The Global Fight for Freedom

This week, contrary to popular opinion, The Economist marveled at America’s enduring power. It was more of a complaint than a compliment, but who cares? They’re right—No nation in history has been freer, stronger, or more prosperous.
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Here is what Xi and Putin will never grasp: American power endures not because her leaders are strong, but because they are bound by a set of rules preventing them from standing between the American people and their aspirations.
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This week’s Dispatches prove only one force can stop the USA. Not Beijing. Not Moscow. Certainly not Tehran. Only American politicians, left and right alike, can stop America.
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Happy 250^th, America! Make sure they stay out of your way. .

Flashpoints

1. China's Robot Wolves Are Prowling
2. Trump Just Can't "Let It Be"
3. Iran's Mass Murderer Nails the Story

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

The West is toasting a triumph. The innovation of a free people has empowered Ukraine to bleed a former superpower — proof the small can now humble the mighty. Savor it.
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But to the east, the pendulum is swinging back toward power.
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They move through the ruins in threes. One scouts. One kills. One waits in reserve. Four-legged, rifle-mounted, they read the rubble with laser eyes and hunt body heat in smoke. The laser fires pulses, mapping pitch-black streets in 3D. An onboard brain decides where to step and what to shoot. The pack scouts ahead of infantry, clears paths, breaches obstacles, and marks ambush points.
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Urban combat has always carried the highest casualty rate. Now, creatures without fear walk into the kill zone so men don't have to.
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China names them ominously: “Shadow”, “Polar”, and “Bloody”. Scout, supply, and slaughter. The newest carry grenade launchers, automatic rifles, and micro-missiles.
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They share what they see, press on as their packmates fall, and link to aerial drone swarms and naval “shark packs”. This is the real menace — a single, autonomous kill network, coordinating across land, air, and sea.
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The trigger waits on a human — for now. But Chinese military research already maps the next step: machines a soldier only launches, then sets free to kill.
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A machine force covers the PLA's weakness — no combat since 1979. It lowers the human cost of seizing Taiwan, where the wolves are built to soak up the slaughter of the first wave.
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America is not asleep. The Pentagon's Replicator program, now the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, races to field thousands of cheap autonomous systems; Anduril and Ghost Robotics fuel a defense-tech boom; U.S. frontier AI still leads the world.
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Yet a Luddite revolt is rising on the left, threatening to cede the battleground. The guardrails proposed thus far are reasonable — Anthropic's principled refusal to build fully autonomous weapons, Democratic bills keeping a human on every lethal call.
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But Bernie and AOC are pushing a data-center moratorium, Warren a new tax. Should it reach the compute that powers military AI, we will have bound ourselves with rope Beijing happily forgoes.
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The future of war is robotic and autonomous, and it will move forward with or without the U.S. As a former software developer, I see it plainly: battle plans will run on a development cycle — coded, deployed, patched, shipped again in rapid sprints, each battle — a release, complete with bugs that will cost lives.
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The side that builds the best algorithm and iterates fastest wins. We do not get to opt out of this war. We only get to win or lose.
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Ukrainian drone-maker Oleksiy Babenko understands the danger of autonomous warfare, but he builds it anyway— because the alternative is annihilation. His logic should haunt every policymaker:
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"Either robots will kill us in 50 years, or the Russians will kill us in a year."

“When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be”
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Like Paul, Donald’s mother was named Mary. But her son never learned the words of wisdom.
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For a century, Republicans claimed "laissez-faire" economics as scripture — French for "let do," or "leave it be." Trump preaches it too. Then he meddles. He tinkers. He dictates, driven by a boundless faith in his own judgment and an instinctive hostility toward anyone amassing power to rival his own — lest they bend the knee.
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So it went this week, as the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from its newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, leaving the company — unable to tell where its users sit — no choice but to shut them down altogether.
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​It was the first time any government forced a publicly released frontier model offline. The shock was global. Across the pond, The Economist fretted about America's "vast new power" over the world's most important technology.
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There is real reason for concern. Mythos hacks so well it had already uncovered more than 10,000 software bugs; Anthropic withheld it from the public and built Fable as the safe, defanged version to satisfy the administration.
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But Amazon — Anthropic's biggest investor and its direct competitor — warned officials of a "jailbreak." Independent researchers found no such thing. Whether Amazon acted for humanity or market share, no one can say.
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This was the second shakedown in four months. In February, the Pentagon branded Anthropic a supply-chain risk and Trump yanked it from federal agencies, calling its leaders woke. The ties to left-wing causes are real enough — but this was obvious punishment for CEO Dario Amodei's refusal to let the military use Claude for mass surveillance or autonomous killing.
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Amodei, perhaps the industry's strongest voice for AI safety laws, keeps getting clubbed on the very safety he champions. The two sides are talking again, but the models remain dark.
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Yet the real hour of darkness was the executive order Trump signed in early June: AI labs must hand the White House every model 30 days before the public sees it. I spent over two decades in software. Inserting federal bureaucrats into a release cycle is lunacy, certain to throttle American competitiveness. They had already cleared Fable, then reversed on a rival's whisper.
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There won’t be an answer from the left. The same week, Bernie Sanders introduced a blatantly Marxist bill to seize a 50% public stake in the largest AI firms, with government voting shares and board seats inside each one. Hayek named the flaw long ago: no commission can hold the dispersed knowledge that guides a fast-moving technology.
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I'm no laissez-faire purist. Government deserves a voice on behalf of the people it represents. But when Amodei said the ban meant pulling the model, Lutnick replied: "That's the point." That is full control, not input.
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American AI still leads the world — better, by far, than the alternative. But the broken-hearted users living in the world agree: there needs to be a better answer.
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​Sources: The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Hill, Time

Occasionally, the people inside the story tell it better than I ever could. This week, I rely on their words to tell Iran's story.
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Last week, Peter Doocy — perhaps the sharpest pencil in the Fox News box — confronted the president with his own words. "A wise man once said… 'Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.'"
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Trump asked who said it. "Donald Trump," Doocy answered. Pressed on how he'd sell the deal to a wary public, the president retreated to the battlefield: "Well, here they lost militarily, okay?"
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They did. The blockade had Iran's economy by the throat. Then Trump inexplicably let it go. Asked why, he said "I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened, but all I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship."
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Then he named the one president he refused to become — not Carter, as we'd speculated, but "the late, great Herbert Hoover."
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A startling admission — and our whole case against him in a sentence: a capricious, transactional retreat traded for a quarter's stock prices, indifferent to the Iranian people he'd promised "the hour of your freedom is at hand," and to the lasting security their liberty would have bought.
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Iran lost the war. Days after signing, its eminently corrupt, mass-murdering chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, explained why it barely mattered. "Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it was not even comparable."
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He is right, and that is the scandal. The navy lies at the bottom of the Gulf. Most of the missiles are rubble. But the one aim Trump placed above all others — "They will never have a nuclear weapon" — survives, left to a 60-day talk with no enforcement. The regime stands. Hormuz reopened on Iran's terms, its leverage banked for the next crisis.

Once more, the sharpest words aren't mine — this time, they come from history.
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"It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it." — Douglas MacArthur"
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"We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win." — Henry Kissinger, reflecting on Vietnam

Sources: Fox News, NBC News, CNN, NPR, Middle East Forum
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Gaffes, Corrections, and Utter Humiliations

Three weeks ago, the Dispatch from Turkey stated that Ankara asked President Trump to delete his post attributing a fabricated quote to Erdoğan, and that he complied. That was wrong. Trump did post the invented line — praising himself as "the leader the world has been waiting for for centuries" — and he did delete it. But no credible source explains why.
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The claim that Ankara requested the deletion traces to Russian state-aligned outlets and social media, not verified reporting. I’m kicking myself for this one — the same kind of lazy and mindless knock on Trump that infects the mainstream media.
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The overall point of the piece holds. The U.S. keeps gilding a regime that bankrolls the Muslim Brotherhood and helps Tehran hunt Americans — and under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, American sons and daughters are pledged to defend it.
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My thanks to the astute reader, Brandon, who identified the gaffe.
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