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King Charles III and U.S. President Donald Trump attend a state arrival ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House on April 28, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Two kings. Really?
May 17, 2026
Last month, the King of England came to Congress and schooled us on what it means to be American. This would be hysterical if it wasn't so tragic.
To understand why, you need to understand two things happening inside our government right now.
The first is the unitary executive theory -- the idea that the president has sole, total control over every agency, every employee, every decision in the executive branch. Not leadership. Control. For most of our history this was fringe. Congress created independent agencies -- the Federal Reserve, the FDA, the National Weather Service -- precisely so expert, nonpartisan work could be insulated from whoever happened to be in office. Madison called the concentration of all powers in one set of hands "the very definition of tyranny."
But in February 2025, Trump signed an executive order declaring all federal agencies "must be supervised and controlled" by the president. Project 2025 laid the blueprint. Then came the purge: FTC commissioners fired, a Federal Reserve governor targeted, USAID dissolved, inspectors general removed, thousands of civil servants stripped of protections.What does this look like in your life? The National Weather Service lost roughly 600 people. Then on July 4, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes and more than 130 people died across central Texas, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. The administration's 2026 budget proposes eliminating the NOAA lab that developed key flash flood prediction tools. At the NIH, about 2,300 grants totaling $3.8 billion were terminated, affecting at least 383 clinical trials. The FDA lost nearly 4,000 employees. Foreign food inspections hit historic lows.
The second thing is a strain of nationalism, championed by Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, that argues a nation isn't built on ideas like "all men are created equal" but on tribal bonds -- shared blood, language, religion, ancestry. Hazony's conferences feature regular speakers like JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Sen. Josh Hawley. This philosophy has entered the White House.
You can hear it when Trump calls immigrants people "poisoning the blood of our country." You can see it in ICE's transformation: at-large arrests up 600%, nearly 70,000 people in detention, two U.S. citizens shot dead by federal agents.
I know many of us have been told -- by the administration, by the news, by people we trust -- that immigrants are driving crime. I understand why that's frightening. But the data doesn't support it. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. The administration's own records confirm that the majority of people arrested in these operations have no criminal record. Because throughout history, when leaders need the public to accept an extraordinary expansion of power, they first have to make people afraid enough to let them.
Which brings me to this week. Trump welcomed King Charles to the White House and spoke of settlers who "bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British," of founders whose "veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage." He rejected the idea that America is "merely an idea."
King Charles told a different story. He called Congress "this citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people." He said the founders "drew strength in diversity." He cited the Magna Carta -- the charter that established no one, not even a king, is above the law. He urged America to "ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking."
He was not being polite. He was sounding an alarm.
Then, apparently without irony, the White House posted a photo of the two men with the caption: "TWO KINGS."
This country was founded because we didn't want kings. The unitary executive seizes the power. The nationalism decides who it's used against. A real king came here and reminded Congress what makes nations strong. Our president stood in the same building and spoke of bloodlines and genetic inheritance.
I know which vision I recognize as American.
Sara Sharpe LaMance of Chattanooga is a writer, communication strategist and the founder of The Letters Project and STILL/WILD.
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Toy soldiers in a battle formation
Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash
The Puncher’s Illusion: Winning the First Round and Losing the War
May 16, 2026
In the Rumble in the Jungle, George Foreman came in expecting to end the fight early.
At first, it looked that way. He was stronger, faster, and landing clean punches. I watched the 1974 championship on simulcast fifty-two years ago and remember how dominant he was in the opening rounds.
By the fifth round, that confidence had faded. Foreman was still throwing, but he was no longer setting the terms.
He had no plan for what followed.
That same problem shows up in U.S. foreign policy, in how wars are fought, authorized, and carried forward.
The United States has repeatedly used force without sustained congressional approval, a tension at the center of the long-running war powers debate.
Under the War Powers Resolution, the president must seek authorization within 60 days of entering hostilities or end the use of U.S. forces. In practice, presidents have stretched or sidestepped those limits, leaving conflicts in a gray area between action and consent.
That pattern matters because it shapes what gets planned and what does not.
Call it the puncher’s illusion.
The United States does not misjudge its ability to strike. The gap is elsewhere. Early success is treated as the measure of success, even though the harder work begins after.
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya all opened with decisive force. In each case, the outcome was determined later, under conditions that had not been fully worked through in advance. The same dynamic was visible in Vietnam, where early escalation gave way to a prolonged conflict shaped by political limits and endurance rather than battlefield advantage.
U.S. forces entered Baghdad with overwhelming military success. Within days, the Baghdad museum was looted, despite warnings that it would be vulnerable. At the same time, decisions by the Coalition Authority dismantled the army and key governing structures. Those moves removed the systems that kept order without replacing them.
The result was not just instability, but the breakdown of the basic framework that allows a society to function.
Nothing about that reflects a lack of battlefield capability. It reflects how the mission was defined.
The objective was to remove a regime. There was no equally clear plan for what would exist the next day. Once the opening phase ends, outcomes depend on factors outside the initial strike, including political limits, institutional capacity, economic pressure, and the resilience of the society under stress.
Those factors shape the result, yet they receive less attention at the front end.
This is where the illusion becomes clear.
American strategy is built to win the first round. It is less prepared for the later rounds.
This is not about one administration. Experienced teams and deep expertise have been present in past conflicts. The pattern still shows up.
Responsibility for what comes next is divided across the system, and no one owns the outcome.
Military operations are tightly scoped and owned. What follows—containment, escalation management, sanctions, maritime security, and diplomatic endgames—spans multiple agencies and often lacks a single point of accountability.
Political incentives reinforce that split. Early action is visible and decisive. The longer phase is slower, harder to measure, and easier to defer. Political support follows the same path. It peaks at the start but fades as the stakes become more complex.
What would it take to plan for the later rounds?
The gap is not a lack of capability. It is a lack of ownership.
If the outcome matters as much as the strike, responsibility for what follows has to be defined with the same clarity as the operation itself. That means assigning a single accountable lead for the post-strike phase, not dispersing it across agencies with overlapping roles and partial authority.
It also means requiring a credible plan for what comes next before authorizing force. The War Powers debate focuses on whether to act. It rarely addresses who is responsible for what follows once action begins. Without congressional authorization, that scrutiny is weaker. Decisions can narrow to a smaller set of voices, and planning for the next phase receives less challenge and less refinement, a pattern reflected in Iraq reconstruction reviews.
Finally, incentives need to shift. Success is measured at the moment of action because that is where attention and authority are concentrated. If outcomes matter, authority and resources have to extend into the phase that determines them.
Until those changes are made, the system will continue to produce the same result: clarity at the start, and diffusion when it matters most. Early action is visible and decisive. The longer phase is slower, harder to measure, and easier to defer.
Attention follows the same path. It peaks at the start and fades as the stakes become more complex.
Foreman did not lose because he lacked power. He lost because he spent it without a plan for the rounds that ultimately mattered.
The United States has built a system that is effective at dismantling structures of power.
It has been less disciplined about shaping what follows.
Until that changes, the opening strike will continue to define success, even though outcomes are decided later, in the phase that receives the least planning, ownership, and sustained attention.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
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a woman drinking from a bottle
Photo by Maayan Nemanov on Unsplash
Liberalism’s Crisis: Why Its Own Success Fuels Today’s Deepest Critiques
May 16, 2026
Liberalism is no longer under attack only from the political extremes. Its most serious critics now come from within its own intellectual house. Before turning to those critiques, it is worth recalling what liberalism actually is: a political and moral framework built on the primacy of individual rights, the rule of law, constitutional limits on power, and the belief that free people—protected in their conscience, speech, property, and personal choices—can coexist peacefully despite deep differences. At its core, liberalism seeks to create a society where individuals are free to pursue their own conception of the good life, so long as they respect the equal freedom of others.
Yet it is precisely this vision of the liberal individual that today’s critics challenge. The unsettling argument they raise is this: liberalism may be failing not because it fell short, but because it succeeded too completely.
Few have made that case more forcefully than Patrick Deneen. His critique challenges the assumptions that have shaped modern democratic capitalism for generations. Yet it stands in sharp contrast to defenders of liberalism such as John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek, who—despite profound differences—saw liberalism as humanity’s best framework for sustaining freedom, prosperity, and social order.
Deneen’s central claim is as provocative as it is unsettling precisely because it cuts against liberalism’s self-image. Liberalism, he argues, did exactly what it promised: it liberated individuals from inherited authority, tradition, and social obligation. But in doing so, it also weakened the institutions that once gave people a sense of identity, moral formation, and belonging. Family, religion, civic life, and local community—once the connective tissue of society—have steadily eroded under the pressure of radical individual autonomy.
The result is not liberation, Deneen argues, but fragmentation: a society that is wealthier and freer than ever, yet increasingly isolated, distrustful, and spiritually unmoored.
For Rawls, this diagnosis fundamentally misses liberalism’s achievement. Liberalism, in his view, is not a solvent dissolving social bonds, but a framework that allows deeply different people to coexist peacefully. Free citizens will inevitably hold conflicting moral and religious beliefs. The task of liberal democracy is not to eliminate those differences, but to create fair rules under which they can coexist. Where Deneen sees disintegration, Rawls sees pluralism governed by justice.
Hayek offers a different defense altogether. His concern is less moral than practical. Complex societies, he argued, cannot be centrally directed because no government possesses enough knowledge to manage them effectively. Markets, traditions, and institutions evolve organically through millions of decentralized decisions. Liberalism works not because it perfects society, but because it allows imperfect societies to adapt and evolve without coercion.
If Deneen fears liberalism destroys tradition, Hayek would argue that liberalism is precisely what allows traditions to survive voluntarily rather than through force.
Beneath this debate lies a deeper question: what kind of creature is the human being?
Deneen rejects the liberal image of the autonomous individual as fundamentally false. Human beings are not self-created actors floating free from history and obligation. They are shaped by families, communities, faith, and inherited norms. A society that treats autonomy as the highest good, he argues, eventually produces not fulfillment, but alienation.
Rawls’ philosophy asks what principles rational individuals would choose under fair conditions, abstracting from the particular identities and circumstances that divide them. Critics argue this abstraction strips away too much of what makes people human. Rawls would counter that without such neutrality, justice becomes impossible in a pluralistic society.
Hayek approaches individuality differently still. Individuals matter not because they are morally sovereign, but because each person possesses knowledge no centralized authority can fully understand. Freedom, therefore, is less a moral aspiration than a practical necessity for coordinating society.
Deneen’s critique becomes even sharper when applied to political economy. Liberal societies often claim to champion limited government and individual independence. Yet as local institutions weaken, individuals become increasingly dependent on large centralized systems—both governmental and corporate. The paradox of modern liberalism is that a culture obsessed with personal freedom can produce societies dominated by impersonal bureaucracies, concentrated capital, and administrative power.
Here, Rawls and Hayek sharply diverge. Rawls accepts a significant role for the state in mitigating inequality and preserving fair opportunity. Markets matter, but they must serve justice. Hayek, by contrast, warns that attempts to engineer fairness often undermine the spontaneous systems that generate prosperity in the first place.
At the center of the debate is liberalism’s claim to neutrality. Deneen dismisses neutrality as an illusion. Liberalism does not merely referee competing visions of the good life, he argues—it promotes one of its own: autonomy, mobility, consumption, and perpetual choice. In the process, alternative values such as duty, stability, and rootedness are pushed to the margins.
Rawls would insist liberalism’s neutrality is political, not moral. The state does not deny deeper moral truths; it simply refuses to impose one comprehensive vision on everyone else. Yet in practice, the distinction often feels less convincing than it does in theory.
So where does this leave liberalism today?
Deneen sees a system unraveling under the weight of its own contradictions. Rising alienation, institutional distrust, polarization, and social fragmentation are not temporary malfunctions—they are the logical outcome of liberalism’s success.
Rawls and Hayek would be more optimistic, though for different reasons. Both believed liberalism retains the capacity for self-correction. The current crisis reflects not the failure of liberalism itself, but failures in how liberal societies have practiced it.
The debate ultimately turns on a deeper question: can a society organized around individual freedom sustain the communal bonds it depends on? Deneen is skeptical.
What is clear is that liberalism can no longer take its legitimacy for granted. Its defenders must do more than restate its principles; they must demonstrate its capacity to address the very concerns its critics raise. And its critics, for their part, must grapple with the risks of abandoning a framework that, for all its imperfections, has delivered unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity.
The future of liberalism will not be decided in abstract theory alone, but in its ability to reconcile freedom with belonging, autonomy with meaning, and progress with continuity. That is the challenge—and the opportunity—of our time.
Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” winner of last year’s International Book Award for Best General Nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor as a political analyst, and speaker within both the business community and on college campuses both in the U.S. and abroad.
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In this photo illustration, packages of Mifepristone tablets are displayed at a family planning clinic.
(Photo illustration by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
‘Women Will Die’: How the Mifepristone Ban Will Affect Women across the Country
May 16, 2026
WASHINGTON–Maternal health advocates and a Virginia state legislator warned that women’s health would suffer even in states that allow abortions if the Supreme Court fails to block a ban on mail deliveries of mifepristone, a drug used in abortions.
Jennifer McClellan, a representative for the state of Virginia and long-time advocate for reproductive rights, experienced a high-risk pregnancy and an emergency C-section 9 weeks before her due date. She said that she worried about the risks to individuals if they lose easy access to Mifepristone for abortions, miscarriages, or other reasons.
“I almost became the statistic of someone, a black woman, who was three times more likely to die of pregnancy or pregnancy-related complications, and many of those are because of miscarriages,” McClellan said during a webinar on Tuesday. “This is what is going to happen: women will die.”
An abortion advocacy group, Free & Just, held a webinar on Tuesday after the Supreme Court approved an emergency request from two Mifepristone manufacturers to continue the mailing of the abortion drug until Thursday, May 14. Mifepristone is a proven safe and effective drug to induce medical abortions.
On May 1, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that mifepristone must be picked up in person. For residents of Louisiana, where there is a strict ban on abortion, including cases for rape and incest, receiving Mifepristone in the mail remained the most effective form of terminating a pregnancy at home.
The state of Louisiana, which brought the case, argued that allowing the medication to be mailed to Louisiana residents contradicted the state’s ban on most abortions.
Sarah Zagorski, a spokesperson for Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group headquartered in Washington, said mifepristone has side effects that need further study, and banning remote access to the drug would protect women.
“It’s definitely a huge milestone. It’s an opportunity for the court to affirm the importance of the safety measures for women,” Zagorski said in an interview.
A 2026 study on miscarriages from the American Public Health Association states that where abortion is banned or has gestational limits showed that from 2016 to 2023, maternal or pregnancy-related mortality rates increased 9.9%, with additional evidence showing that Black women were 3.3 times more likely to die from similar complications than white women in these states.
Activists said the ability to get Mifepristone by mail is important for women across the country, even in states that allow abortions.
"Even in states where abortion is legal, as I said, this effectively ends access entirely for people in rural communities, survivors of domestic violence, and anyone who cannot take a day off of work or arrange childcare to get access to an abortion clinic," said Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights organization headquartered in Washington.
Doctor Kristin Lyerly, who works as an OB-GYN in Minnesota, said that despite practicing in a state that allows abortion, if her rural patients must pick up mifepristone from a pharmacy in person, they may have to travel an hour in each direction.
Lyerly said she sends her patients to telehealth to get prescriptions for mifepristone for more than abortions, and to treat miscarriages.. “It’s the same procedure, I send them to telehealth because they can’t access mifepristone in our rural community,” Lyerly said.
Mifepristone has multiple uses other than abortions, such as hyperglycemia or endometriosis. If the shipment ban becomes law, individuals who use mifepristone for these other medical purposes also would no longer be able to have the medication delivered. She compared the recent 5th Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“This is truly as impactful as Dobbs was for the entire country. In states like Louisiana and Mississippi and Tennessee because they just will not have access to fundamental healthcare not just for abortions, but also for managing miscarriages,” Lyerly said.
Jaylyn Preslicka is a reporter for Medill News Services.
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