As many have observed over the last decade, competing world orders are emerging that center on Russia, China and Iran challenging the world order organized by the US. It is also a challenge that focuses on democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship. Putin, Xi and Khamenei argue that democracy does not work. People, they argue, are willing to surrender their rights in exchange of order and stability. The US is the only nation that can serve as a buffer against the forces of evil represented by Russia, China and Iran. Recently, it is in the Middle East where these competing world orders are being challenged.

It is now an axiom in 2025 American culture that America’s citizens do not trust their government; they have lost confidence in government and are skeptical of almost anything coming out of Washington or even state capitals. For a democracy to truly function well there must be a bond of trust between government and its citizens; a confidence that the state has its citizens’ best interests at heart. If there is an absence of trust, citizens will turn to someone or some form of government they can trust.

Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote a most convicting piece on “trashing America’s global good name.” He wrote: “When I worked in Tokyo in the 1990s, a Japanese colleague told me a story about her father’s defining experience with Americans. In the days after Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, he was a young boy living in a small town.”

It has been a long time in coming and there have been warning signs for years, but the American debt crisis is real and can no longer be ignored: Moody’s downgraded U.S. debt to a notch below its top rating, citing chronic budget deficits and rising debt-service costs. The rating agency lagged behind S&P Global Ratings and Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. in 2011 and 2023, respectively.

Transhumanism is a not a new concept. Known as the father of transhumanism, Julian Huxley, brother of the famed writer Aldous Huxley, described this concept in a 1957 essay saying “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirely, as humanity.” Similarly, Elon Musk has long sought to upgrade humanity claiming that “to avoid becoming like monkeys, humans must merge with machines.” This argument is based on a materialistic and in some cases an evolutionary worldview that concludes we must improve upon evolution’s current iteration of humanity or be left behind by the rise of sophisticated machines.

In mid-April, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that trans women do not fall within the legal definition of women under the country’s equality legislation. This landmark 88-page ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, is a blow to campaigners for transgender rights. As Lizzie Dearden of the New York Times reported, “[T]he five judges involved in the ruling emphasized that they were not commenting more broadly on whether trans women are women, saying it was not the role of the court to adjudicate on the meaning of gender or sex. Instead, the judgment is limited to the precise interpretation of language in the 2010 Equality Act, which aims to prevent discrimination.”

Over the last several months, President Trump has acted to withhold federal funds from a raft of elite universities: Harvard ($2.26 billion), Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Princeton ($210 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million). His complaint is the “abject failure of these institutions to deal with antisemitism on campus, but the president has also demanded a broader crackdown on DEI compulsions and an expansion of viewpoint diversity among predominantly progressive faculty.”

Ideas have consequences and the battle for ideas is important in any age, but especially in our own day, when relativism, secularism and intentional disinformation are rampant in our world. Thus, in an astonishing and shocking act, President Trump, on 15 March 2025, ordered the termination of grants for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and Television Marti), the Open Technology Fund and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks are also being dismantled.

The eruption of antisemitism on the left—dressed up as opposition to Israel’s tactics in a war started by its enemies—is the most potent form of antisemitism in America. Wall Street Journal columnist, Gerard Baker writes, “Antisemitism has a strong pedigree on the left: The equation of capitalism’s evils with the supposed avarice of Jewish financiers is a popular theme, and to it has been added the modern ‘settler colonialist’ narrative that alleges Zionist rapine in Palestine.” Baker adds that “our universities are run by leaders who are models of the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics and culture. It deems the rights of certain people less worthy of protection than others, it divides the world into oppressor and oppressed. You can call for the murder of all Jews, but say sex is biological and you will be punished . . . ‘Truth’ has been deposed and replaced with the monomaniacal ideology of the ‘My Truth’ crowd.”

Attorney, columnist and evangelical Christian David French poignantly observes that it is understood that American elections “could reset our national security strategy, but they did not change our bedrock alliances. They did not change our fundamental identity. Until now.” Donald Trump is upending the entire national security strategy of the United States. His vision is destructive and dangerous. As Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker observes, “Trump’s mendacious contempt for Ukraine and . . . his cringing admiration for Russia and the ‘genius’ in the Kremlin” raise real concerns, but also signify a “new world order,” one that “will come at a steep price.”