It’s been rather longer than a week since I last published one of these, but I’ve been distracted by a combination of writing, travel planning, and various projects, and meanwhile my collection of articles that I thought were worth sharing has grown considerably. So this is something of a catch-up edition.

Not surprisingly, quite a few of the pieces concern Ukraine. Some remarkable reporting has emerged over the past few days about Elon Musk’s role in restricting the satellite communications systems on which Ukrainian forces depend. That story, combined with the administration’s increasingly peculiar approach to negotiations with Russia (Witcoff this past week to Putin while Putin is blowing up civilian apartment buildings in Kyiv: “You are a humanitarian….sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again”), raises questions that go well beyond the conduct of the war itself. What kind of people are actually making American foreign policy? Who gets to decide how military capabilities paid for by American taxpayers are used? And what happens when the interests of private companies and the responsibilities of the United States government become almost impossible to separate?

There’s also some interesting reporting from the Western Balkans, a provocative argument about whether business schools should even exist that was first flagged to me at a dinner party last week, and, for a change, an interview with one of my favorite crime novelists. I’ve also added a couple of recommendations for fellow devotees of detective fiction and British crime television (a personal obsession of mine; I just finished all seasons of Endeavour and am diving into Dagliesh now.)

📖 Articles of Interest

• I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down. (The New York Times)

• Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine (The Wall Street Journal)

• Siding With Putin Is a Huge Mistake (The Atlantic)

• Ukraine Can Turn Imminent Peril to Its Advantage (Foreign Affairs)

• Trump’s Opponents Are Planning Efforts to Reverse His Changes to the Presidency (The Washington Post)

• Containing Escalation in the Black Sea (Carnegie Europe)

• Revealed: Serbian Ruler’s Secret Role in ‘Illegal’ Effort to Help Trump Business (The Guardian)

• Montenegro Moves to Settle Croatia Disputes Threatening Its EU Membership Bid (Euronews)

• Writer Donna Leon: ‘I Don’t Want a Lamborghini. I Have an Orchestra’ (Financial Times)

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📖 Articles of Interest

1. A story about why a professor at one of the world’s leading business schools thinks we should consider closing them all.

   I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.

   Chris Marquis, The New York Times, October 18, 2026

   Chris Marquis teaches at Cambridge University’s business school, which makes his argument that we ought to shut down business schools rather more interesting than it might otherwise be. His complaint isn’t just that MBAs have become ridiculously expensive, or that their graduates sometimes leave school with an inflated sense of their own self-worth. It’s that business schools have spent decades teaching an approach to management that places shareholder returns above almost everything else, with consequences that extend well beyond the companies their graduates eventually run. While I’m not entirely persuaded that closing business schools is the answer, having earned an MBA myself and definitively NOT gone into a profit-maximizing field, it strikes me that there ought to be a way to teach people to manage businesses without instilling in them the belief that the principal purpose of a corporation is to extract as much value as possible for its shareholders. Still, Marquis raises an important question about the values we embed in institutions that train people for positions of enormous influence.

2. A story about what happens when you cross a ketamine addict with exclusive power over a global satellite internet empire and an existential conflict.

   Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine

   The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2026

   This is one of the most disturbing stories I’ve read in quite some time. The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk (contrary to his denials) personally ordered restrictions on the Starlink and Starshield satellite communications services used by Ukraine’s military, disrupting the operation of Ukrainian drones, including systems used to intercept Russian attacks. Ukrainian officials have been left scrambling to determine who made the decision and why. What makes the story even more extraordinary is that the explanations coming out of Washington and SpaceX have been completely contradictory.

   Musk denies acting independently; others indicate that the decision was discussed with White House officials. Senior administration officials and Musk have all been rather mealy-mouthed about the whole situation. Regardless of who ordered it (and I struggle to believe the White House AND Musk didn’t agree to it) I find the larger implications almost incomprehensible. The United States has helped Ukraine develop an essential military capability that depends on technology controlled by a single private company. That capability can apparently be restricted at a moment’s notice, with potentially lethal consequences for Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, while the government and the company point fingers at each other.

3. A story about why the Trump administration is making a disastrous mistake in its approach to Russia.

   Siding With Putin Is a Huge Mistake

   David J. Kramer, John Herbst and William Taylor, The Atlantic, October 18, 2026

   David Kramer, John Herbst and Bill Taylor, who have spent much of their careers working on Russia, Ukraine and the broader region, make a forceful case that the Trump administration’s latest decisions are not simply misguided diplomatic tactics but serious strategic mistakes. Their argument is fairly straightforward: Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia continues to attack Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure, and Russia has shown little genuine interest in ending the war on terms that would preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty. Yet Washington is relieving pressure on Moscow while simultaneously increasing the pressure on Kyiv.

   They argue for tougher sanctions, substantially greater military and financial assistance to Ukraine, and a much more aggressive approach to using frozen Russian assets. A negotiation involves trying to change the incentives of both parties. This administration’s approach increasingly appears to involve accepting Russia’s position wholesale, requiring Ukraine to make massive concessions while asking remarkably little of Moscow in return. At some point a negotiating strategy that consistently imposes costs on one party and offers benefits to the other will completely collapse in on itself.

4. A story about whether a limited energy ceasefire could actually strengthen Ukraine’s position rather than simply give Russia an opportunity to regroup.

   Ukraine Can Turn Imminent Peril to Its Advantage

   Eric Ciaramella, Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2026

   Eric Ciaramella makes a new and interesting argument about the possibility of an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, asking how it might be structured to preserve Ukrainian leverage and impose genuinely reciprocal obligations on Russia. With Russia systematically attacking Ukraine’s electricity and heating infrastructure, and with another winter approaching, the consequences for Ukrainian civilians could be devastating.

   Ukraine, however, has also developed an increasingly effective capacity for inflicting real pain back on Russia by striking its oil refineries and other energy infrastructure. A ceasefire that prevents Ukraine from exploiting that advantage while leaving Russia free to pursue other means of coercion would be a very different proposition from one that genuinely constrains both sides. Nor would an agreement mean much without some credible means of verifying compliance and imposing consequences for violations. While I’ve been skeptical of the administration’s enthusiasm for partial ceasefires precisely because the details matter so much, Ciaramella offers a useful reminder that a negotiated pause doesn’t have to be a concession to Russia.

5. A story about whether Democrats can repair the institutions of government if they regain power—or merely inherit the extraordinary authority Trump has accumulated.

   Trump’s Opponents Are Planning Efforts to Reverse His Changes to the Presidency

   Naftali Bendavid, The Washington Post, October 4, 2026

   With the midterm elections approaching, most of the attention has naturally focused on which party will control Congress. A rather more consequential question is what Democrats would actually do with that control. This article examines proposals being developed by Democratic lawmakers, legal experts and government-reform organizations to reverse some of the changes Trump has made to the presidency and prevent future presidents from exercising the same powers. The ideas include tightening restrictions on emergency powers, limiting the ability of presidents to impose tariffs unilaterally, protecting the independence of the Justice Department, strengthening civil-service protections, and addressing conflicts of interest. Some would require legislation that could be extremely difficult to enact with Trump still in the White House.

   There are also important differences between what a Democratic House could accomplish through oversight and investigations and what would require the support of both houses of Congress, or a new president. What I find particularly interesting is the distinction between stopping a president from doing something and changing the laws and institutions that allowed him to do it in the first place. There is a temptation to think that simply electing a different president will restore the system to its previous condition. I feel that’s simply no longer possible. I also recall the reluctance, once the Democrats ousted Trump in 2020, for the Biden White House to accept curbs on its executive privileges. I hope those who resisted installing guardrails on the executive after Trump have learned their lesson.

6. A story about how Russia is testing NATO’s willingness to defend its own territory without provoking a direct confrontation.

   Containing Escalation in the Black Sea

   Dimitar Bechev, Carnegie Europe, October 20, 2026

   Dimitar Bechev examines the increasingly dangerous situation in the Black Sea, where Russian attacks on commercial shipping have spilled into Romanian and Bulgarian waters. Bechev makes the important point that Russia is exploiting the space between hostile activity and the kind of unmistakable armed attack that might force NATO to consider invoking Article 5. The alliance has to determine how to respond to incidents that violate the sovereignty of member states but fall short of a conventional military attack. He explores practical possibilities, including expanding maritime monitoring and mine-clearance operations involving Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as strengthening air policing over the Black Sea.

   The Black Sea has received considerably less attention than other parts of the war, particularly in the United States. Bechev explains why that may be a mistake.

7. A story about what happens when political power, foreign investment, and the business interests of an American president’s family intersect.

   Revealed: Serbian Ruler’s Secret Role in ‘Illegal’ Effort to Help Trump Business

   Tom Burgis, The Guardian, October 15, 2026

   In the run-up to Serbia’s October 25 parliamentary elections, Tom Burgis has produced a remarkable investigation into Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s personal role in efforts to remove heritage protections from the former Yugoslav General Staff complex in central Belgrade, which ostensibly cleared the way for a proposed development associated with Jared Kushner and the Trump family. The building, damaged during NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign, has enormous historical and symbolic significance in Serbia. According to the reporting, senior heritage officials were pressured to remove its protected status and resigned rather than do so. The affair has resulted in criminal charges against senior Serbian officials, although Vučić himself has not been charged. Kushner and representatives of the Trump family deny involvement in the alleged wrongdoing. The project has been abandoned, at least for the time being.

   The story is disturbing on several levels. There is the alleged willingness of Serbian officials to override legal protections in order to accommodate a politically connected foreign investor. There is the question of why a project linked to the American president’s family received such extraordinary attention from the Serbian government. And there is the broader problem of what happens when a foreign government has reason to believe that cultivating the private business interests of people close to the American president may improve its political standing in Washington.

8. A story about how an EU member state can use the accession process to settle bilateral grievances that have little to do with whether a candidate country is ready to join.

   Montenegro Moves to Settle Croatia Disputes Threatening Its EU Membership Bid

   Luca Bertuzzi, Euronews, October 19, 2026

   Ever since EU member states stood by while Bulgaria blocked North Macedonia’s accession process, I have been worried about how these bilateral disputes in the Balkans will play out during EU enlargement. While Montenegro has made substantial progress toward joining the European Union and hopes to become a member in 2028, Croatia has now presented eight outstanding bilateral grievances that it wants addressed before Montenegro can complete the accession process. Many concern the wars of the 1990s, including missing persons, property claims and unresolved border questions. Germany has intervened to encourage a settlement, concerned that another round of bilateral disputes could derail enlargement.

   These are not necessarily illegitimate concerns, but the EU has a recurring problem when individual member states use their veto powers to block enlargement to extract concessions on questions that are bilateral in nature and only tangentially related to the accession criteria. The irony is that the European Union insists, quite reasonably, that candidate countries strengthen the rule of law, create independent institutions and establish predictable procedures for making decisions. Yet when a candidate has met those requirements, an individual member state can still introduce additional political conditions that were never part of the original bargain. That’s a difficult system to defend, particularly when the EU itself argues that enlargement is a strategic imperative.

   1. A story about a bestselling crime novelist who left Venice, avoids modern technology, and would rather spend her money on Baroque music than luxury cars.

      Writer Donna Leon: ‘I Don’t Want a Lamborghini. I Have an Orchestra’

      Financial Times, 2024

      And now for something completely different. When I was working in the Western Balkans in the late 1990s, I would often find myself in the (then much smaller) Vienna airport browsing through newsstands and bookstores to idle away wait times between flights. That’s where I first discovered the author Donna Leon. Her novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti remain my favorite crime mysteries to this day. Leon gave a wonderful interview to the Financial Times a couple of years ago that I stumbled across while searching on the internet for a reason why a new Brunetti book hadn’t appeared last year. (Every year for over 25 years, a new one appeared each March.)

      Leon lived in Venice for some thirty years before the sheer volume of tourists persuaded her to move to Switzerland. She still returns regularly, and Venice remains as much a character in her novels as Commissario Brunetti himself. But she has little patience for the changes mass tourism has brought to the city. Nor, for that matter, does she have much enthusiasm for modern technology. She doesn’t use a mobile phone or social media, avoids electronic payments, and prefers printed newspapers and books. There is something very appealing about a successful writer who seems almost completely uninterested in the usual trappings of success. Leon comes across as someone who has worked out what she actually enjoys and organized her life around it. That strikes me as a considerably better use of success than spending one’s time trying to demonstrate it to everyone else.

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✨ A Few Things I'm Looking Forward To

📚 Books | Louise Penny’s Miss Wolcott’s Ghost

Since we’re on the subject of crime fiction, Louise Penny published her twenty-first Armand Gamache mystery, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost, on October 20. It begins with a mysterious telephone call directing Gamache to a body in an abandoned cemetery in the forests around Three Pines. I’ve followed this series for years, and I’m looking forward to returning to the peculiar little Quebec village that seems to have an improbably high murder rate.

📺 Television | Blue Lights

And for those who enjoy British detective television, the fourth series of Blue Lights has premiered in the UK. Set in Belfast, it follows ordinary police officers trying to do their jobs amid organized crime, lingering sectarian divisions and the institutional complications of policing in Northern Ireland. What I particularly like about the premise is that it isn’t simply a matter of solving a crime each week. The characters are operating in a place where history and politics are never very far away, even when they’re dealing with what ought to be routine police work.

The Guardian called it one of television’s most thrilling police dramas. If you haven’t come across it, it may be worth starting with the first series.

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Recent Snakes & Ladders

Previous Weekly Notes

An estimated 300,000 people came out to demonstrate for change in Belgrade in March 15, 2025, culminating in a nighttime gathering at Trg Slavija in the center of the city.

ON OCTOBER 25, SERBIAN VOTERS face a choice: continue with the same party that has dominated politics for 14 years, or opt for a new, but as yet undefined, direction.

When Aleksandar Vučić returned to Novi Sad on October 16 for his first major rally there since the city’s train-station disaster nearly two years ago, some of the supporters in the crowd waved flags bearing the face of Ratko Mladić.

Just weeks earlier, General Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, died in prison in The Hague. The Serbian government, while stopping just short of granting him a state funeral, nevertheless supplied most of the trappings. The Justice Minister accompanied Mladić’s body home on a government aircraft, soldiers carried the coffin draped in the flags of Serbia and Republika Srpska from the plane, and a military commemoration followed at the House of the Army.

Thirty-one years after the massacre of more than 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica for which Mladić was ultimately held responsible, the use of his image at an election rally speaks volumes about the choice Serbia faces on October 25. It is not simply a vote for or against one politician or party, but rather a test of the political system Vučić has built, and of whether Serbia is prepared to move on from it.

Vučić resigned the presidency in September to lead the Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, into parliamentary elections and seek a return to the prime minister’s office. Under his leadership, the SNS has dominated Serbian politics since 2012. Over those years, Vučić convinced many European and American officials that Serbia’s stability depended on him. They also treated him as indispensable in managing Kosovo and keeping Serbia at least nominally on a path toward EU membership. That bargain has become increasingly difficult to defend.

The protests began after a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed on November 1, 2024, killing 16 people, including a five-year-old girl. The station had recently undergone an extensive and apparently shoddy renovation as part of a Chinese-backed rail project. For many Serbs, the collapse was not simply a construction failure. It was the foreseeable result of opaque contracts and institutions that bent to political pressure.

The protesters who took to the streets in the aftermath of the tragedy—often referred to as “students” because of their core organizers, although they actually include people from all walks of life—demanded something quite basic. They wanted to know what happened and who was responsible, and organized the largest demonstrations in Serbia since 2000 to demand answers. Vučić responded by accusing them of working for unnamed foreign powers and deployed all the tools at his disposal to thwart their efforts. Protesters faced arrests, surveillance, police violence, and attacks by organized groups of government supporters. Nearly two years later, while some officials downstream of the senior SNS leadership have faced criminal proceedings, the public still lacks a convincing account of how the disaster happened and who was responsible.

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A proposed $500 million real estate development in Belgrade between the Serbian government and business interests close to President Trump provides another window into how this system works. Jared Kushner’s investment firm received a free 99-year lease to redevelop the former Yugoslav General Staff headquarters, a protected modernist complex damaged during NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Serbian officials first had to strip the site of its legal protection. Those who resisted were sidelined or forced out. Prosecutors later alleged that an expert opinion used to justify the decision had been forged. The Culture Minister, Nikola Selaković, and three other officials are now facing trial on charges related to the deal, including abuse of office and falsifying documents. Meanwhile, Kushner’s firm has abandoned the project.

An investigation published by The Guardian last week added a crucial new detail: Vučić himself reportedly summoned heritage officials to the presidential palace to press them to remove the protection, insulting and haranguing them until they resigned or acquiesced. Despite evidence of his direct involvement, however, Vučić has not been charged. Whatever the motives behind the deal, it raises the question of whether Serbian institutions can uphold legal protections when politically favored projects are at stake. The affair also raises a larger question about how Serbia is governed.

Now Serbian voters must decide whether the system that has produced such controversies should continue. There are plenty of reasons to question whether they will be allowed to decide this freely. International observers have expressed concerns about hostile rhetoric, voter intimidation, surveillance, problems with electoral rolls, and obstacles facing citizens voting abroad. The OSCE has said several priority recommendations issued after Serbia’s troubled 2023 election remain unaddressed.

The “Student List,” as the main opposition grouping is commonly referred to, has nevertheless mounted the strongest challenge Vučić has faced in years. Its candidates come from outside the traditional party system, and its campaign has concentrated on corruption, public accountability, and the rule of law. It has managed to displace most of the “traditional” opposition parties, which have grown increasingly ineffectual and have been hemorrhaging credibility after years of infighting.

Despite the appeal of their calls for transparency and accountability, the Student List has yet to answer some fundamental questions about the direction it wants to take the country in.

The movement brings together pro-European liberals, conservatives, nationalists, academics, activists, and others joined by little more than their desire to end SNS rule. It has been much clearer about what it opposes (first and foremost corruption) than about how it would handle relations with the European Union, Russia, Kosovo, the United States, and Serbia’s neighbors. Replacing Vučić could open up Serbia’s political system, but it would not necessarily give the country a more pro-European government.

A Student List victory would answer the immediate question of who governs Serbia, but not what follows. It could use its mandate to rebuild democratic institutions, pursue reconciliation, and put EU membership back on a credible footing. Or it could confront Vučić’s corruption while leaving much of his nationalist politics untouched.

A student-backed government would still have to turn a successful protest movement into a functioning administration. The Democratic Party, the Green-Left Front, the Movement of Free Citizens, and the People’s Movement of Serbia all stood aside. Their members include former legislators, diplomats, and local officials whose experience could be useful. The students should draw on it without handing their movement back to parties that voters have largely stopped trusting.

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Dragan Djilas and the remaining rump of the traditional opposition are making a different calculation. His Party of Freedom and Justice joined Serbia Centre and Solidarity on a separate “European Serbia” list. Djilas says his list gives voters an explicitly pro-European option and could cooperate with the students after the election. That may be true. But the traditional opposition’s weakness, and the baggage carried by several of its leaders, helped create the opening that the students have now filled.

Serbia is not the only one facing a choice. After the election, Europe will have one of its own.

Serbia has already received substantial benefits from the EU. By the Serbian government’s own accounting, EU funds and investment since 2000 have exceeded €7 billion. That includes €1.54 billion in pre-accession assistance between 2014 and 2020, more than €872 million between 2021 and 2024, and another €139.4 million approved in 2025. Serbia has also been allocated nearly €1.6 billion in grants and favorable loans under the EU’s 2024–2027 Growth Plan; €167.6 million had been released by May 2026. Money is only part of the relationship. The EU buys more than 60 percent of Serbia’s exports. Serbian citizens have enjoyed visa-free short-term travel to the Schengen area since 2009, and Serbia has held candidate status since 2012. Brussels has considerable leverage, but it has rarely been willing to use it.

When EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos canceled a planned visit to Belgrade after Mladić’s death, she said the “glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built.” European governments have nevertheless continued to accommodate Vučić as Serbia’s democratic institutions deteriorated. Vučić’s indirect assistance to Ukraine has made European governments more reluctant to break with him, even as he cultivates China and preserves Serbia’s ties with Russia.

Brussels should make clear before the vote that violence or electoral manipulation will carry consequences. Future assistance should depend on reforms Serbia has completed, not promises its government has repeatedly made. Visa-free travel should not be treated as untouchable. A new government that makes a serious turn toward democracy and Europe should find the EU ready to respond. If Serbia chooses continued authoritarianism and nationalism, European taxpayers should not be asked to finance the pretense that it is moving in the opposite direction.

October 25 may end the Vučić era. It will not settle whether Serbia is ready to leave the politics of grievance behind, or whether the Student List intends to lead the country toward Europe. Brussels should judge Serbia by what comes next—and stop paying for promises it no longer has reason to believe.

ONE OF THE THINGS the past two years of the second Trump administration has exposed very clearly is just how many supposedly independent institutions in Washington were never really independent at all. Instead, they were wrapped in a veneer of custom, bipartisan courtesy, and the assumption that presidents would not use every lever legally or arguably available to them to try to coopt, take over, or destroy them.

The problem is fundamentally structural. Congress may have sought to create nominally independent institutions but it literally handed crucial control points—boards, leadership, funding, property or administrative machinery—over to the executive branch.

The United States Institute of Peace is the clearest example. Congress created USIP as an independent institution, yet in 2025 President Trump removed most of its board, moved to replace its leadership, ordered the takeover of its partially privately funded headquarters, and attempted to dismantle much of the organization before the courts could even determine whether any of these measures was lawful. A federal judge later ruled that the takeover was illegal, but significant damage had already been done.

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The Inter-American Foundation (IAF) and U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) had a different weakness. Their boards were presidentially appointed. Once those boards were removed or displaced, the administration could move rapidly against the institutions themselves. At IAF, officials attempted to terminate almost every grant, place most employees on leave and reduce the organization to a shell. USADF faced a similar effort.

The Wilson Center was vulnerable in another way. Ostensibly part of the Smithsonian Institution and set up to honor the memory of President Wilson, an executive order issued on March 14, 2025, directed the center to reduce itself to its minimum statutory functions, and most of its programming stopped. Its president, former Ambassador Mark Green, resigned shortly afterward and a member of the Center’s senior staff was elevated to lead it. The Center later resumed a more limited set of programs and fellowships under a narrower research agenda.

With the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—an institution that had long been above the fray of everyday DC politics—a board heavily dependent on presidential appointments was simply reconstituted. The new board elected Trump chairman and replaced the institution’s leadership. The current drama surrounding the future of the Kennedy Center doesn’t need to be recounted here, but suffice to say there are real questions about its future after measures were taken to close the facility for “renovations.”

These examples all differ legally, but taken together they raise the same question: Why do we continue to call institutions “independent” when a president can, if he or she so desires, seize control of them by replacing their boards, cutting off their money or using executive machinery to disable their operations?

The old rules no longer work. Congress cannot simply restore the old arrangements—it needs to redesign them.

The problem with OMB

One of the most powerful tools in the hands of the executive branch in its battle with Congress over appropriations today is the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Ironically, it is a weapon that the legislative branch essentially handed the president. In light of an ever-growing appetite by both parties, when in control of the White House, to expand executive power, it is time for a serious rethink of this arrangement.

OMB was never intended to serve as a presidential gatekeeper over congressionally appropriated funds. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 created the Bureau of the Budget to help the president pull together a unified budget for an increasingly large and complex federal government.

Congress first required federal appropriations to be apportioned in 1905, largely to stop agencies from spending too much early in the fiscal year and then returning to Congress for additional money. Initially, however, those controls remained within the agencies themselves.

The decisive change came in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt, using reorganization authority Congress had delegated to him, transferred responsibility for making and modifying apportionments to the Bureau of the Budget, which he eventually moved into the newly created Executive Office of the President in 1939. Congress explicitly gave the Bureau responsibility for apportioning executive-branch appropriations when it rewrote the Antideficiency Act in 1950, formally entrenching the centralized system. After Richard Nixon reorganized the Bureau in 1970, that authority rested with OMB.

Congress eventually acted to limit presidential control over appropriated money through the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which stated that presidents could propose rescissions but were prohibited from simply refusing to spend appropriated funds. But while retaining the power of the purse on paper, Congress still delegated to the executive branch significant control over the pipes through which appropriated money actually flowed.

All this history matters. OMB’s power over the pace of spending is not an inherent presidential power. Congress created the apportionment system, permitted it to be centralized in the executive branch, and later codified that arrangement in law. So what started off as a management solution has increasingly become used as a tool to steer policy. GAO has repeatedly warned that OMB cannot use apportionment authority to substitute executive policy preferences for Congressional appropriations decisions, yet under Trump OMB has become even more assertive in this space.

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Fund institutions directly

One obvious response is to flip around the whole presumption surrounding apportionment. Instead of assuming that most appropriations are subject to OMB apportionment unless Congress carves out an exception, appropriations should become available upon enactment unless Congress specifically authorizes OMB to control their timing.

There are still plenty of cases where apportionment makes sense and in those cases it should be retained—payroll, procurement, multiyear programs and large operating budgets, for example. But not every appropriation requires that kind of executive management. Where Congress has directed a fixed amount to a specific institution or purpose, there is no reason for OMB to retain discretion over when—and certainly not whether—the money is released.

One possible starting point could be the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Congress could appropriate funds directly to NED and require Treasury to transfer the full amount within a defined period after enactment without subsequent policy review by the State Department. This would essentially eliminate even the implication that OMB has discretion about whether the funds should be released. Treasury would simply need to execute the law.

Let’s be clear: that wouldn’t make NED immune from political accountability. Congress could still cut future appropriations, amend NED’s charter, or abolish it entirely. The difference is that any of those decisions would require deliberate legislation.

A president is always free to oppose an appropriation—either not sign it, or if already approved, ask Congress to repeal it. Once spending has been enacted into law, however, the president cannot unilaterally refuse to carry it out simply because he disagrees with it.

For institutions that are meant to survive political cycles, Congress should also consider true endowments. This is not an especially novel idea. Universities and cultural institutions operate this way because long-term missions are difficult to manage when an organization has to renegotiate its existence every year. (NED has endowment in its name, even though technically it doesn’t really operate as one.)

Congress could capitalize a fund with a large initial appropriation, with the principal invested under statutory rules and a percentage of earnings going towards support for the institution each year, perhaps alongside annual congressional appropriations.

For democracy assistance, that could mean a true endowment supporting NED and its core institutes: the National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, Center for International Private Enterprise and the Solidarity Center. A similar construct could be considered for USIP or other congressionally created organizations whose missions are designed to extend beyond an individual presidential term.

The purpose would not be to shield them from Congress. Future Congresses would remain free to amend the statute or change the funding. The purpose would be to prevent a president from making an institution financially unviable without congressional acquiescence. That seems like a reasonable threshold.

Practical, common-sense changes

Governance of some of these organizations needs to change as well. If an organization is not an instrument of executive power, there is no obvious reason its board should be appointed by the president or dominated by presidential appointees.

The Kennedy Center is a classic example. Why should the president appoint most of the trustees of the national performing arts center? That arrangement stemmed from bipartisan presidential commitment (Eisenhower and Kennedy) support for the founding of the institution, but it has not held up well in recent years. President Trump has turned it into his personal chew toy and is now, essentially, running it into the ground.

A better model could look more like a university board, with one representative of the executive branch, one for Congress, and the remainder independent trustees serving long, staggered terms. New members could be selected through a nominations process run by existing trustees and outside members, with requirements designed to ensure ideological and professional balance.

This model doesn’t work for every organization. Some institutions exercise powers that constitutionally belong to executive officers, and the Supreme Court in recent years has sharply limited Congress’s ability to insulate those officers from presidential control. That said, many of the organizations we are talking about are not executive agencies at all. The mistake may have been handing excessive discretion to the executive branch as a courtesy, when what Congress actually intended was to create independent public institutions.

Any organizations receiving public money should still be subject to regular GAO audits. Their finances, senior compensation and board membership should be public, and ethics standards should be clear. Grantmaking should be transparent except where disclosure endangers recipients. Congress should require periodic reauthorization of institutional missions and would need to restrict a board from changing its institution’s statutory purpose or disposing of major assets without congressional approval.

The point is not to create organizations beyond the reach of democratic government, but rather to make a distinction between congressional accountability and presidential control.

There is another weakness in the current system: enforcement takes too long. If an administration withholds money in January and litigation lasts until the next fiscal year, Congress can be legally vindicated after the program has already disappeared. That is not an effective remedy.

Congress should give the Comptroller General clear standing to seek immediate judicial relief when the GAO determines that appropriated funds are being unlawfully withheld, and those cases should receive expedited review. If funds are scheduled to expire while the legality of an impoundment is being litigated, the money should remain available until the case is resolved. Otherwise delay itself becomes a backdoor way of circumventing Congress’s prerogatives.

The same issue arises with rescissions. A president should be able to ask Congress to cancel spending that the administration believes is unnecessary, but it should not have the power to decide this unilaterally. If Congress does not approve a rescission, the appropriation remains law and has to be executed. A rescission proposal should not function as permission to hold the money until it expires. In the past, there have been plenty of instances where funds simply could not be spent and were returned to the Treasury. But this is not the same as deliberately withholding spending on programs the executive branch disagrees with, until the time runs out for the money to be expended.

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Don’t just rebuild

At some point there will be a serious effort to reconstruct institutions damaged or gutted by the Trump administration. The easiest, but most mistaken, approach would be straight-off restoration: recreating the former boards, restoring old appropriations, rehiring staff and restarting programs. Some of that will be necessary, but restoring the old structures without taking advantage of the opportunity to make changes would ignore an important lesson.

The system has relied too heavily for too long on norms that were never written into law and on executive restraint that cannot safely be assumed anymore. Congress should look institution by institution at the powers it has left with the executive and ask: Can the president remove the board? Can OMB prevent appropriated money from being released? Does an executive agency have to approve a grant to an institution Congress specifically funded? Can political appointees change an institution’s bylaws or dispose of its property? Can a president effectively shutter an organization before courts determine whether the action was lawful?

Those questions should be answered deliberately in advance. Some organizations obviously still belong firmly within the executive branch and should be subject to presidential control. But others were created precisely because Congress wanted them to have a degree of independence from ordinary executive politics. For those that fall into that latter category, Congress will need to reform them or rebuild them differently.

This should not be a partisan question. One argument heard from members of both parties is that limiting executive power will eventually constrain “their” president as well. That is precisely the point.

The issue is larger than any particular president. The lesson of the past two years is that institutions should be designed on the assumption that a future president can exercise every authority the law actually permits him or her. If Congress doesn’t want a president to have a particular power, it should stop giving that power away.

LAST DECEMBER, I speculated about whether we might be approaching the era of the “post-majority Congress.”

My focus was on the House of Representatives. Given the extraordinarily narrow Republican majority and the parsing of district boundaries through gerrymandering, it looked like a mere handful of independents winning seats could hold the balance in that chamber. In such a scenario, that bloc would serve as a fulcrum, well-positioned to negotiate over who would become Speaker, insist on changes to House rules, and potentially force one of the two parties into something resembling a governing coalition.

I admitted at the time that this was fairly speculative—the stuff of political scientists’ fantasies, like brokered political conventions and a deadlocked Electoral College forcing the presidential election to be decided in the House of Representatives.

Nine months later, though, I’ve found myself wondering if I had been looking at the wrong chamber.

Something intriguing, and little discussed, has been happening in this year’s Senate races in Idaho, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In all three states, Democrats have dropped out, clearing the field for mainstream independent candidates to run essentially one-on-one against Republican incumbents.

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Meanwhile, in Montana, where the Democrat has not stepped aside, we may be getting a useful comparison of what happens when the anti-Republican vote remains divided.

None of this means an independent revolution is imminent. But in the first three races mentioned above, the contests have tightened considerably, and it isn’t entirely unthinkable that even if just one of these candidates were elected, he (they are all men) could hold the balance of power depending on the composition of the Senate.

Revisiting the Fulcrum Strategy

In his 2013 book The Centrist Manifesto, Charles Wheelan proposed what he called the “Fulcrum Strategy.” His idea was not that a new centrist party would replace the Democrats or Republicans. Instead, it imagined a scenario in which a handful of senators belonging to neither major party were elected and formed a bloc. In a closely divided Senate, the support of that bloc could become crucial—even necessary—to form a majority. Rather than winning control itself, it would sit at the pivot point between the two parties.

I’ve always found Wheelan’s argument compelling, and right now it appears his theory could actually be tested in several of the reddest states in America.

Let’s start with Nebraska.

Dan Osborn nearly defeated Republican Deb Fischer in 2024 while running as an independent, with no Democrat on the ballot. He lost by roughly seven points—hardly a nail-biter, but close enough to demonstrate that an independent could assemble a viable coalition in a state Donald Trump won handily.

Now Osborn is running again, this time against Senator Pete Ricketts. Democrats again have no candidate in the race.

Although the polling has bounced around, Osborn is running a serious campaign. A SurveyUSA poll released earlier this month had Osborn at 46 percent and Ricketts at 42. In an indication that the party is taking the challenge seriously, a Republican-aligned super PAC recently announced a $1.4 million advertising buy in Nebraska. At a minimum, Republicans are being forced to spend real money defending the seat.

South Dakota is trying something similar. Democrat Julian Beaudion withdrew from the Senate race in August, leaving independent Brian Bengs—a veteran like Osborn—as the principal challenger to incumbent Republican Senator Mike Rounds. The race is still generally treated as ruby-red despite recent polling showing a surprisingly close contest. While Bengs remains a long shot, the fact that Democrats cleared the field provides the same test as Nebraska: what happens when voters in a heavily Republican state have the chance to oppose the incumbent without voting for a Democrat?

A third state running a viable independent for Senate is Montana, but there the Democratic nominee, Alani Bankhead, has refused to step down despite consistently polling behind the Republican, Kurt Alme, and the independent, Seth Bodnar, in a three-way matchup.

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Recent polling illustrates the resulting problem. A Rutgers-Eagleton survey conducted in late August and early September had Alme at 38 percent, Bodnar at 30, and Bankhead at 16; another had Alme at 44 percent, Bodnar at 24 percent, and Bankhead at 23 percent. Separate head-to-head polling has repeatedly shown Bodnar neck-and-neck with Alme, while Bankhead consistently trails him.

Another dynamic that makes GOP nominee Alme potentially vulnerable is the manner in which he was nominated. Incumbent Senator Steve Daines, who had already filed for reelection and had nearly $5 million in his campaign coffers, withdrew just minutes before the March filing deadline in favor of Alme, who filed only minutes earlier. The timing left no opportunity for other Republican contenders to enter the race and was widely seen as a handoff rather than a democratic process.

So in Montana, recent three-way polling has consistently shown Alme leading, generally with less than 50 percent of the vote. The irony is that in this case, it is the Democrat, not the independent, who may play the spoiler role.

Then there’s Idaho, again hardly a state where you’d expect to find a longtime incumbent GOP senator even remotely threatened.

Todd Achilles, 58, is a former U.S. Army tank commander who spent more than two decades in technology and business, holding senior roles at T-Mobile and Hewlett-Packard.

Juxtapose this with Senator Risch: the 83-year-old is a lawyer, rancher, and longtime politician who first won elected office as Ada County prosecutor in 1970. His professional experience was formed long before the digital economy, and he has no private-sector background in technology or the industries now driving many of the changes in the modern economy.

When Achilles entered the race, winning as an independent in Idaho seemed, to put it mildly, ambitious. The state has not elected a non-Republican to the Senate since Frank Church in 1974, and Trump carried it by more than 36 points in 2024. When Democratic candidate David Roth withdrew over the summer, Achilles became the main alternative to Risch.

Again, the polling is all over the map. Different surveys have produced dramatically different results. Still, recent polls have shown Achilles far more competitive with Risch than any recent Democrat.

The honest conclusion isn’t that Todd Achilles is going to win Idaho—yet. But we don’t really know what will occur when Idaho voters are presented with a Republican incumbent and a credible independent challenger without a Democrat occupying the other major lane. That is what makes the race worth watching.

The Independent Challengers in the Senate

This was the part in my earlier article where I pointed out the power that just a handful of independents, if they band together, could wield in resetting the playing field in Congress.

The four independent candidates are talking about doing something unusual if they make it to Washington. Achilles, Osborn, Bengs, and Bodnar have each said they have no intention of caucusing with either the Democrats or the Republicans. That would distinguish them from the Senate’s current independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, who count toward the Democratic conference for purposes of organizing the Senate.

This isn’t just rhetoric. The New York Times reported in August that Achilles, Osborn, Bengs, and Bodnar are in a group text together and have discussed forming the very “fulcrum caucus” Wheelan talked about in his book—a group potentially large enough to deny either party automatic control and use that leverage to push for changes in Senate rules and the way the institution operates.

Exactly how that would work is still unresolved: committee assignments and control of Senate machinery have traditionally been negotiated through the two party conferences. But their stated objective is clear. They won’t automatically deliver their seats to either party. Rather, they are proposing to remain institutionally independent and, if their numbers permit it, negotiate as a bloc.

Obviously, winning as an independent and governing as one are two completely different things. We have seen independent governors elected in several states in recent years; many have struggled to enact an agenda. But there may be a more compelling argument for legislative independents. In Alaska, independents and independent-minded members of both parties have helped force bipartisan coalition governments in the state House of Representatives and Senate for several sessions now.

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It is also important to note that the Senate already has “independents,” namely Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. But both caucus with Democrats. Other recent “independents” like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona broke with the Democrats officially but remained in the caucus as well.

For this fulcrum idea to work, independent senators would actually have to remain independent, but also cohesive, to be effective (provided more than one is elected, that is). In the past—for example, when the House last lacked a majority in 1917—independents could be picked off (or bought off) one by one until one party could form a majority. As soon as that majority formed, the leverage any one of them might have exercised evaporated. It was almost like a prisoner’s dilemma played out in the congressional cloakroom.

The Senate is built around the two caucuses. Committee assignments, staff resources, floor scheduling, and leadership positions all create powerful incentives to affiliate with one side. Even if several independents were elected, there is no guarantee they would act together. Osborn, Achilles, Bengs, and Bodnar aren’t interchangeable politicians.

Gamechanger?

Whether or not this experimentation with independent Senate candidates in 2026 succeeds or fails, one thing is clear: something has to change. The binary isn’t working for the country any longer. The lack of viable alternatives to one party or the other in many parts of the country means many elections are effectively decided by a relatively small group of voters in (often closed) primaries. Congressional accountability is breaking down, elected officials feel increasingly beholden to outside interests—including, in some cases, the leader of another, supposedly separate branch of government—and citizens across the spectrum feel increasingly distanced from their representatives.

American political parties have never been as permanent as they sometimes appear. Every five or six decades since 1800, we have seen a political party realignment in the United States of one kind or another: the emergence of the Republicans and the demise of the Whigs in the 1850s, the Bull Moose Party and the rise of progressives in the 1900s, and the realignment of southern Democrats to the GOP and northern Republicans to the Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s. We are on schedule for another shift, one ushered in by the capture of the GOP by President Trump.

And neither party necessarily needs to view the emergence of an independent bloc as inherently bad.

The positive influence independent senators could exert on the Republicans will depend on if and when it shakes off the party’s full-on appropriation by the Trump family. Such a bloc could help create some political space for what remains of the institution-minded Republican Party to reassert itself.

For Democrats, the potential benefit is different and more immediate. One thing the core of the Democratic Party has in common with these independents is a reverence for the Constitution and for institutions. An issue-by-issue coalition between a bloc of independent senators and the Democrats could yield progress on ethics, combating corruption in government, reinstalling guardrails to prevent executive overreach, and reasserting legislative-branch prerogatives largely forgone or ceded to President Trump by the Congressional GOP.

This would be highly beneficial for the country: any reform championed by just one party will appear partisan and will be vulnerable to immediate repeal when the other party wins power again. Durable reform requires a broader coalition than just one party, even one that holds a majority in both houses of the legislature. Independent support for—or better yet, championing of—reform could be what is needed to awaken the Republican Party from its Trump fever dream.

Maybe these independent candidates all lose. Maybe one or more wins and discovers that the institutional pull of the two Senate caucuses is stronger than the desire to remain independent. But perhaps a small bloc actually manages to stay together and exercise the leverage Wheelan imagined more than a decade ago.

Nine months ago, when I wrote about a “post-majority Congress,” I was talking about the House. That now seems less likely, but the Senate may still offer up a surprise this year.

[NOTE: The original article stated that “it isn’t entirely unthinkable that even if just one of these candidates were elected, he (they are all men) could hold the balance of power in an otherwise evenly divided Senate.” While that could in theory happen—think Senator Jeffords leaving the GOP in 2001 to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats, shifting the 50-50 balance in the Senate in favor of the Democrats—the edited language reads “…could hold the balance of power depending on the composition of the Senate.”]

There was a lot about the Western Balkans in the news this past week. Two pieces in particular stood out: Representative Keating released a report examining U.S. policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Lura Pollozhani wrote a piece for Kosovo 2.0 on reaction to the verdicts that were passed down against senior Kosovo officials for acts committed during that country’s fight for independence in the late 1990s.

Meanwhile my piece Up Schitt’s Creek Without a Paddle about Trump’s tariffs on Canada continued to generate a lot of feedback. While I think my piece was pretty clear about how wrong-headed and self-sabotaging the policies were for the United States, I can completely understand why any article even discussing the issue would elicit strong emotions. I actually visited Canada last week and while there I heard from countless people how damaging the tariffs were, particularly for small businesses, and I was repeatedly confronted with the question: if Americans don’t agree with Trump why aren’t they out in the streets? And, sadly but utterly unsurprisingly, I also heard at every turn how things could never go back to the way they were before.

I rounded out this week with articles addressing the fragility of democracy, the continued aggression against Ukraine, and the “pay-to-play” diplomacy of the President’s son-in-law.

📖 Articles of Interest

• Pay for Play in the Balkans (House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority)

• “In the Name of the People of Kosovo” Did Not Feel Like Justice (Kosovo 2.0)

• How to Protect Democracy (The New Yorker)

• Putin Would Rather Keep Killing Than Admit He’s Lost. As a Winter of Misery Looms in Ukraine, NATO Must Step In (The Guardian)

• Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy (The New Yorker)

• At Gettysburg, a Reporter Captured a Nation’s Loss, and His Own (The New York Times)

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📖 Articles of Interest

1. A story about what happens when U.S. policy towards Bosnia becomes entangled with business interests close to President Trump.

   Pay for Play in the Balkans

   House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority, Subcommittee on Europe, September 15, 2026

   Representative Bill Keating, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, released a fairly extraordinary report this week on the Trump administration’s Bosnia policy. It focuses on two decisions in particular: the lifting last year of U.S. sanctions on Milorad Dodik, his family and associates; and the administration’s subsequent advocacy for AAFS Infrastructure and Energy to receive the concession for Bosnia’s Southern Interconnection gas pipeline. The company was founded by Trump political allies Joseph Flynn and Jesse Binnall just four days after the State Department publicly expressed interest in an American company taking over the project, according to the report. Keating’s staff claims the potential concession is worth more than $1 billion.

   This is a Democratic minority report, and some of its conclusions are stated in very partisan terms, but that doesn’t make the underlying questions any less important. Bosnia is not an ordinary emerging market in which the United States can casually substitute commercial diplomacy for foreign policy. Dodik, the Office of the High Representative, state property and the Southern Interconnection are all wrapped up in the extraordinarily delicate institutional architecture created by the Dayton Agreement. For thirty years, the United States has used its leverage to reinforce that structure and prevent the country from coming apart. If that leverage is instead being used to advance a politically connected company’s billion-dollar concession, Congress ought to be asking a lot more questions about it.

2. A story about why a verdict can be legally binding and still not feel like justice.

   “In the Name of the People of Kosovo” Did Not Feel Like Justice

   Lura Pollozhani, Kosovo 2.0, September 18, 2026

   Lura Pollozhani was in downtown Prishtina as the Kosovo Specialist Chambers delivered verdicts against former KLA leaders Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi on September 16. She describes the moment when the judge began, “In the name of the people of Kosovo,” and thousands of people watching together responded with a collective “No.” What makes the piece so good is that Pollozhani doesn’t simply argue about whether the defendants were guilty. She is trying to explain why the verdicts felt so profoundly wrong to many Kosovars. The Specialist Chambers are formally part of Kosovo’s own judicial system, but they sit in The Hague and use international judges and prosecutors. More importantly, Kosovars are judging these cases against a much bigger historical ledger: the enormous number of crimes committed against Kosovo Albanians during the war and a widespread belief that, as full recognition of Kosovo’s independence is continually stymied by Serbia and war criminals like General Mladić are feted in death, accountability for many of those crimes has never come. None of that directly impacts on the guilt or innocence of the four men who were actually before the court, but it does help explain why a process intended to deliver justice can deepen, rather than resolve, a society’s sense that justice has not been rendered.

3. A story about the problems with the strategy of protecting democracy by building a wall around its enemies.

   How to Protect Democracy

   Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, September 13, 2026

   Joshua Yaffa looks at Germany’s Brandmauer, or firewall—the longstanding agreement among Germany’s mainstream parties that they will not cooperate with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. That approach becomes much harder to sustain when the party on the other side of the firewall wins nearly 44% of the vote, as the AfD just did in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt last week. I found Yaffa’s argument particularly compelling because it gets at something broader than Germany. There is an understandable tendency when democracy is under threat to focus on defending institutions and enforcing guardrails. Those things matter enormously. The problem, though, is that a firewall is ultimately a defensive strategy. It can keep an anti-system party away from power for a time; it cannot explain why voters should continue supporting the political system on the other side of the wall. Yaffa’s stronger point is that democratic parties still have to govern, persuade people and offer an affirmative political vision. Institutional defense without that eventually starts to look like a political system defending itself from its own voters.

4. A story about whether the limits NATO has imposed on itself in Ukraine still make sense.

   Putin Would Rather Keep Killing Than Admit He’s Lost. As a Winter of Misery Looms in Ukraine, NATO Must Step In

   Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, September 13, 2026

   Simon Tisdall makes an intentionally aggressive case for NATO to become much more directly involved in stopping Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. Russia is heading into another winter of sustained attacks on Ukrainian homes, hospitals, workplaces and infrastructure, and Tisdall argues that the Western response remains far too constrained. While some of Tisdall’s prescriptions would carry risks, I increasingly agree that we have been far too willing to allow Putin’s threats of escalation to prevent us from stopping an increasingly barbaric war primarily targeting civilians.

5. A story about what happens when diplomacy, political access and private business become almost impossible to separate.

   Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy

   Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, September 14, 2026

   Dexter Filkins has written a remarkable profile of Jared Kushner’s role in the second Trump administration. Kushner is simultaneously acting as an informal American diplomat on some enormously consequential foreign-policy issues and running Affinity Partners, his private investment firm, whose investors include foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds. Filkins documents the resulting conflicts of interest through Kushner’s work in the Middle East and elsewhere and talks to ethics experts who argue that the two roles have become hopelessly entangled. The Balkan portions are especially interesting to me. Kushner’s company pursued the redevelopment of the former Yugoslav General Staff complex in Belgrade before abandoning the project amid controversy, and it continues to pursue a much larger resort development in Albania that has spurred unrest in that country. The problem isn’t that Kushner has technically broken any laws; the issue is more basic: governments negotiating with someone who both speaks for the President of the United States and manages billions of dollars in private investments have no obvious way of knowing where one relationship ends and the other begins.

6. A story about a reporter sent to cover a national tragedy who discovered that it had become his own.

   At Gettysburg, a Reporter Captured a Nation’s Loss, and His Own

   Dan Barry, The New York Times, September 17, 2026

   And now for something completely different—and probably the piece that stayed with me the longest this week. Samuel Wilkeson went to Gettysburg in July 1863 to report on the battle. His teenage son Bayard was there too, serving as a Union artillery officer. Wilkeson arrived amid the enormous confusion and carnage of the battle and eventually learned that his son had been killed. He then sat down and wrote his dispatch. The Times revisits that reporting as part of its 175th anniversary, and what is remarkable is the almost complete collapse of distance between correspondent and subject. We usually encounter war through numbers—casualties, territory gained or lost, weapons fired, divisions moved—and journalists try to give those numbers human meaning. Wilkeson was doing exactly that at Gettysburg while discovering that one of those casualties was his own child. More than 160 years later, his account still conveys something that the statistics never can.

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It appears I touched quite a nerve with my recent piece on the rupture between the United States and Canada.

Up Schitt’s Creek Without a Paddle generated quite a bit of feedback, much of it angry and much of it from Canadians. In some cases, commenting on the piece seemed mainly an opportunity to vent about the United States (and there is plenty for Canadians to vent about).

While I close by saying America will need Canada’s forgiveness if we are ever going to rebuild our bilateral relationship, I definitely don’t feel that Canada owes the United States that forgiveness. Quite the opposite: Americans will have to earn that forgiveness, and my concern is that right now most Americans seem oblivious to what is even happening. That will have to change. And when the tariffs really start driving up prices, I think it finally will. But a lot of damage will already have been done.

Anyway, onward. This week’s reading ranges from how drones are transforming the front line in Ukraine to some intriguing new polling from those independent Senate races I’ve been obsessing about, what the war is doing to the Russian state, the legal problems created by increasingly autonomous AI, Andre Agassi’s unexpectedly complicated relationship with pickleball and what Moldova can teach the rest of Europe’s would-be members about actually joining the EU.

📖 Articles of Interest

• The Strange Transformation of the Front Line in Ukraine (War on the Rocks)

• Alme holds an 8-point lead over Bodnar in Senate race (Montana Free Press)

• Booted, then suited: Veterans and the making of Putin’s new proto-elite (ECFR)

• Welcome to the Age of AI Crime and Punishment (Bloomberg Businessweek)

• Can Andre Agassi Enjoy Pickleball More Than He Hated Tennis? (The New York Times Magazine)

• When a government is serious about EU membership (European Western Balkans)

🎧 Worth a Listen

• The Iran Shock Is Not Over (Foreign Affairs)

📬 Substack of Note

• Chartbook 473: Germany’s democratic earthquake (Adam Tooze)

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📖 Articles of Interest

1. A story about how drones are literally changing the geography of war.

   The Strange Transformation of the Front Line in Ukraine

   Édouard Maurin, War on the Rocks, September 9, 2026

   Traditionally, wars have had front lines: one side controls this territory, the other controls that territory, and in between is “no-man’s land”. Édouard Maurin, a French volunteer who fought with a Ukrainian special-purpose battalion near the war-torn town of Pokrovsk, argues that drones are making that model increasingly obsolete. Cheap surveillance and attack drones can observe and strike miles behind what we would ordinarily consider the front, turning a relatively narrow line into a broad contested zone. Fixed positions become liabilities; concealment, dispersion, underground cover and small teams matter more. What particularly interested me is what this means beyond the battlefield. If the dangerous zone is five or eight kilometers deep rather than one, that changes how we eventually think about demining, repairing utilities, rebuilding infrastructure and even determining when territory is actually safe enough for people to return. For those of us thinking about reconstruction, the war may be changing not only what Ukraine will need to rebuild, but what “postwar” territory actually looks like.

2. A story about independent Senate candidates beginning to look a little less theoretical.

   Alme holds an 8-point lead over Bodnar in Senate race

   Tom Lutey, Montana Free Press, September 11, 2026

   I have been following four Senate races—in Idaho, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota—where independent candidates are testing whether there is space for something outside the usual two-party structure. Montana is particularly interesting because the Democrat has stayed in the race. A new Montana Free Press–Rutgers Eagleton poll has Republican Kurt Alme at 38%, independent Seth Bodnar at 30%, Democrat Alani Bankhead trailing far behind at 16% and Libertarian Kyle Austin with 5%. But the coalition underneath those numbers is more interesting than the topline. Among self-identified Democrats, 53% choose Bodnar and 41% Bankhead. Among independents—the largest group in the state—Bodnar leads Alme 38% to 25%. This seems to be a case where the Democrat is the spoiler. None of this means Bodnar is winning, but it does suggest that the independent candidacy is doing something more substantial than simply peeling a few protest votes away from the two parties.

   And Montana isn’t the only interesting data point this week. A new Public Policy Polling survey in South Dakota has Republican incumbent Mike Rounds at 45% and independent Brian Bengs at 42%, with 13% undecided. The polling record is here. That one deserves considerably more caution: it is classified as independent-sponsored and independent-partisan, and other polling has shown a much wider Rounds lead. Still, put this alongside Dan Osborn’s campaign in Nebraska and Todd Achilles in Idaho and I continue to think these races are worth watching. Not because all four independents are necessarily going to win, but because they are testing something fairly fundamental about whether voters in overwhelmingly one-party states will consider a viable alternative that isn’t simply the other major party.

3. A story about what the war in Ukraine may be doing to Russia long after the fighting ends.

   Booted, then suited: Veterans and the making of Putin’s new proto-elite

   Mikhail Komin, European Council on Foreign Relations, September 10, 2026

   A lot has been written about what the war is doing to the Russian military and economy. Mikhail Komin asks a different question: what is it doing to the Russian state? The Kremlin is deliberately moving veterans of the Ukraine war—or, in some cases, people who have acquired veteran status—into political and government positions through programs such as “Time of Heroes.” Several thousand are already serving in some form of public office. Komin sees something more significant underway: a gradual move away from the technocratic model Putin once favored and toward a system that increasingly prizes loyalty and war credentials, with competence to be acquired later. Veterans are not about to replace Russia’s technocrats wholesale, but embedding a generation whose status and careers are tied to the war throughout the state could have consequences for Russian politics—and for any future effort to moderate Russian foreign policy—for years to come.

4. A story about what happens when the law encounters an actor it was never designed for.

   Welcome to the Age of AI Crime and Punishment

   Evan Ratliff, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 9, 2026

   We spend plenty of time debating whether AI will take our jobs or eventually outsmart us. Evan Ratliff has written a long and fascinating piece about a much more immediate problem: what happens when AI collides with a legal system built almost entirely around human agency. Chatbots are already appearing in criminal cases as confidants, advisers and alleged accomplices. Lawyers have argued that some conversations with AI should receive protections analogous to attorney-client privilege. AI-generated material is turning up as evidence and even as statements on behalf of victims. And increasingly autonomous agents raise an even stranger question: what happens when software itself does something that would be illegal if a person did it? Ratliff doesn’t pretend there are easy answers, but that’s what makes the piece so interesting. We are beginning to deploy technology in roles for which basic legal concepts like intent, responsibility, confidentiality and liability have not remotely caught up.

5. A story about learning to enjoy something after spending your life being extraordinarily good at something you hated.

   Can Andre Agassi Enjoy Pickleball More Than He Hated Tennis?

   Lizzy Goodman, The New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2026

   Andre Agassi famously spent much of his extraordinary tennis career hating tennis. Now 55, he has taken up pickleball—and, somewhat to his surprise, seems to be enjoying himself. Lizzy Goodman’s profile is ostensibly about Agassi becoming one of pickleball’s more prominent boosters, but it is really about his relationship with competition, perfectionism and the strange problem of figuring out how to do something simply because you like doing it. Agassi can still become obsessive about tiny details; the competitive part of his brain has not disappeared. But pickleball gives him something tennis apparently never could: permission not to be the best. I found the whole story unexpectedly compelling, perhaps because it is less about sports than about whether people who have spent their lives measuring themselves through achievement can ever learn to stop keeping score.

6. A story about what happens when a country actually decides it wants to join the European Union.

   When a government is serious about EU membership

   European Western Balkans, September 11, 2026

   The headline is a little more judgmental than I might have made it, but Moldova is becoming a fascinating comparison for the Western Balkans—and for Ukraine.

   It entered the EU accession process only in 2022 and now wants to be ready to sign an accession treaty by 2028. The government has made remarkably rapid progress on formal reforms, with the European Commission reporting good progress in almost 20 of 33 negotiating chapters. The article is most interesting, however, where the success story becomes more complicated. Moldova still has limited administrative capacity, judicial reform has created backlogs, anti-corruption institutions need strengthening and ordinary citizens have not necessarily felt all the benefits of reform. Political will can move legislation and negotiations astonishingly quickly. It cannot manufacture state capacity overnight.

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🎧 Worth a Listen

A conversation about why surviving the first energy shock doesn’t mean the crisis is over.

1. The Iran Shock Is Not Over

   Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan with Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs, September 10, 2026

   When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz six months ago, the world seemed headed toward an enormous energy crisis. It didn’t happen—at least not on the scale many people expected. Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan spend this conversation explaining why. Inventories, rerouting, government intervention and changes in the global energy system all helped absorb an extraordinary disruption. But their larger point is that resilience should not be confused with a return to normal. Shipping remains vulnerable, the war continues, and energy markets are now being reshaped simultaneously by Iran, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the uneven green transition, China’s clean-energy dominance and the enormous new electricity demand coming from AI. What I liked about the conversation is that it treats energy as a system rather than simply as the price of a barrel of oil. We survived a shock that many thought would be catastrophic. That tells us something important about resilience. It does not, however, mean the next shock will be absorbed as easily.

📬 Substack of Note

1. A story about what happens when nearly half the voters in a German state decide the existing political system does not speak for them.

   Chartbook 473: Germany’s democratic earthquake: the AfD breakthrough in Sachsen-Anhalt and the question of an “alternative to the Alternative”

   Adam Tooze, Chartbook, September 7, 2026

   I would be really remiss if I didn’t mention something about the German state elections last week that have worked that country—and much of Europe—into a froth. The headline result in Saxony-Anhalt was striking enough: the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland won nearly 44% of the vote in that state and is teed up to form a government, the first time an extreme right party will have formed a government in Germany since the end of World War II. But Adam Tooze digs into something more interesting—where those voters came from and what, if anything, Germany’s other parties can do about it. Turnout surged, and a significant part of the AfD’s growth came from people who hadn’t previously voted. Economic insecurity clearly matters, as does the economic decline of parts of eastern Germany, but Tooze is skeptical that better social policy alone can answer a political movement offering voters something more powerful than a list of material benefits: identity, belonging and an explicit rejection of the existing political mainstream. That makes his question harder than simply asking which policies might lure AfD voters back. What would an actual “alternative to the Alternative” look like—and can Germany’s existing parties create one?

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It has been an extremely frenetic summer—lots of road trips and family visits with time in between spent mostly on projects related to Ukraine and the Western Balkans. Finding the time to collect my thoughts, better yet to share interesting articles, has been a challenge.

My end-of-summer articles run the gamut, from AI to the Nord Stream pipeline to the independent giving Senator Ricketts a run for his money in Nebraska.

As always, these are maybe not the most important pieces that have come out, but they are the ones that made me stop, think, and sometimes reconsider my views.

📖 Articles of Interest

• Capital with a Compass: How to Unlock Investments in the Hardest Places (Brookings)

• Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron (Bloomberg Tax)

• The Wild, Gripping Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Bombing (The Economist)

• NATO’s Nightmare (The Atlantic)

• Here’s How Republicans Are Running Campaigns Against Independent Candidates

  (NOTUS)

• Navy Veteran Dan Osborn Hopeful Nebraskans Will Vote for Independent Senate Candidate This November (Military.com)

🎧 Worth a Listen

• Pete Buttigieg has a theory for how Democrats can win (Politico|On the Road)

• The four steps to hearing hard feedback gracefully (TED Talks Daily with Chris Wheatley)

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📖 Articles of Interest

1. A story about why private investment still needs functioning institutions.

   Capital with a Compass: How to Unlock Investments in the Hardest Places

   Paul M. Bisca, Brookings, July 17, 2026
   As countries reduce foreign assistance, people are increasingly talking about mobilizing private capital instead. But the ideal situation is when the two are working in partnership, when foreign aid, applied to issues such as good governance and capacity building, helps create the enabling conditions for private investment. Fragile states attract very little private finance precisely because investors cannot easily understand or price the political and institutional risks. One of Bisca’s more interesting arguments is that the multilateral development banks are sitting on an underused asset: years of political, economic and institutional knowledge that could be turned into something much closer to strategic intelligence for investors. Guarantees and concessional finance still matter, but so does knowing which ministries actually work, which local businesses are credible and where a seemingly risky investment may actually be viable.

2. A story about some uncomfortable echoes of Enron in the AI boom.

   Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron

   Amanda Iacone, Bloomberg Tax, July 21, 2026

   As the tech industry prepares to spend trillions on the data centers, chips and energy infrastructure needed to power AI, Amanda Iocone looks at how some of that expansion is being financed through special-purpose structures and variable-interest entities that can leave substantial debt outside the parent company’s balance sheet. Meta and Alphabet are among the examples. This is not an accusation that Big Tech is recreating Enron—the article makes an important distinction between using these structures and hiding them—but it does raise a question about how accurately conventional financial statements capture the risks being accumulated during the AI infrastructure boom.

3. A story about who really blew up Nord Stream.

   The Wild, Gripping Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Bombing

   The Economist, July 10, 2026
   The Economist reviews The Nord Stream Conspiracy, Bojan Pancevski’s reconstruction of the extraordinary operation that destroyed the pipelines running from Russia to Germany. The mechanics of the alleged sabotage are gripping enough, but what makes the piece particularly interesting is the larger story surrounding them. Nord Stream was once at the center of Europe’s energy relationship with Russia and of the argument that economic interdependence could help contain geopolitical conflict. Read only a few years later, the story of how those pipelines were built—and then destroyed—feels almost like a dispatch from another era.

4. A story about the war NATO has barely begun planning for.

   NATO’s Nightmare

   Simon Shuster, The Atlantic, August 17, 2026

   Stalin refused to believe ample intelligence that Germany was preparing to attack in 1941. Despite plenty of indications, the United States was caught off guard by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While we don’t want to overlearn the lessons of the past, the idea of Russia attacking a NATO country is no longer as implausible as it once was and preparing for contingencies is perhaps the best deterrent. The scenario Shuster lays out in this Atlantic piece is simple and terrifying: Russia attacks a NATO country in Eastern Europe at roughly the same time China moves against Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to fight on opposite sides of the world. Shuster finds that, despite increasing military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing, Western planners have done surprisingly little serious work on such a contingency. One Prague-based institute has run about 20 simulations and in most of them the United States shifts resources toward Asia and leaves Europe largely to its own devices. The piece is useful less for its prediction value than in how it exposes the degree to which much Western defense planning still happens in geographic silos.

5. Two stories about a movement to elect independent Senate candidates in the West and how the candidates are finally getting some national attention.

   Here’s How Republicans Are Running Campaigns Against Independent Candidates

   Raymond Fernández, NOTUS, September 2, 2026

   Navy Veteran Dan Osborn Hopeful Nebraskans Will Vote for Independent Senate Candidate This November

   Tim Hunt, Military.com, September 4, 2026

   I was pleased to see some articles finally start appearing at the national level on the independents running for Senate in the West. Not because I think the articles are always correct—I take issue with the title of Fernández’s piece, which I think focuses too much on the Republican response rather than on the overall phenomenon. But these four Senate races—in Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and, perhaps most significantly, Nebraska—identify an important trend: the displacement of the Democrats with other alternatives in places that have, essentially, become uncompetitive, one-party states. This monopartisanship is bad for democracy, and in any normal democracy the emergence of organic alternatives would be natural. But in our hyper-bipartisan system—where, in the case of Montana, a Democrat with no shot of being elected persists in running simply to ensure the Democrats remain a “national party” (whatever that means)—the one thing the two major parties are always willing to collaborate on is ensuring no other alternatives emerge. America, however, is ripe for change. And it should be no surprise that the West—which has always demonstrated an independent streak—would be where these ideas gestate. The second piece, about Dan Osborn specifically, is interesting in part because it also focuses on another common denominator among many of these independent Senate candidates: their status as veterans. In Military.com’s case, I think the greatest significance is the outlet itself: this is another example of the Nebraska race moving beyond state and political-specialist coverage and reaching a national audience through Osborn’s military and working-class biography.

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🎧 Worth a Listen

1. A conversation about what Democrats need to build next, rather than simply trying to restore what came before.

   Pete Buttigieg Has a Theory for How Democrats Can Win |

   On the Road with Jonathan Martin, The Politico Playbook Podcast, August 22, 2026
   

   Pete Buttigieg is hands-down the smartest political figure I have had the privilege of working in any proximity to in my entire career. Introverted and hypercurious by nature, he has a photographic memory, the ability to toggle between highly complex issues seemingly effortlessly, and is (perhaps most importantly) a genuinely nice person. So it is always a pleasure to hear an interview where he is able to move beyond the heated discourse of the moment and sketch out his vision for the future. Add to that Jonathan Martin’s skill as an interviewer; he often seems to combine a meal with a conversation that elicits a real and candid exchange. In this particular podcast he sat down with Buttigieg in Traverse City, Michigan, for a wide-ranging chat about the Democratic Party, the Michigan Senate race, institutional reform, AI, economic inequality and 2028. Buttigieg’s central argument is that Democrats cannot simply campaign on restoring the pre-Trump political order; they need to articulate what they want to build next. Whatever one thinks of the argument, it makes this more substantive than the usual interview with a possible future presidential candidate.

2. A short lesson in how not to become defensive when somebody tells you something you don’t want to hear.

   The Four Steps to Hearing Hard Feedback Gracefully

   Chris Wheatley, TED Talks Daily, August 4, 2026
   

   Here’s a change of pace from the heavy political emphasis of this edition’s crop of offerings. I was listening to this podcast while working out at the gym last week, and something just kind of clicked. Chris Wheatley is a leadership advisor, and he starts out with this TED Talk by relating an experience in which a close colleague pointed out how Wheatley made her feel when they got into an argument. Wheatley was surprised, but rather than push back, he turned it into an opportunity to learn and grow. He sketches out a simple framework for receiving difficult feedback without immediately explaining it away, attacking the messenger or retreating into defensiveness. There’s nothing revolutionary here, but it is useful precisely because most of us (myself included) are often worse at receiving honest feedback than we imagine.

Recent Snakes & Ladders

Previous Weekly Notes

RATKO MLADIĆ, the Butcher of Bosnia, died in prison in The Hague on August 27, nine years after being convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for his actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995.

Mladić is perhaps most infamous for directing the massacre of over 7,000 Bosniak men and boys following the conquest of Srebrenica in July 1995. He was also convicted for leading the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, during which approximately 10,000 people were killed, many of them civilians.

This is not a matter of historical interpretation. Mladić received a full trial before an international court. He was convicted of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder, deportation, forcible transfer, terror, unlawful attacks on civilians, and hostage-taking. His convictions and his life sentence were upheld on appeal in 2021.

Serbian leaders have at times attempted to distance the country from Mladić’s actions, while carefully avoiding any admission of collective Serbian guilt. President Boris Tadić apologized for the Srebrenica massacre and eventually succeeded in detaining Mladić and turning him over to the Tribunal. His successor, Tomislav Nikolić, did as well, even as he continued to deny that it constituted genocide. In 2015 while serving as prime minister, Serbia’s current president, Aleksandar Vučić, described Srebrenica as a “monstrous crime” and attended its commemoration, but he too has rejected the genocide designation. He later led Serbia’s campaign against the 2024 UN resolution establishing an international day of remembrance.

Since Mladić’s arrest in Serbia in 2011, after 16 years as a fugitive, Serbia’s leadership has gradually worked to water down the extent of Mladić’s crimes while at the same time pairing every discussion of Srebrenica with crimes against Serbs or invoking NATO’s 1999 intervention over Kosovo, in an effort to suggest that everyone was more or less equally guilty and that Serbia has been unfairly singled out.

There is no doubt that crimes were committed against Serbs, and Serbian victims deserve recognition and justice. That is different from claiming every side is equally at fault. The facts remain: the systematic slaughter of thousands of prisoners after the fall of Srebrenica was genocide, and the siege of Sarajevo subjected its civilian population to 1,425 days of shelling and sniper fire. These are the findings of international courts, not arbitrary allegations.

For me, this is also very personal. In the summer of 1995, between my two years in grad school, I was living and working in a camp for Bosnian refugees in Croatia, teaching English and helping with visa applications to third countries. Many were from eastern Bosnia and had been driven from their homes to other parts of the country before somehow making it out. That summer, the situation in Croatia and Bosnia was dire. Croatia itself was nearly split in half by the frontline, Zagreb had been struck by missiles, and the remaining UN “safe havens” in Bosnia were teetering on the verge of collapse.

I will never forget that July night when news of Srebrenica began trickling out. Clusters of refugees huddled in the courtyard, smoking and drinking rakija as they listened to the radio, some crying and others singing folk songs. I lay on my cot in the stifling heat staring at the ceiling, listening all night to the mournful wails through the open window. The idealist I was at the time simply could not fathom that the UN would allow these enclaves to fall, that Europe and America would stand by and do nothing. I felt a profound sense of shame that we had let the Bosnians down. It became my driving mission to return to Bosnia someday and, however possible and in whatever small way, try to help put it back together again. For me, seeing some measure of justice for those who were killed was essential.

That is why Serbia’s official response to Mladić’s death is, for me, much more than another dispute over the past. It raises a basic question about the future Serbia actually wants.

Shortly before Mladić’s death, his lawyers petitioned the Tribunal to transfer him to a military hospital in Belgrade where he could receive palliative care near his family, a request that was denied. After Mladić died, Vučić, with no hint of irony, called the decision “uncivilized behavior, unprecedented and without excuse,” adding: “We can now see that they wanted Mladić to die behind bars.”

That is, generally speaking, what a life sentence means. Indeed, the men and boys captured around Srebrenica received no humanitarian consideration. They were separated from their families, taken to execution sites, shot, and either buried in mass graves or in some cases left to rot on the side of the road. Many of their bodies were later dug up, moved, and reburied in an attempt to conceal the crime.

Then came the calls for a state funeral. Serbia’s Justice Minister, Nenad Vujić, said in an interview shortly after Mladić’s death that he would “certainly receive all the military and state honors to which he is entitled.” A few days later, Vujić defended the arrangements by saying: “Punishment ends with death. Anything beyond that is revenge.”

Vujić’s background makes these statements especially jarring. Before becoming justice minister in 2025, he led Serbia’s Judicial Academy, coordinated Serbia’s EU rule-of-law negotiations, and had worked as a lawyer at the Humanitarian Law Center.

Serbia has stopped short of formally declaring a state funeral, but it has provided the unmistakable trappings of official, ceremonial treatment. Vujić escorted Mladić’s body back to Serbia on a government aircraft. The coffin was draped in the flags of Serbia and the Republika Srpska as it was carried off the plane by uniformed Serbian soldiers, and a military ceremony will be held at the House of the Army. If this is not technically a state funeral, it is at least state-funeral-adjacent.

The same government providing this treatment for a convicted war criminal is also directly benefiting from the largesse of the European taxpayer. As Marta Kos, the EU Enlargement Commissioner, said when canceling an upcoming visit to Belgrade, “The glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built.”

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That is exactly the issue here.

Since the signing of its Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU in 2008, Serbia has received approximately €4.5 billion in EU financial assistance. Following its official candidate status—a step only made possible after it arrested Mladić and turned him over to The Hague—the country has received €1.5 billion in pre-accession assistance between 2014 and 2020, followed by more than €872 million allocated between 2021 and 2024. The Commission approved another €139.4 million last year. Serbia has also been allocated €1.6 billion in grants and favorable loans under the EU’s Reform and Growth Facility, of which €167.6 million had been released as of May 2026. And financial assistance is only one element of the relationship. Trade is perhaps even more significant: the EU bought 61.1 percent of Serbia’s exports in 2024 and accounted for 58.3 percent of its total trade in goods.

It would be a profound mistake for Serbia to assume it could lose these benefits and simply plug the hole with Russian or Chinese money. Losing EU support would not bankrupt the country. It could, however, result in serious economic challenges. Alternative financing would almost certainly come on worse terms, carry higher costs, and make Serbia far more dependent on outside creditors. And neither Russia nor China can replace the trade relationship.

For too long Serbia under President Vučić has been allowed to benefit from EU support while prevaricating on reform, rewriting recent history, and testing the EU’s tolerance for democratic erosion. Each time the government approaches the limit, it pulls back just enough to avoid consequences.

At a certain point, the EU has to draw a line. Maybe honoring Mladić doesn’t automatically violate a specific EU provision, but that misses the larger point. European taxpayers are financing Serbia’s supposed “convergence” with a union built on democracy, human rights, and historical reconciliation. The country cannot credibly claim to aspire to that future while honoring a man convicted of genocide.

Serbia faces a choice: between the European future it says it wants and the wartime past it continues to hold on to. If it chooses the past, Europe should reconsider paying for the pretense.

I first met Todd Achilles about a year ago, when his independent campaign for the U.S. Senate in Idaho still seemed like a huge long shot. Independents in our predominantly first-past-the-post electoral system are usually seen as spoilers or quixotic lost causes, but the Senate race in Nebraska in 2024 (where an independent came close to ousting a Republican incumbent while the Democrats sat the race out) seemed to provide an interesting formula for candidates interested in offering a genuine, pro-institution, patriotic alternative to the increasingly Trump-captured GOP in places where the Democratic brand simply didn’t fly.

A year after my first Achilles encounter, that is exactly what has come to pass in Idaho. It is also the dynamic in the Senate races this year in Nebraska (again) and South Dakota. Meanwhile, in the fourth state with a credible independent candidate, Montana, the Democrat refused to step aside despite lagging behind the independent in polls. So there, the more expected outcome is also the most likely: the Democrat and independent will split the anti-Republican vote and the Republican prevail despite winning less than 50 percent of the vote.

So I’m starting this edition with two pieces on Achilles and what his campaign might tell us about political competition in America. From there, the readings sport the typical range: American history, Europe’s wildfires, Serbia and EU enlargement, the war with Iran, and Chief Justice John Roberts.

As always, these are maybe not the most important pieces that have come out, but they are the ones that made me stop, think, and sometimes look at something differently.

📖 Articles of Interest

• Democrats Test a New Red State Strategy: Back Independents Over Their Own Nominees (Associated Press)

• The Data-Driven Optimist Running to Fix Congress (Zach Kahn)

• The “Two Ships” Theory of American History (The Atlantic)

• Why Is Europe Burning? (The New Yorker)

• Most EU Supporters Oppose the SNS Government: What Should Brussels Take Away From This? (European Western Balkans)

• 7 in 10 Americans Say Iran War Not Worth Fighting (Chicago Council on Global Affairs)

• The Delusions of John Roberts (The New Yorker)

• Reimagining Enlargement: Visions for EU Policy towards the Western Balkans and the Association Trio (CIDOB)

✉️ Substacks of Note

• The Downballot

• Silver Bulletin by Nate Silver

🎧 Worth a Listen

• Is Trump’s Chaos Pushing Iceland Towards the EU? — The Rest Is Politics: Leading, with Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir

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📖 Articles of Interest

1. A story about whether the best way to offer competition in red states is to specifically not run as a Democrats.

   Democrats Test a New Red State Strategy: Back Independents Over Their Own Nominees

   Steve Peoples and Mike Catalini, Associated Press, May 15, 2026

   This piece is from a few months ago but re-captured my attention due to some recent developments regarding Republican Senator Jim Risch’s re-election campaign in Idaho. Democrats in several deeply Republican states are experimenting with something that would normally be political heresy: stepping aside in favor of independent candidates who may have a better chance of winning. This AP piece looks at efforts in Nebraska, Idaho, South Dakota, and Montana, including the independent Senate campaign of Todd Achilles in Idaho. Achilles, a former Democratic state legislator, argues that an independent candidate can appeal to voters who these days would never vote for someone carrying the Democratic label. I’ve argued for some time that the issue for Democrats isn’t simply that they need to field candidates everywhere no matter what; more important is that they are able to form a majority and wield power. That can also be in coalition with other parties—the caucus already embraces two independents in the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. In places where the Democratic brand itself has become prohibitive, backing—or at least making room for—credible, pro-institution-strengthening independents may be one way of rebuilding political competition. There are obvious risks: an independent who wins is actually independent and owes the Democrats little. But perhaps that is also what makes a run like this more credible.

2. A story about the data-driven optimist trying to put that theory to the test in Idaho.

   The Data-Driven Optimist Running to Fix Congress

   Zach Kahn, June 15, 2026

   If the AP piece explains the political experiment, this profile explains why I find Todd Achilles himself interesting. Achilles is an Army veteran, former Idaho state legislator, businessman, and public-policy teacher who describes his politics as fundamentally evidence-driven: start with the data, be willing to discover that your preferred answer is wrong, and change course accordingly. He combines that with a fairly traditional conception of federalism and individual liberty, including reproductive and LGBTQ rights. More intriguing is his idea for a “Fulcrum Caucus” of independent senators. Achilles argues that if even a handful of the six independent military veterans currently running for Senate were elected, they could deny either party an automatic majority and force Congress back toward negotiation (a variant of what I had hypothesized about the House in a recent Snakes & Ladders substack). I would treat some of the campaign polling cited here cautiously, particularly its distinction between “informed” and “uninformed” voters. But with the Democrat officially bowing out, this race is a head-to-head contest between aging, 83 year-old Republican incumbent and the 48 year old Achilles. Achilles isn’t arguing that independents need to replace the two parties. He is effectively asking how few independents it might take to change the incentives under which the two parties operate.

3. A story about whether two ships that arrived four centuries ago can explain the America we live in today.

   The “Two Ships” Theory of American History

   James Traub, The Atlantic, August 2026

   This is one of those pieces I enjoyed even though I’m not entirely sure I buy the argument it examines. Traub considers David S. Reynolds’s new book Two Ships, which interprets American history through two foundational traditions: the Mayflower (I happened to visit Plymouth, Massachusetts with my family this week) and the Puritan culture of New England on one side, and Virginia’s hierarchical society—inseparable from the arrival of enslaved Africans aboard the White Lion—on the other. Reynolds sees the conflict between these traditions echoing through the Civil War and into today’s red-blue divide. It’s a wonderfully provocative organizing idea. It may also organize history a little too neatly. Traub presses on what gets lost when a complicated national history becomes a struggle between two moral and political lineages, including the Enlightenment ideas that crossed regional boundaries and the many Americans who do not fit comfortably into either tradition. Although I hail from New England and my husband is from the opposite side of the Mason-Dixon line, I came away less convinced that two ships explain America than intrigued by the larger question the essay raises: how much of our present political division is genuinely new, and how much reflects arguments about equality, hierarchy, liberty, and national identity that Americans have been having almost from the beginning?

4. A story about why climate change alone doesn’t explain why Europe is burning.

   Why Is Europe Burning?

   M. R. O’Connor, The New Yorker, August 1, 2026

   Europe is experiencing an extraordinary wildfire season, but O’Connor’s piece is interesting precisely because she refuses to stop at the most obvious explanation. Rising temperatures matter enormously, but so do decades of rural depopulation, the abandonment of agricultural land, the spread of highly flammable pine and eucalyptus plantations, accumulated vegetation, and an approach to fire management that has devoted far more resources to suppressing fires than preventing them. Spain, for example, spends an estimated 78 percent of its fire-management budget on firefighting and only 22 percent on prevention. O’Connor also explores an uncomfortable complication surrounding rewilding: landscapes we sometimes imagine as pristine wilderness were actually shaped for centuries by grazing, farming, forestry, and controlled burning. Remove people from those landscapes and the result is not necessarily a return to some natural equilibrium; it can also be an enormous accumulation of fuel. The larger lesson seems applicable well beyond wildfires. Governments can build increasingly sophisticated emergency-response systems, but response capacity cannot indefinitely substitute for maintenance, prevention, and the less visible work of managing risk before the emergency begins.

5. A story about what happens when the people in Serbia who most want to join the EU are increasingly the people who most oppose the government Brussels is negotiating with.

   Most EU Supporters Oppose the SNS Government: What Should Brussels Take Away From This?

   Marija Stojanović, European Western Balkans, July 23, 2026

   This is an important piece for anyone trying to understand Serbia’s increasingly complicated relationship with the European Union. Recent polling cited by European Western Balkans finds that two-thirds of Serbians who support EU membership do not support Aleksandar Vučić’s government, while only a quarter of government supporters favor accession. That turns one of Brussels’s longstanding assumptions about Serbia increasingly on its head. Vučić has spent years presenting himself externally as the indispensable interlocutor capable of keeping Serbia on a European trajectory while managing a more nationalist and Russia-friendly electorate. But if the country’s genuinely pro-European constituency increasingly lies among students, civil society, independent media, and government opponents, continued stability-first engagement with Vučić risks alienating precisely the people most likely to sustain Serbia’s eventual European integration. The answer is obviously not for Brussels to choose Serbia’s government. It is to stop confusing access to one government with support for Serbia’s European future, and to apply the democratic and rule-of-law standards of the accession process more consistently.

6. A story about a war that most Americans have apparently decided was not worth fighting.

   7 in 10 Americans Say Iran War Not Worth Fighting

   Dina Smeltz and Lama El Baz, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, August 5, 2026

   The headline number is striking: 68 percent of Americans now say that the costs of the war with Iran have outweighed its benefits, compared with 31 percent who think it has been worthwhile. But some of the findings underneath that number are even more interesting. Americans are no less likely to regard Iran’s nuclear program as a critical threat than they were in 2023—49 percent then and 49 percent now—despite the administration’s stated objective of destroying that threat. There is also a substantial partisan divide: 91 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of independents say the war was not worth fighting, while 63 percent of Republicans say it was. I don’t think public opinion should determine foreign policy by plebiscite, and an unpopular war is not necessarily an unjustified one. But democratic governments eventually have to demonstrate that the costs they ask citizens to bear are producing an identifiable strategic benefit. Five months into this conflict, these numbers suggest the administration has not persuaded most Americans that they are.

7. A story about a Chief Justice who wants to protect the Supreme Court as an institution while helping transform what that institution does.

   The Delusions of John Roberts

   Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, August 17, 2026 issue

   There has been no shortage of criticism of the Roberts Court, but Talbot’s profile is more interesting than another argument about whether the Court has become too conservative. Roberts has long presented himself as an institutionalist: someone deeply concerned with the Court’s legitimacy, wary of appearing partisan, and committed to the idea that judges merely interpret rather than make law. Yet the Court he leads has steadily expanded presidential authority, weakened the administrative state, dismantled major precedents, and moved American law decisively to the right. Talbot’s question is essentially whether Roberts somehow misses the contradiction, or if he basically wants to have his cake and eat it too. She traces the continuity between his Reagan-era legal thinking and Roberts’s work as Chief Justice while also taking seriously the occasions on which he has resisted Trump and attempted to preserve institutional boundaries. That is what makes the piece worthwhile. The interesting question isn’t whether Roberts secretly supports everything Trump wants—he plainly doesn’t. It is whether someone can be sincerely devoted to preserving an institution while advancing a jurisprudence that contributes to the erosion of the institutional constraints he believes he is defending.

8. A story about whether the EU can make enlargement geopolitical without making it meaningless.

   Reimagining Enlargement: Visions for EU Policy towards the Western Balkans and the Association Trio

   Víctor Burguete and Elena Ventura, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), July 2026

   Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revived an EU enlargement process that had spent years drifting toward irrelevance. Burguete and Ventura ask what happens now that enlargement is serving two purposes at once: the traditional project of transforming candidate countries through the acquis and democratic conditionality, and a much more urgent geopolitical project of anchoring vulnerable European states inside the Union. They argue, persuasively, that these goals need not conflict. But moving faster without weakening the accession process requires changing the process itself, including differentiated integration and greater use of qualified-majority voting. I was particularly interested in the report’s attention to bilateral vetoes, because this remains one of the system’s most serious defects. North Macedonia’s experience demonstrates how an individual member state can turn accession into leverage over history, identity, or bilateral disputes largely unrelated to whether a candidate is actually ready to join the EU. I continue to think the Union should look seriously at qualified-majority voting for intermediate accession decisions while preserving unanimity for membership itself. Geopolitical enlargement will not become credible simply by urging candidates to move faster; the EU also has to reform the machinery through which they are expected to move.

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✉️ Substacks of Note

1. The Downballot

   I’ve increasingly found The Downballot useful because it pays attention to the elections that national political coverage tends to flatten or ignore. David Nir, Jeff Singer, and their colleagues cover House and Senate contests, state and local races, redistricting, campaign finance, special elections, and the electoral mechanics underneath the national headlines. That matters particularly in a year when some of the most interesting political experiments are occurring far from the traditional battlegrounds. I also appreciate that the publication is interested in what the numbers actually show rather than simply cheering for a preferred outcome. If you enjoy the electoral mechanics behind American politics rather than only the presidential horse race, it is worth following.

2. Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver)

   This is an obvious one but all the more relevant in the run-up to November. I’ve followed Nate Silver’s work since the FiveThirtyEight days, and Silver Bulletin has become one of the places I look when I want to know what the data actually say before deciding what I think they mean. Silver can be contrarian, occasionally to a fault, but that is also part of the appeal. His approach is grounded in probabilities, polling, models, and an insistence on distinguishing what we know from what we merely feel confident about. The publication now ranges well beyond election forecasting into politics, media, sports, risk, and other subjects, while maintaining updated models and polling averages. At a moment when political analysis too often begins with a conclusion and works backward toward supporting evidence, I find the discipline of starting with probabilities and uncertainty useful even when I disagree with where Silver ultimately lands.

🎧 Worth a Listen

1. A conversation about why Iceland may be reconsidering a decision it seemed to have settled more than a decade ago.

   Is Trump’s Chaos Pushing Iceland Towards the EU? (Prime Minister of Iceland, Kristrún Frostadóttir)

   The Rest Is Politics: Leading, July 26, 2026

   I found this conversation between Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, and Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir fascinating and extremely compelling. Iceland abandoned its EU accession effort more than a decade ago, but Frostadóttir’s government has brought forward a referendum on whether to reopen negotiations. The discussion gets into the familiar Icelandic concerns—fisheries, sovereignty, the euro—but also into how dramatically the strategic environment has changed. Frostadóttir lived in Britain during Brexit and talks about what she learned watching that process unfold, as well as how Trump’s approach to Europe and the North Atlantic has altered Iceland’s own debate about where it belongs. There is also an interesting political story here: Frostadóttir took Iceland’s Social Democrats from three seats in parliament to leading the government. What I liked most about the episode is that it treats EU membership not simply as an economic calculation but as a question about how a small country protects its interests in a much less predictable world. Iceland is already deeply integrated into Europe through the EEA, Schengen, and NATO; the question now is whether the geopolitical changes around it have altered the value of remaining formally outside the Union.

Recent Snakes & Ladders

Previous Weekly Notes

One of the occupational hazards of working in and around government is that you begin to notice how often we confuse decisions with outcomes.

A strategy is announced, a reform is launched, or a conference concludes with new commitments. These moments are important, but they’re also the easy part. The harder work begins afterward, when institutions have to figure out how to operationalize these pronouncements, translating ambitions into sustained execution.

That thought kept resurfacing as I worked through this week’s readings. Whether the subject was the future of American scientific research, Ukraine’s reconstruction, organizational leadership, European enlargement, or rebuilding state capacity itself, each article explores some version of the same problem: how do institutions become capable of carrying out their missions?

It’s a question that feels increasingly relevant coming out of my fourth Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC), gatherings that are always full of new “deliverables” which may, or may not, actually end up realized.

As always, these pieces aren’t necessarily the most important things published this week. They’re simply the pieces that made me stop, think, or look at familiar problems from a different angle. If you have recommendations of your own, I’d love to hear them.

📖 Articles of Interest

• An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science—and Anything Trump Doesn’t Like (The New Yorker)

• Reflections from URC 2026: Ukraine’s Reconstruction Has Become Wartime Resilience (CSIS)

• The False Alignment Trap (Harvard Business Review)

• The Winners and Losers of the EU’s Growth Plan (European Western Balkans)

• The dismantling of USAID and the firing of its staff was illegal

  (The Hill)

✉️ Substacks of Note

• Home & Away by Richard Haass

• The Renovator

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📖 Articles of Interest

1. A story about what happens when politics begins deciding what counts as knowledge.

   An O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science—and Anything Trump Doesn’t Like

   Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, July 20, 2026

   Kolbert has a gift for taking what initially appears to be a story about one government decision and revealing the much larger institutional questions beneath it. This essay examines the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape federal support for scientific research, but it is really about something broader: whether political leaders should determine which forms of knowledge deserve public support. What struck me most, though, was how neatly the piece reinforces a lesson that extends well beyond science. Institutions built over decades—whether research agencies, diplomatic corps, or development organizations—can be weakened surprisingly quickly, but rebuilding the expertise and institutional memory they contain is far slower and far more uncertain. Whatever one’s politics, it’s a thoughtful reminder that knowledge itself is a form of national infrastructure, and once that infrastructure begins to erode, restoring it is rarely as simple as appropriating more money.

2. A story (well, really a report) about why reconstruction is really a governance challenge.

   Reflections from URC 2026: Ukraine’s Reconstruction Has Become Wartime Resilience

   Sergiy Tsivkach, CSIS, July 2026

   Sergiy, someone I know and with whom I have often discussed Ukraine’s reconstruction challenges, offers one of the best post-mortems I’ve read on this year’s URC in Gdansk. He argues that its significance lies less in the €10 billion in announced deals than in a more fundamental shift in how reconstruction is being conceived. Reconstruction is part of a continuum, not a standalone, postwar exercise. Recovery is no longer about preparing for “the day after” the war; it has become part of Ukraine’s wartime strategy, encompassing energy security, defense production, critical infrastructure, municipal services, and the broader resilience needed to keep the country functioning under constant attack. Sergiy also makes an important point that is often lost amid the headline figures: most of the announcements were not simply cash transfers, but loans, guarantees, investments, and financing mechanisms whose ultimate success will depend on disciplined implementation. This conference marked a transition, too, from political commitments to project delivery. As someone who has spent much of the past several years working on Ukraine’s reconstruction architecture, I found that distinction particularly important. Announcing initiatives is relatively easy; translating them into bankable projects, functioning infrastructure, and sustained investor confidence is the far more difficult—and ultimately more consequential—task.

3. A story about why agreement at the top matters more than apparent alignment.

   The False Alignment Trap

   Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer, and Philip Jameson, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2026

   This one resonated with the part of me that has studied, implemented, and sometimes barely survived change management exercises over the years. Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson argue in this HBR piece that many organizational transformations fail not because of poor execution, but because senior leaders begin implementing change before they have reached genuine agreement on why the organization is changing, what exactly will change, and how the transformation will occur. The authors draw a useful distinction between alignment—which may mean little more than leaders staying out of one another’s way—and what they call true agreement: a detailed, explicit compact that allows executives to collaborate, compromise, communicate consistently, and hold one another accountable. False alignment tends to arise because leaders do not realize they disagree, they pretend to agree to avoid conflict, or they postpone resolving their differences in the hope that details can be worked out later. The consequences are all too predictable: teams become paralyzed by competing priorities, launch too many shallow initiatives to satisfy everyone, or make real progress but in the wrong direction. What I found especially useful is that the article also lays out a practical process for reaching agreement, including inviting dissent early, debating specific trade-offs, formally documenting decisions, and communicating a single message throughout the organization. Having watched ambitious reforms falter because senior officials agreed on the objective but not on the operational meaning of that objective (I will refrain from providing specific examples…), I found this a particularly convincing explanation of why apparent consensus can become one of the greatest obstacles to change.

4. A story about whether performance-based enlargement funding will finally reward reform rather than merely promise it.

   The Winners and Losers of the EU’s Growth Plan for the Western Balkans

   European Western Balkans, July 20, 2026

   The EU’s €6 billion Growth Plan for the Western Balkans is now roughly halfway through, and the early results are sharply uneven. Montenegro and Albania are expected to reach implementation rates of around 90 percent, while North Macedonia—despite being stuck in a fight with Bulgaria and unable to officially open chapters in the accession process—has accelerated reforms and is likely to move above 50 percent. Serbia, however, remains far behind, with only three of 37 milestones formally confirmed as completed. Of the remaining two countries in the region, Kosovo has been delayed by domestic political deadlock and Bosnia and Herzegovina has barely begun implementation at all. What makes the article important is not simply the ranking of winners and losers, but the mechanism itself: each reform milestone carries a financial value, payments are released according to performance, and funds tied to missed deadlines can be permanently lost or potentially reallocated. The Growth Plan may end in 2027, but the Commission has already indicated that its underlying logic—reforms first, money second—is likely to become a central feature of future enlargement funding. For me, that is the real test. The EU has long struggled to maintain leverage in a process where the major benefits of membership arrive only at the end. This model offers a more immediate reward for progress. Still, Brussels is engaged in a delicate balancing act, needing to hold applicants accountable while also encouraging countries to continue with reforms despite the long road to full membership.

5. A story about whether the rule of law still protects America’s professional civil service.

   The dismantling of USAID and the firing of its staff was illegal

   J. Brian Atwood and Kevin E. Byrnes, The Hill, July 22, 2026

   Former USAID Administrator Brian Atwood and attorney Kevin Byrnes make a straightforward legal argument: the mass dismissal of USAID employees was not simply a policy decision or administrative reorganization, but an unlawful circumvention of the civil service protections established by Congress. They contend that career employees were removed without evidence of misconduct or poor performance, denied the due process guaranteed under the Civil Service Reform Act, and then retroactively labeled part of a “reorganization” to justify actions that were, in reality, politically motivated. The article raises a much broader question than the future of USAID itself. If an administration can effectively eliminate a professional civil service through mass dismissals while bypassing statutory protections, the implications extend well beyond foreign assistance. Having spent much of my career in the Foreign Service alongside USAID colleagues, I found it a thoughtful reminder that the debate is ultimately about the resilience of the institutions and legal norms that underpin a professional, nonpartisan federal workforce.

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✉️ Substacks of Note

1. Home & Away (Richard Haass)

   Richard Haass remains one of the clearest strategic thinkers writing on foreign policy today. I've followed his work for many years because he consistently looks past the headlines to identify the larger strategic pattern. This week's Home & Away, “Overreach,” Haass’s analysis covering everything from the state of American democracy to the state of the world and U.S. foreign policy, argues that both Washington and Tehran have fallen into the trap of strategic overreach, pursuing objectives that exceed what military force can realistically achieve while paying mounting political and economic costs. Rather than allowing escalation to become a strategy in itself, Haass makes the case for restoring discipline through limited objectives, diplomacy, and a negotiated path back from the brink. Whether or not one agrees with all of his prescriptions, he consistently asks the question that matters most: not simply what governments are doing, but whether their actions actually serve a coherent strategy.

2. The Renovator (Danielle Allen)

   One of the reasons I've come to appreciate The Renovator is that it is led by Harvard political philosopher Danielle Allen, whose work on democratic institutions and constitutional governance I've found increasingly thought-provoking. Rather than dwelling on what's broken in American government, the publication asks the more difficult question: how do we rebuild institutions so they can actually deliver? This week's essay, “Rebuilding the Machinery of Government Can't Be a Partisan Project,” argues that restoring state capacity requires much more than reversing previous policy decisions. It means rebuilding expertise, organizational culture, and the systems that allow government to function effectively. As someone who has spent much of my career working inside public institutions, I found it a timely reminder about the work we will have ahead of us. Another lesson I have also been stressing for some time: our duopolistic party system translates inevitably into a zero-sum game between the Democrats and Republicans. Durable reform therefore requires bipartisan work on the underlying systems of government—civil service, hiring, procurement, rulemaking, and administrative capacity—rather than another cycle of partisan workarounds.

Recent Snakes & Ladders

Previous Weekly Notes

This week felt like one of those where I started out thinking I knew what I’d be writing about and ended up somewhere completely different.

Like many of you I spent a fair amount of time tracking Ukraine’s government reshuffle. Given how much of my own work has focused on reconstruction and governance over the past year, it was hard not to. The removal of the Prime Minister after just a year was a shock on its own, but the removal of the popular (and seemingly effective) Defense Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov and the replacement of two of three key ministers leading reconstruction just weeks after the Ukraine Recovery Conference helped turn a cabinet reshuffle into a seismic political shake-up. These developments reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while: real institutional reform isn’t tested when talented people are appointed. It’s tested when they leave.

Beyond Ukraine, though, I found myself drawn to a surprisingly eclectic mix of reading. One essay tried to place the Trump administration’s efforts to remake the federal government in historical context. Another explored the very human costs of dismantling USAID—not through budget numbers or political arguments, but through the lives of the people caught up in it. I also found myself reading several pieces on European enlargement, a subject that rarely grabs headlines but will have profound implications for Europe’s future if—or perhaps more accurately, when—it returns to center stage.

Finally, I picked up two books that have been sitting on my shelf for longer than I’d like to admit. Both ask essentially the same question from different directions: why do great powers go to war? Given everything happening in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, they seemed particularly timely.

As always, these aren’t necessarily the most important things published this week—just the ones that made me think a little harder or sent me down interesting rabbit holes. If you’ve read something I should add to my list, let me know in the comments.

📖 Articles of Interest

• America’s Wrecking-Ball Revolution (The Economist)

• What the Growth Plan Signals for the Future of Gradual Integration and Pre-Accession Funding (European Western Balkans)

• How Ukraine Brought the War to Russia (The New Yorker)

• The Human Cost of DOGE’s War on U.S.A.I.D. (The New Yorker)

• The Quintessential Trump-Era Politician (The Atlantic)

📚 Books of Note

• The Coming Storm — Odd Arne Westad

• Destined for War — Graham Allison

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Articles of Interest

1. A story about whether the United States is witnessing a political transition or an institutional revolution.

   America’s Wrecking-Ball Revolution

   The Economist, July 2, 2026

   Few publications do sweeping institutional analysis as well as The Economist, and this essay is a good example. Rather than focusing on the daily political back-and-forth, it steps back and asks whether the United States is in the midst of a more fundamental transformation of the federal government. The argument isn’t simply that policies are changing, but that the role of government itself—and the balance between elected officials and the administrative state—is being deliberately redefined. Whether you find that project exciting or alarming, the article does an excellent job placing today’s debates in a longer historical context. It also raises an uncomfortable question: if institutions can be dismantled remarkably quickly, how long does it take to rebuild the expertise and capacity they once contained? (If the link leads to a paywall message me and I can try to gift the article to you.)

2. A story about how wars eventually reach everyone.

   How Ukraine Brought the War to Russia

   Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, July 2026

   One of the many reasons I enjoy Joshua Yaffa’s writing is that he rarely tells the obvious story. Rather than focusing on military tactics or battlefield developments, he explores how Ukraine’s increasingly sophisticated drone campaign is changing everyday life inside Russia. (Given the current tensions in Kyiv resulting from Zelenskyy’s latest government reshuffle and dismissal of Defense Minister Fedorov, I felt this piece was particularly prescient.) The Kremlin has spent years trying to insulate ordinary Russians from the consequences of the war, portraying it as something distant and manageable. That illusion is becoming much harder to sustain as attacks reach deeper into Russian territory, disrupting airports, industry, and daily routines. What makes the article especially compelling for me is that it isn’t really about drones—it’s about the gradual erosion of the social contract that has underpinned Putin’s rule for much of the past quarter century. As someone who spends a fair amount of time thinking about the intersection of politics, governance, and public sentiment, I found it a fascinating reminder that wars are ultimately fought not just on battlefields but in the minds of societies. Governments can shape public perceptions for a remarkably long time, but eventually reality has a way of intruding.

3. A story about what happens when institutions disappear.

   The Human Cost of DOGE’s War on U.S.A.I.D.

   David Remnick interviewing Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, July 12, 2026

   This was probably the article that stayed with me the longest this week. The dismantling (really the blowing up) of USAID is something that continues to enrage me to this day. Not only did I work for USAID before joining the State Department; I also served on loan to USAID in Bangkok during the first Trump Administration where my husband (a now-former Foreign Service Officer with USAID) and I helped try to navigate the first, clumsier and less effective attacks on the Agency. This piece, rather than debating foreign assistance through the familiar lens of budgets or ideology, has David Remnick sitting down with former USAID Assistant Administrator Atul Gawande to explore what happens when an institution built over decades is dismantled in a matter of months. What I appreciated most, however, is that the conversation largely avoids nostalgia for the way things were. Instead, it examines the very real human consequences of losing institutional capacity: the loss of expertise, the dissolution of trusted partnerships, and the abandonment of communities that relied on those relationships and are now left scrambling. Whether one supports or opposes American foreign assistance, it’s a sobering reminder that institutions are more than organizational charts or budget lines. They are about experience, relationships, and capabilities that, once lost, can take years or even decades to rebuild—if there’s even the will to do so.

4. A story about how Europe may be quietly reinventing enlargement.

   What the Growth Plan Signals for the Future of Gradual Integration and Pre-Accession Funding

   European Western Balkans, July 13, 2026

   Earlier this week, in an interview with Macedonian Radio-Television, I argued that the European Union doesn’t have an enlargement problem—it has a unanimity problem. What I meant is that no matter how committed Brussels may be to expanding the Union, any member state can derail the process by elevating a bilateral dispute into a European one. Because every significant step in the accession process requires the unanimous approval of all 27 member states, enlargement remains particularly vulnerable to national politics in ways that most other EU policies aren’t. This thoughtful European Western Balkans analysis argues, however, that Brussels may be quietly moving toward a different model. Rather than treating membership as a binary proposition—countries either join or they don’t—the EU is increasingly embracing gradual integration through the Growth Plan and related initiatives. Having spent much of my career working on EU enlargement in the Western Balkans, I found the piece particularly compelling because it suggests the rules of the game might be changing. If successful, this approach could make enlargement more credible and give reform-minded governments tangible rewards much earlier in the process. But it also raises an important question: does gradual integration create a smoother path to membership, or does it risk creating a permanent waiting room where countries receive enough benefits to lessen the political urgency of actually joining?

5. A story about how political systems reshape the people within them.

   The Quintessential Trump-Era Politician

   Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, July 15, 2026

   Anne Applebaum has become one of those writers whose work I read almost automatically. Whether she’s writing about authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, or American politics, she has a remarkable ability to connect current events with deeper historical and institutional trends. In this essay, she uses the late Senator Lindsey Graham as a lens through which to examine the broader evolution of American politics. Rather than treating Graham’s political transformation as simply the story of one individual, Applebaum argues that it reflects changing incentives within the Republican Party, shifts in the media environment, and the gradual erosion of political norms that once constrained elected officials. What I appreciate most about her writing is that she rarely gets bogged down in personalities for their own sake. Instead, she asks what those personalities reveal about the institutions and political culture that produced them. Whether or not you agree with all of her conclusion, it’s a thoughtful essay that encourages readers to look beyond individual politicians and consider the larger forces reshaping American democracy.

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Books of Note

Summer is my catching-up time for reading, and I’ve been trying to make the most of it by reading those books I seem to have collected over the past several months but allowed to pile up next to the sofa in my office. These two have been waiting for me longer than I’d like to admit, and after finally picking them up, I realized they complement one another remarkably well. Both ask essentially the same question from different directions: why do great powers go to war?

1. The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History
   Odd Arne Westad (2026)

   I heard about this book on The Rest Is Politics when Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell interviewed the author, Yale-based Norwegian scholar Odd Arne Westad. This book had me from the first page. Westad argues that the world is entering a period that increasingly resembles the decades before 1914: multiple great powers competing simultaneously, accelerating technological change, weakening international norms, and leaders under growing domestic pressure. Importantly, he is not predicting another world war. Rather, he argues that today’s structural conditions make major conflict more plausible unless governments consciously learn from history and invest in diplomacy, deterrence, and crisis management.

2. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

   Graham Allison (2017)

   Though Allison’s book is older, it pairs really well with Westad’s; it is also relevant today given the active discussions in both academic and political circles about the so-called “Thucydides Trap,” something Canadian Prime Minister Carney raised in his highly regarded speech at Davos in January. In this book, Allison, the founding dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, explores sixteen historical cases in which a rising power challenged an established one, asking whether structural rivalry makes conflict more likely than policymakers often assume. His “Thucydides Trap” thesis has sparked vigorous debate since the book was published, but it remains one of the most influential frameworks for thinking about U.S.-China relations and strategic competition. Read alongside The Coming Storm, it offers an interesting contrast. One book looks backward to explain how the world’s deadliest conflict emerged; the other asks whether today’s geopolitical landscape contains similar warning signs—and whether leaders have the wisdom to avoid repeating history.

Recent Snakes & Ladders

Previous Weekly Notes

After a bit of a hiatus due to an insane travel schedule for work, I’m bringing back Weekly Notes. Every week I read far more than I could ever recommend. Most articles are perfectly competent; a handful genuinely change how I think about an issue, challenge an assumption, or explain a complicated problem unusually well.

These are the pieces that made the cut.

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Articles of Interest

1. A story—actually a speech—warning of an inflection point in U.S.-Israeli relations.

   The U.S.-Israel Relationship

   Rahm Emanuel, Speech at Tel Aviv University, July 8, 2026

   Rahm Emanuel’s speech at Tel Aviv University may prove to be one of the most consequential Democratic foreign policy speeches in years. While I recognize we have witnessed a significant souring of U.S. public opinion towards Israel, the speech is more interesting to me because Emanuel, as a lifelong supporter of Israel, former White House chief of staff, former ambassador to Japan, and potential 2028 presidential candidate, is issuing an explicit warning to the people of Israel that we have reached an inflection point in bilateral relations. He doesn’t hold back in his criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, but his larger argument is directed at Israel itself: the political foundations of American support are changing, and Israel ignores that shift at its own peril. What really stands out is Emanuel’s warning that Israel cannot assume the bipartisan consensus that has sustained the relationship for decades will simply endure. Younger Americans, not just a majority of Democrats but also a vocal core of Republicans, increasingly view the country through a different lens than previous generations.

2. A story about preparing for the Russia that comes after the Ukraine war.

   The Next Russia Threat

   Michael Kofman, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2026

   Kofman tackles one of the most important strategic questions facing Europe today: what kind of military threat will Russia pose after the war in Ukraine? Rejecting both the view that Russia has been permanently weakened and the notion that it will quickly emerge stronger, he argues that Moscow’s armed forces are being transformed by the war. Russia has suffered massive losses in personnel and equipment, but it has also expanded its defense-industrial base, adapted tactically over time, and placed its economy on a long-term wartime footing. The result will likely be a military that is smaller in some respects, but more experienced and potentially better suited to sustained conflict. What makes the article particularly valuable is its emphasis on time. It argues that the period after the fighting in Ukraine ends will not be a return to normal but a window in which Europe must rapidly strengthen its own defenses. If NATO assumes that peace in Ukraine means the Russian challenge has disappeared, it risks repeating the complacency that followed the Cold War. Whether or not one agrees with all of Kofman’s predictions, the piece is an excellent reminder that strategic competition with Russia will continue long after the guns in Ukraine fall silent.

3. A story about whether Congress is surrendering one of its most important constitutional powers.

   “A Huge Grab for Power”: Trump Is Defying Congress on Foreign Aid

   Anna Maria Barry-Jester, ProPublica, June 22, 2026

   This deeply reported investigation examines the Trump administration’s refusal to spend billions of dollars that Congress explicitly appropriated for foreign assistance. While much of the public debate has focused on the merits of foreign aid itself, ProPublica argues that the larger issue is constitutional: if the executive branch can simply decline to carry out appropriations enacted by Congress, it fundamentally alters the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches. The article also raises a question I’ve found myself asking repeatedly over the past year: Where the heck is Congress? The Constitution gives Congress—not the president—the power of the purse. Yet despite repeated assertions of executive authority over appropriated funds, Congress has shown remarkably little institutional interest in defending one of its defining prerogatives. Whether that reflects partisan loyalty, political calculation, or a broader erosion of Congress’s willingness to function as a coequal branch of government, the implications extend far beyond foreign aid.

4. A story about rebuilding foreign aid rather than simply defending it.

   How to Actually Fix Foreign Aid

   David Miliband, Foreign Policy, February 19, 2026

   OK, it took me a while for this one to get to me, but better late than never. I've spent much of the past year thinking about what comes next for international development—not just because of what's happened to USAID (though having worked for USAID and being married to a now-former USAID Foreign Service Officer, I was personally affected) but because many of the weaknesses in the old system were evident long before the current administration came along. That's why I appreciated David Miliband's piece. He doesn't waste time arguing that we should simply restore the status quo. Instead, he makes the case that development assistance remains an indispensable tool of statecraft, but one that needs to become more focused, more accountable, more locally driven, and better integrated with diplomacy and security. It resonated with me because it's very much the question I've been wrestling with in my own work both in the Balkans and regarding Ukraine's reconstruction: success doesn’t come from mobilizing more money alone. It comes from building better institutions, stronger planning systems, and clearer priorities so that scarce resources actually achieve the outcomes they're intended to deliver.

5. A story about why a weakened Putin may be more dangerous than a confident one.

   I have spent 26 years studying Vladimir Putin – this is why I think he’s about to crack

   Bill Browder, The Independent, June 4, 2026

   Ever since I first met Bill Browder when I was a staffer at the State Department and he was lobbying my boss to support the Magnitsky Act, I have read—or listened to—just about everything he says. Few people have spent as long studying the nexus of corruption, repression, organized theft, and political power in Putin’s Russia. In this piece, he argues that Putin’s oldest political trick (starting wars abroad when things are going badly at home) is finally beginning to fail. The war is no longer distant for ordinary Russians: casualties are mounting, money is tightening, Ukrainian drones are striking refineries and military sites deep inside Russia, and even the Kremlin’s own public rituals now carry a sense of vulnerability. Browder is careful not to predict Putin’s imminent overthrow, but he does argue here that the Russian leader looks more frightened and less in control than at any point in years. His larger point is the one I found most compelling: a cornered Putin may be more dangerous and this is therefore the worst possible moment to hand him relief by pushing Ukraine into a premature settlement.

6. A story about a generation discovering that the old bargain no longer works.

   A Job Market Leaving Young Graduates Behind Could Scar Them for Years

   Sydney Ember, The New York Times, June 7, 2026

   I was one of those rare creatures at the State Department (or at least it could feel that way at times) who liked to manage and mentor. Too often, it seemed like an obligation tacked onto other job requirements, but I genuinely enjoyed building, participating in, and at times leading collaborative teams. So when I see an interesting article about management and leadership these days, I tend to latch onto it. So this piece does exactly that, exploring why so many recent graduates are struggling to launch careers despite a relatively healthy labor market. It also sent me down a rabbit hole that led to a fascinating recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which argues that remote work—not AI—is now one of the biggest barriers facing young professionals because it has weakened the mentorship and training model that every generation before them largely took for granted. I know remote work has many advantages, and I wouldn’t want to lose its flexibility, but I also think we’re short-changing the next generation if we convince ourselves that mentoring, learning by osmosis, and simply being around experienced colleagues can be replicated through a screen. Some parts of work can be virtual. Becoming a professional is much harder to digitize.

7. A story about finding the right balance between collaboration and staying in your lane.

   When Your Colleague Won’t Stay in Their Lane

   Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review, June 26, 2026

   Here’s a frank admission: I’ve wrestled with this one throughout my career. My instinct has always been to break down silos and encourage people to think beyond the narrow confines of their own portfolios. Some of the best solutions I’ve seen, whether at the State Department, USAID, or now in my work on Ukraine reconstruction, have come from people who were willing to connect dots that others couldn’t see. At the same time, I also recognize that this approach can create friction. As the head of Public Affairs sections in embassies overseas, I often found myself working at the intersection of communications and policy, and that wasn’t always an easy balance to strike. That’s why I appreciated Amy Gallo’s nuanced take. She doesn’t argue that people should simply “stay in their lane.” Instead, she recognizes that collaboration and constructive challenge are essential to healthy organizations, but so are clarity of roles, respect for colleagues’ expertise, and good judgment about when to step in and when to step back. I continue to believe that the best organizations are those that encourage cross-sectoral collaboration. The challenge is creating a culture where people contribute across boundaries without blurring accountability.

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Substacks of Note

1. Ian Bancroft has become one of my favorite writers on the Western Balkans (and not just because we worked together eons ago in the region). At a time when much of the commentary on the region focuses on political crises, elections, or ethnic tensions, Bancroft consistently finds ways to tell stories that reveal the deeper social and historical currents shaping the region. His pieces on his Autochthoinos Substack remind me that politics ultimately happens in places, among communities, and through the lives of ordinary people.

   Winemaking as Resistance in Bosnia-Herzegovina

   Autochthoinos, July 8, 2026

   On its face, this is a story about wine. In reality, it’s about identity, memory, and resilience in the Western Balkans. Ian uses the vineyards of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a country dear to my heart) to explore how people preserve culture and continuity despite decades of conflict, displacement, and political upheaval. What I admire about this writing is the ability to illuminate the region without reducing it to geopolitics. Bancroft understands that history isn’t only written through peace agreements and elections—it is also written by people who continue to cultivate the same land, practice the same traditions, and quietly refuse to let conflict define who they are. If you’re interested in the Balkans, this Substack deserves a place in your inbox.

2. In terms of foreign policy authors worth reading, this one is obvious. Michael Froman has long been one of the more thoughtful voices on international economics and American foreign policy. Whether writing about trade, alliances, or geopolitics, he has a knack for stepping back from the daily news cycle and asking what the bigger strategic picture looks like. Even when I don’t fully agree with his conclusions, I almost always come away with a better appreciation of the tradeoffs policymakers are wrestling with. This piece particularly stood out to me though.

   Trump, Ukraine, and the NATO Summit: A Love Story

   The World This Week, July 10, 2026

   The title is intentionally provocative, but the essay itself is much more nuanced. Rather than focusing on President Trump’s rhetoric, Froman evaluates what actually emerged from this year’s NATO summit and argues that, in several important respects, the outcomes were better than many observers expected. I appreciated his willingness to judge the summit by its results rather than by the personalities involved. While I remain skeptical of foreign policy built primarily on personal relationships and transactional deal-making, Froman makes a compelling case that strategic gains sometimes emerge from unexpected places. It’s a thoughtful piece that challenges readers to separate process from outcomes—a distinction that is often lost in today’s political debate.

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Podcast Recommendation

1. How Ukraine Became Essential to U.S. Security

   The Conversation Podcast with Dasha Burns, Politico

   This interview with Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Olha Stefanishyna is worth listening to because it looks beyond battlefield updates and makes the broader strategic case for why Ukraine matters to American national security. It’s a useful reminder that the debate isn’t simply about supporting one country—it’s about the kind of international order the United States wants to preserve.

Recent Snakes & Ladders

Previous Weekly Notes

AFTER AN EVENTFUL few weeks for Ukraine—marked by a successful Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk and an even more consequential NATO summit in Ankara—the July 12 resignation of Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko caught many by surprise.

Rumors had swirled almost from the moment of her appointment less than a year ago, shortly after the previous Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome, that Svyrydenko’s tenure might prove brief. Those rumors intensified following last November’s energy-sector corruption scandal. Although Svyrydenko was not personally implicated, the scandal erupted in institutions that had fallen within the remit of the Ministry of Economy during her tenure, after oversight mechanisms intended to prevent precisely this kind of corruption had been weakened.

There was therefore an open question as to whether the political fallout would eventually reach her. When she survived the scandal—and the ouster of her principal patron in the Presidential Office, Andrii Yermak—many assumed she had weathered the most dangerous period of her premiership and would remain in place for the foreseeable future.

The immediate reaction to her resignation has largely become a story about personalities. Who is up? Who is down? Who replaces her? Which faction won? Which one lost?

Those are reasonable questions. But they may not be the most important ones.

Over the past several years, Ukraine has assembled much of the institutional machinery needed to fight a war, pursue European Union membership, attract international investment, and eventually undertake what will likely become Europe’s largest reconstruction effort since the Second World War. The challenge is no longer simply creating institutions, but making these disparate parts function as a coherent system.

Svyrydenko made some modest efforts to address this problem. She established a new Delivery Unit, modeled in part on Tony Blair’s “deliverology” approach to government performance, and empowered her former deputy—and successor as minister of economy—Oleksii Sobolev with a broader mandate to coordinate strategic planning across government.

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These were sensible steps, but they fell short of creating a truly integrated planning mechanism. Authority over strategy, budgeting, public investment, reconstruction, reform, and implementation remained dispersed across ministries, the Cabinet, the Presidential Office, and an expanding web of donor-supported structures. Coordination improved at the margins, but Ukraine still lacked a single institutional architecture capable of translating national priorities into coherent implementation across government.

That is why this Cabinet reshuffle deserves to be viewed through a different lens. The real question is not simply who becomes prime minister. It is whether President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is trying to build a more coherent system of government for the next phase of the war—or simply reshuffle a group of highly capable individuals among different portfolios.

So Why Now?

Absent some dramatic revelation in the coming days, this reshuffle appears to be less about personalities than about timing.

From the outside, the decision seems counterintuitive. Ukraine has just come through one of its strongest diplomatic stretches in months. The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk produced significant political and financial commitments. The NATO summit in Ankara reinforced allied support, reportedly including U.S. approval for Ukraine to begin producing Patriot missiles domestically—an important step toward building a more sustainable defense-industrial base.

Ukraine has also demonstrated an increasing capacity to take the war to Russia and occupied Crimea. Strikes on military facilities, logistics hubs, refineries, and transport networks have begun to affect Russian supply lines and contribute to gasoline shortages in parts of the country. The overall military picture remains extraordinarily difficult, but the narrative has shifted somewhat. The question is becoming less whether Ukraine can survive than how it can sustain pressure on Russia over the long term.

This hardly seems like the obvious moment to replace a prime minister. Yet a government transition also creates an opening to reconsider not only who occupies senior positions, but how those positions fit together and whether the machinery of government remains suited to the challenges ahead.

For much of the full-scale war, Ukraine’s government has necessarily operated in crisis-management mode, driven by battlefield requirements, emergency financing needs, humanitarian pressures, attacks on energy infrastructure, and the constant demands of keeping the state functioning under fire.

Ukraine must still manage all of those pressures. But it must now do considerably more at the same time. It is negotiating accession to the European Union, preparing for another difficult winter, expanding domestic defense production, implementing complex agreements with the United States and European partners, managing enormous public investments, and attempting to attract private capital into an active war zone.

These are not simply questions of emergency response. They are questions of governing complexity.

Reconstruction is not something that begins cleanly after the war. It is a continuum bringing together short-, medium-, and longer-term needs. Decisions about infrastructure, energy, municipal recovery, defense production, economic development, and public investment are shaping the foundations of Ukraine’s future economy now.

Ukraine has assembled many of the institutional pieces needed to manage that process: the Ukraine Plan, public investment management reforms, the Strategic Investment Council, the Single Project Pipeline, multiple project-preparation facilities, the Ukraine Facility, the World Bank-led “Economy of the Future” initiative, and an expanding network of bilateral and multilateral programs.

Most are thoughtful and necessary. The problem is that they were developed by different institutions, at different times, to address different parts of the challenge, and do not always connect as seamlessly as they might.

This is not unusual. Whenever a government, international financial institutions, bilateral donors, and private investors are all responding to a crisis of this scale, strong individual initiatives often emerge faster than the architecture needed to integrate them.

The challenge for Ukraine is therefore no longer simply to create more institutions or programs. It is to make the existing parts work as a system. That is the opportunity presented by this reshuffle

A new government can clarify responsibilities, strengthen the center of government, improve coordination between the Cabinet and the Presidential Office, and create a more direct connection between national strategy, budgets, public investment, donor assistance, and implementation.

Ukraine has no shortage of capable officials or committed international partners. What it still needs is a structure that allows them to work together more consistently and effectively. Whether Zelenskyy uses this transition to build that structure may ultimately matter more than the identity of the next prime minister.

Three Candidates, Three Approaches

The obvious question, of course, is who replaces Svyrydenko. As of this writing, no decision has been announced, and it is entirely possible that names circulating today will prove to be little more than trial balloons. Still, three names have emerged repeatedly in early reporting and in conversations in Kyiv.

More interesting than their biographies, however, is what each choice would signal about the direction Zelenskyy wants to take the government. Each candidate represents a different approach to the institutional challenge just outlined.

Sergii Koretskyi: Betting on Execution

Perhaps the most intriguing name to emerge is Sergii Koretskyi, the head of Naftogaz.

His experience places him at the intersection of several of Ukraine’s most pressing priorities: energy security, state-owned enterprise reform, international finance, and wartime implementation. Unlike Shmyhal and Fedorov, Koretskyi comes not from the center of government but from the management of one of Ukraine’s most strategically important state-owned enterprises.

His selection would suggest that Zelenskyy increasingly views Ukraine’s central challenge as one of execution: delivering reconstruction projects, improving the performance of state-owned enterprises, strengthening energy resilience, implementing agreements with international partners, and turning ambitious strategies into measurable results.

In many respects, that diagnosis would be understandable. As reconstruction matures, implementation capacity may become just as important as policy development. The question is whether the skills required to lead a major enterprise translate naturally into leading an entire government.

Running Naftogaz requires clear lines of authority and organizational discipline. Running the Cabinet requires coordinating ministries that possess different mandates, political constituencies, funding sources, and relationships with international partners. Those are different management challenges.

Still, Koretskyi’s emergence in the discussion may itself signal something important. Zelenskyy may increasingly be looking for senior officials with proven records of operational delivery rather than traditional political experience.

Denys Shmyhal: Betting on Experience

If Zelenskyy’s primary objective is continuity, Denys Shmyhal would seem the most logical choice.

Few people understand the machinery of the Ukrainian state better. During more than five years as prime minister, Shmyhal led the government through COVID, the full-scale Russian invasion, the stabilization of Ukraine’s wartime economy, the creation of much of today’s reconstruction architecture, and the first stages of Ukraine’s EU accession process. He has worked extensively with the European Commission, the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, bilateral donors, and virtually every major institution supporting Ukraine’s recovery.

That experience carries obvious advantages. Ukraine simply does not have the luxury of lengthy transitions. The government must continue negotiating with international financial institutions, preparing budgets, coordinating reconstruction, expanding domestic defense production, and implementing increasingly complex agreements with international partners regardless of who occupies the prime minister’s office.

The downside is equally apparent. Many of the institutions now requiring better integration were established or expanded during Shmyhal’s premiership. They have accomplished a great deal, but often evolved in parallel rather than as parts of a single planning system.

Critics frequently argued that Shmyhal was either unwilling or unable to demand greater coordination across his Cabinet. He also appeared to lack solid advocates within the President’s Office, without which he struggled to compel compliance.

If Shmyhal returns, the question will not be whether he can run the government competently. He has already demonstrated that. The more interesting question is whether he would seek to fundamentally reorganize the machinery of government—or whether continuity itself is precisely what Zelenskyy is seeking.

Mykhailo Fedorov: Betting on Transformation

If Shmyhal represents continuity, Mykhailo Fedorov represents transformation.

Few ministers have become more closely associated with Ukraine’s modern image than Fedorov. As minister of digital transformation, he helped build the Diia platform into one of the world’s leading examples of digital government. More recently, his appointment to lead the Ministry of Defense signaled Zelenskyy’s desire to bring the same emphasis on innovation, technology, and rapid execution to one of the state’s most important institutions.

Ukraine’s next phase will demand exactly the kinds of skills Fedorov has demonstrated: modern management, technological innovation, organizational agility, and an ability to move quickly.

At the same time, his appointment would create an obvious dilemma. Fedorov has been defense minister for only a relatively short period. The reforms he was brought in to lead remain incomplete, and finding an equally capable successor would not be easy. Moving him again so quickly could disrupt one of the government’s highest priorities.

There is also an important distinction between transforming a ministry and coordinating an entire government. As Svyrydenko learned to her detriment, the latter requires balancing competing ministerial interests, aligning budgets with strategy, managing parliamentary politics, and ensuring that dozens of institutions move toward common objectives.

Innovation would undoubtedly remain an asset. Whether innovation alone solves Ukraine’s coordination challenge is another matter.

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What Success Would Actually Look Like

Taken together, these three names tell us something interesting. They are not simply three politicians competing for the same office. They represent three different diagnoses of Ukraine’s next challenge.

Should the government emphasize operational execution? Continuity? Transformation? Those are fundamentally different visions of governance.

Yet while the discussion has focused almost exclusively on the prime minister, personnel decisions below that level may ultimately prove just as consequential. If this reshuffle succeeds, the evidence will not be dramatic. There will be no announcement that Ukraine has finally solved its coordination problems, and no single reform will suddenly align strategy, budgeting, public investment, donor support, and implementation.

Success will look more mundane—and be more consequential. National priorities will be translated more consistently into ministry strategies. Public investment decisions will reinforce those priorities rather than evolve separately from them. Donor-supported initiatives will become increasingly complementary rather than merely parallel. Ministries will spend less time negotiating institutional boundaries and more time delivering results.

That is why the futures of three ministries—Economy, Finance, and Development of Communities and Territories—will matter nearly as much as the identity of the next prime minister.

Together, they sit at the center of Ukraine’s reconstruction architecture, linking national strategy, budgeting, public investment, reconstruction, and implementation. Around them sits a broader ecosystem of institutions and initiatives, including the Strategic Investment Council, the State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development (SARDI), public investment management reforms, the “Economy of the Future” initiative, the Ukraine Facility, project-preparation facilities, and a growing range of bilateral programs.

Each addresses an important part of the problem. But responsibilities for planning, prioritization, financing, and execution remain divided among ministries, implementation agencies, the Cabinet, the Presidential Office, and international partners. The task now is not simply to strengthen each institution individually, but to clarify who leads on what—and to connect the parts more effectively.

Encouragingly, many of my recent conversations with Ukrainian officials and donor partners suggest that this need is increasingly understood. The discussion is beginning to shift from creating new mechanisms toward making existing ones work together more effectively. That recognition could create space for Ukraine and its international partners to shape a broader effort focused not on adding another institutional layer, but on helping the existing ones work together more coherently.

That is the opportunity presented by this transition. The next prime minister will matter. So will the balance of power inside the Presidential Office, the leadership and mandates of the three central ministries, the role of implementation agencies such as SARDI, and the authority given to those responsible for strategic planning and delivery. But the real test will be institutional.

Six months from now, the important question will not be which candidate appeared strongest on the day Svyrydenko resigned. It will be whether Ukraine has become better at turning national priorities into coordinated action.

If it has, this reshuffle may prove to have been more than another round of personnel changes. It may ultimately be remembered as the moment Ukraine began adapting its institutions—not simply to survive the war, but to govern the reconstruction that is already underway.

Over the past week, I have found myself thinking a great deal about the Western Balkans.

On Friday, leaders from across the region gathered in Tivat, Montenegro, for the EU–Western Balkans Summit. The choice of venue was fitting. Montenegro appears to have the clearest path toward becoming the European Union’s next member state and has undergone one of the region’s most remarkable transformations over the past two decades. It moved from being one of the two remaining constituent republics of the Serbia-Montenegro union, to an independent state often defined by corruption and political stagnation, to one of the region’s most dynamic and reform-oriented countries.

What has been weighing on me, however, is that Montenegro’s success increasingly highlights a broader trend across the region. The Western Balkans are beginning to divide into two distinct categories: countries with a credible and increasingly visible path toward EU membership, most notably Montenegro and Albania, and countries that appear to be falling further behind, including Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and North Macedonia.

Readers of this newsletter know that I spend a considerable amount of time worrying about this growing bifurcation and what it could mean for European and transatlantic security. As the European Union works to create viable accession pathways for Ukraine and Moldova, it risks creating a dangerous contradiction in its own neighborhood. Europe is trying to lock the front door while it leaves the back door open to Russian and other malign influences in the Western Balkans.

Unfortunately, the United States has not been helping to address this challenge in recent months. The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on former Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik; forced out Bosnia’s High Representative, Christian Schmidt; stepped back from decades of bipartisan American support for the region’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions; and is now reportedly considering withdrawing from the Peace Implementation Council, the body that has helped oversee implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement since 1995.

The absence of American engagement removes one of the pillars that has helped preserve stability in the Western Balkans for the past three decades. While Washington and Brussels have not always agreed on tactics, they generally worked toward the same strategic objective: a stable, democratic region integrated into European and transatlantic institutions. American political engagement, technical assistance, and reform support often complemented the EU’s accession process in ways that made both approaches more effective. Without that partnership, everyone is operating at a disadvantage.

Those concerns have framed much of what I have been reading and listening to this week, though not everything. What follows are a few pieces that helped sharpen my thinking.

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Articles of Interest

1. A story about whether the European Union is finally prepared to treat enlargement as a strategic necessity rather than a perpetual aspiration.
   

   EU Must Prove It Is Capable and Willing to Take In New Members, Leaders Say
   Jon Henley, The Guardian, June 5, 2026

   It is early days after the Tivat summit for detailed analyses, but this dispatch from the Tivat summit effectively captures a reality that has become increasingly difficult for European leaders to ignore: the credibility of the enlargement process is now a geopolitical issue in its own right. What stood out to me was the extent to which leaders such as Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged that the problem is no longer simply whether candidate countries are ready to join, but whether the EU is willing and able to expand. The article also highlights the growing discussion around gradual integration, which would allow candidates to participate in parts of the European project before full membership. The question lurking beneath the summit is whether this is meant to serve as a bridge to accession or a substitute for it.

2. A story about how dramatically U.S. policy toward the Western Balkans has shifted under the Trump administration.
   

   A Deeper Look at Trump’s New Policy Toward the Western Balkans
   Atlantic Council, June 5, 2026

   The Atlantic Council’s experts dissect the Trump administration’s newly released Western Balkans strategy and conclude that Washington is pursuing a fundamentally different approach than the one that guided American policy for most of the post-Dayton era. Rather than emphasizing democratic reform, institution-building, and conflict management, the new approach places greater weight on stability, burden-sharing, and commercial interests. What I find most disturbing about this situation is the widening gap between European and American thinking about the region. For decades, the Balkans were one of the clearest examples of transatlantic cooperation, but increasingly, they are becoming an example of transatlantic divergence. The ability to stabilize the region following the 1990s was predicated on tight collaboration between the United States and Europe, a collaboration that seems to be unraveling (or being unraveled by Trump, to be more precise).

3. A story about why even the most successful former Yugoslav republic should not be viewed as immune to Europe’s populist currents.
   

   Slovenia Braces for Veteran Right-Wingers’ Radical Agenda
   Balkan Insight, June 5, 2026

   Slovenia is often treated as the success story of the former Yugoslavia: the first to join both NATO and the EU, the wealthiest successor state, and a country that largely escaped the instability that plagued much of the region. That is what makes this story so interesting. Viktor Orban may be gone, but he has fostered similarly minded leaders around Central and Eastern Europe. While Bulgaria, Czechia and Slovakia have received most of the attention, Slovenia’s Janez Jansa is probably the closest thing to an Orban acolyte. This piece examines the return of this veteran right-wing political force and the possibility that Slovenia could experience some of the same illiberal pressures that have reshaped politics elsewhere in Europe. The lesson is not that Slovenia is destined to follow Hungary’s path, but that democratic consolidation is never permanent. Even countries widely viewed as “finished projects” remain vulnerable to political backsliding.

4. A story about the growing divide emerging within the Western Balkans accession process.
   

   Marta Kos: Montenegro and Albania Are Clearly Moving Into the Next Phases of Their Accession Process
   Sofia Popovic, European Western Balkans, June 5, 2026

   European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos delivers what may be the clearest official acknowledgment yet that the Western Balkans are no longer moving toward the EU at the same speed. Her comments make clear that Montenegro and Albania have established themselves as the frontrunners for membership while other candidates continue to struggle with domestic political obstacles and unresolved disputes. What struck me most was not the optimism surrounding the two lead countries, but the implicit recognition that a two-tier Western Balkans is emerging. That, to me, is a serious problem—the EU risks creating a vacuum in the heart of Europe if it cannot apply some of the same creative political thinking to the Balkans region as it has been trying to do for Ukraine and Moldova.

5. A piece about why a college degree is no longer providing the labor-market security many young Americans expected.

   A Job Market Leaving Young Graduates Behind Could Scar Them for Years
   Sydney Ember, The New York Times, June 5, 2026

   This article is a detour from the Balkan theme, but one I found very interesting. The New York Times examines the increasingly difficult employment landscape facing recent college graduates and challenges the long-standing assumption that higher education guarantees economic opportunity. While college graduates still fare better than those without degrees, the transition from school to work has become more uncertain, particularly in white-collar sectors facing hiring slowdowns and technological disruption. One underappreciated problem that I care a lot about is mentorship. New entrants to the labor market need guidance, feedback, and exposure to workplace norms. In a post-COVID work culture with more frequent telework, those forms of mentorship are harder to find. That kind of in-person engagement is critical to new workers. (It definitely was to me.) As a result, we risk short-changing the next generation of leaders before they even have a chance to develop.

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Substacks of Note

1. Here’s a worthwhile democracy-reform Substack from Rob Richie and the Expand Democracy team. This one resonates with the side of me interested in solutions to the structural challenges that politics in the United States faces today.

   The Expand Democracy 3
   

   Rob Richie, the former head of FairVote and one of the country’s most thoughtful advocates for electoral reform, is now leading Expand Democracy, a nonprofit focused on advancing pro-democracy ideas and strategies. Their Substack, The Expand Democracy 3, is a useful way to track debates that often sit just below the surface of mainstream political coverage: voting systems, representation, election administration, civic infrastructure, and the practical mechanics of democratic renewal. I have long appreciated Rob’s ability to connect big structural reform ideas to concrete political pathways. For readers interested in how American democracy might be strengthened rather than simply defended, this is worth following.

2. produced a deeply affecting essay about what humanitarian workers face when they return home. Anyone who has served overseas, particularly in crisis response situations, and then returns home and feels kind of lost (and not understood) should be able to relate to this one.

   Who’s That Aid Worker? — Part 2: After the Field
   The Continuity Project, May 29, 2026

   This piece struck a real chord with me. It is not simply about the stress of crisis work, but about the harder-to-describe experience of coming home from it: the loss of role, the difficulty of translating field experience into ordinary conversation, the moral injury that comes from knowing what should have happened and watching systems fail to do it, and the strange solitude of carrying specific knowledge about places that the public debate often flattens. What I appreciated most is that the essay avoids both romanticizing and pathologizing humanitarian workers. It treats the work as meaningful, costly, imperfect, and morally complicated—which is probably the only honest way to write about it. For those friends and colleagues who lost their USAID and development jobs this past year, I think it is even more resonant, because it is impossible, unless you have lived the same experience, to fully understand the sense of loss these people are feeling.

Recent Snakes & Ladders

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I’m back home after last week’s whirlwind trip to Europe and have been trying to metabolize a set of conversations that all seemed to point in the same direction: many of the assumptions that structured the post–Cold War world are now being reworked in real time.

That sounds grandiose, but it increasingly feels less like an abstraction and more like the reality policymakers are now operating in. NATO is trying to figure out how to sustain deterrence if the United States becomes a less reliable conventional military presence in Europe. Ukraine is not merely surviving Russia’s invasion, but actively reshaping the battlefield and the future of warfare. Meanwhile, the political signals are more muddled. Hungary demonstrates that even 16 years of illiberal democracy can be reversed if the electorate so decides, but it remains far from clear how applicable those lessons are to other European countries — or, more pointedly, to the United States.

The throughline this week is that adaptation is no longer optional. The question I’ve brought back to the U.S. is whether the damage done to our network of alliances by the Trump administration will set us on a course for a “divorce” with Europe, or whether we will be able to renew the relationship, strengthen it, and make it more fit for purpose as we face new challenges together. I believe strongly that the latter is where we have to land in the end, but I left Europe with a much more unsettling question: Will our allies ever feel they can fully trust us again — and if they do not, what will that loss of confidence mean for America’s role in the world?

Articles of Interest

1. A story about how NATO’s deterrence problem is becoming less a question of rhetoric than of actual military capacity.

   The Coming Crisis of NATO Deterrence

   Celeste Wallander, Foreign Affairs, May 2026

   This is one of the clearest pieces I’ve read about the gap between NATO’s stated commitments and the conventional military capabilities needed to make those commitments credible. Wallander argues that the United States is making a dangerous bet in Europe: trying to reassure allies through continued nuclear guarantees while reducing parts of the conventional forward presence that have long helped make deterrence work in practice. What I found most interesting in this piece was how it moves beyond the familiar debate over whether America is “committed” to NATO and instead asks what that commitment actually consists of operationally. Deterrence is not just a declaratory policy or a presidential statement; it is troops, logistics, munitions, command structures, exercises, and the demonstrated ability to move quickly in a crisis. In that sense, the article fits very directly with what I heard repeatedly in Europe over the past two weeks: the issue is no longer whether Europeans understand that they need to do more, but whether they and the United States can close the gap between political urgency and military capacity before Moscow decides to test it.

2. A story about how Hungary’s opposition managed to make an entrenched illiberal system beatable.

   How to Win an Election in Viktor Orban’s Hungary

   M. Gessen, The New York Times, May 29, 2026

   M. Gessen’s piece on Hungary stood out to me because it is not simply another warning about democratic backsliding, but a rare and useful account of how an opposition movement can break into a system that had been methodically designed to keep it out of power. For years, Viktor Orban’s Hungary has functioned as one of the central reference points for contemporary illiberal politics: a country where elections continued to take place, but where the media environment, state resources, patronage networks, and political rules were all tilted heavily in favor of the incumbent. What makes the story so interesting is that Hungary’s opposition did not defeat Orban by pretending those structural disadvantages did not exist. It found a way to campaign through them.

   The most compelling part of the piece, to me, is its focus on political imagination after years of learned defeat. Orban’s power rested not only on institutional control, but on the widespread assumption that he could not really be beaten. (I remember even on the day of the election hearing from friends concerned Orban would “never” accept a loss.) The success of the opposition therefore mattered not just electorally, but psychologically. It showed that even a highly managed illiberal system can become vulnerable when corruption, economic frustration, political fatigue, and a credible challenger converge. For those of us watching similar dynamics elsewhere, Hungary is a reminder that democratic politics can look exhausted right up until the moment it suddenly does not.

3. A story about how Ukraine’s decision to take the war directly to Russia is changing the strategic logic of the conflict.

   Ukraine Has a New War Strategy—and It’s Working

   Paul Hockenos, Foreign Policy, May 2026

   This piece captures something that has become increasingly important to how I think about the war: Ukraine is no longer simply trying to endure Russian pressure, absorb Western assistance, and hold the line. It is actively changing the geometry of the war. Hockenos writes about Ukraine’s decision over the past year to bring the fight directly to Russia through long-range strikes, sabotage, and attacks on infrastructure that Moscow had once assumed were safely beyond reach. What is striking is not just the operational success of these attacks, but the way they undermine one of Russia’s central advantages: depth. For much of the war, Russia has relied on geography, sheer size, and a willingness to absorb huge costs. Ukraine’s evolving strategy is forcing Russia to defend more territory, protect more infrastructure, and explain more disruption to its own population.

   That does not mean Ukraine has solved the war, but it does suggest that Kyiv is finding ways to impose costs on Russia that are political and psychological as well as military. It is also another reminder that Ukraine is not merely a recipient of Western strategy; it is producing strategic lessons that the West is still struggling to absorb.

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Book Recommendation

I have been reading a book that I wanted to recommend this week: Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy by Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown. I first came across it when listening to an episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast featuring Mettler a few months ago. The conversation stuck with me because it offers one of the clearest explanations I’ve heard of how geography has become such a powerful organizing force in American politics.

What makes the book particularly relevant is that it avoids the easy caricatures that often dominate conversations about rural and urban America. The divide is not simply about red states versus blue states, coastal elites versus flyover country, or cultural resentment floating free from material conditions. Mettler and Brown instead show how economic change, political representation, media ecosystems, and institutional incentives have all helped turn place into political identity.

That matters because the American constitutional system was never designed for a politics in which geography and partisanship align so completely. The Senate, the Electoral College, and many state-level institutions all give disproportionate influence to less populous places.

For much of American history, that imbalance was softened by the fact that both parties had meaningful rural and urban constituencies: rural Democrats in parts of the farm belt, urban Republicans in New England and the Northwest, and a much more fluid relationship between place and party.

When rural areas become overwhelmingly identified with one party and urban areas with the other, however, those institutional advantages no longer operate as quirks of federalism; they become mechanisms for minority rule. That is what makes the rural-urban divide feel so dangerous. It is not only a cultural or electoral divide, but a structural one — and one that increasingly shapes whether national majorities can actually govern.

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Recent Snakes & Ladders

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ALTHOUGH THERE ARE so many things I could be writing about at the moment, these electoral analyses have really captured me at the moment and so I decided to indulge in one more examination of an issue that creates perhaps the biggest impediment to the emergence of a third party in the United States.

The spoiler problem is one of the oldest grievances in democracies that elect their representatives via plurality vote. Every four years, American voters who prefer a third-party candidate are warned they are “wasting their vote” or, worse, handing the election to the candidate they like the least. Ralph Nader in 2000. Jill Stein in 2016. The accusation is always the same. But how true is it, really?

Most people argue that the solution is to do away with the Electoral College and give the presidency to the candidate who won the most votes—regardless of whether or not they win an outright majority. This appears simple on the face of it, but America’s constitutional framework is federal and state-mediated, not a simple national popular-vote democracy, and its constitutional framework is set up very specifically to empower the states to elect the president. So I decided to assume we cannot discard the Electoral College but we can change the way the Electoral College votes are allocated.

There are a few proposals already out there about how this might be done. One is to assign electoral votes by congressional district, with the overall winner of the most votes getting the two “statewide” votes regardless of the margin. But this perpetuates the gerrymandering problem, since congressional districts are not fairly carved up. Another option is to assign electoral votes by proportion of the vote—which is cleaner and likely more reflective of the voters’ will.

However, I thought I would try a different kind of thought experiment: what if every state had been required to use ranked-choice voting (RCV) in 2000 and 2016, with each state’s electoral votes going winner-take-all to whoever prevailed in that state? In other words, a candidate would have to win over 50% of the vote to win, but would still win all the electoral votes. You don’t change the way we allocate electoral college votes (winner-take-all, except in Nebraska and Maine), but you do require a candidate to win over 50% to get them. Thus you remove the “spoiler” from the system.

Under RCV, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes redistributed to voters’ next choice—so we can model, with some assumptions, exactly what would have happened.

The results are illuminating—and in the 2016 case, much more complicated than the conventional wisdom might have suggested.

2000: The Clean Case

The 2000 experiment is almost too easy to set up. The four relevant candidates were George W. Bush, Al Gore, Pat Buchanan (Reform Party), and Ralph Nader (Green). The second-choice assumptions are straightforward:

• Buchanan → Bush (Buchanan was a right-wing nationalist; his voters’ home was clearly the Republican Party)

• Nader → Gore (Nader ran explicitly to Gore’s left, drawing disaffected progressives)

Under RCV, the math in each state simplifies to a single comparison. In states where neither Bush nor Gore got more than 50% of the vote, the candidate who gets the least votes drops out and his (in 2000 they are all men) votes are reallocated to his voters’ second choices; if no candidate still has more than 50% of the vote, the next lowest candidate drops and his votes are reallocated. In the end, the essential assumption we make is that Bush will get Buchanan’s votes and Gore will get Nader’s.

The result? When everything is calculated state-by-state, two states flip—and both go to Gore.

Florida is the famous one. Bush’s actual margin was 537 votes. Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida to Buchanan’s 17,484. Buchanan drops out and his votes go to Bush, but Bush still doesn’t reach 50%. So Nader drops and his votes are reallocated—this time, we are assuming, primarily to Gore. After that redistribution, Gore wins Florida by nearly 80,000 votes. It isn’t close.

New Hampshire also flips. Bush won it by about 7,200 votes, but Nader had 22,198 votes there versus Buchanan’s 2,615. Gore wins New Hampshire by over 12,000.

No states flip in the other direction. Buchanan was so much smaller than Nader almost everywhere that none of Gore’s states were in danger. The final RCV electoral count: Gore 295, Bush 242. A comfortable win.

The conventional wisdom about 2000 holds up perfectly under scrutiny. Nader cost Gore the presidency. Two states. Case closed.

2016: Where It Gets Complicated

The 2016 experiment looks similar on the surface—Jill Stein (Green) maps cleanly onto Nader, and her votes go to Clinton—but Gary Johnson scrambles everything.

Johnson received nearly 4.5 million votes as the Libertarian nominee, the strongest third-party performance since Ross Perot. The problem is that unlike Buchanan, who was clearly a right-wing figure, Johnson’s voters were genuinely bipartisan. Pew Research found that in a two-party race, his supporters split 43% for Clinton, 42% for Trump—essentially a coin flip. He was a former Republican governor who ran on a fiscally conservative, socially liberal platform, and he drew protest votes from both sides of the aisle.

This means we can’t run one experiment. We have to run three.

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The Scenarios

Scenario A — Johnson goes to Trump (treating him as a right-leaning spoiler): Trump doesn’t just hold his states. He picks up Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire from Clinton, because in all four Johnson’s vote was large enough to push Trump over the top once redistributed. Final result: Trump 330, Clinton 208. Trump wins by more than he actually did.

Scenario B — Johnson goes to Clinton (treating him as an anti-Trump protest vote): Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all flip to Clinton. North Carolina stays with Trump (his margin there was too large). Final result: Clinton 318, Trump 220. Clinton wins decisively.

Scenario C — Johnson splits 50/50 (the most data-supported assumption): This is where it gets elegant. When you split Johnson’s votes evenly, his half to Trump and his half to Clinton cancel each other out. They become mathematically irrelevant. The election is then decided entirely by Stein’s votes alone. And Stein exceeded Trump’s winning margin in all three states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) that decided the election:

Those three states carry 46 electoral votes. Thus the final RCV count is Clinton 278, Trump 260. Clinton wins.

There’s a crucial detail that gets overlooked in virtually every post-election analysis of 2016: Jill Stein was not on the ballot in Florida, Nevada, or North Carolina. She had no meaningful presence in those states. This matters enormously. Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, stays with Trump in every scenario except the extreme “all Johnson to Clinton” case. Without Stein on the ballot, there are no Green votes to redistribute to Clinton in the state that would have put her over the top most comfortably.

What This Tells Us

The two elections tell very different stories about third parties and spoilers.

In 2000, Nader was unambiguously the decisive factor. He was larger than Buchanan, clearly left-leaning, and present in the states that mattered. The RCV counterfactual is clean: Gore wins.

In 2016, the picture is more nuanced. Stein was the cleaner spoiler—a left-leaning candidate whose votes, when redistributed, flip exactly the three states that decided the election. But she was also smaller and missing from several key battlegrounds. Johnson was far larger and potentially more consequential, but his ideological ambiguity means he could plausibly have helped either candidate.

Perhaps the most striking single number in the whole exercise: under the most defensible assumptions, Clinton would have won Pennsylvania under RCV by about 5,600 votes—a margin almost as razor-thin as Bush’s 537-vote Florida margin in 2000. And without Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes, Clinton would have lost the electoral vote regardless.

The Spoiler Effect Exists

It is pretty clear that in any election where a plurality of the vote wins, spoilers can affect the outcome. The predominantly first-past-the-post system used in most of the United States is particularly vulnerable to this, though proportional systems with thresholds to enter the legislature can also be affected. So these concerns cannot be dismissed out of hand.

The few states where the system is different—Washington State and California’s “jungle” primaries and top-two runoffs, Alaska’s similar system but with a top-four ranked-choice, Maine’s RCV for national (but not state) races, and the several states that have simple top-two runoffs—are less affected by this dynamic. Which is why when we discuss the need for new parties and new options, people generally start with a discussion of electoral reform.

To get agreement on electoral reform, however, you need broad-based support—something that the zero-sum-politics of the present Republican-Democratic duopoly do not make room for. Anything supported by one party is generally opposed by the other, with reform today being championed by the Democrats and viewed with suspicion by Republicans. Thus we have a chicken-and-egg dilemma, without a clear path forward.

Nevertheless, the fact is that in a system that awards electoral votes by plurality vote, third parties don’t just complicate elections. They can silently determine them. Whether that’s a bug or a feature depends on how you feel about having more than two choices.

All calculations used certified FEC vote totals. Johnson estimates for states lacking individual candidate breakdowns were derived from reported percentages and FEC “All Others” aggregated. Stein ballot access status per FEC records and campaign filings. Johnson second-choice data from Pew Research Center, August 2016.

I started the week on the Estonian-Russian border in Narva, surprised by the narrowness of the river that separates the two countries. I ended it inadvertantly sparking a rather feisty exchange at GLOBSEC in Prague between the Speaker of the Serbian Parliament and the former Prime Minister of Bulgaria over North Macedonia’s EU fortunes. This whirlwind European trip, which also took me to Belgrade, has left me without a voice, excited about all the follow-up exchanges I’ve teed up, energized by all the conversations and discussions I had, but also longing to get back home and sleep in my own bed again.

The one observation that stood out the most to me this week at GLOBSEC and last week at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn is how much European security conversations have shifted from crisis management toward long-term structural adaptation.

Increasingly, European policymakers seem less focused on “ending” instability and more focused on managing what they now view as a permanently more volatile geopolitical environment, in large part caused by the Trump administration but also buffeted by their own challenging domestic politics. The relative absence of official Americans underscored to me the importance of ensuring the U.S. think tank, business, and academic community remains engaged and does its best to fill in the gap. Showing up is critical right now. I felt our European allies received a measure of assurance with our presence, though it certainly doesn’t compensate for the overall deterioration in relations with the United States.

For years, much of Europe’s political architecture was built around the assumption that large-scale interstate conflict on the continent had become historically unlikely. What seems increasingly clear now is that many European institutions are beginning to operate from the opposite assumption: that the relative stability of the post–Cold War period may have been the anomaly rather than the norm.

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Articles of Interest

1. A story about how Ukraine’s drone innovation cycle is compressing the traditional timeline between battlefield experimentation and institutional military doctrine.

   How Ukraine Gained the Upper Hand in the Drone War

   Jimmy Rushton, Kyiv Independent, May 19, 2026

   Ukraine increasingly appears less as a dependent recipient of Western military assistance and more as a driver of military innovation that NATO itself is studying in real time. What is fascinating about this is not just the Ukrainian ingenuity and technological innovation involved, but the speed at which the country has adapted tactically and institutionally. Ukraine’s drone ecosystem now operates across multiple layers simultaneously: tactical battlefield FPVs, mid-range strikes against logistics and command infrastructure, and increasingly sophisticated deep strikes inside Russia itself. What stood out most was the broader strategic implication: Ukraine’s ability to innovate rapidly in unmanned systems is beginning to erode two of Russia’s core advantages — manpower and geographic depth — while simultaneously forcing NATO and Western militaries to rethink how quickly battlefield experimentation can reshape modern military doctrine.

2. Two stories about this year’s partnership between GLOBSEC and Politico for GLOBSEC’s annual conference.

   POLITICO and GLOBSEC partner to launch the POLITICO Speakeasy at the 2026 GLOBSEC Forum

   Press Release, Globsec.org, May 5, 2026

   Serbia’s Brnabić condemns EU double standards on enlargement

   Sonja Rijnen and Anne McElvoy, Politico.eu, May 21, 2026

   I spent a great deal of time during GLOBSEC at one of the most innovative of the gathering’s many innovative settings—the POLITICO Speakeasy at GLOBSEC 2026. The format was terrific—an almost constant round-robin of short, topical interviews with some of the most important people shaping transatlantic relations, in an intimate setting and tapping some of Politico’s best talents, including Anne McElvoy and Brussels Playbook Podcast hosts Zoya Sheftalovitch and Nick Vinocur. (Shout out also to Politico’s Gavin Sundwall and Cristina Gonzalez for flagging the programming to me and being such terrific organizers/hosts.) Among the memorable exchanges for me was one (naturally) about the Balkans and enlargement politics. McElvoy’s fantastic interview with Ana Brnabić touched directly on Serbia’s increasingly uneasy positioning between Brussels, Moscow, and the changing politics of EU enlargement. McElvoy didn’t hold back, and neither did Brnabić—leading to a truly substantive discussion.

3. A story about how the Strait of Hormuz crisis exposed a surprisingly underappreciated dependence the United States has on its transatlantic allies.

   Why Trump can’t reopen Hormuz without Nato minehunters

   Iona Cleave and Joel Seidman, The Telegraph, May 20, 2026

   A good friend of mine, Joel Seidman, wrote this fascinating piece for the Telegraph about the under-discussed U.S. reliance on its allies to help de-mine the Strait of Hormuz. A highly successful former NBC producer, Joel has been focusing on Ukraine and transatlantic relations the past few years. He and Kevin Tibbles, working with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, produced a documentary called Putin’s Endgame (watch it via the link here) in 2025 which aimed to raise awareness, particularly in the United States, of what is at stake if Putin prevails in Ukraine. His piece in the Telegraph this week argues that the United States—despite possessing the world’s most powerful navy—may not actually be capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz on its own if Iran successfully mines the waterway. Instead, Washington increasingly appears dependent on specialized mine-hunting capabilities developed and maintained primarily by European NATO allies over decades of investment in Baltic and North Sea maritime security. What makes the story especially striking is the broader strategic irony: while American political rhetoric has often framed European allies as overly dependent on U.S. military power, this particular crisis revealed a highly specialized area where the dependency may now partially run in the opposite direction. More broadly, it feels like another example of how the post-Cold War division of labor inside NATO is being stress-tested by a far more unstable geopolitical environment.

4. A story about how Poland is attempting to navigate growing political friction with the United States without escalating into a broader strategic rupture.

   Poland’s fugitive former justice minister can’t rest easy in the US

   Jan Cienski, Zoya Sheftalovich and Chris Lunday, Politico, May 23, 2026

   Another story that received considerable attention during the POLITICO Speakeasy at GLOBSEC 2026 involved former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who—despite remaining a sitting member of the Polish parliament—reportedly received a journalist visa approved directly by the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State before leaving Poland ahead of looming corruption charges tied to his tenure as justice minister under the previous, closely Trump-aligned Polish government. The country’s current foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, raised the issue in an interview with Politico, gently pointing out the irony that the U.S. was cracking down on illegal immigration while granting Ziobro (who has no journalistic background) a visa intended specifically for members of the press. It increasingly feels like many European governments are trying to manage two realities simultaneously: preserving the core transatlantic security relationship while also quietly coping with a more politically unpredictable American environment.

5. A story about how Europe is increasingly beginning to think about hybrid warfare as a permanent condition rather than a temporary disruption.

   From Shield to Sword: Europe’s Offensive Strategy For the Hybrid Age

   Will Brown, Jana Kobzová, Nicu Popescu and José Ignacio Torreblanca, European Council on Foreign Relations, March 6, 2026

   One of the more interesting policy briefs I read this week (from March, but that I only saw this week courtesy of my friend Donna Woolf) argued that Europe’s response to hybrid threats—cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, disinformation, drone incursions, covert financing, and political destabilization campaigns—remains fundamentally too defensive for the geopolitical environment it now faces. The most interesting part of the piece to me (as a former public diplomacy practitioner) was its implicit argument for rebuilding something closer to a modernized Cold War-era public diplomacy apparatus. The authors repeatedly point to the role institutions like Radio Free Europe, the BBC World Service, and broader Western strategic communications efforts played during the Cold War — not simply rebutting Soviet narratives, but proactively shaping democratic ones. It feels especially notable given how much of that infrastructure was either deprioritized after the Cold War or actively dismantled in recent years, particularly under Trump. The broader argument seems to be that Europe increasingly recognizes it cannot rely exclusively on defensive resilience measures and may need to rebuild a more offensive democratic information strategy of its own.

Closing Thoughts

It was terrific to attend the Lennart Meri Conference and GLOBSEC 2026 for the first time, but I’m looking forward to some time back home for the next few weeks before more travel related to the Balkans and Ukraine. Both conferences were incredibly interesting, in very different ways—Lennart Meri for its intimacy and its Nordic-Baltic take on many of the issues affecting transatlantic relations today, GLOBSEC for its sheer scope and the variety of sessions and speakers.

Many of the discussions we were having in both Tallinn and Prague—around resilience, deterrence, enlargement, industrial capacity, and institutional adaptation—are no longer happening in isolated policy silos but are beginning to merge into a broader attempt to adjust to a far more unstable geopolitical era. I suspect a lot of the next few months will revolve around how sustainable that adjustment actually proves to be.

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I’m writing this from Tallinn, Estonia, where I’m spending the next few days at the Lennart Meri Conference—the annual gathering of European and transatlantic security thinkers organized by Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security. Being here changes how you see things. Estonia is a country of 1.4 million people that shares a 200-mile border with Russia, has been occupied twice in living memory, and has nonetheless chosen to build one of the most digitally advanced, civically prepared, and democratically functional societies on earth. The stakes of the questions being debated inside the conference hall are not abstract here. They are, quite literally, the view from the window.

That shift in vantage point left a strong impression on me. Russia to Estonians is no theoretical danger; it looms as an existential threat, literally right on their horizon. (Unlike Sarah Palin, they can actually see Russia from many of their houses.) Perspective, it turns out, is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for seeing clearly.

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Articles of Interest

1. A story about what it looks like when a small country decides preparation is not optional.

   Estonia in the Crosshairs

   Tamar Jacoby, Washington Monthly, October 2025

   Writing from Tallinn, this piece has been on my mind constantly. The article’s on-the-ground reporting captures something the security briefings don’t quite convey: Estonia has made a collective, society-wide decision to be ready. Defense spending is at 5.4 percent of GDP—well above what most NATO members have even pledged. Conscription is mandatory. There is a large volunteer defense force. Civilian resilience training is routine. The country has been building anti-tank trenches, bunkers, and embankments along its Russian border not because an attack is imminent, but because peacetime is the only time to prepare. Resilience here is not a slogan. It is a budget line and a way of life. The piece also captures the anxiety that runs beneath the preparation: Estonia knows it cannot stop a Russian army alone. What it can do is make the cost of aggression high enough, and hold on long enough, for allies to arrive. That calculus depends entirely on whether the alliance means what it says — which is, of course, the question the entire conference this week was trying to answer.

2. A story about accountability when the normal mechanisms are unavailable.

   Ukraine’s Energy Corruption Scandal Just Got Much Worse

   Anastasiia Lapatina, Lawfare, May 13, 2026

   This piece provides a troubling update to the ongoing corruption investigation rocking Ukraine. Leaked wiretap transcripts, corroborated by the Ukrainian anti-corruption authority’s own released audio, now suggest for the first time that President Zelensky himself may have personally benefited from a money laundering scheme involving his longtime associates. The evidence centers on references to someone called “Vova”—a common diminutive for Volodymyr—in conversations about a luxury compound being built outside Kyiv with money traced to kickback schemes at Ukraine’s state nuclear operator. Zelensky has offered no denial or comment in the two weeks since the transcripts emerged. What makes the piece worth reading carefully is not the unproven link but the structural analysis at the end. Impeachment is legal but politically impossible. Elections are prohibited under martial law. Zelensky’s approval rating remains near 60 percent. The accountability mechanisms that democracies normally rely on are currently unavailable—and the war provides both a genuine rationale for tolerating that and a convenient cover for those who would prefer accountability not arrive at all. Worth noting: Lapatina is Ukrainian, the evidence comes from leaked discovery materials, and the key Zelensky link remains unproven.

3. A story about the democratic infrastructure that smartphones and uber-connectivity are quietly dismantling.

   The Anti-Social Century

   Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, February 2025

   This is an oldie but a goodie, one that came to mind as we were discussing the challenges to democracies faced by the loss of social cohesion. Thompson’s essay begins with a simple observation—Americans are now spending more time alone than at any point on record—and builds outward from there. In-person socializing fell by more than 20% between 2003 and 2023, with sharper declines among young men and those under 25. The political consequences, Thompson argues, are structural: democratic culture requires what he calls the “middle ring” of relationships—not intimate friends, not anonymous strangers, but the neighbors, regulars, and fellow participants in civic life who make it possible to encounter people whose lives don’t mirror your own. The increasing tendency to connect virtually has made those encounters rarer, and the political extremism that tends to fill the vacuum is not incidental. Online interaction gives us the tribes we seek; the middle ring gave us the friction that made us more governable.

4. A story about the tool that’s supposed to help you think—and what it’s quietly doing instead.

   Your AI Has Emotions. Science Just Proved One Is Working Against Your Judgment.

   Sascha Bosio, Bosio Digital, May 2026

   Two peer-reviewed studies published in the same week make an uncomfortable pairing. A Stanford study in Science found that a single AI conversation made participants 50 percent more likely to affirm harmful behavior and measurably less willing to repair damaged relationships. Simultaneously, Anthropic’s interpretability team published findings identifying 171 functional emotional states inside Claude Sonnet 4.5—states that causally drive behavior, including a direct link between positive emotional tone and sycophancy. Together they describe a feedback loop: the AI’s internal architecture pushes toward agreement, users feel validated, their judgment drifts, and they rate the AI more highly, which reinforces the training signal. The governance problem that stays with me is specific: because the problematic behavior lives at the model’s internal representation layer, it produces no visible trace in the output. You can review every word the AI says and still not detect it. The sycophancy isn’t a malfunction—it is, in a real sense, the system working as designed.

5. A story about who the Democrats are going to be—and who they’re going to let back in.

   The Boys Are Back In Town

   Julia Ioffe, Puck, May 2026 (subscription)

   The setup: a gathering of Democratic foreign policy hands at Soros Fund Management offices in Manhattan, organized by National Security Action—the group Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes founded in 2018—has begun positioning the Biden foreign policy cohort for a return to influence in the next Democratic administration. The problem, according to Democratic insiders quoted in the piece: this is precisely the team that presided over the Afghanistan withdrawal as well as Gaza and, critically, helped cover up Biden’s cognitive decline. The piece captures a fracture running through the Democratic foreign policy world between those who believe continuity is the path back to governing and those who think the party cannot afford to reinstall the people who contributed to the 2024 collapse.

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Substack of Note This Week

1. Thinking About… by Timothy Snyder is among the most substantive things being written in English about Ukraine, democracy, and the logic of the current moment. Snyder is a Yale historian of Eastern Europe and authoritarianism who has spent years arguing that what happens in Ukraine is not a regional conflict but a test of whether democratic order can be defended at all. His recent conversation with Paul Krugman on Ukraine, economics, and the dangers democracy faces from within ended with a point that reads differently from Tallinn than it does from most other places: democracy depends on citizens who participate, not spectators who wait. He is not always easy reading—he demands historical context and rewards careful attention—but he is one of the few writers who makes the connection between what is happening in Kyiv, what is happening in Washington, and what is at stake for the rest of us feel not alarmist but precise.

2. The Baltic Flank by Holger Roonemaa is one of the more valuable discoveries I made this week in Tallinn. Roonemaa is an award-winning Estonian investigative journalist who writes in English about Baltic security, Russian hybrid warfare, and the intelligence picture that most Western analysts either miss or can’t access. What makes the Substack distinctive is the sourcing: he reads the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian intelligence and threat assessment reports in their original language—documents that exist in English translation but rarely get the careful, detailed treatment they deserve—and surfaces the findings that matter most. His recent breakdown of the 2026 Baltic threat assessments identified, among other things, a GRU cover company operating through product codes and logistics chains to procure technology for Russia’s military industry, naming ten specific officers involved. That is not the kind of detail you find in most English-language security commentary. If you want to understand what is actually happening on NATO’s eastern flank, from people who live there and read the primary sources, this is where to start.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Closing Thoughts

The Lennart Meri Conference takes its name from Estonia’s first post-Soviet president—a man who spent the Soviet occupation writing fiction because he couldn’t write history, and who, when independence arrived, built institutions from scratch because he understood that freedom doesn’t maintain itself. The conference’s theme this year—“Fortune Favours the Brave”—is drawn from Virgil, but the organizers are careful to add the modifier: courage without preparation is not bravery. It’s recklessness.

Estonia has internalized that distinction more thoroughly than perhaps any country on earth. It spends 5.4% of GDP on defense. It has mandatory conscription and a volunteer force and civilian resilience training and anti-tank trenches along its Russian border. It hosts NATO’s cybersecurity center and has been fighting hybrid warfare—cyberattacks, cable-cutting, border provocations, intelligence operations—since 2007. It does all of this not from panic, but from a clear-eyed reading of history and geography: it has been occupied before, and it intends not to be again. “Gas might be expensive,” former Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said in 2022, “but freedom is priceless.” That is not a slogan in Estonia. It is a policy.

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BETWEEN THE VIRGINIA Supreme Court’s recent intervention into the state’s redistricting process and the Supreme Court’s broader weakening of Voting Rights Act protections over the last decade, I have found myself thinking a great deal about where America’s escalating “gerrymandering war” is ultimately taking both political parties—and the country as a whole.

Across parts of the Deep South, states are now moving aggressively to redraw districts in ways critics argue dilute Black political representation and weaken heavily Democratic constituencies. At the same time, blue states increasingly face pressure to retaliate with harder-edged partisan tactics of their own.

That dynamic—escalation justified by counter-escalation—is rapidly becoming the defining logic of modern American redistricting. Every time redistricting is considered, American politics starts sounding less like democracy and more like trench warfare, as both parties increasingly conclude that they cannot afford to “unilaterally disarm” and that if the other side is going to aggressively gerrymander its states, they must respond in kind. And so the cycle continues.

On one level, the logic is understandable. Politics rewards power, not restraint. If one side aggressively redraws congressional maps to maximize its advantage, the other side feels pressure to respond in kind.

But the problem with redistricting wars is that they slowly corrode democratic legitimacy itself.

For years, Democrats have often had greater credibility on this issue. Not universally, and not perfectly, but broadly speaking, Democratic-controlled states were more likely to support independent commissions, nonpartisan mapmaking, or systems designed to reduce overt political manipulation. There are obvious exceptions. Illinois and Maryland remain among the clearest examples of Democratic gerrymandering.

Still, major redistricting reform movements over the last several decades disproportionately emerged from Democratic states or bipartisan coalitions led more heavily by Democrats. That does not mean Democrats are uniquely virtuous or incapable of cynical politics. But it is difficult to ignore that the two parties increasingly relate to norms and institutions differently.

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The modern Democratic coalition retains strong institutionalist instincts. Many Democratic voters and elected officials continue to place relatively high value on procedural legitimacy, constitutional norms, and rule-based governance even when those constraints are politically frustrating.

The modern Republican coalition, particularly in the Trump era, has increasingly embraced a more populist and institution-skeptical worldview. Large segments of the Republican base increasingly view political norms and institutions less as neutral frameworks worth preserving than as obstacles controlled by hostile cultural and political elites.

That difference matters because a political coalition that still values institutional legitimacy will often struggle to sustain the same degree of procedural escalation as one that increasingly views norm-breaking as politically necessary.

This is part of why Democratic attempts to “fight fire with fire” so often generate visible internal conflict. Many Democrats genuinely believe aggressive gerrymandering or procedural hardball undermines democratic legitimacy even when those tactics might produce short-term advantages.

The parties are not mirror images of one another, and understanding that asymmetry is necessary to understanding why institutional conflict in America keeps escalating.

The Geography of American Power

Part of what makes this issue so difficult is that the incentives themselves are not symmetrical.

Over the last several decades, American politics has increasingly sorted itself along a rural-urban divide. Republicans have become dominant across many rural areas and smaller states, while Democrats have concentrated more heavily in large metropolitan regions and dense urban corridors.

That geographic polarization matters enormously because the American constitutional system structurally advantages dispersed rural coalitions over highly concentrated urban ones. In the past, both parties maintained meaningful footholds in rural America, so the imbalance was less stark. But particularly over the past two decades, Democrats’ share of the rural vote has declined precipitously, shifting the structural advantage increasingly toward Republicans.

The Senate is the clearest example. Wyoming and California each receive two senators despite radically different populations. The Electoral College amplifies similar imbalances.

Political geography further compounds the problem. A party whose voters are densely packed into cities naturally “wastes” votes by winning urban districts overwhelmingly, while a party whose voters are spread more efficiently across suburban, exurban, and rural regions can convert narrower statewide majorities into larger numbers of seats. Republicans therefore possess structural advantages that extend beyond gerrymandering itself.

California illustrates both the promise and tension of modern redistricting reform. The state’s independent commission system was a serious attempt to move districting away from overt partisan self-dealing and toward a more administrative and publicly accountable process. Whatever one’s politics, the broader principle behind the reform was clear: politicians should not simply draw their own districts for partisan advantage.

The American system, however, creates a complication. The United States is simultaneously a union of states and a single national political entity. We treat elections as state-level processes when convenient and as expressions of one national democratic legitimacy when convenient. Those two ideas increasingly collide.

Congressional control, presidential legitimacy, judicial appointments, and national policy are all experienced nationally by voters. Yet the rules governing representation remain fragmented across fifty states operating under very different political incentives. That creates profound tensions when institutional reforms are adopted unevenly.

If one large state imposes meaningful restraints on partisan districting while another aggressively maximizes every available advantage, voters do not necessarily experience the result as “fair federalism.” Many instead experience it as asymmetrical political disarmament inside a national competition for power.

That does not mean reforms like California’s were misguided. Quite the contrary, independent commissions remain, in my view, the healthiest way of administering a mostly first-past-the-post, district-based democracy. But it does help explain why even good-faith institutional reforms become politically fragile once large numbers of voters begin to believe that procedural restraint is being practiced unevenly across the system itself.

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At the same time, it is important not to romanticize the experience of other democracies. Canada and the United Kingdom—both of which also have representation elected from single-member districts—are also experiencing polarization, populism, institutional distrust, and increasingly sharp urban-rural divides. They are not immune to the same pressures reshaping politics across the Western world.

And yet, despite those pressures, neither country has seen redistricting descend into the same level of openly partisan warfare that increasingly defines American politics.

Some of the difference is institutional. In both Canada and the UK, redistricting is handled through more administrative and bureaucratically insulated processes. Politicians generally do not directly draw their own districts. Independent commissions, judicial norms, public consultations, and stronger bureaucratic traditions create more distance between partisan incentives and the mechanics of representation itself.

But the American system is also structurally distinct. The United States combines presidential elections, federalism, separately sovereign state governments, an Electoral College, a Senate that heavily amplifies smaller states, and highly decentralized election administration in ways few other democracies do.

Part of the difference could simply be timing. Canada and Britain may not be immune to the democratic stresses reshaping the United States so much as merely earlier in the cycle.

America increasingly treats district boundaries as political weapons. Comparable democracies still largely treat them as administrative responsibilities. That distinction matters because institutions shape political behavior over time. A system that directly rewards partisan actors for manipulating representation will gradually normalize manipulation itself—and that is precisely what the United States is increasingly doing.

The Real Victims of Gerrymandering

The incentives may be state-by-state, but the consequences are increasingly national.

Texas Republicans are incentivized to maximize Republican power in Texas even if retaliatory gerrymanders elsewhere ultimately cost fellow Republicans seats in more Democratic states. Likewise, Democrats controlling blue states increasingly face pressure to maximize Democratic power locally even when doing so risks further accelerating the broader cycle of institutional escalation. Every individual actor behaves rationally, but collectively the system becomes worse.

Ironically, Republicans may still discover that there are limits to what gerrymandering can accomplish politically. Since Trump returned to office, Democrats have consistently overperformed in special elections and state-level races, often by significant margins, including in areas where Trump won comfortably in 2024.

Republicans still possess structural advantages in the House. Democrats generally need more than a bare national majority to secure durable congressional control because of political geography and district distribution. There are limits, however, to how much district maps can compensate for political reality.

If Democrats are winning nationally by seven or eight points, that becomes difficult to engineer away entirely. Gerrymandering can distort democracy, but it cannot completely override political gravity.

Still, the deeper issue is not which party temporarily gains an advantage. It is what happens to voters.

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The people most harmed by modern gerrymandering are often the political minorities trapped inside states where they no longer have any realistic path to meaningful representation.

A Republican living in Maryland or Illinois may find that their congressional vote has little practical effect. A Democrat in Texas or Tennessee may experience the same reality in reverse. These are often not tiny fringe minorities. Sometimes they represent well over a third of a state’s electorate. Yet through aggressive district engineering, those voters can effectively be reduced to permanent spectators.

Not every lopsided political outcome is necessarily evidence of gerrymandering. In parts of New England, for example, Republican underrepresentation reflects not only district boundaries but also the geographic dispersion and long-term decline of Republican vote share itself. Political geography and partisan engineering are related but not identical problems, though modern American politics increasingly combines both.

Safe districts reward ideological purity rather than persuasion. Politicians become more afraid of primary challengers than general elections. Compromise becomes politically dangerous. The goal shifts away from building broad coalitions and toward energizing narrow partisan bases.

Healthy democracies depend on people with different views learning to coexist within shared institutions and mixed communities. Gerrymandering increasingly encourages the opposite instinct: sorting citizens into hardened camps and treating politically mixed populations as inefficiencies to be engineered around.

A National Problem Without a National Solution

Ultimately, this is why the United States will probably have to confront the question nationally rather than continue treating it as fifty separate state-level battles. America’s political system has become too nationally integrated for representation itself to remain governed entirely by asymmetrical state-by-state escalation.

Presidential legitimacy, congressional control, judicial appointments, and national policy are all experienced collectively by the public. Yet the rules shaping representation remain fragmented across states with radically different incentives, traditions, and levels of institutional restraint. That fragmentation increasingly undermines trust in the legitimacy of the system itself.

The problem is not simply that one party gerrymanders more aggressively than the other at a given moment in history. The deeper problem is that both parties are now trapped inside a structure that rewards escalation and punishes restraint. Once that dynamic takes hold, even good-faith reforms become politically fragile. Voters begin to fear that institutional fairness practiced unilaterally amounts to strategic surrender. That is simply not sustainable in a country that still expects elections to produce broadly legitimate national outcomes.

A national approach would almost certainly face constitutional and political challenges of its own. The Supreme Court has ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims are largely nonjusticiable in federal court, though notably it did not explicitly declare partisan gerrymandering constitutional. In fact, the Court explicitly left room for Congress to regulate congressional elections under the Constitution’s Elections Clause.

That clause is significant because the Constitution explicitly gives Congress authority to “make or alter” regulations governing congressional elections. Historically, Congress has repeatedly used that power to shape how federal elections are conducted, including imposing requirements for single-member congressional districts and enforcing voting-rights protections. The constitutional debate, therefore, is not whether Congress possesses any authority over congressional districting—it clearly does—but how far that authority extends in a system that also grants substantial autonomy to the states.

Whether the current Court would uphold aggressive nationwide districting reforms remains uncertain. Independent commissions themselves have already been upheld constitutionally, but mandating them or similar reforms nationally would almost certainly provoke major litigation over federalism and state authority.

That uncertainty itself reflects the deeper problem: the same constitutional structure that allows modern partisan mapmaking also makes solving it nationally extraordinarily difficult.

Still, independent commissions, clearer national standards for districting, and stronger judicial guardrails could at least begin moving representation away from becoming an endless partisan arms race. None of those reforms would eliminate every distortion in the American system. But they could begin restoring confidence that representation is something more than a permanent struggle over procedural advantage.

None of this will be easy. Any serious reform effort would face constitutional scrutiny, partisan resistance, and deep mistrust from both sides. But that is precisely why any lasting solution would likely need to emerge from a coalition broad enough to reassure voters that the goal is not unilateral partisan gain, but restoring confidence in democratic representation itself.

Once politics becomes primarily a struggle over who controls the rules rather than who persuades the public, democratic legitimacy itself starts to weaken. That is the real danger gerrymandering poses to the United States: not simply unfair maps, but a political culture that gradually forgets what elections are supposed to be for.

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Across very different domains—Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Europe’s relationship with the United States, democratic reform, military innovation, humanitarian logistics—the common thread for me this week was that stress reveals the true condition of systems.

Ceremonies, alliances, constitutions, armies, supply chains, and public institutions can all look more stable from the outside than they really are. But when pressure builds, the weak points become harder to hide. Russia’s Victory Day pageantry exposed the fragility beneath Putin’s image of control. Europe’s slow reassessment of the United States showed how alliances can continue formally even as confidence erodes. And the pieces I read on democracy reform, military adaptation, and logistics all pointed in the same direction: institutions do not endure on their own. They endure when someone is maintaining the machinery underneath.

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Articles of Interest

1. A story that made me think about how symbols of strength can become evidence of weakness.

   Russia’s Victory Day is Putin’s biggest liability

   Eva Hartog, Politico Europe, May 2026

   Victory Day has long been central to Vladimir Putin’s political mythology. But this year, the spectacle seemed to reveal more anxiety than confidence. The piece is useful because it treats Victory Day not simply as propaganda, but as a constraint: Putin has wrapped his legitimacy so tightly around military triumph that the holiday now creates pressure for the war to look victorious, even when the underlying picture is far more ambiguous. What is supposed to be Putin’s great ritual of strength increasingly highlights the limits created by his own war. (A humorous complement to this article was Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s trolling of Putin, granting “permission” to hold the rally and announcing Red Square—the site of the event—would be a temporary “exclusion zone” from Ukrainian attacks.)

2. A story about Putin running out of room to maneuver.

   Russia’s War Setbacks Are Making Putin Paranoid
   Christian Caryl, Foreign Policy, May 7, 2026

   This paired naturally with the Politico piece. Foreign Policy’s article framed Putin as a leader who has long been skilled at creating dilemmas for others, but who is now increasingly trapped by the contradictions of his own war. The anxiety around Ukrainian drone attacks, Victory Day security, and the vulnerability of Moscow itself matters because it punctures one of the Kremlin’s most important narratives: that Russia is the secure, sovereign center of power, while Ukraine is the unstable battlefield. The larger point is that Ukraine’s ability to strike deep into Russia has changed the political psychology of the war. Even when the territorial battlefield is grinding and slow, the symbolic battlefield is moving. Putin’s problem is not only military, but narrative. He needs the war to demonstrate Russian strength, but the longer it continues, the more it exposes the costs, vulnerabilities, and anxieties of the system he has built.

3. A story about the quiet unraveling of the transatlantic relationship.

   Europeans Are Quiet Quitting the United States
   Rym Momtaz, Carnegie Europe, May 2026

   Rym Momtaz’s piece is one of the most useful frames I have read recently for understanding Europe’s current posture toward Washington. The argument is not that Europe can simply divorce the United States, because it can’t. Rather, European leaders are beginning to make long-term structural decisions that reflect a loss of confidence not just in one U.S. administration, but in American reliability more broadly. That distinction matters. A crisis with one president can be waited out, but two Trump administrations look like a pattern—and the Biden interregnum more of the exception, a last gasp of U.S. multilateralism. A crisis of faith in the American system (versus one specific president) produces different behavior. It forces Europe to hedge, even when hedging is expensive, incomplete, and politically awkward. Europe is not dramatically walking out of the relationship. It is still in the meetings, still issuing communiqués, still depending on U.S. capabilities in many areas. Beneath the surface, however, the incentives are changing. Defense, technology, space, infrastructure, and industrial policy are all becoming arenas in which Europeans are asking how much dependence on the United States they can still afford.

4. A story about why good reform ideas are not enough.

   Timing and Tactics: How to Overcome Opposition to Pro-Voter Reforms
   Expand Democracy, May 2026

   The Expand Democracy piece is a useful reminder that democracy reform is not simply a matter of having the better argument. Reform efforts succeed or fail based on timing, coalition-building, opposition research, public framing, and the ability to anticipate how opponents will attack even broadly popular changes. Expand Democracy describes its mission as supporting policy ideas that strengthen “a democracy of, by, and for the people,” and its Substack focuses on pro-democracy ideas and strategies. That practical orientation is what makes the piece valuable. It does not treat reform as an abstract civics exercise. It treats it as a political and institutional challenge. The lesson is that pro-voter reforms need more than public-spiritedness—they need strategy. (This pairs nicely with one of my new favorite books, Jill Lepore’s We the People, which dives into the complexities of amending what has become one of the world’s most stubbornly unamendable constitutions.)

5. A story about how war accelerates military adaptation.

   There is no better spur to military innovation than war
   The Economist, April 23, 2026

   Back to Ukraine, but from a different angle. Ukraine has become one of the central laboratories of modern warfare—drones, electronic warfare, software adaptation, open-source intelligence, and rapid procurement cycles are changing the tempo of military learning. The central point is not that war is good for innovation in any moral sense, but rather that war punishes slow institutions and rewards those that can learn under pressure. That lesson extends beyond the military, too. Organizations often claim they are adaptive, yet stress tests whether that is true. In wartime, the gap between a system that can learn and a system that merely studies lessons can become a matter of survival. The piece also helps explain why the war in Ukraine has drawn so much attention from militaries around the world. It is not only a conflict over territory. It is a live demonstration of how technology, logistics, command structures, and industrial capacity interact under sustained pressure. Innovation is not just about inventing new tools. It is about whether institutions can absorb them quickly enough to matter.

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Substack of Note This Week

1. Expand Democracy is a sharp, practical newsletter focused on how to strengthen democratic institutions and make pro-democracy reform politically viable. What I find useful about it is that it does not treat democracy reform as an abstract civics exercise. It looks at the mechanics: timing, coalition-building, public framing, opposition tactics, and the institutional details that determine whether good ideas can actually survive contact with politics.

Closing Thought

The lesson across all of these pieces is that resilience is not rhetoric (as much as the word is overused regarding Ukraine, to the chagrin of many Ukrainian friends of mine). Russia’s pageantry, Europe’s alliance management, America’s democratic reform debate, and Ukraine’s military adaptation all depend on systems that must work under stress.

When they do not, the failure often appears sudden. But it rarely is. The weakness was usually there much earlier, obscured by ceremonies, habits, wishful thinking, or the comforting assumption that inherited systems will keep functioning on their own.

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