaliate for an Ontario government advertisement quoting the late President Reagan on tariffs — perhaps it will simply go away.
That autumn threat, however, has done lasting harm: after a year of Mr. Trump’s provocations, the Canadian government has felt forced to make auto-trade and other arrangements with China to diminish the effect of any U.S. tariff on Canadian goods. The harm done by last week’s threat against America’s European friends will likewise escalate over time until it is reversed.
With this in mind, three points: the U.S. has no legal, historic, or other claim to Greenland; the administration’s effort to make such a claim is corroding American security; and Congress should repeal any tariffs on these countries immediately, and then reform trade law more generally to halt tariff innovation by decree and restore Constitutionally appropriate policymaking. More –
1. Greenland: Greenland is an autonomous country, constitutionally one of three realms of the Danish monarchy, with an elected government that sets its own policies. It is a NATO ally, with a large U.S. military base and an open economy. The governments of both Greenland and Denmark worked closely with the U.S. for eight decades on Arctic security (and often have been advocates of larger Arctic defense commitments than U.S. administrations have been willing to make), resource mining, and any other actual policy concerns, and remain willing to do so. Both have also made clear that sovereignty is not negotiable: neither Danes nor Greenlanders are interested, any more than Americans would be interested in selling off chunks of U.S. land and people to other countries. There is no Greenland “issue.”
2. Security: U.S. military alliance with the world’s advanced democracies — Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia — has been the foundation of American national security and world peace since the Second World War. It needs to remain so. Denmark specifically, as PPI’s Ed Gresser observed last year, is a four-generation ally and good neighbor, which committed 21,000 soldiers to the U.S.’s call for help in Afghanistan and Iraq and lost 50. National Security Director Peter Juul noted last week that threats and abuse against allies and good neighbors — that is, adventures which put this foundation of security at risk — are madness, and adds some time-to-break-the-glass ideas on ways Congress can usefully respond.
3. Tariffs: Congress has Constitutional authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises,” and needs to use it now. Mr. Trump has shown, repeatedly, over the past year, that he cannot responsibly manage any delegated tariff powers. Congress, and in particular Rep. Jason Smith and House Speaker Mike Johnson, need to remove his temptation to use them. This requires laws to (a) cancel any tariffs on Americans buying Danish or other European goods, and (b) require Congressional approval of any future tariffs imposed under trade laws including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”, the basis for most of last year’s tariff decrees, presumably meant by Congress to help address rather than try to create emergencies); the various “Sections” of trade law 232, 301, 122, and 338; and (c) likewise require Congressional approval for entering, or leaving, trade agreements with tariff components.
Such bills already exist. With leadership from Sens. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul last October, the Senate has already voted to terminate Mr. Trump’s IEEPA tariff decrees. The House bill introduced last spring by Trade Subcommittee Ranking Member Linda Sanchez and the other Ways and Means Committee Democrats, HR 2888, would cancel all of Mr. Trump’s “emergency” and “national security” tariffs and require Congressional approval of any new ones. Now would be a good time for them.
Last point: As we — again — noted last year, the world is full of complex challenges, painful choices among lesser evils, and chronic problems with no obvious solution. The status of Greenland isn’t one of them. To the extent there is any problem, it is quite new and has an obvious and easy solution: the Trump administration should stop causing it.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
Offer a positive alternative.
PPI on Denmark and Greenland:
National Security Director Peter Juul on Mr. Trump’s possible motivations, the costs they are imposing, and Congressional options, January 2026.
New Ukraine Project Director Tamar Jacoby on the European reaction, January 2026.
And Gresser on Greenland and Denmark as good neighbors and four-generation allies, April 2025.
The National Archives transcript of the Constitution; see Article I, first line for “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.”
Next steps:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on the Senate vote to repeal the April 2 “global baseline” tariff decree, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on the obvious absence of any Greenland emergency.
WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report warning that Virginia’s rigid energy mandates are colliding with surging electricity demand from the state’s booming data center industry, creating a policy-induced risk to affordability and grid reliability that could undermine public support for climate progress. As demand accelerates and reliability pressures mount, the report finds that inflexible, technology-specific mandates are increasingly disconnected from economic and system realities.
The report, titled “The Virginia Challenge: Meeting Energy Demand Affordably,” is the third in a PPI series examining how rigid climate mandates and prescriptive technology requirements can threaten affordability and reliability when real-world energy demand and grid constraints are treated as secondary concerns.
“Virginia’s emissions success came from a pragmatic strategy that prioritized reliable, clean power,” said Neel Brown, Managing Director at PPI. “But the state is now forcing the retirement of the very resources that made that progress possible — just as electricity demand is exploding. When policy ignores reliability and affordability, the result is higher costs, greater risk, and eroding public support.”
Authored by Brown and John Kemp, an internationally recognized energy markets expert, the report finds that Virginia’s strong emissions record largely predates the Virginia Clean Economy Act and reflects a successful shift from coal to natural gas and nuclear power. The report warns that today’s rigid mandates, enacted before the data center boom, now risk delivering diminishing climate returns while increasing costs and reliability risks for households and businesses.
Despite this strong baseline, the state’s current energy strategy is increasingly strained by skyrocketing demand, capacity concerns, and mounting wholesale costs. With reliability and affordability at stake, Virginia faces a critical opportunity to recalibrate its approach before inflexible mandates erode both climate progress and public support.
Key findings from the report include:
Virginia’s electricity demand grew at an annual rate of 3.1% from 2019 to 2024 — more than triple the national average — driven primarily by the explosive growth of data centers in Northern Virginia, now the largest concentration in the world.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act mandates the retirement of nearly all natural gas and coal generation by 2045, even though gas and nuclear currently provide 87% of the state’s electricity and have been the main drivers of emissions reductions.
Despite this surge in demand, wind and solar together supplied only 7% of Virginia’s electricity in 2024, underscoring the gap between renewable targets and deployment reality.
Wholesale electricity costs in the PJM Interconnection region surged more than 40% in the first nine months of 2025, with capacity charges, paid to ensure grid reliability, tripling over the same period.
Virginia’s per capita emissions (10.8 tons) and carbon intensity per $1 million GDP (158 tons) are already well below the national average, reflecting pre-VCEA gains from replacing coal with lower-emission resources.
The VCEA’s rigid mandates, crafted before the data center boom, do not account for today’s demand realities, risking reliability shortfalls and rising costs if clean-firm power is retired prematurely.
The authors argue that inflexible technology mandates and statutory retirement deadlines, combined with a failure to adapt to rising demand, have created a structural risk to Virginia’s power grid. When affordability and reliability are overlooked, consumer costs rise, and support for climate action falters. The report urges policymakers to pivot toward outcome-based energy policy, expand clean-firm capacity, and treat affordability as a core indicator of climate policy success.
PPI’s analysis offers a roadmap for recalibrating Virginia’s strategy, emphasizing flexibility, reliability, and fairness, to maintain progress toward decarbonization while safeguarding the Commonwealth’s energy future.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi.
THE CHALLENGE OF BALANCING CLIMATE AMBITION WITH REALITY
Virginia’s energy policy is at a critical inflection point. The rigid, technology-specific mandates of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which legally commits the state to a 100% carbon-free electricity grid by 2045, are on a direct collision course with the skyrocketing energy demand from its world-leading data center industry. In 2020, this landmark legislation was enacted by a Democratic legislative majority on a mostly party-line vote and signed into law by then-Governor Ralph Northam. The world has since shifted dramatically, redefined by a surge in electricity demand from an industry that is both a pillar of the modern economy and a monumental consumer of power.
This conflict poses a risk to the Commonwealth’s energy future. Unless Virginia adopts a more pragmatic approach that prioritizes reliable, clean firm power, i.e., sources that are both lowcarbon and available on demand, it risks severe grid instability. Such a crisis would not only jeopardize the state’s long-held advantage of affordable energy but could also paradoxically undermine its own climate goals by forcing reliance on less clean measures like prolonged coal generation and fuel oil peaker plants to maintain grid integrity.
To navigate this challenge, policymakers must first recognize the foundations of the state’s prior success. Understanding Virginia’s impressive pre-VCEA decarbonization achievements is crucial to charting a sustainable path forward that aligns its climate ambitions with the realities of its growing energy needs.
It is also important to note that while the VCEA primarily addresses carbon emissions from electricity generation, the largest source of emissions in Virginia is the transportation sector at 53%, followed by electricity generation at 23%.
It has taken European leaders nearly a year to recognize what they were up against in Donald Trump. The 47th president has been browbeating and insulting them since he returned to the White House. He has called Europe a “decaying” continent led by “weak,” “incompetent” people who “are not doing a good job,” and his administration has vowed to “cultivate resistance” to continental governments, replacing them with far-right populists. Still, most European leaders have been afraid to push back, wary of alienating the great power that has guaranteed the continent’s security and prosperity for over 80 years.
But this dynamic appears to be changing as Trump ratchets up his threats to take over Greenland—the autonomous territory of a loyal NATO member—either “the easy way” or “the hard way,” with the use of force.
As recently as last fall, European leaders fell into two camps. The largest group consisted of what you might call “appeasers” like NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who never publicly questions or counters Trump and called him “Daddy” at last summer’s NATO summit. In the other camp, generally younger, less established, or no longer in public office, are the “rebels.” Among the most outspoken is former Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, who warns that NATO is heading into its “twilight“ years and if Europe “doesn’t wake up, we might have to declare it dead.”
What’s been missing are sober, down-to-earth voices with concrete plans for how Europe can move toward a new order, out from under America’s shadow and able to defend itself against an aggressive, revanchist Russia.
In recent weeks, untold numbers of ordinary Iranians have taken to the streets of their towns and cities to protest the repression and incompetent economic management of the country’s ruling theocratic regime. The regime itself appears intent on slaughtering its way to survival, murdering thousands of ordinary Iranians in what has become one of the bloodiest domestic crackdowns the world has seen in decades. Supposed moderates have closed ranks behind the regime, and cracks have yet to appear in the regime itself or among security services like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). While its immediate fate remains uncertain, the regime’s long-term prognosis appears terminal: too much popular discontent with a regime too ideologically rigid and corrupt to face (much less solve) Iran’s severe economic problems.
Even if the Iranian people topple the present regime and replace it with a more liberal and democratic one that reflects the actual aspirations of the Iranian people, that new government may not see eye to eye with the United States when it comes to regional and global politics. But it would lack the current regime’s ideological zealotry and would probably not maintain Iranian support for terrorist and militant groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis that sow chaos and destruction across the Middle East and the rest of the world.
For his part, President Trump threatened military action against Iran if it continues its crackdown — though it’s not clear what the use of force would actually achieve. Destroying some regime security services facilities — say, a few IRGC barracks — probably would not do much to stop the regime’s current killing spree; this is, after all, an existential question for the regime from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on down. Moreover, an American-led air campaign seems just as likely to disrupt protests as hamper the regime’s repression: many ordinary Iranians would understandably head for cover to avoid incoming missiles and bombs, while the regime would use such strikes to attack protestors as tools of foreign powers and pose as the defenders of Iranian sovereignty. Even if air strikes precipitated the fall of the present regime, moreover, it’s hard to believe that a new Iranian government that rose to power in the wake of American military action would prove entirely stable or legitimate even in the short run.
Nor, for whatever it’s worth, do America’s regional partners — Israel and Egypt as well as Gulf monarchies Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — want the United States to take military action against Iran. Most Americans agree, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll that finds some 70% of registered voters opposed to American military intervention in Iran.
Fortunately, the United States does have smarter and potentially more effective policy options beyond the use of military force to support Iran’s protestors: cyber operations could disrupt the regime and its security services as they continue their murderous crackdown on the Iranian people, making coordination between elements of the security services more difficult and giving protestors more room for maneuver against them. It could also deny the regime the ability to censor and jam communication with the outside world, allowing Iranians to get their story out without regime interference. Functional American public diplomacy and support for civil society groups could also have proven useful in Iran today had not the Trump administration made them an early target of its lawless attack on the federal government; indeed, Trump slashed funding for initiatives intended to help dissidents and protestors circumvent internet shutdowns of the sort imposed by Iran’s regime.
It would also be useful for the United States to coordinate with its allies and partners in the European Union, bringing additional pressure to bear on the regime from governments that historically have had more avenues for engagement with Tehran. But President Trump’s insane impulse to seize Greenland by whatever means necessary has created a rift with America’s European allies that only consumes time, attention, and resources that could’ve been devoted to real problems — not just the Iranian uprising, but support for Ukraine in its ongoing fight against Russian aggression. Instead, America and its European allies find themselves in a wholly unnecessary crisis of Trump’s own making.
What’s more, the United States could offer carrots in the form of sanctions relief that could both buoy protestors and create rifts within the regime itself. Ironically enough, Trump himself has precedent here: he lifted sanctions on the new post-Assad government in Syria last year, and could make a similar pledge to do so in Iran if the regime changes there. And if Iranians were to, in fact, change their regime, it would certainly be helpful if the United States had some sort of foreign assistance agency to help any new Iranian government establish itself and take root — but with the destruction of USAID, no such agency exists.
But President Trump and his administration appear more interested in military action against Iran for its own sake, only loosely tethered at best to any political or strategic objectives — to say nothing of an actual sense of how the use of force might help achieve them. They seem to believe their earlier uses of military force — against Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, against small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, and most recently against Venezuela — have been wholly unqualified and unblemished successes, leading Trump and his administration to level military threats not only against Iran but Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland as well.
There’s a word for this sort of overconfidence: hubris. And hubris inevitably leads to nemesis: downfall and ruination.
As Congress prepares to return from its winter recess, negotiations over another round of legislation to regulate the crypto industry are heating up. Whether Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee can reach an agreement remains an open question. That is unfortunate, because among the issues that still need to be addressed, one of particular importance is the impact of crypto on lending to underserved communities.
Rural areas, inner cities, and economically disadvantaged communities rely heavily on community banks, typically defined as those with less than $1 billion in assets, for access to capital, credit, and basic financial services. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have long recognized this reality, which is why despite partisan differences they have supported initiatives such as the New Markets Tax Credit to expand capital and credit in underserved areas.
Protecting this lifeline of credit and capital is also a key reason behind the prohibition on stablecoins offering interest to customers, enacted as part of the GENIUS Act.
WASHINGTON — Today, Mary Guenther, Head of Space Policyat the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), issued the following statement regarding the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act introduced by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.):
“PPI applauds this bipartisan group of legislators for coming together to help make the satellite industry more globally competitive through regulatory streamlining. As highlighted in PPI’s recent publication, ‘Competing for the Upper Hand in the Ultimate High Ground: The Modern Space Race Between the U.S. and China,’ the United States is in a strategic power competition with China, and a number of satellite services are critical to maintaining our technological leadership. Our current regulatory system for space is disjointed and overly burdensome, which makes it challenging for the innovative commercial space sector to out-innovate China.
“Beyond their significance to maintaining competitiveness with China, satellite services improve the lives of Americans every day by expanding access to internet connectivity, providing weather information, getting farmers the insights they need to be more productive, and enhancing national security.
“This bipartisan bill would take an important step toward simplifying the regulatory environment for the space industry and helping the United States remain the leader in space, which benefits all Americans.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi.
In the age of Donald Trump, America’s multiple safeguards to protect against the rise of a strongman exerting authoritarian powers are being tested more strenuously than at any time in modern memory. The early results are not good. Congress has failed to jealously guard its powers. The Supreme Court has repeatedly deferred to the executive. Majormediaorganizations, universities, and law firms have bent to the president’s will.
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