Under Trump, the United States has fallen to 64th place in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, below 22 of the 27 countries in the European Union. The only EU countries that performed worse are Malta, Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, and Greece. Among the reasons cited by RSF are: 1. Political pressure, threats and retaliation against journalists and media organizations by the Trump administration. 2. Increasing concentration of media ownership, elite influence over major outlets, and the continuing collapse of local journalism. 3. A deteriorating legal and security environment for journalists, including harassment, assault, wrongful arrests, restrictions on access, and the use of government institutions against disfavored media. RSF explicitly says that Trump’s return to office has “greatly exacerbated” the decline in American press freedom. The First Amendment may remain written into the Constitution, but this administration has shown little respect for the principles it is supposed to protect.

It is curious that the White House should ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, use the FCC to threaten others (including pressure that led ABC not to air James Talarico's interview with Jimmy Kimmel), investigate journalists (including New York Times reporters Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt), and facilitate further concentration of media ownership, coincidentally in the hands of Trump-friendly billionaires, all while railing about freedom of expression in Europe. The United States ranks 64th out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), its lowest ranking since the index began in 2002. The United States now ranks below 24 of the EU's 27 member states.

Trump is in no position to claim that he can stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He tore up the JCPOA in 2018, dismantling an agreement under which Iran's enrichment was restricted and subject to extensive international monitoring. That did two things: 1. It damaged US credibility, as it demonstrated that the lifetime of an agreement with the United States could be as short as a single administration. 2. It paved the way for Iran to abandon the JCPOA's enrichment restrictions and eventually reach 60% enrichment. Under the agreement, Iran's uranium enrichment was capped at 3.67% U-235 for fifteen years, by which time a permanent agreement could have been negotiated. Trump's bombing campaign gives Iran an additional incentive to continue its nuclear program, because Tehran can see a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against future American attacks. Then there is the second problem: we simply cannot account for all of Iran's enriched uranium or verify where it is currently located. If the media were to accurately represent the strategic results of this war, they would say: 1. Iran still has a large ballistic-missile arsenal and has resumed producing new missiles. It has also developed more advanced systems, including electro-optically guided ballistic missiles. 2. The regime remains in power, with the IRGC still central to both internal control and Iran's military power. 3. Iran has become even more ruthless toward dissidents, with executions increasing substantially. 4. Iran's enriched nuclear material remains under Iranian control, while international inspectors cannot presently account for all of it. 5. Iran's regional leverage has grown in important respects, particularly through its ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz and through the Houthis' growing position around the Bab el-Mandeb. In other words, Trump's war was a disaster on every front.

Carney and Zelenskyy signed a declaration to establish a 100-year partnership in Calgary on Thursday, including a C$350 million interceptor package, drone co-production, and winter energy support. While Trump has "great" phone calls with Putin, Canada, which, I am afraid, increasingly sees us as a former ally, shows the true moral center by standing with Ukraine in what will be one of the defining events of our lifetimes: a war in which one side is unambiguously right and the other unambiguously wrong, and a war, exceedingly rare in the post-Cold War era, in which the jus ad bellum is so clear: namely, Ukraine exercising its right to defend itself against an unjust invasion by a rogue power. And in this defining conflict, America is the bête noire, a once-formidable champion of an international rules-based order reduced to becoming one of its antagonists, increasingly feared by allies and, unfortunately, derided by its enemies.

I am worried. Economic red lights are flashing, much of which can be traced to the utterly unserious way this administration has handled economic policy. And I deeply sympathize with the next administration, which will likely have to pick up the pieces if it is halfway committed to preventing a future debt crisis. The August inflation numbers are in. The PPI rose 5.4% year on year, or 0.4% from July. Much of the immediate increase was driven by energy, with final-demand energy prices rising 4.2%, while tariffs are adding a separate source of inflationary pressure through higher import and intermediate-goods costs. The continuing war with Iran and the resulting increase in oil prices have compounded the problem. This is occurring against an already precarious backdrop in the Treasury market. Investors are increasingly concerned about persistent federal deficits, future borrowing requirements, and the enormous volume of debt that must be financed. Those concerns are unlikely to be helped by Trump's proposal to return tariff revenues to consumers as $5,000 rebates, which would cost over $1.2 trillion if paid to every American adult and vastly exceed annual tariff revenues. This does not even include the additional inflationary pressure generated by more than $1.2 trillion in household transfers, much of which would flow into consumption. These pressures have already been reflected in long-term Treasury yields. Thursday's $22 billion auction of 30-year bonds went poorly, with buyers demanding a yield of 5.308% and yields continuing to rise afterward. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's clumsy buyback operation did little to calm the market either. Treasury bought back about $5.2 billion in long-dated bonds after setting a maximum of $6 billion, itself below the upper end of market expectations. The 10-year yield subsequently climbed to roughly 4.96%, while the 30-year yield pushed above 5.3%. The consequences extend well beyond the bond market. Higher long-term Treasury yields feed into higher mortgage rates, increase corporate borrowing costs, raise the cost of financing capital-intensive projects such as data centres, and progressively increase federal debt-servicing costs as existing debt is refinanced. At the same time, renewed inflation increases pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep overnight rates high or raise them further rather than easing monetary policy. Putting the United States back on a sustainable fiscal path requires first addressing the structural causes of the deficit, including Social Security, Medicare, defence spending, and rapidly increasing interest costs, while also confronting the revenue side of the equation, which will require some combination of higher taxes, closing tax loopholes and tax expenditures, and stronger enforcement. Second, tariffs and quotas that distort prices and trade should be removed, while subsidies should be subjected to much greater economic discipline. Third, the administration needs to stop making ham-fisted economic interventions that break with fairly elementary economic orthodoxy. Tariffs raise domestic prices. Large structural deficits increase borrowing requirements. Energy shocks feed inflation. Persistent inflation raises expectations for interest rates, and higher long-term rates make housing, investment, and government borrowing more expensive. Much of what this administration has done had predictable economic consequences. Unfortunately, neither the administration nor Congress has demonstrated much willingness to confront the underlying fiscal problems or abandon policies that are making them worse.

The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So it is with the U.S.'s ongoing war with Iran. True, the United States is now targeting cargo vessels, not just military targets, raising serious questions under international law depending on their status and use, but the underlying mindset is the same. Iran says it attacked 10 ships near Hormuz after the United States sank five Iranian oil tankers. Iran also fired ballistic missiles at a U.S.-used base in Jordan. At least one seafarer was killed and another was missing in the maritime attacks. Brent crude moved to about $105 per barrel. Separately, a Panama-flagged tanker carrying roughly 2 million barrels of Iraqi fuel oil was struck by a drone in Iraqi territorial waters; Iraq has not attributed that attack. UKMTO also reported several merchant vessels hit or disabled across the Gulf and Gulf of Oman. Iran has also reportedly used the Qassem Basir electro-optically guided ballistic missile operationally for the first time, a potentially significant development because such terminal guidance could improve accuracy against moving targets and reduce dependence on satellite navigation. Hegseth said that the U.S. had "functionally defeated [and] destroyed" Iran’s ballistic missile production; Iran fielding new weapons is not a promising affirmation of that claim. Trump may soon need to face the uncomfortable reality that most serious analysts have understood for some time now: that his war has failed to achieve its apparent strategic objectives (whatever they were), while Iran has become more central to global security and energy calculations as a direct consequence of the conflict. The United States is in a worse strategic position, and worse still, much of its credibility has been squandered. As to what his next steps might be, only Trump knows, but perhaps not offending and browbeating allies might be a good way to elicit some degree of cooperation. And escalating the conflict by sinking Iranian cargo vessels is unlikely to make the IRGC less hostile, as this week has demonstrated. Turning this from an America-Iran conflict into a multinational maritime coalition securing the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, and Strait of Hormuz would be a solid strategy, although given the state of things, Iran's acquiescence would still likely be needed. But it is unfortunate that he has burned off much of our allies' goodwill, making achieving this a steep upward climb. Who knew that we would need our allies? To call this a foreign-policy disaster would be understating it.