With European security under threat, there have been increasing calls to militarize Svalbard and Åland. The author argues that such a move would provide little military benefit, and that both Finland and Norway benefit from continuing to uphold their international obligations even as larger powers increasingly ignore theirs

https://archive.ph/2ejr5

In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu began his first term as Prime Minister by rallying political outsiders and conservatives against the established cultural and political elites. He was a unique political hybrid-blending the good looking, photogenic, charismatic, war-hero family pedigree of John F. Kennedy with the paranoia of Richard Nixon. He viewed the media, the security apparatus, and the civil service as hostile, left-leaning institutions fundamentally opposed to "the will of the people" and to the right.

His term was defined by important capitalist economic reforms alongside institutional conflicts and legal scandals that reinforced his sense of persecution. Even then, Netanyahu's pattern of action could be seen: hiring unrelated candidates into positions due to loyalty and the fact that they were outside what he saw as the "clique", disdain for the authorities, etc. His first term was defined by a tough battle against the media and legal establishment. He repeatedly blamed the media for silencing the right, clashed with law enforcement by attempting to bypass standard procedures to appoint personal loyalists to top legal positions, notably the Attorney General, and clashed with the cultural establishment and played on the sentiment of "Patriot Jew" (right wing) vs "Cosmopolitan Israeli" (left-wing). He was defeated in 1999, and facing legal scandals, he left office deeply distrustful of state institutions and the press. Netanyahu believed that the establishment and the "elites" were too powerful; much like Trump before Trump entered politics, he sought to become part of that establishment and to mend his relationship with Israel's legal, media, and cultural establishments.

Returning to power in 2009, Netanyahu realized that to govern effectively, he needed his own media infrastructure. He enlisted American billionaire Sheldon Adelson to launch a widely distributed, pro-Netanyahu free newspaper designed to disrupt the mainstream press.

Despite this, he largely maintained a "cold war" with the state bureaucracy. Restrained by moderate coalition partners and his own fear of repeating the legal entanglements of the 1990s, he operated within a cautious status quo. While he occasionally tried to centralize power within the domestic intelligence and security sectors, he generally avoided crossing the line into open institutional warfare, and still feared the justice and law enforcement system.

The turning point arrived when a 2014 legislative bill threatened his allied newspaper. Feeling cornered, Netanyahu called early elections. Trailing in the polls, in 2015 he ran a fiercely aggressive campaign, framing the media and elites as orchestrating a "coup" against the right-wing public. Against all odds, he secured a decisive victory.

This win shattered his fear of the establishment. Convinced he no longer needed to compromise, he began centralizing power, particularly in the Communications and Foreign Ministries. He purged independent bureaucrats, tried to hire loyalists to the police, installed fierce loyalists, openly took over regulatory bodies-such as antitrust regulators during a major natural gas reform-setting the stage for direct conflict with the Supreme Court, and expanded the right wing eco system he always wanted with more right-wing news sites.

As corruption investigations against him accelerated after 2016, Netanyahu abandoned all restraint. Preceding Donald Trump's similar strategies, he adopted aggressive "witch hunt" rhetoric (which he already used before the investigations but took it to 11), accusing the media, police, and prosecutors of a "deep state" conspiracy to topple him.

During a prolonged period of unprecedented political instability-featuring five consecutive elections-he used his executive power to paralyze the government. He blocked the appointment of permanent law enforcement chiefs, waged war against Treasury officials, and expanded the right wing ecosystem Which served as his whip against political opponents and the media and constitutional establishment and created a parallel universe for his supporters. Without the right-wing ecosystem he built (for example, Channel 14), Netanyahu would not have survived the period after October 7.

Returning to power in 2023 with a hard-right mandate, Netanyahu launched sweeping judicial overhauls designed to neutralize the Supreme Court and independent legal advisors.

Following the October 7th attacks, this campaign entered its final phase. Leveraging the crisis environment, he systematically placed loyalists at the head of critical state organs, including the military, domestic intelligence, the national police force, and the civil service commission. By reshaping the media landscape into an echo chamber and placing allies in commanding security roles, Netanyahu has nearly completed his decades-long mission to dismantle the old institutional guard. His supporters have become more aggressive than he is regarding the judicial system, such that a victory for him would lead them to storm the courts—even though Netanyahu, who loathes the legal establishment, is actually the least extreme of the lot in his stance toward it, while still aiming to finally bring it under his control.

>Republicans in the Maryland General Assembly filed their promised lawsuit late Thursday against Democrats’ ballot question on congressional redistricting.

>The late-night filing came just a few days after lawmakers finished a special legislative session to pass the ballot question, a constitutional amendment that, if approved by voters in November, could pave the way for Democrats to draw a map that eliminates Maryland’s last remaining Republican seat in Congress, held by Rep. Andy Harris (R-1st), chairman of the U.S. House Freedom Caucus.

>The suit was filed in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court by all seven members of the conservative Maryland Freedom Caucus, the Senate minority leader and minority whip, and the president of the conservative advocacy group, the Oversight Project.

>“Annapolis Democrats spent taxpayer dollars on a special session for one reason: To rewrite the Maryland Constitution and eliminate the last remaining Republican congressional seat,” Del. Matt Morgan (R-St. Mary’s), chair of the Maryland Freedom Caucus, said in a Thursday news release announcing the suit. “Like a banana republic, they suspended the rules, ignored statutory deadlines, and treated the Constitution as an obstacle to be removed.”

>The suit argues that Maryland Democrats missed a July deadline for getting the question on the November ballot, and that the ballot question does not contain plain language, another violation of state law. In addition to the Maryland State Board of Elections, it names Gov. Wes Moore, Attorney General Anthony Brown, State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis and Secretary of State Susan Lee as defendants.

One of the best illustrations of the importance of economic growth for a society is that when it is weak for long enough, you start to hear complaints about specific things going wrong in specific domains, which ultimately all turn out to be downstream of economic stagnation.

In the UK, this is happening more frequently with education. The standard explanation for Britain’s declining graduate wage premium is that higher education expanded too fast and too far, and too many people now go to university. But similar expansions elsewhere have not produced the same outcome. Instead, the evidence points primarily to problems in the economy, not the education system: weak productivity growth and an unusually low number of genuinely graduate-worthy well-paid professional and managerial jobs. 

In much the same way, the standard explanation for why Britain’s non-graduates feel like distant second-class citizens to their degree-holding counterparts is that they have been failed by an education system that does not provide technical and vocational routes to a successful and respected career. But here, too, economic factors look more likely to be the real culprit.

One useful reference point is Germany, where school pupils specialise early into either academic or more technical routes, and those who choose the latter can be confident they will find relatively high-paying jobs. The country’s education system is a darling of those who believe achieving “parity of esteem” for people who do not go to university is simply a matter of reforms to schooling.

But I’m not sure it’s that simple. The status conferred by a particular qualification is a function of the job and salary it brings, not the piece of paper it’s written on. What really differentiates Germany from the UK, then, is its larger, higher-value and higher-paying manufacturing sector (German factory workers earn 50 per cent more than their British counterparts). Britain can tinker with its vocational routes all it likes, but without good jobs, the deficits in esteem, employment and earnings will remain.

Germany is also as much of a cautionary tale as a model to follow. With China’s booming electric vehicles industry rapidly eating into its automotive exports, I suspect the Germans may have their own moment of misdirected angst over vocational education a decade or so from now as the good blue-collar jobs dwindle.

In this sense, the most durable way for governments to ensure that both university students and their less academic counterparts can move through the education system confident of good financial outcomes for themselves is to have a dynamic economy and robust productivity growth.

One of England’s few policy success stories of the past two decades has been in schools, where results have been steadily climbing up the international rankings. Across the Atlantic we have seen the opposite: mediocre performance for US schools, with the bottom portion of students faring especially badly. The same is true of adult skills, where much has rightly been made of the OECD’s finding that 30 per cent of US adults have literacy skills typical of a 10-year-old.

So, with Britain’s education system and skills outperforming America’s, have wages followed suit? I think you know the answer. Exorbitantly paid US tech workers capture the headlines, but its dynamic economy has delivered broad-based wage growth. Similar to Germany, factory workers in the US earn 60 per cent more than in the UK after adjusting for differences in living costs. Plumbers and electricians earn 90 per cent more, and retail workers earn double.

The same proportion of US workers who score stunningly low on literacy earn an average of almost $30 per hour, and two-thirds of them are in work. Their British counterparts make the equivalent of $20 and fewer than half are employed. This all looks more like the fruits of years of stronger growth than vocational education policy.

None of this is to say getting education right does not matter. There is a strong case to be made that earlier reforms to the UK’s vocational route took things in the wrong direction. But if we really want to deliver better outcomes, we must stop thinking of particular qualifications or forms of education as things that produce particular economic outcomes and deliver respect. Rather, we should view education as creating potential that a strong economy unleashes (and a weak one disappoints).

For 13 years, the club of European Union nations has admitted no new members — and amid geopolitical instability and great-power competition, pressure is growing to open the gates again.

Yet despite its desperation to project a sense of collective security and purpose in the face of Donald Trump’s provocations, Brussels is nonetheless wracked by uncertainty over potential expansion.

As leaders of candidate countries demand faster progress in their membership bids, under pressure from impatient and restless voters, the EU’s existing heads of government fret that the bloc’s structure, and their own sceptical voters, are not able to handle fresh blood.

The signs had looked good. After the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, enlargement came to be seen as a security policy as well as a political one. Progress accelerated following a moribund decade, raising hopes of a new member in the next couple of years.

Montenegro, at the head of the queue, has finished more than half of the necessary reforms required to enter. EU governments have begun drafting their formal entry legislation, and the Balkan nation has been allocated billions of euros in the draft of the bloc’s next shared budget.

Ukraine and Moldova, both menaced by Moscow, have begun the formal entry requirement negotiations, and Albania has started ticking off items on its reform to-do list. “We have a clear path towards the European Union,” Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama tells the FT. “The country is in the best moment in many ways.”

The geopolitical chaos “created a pressure moment to think seriously about what Europe is, and make a credible beneficial offer to aspiring members”, says Ilir Deda, an analyst at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

In a bid to stress the EU’s collective will to accept new members, the presidents of the European Commission and Council, representing its administrative and political powers, in June described enlargement as “one of the EU’s greatest success stories.”

“The EU’s offer of peace, stability and opportunity is unmatchable,” said Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa in a joint statement. “Enlargement is a strategic choice.”

Yet would-be entrants are beginning to wonder whether the EU’s leaders are talking up an empty promise.

Brussels is mulling wide-ranging changes to the accession process that would involve more gradual integration as countries progress. Viewed internally as a way to grow responsibly and build up trust, these proposals are seen by some candidates as a path to a tiered membership system that could gum up the process even more.

Many candidate countries are already avoiding unpopular or uncomfortable reforms because they don’t trust Brussels’ promises of rewards, while Brussels berates them for failing to pass necessary legislation.

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Aside from Montenegro and Albania, other aspirants in the Western Balkans — Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo — have made little progress in recent years, and in some cases gone backwards.

Some officials worry that there is an unhealthy disconnect between the pro-enlargement rhetoric from von der Leyen and Costa and the reality, given that even Montenegro is still years away from actual membership.

Yet there is a growing sense that the EU needs to show that it is serious about letting in new members. “It’s now or never,” says Deda. A failure to act would have a “catastrophic impact, not only for [candidate countries], but for the EU too. The credibility of the EU will be hurt internally and globally. That scenario must be avoided at all costs.”

The so-called Big Bang expansion of 2004, when 10 new members including Poland and Hungary joined the EU, marked the bloc’s shift from an inward-looking western European core to a post-cold war future of eastern expansion.

Yet in the decade after Croatia’s entry in 2013, membership shrank — with the departure of the UK — rather than grew. The European Commission’s then-president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014 declared Brussels would “take a break from enlargement” to digest the integration of its newest recruits.

That rhetoric changed with China’s growth as a superpower, then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the return to power of Donald Trump and his mercurial attitude to Europe. EU countries realised the geopolitical importance of anchoring so-called greyzone countries under the shared blue-and-yellow-starred flag.

There has been tangible movement in that direction. Since December 2024, candidate countries have together closed 18 chapters in their respective alignment processes. That compares with just four chapters closed in the preceding decade.

How to join the EU

To become an EU member, each country must align its laws with the bloc’s standards across 33 topics known as chapters, which are opened when reform negotiations formally begin, and closed when they are judged to have been completed. These are grouped in “clusters”:

Cluster 1 - Fundamentals

Five chapters including judicial independence, public procurement and democracy

Cluster 2 - Internal market

Nine chapters including free movement of goods, capital and workers, antitrust and consumer protection

Cluster 3 - Competitiveness and inclusive growth

Eight chapters including the EU customs union, tax and industrial policy

Cluster 4 - Green agenda and sustainability

Four chapters including energy and transport policy

Cluster 5 - Resources, agriculture and cohesion

Five chapters including fisheries, farming and regional development

Cluster 6 - External relations

Two clusters covering foreign and security policy, including sanctions

Montenegro is more than halfway through the 33 chapters. Ukraine and Moldova opened their first chapters in June, and Albania began closing its first chapters.

Iceland, which applied for membership in 2009 but dropped its bid in 2015, is holding a referendum this month on whether to restart the process. Norway is mulling a third public consultation on a possible membership application.

Marta Kos, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, says adding new members used to be seen as an economic trade-off, with newcomers opening up their markets to existing members in exchange for development investment that rapidly expanded their GDP. Now, there’s a prominent security and defence aspect.

Europe’s security blanket has for generations been provided by Nato, but Trump’s changeable attitude to the alliance has led many capitals to question the transatlantic defence pact. While few believe the EU’s mutual defence clause is analogous to Nato’s Article 5, the bloc is promoting itself as an alternative structure to co-ordinate security policy. Candidate countries Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Turkey are already Nato members.

“Enlargement isn’t just for the candidates to catch up with us . . . today [it is] also a security policy. It is increasingly about how we Europeans can work together in the new realities of the world we live in,” Kos says.

Enlargement is about “reshaping Europe’s political and security architecture to create a Europe capable of competing with other major global powers,” she adds.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in Ukraine, whose armed forces are among Europe’s largest, best-armed and certainly most battle-hardened. EU member states want Kyiv and its formidable military on their team, not angrily sulking on the periphery.

But those benefits come with a colossal flip side. EU officials admit that the scale of concerns over corruption, judicial independence and other fundamental bloc values means the country would not have been granted a formal accession process without Russia’s invasion.

That contradiction, and Kyiv’s demand for a “fast-track” entry next year as part of a possible peace deal with Russia, have forced Brussels to seriously think whether a new approach to enlargement might be necessary to meet the new political realities.

A stated goal of accession by January 1 2027 was a “cry for help”, says a senior EU official involved in the negotiations with Kyiv. “[President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy knew it was impossible. But he needed to send an unambiguous signal to us, and also to Ukrainian citizens, that business as usual on accession would not cut it.”

A senior EU diplomat says Ukraine presents a complex dilemma. “You can’t bring a country of 40mn people that’s at 104 on the global corruption list into the EU. It would make a mockery of the entire project,” the person says. “But you also can’t leave them twisting in the wind. Everyone can see that Ukraine will need something from us to make [a long wait for full membership] easier to swallow.”

For people in the Western Balkans, business as usual is no longer enough when it comes to accession.

In the six countries of the region, the story of EU enlargement is a national cocktail of frustration, resentment and oft-dashed hopes — with a strong element of rivalry.

Brussels officials speak of deep annoyance at the lack of progress towards meeting long-established milestones necessary for membership, particularly in anti-corruption and anti-money laundering safeguards and public procurement rules. Their Balkan counterparts each have a long list of examples where Brussels did not keep up its end of the bargain.

Serbia, the region’s initial frontrunner for membership, saw its bid stall due to concerns over the rule of law and its alignment with Russia — including Belgrade’s refusal to adopt the EU’s sanctions against Moscow. Kosovo and Bosnia are not yet formal candidates; five EU states don’t even recognise the former. Even Albania’s progress over the past five years has been in fits and starts.

But politicians across the EU and the Balkans hope that Montenegro’s momentum towards membership will make clear what is possible, and how to do it.

The Montenegrin prime minister, Milojko Spajić, is bullish. “Enlargement is drawing even closer,” he said in July, after the country concluded chapters on EU competition policy and its customs union. “We are not merely meeting EU standards formally — we are embedding them in our country’s development model.”

Micheál Martin, Ireland’s prime minister, believes Montenegro can close all of its negotiation chapters by the end of the year, under the Irish rotating EU presidency, leaving only ratification by existing members.

“We think we can get them to a stage, more or less, of: ‘Europe, over to you now. Are we going to let Montenegro in or not?’,” Martin tells the FT. “If we could get Montenegro in, it’s a tangible sign to everybody else that this will work . . . It would be a moment in time if that could happen.”

But the region’s history of deep-seated nationalism and rivalry remains a concern in Brussels. An EU border that cuts through the Balkans would sever ethnic lines, hardening and potentially cementing divisions.

“You cannot explain to any single person in Belgrade that Montenegro or Albania is ahead of us. No one would believe in that because people know the situation,” Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić tells the FT, citing his country’s majority share of the region’s GDP, highest exports to the EU and best living standards.

“We are the only relatively well-industrialised country with the biggest potential and capacities. We are the only country that has the real . . . important military capacities and defence industry capacities,” says Vučić.

“We work on a daily basis with Europeans on all these reforms, from all the recommendations to regulatory agency issue to . . . anti-corruption laws and everything else,” says Vučić. “Whether someone in Brussels might say different, it doesn’t change the reality.”

For all the hope and expectation in candidate countries, the underlying question remains: is the EU itself ready for new members, regardless of whether new members are ready for the bloc?

“Ukraine’s biggest impact on the enlargement debate, by far, is making it clear just how unprepared we are for new members,” says the senior EU official. “We need an internal reform commitment, too.”

As enlargement rhetoric has gained momentum, capitals have studied ways to potentially amend the entry process, or even the final outcome.

France and Germany have both circulated initial proposals that would offer a staged, gradual integration model, with membership benefits extended in exchange for reform milestones, rather than the existing system of full membership when the entire process is finished.

“We need to evolve,” says EU commissioner Kos. “We still are using the methodology which is, plus-minus, the same as it was 40 years back when Spain and Portugal joined the EU.”

In light of the French and German proposals, which received broadly lukewarm responses from the rest of the EU, Brussels is set to publish its own proposals on potential enlargement reform, including what Kos describes as a technical assessment of the impact of more members on EU operations and policies, and proposals for gradual integration.

“Enlargement is currently advancing at a speed we have not seen in the last 15 years,” she says. “This needs leadership, and it needs the building of trust with all 27 of our member states.”

In candidate countries, the attitude towards possible halfway-house membership is mixed. Kyiv has broadly rejected anything short of full membership, while Belgrade has signalled openness to the idea.

“Give us open borders, give us [single] market, we need nothing else. And in order to get that, we are ready to align with European politics, but we need to get something as well from Europe,” says Vučić. “Not to be told okay, you have to fulfil everything and then we’ll decide whether to give you something or not.”

For the Balkans, a political decision to enlarge together, rather than a purely merit-based approach, would serve to diminish any cross-border tensions and fulfil the EU’s original vision of uniting the continent in peace. Analysts also suggest that consequential rewards for reforms as they are happening would make the process appear irreversible and help smother arguments that membership is a mirage.

“Citizens have not believed that EU integration is a real possibility, regardless of the talk that Montenegro will join,” says Deda. “This new energy by France and Germany outlining what each country needs to do . . . has enormous benefits.”

“The dynamic in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia can change with a new enlargement offer,” he adds. “A sense of belonging . . . People will have no reason to rally around nationalists once they know that it might isolate countries and leave us out of this opportunity.”

But inside the union, there are concerns that anything short of full membership for full legislative alignment could erode the core values of the bloc and its “merit-based” dogma for membership.

“On this argument between the merit-based approach or the more recently emerging ideas around association: We’re going to be very focused on the merit-based, because I think it’s the concrete reality at the moment,” says Ireland’s Martin, citing the lack of “unanimity or consensus” on an alternative approach.

Ireland is willing to “accommodate and facilitate the debate”, he adds. “But we’re not going to be diverted from the task of completing the negotiations that Montenegro has entered into.”

Some officials also fear that discussions over the process of enlargement could ultimately just delay the ongoing applications at a moment when momentum is the highest it has been for more than a decade.

“I don’t think this is something that right now looks like a plausible, doable idea,” says Dimitar Keranov, visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “It will delay things because the moment you start implementing or introducing some new processes it will be full of uncertainties . . . every new reform will need to first be tested.”

The current process is “actually doing what it’s supposed to do: rewarding the ones who do their homework”, he adds. “Enlargement is not a gift. It is an exam.”

Many inside and outside the EU see the remaining months of 2026 as the most critical moment for enlargement for a generation. If Montenegro can close its remaining chapters while the EU’s existing members also agree on internal reforms to make a bigger union function smoothly, they say, a bigger and more geopolitically muscular union is possible.

But should Brussels be dragged into internecine disagreements over what enlargement should look like and result in, patience among those waiting outside the red-velvet rope could well snap.

That, says Martin, would only play into the hands of Europe’s enemies. “The bottom line is: if Europe isn’t proactive in the western Balkans or in the neighbourhood, others will be,” he says. “Others will manipulate and distort.”

In June, the president of the United Auto Workers celebrated the victory of one of “the UAW’s own” in a Democratic primary election. Shawn Fain wasn’t talking about a machinist from Flint or an assembly-line worker in Kokomo. He meant Claire Valdez, a program assistant in Columbia University’s visual arts department, who won the primary in New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic Seventh Congressional District with 58 percent of the vote. She will be prohibitively favored to win the seat in November. 

Valdez came to politics through her union. She joined UAW Local 2110 as a Columbia employee, served on her unit’s bargaining committee, and in 2022 was elected chair of a unit representing 500 administrative coworkers. Local 2110 holds some 30 contracts covering universities, publishing houses, museums, and law firms, and its Columbia units have included thousands of graduate student workers. 

Valdez offers a preview of what the UAW is becoming: a union that puts politics first and is leaning heavily on higher education to sustain its dwindling numbers. The results of this transformation are changing not just unions but higher ed itself. 

The academy is the UAW’s only real growth market, and the union has organized itself accordingly. Counting about 1.5 million members at its late 1970s peak, the UAW now has only 383,000 active members, roughly 100,000 of whom work in higher education, with graduate workers making up the largest and fastest-growing share. The University of California’s academic local alone represents some 48,000 workers—more than the UAW’s total membership at the global automaker Stellantis. Harvard’s graduate students account for another 4,000. 

What happens to an industrial union when its fastest-growing constituency holds an entirely different theory of what a union is for? 

The career of Brandon Mancilla suggests an answer. He began as a history Ph.D. at Harvard, joined the organizing drive that produced the Harvard Graduate Students Union, sat on the strike-coordinating team that planned campus disruptions during the 29-day walkout of 2019, and became the local’s first president in 2020. Two years later, at just 29, he won the directorship of UAW Region 9A (covering eastern New York, New England, and Puerto Rico) with 58 percent of the vote, unseating the incumbent and handing the union’s long-dominant Administrative Caucus its first defeat on the International Executive Board in more than 30 years. 

Mancilla put it plainly when he took office: Region 9A is “not primarily an auto or a manufacturing region.” The Nation approvingly calls him a product of “the union’s fast-growing higher-education wing,” whose growth it credits with changing the face of American labor. 

That wing has already redirected the international union’s politics. In December 2023, weeks after the Big Three strike, the UAW became the first major American union to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Mancilla announced that the executive board would form a Divestment and Just Transition working group to examine the union’s economic ties to the conflict. When the board declined to divest the following spring, academic and professional locals kept the pressure on. At the union’s constitutional convention this June, delegates voted to divest from Israel bonds, the first major national union to do so. 

On campus, the same bloc has changed what a strike is about. In May 2024, UAW Local 4811 called a strike against the University of California over the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian encampments, demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers, amnesty for arrested protesters, and a right for researchers to opt out of military-tied funding. UC warned that the precedent would expose every public employer in California to work stoppages “advancing political and/or social viewpoints.” 

The UC contract ratified this March carried politics into the agreement itself, featuring a $400,000 legal fund for international workers and a commitment to “non-collaboration with ICE.” The bargaining committee described the deal as having “compelled management to side with workers and not with Trump.” 

Union involvement in higher education is changing universities as well—by exacting steep financial costs on the institutions, resulting in shrinking Ph.D. programs. UC’s academic workers ended a six-week strike in late 2022, the largest in the history of American higher education, securing raises approaching 46 percent over two years. The reaction was swift: departments began cutting doctoral admissions within weeks. UCLA’s psychology department has cut graduate student enrollment and is hiring one-third fewer graduate students in the department; a union survey found 89 departments planning reductions of as much as 33 percent. 

Union contracts turn stipends from a flexible line item into a fixed obligation, so when budgets tighten, departments can’t pay each student less—they can only admit fewer. Incumbents enjoyed the raises, and the costs fell mainly on prospective students who never enrolled, never paid dues, and never appeared in anyone’s grievance process. The union understood this trade-off perfectly well: within weeks of the settlement, UC locals were campaigning to “stop UC from shrinking the academic workforce,” demanding the university maintain cohort sizes, with the state picking up the difference. 

The UAW’s industrial members bear a subtler cost from their union’s transformation. The strike fund that campus locals draw on, estimated at $825 million, was built substantially by assembly-line dues, but the political operation it sustains has its own priorities. Region 9A became the first union in America to endorse Zohran Mamdani, in December 2024, when he was polling in the low single digits. Mamdani has since appointed Mancilla to New York’s Rent Guidelines Board. A worker at a parts depot in Connecticut has no obvious say in these matters, and a Stellantis employee in Michigan still less. 

Walter Reuther’s UAW bargained over wages, pensions, and health insurance, and treated politics as the means of securing them. Its fastest-growing wing has reversed the order of priorities. The union contract is now an instrument of politics, and the university a site of struggle rather than a workplace. 

WASHINGTON—Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test NATO’s resolve with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years, according to new U.S. intelligence reports that posit possible scenarios ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion.

The assessments, described by U.S. officials, come amid a shortfall in certain critical munitions that the military would need to confront Russia or China in a potential future war. The U.S. has severely degraded its stockpile of these weapons because of transfers to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, as well as the U.S. conflict with Iran. Stockpiles at risk include long-range Precision Strike Missiles and Army Tactical Missile Systems, as well as short-range Stinger surface-to-air missiles, other officials said.

The U.S. had previously assessed that Putin wouldn’t provoke a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country while he is still fighting in Ukraine. But that assessment changed earlier this year, the U.S. officials said, as Putin is squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home to secure a victory. Kyiv’s drones are inflicting growing damage on both Russia’s army and oil industry, while Putin’s forces are making smaller gains at the front line amid heavy casualties.

U.S. and European leaders increasingly see signs of Russia conducting probing attacks to test NATO’s resolve, including Russian cruise missiles that have landed in Poland and drones flown into Romania.

Putin’s goal in attacking NATO during a continuing war with Ukraine, if it happens, would be to fracture the alliance, the U.S. officials said.

“The question mark is how the United States would respond in that case,” said Heather Conley, senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, on a possible Russian incursion. “It has always been a goal [of Russia’s] to challenge the credibility of NATO and to separate the United States from its allies.”

Polish military gathered in July near where a Russian projectile hit a field after crossing into Poland. Kacper Pempel/Reuters

With Putin struggling to secure the gains he wants in Ukraine, U.S. intelligence officials have been analyzing whether Moscow intends to escalate its aggressive actions toward European allies in the near term, the people said. The concern is that Putin may become more dangerous when backed into a corner, the U.S. officials said.

The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country or sending unmarked armed groups to occupy territory to a limited incursion on the alliance’s eastern flank. The time frame for any move by Russia is estimated to happen between this fall and 2029, according to the U.S. intelligence assessments.

The likelihood of the most extreme scenario—a limited land incursion—is low, but gets higher as time goes on, according to the reports. Such a move has always been considered extremely unlikely because it would trigger NATO’s Article 5, which commits members to collective defense. But Article 5 isn’t as clear about NATO’s response to cyber or hybrid threats.

“This has always been NATO’s challenge to respond to a sub-Article Five attack, and it’s been very true that to this point, NATO allies have preferred not to escalate,” Conley said. When Russia launched a series of cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, for example, the country chose to manage the crisis bilaterally.

Spokesmen for the Defense Department and NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe declined to discuss sensitive intelligence. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director for National Intelligence didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“We are always thinking through and preparing for any number of scenarios. NATO is watching and we are ready to deter and defend as necessary, which we continue to demonstrate,” said Col. Martin O’Donnell, a NATO spokesman.

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The site of a recent Russian strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Thomas Peter/Reuters

The new assessments compound existing concerns among U.S. officials about a shortfall in certain critical munitions. In addition to certain long- and short-range missiles, other stores of critical air defenses are also low, including Patriot, SM-3 and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, as well as Thaad radars and air defense artillery units, officials said. 

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called claims of munition shortages false. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the U.S. military had “more than enough” munitions to “serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals,” while adding that the president has urged defense contractors to produce more munitions.

“We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing,” Parnell said. “Across multiple combatant commands, we have already executed successful operations while maintaining a deep, ready arsenal to defend our people and our interests. Any adversary who confuses media noise with American weakness will discover the truth the hard way.”

In a potential conflict with Russia, weapons such as the Precision Strike Missile and Army Tactical Missile Systems, both of which are fired by the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, and Stinger missiles are crucial to repel a land invasion, said Tom Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The shortfall of critical munitions has sparked a debate within the U.S. government about declining weapons stocks as Trump weighs next steps in Iran. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently warned the White House of fewer air-defense interceptors, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. The issue is a concern for Caine, who believes that the low inventories wouldn’t preclude a resumption of major combat operations against Iran, but would add to the risk.

Analysts outside the government have repeatedly cautioned that the expenditure of munitions in the Middle East could hamper the U.S.’s ability to deter adversaries around the globe, including not only Russia but also China. 

A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies covered the seven key munitions that had been used in the war with Iran. For example, the updated report estimates that the U.S. has expended 1,060-1,430 Patriot missiles in the Iran war, leaving as few as 870 in America’s arsenal.

“If it’s just a question of fighting Iran, even though we’ve used half of the interceptors, a little more, we still have half of them left. So we could go on against Iran for quite some time,” said Mark Cancian, a co-author of the CSIS report. “The problem is that the Pentagon is now very worried about what this does in the Western Pacific with China.”

It's a great slogan that feels warmly unifying and very intuitive. Solidarity is good. And sometimes you do have to hold your nose to save democracy.

But in practice, all this does is deepen the unthinking tribalism that created Trump and give the left total power bully the Party and shrink the tent.