U.S. News/Policy

The Soviet Union didn’t merely stockpile biological weapons—it explored whether modern science could make nature better at killing people. Behind the supposedly civilian Biopreparat program, Soviet scientists worked with anthrax, plague and genetically manipulated pathogens while Moscow publicly signed treaties prohibiting biological warfare. We learned how to rewrite biology. Unfortunately, we never figured out how to rewrite human nature.

The Obama Presidential Library is not a National Archives presidential library at all. It’s a museum, a foundation headquarters, and a Chicago Public Library branch. A presidential library with no presidential library in it might be the most honest thing on the campus.

The Obama Foundation promised Chicago a $470 million endowment so taxpayers would never get stuck with the bill for his presidential center.

Eisenhower helped build NATO, but he never intended American taxpayers to carry Europe’s defense indefinitely. By 1959, Ike was already frustrated that Europeans hadn’t assumed greater responsibility. Nearly seven decades later, we’re still having the same conversation. Perhaps it’s time to revisit what the general actually envisioned—and why his expectations remain so relevant today.

During the last shutdown, one private citizen wrote a $130 million check so our soldiers could get paid. Every member of Congress got paid on time anyway. They wrote the law that way.

In December 1995, an American armored column crossed the Sava River into Bosnia to enforce a peace agreement. Nobody in those tanks was starting a war with Russia—but they were crossing into a new post-Cold War world. Over the next few years NATO would expand eastward, bomb Yugoslavia, and move into Kosovo while Moscow watched the strategic map change. The road to Ukraine didn’t begin in 2022. Trace the tracks backward far enough, and eventually you arrive at a muddy floating bridge across the Sava.

After a long hiatus, a good part of which involved begoming a grandfather, Kevin White is back with us, relating a bit about military childhood.

In the 1970s, the experts warned that there were simply too many of us. Governments listened, population control became policy, and frightening projections were treated as scientific certainty. The catastrophe never arrived—not because resources were infinite, but because the models underestimated their most important variable: human ingenuity. The population pessimists counted mouths. Genesis counted hands. And history left us a useful warning: you don’t need a global conspiracy when everyone believes the same experts.

My shoulder waited three years. The VA pushed my surgery back three years, and Bernie Sanders wants to put your mother and your kids on a bigger version of that exact government line.

I remember seeing it painted on buildings as we moved through Bosnia and Kosovo—a cross surrounded by four strange C-shaped marks. I knew it meant something Serbian; I didn’t realize somebody had managed to cram centuries of Byzantium, Orthodox Christianity, Ottoman conquest, Kosovo, nationalism and war into four little squiggles. The Serbian cross and its famous motto, “Only Unity Saves the Serbs,” taught me something I wouldn’t fully appreciate until years later: American soldiers arrived in the Balkans carrying maps, but the people who lived there were carrying centuries of memory.

Game theory is mankind’s invention of 3D chess—the realization that rational players can make moves that look completely irrational when you can’t see the whole board. But American geopolitics adds another dimension: time. Presidents get four or eight years. Institutions, alliances, armies, intelligence agencies, bureaucracies, and strategic interests can endure for generations. So perhaps the real question isn’t simply, “Who runs America?” It’s more interesting than that: Who keeps playing after everyone else leaves the table? Because the biggest mistake in 3D chess may not be misunderstanding the move. It may be misunderstanding who the players actually are.

When NATO started bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, most Americans discovered Kosovo approximately fifteen minutes before forming an opinion about it. The problem was that the people actually living there had been fighting over its history for roughly 600 years. From the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the Ottoman world of Vlad the Impaler, through Tito’s Yugoslavia and one bizarre, politically explosive glass-bottle incident in 1985, Kosovo accumulated centuries of grievances before the first NATO bomb fell. American troops arrived carrying rifles, radios, maps and rules of engagement. The Balkans were waiting with six centuries of history.

Kimberly Guilfoyle has spent decades surrounded by fame, wealth, beauty, and political power. From Gavin Newsom’s wife to Fox News celebrity to Trump’s ambassador to Greece, her journey raises an uncomfortable biblical question: What profits a woman to gain the whole world and lose her soul? As new financial allegations emerge, perhaps it’s time to revisit what Jesus taught about the love of money. I hope she finds redemption, because heaven doesn’t accept American Express.