I.

Cole Tomas Allen, the young man who walked into the Washington Hilton on Saturday night with a shotgun, a handgun, multiple knives, and a stated intention to kill the president of the United States, gave a charming interview to ABC7 in Los Angeles in 2017. He was a Caltech senior studying mechanical engineering. He had designed a prototype emergency brake to keep wheelchairs from skidding when their wheel brakes engaged. The reporter found him gracious and articulate. The brake worked.

In the almost decade between his star turns, Allen took a master’s in computer science at Cal State Dominguez Hills, tutored high school students at C2 Education in Torrance, and was named the company’s Teacher of the Month in December 2024. The parents of his students told the Los Angeles Times he was intelligent, soft-spoken, and on the nicer side. His professor at Cal State remembered him in the front row, attentive, polite, and frequently emailing about coursework. On Saturday night, having traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, he sent his family a note ten minutes before the attack. He apologized to those whose trust he had abused. He said he did not expect forgiveness. In the writings he left behind, he called himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”

How does the boy who built a wheelchair brake become the assassin at the magnetometer? The reporters covering the case have proposed mental illness, online radicalization, isolation. None of these answers is wrong. None is sufficient. They describe the surface, but the deeper architecture demands our attention.

Allen is the third in eighteen months. Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in December 2024. Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Each of these young men explained himself before he acted. Each presented his act as service to the nation. Each accepted, or anticipated, his own death as the price of that “service.” The framework authorizing their reasoning is older than effective altruism, but effective altruism is its current respectable form. The corrective is older still. It is a verse of John’s Gospel that our culture has either forgotten or, having half-remembered, inverted.

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II.

Allen, apparently obsessed with saving the nation by sacrificing its president, is a modern echo of the gospels’ Caiaphas.

“It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” The high priest spoke at a council convened after the raising of Lazarus, when the religious authorities had concluded that the Jesus movement, left alone, would provoke a Roman crackdown destroying the temple and the nation with it. The calculation, on its face, is prudence. It is the kind of arithmetic any administrator runs. It produced unanimity in the council and discharged a social tension that had become unbearable. The gospel writer treats the line as both prophetic and damning in the same breath.

René Girard located here the mechanism by which human societies have always discharged collective tension. Unanimous violence against an innocent victim produces social cohesion, the appearance of justice, and a feeling of relief so profound that participants experience it as a sacred event. The mechanism works in the technical sense. Cultures across history have used it. What the gospels do, on Girard’s reading, is take the side of the victim and expose the lie. Once exposed, the mechanism cannot work the same way again. The lynch mob becomes suspect even when its victim looks guilty. The persecution texts of the ancient world give way, slowly, to texts that worry about scapegoats.

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This is one source of an intuition that Western societies, including their secular members, treat as bedrock: the individual is inviolable; human sacrifice is categorically forbidden; the lynching is suspect even when the lynched man looks like a villain. These intuitions are not universal. They are not present in every civilization. Aztec sacrifice, Carthaginian Tophet, the burning of widows on funeral pyres are recent on the scale of recorded history. The reason most contemporary Westerners recoil from them is not that human nature has improved. It is that our ancestors read, and we still half-remember, a particular text. The atheist horrified by ritual killing is borrowing intellectual furniture from a faith he does not profess, and may find that, absent care, that furniture may not be bequeathed to the next generation.

III.

Mangione wrote the script. Robinson and Allen are reading from it.

The Mangione manifesto reasoned, in the language it could find, from harms in aggregate to a license for individual action. The American health insurance regime kills people; therefore the executive of a major insurer must die. The math is the giveaway. The math assumes that lives are fungible, that suffering can be summed across persons, and that the sum can be set against a particular killing as its justification. Once the premises are granted, the conclusion follows. Read carefully, the manifesto is not the work of a deranged mind. It is the work of a logically consistent one, operating from premises Christianity was supposed to have rendered unthinkable.

Tyler Robinson is the harder case. The reasoning, on what we know of it, was structurally identical to Mangione’s, with different inputs. Charlie Kirk’s speech was causing harm; the harm had to be stopped. Speech replaces insurance claims; the conclusion follows along the same path. Kirk was, by any honest accounting, the most prominent voice persuading young men of his generation toward the conservative tradition. He was killed for that work, by another young man of the same generation reasoning from the same premises that had moved Mangione nine months earlier.

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Allen completes the figure. The “Friendly Federal Assassin” is Caiaphas in modern dress: the same prudential frame, the same self-presentation as servant of the nation, the same willingness to absorb personal destruction as the price of the service. Allen intends, on his own account, to save the country. He accepts his own death in the bargain. That is the deeper Girardian point. The scapegoater becomes scapegoat. The cycle does not stop. The president has described the manifesto as expressing hatred for Christians; whether the text bears that out in detail is a question for the trial. The structure of Allen’s reasoning, whatever his explicit theological views, is the structure that the Christian tradition was supposed to have foreclosed.

Allen is not crazy in any legal or clinical sense. He sat in the front row. He was Teacher of the Month. He was reasoning. The reasoning leads where it leads when the prohibition is gone.

IV.

Caiaphas needed Pilate. He still does.

The Pilate of John 18 and 19 is not the architect of the killing. He examines the prisoner, finds no fault in him, says so on the record, and authorizes the killing anyway. He cannot afford the political cost of intervention. He washes his hands, declares himself innocent, and returns to administration. The killing proceeds.

The pattern of the past eighteen months on the institutional left has been the pattern of Pilate. Mainstream organs that shape liberal opinion did not endorse Mangione’s act. They did, in publication after publication, treat his manifesto as a document deserving sympathetic exegesis and his person as an object of unsettling cultural fascination. They did not endorse Robinson’s killing of Kirk. They did, with rare exceptions, treat Kirk’s death as an occasion to revisit Kirk’s rhetoric rather than to denounce the architecture of reasoning that produced his killer. They will not endorse Allen. They have already begun to amplify him. Norah O’Donnell, interviewing the president the day after the attack, read Allen’s denunciation of him aloud from the manifesto, the words “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” delivered in the measured cadence of network news, the assassin’s accusation laundered through the authority of CBS into a question the president was invited to answer. This is the work Pilate’s procurators do once the killing is underway. They give the charge a hearing. They treat the killer’s grievance as a contribution to public discourse. They will, in the days to come, find ways to write that the country’s politics had become unbearable for sensitive young men.

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This is the Pilate move. It does not require approval of the killings. It requires only the choice not to intervene against the architecture that produces them. The intervention would mean naming the moral grammar of utilitarian aggregation as defective, repudiating the networks that have grown wealthy and respectable on its terms, and acknowledging that a political coalition that has lately mocked Christian moral seriousness as theocratic threat is now reaping a harvest its mockery helped to sow. The institutional left will not make the intervention. The political costs are too high. The energy of the men at the magnetometer does work, in the structure of contemporary politics, that mainstream voices would not do themselves. So, the hands are washed, the case is found wanting on its merits, and the killing proceeds.

The defense is always that these are isolated cases, lone wolves, mentally unwell young men whose acts cannot be generalized. The defense does not survive three cases reasoning from identical premises within eighteen months.

V.

The architects of the authorizing architecture are not bad people. This is the part of the argument that requires care. The casualties of a wrong idea are often the people who took it most seriously.

Peter Singer at Princeton has spent fifty years arguing, with patience and rigor, that geographic distance ought not block moral obligation and that the comparison of outcomes across persons is the proper grammar of ethical thought. The argument has produced real charity and saved real lives. It has also produced a moral grammar that lacks any categorical prohibition on the scapegoat. Singer’s frame can absorb such a prohibition only as an empirical generalization about the long-run consequences of permitting killing. It cannot ground the prohibition as inviolable in itself.

Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried at Stanford Law have done careful, humane work on responsibility and consequentialism. Their philosophical project is serious. Their son Sam took the philosophy he had inherited seriously and acted on it. Under the pressure of running an exchange in a falling market, he discovered that the architecture he had been taught could not hold a line a more ancient grammar would have held. He is a talented young man lost to a wrong formation, one of the casualties of an idea, worth another chance if the idea around him is ever named clearly enough to be repudiated.

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The same charity is owed his parents and the broader effective-altruist community. They are people of conscience working on serious problems. The question their architecture cannot answer, because no consequentialist architecture can answer it from inside, is why the inviolability of the individual ought to function as a non-negotiable constraint on the aggregation of welfare. That premise was historically supplied by a religious tradition the academy has spent a generation treating as embarrassment. Stripped of the premise, consequentialism is arithmetic, and arithmetic licenses whatever the numbers favor. This is not a failure of the philosophers; it is a structural limit of philosophy unaided by what theologians used to call revelation. A generation of our most gifted young people is being formed in the architecture. Some end at FTX. A smaller number, formed in adjacent architectures with sharper edges and weaker ties, end at a magnetometer.

VI.

Allen will be prosecuted. The federal indictment names attempted assassination, interstate transport of a firearm in furtherance of a violent crime, and discharge of a firearm during a violent crime. Conviction is overdetermined. He will spend his life in federal prison.

This is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Positive law forbids the killing. Positive law cannot supply the moral grammar that makes the prohibition feel natural. Hart’s minimum content of natural law gestures toward the insight; Fuller’s morality of law gestures toward it from the other direction. The deeper Thomistic point, recovered in Pope Leo XIV’s Vatican Tribunal address last month and treated at length in these pages, is that positive law presupposes a populace that will not reason its way around it. When the populace makes the move, the law has nothing to say that the populace will hear. Allen knew the law. The law did not deter him. Criminal law’s deterrence model assumes a baseline of socialization that recoils from killing. When the socialization fails, the law can punish the killer. It cannot reach the next one through punishment alone. The genuinely persuaded man who has already accepted his own death is the case the criminal law was never built to handle.

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Schmitt’s formulation belongs here. The sovereign decides on the exception. The state’s monopoly on legitimate force is the renunciation, by every other actor, of the right to decide which deaths serve the nation. When private citizens reclaim the right, the polity has either revolution or terror. The American settlement assumes that even those who hate one another will not kill each other. That assumption is doing more work than the Constitution acknowledges, and the work is not legal work.

The asymmetry should be named. Mangione, Robinson, and Allen are men of the left. The American right has its own histories of violence. In this particular moment, the active assassin script is a script of the left. The most plausible reading is that the secular left has gone further down the road of forgetting than the secular right has. The right’s secularism still trades on a residual Christian inheritance, often without acknowledging the source. The left’s secularism, especially in its technocratic and effective-altruist forms, has taken the deeper drink. The grammar of aggregate welfare without inviolable individual claims has done its work first where it took root first.

We are not going to legislate our way out of this. The criminal statutes will not do the work. Hardened protective details will reduce frequency but will not address the source of this violence. The assassination of public figures by gifted young men reasoning from utilitarian premises is not a legal problem. It is a catechetical one. The catechism that produced the Western refusal to sacrifice the one for the many was Christian. The substitutes on offer—humanism, effective altruism, technocratic liberalism—are not catechisms. They are denominational variations on the position Caiaphas took in the council. They will produce more Cole Allens. They cannot help producing them. The broader culture still benefits from the Christian inheritance while forgetting its source. Whether it recognizes what it is losing in time to recover it is the open question of our generation. All signs derived from the Hilton on Saturday night were discouraging.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

In 2012, Xi Jinping promoted the idea of a “new era of great power relations,” a term that had been introduced in China decades earlier, but which took on new meaning given China’s remarkable economic development. It was, early on, a sort of invitation to then U.S. president Barack Obama and a signal of Chinese newfound confidence as a leader in a global order to which it hoped to contribute not only materially but in terms of values and norms. President Obama demurred and his successor, Donald Trump, gave a clearer response in his 2017 National Security Strategy, which spoke of a new era of great power competition. Even so, for several years Xi Jinping promoted the concept of a “new era of great power relations,” and it was dissected and evaluated at length by Chinese scholars and sinologists. In the end, he adjusted to a “new era of international politics.”

In a forthcoming essay, Chen Gang and I explore why Xi Jinping was unable to persuade audiences, domestic and international, to endorse the idea of a “new era of great power relations.” In a striking contrast, U.S. president Donald Trump, with little interest in conceptual elaboration, generated a seemingly endless discussion of how he has brought about changes in the international system, and, despite severe criticism, many political leaders have proven themselves willing to engage with the shifts he has introduced, such as the global tariff-cum-bilateral negotiation scheme he launched without warning in April 2025.

This essay offers a preliminary analysis of the foreign policy of the second Trump administration. While there is so much to address, as with his earlier administration, the current administration has moved quickly and delivered constant rhetorical displays to attract attention. But this mandate features much bolder and more definitive policy moves, as well as a more confident and less leaky administration, which largely acts first and explains later. For reasons of space, I hoped to limit the discussion to the Western Hemisphere, the area identified by the National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2025 and the National Defense Strategy (NDS) of January 2026 as the most important region for U.S. security. Yet the ongoing military activities in Iran make such a restriction impossible.

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Since returning to the presidency in January 2025, Donald Trump publicly considered making Canada the 51st state, suggested possible military tactics to control Greenland, and insisted on U.S. control of the Panama Canal. The United States has deployed its military forces to blow up boats in the Caribbean alleged to be engaged in drug-trafficking, has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, and has exerted pressure on regional governments to prevent oil shipments to Cuba. In addition to raising tariffs on the entire world, Trump raised additional tariffs in response to actions taken by presidents (Colombian president Gustavo Petro) or supreme courts (in Brazil), endorsed presidential candidates (Honduras), and pushed an IMF support loan to help presidents regarded as fellow travelers (Argentina).

The above represents a considerable change in the scope and intensity of U.S. foreign policy activity in the Western Hemisphere. Many analysts have criticized the Trump administration for pursuing a so-called “sphere of influence” policy, which they see represented in U.S. government efforts to dominate the Western Hemisphere and expressions of interest in withdrawal from other regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, East Asia). Critics worry not only about abandoning allies—such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea—but also about ceding legitimacy to aggressive action by China, Russia, and others in their perceived respective “spheres of influence.”

While Trump’s policies may have such consequences, these are certainly not their goals. Critics confuse “backyard” and “sphere of influence.” A great power may be concerned about activities, including those sponsored by other great powers, in its backyard. But in order for a great power to have a sphere of influence, that sphere must be recognized by other great powers as a geopolitical fact. The Trump administration recognizes only one sphere of influence, that of the United States. It may recognize the security concerns of Russia or China (or Turkey, etc.), but it also sells weapons to neighbors and actively pursues freedom of navigation activities in regions critical to the security of other great powers. The United States is not alone in not recognizing a Chinese or Russian sphere of influence. Many countries, including China, operate in Russia’s “near abroad,” and there is considerable diversity of geopolitical alignment amongst countries bordering and proximate to China. So Trump 2.0 policies do not really seem to be what analysts identify (or fear) as a sphere of influence foreign policy.

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That said, the Trump administration expressly aims to recalibrate relations with its allies, with the latter taking more of a leading role in local/regional security concerns and the United States operating as a second level of defense. This is most visible in the U.S. plan for South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to play more of a role in security within the First Island Chain and the United States more involved in the Second Island Chain. There are risks with such a recalibration, but this is not—at least in terms of strategy—conceding or legitimating spheres of influence.

The criticism of the Trump administration pursuing a sphere of influence foreign policy is part of a broader conceptualization of policies that find parallels in the nineteenth century, especially in the form of great power competition. The Trump administration would no doubt accept this characterization, as it sees foreign policy in realist terms, with states being most prudent when they pursue national interest according to their limited capabilities. More tellingly, the National Security Strategy refers often and positively to the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, and proposes the development of a “Trump Corollary” (which news agencies have dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”). This hemispheric strategy has been to pressure governments to reduce exposure to Russia, China, and Iran, and conceive new collective efforts in areas of security and migration (primarily or, at least, initially). The various activities mentioned earlier are representative of largely unilateral efforts to these ends, while the Shield of the Americas (or the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition), announced in March 2026, is a multilateral, ongoing cooperative effort.

While there are visible analogs between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. policy in Latin America and the current Trump administration strategy in the Western Hemisphere, the most directly resonant comparison is in tactics. That is, moving and then parking an armada in the Caribbean (or other seas) and demanding significant foreign policy concessions seem ripped from history textbook discussions of gunboat diplomacy. That practice, a tactic used first by European countries and then the United States and Japan, involved showing potential naval power outside a port in order to intimidate a polity considered less militarily capable into backing down on a particular case or range of policies. If the presence of the vessels was insufficient, the port might be shelled. Yet, for the most part, gunboat diplomacy was seen as a diplomatic tactic—coercive, but short of war.

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With the standardization of international law, the collapse of colonialism, the Cold War re-spatialization of politics, and the politics of decolonization, gunboat diplomacy became increasingly viewed as illegitimate and inefficient. The Trump administration’s redeployment of a vast number of naval vessels to the Caribbean to pressure South American governments and the later destruction of boats alleged to be drug trafficking fit within norms and tactics of an earlier era of intense great power competition. The pressure campaign on Cuba, with the aim of producing a change in policy and leadership, if not in regime, follows a similar script. The rendition of Maduro seems to be gunboat diplomacy 2.0. In this case, the naval presence in the Caribbean followed and juxtaposed diplomacy, which was the case in earlier gunboat diplomacy. But the success of the rendition was largely due to an intelligence operation that predated the arrival of the boats. This intelligence and diplomacy, then showing the flag with naval presence, is characteristic of the U.S. war with Iran.

If there are tactical similarities between U.S. operations in Venezuela and Iran, there are nevertheless very important strategic differences. The NSS and NDS make clear that U.S. foreign policy should be narrowly focused on national interest, which means that the United States should prioritize the Western Hemisphere and East Asia, deprioritize the Middle East and Western Europe, practice realism and not worry about types of regimes outside of the Americas and Europe, and avoid “regime change wars.” Up until the February 28 opening of hostilities with Iran, U.S. foreign policy was rather consistent. Pressure was placed on European and East Asian allies for them to ramp up military spending and to invest more in U.S. industry. The Russia-Ukraine war was seen as a European conflict where the United States would increase its role as mediator and play a less automatic role as patron. Critics worried that Trump’s effort to get a deal from China might reduce military sales to Taiwan. In the Middle East, Trump endorsed former ISIS member turned nationalist Syrian president Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who won over the United States in a November 2025 visit, perhaps due to his play on the basketball court with U.S. military officials. Trump also was in the process of reengaging Iran in what seemed to many to be a return to the type of nuclear deal from which he walked away in 2018. Indeed, the military strikes occurred while Oman-led negotiations were allegedly progressing.

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Without making a clear case for why the attack on Iran was necessary, Trump has issued a series of demands, culminating in his call for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender,” as well as his threat that “a whole civilization” might “die.” Rather than working with regimes from regions outside of the Western Hemisphere and Europe that are oriented by distinct values, Trump has called upon the Iranian people to democratize their regime. The priority the NSS and NDS give to East Asian security seems challenged as Trump mentioned sending THAAD missiles from South Korea to the Middle East to replenish missiles spent responding to Iranian counterattacks (this has yet to be verified). Moreover, Iran has proven itself more resilient than perhaps Trump imagined. The decapitation of many leaders, which followed earlier rounds of decapitation, has led to neither the emergence of a “Delcy-Rodriguez figure” (a term that we who study Latin America would never have conceived prior to this January), nor a regime collapse, nor a generalized popular rebellion. Rather, Iranian missile strikes have continued, and, most importantly, Iran has shown that in choking off the Strait of Hormuz, it can hit the United States, indirectly, at the gas pump and squeeze U.S. allies who were uninvolved in the planning and decision-making of the U.S. military action but who bear much of the costs.

So why did President Trump authorize the military operation in Iran? His concern about Iran predates his first term in office, yet it is the authorization of the strikes and the deviation from the NSS/NDS strategy that are most surprising. It is likely that the mass protests and government repression convinced him that the regime was unpopular. The rapid slide of the Iran’s rial and the very widely reported drought in Iran, as well as the country’s foundering since Israel’s responses to the October 7 Hamas attacks, suggested that the government was vulnerable. In such a scenario, a very quick, kinetic attack, combined with decapitation, could allow for rapid escalation and then de-escalation with a more pliant Iran. The success of the operation in Venezuela and the pressure campaign in Cuba made it very possible that Trump could reverse the course of the Venezuelan government and possibly bring policy, if not regime change, in Cuba, something that has dogged U.S. presidents for six decades. The opportunity to do the same in Iran, a hostile regime for close to five decades, may have been too difficult to pass up, even if the Trump administration needed to break many of its own rules and principles to do so.

It is too soon to know what the consequences of this military engagement in the Middle East will be, but important questions remain. Is the attack a one-off deviation, or is it an extension of the principles of dominating the Western Hemisphere to a broader theater—perhaps bolstered because of the perceived success of Western Hemisphere operations and relatively muted responses from others—that there is only one, global sphere of influence, and that sphere is America’s? Either question raises further questions. Recent U.S. presidents have tried to respond to a global order in which China and the United States have, relative to twenty years ago, greater and lesser military and economic capabilities, respectively. These presidents have differed in terms of how they have leveraged (and treated) allies, engaged in global trade regimes and international organizations, and deployed military force, but all have tried to respond to a shifting global order as both leader and participant within that order. Trump’s Western Hemisphere policies and strategies prior to the war with Iran offered a consistent, if controversial, approach that seemed to deliberately direct U.S. and global order during an inflection point toward a new nomos. It is harder to evaluate his overall foreign policy strategy since the decision to attack Iran, and harder still given Iran’s resistance and the global consequences. What seems clear is that considerations of great power competition have moved from discussions among security officials to headline-leading speeches of heads of state across the world.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues • China Initiative

Tony Spanakos is Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. He has been a Fulbright Scholar (2002 Brazil, 2008 Venezuela) and visiting researcher at the East Asia Institute (Singapore 2009, 2017). He is co-editor of Reforming Brazil (Lexington), Conceptualising Comparative Politics (Routledge), and “The Legacy of Hugo Chavez,” a special issue of Latin American Perspectives. His work examines questions in the areas of democratization, the use of concepts, international relations, and political theory, giving particular attention to Latin America, East Asia, and U.S. relations with these regions.

I.

The confrontation between Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump over the American-Israeli war with Iran has generated considerable heat and rather less light. Trump called the first American pope weak and terrible for foreign policy. Leo responded that he had no fear of the Trump administration and would continue to preach the Gospel. The cycle looks like a political spat. In truth, it surfaces an ancient disagreement in Christian thought about faith and the use of force, a question the tradition has never fully resolved and that Leo has now restated at volume without reckoning with its implications.

Both figures deserve more charity than the exchange has produced. Trump’s instinct that a civilization under existential threat from a nuclear-armed adversary has the right and duty to defend itself is not theologically illiterate. It is the settled position of the Catholic Church whose leader is criticizing him, and in this exchange the president finds himself, improbably, its defender. Leo’s instinct that invoking divine blessing on the destruction of an entire people is politically reckless and spiritually dangerous is also not wrong. The positions become incompatible only when Leo reaches for language more absolute than the tradition warrants and Trump for divine endorsement more confident than any statesman should claim.

II.

Leo’s recent statements have followed an unfortunate arc. On Palm Sunday he said that Jesus “is the king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” adding that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war but rejects them.” On social media he wrote that “God does not bless any conflict” and that no disciple of Christ “is ever on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” He supported these claims with a citation from Isaiah 1:15, in which God tells Israel he will not listen to their prayers because their hands are full of blood.

These statements deserve a more careful reading than the political exchange has given them. The claim that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war is one I cannot find any pacifist tradition actually defending. Taken literally, it nullifies the prayers of every Christian soldier who ever prayed for God’s protection, and those of every priest who ever ministered to a dying soldier making his peace with God. To advance it as papal teaching is to claim that the prayers of every Catholic sailor at Lepanto, every Union chaplain at Gettysburg, every G.I. and Tommy kneeling before Normandy, and Billy Graham across half a century with American presidents, went unheard in heaven. It contradicts the pastoral practice of the Church in every war through which it has ministered.

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The Isaiah citation deserves closer attention than it has received. The prophetic critique in Isaiah 1 is directed not at war but at a people who combined ritual observance with social injustice, bringing sacrifices to the temple while oppressing the poor and the widow. “Your hands are full of blood” is a charge of moral hypocrisy against a religious establishment, not a categorical indictment of military force. The same tradition that produced Isaiah also produced Joshua’s campaigns and the books of Maccabees, which sit inside the Catholic canon precisely because the Church has never read scripture against itself in this way. One suspects the verse was originally set aside for a different quarrel, perhaps a homily condemning immigration enforcement, and reached for without anyone checking.

“No one can use Christ to justify war” is not an exegetical argument. It is a doctrinal claim, and it stands in direct contradiction to the settled teaching of the Catholic Church over which Leo presides.

III.

The just war tradition is not a compromise between Christian ethics and political necessity. It is the product of taking the moral stakes of violence seriously enough to specify, with legal precision, the conditions under which violence is nonetheless permitted. Augustine argued that love of neighbor could require the use of force. Aquinas systematized the framework around legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. The Salamanca School (Vitoria, Suárez) translated it into the jus gentium that founded modern international law, and Grotius carried the same structure into the Protestant and secular world.

Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes preserved it while emphasizing proportionality. The Catechism codifies it at paragraphs 2307 through 2317, and those paragraphs reward a closer reading than Leo’s homilies have invited.

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The Catechism urges prayer for peace, and then states that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” The right is not grudgingly tolerated; it “cannot be denied.” Paragraph 2309 sets out the four jus ad bellum criteria (grave and lasting damage, last resort, serious prospects of success, proportionality) and expressly reserves their evaluation to “the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good,” that is, to statesmen, not to bishops and not to the pope. That reservation is a remarkable concession in a document not otherwise famous for reticence about papal authority, and one Leo appears to have forgotten or to be purposely flouting. Paragraph 2310 teaches that soldiers who carry out their duty honorably are “servants of the security and freedom of nations” who “truly contribute to the common good.” This is not the language of an institution that believes God refuses to hear warriors’ prayers. Paragraphs 2312 through 2314 set out the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality, largely tracking the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law. Paragraph 2316 authorizes regulation of the arms trade but assumes, without embarrassment, a legitimate arms industry. Paragraph 2317 locates the roots of war in “injustice, excessive economic or social inequalities, envy, distrust, and pride,” a diagnosis Leo has in fact echoed. Nearly every one of the preceding paragraphs, however, contradicts something he has said in the past three weeks.

Jean Bethke Elshtain pressed the Augustinian point with force in Just War Against Terror: the love commandment does not merely permit but can require the protection of the innocent through force. Elshtain, writing as a Lutheran political theorist deeply engaged with the Catholic tradition and cited widely in international law scholarship, was no enthusiast of American power. She saw clearly that a pacifism unwilling to confront the reality of aggression does not end injustice but reassigns its victims. That argument is not easily answered by papal fiat.

Aquinas is the deeper problem. Leo quoted him with approval at the Vatican Tribunal just weeks before the Iran war escalated. The natural law framework he invoked there leads directly to conclusions about just war Leo is not drawing. A prince who fails to use the sword to protect his people from grave injustice fails in his duty. Having dragged the Angelic Doctor out of the attic for natural law, Leo may come to regret that Aquinas has a great deal more to say.

IV.

There is a pacifist strand in Christian history, and the Christians who have held it with full consistency deserve genuine respect. The Anabaptist tradition, represented today by the Mennonites and the Amish, holds categorically that Christian discipleship excludes participation in war or in any form of violence. Within Catholicism the purest twentieth-century expression was the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, whose political commitments sat well to the left of the Church’s magisterium.

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The witness of the consistent pacifists is not easily dismissed. Their refusal of the sword stands as a rebuke to Christians who reach for coercive means too quickly. But a rebuke is not a doctrine, and a personal witness is not a magisterium. What distinguishes the Mennonites from Leo’s position is that they have accepted the cost of their conviction. They do not run states. They refuse to serve in the military and accept the legal consequences of that refusal. They do not accept the protection of armed guards.

The Catholic Church is not a Mennonite community. Catholic men serve in the military in every country where Catholics live, and the Church supplies chaplains to attend to their spiritual needs. Leo both presides over a sovereign state and is protected by the Swiss Guard, an elite commando squad with modern weaponry hidden beneath their flamboyant costumes, charged with using lethal force to defend the pope. The pope who proclaims that no disciple of Christ is ever on the side of those “who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs” has armed men standing outside his bedroom door.

A liberal Catholic reader will object that the historical argument proves too much, since post-conciliar popes have contradicted immemorial teaching on a number of matters, from religious liberty and usury to, in Francis’s case, capital punishment. Benedict XVI distinguished a hermeneutic of continuity from a hermeneutic of rupture, favoring continuity; Francis preferred rupture. But even rupture requires the formal work of doctrinal development. Francis changed the Catechism text on capital punishment, published his reasoning, and left a paper trail. Leo so far has issued only homilies and social media posts. His soon-to-be-published first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is dedicated not to questions of war and peace but to the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. If Leo intends to repudiate the Catechism’s just war doctrine, the honest and legally coherent path is to say so and defend the change through the ordinary magisterium. Homilies, however heartfelt, are not development of doctrine.

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V.

The Protestant and Orthodox traditions offer useful triangulation. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology sidesteps the question of whether God condones violence by dividing God’s reign into two realms: the spiritual, governed through the Gospel and grace, and the temporal, governed through law and the sword. A Christian soldier acts as an agent of the temporal order, not as a disciple of the Sermon on the Mount. The kingdoms must not be collapsed. A commander who claims God’s specific blessing on his campaign makes the same category error as the categorical pacifist, from the opposite direction, by baptizing coercive power with transcendent authority it does not possess.

Eastern Orthodoxy occupies a distinct and underappreciated position. It has no formal just war doctrine, nor is it pacifist. What it has is closer to “justifiable but never truly just” war: violence may be permitted as a tragic necessity but is never celebrated. Canon 13 of St. Basil the Great counsels that soldiers who kill in war, even legitimate war, be excluded from communion for three years as a penitential discipline. The canon was never universally enforced, but the claim is clear: killing, even when permitted, incurs a spiritual cost requiring cleansing. The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill has in recent years done precisely what the tradition warns against, blessing Russian military action in Ukraine and framing it as civilizational warfare. The damage to Russian Orthodoxy illustrates what happens when “justifiable but not just” collapses into crusade theology. It should give pause to anyone who reaches too quickly for divine endorsement, including a pope who reaches in the opposite direction too quickly for divine prohibition.

VI.

Carl Schmitt observed that politics cannot be reduced to moral categories because it rests on a friend-enemy distinction that universal moral claims do not dissolve but merely relocate. A state that claims to fight not an enemy but a criminal, not a war but a crusade, has not transcended the political; it has moralized it. Leo’s version runs formally in the opposite direction and practically in the same one.

When Leo says no disciple of Christ can be on the side of those who “once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” the language is universal, but the application has been conspicuously one-sided. The Islamic Republic of Iran has waged proxy war against the West since 1979. It arms and directs Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Its mining of the Strait of Hormuz inflicts far greater harm on the developing world’s poor, those the Church rightly cares about, than on Western militaries. It has pursued a nuclear weapons capability defying the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Leo has not addressed any of this with comparable intensity. He has reserved his categorical moral language for the American and Israeli response.

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This is the familiar pattern of the Cold War peace movements. Campaigns like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament framed themselves as bilateral calls for disarmament, but the practical effect ran one way: mass rallies in London and Bonn, silence in Moscow, and pressure for Western unilateralism that would have left the Warsaw Pact’s nuclear superiority undisturbed. Formal universalism paired with selective application is partisanship laundered through transcendent language. Schmitt saw this pattern clearly a century ago, and it is what Leo, intentionally or not, has reproduced.

VII.

The second observation is about asymmetry. Christianity is the only major world tradition in which categorical nonviolence has emerged as a serious internal option. Islam has its own well-developed jurisprudence of war and peace, with meaningful constraints on the conduct of warfare, though it draws different rules for conflicts among Muslims and with non-Muslims, and has produced no historic peace church along Mennonite or Quaker lines. The fourteen centuries of encounter between Christianity and Islam have been, in significant part, a military encounter. Catholic Europe fought off successive Islamic incursions at Tours under Charles Martel, at Lepanto, and at the gates of Vienna, and survived as Catholic because it fought. Eastern Europe, pressed in turn by Islamic and later Soviet power, did not fare as well. A Church committed to categorical pacifism in such a world would face a situation history has rarely resolved in the pacifist’s favor. Leo’s language, taken seriously, would require Catholics to accept that asymmetry as a condition of discipleship, and nothing he has said suggests he has thought through what that would mean for the Church he leads or for Western civilization.

The pacifists may still be right. The Mennonites who survived Soviet collectivization and Nazi occupation without arms are a witness with which the tradition must reckon. Their wager on divine protection is not irrational, but such protection is miraculous, and ordering a Church around the expectation of miracles is a presumption the natural law tradition has consistently warned against. If the pacifists are right, we will need miracles, and no magisterium can bind Catholics to that wager by homily.

The most honest thing Leo could say would not be that God never blesses conflict. It would be closer to this: the Church has lived in the tension between Gospel and sword since Constantine; the tradition has developed a precise legal grammar, preserved in the Catechism and in centuries of canon and international law, for acknowledging that tension; and any revision of that grammar must be done in the forms the tradition recognizes, through encyclical and council, not through homily and social media. Until then, paragraphs 2307 through 2317 remain the teaching of the Church, and the pope who departs from them in practice while leaving the text in place departs from his own magisterium.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

On March 14, 2026, Pope Leo XIV addressed the judges and officials of the Vatican City State Tribunal for the inauguration of its judicial year. The occasion was routine. Popes have been giving these addresses for decades, and they follow a predictable arc. Pontiff after Pontiff expresses gratitude for the quiet work of the judiciary, a few theological reflections on the nature of justice, and an exhortation to fidelity. Leo XIV followed a proven formula, and his remarks were remarkable primarily for their adherence to convention.

“Authentic justice,” the pope told his judges, “cannot be understood solely in the technical terms of positive law. In the light of the mission that guides the action of the Church, it also appears as the exercise of an ordered form of charity, capable of safeguarding and promoting communion.” He then spent the balance of his remarks unpacking this claim with support from the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, grounding the administration of justice in the Thomistic virtue tradition and the Augustinian theology of rightly ordered love.

This is not new ground but draws from the most settled propositions in Catholic jurisprudence. That his remarks received attention tells us something about the current state of the institution he leads. For thirteen years, under the pontificate of Francis, the Angelic Doctor served a largely decorative function in papal discourse. He was invoked occasionally, but almost never deployed structurally. Francis’s preferred register was pastoral, situational, and oriented toward discernment and accompaniment rather than toward the stable and objective character of justice upon which Aquinas insists. Leo XIV’s address is not a revolution, but a recovery. And the fact that this recovery of first principles feels revolutionary invites reflection, not only for the Church but for any institution that claims to operate from pre-liberal philosophical foundations while having quietly abandoned them in practice.

The philosophical architecture of Leo’s remarks deserves attention, because it is doing more work than the occasion required. Leo XIV does not merely assert that justice transcends positive law; he provides the Thomistic scaffolding for the claim. He quotes Aquinas’s definition of justice from the Summa Theologiae: “constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum unicuique tribuendi,” the constant and perpetual will to render to each person what is due. He notes Aquinas’s insistence that “iustitia ad bonum commune ordinatur,” that justice is ordered to the common good. And he invokes the theological formula “caritas perfecta, perfecta iustitia est”: in the fullness of charity, justice finds its most authentic fulfillment.

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The structure of the argument is precise. Justice is not a set of rules but a virtue, a stable disposition of the will oriented toward truth and the good of others. Because it is a virtue, it cannot be reduced to the technical application of norms, but requires the exercise of practical wisdom by a person whose character has been formed for the task. And because justice finds its perfection in charity, the legal order is not self-grounding. It depends on a prior moral order, an account of what is due to persons and why, that positive law presupposes but cannot generate.

This is the classical natural law critique of legal positivism, and it has secular analogues that readers of Telos will recognize. The insufficiency of proceduralism is a theme that runs from Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal legalism through the Frankfurt School’s analysis of instrumental reason, both central to the intellectual project that Telos has sustained for more than half a century. Schmitt argued that liberal constitutionalism imagines a self-executing legal order in which the question “who decides?” can be permanently deferred, because the rules themselves decide. The Frankfurt School argued that instrumental rationality, left to its own devices, hollows out the substantive commitments that give institutions their purpose. Leo XIV is making a cognate claim from within the Catholic tradition. Positive law, however necessary, cannot sustain a just legal order without reference to the substantive moral vision that animates it.

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It is worth noting what the pope is not saying. He is not dismissing positive law. He explicitly affirms “the observance of procedural safeguards, the impartiality of the judge, the effectiveness of the right of defence [sic] and the reasonable duration of proceedings” as conditions through which the judicial function “acquires particular authority and contributes to institutional stability.” The argument is not positivism versus natural law. It is that positivism is necessary but insufficient: the skeleton without which the body cannot stand, but not the life that animates it.

The Schmittian resonance, however, introduces the Schmittian problem. If positive law must be supplemented by the judgment of a person exercising the virtue of justice, everything depends on the formation and orientation of that person. The question “who decides?” does not disappear simply because one has identified the inadequacy of the claim that rules decide for themselves. It returns with greater force because the person who claims to transcend positive law in the name of a higher justice now wields a more potent authority than the mere technician of legal procedure ever did.

The Thomistic framework has an answer, but the answer presupposes conditions that do not obtain outside its native habitat. Aquinas wrote within a civilization that shared, at least nominally, a metaphysical anthropology: an account of what human beings are, their purpose, and what they are due. Within that shared horizon, “the constant and perpetual will to render to each what is due” has determinate content. Outside it, the formula becomes an invitation to fill in the blanks according to one’s own commitments, and to do so with the elevated confidence that comes from believing oneself to be serving justice rather than merely applying rules. The contemporary American legal landscape is littered with examples of such confidence run amok. Judges who override statutory text in the name of evolving standards of justice, prosecutors who decline to bring charges because enforcement would offend their understanding of equity, juries that reach verdicts animated by moral convictions, class animus, or political grievance untethered from facts or evidence: all of these actors could describe their conduct in the language of the tribunal remarks. Every one of them believes, or could plausibly believe, that he is exercising an ordered form of charity rather than merely applying positive law. The question is not whether they are sincere. Sincerity, absent a shared account of the order to which charity should conform, is no check at all on the exercise of power.

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Leo XIV can address the Vatican tribunal in these terms because Vatican City is, uniquely among the world’s polities, a jurisdiction in which the metaphysical premises of the Thomistic argument are formally, if not actually, shared by all participants. The supreme legislator, executive, and judge is one person who claims to be the Vicar of Christ. Canon law is the first source of norms. The judges serve at the pleasure of the pope and exercise their power in his name. Whatever difficulties attend the practical administration of justice in this peculiar micro-state, the theoretical problem of shared premises does not arise. The rest of us are not so situated.

The most rigorous theological challenge to what Leo XIV is doing comes not from within the Catholic tradition but from the Reformation. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology represents the foundational Protestant attempt to answer the question the tribunal remarks raise: what is the relationship between divine justice and the positive law of temporal institutions?

Luther’s answer is that God governs through two distinct kingdoms, each with its own proper logic. The spiritual kingdom operates through the Gospel of grace, forgiveness, and the free gift of justification. The temporal kingdom operates through law, reason, and coercive order. Both are legitimate expressions of divine governance. Neither can substitute for the other. The temporal kingdom does not need to become the spiritual kingdom in order to fulfill its function. The judge who administers temporal law faithfully, with impartiality and procedural rigor, is already doing God’s work in the earthly kingdom. He does not need to imagine himself as administering divine charity for his work to have moral weight.

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The force of this becomes clear when set against Leo XIV’s central claim. When the pope tells his judges that justice is “an ordered form of charity,” Luther would urge the sharpest caution. The moment a temporal judge begins to think of himself as administering charity rather than law, the restraints that proceduralism provides (imperfect, insufficient, but real) begin to dissolve. The judge who believes he is serving a justice that transcends positive law has given himself permission to override the law’s constraints, and he has done so with a confidence that no merely human actor is entitled to possess.

This is not a defense of positivism. Luther is neither Austin nor Kelsen. He does not believe that law is merely the command of the sovereign backed by force. He believes that temporal law participates in God’s governance of a fallen world. But he insists that the mode of that participation is proper to the temporal kingdom, which operates through reason, precedent, procedure, and the restraint of coercive power by institutional structure, not through the direct application of theological charity to legal disputes.

The contemporary relevance of Luther’s insight is stark. Every instance in which a legal actor invokes a justice higher than the positive law he is charged with administering, whether from the left or the right, is an instance of the category confusion Luther warned against. The progressive prosecutor who declines to enforce laws he considers unjust, and a conservatively ideological judge who reads his policy preferences into constitutional text are engaged in the same structural move. Both baptize temporal coercion with transcendent authority it does not possess. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology does not resolve the tension between positive law and transcendent justice. But it names, with a precision the Thomistic framework sometimes lacks, the specific danger of resolving it too quickly.

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Had we only Thomism and Luther, we could merely diagnose our present ills. Positivism is insufficient, the Thomistic alternative is unavailable outside its native habitat, and the Lutheran correction warns against cheap substitutes. The question of formation, of where rightly ordered judges and legislators actually come from, would remain unanswered.

It is here that the Wesleyan tradition offers something constructive. John Wesley shared Luther’s Protestant sobriety about the fallenness of human institutions, but he refused the quietist implication that the brokenness of the temporal order is simply to be endured. His distinctive theological contribution was the insistence that sanctification is real, progressive, and practically achievable. He does not offer perfection in the Pelagian sense, but genuine transformation of the person through disciplined engagement with what he called “the means of grace.” Prayer, Scripture, sacrament, Christian conference (by which Wesley meant structured mutual accountability among believers), and acts of mercy were not optional devotional exercises but the mechanism through which persons were formed for the exercise of rightly ordered judgment.

The genius of the Wesleyan project was institutional. That emphasis on disciplined, morally formative community also points backward to earlier Protestant traditions, including aspects of Calvinist covenant theology, which likewise understood communal structures as central to the formation of Christian judgment. The class meetings and bands that defined early Methodism were intentional communities of formation, featuring small groups in which persons submitted to mutual examination, confessed their failings, and held one another accountable to standards that the broader culture did not enforce. Wesley’s famous dictum, “think and let think,” preserved genuine pluralism on matters not essential to the faith while insisting that the persons who exercise judgment must themselves be genuinely formed, not merely instructed or credentialed. This is a critical distinction. Credentialing tells you what a person knows. Formation shapes who a person is.

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Translated out of confessional language, the Wesleyan insight is that virtue is cultivable at the human scale even when it is not achievable at the civilizational scale. One need not restore Christendom (the integralist hope) or redesign the constitutional order (the technocratic hope) in order to produce persons capable of judgment that transcends mere proceduralism. What is needed are communities of practice with thick moral commitments and real structures of accountability, communities honest enough to acknowledge that technical competence is not a substitute for character. The liberal order cannot produce the kind of people it needs through proceduralism alone. But it also cannot and should not attempt to reimpose a civilizational metaphysics. What it can do is attend seriously to the conditions under which formational communities flourish, and stop pretending that three years of law school and a bar examination produce wisdom.

Leo XIV’s address to the Vatican tribunal is a small, quiet text delivered to a tiny audience in a very small state. Its philosophical claims are not original. Its theological sources are not novel. Its practical implications, within the 121 acres to which it is formally addressed, are modest. And yet the question it raises is among the most urgent of the present political moment. The pope evidently doubts that any legal order can sustain itself on positive law alone.

The pope told his judges that their work requires “not only legal competence, but also wisdom, balance, and a constant search for truth.” That sentence is either a platitude or a radical challenge, depending on whether anyone takes seriously the question of where wisdom, balance, and a disposition toward truth actually come from. They do not come from law school. They do not come from procedural rules. They do not come from professional codes of conduct, however carefully drafted. They come from formation in communities with substantive moral commitments, communities capable of shaping not only what a person knows but who a person is. The Thomistic tradition names this problem with unmatched philosophical precision. The Lutheran tradition identifies, with equal precision, the danger of premature solutions. The Wesleyan tradition suggests that the work of formation is possible, if modest in scope and honest about its limits. Whether any of these resources can be brought to bear on the institutions that most urgently need them is a question that Leo XIV’s remarks pose but do not answer. Perhaps it is enough, for now, that a pope has posed it again. The answer will have to come from the rest of us, in communities smaller and more particular than Rome, doing the slow and unspectacular work of forming persons for the exercise of judgment in a world that feels increasingly unformed and uninterested in reformation.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

Alexander Sollfrank is Commander of Germany’s Joint Operational Command and former Commander of NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command. He has previously emphasized the importance for the Bundeswehr and NATO to prepare for a Russian assault. In a recent interview in the German newspaper Die Welt, he underscored how, despite considerable losses in the Ukraine War, Russia is simultaneously rebuilding in a way that could facilitate its opening an additional front on Europe’s eastern flank and a potential targeting of Germany. The assault might well begin—indeed, perhaps it has already begun—in hybrid dimensions including disinformation, sabotage of critical infrastructure, and cyberattacks, as preparation for a full-scale conventional invasion.

Rather than treating the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran as distinct conflicts, one can deduce from Sollfrank’s warning that they are preliminary theaters within a single great power competition that can spill over into the European heartland and challenge NATO to live up to its responsibilities. There is no inevitability in this potential escalation, but neither should one overlook how the distinct wars—here Ukraine, there Gaza—may not only foreshadow an expansion into Europe, but are already merging into a single war, with increasing interaction between the several zones: Russia aiding Iran with upgraded drones and intelligence to counter the United States, while Ukraine enters into defense pacts with Gulf states as a response to Iran’s drone warfare against Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, and even Qatar. In the interview that follows, Sollfrank discusses how the fighting in Europe might begin.

General Sollfrank, Russia is currently suffering massive losses—in both personnel and materiel—in its war against Ukraine. Does Russia still pose a genuine threat to Western Europe?

Alexander Sollfrank: Our analyses proceed from the premise, first, that we here in the West—in Germany, in Europe—remain clearly in Russia’s crosshairs. That we are potentially vulnerable to attack. That Russia is currently doing everything in its power to replenish its stockpiles, to strengthen its troops, and to grow its military to a size of 1.5 million soldiers. The question is: When will Russia attack? When will the situation arise in which Russia launches an attack on Europe—including Germany? Of course, a smaller, regional-scale attack is possible at any time. NATO speaks of a “Fight Tonight”—a scenario for which we must be prepared. And that, too, is firmly within our focus. At present, our planning is based on the assumption that Russia will be ready to launch a large-scale attack against us by 2029. However, we are also making preparations for the possibility that an attack—albeit on a smaller scale—could occur sooner. And that is precisely what we are preparing and gearing up for.

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The nature of warfare is no longer evolving in annual increments, but rather in terms of months and weeks. What does this imply for potential attack scenarios? Should we anticipate, above all, a massive drone war?

Sollfrank: I think that when we discuss scenarios regarding how Russia might potentially threaten us in a conflict, we can generally assume that such a move would naturally be preceded by corresponding hybrid attacks—that is, anything falling outside the scope of a conventional assault. We are already witnessing elements of this today: sabotage, disinformation, and, for instance, massive cyberattacks. Should an actual attack materialize, a conventional military strike would, of course, constitute an integral part of that offensive. Moreover, such an attack would be waged across all domains—on land, in the air, and at sea. Such a scenario would also be accompanied by nuclear threats as well as by long-range strikes deep into enemy territory, specifically targeting areas toward France and Germany, in order to hit key strategic nodes within those regions. In short, we must be prepared to face precisely the kind of warfare we are currently witnessing in the conflict involving Iran.

Do you have sleepless nights given the fact that time may be running out? We see the rearmament efforts—in Germany as well as among our NATO partners—but are we really moving fast enough?

Sollfrank: Well, as the Commander of the Joint Operations Command, I serve as the operational commander of the German Armed Forces—the Bundeswehr—and in that capacity, things can never move fast enough for me. We cannot afford for weapons and ammunition to arrive too late. We cannot afford lengthy debates before a decision is finally reached. So, from that perspective, I must admit that I am constantly restless.

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On the other hand, I remain confident: I see a great sense of unity here in Germany—and indeed across all 32 NATO nations—regarding our resolve to counter any potential attack. Take “Eastern Sentry,” for example: this is an air-based deterrence operation in which Bundeswehr Eurofighters fly daily patrols along the eastern flank, ready to repel attacks should the need arise. We have ground forces stationed in Lithuania. Other nations have forces deployed in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and so on. Along the entire eastern flank, we have forces in place—specifically to be ready to “fight tonight.”

Even without the United States?

Sollfrank: Well, the United States is, of course, absolutely central to NATO—particularly in ensuring that the alliance, as a nuclear power, maintains the necessary credibility in its deterrence posture. However, my daily interactions with American generals and soldiers leave absolutely no room for doubt that the Americans are fully committed and standing right alongside us.

Has it truly sunk in among the German public that this threat posed by Russia is not some distant, abstract issue, but rather a matter of immediate and pressing relevance?

Sollfrank: I certainly sense that this awareness—this consciousness—exists: that the days of being free from threat are over, and that there is someone here who could potentially attack us with weapons to enforce his interests. And not merely as an abstract construct, but possibly very soon—and then in a very, very concrete way.

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You are preparing for a day that everyone hopes will never come. Should that day arrive nonetheless, can NATO—can Germany—win such a war against Russia?

Sollfrank: I am firmly convinced that we can. Of course, there are still shortfalls here—deficiencies that we identify and address on a daily basis. We are working hard to resolve them. However, if I were not convinced right now that such an operation—such a war—could be successfully prosecuted, then deterrence itself would be a complete failure. And I am convinced: Our plans are sound, our forces are prepared, and we have an excellent fighting force. We will counter any act of aggression with everything we have. We work hard every single day on our preparations. If we were to waver, if we were to falter, or if we failed to use this time—for instance, to stockpile the necessary armaments, ammunition, and so forth—then things would indeed become difficult. But let me reiterate: 32 nations are currently putting their shoulders to the wheel. And things are moving in absolutely the right direction.

I would like to return to the subject of the deficits. When you look at Ukraine, you no longer see an infantry war, but rather a drone war. Russia is currently striving to produce up to 1,000 drones a day. Does NATO—does Germany—even have the capacity to hold its own in such a drone war?

Sollfrank: Yes, well, we are monitoring this very closely. Incidentally, Russia has just fired 1,000 drones at Ukraine within a 24-hour period. Nor does Russia show any signs of ceasing its attacks. Moscow is not backing down, despite suffering massive losses. And, naturally, we are not yet prepared for a conflict on this scale. That must be stated quite clearly. However, we are well on our way—on a very, very good path—to developing this capability. And we already have truly excellent capabilities to demonstrate. But once again: time is critical, and we must not let up now.

This interview originally appeared in German in Die Welt and is presented here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

German novelist Peter Schneider, who passed away on March 3, was one of the most prominent literary voices of the “1968 generation” of the Vietnam-era protest movement. More quickly than many of his contemporaries, he grew critical of the dogmatic tendencies that emerged within that movement, as parts of the anti-authoritarian left developed their own forms of authoritarianism. By 1970, the New Left was decomposing in divergent directions. Some adherents turned to terrorism—the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, like the Weathermen in the United States. Others reverted to variants of orthodox Marxism, the “Old Left,” and found themselves defending the Soviet Union through formal or informal ties to Communist parties. Still others—among them Schneider—confronted the shortcomings of dogmatic leftism and, over subsequent decades, articulated a politics of freedom and dignity, often worked out through literary form.

He entered the literary scene with his 1973 novel Lenz, exploring the disappointments of the protest generation. His Mauerspringer (1982; English translation: The Wall Jumper, 1983) presents the surreal fantasy of a figure moving back and forth across the Berlin Wall. Alongside his fiction, Schneider was a prolific essayist on cultural and political questions, including contributing to Telos. In lieu of offering a full retrospective of his literary career, it is instructive to return to one example, his 1999 Telos essay “Intervention in Kosovo.” That text can serve as a litmus test for Schneider’s mature political thinking. It condenses the trajectory from the anti-authoritarian critique of the 1968 generation, through the turn to subjective experience, to a defense of intervention grounded in human dignity rather than ideology. It also speaks with renewed urgency today, as questions of intervention—Kosovo then, Ukraine and Iran now—remain unresolved.

Schneider’s intellectual development can be understood as a movement through three phases: from the critique of the dogmatic left, through the emergence of “new subjectivity,” to a position that combines moral affect with a willingness to endorse force under certain conditions. In the Germany of the early 1970s, the turn to “new subjectivity” marked a rejection of authoritarian politics, accompanied by skepticism toward any rigid theorization and an affirmation of individual experience. Emotion was granted priority over abstraction; Schneider was a central figure in this development. It is therefore not surprising that, three decades later, in the Kosovo essay, he begins not with doctrine but with affect:

The war in Kosovo is heartbreaking for everyone whose feelings are not limited by their convictions. Watching the daily television images of refugees and the NATO bombings, only dogmatists could be satisfied by their arguments for or against the war. Opponents and advocates of the intervention alike should concede their mixed emotions, and there is no reason to deny similar scruples to the political leadership of the Western alliance.

This opening establishes a fundamental premise: before questions of morality, legality, or strategic aims, one must acknowledge suffering and respond to it. War is hell, and the suffering of victims demands recognition. Schneider’s insistence on the primacy of affect reflects a consistent ethical stance: suffering is never to be endorsed or dismissed, regardless of political alignment. In this regard, his position stands in sharp contrast to contemporary responses to violence that have, at times, such as after the October 7 attacks, included both open celebration of violence against civilian victims or cold denial of the reality of the atrocities.

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From his initial moment of solidarity with victims, Schneider proceeds in his Kosovo essay to the central conceptual claim: respecting sovereignty is not a blank check for violence. Against anti-interventionist arguments that point to ulterior motives—strategic, economic, or geopolitical—he focuses on the normative core of the issue:

So far, no one has come up with a minimally convincing argument for the claim that the NATO intervention concerns natural resources, strategic positions, territorial expansion, etc. On the contrary, this war is about the establishment of an elementary principle: legitimate sovereignty and the domestic concerns of a state do not include the systematic expulsion, rape, and murder of a segment of the population.

Here Schneider articulates what would later be codified in the language of a “responsibility to protect”: sovereignty is conditional upon the protection of a population. States may claim autonomy, but they do not therefore have the right to commit mass violence against their own citizens. Read today, however, this argument appears to belong to a different historical moment. What has changed is not only policy but the moral vocabulary itself. The language of human rights and protection has receded in favor of deterrence, stability, and strategic interest. In the case of Ukraine, the dominant justification concerns the defense of state sovereignty rather than the protection of populations. With regard to Iran, concerns focus on nuclear proliferation and regional destabilization, while the suffering of the Iranian population, though acknowledged, does not serve as the primary rationale for policy. Schneider’s Kosovo essay thus marks a moment when European intellectual discourse still entertained the possibility that military force could be justified in explicitly moral terms.

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A third dimension of Schneider’s argument concerns his critique of pacifism, particularly in the German context. In the decades after World War II, a strong anti-military reflex developed in West Germany, a salutary reaction against the legacy of Nazi crimes. Yet this was not a universal pacifism; it was only a historically specific and limited claim: because of its past, Germany should abstain from military involvement. Schneider exposed the paradox at the heart of this position:

In the discussion of whether Germany should participate in the Bosnia intervention, it was bizarre and, frankly, ghoulish to hear how a recognition of the history of German guilt was turned into a privilege. Thus, some were prepared to accept the possibility that young Swedes, Danes, French, and Dutch might risk their lives for human rights; yet, given the Nazi past, Germans, so it was claimed, should be spared.

Here the guilt of the past ceases to be a burden and turns instead into a justification for nonparticipation, effectively outsourcing the labor of moral responsibility to others. With modest modifications, this logic persists in contemporary Europe, not only in Germany. There is an expectation that others, the United States and sometimes Israel, do what the German chancellor called the “dirty work,” which Europe avoids. In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, European states have provided financial and military support, yet direct participation remains unthinkable. Similarly, in the context of the conflict involving Iran, European leaders condemn destabilizing actions by Iran and Hezbollah—they do know what is wrong—while nonetheless criticizing U.S. policy and limiting themselves to, at best, defensive or indirect measures. Schneider’s critique exposes the moral asymmetry of such positions: abstention may preserve safety and the psychological advantage of ethical purity, but it does not confer innocence.

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This leads to Schneider’s most forceful claim: the rejection of intervention does not constitute a higher moral stance. On the contrary, it may entail complicity through passivity:

Well before the massacres in Bosnia, it was clear that one does not remain innocent if one refrains from offering timely opposition to dictators and tyrants, if necessary with force….The opponents of intervention cannot lay claim to some higher morality. They should face up to the fact that they passively stand by and watch the expulsion and massacre of civilians, while they almost automatically minimize or relativize their suffering…

Schneider does not reject diplomacy as such, but he warns against its misuse as a delaying tactic that allows violence to continue. This insight leads him to a reconsideration of timing in the use of force. Rather than treating military action as a “last resort,” he suggests that earlier intervention may prevent greater harm:

The only way the current bombing war in Kosovo might have been prevented would have been through war, a much earlier military intervention….It is, therefore, time to rethink the notion that military force should only be used as a “last resort.”

This argument challenges a deeply ingrained moral intuition. The idea that force must always come last may, paradoxically, increase the scale of violence by allowing dictators to rampage and conflicts to escalate unchecked. Schneider’s position thus combines moral seriousness with a realpolitical willingness to confront tragic choices: the refusal to act may itself be a form of moral failure.

Read today, Schneider’s Kosovo essay appears less as a policy prescription than as a reminder of a lost moral vocabulary. It reflects a moment when European intellectual life still grappled with the possibility that force could serve the ends of human dignity. Its distance from current debates is precisely what makes it illuminating. In an era increasingly defined by strategic calculation and geopolitical realism, Schneider’s insistence on the ethical stakes of intervention challenges us. He understood the importance that individuals take part in the civic project, even including through the projection of military force. He himself stood out as a perceptive citizen, an astute observer of the political scene, and a consistent critic of public hypocrisy, the best legacy of 1968. We were fortunate to be able to publish him in Telos.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

I vividly remember perhaps my earliest Nowruz. The exact moment of the new year, vernal equinox, changes every year. That year, it arrived at midnight. We were in our ancestral village, in my grandparents’ house. There was no electricity. Only the faint light of an oil lamp. Just before the new year, my grandfather returned from his orchard outside the village. A farmer, he spent most of his days there caring for the trees. In his hands, he carried a small block of earth. From it grew a Nowruz tulip, a local flower that blooms each year around the arrival of the new year. My grandfather had not cut the flower, he never cut flowers. Instead, he brought the tulip with its roots still in a clump of soil. After Nowruz, he would take it back and return it to the earth where it belonged.

The Haft Sīn is the Nowruz spread that Iranians prepare to welcome the new year. It includes seven items whose names begin with the Persian letter s. Each one symbolizes a wish for the coming year. Flowers and fresh green sprouts are also placed on the spread. They welcome spring and symbolize hope for a good harvest. A small bowl with a goldfish and colored eggs are also part of the table. We caught a small fish from the river that ran through the valley below the mountain where our village rested. It swam in a bowl on the Haft Sīn table during the celebration, and the next morning we returned it to the river. For the eggs, my grandmother took me to the henhouse early in the morning. She showed me how to choose them, which ones to leave so they could become chicks, which ones to throw away, and which ones we could collect to eat after Nowruz.

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When my grandfather arrived with the Nowruz tulip, we gathered around the Haft Sīn spread. He turned on his old radio. Together, we listened for the countdown to the new year. After the new year arrived, my grandfather entertained us with shadow plays. He made figures with his hands in the light of the lamp. Later, we fell asleep listening to my grandmother’s fairy tales, stories about a little girl who saved her hometown from a Div, a mythical monster. Except for the radio, we celebrated Nowruz almost the same way my ancestors must have done thousands of years ago. In the same village. In a simple house. Gathered around an oil lamp. Hoping for a prosperous new year. Ritual has a power in this way, it folds time. A single night can carry centuries within it. Many countries have been shaped by migration. Their earliest languages and rituals have often been lost. Iranians, however, show a rare continuity.

The memory has stayed with me. The smell of fresh bread. The wind against the wooden doors and windows. The flickering light on the walls of the mud-brick house. Spaces like these shape our inner worlds long before we understand them. Perhaps that is why I studied architecture. Nowruz has always been a celebration of life’s small gifts, nothing grand, nothing loud, just moments of hope. A few years later, I witnessed my first Islamic Qurban feast. It took place in my hometown, in Meydan. Hundreds of lambs stood crowded together, waiting for their throats to be cut, their blood offered in thanks to Allah, recalling Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. It was not hard for me to know which traditions I felt close to, which celebrations I wanted to honor, and which rituals I wished to be part of.

But under a totalitarian regime, even the most intimate traditions become politicized. Nothing escapes government interference, especially Nowruz. These regimes want isolated individuals, stripped of their individuality and turned into obedient masses. Nowruz does the opposite. It brings people together and reconnects them with family, memory, and the shared rhythms of life. Power tries to control rituals, calendars, and bodies. The Islamic Republic attempted to discipline time itself by replacing Nowruz with Islamic events. But ritual survived power. At first, officials insisted that people should prioritize what they called proper Islamic celebrations: the birth of Mohammad or the day he received revelation. Yet society did not abandon Nowruz. It remained deeply rooted in everyday life and memory. Some influential clerics openly criticized it. Morteza Motahhari, a prominent religious thinker and a close disciple of Khomeini, called Nowruz rituals a superstition. To them, Nowruz was irrational folklore. Rituals like the Qurban sacrifice, however, appeared perfectly logical and legitimate. But again, people did not let go of Nowruz. After all, who can truly forget the first day of spring?

Eventually, the clergy attempted a different strategy: to Islamize the celebration rather than eliminate it. They introduced Arabic prayers that, they claimed, should be recited at the moment of the new year, as if the arrival of spring needed religious validation in order to be complete. Yet the unease with Nowruz remained visible. In his annual New Year speeches, Ali Khamenei never sat beside a Haft Sīn table or any of the traditional symbols of Nowruz. Instead, he appeared with only a Qur’an on the table beside him while addressing the nation.

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In this way, something as gentle as Nowruz has been turned into a political battlefield. In Persian, Nowruz literally means “new day.” Yet the word ruz also carries a broader meaning: it signifies an era, an age, or a moment in history. This is why Nowruz has endured. It is not merely a date on a calendar. It is the human belief that the world can begin again. Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the human capacity to begin again, resonates deeply with the spirit of Nowruz. As a celebration of a new day and the renewal of spring, Nowruz reflects all beginnings.

This Nowruz, after Khamenei’s death, would be more than the turning of the year. It would mark the beginning of a new era for many Iranians. We would grow green sprouts in the names of those killed in the protests and uprisings of the past forty-seven years. And when we looked at the Nowruz tulips, we would not wish for a better future anymore. We would look at them knowing that a new and prosperous era for Iran has begun.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari grew up in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran and trained as an architect in Iran before pursuing her PhD in the United States. She is completing her PhD dissertation, Literary Selves and Architectural Space, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, literature, gender, and spatial politics in modern Iran. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Comparative Literature and has worked with museum collections and exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum. Her work on Iranian literature, art, and culture has been published in both Persian and English.

Beginnings: Habermas and the Early Telos Milieu

Jürgen Habermas passed away on March 14 at the age of 96. By far the most prominent German philosopher of his generation, he became a leading intellectual in the Federal Republic and gained extensive international renown. Telos had a long engagement with his work, with references to Habermas stretching back to the early 1970s, that is, to the very first years of the journal, which was founded in 1968. The Telos discussion of Habermas would continue for decades. A detailed analysis of that engagement—as part of the larger American reception of Habermas—would surely be a worthwhile project. Here are some of the key parameters.

One might frame that reception history in terms of the history of Critical Theory, with two lineages initially close to each other, then diverging, and, half a century later, displaying a surprising similarity. Habermas’s intellectual career was, of course, intimately connected to the Critical Theory of the Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer. Telos, in its early years, understood itself as a conduit for “European theory”—at first meaning phenomenology, Critical Theory, and Italian Marxism—as alternatives to what was perceived as the anti-theoretical empiricism of American social science.

Both Habermas and Telos initially emerged from the Left, or more specifically from the New Left, but both quickly distanced themselves from the excesses of the radicalized student movement. Habermas famously denounced the movement’s intolerance and propensity to violence as a form of “left fascism,” while Paul Piccone, the founder and longtime editor of Telos, spoke of the “self-dismantling of Marxism,” until it appeared that there was nothing left in Marxism worth saving.

The Public Sphere and Diverging Agendas

An initial focus of discussion was the concept Habermas had developed in his early work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit, meant discursive participation in the formation of opinion through rational exchange, outside the private sphere of economy and family but also outside the structures of governmental authority. The implicit prioritization of language—that is, discussion—anticipated Habermas’s later grand theme. A key argument of the book was that the public sphere of the eighteenth century established a norm of universal participation that had been subverted by the twentieth century through an occupation of the public sphere by economic and political forces, leading to a “refeudalization.” The ideal of reaching a judgment through consensus had been replaced by what Noam Chomsky would label “manufactured consent.” Habermas proposed measuring the manipulated present against the aspirations of that origin.

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In the 1970s, Telos found a home at Washington University in St. Louis, where Piccone was serving as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. Across the campus, Peter Uwe Hohendahl chaired the German department. Hohendahl made the public sphere a key category for his own scholarship on literary history. Yet these two critical theorists were positioned differently on the question of the public sphere.

For Hohendahl—as for Habermas—the issue was the retrieval of the normativity of the original project of the bourgeois public sphere, which meant rational and fully (or aspirationally fully) inclusive communication. For Piccone and the group around him, the focus lay more on the flaws of contemporary forms of controlled opinion and their attendant conformism. The two positions were by no means incompatible, but they pointed toward alternative agendas: on the one hand, elaborating the terms of a rational society; on the other, criticizing structures of domination. In practice, the former could engender a reformist politics, while the latter maintained the aversion toward concrete political praxis that had been associated with the older generation of the Frankfurt School.

The circle of figures associated with Telos extended far beyond St. Louis to include some of the leading American readers of Habermas, especially in New York, alongside affiliates elsewhere in the United States and Europe. Adorno died in 1969, so it is at least remarkable that the splits that developed within Telos came to be defined in terms of proponents of Adorno on the one hand and Habermas on the other. As in similar developments elsewhere in intellectual history, some of the attendant altercations involved personalities. Yet another component was the divergence just described: the normativity of rationality versus the critique of domination, whereby proponents of the latter stance would eventually prove more willing to engage cultural dimensions otherwise dismissed as irrational—community, religion, tradition, and decisionism. Indeed, these separating tendencies could be read as two distinct, equally legitimate, but ultimately antagonistic derivatives of Critical Theory’s key text, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Habermasian position represented the hypostasis of enlightenment, while the Adornian wing emphasized its critique.

Germany, America, and the Political Context of Theory

The Telos encounters with Habermas also unfolded within different political contexts. For Habermas himself, the lifelong project involved the establishment of a culture of liberal democracy, first in the Bonn Republic of West Germany and later in the Berlin Republic of unified Germany. A core element in this project was his advocacy of “constitutional patriotism” as the foundation of German political community, in opposition to nationalism, let alone ethnonationalism. This agenda represented, intentionally and consistently, the aspiration to achieve a break with the Nazi past. One might describe this stance as anti-totalitarian, against both Nazism and communism. Indeed, Habermas also articulated a critique of Marxism. Yet for him, and for many of his followers, criticism of communism was never similarly robust, presumably because “anti-communism” had come to appear, during the Cold War, as a conservative position.

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For Telos, and more broadly for critical theory in the United States, it was not a Nazi past that overshadowed discussion but rather the development of the American administrative state, the legacy of the New Deal, and then the policy crises and “malaise” of the 1970s and the Reagan era. The points of political orientation in Germany and the United States were therefore different enough to send theoretical discussions down different roads. Habermas’s great work on communicative rationality, unmistakably meant as an alternative to the mass manipulation associated with the Nazi past, was effectively a linguistic turn, a prioritization of public speech. Yet for Piccone this centrality of language privileged precisely those actors who could command elaborate speech codes, that is, an intellectual elite, while disprivileging other social strata—a viewpoint sharpened by the influence of Alvin Gouldner and Christopher Lasch.

From this perspective, Habermas’s rationalism came to mean the elevation of rational experts. But there was already, in the United States, a skepticism toward “the best and the brightest,” to invoke the title of David Halberstam’s book on how an intellectual elite had led the country into the Vietnam War. That dissatisfaction with elites anticipated the later anti-elitism of twenty-first-century populism. Indeed, the war and the antiwar movement may be the key to the difference between the German and the American lineages of Critical Theory. Habermas was always writing against the Nazi past, while the American discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, including in Telos, was shaped by the repercussions of Vietnam.

A further political difference of the era, which informed the theoretical divergences, concerned the Cold War and its conclusion. As part of its break with Marxism, Telos staked out definitively anti-communist positions, aided in part by its collaborations with East European and Soviet dissident voices. This was never a priority for the German Left. Matters came to a head in the missile debates of the mid-1980s, surrounding the NATO decision to station medium-range cruise missiles in Germany as part of the Reagan-era arms buildup. Massive protests of the West German peace movement ensued, which Habermas supporters tended to endorse, while others around Piccone supported NATO. Here the ultimate theoretical difference involved the extent to which one would break with orthodox Marxism; the political difference involved Cold War military strategy. Until today, a difference of interpretation remains. Americans tend to see 1989—the opening of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire—as a result of the Reagan arms buildup, with which Russia could not compete. Germans on the Left tend to explain the outcome in terms of Ostpolitik and/or the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.

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Religion, Translation, and Late Habermas

In this brief overview of Telos and its engagement with Habermas, the final stage involves religion, beginning with Habermas’s 2004 conversation with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI the following year. The two figures indisputably represented alternative traditions: rationalism and religion. Moreover, at that point Ratzinger was widely, and not wrongly, viewed as a conservative in dogmatic matters, even though later he would argue strongly for the compatibility of religion and reason.

In the conversation, Habermas, ever the rationalist, insisted on the neutrality of the state in matters of religion. Nonetheless, he conceded that religion might carry moral insights that the state should implement. The significant issue was not merely that state policy might at times coincide with Church teaching, but that the religious tradition had access to moral insights reached not by rational deliberation alone but by virtue of its own distinctive apprehension of existence, including, for example, the experience of the holy, the reading of sacred texts, or even revelation.

Habermas continued to grapple with the question of religion in his late opus, Also a History of Philosophy. The relationship between faith and knowledge appears there as a process of “translation”—once again reflecting his focus on language—from religious into postmetaphysical claims. In other words, religion remains a source for normative morality, even for the secular state and society.

This historicization of the relationship between religion and rationality, including their relation to the state, echoes an older motif of Critical Theory: the connection between the presumably irrational—myth—and its rational consequences. At the same time, Habermas’s turn toward the productivity of religion deserves comparison with, and contrast to, the Telos turn toward religion, tradition, and community dating from the 1990s. Here lies the surprising convergence between Telos and Habermas after years of dramatic separation. For Telos, engagement with religion involved political theology, collaboration with Radical Orthodoxy in England, and at times the suggestion that religion might be the Critical Theory of the contemporary moment.

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Convergences: Habermas, Schmitt, and Böckenförde

The controversial component, however, in the journal’s turn toward questions of religion was the journal’s interest in the principal source of political theology, the work of Carl Schmitt. Opening the Schmitt discussion in the 1990s was regarded as deeply controversial, given Schmitt’s Nazi associations. Yet the broad Schmitt reception, in Europe, in the United States, and far beyond Telos, has hardly centered on his worst political judgments. Neither has it been a matter of trying to justify his endorsement of Nazi rule. The point is that he nonetheless had other important insights.

The contrast between Schmitt’s decisionism and Habermas’s communicative rationality deserves a much fuller elaboration. Here, however, in a brief reflection written in the immediate aftermath of Habermas’s passing, the point is that both Telos and Habermas—and, in a different register, Schmitt—came to explore the significance of religion. Indeed, Habermas’s view that postmetaphysical thought draws on metaphysical sources is consistent with Schmitt’s political theology and, more specifically, with the claim put forward by Schmitt’s student Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, whose famous dictum states that “the liberal, secularized state lives by presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee.”

How close was the Habermasian exploration of religious tradition to Böckenförde? Böckenförde was certainly close to Schmitt. Yet in the exploration of those “presuppositions,” including religion and other aspects of tradition, the polemical distinction between rationalism and irrationalism becomes increasingly untenable. The normativity of rational discussion, which Habermas located at the origin of his work on the public sphere, evidently depends on nonrational cultural substances. That recognition may mark the deepest point of contact between Habermas and the intellectual trajectory of Telos: after decades of divergence, both came to confront the persistence and validity of irrational traditional elements that inform postsecular modernity.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

A recent decision by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) here in Canada has caused an international uproar. Barry Neufeld, a former elected school trustee from Chilliwack, B.C., a city east of Vancouver, found himself on the wrong side of a complaint alleging he discriminated against transgender teaching staff when he made public statements opposing a gender-affirming curriculum in B.C. schools. After more than eight years of wrangling, the BCHRT released its determination on the case last week, finding against Neufeld and awarding the complainants the remarkable sum of $750,000 Canadian, or about $550,000 in American dollars.

The BCHRT decided that numerous statements and social media posts from Neufeld breached provisions of the province’s human rights code, including bans on the publication of hate speech. The Tribunal also found that Neufeld’s actions, taken in his capacity as a school board trustee, created a poisoned workplace for LGBTQ teaching staff. Specifically, the BCHRT ruled that Neufeld’s denial of transgender identity as distinct from sex at birth was an “existential” denial of the existence of trans individuals. Critics of the decision, including even British comedian John Cleese, have called it a threat to free speech and an effort to chill public debate on trans issues.

While the legal aspects of the case are fascinating on their own, I want to move beyond the confines of law to consider the broader power dynamics at play, both in terms of the decision itself and the public reaction. Specifically, I want to uncover the homogenizing effects of state-authorized disciplinary entities such as human rights commissions as they act to deploy and control political speech in a modern democracy like Canada.

In doing so, I will look at three aspects of the case. First, using my own scholarship on the self-incriminating dynamics of a cancellation event, I will demonstrate how the BCHRT was complicit in and exploited Neufeld’s self-condemnation. Second, engaging a critical theory lens, I will consider how the contemporary notion of human rights as monopolized by the state through punitive administrative tribunals narrows the boundaries of acceptable public speech. Finally, I will analyze the response to the Neufeld decision as an instance of the growing efforts of non-state-authorized actors to counter the homogeneity of contemporary disciplinary rights with dissenting heterogeneous sources of authority. This analysis draws on my own experience as a Commissioner and Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

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Cancellation as Self-Inflicted Silencing

Though there are many glaring statements that stand out in the BCHRT decision, one is of particular interest for our discussion. In 2017, as the B.C. government was issuing its Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) educational program for grade students, Neufeld, then a public school trustee, posted a Facebook statement in which he referred to the SOGI program as a “weapon of propaganda” designed to instruct students that “gender is not biologically determined, but a social construct.” Neufeld went on to characterize gender-affirming care as a form of “child abuse.”

The post was Neufeld’s first public foray into the topic, and though it would not be his last, it evoked an immediate response that mirrors the tripartite dynamic of a cancel culture event. As the BCHRT decision notes, the Facebook post “raised alarms within and outside the [school] District.” As a result, Neufeld did something that is the norm in the ritualized domination of speech we call cancel culture: he apologized. Regardless of whether it was warranted, Neufeld stated that “I want to apologize to those who felt hurt by my opinion.” He added that “in a free and democratic society, there should be room for respectful discussion and dissent.”

While his post contains many of the standard phrases common to a cancellation event apology, what is most interesting is that the BCHRT decision decided to reproduce the statement with its own commentary, writing: “Unfortunately, Mr. Neufeld’s commitment to respectful discussion and dissent did not last.” In my own research on cancel culture, I have identified three parties that are necessary for a cancellation event to occur. These include: (a) the cancelers who initially call out a statement for the purposes of virtue signaling to their own political in-group; (b) the target who routinely implicates themselves in an alleged harm by issuing a subtly coerced apology or statement; and (c) third-party institutions such as employers who complete and verify the cancellation dynamic by terminating or otherwise deplatforming the target.

In Neufeld’s case, we immediately encounter this hermetic and self-confirming tripartite structure in the decision’s initial pages. Alarms are raised by cancelers. Neufeld as the target becomes complicit in his own prosecution by issuing his apology. The BCHRT takes on the role of a third-party institution that uses the apology as proof of his guilt. As with the vast majority of cancellation targets, Neufeld unwittingly provided the rope to hang himself, so to speak. His apology, designed to placate critics, instead renders him complicit in his own silencing by condemning his past speech and providing ammunition for those third parties, such as the BCHRT, who might turn his words against him. In this sense, the power imbalance inherent in a cancellation event is embedded in the BCHRT’s decision.

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Negativity and the Homogeneity of Human Rights

One of the main criticisms of the BCHRT’s decision in the Neufeld case concerns the chilling effect it will have on free speech, especially given the exorbitant damages award of $750,000. The point of these critiques is that free and robust public discussion, even offensive discussion, is necessary for a properly functioning liberal democracy. While the law and the decision cite the importance of free expression, the legal analysis employed by administrative tribunals uses a balancing approach between acceptable speech that expresses an opinion, on the one hand, and hate speech that allegedly harms individuals’ dignity or incites discrimination, on the other. This analysis, as deployed by the BCHRT, increasingly expands the ambit of hate speech at the expense of free speech.

However, it also has an additional and perhaps more insidious effect. By protecting certain speech and condemning other speech, state-authorized disciplinary regimes prioritize certain identities and sources of authority. Here it is useful to turn to the work of critical theorist and Telos founder Paul Piccone. In his writings, Piccone sought to understand the crisis of liberal democracy apparent in the twentieth century and again evident across the Western world in the domestic and international turmoil of the twenty-first century. In particular, he was concerned with the stifling uniformity of acceptable political speech that was becoming the hallmark of liberal democracies. In a view shared with many in the critical theory school, Piccone argued that liberal democracy was pushing aside and subsuming all other authorities, from religion and educational hierarchies to class and sexual distinctions. His response was to call for a populist deployment of excluded authorities on a local level to counter the overweening integrating force of the state.

Writing in the Hegelian tradition, Piccone believed that a level of negativity via robust contending authorities was necessary to produce social and political progress. If all authorities become standardized and subject to the pretensions of administrative conformity, as in the case of contemporary human rights commissions, liberal democracies will ossify and become what I have elsewhere called “prosecutorial democracies.” For Piccone, it is not only free speech that must be protected but the substantive and varied sources of political authority that prevent the homogeneity of human rights.

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Applying Piccone’s analysis to the Neufeld case, the BCHRT decision appears as yet another effort by a disciplinary regime to control and limit acceptable speech while designating dissent as hateful, discriminatory, and objectionable. This comes to light when we consider that many of Neufeld’s posts contain religious references regarding the creation of two biological sexes as dispositive over socially constructed gender roles. Now, to those who would accuse Neufeld, and perhaps Piccone, of supporting Christian nationalism by referring to religious authority, it is fairly clear that this accusation misses the mark. In Neufeld’s case, he is certainly inspired by a specific religious position; however, as Piccone would argue, to maintain the health of our democracies, representatives of numerous heterogeneous authorities are required. Neufeld’s position would be one of those authorities. As far as Piccone is concerned, religion is just one of many countervailing social authorities that can stand against the homogenizing impact of late-modern liberal democracy; others include local political, social, and labor organizations.

The Reaction to the BCHRT

As I have noted, Neufeld’s case has drawn international attention. The vast majority of those commenting on it are appalled by the hefty fine, with some likening it to a new form of social justice blasphemy laws. In this regard, human rights have turned from the guarantor of a liberal framework for freedom to a prioritization of specific social actors. Not only are state-authorized entities determining what speech is condoned, they are implicitly giving preference to particular identity claims over others. This approach dovetails with the intention of cancel culture to silence dissent while privileging specific groups.

Those groups chosen for preferment tend to include ones that are most likely to challenge moral and political paradigms, especially Western paradigms. While Piccone would not oppose the diversity of differing authorities, what we are seeing now is entirely the opposite of diversity. Rather, under the rubric of inclusion, specific identities are given prominence for their presumed ability to challenge Western dominance. As with the Neufeld case, this includes transgenderism—but a form of transgenderism that eschews the sexual binary that once animated transitioning to the opposite sex, in favor of the gender fluidity espoused by authors such as Judith Butler. For this reason, among the most salient of allegations are those where the target is accused of transphobia, Islamophobia, or racism. Gone is the impetus to protect women from sexism, gay men from homophobia, or Jews from antisemitism; these groups are now themselves considered adjacent to the would-be oppressive white, straight male.

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However, as the broad negative reaction to the Neufeld case indicates, while state-controlled administrative tribunals are actively narrowing the range of public speech, dissenting non-state actors are emerging, effectively giving teeth to Piccone’s remedy to the homogenization of rights and speech. These groups and individuals are largely immune to the silencing allegations leveled against them and increasingly assert their own interpretation of their rights in opposition to state-sanctioned regimes. This includes women challenging the entrance of trans individuals into women’s spaces and sports, gay men calling out efforts to pigeonhole younger gay men into transgender categories, and Iranians rediscovering dormant and suppressed religious and cultural traditions against the Islamist Iranian regime. While many of these opposing voices make their claims under the protection of liberal human rights, they do so explicitly in contrast to the contemporary capture of rights language by state-authorized ideologies within in our increasingly prosecutorial democracies.

Although the Neufeld case highlights the dangers of conformist disciplinary regimes and the tyranny of contemporary human rights doctrine for healthy democratic debate, the reaction to the decision also points to a diverse group of dissenting authorities rising up to challenge the state-approved narrative on rights. This is largely in line with Piccone’s prescription for populist movements operating at the local level. Whether this political and social movement will assist Neufeld in his legal appeal of the BCHRT decision remains to be seen.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Collin May, a lawyer and writer in Calgary, Canada, is the former Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and an adjunct lecturer in community health sciences at the University of Calgary. He is currently completing a book on the future of cancel culture.

Editor’s note: This article was completed and scheduled to be published before the attack on Iran on February 28.

As the latest round of negotiations between Iran and the United States concluded this Tuesday in Geneva, substantial numbers of American troops continued deploying to bases and forward positions across the greater Middle East. The talks followed Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric more than forty days earlier, when he openly backed and encouraged Iranian demonstrators after the eruption of widespread anti-regime protests, which were met with a brutal crackdown by Iranian security forces, with reported death tolls reaching into the multiple thousands.

The significant reinforcement of U.S. forces in the region reflects the administration’s reliance on coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran in the face of continued Iranian intransigence. Yet the outcome of the Geneva talks revealed little substantive movement, particularly on Iran’s insistence on its right to enrich uranium on its own soil.

Trump now confronts a dilemma he likely did not anticipate at the height of the Iranian protests, when he declared on Truth Social on January 1 that the United States was “locked and loaded and ready to go.” He has since shifted from maximalist demands regarding the Iranian regime’s response to the protests, to negotiations focused solely on the nuclear issue. The question of whether, and when, to use force against Iran runs directly against his political instincts: an approach that places dealmaking at the center of his foreign policy and is animated by a deep aversion to protracted conflicts.

The current American force posture highlights the wide range of military options available to Washington, from a rapid, concentrated strike to a more sustained campaign. What remains unclear is the strategic endgame and whether a viable exit strategy exists that would allow the president to claim tangible success while containing regional escalation. This includes recent reports highlighting doubts expressed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, regarding the feasibility of a major U.S. operation without triggering a broader and protracted regional conflict. This uncertainty, and the high risk of a wider regional conflagration, could ultimately undermine Trump’s ability to expand the Abraham Accords, the signature foreign policy achievement of his first term, and to build a regional order that genuinely reduces Washington’s military footprint.

The Middle East Paradox

Donald Trump’s return to the White House was expected to usher in a phase of reduced American kinetic involvement in the Middle East. Yet the widening gap between his rhetoric and prior political commitments has produced a paradox: a president committed to ending “endless wars” and recasting the region as an arena for dealmaking could, in practice, preside over a regional conflagration. This tension was reflected in the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in early December 2025, which offered an implicit critique of decades of American interventionism, particularly the neoconservative project of exporting liberal democratic values, and reframed the Middle East as a theater for “partnership, friendship, and investment,” that is “no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.”

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These themes resonated with anti-interventionist elements on the Republican far right and resurfaced during the Twelve Day War, when critics portrayed escalation as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to end “endless wars.” Trump’s response, however, was revealing. Attacks from figures such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon were met with open defiance, with the president declaring, “I’m the one that developed ‘America First.’ . . . For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon.” The subsequent B-2 strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz underscored Trump’s preferred model of intervention: the application of overwhelming force with minimal long-term investment, and a highly personalized approach that keeps the movement’s ideology subordinate to his immediate strategic calculations.

This episode highlights the degree to which MAGA is organized around Trump personally, functioning less as a coherent ideology than as a flexible vehicle shaped by his immediate political and strategic calculations. The resulting tension between an anti-interventionist narrative and a readiness to use force when expedient continues to shape U.S. policy in the Middle East and complicates America’s long-term strategic planning in the aftermath of a potential strike.

Israel’s Calculus

A significant factor in America’s strategic calculus has been substantial pressure on the part of Israel for decisive U.S. action against Iran. For Jerusalem, the long-standing focus on Iran’s nuclear program has now given way to significant worries about Iran’s rapidly expanding ballistic missile arsenal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli defense establishment see Iran’s ballistic missiles as the most pressing strategic threat facing the Jewish state, particularly after the American airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer. Jerusalem’s stance has been underlined to the Trump administration in the frequent meetings between the prime minister and the president, yet the framework of the negotiations between the United States and Iran has focused only on the narrow nuclear issue, despite Israel’s best efforts to push for Iranian concessions on its missile program and support for its proxies throughout the region. Yet, despite these gaps, Israel and the United States remain highly coordinated, and a potential Iranian response would likely lead to direct Israeli involvement in tandem with the United States, bringing to bear Israel’s own considerable firepower together with its unsurpassed intelligence on Iranian targets.

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The Immediate Response

While Washington and Jerusalem stand ready to strike Iranian targets, the most immediate and consequential arena for an Iranian response is likely to be the Gulf, where hydrocarbon infrastructure and military assets in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar would be most exposed to retaliation. These worries, as well as the desire of the Gulf monarchies to deescalate any further tensions that would harm the tenuous détente with Iran, are the central focus of their strategic calculus. Iranian proxies, such as the Shi’a militias in Iraq, a weakened Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, could be brought to bear on Western as well as Israeli targets in a multi-front escalation.

Additionally, worries abound over potential Iranian actions targeting global shipping, including the possible disruption or closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical maritime artery through which more than 20 percent of global energy supplies transit, raising the risk of severe economic repercussions well beyond the region. A disruption in oil supply also could have significant impact on global prices, particularly in a critical midterm election year in the United States. While American officials, most prominently Energy Secretary Chris Wright, pointed to the lack of a global price shock during last summer’s Twelve Day War, the past is not always prologue, and a disruption of Iranian oil supply—around 5 percent of global output, could still impact prices.

The Day After: The Regional and Global Balance

The most pressing question for American strategic planners remains: what does Washington aim to accomplish over the long term? The consequences of the choice before the administration, whether to continue to pursue a diplomatic agreement with Tehran or, more consequentially, to resort to force, will constitute a critical test for President Trump and a defining moment of his presidency. The implications of a military campaign would shape perceptions of American power from the Middle East to Moscow and Beijing, with far-reaching geostrategic implications for the international system, particularly in light of the lessons drawn from the U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Another inconclusive or protracted conflict would further shape global perceptions of U.S. power and credibility, reinforcing doubts not only regarding Washington’s ability to stabilize the Middle East, but also about its capacity to sustain long-term competition in other critical theaters. This is particularly significant when viewed through the lens of Washington’s broader strategic competition: Russia would likely interpret another Middle Eastern conflict as a diversion that creates additional space for expanded operations in Ukraine, while China would closely scrutinize American military performance and strategic behavior that could directly inform Beijing’s own calculations in the Indo-Pacific arena and beyond.

The Trump administration’s preferred option remains the resolution of the current standoff through diplomatic means, which would see Iran agree to freeze uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. If this is the case, it will serve as a textbook example of the success of American coercive diplomacy. Conversely, any perception of American capitulation to Iranian demands, including a performative deal to save face, particularly if accompanied by a withdrawal of the U.S. Navy carrier groups and forward-deployed forces, would deal a significant blow to Washington’s credibility and deterrence.

If Trump decides to attack, the most optimistic scenario rests on the assumption that a sustained and concentrated military blow would shatter the Iranian regime’s will, forcing Tehran back to the negotiating table from a position of near-total inferiority, akin to the moment at the end of the Iran–Iraq War when the Ayatollah Khomeini was compelled to “drink from the poisoned chalice” in order to preserve the Islamic Republic. The core analytical premise underpinning this scenario is that an Iran that is functionally and structurally weakened would have little choice but to seek an agreement largely capitulating to American demands, most notably on the issue of uranium enrichment. With this logic, an attack need not explicitly aim at regime change, an outcome for which there are no guarantees, but rather at destabilizing Iran sufficiently to encourage renewed mass protests and elite fragmentation and discord. Additionally, a targeted American campaign aimed at degrading the foundations of Iran’s leadership and critical infrastructure, all while encouraging renewed public protests, but stopping short of explicitly pursuing regime change—leading to changes within the construction of the regime, could emerge as a plausible outcome, achieved without the deployment of U.S. ground forces or direct political intervention. Yet this still leaves significant questions as to what Washington’s long-term strategic plan would be. A military move to seek regime change remains the least likely outcome, and is far from guaranteed, even if Trump has previously spoken openly about his desire to see the Iranian regime overthrown.

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An American attack remains burdened by a range of negative scenarios and, absent clearly defined strategic objectives, risks producing outcomes directly opposed to those intended. A large-scale American strike that fails to produce a durable agreement, alter the balance of power within the Iranian regime, or threaten its survival—leaving its current leadership and uranium enrichment capabilities intact—would be widely perceived by regional and global actors as a colossal failure, severely harming American interests. The Iranian regime would likely move to accelerate decisively toward nuclear weapons as a form of insurance policy, shortening breakout times and eliminating any remaining constraints. Such a move would then likely trigger a regional nuclear arms race, with states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey reassessing their own nuclear options. As a result, an American strike without defined strategic objectives could thus institutionalize regional nuclear proliferation rather than prevent it.

At the regional level, American military action would likely reinforce ongoing geopolitical realignments, regardless of its outcome. The split and evolving rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), driven by their own competition for leadership within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Arab world, has also been driven by the Saudi desire to balance against Israel through an evolving regional alignment that includes Turkey and Qatar—particularly given Israel’s close strategic alignment with the UAE.

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For Riyadh in particular, the pre-October 7 regional order—defined by a tense but largely self-contained balance between Israel and Iran and its proxy network—served Saudi interests by constraining both competing regional powers. Israel’s systematic dismantling of the Iranian “ring of fire” of proxy forces since the October 7 attacks has altered that equilibrium, with the Jewish state seen as the unrestrained regional hegemon. Yet an American success in defanging Iran would give the Trump administration greater ability to coerce the Saudis to rebalance its regional alignment with Qatar and Turkey, force Israel to make concessions on the Palestinian issue, and finally achieve the long-awaited expansion of the Abraham Accords. Likewise, Israel’s strategic standing will be impacted directly by the results of a conflict with Iran. A significant success will reinforce its image as the Middle East’s regional heavyweight, with American political and military backing. An American failure—and certainly one in which Israel is an active participant—combined with significant Iranian strikes on the Israeli home front would have a dramatic impact on the perception of Israel’s strength and deterrence in the eyes of regional actors.

Ultimately, Washington’s ability to shape the regional order will hinge on the outcome of any military operation, or its ability to craft a sustainable deal that limits Iran’s nuclear program. What cannot be denied is that the aftermath of a potential American campaign against Iran would carry far-reaching and potentially fateful consequences. Success would reinforce American deterrence, reassure allies, and strengthen U.S. leverage in expanding the Abraham Accords. Failure, by contrast, without either a diplomatic agreement or a change to the status quo in Iran, would weaken U.S. credibility in the region and potentially draw it into a protracted conflict in the Middle East. In this sense, the decision to go to war, and its outcome, will shape perceptions of American power among both allies and rivals, with lasting implications for the international system and the United States’ global strategic position for years to come.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Eldad Shavit is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and previously served in senior roles in Israel Defense Intelligence and the Mossad, where he served as the head of the research and analysis division.

Jesse R. Weinberg is a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and the coordinator of the Israel and the Global Powers research program at the institute.

Thomas Kuhn famously argued that scientific revolutions occur when mounting anomalies create a crisis within an established paradigm, eventually producing a paradigm shift that transforms a field’s underlying worldview. Although Kuhn developed this concept to explain changes within science, the term is now often used more broadly to describe profound transformations in societies. What has unfolded in Iran in recent years marks not just another cycle of protest but a paradigm shift in the worldview of many Iranians. Some observers were stunned by the radical nature of the protests in Iran; it defied their expectations of an “Islamic country.” Inside Iran, however, this defiance did not come as a surprise. For many Iranians, the gap between public belief and the regime’s Islamic ideology has been widening for years.

The surprise among external observers reveals how persistent the assumption has been that Iran is fundamentally, or uniformly, an “Islamic” society; implicit in this assumption has been the notion that Iran’s political structure reflects a shared religious worldview with Iranian people. That assumption is increasingly untenable. The protests went beyond anger at policy or leadership. They expressed a deep rejection of Islamic ideology. Recent analyses, including research sponsored by Stanford Iranian Studies on Tehran protests from 2009 to 2023, show a clear shift in the language and demand of protests. Earlier demonstrations used reformist and religious rhetoric within the Islamic Republic’s framework. Recent protests are openly anti-clerical and secular.1 Focusing on slogans alone, however, still misses the broader transformation. Religion itself is disappearing from Iranian society.

A central feature of the twenty-first-century protests in Iran is the collapse of a historical coalition that shaped nearly every major political movement of the twentieth century: the moral and organizational authority of the clergy, the bazaar, intellectuals, and dissatisfied members of the public. For over a century, from the Constitutional Revolution to the 1979 revolution, clerical figures were often its legitimizing force. Large segments of the population followed them, mobilized under their guidance, and in many cases were willing to die for causes framed in religious terms. In the two decades before the 1979 revolution, even many radical communists in Iran, such as Khosrow Golsorkhi, articulated their struggle by using Islamic symbolism, invoking Imam Hussein as a model or pioneer of radical socialism. That pattern has now been broken.

In twentieth-century Iran, protesters rarely targeted Islam or the clergy. Reformist and nationalist intellectuals worked within a religious framework and largely avoided direct criticism of religion. They could challenge political authority, but openly confronting Islam carried severe social and personal risks. Criticizing Islam was even declared to be an illegal act. Those who crossed that line paid heavily. Some, like Fathali Akhundzade, articulated radical secular critiques but did so from outside Iran. The limits of secular critique persisted even under Reza Shah, whose rule the Islamic Republic now portrays as aggressively anti-clerical. Efforts to limit clerical power never eliminated religious institutions. Figures like Mohammad Ali Foroughi, the prime minister, and Ali Asghar Hekmat, the minister of education, cultivated pragmatic ties with religious authorities. Ahmad Kasravi’s fierce denunciations of clerical power and Islam led to his assassination by religious militants in 1946. Even intellectuals who disagreed with clerical dominance frequently regarded figures like Kasravi as too radical and destabilizing. The response from intellectuals to his killing was almost nonexistent. Virtually all stories, plays, and poems of Sadegh Hedayat, a modern Iranian writer and fierce critic of Islam, were banned during his life. He died by suicide in 1951 after the assassination of his brother-in-law, Prime Minister Ali Razmara. Razmara was killed by members of Navab Safavi’s Fada’iyan-e Islam, the group that had also assassinated Ahmad Kasravi.

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All of that has changed today. Not only secularization but a radical criticism of Shi’ism has spread beyond small intellectual circles into broader society. This shift is visible in everyday life. Ideas once considered extreme now serve as a starting point. For centuries, the clerical establishment claimed authority over life’s most intimate moments—language, birth, naming, marriage, and death. Religious approval was required for legal and social legitimacy. Everyday choices were subject to clerical control or influence. The message was clear: the religious system would authorize the life cycle, and without that authorization, people faced exclusion and pressure. Naming practices provide a revealing indicator of this transformation. In early twentieth-century Iran, choosing nonreligious or explicitly pre-Islamic Iranian names carried negative social consequences. Families often felt pressure to select names aligned with Islamic tradition, not only out of belief but out of caution. People with nonconforming names sometimes drew suspicion or were linked to persecuted religious minorities, such as the Baháʼís. Now civil registry data from the past three decades shows a steady shift away from religious names toward historically Iranian and more secular ones.2

This shift also appears in life-cycle rituals, especially marriages and funerals, where clerical authority once seemed absolute. Over the past decades, a parallel culture has developed in which people comply with the state’s religious requirements only to the extent necessary for legal survival while creating alternative ceremonies that reflect historical Iranian values and identities. Marriage shows the shift clearly. Iran has no civil marriage, so couples still complete the Islamic contract for legal recognition. Yet many couples now hold separate ceremonies rooted in Iran’s history, literature, and secular culture. They treat the religious contract as paperwork and seek meaning in alternative celebrations. These include mixed-gender gatherings and dancing, both of which are banned by religious authorities in Iran. In these counter-religious celebrations, couples recite Persian poetry instead of the Arabic aqd ceremony and serve wine despite its prohibition and prosecution under the Islamic Republic.

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Funerals show an even sharper change. In Islam, proper burial and the recitation of prayers for the dead, including the talqin—reciting Quranic verses in the ear of the dead—are considered essential. Today many families in Iran choose otherwise. Instead of inviting a mullah to recite prayers, rowzeh, and the Qur’an, they hold memorials in secular spaces. These gatherings often include classical Iranian music and poetry readings, which is notable given the long-standing restrictions on music and musical instruments in Islamic law. During recent protests, people buried victims without Islamic rituals. They gathered around music, poetry, mourning dance, and symbolic acts like cutting hair and invoking the Shahnameh and Iran’s historical flags. Life-cycle rituals once anchored religious authority, and mosque-centered rites once dominated. Even state media now acknowledge declining religious participation and empty mosques. The state still enforces religious law, but many people redefine these rituals themselves, and Islam has lost much of its influence over birth, marriage, and death. Authority is shifting.

This shift is cultural and psychological as well as political. Language is often an accurate registry for such changes. Iranians are making this shift visible in everyday speech. Many now replace Islamic expressions such as salaam, inshallah (allah willing), and mashallah (allah be praised) with Persian, nonreligious alternatives like doroud (hello), omidvaram (I hope so), and afarin (best wishes), emphasizing human agency over divine will. People are building identities and practices outside a religious framework. Public festivals show the same pattern. After 1979, the state tried to center religious holidays and sideline Iranian celebrations. Nowruz, the first day of spring, and Shab-e Chelleh, the winter solstice, survived mostly in private. Festivals like Sadeh and Mehregan lingered on the margins, but in recent years they have returned to public space. Nowruz has become a powerful marker of national identity, and other festivals are increasingly visible in cities. The state promotes Muharram and Safar as months of mourning, yet many now use this period for travel rather than religious rituals or pilgrimages. The tension between Iranian cultural traditions and Islam has deep roots. Influential medieval religious authorities such as al-Ghazali long condemned pre-Islamic festivals, yet these traditions endured, and many have been revived as forms of cultural resistance.

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Survey data from independent research groups outside state control points to a sharp decline of Islamic belief and identity in Iran. Even among those who still describe themselves as religious, many draw a firm line between private belief and any support for an Islamic political order. The GAMAAN survey on religion in Iran in 2020 reported that only about 32 percent of respondents identified as Shi‘i Muslim, roughly 5 percent as Sunni Muslim, and around 72 percent opposed the compulsory hijab.3 These figures were recorded before the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, which exposed an even deeper rejection of Islamic rule and identity. Large segments of the population now reject religious identification altogether.

This is why the current protest movement cannot be understood solely as a political uprising against a specific regime. It reflects a paradigm shift. Today, many protesters in Iran openly question Islam itself, at times through acts such as burning hijabs and rejecting symbols associated with Islam.4 The Islamic Republic appears aware of the shift. Clerics now justify the hijab by invoking Persepolis reliefs (the capital of the Achaemenid Empire in ancient Iran) and female figures from the Shahnameh (the Book of Kings is Iran’s epic mytho-historical work) rather than Fatemeh, the daughter of Muhammad. If in 1979 the most conjured symbols were Imam Hossein and Ashura, today figures like Kaveh the Blacksmith have taken their place, with protesters invoking the Shahnameh’s story of resistance against Zahhak, the mythical figure of Arab origin who ruled Iran for a thousand year and brutalized its youth. The revival of Iranian historical festivals and figures, the diversification of private belief, the emergence of parallel life-cycle rituals, and the language people use all point in the same direction: a society becoming more secular. A political transformation may or may not come quickly. A cultural and social transformation, however, has already occurred.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari grew up in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran and studied architecture there before pursuing her PhD in the United States. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation, Literary Selves and Architectural Space, at Brown University, which examines modern architectural history in Iran and the role of women in shaping Iran’s local modernity. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Comparative Literature and has worked with museum collections and exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum. Her work on Iranian literature, art, and culture has been published in both Persian and English.

One of the most troubling features of our current global order is not that injustice occurs, but that it can be indefinitely managed, deferred, and rendered procedurally invisible.

The international system was never designed to be morally ideal. Institutions such as the United Nations emerged above all to manage great-power rivalry, stabilize sovereignty, and prevent systemic war. Human rights, while rhetorically central, were always institutionally secondary—invoked selectively and enforced unevenly.

Yet today, the ethical cost of that design feels increasingly visible.

Nowhere is this dynamic more clearly illustrated than in the international community’s inability to move beyond condemnation toward meaningful accountability for the Iranian regime’s ongoing crackdown on its own citizens. The evidence is abundant. The suffering is visible. The legal mechanisms, at least in theory, exist. And yet the path toward international legal escalation—particularly through the International Criminal Court—remains blocked.

The blockage of accountability is especially evident in relation to the International Criminal Court. While the ICC does not operate under the same veto structure as the Security Council, its jurisdiction remains constrained by state consent, referral mechanisms, and enforcement capacity. In cases such as Iran—where the state signed but never ratified the Rome Statute, and is therefore not subject to the Court’s jurisdiction—meaningful escalation depends on Security Council referral, which returns the question of justice to the logic of great-power alignment.

Not because the case is unclear. But because the system itself has learned how to neutralize moral urgency.

At the center of this paralysis lies the veto power of the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China’s repeated use of the veto is often framed as obstructionism, or as cynical geopolitical maneuvering. But this framing, while emotionally satisfying, risks missing the deeper ethical problem. The veto does not deny that violence is occurring. It does not dispute that rights are being violated. It simply prevents consequence.

The veto suspends justice without ever having to argue against it.

This is a crucial distinction. What we are witnessing is not a clash over facts or values, but a quiet triumph of institutional process over responsibility. International law remains intact on paper, while its activation is indefinitely postponed by strategic alignment. The result is a form of moral stasis: the appearance of order without the substance of justice.

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Iran, in this sense, is not an exception. It is a case study.

The regime’s actions—mass arrests, executions, suppression of dissent—have been widely documented. Calls for international accountability are not radical demands; they are appeals made within the existing legal framework. Yet escalation stalls, not because evidence is lacking, but because the geopolitical cost of action outweighs the moral cost of inaction for powerful states.

This is where the ethical terrain becomes especially delicate.

The use of the veto by Russia and China does not rest on an assessment of Iran’s internal moral order, nor does it require an endorsement of repression. Their position is shaped by a broader logic: resistance to Western-led interventionism, preservation of sovereignty norms, and the maintenance of a global balance that limits external scrutiny of domestic conduct—including their own.

In this sense, the veto reflects not moral indifference, but moral displacement. Human suffering is not denied; it is subordinated to strategic continuity.

What emerges from this dynamic is not simply division, but a new form of convergence. A world increasingly organized around blocs that shield one another from accountability, bound together less by shared values than by shared interests. Power protects power. And the human cost is externalized.

The deeper tragedy is not that global actors disagree. Disagreement is inevitable. It is that the system now functions in a way that allows all sides to appear principled while innocence remains unprotected. Western powers issue statements and sanctions, constrained by their own inconsistencies and past interventions. Eastern powers invoke sovereignty and non-interference, secure in the knowledge that procedure itself will do the work of delay.

Between them, ordinary people are crushed—not by ideology alone, but by the architecture of global order.

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When procedure is absorbed into great-power competition—serving delay and stability rather than accountability—justice quietly disappears without ever being openly opposed.

This is the ethical wound that should concern us most. Not merely the failure to act in Iran’s case, but the gradual shrinking of the global moral imagination. Accountability becomes conditional. Law becomes selectively activated. Suffering becomes a negotiable variable within the calculus of stability.

The world now stands clearly divided, not simply between East and West, but between those for whom power remains accountable to human life and those for whom human life is an acceptable cost of geopolitical equilibrium. Yet even this division is misleading. In practice, the major powers increasingly resemble one another in the same tragic way: all claim restraint, all invoke process, and all manage outrage until it fades.

The lives lost in Iran are not lost because no one knows. They are lost because knowing no longer compels.

This is not a call for reckless intervention, nor an argument for moral absolutism. It is an invitation to reckon honestly with what our systems now permit. A reminder that legality without consequence is not neutrality—it is abdication.

The tragedy of our divided world is not simply that powers compete, but that in doing so they increasingly agree—implicitly—that the lives of ordinary people are expendable within the calculus of stability.

In such a world, the question is no longer who is right, but what kind of order we have learned to accept.

Milad Milani is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Western Sydney University. His work explores Islamic thought, mysticism, ethics, and political theology, with particular attention to questions of authority, tradition, and modernity. He is the author of Heidegger, Ontology, and the Destiny of Islam.

When Power Turns against Belonging

There is a simple question that refuses to go away, no matter how often it is displaced by politics, ideology, or strategy. It is not a question of systems or outcomes. It is older than constitutions and more enduring than revolutions.

How does a ruler come to fear the people he claims to represent?

This is not merely a failure of governance. It is a moral break. When power turns against those from whom it draws its legitimacy, something more than injustice has occurred. A bond has been broken; one that is not written into law but carried in memory, custom, and the quiet expectation that those who rule do so in care of what they have inherited.

To govern a people is not first to command them. It is to belong to them.

Belonging is not a matter of blood or belief, but of fidelity: to the land one inhabits, to the lives entrusted to one’s care, and to the future that must remain possible for those who come after. A ruler who governs without this fidelity may retain power, but he no longer stands within the moral horizon of the place he claims as his own.

This essay grows out of my recent ABC Religion & Ethics article on Iran’s ethical reawakening but seeks to think more slowly and more fundamentally about the moral breach now shaping Iran’s political destiny.

The tragedy now unfolding in Iran is often misnamed.

Custodianship and the Moral Shape of Power

Political power always tells a story about what it believes a country is.

Some regimes understand the land as an inheritance that is received rather than seized, held in trust rather than exploited. In such traditions, authority is justified not by force or ideological purity but by care: care for the people, for the continuity of culture, and for the future that must remain open even beyond the ruler’s own time. Power here is custodial. It does not own the nation; it safeguards it.

Other regimes tell a different story. They treat the country as an instrument; something to be mobilized, reshaped, or sacrificed in service of an abstract project. In these systems, the people are no longer ends in themselves. They become means: bodies to discipline, voices to silence, lives to expend. Power, once severed from care, becomes possessive. And possession, unlike stewardship, tolerates no refusal.

The conflict in Iran is best understood through this distinction.

Iran’s deepest political imagination—formed across ancient, imperial, poetic, and later religious horizons—has long resisted ideological absolutism. Political legitimacy was never grounded primarily in doctrine, but in the capacity to hold the country together: to protect the land, dignify its people, and preserve the conditions under which life could flourish. Even when authority was flawed, it was judged against this ethical expectation. A ruler who governed against the people risked losing not only power but moral standing.

The present regime stands outside this grammar.

It does not govern as a custodian of Iran but as a proprietor over it. The country is treated as a site of permanent mobilization, its people as raw material for a revolutionary project that admits no limits. Loyalty is demanded not to the nation but to an ideological apparatus that justifies endless sacrifice while offering no political horizon beyond obedience.

This is why repression in Iran is not incidental—it is structural.

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When the People Speak

A state that sees itself as the owner of the people must control appearance, speech, desire, and memory. It must regulate women’s bodies because autonomy threatens possession. It must suppress art because beauty cannot be commanded. It must distort truth because truth answers to no authority. What emerges is not merely authoritarian governance but a form of rule fundamentally at odds with the moral conditions that allow a society to recognize itself.

Against this, the Iranian people are not proposing a counter-ideology. They are asserting something far more elemental.

When the people begin to speak ethically, their words no longer sound like demands. They sound like recognitions. Again and again, the language returns to life, dignity, truth, and freedom. This repetition is not accidental. It signals a shared moral intuition struggling to find words adequate to its clarity.

To say “we want life” is not to propose a policy. It is to assert a limit. It is to say that power has crossed a threshold beyond which it no longer protects what it governs. The insistence on women’s freedom is not symbolic; it is diagnostic. A system that must control women’s bodies to preserve itself has already revealed how it understands the people as a whole.

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These protests do not reject Iran’s moral inheritance. They appeal to it. They draw upon an ethical memory in which truth stands against falsehood, dignity against humiliation, and life against domination. This memory persists across Iran’s history: in poetry, philosophy, and ordinary expectations about what authority owes those it governs.

What the chants give voice to is not rage but recognition: a clarity that the relationship between ruler and people has become irreparable. Once this recognition takes hold, reform ceases to be imaginable. A regime that must silence its citizens to survive has already conceded that it no longer governs with their consent, nor even in their name.

Fear becomes the signature of power that no longer believes in its own legitimacy.

Ērānzamin: Belonging as Moral Test

At a certain point, political language fails; not because the stakes are too complex, but because they are too simple.

One does not need a theory of sovereignty to ask whether a leader loves his people. One does not need a doctrine of legitimacy to recognize when power has turned predatory. There are moments when history reduces itself to a single moral test, and everything else—institutions, slogans, negotiations—falls away.

To belong to a land is to recognize oneself as answerable to those who share it and to those who will inherit it. Belonging binds authority to care. It establishes a limit beyond which power may not pass without becoming something else entirely.

A ruler who murders his people in order to rule them has already declared that he does not share their world. He may occupy the land and command its institutions, but he no longer stands within its moral soil. He governs over the country, not from within it.

This is why the struggle in Iran is so difficult to misread from within and so easy to misunderstand from without. For Iranians, the question is no longer whether reform is possible within the system. It is whether those who claim authority still belong to the same ethical world as the people they govern.

And the answer, resoundingly, is no.

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The West’s Difficulty with Ethical Struggles

Western responses to Iran are almost always framed in the language of management: de-escalation, engagement, restraint, negotiation. These reflexes presume a shared moral ground between rulers and ruled, a ground on which compromise remains meaningful.

In Iran, that ground has collapsed.

To treat the regime as a legitimate interlocutor is to repeat the misrecognition that sustains its power. For those risking their lives, diplomacy conducted in the name of stability does not sound pragmatic. It sounds like abandonment. Ethical struggles cannot be resolved through technocratic adjustment. They ask instead whether a form of power still deserves to exist.

This question is unsettling, particularly for political orders built on continuity and risk minimization. Yet refusing it carries consequences. Stability purchased at the expense of dignity is not stability at all, but deferred violence.

Destiny without Prophecy

History does not always announce itself with certainty. Sometimes it gathers quietly around a recognition that cannot be undone.

Iran has entered such a moment.

What is at stake is not the triumph of a new ideology, but the possibility that power might once again be reconciled with care. A people can endure hardship and imperfect rule. What they cannot endure indefinitely is being governed by those who do not love them.

A state that governs against life forfeits its claim to the future. It may persist through fear, but it cannot generate belonging. And without belonging, power becomes weight without ground—force without direction.

The Iranian people are not asking to be rescued. They are asking to be recognized.

They have remembered that belonging is not granted by power, but withdrawn from it. Once withdrawn, it cannot be coerced back into place. The world now faces a choice—not of intervention or indifference, but of recognition: whether it will continue to manage the problem or finally see the moral struggle that has already declared itself.

History will not ask who prevailed in the short term. It will ask who still loved the land enough to refuse its degradation—and who, when that refusal became unmistakable, chose to see it.

Milad Milani is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Western Sydney University. His work explores Islamic thought, mysticism, ethics, and political theology, with particular attention to questions of authority, tradition, and modernity. He is the author of Heidegger, Ontology, and the Destiny of Islam.

Introduction: A Kurdish Odyssey from Betrayal to Triumph

My story is rooted in the heart of Kurdistan, a land of resilience and yearning, torn apart by the whims of empires and the betrayals of history. In 1921, Britain and France, wielding the arbitrary pen of colonialism, divided Kurdistan into four fragments, annexing my part to the newly formed state of Iraq. This was a bitter deception, as the Kurds had been promised a homeland of their own in the Treaty of Sèvres, signed on August 10, 1920, between the Allied powers and the Ottoman Empire. That treaty, born in the aftermath of World War I, dangled the hope of an independent Kurdistan before us. But Turkish objections crushed that dream, leading to the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24, 1923, in Switzerland. This agreement redrew the map of the Middle East, solidifying the borders of modern Turkey and apportioning Kurdish lands to Iraq, Syria, and Iran. For the Kurds in all these states, this was not just a geopolitical maneuver—it was a sentence to alienation, exclusion, and suffering.

In Iraq, we Kurds never accepted our forced incorporation, nor were we welcomed as equals by the Arab majority. Instead, we faced relentless oppression, marked by two genocides under Saddam Hussein’s regime. His campaigns of violence, including the infamous Anfal genocide and the chemical attacks on Halabja, sought to erase our identity, our culture, and our very existence. Yet our spirit endured. The Kurdish liberation movement, through decades of struggle, secured a fragile autonomy for our region in 1991. But this hard-won freedom was precarious. In 1992, the threat of another Iraqi assault, including the specter of chemical gassing, drove us to Korew—our word for the mass exodus that saw entire communities flee in fear. That same year, the United States and its allies imposed a no-fly zone, a lifeline that offered a semblance of protection and a fleeting taste of freedom. Still, Kurdistan remained strangled by political isolation, economic sanctions, and cultural suppression from all neighboring states—Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq itself.

The 1990s were a time of profound hardship. Poverty gripped every household, and survival was a daily battle. I attended school in the late 1990s, under the weight of this collective struggle, where the lack of resources was as palpable as the resilience of our teachers and families. We studied in crumbling classrooms, with empty stomachs and unwavering dreams. Then came 2003, a turning point that reshaped our destiny. The American intervention in Iraq, often debated and criticized, was for us Kurds a beacon of liberation. It dismantled Saddam’s tyranny and flung open doors that had long been bolted shut. Almost overnight, Kurdistan transformed from a marginalized, sanctioned region into a vibrant hub of opportunity in the Middle East. The cultural renaissance that followed revived our language, music, and traditions. Politically, we gained a voice, with political movements stepping onto the global stage. Intellectually and academically, our universities flourished, and our youth began to dream beyond survival. This article tells my story—a journey from the darkness of oppression to the light of possibility, through the lens of a Kurd who witnessed the transformative power of the 2003 intervention.

In this narrative, I do not claim that American intervention was responsible for the emergence of the Kurdish language or Kurdish intellectualism, as the Kurdish language has been a vital medium for expressing spirit, emotion, communication, politics, culture, and art for over five centuries, and Kurdish intellectualism has consistently existed across most parts of Kurdistan, even before the division following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. During World War II, intellectual movements were primarily shaped by Marxism, some by liberal democracy, and a few minor ones by Nazi ideology. However, I argue that, from a geopolitical standpoint, American intervention was one of the most significant events in recent Kurdish history and the region.

The Kurdish Language: From Margins to Philosophical Eminence

In the tapestry of human history, where threads of language weave the narratives of nations, the story of the Kurdish tongue is one of resilience, suppression, and, ultimately, a transcendent rebirth. Two years ago, I encountered an article by Jay Loschky, “Life in Kurdistan: A Tale of Two Wars?,” which opened with a striking revelation: “And unlike in the south, the invasion generated goodwill for the U.S. that is still present today. In late 2022, nearly four in five adults in Iraq’s Kurdish region (79%) said they approved of U.S. leadership, making Iraqi Kurdistan the most pro-American political entity in the Middle East at any time, even more so than historical U.S. ally, Israel (67% in 2017 and 2018). In contrast, across the rest of Iraq, 28% of residents approved of U.S. leadership.” This statistic unveils a profound divergence in perception, one that beckons a deeper inquiry into why the Kurds, unlike their neighbors, shun the term “American invasion” in favor of “War of Liberation.” This choice of words is not mere semantics; it is a philosophical act, a reclamation of narrative that shapes the consciousness of a people and the destiny of their language.

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For the Kurds, language is not merely a tool of communication but a vessel of identity, a living archive of their struggles and aspirations. To invoke Hegel, whose philosophy illuminates the dynamic interplay of concepts and reality, words are not static abstractions but dialectical entities, “the unity that is in itself differentiated, and this differentiation is its own determination” (Science of Logic, §160). Concepts, for Hegel, are the truth of being, the mediators through which reality and thought converge. The Kurdish embrace of “War of Liberation” over “invasion” is a conceptual revolution, a refusal to let external narratives define their experience. It is a declaration that the events of 2003 were not an imposition but an emancipation, a catalyst for the Kurdish language to rise from the margins to the philosophical forefront of a reborn nation.

Before 2003, the Kurdish language languished under the weight of systematic suppression across the four fragments of Kurdistan. In Turkey, the prohibition of Kurdish was not merely legislative but existential; to speak it was to risk death, as the state waged an ideological war to erase it from public and private spheres. In Syria, the story was grimly similar, with Kurdish voices silenced under the guise of Arabization. In Iran, while direct state violence was less overt, an insidious ideological campaign sought to marginalize the language, though it could not extinguish its flame. In Iraq, under the Ba’athist regime, the Kurdish language was not wholly banned but was shackled by fear. To use it politically or scientifically was to court execution, forcing Kurds to whisper their mother tongue in the shadows, stripped of its potential to engage with the world’s intellectual currents.

The partial autonomy gained in 1991, following the Gulf War and the establishment of the no-fly zone, offered a fragile reprieve. The Kurdish language began to stir, like a seed breaking through frostbitten soil. Yet it was the seismic shift of 2003, the War of Liberation, that shattered the chains binding this ancient tongue. The fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime did not merely topple a dictator; it unleashed a cultural and intellectual renaissance that elevated Kurdish from a forcibly marginalized language to a philosophical language. Almost overnight, the Kurdish region became a crucible of possibility, where economic and political support converged to nurture a linguistic awakening.

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This awakening was no mere accident of history but a deliberate flowering, nourished by the newfound freedom to engage with the world. Thousands of publishing houses sprang up across Kurdistan, their presses humming with the fervor of young translators who brought the world’s literary and philosophical treasures into Kurdish. The complete works of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the luminaries of French theory, alongside sociologists like Max Weber and Bertrand Russell, let alone Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Erich Fromm, and the Frankfurt School, found new life in Kurdish translations. These were not mere texts but portals, allowing a people long denied access to global thought to converse with the universal. Universities blossomed, their philosophical faculties becoming beacons of inquiry where Kurdish scholars wrestled with the eternal questions of existence, ethics, and being.

Various philosophical currents and their associated ideologies have shaped intellectual discourse, with Marxism dominating from the 1960s to the late 1990s. After 2003, Marxism waned, and liberal currents gained prominence, leading to the translation into Kurdish of works by philosophers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Charles de Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper, John Rawls, and Raymond Aron, generating commentary and influencing intellectual thought. French theory, particularly postmodernism, also became a major force, with translations of works by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes ongoing. Nietzsche significantly influences intellectual debates, alongside Martin Heidegger, whose works are also translated and used to interpret Kurdish society, history, politics, and economics. German idealism and classical philosophy, particularly Hegel and Kant, remain highly influential, with their works widely translated. Recently, Hegel’s ideas have gained traction among young Kurds, who use them to philosophically ground discussions of Kurdish history, identity, statehood, and nationhood, as explored in my TelosScope article on Hegel’s influence among Kurds and Jews. Around 2010, a new wave of Marxism, often termed neo-Marxism or post-Marxism, began to attract scholars in Kurdistan. Philosophers associated with this movement, such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and Jacques Rancière, have had their works translated, alongside a renewed interest in Guy Debord. This current is now vying for prominence in intellectual circles.

The War of Liberation, then, was not merely a geopolitical event but a philosophical watershed. It liberated not only land but the very soul of a language, allowing it to transcend its historical wounds. Where once Kurdish was a tongue of survival, spoken in defiance of erasure, it became a medium of contemplation, a language capable of articulating the sublime and the profound. The proliferation of publishing houses dedicated solely to philosophical texts is a testament to this transformation. These institutions did not merely print books; they forged a new intellectual identity for a people who had been told their language was unworthy of such aspirations.

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To speak of the Kurdish language’s journey is to speak of a people’s refusal to be defined by their suffering. It is to recognize, as Hegel might, that the Concept of liberation is not a static ideal but a living process, one that unfolds through the dialectical interplay of oppression and resistance, silence and speech. The Kurdish language, once confined to the margins, now stands as a philosophical force, a testament to the power of a people to reclaim their voice and, with it, their place in the constellation of human thought.

In this vibrant intellectual landscape of Kurdistan, distinct currents have shaped both thought and politics. Liberal intellectuals, exemplified by Mariwan Kanie, have passionately advocated for progressive ideals tailored to Kurdish society, often aligning with reformist movements like the Gorran Movement. Kanie’s works, such as Forced Paradise: On Religiosity and the New Religious Actors in Kurdistan, boldly challenge Islamist narratives, stirring debate and even criticism from some on the Left. In his book Radical Thinking: On Slavoj Žižek, Sayyid Qutb, and Liberalism, he meticulously critiques the parallels between radical ideologies, cementing his role as a leading liberal voice.

In stark contrast, French theory, exemplified by the acclaimed novelist Bachtyar Ali, whose works have been translated into numerous European languages and earned German literary prizes, adopts an apolitical stance tinged with cultural pessimism. Ali draws on post-Marxist thinkers like Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Louis Althusser, subtly countering Kanie’s liberalism through his novels. His influence has significantly shaped the intellectual and political climate in Kurdistan, offering a critique of liberal ideals rooted in post-Marxist frameworks.

Meanwhile, Mohammed Kamal, a prominent Kurdish philosopher and professor at Melbourne University, has become a spiritual leader of Nietzscheanism and Heideggerianism in Kurdistan. An atheist, Kamal translates major philosophical texts into Kurdish, inspiring a generation of readers. However, many of his followers have veered toward reactionary politics—not in religious terms, but in their political outlook—further diversifying the region’s intellectual currents.

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A younger generation, inspired by the Frankfurt School and including myself, critically engages with these three currents—liberalism, French theory, and Nietzschean reactionism. This group has pioneered antisemitic studies in Kurdistan, with works like my Genealogy of the Camp: How the Holocaust Started, my translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia (in progress), and translations of Walter Benjamin’s writings. Others have translated Adorno’s texts on right-wing radicalism and Auschwitz. My two-volume book Dance on the Volcano: Nietzsche and Gesamtkunstwerk was an intellectual quest challenging both Heideggerianism and French theory. In the context of the Israel–Iran conflict, this generation intellectually aligns with Israel but remains neutral in internal Kurdish politics, prioritizing philosophical depth and intellectual rigor.

This Frankfurt School–inspired cohort, blending leftist, liberal, and conservative ideals, is seen as politically astute regarding Kurdistan’s future. Their focus on antisemitic studies and critical engagement with both global and local intellectual trends sets them apart, fostering a nuanced, non-partisan approach that seeks to navigate the complex interplay of ideas shaping Kurdish society.

Kurdish Universities as Beacons of Enlightenment

In the aftermath of 2003, Kurdistan witnessed a renaissance, with universities rising across Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Duhok as sanctuaries of intellectual and moral renewal. These institutions were not mere buildings but philosophical crucibles, forging a higher political consciousness, nurturing civil societies, and championing enlightenment against radicalism and religious intolerance. Hailed as “the last safe haven for secularism,” Kurdistan’s 2012 educational reform—mandating religious neutrality in public schools and equal teaching of all major faiths—set a precedent unmatched in the Middle East. This part explores how Kurdish universities became the vanguard of a transformative vision, reshaping a people’s destiny through the power of ideas.

These universities emerged as acts of defiance against a history of marginalization, embodying the philosophical ideal that knowledge is liberation. They fostered a political consciousness that rejected authoritarianism, engaging students with concepts of governance and justice to envision a pluralistic society. Through seminars and debates, they cultivated a generation equipped to build a democratic future grounded in dialogue.

Beyond politics, universities were the heart of civil society, weaving networks of trust through student unions, public lectures, and community initiatives. These spaces bridged divides, fostering a civic ethos rooted in mutual respect and enlightenment ideals of reason and universality, creating a society united in shared purpose.

Most significantly, these institutions confronted radicalism and intolerance, nurturing a culture of secular inquiry. The 2012 reform, born in academic halls, challenged dogmas through courses in ethics and comparative religion, promoting tolerance over division. Despite resistance from traditionalists, universities stood firm, deconstructing extremism through critical thought and fostering a society that valued coexistence.

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Kurdish universities were not just schools but forges of enlightenment, where reason healed the wounds of history. They transformed Kurdistan into a beacon of progress, proving that ideas can illuminate even the darkest corners, guiding a people toward a future of tolerance and unity.

Several universities in Kurdistan host distinct philosophical faculties, each with unique traditions, though their boundaries are not always rigid. Salahaddin University in Erbil has a philosophy department emphasizing Greek and medieval philosophy, maintaining a strictly apolitical stance amid the Kurdish context. The University of Raparin, located in Ranya—a city of historical significance due to the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, where civil disobedience and armed resistance expelled Iraqi forces—established its philosophical faculty in 2005 under Kawa Jalal, a scholar trained in Germany during the 1980s. Jalal steered the faculty toward the Frankfurt School and Martin Heidegger’s thought. However, between 2009 and 2013, a group of young Kurds, funded by the government to study in the UK, returned and shifted the faculty’s focus toward analytical philosophy. Lastly, the University of Sulaimani is a hub for leftist and postmodernist currents, with French theory exerting significant influence. During the financial crisis in Kurdistan, student movements opposing market deregulation, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and salary cuts for public employees emerged from the University of Raparin and the University of Sulaimani.

Struggling for Democracy

Western ideals began to permeate Kurdistan, leading many Western observers to see the region as a potential stronghold for democratic values in a volatile Middle East. However, the journey toward democracy was far from smooth, marked by internal rivalries and external challenges. The political arena was long dominated by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which sought to divide power and wealth between themselves. This dynamic shifted with the rise of the Gorran Movement (Change Movement) in 2009, which championed social and political reform and quickly became the second-strongest party in parliament. Its success forced the ruling parties to compromise, reshaping the political landscape. New voices, including youth, student, and feminist movements, also emerged, though efforts to advance LGBT rights faced significant resistance, reflecting the region’s complex social fabric.

The foundation for Kurdish democracy was laid in Iraqi Kurdistan after the 1990–91 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition enforced a no-fly zone, protecting the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s aerial attacks. This allowed for the region’s first real taste of autonomy. In May 1992, parliamentary elections established the Kurdistan National Assembly, with the KDP and PUK nearly splitting the seats and forming a unity government. However, this early democratic effort was tested by a civil war from 1994 to 1998, which split the region between the two parties. Peace was restored in 1998 through the U.S.-mediated Washington Agreement, stabilizing the democratic framework.

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In the twenty-first century, Iraqi Kurdistan solidified its autonomy with American support during the Iraq War and insurgency, fostering a relatively advanced democratic system compared to other regions. The rise of opposition movements like Gorran challenged the KDP-PUK dominance, pushing for greater accountability. Meanwhile, in Syria’s Kurdish region of Rojava, democracy began to take root as Kurdish forces fought ISIS and secured territory, of course again with the support of the United States. These efforts laid the groundwork for local governance and inclusivity, hinting at the potential for a new autonomous region. Despite these strides, Kurdish democracy remains a work in progress, grappling with internal divisions, external pressures, and societal challenges, yet sustained by the resilience of its people and their vision for a more representative future.

A point should be raised regarding Rojava in this context. Rojava, formally the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), emerged during the Syrian Civil War as a Kurdish-led autonomous region, capturing areas like Kobanî, Afrin, and Jazira in 2012 amid the Assad regime’s withdrawal. Its governance model is deeply rooted in the intellectual ideologies of Abdullah Öcalan’s democratic confederalism, Murray Bookchin’s ecological communalism, and Toni Negri’s autonomist theories, which collectively emphasize decentralized, egalitarian systems, gender equality, ecological sustainability, and multiethnic cooperation. These ideas attracted global leftists, anarchists, and autonomists, inspired by Rojava’s radical vision. Its fight against ISIS, notably during the 2014–15 Siege of Kobanî, aligned it with the U.S.-led coalition as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), elevating its international profile.

Post-Assad, Rojava has leaned toward emphasizing Kurdish identity, reflecting regional pressures and a shift from its universalist roots. Despite its anarchist and communalist ideological foundations, Rojava has pursued pragmatic alliances, particularly with the United States, and recently signaled potential cooperation with Israel, as commander Mazloum Abdi noted in a BBC Farsi interview. Deputy Elham Ahmad also expressed gratitude to Israel in a Jerusalem Post interview for past support, underscoring Rojava’s complex navigation of geopolitical realities while striving to uphold its intellectual commitment to decentralized, ecological, and egalitarian governance.

The collaboration between Rojava’s Kurds and the United States left the global left in a state of confusion and indecision. While Kurdish forces relied on American air support to combat ISIS, many international leftists joined the fight against terrorism, aware of U.S. backing through air strikes that cleared the way for Kurdish ground operations. These leftists largely refrained from criticizing U.S. involvement or Kurdish cooperation. However, criticism emerged, particularly from Western Marxists and Trotskyists. During the ISIS siege of Kobane, for instance, many German Trotskyists condemned the Kurds for aligning with “imperialism” rather than solely blaming ISIS. A notable example was a Berlin demonstration where Christine Buchholz, a Left Party parliament member, displayed a poster reading “Free Kobane and Stop U.S. Bombing,” highlighting the left’s contradictory stance. Without U.S. air strikes, the Kurds likely faced massacre, yet some Marxists framed the bombings as targeting the “local population,” vaguely defined.

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Later, as the left shifted its focus to the Israel–Palestine conflict, support for the Kurds waned, though criticism persisted. At a 2020 Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference in Berlin, two leftists (one Palestinian, one Irish) accused Rojava’s Kurds of ethnically cleansing Arabs, echoing Erdoğan’s 2018 rhetoric during Turkey’s assault on Afrin. Turkey justified its invasion of the Kurdish city as a defense against “terrorism” (equating Kurds with terrorists) and to protect “natives.” Subsequent reports from international organizations confirmed that 98 percent of Afrin’s Kurdish population was ethnically cleansed, replaced by Syrian Arabs, refugees from Turkey, and Palestinian settlers.

Conclusion: Has American Intervention Failed?

The debate over the success or failure of American intervention has intensified with the recent Israel–Iran war and the United States’ eleventh-hour involvement, prompting global critics to label U.S. efforts as doomed, often citing Iraq and Afghanistan as prime examples. While Afghanistan’s complexities are beyond the scope of this discussion, Iraq’s case demands a more nuanced examination. The most significant shortfall of American intervention in Iraq was its failure to curb Iran’s expanding influence, which enabled a Shia-dominated central government in Baghdad to undermine Kurdish autonomy through unconstitutional budget cuts and to intensify oppression of the Sunni population. This marginalization of Sunnis inadvertently bolstered support for ISIS in their regions, leading to a brutal war against Kurdistan that crippled its economy and slowed the democratic reforms that had gained traction between 2005 and 2014. Iran’s fingerprints are evident in two destabilizing forces: its support for the Iraqi government’s anti-Kurdish policies and its backing of Shia paramilitary groups, which have relentlessly targeted Kurdish borders for over a decade, further eroding regional stability.

I want to briefly address Iraqi anti-Kurdish policies influenced by Iran. Iran has consistently sought to undermine Iraqi Kurdistan for various reasons, including its significant influence on Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan, which has heightened Kurdish national consciousness and frustrated Iran’s agenda. After 2005, Iraqi Kurdistan opened its borders to Kurds from Iranian Kurdistan, allowing workers, skilled professionals, and experts—many of whom were denied jobs in Iran due to their political views—to migrate. They were later joined by their families. With Iraqi Kurdistan’s stronger currency, these Kurds rebuilt their lives and brought back ideas of Kurdish identity and the potential for a progressive Kurdish state. This inspired greater political activism among Kurdish civil society in Iranian Kurdistan, leading to numerous uprisings, including the 2022 protests sparked by the death of Jina Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police. Her funeral saw Kurds chanting revolutionary slogans, igniting widespread unrest across Iran.

Iran seeks to control Kurdistan’s oil and gas fields through Iraq’s central government for two main reasons: (1) to economically weaken Kurdistan, preventing it from forming independent international ties with Western companies and Israel; and (2) to secure more revenue from Iraq, which has consistently tried to strip Kurdistan of control over its oil and natural resources. The Iraqi constitution lacks clear legislation on oil industry dealmaking authority, which Iraqi politicians have exploited to foster oligarchy and empower Iran. However, this ambiguity has also allowed Kurdistan to assert control over its own oil in the long term. Under Iran’s influence, Iraq cut Kurdistan’s entire budget in 2014—a policy that persists, with additional cuts to state employee salaries in early 2025—demanding that Kurdistan surrender its oil industry to the central government to restore funding.

Yet to brand American intervention as an outright failure is a one-dimensional perspective that overlooks the broader picture. For Kurds in Iran, the Israel–Iran war, with U.S. involvement, has sparked hope as a potential second opportunity to advance their long-standing quest for self-determination. In Iraqi Kurdistan, American support, despite its limitations, laid the groundwork for a degree of autonomy and democratic governance unmatched elsewhere in the region. The Kurdish experience reveals a duality: while U.S. intervention fell short in countering Iranian influence and preventing conflict, it also opened doors for Kurdish resilience and political progress. Reducing this complex history to a narrative of failure ignores the aspirations and agency of Kurdish communities, who continue to seize emerging opportunities to build a more inclusive and self-governed future amid an ever-shifting geopolitical landscape.

The final point is that during the first Trump administration, Kurds in Rojava and southern Kurdistan (Iraq’s Kurdistan region) experienced significant anxiety over potential U.S. abandonment, particularly due to fears of a U.S. military withdrawal from Rojava. This fear intensified under the second Trump administration. While Donald Trump’s plans for Rojava remain unclear, the persistent uncertainty underscores the critical importance of the American presence for Kurdish survival and the developments previously mentioned. The Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan share similar aspirations for their future, seeking to unite politically, culturally, and intellectually with the other two regions.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues • Israel Initiative

Peshraw Mohammed, born in southern Kurdistan (Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq), based in Berlin, is a freelance author and translator specializing in German philosophy, antisemitism, and the cultural history of National Socialism. Since October 7, he has been writing regularly for German platforms and delivering speeches on antisemitism across various political spectra, including the right, the left, and Islamism. He is currently working on his forthcoming book, Genealogy of Demonization: The Interconnectedness of Antisemitism and Antikurdism (in English).

A distinctive feature of the recently released 2025 National Security Strategy is its recognition of culture as a key dimension of national interest. Of course, it does not neglect the standard security topics—alliances, foreign policy, and defense capacity—but it also pays significant attention to questions of culture and national self-understanding. What that means in detail for the United States is a topic for a separate treatment; here however it is worth noting how the evaluation of security in Europe—and the reaffirmed American interest in European security—involves worrisome cultural developments on the old continent. To be sure, in the background, the traditional American insistence that our European allies invest more in their militaries continues, since their defense is not only about culture. But culture matters; civilizational erosion in Europe and the undermining of shared values in the Atlantic Alliance are threatening the security agenda that more tanks and missiles may not be able to fix.

Precisely because the document reaffirms American interest in Europe’s thriving, it also calls out—harshly—deleterious cultural developments. If Europe is voluntarily giving up on freedom and instead pursuing policies of repression, the credibility of the alliance necessarily declines. Policies hostile to core rights in Europe will undermine the American public’s attachment to the historical connection. “In particular, the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common government are core rights that must never be infringed. Regarding countries that share, or say they share, these principles, the United States will advocate strongly that they be upheld in letter and spirit. We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies” (NSS, p. 12).

Washington’s criticism toward Europe could hardly be clearer: countries that share—or perhaps only say they share—these values are not succeeding as custodians of the values. In our contemporary public sphere—in the press and in university discussions—the anxiety about threats to democracy or the perception of a “democratic backsliding” is typically directed by the left against the right and by Europeans against the United States. The new National Security Strategy document turns that around and, affirming that there is a threat to democracy, locates it in the managerial practices of Europe and England. That erosion of liberty, the systemic suppression of heterodox opinion, is itself a threat to security.

Part of this grim diagnosis of the European values decadence is a reprise of Vice President Vance’s tough love comments from the Munich Security Conference. Conventionally the Atlantic Alliance has been understood as a community of values, the familiar collection of rights that have come to define Western societies since the era of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions—foremost among them freedom of speech and freedom of opinion. Without free speech, the public sphere cannot act as a brake on government power. Yet for observers of the European scene, precisely the power of those freedoms appears to be under assault. Those rights, dating from 1776 or 1789, were in fact disseminated across society only slowly and inconsistently; but is liberty today suddenly subject to an abrupt constriction in the shadow of cancel culture and the pandemic orders?

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One large version of this repression involves the Digital Services Act, which ultimately is an attack on large U.S. technology companies when they refrain from carrying out a mandated policing of free expression. If social media platforms allow too much speech, they face indictments and fines from the European Union. Meanwhile, however, there are micro versions of the same efforts to surveil and to control. There was, for instance, the sorry case of the unlucky German retiree who tweeted about the former Minister of the Economy, calling him stupid—ein Schwachkopf—which was enough for the police to show up at his door and confiscate his electronic equipment. Or the case of media critic Norbert Bolz, whose satirical improvisation of an erstwhile Nazi phrase led to a police visit. Sarcasm is not an excuse. The state has no tolerance for irony, except its own when it is unintended.

And, believe it or not, we now face an organized assault on a library—an unlikely threat to the democratic order—because it houses a collection of books about conservatism (reportedly conservatism in the United States and Russia are key topical areas). This Library of Conservatism in Berlin is scheduled to be expelled from a library association and thereby excluded from a vital cataloging network—perhaps not the stuff of violent drama but nonetheless a not-so-subtle form of censorship: the books will not be burned, but researchers will have a very hard time finding them. The biographer of Adorno, Lorenz Jäger, discusses the matter here. Note: there has been no finding by governmental authorities of illegal extremism, no indictment by a district attorney, nor any opportunity for due process in a court of law. The only problem is the character of the book collection.

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From a U.S. perspective, three aspects of the effort to ostracize the library are noteworthy.

First: This is an obvious example of the cancel culture movement, which evidently continues in Germany even if it is being rolled back in the United States (or so we hope). The German left habitually quotes the martyred Communist Rosa Luxemburg, famous for her statement—in the context of her attack on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, by the way—that freedom always means the freedom of the others. Apparently that does not hold if the others are conservatives whose freedom may be curtailed.

Second: The library affair is one piece of the Kampf gegen Rechts, the campaign against the right, that has dominated the German political discourse for a number of years. If the old West Germany defined itself in terms of an anti-totalitarian consensus—symmetrical opposition to Nazis and to Communists—the new German culture sees no problem on the left, no matter how violent left protestors may become. Instead, it directs all its moralizing wrath against the right, even the moderate right. The scope of “the right” that is subject to vilification grows ever larger. In place of an unquestionably appropriate rejection of violent neo-Nazis, we witness a political culture in which all positions, even those slightly right of center, face suspicion and denunciation. The net effect of this redrawing of the political map has been to curtail significantly the latitude of the notionally conservative Chancellor Merz—and that is probably the political point, rendering the conservative parties dependent on the left.

Third: The attack on the Library of Conservatism is indicative of a particularly insidious technology of repression, perfected during the cancel culture years. There is, so far at least, no direct demand to close the library. However, it will be cut off from a communication and catalogue network and therefore rendered effectively inaccessible. This is so-called deplatforming based on denunciation and surveillance, with no possibility of appeal, except by going to court. As local as this story about a single book collection in Berlin may seem and no matter how bizarre it may sound, it encapsulates the unfolding program for repression and censorship that remains at the core of contemporary progressive culture policy: disapproved speech is defined, one way or another, as hate speech and—such is the intent—either directly criminalized or indirectly silenced.

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

This essay first appeared in Die Welt on November 28, 2025, and is translated here by permission of the author. Translation and notes by Russell A. Berman.

The self-proclaimed angels of peace are now on the right—as the debate surrounding the war in Ukraine demonstrates. But if the West truly submits to Putin’s aggression, then the open society will have failed.

For decades, pacifism was primarily a left-wing project. The Green Party was largely founded on pacifist principles. The hippie movement during the Vietnam War propagated the idea just as passionately as the anti-nuclear power movement and the Easter marches.1 And from the first international peace congress in 1848 to Bertha von Suttner’s2 pacifist novel manifesto Lay Down Your Arms! (1889) to the platform of the Left Party, it was always primarily communists, socialists, or social democrats who embraced this seemingly attractive idea.

For some time now, however, pacifism seems to have switched sides.

While the German Greens have become some of the most ardent hawks, doves are suddenly appearing, especially in the conservative or far-right camps. Increasingly, one hears from the American or Hungarian governments, other right-wing populist parties in Europe, and not least the AfD, statements that one would have more readily attributed to John Lennon, Heinrich Böll, or Rudi Dutschke.3

Björn Höcke has so far embodied the spearhead of pacifist rhetoric.4 Shortly after the start of the war of aggression, he spoke out against arms deliveries to Ukraine, arguing that such deliveries would only prolong the war. In his anti-war campaign, Höcke even invoked the 1970s motto of the peace movement, “Create peace without weapons,” and published an image featuring the symbol of the peace dove.

This is as surprising as it is dangerous. For in the guise of the peace dove, Höcke and his ilk are merely praising the right of the stronger. If there is one idea that has proven particularly unrealistic and false over the course of a century and a half, it is the notion that wars can be prevented or ended by renouncing armaments, weapons, and military strength.

“The dying must stop.”

Of course, every reasonably sensible person is against war as a means of politics. Almost everyone finds peace preferable to violence and prefers diplomacy to military conflict. The problem is that wars are always started by the few who see things differently: autocrats, dictators, or psychopaths. These are generally not deterred by peace doves, but only by military strength and deterrence. Or, if it’s too late, only slowed down by military intervention.

Therefore, in light of the war in Ukraine, it is surprising and disturbing to hear the phrase “the dying must stop” with increasing frequency. Of course, the dying on the battlefields in the heart of Europe must stop. And it would stop immediately if Vladimir Putin withdrew his troops. The dying should never have begun. But what this pious phrase unfortunately usually implies comes tacitly afterward: A war against Russia cannot be won anyway, Ukraine has no chance, and an escalation, let alone the possibility of a nuclear strike, must not be risked under any circumstances. Therefore, it would be better to hand over Crimea, the Donbas, and other occupied territories to Putin, as proposed in the 28-point plan supported by the United States. But that is not peace; it is capitulation.

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What underlies the rhetoric of the new right-wing vulgar pacifism is not a yearning for peace, but for submission. Perhaps even subconsciously—frustrated by the unbearable slowness of democratic processes and compromises—a secret longing for the strong fist of the autocrat. Or simply fear.

The utopian vision of these self-proclaimed peacemakers has a dangerous side effect, disguised as economic pragmatism: To save the German people from the consequences of disastrous green climate policies, it is now essential to finally resume importing gas and oil from Russia. Only in this way, they claim, can German energy prices fall.

However, firstly: Germany is already circumventing the Russia sanctions—in Schwedt, a refinery is operating that, after coordination with the Americans, refines Kazakh oil from Russian pipelines, because otherwise the Berlin-Brandenburg region, including the airport, would be paralyzed.

And secondly: this thinking is akin to feeding the crocodile in the hope that it will eat you last. Sixteen years of government under Angela Merkel created an unnecessary dependence on Russian energy (and thus on Russian arbitrariness) through an irresponsible phase-out of nuclear power and an even more irresponsible import strategy from Russia: After Germany withdrew from nuclear power, the share of Russian gas imports increased from 36 percent in 2011 to 65 percent in 2020. This policy financed and empowered the very Putin whom the democratic world must now confront. It is therefore tasteless that the AfD has been demanding, for years in its party platform and most recently again in the major Bundestag debate, a return to increased Russian gas and oil exports. It is submission to an autocratic regime. It is the trivialization of a dictator and his war crimes. And it is yet another reason why the AfD must never assume governmental responsibility in Germany.

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Of course, one can submit to an aggressor who kills people to occupy land that doesn’t belong to him, driven by short-term, opportunistic interests. One can also submit to the Iranian mullahs and their henchmen, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others, because it’s too exhausting to support the imperfect democracy in Israel with all means—including military ones—in the fight against terror. One can also submit to the Chinese, their clever and highly strategic trade wars against America and Europe, and their ruthless ambition to one day annex democratic Taiwan. One can do all this in the name of pragmatism and, more recently, in the name of pacifism (“the dying must stop”). But one must know the price.

The Idea of the West

The price is an open society. The price is democracy. Freedom. Freedom of expression. Freedom of lifestyles. In short, what we—not in a geographical sense—call the idea of ​​the West. Nothing less is at stake in defending against Russian aggression in Europe and Islamism in the Middle East.

The statement that the war against Putin cannot be won is false. NATO, and even more so the so-called Ramstein Coalition, that alliance of 50 democratic states supporting Ukraine, is vastly superior to Russia, both financially and militarily.5 If this coalition had drawn clear lines at the beginning of the war, through maximum military support, Putin would never have gotten this far, and millions of lives could have been saved. Now the price is higher. But it is not too late. If we fail, Ukraine is only the beginning. Moscow will understand the encouragement.

The aggression against the open society can be ended. It simply requires the will to do so. However, with Europe’s currently weak, divided, and impotent stance, this cannot succeed.

Natan Sharansky, the Russian dissident who survived nearly ten years in the Soviet Gulag before becoming Israel’s deputy prime minister after his liberation, once surprised me with a remark.6 I was initially outraged, then unsettled, and finally convinced. He quoted the pacifist anthem, the beloved and celebrated line from John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” in which he envisions a different world: “Imagine . . . there is nothing to die for.”

Sharansky added: “What a nightmare.”

Matthias Döpfner is the CEO of Axel Springer SE.

Populist politics aims not only at implementing a policy agenda, but also at transforming political culture at large. Javier Milei is certainly a populist in this regard. Like previous leaders of this kind in Argentine history, such as Hipólito Yrigoyen in the 1910s and Juan Perón in the 1940s, Milei wants to fundamentally change Argentina. But unlike his predecessors, he wants to do it from the right. Will he succeed? Based on recent history in Argentine politics, it seems unlikely that Milei will achieve his stated goals of lasting macroeconomic stability and dramatic reduction of the public sector. However, his best shot at producing a lasting social transformation consists in preserving the ambivalence of his ideological orientation. In this regard, he is no different from previous populist leaders, though his right-wing vision certainly is.

In order to understand the nature of Milei’s innovation, we have to consider the unusual ideological alignments of Argentine politics. Instead of divisions along the left-right spectrum characteristic of most countries, Argentina has typically had a populist and a non- (and often anti-) populist pole. The populist pole, which since the 1940s mostly coincided with Peronism, was ideologically oriented to political and economic pragmatism, strong leadership, and mass mobilization. The non-populist pole was ideologically oriented to rule-based politics and economics, respect for political institutions, and more procedural forms of political participation. Both poles contained left- and right-wing tendencies, which often led to unexpected shifts in ideological positions within one and the other. Peronism had been mostly associated with economic redistribution in favor of the working class since the 1940s, then it became the party of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s with Carlos Menem, and finally it shifted to a clear left-wing economic and social agenda in the 2000s and 2010s with Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.

Until the 2010s, right-wing ideologies had no clear place in the political field in Argentina. Generally and comparatively speaking, Argentines tend to agree with the idea of a strong public sector that actively fosters economic redistribution, and no major political party had put market-based economics at the core of its agenda. In the 1990s, after campaigning strongly on redistributionist ideas, Peronist president Carlos Menem unexpectedly turned to neoliberal economic reforms in an attempt, which proved successful in the short run, to end hyperinflation and achieve macroeconomic stability. However, this ideological shift turned out to be temporary, as Peronism switched back to State-centered redistributionist policies in the 2000s. During those years, business owner Mauricio Macri founded a new center-right political party, Propuesta Republicana, which grew from the City of Buenos Aires to the rest of the country until winning the presidential elections in 2015. Although decidedly pro-market, Propuesta Republicana presented itself as a moderate political force, with an agenda of efficient management (as opposed to drastic reduction) of the State, fighting against corruption and respect for institutional procedures.

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Against this background, Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, is the first decidedly, unapologetic major right-wing political party in modern Argentine history. As his supporters often point out, 2023 represents the first presidential election in Argentina in which a candidate wins with an explicit agenda of gutting the public sector. Milei and his followers interpret this as a cultural transformation: for the first time, the right has an opportunity to implement the radical economic reforms required to achieve long-term macroeconomic stability not against the will of the majority of voters but rather backed by it. If they are successful in drastically reducing the public sector and dismantling the welfare state, they believe, this cultural transformation will become permanent, as more and more people will need to adapt to the rules of a market economy. Thus, Milei’s followers often describe their project as a “cultural battle”—a term that, ironically, is associated with the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and which was also popular during Kirchnerism. They believe that there is a unique ideological context that makes possible a radical economic transformation, which will in turn reinforce the cultural change and make it permanent. Like previous populist projects, Milei’s economic agenda is linked to a larger transformation of society, without which this agenda cannot hold.

It is of course uncertain whether this radical transformation is possible. The conditions for populist movements are often an effect of structural changes that produce a mismatch between society and political elites, leading to the idea that the people needs to take power back from them. In one of the first and most classical sociological studies of the emergence of Peronism, Argentine sociologist Gino Germani argued that Perón’s base was composed largely of internal migrants who had left agricultural regions to find new jobs in industrial areas. There are indications that many of Milei’s strongest supporters are young people who work in informal sectors, especially those “entrepreneurs” selling their labor or products through apps. It might be the case that structural social changes have produced a new constituency of lower-income voters who see the State as an obstacle or a threat rather than as a source of care and opportunity for social mobility. But it is also possible that the appeal of libertarian ideas that made possible Milei’s victory in 2023 will vanish if he is unable to provide the economic stability and growth that most Argentines long for after more than a decade of growing inflation and stagnation.

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Milei is well aware of this, which is why his populism remains ambivalent. The core idea with which he campaigned in 2023 was the struggle against “the caste,” a vague concept that referred to traditional political elites, but which he and his followers often use more expansively for anyone who profits from the public sector. Like most populists, Milei makes the dividing line between the people, which he refers to as “decent Argentines” (argentinos de bien), and the self-interested elites ambiguous. This makes room for adaptation: when on the offensive, Milei associates a certain group with the caste. For example, when he accused public universities of mismanaging public funds, as part of his plan to reduce their funding, his supporters circulated the idea of a “university caste.” Sometimes the accusation is more implicit, as when they claimed that Hospital Garrahan, a top-of-its-class children’s hospital, was full of “ñoquis,” a colloquial word that refers to public employees who never show up to work. When on the defense, by contrast, “the caste” is narrowed down to traditional politicians. In this regard, Milei follows a conventional populist script, which creates a strong dichotomy between the people and its enemies, but makes the dividing line between one and the other undefinable and fluctuating.

This malleability, however, has limits. Populist leaders often face a backlash against their most radical policies, at which point they must strategically back down. But backing down has its own perils, since they draw much of their electoral appeal from the idea that they are disruptors who are fighting against an entrenched elite. This aura of disruption is particularly important for exciting and mobilizing their most hardcore supporters. As populist leaders start sounding less extreme, they become more tolerable to moderate voters, but they also become less distinctive. Recently, in the face of prolonged economic hardship and a more unified political opposition, many relevant political and economic players have pressured Milei to tone down confrontation and make room for political compromise. To some extent, he has yielded to this pressure. This is evident in two major shifts in his campaign during the midterm elections in October 2025, compared with 2023: first, the main target of his attacks was no longer “the caste,” broadly understood as all traditional politicians, but rather Kirchnerism; second, he did not focus on gutting the State at all costs, but instead asked for patience for his macroeconomic reforms to translate into growth, and thus into economic well-being. This strategy has inspired more trust among potential political and economic allies. At the same time, however, Milei started to sound more like a traditional politician, which risked hurting the appeal that led him to power. This is probably why he staged an extremely unconventional rock concert, where he sang, in a very out-of-tune fashion, a series of classic music hits from Argentina. The aim was likely to preserve some of his image as an outsider who does not play by the rules of normal politics.

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The strategy seems to have paid off so far. Unexpectedly, La Libertad Avanza beat both Peronism and third parties in all the main districts (including the City of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba, Mendoza, and, shockingly, the state of Buenos Aires, which is the stronghold of Peronism) in the midterms. Political analysts agree that the victory reflects a longing for stability and an aversion to going back to the economic uncertainty of the past, largely associated with Peronism, rather than widespread enthusiasm for Milei’s agenda. Therefore, while on the one hand Milei has regained momentum for unfolding his transformational plans, on the other there are signals that his support by voters depends on both economic stability (including, above all, relatively low inflation) and weakness of the opposition. Both factors might rapidly change due to unexpected circumstances that are out of Milei’s control—as happened to President Macri after his impressive victory in the midterms of 2019. So far, during the last few weeks, Milei has stuck to a slightly more moderate script, establishing amicable relations with parts of the opposition while reserving his attacks for Peronists, such as the governor of the state of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof. But with a stagnant economy that has required two bailouts by the IMF and by the U.S. Treasury just this year, it is likely that Milei will face new unexpected challenges that will call for further changes in his approach.

One way Milei can adapt his populist style to changing circumstances is simply to change focus. If his radical anti-State agenda starts facing a backlash, Milei can intensify cultural politics, such as the critique of feminism and gender politics, the reinforcement of traditional values, and the unyielding international alignment with “the West”—represented, in his view, by the United States and Israel. Like similar right-wing populist leaders, such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Milei has attempted this in the past, but with meager benefits. After his speech at the Davos Forum in January 2025, where he explicitly associated homosexuality with pedophilia, thousands of people gathered on the streets to demonstrate against it, while few prominent voices stood to defend him. So far, the core appeal of Milei’s populism seems to be circumscribed by its economic aspects, and so his capacity to stretch it to other ideological terrains seems limited.

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Consequently, it would seem that the future of right-wing populism in Argentina is tied to its economic success. Unlike in the past, many Argentines are now open to a radically market-friendly solution to the longstanding woes of economic instability and endemic inflation. While this is certainly a significant change of attitude, it does not necessarily mean that they are generally willing to give up on public education, universal healthcare, public investment in infrastructure, and other targets of Milei’s libertarian ideology. If his “cultural battle” is to succeed, it will need to be towed by durable economic benefits that lead people to believe that big sacrifices are worth it. However, the confrontational, winner-takes-all approach characteristic of populist politics may be detrimental to this goal. The Argentine economy has deep structural problems that require carefully planned solutions, backed by broad political and economic support. Milei’s attempt to fundamentally change the economy by overwhelming opposition in one swift stroke has paid off so far, but it is likely to hit the same obstacles it faced in the past—as was already the case, for example, with the government’s inability to sustain the exchange rate between the peso and the U.S. dollar, which led to the unexpected bailout by the United States Treasury.

The success of Milei’s populism will depend on his capacity to preserve its ambivalence. In this regard, Milei is no different from other politicians of his kind, for populism needs ambivalence to thrive. If a populist leader fixes the dividing line between the people and the elites, the movement loses its ability to adapt to the changing circumstances of the political field in a democracy, and thus it either becomes authoritarian (if it eliminates democracy) or narrows the scope of its appeal. If it blurs this dividing line too much, it starts to assimilate to traditional politics and loses momentum. How much room for maneuver does Milei have? Are Argentines generally more receptive to this new kind of right-wing populism, or is this rather a brief ideological window that will rapidly close if economic expectations are disappointed? The answer is surely somewhere in the middle. The only certainty is that Milei’s project of turning right-wing populism into a lasting transformational force in Argentina will depend on his capacity to preserve and strategically profit from its ideological ambivalence.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Javier Burdman is Research Fellow at the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET) and Invited Professor at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. He specializes in modern and contemporary political theory.

David A. Westbrook, longtime friend of TPPI and editor at the journal Telos, has just published his new book, Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party, which many in our circle will undoubtedly be interested in reading. The book is based on conversations among international social scientists between the 2008 financial crisis and Covid.

The e-book version is open access and can be downloaded for free here, or purchase the print version at either Routledge or Amazon. You can also read more of Westbrook’s writings at his Substack, Intermittent Signal.

More from the book’s press release:

BUFFALO, N.Y.—We are, says legal scholar David A. Westbrook, living in a transitional moment in history—a time when long-held assumptions about the world order and liberal democracy seem to be upended every day.

“Our history [seems] to have entered its autumn,” he writes. “How do we start building anew? What do we build, with what we still have?”

A new book by the University at Buffalo School of Law professor, Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party (Routledge, 2025), offers a deeply reasoned and ultimately hopeful set of answers.

Westbrook holds the Louis A. Del Cotto Professorship at UB and directs the school’s New York City Program in Business and Law. He brings to his latest project insights from an international group of social scientists with whom he has been in conversation for the past two decades. Drawing on the best in interdisciplinary scholarship and thought, he proposes a way forward for both academics and policymakers.

“QDP [Quixote’s Dinner Party] is a long-term passion project, a collaborative effort to grapple with where we are as academics confronting the problems of the university, bureaucracy and power, and having an intellectual life today,” Westbrook says. “Maybe rethinking the humanities and critical social sciences, law included. That’s all!

“It’s very much a book about the intellectual zeitgeist, our anxieties and hopes and sensibilities, which are not entirely or even mostly rational topics. Therefore, in lieu of academic explication or argument, QDP is sort of polyphonic literary meta-scholarship, couched as a memoir of conversations among international social scientists between the financial crisis and Covid. As my interlocutor Vitor Gaspar, a senior official at the International Monetary Fund and formerly finance minister of Portugal said, ‘a book like no other.’”

Social Thought From the Ruins is built in five sections: Crises of Meaning; Curiosity; Powerful Subjects; New Buildings from Old Stones; and Hopes. Chapters address such topics as the role of curiosity inside and outside the university; the role of teaching in social change; and how it might be possible to humanize the bureaucracies that hold increasing sway over our lives.

“An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking,” Routledge says, “this book interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence.

“Will the critical social sciences have anything to offer the exercise of power, or are we doomed to incessant and ineffectual critique? Can bureaucracy be made at least more accountable, if not democratic? Conversely, can we feel less alienated from the structures of power that rule us, or that fail to govern at all? Can we feel at home?”

Colleagues in the wider academic community have lauded the value of the author’s critique.

“This is Westbrook at his best: sparkling insights, surprising connections, dashes of humor and thought-provoking reflections,” says Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, emerita, at Harvard University, and a former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

Adds Francisco O. Ramirez, Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University: “This fascinating book ends by inviting readers to begin again. To do what? To be engaged in imaging a second spring, no less. Via a set of erudite, quirky and controversial reflections on the erosion of meaning in key institutions, from the polity to the university, Westbrook invites readers to partake in conversations about freedom and security as well as knowledge and intellectuals.”

Starting today, and in effort to keep with Westbrook’s ambition to shift this conversation beyond the walls of the university as well as reach an international audience, Routledge is making Social Thought From the Ruins available without cost in both e-book and audiobook formats.

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What Readers Are Saying about Social Thought From the Ruins

“As a theater maker, and curator of spaces and people, I found Westbrook’s insights and theories about constructing and deconstructing institutions useful, in the highest sense of the word.”

—Matthew Gasda, Playwright and Founder, Brooklyn Center for Theater Research

“Westbrook wrote a book like no other. Provocative and original, it feels like an engaged conversation with a well-read and well-traveled friend. You will be curious, puzzled, perplexed, challenged, shaken, rattled and eager to start again.”

—Vitor Gaspar, former Minister of Finance of Portugal

“A deeply thoughtful, genre-blurring meditation on the collapse of meaning in our data-saturated age.”

—Erik J. Larson, computer scientist and author of The Myth of AI

“Westbrook is a Renaissance man, whose breadth of knowledge makes him an icon in dialogues between the law and other disciplines: anthropology, sociology, history, literature, art, economics and international relations, dialogues that wrestle with the key issues of our times. Echoing Quixote’s shift in the twilight of his life from the idealism of the bygone cavalry of the Middle Ages towards the realism of the age that Sancho Panza exemplified, Westbrook shakes the narrative to explain contemporary challenges in the search for a new spring.”

—Rosa M. Lastra, Queen Mary University of London, Law

“The reader will be at once thrilled and puzzled, charmed and stunned, inspired and challenged—and much more. This is a book written by a serious academic like non-other I know of….[Westbrook’s] mastery of English and its literatures allows him to write as a poet. Poetry becomes what the poet means it to be—sometimes sad, often beautiful. It makes sense only after the reader ponders, goes back, thinks, and feels what its words captured and broadcast.”

—Charles Lemert, from the foreword

“Returning with passion to several key themes in his past writing, Bert Westbrook, navigator of the contemporary and quixotic dinner companion extraordinaire, evokes a structure of feeling that is acutely uncomfortable for those of us caught within bureaucratic universities, persecuted by their patron state.”

—George E. Marcus, UC Irvine, co-author of Anthropology as Cultural Critique

“How can those of us with intellectual inclinations lead secure and fulfilling lives today? And if neither the University nor the world beyond it can sustain intellectual activity—aside from research for medicine and technology, that is—then what is the point in nurturing such aspirations anyway? These questions are explored with wit and imagination in a new book by David A. Westbrook, Social Thought From the Ruins….The ‘ruins’ in the book’s title are those of the humanities and social sciences, in particular—disciplines which seem increasingly unable to foster original thought, to engage constructively with modern society, or to convince the public that they deserve to exist at all.

“Westbrook argues that the crisis of the University is bad not just for committed professors—a group he likens to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, who longs to be a gallant knight after the age of chivalry has already passed—but for all of us. The contemporary world is full of complex structures, from banks and corporations to armies and government bureaucracies, which need competent people to lead them and competent critics to save them from their own worst tendencies. Only a University-like institution can fill these roles, even if it is not doing a very good job at the moment. As Westbrook puts it, ‘sickness in the University is sickness in the gonads of the polity,’ a cancer in society’s reproductive organs.”

—Wessie du Toit, UnHerd

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Should a university professor be free to select teaching materials and to explore her subject of instruction in the classroom according to her best professional judgment? To pursue and publish research on subjects of her choosing? To address issues of public moment outside her field of study? To speak to the policies and decisions of her own institution? If so, what standards constrain her? And how should these questions be addressed? By individual bargains struck by her and her institution when she applies for appointment? By an institution-wide policy? If the latter results in different policies, one institution to another, the result might be more or less faculty freedom depending on the institution. If so, what would the consequences be for the ability of faculty to move from one institution to another? How do the answers to these questions bear on the larger community’s interest in the intellectual vitality of higher education?

These questions vexed the emerging academic profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were addressed in 1915 by the newly formed American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in the issuance of a declaration demanding academic freedom, in the creation by it of a standing committee—its first, Committee A—to consider necessary refinements of policy under charging circumstances, and in the initiation of a process of investigation by impartial ad hoc committees into serious institutional departures from AAUP standards. The latter resulted in detailed reports, vetted with the parties beforehand to assure accuracy, that named and shamed miscreant administrations.

On this foundation, a quarter of a century later, the larger academic community arrived at a consensus on these questions—in a pact, the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,1 made between the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (AAC), the then-leading organization of liberal arts colleges. Further policy refinements, as circumstances required, and case investigations to secure compliance remained in the hands of the AAUP.

The parties could not have anticipated at the time how successful that endeavor would be. The 1940 Statement has been endorsed by well over two hundred disciplinary societies and educational organizations. It is incorporated by references or in text in innumerable college and university policy compendia. It has been relied on by those courts that understand that institutional and faculty obligations as a matter of contract law draw sustenance from the norms and expectations of the profession.2 In sum, the 1940 Statement has become the national norm, the uniformity of which is assured by the repose of the authority to interpret it in a standing body historically composed primarily of scholars with disciplinary stature and a commitment to principle, whose judgments are enforced by the weight of opinion and occasionally reinforced by the courts. Soft law, to be sure; but surprisingly effective.

Absent a common understanding enforced by a consensus of respected opinion, and given the rising demands today to sanction faculty for speech objectionable to groups on and off campus—students, donors, alumni, and activist organizations—university faculty would be left to twist in the shifting winds of political and social excitements, with protections varying only according to local circumstances.

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The glue that held this system of private ordering together is the credibility of the AAUP: a general acknowledgment that its pronouncements were those of principle, well considered and well wrought—Judge J. Skelly Wright, a well-respected federal judge, spoke of AAUP documents as being noted for “thoroughness and scrupulous care”3—uninfluenced by organizational ends or exogenous policies. The question has now been raised of whether that is still so.

Before addressing it, an autobiographical note might be helpful. I joined the staff of the AAUP fresh out of law school in 1967. Over the next five years, I dealt with over a thousand complaints of violations of AAUP policy involving hundreds of institutions. I later served as AAUP’s general counsel, arguing to the courts for the normative role of AAUP policy, some of whose successes have been noted above. I chaired Committee A for a decade and then served it in a variety of other roles for another decade. In all, after a half century of intimate involvement, I believe I have a pretty good sense not only of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses but also of the unique and irreplaceable role it came to play. That said, the AAUP is not now what it was even a decade ago. I believe the academic community would be ill served were it to allow the AAUP to sail under false colors.

Return to the two pressures the AAUP had long resisted. Of distortion worked by the influence of organizational ends: in the 1970s, the AAUP allowed its campus chapters to become collective bargaining representatives. Some AAUP leaders at the time thought this would compromise the AAUP’s credibility. For decades, however, that did not happen. The Association was able to wall off its local activism from the deliberations of Committee A. The wall has now been dismantled. The AAUP has merged into the American Federation of Teachers, a step it had resisted since its founding. The current president has been nothing if not clear about the course the refashioned AAUP will chart, that it

cannot exist primarily to write reports and statements and conduct research on higher ed. . . . These are important, but they must be used as tools toward the goal of aggressively organizing academic workers of all types across the country.4

The distortion of principle for organizational ends has not yet been evidenced, even as Committee A now labors under that cloud. Not so the role of exogenous ends. The AAUP has been attacked for actions that the critics claim have abandoned academic freedom for other social or political goals that the organization values more.5 That is the question presented here.

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The AAUP statements that the critics have taken on should be considered in detail, not for the result alone but for the manner of reasoning—in fidelity to principle and in the cogency of reasoning. The most salient are three in which the AAUP has: (1) absolved criticism of Zionism and Israel of any taint of antisemitism; (2) abandoned its prior position that systematic participation in the boycott of Israeli universities could threaten academic freedom; and (3) declared that adherence to the dictates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as a condition of faculty retention is consistent with academic freedom.

These actions confirm the critics’ conclusions: they reveal a body now driven by considerations other than fidelity to principle or even thoughtful analysis. As a result, the deep well of communal respect has been drained dry; the AAUP’s credibility exists no longer. This leaves the academic community bereft of that still small voice of principle that calls it to account, and it denies the courts a respected resource.

Racism and Antisemitism

In 2023, Committee A published a statement, “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism.”6 It took a Florida law on racism as illustrative of efforts by “partisans” on the “Far Right” to distort history, to “invert the very meaning of racism,” to scrub a “now innocent nation of responsibility for ongoing racist or settler-colonial violence” in the “guise of protecting students from harm.” It then disparaged Florida’s law on antisemitism for treating criticism of Israel and Zionism under that head. The statement did not deal with the statutory text on race, but it did the text on antisemitism.

Of race: The Florida law defines as wrongful, as race discrimination, “to subject any student . . . to instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, implicates, or compels such student . . . to believe” any one of eight listed precepts. That, for example,

1. Members of one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to members of another race, color, national origin, or sex.

. . .

3. A person’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.7

At first blush it is not easy to see that declining to promote, advance, or espouse these odious precepts inverts the meaning of racism or “scrubs” a guilty (or by virtue of the law, a “now innocent”) nation of its historical responsibilities for “ongoing racist or settler-colonial violence”; nor is that lack of clarity dispelled by condemning the motives of those “partisans” who sought the law—and what law is not sought by its partisans?—who are accused of using the law as a “guise” for these nefarious purposes by cloaking them in what facially would certainly seem to be acceptable ends.

The significance of the personal attack on the law’s proponents, a jarring departure from Committee A’s historical practice, is more than a matter of style. Committee A has assigned personal blame for academic wrongdoing to academic administrators when the investigation in a particular case might require it, as that would be in the nature of the case; but it has not done so in the political realm. Committee A has functioned there as an arbiter of the principles implicated by political action, not as an adversary engaged in ad hominem polemics against the political actors. Even as the AAUP challenged the constitutionality of the loyalty oath, it never impugned the oath’s supporters.

In fact, the Florida law suffers from the same infirmity the AAUP saw in the loyalty oath and argued before the U. S. Supreme Court, with which the Court agreed. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents,8 the subject professors had to swear that they will not “willfully and deliberately advocate, advise, or teach the doctrine” of the desirability of the forceful overthrow of the government. The AAUP argued that these restrictions were an unconstitutionally vague infringement on the freedom to teach, which it claimed to be constitutionally protected. The Court agreed:

[D]oes the statute prohibit mere “advising” of the existence of the doctrine, or advising another to support the doctrine? Since “advocacy” of the doctrine of forceful overthrow is separately prohibited, need the person “teaching” or “advising” this doctrine himself “advocate” it? Does the teacher who informs his class about the precepts of Marxism or the Declaration of Independence violate this prohibition?9

Equally, does a teacher violate Florida’s law by exposing students to instruction that unlawfully “advances,” “implicates,” or “espouses” the precept in Prohibition 1 by assigning a speech by Louis Farrakhan in a course on contemporary social movements; or in Prohibition 2 by assigning an article from Der Stürmer in a course on modern German history? The First Amendment and academic freedom analyses and consequences are identical in both.

It should make no difference that the partisans for Florida’s law might claim to address the state’s racial divisions by shielding students from any racial affront in the classroom, any more than the partisans for the loyalty oath might claim to buttress academic freedom by assuring that students are taught by professors whose minds are free from the dictates of a foreign power. Whether driven by an expressed laudable aim or a surreptitiously reprehensible one, these laws are to be condemned on the ground that the AAUP argued and that the Keyishian Court accepted:

The Nation’s future depends up on leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.”10

It is well that this lesson be learned anew; but no more need be said. As the wrong is a matter of fact, not of motive, the statement does a disturbing disservice by an implicit message that motive might matter. This motif recurs in the committee’s later engagement with DEI.

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Now, of antisemitism: The Florida law was oddly convoluted. It required that public institutions of higher education treat antisemitism the way they treat racial discrimination, by which logic an institution that ignores the latter can ignore the former. Further, as the expression of antisemitism is a matter of free speech, it is far from clear what Committee A’s address adds once the First Amendment is put in play. Nevertheless, the committee did choose to address the law, the bone of contention being its definition of antisemitism as including speech concerning the state of Israel. The statute defines “Examples of anti-Semitism related to Israel” as including:

1. Demonizing Israel by using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazi, or blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions.

2. Applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, or focusing peace or human rights violations only on Israel.

3. Delegitimizing Israel by denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist.11

However, consistent with the law’s treatment of institutional responsibility as triggered only by discrimination, it goes on to provide that “criticism of Israel that is similar to criticism toward any other country may not be regarded as anti-Semitic.”

In terms of classroom instruction, the evil in this law is the same as the prohibition of subversive teaching in the 1960s: that a teacher of modern European history must be allowed to use the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as much as The Communist Manifesto, when germane to a course of instruction in, say, modern European history, such being the nature of the freedom to teach. The instructor should be equally free to post on her social media that she endorses the Damascus Protocol of the First Palestinian Congress of February 10, 1919. As it would have allowed only “Arabicized” Jews resident in Palestine to continue to reside there, her post would maintain that only their descendants should be allowed to remain. Such would be an exercise of her freedom of political speech as a citizen.

There the matter should have rested. Instead, Committee A dove into a controversy over the definition of antisemitism. It points to the text of a document, “The Jerusalem Declaration,” drafted by a “group of scholars” from several countries in counterpoint to a document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and praises the former for “seeking a clearer definition . . . [of antisemitism] that does not blur the distinction between antisemitic speech and political critique of Israel and Zionism” (emphasis added). In other words, it is Committee A’s position that there is a clear, unblurred distinction between antisemitic expression and political critiques of Israel and Zionism, which it would be wrong to conflate.

Professor Steven Lubet of the Northwestern University School of Law pointed out the threshold difficulty that Committee A “has no expertise in defining antisemitism.”12 He is correct. Nothing in Committee A’s experience equips it to address the question; in its entire history no case, policy document, or report has ever dealt with antisemitism, save for the singular 1939 report on the dismissal of a Jewish professor of bacteriology by Saint Louis University for his support of the loyalist government of Spain—and then only glancingly.

Consequently, when Committee A decided to weigh in on what antisemitism “is,” the committee was out of its institutional depth. As a result, it maintains that there is an unblurred distinction in what is widely recognized to be inherently blurred. That reality is captured with clarity by Anthony Julius in his Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (2010):

Israel is the only state in the world whose legitimacy is widely denied and whose destruction is publicly advocated and threatened; Israelis are the only citizens of a state whose indiscriminate murder is widely considered justifiable. Now, these sentiments are both sufficiently irrational and sufficiently serious in their practical implications, to merit urgent, considered reflection. And during the course of that process of reflection, the pondering of the relation between the history of anti-Semitism and the datum of Israel as the Jewish State is bound to arise. When reflecting upon the character of contemporary Israel-hatred, then, the question of anti-Semitism cannot be avoided.13

Consider the Florida law’s first example, the use of an anti-Jewish image to denote the State of Israel. There are troves of cartoons worldwide that do just that. One of the more innocuous, from a newspaper in Qatar (November 6, 2023), appears below. In it, a newspaper headline, “The World Implores Israel to Stop the Aggression in Gaza,” is read by a caricatured laughing Jew, with the Israeli flag on his hat.

The trope of the smiling Jew stands in a direct line of descent from the famous poster for the infamous Nazi film Jud Süß to Viktor Orbán’s poster of George Soros in the last Hungarian election. Without doubt, the cartoon makes a political statement about Israel. Without doubt, it uses an anti-Jewish slur to do it.

A year after the Committee A statement on antisemitism and racism, Stanford University created a body to study and report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias on its campus. It, too, noted that different definitions of antisemitism were in contention when speech critical of Zionism and Israel is involved—three definitions, in fact. But unlike Committee A, the Stanford committee took counsel from reality: “Regardless of which definition one prefers, the very fact that there are three definitions divided by how they regard the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism illustrates the near impossibility of splitting one clearly from another.”14 No notice was taken of the AAUP.

There is more. Committee A’s statement on antisemitism and racism maintains that once criticism of Israel is taken out of the picture, nothing remains:

[W]hile the growth of antisemitism is a severe threat, it can and should be addressed under existing civil rights laws as religious or race discrimination.

As Professor Lubet has also pointed out, no law deals with antisemitism as such other than Florida’s badly crafted stab at it. Consequently, anti-Jewish action has to be brought under one or both of the only categories that extant law allows—namely, race and religion—though even these cannot capture all of what is involved, as David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: A History of a Way of Thinking (2023) so rigorously explores. Yet this state of affairs is taken by Committee A to obviate the need to think any further or deeper.

Let us step back to take the statement as a whole. It declares that antisemitism on campus, which it claims to be distinct from and not to be blurred with criticism of Israel or Zionism, is a growing and severe threat, but it declines to explore the nature of the threat, to examine its sources, or to consider why it is growing. It then concludes that inasmuch as existing law dealing with discrimination on grounds of race or religion is adequate to deal with a threat it neither defines nor examines, nothing more need be said or done. This from a body heretofore held in high regard for its “thoroughness and scrupulous care.”

The Boycott

Committee A’s engagement with the call to boycott Israeli universities proceeded in two phases: a declaration four-square in opposition, followed nineteen years later by an about-face. Before the latter is considered the former should be laid on the page.

1. Opposition

In 2005, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) called on its members not to cooperate or collaborate with two Israeli universities. The resolutions drew international attention. In response, Committee A placed the matter on its agenda and the professional staff was asked to prepare a draft statement based on established policy for the committee’s consideration. The staff’s two-paragraph draft, which the committee adopted, condemned the AUT’s resolutions and called for their repeal:

Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas.15

As the controversy continued, the committee responded by appointing a subcommittee to take a deeper dive. The subcommittee’s 2006 report, “On Academic Boycotts,”16 canvassed the issue in greater depth and in light of the texture of AAUP policy and experience. It set out a taxonomy of boycotts: “economic,” intended to injure the target financially; “symbolic and cultural,” intended to stigmatize the target, which might nevertheless have adverse consequences on third parties, for example, on the earning capacity of writers and artists; and “academic,” which “strike[s] directly at the free exchange of ideas.” Even as an academic boycott might call for non-cooperation only at the institutional level, leaving individuals to their own devices, it “inevitably involves a refusal to engage in academic discourse with the teachers and researchers” housed in the targeted institutions.

The report’s conclusion was categorical: “we oppose academic boycotts,” albeit by institutions, not by individuals. The nature of what was opposed was further refined, for even as individuals are free to decide not to cooperate with foreign scholars or their institutions, when these individuals act collectively and the refusal “takes the form of a systematic academic boycott, it threatens the principle of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend”; that is, in effect, such group action could come within the ambit of what Committee A opposed. However, the distinction between allowable individual and disallowed systematic group action was not further explained, nor was the line between them explored. It should have been. In the event, that obvious lacuna was not addressed in the committee’s later action, even as the position on it was explicitly reversed.

2. The Volte-Face

There matters stood until the summer of 2024, when the then Committee A approved a statement that expressly “supersedes” the position adopted nearly two decades before. The new “Statement on Academic Boycotts”17 explained its raison d’être: that the 2006 position “has been controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom. We therefore believe that this position deserves reconsideration and clarification.”

The justification is disingenuous. Academic freedom has been “controversial” and “contested” ever since it was first demanded, yet that has never been taken to require reconsideration. As we have seen, the statement on racism and antisemitism has been soundly criticized, yet the committee has not reconsidered it.

This leaves the assertion that because the 2006 position has been “used to compromise academic freedom,” it should be reconsidered. That could provide a valid reason were it to mean that the 2006 report has been used to justify the threat or imposition of discipline. But the report makes no mention of there being any instance, in press accounts or complaints brought to the staff, of any faculty member having been disciplined or threatened with discipline simply for advocating for the boycott. On closer inspection, however, one sees that the assertion is not that the 2006 report has led to violations or abridgments of academic freedom, but rather that it has been used to “compromise” it. This must mean something other than a violation or an abridgment, but the 2024 statement breathes no hint of wherein that “use” resides.

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As we cannot find a guide to the meaning of “used to compromise” in the 2024 statement, we are compelled to look elsewhere. The chair of Committee A, Professor Rana Jaleel, essayed the notion earlier, in an article entitled “Teaching Palestine,”18 which appeared in the AAUP’s journal in 2016. We cannot know whether her thinking played a role in what the committee meant by “used to compromise,” but her essay is the only document we have that could shed light on it.

Professor Jaleel pointed to legislation that disallows the state and its universities from doing business with businesses that observe the anti-Israel boycott or that require entities under legislative control, such as university pension funds, to divest from such businesses—in effect, laws that boycott the boycotters. She called on the AAUP to “push back” against these and all other laws that, she says, “cast any critique or less than favorable academic assessment of the Israeli state as discriminatory.” She demands this pushback “in the name of academic freedom.”

The sense seems be that legislative directives of this sort, even if at a remove from campus life, have the capacity to create an on-campus atmosphere so inimical to those who favor the boycott as to chill or, to use the 2024 statement’s phrase, “compromise” advocacy for it. In other words, what the AAUP said in 2006 has to be reconsidered because advocates for the boycott have been put at a forensic disadvantage.

The argument concerning legislative chill is logically flawed and empirically unsupported. By its logic, were the state to accede to the demands of the BDS movement and divest university investments in companies that do business in Israel, those faculty members who oppose the boycott and wish to say so would have had their academic freedom “compromised.” The only way that would not be the case would be to maintain that advocacy for BDS is protected by academic freedom while advocacy against it is not.

Nor is there any factual basis for the claim that such legislation has actually “been used to compromise” academic freedom in that chilling sense. Illinois law, for example, directs its state university retirement system to decline to invest in companies that observe the anti-Israel boycott and to divest from those that do.19 Yet at the University of Illinois, the BDS movement shows no sign of abatement.

Nevertheless, on these sinking sands the 2024 statement proceeds to ground a syllogism. The major premise: that violations of fundamental human rights abound across the globe, denying the right to life, liberty, religion, and much else. The minor premise: when faculty deploy the academic boycott against institutions of higher education in these countries in order to end or ameliorate these abusive conditions, academic freedom is not infringed. The conclusion: individual faculty members should be free to “make their own choices regarding their participation.”

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The conclusion would seem to be in keeping with the 2006 report’s recognition, in contrast to a boycott by a university, of “the right of individual faculty or groups of academics not to cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions with whom or with which they disagree.” The difference lies in the fact that the drafters in 2006 took up the necessary next question: if individuals or groups have a privilege to decline to cooperate with foreign institutions, may they do so “systematically,” as, say, an entire departmental faculty, even as they declare it to be a personal, not a departmental, action? If the institutional/individual distinction is to be maintained, that question cannot be avoided, and the 2006 report did not. It addressed that question in the sentence that follows the allowance of individual action: “[W]hen such noncooperation takes the form of a systematic academic boycott, it threatens the principles of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend.”

The 2006 report did not comment on what it took for the effort to be wrongly systematic, where the line will have been crossed. Even as more was needed, the sense of it seems to be this: a department may not adopt a statement that as a department it condemns Israel as a “racist, colonial, apartheid state” and declares non-cooperation by the department with any Israeli university, institute, or academic program, even as members of the department may announce non-cooperation individually. But if nearly the whole of the department’s faculty join as a group in a common pronouncement of non-cooperation, the 2006 report would seem to see it as a systematic boycott, one in which the whole is larger than the sum of its individual participants—it being of no moment that the collective statement is accompanied by a statement that its signatories are not speaking or acting for the department. Absent more in the 2006 report, this would seem to be the sort of systematic boycott the report disallowed: that the department was not identified as the actor is a distinction without a difference. The impact on students—undergraduate and graduate, present or prospective—who wish to pursue academic work in Israel, or on incumbent or potential faculty members who wish to engage in collaborative projects there, would seem to be as much as if the department had acted in its name. The group pronouncement would bear much the same chilling effect that Professor Jaleel claimed rendered anti-boycott legislation wrongful, save that here the impact drenches the entire department from within, whereas legislation stands at a considerable remove outside of it.

The 2024 statement declines to address the 2006 treatment of the systematic boycott directly, but it does so by indirection, and emphatically:

Committee A therefore holds that individual faculty members and students should be free to weigh, assess, and debate the specific circumstances giving rise to calls for systematic academic boycotts and to make their own choices regarding their participation in them. [emphasis added]

This choice is asserted to be a matter of academic freedom.

More on the grounding in academic freedom in a moment, but it pays to stress that the “therefore” is preceded by no engagement with the 2006 report’s reservation, nor accordingly is any attempt made to reconcile the 2024 statement’s explanatory grounding for the need for change—to dispel the “compromising” (or chilling) effect the opposition to the boycott allegedly has had—with the 2006 report’s opposition to the systematic group boycott apparently predicated on that very ground.

The 2024 statement then extends academic freedom to participation in a specific kind of boycott. Unlike the taxonomy of boycotts given in 2006, the 2024 statement would seem to distinguish a primary boycott, an infliction of economic or reputational cost imposed on an actor to sanction the actor’s wrongful action, from a secondary boycott, where a party that has done no wrong is made a target of financial or reputational harm because it has a relationship to the wrongfully behaving actor in order to pressure the non-actor to pressure the wrongdoer.

The 2024 statement first embraces the secondary boycott full-throatedly and then retreats from it without a word acknowledging that it is doing so or explaining why. It starts out by reciting a litany of fundamental human rights violations in global terms and states that faculty can support a boycott to “advance the . . . fundamental rights [from ‘arbitrary arrest or detention,’ etc.] of colleagues and students who are living . . . under circumstances that violate . . . one or more of those rights”; that is, faculty can engage in secondary boycotts of institutions housed in countries whose governments violate rights against arbitrary arrest, detention, etc., for no reason other than that they are housed there and that these violations affect faculty and students. But in its concluding sentence, the 2024 statement would restrict academic freedom to participation in the primary boycott:

Academic boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends. [emphasis added]

The statement makes no effort to connect the two assertions: It says that individuals should be free to boycott on their own account per se, which fairly implies they may support a primary or a secondary boycott, but especially the latter in light of the litany of human rights abuses it recites that cannot be attributed to the targeted universities—arbitrary arrest and detention, for example. But it then says that academic freedom extends only to participation in a primary boycott. The way it reads, a professor has the academic freedom to engage in a systematic primary boycott, but not a systematic secondary one, without a word to explain why as a matter of academic freedom that would be so.

A secondary boycott, if allowable, could rest on findings of human rights violations by the Israeli government adequately documented by well-respected neutral bodies. The targeted universities need not be shown to have engaged in any wrongdoing. Not so the primary boycott. If Israeli universities are to be boycotted for their discrimination against Arab students and faculty—a matter of much controversy20—the nature and extent of that wrongdoing should be found sufficient to justify the action. Unlike the process of AAUP investigation, wherein wrongdoing would be the subject of inquiry, the launching of a systematic primary boycott need not be founded on any process to assure the accuracy of the allegations, nor does it provide any opportunity for the targeted institution to defend itself. The issues of accuracy and fairness inherent in the primary boycott pass without Committee A’s notice.

Nor did the 2024 statement attempt to explain how academic freedom applies. The 2006 report saw the boycott as “threatening” the freedom of “free communication,” i.e., the liberty of academic collaboration that the AAUP’s core document—the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure—assured. That rationale could not apply to the reverse, to participation in a boycott. If academic freedom applies to participation, it would have to be grounded in the 1940 Statement’s protection for political speech; but that liberty draws no distinction between a primary or secondary target inasmuch as both are matters of political expression and action.

Suffice it to say, the freedom of political expression, no less than of disciplinary and intramural expression, is subject to ethical norms: professors do not “discriminate or harass colleagues,” says the AAUP’s Statement on Professional Ethics,21 and they “respect and defend the free inquiry of associates,” no less in political speech than in addressing intramural issues. The 2006 report objected to the systematic group boycott apparently on the ground that, akin to a boycott by the university, a systematic group boycott threatens (or “compromises”) the capacity of colleagues freely to decide what academic collaborations were best suited to their research and teaching. The 2024 statement emphatically rejects that reasoning, without a word of explanation.

Let us step back to take the statement as a whole. In 2024, Committee A chose to reconsider a matter it had previously addressed in categorical terms anchored in the 1940 Statement’s guarantee of the freedom to research and teach. The reasons given for reconsideration are threadbare, at best. The result is a tangle of inconsistencies and begged questions, with no reference to—let alone inquiry into—the role played by freedom of research and teaching, on which the committee’s position rested a generation before.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

A number of universities have adopted policies governing faculty appointment, retention, and promotion geared to a sociopolitical end, i.e., to achieve “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). These policies would seem to rest, expressly or tacitly, on the fact that the student population served by the institution includes members of numerous minority groups, some long ignored, slighted, or discriminated against societally and, possibly, by the institution itself, and that it should be part of the university’s mission to address what it conceives to be these groups’ needs and aspirations. That end is to be achieved by requiring every faculty member, as a condition of employment, retention, or promotion, to further that aspect of the institution’s mission in their teaching, research, and service. Toward that end, every candidate for reappointment, tenure, and promotion is to submit a statement explaining—and, for incumbent faculty, detailing—how, as one such policy puts it, the individual has “facilitated a diverse and equitable community in your teaching, mentoring, outreach, research, and/or service.”

On January 21, 2025, well after Committee A addressed the compatibility of DEI with academic freedom, President Trump issued an executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” directing federal agencies to dismantle DEI policies. The executive order did not define what DEI meant, but it required institutions of higher education that receive federal funds and that participate in federal student loan assitance to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023). It is not clear at present what more these institutions are expected to do beyond complying with the law. The interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, has gone much further. He has demanded that Georgetown University’s law school discontinue instruction involving DEI.22 It should be the case as a matter of constitutional law that the federal government cannot coerce universities to coerce their faculties in teaching when their teaching is germane to a subject of instruction and adheres to professional standards of care and ethics. That, however, need not be pursued here. Committee A did not address the legal aspects of DEI policies. It took up the policy’s compatibility with academic freedom. So shall we.

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To its advocates, DEI is well within the prerogative of a university, especially when acting congruently with the sentiments of its faculty, to emphasize that aspect of its mission and to implement it in that way. To its critics, a DEI statement is parlously close to a loyalty oath and in execution is inimical to academic freedom. As Ralph Fuchs, a former AAUP president, put it while the loyalty oath controversy raged, even giving due allowance for the institution’s prerogative to chart its mission—“the essentiality of autonomy for academic institutions”—the “core of the matter” remains the “freedom of individual faculty against control of thought or utterance from either within or without” the institution.23

Had Committee A taken up DEI in keeping with its customary process of policy consideration in such a weighty matter, it would have: assembled the data on what these policies actually provided, how widespread they were, and how they were being administered; engaged with the arguments on the relationship of DEI to academic freedom in the literature and in the deliberations of faculties, including those that refused to go down that road; and provided a clear, dispassionate analysis of how DEI stacked up against the 1940 Statement’s commitment to freedom of research, teaching, and political engagement. It did nothing of the kind. Instead, it launched an aggressive defense of DEI, accompanied by a strident attack on its critics, in all of six paragraphs and three conclusory recommendations. Each bears brief synopsis before the substance of the statement is addressed.24

1. The DEI Statement in Summary

The first paragraph recites the AAUP’s support for affirmative action, which includes the promotion of diversity not only in the composition of the faculty but also in the production of knowledge, of opening “entirely new vistas of inquiry that were not possible without it” (emphasis added).

The second paragraph folds DEI criteria into this “broader vision,” thereby allowing “DEI criteria in faculty evaluation,” including the use of statements that “require faculty members to address their skills, competence, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service” (emphasis added). It notes an AAUP survey in 2022 indicating that 21.5% of four-year institutions have included DEI criteria in their tenure policies and that another 39% were considering it.

The third paragraph notes the objection to DEI on academic freedom grounds. The response then reads in its entirety: “This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom” when “implemented appropriately” in accordance with “standards of faculty governance.”

The fourth paragraph goes on at length to explore the role of the faculty in setting and applying standards for faculty performance and evaluation. It argues that DEI is in keeping with that traditional role when the policy is faculty-approved.

The fifth paragraph attacks critics of DEI who use “sweeping or abstract criticism” of it to misrepresent, “often deliberately,” what it really does, which, to repeat, is to ensure “teaching, research, and service that responds to the needs of a diverse global public” (emphasis added). Faculty members are free to voice dissent, but “when an appropriate larger group”—a faculty committee, one would assume—adopts an “educational policy” by which an individual’s performance is measured toward these ends, the policy must be adhered to.

The sixth paragraph pursues the critics of DEI with greater vehemence. These are treated in the same fashion as the “partisans” criticized in the 2023 statement on racism and antisemitism: that attacks on DEI have gone “hand in hand with partisan efforts to restrict or ban” the teaching of some subjects and that

attacks on DEI have played an integral part in the partisan political playbook to turn back the clock on advances that have been made toward the goal of diversity in the faculty, student body, and areas of study.

The statement concludes with three recommendations: that DEI can be declared to be part of the institution’s mission; that faculty should be involved at all stages in developing the policy; and, critically, that “[m]eaningful DEI faculty work should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.”

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Before addressing the statement’s rejection of DEI’s incompatibility with academic freedom when “appropriately implemented,” the manner in which the statement sets the stage should be noted: it stresses widespread acceptance; it denigrates those who are of a contrary mind; and it places dispositive weight on faculty approval. Let us look to each.

The statement starts out by noting the extent to which DEI policies have been adopted or considered for adoption; but it declines to note that the same staff report also found that over 39% of the institutions surveyed had decided not to consider such policies, nor that several months before Committee A issued its statement, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard rescinded its DEI policy, as did MIT. The reasons for Harvard’s and MIT’s actions were never inquired into, let alone addressed.

The attack then impugns the motives of those critical of DEI. They are not named, but some might be noted. In August 2022, the Academic Freedom Alliance, scarcely a partisan for the repression of teaching, issued a statement in opposition to DEI.25 Committee A declined to acknowledge it. Brian Leiter, a distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, also scarcely a partisan for the repression of teaching, found fatal fault with DEI on constitutional grounds, which Committee A declined to note.26 The author, who would like to believe he is not a partisan for the repression of teaching, unpacked the University of Illinois’s DEI policy on academic freedom grounds the year before Committee A spoke; but this, too, was ignored.27 Shortly before Committee A acted but with ample time for it to take into account what was said, David Rabban of the University of Texas Law School, a former chair of Committee A and AAUP general counsel, published a comprehensive work on academic freedom and the First Amendment—Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (2024)—that provided just the sort of dispassionate assessment one would have expected of Committee A; he concluded that, on balance, the opponents had the better of it.28 Rabban is not a partisan for repression of teaching. Committee A took no note of his work.

The statement then makes faculty approval of the policy key to its endorsement of DEI. For academic freedom purposes, faculty approval is and should be irrelevant; the heavy reliance placed on it is fraught with mischief. As a matter of sound institutional governance, faculty are accorded a primary role in the development and adoption of educational policies bearing on instruction, research, and faculty status; a faculty is accordingly expected to understand and respect academic freedom. But faculties can and have failed in that regard.29 When one does, Committee A’s role is to correct the error, and it has.30

It is worth noting that a number of faculty members subject to the loyalty oath supported it, and a larger number were indifferent.31 The AAUP did not consider the depth of faculty support for the loyalty oath vel non to have any bearing on the academic freedom consequences of it. The reason is that the abridgment of academic freedom is a matter of fact irrespective of the status or motive of those effecting or acquiescing in it. The way Committee A has cast it, a DEI policy identical in every word would or would not abridge academic freedom depending only on the ideological or political proclivities of a majority of a bare quorum of “an appropriate larger group.” Faculty liberties cannot be made to hang by so precarious a thread. It should be enough to say of the right to exercise academic freedom what the Supreme Court said of the right to exercise freedom of thought and speech: it depends on no majority, it hinges on the outcome of no vote.32

2. DEI and Academic Freedom

The most arresting feature of the DEI statement is that although it cabins the acceptability of a DEI policy to its “appropriate” implementation, it says nothing, not a word, to inform the reader of what that “appropriate” implementation is or would be. What does appear from the text of these policies is that DEI functions in a two-step process. First, those groups qualifying for DEI treatment must be identified: some, but not other races (Black, but not white?); some, but not other religious affiliations (poor rural evangelicals, but not wealthy urban high church Episcopalians?); some, but not other ethnic origins (Mexico, but not Poland?); some genders, but not others (heterosexual females, but not heterosexual males?); and so on. Teaching, research, or service involving groups not meriting DEI designation will not be accorded DEI credit. As the Stanford report on antisemitism observed, this binary formulation reduces “complex social and political phenomena to slogans in utter contradiction to the university’s mission of critical inquiry.”33

Second, while it might be enough to teach and research regarding a designated group, when it comes to service activity, engagement on a designated group basis would be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for DEI credit. The specific engagement must further interests that those who administer the policy find concordant with the goals they set—not of diversity alone, but of equity and inclusion as well. Most often one would coincide with the other, but not invariably.

Before pursuing that, what academic freedom means in relation to these obligations should be briefly addressed. The 1940 Statement assures the instructor freedom of teaching and research. The freedom to teach, Edward Shils observed,

means the freedom to teach in ways which the teacher regards as effective as long as respect is shown for the rules of reasonable discourse, for the dignity of the student, and for general rules of propriety.34

The critical point is that the pedagogical choices to which the freedom attaches—selection of the materials to assign, of illustrations and examples to emphasize, of questions to explore—are for the instructor to make in exercise of her professional judgment.

So, too, of the freedom to research. In his 1972 annual report as president of Yale, Kingman Brewster characterized the guarantee of this liberty as a reflection of the “inner direction” of scholarship, asserting that scholars should be

guided by their own intellectual curiosity, insight, and conscience. In the development of their ideas they should not be looking over their shoulders either in hope of favor or in fear of disfavor from anyone other than the judgment of an informed and critical posterity.35

What Theodore Caplow and Reece McGee said in the midst of the last century retains its vitality today:

The ideal of academic freedom includes the assumption that men [and now women] working on the fringes of established knowledge will often dissent from the truths of the majority, will appear unreasonable, eccentric, or disloyal, or will be unable to explain to others their motives for pursuing a particular line of effort.36

It is, as Abraham Flexner put it in 1939, the right to pursue “useless knowledge” geared to no external measure.37

The DEI obligation has to be mapped onto these core liberties. In some disciplines it is conceivable, even likely, that the instructor’s free choice of teaching matter and research subject will coincide or overlap with a group given DEI designation—e.g., in urban sociology, criminology, health policy, etc. As such an instructor would secure DEI credit for doing what she otherwise would, there would be no compromise of her academic freedom. Some disciplines have no DEI connection—particle physics, theoretical mathematics, geochemistry. Instructors in these fields are compelled accordingly to satisfy DEI requirement by service activities if they wish to be retained; more on that below. There remain disciplines in which researchers and teachers could add a DEI component, though doing so would be contrary to their professional judgment. Consider an instructor in musicology fascinated with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s idea that a composer might “have a special message for his own people,” as he had put it, and who chooses to pursue what Williams meant by a deep engagement with his work. She has no interest in William Grant Still—or Bedřich Smetana, for that matter. Not that Still (or Smetana) would be unworthy of study, but he is not the composer of her intense and singular interest. Unless she alters her research design or course material to satisfy her DEI obligation by paying “enough” attention to him or a like minority composer, in keeping with the institution’s roster of accepted DEI designations—possibly including Smetana if being Czech qualifies for diversity designation—she would be required to compile a satisfactory compensatory dossier of extracurricular DEI service in order to secure tenure.

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It pays to stress that the pressure she and all others in similar situations face is a political one. Nothing in musicology tells her that unless she includes a composer from a designated racial or ethnic group, she would be derelict in teaching or research, and even less that she might suffer the loss of her position for the failure to do so. It is the “new vista” that DEI adds, not “possible otherwise” precisely because it is not founded in any disciplinary dictate or tenet: it is made “otherwise possible” by an institutional mandate.

Those unable or unwilling to adjust their research and teaching to secure DEI credit have no alternative but to engage in approved DEI-related service activities, intramurally or in larger civil society. Here, too, what is credited vel non reveals the political nature of the policy and the infringement on freedom it causes.

Most institutions include “service” as a component of faculty evaluation. Inasmuch as universities rely on faculty to perform many administrative functions, commonly in committee, an incumbent’s willingness to perform these tasks is taken to be part of the obligations of office. Service can be counted as well by the incumbent’s activities in extra-institutional disciplinary bodies and the like that add stature to the individual and luster to the institution. The idea of service for DEI purposes is far more encompassing: it includes participation in outreach efforts on campus or in the larger community, all manner of civic engagement geared specifically to advance the goals of DEI. This abridges the freedom of political and civic association, or non-association, irrespective of any further parsing of the obligation.

Nevertheless, such a parsing is instructive. Assume our geochemist, unable to compile a record of DEI activity in research and teaching and so needful of a DEI record in civic outreach, concludes that the goals of Marcus Garvey’s long-neglected Universal Negro Improvement Association would have solved the American Dilemma had it been pursued, and thus seeks to establish a campus chapter. As that effort would address an approved racial group, it would seem to be worthy of DEI credit; but as the movement’s goal is to repatriate African Americans, albeit voluntarily, this civic engagement would be unlikely to receive DEI credit due to its failure to meet the “inclusion” requirement.

Assume, our musicologist, unable to complete a satisfactory DEI dossier in research and teaching, takes an interest in a poor, rural, evangelical sect and seeks better to integrate its adherents into mainstream society by persuading the sect’s young women to pursue a higher education. The instructor learns that a tenet of their belief is the total rejection of abortion, which the instructor must accept and advocate if she is to gain the group’s trust. Even though her civic engagement is in support of the female members of a marginalized religious group, she would be denied DEI credit because the end she sought, by denying women reproductive choice, would be inconsistent with the “equality” component of DEI.

If the DEI policy means what it says, that every faculty member subject to it must satisfy the DEI obligation as a condition of retention, the university must lose what all in the field agree are promising scholars destined for remarkable achievements, not for want of excellence in research in any way, nor for want of excellence in teaching in any way, but for failure to satisfy the institution’s political agenda.

Let us step back to take the DEI statement as a whole. Committee A has endorsed a policy that allows professors to be put to a Hobson’s choice: either compromise their judgment in teaching or research, or engage in officially approved political or ideological expression and association. In public universities it is difficult to conceive that this could possibly withstand constitutional muster, nor can it be reconciled with the 1940 Statement’s assurance of professional and personal liberty. Committee A flatly “rejects” that conclusion, but it does so without any engagement with the 1940 Statement, the source of its authority; in fact, the 1940 Statement makes no appearance in this document. Instead, the committee attributes its support to the “needs of a diverse global public” without a moment’s reflection on the fact that if academic freedom can be sacrificed on that altar, the door is opened to any authority vested with legal control of the institution to declare what those needs are and to condition faculty retention on fulfilling them.

It seems inevitable that sometime, somewhere, one or more instructors will be not be reappointed for no other reason than the failure to satisfy a DEI requirement. It seems equally inevitable that at least one housed in a public university will contest the decision on constitutional grounds and, in that event, that the AAUP will appear before the court as amicus curiae. In that case, it would be expected that the AAUP will address the court much along this line:

We appear before this court as the repository of a century’s thoughtful engagement with the meaning and significance of academic freedom, to bring our considered judgment, expressed in the statement on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation,” to the court’s attention and to argue in support of it.

To which the only frank response a court could make is: “You are the successor in title; but no longer in principle, spirit, or scrupulous care.”

Matthew W. Finkin is the Swanlund Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize, honorary doctorates from three European universities, and the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académique conferred by the government of France for his work in comparative labor law. He is the co-author, with Robert Post, of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2009).

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues • Israel Initiative

Canada has always struck me as a country innocently surprised by its own complexity. Its seemingly polite veneer disguises a fragile federation, stitched together despite pronounced regional affinities, two official languages, vast physical breadth, and a growing number of Canadians without deep roots in this country, like me. Those who do have familial roots that go back have been encouraged to feel guilty about the manner of Canada’s creation.

These multileveled conflicts explain Canada’s existential jitters, which came suddenly to the fore when Donald Trump trolled Canada with the suggestion of turning it into the 51st state. Columnist John Ivison warned that the country is “drifting rudderless toward the falls,” while journalist Jen Gerson questioned whether Canadians have the stomach for sacrifices to maintain their sovereignty. Andrew Coyne noted that Canadians recoil from the idea of joining the United States but struggle to articulate what, precisely, holds the Canadian project together.

Underneath it all lies the complex truth about the impact Pierre Trudeau and his son Justin Trudeau have had on Canada—more specifically, on English Canada, the cultural locus of the deep anxiety. Neither Pierre Trudeau’s nor Justin Trudeau’s idealistic blueprints have settled Canada’s contradictions. That’s because both men, with their very different personalities, tried to leapfrog the painstaking, incremental process of forging a stable federation out of a country with not much history or a founding myth. (This does not mean that, without them, Canada would have found a surer path to a less fractured federation.)

My friend and the founder of Telos, Paul Piccone, spent much time thinking about Canada in the 1990s. He would most likely agree that both Trudeaus—unintentionally—eroded the very sovereignty they presumed to strengthen. That’s certainly what he thought of Pierre Trudeau. Piccone believed that top-down gestures such as official multiculturalism risked hollowing out Canada’s “real” cultural and political structures. Yes, inclusivity can be noble. But if it is not backed by robust local institutions and realistic policy frameworks, the confederation starts looking like a house of cards—vulnerable to sudden gusts of global upheavals.

It’s easy to imagine a future. It’s very hard to manage the day-to-day trials of unaffordable housing prices, contending with growing debt, or facing an American president who flirts with 25-percent tariffs on Canadian exports.

For much of the past century, the Liberal Party managed that complexity with a studied caution reminiscent of William Lyon Mackenzie King’s unspoken motto: “Don’t overdo things.” This oddball among Canadian prime ministers understood that a country with vast spaces and a small population—which King described as having “too much geography and not enough history”—is not one that can be easily fashioned into an ideal.

Yet every once in a while, Canada’s political steering wheel ended up in the hands of a prime minister named Trudeau determined to remake the country—first Pierre Trudeau, then his son Justin Trudeau. Different eras, different styles, but a shared ambition to reshape Canada’s very identity. Again, this primarily pertains to English Canada. And that ambition, not so ironically, edged the country toward the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in today.

When he came to power in the late sixties, Pierre Trudeau’s admirers saw a man forging a bold new destiny, one that unmoored Canada from its stodgy Loyalist traditions. As David Frum has written recently, Pierre Trudeau had “overdone things.” His attempt to transform Canada into a top-down, rationalist project—asking Canadians to forego their English and French affinities and embrace multiculturalism—proved too sweeping, too ahistorical, too dismissive of how deeply regional identities run in this country.

Nearly three decades later, Justin Trudeau arrived in office with what appeared to be an opposite approach: less austere, more empathetic, exuding emotional inclusivity and a “sunny ways” optimism. Yet beneath the difference in style lies a similar will to remake Canada in line with a personally held vision. Pierre Trudeau was the intellectual; Justin Trudeau the empath. Both believed, however, in the power of federal leadership to inspire a unified national field theory. While Pierre Trudeau recast Canada through the introduction of multiculturalism and, a decade later, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Justin Trudeau conjured a “post-national” Canada defined by moral leadership, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and diversity galore. In effect, father and son each tried to coax English Canada away from its older Loyalist reflexes—deference to tradition, respect for hierarchies, and incrementalism—and toward something more transformative. Hegel would describe both their strivings as emblematic of a “beautiful soul.”

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the “beautiful soul” is someone who is certain of their own purity or moral stance—so certain, in fact, that they shy away from the messy realities and compromises involved in truly acting in the world. A “beautiful soul” dwells in a realm of ideals but often fails to come to terms with the friction of actual politics, material interests, or human fallibility. Both Pierre and Justin Trudeau, each in his own fashion, can be read as Hegelian “beautiful souls” in the sense that they’ve operated with visions of Canadian identity and moral progress—yet both have encountered, and sometimes sidestepped, the unavoidable complexities of governing.

There’s a similarity in that each man wanted Canada to stand for something bigger than itself. Pierre Trudeau championed rational liberalism—bilingualism, multiculturalism, and constitutional reform—that diminished the monarchy’s symbolic role. Justin Trudeau, guided by a progressive moral sensibility, centered on apologies for the inevitable historical clash between modernity and nature-bound traditions, championed diversity, and codified land acknowledgments as a version of a national anthem. In different registers, father and son attempted to transcend Canada’s inherited structures, urging us to look forward to a newly minted national ideal. But they also shared an inescapable dose of narcissism: each was so sure that his personal worldview could reorder Canada that the messy realities of confederation (Western alienation, Quebec nationalism, or lagging levels of productivity and innovation) came second to rhetorical ambitions.

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Cracks appeared quickly in both projects. Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program stoked resentment in Alberta and beyond, damaging Western trust in Ottawa for a generation. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau’s flurry of social reforms—laxer sentencing laws (often labeled “restorative justice”), expansive immigration targets, and turning the Canadian armed forces into a feminist project—collided with spiking criminality, opioid crises, and a housing shortage that leaves many Canadians priced out of major cities. Although the younger Trudeau did not orchestrate these policies alone, he gave them moral force. He framed them as part of a higher, more compassionate Canada, one in which old boundaries no longer apply. It was, in spirit, the same “do too much” approach that bedeviled his father.

Both father and son epitomized a drive to reimagine Canada from the top down, counting on personal charisma to smooth over complicated realities. Yes, they both championed progressive values: Pierre Trudeau with his unwavering confidence in rational liberalism, Justin Trudeau with his high-profile embrace of equity and reconciliation. But these values only carried them so far before colliding with the practical demands of a confederation that prefers its changes slow and steady.

Hence, Canada finds itself at a cul-de-sac. The “beautiful souls” in power extended the country’s horizons but also left it overstretched and unsure of the path forward. If Pierre Trudeau’s approach taught the Liberals to “never overdo things again,” Justin Trudeau’s might be repeating the same cautionary tale in a different key. Polling suggests disillusionment. The father faced a knockout defeat in 1984; the son is now stepping aside as Liberal leader under historically low approval ratings. And neither Mark Carney nor Chrystia Freeland—the two main aspirants to become leaders of the Liberal Party—has what it takes to turn Liberal fortunes around.

Maybe the question is whether we can rediscover the humbler instincts that once anchored Canadian governance. True, that cautious style can slip easily into complacency. Canada must find a way to matter in the world beyond proclaiming its desire to be good. And so we stand, suspended between paternal intellectualism and filial moralism—between the sense that we must do something big and the fear that big attempts risk fueling national breakdown.

In the end, father and son were more alike than either might have admitted: each believed his own vision could remake Canada; each ended up straining the seams of this complicated confederation. That push and pull is our Canadian cul-de-sac—a place where the hunger for grand, quick transformation collides with the reality of a country built on slow, delicate negotiations. Perhaps we’ll emerge from this impasse by learning how to keep ambition alive without ignoring the cautionary voices that whisper, “Don’t overdo things.” And maybe we’ll realize that both Trudeaus, for all their differences, have shown us the perils of skipping the hard work of forging unity one patient step at a time.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Wodek Szemberg was a member of the Toronto Telos Group in the 1970s. For the next forty-odd years he was a TV producer with TVO, a provincial educational broadcaster. He is now a freelance writer and is also producing a documentary series entitled “The End of Sex”