As plebes at the US Naval Academy in 1986, we were required to memorize 1000+ facts, quotes, and random crap (aka “Rates”) during our Plebe summer. I still remember one of those quotes, at the time ascribed to John Paul Jones (the father of the US Navy) :

“It is by no means enough that an officer of the Navy should be a capable mariner. He must be that, of course, but also a great deal more.”

The passage went on to describe a naval officer as a person of “liberal education,” capable of distinguishing “error from malice, thoughtlessness from incompetency, and well-meant shortcomings from heedless or stupid blunder.”

I thought that was darn-right enlightened. This is exactly what I hoped to become—a person who learned how to discern right from wrong (i.e., apply judgment) when the answer was not clear.

When Scholarship Confronts and Corrects Tradition

The only problem was that John Paul Jones had not actually written those words. The quote first appeared in a 1900 biography written by Augustus C. Buell. In 1986 (the year my class started at Navy), the Naval historian James C. Bradford exposed Buell as a fabricator who invented multiple letters and statements. However, the Academy did not formally correct Reef Points until 2003! And, classic Navy, rather than discard the passage, the Academy retained it under a corrected heading: “Written by Augustus C. Buell in 1900 to reflect his views of John Paul Jones.” I did not know about this until this week when I was researching this article.

That story captures something essential about military education. Tradition gave the passage authority; however, it is important to give room for scholars to explore what we assume is true. To be clear, the discovery that Jones did not write the words did not make it less inspirational to me and, I imagine, many of my classmates. It did require an institution (i.e., the Naval Academy) to correct a story it had been telling about itself for GENERATIONS! This is exactly what education should do. It should teach us to respect inherited traditions while, at the same time, allowing for self-reflection when a new fact pattern is discovered.

Why This Matters Now?

Why am I making a big deal over a quote from 1900?? Because the DoD is considering a complete restructuring of the way the service academies approach their mission to educate the officers of the future. According to an unreleased draft memorandum obtained by CBS News, the proposal would eliminate civilian tenure at the service academies (and senior war colleges) and subject every course to a “line-by-line” review. The new standard applied to the course would be that they need to advance “tactical, operational or strategic warfighting.” Courses deemed nonessential or “ideologically driven” could be eliminated. (note: as of July 30, the memorandum had not received final approval.)

To be clear, I do think there is some legitimacy to the review. The service academies, by definition, are not ordinary universities. Their stated purpose is to prepare officers to defend the country. Thus, their curricula should be rigorous, relevant, and connected to that mission. And, I think it is totally fair to expect Civilian faculty to be held accountable for the quality of their teaching, scholarship, and contribution to the institution. Moreover, I know from experience that tenure does not guarantee excellence.

Behind The Wizard’s Curtain

I was an English major at the Naval Academy, graduating with a BS in English (yes, I get the irony). Most of my professors in my department were civilians. I then had the good fortune to go back as a “military instructor” in the English department. Thus, I got to see what really happened behind the Wizard’s curtain and also spent time getting to know many of these professors as colleagues and some as friends. In reflection, they were not all great teachers, and most were not all active scholars (to be fair, the Naval Academy was not a “research university,” so the research requirement was pretty light). Thus, tenure did not automatically produce continuing contribution.

Some professors were deeply committed to the mission of developing future officers. Others appeared to be just putting in their time. There were exceptions, of course. I remember one professor, in particular, who challenged the Academy almost weekly. He ruffled lots of feathers. And while I think his arguments were provocative, sometimes they seemed unnecessarily so. At the same time, some of his criticisms were true, and they forced the institution to confront questions it might otherwise have preferred to avoid (ironically, Pres Trump and Sec. Hegseth would have loved this guy’s take on DEI at the Academy)

This experience left me with a mixed POV re: tenure. It can (and does) protect mediocrity. At the same time, it protects the person willing to tell an institution something it does not want to hear.

The World Beyond The Academy

I have been reading Rick Atkinson’s The Long Gray Line, his account of West Point’s Class of 1966. This class of 560ish entered West Point at a time when the Academy inculcated a fixed moral architecture: duty, honor, country. This also included what Sec Hegseth would call the warrior ethos: loyalty to the unit; obedience to lawful authority; & courage in the face of danger.

The book follows this class through Vietnam and then back to the US in the early 70s, which had changed radically from the time they entered West Point in 1962. They became part of what Atkinson describes as the first generation of West Pointers to join a losing Army. To be clear, their struggle was not caused by the absence of principles. It arose because the reality they faced was often confusing, and it was hard to reconcile which principle in their moral architecture should apply. Atkinson shares many stories of these young officers wrestling with hard-to-answer questions such as:

• What did an officer owe his soldiers when the mission appeared strategically incoherent?

• What did loyalty to the chain of command require when senior leaders seemed disconnected from conditions on the ground?

• How should an officer reconcile the urgency of protecting his men with obligations toward civilians?

• When did honor require obedience, and when did it require candor?

• How could an officer distinguish between a lawful order, a wise order, and a moral one?

Each of the men featured in his book comes up with different answers to these questions based on their specific situation and moral compass. Some survived, and many died. Even more were scared (physically, mentally, emotionally) for life based on their experience in Vietnam.

We have seen how this same dynamic play out in more recent conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately, the morality of war is gray. The hardest choices are rarely between obvious good and obvious evil. They are between competing duties, incomplete information, and consequences that cannot be fully anticipated.

This is where the distinction between Military “training” and “education” becomes meaningful. Training teaches a person to perform a known task under defined conditions. Education prepares a person to determine what the conditions mean, which principles apply, what consequences may follow, and what to do when the rules seem to be in conflict. Today’s officers need both. They must know how to execute a mission. They must also understand the mission’s relationship to the broader strategic purpose. They need to understand military law, their constitutional obligation, and their moral responsibility. An order can be lawful and still be foolish. A commander can satisfy the immediate demands of the chain of command while failing the soldiers or citizens whose trust gives that command its legitimacy. Thus, I would argue that developing judgment is an essential warfighting capability. But how does one develop judgment?

Good thing we have 1000s of years of thinking on the topic to refer to!

Educating the Guardians

One of the earliest examples we have of how to educate the guardians of a Republic is Plato’s dialogue The Republic, written more than 2000 years ago. In The Republic, Socrates asks what qualities should characterize those entrusted to guard the city (i.e., the military). He shows that courage and martial spirit (i.e., the warrior ethos) are necessary but not sufficient. The Guardian must possess seemingly opposite qualities: he and she (yes, there were female guardians in The Republic) must be both fierce toward the city’s enemies but also gentle toward its citizens.

So how does a Guardian discern who is friend and who is foe? This distinction depends upon recognition and knowledge. The Guardian must be more than strong. He must be capable of determining whom he is obligated to serve. That is why Plato devotes so much of The Republic to the education of those entrusted with power. Plato, Republic, Book II, 375e-376d.

Because he understands how profoundly education shapes the Guardian’s character, Plato also permits the rulers of his imagined city to regulate its stories, poetry, music, and myths. I.e., Plato is suggesting that the rulers use education as a means of limiting what the Guardian is allowed to think. And this insight is at the heart of the tension within military education. The state must educate its Guardians well enough to exercise independent judgment. Yet the state may also be tempted to control that education so tightly that independent judgment becomes impossible. WOWZA!! This seems pretty relevant today.

Constitutional Loyalty Versus Political Compliance

A constitutional republic should expect constitutionally loyal officers. At the same time, it should also not want politically compliant officers. These ideas are not synonymous. Political compliance attaches loyalty to the people temporarily holding power. Constitutional loyalty attaches loyalty to the constitution these officials have sworn to preserve. That distinction requires officers who can reason historically, legally, morally, and strategically. It also requires officers capable of offering civilian leaders candid advice. These civilian leaders should embrace these thought partners, not purge them from the military.

This is why the proposed standard for curriculum review is inadequate. History courses may not appear to contribute “directly” to tactical warfighting until a commander must recognize that battlefield victories are not producing political progress. Reading books may seem peripheral until an officer must be able to empathize with the humanity of the enemy. Studying Philosophy may seem abstract until duty, honor, law, and loyalty each suggest different paths forward when confronted with a moral quagmire. These disciplines do not distract from the formation of warfighters. In fact, properly taught, they help prevent warfighters from becoming mere instruments of force.

The Naval Academy’s own mission recognizes this broader responsibility. I.e., its mission is to develop midshipmen “morally, mentally and physically” and to prepare them for “the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.” It is a mouthful, but certainly broadens the remit of a military education and echoes what Buell said about John Paul Jones 200 years ago.

Another Lens to Use

The proposed review should therefore ask more thoughtful questions than just whether a course has an obvious connection to warfighting. For example, does a course:

• Develop strategic reasoning?

• Deepen historical and cultural understanding?

• Sharpen ethical and constitutional judgment?

• Does it teach officers to connect tactical action to political purpose?

• Expose students to arguments they must be able to understand and answer?

Or to be more precise, for the Naval Academy, you could just ask: “Does it contribute demonstrably to the Academy’s mission?” Ultimately, the standard should be contribution, not conformity.

Accountability without ideological purification

The language of the draft memorandum creates a deeper concern. It reportedly proposes eliminating courses deemed “ideologically driven” without explaining who will make that determination or by what standard. Obviously, every curriculum reflects judgments about which ideas, histories, and capabilities matter. Removing a course can be as ideological as creating one. The question is not whether ideology can be eliminated from education. It is whether students will encounter serious competing arguments and learn to assess them through evidence, reason, and debate.

Similarly, a “line-by-line” review can be a tool of institutional accountability. However, it can also become an ideological purification campaign, particularly if the reviewers begin with a political conclusion about which questions may be asked. This is where civilian faculty perform a distinct institutional function. Military instructors bring recent operational experience, professional credibility, and the “lived experience” of being in the Fleet. Civilian professors bring disciplinary depth and provide institutional continuity. Because military officers rotate every 2-3 years, civilian professors also preserve knowledge and programs across generations of leadership. This continuity provides perspective over time.

What To Do About The Deadbeats?

I do think there is an opportunity to uplevel the impact and effectiveness of civilian professors (and military instructors). But this is not by eliminating intellectual independence (as protected by tenure). Instead, one way to do this would be to build a stronger system of accountability around it. I.e., tenure should protect rigorous inquiry, not weak performance. Faculty should be evaluated on the quality of their teaching, the seriousness of their scholarship, and their contribution to the Academy’s mission. Existing procedures for addressing nonperformance should be examined and strengthened where necessary. But a professor should not have to worry that a historically grounded point of view or a criticism of institutional policy will be the justification for being fired.

If we don’t protect intellectual independence at the Academies, the midshipmen and cadets will never learn how to reconcile competing ideas. Professors will avoid difficult subjects. Administrators will remove controversial readings. They will be living in Orwell’s 1984. This may produce conformity, but it will not produce judgment.

A capable warfighter, but also a great deal more

As Buell wrote, a naval officer must indeed be a capable mariner, “but also a great deal more.” Yes, technical competence is indispensable. Yes, physical courage is indispensable. At the same time, historical understanding, moral imagination, constitutional loyalty, intellectual humility, and the ability to distinguish error from malice are indispensable. To that point, the West Point Class of 1966 did not enter Vietnam without principles or courage. Their ordeal began when principles came into conflict and courage demanded more than physical bravery.

To be clear, I don’t think any curriculum could provide officers with ready-made answers to every moral or strategic dilemma. These are not “Rates” to be memorized. Instead, a military education should be focused on developing the habits of mind and character necessary to face those dilemmas responsibly. And this is not the same type of education a college kid gets at a civilian school. Nor should it be.

These officers (aka guardians) are trusted with the power of life and death. And, as a republic, we should expect that they know how to fight and win. At the same time, as Plato wrote 2000 years ago, a republic must also educate its guardians to understand why they fight, what limits their power, whom they serve, and how to respond when duty, honor, law, and strategy no longer point in the same direction.

Cyclops

Joyce, via the narrator, characterizes the unnamed “Citizen” as bombastic, sentimental, learned, threatening, and occasionally perceptive. Throughout this episode, the Citizen speaks for an Ireland that has been a British colony for 700 years. During that time, its people were suppressed, its economy exploited, and millions were forced to leave (most recently due to the potato famine). So his grievances are not invented. At the same time, he is frequently shown as being absurd, creating a myth of a pre-British Ireland that is, at best, fanciful. This is what gives the episode its power. Joyce does not make the Citizen a fool for loving Ireland. He makes him dangerous because his love of Ireland is inseparable from his hatred of the British and those he believes do not belong there.

Monticello

I first visited Monticello 45ish years ago with my family. To put this in perspective. At the time, the Jefferson Foundation still rejected the idea that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemings’s (one of his slaves) 6 children. I remember, nearly 50 years ago, being impressed by the many books, scientific instruments, and all the cool gadgets he had in the house (e.g., the dumbwaiters). Last Friday (July 3rd), I went with my mother to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This time, I had a better appreciation for how this house stands as a monument to the Enlightenment ideals that Jefferson and the other founders sought to inculcate in our early national identity.

I was also very clear that this house stood as a monument to contradiction. The man who wrote that “all men are created equal” lived with 400+ enslaved men, women, and children who were essential to the operation and upkeep of Monticello and its 5,000 acres. He only granted a small number (Heming’s children) freedom through direct action and as part of his will. Most remained enslaved at his death, and many were sold as part of the settlement of his estate.

The two experiences raised the same question: Who is included when a nation says “we”?

Make Ireland Great Again (MIGA)

The Citizen believes Ireland was once heroic, culturally coherent, and populated by men of courage and conviction. He argues that its greatness was stolen through foreign conquest, economic exploitation, and cultural contamination. Its ruin was due mostly to evil women influencing their men. For example, he short-hands the story of King Mac Murchada inviting Norman lords to help him reclaim his lands in 1167 by saying “the strangers, says the citizen, Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought them in. The adulteress, and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here” (lines 12. 1161-1164).

Myths, by definition, are not true; however, they are often rooted in a truth or a perceived truth. This is why myth-making is so powerful when defining a national identity. While the Citizen is right that this incident led to Norman lords coming across to Ireland and, eventually, Henry II arriving in 1171, which then led to 700 years of occupation, the story is much more complicated than how he frames it. He is fostering a myth.

In the Citizen’s worldview, Ireland can only reclaim its greatness by restoring what he thinks was true before—i.e., Make Ireland Great Again. Throughout “Cyclops,” Joyce parodies this vision via a second narrator’s voice, often called the parodist, by transporting the ordinary life of the Dublin pub into what feels like a “King Arthurian” world full of Gaelic kings, warriors, saints, giants, ceremonial processions, heroic contests, and improbable national glory.

The Citizen himself assumes mythological proportions. He is introduced as a massive, almost prehistoric figure, “seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower”; he was a “broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired… (you get the idea) [12.150-167ish]. And he is accompanied by a mangy dog whose lineage is recited like the genealogy of an ancient king in one of the interpolations (note: interpolations are interruptions in the narrative). In fact, Joyce uses 33 different interpolations to inflate the men in the pub and Irish Nationalism into heroes from some lost Irish epic.

The parodies in the interpolations are funny and, at the same time, sharp. Through them, Joyce is showing us what nationalism does to history. The Citizen’s Ireland is ancient, masculine, Catholic, and of one ethnicity. Its people are the heirs of warriors and martyrs. Its decline is due to foreigners (primarily the British occupiers and immigrants) and those Irish who lack the proper degree of loyalty. What his view of Ireland does not include is the failures, contradictions, and evolutions that constitute an actual country. Instead, he—and the other Irish Nationalists like him—harken back to an imaginary nation that existed before outsiders, weak leaders, elites, and traitors corrupted it.

In this episode, the Citizen also transforms this love of Ireland into a kind of loyalty test of who is entitled to be Irish. And this is where Bloom, a modern-day Odysseus, confronts the Citizen in a way that echoes Odysseus’ own confrontation with the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey. Bloom was born in Dublin and is an active “citizen.” He works at the local newspaper and knows many other citizens with whom he interacts throughout the day (e.g., he attends Patty Dignam’s funeral with a group of men). Thus, he is part of the city as much as any other citizen. However, he is also Jewish, the son of an immigrant, and is more empathetic than a typical Dublin man at that time.

In the earlier episodes, these differences mark him as an outsider. He makes a faux pas when riding in the carriage and is not familiar with the routine of the mass when he enters the church in the Hades episode. He suffers low-grade antisemitism from the people he works with at the Newspaper office in the Aeolus episode. Moreover, he chooses to operate outside of the accepted social mores. For example, he does not stand a round of drinks when he walks into the pub in Cyclops and chooses not to eat with the other men in the pub in the Lestrygonians episode, instead choosing to eat a cheese sandwich at another restaurant.

Even though Bloom was born in Ireland, to Citizen, he fails the test of national authenticity (or purity). His ancestry is suspect, and his religion places him outside the dominant culture. Most importantly, he refuses to hate Ireland’s designated enemies with sufficient enthusiasm and so fails the “loyalty” test as well. When Bloom argues that persecution cannot be answered by more persecution, the Citizen does not treat him as a fellow Irishman with a different political view. He treats him as an alien whose claim to Ireland is fundamentally fraudulent. This is where patriotism becomes nationalism.

A patriot, by definition, is someone who loves, supports, and is willing to defend their country. Bloom makes clear that he is a patriot. But this is not enough for the Citizen. The Citizen wants to decide which people have the right to love Ireland, and this is always the foundation of nationalism. The Citizen’s nationalism is therefore not simply an expression of national pride. It is a theory of national ownership. Ireland belongs to a particular kind of Irishman, and anyone who does not match that type must continually demonstrate their loyalty. This sounds eerily familiar today.

The Politics of “Again”

At its core, the MAGA movement is also a politics of restoration. It begins with a story of national decline. America was once stronger, safer, more prosperous, more unified, more respected, and more culturally confident. That greatness was then squandered by weak leaders, corrupt elites, immigrants, globalists, and citizens who no longer honor the country’s history or traditions. To that point, in his 2017 inaugural address, President Trump promised to “rebuild our country and restore its promise.” And in his 2025 inaugural address, he described himself as having been saved by God to make America great again and repeatedly promised that the country would become powerful, prosperous, and productive “once again.” His constant use of “again” is actually brilliant. It has enabled millions of people to share a feeling of dispossession without requiring them to agree about precisely what has been lost or when the golden age existed. That ambiguity is politically effective. However, it is also dangerous because we don’t have clarity on what we are working to restore. The questions that it begs include

• When was America great?

• Who was free?

• Who could vote?

• Who could own property, attend a university, enter a profession, serve on a jury, marry freely, or move about freely without fearing the power of the state?

Without clarity on these questions, it is left to the leader, in this case, President Trump, to define.

Our Republic was Limited by Definition

I have been working my way through We The People: A History of the US Constitution by Jill Lepore, and she makes clear that, at first, our Republic was not a fully representative democracy. Voting qualifications varied by state, but political power remained overwhelmingly concentrated among the elites (i.e., mostly white men who met property, tax, religious, or other qualifications). One source states that only about ~6% of the total population was eligible to participate in the nation’s first elections. Women were generally excluded from formal political power. Enslaved people were treated as property, and Native Americans were largely considered outside the constitutional community. Free Black Americans faced severe restrictions, even where they were not formally prohibited from voting.

Thus, the most revolutionary idea of the Declaration of Independence (DoI) was stating the ideal “all men are created equal” within a radically restricted society. Jefferson and the other founders knew that this language was expansive, and they had to wrestle with the contradiction from the beginning. Jefferson’s original draft of the DoI included an attack on the transatlantic slave trade. Congress removed the passage during its revisions, in part because slavery threatened the political unity necessary to declare independence. To be fair, Jefferson’s language placed much of the blame on the British Crown rather than recognizing the colonists’ own participation in and profit from the trade. Jefferson understood the contradiction better than his defenders sometimes admit.

But recognizing a moral contradiction is not the same as escaping it. Jefferson was caught in a moral quagmire, one of his own making. He could see that slavery violated the principles of the Revolution, and he understood that the institution of slavery would only deepen the nation’s political and moral crisis. Thus, he could articulate ideals that would eventually be used to condemn slavery, but he remained personally, economically, socially, and psychologically dependent upon the system he knew to be unjust. This conflict became clear to me as I walked the grounds of Monticello and realized that Jefferson, who had 6 children with his first wife, had 6 children with Sally, made Sally’s 6 children live in the slave quarters (Sally had a special room). He was not the father of 1 “oops” child with the maid; he had 6 children whom he never claimed, who looked like him, and whom he had to see daily. Thus, he was confronted with his own hypocrisy for 50 years after writing the Declaration of Independence.

The DoI does not deserve reverence because its author perfectly embodied its principles. Clearly, he did not. Instead, it matters because its words created a standard by which Jefferson himself, the founding generation, and every subsequent generation could be judged. In his last known letter, written on June 24, 1826 (about 2 weeks before he died on July 4th!!), Jefferson expressed the hope that the document would eventually awaken people everywhere to self-government and human rights. “All eyes,” he wrote, “are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.” Jefferson could see the direction the world needed to travel more clearly than he could live it himself. And, in fact, he was right. 100+ countries have incorporated parts of the US Declaration of Independence in their own declarations. People get the ideal.

Restoration Versus Expansion

This is where the Citizen and the DoI point in opposite directions. The Citizen believes a nation becomes great by recovering a mythic history. He searches the past to find a pure Irish population capable of inheriting Ireland (there is even an invented 12 tribes of Ireland interpolation). By contrast, the DoI suggests that our nation can become even greater by including people it once excluded. In fact, over the past 250 years, we have seen different groups embrace the ideal of “all men are created equal” to create a more expansive definition of citizenship (very much in line with Bloom’s POV). For example, from the day it was published, abolitionists seized the Declaration’s language and applied it to slavery. Frederick Douglass used the nation’s founding principles to expose the hypocrisy of celebrating liberty while millions remained enslaved in a speech on July 4th in 1852, saying:

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.:

Likewise, the women at Seneca Falls adapted the Declaration to demand political and civil equality. The Reconstruction era attempted, however imperfectly, to create an interracial democracy. More recently, the civil rights movement demanded that the country honor promises it had repeatedly deferred. Each generation has widened the meaning of “we.”

MAGA suggests a different path forward. Like the Citizens’ nationalism, MAGA’s leaders, such as JD Vance, ask us explicitly to return to an earlier age, before some combination of immigration, globalization, secularism, feminism, civil rights, demographic change, institutional decay, and elite betrayal altered the country. To be fair, not every concern articulated by MAGA adherents is illegitimate. Many Americans have experienced dispossession & economic insecurity. We have all suffered through the fallout and cost of too many failed wars and military actions since WWII. And today, we are experiencing cultural fragmentation due to increased and seemingly overwhelming immigration. Finally, many feel that the institutions that our government has created are too big, bureaucratic, ineffective, and wasteful. Thus, any path forward that refuses to acknowledge those failures will not defeat restorative nationalism. It will feed it.

Joyce’s warning is not that grievances are imaginary. His warning is that these grievances can become an identity in and of themselves. Once a movement understands itself primarily as the victim of national betrayal, nearly any act can be defended as restoration. Political opponents are enemies who should be harmed. Immigrants are invaders who should be repulsed. Judges become conspirators and journalists become traitors. In this world, elections are only legitimate if they deliver the proper result. Politics is no longer an argument among citizens over the common good. It becomes a struggle over who owns the country. Sound familiar?

The Biscuit Tin

Joyce finally exposes the Citizen’s pretensions through comedy. After speaking in the elevated language of Irish heroism, national destiny, sacrifice, and betrayal, the Citizen pursues the departing Bloom and hurls a biscuit tin after him, echoing the Cyclops throwing the boulder at the fleeing Odysseus in the Odyssey. The gesture is ridiculous, but not harmless. That is Joyce’s point. Nationalism presents itself in epic language. It invokes ancient heroes, sacred soil, betrayed ancestors, and the destiny of a chosen people. But its grandeur often culminates in petty cruelty directed at a real person.

The Citizen imagines himself defending Ireland. He is, in fact, attacking another Irish citizen. He wants to fight the persecution by the British, but then, in turn, he persecutes a Jew. He sees himself as a national hero, but, in effect, he has become a drunken bully throwing a biscuit tin. This is made clear when the narrator, who has been on the Citizen’s side throughout the episode, turns on him at this point and says, “Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ’ sake and don’t be making a public exhibition of yourself” (12.1792-3) through the streets of Dublin.

America at 250

Joyce called the episode “Cyclops” because nationalism epitomized by the nameless Citizen produces a distinctive kind of blindness. The Citizen does not lack sight. Instead, he has a very narrow, monocular vision where he can only see the wounds inflicted upon Ireland as a persecuted people. Ironically, he can’t see or admit to the persecution of Bloom, even when Bloom says he is part of a persecuted race as well, saying “I belong to a race too. . . that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant” (12.1467-8). MAGA sees real failures in modern America. However, like the Citizen, MAGA looks at these problems through the single eye of restorative nationalism. As enlightened as Jefferson was, he could also not fully see either, or, to be more precise, could not force himself to confront how the rights he articulated in the Declaration of Independence actually condemned the world he lived in.

On our 250th birthday, the question is not whether we will make the country great again, but how we will make America even greater in the years to come. And this is where we can turn to Bloom (the voice of Joyce) again, who says “A nation is the same people living in the same place” (12.1422). For Bloom, a nation is created by people who contribute to the community. The irony in this Episode is that it is Bloom who is taking care of his fellow citizens. The Citizen’s implicit definition of a nation is ancestral and exclusionary. Bloom can live in Ireland, serve Irish people, and call himself Irish, but the Citizen still sees him as a foreign Jew.

Our choice today is not between patriotism and shame. It is really about two different visions of national greatness. One tells us that greatness lies behind us. We can recover it by restoring the culture, hierarchies, & boundaries of a bygone era. The other suggests we can continue to build on our historical greatness by embracing our history as a nation of immigrants. For sure, we need to be intentional and disciplined about who we continue to welcome to our country and how we provide a path to citizenship. But this assumes that we embrace a look forward versus look back view of what it means to be a people and a nation.

I was talking with a friend’s son the other day, who was working on an essay about the future of space power. His argument was that control of space will increasingly shape military strategy and geopolitical influence. We ended up discussing how great powers use new technologies to project force, secure commercial interests, and expand their spheres of influence in different domains (land, sea, and air) and how this pattern might play out in space. Our conversation reminded me of the first time I learned about “force projection” at the Naval Academy.

When I joined the Navy in 1986, during the Cold War, we were talking about power projection, carrier battle groups, and the need for a 600-ship Navy. The ability to respond to crises anywhere in the world was part of what made the US a global commercial power after World War II. The new international order depended on cargo ships moving freely across the seas, and that meant naval power was not merely a military asset. It was one of the underlying foundations of global trade and geopolitical stability.

To that point, at the Naval Academy, we studied Admiral Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, published in 1890. Mahan argued that maritime strength had a determining influence on the rise and fall of countries and empires. Commerce, ports, fleets, geography, and national policy formed an integrated system. When he was writing, Britain had already demonstrated the point. Its navy did not simply defend an empire. It helped build one by working alongside commercial entities such as the East India Company to protect trade routes and ensure that resources flowed back to the motherland.

After WWII, the US adapted this logic to a different kind of world order. Rather than constructing a formal empire, we built forward bases and deep alliances (e.g., NATO) to secure an open-market system undergirded by global sea lanes. This system was broader than the British imperial system, and we benefited immensely as a country, both economically and politically. One of the core principles of our global power was that, while we did not own the seas, we assumed primary responsibility for keeping them open.

Our Admirals Know the Lesson

Nearly forty years later, some of my classmates are now leading our modern Navy as two and three-star Admirals. In fact, some are responsible for the theaters (the Gulf and the China Sea) where we are now seeing an ancient power struggle play out. I am certain that these admirals, and the rest of our Naval leadership, understand sea control, sea denial, power projection, and the risks that choke points pose. So the issue is not whether America’s admirals understand history. The issue is whether our political leadership understands the system that those admirals are being asked to defend. A recent New York Times opinion essay on Iran, Hormuz, the Navy, and the South China Sea raises this very question: “What happens when a regional power can use geography to challenge a global naval power?” What interests me is that Herodotus addressed this question and documented this pattern in The Histories, which he wrote 2400 years ago.

What Salamis Teaches Us About Choke Points

In 480 B.C., Xerxes (of Persia) invaded Greece to extend his empire (I wrote why great powers go to war here). At that time, Persia was becoming the most important empire in the world. It had immense wealth, a huge army, and the biggest navy in that theater. During the war, Xerxes marched his army across Greece and conquered Athens. The Athenians had to retreat to another island to establish a stronger defensive position. Herodotus tells us that the Greek fleet also gathered at Salamis in part because the Athenians had the largest number of ships in the fleet during the war. They had already provided the largest contingent at Artemisium and, again, provided the most ships at Salamis.

Themistocles, one of the Athenian generals (who oversaw the fleet), recognized that they would not be able to win against the Persian fleet in open water since they were significantly outnumbered. However, he realized he could use geography to his advantage, specifically the narrow channel near Salamis. In the straits, the large number of Persian ships would become a liability. In this case, scale became a disadvantage.

This is the 2,400-year lesson. Naval power is never just measured by the size of a fleet. In open water, scale may dominate; however, in narrow channels, scale can be a disadvantage. And, as such, Salamis has stood as a warning for generations of naval leaders. If you really want to own the seas, then geography becomes strategy.

Hormuz and the Return of the Choke Point

We are seeing this lesson play out in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran does not need a blue-water fleet to challenge the US on the open seas. As it is proving, it only needs to make the Strait of Hormuz dangerous enough that insurers won’t insure commercial shipping. As many reporters have already documented, a significant share (25% or so) of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the strait. We are now seeing, in real time, the downstream impact of controlling this choke point in the energy markets, including a significant rise in oil and gas prices. The biggest issue is that there is no easy way out of this quandary of our own making. We either have to escalate or accommodate.

The kicker is that we have been talking about the risk in this specific strait for decades. We were talking about it when I was at the Naval Academy 40 years ago. And since then, it has been the subject of countless policy papers and role-played endlessly in war games. And the current situation is proving the strategic point that a regional power can destabilize global commerce without conquering territory or defeating a great-power navy. As we have seen, Iran does not even have to fire on every ship that enters the strait. It just has to make the perceived risk credible. And this changes how we should think about global commerce, military investment, deterrence, and the relationship between regional power and the global order.

Sea Denial as Maritime Guerrilla Warfare

We often think of naval power in terms of decisive battles, where large platforms (battleships and/or aircraft carriers) fight massive engagements. But the reality of the choke point is that we cannot counter Iran’s “maritime guerrilla” warfare tactics. Drones, mines, fast attack boats, anti-ship missiles, unmanned underwater vehicles, cyber disruption, and shore-based sensors do not need to defeat the US Navy. They just need to make the Navy’s mission harder, slower, and more expensive. Ultimately, time is on Iran’s side as the political resolve (and ability to pay for this war) in the US continues to erode.

This is the lesson of land-based guerrilla warfare applied to the high seas. The weaker actor avoids the stronger actor’s preferred battlefield. It uses terrain and disperses risk. It creates uncertainty and then turns tactical disruption into political leverage. On land, we saw versions of this strategy play out in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others. We spent millions of dollars and too many of our young men and women’s lives fighting in these conflicts, and, at best, we were able to create stalemates (e.g., in Korea). Too often, we retreated, and the regime we left behind crumbled. We are seeing this same principle of denial, in this case, “sea” denial, play out in the Strait of Hormuz. And Iran, as a Regional Power, is impacting almost every other country at this point.

Global Power and Regional Leverage

At the heart of this conflict is the distinction between Global Power and Regional Leverage. Global powers require mobility. Their military strength, alliance commitments, commercial interests, and political credibility all depend on force projection at a distance. Regional powers require leverage. They do not need to project everywhere. They just need to exploit the geography nearest to them. This is the lesson of Salamis. It is also the logic of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the maritime approaches to Taiwan and the South China Sea. While the specific political contexts differ, the strategic reality is the same. Wherever global commerce must transit a narrow passage, regional actors can gain asymmetric power.

And the rapid advance of technological innovation is only making this asymmetric power more asymmetric. Much like how the battlefield in Ukraine is being transformed by drone warfare, the way that Iran is using technology to fight this conflict will inform future “choke point” confrontations. And guess what. All of our potential enemies are watching very closely. Drones, missiles, mines, unmanned, AI-powered systems, and surveillance networks are transforming how we need to think about building the armies and navies of the future.

What the United States Must Rethink

The United States now has to rethink its approach to building and using naval power without abandoning what has made it so effective over the past 40 years. The answer is not to choose between big ships and small systems. It needs both, and Admiral Mahan’s insights are still very relevant. Aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, logistics ships, and forward bases still matter because global power requires reach. The only difference is the need to integrate the lessons of Salamis more fully. Ultimately, we need to find a way to preserve freedom of the seas without being forced into a maximal war, with the threat of using nuclear weapons, every time a regional actor threatens a choke point. Thus, the future of naval power will require a fuller theory of control. It must combine the ability to project overwhelming force with the ability to defeat distributed disruption. And we must do this with allies.

Allies Matter More Now Than Ever

This is where the political question becomes more urgent. Our Navy can clear mines, escort ships, hunt submarines, and deploy unmanned systems. But the US cannot, by itself, rebuild the credibility needed to encourage other countries to participate and to make potential adversaries think twice. As we have seen since WWII, global maritime order is not built transaction by transaction. It depends on credibility, coalition trust, shared burden, and predictable commitments. The open sea-lane system has taken 8 decades to build. If allies start to doubt that it works and adversaries begin to challenge it, we will see it unravel.

There is a deeper irony here. The United States built the postwar maritime order in part because it understood that commerce, alliances, and deterrence were inseparable. The ability of a ship to sail safely through the Gulf or the Suez Canal was largely due to our NATO partners and other countries trusting that we would honor our commitments. By undermining that system politically, the military challenge grows harder. We will never be able to build enough ships, drones, and missiles to compensate for the loss of this credibility, and it will take a generation (s) to rebuild the trust.

My conversation with my friend’s son began with space power, with the next domain of global competition and the next generation’s understanding of power projection. Space will shape the future of warfare and commerce in ways we are only beginning to grasp. But recent events in the Strait of Hormuz remind us that some of the oldest lessons remain relevant.

The Chain of Consent

If you have been following the news, it seems the idea of what constitutes a “free and fair election” has been popping up almost daily. Last week, the Supreme Court issued its decision to revise the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday, a judge said that the FBI did not have to return the records it had confiscated. And today, another judge blocked the redistricting in VA. All of this means that we are focused on the process of voting versus being focused on the candidates and the issues, which seems kind of bizarro.

What is happening?

Everyone says they support free and fair elections. That is part of the problem. The phrase has become so universally affirmed that we have lost track of the 2nd order questions that ensure we actually have free and fair elections. For example:

• Free from what?

• Fair according to whom?

• Protected by which laws?

• Administered by whom?

Part of the issue, I think, is that we tend to think about elections as moments. We all submit our ballots (either in person or via mail) on election day, and then we watch to see who wins on TV. But an election is less a moment than a chain of activities. At the simplest level, elections are a pretty straightforward process. First, citizens register; then they vote. After the election, officials count the votes, and Election Boards certify the results. When required, courts resolve lawful disputes. When there is faith in the process, losers accept defeat, and winners can get on with the business of governing. If there are process breakdowns in this process, then we are undermining one of the core principles of our republic. Specifically, elections represent the people giving “consent” to be governed by legitimate power. It calls into question the very idea of self-government. . . and that is a BIG DEAL!

What we are seeing now is that the threat to free and fair elections is not confined to Election Day. It is a full-system attack on this “chain of consent.” Before the vote, rules can be written to make participation harder or representation less meaningful. During the vote, election workers can be intimidated, exposed, or driven out. After the vote, losing factions can contest, delay, refuse, or delegitimize lawful outcomes.

The Founders anticipated this problem at the structural level. For example, Hamilton saw the same problem in the machinery of elections. In Federalist No. 59, defending Congress’s constitutional backstop over federal election rules, he wrote that “every government ought to contain in itself the means of its own preservation.” That is why Article I, Section 4 in the Constitution gives states (not the federal government) authority over the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections. At the same time, this section gives Congress the power to “make or alter such Regulations.” I.e., the founders were trying to build in checks and balances. As Madison put it in Federalist No. 51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The Constitution was designed around the assumption that power would always seek advantage, and that ambition would have to be checked by institutions, law, and civic restraint.

Hamilton made the institutional point in Federalist No. 59. For him, election rules were not clerical details: they were constitutional infrastructure. If one political actor could control the rules for choosing representatives, that actor could endanger the representative system itself. That is why the Constitution creates a balance of power between the states and Congress. The Founders were treating election administration as a vulnerability that had to be checked. And we are now seeing this vulnerability being exploited.

To address this vulnerability, it helps to revert to the 4P framework (principle, policy, process, and practice) that I introduced a year ago. In this context,

• The principle is consent. Our government derives its legitimacy from the governed.

• The policy is the legal architecture that protects both secure elections and meaningful access.

• The process is the machinery that turns votes into certified outcomes.

• The practice is how citizens, candidates, parties, courts, and officials act when power and the perceived threat to power are at stake.

When one level breaks, the others are stressed. When all four are attacked at once, the republic enters dangerous territory.

Before the vote: Who actually is voting?

The first link in the chain is participation. And there has been an ongoing debate for many years on this topic. But the volume on this specific issue has gone to 11 in the past year. The key questions to consider are:

• Who gets to vote?

• Under what rules?

• With what burdens?

These point to the larger question of how we, as citizens, can trust that the system treats all eligible citizens as legitimate participants in self-government.

No serious person can argue that election security does not matter. Of course, citizenship matters. It is also critical to ensure we have accurate voter rolls and that ballots remain secure. We need to monitor the process closely to detect fraud at each stage. And the evidence shows that voter fraud is NOT a myth. Doing a cursory search today shows that fraud exists, but it is rare, usually local, and often detectable. It manifests in abuses such as absentee-ballot fraud, voter registration fraud, duplicate voting, or misconduct by campaign operatives. However, the most documented vulnerabilities are not the ones most often invoked to justify broad restrictions on voters. For example, in-person voter impersonation is nearly nonexistent. News21’s review of alleged election-fraud cases from 2000 to 2012 found that absentee-ballot fraud and registration fraud were the two largest categories, while in-person voter impersonation accounted for only 10 alleged cases. The AP’s review of the six 2020 battleground states disputed by Trump found fewer than 475 potential fraud cases out of 25.5 million presidential ballots cast, far too few to affect the outcome.

To be clear, noncitizen voting occurs, but the documented cases are isolated. The 2018 North Carolina 9th District case shows that election fraud can be serious enough to force a new election, but it also shows the real pattern: organized misconduct around absentee ballots, not millions of illegal voters.

Net/net: a republic should take fraud seriously. But taking fraud seriously means matching the remedy to the evidence, and not using rare misconduct as a pretext to burden lawful voters, intimidate election workers, or delegitimize every outcome one faction dislikes.

Does The Remedy Reflect Proportional Response

Perhaps more important is the need to evaluate whether a particular rule solves a real problem without creating unnecessary burdens for eligible citizens. A law can use the language of election integrity while actually weakening lawful voters’ ability to participate. That is the debate around the SAVE America Act. This bill would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and impose new federal requirements around voting eligibility. Supporters presented it as a safeguard against noncitizen voting. Critics argue that it risks disenfranchising eligible voters who lack ready access to the required documents or whose documents do not match their current names, such as married women, older voters, lower-income citizens, and people with complicated records. Reuters recently reported that the bill had passed the House but faced a Senate filibuster threshold, making passage difficult.

Again, I am not arguing whether noncitizens should vote. They should not. The issue at stake here is whether the proposed remedy is proportionate to the demonstrated problem and does not place an undue burden on eligible citizens. If the practical effect of a security rule is to make lawful participation more difficult, then the policy may preserve the appearance of integrity while weakening representation.

The same problem appears in the evolving Voting Rights Act (VRA) landscape. The 15th Amendment states that the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The VRA of 1965 was intended to close the gap between what was articulate as a “right” and actual political access on the streets of America. The Court has not erased the Voting Rights Act in one stroke. But over the past several years, the practical direction has been toward narrowing the scope of federal voting-rights protections, especially regarding redistricting and race-conscious remedies. In April 2026, the Court struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, a ruling AP described as weakening a landmark Civil Rights-era law and opening the door to more redistricting fights across the country.

This is the policy-level danger. A right that exists only in theory is not yet self-government. The vote must be legally protected, practically accessible, and politically meaningful. If laws or court decisions narrow participation or representation while claiming neutrality, the “chain of consent” becomes less trusted before Election Day even arrives.

During the vote: the people who ensure the votes are counted

The second link in the chain is administration. Elections are run by clerks, registrars, poll workers, observers, county officials, state boards, judges, volunteers, and ordinary citizens who agree to do unglamorous work under pressure. It just amazes me that this is what happens around the country for every election. The election worker is the infrastructure. That is why the recent federal intervention in Fulton County, Georgia, matters. The issue is not only that the Justice Department has confiscated materials from the 2020 election. It is that the investigation has moved toward the people who administered the election. According to AP, the DOJ sought the names and personal contact details for people involved in Fulton County’s 2020 election. Fulton County moved to quash the subpoena, arguing that it was overly broad, lacked a legitimate prosecutorial purpose, and risked intimidating or harassing election workers.

That is a serious escalation. A subpoena for records is one thing. A demand for workers’ and volunteers’ personal information is another. It undermines the human infrastructure of elections. Remember, Fulton County is the same place where election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss became targets of false fraud claims after the 2020 election. Their lives were upended by false accusations. They later won a major defamation judgment against Rudy Giuliani, but no court judgment can fully restore a community’s confidence in the process when ordinary election workers are turned into political targets.

That is the point at which “election integrity” can become a form of intimidation. A republic needs lawful mechanisms to investigate real misconduct. But when the power of federal investigation is directed at election workers amid repeatedly debunked fraud narratives, citizens are right to ask whether the system is protecting elections. Ultimately, our ability to hold “free and fair elections” depends on this civic workforce willing to count the vote. If these workers are harassed, exposed, threatened, or driven out, the system is undermined before any ballot is cast.

After the vote: when losing becomes delegitimizing

The third link in the chain is acceptance of lawful outcomes. An election is not fully complete when voters vote. As we have witnessed over the past several election cycles, the votes must be counted. And then the election needs to be certified at several levels. Unfortunately, we have had to rely on the courts to adjudicate in recent elections due to a perceived breakdown at this stage. This is where the Trump era introduced something especially corrosive. This pattern did not begin in 2020; it actually began in 2016, after Trump won the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote. Rather than simply accepting the constitutional victory, he claimed without evidence that he would have won the popular vote if millions of illegal votes had not been cast. FactCheck.org described the claim as bogus and unsupported.

That matters because the claim was not necessary to challenge the result. Trump had won. The claim served another purpose. It turned victory into a grievance. It taught supporters that an unfavorable democratic signal (i.e., Trump not winning the popular vote), even when there was a successful constitutional outcome, could be explained away as fraud. This pattern metastasized after 2020. And my home state of Georgia became one of the central battlegrounds. It was not just because of the small win that Kamala eked out. More concerning was that Federal investigators seized more than 600 boxes of 2020 election materials from Fulton County. This meant that a state election process was being interfered with by a federal body—a dangerous re-balancing of the constitutional powers. Reuters reported that the investigation is tied to Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia, and a federal judge recently allowed the DOJ to keep the materials. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

At the same time, Georgia’s election oversight system became a separate issue after 2020. The Georgia State Election Board, which has the authority to set election rules and investigate election administration, has become increasingly contested over the past 6 years. The board adopted controversial rules before the 2024 election, and Trump publicly supported/ endorsed some of these board members. The Georgia Supreme Court later invalidated four of seven rules passed by the board, including measures critics argued could have delayed certification or required hand counts after polls closed.

This is where the issue becomes bigger than one candidate, one state, or one case. We have seen that our republic can survive recounts and hard-fought disputes over election rules. What it cannot survive is a permanent politics of delegitimization, where every loss is fraud, every administrator is suspect, every certification is conditional, and every institution is legitimate only when it produces the desired outcome. Lawful challenge is part of democracy: Permanent delegitimization is not.

What we can do about it

The answer cannot be only outrage. If the threat is a full-system attack on the chain of consent, the response must operate at every level: principle, policy, process, and practice.

• Principle. We need to restore the basic standard that a free and fair election is possible, even if “my” side does not win. Instead, a free and fair election is one in which eligible citizens can vote, lawful votes are counted, disputes are resolved through evidence and law, and the outcome is accepted as legitimate even by those who lose. That standard has to be stated clearly because it is no longer universally practiced.

• Policy. We should defend secure access. The choice is not between election security and voting rights. A serious republic needs both. Citizenship verification, accurate voter rolls, ballot security, and fraud prevention matter. But it also needs to support reasonable access, equal representation, and enforceable remedies when states or parties make participation harder for lawful voters. The question for any newly proposed election law should be direct: Does this rule or policy protect the vote, or does it protect power?

• Process. If our election workers (clerks, registrars, poll workers, observers, county officials, state boards, judges, and volunteers) are intimidated, exposed, harassed, or replaced by factional actors, then our system is weakened before a single ballot is cast. We need citizens to volunteer, and we need local leaders to monitor board appointments and rule changes. Both business and civic leaders should be vocal in support of election workers.

• Practice. We need to restore the discipline of evidence-based investigations and the idea that losing an election is part of the process. Obviously, we should be vigilant and investigate real fraud. But we should not tolerate fraud claims as political theater. If someone says an election was stolen, they should prove it in court by producing evidence. Otherwise, we will continue to erode public trust. Finally, when a lawful election is lost, the answer should not be to attack the system. Instead, the answer should be to re-group, re-organize, and get ready for the next election.

This may be the hardest part. A constitutional republic depends not only on winners who govern lawfully, but on losers who accept legitimate defeat. That is not a weakness. It is the discipline that makes self-government possible. To that point, the Founders built institutions to guard against our worst tendencies in elections. However, these institutions depend on a set of common values and accepted behaviors, such as restraint, evidence, lawful challenge, peaceful transfer, and the willingness to accept that the people may choose someone else. Free and fair elections do not just happen. They exist only when citizens defend the principle, protect the policy, monitor the process, and practice the restraint that republican government requires.

That is the work in front of us for the next 6 months.

A Moment That Didn’t Quite Make Sense

I’ve spent the last 24 weeks working through Herodotus’s Histories with the Symposium Institute, which offers quarterly seminars on the great books. One of my biggest takeaways from this text is how often the motivations and justifications of leaders from 2400 years ago feel so contemporary. I was reminded of this again when President Trump called on our allies to help secure the Strait of Hormuz this week, and they said “No.” There was no ambiguity and, perhaps more interestingly, their responses were not coordinated. Some questioned our objectives; others pointed to the lack of consultation before the attacks; and several declined outright without giving a reason. At first glance, this could be written off as a familiar debate about burden sharing, who does more, who pays more, and who needs to show up when. However, I would suggest this was a signal that alignment with our allies can no longer be assumed, and that something more structural is shifting in how the world works today.

To be clear, this was not a failure of capacity or capability. Our NATO allies have the ability to act, and they have done so in the past. What was missing in this case was agreement on the purpose, potential risk, and likely outcome. Trump, with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, decided to invade Iran based on intelligence and timing. They saw their opportunity and took it. Some argue that Israel was going to attack Iran regardless, and Trump did not want to be left behind. We will probably never know the full truth on that front. However, we do know that these two leaders moved forward without bringing other allies along. The implication is that the mechanism that once reinforced cooperation among allies may be weakening, and this is where Herodotus becomes relevant.

What Herodotus Actually Shows About Alignment

In Book 9 of The Histories, as King Xerxes of Persia begins to withdraw, he leaves his general Mardonius behind to take a final stand. In this phase, Mardonius marshals a force of 300,000 Persians and allied troops and must determine whom he can rely on. He seeks visible demonstrations of loyalty, not passive support. This is most evident with the Thebans, a Greek city-state that has already “medized” (aligned with Persia). At this point, Thebes has expressed support for the campaign, but Mardonius pushes them to prove that loyalty by attacking other Greeks. Thebes draws a line and refuses to attack fellow Greeks, choosing instead to operate in a more measured and conditional manner. The result is participation that satisfies Mardonius’ demand for alignment without fully embracing its implications.

The deeper insight is that loyalty tests often do not strengthen relationships or trust. Instead, they reveal the limits of the alliance. Loyalty that must be demonstrated on demand is already under strain, and testing it exposes that strain rather than resolving it. When the war turns, and the Greeks prevail, Thebes is judged and punished as an opportunist whose commitment was always partial. That outcome is not simply about choosing the wrong side, it is also about the nature of the alignment itself. Herodotus shows that power can produce compliance but not conviction, and that distinction becomes decisive when outcomes are uncertain and risks are high. The Theban example demonstrates that “compelled alignment” produces risk-averse behavior. Actors comply just enough to avoid punishment but not enough to share the strategic burden. Thus, Persia has a HUGE coalition on paper, but its medized allies mostly act cautiously, which is exactly the condition that undermines coordination in decisive moments. This pattern repeats throughout the ages.

From Alignment to Compellence

The pattern that emerges is not unique to Persia, nor does it depend on ancient conditions. As I wrote in this article, many countries throughout history have justified invading others on the basis of perceived threats or fear of invasion. Over time, some of these countries secured regional hegemony and, like ancient Persia, Athens, Rome, and France under Napoleon, sometimes became empires. In the 19th century, we saw another evolution in power through the “spheres of influence” strategy. As this process unfolds, alignment shifts from being negotiated with allies to being expected from those who are subjugated. Eventually, expectation turns into entitlement. The challenge is that when alliances begin to fray under those conditions, the instinct is to apply pressure rather than rebuild agreement. The result is a transition from persuasion to compellence, which changes the nature of the broader political system.

The reason this transition matters is that it alters the quality of participation. Leverage can compel action, but it cannot create alignment. Systems built on alignment begin to degrade under pressure. The implication is not that power disappears, but how it is used must change, especially in situations that require coordination rather than unilateral action. That distinction matters because alliances are not simply collections of capabilities; they are systems of shared risk, and shared risk depends on voluntary commitment. Alliances are also built among people with egos, and when those relationships are devalued or ignored, trust erodes and commitment becomes conditional.

The Return of Gunboat Diplomacy

The New York Times has run several articles alluding to “Gunboat Diplomacy” over the past couple of months. Gunboat Diplomacy refers to European powers’ use of naval forces in the 19th century not only to fight wars but also to secure access to trade routes, resources, and strategic positions. The approach was effective at producing immediate compliance but rarely produced durable partnerships because the underlying alignment was never established. A more recent example would be Venezuela, where the US has been using economic pressure for years and then, in January, used military force to secure resources (oil) and assert regional power more directly. In the end, Gunboat diplomacy is not just about force. It is about sequencing. Action comes first, and alignment is sought afterward. That sequence works against weaker states. However, it fails with allies because it bypasses the very process that creates legitimacy.

This metaphor helps contextualize a series of military actions that might otherwise seem unrelated. Venezuela, Greenland, the first attack on Iran, and now the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz differ in context, but they share a common structure in how power is applied. In each case, the US is using leverage rather than legitimacy to secure security, resources, or a strategic position. With the most recent escalation, we see the Trump administration attempting to apply these tools to both allies and adversaries. The implication is that the boundary between coercive and alignment-based power is blurring.

Allies, Adversaries, and the Misapplication of Power

The post-WWII global order depended on maintaining a clear distinction between how power was used against adversaries and how it was used with allies. The United States did not build its post-war power base by conquering its allies, as ancient Persia and other empires did. Instead, it helped former enemies such as Germany, Italy, and Japan rebuild their economies and political systems, and over time, some of these former adversaries became some of its most reliable partners. The reason is that the US was deliberate in how it organized the postwar system. It worked with like-minded countries (largely democracies or social democracies that embraced capitalism and the rule of law) through global and regional institutions designed to reduce the risk of another world war. The assumption was that shared interests and shared values would make participation both rational and legitimate, producing durable alignment rather than coerced compliance. As Sting once sang, “I hope the Russians love their children too.”

Obviously, that system has not been perfect, and debates about burden sharing, particularly within NATO, have persisted for decades. The challenge was never the absence of disagreement, but how those disagreements were resolved. These institutions functioned because alignment was grounded in consent rather than extraction, and because consultation reinforced legitimacy even when outcomes were uneven. When alignment was strong, the separate countries were able to coordinate action and response, even in complex and high-risk situations. The First Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush is a clear example in which the United States built a broad coalition with defined objectives, international backing, and shared ownership of both risks and outcomes. By contrast, the 2003 invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush revealed what happens when alignment is weaker. As the coalition narrowed and legitimacy was questioned, participation became more conditional. That distinction matters because the effectiveness of power is not simply a function of capability, but of whether it is exercised in a way that sustains alignment or erodes it.

What appears to be changing today is not simply the level of contribution, but the method used to secure it. When tools associated with coercion are used in relationships that depend on alignment, the nature of those relationships changes. Hard power tactics such as the use of military force before consultation, tariffs, sanctions, and trade restrictions are examples. These tools may be effective when dealing with adversaries, where compellence is the objective. By contrast, alliances have historically relied on different tools, including legitimacy built through consultation, participation in shared institutions such as NATO, and economic integration through financial systems. This connective tissue builds mutual obligation over time. You cannot compel allies the way you confront enemies, and you are not going to conquer them, so applying pressure in these contexts often produces hesitation rather than commitment. The result is participation that is narrower, slower, and more conditional. That change is subtle at first, but it accumulates over time and becomes visible in moments like Hormuz, where coordination fails because of the weakness of the relationship, not the strength of the military.

The deeper logic of this type of system was actually articulated by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 11. In this essay, he argues that commercial relationships create alignment in ways that coercion cannot. Thus, trade, interdependence, and shared prosperity bind nations together because they make cooperation mutually beneficial rather than externally imposed. The implication is that influence built through economic integration is more durable than influence imposed through force. That distinction became the foundation of the postwar order, even if it was not always articulated that way.

Why This Moment Matters

Thus, the Strait of Hormuz is not just a policy dispute; it is a signal about how the global world order is changing. When allies decline to participate, the issue is not simply compliance; it is the condition of the relationship that would have produced participation in the first place. The real question we face now is whether our relationships (alliances) are at a point where alignment must be re-negotiated each time rather than assumed.

That shift has implications that extend beyond any single conflict or country, because it affects how quickly and effectively countries can coordinate when interests overlap. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned in his remarks at the recent Davos Conference that the assumptions underlying the postwar economic and political order are beginning to break down, particularly the expectation that major powers will operate within a shared framework of rules and coordination. The implication is that we are not simply observing isolated policy disagreements, but entering a world in which each country must rethink how it relates to others. The result is a system in which alliances become more conditional, cooperation becomes more transactional, and the ability to organize collective action becomes less reliable. This is not uniquely American, and it is increasingly reflected in how leaders across the global system describe the current moment. The postwar order was built on assumptions about legitimacy, shared interest, and coordination, and those assumptions are now being tested in visible and cumulative ways. The implication is not immediate collapse, but gradual fragmentation, in which the system continues to exist but functions with less cohesion and predictability.

The Leadership Challenge

The challenge we face today is structural and sits at the intersection of power, legitimacy, and alignment. In an earlier essay, I argued that leaders of republics must be clear about the moral and political objectives when they use force, because ambiguity leads to strategic drift. That remains true, but it is no longer sufficient. Leaders must also understand the type of power they use and whether it aligns with the relationships and alliances they seek to sustain.

Herodotus shows that this dynamic is not new, and it emerges when systems transition from one mode of organization to another. The deeper question is whether we can recognize that transition early enough to adjust how we operate within it. Because once alignment weakens to the point where it must be compelled, the system is already breaking, even if its structures remain intact. Power does not fail immediately when coercion replaces legitimacy. It simply stops working when it matters most.

The question, then, is not whether today’s global order is under strain: It is. The question is “do we understand the source of that strain clearly enough to respond to it?” If alignment with our allies must be rebuilt each time, then we are already operating in a different kind of system, one where cooperation is negotiated rather than assumed. That shift does not eliminate power, but it changes how power works. Leverage can compel action, but when it replaces legitimacy, it does not sustain the system. It begins to undermine it.

Introduction

I have been wanting to write a version of this article for several months. In Dec, I wrote an essay titled “Why Herodotus? Why Now?” about the attack on Venezuelan boats in International waters. It seemed to me to be a clear signal of Trump’s imperial ambition and desire to revert to a 19th-century “Sphere of Influence” realpolitik model. His capture of Maduro on Jan 3rd reinforced my belief.

Then I was going to write it when he was threatening to invade Greenland in early Jan, seemingly another “sphere of influence” play. Fast forward to today (Feb 28th), and he has initiated, with Israel, a “major attack” on Iran. The context is different because Iran, obviously, is not in our sphere of influence; however, there are some similarities across these scenarios. And now I need to get this essay out before he decides to “speak loudly and hit with a big stick” again.

To be clear, this essay is not a partisan critique of the attack on Iran. There are a bunch of political pundits arguing both sides of that debate right now. Instead, I want to step back and ask how a Republic should think about war. I draw on Clausewitz and Herodotus to examine how leaders throughout history have constructed their casus belli. My concern is not whether force is ever justified. It is whether we have become less disciplined in distinguishing among the justifications for “major combat operations” and/or declaring war (e.g., for defense, prevention, or influence). More importantly, I would argue that we, as citizens and our representatives in Congress, need to demand more clarity about the moral rationale and political objectives before our leaders—no matter who the leader is—initiate military action against sovereign foreign governments.

The Question We Must Ask

Today, President Trump announced sustained strikes aimed at degrading Iran’s missile and naval infrastructure, framing the action as necessary to eliminate emerging threats to American interests and regional stability. He has been hinting at this for a while, most clearly at the State of the Union Address last week. It is important to note that he has not declared war (Congress still retains that power); however, he has committed an enormous force (with Israel) to attacking Iran on his own. The challenge he must overcome is less about the process: it is, more importantly, a moral and political one. When a Republic initiates large-scale combat operations, its leadership must articulate two things to its citizens:

• The moral rationale and

• The political (strategic) objectives

In the US, we trust that a President (supported by Congress) will clearly articulate the “moral rationale”, i.e., what wrong has been done to the US, and that responding with force is appropriate. The most obvious example of this is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The moral rationale for our declaring war was crystal clear.

In the last 50 years, I think we have had too few examples of leaders (regardless of political party) who can clearly articulate both the moral rationale and the political objectives (i.e., the end state we seek, and how we will achieve it once the dust settles). An example of where we did this right was General MacArthur’s work in post-war Japan and the Marshall Plan’s impact on Europe after WWII. Unfortunately, what we have seen in more recent conflicts, such as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, is that if the strategic objectives are not clear or if we have not planned for the post-war nation-building, we get mired in extended and VERY expensive conflicts.

Clausewitz and the Political Objective

I pulled out my copy of On War by Clausewitz to remind myself of his views on the link between war and political objectives. In the very first chapter, he says that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Thus, the political objective governs the military aim. For example, if the political objective is survival, a country’s strategy is constrained and finite. It is a defensive posture. However, if politicians start banging the drum about prevention or influence, the requirements for declaring war change. He warns that the risk of lacking clarity regarding the political objectives is that war becomes untethered from its purpose. In many cases, the initial strike becomes the first step in something larger than originally described and justified. If you look at the last 50 years of our efforts to intervene, most have devolved into long-running foreign entanglements.

When a Moral and Political Objective Align

Hearing the phrase “major combat operations” took me back to 1986, when I joined the Navy during the Cold War. At that time, the Soviet Union was not an abstract concept. It had more than five million active personnel, approximately 2x what we had. At its mid-1980s peak, the Soviet Union possessed ~40k nuclear warheads, again, nearly double the American arsenal. And its intercontinental missiles could strike American cities. In this way, the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to our very existence.

The Reagan administration responded with a substantial defense buildup. I remember there was a goal to build a 600-ship Navy, and military spending increased each year. Joining the military at that time felt like the right thing to do. The moral objective was clear: we needed a strong military to defend against a very real threat. The political objective was survival. This narrative played out broadly in our culture with movies such as Red Dawn, in which the Soviets invaded Colorado, The Hunt for Red October, where we were one turn of a key away from nuclear Armageddon, and Top Gun, which showed that spending lots of $$ on Aircraft Carriers and Naval Aviation would allow us to project our power around the world.

From Deterrence to Preemptive Strikes

Before 1989, when the wall fell, our primary posture on the world stage was one of deterrence. We were clear that going to war with the Soviets would lead to mutual destruction. This led presidents from both parties to pursue influence through proxies and to support small-scale “interventions.” The wall fell in 1989, and our posture changed in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In response, President G.H.W. Bush created a “coalition of the willing) to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty. He was able to do this because the moral rationale was clear and the political objective was defined and limited. We were supporting an ally who had been invaded and trying to stabilize a region. (Comparing what we did/did not do in Kuwait to what we are doing/not doing in Ukraine will need to wait for another essay.)

By 2003, the argument had shifted. President G. W. Bush (the son) justified the preemptive invasion of Iraq on the grounds of preventing the potential future use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The burden threshold moved from responding to aggression to predicting a theoretical threat. As we all know now, the intelligence President Bush relied on was faulty; there were no WMDs. And, unfortunately, Iraq became an expensive quagmire for 8 years. According to an article by Rand, The Invasion of Iraq: A Balance Sheet, the war cost between $2 and $3 trillion in direct and long-term costs. Moreover, 4,400 U.S. service members were killed, and more than 32,000 were wounded. That’s a big “whoops.”

Even when confronted with the costs of a preemptive posture, the US has continued to embrace this doctrine, and almost every president since has used force to eliminate potential dangers before they materialized. This is obviously a slippery slope, as we can’t actually know what a regime will do. However, this was a strategic shift in how we justified the use of “military action.”

Herodotus and the Narration of Necessity

Herodotus shows that the problem of justification is ancient. In Book 1 of The Histories, Croesus of Lydia consults the oracle at Delphi before attacking Persia. He is told that if he crosses the river Halys, he will destroy a great empire. He assumes it will be Persia’s. It is his own. The episode is not simply about unreliable prophecy. It is about how leaders interpret ambiguity to align with their ambition. What begins as uncertainty becomes inevitable through narrative manipulation.

Under Darius I, Persian expansion is framed not as conquest but as stabilization. Campaigns against distant peoples are justified as necessary to secure order and prevent future revolt. In this logic, unrest anywhere signals potential instability everywhere. Darius wanted to expand the empire’s perimeter to ensure internal peace. Ironically, what began as defense becomes preemptive consolidation.

This is “defense” logic stretched to its outer boundary. If disorder beyond the frontier is treated as an intolerable threat, then expansion becomes the path to security. The implicit argument is simple: Darius sought to establish a “Pax Persica” by conquering the known world. The danger in this reasoning is not that security is irrelevant. It is that the definition of threat expands with the leader’s (or state’s) ambition. Once instability anywhere is grounds for action everywhere, the justification for war becomes nearly limitless. And this is what we are witnessing today.

The key for me about this episode is that Herodotus tells this history by “preserving” speeches he probably never heard. To his credit, he does offer competing explanations for why things happen. One of the things Herodotus makes clear is that a leader’s narrative creates the sense of necessity for war. In this way, war enters the people’s imagination before a country deploys troops or ships. Leaders shape the future today, just as they did 3,000 years ago. This is a permanent feature of statecraft.

This reality does not make war illegitimate. However, it makes clarity essential. Because once a leader has constructed the narrative of necessity, citizens must decide what kind of necessity it is:

• Are we defending ourselves?

• Honoring an alliance?

• Preventing imminent harm?

• Or projecting influence?

These are not rhetorical distinctions. They define the moral and strategic burden of the conflict.

The Categories of War and Their Burdens

There are only a few reasons states go to war, each of which carries a different burden of justification.

• Defense. Responding to an attack on our country (e.g., Pearl Harbor or 9/11) requires the lowest moral burden. The right of self-defense is foundational. At the same time, the strategic objective is often defined and finite. We are going to strike back to prevent future invasions.

• Honoring an Alliance. This is a VERY interesting one, especially regarding what is playing out in Ukraine. While Ukraine is not a member of NATO, which defines our obligations, it is an ally, and the moral burden rests on commitments. The strategic burden is also relatively clear. The response should be proportional and focus on preserving the coalition’s legitimacy. This is why Article 5 of NATO has been sacrosanct for 60 years.

• Preemption or prevention. When operating in the realm of a “potential" threat, the moral burden is obviously greater. At the very least, the leader needs to provide credible evidence of an imminent or intolerable threat. This was President Bush’s WMD argument. Similarly, the strategic burden requires the leader to be clear about the end state and ensure we avoid open-ended escalation. This is the argument that President Trump ran on during his 2nd campaign—no more wars of foreign entanglement.

• Expansion or influence. As I wrote about in the earlier essay, this reason was used in the 16th-19th centuries to justify many countries’ ambitions to secure resources and/or influence. Today, this casus belli carries both the highest moral and strategic burden. It risks becoming a justification for imperial ambition. And, if pursued, it requires governance capacity, legitimacy, and willingness to own the consequences. Putin has used this justification for his invasion of Ukraine. It will be interesting to see what he and Russia do to the lands they retain when the fighting finally ends.

What about Iran?

The Trump administration is currently framing the attack as “prevention.” The administration argues that degrading missile and nuclear capabilities now reduces future danger. To be clear, Iran is not the Soviet Union of the 1980s. It is a regional power with asymmetric capabilities. It cannot mount a conventional invasion of the American homeland. That distinction matters. If the justification is prevention, the evidentiary standard must be high and the political objective precise. If the objective is influence or regime change, the burden rises even more because, then, the United States becomes responsible not only for attacking weapon sites and infrastructure. It also becomes responsible for shaping and financing what follows. This is going to be REALLY hard without putting troops on the ground.

Our Burden Now

Herodotus shows how states narrate necessity, and Clausewitz reminds us that politics must define the aim. Together, they expose a permanent tension in Republican governments. War can be justified. But its legitimacy depends on clarity before action, not rationalization after the fact. The burden of a Republic is not to avoid force at all costs; it is to be clear about the moral and political objectives for using force. If we are defending ourselves, we should say so plainly and define the limits of that defense. If we are honoring an alliance, we should anchor the action in a treaty and ensure proportionality in our response. If we are acting to prevent future harm, the evidentiary standard must be high and the end state defined precisely. If we are pursuing influence, we should acknowledge the moral and strategic weight of reshaping another nation’s future.

When these distinctions blur, we end up with “forever wars." The cost is not only financial or military, though history shows those costs can be staggering. We have seen this move before in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In each case, the absence of a clearly defined political object made victory elusive and our ability to exit VERY difficult.

The deeper cost is our legitimacy as a Republic. When this happens, citizens lose trust that force is being used appropriately, leading to protests and civil unrest. Abroad, we are already seeing allies question our reliability. To that point, several countries sent troops to Greenland as a counter to Trump’s threat to invade. Eventually, adversaries (e.g., China) will start to test our resolve in their own spheres (e.g., our willingness to defend Taiwan). Ultimately, the global order becomes less predictable, leading to market instability. No one wants this. . .

Our obligation now is not partisan. It is constitutional and civic. Congress must assert its authority. President Trump and his team must define their moral rationale and political objectives with precision. And we, as citizens, must demand clarity about what category of war we are entering, the expected costs, and what the “end state” looks like.

Civic Complicity

In a recent conversation with friends about the Jeffrey Epstein case, I was reminded of the Ring of Gyges thought experiment in Plato’s Republic. In sum, Glaucon asks Socrates a simple question: if you could act unjustly and never be exposed (because you were wearing a ring that made you invisible), would you? At its core, the ring of Gyges is a thought experiment about justice. Glaucon is asking: “Do we act rightly because we are good, or because we fear shame and punishment?” Socrates dismantles this argument, but before doing so, acknowledges that this is a thoughtful argument. This pause invites the reader to consider the thought experiment more carefully. If you could 100% escape consequences, what would you do?

As Frodo from The Lord of the Rings reminds us, it is tempting. . . .

During the conversation, a friend, Rebecca Weber, steered us in a different direction. She argued that this case is not just about Epstein’s and the other pedophiles’ accountability. It is also about the people around him, his associates and friends, who enabled him. More provocatively, she argued that the case is about those who suspected or knew about Epstein’s crimes and chose to either remain in a relationship with him and/or stay silent. Rebeca’s question has stayed with me for the last couple of weeks.

What is our accountability?

Most of my writing has focused on civic responsibility in the political sphere. How do we hold leaders accountable? How do we preserve a republic against corruption and ambition? The Epstein case is forcing us all to think more deeply about our own accountability in the personal sphere. This essay will address several questions:

1. When does private vice become public harm?

2. How much knowledge creates a moral (if not civic) obligation to act?

3. Does proximity increase our responsibility to act?

4. What type of society are we if our most powerful citizens, in particular, choose not to confront crimes?

What would Plato say?

In the Republic, Plato actually makes a relevant point about justice that addresses the Epstein case. He states that justice depends on structure, not merely personal restraint. A corrupt individual is dangerous, but the real danger is a community that tolerates corruption. The Epstein case brings this scenario to life. Injustice persists not only because of his criminal acts, but also, as Robert Draper, a NYT reporter, wrote recently in this article, because others made the calculation that their comfort, access, or reputation mattered more than confronting and/or reporting him. This raises two questions:

• When does another person’s wrongdoing become my responsibility?

• How do we draw that line without sliding into a culture of suspicion and denunciation?

Athenian Civic Duty

In Athens, citizens were not passive observers of the law. Any citizen could bring a public action against an illegal decree. Known as “graphe paranomon,” the principle was simple: laws do not enforce themselves. Citizens must guard them. In the Athenian Constitution, legal accountability was participatory. But there were also guardrails in place. Accusers faced real risk. Frivolous or malicious claims could result in financial penalties, reputational damage, and public shame. Thus, their system balanced two dangers: apathy that allowed lawlessness to spread and the potential weaponization of accusation that would corrode trust. That tension feels very modern. Today, I think most rational people would state that they want accountability without creating a surveillance culture.

Parrhesia and the Line Between Vice and Harm

The Greeks had several other relevant concepts that can help us parse this moral dilemma. The first, “parrhesia,” is defined as frank and courageous speech in the public sphere, what we might call “speaking truth to power” today. To be clear, for the Greeks, parrhesia was not suspicion, nor was it about surveillance. It was public truth-telling when public harm was evident. And it is important to note the distinction between private “vice” and public “harm.”

Idia versus Koinon

In some ways, a “witnessed” crime happens twice. First, when an individual commits the crime. Second, when others with knowledge decide that personal safety, reputational risk, or privileged access matter more than justice. To be fair, a “free” society can’t demand universal suspicion, monitoring, and reporting. The Greeks drew a distinction that can help us make a meaningful distinction. They separated “idia,” aka “private matters,” from “koinon,” aka matters of the “common good.” And they thought that, in a free society, people should leave idia largely alone. Thus, adults can make choices others dislike, and having a disagreement does not create a civic duty to report. But when conduct crosses into the koinon, the community has a stake, and a citizen needs to act.

Thresholds of Responsibility in a Free Society

And this brings us back to Epstein and the choice his colleagues and friends faced. This case is clear. Epstein was not merely immoral. He was found guilty of criminal exploitation. There is a line here. We, as citizens, are not obligated to police private sin; however, we are obligated to act when we have credible knowledge of serious harm. The challenge for a free society is finding that line and having the courage to stand on it. I would suggest there are 3 thresholds of understanding that require different responses:

1. Difference of opinion/preference

2. Suspicion of wrongdoing

3. Knowledge of criminal activity

First Threshold: Difference of Opinion or Preference

An example of a “difference of opinion” would be associating with someone who does something you might consider a “vice,” but it is legal. One example would be smoking pot or perhaps gambling. In some states, these activities are legal, and, as such, there is no civic duty to intervene. In fact, I would argue that the opposite is true. The virtuous thing to do in this case is to let the other person live their life. You can choose whether or not to be friends with this person, but it is not up to you to pass judgment.

Now, if that person is smoking pot in a state where pot is illegal, it becomes more gray. This is where you need to think about the dimension of harm (covered below). Who is the person harmed by engaging in the illegal activity? If it is just harmful to the individual, I would argue you don’t have a civic responsibility to report them. You may have a moral responsibility to intervene to provide help if they are a friend or family member. But that is judgement call you get to make. . . . and live with.

Second Threshold: Suspicion of Wrongdoing

“Suspicion of wrongdoing” is self-explanatory. In this scenario, you may suspect something deeply immoral or seriously illegal is happening; however, you do not have proof. The Greeks feared two dangers in this case:

1. Cowardice that ignores warning signs

2. Sycophancy that weaponizes accusation

As mentioned above, in Athens, they tried to balance these two by attaching risk to making an accusation. It is important to underscore that the principle was not universal reporting along the lines of what Orwell warned us about in Animal Farm and 1984. Suspicion alone did not mandate denunciation. There are several factors to consider when evaluating the right action to take:

• Knowledge

  • Rumor does not equal responsibility. Credible knowledge changes the calculus.

• Harm

  • Not all illegality is equal. Regulatory violations (e.g., illegal gambling) differ from coercive exploitation (e.g., forced prostitution or sex trafficking). The more severe the harm or asymmetric the power imbalance, the stronger one’s duty is to engage.

• Proximity

  • A casual acquaintance is not the same as a close association with the perpetrator.

• Vulnerability of the victim

  • A society has a heightened duty when the victims cannot protect themselves.

Thus, the deeper your knowledge, the greater the harm, and the closer your proximity, the stronger your obligation. At the very least, if you have a suspicion without evidence that something illegal is happening, then you should end the relationship. I think this is where many of Epstein’s e-mails are starting to expose people’s lack of judgment. Before he was found guilty, it was clear that many people knew something was not right; however, they continued to maintain a relationship because of Epstein’s connections, influence, and access to money. And many are now paying the consequences.

One notable example is Dr. Peter Attia, profiled in a recent Atlantic article. (caveat: I was a huge fan of Dr. Attia; I read and promoted his book, I listened to his podcasts, and I bought his protein bars.) This guy had it made, except for the fact that he maintained a relationship with Epstein and, as the e-mails suggest, knew what Epstein was up to. As Tom Bartlett wrote, “[wellness advisors are] selling wisdom. Follow my advice, they contend, and you’ll live a longer, healthier, more fulfilled life. But a chummy, yearslong association with a convicted child predator is, at the very least, unwise.” Now Dr. Attia’s reputation is in shambles, and his professional career is probably over, which is appropriate

The real issue is that Dr. Attia is just one of a few people now being held accountable in the court of public opinion. I assume there are many more in the 3M pages of documents that have not yet been released, and we will hear more in the years to come.

Third Threshold: Knowledge or Witness of Criminal Activity

If you witness criminal activity, especially exploitation, silence is no longer neutral. And this is where the Athenian model really stands out. In Athens, there was no separate professional prosecutorial class as we understand it today. Investigations of public crimes were often initiated by private citizens. We have a much bigger democracy, so we need codified laws and enforcement agencies (e.g., the police, FBI, etc.) to ensure compliance. But the core idea of what it means to be not just a citizen but a participant in protecting our community remains the same.

To my point above, I am not suggesting we need a community of constant surveillance, ala East Germany or any other authoritarian regime. I am suggesting we DO share responsibility when harm is evident. This obligation is rooted in a set of shared values and a commitment to protecting those who can’t protect themselves. The moment you continue association with a criminal after witnessing harm, you cross from proximity into complicity. Even if you are not legally culpable, you incur moral obligation, and, we would hope, reputational risk for not taking action. And this is probably the most distressing part of this case. We are witnessing an entire class of society, what Robert Draper in his NYT article calls “The Epstein Class” of mostly rich men who acted as if their elite status shielded them from any potential repercussions

Summary

The lessons of Gyges and Epstein force us to confront two different but related questions:

• Gyges tempts the individual. I.e., will you act justly when no one is looking?

• The Epstein case, by contrast, tests the collective. I.e., what are we, as citizens, willing to tolerate?

The Epstein case illustrates what happens when an elite network blurs the line between the two. Continuing association after credible knowledge signals endorsement, even if it is not necessarily legal guilt. In the “Epstein Class,” silence protected access and reputations. Ironically, they acted as if they were each wearing their own ring of Gyges. Clearly, they did not realize that there were 7m records of wrongdoing just waiting to be exposed. Or perhaps they thought there was just no way they would get caught, especially after Epstein committed suicide. In many ways, the conspiracy theorists had it right.

So what is the lesson for the rest of us?

Civic responsibility is not just about what we do in the public sphere. As Rebecca reminded us, it extends to the relationships we maintain and choices we make. The question is not whether we will ever encounter wrongdoing. We will. The question is whether we will calculate our own risk first or the victim’s. When we have a difference of opinion or preference, we should practice tolerance. When confronted with suspicious behavior, we should exercise prudence. However, if we have clear knowledge of wrongdoing, then we must have the courage to act.

At its core, The Histories examines how power evolves over time, especially as it expands. The first four books focus on empire building, tracing Persia’s rise from origin stories and early defensive actions into expansion and consolidation. For Herodotus, empires rarely begin as projects of conquest. They begin as efforts to secure a people or tribe. Success leads to further expansion, which over time hardens into doctrine, administration, and a pursuit of hegemony. A later parallel can be seen in the rise of Napoleon and the French Empire in the early nineteenth century.

That is why Herodotus is useful now. The Histories offers a lens for examining the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and its actions toward Venezuela. Books I–IV also help frame what appears to be a return to organizing world order around spheres of influence, a framework that predates World War II. My aim is not analogy for its own sake, but to examine the risks and tradeoffs that arise when a republic begins to operate according to imperial logic.

When Action Becomes Policy

The seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers last week marked an escalation in a series of U.S. actions in the Caribbean and Pacific that began, ostensibly, as a counter-narcotic operation. A key shift was the military’s assumption of a role traditionally handled by the Coast Guard: law enforcement. That change alone has raised legal and strategic concerns and has been widely covered by the press. More significantly, however, is the move from interdicting suspected criminal activity to effectively imposing a blockade. The administration has moved from enforcement to preemptive control over the commercial movement of another country’s ships.

I have seen this movie before. During my time in the Navy, the first Gulf War was justified by assumptions about weapons of mass destruction that later proved false. The lesson was not just about intelligence failure, but also about how quickly the logic of “enforcement” can slide into justifying the use of force once the frame shifts.

At the same time, the administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). The document makes explicit what has been emerging in practice. It treats the Western Hemisphere as a core security domain, frames nearby instability as a direct threat, and assumes U.S. preeminence in the region. It deemphasizes global stewardship in favor of national interest, competition among major powers, and regional control. In many ways, it feels like a flashback to the 19th century.

What remains unclear is whether this approach was coherent from the start of the term or whether the strategy now serves as a post hoc justification for actions taken over the past eleven months. Going forward, that distinction matters less. The framework is now explicit, and policy execution is aligning with it. In that sense, the NSS functions much like Project 2025 did. It codifies the administration’s intent, reduces ambiguity, and signals how power will be exercised going forward.

Escalation as Pattern

The tanker seizure follows an escalation path that Herodotus identified more than two thousand years ago. In the Histories, Persia’s initial actions are justified as narrow and defensive, and each step is framed as limited. Over time, the accumulation of these steps changes the policy itself. In the US today, this shift from counter-drug enforcement to managing economic activity suggests that proximity has become its own justification. In this worldview, power sets the terms, and sovereignty becomes conditional.

This pattern actually helps to reframe Trump’s early foreign policy remarks. When he made statements about absorbing Canada, revisiting the Panama Canal, or purchasing Greenland early in his tenure, these comments were widely dismissed as unserious. Viewed through the lens of the NSS, they look different. They resemble tests of institutional tolerance for territorial and hemispheric claims. What appeared random then now appears deliberate and intentional.

The same logic appears in the administration’s posture toward Ukraine. U.S.-favored proposals that deemphasize full territorial restoration reflect a belief that stability comes from recognizing spheres of influence rather than contesting them indefinitely.

The Globalization Critique

There is, obviously, another way to interpret these developments. Critics of the postwar order argue that globalization hollowed out domestic capacity, diffused accountability, empowered rivals, and bound the United States to institutions and commitments that no longer deliver reciprocal restraint. For example, thinkers such as Karl Polanyi warned that disembodied markets provoke political backlash, and John Mearsheimer argues that liberal internationalism collapses under great-power competition. Stephen Walt emphasizes balance-of-power realism over universal norms, and, more recently, analysts like Elbridge Colby argue that strategic focus and regional prioritization are necessary responses to overstretch.

From this perspective, Venezuela is not an imperial test case but a consequence of failed regional globalization, and Ukraine reflects the limits of universal norms when confronted with hard power. Advocates of this view argue that the pullback from NATO and other globally oriented initiatives is not a retreat, but a correction.

The NSS clearly reflects this perspective. It frames spheres of influence and selective engagement as pragmatic responses to a world in which universal enforcement no longer works. This argument is important and warrants its own treatment. And I plan to explore it in a separate essay focused on why globalization is breaking down and what these thinkers help us understand about the political backlash it produces. For the purposes of this essay, however, the question is not whether globalization failed, but what follows when its critics succeed and a republic reorganizes itself around control, proximity, and power—taking an imperial posture.

Herodotus and the Mechanics of Empire

Herodotus does not describe an empire as a sudden moral failure. He describes it as an accumulation of decisions that feel reasonable in sequence and irreversible in hindsight. In Book 1, the story begins with Croesus of Lydia, who attacks Persia after misreading an oracle that warned he would destroy a great empire. Croesus believes he is acting prudently to neutralize a rising threat (whoops! Those darn oracles). When Cyrus defeats him, what began as self-defense evolves into a doctrine of conquest and absorption. Cyrus’ subsequent campaigns follow the same pattern. He conquers the other Ionian Greek cities not because they pose an immediate threat, but because leaving them autonomous would create instability along the frontier. Thus, invasion is justified on the grounds of prevention. More importantly, he folds the wealth, territory, and administrative capacity of these countries into Persian rule. This is how security becomes destiny, and expansion is no longer debated as a choice. Instead, it is treated as the natural consequence of success. Bigger is always better!

By Books 2 and 3, this logic has become institutionalized. Cyrus’ successor Cambyses invades Egypt not because it is an immediate threat, but because he believes Persia must extend its control over adjacent regions to be complete. Darius, the next in line, takes the next significant step in establishing an empire by establishing a governing structure to manage this immense territory. He reorganizes the empire into “satrapies” and standardizes tribute, taxation, and military obligations. And then, voila, Persia is now operating essentially in a full “sphere of influence” modality, extracting resources, suppressing rebellion, and enforcing order across vast territory. By the time Persia turns north toward the Scythians in Book 4, it has already mastered the logic of empire, even if it does not describe itself as an empire. It has subdued Lydia, Ionia, Babylon, Egypt, and much of the Near East. Expansion is no longer episodic; it is now assumed.

From Imperial Logic to American Doctrine

The pattern Herodotus identified in the fifth century BCE continues into the rise of European empires and is formalized in the 18th and 19th centuries. By this time, three assumptions come to define imperial expansion and the creation of spheres of influence.

1. Security is understood as depth. Borders alone are no longer considered sufficient. Safety requires buffers, controlled approaches, and managed peripheries. Napoleonic France and Imperial Russia are two examples of where territory adjacent to the state is treated as a potential threat unless it is stabilized or subordinated.

2. Economic access becomes inseparable from political control. Industrializing states come to treat supply chains, trade routes, ports, and raw materials as strategic assets. Securing commerce increasingly requires securing territory or at least decisive influence over it. The Scramble for Africa and U.S. intervention in South America make this strategy clear show how potential economic vulnerability becomes a national security concern. In this case, political intervention is justified as a means of protecting vital interests.

3. Rivalry forces consolidation. Empires rarely expand in isolation. It is now viewed as a zero-sum game. The world “pie” is not getting bigger, and each advance by one power is interpreted as a loss by another. Expansion is therefore framed as defensive, even when it is, in practice, aggressive. Spheres of influence emerge as a means of managing competition and reducing the risk of perpetual war, even as they normalize domination and hierarchy. The Cold War is the most recent example of this playing out since WWII. I remember explicitly when the wall fell, and the soviet union collapsed, we moved from a reactive posture for our military to preemptive. This was a significant change and, actually, one of the reasons I left.

The Monroe Doctrine is the American expression of this evolution. President Monroe announced it in 1823. It warned European powers against further colonization in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike today, it was more aspirational as the US lacked the capacity to impose it. We relied largely on British naval power to lend it weight.

Over time, that changed. By the late 19th century, the doctrine shifted from warning to justification for expansion. Specifically, the Spanish-American War marked a turning point. The United States did not merely expel European influence; it acquired territories of its own. President Theodore Roosevelt accelerated this shift with his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, arguing that instability in Latin America justified U.S. intervention to restore order. The language was managerial rather than conquest-oriented, but the effect was systemic control. Like today, sovereignty became conditional.

During the Cold War, this logic became more ingrained in our foreign policy. Interventions across Latin America were framed as necessary to prevent ideological contagion and preserve regional stability (e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis). The hemisphere was treated less as a community of sovereign states and more as a strategic space to be managed. Sovereignty was respected in principle but was overridden when needed. This is how the American republic reconciled its self-image with imperial behavior. Control was framed as protection. Intervention as responsibility. But this was really an Empire-like play without calling it such.

Conclusion: The Republic and the Temptation of Empire

The seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers and the release of the 2025 National Security Strategy make clear the Trump administration’s shift toward regional dominance and spheres of influence. Read narrowly, these moves appear pragmatic. They simplify decision-making and provide strategic clarity. As someone said, “America First” is now “America(s) First.” For the United States, asserting our primacy in the Americas can look efficient and stabilizing.

When we back out and reflect on historical precedents, these moves are familiar. Herodotus demonstrates how empires form without explicitly calling themselves empires. In the case of the Persian Empire, expansion began with initially defensive measures. Then geography/proximity became justifications for ensuring its security.

The United States has long resisted the label of empire, largely because it was founded as a republic. In this model, power is intended to be constrained by the structure of government and the balance of powers. We also have operated in line with “the rule of law” and, as such, we would argue our legitimacy is supposed to matter as much as capability.

At the same time, American history is replete with contradictions. When faced with unrest on our borders or conflict with rivals abroad, we have repeatedly adopted imperial tools while denying we are an empire. The Monroe Doctrine, its corollaries, Cold War interventions, and today’s renewed emphasis on spheres of influence all reflect this pattern.

What makes this moment different is not the contradiction itself, but the new reality we are facing. Since World War II, many administrations (both democratic and republican) have justified empire-like actions as temporary deviations within an expanding liberal order. Today, that order is under strain. Power is more distributed with the rise of China, Russia, and even India as super powers. Global institutions are weaker. Rivals are less willing to accept U.S. leadership even in name. At the same time, Americans have made clear that they are unwilling to bear the human and financial costs of acting as the world’s policeman.

The danger is not that the United States misjudges others. It is that it misjudges itself. As mentioned above, Herodotus does not argue that an empire is immoral. He shows that it is consuming, self-justifying, and difficult to reverse. Once imperial logic becomes habitual, it reshapes institutions, expands executive discretion, weakens oversight, and normalizes exceptional measures. And this is what we are seeing play out, perhaps more explicitly than in the past 100 years.

The question we face today is not whether spheres of influence are returning. They are. The question is whether our republic can adopt their logic without abandoning the principles that once distinguished its power, or whether American exceptionalism was never more than a convenient story we told ourselves.

This essay begins a three-part exploration of judgment. Today, we talk about right and wrong; we debate policy; and we seem to argue endlessly about how to interpret laws. However, the hard work is learning how to decide well when the rules are opaque, the facts are incomplete, and or the situation is actually a crisis. This is the work of judgment, and requires balancing and interpreting three domains at once: legal authority, ethical duty, and moral conviction (what I refer to as the Triad of Judgment).

The immediate catalyst for this essay was the now-infamous video from six members of Congress reminding service members to follow legal orders. A lot has already been written about the video, Trump’s reaction to it, and the fallout for those members. I am not going to focus on that. Instead, my focus is on what this video did not address—judgment.

This first essay looks at the military because the stakes are highest and the tension between the points of the triad is most stark. In the second essay, I will turn to civic life and explore the demands placed on citizens and institutions when they confront the same tensions between ethical, legal, and moral choices. In the third essay, I plan to widen the frame to examine how different cultures structure judgment, and what this may mean for our own society confronting such deep diversity in the polis today. In these essays, I plan to explore how judgment is formed, tested, and sustained in a free society. We will see if I actually get through all three ;).

A Reminder That Missed the Mark

The six congressional Democrats who released a short video last week reminding service members to follow legal orders seemed to believe they were offering clarity at a tense moment. I appreciate the members’ stated intent to “take a stand” and “remind” military personnel of their responsibilities, but the message came across as political theatre rather than a meaningful contribution. As the fallout shows, it landed more as a provocation than as a civic safeguard. It was also, as I will argue below, an oversimplification of what judgment actually requires in the profession of arms.

What the Video Got Wrong

The problem was not the content. Every officer already knows they must follow legal orders and refuse illegal ones. That is foundational. The issue was that the video spoke to the most basic level of duty and ignored the depth of training already in place. It treated the officer corps as a blank slate in need of a primer rather than a community shaped by a long, rigorous tradition of legal, ethical, and moral formation. The US military has built an entire ecosystem to ensure service members understand:

• their responsibility to follow legal orders, reject illegal ones, and the consequences for failing to do so

• the support available through the chain of command

• the access they have to military lawyers (JAGs) who can interpret questionable orders when necessary

This is drilled into officer candidates from the first day at an academy, in ROTC, or in OCS. When I was at the Naval Academy, we had multiple courses during our four years focused explicitly on these questions. We studied frameworks, case histories, and the gray spaces where no checklist applied. Guest speakers came to describe dilemmas they faced in real time. Obviously, we were not in a battle situation or facing moral crises in our day-to-day lives, but we deliberately tried to hone our judgment so we would respond appropriately when/if we faced one of these situations while in the Fleet.

Classmates who stayed in the service tell me that this education never stopped. At each promotion, they received renewed training on the UCMJ and on the ethical obligations of leadership. This training was an essential part of learning how to lead a platoon, captain a ship, or oversee a battlegroup. Success was not just about executing the right tactics. It also depended on learning to act legally, ethically, and prudently at every level of authority.

The Triad of Judgment

My deeper frustration with the video was the way it collapsed the complexity of military judgment into a single category. In reality, officers navigate three distinct domains.

• First: legal rules. These are the statutory and regulatory boundaries set by Congress and the UCMJ.

• Second: ethical expectations. These are the standards of professional conduct shaped by the norms of the service, the laws of war, and the responsibilities of command.

• Third: moral conviction. This is the personal compass that shapes how we all interpret our obligations when the law is not as clear and our ethical framework does not map perfectly onto a situation.

Modern officers must be fluent in all three. They evaluate orders not only for their legality but for their alignment with the profession’s standards and their own moral sense. They interpret intent, assess context, protect civilians, and preserve the integrity of the mission. This is not a skill that can be activated by a sixty-second political message. It is a discipline built over the years.

Returning to the Roots of Judgment

To understand the depth of this responsibility, it helps to return to the thinkers who first wrestled with the relationship between law, character, and behavior. In the Western tradition, Plato provides one of the earliest structural frames in the Republic. In his construct, law is the outer boundary that holds the city together, but rules alone never produce the right kind of leader. As I have written in other essays, in the Republic, he introduces the idea of a class of people called Guardians who literally guard the city. He insists that these leaders must be educated through music, mathematics, physical training, and civic mentorship so that they develop both reason (aka the ability to discern right from wrong) and spiritedness (aka courage) in the right proportion. Plato’s goal in this type of education is not just knowledge but judgment (the ability to discern rightly). To that end, the Guardians develop judgment through deliberate education. Plato’s deeper insight is that authority can be manipulated when people lack the inner resources to distinguish legitimate command from charismatic power. As such, Guardians need training, discipline, and mentorship to perceive (aka discern) that difference.

Aristotle and the Discipline of Practice

Aristotle, Plato’s student, doubles down on the idea of practice. His Nicomachean Ethics is not a book of abstractions. It is an operating manual on how to cultivate character. Courage is learned by doing courageous things. Justice is learned through repeated acts of fairness. Wisdom grows through learning to choose well in the gray zones, when information is incomplete, and the rules do not neatly apply. For Aristotle, the only way to develop a righteous character is through repeated intentional action in situations of ambiguity. For him, judgment matures through doing, not theorizing.

The Church and the Long Unity of Law, Ethics, and Morality

After the classical period, this entire structure was absorbed into the Christian tradition in the Western world. At the risk of oversimplifying seventeen hundred years of history, the Catholic Church valued the Greek pursuit of virtue and the Roman focus on law. The Church taught that morality, ethics, and authority formed a coherent whole under a divine order overseen by a single God. The clergy interpreted that order and anchored judgment within a stable cosmology. This worldview offered a unified account of duty, character, and conduct. Whatever its failings, it provided the West with a shared vocabulary for judgment that endured for centuries.

Descartes and the Turn Inward

One of the first significant breaks in that unity came when René Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am” in 1637. While it seems obvious to us today, this statement relocated the foundation of certainty from divine authority to the individual mind. Instead of grounding truth in revelation or inherited tradition, Descartes made the thinking self the starting point of knowledge. Once certainty is anchored in an individual, moral and political authority begin to shift. The self becomes the primary source (arbiter?) of judgment. Descartes’ declaration did not create the Enlightenment, but it did facilitate it by placing the rational individual at the center of moral life. And that was a BIG shift.

The Enlightenment and the Fracturing of Moral Authority

Thinkers like Hume and Kant expand the move Descartes initiated (i.e., the shift in moral authority from shared structure to the individual self). For example, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that morality arises from sentiment, the reactions of the heart, rather than disciplined habits. For him, morality becomes more about personal conviction, and ethics becomes a shared social convention.

Not that I ever really understood Kant, but I do remember his idea of the “categorical imperative.” Essentially, he grounds morality in universal reason, which would bind all rational beings regardless of tradition or community. As he wrote in the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Together, Hume and Kant unravel the older unity between law, ethics, and morality, setting the stage for the modern categories we now take for granted. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, and G. E. Moore completes the shift by defining morality in terms of intrinsic goods. In his worldview, ethics becomes the norms that govern particular practices and professions.

Why This Genealogy Matters for Military Judgment

Why spend several paragraphs on this quick summary?

Because it helps explain why modern officers often feel pulled in three different directions at once. They carry a personal moral compass. They operate within a professional ethic. And they serve under a legal framework that sets the boundaries of permitted action. Like Plato’s Guardians, they learn judgment for the times when these domains do not align.

The difference between these layers becomes clearer with a simple thought experiment. Imagine an officer ordered to demolish civilian homes that have been legally cleared, but that house families with nowhere to go. The action is legal. It satisfies the policy. Yet it may violate the officer’s moral sense and conflict with the ethical expectations of proportionality and the protection of noncombatants.

Now invert it. Consider a medic who disobeys a lawful order to withdraw from a battle zone to save a wounded civilian. The act violates a legal order, yet it aligns with the profession’s ethical responsibility to preserve life and with the medic’s moral conviction. These examples show why legality, ethics, and morality cannot be collapsed into a single category. Human judgment must bridge them.

When the Domains Diverge: Historical Cases

History is full of moments where these domains came apart, often with tragic consequences. When I was at the Naval Academy, we studied the case of My Lai in Vietnam. A unit under stress, facing ambiguous orders and operating in a confusing environment, killed hundreds of civilians. The legality of their orders was murky, the ethical obligations were ignored, and their moral compass failed. This case study was one of the clearest examples of how quickly judgment can collapse under fear, pressure, and poor leadership. But it is certainly not the only one. Another incident that garnered a lot of media attention was the events in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. Based on what I found on the InterWeb, a Marine convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device. Rightfully pissed, the Marines then carried out a clearing operation, which, unfortunately, resulted in the deaths of twenty-four civilians. Under immense stress, they stretched the rules of engagement. They did not have time to interpret the law, and clearly, the ethical guardrails collapsed in the fog of war.

Finally, the postwar trial of General Yamashita in 1945 introduced the doctrine of command responsibility. Yamashita argued he had not ordered atrocities committed by his troops. The tribunal rejected this defense, asserting that a commander has an ethical and moral duty to control his forces. The court imposed responsibility for commanders that went beyond direct legality, showing how ethical and moral expectations can extend beyond the narrow boundaries of statutory law.

The Gap Between Political Messaging and Military Reality

These cases reveal how complex military judgment really is. They show how officers must navigate legal rules, ethical expectations, and moral convictions simultaneously, often under pressure and without perfect information, which is why the recent video landed the way it did for me. It implied that the military’s central challenge is remembering what is legal. Yet officers train in this space every day. They rehearse these questions through simulations, seminars, case studies, and small-unit training. Treating this as a timely reminder instead of a foundational practice denigrated the profession. As such, the gesture felt symbolic rather than substantive, a political signal wrapped in civic language. If someone were already inclined to follow an illegal order, a sixty-second reminder would not correct their judgment. If someone is committed to acting ethically, that same video adds nothing.

What Changes Across Cultures, What Must Not

I was talking to a friend about the Triad of Judgment, and they made the point that the way we in the West view law, ethics, and morality is not universal. Instead, they are products of our particular intellectual tradition that started in Athens, was redefined in the Enlightenment, and has continued to evolve into what is our current liberal society (note: I am not talking about liberal in terms of political affiliation).

Her point was that other cultures define these concepts and their interplay differently. Some seem to integrate morality into law. Others embed ethics in social harmony rather than professional identity. Many traditions see the individual moral compass as inseparable from communal obligation. These distinctions are constructs shaped by a particular history. (It was this conversation that got me thinking about writing a 3-part series on this topic.)

Net/net: even if the categories vary across cultures, the underlying need does not. Every society depends on people who can balance authority, duty, and conscience. When that balance breaks, the guardrails fail. When judgment is cultivated, institutions hold.

And this brings the conversation back to the American military. The officers are already getting this training. They are learning to navigate the triad within our own historical frame and legal system. Our responsibility is to reinforce that training, protect the space for it, and support the profession’s ongoing development of judgment. It is not to use them as tools in the political theatre playing out today.

Veterans’ Day stands apart from most of our national holidays, as it does not honor the fallen or an abstract idea (e.g., labor). Instead, it honors those who are still alive: the men and women who served in both war and peace. At its core, the day is about recognizing the service and sacrifice of those who were willing (for some period of time) to put the needs of the nation above their own.

But service has always meant more than standing guard against foreign threats. Service is also what keeps the Republic whole. And this is what I am thinking about this Veteran’s Day. Specifically, assume that the military is charged with protecting us primarily from foreign enemies. In this case, who protects us when partisan division has deepened, trust in governmental institutions (and media) has collapsed, and civic virtue begins to erode? (I.e., the challenge we face today is primarily an internal/civic one, not a real external threat.)

That question feels especially pressing this year, as the language of service itself is being redefined. In public life, and even within the military, the vocabulary of citizenship has grown increasingly martial. We speak more easily about fighting than preserving, about crushing the “other” versus governing together. Nowhere was that clearer than in Secretary of War (SoW) Pete Hegseth’s speech on Sept 30th.

On that day, Secretary Hegseth stood before hundreds of flag officers and called on them to “restore the warrior ethos.” His message, drawn from personal combat experience, was passionate and sincere. But as I wrote in an earlier essay, I thought it struck the wrong note for that audience. IMHO, it missed the mark, not in spirit but in calibration. It mistook moral fervor for strategic vision, confusing the posture of strength with the practice of leadership.

A week later, the Department of War made the address mandatory viewing for every member of the armed forces. The order was more than symbolic; it codified a mindset. From this vantage point, service is defined entirely by combat. The survival of any republic depends on both the courage to fight and the wisdom to govern. The Greeks understood this tension well. Homer celebrated courage; Plato asked how courage could be made just. Elevating combat as the sole measure of service risks narrowing the meaning of citizenship itself. Valor remains essential, but without civic restraint and reflection, it hardens into ideology.

From the Age of Heroes to the Republic

Long before any republic took form, Greece was a patchwork of tribes and shifting alliances. The world of the Iliad, set around the 12th century, was composed by Homer in the 8th century BCE. It was defined by personal honor and divine whimsy. Power belonged to kings and chieftains, and justice meant vengeance or restitution. And the gods were meddling in EVERYTHING.

The Trojan War was not fought for justice or principle but for honor and pride. Yes, it was ostensibly started to return Helen, but it was more about Agamemnon’s (the king’s) reputation than about a woman’s honor. The virtues it celebrated were personal and martial: valor, glory, and loyalty to comrades.

By the 4th century BCE, when Plato was writing, Greece had changed. City-states had emerged & democracy in Athens had a successful, albeit relatively short run. More interestingly, the way people talked about virtue had evolved. As the Bryn Mawr Classical Review notes, Homer’s epics mark “the gradual transition from a society without formal law to an institutionalized legal system” (BMCR 2023.04.05). Plato represents the next step: the transformation of heroic virtue into civic order. In his Republic, he asks what it would take to build a just city. The contrast is stark. Homer’s world speaks in terms of valor, honor, and duty. Plato does not dismiss these virtues. Instead, he refines them. He asks how courage and strength might serve justice, order, and governance, and introduces the idea of a “guardian” class.

Fast forward 2500 years, and we are still wrestling with the same problem: how can we unite the warrior’s strength with the guardian’s restraint? As Plato did for Athens, we must ask what kind of education, discipline, and civic virtue can harmonize passion and justice in our Republic. The critical challenge we face today is not one of conquest but whether our collective character can still sustain the political order it built.

The Guardians and the Soul of the Republic

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates begins not with politics but with a thought experiment. If justice is too hard to see in one person, he says, perhaps it is easier to see in something larger, a city “built in speech.” Socrates uses the city metaphor for two reasons. First, it allows us to study the soul writ large. At the same time, he makes clear that the health of a republic depends on the alignment between a city’s civic order and the moral order of its citizens.

Within this city, Plato distinguishes three classes of people: producers, auxiliaries, and guardians. The first provides for material needs, the second defends against external threats, and the third preserves wisdom and order. The first two are familiar in our own Republic. The third, the guardians, is harder to find.

For Plato, the guardian was not merely a soldier. He was a philosopher-warrior, trained to unite discernment and discipline. His role was to ensure that courage served wisdom, not the other way around. That ideal feels distant today. Our generals are bound by civilian command, but our elected officials seem to serve their parties rather than a higher calling, what the Greeks might call the “noble” and the “good.” If the city reflects the soul, then our disunity is not only political but moral. Our courage, reason, and desire are out of balance.

The question I raised above about who should protect the Republic from within points to the absence of an actual guardian class. Our military certainly embodies courage, but who embodies wisdom in governance today? Plato’s guardians remind us that service without reflection is mere obedience, and reflection without courage is mere philosophy. Neither is enough by itself. And a Republic that forgets how to balance the two risks losing both its strength and its soul.

Some might argue that we already have guardians. We have police who keep the peace & order; we have the FBI and Department of Justice who interpret and enforce the law; and we have the National Guard who protects us in times of crisis. In the Platonic sense, these groups operate as auxiliaries, not true guardians. For him, guardians needed the courage to protect, the wisdom to discern, and the ability to act.

But what about Congress and the Judiciary?

Congress was designed to be the deliberative guardian of the people’s will. Ideally, Congress channels its passion/conviction through debate, lawmaking, and compromise. The Judiciary was designed as a guardian of principle. They are in place to interpret the law according to the constitution (we hope) rather than shifting political will. In theory, these two bodies mirror the two halves of Plato’s guardian ideal: Congress is charged with the courage to act, which is balanced by the wisdom to restrain (judicial reason). The Founders essentially embedded the guardian model into structural form rather than social class.

At the same time, they diffused what Plato concentrated. The police uphold peace, yet their power depends on the justice of the laws they enforce. The courts interpret those laws, but their wisdom depends on the moral clarity of the society that shapes them. The legislators act in the people’s name, but only the people themselves can sustain the virtue that makes self-government possible. Plato’s insight remains timeless. No institution, however well structured, can preserve order if its members have not first learned to govern themselves. Those who preserve a Republic cannot be the ones who govern it, but, instead, they must be the ones who keep faith with its ideals day in and day out.

The Republic Within

Plato’s insight was that the Republic begins inside each of us. The just city is a metaphor for the well-ordered soul. Justice, in this view, is harmony. Each part of the self, what the Greeks would call “reason,” “spirit,” and “appetite,” has its place. The trick is to maintain the balance between these different drives. Disorder arises when passion overwhelms judgment or when desire eclipses duty.

Plato would argue that a well-functioning city would also strive to strike the right balance. And this is where our Republic, especially during the past several decades, is struggling. We are spirited but not always wise. We demonstrate courage, but are we applying enough discipline? Public life has clearly become a contest of appetite and emotion. We can literally see the spirited part of the soul fighting itself. We have defenders of conviction, but struggle to find common principles that unite rather than divide the country.

To recover the guardian spirit requires turning strength toward preservation rather than conquest. The founders understood this. John Adams warned, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” (Adams, Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 1798). The ability to govern oneself before governing others is the foundation of freedom. It is what prevents strength from becoming the kind of tyranny that Callicles advocates in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus argues for in the Republic. They suggest that the stronger should rule over the weaker, that conventional morality is a social construct to protect the weak, and that unbridled desires, which they see as signs of strength, are the key to happiness.

This ancient argument about power and virtue still defines the struggle of every Republic. Callicles and Thrasymachus exalted domination as the natural order (strength is might). Plato sought to prove that justice, not power, was the true measure of strength. This is why he turned the question of power inward. What if the health of a Republic depended not on who ruled, but on how they ruled? Then the real question to ask, which is at the core of many of Plato’s dialogues, is how a person can rule him/herself. As both Plato and the founders note, if citizens cannot rule themselves with temperance and humility, then no system can preserve liberty for long.

Renewing the Habits That Keep a Republic Alive

One question Plato never answers in the Republic is whether his city in speech was meant as a blueprint or only a thought experiment. He presents it as a mirror for the soul, but he never insists that it could be built. Perhaps he knew that perfect justice can only be imagined. Yet the Republic endures because it shifts the question from designing a city to asking everyone who reads it to consider their own responsibility as a moral (aka a “noble” and “good”) citizen. Plato makes clear that a Republic’s strength depends less on the structure of its institutions than on the character of those who inhabit them.

That, then, is our modern challenge. We have the machinery of democracy in place, but not always the virtue to operate it well. This is not a partisan (i.e., Republican or Democratic) problem; it is a civic one. The founders understood that self-government was an experiment that would live or die by the moral discipline of its citizens. Benjamin Franklin echoed the same truth that Adams and others did: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters” (Franklin, Letter to the Abbés Chalut and Arnaud, 1787).

Those habits (governing impulse with judgment, constraining anger with patience, and modulating conviction with humility) are the modern equivalent of Plato’s guardianship. This is the inner work required to preserve freedom from its own excesses. As such, we need a new idea of “guardianship” for our time. To be crystal clear, I am not talking about a class of rulers but, instead, arguing for a renewal of civic character. We need guardians of truth in media, of fairness in law, and of integrity in leadership. Our Republic will endure not because of the warriors who defend its borders but because of citizens who are willing to defend its ideals.

That is the service this moment, this Veterans’ Day requires.

Over my 58 years, I have spent a lot of time in Washington. I first went to the museums as a child with my parents, visited often as a midshipman, and then returned when I was an instructor at the Naval Academy. For the past 20+ years, I have returned to Washington several times with my little family to make sure our boys have the same opportunity to experience the epicenter of our Republic (and to see all the cool airplanes in the National Aerospace Museum). Upon reflection on all those visits, I believe the White House represents an entirely different model of power, by design, for our Republic. I have walked its perimeter, toured its rooms, and stood on the Mall looking at its neoclassical simplicity. It has always struck me as relatively modest, especially compared to the palaces of Europe.

Versailles is clearly a palace. The White House, by contrast, was meant to be a house. One reflects dominion; the other representation. The kings and queens clearly owned Versailles. By comparison, the White House belongs to the citizen-visitor, to the everyday American. Until recently, this difference felt to me to be one of the core principles of our Republic.

Our White House was designed as the people’s house.

Representation Matters

When Thomas Jefferson became president, he continued to make clear that the executive serves, not rules. “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Jefferson wrote. He also warned that “no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” The presidency, he believed, was a temporary lease held in public trust.

Jefferson even opened the White House to public tours, inviting ordinary Americans into the space to affirm its shared ownership. Several presidents continued this tradition. And in 1829, Andrew Jackson held an open-house reception that drew some 20,000 citizens. The result was chaotic. There was a lot of damage, torn carpets, and overturned punch bowls. However, the message was clear: the people were inside “their house.” Obviously, there was a need to create more order and security over time. But, even today, you can tour part of the White House. This ability to visit the epicenter of executive power signifies something larger. A “republic,” by definition, demands a seat at the table.

The Street Corner & The Protest

This past weekend, I stood on a street corner with my wife as part of the “No Kings” protest in Hailey, ID. Idaho is one of the “reddest” states in the Union, but Hailey is probably more purple than red. That being said, there was a good turnout—a lot of retirees, parents with strollers, and many people carrying very witty signs. The gathering was peaceful, visible, and harmless. Then I saw the video later in the week. You know the one, the President, via AI, is dumping “poop” on protestors in a jet marked KING TRUMP. I honestly thought it was a hoax, but, from what I can tell, it was posted by President Trump. What struck me was what the joke represented. The protestors are garbage, and they have no voice. The rally claimed seven million participants across the country. The President neither met with them nor addressed their concerns. Instead, he mocked them (us). He weaponized spectacle against his fellow citizens.

When Public Power Becomes Performance

Then, yesterday I read about how President Trump has demolished parts of the East Wing to erect a lavish $200 million ballroom. But, as others have argued, when the building is the White House, which is meant to stand for all Americans, speed without transparency is a red flag. To be fair, Washington suffers from an excessive number of review boards and significant delays. A builder’s instinct—get it done—is not inherently corrupt. Trump’s background in construction lends him credibility in the domain of building.

At the same time, this remodel builds on the other changes he has already made to the White House. He is recasting the presidency as royalty. The East Colonnade is now dazzled in gold-framed portraits of presidents, except one: President Biden is represented only by an autopen signature. Symbolism? Yes. But what kind? This is clearly a statement that the house belongs to the President (builder), not the public. And the gap between those who build the rooms and those who sweep them is widening, just as it did outside Versailles’s gates.

Add a live-fire demonstration by the United States Marine Corps on the same weekend as the nationwide protest, and you have spectacle layered on spectacle. The Marines are one of our most respected military branches. They have a long and proud history, earned through incredible valor and sacrifice. We should celebrate this heritage appropriately. And, of course, their training and readiness is vital. I have watched a live-fire exercise, and it is SUPER impressive. But the timing and choreography felt like a show of force aimed at the citizenry, not for them.

Versailles, 1789: When Distance Became the Point

By the late 1780s, Versailles no longer represented the glory of France; it represented its fracture. The nobles dined under chandeliers while the price of bread doubled for the people. The king’s courtiers could walk for half an hour through marble halls without meeting a commoner. Versailles was not simply a residence; it was a symbol of economic inequality. There was excess at the center and scarcity at the edges. When the French citizens finally marched to Versailles in 1789, they weren’t just angry at hunger; they were furious at the inequality. The royal family had withdrawn so completely into its own world and was divorced from the reality of the rest of the kingdom. The policies King Louis XIV enacted bankrupted the country to support his desire to maintain his opulence. Does this sound familiar?

I don’t think we are on the cusp of revolution, but the parallelism feels eerily familiar. The most recent articles on the economy show that we are living through a widening divergence. Billionaires’ wealth, based in large part on the record-high stock market, is also at a record high, while working-class wages are flat, and our civic infrastructure is fraying. To that point, the top 1% now holds over 30% of national wealth. At the same time, we have a president constructing a $200-million ballroom, gilding the halls, and mocking citizens through AI imagery. These actions are not the cause of inequality, but it is its theater. It makes the distance visible in a way that is both brazen and unprecedented. The king is not starving the people; he is entertaining them from the palace, we are going to end up funding no matter what he says.

That is what makes the Versailles comparison so haunting. The architecture is different; the principle is the same. When the few withdraw into spectacle, the many begin to withdraw their consent.

From Principle to Practice: The 4 P Framework

In my early essays, I employed what I call the 4P framework to understand the situation better and identify potential solutions for moving forward.

• Principle: In a republic, the executive is the caretaker. Citizens are participants, not spectators.

• Policy:

  It seems obvious, but we need to demand transparency and accountability. E.g., we should:

  1. Reinstate public review for major modifications to federal residences. Yes, it will take longer, but we are building for the long-term, not just one term.

  2. Demand disclosure of funding sources for such projects. Trump has said that the ballroom will be paid for by corporations and individuals. Talk about currying favor and potential conflicts of interest. We should bring transparency here and then track what happens afterwards. Who benefits from these donations?

  3. Require public office holders to label high-impact AI political content, just as they do with political TV advertising. They need to take ownership of what they are putting out.

• Process: Obviously, this is hard to do when the Executive branch does not believe in oversight and is defunding all independent agencies, but we should still insist on using independent entities (architectural review boards, GAO audits) to ensure changes to “the people’s house” are, in fact, of the people.

• Practice: Protest. Document. Ask questions. Turn up in the gallery, the lawns, the lobby. Assert that your voice matters, even if the hall is gilded.

Conclusion

If you’ve read my previous essay on executive power and the metaphorical king in modern America, the pattern is familiar. Over the past 10 months, Trump has been executing Project 2025’s mandate, probably better than the architects thought possible. He is concentrating power, devaluing the process, and erasing accountability. This isn’t the first time the U.S. has flirted with regal imagery, and Trump is not the only president to employ personal aggrandizement. But what we’re seeing now is more brazen. The “people’s house” is turning into a builder’s toy. Next up is the “Arc de Triomphe”!

King Louis’ reign fell when its symbols (e.g., Versailles) no longer matched the reality of the people’s lives. Republics don’t fall in the same way as a monarchy; however, they can be hollowed out just as fast. This leaves me wondering: Is this all we can hope for from the President—a designer ballroom, a live-fire spectacle, a mocking of peaceful citizens? Or can we reclaim the house and remind him, you serve us?”

The Class of 1990 graduated 990 midshipmen, of whom twenty-seven made flag rank (i.e., an admiral or general), and several are still serving. I had the good fortune to count one as a roommate, one as a best friend, and another as a company mate. I have also known several others. Every one of them was exceptional even as a midshipman, disciplined, wicked smart, natural leaders, and devoted to something larger than self. Seeing them now, three and a half decades later, still carrying that same sense of mission, I could not help but feel both pride and humility.

When I watched Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s recent speech at Quantico, with our flag draped behind him and his tone rising like a football coach at halftime, I found myself imagining my classmates sitting in that audience and cringing. To be clear, I do not know who was actually there, and I did not ask when we met at the reunion. I did not want to put anyone on the spot. My impression of the Quantico event comes from watching the video, reading the transcript, and following the press coverage. Yet even at that distance, one thing was impossible to miss: the cognitive dissonance at the heart of his message.

In one breath, Hegseth declared that we have “the greatest military in the world.” In the next, he condemned its “culture as rotten to the core.” Both statements cannot be true. If the culture is rotten, then our greatness is a façade. If the culture is strong enough to sustain the world’s most capable force, then the problem is not cultural at all but perceptual.

For the past two weeks, I have been turning that contradiction over in my mind, the gap between pride and decay, excellence and collapse. It is both a rhetorical problem and a leadership one. You cannot sustain the greatest military on earth with a rotten culture. Greatness, by definition, is cultural. Discipline, professionalism, and trust are cultural achievements.

A leader’s first responsibility is to reconcile his own contradictions. Rhetoric that celebrates excellence while condemning the people who embody it is not leadership. It is confusion.

The Leadership Triad

They call the Service Academies “leadership laboratories” because we spend an enormous amount of time studying and practicing leadership over the course of four years. We all carry those lessons and experiences into the Fleet and then into the corporate, nonprofit, or government jobs we take after leaving the military.

One thing that every leader in any context learns is that there are three interlocking levers you shape to lead: vision, strategy, and culture. Usually, you begin by defining a compelling vision that provides the “why” and creates a sense of purpose for the sailors or employees you serve. You translate that vision into a clear strategy, which, at its simplest level, is a plan of action rooted in evidence, informed by experience, and dependent on shared accountability. You then ground the vision and strategy in culture, which articulates the values expressed through behaviors, habits, and rituals. Getting the balance right between vision, strategy, and culture creates alignment.

At Quantico, Hegseth effectively ignored the first two levers. His stated vision was to “restore the greatest fighting force in history.” That is certainly aspirational, but also somewhat empty. He suggested that he would speak to a broader strategy at another time, but this speech was not intended to address a concrete plan for readiness, modernization, or force posture. Instead, he explicitly stated that his remarks would be about culture. Fair enough. He is the Secretary of Defense (Whoops, I mean “War”). He has the right to bring all the senior leadership together at any time to discuss whatever he chooses.

That choice to focus on culture, however, reveals his bias. He sees the disease as moral, not structural. When you look at the ten directives he released that day, it is clear that bureaucracy, diversity, and a lack of physical standards are his primary villains. Yet in complex systems, culture is rarely the root cause. It is the reflection of deeper design flaws.

And this is where he missed the mark. The problem was not only his diagnosis, but his delivery. Words matter in leadership, especially when they are meant to inspire people who already carry the burden of service. As I reflected on the speech, I found myself returning to Aristotle’s enduring test for persuasion. In The Rhetoric, he argues that a truly effective speech balances logos (reason), pathos (emotion), and ethos (credibility). Together, these create not only persuasion but trust. Measured by that standard, Hegseth’s speech felt unbalanced.

Pathos: The Halftime Speech

No one doubts that Hegseth can deliver a great speech. He is a natural communicator, articulate, confident, and emotionally fluent. The setting added to the effect. It was pure theater, designed to impress. . . and I was! The event took place in Quantico’s main hall, with the American flag perfectly framed behind the podium. The room was filled with uniforms and medals. It was a “designed for TV” moment. This was not only an opportunity for him to speak to military leadership, but also to address America. (Some have suggested he was using this event to soft-launch his bid for the presidency.)

His words carried the rhythm of command: “fit not fat, sharp not shabby.” He invoked toughness, duty, and pride. His energy was contagious. It was the kind of oratory that can rouse a crowd or a unit when morale is low. Yet his delivery felt more like a halftime speech at a football game than a strategic address. It was all heat and little light. A halftime speech assumes shared purpose and a clear opponent. It is meant to refocus a team that knows the rules, the stakes, and the field they are playing on.

The U.S. military in 2025 is not that kind of team. It is a complex, global enterprise that must balance deterrence, technology, and alliances. The audience at Quantico was not a locker room of players. It was the general staff. That is where the problem begins. The rhetoric of the battlefield does not translate into the warroom.

Evoking Patton

The intention to invoke Patton is too obvious not to have been deliberate. The flag, the gravelly cadence, the moral certainty all echo Patton’s “no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.” But Patton’s genius wasn’t volume; it was context. He was speaking to troops of all ranks who were about to fight and die. His coarse bravado worked because it converted fear into focus. The immediacy of battle gave his words their power.

Hegseth borrowed Patton’s tone but not his circumstance. We, as a country, have been in a continual state of fighting since WWII, and he was speaking to leaders who have already fought the wars of this century (Afghanistan, Iraq, the War on Terror). These are not soldiers waiting to be hardened; they are commanders who have spent decades navigating moral ambiguity and strategic fatigue. While Patton’s speech made clear the necessity to fight TODAY, Hegseth’s speech came across as political theater. And this is the key insight from Aristotle: Pathos, without context, turns from inspiration to performance.

Logos: The Missing Logic

Passion is powerful, but leadership requires logic. In this respect, the Quantico speech was hollow. Hegseth did not share any data on the state of our readiness. He failed to provide an analysis of our industrial base or assess our preparedness to fight the next war. While he pointed to the need to embrace cyber, AI, and unmanned systems, he offered no meaningful insight. There was no discussion of the changing global landscape or how we should prepare for potential conflicts with China, Russia, or Iran. He did say he would address China at a later time.

But it seemed to me an epic missed opportunity not to start that conversation with the very leaders best positioned to shape it. Imagine if those officers had been able to spend three or four days together, examining our current readiness, sharing perspectives from their theaters of operation, and debating the new realities we face across all four branches of the military.

Instead, Hegseth diagnosed “rot” and prescribed symbolic reforms: grooming standards, fitness tests, and ideological purges. By focusing on aesthetics (i.e., how the military looks and sounds), he confused cultural optics with operational effectiveness. He missed a chance to unite those leaders behind a clear vision and a strategy fit for the twenty-first century.

Patton could afford to be simple because his logic was existential: win or die. A modern Secretary of War cannot. His job is to align national resources with strategy, not to give pep talks about toughness. Aristotle would call this a failure of logos. He was making an argument without proof, claims without causality. A speech built on emotion can lift morale for a moment, but only logic can align an institution for the long run. Aristotle might say that passion can ignite, but only reason can guide the flame.

Ethos: The Misjudged Audience

The third lever a speaker needs to incorporate to be persuasive is ethos. Ethos is rooted in credibility, respect, and proportion. This is where Hegseth stumbled the most. Ethos is not defined by rank; it is earned through trust. A leader’s moral authority comes from understanding the lived reality of those he leads. This requires empathy as well as conviction.

The men and women sitting in that auditorium have spent thirty years leading through uncertainty. They have managed deployments and moral complexity in situations that most of us could never imagine. Every single one has lost comrades during the years. They know the cost of war. To lecture these leaders on standards is to miss the point. They do not need to be told what excellence is; they have lived it.

Hegseth’s ethos problem was not insincerity; it was miscalibration. He mistook passion for persuasion and grievance for guidance. He had the stage perfectly set, but he did not understand the audience.

How could he?

While he served honorably in combat and was awarded two Bronze Stars for valor, he reached only the rank of major. He never held a major command. He was never a field-grade officer. He never had the perspective-broadening experiences that every one of those officers in that room had.

The Hammer of Culture

There is an old adage, “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The lesson, obviously, is to apply the right tool for the right situation. However, I think we all tend to have our preferred “hammer” when approaching new situations or challenges. I know I do.

After studying different types of leadership in various contexts for the past 40 years, I would suggest that different types of leaders favor different types of “hammers.” Business leaders prefer strategy; Academics rely on theory; Politicians embrace vision; and warriors often rely on culture as their starting point. This is the whole point of Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors. Although I haven’t read the book in its entirety, I have read several sections, and it is clear to me that his speech at Quantico was essentially a summary of his ideology and arguments. He believes the armed forces have lost their soul: that bureaucracy, “wokeness,” and moral confusion have softened the warrior spirit.

Again, there is some truth in his diagnosis. Risk aversion and careerism in the military are real. But when culture is the hammer, everything looks like a cultural nail. I am no expert, but it seems to me that the harder truths we face as a modern military include procurement inefficiencies, industrial decay, alliance management, & geopolitical drift. These are not cultural at all; they are systemic. To frame every institutional challenge as a moral failure is to mistake symptoms for cause.

The Meritocracy Mirage

Part of why Hegseth’s rhetoric resonates is because it touches a real nerve: the slow erosion of our military’s faith in meritocracy. I think every person who enters the military believes the system is fair. I know I did. There are clear standards, and the promise is that hard work (not who your family is or how much money you have) will lead to recognition and advancement. Over time, everyone discovers it is more complicated. When I was in the Navy, differentiation in Fitness Reports often came down to wording and font size. Promotions beyond O-3 (Lieutenant in the Navy and Captain in the Army, Air Force, and Marines) seemed to depend on a handful of subjective judgments, timing, and sponsorship.

You join the military believing in the ideal of fairness to realize, over time, that this ideal is filtered through human subjectivity... as is everything else in life. I know many fine officers who have left the military bitter, convinced the system isn’t about merit after all. And this is the emotional wound that Hegseth tapped in his book and speech. But here’s the paradox: the ones who survived that climb, the twenty-seven from my class who became flag officers, did not achieve their success through a corrupt system. They are, in every sense, extraordinary. They are the best of us. They were exceptional as midshipmen, and they remain extraordinary today.

That’s why the speech at Quantico felt less like reform and more like reproach.
It told the best among us that they had somehow failed, when in truth, they had been carrying the institution’s honor through thirty-five years of unrelenting war and politics.

Deterrence versus Preemption. Which way are we going now?

The deeper question beneath all this rhetoric is what our posture on the world stage should be. Specifically, should we have a policy of deterrence or preemption? When I joined the Navy in 1986, the Soviet Union was still a very real threat. The Navy I entered was built on the principle of strategic deterrence: strength without aggression. The Cold War logic was to prevent war, not provoke it. The post-9/11 world inverted that logic. Starting with George Bush, we became a force of perpetual preemption, constantly deployed and forever engaged.

This is the core cultural challenge. A deterrent culture prizes patience, discipline, and clarity. A preemptive culture prizes aggression, initiative, and momentum. Hegseth’s rhetoric clearly points toward an expansion of our preemptive posture. This is, ironically, the opposite of what Trump campaigned on. His “America First” message, and most of his actions over the past nine months, have reflected a desire to avoid entanglement abroad. The notable exceptions were his direct strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the recent attacks on Venezuelan vessels. Neither country poses a direct threat to the United States. When it comes to China and Russia, he is pulling back troops, weakening alliances, and withdrawing from long-standing soft-power initiatives.

The opportunity at Quantico was to reconcile these two worldviews so that our admirals and generals could gain clarity on their mandate. That is the conversation our senior leaders should be having, not whether their haircuts are tight enough or if they can do thirty pushups.

Closing: Aristotle and the Measure of Leadership

Leadership, in the end, is about proportion and the ability to balance fire and light.
Aristotle called it the harmony of logos, pathos, and ethos. Patton embodied that balance in war: fire matched by purpose, conviction grounded in credibility. Hegseth mastered the fire, but not the light. His words burned bright but cast no illumination on the harder questions of strategy, structure, or purpose.

As I think about my classmates, especially those still serving, I’m reminded that culture isn’t something you fix with speeches. It’s something you live, day after day, through competence, integrity, and quiet excellence.

Net/net: if America truly has the greatest military in the world, it is because of the people who were in that room. And if our civilian leadership wants to preserve that greatness, they should begin not by lecturing warriors on how to fight, but by listening to those who already have.

Last week I returned to Greenwich with my wife, 22 years after our first visit together. Greenwich is the birthplace of modern navigation, the zero point against which all the world’s clocks are set, and, as such, how all the early navigators were able to chart their course across the globe. It is Chronos embodied. In many ways, time has stood still. The observatory still overlooks the Thames. Tourists still straddle the brass meridian, one foot in the east, one in the west. The one obvious change is that people now take selfies with iPhones, which only became available in 2007.

The first time I came here, I was newly married and early in my corporate career. Time was something to master. . . to maximize. I admired Greenwich for what it meant for the age of sail and the order it represented.

Coming back two decades later, I felt something different. The Prime Meridian was unchanged, but I had changed. Now the meaning of standing there was not only about Chronos, the precision of measured time, but also about Kairos: the fullness of the moment, the act of returning. Time was no longer just about control; it was about meaning. And behind both, I sensed the 3rd face of time (Aion), the eternal time.

Chronos: Life by the Clock

I have lived most of my life according to the drumbeat of Chronos. As they say in the Navy, “time, tide, and formation wait for no man.” To that point, our four years at the Naval Academy were divided into rigid blocks: morning formation, class, noon formation, drills or athletics, evening formation, homework, and then lights out. From reveille to taps, the relentless tick of the clock governed my life. And woe be it to the midshipman who was late to an evolution!

Later, as a CEO, my days were often filled with back-to-back 30-minute meetings from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., sometimes without a pause for lunch. The year was divided into monthly business reviews, quarterly board meetings, and annual strategy/financial planning sessions. In many ways, this hyper-awareness of Chronos served me well. Structure brought discipline and focus. World-class execution requires a rhythm. And the rhythm of business is one rooted in measuring everything that can be measured and then optimizing whatever is possible.

The teams I worked with got a lot done. But living always by the clock (or the scorecard) leaves something missing. It makes you efficient, but not necessarily present. At some point, I began to wonder: “Is a well-measured life the same as a well-lived life or what the Greeks might call ‘a noble and good life’?”

This question opens the door to other dimensions of time, ones the Greeks called Kairos and Aion.

Kairos: The Sacred Moment

Throughout my life, there have been moments when I felt a different kind of time. In these moments, time seemed to slow down or sharpen into focus. Sometimes they came during “peak” experiences, e.g., standing atop a mountain before a ski run, racing downhill on a bike, or flying in the A-6E Intruder at 500mph at night in the mountains. Other Kairos moments arrived quietly, e.g., when sitting in a church or walking in the mountains. My presence felt small, and the world felt large. The Greeks called this type of time “Kairos,” which they defined as the opportune, decisive, sacred moment. Now, nearing sixty, I find myself more open to Kairos and less concerned with maximizing every tick of Chronos. The challenge at this stage of my life is to notice these moments of awe, the ones that give time its depth and meaning, and to step forward when they arrive.

Opening yourself to Kairos also changes the way you see time itself. It stretches your perspective. What once felt like isolated flashes of intensity begins to reveal a larger pattern, a sense of continuity beyond the moment. I have been reading a lot of Rumi recently, and I think this is what he is describing when he talks about experiencing the divine as the “beloved.” This other consciousness, cultivated through prayer, meditation, or for Rumi the sama-zan is the doorway into Aion, the time of ages, the eternal backdrop in which both Chronos and Kairos unfold.

Aion: The Eternal Backdrop

If Chronos orders our days and Kairos charges certain moments with significance, Aion is the vast backdrop in which both unfold. It is the time of ages, of cycles and continuities, of rivers that keep flowing long after we are gone. I felt this even more poignantly when we visited Notre Dame this week. This was another place I had visited several times before, but this was my first visit after the recent restoration. It is more magnificent than ever, and I think—even with the throngs of tourists—one really can sense the eternal walking through the nave aisles and looking up at the stained glass.

If Greenwich embodies Chronos, then Notre Dame evokes Aion. Together they reveal the paradox: we are creatures of the clock, yet we long for eternity. And at the transition points in our lives, it is Kairos that opens the doorway between the two.

A final thought

I have always known something of these three faces of time. What is different now is the perspective that comes with age and experience. Living a full life gives you enough distance to see not just the parts but the pattern. Chronos alone is not enough. It will keep you efficient but never present. Kairos, while thrilling, needs to be recognized as more than a flash. It is an invitation to a larger reality. And Aion has become clearer as I am learning to let go of control and try to rest in something larger.

At this point in my life, it is not about abandoning one face for another. The challenge is to hold the three in tension. Time is no longer just something to manage or endure, but something to inhabit with gratitude.

Every so often, someone accuses me of being partisan. When it happens, I try not to dismiss it outright. I take a hard look. Am I just reinforcing my own side? Am I blind to my own biases? The truth is, of course I’m biased: we all are.

As I reflect on my own biases, I have tried to be biased toward values (or principles), not parties. This is what has inspired the writing I have been doing since April. In many of the essays, I have tried to search for the key principles undergirding our Republic by digging into the Greek Classics, Enlightenment thinkers’ writings, or founding fathers’ letters. To be fair, this has not been my approach throughout my life. In the past, I would focus more on the issues that I thought were most urgent at the time, and then I voted for the candidate who I thought was most aligned with how I thought we needed to move forward as a country at that time. So while it was still values-based, I was not digging deeply at our Republic’s intellectual foundation. This means I have supported Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and independents over the years, which may confound my critics :).

The problem is that with the two-party structure we have in place, it often feels like we’re forced to choose one of two teams. And over the past 10 years at least, this has manifested not just at the ballot box but in every “political” conversation. That’s what I want to examine in this essay. I am not trying to say I am above the fray. Instead, I want to pose a couple of questions that I have been wrestling with while sitting in the middle of the fray:

• What is partisanship, really?

• Why does it dominate American life?

• Is there still room for reasoned, values-driven judgment within a system built for binary loyalty?

When Rivals Were Running Mates

In the original design of the U.S. Constitution, the president and vice president weren’t chosen as a team. Each elector cast two votes for president, and the runner-up became vice president. That meant the two most powerful executives in the nation could (and did) represent opposing ideologies. A case in point: in 1796, Federalist John Adams became president. His vice president was the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson.

At one level, it sounds like a reasonable way to create a balanced executive branch, but I could not imagine what it would be like to work with the person you have been campaigning against for the role of President (Hamilton, the musical, brought this reality to life for me). Can you imagine if Kamala was Trump’s VP???

This experiment experiment ended in dysfunction. By 1800, Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in electoral votes, forcing a constitutional crisis and 36 ballots in the House to determine who was going to be President. The result? We passed the 12th Amendment in 1804 to separate votes for president and vice president. Thus, the 12th Amendment was not just a procedural tweak. It was, in effect, the first structural rewrite of the Constitution to deal with partisanship.

The Founders had hoped to avoid factions. But as Madison warned in Federalist No. 10, “the causes of faction cannot be removed. . . relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.” When factions proved inevitable, the Founders adjusted the machinery and strengthened structural guardrails to prevent any one coalition from dominating unchecked. Today, I wonder if we need a similar reckoning not because I hate parties, but because I fear what partisanship has become.

Why I’ve Voted Across the Spectrum

As I mentioned above, over the past 37 years, I have voted in 10 presidential election cycles. During that time, I’ve voted Republican; I’ve voted Democrat; & I’ve voted Libertarian. I’ve supported third-party candidates who had no mathematical shot of winning. Part of that is circumstantial: I’ve lived in states where the national outcome was rarely in question, and I wanted to register my support for a 3rd party. But more than that, I have always voted based on values, not for a particular party platform. Each election, I ask: What is the most important issue at this moment in history? Which candidate is most aligned with the values I care about? I appreciate that there is never a perfect candidate, but I want to feel that the President, in particular, is going to be the leader I think we need for the next 4 years.

And yet, when I write or speak publicly about politics, I sometimes get accused of being partisan. What I think is principled critique, others hear as team loyalty. I believe this disconnect says less about me and more about what our system has become.

Parties Were Meant to Be Tools, Not Tribes

As noted above, the Founders didn’t design for political parties. Many, like George Washington, explicitly warned against them. Washington called partisanship a “frightful despotism.” John Adams went further saying, “There is nothing which I dread so much as the division of the Republic into two great parties. . .This is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” I encourage you all to read that twice!

But as I’ve written in other essays—quoting much smarter writers than me—there’s a natural human tendency to form tribes. When we look at history, humans seek identity, protection, and belonging. They, in turn, then give loyalty to their designated tribe. Over the years, political affiliation has become an extension of that instinct. That’s part of why parties developed in the first place. But if we look back, the first American parties were more like philosophical coalitions versus political power machines. Hamilton’s Federalists vs. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were debating the very soul of the new republic: centralized finance vs. agrarian liberty; British ties vs. French solidarity.

I am not a political scientist, but it seems to me that two things changed our view of parties: (1) The professionalization of politics and (2) the flood of monied interests that followed. Over time, campaigning became a permanent business, not a periodic civic act. Serving in Congress became a full-time job only in the 20th century. And fundraising seemed to become the primary objective (especially of house members) versus deliberation. Party platforms began to calcify around donor blocs, media narratives, and electoral math to secure and protect power and the distribution of money to constituents. The rise of PACs, gerrymandering, and 24-hour media cycles further entrenched this new way of operating.

Side note: It’s almost comical to me that Jefferson’s party was called the Democratic-Republican Party. Today, the two names signal opposite poles. But at the time, “democratic” meant expanding participation and resisting elite rule, while “republican” emphasized civic virtue and limits on centralized authority. Both terms have since been hollowed, redefined, or flipped depending on which political team wears the jersey.

Unfortunately, we no longer debate ideas or are able to engage in principled disagreement. The political power machine has taken over. As such, partisanship today has little to do with the intellectual roots of those early disagreements. We don’t just argue; we ascribe moral failure to the “other.” And in recent times, it seems like it is not good enough to just compete and win; we now try to destroy the “other.” As the political scientist, Lilliana Mason, talks about in her work on “affective polarization,” citizens now dislike each other more as people than they disagree on issues. This is terrifying on one level. Loyalty to ideas has been replaced by loyalty to factions. . . and the fringe elements of both factions are ready to fight to the death.

Why the System Forces Us Into Binaries

Part of the problem isn’t cultural; it’s architectural. From what I can tell, there are at least 3 design flaws with our current system.

1. Winner-take-all elections mean there’s no reward for second place.

2. Not having a coalition government means the ruling party must win outright.

3. Spoiler dynamics make third-party votes risky, even when they reflect genuine beliefs.

The result? In America, only one of two teams can win. This means only two platforms can survive. This forces voters into false choices and punishes nuance.

We saw this play out during the last election cycle with the promulgation of Project 2025, a sweeping Conservative blueprint for executive power consolidation, civil service purges, and a hardline cultural reset. In fact, if you look at what Trump and team have done over the past 9 months, they have certainly delivered on Project 2025’s mandate. And it was not like they hid what they were going to do. Given the Republican controlled Congress and right-leaning Supreme Court, Trump has been delivering on one campaign promise after another. This is not a defense or critique of those policies, but an observation about the strategic clarity and institutional alignment of the GOP. All I can say is that we, as Americans, got what the majority voted for.

In contrast, the Democratic coalition often lacks a clear response and sense of coherence. While it positions itself as more inclusive, it is increasingly reactive and stretched thin, trying to serve both institutionalists and more radical activists at the same time. One example would be the debates within the Democratic National Committee over the Israel–Gaza war, where generational and ideological rifts surfaced, even on matters where a reasonable person might expect unity. For example, a proposed resolution calling for an arms embargo on Israel was rejected, though a more moderate ceasefire resolution was eventually passed. The kicker—this resolution was quietly withdrawn in the interest of party unity. I mean REALLY?! The DNC could not agree that a ceasefire resolution was a good idea??

The Parties Have Changed—The People Haven’t

As comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz recently observed, “The parties have changed—but the people haven’t.” He’s right. Twenty years ago, it would’ve been unthinkable for major unions to throw their support behind Republicans. Today, it’s happening not because union workers became MAGA, but because the Democratic Party moved, and the GOP moved faster. This isn’t ideological drift, it’s strategic rebranding. The parties are optimizing for power. I would argue that most people still wrestle with the age old questions when selecting a president or representative:

• Who is going to protect my job?

• Who sees my community?

• Who keeps the lights on?

• Who will defend our interests best on the world stage?

Here is the kicker: The more the parties mutate, the more disoriented ordinary citizens become. In other words, the more tribal the system becomes, the harder it is to be independent.

The Volume Is the Problem, and the Signal Is Harder to Find

Too often, we confuse certainty with clarity. But clarity comes from dialogue, not dogma. In many ways, the biggest casualty of today’s partisanship reality is tone.

• The far right screams.

• The far left shames.

• And the exhausted majority tunes out—or gives up.

But I don’t want to give up. I want to stay in the conversation. That means keeping the volume down long enough to actually hear people out and to read and listen outside my default lane. I’ve had readers recommend new sources, and I’ve followed their lead. Lately I’ve been reading The Free Press, exploring The Dispatch, and listening to The Fifth Column podcast. Not because I agree with everything but because they are helping to sharpen my thinking. My favorite go-to remains The Economist. It’s not perfect, but it offers something rare: a global perspective rooted in classical liberal values. It is economically pro-market, socially liberal, and grounded in comparative insight. Reading how issues play out across democracies/ republics around the world (e.g., the UK, India, Israel, or Taiwan) helps me see what’s structural versus cultural, i.e., what’s uniquely American versus what seems to be more universally human.

Final Reflection

I clearly don’t have all the answers. But here’s what I do know: being a citizen in a republic means more than picking a side. The challenge we, as the polis face, is staying curious while everything around you insists on outrage. It means showing up with discernment, leading with inquiry in the face of outrage, and being willing to engage. The system we have today is built to sort us into tribes. It’s optimized for loyalty, not thoughtfulness. But I don’t think that excuses us from trying to think deeply about the issues and our values. We do need to figure out how to dial down the volume, personal acts, and unfounded claims (on both sides) to create space for better listening across the political spectrum.

Having said all of this, I am still an optimist. I still believe there’s space for us—together—to create a more civil discourse. That’s the path I’m trying to walk. I’m not above the fray. I’m in it. I just don’t want to be consumed by it. I will keep reading widely, listening carefully, and voting based on values. And I will try to resist the temptation to mistake agreement for allegiance. Instead, I will try to stay focused on the deeper question: What kind of society can we build together?

If that makes me partisan in someone’s eyes, so be it.

We comfort ourselves in America by thinking, “It can’t happen here.” But what happens when troops patrol our cities not by necessity, but by presidential decree? In Los Angeles, we watched this unfold: Trump “federalized” 4,000 National Guardsmen (over the objections of the governor) and then sent in 700 active-duty Marines to “support” federal operations. In Washington, D.C., today, the President has bypassed the mayor, activated the Guard, and taken control of city streets. These are not metaphors. These are facts.

Like in 49 BCE, this is less about the total number of troops deployed and more about the principle. I.e., what happens to a Republic when the power to define the “enemy” and deploy military force rests with one man alone—without court review, without congressional check, and without state consent?

I served in the U.S. military and took the same oath that countless others did: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But what happens when the meaning of “domestic enemy” is no longer defined by law, but by politics? What happens when protest becomes insurrection, and dissent becomes disorder based on what one person thinks? As Madison wrote in Federalist No. 41,“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty.”

The Power to Name the Enemy—and the Force That Follows

In a constitutional republic, the authority to define an enemy is tightly constrained for a reason. It’s not just a question of legal semantics. It’s a civic firewall. If this power (i.e., defining the enemy) becomes the exclusive domain of the executive, it opens the door to a command state. In this reality, the use of force is no longer a last resort, but, instead, the ability to deploy the military becomes another political tool. And as history has taught us time and time again, once this door is opened, it rarely gets closed . . . without the need for armed conflict.

To be clear, I am not talking about the role of president as commander-in-chief during wartime. During war, in a Republic, it makes sense to have one person (a civilian) ultimately responsible for defending the nation against external enemies. For most of history, an enemy was a foreign army. In the 21st century, “foreign enemies” have become complex: non-state actors, ideological groups, terrorist networks, and proxy armies (e.g., Hezbollah). And, in this scenario, we need a chain of command that oversees the deployment of aircraft carriers, divisions of soldiers, and our nuclear triad.

But the Founders drew a bright line between external defense and internal governance. Domestic enemies were not to be defined by the president alone, but by courts, Congress, and due process. That distinction is vital. The line between protest and rebellion is blurry. The line between political opposition and domestic threat is even blurrier.

To announce that citizens are enemies, and then deploy force accordingly, is to invert the very principle of a republic.

The Ladder of Force: How It’s Supposed to Work

Our system of government was built on layers of force, each one more centralized and more armed (lethal?) than the last. I am not a legal scholar, but the logic behind this structure seems to be clear. We have designed a system based on restraint and deliberate escalation. In a local context, the first response to unrest should be led by local civil authorities as they are the people closest to the problem. If this fails, then there should be an escalation to the state level (e.g., governors). Only in the most extreme and legally justified circumstances should the federal military be involved. To that point, in Federalist Paper No. 28, Hamilton acknowledged that while executive force might be legally valid in “extraordinary circumstances,” such force should be reserved for true insurrection, not political dissent or executive convenience, writing: “Military force... will be used only in rare and extraordinary instances of insurrection or rebellion.”

I have simplified this as the Ladder of Force below.

This sequence is not just practical; it is philosophical. It reflects one of the founding principles of the Constitution. I.e., powers that are not explicitly delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people. The aim was not efficiency. It was accountability. Specifically, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

This is the logic behind the federalist construct and the civil-military chain of escalation. Each rung of the ladder exists to prevent abuse and ensure that force is applied proportionally, and always under civilian control. Each step up that ladder requires a higher threshold of justification and broader oversight. When active-duty Marines are sent into Los Angeles, we bypass those thresholds entirely. As Lt Gen Walter Gaskin said, “Deploying them on American soil is a misuse of talent and forces.”

This escalation exists not just to maintain order, but to protect liberty. Every rung of this ladder acts as a check: the mayor before the governor, the governor before the president, the police before the troops. When the president bypasses these levels, we’re no longer climbing a ladder. We’re conflating the roles and responsibilities of the different peacekeeping forces.

How This Moment Compares: Not the First, but the Most Dangerous

As I have written in other essays, the rise of an imperial presidency through the consolidation of executive power is not a Trump thing. Presidents from both parties have over-reached, and this is something Congress has refused to address. In this case, Trump is also not the first president to deploy troops domestically. See below for a summary of which presidents have done what, using what justification, and whether they had consent.

With regards to Trump, as many have noted, he is the first in modern history to do so at this scale, with this frequency, and without consensus. The most interesting scenario is unfolding in Washington, D.C.

Obviously, DC, by definition and design, is different. As William Banks from Syracuse wrote: “The president’s authority over the D.C. Guard is nearly unchecked, making the city a constitutional laboratory for federal overreach.” In this case, the 2,700-member D.C. National Guard reports directly to the president. When Trump activated the D.C. Guard, he didn’t have to ask permission. The risk is that this legal anomaly could become a national precedent. In 49 BCE Cicero saw the future of the dissolution of the Republic writing many letters and giving lots of speeches. He watched Caesar redefine necessity, erode republican norms, and turn “emergency powers” into everyday ones. We’re not witnessing the collapse of our Republic in a single moment. We are watching a civic transformation. One where the tools of foreign war (troops, drones, surveillance) are being turned on our citizens.

Path Forward

The oath I took was to the Constitution, not to a president. If we allow any president to define the enemy unilaterally and respond with military force on our soil, against our people, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon. The only question is: Can we still turn back?

This is where Congress needs to step up, reassert its authority, and reestablish the balance between the different branches of government. Some ideas to consider.

• Reform the Insurrection Act: Require multi-branch approval for troop deployments on domestic soil.

• Codify the definition of “domestic enemy”: Tie this designation to legal thresholds and judicial review—not executive fiat.

• Clarify Title 10 and Posse Comitatus: End the statutory ambiguity that allows active-duty troops to be used as political instruments.

• Strengthen federalism: Ensure governors and mayors retain authority over civil order unless rebellion or insurrection is legally declared.

This essay is part of my ongoing series exploring how classical texts can offer a perspective on the challenges we are facing in America today. I don’t claim to be a classicist or a political scientist. I am someone who keeps returning to the Great Books in search of wisdom and inspiration.

Over the past year, I read The Iliad and The Odyssey one chapter per week through the Symposium Institute. Although I have read parts of both epics several times over the years, this was the first time I read them in sequence and with sustained attention. Sitting with them week after week allowed our seminar group to explore the various themes in depth. In the end, these epics are not just stories of war and survival in 700 BC: They are mirrors for our present moment. In the essays that follow, I’ll explore several of the themes that emerged through our reading. In this piece, specifically, I want to reflect on: what it means to become a nation, and what it takes to remain one.

(Note: if you are interested in this type of thing, check out the different offerings at this website. It is like going back to St John’s College, except there are no tests or papers and the weekly readings are short. The value is in the conversation. This quarter, I am doing Don Quixote, Henry IV, Lorca, and Xenophon. . . come join us!)

Listening to the National Conservative Argument

Last week, I listened to Ezra Klein (a center-left journalist) interview Yoram Hazony (a leading center-right thinker) about his book The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony is one of the key voices in the National Conservative movement. Before listening to this interview, I did know much about this movement. But I do know that leading Republican leaders such as J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio embrace this ideology and regularly speak at its annual conferences, so I wanted to learn more. And while I have not read his book, the interview gave me a glimpse of into their worldview.

Hazony’s Thesis: Inheritance Over Ideals

Hazony argues that a nation is not built on abstract ideals like the ones found in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Instead, a nation is built on inherited bonds. These include things such as kinship, religion, language, and a shared memory (i.e., narrative). In his view, a people becomes a nation not through universal principles but through mutual loyalty and cultural inheritance, carried forward across generations. He said: “The foundation of national cohesion is not a universal reason, but the shared stories and mutual loyalty that bind one generation to the next.” Without those bonds, Hazony warns, societies either disintegrate into isolated individuals or fracture into warring tribes. He cites countries like Syria and Lebanon as modern examples of political fragmentation born from the absence of a unifying national identity. And he warns that America is at the precipice of such a decline. Provocative to say the least.

J.D. Vance echoes this ethos in his public speeches. He rejects the idea that America can be defined solely by its founding principles, calling it “way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.” Why? Because that framework would embrace any global citizen who believes in liberty, while possibly excluding Americans whose ancestors fought and bled for this country. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War,” Vance has said, “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.” The question, for me, is when do you start counting legitimacy. I.e., do people whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War have more of a claim on being Americans than those who fought in the Civil War? How about those immigrants who came over and fought in WWI or WWII?

The American Tension: Bloodlines vs. Creed

Listening to Vance and Hazony, especially in light of this administration’s immigration policies, keeps pulling me back to a deeper, unresolved question: What does it actually mean to be American? Is our national identity something inherited through lineage and bloodlines, or is it forged through a shared creed and a common understanding of how society should run? Hazony clearly favors the former. But America’s founding story (our origin story) is that anyone can become American, not by birthright, but by belief. Yes, that founding vision was deeply flawed as it was constrained to white, Anglo-Saxon Christians in the beginning. And yet, being an American was rooted in a radical idea: a people (aka a nation) could be formed not by common blood, but by common consent. In contrast to Europe’s “blood and soil” nation-states, terms later corrupted by fascist ideology, America could become a nation of “creed and consent.” Even at the time of the Revolution, most people likely felt loyalty first to their colony or state. They fought as Virginians or New Yorkers, not as “Americans.” Like the warriors in the Iliad, they showed up as part of a tribe. Nationhood had to be forged in battle, and they shared a larger vision of America manifest in the stories they were telling that transcended tribal lines.

In some ways, our national identity has always been held together by the stories we tell about ourselves. I explored this idea in a recent essay, “Who Gets to Write the Story?”, which reflected on the power of narrative to define who belongs and who doesn’t. I know this might feel a little too English-major wonky, but I believe this tension over identity and the power of narrative sits at the heart of today’s immigration debate. On the surface, it’s about policy: who crosses which border, under what terms. But beneath it all is a deeper question of belonging—one Hazony raises and the Founders wrestled with: What holds a people together? What defines the “we”? Hazony argues for ancestral bonds and cultural inheritance (He uses “ancestral bonds and cultural inheritance” versus “blood and soil,” for obvious reasons). But if our republic is to survive as a unified nation, we must ask whether our shared story is still strong enough to bind new tribes into one people.

A Literary Mirror: Tribalism and Nationhood in the Iliad

When I first read The Iliad in high school, I remember resonating with it mainly as a story about war and heroes. I was heading to the Naval Academy and could empathize with Achilles. Agamemnon had done him wrong, and he was going to reclaim his honor. The Iliad was an instruction manual for my 18-year-old proto-warrior self. But this time, I saw something different. The Iliad is also a story about a coalition of tribes on the verge of becoming a nation. The Greeks at Troy are a fragile alliance of tribes: Achilles and the Myrmidons, Odysseus and the Ithacans, Ajax and the men of Salamis. They share gods, language, and customs, but their loyalty is to their individual Captains, and this almost leads to their defeat. When Achilles and Agamemnon clash, their egos nearly tear the whole alliance apart. In the early part of the war, the Achaeans’ campaign falters not because of Trojan resistance, but because of internal division. Their “we” is untested, unstable.

It’s Nestor, the old warrior, who tries to hold the threads together through story and memory. Again and again, he urges the captains to remember what is larger than their own tribes, their own egos. In Book 1, as tempers flare, Nestor warns, “Let us not rend our hearts with contention... The son of Atreus is king over many.” Through the stories he tells, Nestor tries to turn a coalition of tribes into something more enduring: a people bound by shared memory, not just necessity. Classicists have long argued that the Iliad isn’t just recounting a war; it’s writing a nation into being. The story itself becomes the vessel that transforms tribal loyalty into cultural inheritance. At the same time, the young warriors mostly ignore him. What finally brings Achilles back into the fold isn’t command, it’s shared grief. His empathy for Priam, the enemy king, becomes the bridge. It’s a stunning moment of human recognition across tribal lines.

From War to Return: The Odyssey and the Fragile Aftermath of Belonging

If The Iliad is about forging a nation through battle, then The Odyssey is about what follows when the war is over, when the unifying narrative dissolves and each man must find his way home. We see this same dynamic in modern wars: nations and peoples rally around a shared cause, only to fracture once the immediate objective is reached. For example, we saw this in the US with 9/11 when, for a moment, we were united. The Israelis experienced this after Oct 7th. Before the attacks, internal protests and political division dominated public life. But in the aftermath, the country rallied behind its leadership and responded with overwhelming force. Unifying against a common enemy is not the hard part. The challenge is staying unified when the common enemy is dispatched or the common cause is achieved. That’s the challenge of return. And, as The Odyssey demonstrates, not all returns are equal.

Odysseus doesn’t simply sail home. He wanders. He’s detained, tested, and . . . forgotten. He is a man without a country, without a name, and sometimes without a memory. His 10-year journey is a meditation on survival, but also on identity. I think of the journey home of many of the Vietnam veterans as being similar. Who are you when no one remembers your story or, more concerning, does not want to hear your story? To that point, one of the most poignant moments is when Odysseus returns in disguise and hears the old bard sing of the Trojan War. He weeps not just because of what he lost—including ALL of his men—but because in the telling of the Trojan War (basically The Iliad), he becomes known again. For him, his place in the kingdom is restored through story.

It is interesting to note that Nestor appears in the Odyssey, again as the “memory holder.” When Telemachus seeks news of his missing father, he goes to Nestor first. The old man doesn’t have the answer, but what he offers is more critical: memory and counsel. Nestor tells Telemachus what came before. He remembers who was at Troy. He reminds Telemachus and the next generation of the purpose and the cost of war.

Nestor is like a living bridge between war and return. If the Iliad asks what it takes to fight together, the Odyssey asks what it costs to come back alone. Nestor stands in both poems as the keeper of the story, the reminder that survival without memory isn’t enough. A society isn’t held together by one man’s endurance; it’s held together by the stories and counsel that bind generations into a “we.”

Immigration, Identity, and the Question of Civic Continuity

America today is struggling not just with who crosses the border, but with how we remember ourselves. To be clear, I am not debating the fact that we:

1. Should be able to control our borders

2. Should ensure, as much as possible, that we don’t admit criminals.

3. Have a HUGE issue with all the illegal immigrants already in the country.

I don’t have any easy answers to those structural issues. Instead, I am focused on what it means to be an American if you arrive here legally and decide to pursue citizenship. Hazony would argue that, absent shared blood or cultural lineage, no real “we” can hold. But I believe the American “we” has always been aspirational even if it has never been fully achieved. Heck, we had to go through a Civil War and then another 100 years before we fully acknowledged people other than white men as citizens.

Our national identity has never been static. It has evolved precisely because it is rooted in a set of ideals designed to grow alongside us. This was, in fact, part of Thomas Jefferson’s vision. He believed that constitutions should be regularly revised to reflect the needs and insights of each new generation. In a famous 1789 letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “the earth belongs always to the living generation,” and that “every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.” His point was clear: no generation should be governed solely by the assumptions of its ancestors. To stay alive, Jefferson argues that a democratic society must be willing to adapt and revise the rules of self-governance. This would seem to be exactly the opposite of what Hazony would like.

The Story That Binds: Memory, Mercy, and the Making of a Nation

The question in our immigration debate isn’t just borders; it’s whether our civic story is still big enough to bind new tribes into one people. We have always been a nation of immigrants. It is one o the reasons for our continued strength on the world stage. It is why the best of the best keep wanting to come here to study and to make their fortune. We all benefit. This is why our national narrative matters. We must tell a story that is big enough for people to want to join it. The Iliad gave the Greeks a tale that elevated their tribal skirmish into an origin story that we have been telling for 2000+ years. The Odyssey warned that without such a story, even the hero can be lost at sea.

That’s where Hazony’s model shows both its insight and its fault line. He’s right that mutual loyalty and cultural inheritance matter. But they are not enough on their own. Without a collective narrative that transcends tribe, ancestral bonds harden into walls. That’s the Iliad’s warning: tribal honor and ego can fracture a people at the moment they most need unity. America’s crisis isn’t just the loss of lineage; it’s the loss of a shared narrative that binds our many tribes into a republic. The founders understood this. Homer understood it too. The Iliad ends not with victory but with compassion. Achilles and Priam bond over their shared grief—the cost of war. As Priam kneels before the man who killed his son, he says, “I have endured what no man on earth has ever done before. I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.” The Odyssey ends with the gods halting vengeance before it consumes the home. Both suggest the same truth: a society survives not through conquest or inheritance alone, but through memory, mercy, and a story big enough to hold everyone inside it. That story is what turns family into tribe, tribe into nation.

We are living our own Iliad now with our different political “tribes” locked in battle, unwilling to cede an inch. Unlike Achilles and Priam, we are able to see the humanity in the “other.” The question for me isn’t about who is going to the next election. It’s more about whether we can remember, forgive, and rebuild a nation worth returning to. To that point, The Odyssey reminds us that survival alone is not the goal. Homecoming requires more than endurance. It demands that a people rebuild what war has dismantled. For America, I believe this means renewing a national identity not built solely on shared ancestral bonds and cultural inheritance, but on a story large enough to hold all our tribes — old and new — together.

Chapter 1: Tilting at Windmills

When news broke that Trump had ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear production sites, two images popped into my mind at once. The first was of Major T.J. “King” Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove riding the bomb into Armageddon with a grim smile. The Other was of Don Quixote, the mad knight errant, lowering his lance at windmills he insisted were giants. Both are stories of men so enthralled by their own narratives that reality itself becomes collateral damage.

Part of why Quixote came to mind was that I am reading Don Quixote for the first time—yes, the whole thing. I joined a seminar this summer midway through; the group had just finished Book I, and I started with them in Book II. To catch up, I read Book I and then stepped directly into the second. That experience — moving from one book into the other almost without pause — made the hinge between them blindingly clear.

In Book I, Quixote is fully inside the fantasy. We, as readers, observe his mad “adventures” from the outside and are to laugh (and pity?) the old knight as he turns peasants into princesses and windmills into giants. But in Book II, which Cervantes wrote 10 years after finishing Book 1, everything tilts. Quixote discovers that his adventures have been written down and read. He becomes aware of himself as a character inside a story and begins performing Don Quixote consciously, for an audience already primed. It is one of the most startlingly modern moves in literature: a character who knows he is a story. . . and Cervantes was writing in the 1600s.

Chapter 2: Authorial Intent and the Shock of Cervantes

I think most people know the story of Don Quixote and the windmills, but what was new to me in reading it in its entirety is this dramatic shift in perspective between Book I and Book II. I think this hit me so sharply because of my own background as an English major and later an English Instructor at the Naval Academy. Teaching midshipmen — who really don’t want to be in a literature class — had its own challenges. In particular, we always seemed to circle the same age-old questions about authorial intent:

• Did the author really mean this?

• Are we just reading too much into it?

• How much of the author’s life is in the story?

• Can a book speak for itself, or does an author have to tell us what it means?

At first, I would take a new-critical approach with them, encouraging them to treat the text as a narrative complete within itself. It just made it simpler. The author’s life, the historical context, the cultural echoes, the inherent authorial biases could wait. We’d stay inside the confines of the book. I did it partly to teach them deliberate reading discipline: read what is there, not what you want to be there. But I also did it out of mercy. Eighteen-year-olds in their first literature class need a foothold, and New Criticism offers one. It says: start with the text. Trust the text. Everything else can come later.

But the more you read — especially modern novels — you can’t help but realize that an author is never writing into a void. A story only comes alive in conversation with the reader. Context matters. The text is not a sealed system; it’s a negotiation between writer and reader. Meaning shifts as the eyes that behold it change. That always felt like a 20th-century revelation to me, the domain of Joyce, Woolf, Pirandello, Brecht, and the other modernist and postmodernist authors who constantly pull the reader into the act of making meaning.

And yet here was Cervantes, four centuries earlier, in what’s often called the first novel, was already embracing this duality. In Book II, he lets Don Quixote become aware of the reader, folds the story back on itself, and acknowledges the audience inside it. It isn’t just clever metafiction; it’s a meditation on the power dynamics between author, character, and reader.

And it brought me to a question I haven’t been able to shake: if even a novel is a negotiation between author and audience, what happens when the “story” in question is not a book at all, but a country trying to understand itself in real time?

Chapter 3: A Republic Without a Cervantes

Cervantes, for all his playfulness, still held the world together as the author. As readers, we know what is real and what is delusion because there is a single authorial frame. However, in the real world, there is no Cervantes. There is no one to tell us that the giant really is a windmill. Instead, we live inside a contested text, written and rewritten every day by cable news, podcasts, Substacks, social feeds, & viral clips. Reality itself has become a battlefield of rival narrators, each fighting to impose their version of the story on the rest of us.

Which raises the old classroom question in a way I never imagined when teaching literature: Who holds authorial intent when the ‘text’ is not fiction but a nation trying to narrate itself in real time? In a novel, we can argue about what the writer meant, but at least there is a writer. In our public life, there is only the negotiation, the constant rewriting of events by those with the loudest pens and the biggest platforms. The question isn’t just what the story means. It’s who gets to claim they meant it in the first place.

Chapter 4. Sancho and the Price of the Story

The other thing that has struck me in reading Don Quixote is that he did not ride alone. Sancho Panza trudged beside him, body bruised, dignity battered, but never giving up. Time and again, Sancho absorbed the blows of his master’s illusions. Quixote dreamed of honor under oak trees while Sancho coughed up dust and blood. Sancho stayed loyal—at first—because Don Quixote’s story promised him an island, a place in the tale that would make the suffering worth it.

Trump has his Sanchos, too. For example, the loyal squires who suffer the blows of his illusions. Just look at the staffers who twist themselves into legal knots (e.g., the drama about what Emile Bove knew when), party leaders who endure humiliation (e.g., Brian Kemp and others), and citizens who bear the costs in broken relationships, livelihoods, and sometimes even their freedom. These people suffer the bruises while he sleeps soundly under the gold-everything of Mar-a-Lago.

A case in point. One of my very good friends was among the first thirteen people convicted for storming the Capitol on January 6th. We hadn’t spoken in years, but seeing his name in the headlines made it real. This wasn’t just about Trump’s illusions or the country’s polarization. It was about a kid I’d grown up with who had gone so far down the QAnon rabbit hole that he was willing to trade his freedom for it.

Cervantes understood that Sancho’s bruises made Quixote’s madness real. It’s the same here. The cost of Trump’s narrative isn’t paid in speeches or editorials. It’s paid in prison sentences, broken friendships/families, and a Republic shaking at its foundation.

Chapter 5: Narrative as Power

In many ways, a functioning republic depends on a shared reality. Elections, law, the consent of the governed, all of these foundational principles rest on the idea that we are living inside at least a roughly common story. When this collective consciousness collapses, consent fractures. Government becomes nothing more than rival authors wrestling for the pen, each trying to claim they alone can write our country’s truth.

David Brooks wrote a recent article on this in the Atlantic. Trump’s power comes from his understanding that in a fragmented media ecosystem, the story itself is power. If you control the narrative, then you control the reality people inhabit. And Trump has been doing this—very successfully—his entire career. This is why the question of authorship in this era is not literary; it’s constitutional.

Chapter 6: Who Gets to Write This Story?

It is often said, history is written by the victors. In our time, the story is being written in real time by whoever can spin the most captivating tale. Memoirs, algorithms, partisan networks, viral conspiracies, all of them competing to seize the role of ‘uber-author,’ each claiming the right to define what happened and what it meant. But unlike a novel, the real world has no ultimate author. Reality is stitched from multiple lenses, partial truths, and provisional narratives. That makes our job as citizens harder, not easier. We cannot wait for a single authoritative narrator to tell us what is true. We have to build a shared truth together, across fractured platforms and deep distrust.

That means strengthening institutions that discipline fantasy, which includes supporting local journalism, civic education, & and independent judiciary. It means resisting our own craving for simple stories that require heroes and villains. And it means asking, as Cervantes did four hundred years ago: who gets to write the story we are living in?

Because if we don’t answer that collectively, someone else will. And they will not hesitate to turn every windmill into a giant, every neighbor into a traitor, and every one of us into Sancho Panza, carrying the bruises for someone else’s delusion.

Chapter 7: Conclusion

In the end, writing this feels less like making an argument and more like starting a dialogue with myself, with Cervantes, with whomever chooses to read this. As a writer, I’m trying to shape a story. As a reader of Don Quixote, I’m interpreting a story. And as a citizen, I’m caught inside a story that none of us fully control. It’s a strange place to stand, at once writer, interpreter, and character commenting on and participating in a larger story we are all still drafting.

This has always been the indicator of a Great Book: it doesn’t give you the answers. It leaves you with the questions that define what it means to be human. So, in that spirit, I will leave you with some of the questions I am wrestling with on my own journey:

• Is it even possible to create one shared narrative for a country or a time? Or is that longing for a single “uber-story” itself a kind of delusion?

• If not, how do we create a civic space where rival stories can coexist and be tested against one another without destroying the fabric that holds us together?

• And perhaps the hardest of all: in the absence of a single author, how do we move forward collectively? How do we stitch a future out of fragments when every windmill is a giant to someone, and every character believes they are the hero?

Cervantes didn’t answer those questions. He left us to wrestle with them. Maybe that’s the work of democracy. We don’t need to settle the story once and for all; we do need to keep writing it together.

Act I: The Soundtrack of Tragedy

It's a family tradition to listen to Hamilton when driving from Oakland to Sun Valley. This week, I was driving with my oldest son, Graham, who is an absolute Hamilton junky. The soundtrack always gets me, especially the part where Aaron Burr describes Alexander Hamilton as a man who “climbed too fast, burned too bright.” Hamilton was an orphan and an immigrant (don’t get me started about the value of immigrants in our Republic). As the musical and Ron Chernow’s biography make clear, Hamilton soared like Icarus to the sun, driven by genius and ambition (as the song goes—” he will never be satisfied”). However, he was ultimately undone by his pride. By the final act, Hamilton has (effectively) lost his marriage, his son, and ultimately, his life, not because his enemies were more clever, but because he could not temper his ambition.

It is, in every sense, a tragedy. A story that is Greek in structure & Shakespearean in spirit. I was struck by the “Trumpian tragedy” unfolding this week with the very public spat between Trump and Musk. I couldn’t help but feel that we are reliving those old tales again: kings clashing in the court, driven by ego, betrayed by allies, obsessed with legacy, and blind to the wreckage they leave behind.

Only now, the stage isn’t in a throne room; it’s playing out on two different social platforms with millions and millions of people around the world watching it unfold in real-time.

Act II: The Rise, the Return, and the Betrayal

Scene 1: The King Withdraws

Before I get to Trump, I want to acknowledge that Joe Biden, too, is living a Shakespearean tragedy as well. The Democrats framed his decision not to seek re-election in 2024 in the language of dignity and continuity. But as I wrote in this essay (The Emperor Has No Clothes), there is a much darker side to what unfolded. We will see if it rises to the level of criminal negligence and conspiracy that played out at the end of Woodrow Wilson’s term. But there is something more Shakespearean about Biden’s abdication. It evokes the image of King Lear surrendering the crown not in wisdom, but in weariness. And his (and his advisors’) failure to say “the emperor has no clothes” ruined any chance the Democrats had for winning the election. Kamala Harris—anointed rather than elected through a competitive primary—ran a competent but uninspired campaign.

Scene 2: The Crown Reclaimed

Trump’s return to the presidency was never just political. It was personal, performative, and retributive. All you have to do is look at some of his quotes to see how Shakespearean his campaign was. In addition to Making America Great Again, his one animating idea seemed to be revenge. There are many examples, but here are 3:

• At CPAC, he said, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

• In a July 2024 interview, he made clear his intention to go after Biden. “Look, when this election is over … I would have every right to go after them, and it would be easy because it’s Joe Biden.”

• On Dr. Phil, he said, “Revenge is a very strong word, but maybe we have revenge through success … Sometimes revenge can be justified, I have to be honest.”

Like Macbeth enacting bloody justice or Lear purging traitors to maintain control, Trump has been using Executive Orders as weapons of personal retaliation, admonishing his hand-picked (and often unqualified) appointees to go after his opponents. The stakes weren’t philosophical; they were theatrical. His audience is not the nation, but rather his base, who have felt wronged and want catharsis. They see in Trump not a reflection of themselves, but a champion of their grievances, a billionaire who rages on their behalf, even as he lives nothing like them (which he makes clear again and again).

In some ways, Trump has become a kind of emotional proxy: crude where they feel silenced, defiant where they feel dismissed, vengeful where they feel betrayed. In this tragic drama, his power isn’t just political; it becomes sacramental. His near assassination only adds to this narrative. He has become an absolution for their pain through the performance of his revenge.

That said, it would be reductive to dismiss this entire movement as a spectacle. Many of Trump’s supporters are not simply angry; they’re disillusioned. They believe, with reason, that the institutions they once trusted have failed them. They supported Trump not because of his theatrics, but because he gave voice to their frustration. He may be a flawed vessel, but for many, he’s the only one who was willing to fight.

Scene 3: The Brutus Reversal

Elon Musk, once the quintessential courtier, played the role of patron, influencer, and benefactor in Trump’s return. In February, he publicly declared the now‑notorious line (on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront), “I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man.”

And he certainly put his money where his mouth was, becoming the single largest political donor of the 2024 cycle. According to The New York Times and FEC filings, Musk poured over $270 million into Trump‑aligned super PACs, including America PAC and RBG PAC, and spent $290 million in total to support Trump and allied Republicans. (Don’t even get me started on how Citizens United has corrupted our entire representative government.) In fact, Trump said without him [Musk], "we wouldn't have won."

But then comes the plot twist this week. Musk reversed course. He publicly described Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” as a “disgusting abomination,” pointing to it as proof that Trump was betraying libertarian ideals. This reads like a betrayal reminiscent of Brutus in Julius Caesar: Musk accused Trump of breaking faith, not just with fiscal discipline, but with their shared narrative. The fallout escalated quickly with Musk:

• Floating the idea of a new political party on X, titled The America Party, describing it as the “80% in the middle”—a call for a techno‑populist alternative

• Claiming that Trump would have lost the 2024 election without him.

• Linking Trump to the Epstein files—an unsubstantiated but explosive public reference

The narrative here isn’t just betrayal—it’s dramatic inversion. Musk, the patron, becomes the prophet of revolt. Musk, the biggest single donor to Republicans, becomes the leader of the dissent. He not only funded Trump’s revival, but he also claims he won it. Now he suggests he might break it. WOW! When you are the world’s richest man, I guess you can play both kingmaker and kingbreaker.

Act III: Why Kings Make Good Tragedies

And this is where I started to think more about Tragedies as a construct. Tragedy, in its classical Greek form, was never just entertainment: it was a public reckoning. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and others used their plays to explore what happened when individuals, especially those with great power, lost sight of their limits. The central concept was “hamartia,” a fatal flaw not rooted in villainy, but in excess. Their protagonists had too much pride, too much ambition, and/or too much certainty. As Aristotle describes in his Poetics, a tragic hero is a character of high status, not preeminently virtuous, who experiences misfortune due to a flaw in judgment rather than evil. The parallels to our current moment are striking.

Through figures like Oedipus, the Greeks didn’t just witness collapse. They participated in a collective act of recognition. “There, but for the grace of the gods, go I.” Tragedy was society’s mirror: a way for the polis to examine itself through the fall of the mighty. And this is why these tragedies remain worth studying today.

Shakespeare inherited this tradition and deepened it psychologically. His tragic kings—Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, Caesar [ok, he was technically an emperor]—don’t just rule. They implode. They mistake performance for truth. They confuse power with love. And when their downfall comes, it isn’t fate or divine punishment that undoes them, it’s their very human flaws. The same traits that make them magnetic are the ones that make them self-destructive.

And this is what makes these individuals so compelling. At some level, we empathize with them. There is something in their ambition, their hubris, and ultimately their unraveling that we see in ourselves. We admire them. We envy them. And so when they fall, the tragedy stings, not because they were evil, but because they were so nearly great. Take Hamilton as an example. If there was ever a founding father who deserved to be president, it was Hamilton. But he was the author of his undoing.

Act IV: The Platform Is the Palace

Today’s tragedy isn’t playing out on a stage: it’s unfolding across two rival social platforms with 100s of millions of people in the audience. Trump controls Truth Social, with roughly 2 million followers. Musk commands X, with over 400 million monthly active users. These platforms aren’t just tools, they’re territories. The protagonists control their narratives, and their followers are fiercely loyal to them.

And we are experiencing these stories unfiltered. The professional media once served as a civic referee, filtering truth from spin. Now, it is mainly trying to play catch-up. What was once mediated is now performed. Meanwhile, although the two-party system still exists on paper, real power has shifted elsewhere. The Democratic Party has imploded. It is disoriented, fragmented, and devoid of coherent leadership. The Republican Party has calcified into a MAGA monoculture. The power now resides in the personalities who dominate the attention economy and the platforms that broadcast them without limits.

We watch our politics unfold like a live-action court drama. Every day is a new act. Every budget battle becomes an opportunity for someone to launch into a soliloquy. Every betrayal now becomes a trending topic, sidelining more important global news (e.g., the war in Ukraine or the ongoing disaster in Gaza). But here is the kicker. Tragedies were once staged for reflection. Because this is happening 24/7, 7 days a week, we, as the audience, never experience catharsis. There seems to be no resolution. We are trapped in a vicious cycle of continuous escalation.

Curtain Call: What Tragedy Still Teaches

If I am being honest with myself, these men (Biden, Trump, and Musk) are not monsters—nor are they tragic heroes of old. They are tragic figures—each consumed with and blinded by their own sense of destiny and legacy.

And how do we fit in? I suggest we are the chorus. We watch their unraveling not with horror, but with fascination as this unfolds. Ultimately, playwrights use tragedy to teach restraint. Their plays remind us that greatness without self-awareness leads to collapse. But because this tragedy is happening in near real-time, we are losing our ability to reflect. It is hard to discern what is truth, what is hype, and what is real. It feels like there is no space for judgment.

Yet none of this is new. The patterns of ambition, betrayal, hubris, and ultimate downfall are as old as the stage itself. The opportunity we face is not to try to silence the drama. We will never be able to. However, we can try to step outside of the forever chaos. We can reclaim the pause, reflect on the roles we are playing, and think about how to craft a different ending.

And to be clear, that doesn’t mean returning to the status quo. Many of our institutions have failed. Many of our leaders from both parties have lied. If we are to choose a different ending, it must be built on renewed trust, accountability, and truth-telling. We have to create alternative sources of shared context beyond the echo chambers of social media. A step forward, I believe, is choosing principle over personality (and performance), institutions over influencers (but only if those institutions are willing to reform), and reflection over rage.

Expertise is having a moment—a dark one. Across the political spectrum, from social media mobs to government offices, we are witnessing the deliberate erosion of trust in experts, institutions, and the slow, hard work of discovery.

This is not a theoretical concern; it's unfolding in real time. President Trump has frozen over $2 billion in federal research funding to Harvard University, citing alleged antisemitism but widely interpreted as a political attack on elite institutions. At the same time, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has circumvented traditional scientific review processes to revise vaccine recommendations, signaling a new era in which ideology overtakes evidence.

These events are not isolated. They reflect a broader unraveling of the systems by which our society once decided what is true, who is credible, and how we move forward. This essay is an attempt to trace the roots of that unraveling and to ask whether we still believe in the value of expertise at all.

Prologue: Believing in Experts, Respecting the Work

When I was a kid, I believed the experts. Teachers, coaches, scout leaders, and senior officers: if they stood at the front of the room, had a whistle, or held a higher rank, I assumed they knew what they were talking about. While I would not blindly follow them, I would certainly give them the benefit of the doubt.

Throughout my time in school, this seemed logical: teachers had the knowledge, the facts, and I was there to learn. I also believed in the institutions in which they worked and the process by which they developed their expertise. I believed that our society moved forward through a rigorous, disciplined search for truth. Over time, I learned to challenge assumptions, but I never lost respect for those who had put in the time.

Act I: The Confidence Epidemic

I would suggest that this is, in general, how our society used to work. We trusted certain institutions because they were built on the idea that knowledge mattered and that those who spent years studying and mastering subjects, as demonstrated by their degree and or certification, deserved a degree of deference.

I think back to the post-war technocracy, when President Kennedy gathered the best and brightest, and we accomplished things like landing on the moon. Certainly, these groups were far from perfect, but it seemed their ambition was to solve public problems with intellectual rigor and civic seriousness. Over the past 60 years, through the strife of the 1960s and 1970s, the broken presidency of Nixon, and up to the present day, there has been a growing sense that the elites are the problem.

At the heart of the old model was a basic premise: competence mattered. Intelligence was earned through hard work, challenging assumptions, and doing experiments. And, obviously, if there was a commercial opportunity, then people who had the best ideas could make a great living. It’s why the best students from around the world came to Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard. The promise wasn’t that we had all the answers. But we had built a modern-day Athens where some of the most intelligent people in the world were working on the hardest problems, and they were doing so in a system that valued truth over bravado.

This is why the United States became a global talent magnet. It is why Silicon Valley has thrived. And now, at a societal level, we’ve entered a bizarro new era. We’ve gone from an over-reliance on authority to outright hostility toward expertise. I fear we are now becoming a culture that no longer values inquiry and constructive tension. Instead, we are becoming a culture of certainty without study. We’ve entered an era where confidence routinely outshouts competence. Somewhere in this swing, we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between genuine expertise and empty confidence.

This collapse of trust in expertise isn't just a political shift. It’s a philosophical crisis. We've not only turned away from the experts, but we’ve also lost the very tools to tell who an expert is. And this isn't a new problem. The ancient Greeks faced it too. But unlike us, they relied on a framework for distinguishing truth from noise.

Epistemic Wisdom: What the Greeks Got Right

The Greeks understood something modern society is obfuscating: not all knowledge is the same. Plato distinguished episteme (true, justified knowledge) from doxa (mere opinion). Aristotle expanded this framework, identifying three distinct forms of understanding:

• Episteme: scientific knowledge, grounded in universal truths and logical reasoning.

• Techne: practical know-how, the craftsmanship of medicine, architecture, or engineering.

• Phronesis: practical wisdom, discernment in action, judgment under uncertainty, the kind of understanding essential for leadership and citizenship.

These distinctions were not just academic. They shaped the Greeks’ thoughts on education, governance, and moral responsibility. A good physician needed techne. A good philosopher required episteme. But a good statesman? He needed phronesis, the wisdom to balance competing truths, navigate uncertainty, and prioritize the common good.

Today, we have lost that nuance. Doxa is being confused with episteme. We no longer ask: What kind of knowing is this? Instead, we ask: Who’s speaking, and do I like them? The result is epistemic anarchy. People use anecdotes as evidence. Politicians champion personal beliefs as public policy. It is completely disorienting in the political realm. In the scientific realm, it is starting to lead to real deaths.

The modern, well-intentioned instinct to treat everyone equally has resulted in a common belief that every opinion deserves equal weight. But democratic equality doesn’t mean epistemic equality. A virologist's judgment on the efficacy of vaccines is not equal to a YouTuber's guesswork (check out Joe Rogan's interview of RFK Jr as one case). When we lose the ability or the will to make these distinctions, we don't just blur knowledge. We undermine society’s ability to engage complex ideas. Without episteme, we lose truth. Without techne, we lose competence. Without phronesis, we lose judgment. And when all we have left is doxa and demagogues, we flail.

Act II: The Cost of Epistemic Collapse

Over the past several months, we have watched as Trump and his administration have stripped Harvard of its federal funding, a significant portion of which supports research and development. On paper, it was about accountability, ostensibly because they were being anti-Semitic. In reality, it was something darker: a public spectacle meant to punish perceived elitism by attacking one of our leading educational institutions.

At the same time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Health and Human Services Secretary, continues his mind-bending opposition to the efficacy of vaccines, even when the science-based evidence is irrefutable. I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History”* podcast on RFK Jr. this morning, and found it to be both illuminating and distressing. One example is that RFK Jr. continues to publicly discredit the rotavirus vaccine, citing two unverified sources to claim it causes more harm than good. Before the vaccine, millions of children died every year from rotavirus.

One researcher spent 26 years developing a vaccine that helped cut global child mortality in half, from 6 million deaths per year to just 3 million. It is, by many accounts, one of the most important breakthroughs in pediatric medicine in a generation. And yet here we are. Our HHS Secretary, who is untrained in medicine, cites two fringe sources to cast doubt on the entire field of epidemiology. It would be laughable, except it’s working. Measles, once eradicated in many places, is now returning. Rotavirus vaccine rates are stalling. This is what happens when we treat all opinions as equal. Kids die.

Expertise vs. Elitism: A Critical Distinction

Let me be clear: I am also not trying to defend the elites. And I think one of the issues is that people are conflating expertise with elitism. One is earned through time, testing, and a commitment to evidence. The other is often inherited, curated, or performative. What I want us to defend is the process of learning, the discipline of inquiry, and the humility required to know what we don’t know. RFK Jr.’s rotavirus claim didn’t emerge from science; it emerged from distrust masquerading as independence. That same mindset now infects debates about measles, COVID, and even cancer. But science doesn’t advance through bravado. It advances through the scientific method. To be sure, experts can be wrong. They should be challenged. That’s the point of science. However, the challenge must come from within a shared framework of how truth is pursued, rather than outside of it.

Act III: When Societies Forget How to Learn

The Roman Republic didn’t fall overnight. It decayed slowly through cynicism, through erosion of shared norms, and through a loss of trust in its own institutions. When it collapsed, it took with it not just political order, but the infrastructure of learning. Books were burned, and with them, knowledge vanished. Builders forgot how to build and maintain the roads. Farmers forgot the value of crop rotation. Sculptors no longer developed beautiful works of art. Society regressed, and we entered the Dark Ages. It literally took centuries for the light to return.

And when the light returned, it was not thanks to emperors or armies. It was thanks to monks in Irish monasteries, who copied books by candlelight. I watch what is playing out around us: the attack on the very idea of the university, a place to learn and wonder. Are we witnessing the fall not just of our republic but also of our very way of being? We are not just losing books at libraries. We are losing belief in the very idea that some people might actually know more than others. We are losing trust in facts and the process by which one builds a data-based informed opinion.

Act IV: Rebuilding the Republic of Knowing

At its core, the American experiment isn’t just about individual liberty. It has always been about the freedom to think, to test, to challenge, and to learn. This is perhaps the unforeseen upside of the First Amendment. It does not just protect free speech, it protects the search for truth. Moreover, as I have argued in earlier essays, the rule of law ensures we can question power without being subject to violence (physical, reputational, or financial). This democratic infrastructure enabled our university system, which is the envy of the world.

Please know that I am not defending all universities. They are imperfect because they are human-created entities. They have become bloated bureaucracies. And they have clearly become too left-leaning in their hiring and promotion practices. All of these systemic issues need to be addressed. But to defund these institutions out of political spite is to set fire to the scaffolding of our own success, and it will have ramifications for generations to come. This is not just about Harvard. It is about who we want to be as a nation. Do we want to attract the best minds from around the world, those willing to put in the work, to build, to innovate? Or do we want to retreat into ideological suspicion and smallness?

Coda: Defend the Republic. Keep the Light Alive.

I don’t really think we are on the cusp of the next Dark Ages, but we are living through a test. We are being asked: Do we still believe in the search for truth? It won’t be the end of the world if Harvard loses its government funding. They will figure out a way to survive as an institution. Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that the danger we face today is that we all, not just Harvard and the other elite universities, are facing an existential crisis. We are being told the expertise does not matter. We are being told not to listen to those who have spent a lifetime learning how to ask hard questions and then do the hard work to find the data they use to provide informed opinions. When Rome fell, the books were burned, the experts were ostracized, and civilization receded into shadows. We must not let it happen again.

1. The Naked Parade

The emperor has no clothes. Everyone sees it, but no one speaks. This fable is now a headline reality. First, let me say that I hope President Biden recovers and suffers as little as possible at this stage of his life. At the same time, I think the announcement about his advanced cancer diagnosis brings into sharp relief an issue we have been wrestling with for the past three to four years—his infirmity. President Biden’s current diagnosis raises questions not just of personal health but of national trust.

• How long did his inner circle know?

• Why didn’t they tell the public?

• And what happens when those closest to power prioritize shielding the person over serving the people?

This is not just about Joe Biden. It is about the architecture of our republic. We depend on the integrity of those who guard the office, especially when the occupant cannot. And I worry that without systemic change, we are in a system that rewards courtiers not councilors.

2. From Guardians to a Guardian: What We Forgot

In an earlier essay on the “Imperial Presidency,” I discussed how, in The Republic, Plato envisioned a class of “guardians” who would rule for the good of the whole. In that article, I suggested that finding, training, and empowering guardians was idealistic at best. However, Plato didn’t trust just one man; he also envisioned a broader structure to enable the republic to function. And while the founders clearly drew from Plato, you can also see where they took inspiration from other Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Hobbes, and others. David Hume, wary of all rulers, wrote:

“In contriving any system of government… every man ought to be supposed a knave.” (from Hume’s essay Of the Independency of Parliament)

What does this mean? Hume is telling us not to trust that men will be good. You need to design a system with its starting point that men will be men. Along those lines, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “The life of man [in nature] is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (The Leviathan). The Founders did not all agree with Hume and Hobbes, but they shared their realism. That leaders—even good ones—need guardrails. And that when those guardrails fail, republics start to drift. To this point, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. . .”

I love this honest assessment of human nature. And this, then, is why they built the system they did: why they created the separation of powers; why they included a Vice President who was supposed to be ready to step up; and why they instituted a Cabinet. All of these folks were to swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the man. But that system fails when loyalty overrides judgment, as I tried to argue in another essay about the difference between loyalty and patriotism (“Showing up for the Republic”).

3. The Constitution Is Imperfect

The original Constitution was vague on presidential incapacity. Article II, Section 1 simply states that presidential powers “shall devolve on the Vice President” in the event of “inability,” without defining what that means. It took the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, to bring clarity:

• Section 3: Allows the President to voluntarily transfer power.

• Section 4: Allows the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the President unable to perform his duties.

This seems like a reasonable constitutional “circuit breaker.” However, in practice, no one has used it. Why? Because Cabinet members are appointed, not elected. Ostensibly, they are approved by the Senate, but every single one knows they serve at the pleasure of the President. This brings us back to the idea of what patriotism requires at all levels in our society.

4. When History Repeats Itself

As I researched this essay, I was reminded that this was not the first time a president’s health had been concealed and/or advisors had colluded to protect the individual at the expense of the republic.

• Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke in 1919. Historians say that for nearly 18 months, his wife and close aides effectively ran the government, without informing Congress or the public. Holy smokes. That is basically a coup in the guise of spousal care!

• Franklin D. Roosevelt. Commentators said that FDR was visibly declining during his final term—sound familiar? Advisors and doctors knew he was dying, but they concealed the truth because the country was at war. My understanding is that Vice President Truman wasn’t even fully briefed on the atomic bomb project when he took office after FDR’s death. This seems nearly criminal—not to have brought the second in command (and the cabinet) into the loop.

• Ronald Reagan. After being shot in 1981, he temporarily transferred power, but only informally. Later in his second term, there were questions about his cognitive decline. At that time, no formal action was taken, and it would be years before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. How much was his judgment impacted while he was president? We will never know.

• George W. Bush is the only president to formally invoke Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, transferring power to the Vice President twice during colonoscopies, for a total of two hours at a time. This made sense as a safeguard in case of an emergency, but the expectation was that he (Bush) would return to his duties.

These four hours remain the only documented instances of the 25th Amendment's use in peacetime. All the other examples were managed in silence, much like we have witnessed with President Biden, and this is a structural flaw in the system that needs to be addressed.

5. The Gray Space Between Loyalty and Integrity

I recall the moment I first took the oath of office as a midshipman on Induction Day (“I” day) at the Naval Academy, and then again years later as a newly commissioned officer in the Navy. 990 (“Go 90”) of us raised our right hands on that day and said:

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States… and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States…”

During the 4 years at the Academy, we dug into these ideas. For example, officers do not swear to “obey the orders of the President” like enlisted members do. Instead, they pledge loyalty to the Constitution. This legal distinction is intentional and reflects the greater burden of judgment and responsibility entrusted to commissioned officers. While the oath does not specifically call out “lawful” orders, we spent considerable time discussing what constitutes a lawful and an unlawful order. A lot of the philosophical underpinning came out of the Nuremberg trials, but we also talked about more recent examples (e.g., Vietnam). Some cases were clear, but many others were gray.

Our leadership instructors were trying to build our moral judgment to wrestle with the question: “What do you do when you're given an order—or work for a leader—who may no longer be fit to lead?” before you are faced with the ethical dilemma. I think the real challenge is when a superior’s actions or orders are not criminal. I.e., what do you do when your superior seems erratic or their judgment is seriously impaired? Obviously, we were not supposed to disobey lightly, but we were not supposed to obey blindly either.

That’s where moral courage lives: in the murky gray space between loyalty and integrity. In Showing up for the Republic, I argued that true patriots defend the republic, even against their own party, even against popular opinion, even against the commander-in-chief. Today, Cabinet members and senior advisors inhabit that space. Their job is not to protect the President. It’s to protect the office. And I think we witnessed an abject failure of Biden’s Cabinet to exert moral courage. I also acknowledge that it's easy for me to say this, as I was never faced with this challenge and never had my moral character tested. I can only hope that if I did, I would have risen to the challenge.

5. Watergate: Not Just the Crime, But the Cover-Up

This moment clearly reminds us of Watergate and the lessons we have not learned. There, too, a small group of trusted advisors and cabinet members closed ranks around a failing president. There, too, deception became policy and practice. In many ways, the cover-up was worse than the crime because it revealed a mindset: the presidency belonged to the man, not the republic. This scenario also featured a White House stonewalling the press and misleading the public. The “defend our guy at all costs” logic lives on. The concealment of Biden’s illness over the years is not a difference of kind, only a difference of degree.

Perhaps more concerningly, we saw the democrats and their supporters in the press attack anyone who suggested the emperor had no clothes. One example was Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Congressman. He ran for office saying openly that Mr. Biden couldn’t win re-election, even against Mr. Trump, and wasn’t up to serving another four years. He also said he would gladly drop out if more prominent Democrats entered the race. No one did, and for his honesty, Mr. Phillips was deemed a traitor to his party, an opportunist, and a Republican cat’s paw. ( - from James Freeman)

6. The Path Forward

So this is where I am stuck. How can we change the system to adapt to the fact that (1) we know people, especially those in power, are fallible, (2) In the modern republic, Cabinet members are more likely to prioritize personal loyalty over institutional duty, and (3) we tend to elect old people who have a higher risk of losing touch with reality. Batting this around with ChatGPT, I came up with several potential structural reforms.

Require Annual, Independent Medical Evaluations

Let’s appoint three doctors as a tribunal. The president, the Chief Justice, and a bipartisan panel in the Senate each get to pick one. The president is required to undergo an annual medical examination, and the report is submitted to Congress. The public would get a summary version. I appreciate this starts to tread on personal privacy rights, but if you are President, you should be willing to be subject to some level of assessment that you are fit to execute your duties.

Mandate Transparency Triggers

A President must disclose all major medical visits. Additionally, there should be a formal review (maybe similar to the annual medical review process above) whenever a President goes 30 days without a live public appearance. Finally, the president must reveal any medications that might impair his/her cognitive ability.

Elevate the Vice President’s Operational Role

I think we would all agree that the VP role is really more ceremonial than substantive today. I believe there is an opportunity to create a practice similar to what we do in the corporate sector: a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) with a company’s board of directors. In this case, we could institute a quarterly continuity review of the republic with the VP, National Security Council, and senior Cabinet officials. This way, the VP would be up to speed on all major trends, issues, and risks on a 90-day basis as part of his/her job. The VP becomes a true 2nd in command, ready to step forward or step in.

Rebuild a Culture of Truth-Telling

This is the most obvious, but probably hardest to actually enact, as it works against our natural “tribal nature.” We need to instate protections for whistleblowers who raise concerns about presidential fitness. We need to reground public oaths in service to the system, not the sovereign. Additionally, we need to provide training for Congress and cabinet members on what this means. You don’t develop an ethical muscle if you don’t think about it and practice it. Finally, we need to defend the press’s right to investigate executive function AND mandate that the president and their press secretary answer questions in good faith and on a regular basis. There should be a clear process in place for holding both accountable for misleading the public.

7. The Republic—If We Can Keep It

In The Imperial Presidency, I wrote that we are drifting toward elective monarchy, where we choose a king every four years and then look away. I honestly don’t think Americans really want a king (or queen). I do think we want someone who seems steady, someone who can shoulder the burden so we don’t have to think about it every day. However, in a republic, that’s a dangerous kind of comfort, because—as we are witnessing today— the system only works if the people inside it actually do their job. We need our leaders to remember that loyalty to a person is not the same as fealty to a principle. The situation with President Biden over the past several years was not a failure of health; it was a failure of courage. And, in this case, the courage that we needed was someone to pull the right people together and say, “It’s time. . . .the emperor has no clothes. And we need to do something about it.”