Diplomacy Over Brinkmanship
We must repair our ties with NATO and the United Nations. The world is getting too unstable, and that instability is being encouraged rather than countered. Stability and peace are good for everyone. Wars are amazingly terrible. Just read history.
What the current administration is trying to do with tariffs, China, Venezuela, and Iran may be well-intentioned, but these efforts will fail and leave things worse than where they started due to how they are being handled. Brinkmanship is not diplomacy. There is a difference between negotiating from strength and threatening the house down every few weeks—and our allies, our adversaries, and our own businesses can all tell which one they're watching.
For eighty years, the single greatest advantage the United States has held over every rival is something no other country can copy: a network of allies who fight alongside us, buy from us, share intelligence with us, and host the bases that let us project power without going it alone. No adversary—not China, not Russia—has anything close. That network is worth more than any single weapons system, and it costs a fraction of what going it alone would.
For years, the fair criticism of NATO was that too many members leaned on the American taxpayer and didn't pay their share. That criticism worked. As of 2025, all 32 members meet the 2% of GDP defense benchmark, and combined allied defense spending now exceeds $1.5 trillion for the first time in the alliance's history. This is the goal we should be building on—allies who carry their weight—not walking away from. You don't torch the most valuable asset you own the moment it finally starts paying off.
Burden-sharing is common sense. Treating loyal democracies like protection-racket customers is not. We push allies to spend and prepare, we hold them to it, and in return we honor our word—because an alliance that our friends can't count on isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and every adversary is watching to see whether America keeps its promises.
Real strength gives you options. It lets you sit down at a table without flinching, offer the other side a way to say yes, and walk away when the deal is bad—all without firing a shot. What we're watching instead is a foreign policy run on ultimatums: maximum threats, no off-ramp, and a new confrontation before the last one is resolved. That isn't toughness. It's improvisation, and it leaves everyone guessing what America will actually do.
The same pattern shows up with China, Venezuela, and Iran. Pressure without a plan for what comes next backs adversaries into corners where their only face-saving move is to escalate. Deterrence works when it's paired with a credible path to de-escalation—a clear line, a real consequence for crossing it, and a door left open for the other side to back down. Take away the door and you don't get peace through strength. You get a crisis nobody planned and nobody can climb down from.
And tariffs are not a foreign policy. Used as an all-purpose weapon—against rivals and allies alike—they raise prices on Americans, invite retaliation against our own farmers and manufacturers, and push the countries we need onto China's side of the ledger. Trade tools have their place, but wielding them as a substitute for actual diplomacy costs us at home and abroad at the same time.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the clearest lesson of our era in what happens when aggression goes unanswered: it doesn't stop at the first border. Helping Ukraine defend itself—alongside allies who in 2026 pledged roughly €70 billion in military support—is not charity. It is a comparatively cheap way to weaken a hostile power, prove that borders still mean something, and remind every would-be aggressor that the cost of invading a neighbor is real.
But "help Ukraine" is not the same as "war without end." We should press hard—with our allies, not around them—for a durable, negotiated peace that Ukraine can actually live with, rather than an open-ended conflict with no defined goal. Backing an ally and seeking an off-ramp are not opposites. Doing both, at the same time, is what serious foreign policy looks like.
None of this works without a military second to none, and we support funding one: ready, modern, and well cared for, with veterans treated the way people who signed a blank check to their country deserve. Strength is what makes diplomacy credible in the first place. But strength is a tool, not a hobby, and the last quarter-century should have taught us the cost of open-ended wars launched without a clear objective, an exit, or an honest accounting of what they'd take.
There's also a constitutional piece that ties directly to the rest of our agenda. The Constitution gives Congress—not the President alone—the power to declare war, and for decades Congress has quietly let that power drift to the executive branch so it never has to cast a hard vote. That's backwards. Committing the country to war should require the people's representatives to go on record, in public, before the shooting starts. Reclaiming that responsibility isn't weakness—it's the accountability the Founders built in on purpose.
Further reading: Swinging the Sanctions Ax at a Court—and Chipping Away at the Dollar → — why weaponizing sanctions over grievances erodes the dollar dominance that keeps our rates low and our leverage strong.