As your correspondent submitted his latest dispatch from DC, the status of the ceasefire with Iran was up in the air. By the time you’re reading this, the bombing may have resumed — and perhaps that is as it should be if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continues to block the Straits of Hormuz, which was a crucial condition for the temporary ceasefire.

Back in Washington, the cherry blossoms — that spectacular wash of pink across the city — are sadly over. Politics and policy debates, however, never are …

Our fine men in uniform

However fragile this ceasefire may be, and however bombastic and intemperate our commander-in-chief, Donald J. Trump, may be, it is worth pausing to marvel at the extraordinary effectiveness of the United States (US) military.

First there was the daring raid on Caracas and the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his very own Lady Macbeth, Cilia Flores. To fly into hostile territory and arrest a head of state — illegitimate or not — is the stuff of Tom Clancy novels, and no doubt Hollywood producers are already planning the inevitable blockbuster.

In Iran, too, the effectiveness of US forces — combined with Central Intelligence Agency intelligence officers and analysts — has been striking. Operation Epic Fury has reportedly wiped out Iran’s navy and much of its defensive capability. Working alongside the Israeli Air Force, allied forces have destroyed more than 80% of Iran’s air defence systems. The fact that more US jets were lost to friendly fire (three) than to Iranian action (two) is remarkable. And once again, Hollywood will surely not be far behind — this time with the story of the intrepid rescue mission to save a downed US airman hiding in the mountains of southern Iran.

The total US military budget now exceeds $1 trillion annually — a vast sum, and by some estimates more than three times the combined military spending of European Union (EU) countries. There is undoubtedly waste in such a large budget, but recent events suggest that considerable resources are being deployed to significant effect. President Trump’s latest proposal would increase Pentagon spending to $1.5 trillion. Congress is unlikely to approve this in full, but it does signal the administration’s priorities, including a long-overdue military modernisation programme.

Many will baulk at these figures, and not without reason. Yet if maintaining a strong military presence helps to deter or dismantle regimes that spread instability — allowing global trade and prosperity to continue — the investment may prove worthwhile.

It also appears that open, democratic societies — with political accountability, free speech, and transparency, and where the life of an individual soldier is treated as sacrosanct — outperform authoritarian societies. Russia falls into the latter category; the US and Israel into the former. In a grim echo of Stalinist practices, Russian commanders appear willing to expend soldiers’ lives with little regard. By contrast, the US and Israel will move heaven and earth to save a single service member. That difference in values goes to the heart of what is being defended — and why liberal democracies must prevail.

Our dwindling middle class?

For years, Vermont’s Democratic senator Bernie Sanders has argued that the middle class is shrinking, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Similar claims are made by many on the political Left, and increasingly echoed on the Right, where globalisation is blamed for exporting jobs and hollowing out middle-class prosperity. Both sides tend to call for more protectionism and greater government intervention.

There is a kernel of truth here. The rich are indeed getting richer. But the claim that the poor are getting poorer is not true. The middle class may be shrinking — but not necessarily because people are falling down the income ladder. Rather, they are moving up it.

Research by American Enterprise Institute scholars Stephen Rose and Scott Winship shows that the upper-middle class has grown from around 10% of families in 1979 to more than 30% today, while the lower-middle share has declined. Furthermore, data from sources such as Human Progress show that we are not only richer, but have access to more and better things than ever before.

That is not to deny that many individuals and families still struggle. Ask any twenty-something trying to buy a home. But the remarkable thing about America’s mostly free market (and it’s not nearly as free as it should be) is that it is in precisely those sectors most regulated by the government that are the most out of reach to the poor. And mostly the regulation is done in the name of making things more accessible and better for the poor. Irony, thy name is government regulator.

Economist Mark Perry’s well-known “chart of the century”, which tracks price changes across US goods and services, illustrates this point: prices tend to fall in competitive sectors and rise in heavily regulated ones.

The nationalist conservatives on the new Right would have us believe life is awful and we need more government intervention to fix it. Their “solutions” would actually leave us all far worse off. Perhaps that’s why they have to be less than honourable in making their case, to the point of knowingly using outdated or incorrect data. One of the leaders of this natcon crusade is the economist Oren Cass of American Compass. Have a look at this revealing exchange between Cass and Scott Winship on the use of Winship’s data, and the way Cass declines to use data that would conflict with the case he hopes to make.

Trade “liberation” … liberation from what exactly?

US Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer spoke at a Washington think tank this week, outlining the administration’s trade agenda. When President Trump introduced his tariff programme just over a year ago, he described it as “Liberation Day”. What exactly the US is being liberated from remains open to interpretation — possibly prosperity itself.

Administration officials argue that trade with China, particularly since its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, has cost millions of American manufacturing jobs — figures as high as 3.7 million jobs are often bandied about. However, manufacturing employment had been declining as a share of total employment for decades prior to China’s entry into the WTO, and the rate of decline did not change afterwards. Automation appears to have played a far more significant role than trade. If you were a manufacturer, the robot took your job, not Ming Wang from Shanghai.

At the same time, the broader US economy has remained dynamic. Many displaced workers have found employment in other sectors. Data cited by Scott Winship shows that unemployment among former manufacturing workers was 3.7% in 1999 and had fallen to around 3% by 2023.

Nevertheless, protectionist sentiment remains strong. As Greer indicated, the administration is prioritising bilateral agreements and has all but given up on the WTO. Given that, it was not surprising that the room in which Greer spoke was filled with trade representatives from numerous embassies from Europe and Asia. The EU Ambassador to the US was seated in the front row. That’s as it should be. But where were the Africans? Where were the South Africans? Nowhere that I could see.

That’s a poor show, especially when Greer spoke at length about the Trump Administration’s desire for trade deals on critical minerals, including rare earths. The South African government could and should be talking with the Trump Administration about minerals deals, but it doesn’t seem they are. Perhaps the leaders of the African National Congress are too busy weeping over the deaths of Iranian terrorists to pay attention.

JD’s Hungarian waltz

Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to support Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in his re-election campaign. Hungary’s nationalist conservative model has often been cited by parts of the American Right as a template.

However, critics — including Swedish economist Johan Norberg in a new Cato Institute paper — argue that Orbán’s government has weakened democratic institutions while delivering little in the way of economic growth or progress on key objectives such as increased fertility rates.

Let’s take Hungary’s goulash and paprika but leave its economic and social policies in the bin.

Back home, JD’s main backer, Tucker Carlson, has been excoriated by President Trump, who called him a “low-IQ person” and dismissed him as “irrelevant.” Thank goodness Trump has finally called out the vicious, and increasingly deranged, podcasters on the far Right who have been spewing antisemitic bile for far too long. Your correspondent lives in the hope that Tucker being on the outs signals the decline in JD political fortunes, for the list of better candidates to take on the Republican Party’s mantle is very long.

Previously JD appeared in Germany and threw his weight behind the right-of-center Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, to little effect. By the time you read this, we may know the outcome of the Hungarian election and perhaps, if the polls are accurate, Peter Magyar will have trounced him. Should that come to pass, it will be another sign of JD’s poor political instincts. Maybe those instincts will have him moving back to Ohio after his term is up, but I’m a hopeless optimist.