The 2026 World Cup will bring the global game to three North American hosts: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But in the United States, it will arrive at a moment when the very meaning of hosting has become highly contested. In the background, another kind of infrastructure is being prepared: the immigration and security apparatus that will determine who enters the United States and who does not.

Teams from 48 nations will play 104 matches in 16 cities across North America between June 11 and July 19, chasing the 18-carat gold trophy of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association—FIFA—and a record $50 million in prize money.

What unfolds over the next 40 days will not only be games and competition. By staging its tournament in an America that lays its welcome mat behind an armed checkpoint, FIFA has put at risk the very organizational integrity it claims: a federation built on unity and fair play. The tournament did not pose the question of what kind of America was chosen to co-host the games; it merely scheduled the spectacle for prime time and put it in front of a billion-strong audience.

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On February 14, 2026, at the Munich Security Conference, Canadian Defense Minister David McGuinty signed a document no non-European nation had signed before. The agreement allowed Canada to join the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) program, a $175 billion defense procurement initiative central to Europe’s rearmament plans. The terms were unprecedented: up to 80 percent of components in Canadian-made defense gear sold through SAFE could be sourced domestically, far above the 35 percent cap applied to all other countries. At first glance, the SAFE agreement appears financially impressive. Canadian contractors gain access to billions of dollars through EU defense contracts. Compared to the projected $1.5 trillion U.S. defense budget for 2027, though, Canada’s share seems like small change. But the dollars involved are not the significant element of the SAFE deal. The true significance resides in the precedent the accord sets. For the first time, a longstanding American ally is openly pursuing a parallel and alternative defense partnership with Europe, signaling a broader effort among Western allies to diversify strategic dependencies. Canada was the first nation to embrace SAFE as an alternative to America. But will it be the last?

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There will be no Suez. No Saigon. No single humiliating frame for historians to seize upon. America’s retreat from Africa—a continent of 1.5 billion people and the minerals that power everything Washington claims to covet—is happening quietly. Troops are drawn down, aid is slashed, and diplomats are recalled to no fanfare. The official rationale is the pivot to the Indo-Pacific. The actual driver looks more like reflexive shrinkage. And when the bill comes due, the total could be larger than anyone in Washington realizes. The clearest evidence of the retreat is buried in a Pentagon org chart reported by U.S. media in December. The diagram is a plan to fold U.S. Central Command, European Command, and Africa Command into a single unit called the “International Command.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly asked planners to reduce the Pentagon’s global command structure from 11 to 8. NORTHCOM, the homeland defense command, and SOUTHCOM, which covers 31 countries and 14 territories in Central and South America plus the Caribbean, are to be merged into a new “Americas Command” (AMERICOM). The move reflects the administration’s goal to dominate the Western Hemisphere.

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The Constitution is clear: Congress declares war. Period. That is the way the Founding Fathers wrote it. They set the line in the nation’s founding document. On May 1, 2026, a sixty-day War Powers clock ran out of time on Operation Epic Fury. The war had been declared over on paper. The ships, aircraft, personnel, and threat framework remained. Washington did not cross the line drawn by the Founders. It wrote around it. As the clock ticked toward the deadline set by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, President Donald Trump hatched a plan: He would send a letter to the congressional leadership arguing that the hostilities with Iran had effectively ended. A ceasefire was in place. The intense phase of the air campaign had ended. By the administration’s account, the sixty-day clock had already stopped running and the executive’s legal obligations no longer applied. At the same time, the letter said the Iranian threat remained significant, that U.S. forces would continue repositioning, and that the president retained every authority he would need to resume fighting on short notice.

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Nothing angers American voters more than rising gasoline prices. They are not only an economic burden but the most direct channel through which the costs of the war with Iran are passed to the American voter. Even with talk of a breakthrough in negotiations with Iran, that relief is not something voters feel right away. As gas prices rise, they push up the broader cost of living and become a barometer of voter anger. For weeks, Americans have been paying more at the pump, adjusting their spending, and absorbing higher costs across daily life—and those effects do not fade quickly. In practice, it often takes months for earlier increases in fuel prices to work their way through the economy. With prices now reaching more than $4 a gallon and inflation rising sharply, the price at the pump is no longer just an economic indicator; it is rapidly becoming a political liability. With midterm elections approaching, it is a political gauge flashing red for Donald Trump and the wider Republican Party.

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There’s an old saying in American military circles: Do not change horses in the middle of the stream. The axiom reflects some hard-learned lessons about what can go wrong when a country subordinates military prowess to backroom politics in selecting commanders during a war. The impact can ripple through the ranks and cause as much damage as a jammed rifle or a misguided missile. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ignored that wisdom when he forced the departure of the Army’s top commander, General Randy George, the Army chief of staff, as war raged in Iran and thousands of troops from the 82nd Airborne deployed to battlefields near the Arabian Gulf. On the same day, he also dismissed Gen. David Hodne, who led the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Maj. Gen. William Green, the leader of the Army’s Chaplain Corps.

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President Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel in a war with Iran has exposed a fundamental strategic contradiction: the United States has reinforced its dependence on fossil fuels while simultaneously triggering a conflict in the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, the system’s central point of vulnerability, without a credible plan to manage the consequences. Trump told the nation that America was at war with Iran, fully aware that U.S. attacks would roil global oil markets. The impact was not buried in some top-secret CIA analysis. Any oil broker with a Bloomberg terminal knew what would happen if Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The precedent was clear—from the Tanker War of the 1980s when U.S. ships had to escort oil vessels to repeated Iranian threats to weaponize its geography. Any disruption would transmit immediately through global markets, sending gasoline prices at pumps across the country soaring. Washington understood the danger and proceeded anyway.

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The bombs are falling on Tehran, Natanz, and Fordow. Missiles threaten oil tankers trying to navigate the Strait of Hormuz. The headlines tout the deadly sorties and missile attacks by Washington and Tel Aviv while Iran retaliates against neighboring states hosting U.S. assets. But when the dust settles over the smoldering remains of Iran’s crippled nuclear program, the country likely to win the war in the Middle East will be one that has not joined the fight: China. Beijing’s long-term goal in relation to the U.S./Israeli war is not complex. Nothing forces China to pursue any intervention or take any strategic risks designed to capitalize on the war. Instead, it patiently observes as air and sea battles generate geopolitical fallout across the region and indeed the globe. Wartime developments play almost faultlessly into Beijing’s hands, as the conflict exposes American vulnerabilities, strains its resources, and reshapes its regional relationships.

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Jeff Bezos's vision for the future of the Washington Post reminds me of a mistake the late Sam Zell made when he engineered his acquisition of the Tribune Company nearly twenty years ago. Zell, a feisty and mercurial real estate billionaire, didn’t understand a fundamental truth about the business he had acquired. Neither does Bezos, judging from a piece written about the Post in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. I first met Zell in 2006 when I was managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, just before he stepped forward to acquire the Tribune newspapers and reverse the fortunes of the stellar publications the company owned, including The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

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On the morning of February 28, 2026, America went to war. Not in the way it has gone to war in the modern era—with congressional authorization, lengthy intelligence briefings, and months of public debate—but with an eight-minute video posted on Truth Social. Bombs fell on Iran before most Americans had finished their morning coffee. President Trump announced “major combat operations” in Iran, warned that American lives “may be lost,” and later told the world that the U.S.–Israeli air strikes had killed Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump also addressed the Iranian people, urging them to overthrow their government. If a legal framework existed for such an audacious attack, the White House did not initially bother to present it to Congress. Eight days earlier, the Supreme Court, in a ruling joined by six of nine justices, had bluntly told the president that he could not unilaterally reshape the global economy through self-declared emergency powers without congressional authorization. Though the ruling concerned tariffs rather than war powers, the principle was clear. Apparently, the lesson was not.

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The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling striking down President Donald Trump’s tariffs goes beyond dismantling a central pillar of the administration’s trade policy. It also significantly constrains the executive branch’s ability to impose tariffs unilaterally, shifts authority in tariff decision-making back to Congress, and alters the strategic calculus of U.S. economic statecraft at a moment of heightened Great Power competition. The ruling carries widespread economic and political ramifications, representing a major check on presidential power and invalidating the White House’s tariffs on nearly every American trading partner. Chief Justice John Roberts, with support from two Trump-appointed conservatives, wrote the majority opinion rejecting the administration’s interpretation of emergency tariff powers in a blow to Trump’s economic agenda. All three liberal justices agreed, but for different legal reasons.

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President Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh to chair the Federal Reserve places the central bank at a crucial juncture. Warsh’s sudden conversion from a diehard inflation hawk to an advocate of Trump’s interest rate cuts, combined with fiscal fragility, political pressure, and perilous macroeconomic conditions, creates a looming threat to the Federal Reserve’s cherished independence and, by extension, the credibility of the U.S. dollar. This nexus of risks occurs at what may be the most structurally dangerous moment for U.S. monetary policy since the era of Paul Volcker, the legendary cigar-chomping Fed chair who rescued the nation from raging inflation in the 1980s. The federal debt now exceeds 120 percent of GDP. Annual deficits surpass $1.5 trillion. Debt service costs exceed $1 trillion per year.

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Federal inaction on AI regulation has produced a patchwork of state AI laws, undermining U.S. competitiveness and threatening the country’s leadership of a potentially civilization-defining technology. Since 2024, more than 145 AI-related laws have been enacted at the state level, with Colorado, California, Texas, and Utah adopting divergent regulations. State approaches to regulation vary significantly. Colorado implements risk-based consumer protections for individuals affected by AI. California targets specific sectors, regulating transparency and generative AI. Texas emphasizes industry self-regulation while forcing compliance with existing statutes, including biometric privacy laws. Utah mandates only limited consumer disclosures tied to high-risk and sensitive data contexts. Penalties and compliance requirements differ across states, creating distinct regulatory obligations for companies operating in each jurisdiction.

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President Trump's military raid that removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro may have been tactically impressive, but his promise of billions from a Venezuelan oil bonanza faces harsh economic realities: the nation's oil industry, despite sitting atop the world's largest proven reserves, has collapsed from 3.5 million to 1 million barrels per day after decades of mismanagement, with crumbling infrastructure that hasn't been updated in 50 years. Technically challenging tar-like heavy crude, Venezuelan oil is expensive to extract and refine, and major oil companies show little enthusiasm for investing given they're still owed billions from previous nationalizations and face better opportunities elsewhere like Guyana.

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Just eleven months after Donald Trump’s historic return to the White House, his iron-clad base of support is showing strains catalyzed by voter angst over how he’s handling the issues that got him elected. The starkest evidence of pressure on Trump’s political standing comes from polls conducted in December 2025 that tested his support. His approval rate of only 36 percent nearly matched his all-time low of 34 percent reached just after the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 near the end of his first term. But the polls are not the only bad news for the president, whose party faces midterm elections that could dilute his power. In contrast to the early months of his presidency, Trump also faces a backlash in political circles populated by those who wouldn’t dare challenge him or his agenda just months ago.

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The war of words and weapons between the US and Venezuela involves much more than a conflict over drug trafficking and democracy; it’s a test of how effectively President Donald Trump can project power in America’s own hemisphere without creating more problems than he solves.can project power in America’s own hemisphere without creating more problems than he solves. With the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, positioned off the waters of Venezuela, Trump’s Department of War – renamed from the Department of Defense by executive order in early September – assembled “Operation Southern Spear,” the most significant commitment of US troops in the region since America invaded Panama in 1989. Various reports suggest that America now has about 15,000 US troops deployed in or near the Caribbean.

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As America’s big artificial intelligence (AI) companies unveil plans to build multibillion-dollar data centers, their digital ambitions to support miraculous AI technologies face a far more mundane roadblock: electrical power. Creating and sustaining AI systems requires massive amounts of electricity. To meet the demand, AI companies are embarking on an unprecedented investment spree in data centers, or warehouses of computers, and the power gear they need to run AI systems 24/7, 365 days a year. Indeed, data centers now account for one of the fastest-growing sources of energy demand required for supercomputers of the future. Consulting firm Deloitte estimates that power demand from AI data centers could grow more than 30-fold in less than a decade, reaching 120 gigawatts (GW), up from just 4 GW in 2024.

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On the surface, Steve Morris and Alvarys Santana don't seem to have much in common. He's a white man and a Republican. She's a Hispanic woman and a Democrat. He's a veteran of several election campaigns; she's a novice running for public office for the first time. Yet they share a common affiliation that made a difference in a nonpartisan November 4 election in Concord, N.C.: Both won separate, hotly contested races after being endorsed by the Forward Party. If you are confused about how one political party could endorse candidates from two other parties in a nonpartisan local election, then you've not heard much of the Forward Party, the closest thing America has to an organized political center of gravity that promotes moderate politics.

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Cryptocurrency didn’t grow in a straight line. It arrived in fits and starts, first as a curious experiment among a handful of tech enthusiasts, then as a fast-moving marketplace that pulled in millions of investors almost before anyone understood what it was becoming. In just a few years, it carved out a place of its own inside global finance. Yet despite all the attention and money flowing into it, the crypto world is still very young, operating with minimal oversight and sitting just outside the boundaries that govern traditional markets. That gap matters. It is more than a technical detail; it is a fault line built into the foundation of the crypto world. And every so often, the volatility that defines this space doesn’t stay neatly contained within it. Instead, it spills outward, catching established markets off guard and reminding everyone that a system built on innovation and speed can still shake the very financial structures it once promised to reinvent.

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Americans extol the First Amendment in terms usually reserved for the Ten Commandments. It is a revered article of governance, making the nation a global beacon for freedom of expression. Yet many Americans struggle to specify the freedoms the amendment grants. Now, seasoned political strategists appear ready to exploit this gap between reverence and familiarity. They are targeting a court precedent that has long been considered a cornerstone of the amendment’s press freedom guarantee. Legal scholars see this as the most serious threat to the American press in over 50 years.

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