As a civic organization, the Capitol Hill Restoration Society helps protect the historic character of Capitol Hill. History lives in our buildings and architecture and prior to associations like CHRS, there was very little that could be done to prevent razing or extreme modification of houses now deemed historic. While the RFK campus is not directly connected to Capitol Hill, as the historic district’s eastern end is between 11th and 14th Streets east, our collective quality of life is deeply impacted by our neighbors’ well-being and the decisions made by the city. (N.B.: Here is a map of the Capitol Hill Historic District as of 2018.)

CHRS recently shared a press release supporting the development of the RFK campus as a site for recreation and increased affordable housing– in other words, espousing progressive ideals that have been espoused previously by the Bowser administration. The condensed release is below, but here is a link with added context and sources. We appreciate the thoughtful approach and scholarship that CHRS has invested in stating their position.

CHRS is in alignment with the important District goals in the 2021 Comprehensive Plan and earlier studies which have been long championed by Mayor Muriel Bowser and other civic leaders,” Angie Schmidt, president of CHRS, said.

CHRS supports using the land for athletic and recreational use, she said, as well as including affordable housing, commercial and residential projects, continued public access to the Anacostia River Trail, and no development within 60 feet of the shoreline and wetlands next to the Anacostia River. 

But, she said, “The residents of Ward 7 and the Kingman Park Historic District have a much more vested interest in how the campus is developed. CHRS intends to be a good neighbor and support their wishes.”

The post Capitol Hill Restoration Society Supports Progressive Development on RFK Campus appeared first on The Hill is Home.

For years, Happy Bud was just another storefront on Georgia Avenue in Petworth; a place where just about anyone over the age of 21 could walk in and buy all manner of smokable cannabis, edibles, and even magic mushrooms.

But in early February things were decidedly less happy: D.C. police officers and regulators with the Alcohol Beverage and Cannabis Administration confiscated more than four pounds of cannabis and padlocked the store. Two “Notice of Closure” signs are now visible in the door and window, scarlet letters marking a change in how weed is bought and sold in D.C.

Happy Bud is one of 28 cannabis gifting stores that ABCA shuttered since last fall, with another 28 having voluntarily closed after receiving warnings from the city. And that’s only the beginning: ABCA says that enforcement will expand in the spring, likely putting an even larger dent into what was a vibrant – albeit illicit – homegrown market for cannabis in the nation’s capital. (Have any doubt of its prevalence? Just take a deep breath on any D.C. sidewalk.)

The enforcement blitz against the so-called I-71 shops – named after the 2014 ballot initiative that legalized the personal possession, cultivation, use, and gifting of small amounts of cannabis – won’t leave consumers high and dry, though. ABCA has been rapidly issuing new licenses to new medical cannabis dispensers and cultivators, so much so that the regulated market for weed could grow exponentially in the coming year.

But even those legal sellers are facing stiff headwinds. The number of registered patients that can legally buy from them hasn’t grown significantly, there’s a shortage of locally made cannabis products for dispensaries to sell, and Maryland’s fully legal market for recreational cannabis sales easily draws D.C. residents just over the border.

“Things are in flux,” says Meredith Kinner, an attorney who specializes in helping cannabis sellers get medical licenses. 

A quick history on D.C.’s weird weed market

For the full story, we need to start in 1998. That’s when D.C. voters approved a ballot initiative legalizing the sale of medical cannabis to people with a range of significant conditions, like HIV/AIDS, glaucoma, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. The first actual sale, though, didn’t happen until 2013. (More on why in a second.) Then there was Initiative 71 in 2014, which was premised on the basic idea that D.C. residents should be able to grow, consume, and possess small amounts of cannabis for personal use. 

Republicans in Congress, though, didn’t like either of the voter-approved initiatives. After the 1998 vote legalizing medical cannabis, they prohibited the city from spending any money to actually get the program off the ground. (Hence the delay until 2013 for sales to start.) And in 2015, they signed off on a budget provision prohibiting D.C. from taking any steps to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana, as was becoming a growing trend in states across the country. (It’s known as the Harris Rider, after Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris, who authored it.)

D.C.’s cannabis aficionados, though, were quick to find a loophole: gifting, which Initiative 71 allows. It didn’t take long before an underground scene made up of pop-up events and delivery services emerged, all offering everyday items for sale with gifts (wink, wink) of cannabis on the side. This so-called gray market quickly graduated to storefronts, with more than 100 popping up across D.C. and producing estimated annual sales worth some $600 million.

All the while, the congressional prohibition on D.C. legalizing recreational sales remained in place – despite city officials saying they wanted to move forward with it – and the small number of medical marijuana dispensers started complaining that they were losing business to the large sector of unregulated gifters.

Getting rid of gifting

In late 2022, the D.C. Council came upon a somewhat clever compromise. It made it far easier for residents and visitors to get a medical cannabis card, which lawmakers posited would mean more people would shop at legal medical dispensers instead of the gifters. More importantly, though, the council offered illicit gifting shops a path to transition to the legal medical market – or face the city’s regulatory wrath. 

The move produced quite a rush: more than 200 license applications were filed through mid-2024, most for retail locations. Around the same time, ABCA gained the power to issue warnings to any gifters that hadn’t applied to transition – and eventually padlock their doors. Those closures started last fall, and the pace only picked up in recent months. (D.C.’s crackdown was modeled on the one that happened in New York City last year.)

According to Fred Moosally, ABCA’s director, in the latter months of 2024 the agency confiscated more than 265 pounds of cannabis, 151 pounds of edibles, six unregistered guns, and more than $50,000 in currency. In some cases, police found what they said was cannabis laced with amphetamines, along with 61 pounds of psychedelic mushrooms – which are not regulated nor legal, though enforcement is a low police priority. 

The enforcement – which to date was coordinated by a single ABCA inspector – is expected to ratchet up in April. Moosally says that 33 gifters who applied for dispensary licenses have until March 31 to finalize the transition or close up shop altogether. He also says ABCA is in the final process of hiring two more cannabis inspectors.

‘We are still barely surviving’

All of the talk of enforcement is of little comfort to some of D.C.’s existing medical marijuana dispensaries, who say they are still losing business to existing gifters and illicit delivery services – not to mention Maryland’s market.

“For many years, there have been hundreds of illegal shops operating in D.C. It is still true that most if not all retailers are a block away from an unregulated retailer,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn, the owner of Takoma Wellness Center, the city’s longest-running medical dispensary, in testimony to the council earlier this month. “This failure to shut down more shops quickly has made it harder for legal shops to succeed. We are still barely surviving.”

As of January 2025 there were some 30,000 patients registered with the medical cannabis program, including D.C. and non-D.C. residents, an increase of roughly 3,000 patients compared to September 2024. But in that same time the number of licensed medical dispensaries has doubled – and there’s more competition to come. There are 33 pending dispensary licenses that could come online by the end of March, and another 150 conditional licenses that have until mid-2026 to open.

On top of that, businesses in the medical cannabis market are regulated in a way their gifting counterparts never were. To start off with, dispensers have to source the product from local cultivators while gifters have been known to illicitly ship it in from as far away as California. 

“We were shocked that our profits were not a tenth of what we projected,” shared Caroline Crandall, co-owner of Green Theory in the Palisades, which was one of the first gifting stores to make the jump to the legal medical market last year. “We are simply trying to make a living … but the reality we face is unsustainable. We are operating at a significant loss.”

Like Kahn, Crandall wants ABCA to come down harder on the remaining gifters in town. And there seem to be plenty – Moosally told the council he estimates anywhere from 50 to 75 shops remain, though there are more when delivery-only services are factored in.

Crandall asked the council to make registering for a medical card easier, while Linda Mercado Greene, who owns Anacostia Organics, the only dispensary in Ward 8, wants financial assistance to cover the discounts she is required to give low-income patients. (Per D.C. law, they get a 20% discount on all products.) Greene estimates that she’s lost almost a half-million dollars over the last five years because of the discounts.

“The licensees need to be supported. They need to advertise that they exist,” Kinner tells us, adding that a lot of people don’t know the difference and just assume whatever dispensary they go to is a legal one. “A lot of people don’t know the medical market exists, and ABCA and the council have done a poor job touting its existence, providing more information on how to become a patient.”

But legislative solutions may be tough to come by. D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said at the council hearing that he’s concerned that ABCA isn’t moving fast enough to close illegal operators. At the same time, he said that the city’s ability to do more to help ease the burden on medical cannabis operators could be curtailed by the decade-old congressional prohibition on legalizing recreational sales.

“If it gets too easy, do we increase the risk that maybe we’re running afoul of what Congress allows?” he said. “We have to be mindful of that.”

Democrats, from moderates to progressives, have been reconsidering a lot of their electoral assumptions since Kamala Harris’s defeat, and the general tenor of conversations that I’ve been privy to has been pretty good.

Not everyone’s ideas are amazing or perfectly aligned with my sense of the path forward. And in particular, there’s a natural tendency to focus too much on superficial and comfortable changes while avoiding pain points and conflicts. But relative to the discussions of 2017-2022, there is a refreshing lack of wishful thinking about the power of voter registration or magical mobilization tactics. Folks who disagree with each other about a lot of things broadly agree that Democrats need to say and do some things that will make some people who voted for Donald Trump — in many cases two or three times — want to vote for Democrats instead.

The one exception to this, I have to say, is that there is a lot of enthusiasm for building new “infrastructure.”

And I get it. Many of us are incredibly alarmed by what Trump and Musk are doing, and people are eager to spend money fighting back. There are also a lot of people out there hustling to raise money for their own projects. Some of those projects are good, some are bad, and some are mid. But whatever your project, if you’re looking for funding, it’s almost always in your interest to argue that more infrastructure is needed. So I kind of feel like it falls to me to be the skunk at the party who calls this into question. Which is not to say that nothing should be funded! There are good ideas out there, and there are things that the world could use.

But there is also an enormous amount of cruft in progressive politics. And the whole space would really benefit from a zero-based budgeting analysis, because a lot of the existing infrastructure is directly counterproductive.

The keys to electoral politics — finding out what your voters think, and adopting some heterodox views that are popular with the electorate — are just not that complicated. Candidates don’t certainly don’t necessarily need a lot of infrastructure to execute on them. But what anyone working to elect Democrats does need is the freedom to do it without taking massive amounts of friendly fire.

Infrastructure for what?

A much harder question than “What will help candidates win in red-leaning districts?” is “Why has it come to be difficult to execute on this basic playbook?”

And the answer in many cases is not the absence of infrastructure but its excess.

Sometimes this is blatant. Indivisible had incredibly honorable roots in the earliest days of Trump’s first term. There was a tremendous grassroots outpouring of concern. People wanted to know what they could do, and the original Indivisible Guide was a great set of practical suggestions for people who wanted to up their level of engagement. But as Indivisible grew as an institution, it just sort of converged with the highly ideological DC-based NGO borg (see Theda Skocpol and Carolina Tervo), detached from the grassroots anti-Trumpism that inspired record Women’s March attendance and pragmatic 2018 candidate recruitment.

As Liam Kerr points out, this eventually landed with Indivisible explicitly organizing not against election denialists and people trying to cut Medicaid, but against the existence of the moderate Dem caucuses that serve as the bulwarks against MAGA trifectas forever.

This is not to say that Indivisible is a uniquely pernicious actor in the progressive infrastructure. In a lot of ways, they are unusually smart operators. That just means that, in this case, they were unusually explicit about the fact that tent-shrinking and orthodoxy-enforcement are key organizational goals. The Revolving Door Project, similarly, has as its core mission trying to get people kicked out of the Democratic Party coalition, starting initially with executive branch appointees but expanding to encompass outside commentators. The big enemies of their “Hackwatch” project aren’t Fox News personalities or right-wing influencers, but Jason Furman and Catherine Rampell.

Factional infighting is a valid form of activity. If your life is dedicated to helping left-wing Democrats beat moderate Democrats, then we just disagree. But I think we can still respect each other and surely find plenty of causes where we’re actually aligned.

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But from a funder and party-building perspective, it’s important to understand that this is the function of a lot of progressive infrastructure. It’s often framed less explicitly than the two examples above. But most progressive advocacy organizations — whether on climate, immigration, or criminal justice — dedicate the bulk of their advocacy efforts to pressuring Democrats to adhere to ideological orthodoxy. They do, at the end of the day, encourage people to vote for Democrats over Republicans. But they don’t do anything to persuade voters to switch sides, and they don’t do anything to build bipartisan legislative coalitions. They just discourage Democrats from doing the kinds of things that could persuade voters and craft bipartisan bills.

If your interest in politics is motivated by something like, “Donald Trump seems like a really bad, corrupt, authoritarian person” or “The government should give a damn about poor people” or “Women should have reproductive rights,” then supporting these kind of organization is worse than doing nothing. Note that tent narrowing is generally bad for your cause even if the narrowing is specifically on your issue. If, in 2016, there had been pro-life Democratic senators representing southern states, where (unlike outside the south) abortion rights are less popular than the Democratic Party, they would almost certainly have voted to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and women today would be better off. Trying hard to win elections is really important, and funding groups whose raison d’être is making that harder are deeply harmful.

The scourge of misinformation

A couple of weeks ago, a very smart, very pragmatic moderate Democrat told me that 90 percent of the public supports universal background checks and only the fear of primary challengers can possibly explain why Republicans vote against it.

For this guy’s personal politics, it’s fine to believe this. Gun control is a good issue in his district, and he’s heterodox on issues where it makes sense for his voters. And in terms of his narrative about himself, it’s part of a good moderate-sounding discourse about how both sides are hostage to extremists, whereas he’s smart and sensible.

But there’s something screwy about this vision of background checks being universally popular. You’ve probably noticed that background checks is never wielded as a decisive wedge issue in a campaign against a frontline Republican incumbent. It doesn’t test well in ad effectiveness experiments. When Maine, a state that Hillary won, had a background checks ballot initiative in 2016, it failed by a few points. That same year, a similar initiative passed in Nevada, but again ran a few points behind Clinton.

I’m not going to tell you that universal background checks are unpopular. It seems like they run a bit behind the Democratic Party in rural areas and a bit ahead of it in suburban ones. But it’s also not particularly hard to understand why Republicans are comfortable opposing this idea — it’s low-salience, their base doesn’t like it, and it’s not overwhelmingly popular outside of that.

So why did my guy think it’s a 90-10 issue?

Well, there are a million ways to game an issue poll. And one thing advocacy organizations have learned to do is to invest heavily in polling that leverages acquiescence bias1 and careful question wording to exaggerate the support for their cause. The people who do this aren’t necessarily saboteurs, tent-narrowers, or bullies. These are often cheerful, well-meaning issue advocates who genuinely are pushing popular causes. But they’re often taking a cause that, in a well-designed survey is a 55-45 issue, and trying to tell you it’s an 80-20 issue.

Because almost everyone working on almost every cause is doing this, there’s an incredible amount of pressure on people who know better to also do it. If you have a genuinely 60-40 issue but everyone else is lying and pretending their 55-45 issue is 80-20, then you have to lie, too, or you’ll be left in the dust. The result is an informational tragedy of the commons, where many actors in the political system are misinformed about the popularity of their own positions. Most seats aren’t competitive and American elections are very polarized, so in practice, it doesn’t really matter if the average member is publicly taking several toxically unpopular positions for no particular reason. But by the same token, precisely because most seats aren’t competitive, the average member has no incentive to fight through this sea of public opinion misinformation that he and his staff are swimming in.

So lots of members who, all else being equal, would prefer to say things that are helpful to their frontline colleagues so they can win a majority are accidentally saying things that undermine the party brand. Not because of a lack of infrastructure but because there is too much bad infrastructure — too many advocacy organizations that are polluting the information environment because the whole incentive structure of the network of progressive infrastructure is disastrous.

Good things are good

I’m not trying to be too negative or contrarian about the value of political infrastructure.

I’ve been shouting into the void for years that rigorous, accurate policy analysis is an underrated investment opportunity. I think you can find non-partisan homes for this kind of analysis and also party-aligned homes for it, and both are valuable and useful in real ways.

But (and this is the hard part) the analysis has to actually be good. Not just anyone can do that. You need to be careful and selective about building your team, and you need to be able to stand by them, even if they piss people off. But high-quality analytic work is incredibly useful, both in the form of “here’s an idea we came up with and it’s good” and also in the form of working closely with elected officials to refine their own ideas into a viable form.

For all the pixels spilled on electoral strategy, the positioning part (project moderation, open-mindedness, big-tent vibes, and say popular stuff) is easy compared to governing. Politicians genuinely need help with that.

Closely related things, like magazines or websites where smart people say true things about the world and conferences where people can network and discuss, are also useful. Putting smart political ideas into media outlets with broad reach among people who aren’t political obsessives would be helpful. It’s good for like-minded elected officials in different spheres of life but with aligned values to find places to connect. Providing talented people media training so they can be a little more effective on television, on podcasts, and on vertical video can be useful. There are bits of good infrastructure out there that could use more money and bits of good infrastructure that it’s worth building.

The point I want to make as someone who’s not personally pitching right now is that this is not a situation where everything helps at least a little.

The infrastructure itself can be harmful by formulating policy proposals that are bad, spreading misinformation about public opinion, threatening candidates or elected officials who try to break from the heard with negative attention, and deliberate narrowing of the tent.

Thinking eight years forward

One reason this is on my mind is that while many people are extremely agitated about Trump right now and desperate to do something, the odds are very high that Democrats will take back the House in 2026. There are no guarantees. But history, the map, the current generic congressional ballot polling, and the shifting nature of the parties’ voting bases all point in that direction. Of course, Democrats could still screw it up. Or they could over-perform with smart tactics.

Whatever Democrats spend the next 18 months doing, though, they stand a good chance of looking really smart over the winter of 2026-27. What’s important is that they actually be smart.

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Looking back at recent history, I think this is what happened during the “resistance” to Trump’s first term. You had a big, grassroots, anti-Trump movement. Democrats did well in the 2018 midterms by riding normal political backlash, plus sensible recruiting of mostly pragmatic frontline candidates. But a lot of infrastructure investment during this period wasn’t aimed at assembling a big tent anti-Trump coalition. It was aimed at funneling anti-Trump sentiment into a push to replace Clinton/Obama liberalism with a new ideology. This project was only partially successful at capturing the party, but its ideas were influential enough to generate significant backlash.

What I want everyone who wants to beat Trump to think about now isn’t just what kind of infrastructure will look good after the midterms or might be “good enough” in a 2028 world where things have gone badly wrong and there’s anti-Trump backlash.

We should be thinking about what infrastructure sets Democrats up to compete for state office everywhere so we can expand Medicaid? What would make it so that high-income blue states are also high-growth? So that the “party brand” is healthy enough that people aren’t casting about for Osborn-style gimmicks to get to a Senate majority? There are investments that can advance those goals, but I think the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the average piece of infrastructure is probably counterproductive to them.

It’s also probably worth recalling that Donald Trump in 2016, for better or worse, completely remade the image of the Republican Party just by being good on television and saying stuff. There’s a good amount of MAGA-aligned infrastructure now, but that was all built after Trump refocused the party on a different set of issues and disavowed a lot of Bush-era policy commitments. It’s hard to pull that off, in the sense that the odds of failure are relatively high. But it’s not actually a massive resource-intensive undertaking — it takes people with talent and good ideas and a bit of luck.

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America is not coming to save Europe this time.

That is the clear message of two landmark speeches from the past week — one by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the other by the Vice President JD Vance. Hegseth, speaking at a summit in Brussels on February 12th, declared that Europe is no longer America’s primary security focus:

We're…here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe…The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must – and we are – focusing on security of our own borders…We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail…Deterrence cannot fail, for all of our sakes…As the United States prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front…Together, we can establish a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and Pacific respectively. [emphasis mine]

Hegseth also warned that the U.S. will eventually pull its troops out of Europe, and said that Europe must provide the vast majority of support for Ukraine going forward.

Two days later, at the Munich Security Conference, Vance argued that Europe’s biggest threat was not Russia or China, but what he perceives as a slide toward anti-democratic values:

[T]he threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor…[W]hat I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

As evidence of Europe’s retreat from democracy, he cited Romania’s cancellation of an election result due to supposed election interference, Sweden’s jailing of a rightist activist for burning a Koran, and Britain’s arrest of an anti-abortion activist for silently praying near an abortion clinic. He also urged European governments to spend more on defense, and to listen to their citizens who are upset about recent waves of immigration.

Now, there are two very different ways you can interpret these speeches, but they both lead to the same basic conclusion.

The first interpretation is that Hegseth and Vance are telling Europe hard truths that it needs to hear. After all, even if America wants to be the guarantor of European security as it was in the Cold War and the World Wars, it can’t be — at least, not if it wants to be the guarantor of security in Asia, where its most formidable foe looms. China dramatically overmatches America in terms of manufacturing capability, has four times America’s population, and is a peer in terms of technology. Even with Japan, India, Korea, Australia, and other allies fully on board, America would be desperately hard-pressed to withstand a concerted Chinese attempt to take over Asia.

Stretched by decades of deindustrialization and smothered in layers of lawsuits and regulations, America is not the arsenal of democracy it once was. It has no choice but to prioritize. Asia is more economically important to the U.S., and China is a much bigger long-term threat to the U.S. than Russia is. Thus, it’s simply inevitable that America will have to turn towards Asia and away from Europe and the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Vance has a point about European values. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights claims to protect freedom of expression, as does the UK’s Human Rights Act of 1998. The laws that criminalize burning the Koran and praying near an abortion clinic definitely seem to go against the principle of free expression. And even though Russia interfered in Romania’s election, annulling an election sets a dangerous precedent, because it’s always pretty easy to claim foreign interference if you’re an unscrupulous autocrat.

So it’s possible that Hegseth and Vance are not only being sincere, but are giving Europe a needed wake-up call.

The second interpretation is that Hegseth and Vance are being disingenuous. According to this narrative, the MAGA movement admires and is closely aligned with Russia. Trump draws a false moral equivalence between Russia and Ukraine, unfairly laying some of the blame on Ukraine for the war. Russia has always favored Trump over his rivals, whether or not their support has been materially important; Trump tends to like people who support him. And many on the American right see Russia (wrongly) as a supporter of traditional Christian and masculine values, unlike the Europeans, who they see as godless deracinated socialists. So perhaps Trump and his people simply want Russia to prevail over Ukraine.

When Hegseth says America needs to divert resources toward securing its own borders, he’s obviously blowing smoke — even quadrupling the amount America spends on border security (just $7.3 billion in 2024 despite years of big increases) would leave it far smaller than Ukraine aid. And it’s a bit rich for JD Vance to criticize Romania for annulling an election, when he supports Trump’s effort to do something extremely similar back in 2020.

In this interpretation, everything Trump’s people are saying is simply an extension of right-wing culture-war politics — their concern for free speech is a fig leaf, they like European far-right parties because they’re anti-immigration, and they want to switch America’s foreign policy back to isolationism and the Western Hemisphere.

I’m a bit agnostic as to which of these interpretations is correct. My instinct is that Hegseth is being sincere, while Vance is probably playing to his domestic political base in the U.S. And I think the Trump administration probably contains a fair number of both right-wing isolationists who want America to withdraw from the world and focus all its energy on internal ideological conflicts, and conservative internationalists who recognize the magnitude of the threat from China.

But more importantly, I think that from Europe’s vantage point, it mostly doesn’t matter which interpretation of America’s recent words and actions is more accurate.

Whether America really wants to focus on deterring China in Asia, or whether it just wants to retreat from the global stage and focus on bullying Canada, Panama, and its own minorities, that doesn’t change the cold hard fact that America is retreating from its role as the guarantor of European security. And whether or not Trump’s people actually think Russia is a threat to Europe, that doesn’t change the fact that Russia is a threat to Europe. And whether Trump’s people truly care about free speech, that doesn’t change the fact that Europe’s people are angry about recent immigration waves, and if that anger isn’t accommodated through the democratic process, Europe’s stability could be in danger.

In other words, both the challenges that Europe faces, and the fact that the U.S. is not going to help with those challenges, are clear and obvious. Europe must either stand on its own against the threats that face it, or capitulate to those threats.

Fortunately, some of the Europeans may finally be realizing this. Benjamin Tallis has an excellent thread in which he argues that although it’s bad that the U.S. is withdrawing its protection, Hegseth is essentially right that Europe needs to step up and fill the void that the U.S. is leaving. Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been saying similar things. And France’s President Macron has called an emergency EU summit to discuss America’s withdrawal from the region.

And fortunately, Europe has the fundamental strength required to defeat the threats it faces, even without America’s help.

Europe can handle Russia by itself — if it wants to

Just as the U.S. is overmatched by China, Russia is overmatched by Europe. Two years ago, I wrote out the basic case, with some relevant numbers:

Europe has far more people and industry than Russia does. The EU and UK together have half a billion people — more than three times as many as Putin’s empire:

With Turkey in the mix, the ratio is even more lopsided.

As for industrial output, even after Russia’s big wartime mobilization, Europe still makes far more stuff. If Russia is included in Europe, it’s only be the fifth-largest manufacturing economy in the region:

Even the UK manufactures more than Russia!

Now, not all kinds of manufacturing are equally useful for war — Russia tends to make a lot of tanks and artillery shells, while Europe makes a lot of pharmaceuticals and medical devices — so this is just a rough measure. But the comparison is so lopsided that it’s clear that in any protracted conventional conflict, a united, determined Europe would prevail over Russia, even without an iota of American help. And Europe has its own nuclear deterrent as well, mostly in the hands of France and the UK.

Nor is it fanciful to think that Europe might unite to fight Russia. Even if the U.S. formally withdraws from NATO, or simply refuses to come to its allies’ aid, NATO command can serve as a unified military command for any and all European efforts against Russia. Crucially, NATO also includes Turkey and the UK, who aren’t in the EU, but both of which are rivals of Russia. In fact, without a Trump-led U.S. weighing the alliance down, it could be free to become the pan-European military force that the region needs.

Politically, too, Europe is more united than it has been in its entire history — witness how the whole region came together to apply sanctions on Russia in 2022, and how even traditionally neutral countries like Sweden have been joining NATO.

But even with unity, Europe will still need the will to fight. Currently, despite a lot of bold rhetoric from officials in Germany, France, and the UK, none of Europe’s biggest nations are doing anywhere near what it would take to contain Russia without American help.

Usually, this is put in terms of the percentage of GDP that European countries spend on their militaries. And yes, Russia spends far more of its GDP on its military than the major European countries do:

Changes in this number can also give us information about a country’s priorities. The fact that military spending hasn’t climbed much in Germany, France, and the UK shows that they aren’t yet taking the Russian threat as seriously as they should. Poland, in contrast, is clearly taking the threat seriously, which is why Hegseth consistently praises Poland.

Of course, Europe has a much higher GDP than Russia does, so even a smaller percentage of GDP could translate into a larger total amount of military spending. But it’s important to remember that real military purchasing power also depends on prices — if soldiers’ salaries and health care, weapons, vehicles, transportation, etc. are cheaper in Russia than in Europe, that means $1 of Russian defense spending counts for more than $1 of European defense spending.

In fact, Russia gets its military stuff for a lot cheaper. Taking this into account, it probably spends about as much on its military as all of Europe combined:

Russia's military expenditure is rising so fast that it is outperforming all European countries combined despite their effort to boost budgets and rearm, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ latest Military Balance report…The think tank said that Russia’s military expenditure last year was forecast at 13.1 trillion rubles ($145.9 billion)…Meanwhile, Europe’s combined 2024 defense spending was $457 billion…11.7 percent higher in real terms than the previous year…

But if Russia's spending is calculated in purchasing power parity terms — used in countries like Russia where domestic inputs are significantly cheaper than on the world market — the Kremlin's military expenditure would come to $461.6 billion, the IISS said.

In terms of active military personnel, Russia has about 1.1 million, while NATO without the U.S. still has about double that. But it’s not clear how many of those troops NATO could actually bring to bear in a fight.

Germany, France, and the UK need to raise their defense spending — immediately, and by a large amount. Hegseth is right — Poland’s target of 5% of GDP in 2025 is appropriate, and is about the same as the U.S. spent during its peacetime military buildup in the 1980s. Furthermore, European countries need to make sure their troops are well-trained and their militaries are well-integrated. And Europe needs to beef up its nuclear deterrent, to be less reliant on the (now likely nonexistent) U.S. nuclear umbrella — France and the UK need to build more nukes, while Germany and Poland need to get their own.

There are basically two dangers here for Europe: lack of popular will within each country, and lack of coordination between countries.

It’s possible that European publics simply don’t worry enough about the Russian threat, or that they’ve become so rich and complacent — or perhaps so infused with leftist ideology — that they hate the very idea of spending money on the military. European elites — especially elites in Germany, France, and the UK — simply need to sell their public on the notion of a strong, integrated defense.

If they can’t do that, the European countries will prove true the common authoritarian accusation that democracies are inherently weak and unable to defend themselves. In the 20th century, democracies passed the toughness test, sacrificing blood and treasure to crush fascism and contain communism. Perhaps America is failing that test in the 21st century. But if so, it becomes all the more important that Europe pass the test.

The other danger is that each European country will look after its own narrow interests, throwing the other countries to the wolves. There’s a tendency of each country to view the nations to the east of it as buffer states — a defense-in-depth to hold off the Russians. This is a dangerous fantasy. The more Russia conquers, the more powerful it growth, since it basically enslaves each conquered group into its army to conquer the next group. When the USSR attacked Poland in 1919, it did so with many Ukrainian troops; when it menaced West Europe during the Cold War, it did so with Polish troops. And so on. Europe has to make a stand and put up a hard wall, instead of letting Russia continue to absorb and enslave its people bit by bit.

If the U.S. abandons Ukraine to Russia entirely, as now looks fairly likely, it might make sense for Europe to actively intervene in the war, helping the Ukrainians stop Russia from grabbing any more territory. Ukraine has grit and inventiveness, but they lack manpower; Europe could send troops to shore up their defenses, and learn how modern warfare works in the process. But even if direct intervention doesn’t happen, Europe will need to fortify its borders in the east against continued Russian encroachment.

In fact, there’s a historical precedent for this. In 1853-56, the UK and France — who at that time were generally rivals — forged an alliance to help shore up the weakening Ottoman Empire against Russian territorial grabs. The result was the Crimean War, in which the alliance of Britain, France, and Turkey — depicted at the top of this post — defeated the Russians and halted their westward expansion. But even if Europe doesn’t actually fight in Ukraine, if it raises defense spending and deploys its militaries to its eastern borders, it can face down the new Russian empire over the next two decades.

Europe needs to fix its economy and immigration

It should also go without saying that Europe needs to fix its economy. The region has stagnated over the past decade and a half. Even measuring at purchasing power parity — which isn’t affected by exchange rate movements — it’s clear that Europe has been falling behind the U.S.:

It’s not just that the U.S. has more immigration, either — Europe’s per capita GDP has lagged as well.

Germany has done especially poorly in recent years. Its industrial production has been falling since long before the Ukraine war started and Russian gas got cut off:

Europeans who are confronted with these facts typically comfort themselves (or attack their American critics) by pointing out Europe’s lower inequality, higher life expectancy, and lower crime. But while those advantages make Europe a nice place to live, they aren’t much use against hundreds of thousands of Russian drones. To build up military-industrial strength, you need higher GDP and you need higher industrial production.

Just how Europe can get those things is a difficult question. There are some obvious policy moves, like eliminating internal trade barriers between European countries, general deregulation, and copying the Danish “flexicurity” system to increase labor mobility. Europe also needs as much cheap energy as it can get, since factories are especially power-hungry. Restarting any and all mothballed nuclear reactors is a must, and a lot more should be built. Europe should also be building as much solar power as possible, especially in Spain where it’s sunny and relatively underpopulated, and then piping that power to the industrial heartland using high-voltage transmission lines.

On top of that, Europe needs to build a better software industry. Software, especially AI, will be increasingly important for manufacturing, and software exports can give the economy a boost as well. Europe is already home to huge amounts of talented coders, especially in East Europe, and it also has tons of capital to invest. But so far the region has really struggled to build a U.S.-style software ecosystem. The first thing to try here is deregulation — reform laws like GDPR until they present essentially no barrier to innovation. After that, tweak financial laws to encourage venture capital, and work to harmonize standards and regulations across EU member states so the market isn’t fragmented.

Europe’s biggest challenge, of course, is aging — something every country in the world is either dealing with or will have to deal with fairly soon. Sadly, effective pro-natalist policies still mostly don’t exist (though France gets modest results with them) Until recently, robust immigration partially plugged Europe’s gap, but there’s clearly a giant backlash against the kinds of immigrants Europe has been taking in en masse for the past decade and a half. Even if you doubt JD Vance’s motives, he’s right that European countries need to accede to the will of their increasingly immigration-skeptical populaces; to do otherwise would risk political instability.

The most obvious move here — in addition to deporting immigrant criminals so that the populace feels more positively about the whole thing — is to simply restrict the set of source countries. Taking fewer refugees from violent war-torn regions, and taking more skilled or semi-skilled immigrants from stable low-crime countries, would probably be a good idea.

Anyway, I have much more to say about the European economy, but for right now, I just want to point out that although Europe desperately needs a stronger military, countries that pump up their militaries without concomitant increases in their economic output typically don’t fare well. The Europeans need to think about economics and military power as one big interrelated effort — a Europe that stands up and fights for itself, instead of waiting for America to swoop in and save the day like it did in the 20th century.

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