Op-Ed

Liberal democracies did not fail because they defended themselves after 9/11, but because they spent the next two decades pretending that ideology, borders, and integration no longer mattered in a world where all three still kill people.

The Senate’s vote is Congress doing its job the way the Constitution intended, putting sunlight on military force and drawing a hard line against any president who thinks war powers come with no questions asked.

Dürer’s knight rides on as a reminder that leadership is measured less by the enemies at your back than by whether you keep your principles intact when politics, temptation, and fear start whispering in your ear.

I am not crossing into Cambodia because I want to, but because borders now behave like quiet intelligence services, and once you have been attached to a war, even a routine visa run starts feeling like you are moving through someone else’s threat matrix.

Fuentes sells antisemitism and Kremlin-friendly authoritarian nostalgia the way the internet sells everything else, as meme-flavored entertainment stripped of consequence, and Europe cannot afford to treat that kind of cultural poison as harmless content.

What should feel like a straightforward moment of recognition too often turns into a slow, bureaucratic grind where lost awards, subjective gatekeeping, and poor communication leave deserving service members feeling dismissed instead of honored.

The tanker seizure off Venezuela, executed under a lawful warrant and powered by tight interagency teamwork from the Coast Guard, FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Department of Defense, shows how the United States can hit terrorist-linked maritime networks where they move money and materiel while staying inside the lines of due process.

Trump’s National Security Strategy isn’t isolationism, it’s a hard pivot toward a narrower, transactional worldview where borders and identity politics drive the threat picture, “Western civilization” becomes a tribal banner, and allies are left wondering if they’re partners or just the next line item to be renegotiated.

America is not collapsing from outside pressure but hollowing itself out from within, trading shared civic responsibility for grievance, celebrity worship, and the comforting lies of a cult that mistakes cruelty for strength and ignorance for conviction.

Zelensky’s refusal to trade away a single inch of Ukrainian soil is not stubbornness but the last solid line between a world of rules and a world where every dictator thinks they can redraw the map at gunpoint.

From where I sit in Phuket, watching FPV suicide drones carve into Thai positions from a frontier run by casinos and scam compounds, it is clear this is no border misunderstanding but a conflict engineered by foreign operators using Cambodia’s criminal economy as cover.

The American people will only continue to trust their military if its leaders meet them with the same honesty and courage we expect from every soldier who ever raised their right hand to serve.