Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian

 

Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian

The National Museum of American History, like so many aspects of the Smithsonian, has strayed far from its original purpose.

Roger Kimball, American Greatness

It seems that everyone is talking about two things these days: The Odyssey (or, to be more strictly accurate, The Odyssey as reimagined by Christopher Nolan) and the Smithsonian Institution, specifically the National Museum of American History (NMAH), one of the roughly 20 museums that huddle under the taxpayer-funded umbrella of the Smithsonian.

I have not seen the film version of Homer’s epic. But I feel confident in reporting that, for sheer entertainment, the televised cross-examination of NMAH’s longtime director, Anthea Hartig, easily beat out the cinematic version of The Odyssey. How can I say this, not having seen Matt Damon emoting around in his beard and shiny armor? Well, Sydney Smith (1771–1845) said that he never read a book before reviewing it because he found that the exercise prejudiced him. So it is with me. I shall endeavor to escape prejudice, bias, both intentional and the other kind, as well as parti pris altogether, by boldly commenting on some aspects of the Nolanized version of the story without having seen it. And seeing it is work, dear reader. A look at the screening schedule tells me that it runs nearly three hours, 172–173 minutes by the clock, though no one has been able to tell me why, in this homogenizing age of atomic clocks, we can’t get a more precise reckoning of the time.

By all accounts, Nolan’s Odysseus, unlike Odysseus in Homer’s telling, is a troubled, guilt-ridden specimen, forever agonizing over his aggressive behavior and mistreatment of others. He has, not to put too fine a point on it, anger issues, unlike Homer’s Odysseus, who experienced anger but no anger issues. In Homer’s version, Odysseus is a hero. He is clever, yes, both cunning (“πολύμητις”)  and complicated (“πολύτροπος”). But even more often than Achilles, Odysseus is described as πτολιπόρθιος, “sacker of cities.” He was a warrior. He didn’t anguish about those to whom he caused anguish. It was part of who he was. He gloried in it.

Given the length of the movie and the many liberties taken with the script, I am surprised that no one suggested having Matt Damon pay a visit to the Smithsonian or at least the congressional hearing about the Smithsonian. We know that Anthea Hartig is keen on beginning meetings with a “land acknowledgment.” It’s all a little masquerade, of course, a rancid bit of virtue signaling that costs its performer exactly nothing. But I suspect that behind the theater—by which I mean the hypocrisy—is a timid bid for expiation or absolution. There is a lot of unearned guilt sloshing around the National Museum of American History these days, and the ritual of land acknowledgment, though ever so specious, might be seen as a moral or existential hedge, drawn from the same sort of calculation Pascal conjured with in his famous wager about how individuals ought to think about the odds when it came to the existence of God.

What I want to know, however, is what Odysseus, the Homeric hero, not the movie mannequin, would have thought about the practice of land acknowledgments. Let me put cards on the table and say that I believe he would have treated the people insisting on them as he treated the Cyclops Polyphemus or, come to that, the suitors pestering the patient Penelope, his wife.

I said that the best entertainment I enjoyed last week was the cross-examination—not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation—of Anthea Hartig. And the best of the best, I thought, was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). In under 5 minutes, he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on Hartig’s long tenure at the National Museum of American History. And he did it by the simple, revelatory expedient of confronting her with the Smithsonian’s own public educational materials. “Are you a white supremacist?” he asked. “Oh no, no,” replied Hartig, smiling weakly. “Do you think we all have implicit biases?” asked Gill. “If so, what are yours?” Oh dear. “Do you think it is important to be polite?” Gill wondered. “Oh yes,” quoth Hartig, perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness, Gill would be polite to her. No such luck.

Politeness, you see, is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the Smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy. Other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work, rational thinking, respect for private property, delayed gratification, and rugged individualism.

You think that I am making this up, but I am not. It’s all there in an official NMAH brochure called “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” File it under “Things are always worse than you think.” Here’s a thought experiment: What if these habits and behaviors really were signs of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”? What then? Or to put it another way, how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States”? (It would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white. I’d wager most of them were liberal white women.)

The point is this: the Smithsonian Institution was created to preserve and celebrate the American heritage. By the same process of moral entropy that has undermined American educational institutions, transforming them from unapologetic repositories of our storied past into tenebrous havens for those “men without chests” that C. S. Lewis delineated, the Smithsonian Institution has abandoned its original mandate. No longer is it about celebrating America’s past, where by “celebrate” I do not mean “exonerate” past evils and failures, the sort of deficiencies that are part of every nation, no matter how great. The Smithsonian should not be about covering up America’s failings. It should be about putting those failings in the more capacious context of America’s stupendous achievements. This the Smithsonian under its current leadership has conspicuously failed to do.

Some observers are puzzled that President Trump should lavish so much attention on what is, after all, merely a cultural institution. He does so, I believe, because he understands that the ulterior motive of the Smithsonian Institution in its current incarnation is to rob us of our heroes. As I have put it elsewhere, Trump’s attention to institutions like the Smithsonian is part of his ambition to give America back its heroes. That is why he has overseen such meticulous criticism of the Smithsonian. Admonition, Montaigne observed, is one of the highest offices of friendship. Criticism takes time and effort to formulate and dispense. If he didn’t care, President Trump could, like presidents before him, just pass by cultural institutions like the Smithsonian and our educational apparat. But he does care, which is why he devotes serious attention to improving them.

Above all, The Odyssey is a story about νόστος, homecoming. The National Museum of American History, like so many aspects of the Smithsonian, has strayed far from its original purpose. It is wandering amongst monsters, enchanted by Sirens, lost in its fatuous, puerile disillusionment. It is time to bring it home. Perhaps Donald Trump is the Athena-like guide who can pull it off.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).

California’s Road to Serfdom

 

California’s Road to Serfdom

Property rights are an essential liberty. Violating them is the very definition of tyranny.

Marc Wheat & Mitchell Bahnsen, essay,  Law & Liberty

Several years ago, California brothers Arron and Arthur Benedetti inherited 267 acres of farmland from their father, a turkey farmer who spent his life working that land. They were not asking for a subsidy, tax break, or any government benefit. They simply wanted to build a home on property they had lawfully inherited. The government of Marin County, however, took it upon itself to say that the brothers could have their permit, but only if they signed a covenant permanently committing the land to commercial agricultural use, farming it themselves, or contracting it out in perpetuity.

The result is a trap with three exits, none of them acceptable: sell the land, farm it commercially, or sit on it and do nothing. Even though the brothers have a strong incentive to take good care of the land they own, building a home and living on what their father built is, apparently, not among the options Marin County is prepared to allow. Now, with a petition before the Supreme Court, the Benedetti brothers, two plumbers who have resided in California their entire lives, are asking the nation’s highest court to affirm a freedom the rest of the Western world has long held dear. Their case is not merely about a building permit or a zoning dispute, but whether the government may use its regulatory leverage to conscript private citizens into occupations of its choosing, and whether property rights in America retain any real meaning at all.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that the path to tyranny is rarely dramatic. It does not typically announce itself with jackboots and seizures, but arrives quietly, incrementally, through the accumulated weight of regulatory conditions that strip individuals of the freedom to direct their own lives and labor. It may start as small as a permit denial, and before long the citizen finds himself not the master of his property but its captive, working it as the state commands, or not at all. Marin County, California, has offered a case study in exactly this dynamic, and the Supreme Court now can say, clearly and finally, that this is not how American property law works.

When Americans want to modify their property, they must first ask permission from the state. That requirement may sound innocuous, but it gives local government the power to withhold the permit until the owner surrenders something the government wants but cannot legally demand outright. Marin County pulled that lever here, in direct defiance of controlling precedent.

In Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a California agency’s demand that homeowners grant public beach access as the price of a building permit. The condition, the Court held, lacked any “essential nexus” to a legitimate government interest, making it not a regulation at all, but what the Court bluntly called “an out-and-out plan of extortion.”

Building on this, Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994) held that even where a nexus exists, the burden imposed on the property owner must be “roughly proportional” to the government’s actual interest. Marin County’s demand satisfies neither test. There is no meaningful correlation between Arthur Benedetti’s desire to build a home and the county’s interest in preserving agricultural land, especially since agricultural land already accounts for over half of the US land base. Even worse, permanently conscripting a family’s property into commercial farming is wildly disproportionate to any legitimate regulatory goal. As the Court made clear in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District (2013), this framework applies regardless of how the government structures its demand. It is a foundational truth in constitutional law that the state cannot do indirectly what it is forbidden to do directly. The county may argue it is simply protecting open space and agriculture, both legitimate interests, but that is precisely the problem. If those interests are legitimate, the county has legitimate tools, by purchasing the land, negotiating a voluntary conservation easement, or deploying its taxing power. What it cannot do is coerce a private citizen into a particular occupation by holding his building permit hostage.

To understand what Marin County is doing to the Benedetti brothers, it helps to understand what it is undoing. The instinct to protect private property is not a modern political preference. It is a thread woven through the entire fabric of Western civilization, from the earliest moral codes to the constitutional settlements that shaped American law. Russell Kirk, in his classic The Roots of American Order, traced the moral inheritance of America through four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. Each contributed something essential to the Western understanding of property, and together they form a tradition that Marin County’s permit condition casually discards.

From Jerusalem came the foundational moral prohibition against violating private property. The Ten Commandments, Kirk wrote, were intended as “liberating rules that enable a people to diminish the tyranny of sin.” Prominent among them is the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” The prohibition is brief, but its implications are vast, with the commandment presupposing private ownership as a moral fact, and its violation as a moral wrong. This means property, stewardship, and justice were woven together from the beginning of Western moral order.

Athens refined the intuition about property into philosophy. Aristotle, laboring for years to define justice, concluded that people will be equals and partners in a community precisely when people still have their own things, “for when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another and they will make progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business.” Ownership, for Aristotle, was not merely an economic arrangement but a precondition for the kind of exchange and reciprocity that makes justice possible. When the state disrupts that arrangement, forcing an owner to use his property as the government prefers, it substitutes bureaucratic preference for the merit-based distribution that justice requires. “All agree,” Aristotle wrote, “that what is just in distributions ought to accord with a certain merit.” Marin County’s permit condition holds no merit at all.

Roman statesman Cicero maintained that “each one should retain possession of that which has fallen to his lot,” in opposition to the redistribution of property. Nearly two millennia later, Justice James Wilson of the early Supreme Court would later paraphrase Cicero in describing a just state as one formed by free persons united “to enjoy peaceably what is their own” in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793).

From London came the philosophical architecture that most directly shaped the American founding. John Locke argued in the Second Treatise that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself,” and that “the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Property, on Locke’s account, is not a gift of the state. It precedes the state, arising from the natural relationship between a person and the fruits of his labor. Edmund Burke, writing as the French Revolution unfolded in 1790, was equally direct, maintaining that people “have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful,” and “whatever each man can separately do without trespassing on others he has a right to do for himself.”

The turkey farmer who worked 267 acres of Marin County land had a claim on that land that no county permit condition can extinguish, and his sons’ claim is no less legitimate. Across every city in Kirk’s moral geography, the conclusion is the same. Forced occupation, or the compulsion to use one’s property as the state commands, is not regulation, but simply tyranny by another name.

The Founders did not merely inherit this tradition but secured into the heart of early American governance. James Madison wrote in 1792 that “that alone is just a government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” He was equally clear about what an unjust government looks like, primarily one that uses “arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies” to “deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called.” This was a consensus shared widely among the Founders, including Hamilton, Jefferson, and others. Property rights were, as William Michael Treanor points out, understood by “the key writers who set the intellectual framework of our Constitution—John Locke, David Hume, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and James Madison” as “a bulwark of the individual against the arbitrary power of the state.”

What Marin County is attempting, in the end, is to make the Benedettis serfs on their own land, forced by regulatory fiat to work on the soil as the government prefers, or else forfeit what their father built. The Supreme Court has the tools to stop it, including earlier judicial precedent, the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and a tradition of Western jurisprudence stretching back through London, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.

Hayek understood that the road to serfdom is paved not with dramatic usurpations but with small, incremental surrenders of economic freedom, each one justified by some legitimate public interest, each one eroding a little further the citizen’s ability to direct his own life and labor. A permit condition in Marin County may seem like a small thing, but the principle at stake is far from small—it concerns the foundations of our civilization itself. The Supreme Court should remind California and other governments tempted by the same logic that property rights are not a second-class freedom.

Marc Wheat is the general counsel for Advancing American Freedom, the advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Mitchell G. Bahnsen is a policy & legal intern at Advancing American Freedom and a student of politics, philosophy, and economics at Westmont College. He concurrently serves as a research assistant at the California Policy Center, and his commentary on constitutional principles, technology, and culture has been featured widely across conservative and classical liberal publications.

Mamdani fuels racial rift

 

Mamdani and his DSA cronies are fueling a racial rift

within the already fractured Dem party

Michael Goodwin, New York Post

The explosive charge by a black politician that Mayor Mamdani and his socialist army are guilty of “white supremacy” reveals another front in the war for New York launched by the radical left.

“White supremacy comes in all forms,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards posted on social media.

He also referenced a well-known quote from the late Malcolm X about “dangerous white liberals.”

At heart, the issue boils down to political power, who has it and competing visions for how it should be used.

A major flashpoint is that Richards is a career pol who has consistently advocated for expanded black and Latino ownership of private homes as a means of creating intergenerational wealth.

That’s totally at odds with the views of Mamdani’s agenda, and especially his top housing aide, Cea Weaver, who has made comments about housing that are ­beyond bizarre.

She once celebrated the government’s “sacred right to seize private property,” called homeownership “racist” and said it is “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

Dems under attack

In one of his many warnings about the excesses of the Mamdani machine that drove him from City Hall, former Mayor Eric Adams weighed in on the topic.

He correctly noted on X that “Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle. You have to be completely out of your f***ing mind to call that ‘white supremacy.’ ”

The spark for Richards’ latest comments is a growing resentment among the black political establishment that it is losing its hold on power and influence to the DSA, which, a 2021 survey found, is 85% white.

The group used its superior organizational skills, mostly in gentrifying neighborhoods, to turn out their voters and successfully knock off a slew of congressional and Albany Dems in last month’s primaries.

The coup alarmed the entire party, but black and Latino officials especially see themselves as under attack.

(Republicans are such an insignificant factor in the city’s political landscape that nobody blames them!)

State Attorney General Letitia James, although she had supported Mamdani’s election last year, pounced on the primary results to accuse him and the radicals he supported of being ignorant of the racial and social history of the neighborhoods they would be representing.

“Some of the candidates he has supported do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic,” James said on CNN about the ­primary results.

By then, housing ownership was already a racial flash point under Mamdani.

‘Unfair system’

It first arose in February, when he threatened to raise all city property taxes by nearly 10% if ­Albany did not hike income taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and big corporations.

The outcry was especially sharp in Cambria Heights, a suburban-like neighborhood in southeastern Queens near the Long Island border that is home to numerous black and other nonwhite families.

Many own their homes and some also own rental units.

Richards called the proposed tax plan a “nonstarter” and said at the time that he told the mayor as much.

“Under no circumstance should we consider balancing our budget on the backs of working-class New Yorkers, especially seniors on fixed incomes and workers who keep our city running,” he said in an interview.

A black homeowner named James Johnson, who attended a Cambria Heights protest aimed at Mamdani, was quoted in The Post as saying: “You screamed affordability. You ran on it. You said affordability, affordability, affordability . . . And the first thing, not even three months into your administration, into your term. You wanna hit us with a 9.5% property tax increase? Not happening.”

Another resident, Darryl Smith, added, “You keep raising the taxes, you’re gonna run us out of here. Where are we gonna go?”

The sentiment was widely shared in white liberal political circles as well, with Council Speaker Julie Menin rejecting the mayor’s property tax threat.

Signaling that it would be dead on arrival, Menin said, “We cannot be raising property taxes 9.5% on the backs of small property owners, small business owners, black and brown communities throughout our city.”

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso agreed: “This would only make an unfair system worse and hit black and brown communities hardest.”

Gov. Hochul, fearing she would be blamed for any tax hikes in an election year, satisfied Mamdani’s need for quick cash by shipping him billions in state money.

Power play

A key aspect of the racial heat is timing.

The surge of mostly white socialists comes as black politicians have reached the height of their political power in the city and state.

Adams, the city’s second black mayor, was forced out after a single term by Mamdani’s followers.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate, Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, respectively, are black.

Hochul’s running mate this year is Adrienne Adams, a former speaker of the City Council and the first black woman to hold the post.

Other top black officials include Attorney General James and the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams.

An additional front in the rising racial antagonism is that DSA members have been sharply critical of Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn pol who, as House minority leader, is the first nonwhite official to hold the top leadership spot of either party in either chamber.

As if to rub salt in black wounds, many socialist newcomers are calling for him to step down and threatening to remove him if he won’t go voluntarily.

It’s a Tehran Death Trap

A troubling report in The Washington Post paints a bleak picture of President Trump’s options in Iran.

It finds, “Analysts at American spy agencies have concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war.”

The newspaper says the report was written primarily by the CIA, whose analysts “underscored the Tehran regime’s staying power despite the loss of many of its top leaders and much of its military hardware to U.S. and Israeli attacks.”

The finding reflects what has surprised me most about the war. The regime’s willingness to accept so much pain and destruction defies logic — and Western assumptions.

The only explanation that makes a whit of sense is widespread in Israel: that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a Shia Islamist cult of martyrdom.

Controlled by psychopaths, it tortures and kills resisters and aims to impose its fanatical will on the region, and then the world, no matter the cost.

Only death will stop them.

Lies and the Language of Violence

 

Lies and the Language of Violence

Seth Mandel, Commentary

Abe Greenwaild's July 15 newsletter discussed a bizarre scene in which Rep. Ro Khanna, an anti-Israel demagogue testing a run for president, was repeatedly badgered by left-wing podcasters to say that Palestinians have a right to kill Israelis, which they did on October 7.

The Dropsite podcasters were precisely the sort of company Khanna has been keeping lately—anti-Zionists obsessed with violence. As Abe wrote:

“Khanna came face to face with the lunacy of the mob that he’s been trying to please with tweets, speeches, stunts. And he let [Jeremy] Scahill down by refusing to speak the monstrous words that would have admitted him into the esteemed ranks of the radicals. Khanna instead called October 7 a terrorist attack, denied Hamas’s right to kill Israelis, and offered some mush about nonviolent resistance.”

To progressives, the logical endpoint of their rhetoric about the evils of the Jewish state is violence against the Jewish state, and Khanna can’t pretend otherwise without getting himself called out for the contradiction.

Now it turns out that the very day Khanna went on the Dropsite show, the Democratic Socialists of America—the intellectual force behind the progressive coalition of which Dropsite is a part—released its updated national platform. And coincidentally, their platform also made explicit the group’s support for violence against Israel.

The wording of the DSA platform was slightly less overtly violent than the Dropsite crew’s on Tuesday. But not less-violent enough to leave any doubt. Under the Free Palestine subheading in the section on “a working-class foreign policy,” the DSA writes:

“Recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right to resist military occupation, and the right to self determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.”

In politics, when there is a mass coordinated campaign to sell a lie, that lie has a specific purpose. We would do well to get used to asking ourselves what might be the purpose of the lies we come across. The purpose of the “genocide” lie is clear if you just listen long enough to the people spreading it. The reason they falsely accuse Israel of genocide is that they want to justify violence against Israelis.

The same is true for the “occupation” lie. Both the DSA and the Dropsite folks know Israel left Gaza 20 years ago. They are not ignorant of the fact that the occupation is long over. They just don’t care, so they use it to pressure a congressman (unsuccessfully) to say that murdering Israelis is permitted. And the DSA uses the same lie to support Palestinian “resistance.”

As Dropsite and others have made clear, October 7 is included in “resistance.” That word, resistance, is the key to understanding how all this incitement works in broad daylight. “Resistance” is meant to substitute for “self-defense.” But because what these activists are describing is not actually self-defense, they generally don’t use that phrase. They use “resistance” to evoke the concept.

The next step is to expand the targets of resistance beyond Israelis. Violent anti-Semitic incidents in Canada in 2026 have more than doubled the number of such incidents in 2025, and the year is barely half over. Why are people attacking Jews in near-record numbers, 6,000 miles away from the conflict? Because the resistance ideologists have expanded the definition of culpability: The people being attacked in 2026 for a war that ended in 2025, which was launched by Palestinians in 2023, “are complicit,” the extremists tell us.

So are politicians. I wrote yesterday about Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who was bullied into changing his vote on an Israel-related bill by Hamasniks in America. We talked about the case further on the podcast this morning. The gist of it is that Smith voted against his own beliefs and principles because he was giving in to a campaign of intimidation. As Smith himself said after the vote:

“I am deeply concerned about the tactics used by those on the far left to advocate for cutting off aid to Israel. To date, my family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbors’ lives have been disrupted by demonstrations in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted. Those who engage in this type of behavior model a dangerous form of corrosive politics that seeks to intimidate those who disagree with them. We must be able to have civil discourse if we want to solve difficult problems, and I remain committed to open, respectful engagement.”

Smith had already flipped on a different anti-Israel amendment after pressure last month. It has clearly been a difficult six weeks for him. His statement sounds like a plea for mercy. But the DSA and the rest of the Hamasniks have made it equally clear that whatever happened over the past six weeks is a prelude to more.

Putin Has Lost the War

Putin Has Lost the War in Ukraine

The only question is what the endgame will look like.

Gregory W. Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko, National Review

In February 2022, Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked military attack on Ukraine assuming that Kyiv would fold in a week, that its president would flee or be killed by one of Russia’s hit squads, and that a soft, divided West would issue a strongly worded communiqué and get back to buying gas from Russia. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. Four-and-a-half years later, his military has been humiliated, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still in charge, and the West — despite some tenuous moments — has bankrolled the methodical destruction of much of the Russian military. Putin may yet hold a ribbon of scorched Ukrainian soil when the guns fall silent. He has already lost this war; the only question is what the endgame will look like.

Consider what “winning” now looks like from Moscow. In June, after months of grinding assault, Russian forces seized perhaps a dozen square miles of Ukraine — a patch smaller than Manhattan — and paid for it with something close to 40,000 casualties. The Institute for the Study of War reckons the exchange at roughly 1,300 Russian dead and wounded for every square kilometer taken, up from 68 the year before. That is more men lost in a month than the Kremlin can recruit, despite ever-higher signing bonuses and the clearing out of prisons. For Russia, the war has become a meat grinder, and Putin keeps feeding it his own people. With Ukraine’s drone advantage constantly growing both in numbers and sophistication, the eventual outcome is now clear.

To grasp the scope of Russia’s impending defeat, it is helpful to remember Putin’s original goals included halting NATO’s expansion; instead, he frightened Finland and Sweden into the alliance and roughly doubled the length of Russia’s NATO frontier. He also invaded to prove Ukraine was not a real nation; instead, his “special military operation” has forged a fractious, partially Russophone country into a proud and patriotic people who will hate Moscow for at least a century. He invaded to shatter Western unity; instead, he provoked German rearmament, revived the NATO alliance, and reduced his own country to a resource colony of Beijing.

Diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that Soviet power “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” Putin has spent four years proving the maxim true about his own regime. The Kremlin is now so panicked about the direction of the war it is reported to be resorting to biowarfare: dumping dead, anthrax-infected cows in fields near residential areas in Kherson. Perhaps worst of all for Putin, his beloved Crimea, which he took by force in 2014, is now under a state of emergency, with Russians fleeing by the thousands back to Russia. In fact, Crimea is at risk of being retaken by Ukraine in part this year and eventually fully as the Russian military continues to falter. Such a defeat would be Putin’s Waterloo.

President Trump always wants to be on the winning side, and even he and his team now see that Russia “doesn’t have the cards.” His comments on July 8 at the NATO summit encouraging Ukraine to strike targets deep in Russia marked strengthening of U.S. support for Ukraine, another bad sign for Putin. In fact, the summit itself was a complete about-face from last year’s, with allies openly discussing the Kremlin’s rapidly worsening military situation.

The economic realities are, if anything, more damning. Sanctions were never a guillotine; they were a slow puncture, and the tire is finally going flat. Oil and gas revenue — the lifeblood of the Russian state, some 40 percent of the federal budget — fell by roughly a quarter last year. The National Wealth Fund’s liquid reserves have dropped by 61 percent since the Russian invasion and now holds mostly hard-to-sell Chinese yuan and gold bullion, which Moscow continues to sell aggressively to finance the war. Growth has collapsed from the wartime “sugar rush” of 4 percent to something the Kremlin’s own ministers now admit was near zero for 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, the Russian economy actually contracted. It appears Q2 was more of the same. The Russian government now spends close to 50 percent of its resources on the war, crowding out spending on education, health care, infrastructure, and everything else not war-related.

To plug the ever-expanding national deficit, Putin has raised the value-added tax and expanded taxes on small businesses. As a result, a quarter-million small businesses have closed. Prices for basic food items were up 20 to 30 percent in Moscow in just the month of January. Interest rates remain in the punishing mid-teens and in truth are only available for companies in military-related industries. And with Ukrainian drones and missiles damaging Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure nightly, average Russians are furious about the kilometer-long gas lines that are the new normal in most areas. Russian social media channels reflect widespread frustration with Putin and the war, scenes that were nonexistent just a year ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, Putin himself is showing signs of severe stress. In a recent interview with a Russian journalist, Putin spoke at times incoherently about battle plans for Ukrainian towns and cities that do not exist. Russian elites are increasingly convinced Putin has led Russia into a death trap and has no credible plan to bring the war to an end.

Some in the West — wary of the costs and suspicious of every foreign entanglement — will object that Russia still holds Crimea and much of the Donbas, that Ukraine’s counteroffensives have stalled and that this looks less like victory than a bloody stalemate. The truth is that Russia is increasingly unable to supply or support its troops in Crimea. With a kill rate in the Donbas estimated at 10:1 in Ukraine’s favor, Russia is bleeding with an actual net loss of territory in June. A great power that sets out to subjugate its neighbor and, four-plus years on, cannot take a single fortress town without spending whole battalions has proven it cannot win. It has advertised the hollowness of its own threat. Putin wagered the future of Russia — its men, its treasury, its standing, its access to the modern world — on a quick imperial restoration. He got a frozen, ruinous quagmire and a NATO twice as long as the one he feared. Since 2022, he has even lost many of his former global allies such as Syria, Venezuela, and Armenia, with Iran and Cuba on the edge. And now he is losing his own people, who see with their own eyes that the war has come to Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention their gas stations and grocery stores.

Putin has failed in each of his pre-war objectives and has lost the upper hand in the war. Without the use of nuclear weapons, which would risk a retaliation that could easily wipe out his entire regime and much of Russia’s major cities, Putin has lost the war in Ukraine.

The task before the West is clear, but it is not easy. We must keep our nerve, keep Kyiv armed, and let the brutal math finish its work — as a bankrupt state bleeds money and men faster than it can bear. As in the Cold War, the U.S. must lead this effort. Signing the Russian Sanctions Bill courageously passed by the House recently would be a strong step forward.

Ronald Reagan grasped what Kennan taught: Against a brittle tyranny, time and pressure accomplish what armies cannot without unacceptable costs. The only question for Putin now is how many more Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians he will kill before he admits defeat or is removed from power by those he has led into this disaster. He has already lost 1.5 million Russian soldiers, killed or left homeless tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, and kidnapped more than 20,000 innocent Ukrainian children. It is time Putin ends the insanity or is removed from office. Continued strong Western support for Ukraine will hasten that blessed day.

Gregory Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko are co-authors of the recent book Portraits of Ukraine: A Nation at War and are giving all profits from book sales to pro-Ukrainian charities.