U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
A thought experiment: would anyone who referred to the killing of 50 Jewish people, many of them “entirely innocent non-combatants, including children,” as “one of the unavoidable burdens of political power, of Palestinian liberation’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” ever be hired by a major television news network?
Would their news outlet ever be potentially offered more than $200 million to merge with that major news network?
Of course not, and for good reason. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening, only with one small but major difference: the writer and her news outlet responsible for this statement, Bari Weiss and The Free Press, were not talking about Hamas’ murder of Israelis, but rather about Israel’s killing of 50 Palestinians — “Zionism’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” as Weiss described it in 2021.
Weiss is currently in talks to sell The Free Press to CBS News for between $200-$250 million, after reportedly winning over its new owner, David Ellison, “by taking a pro-Israel stance,” according to the Financial Times. Ellison “wants to position The Free Press alongside CBS News,” the paper reported, while another source told the New York Times that Ellison is weighing up giving Weiss “an influential role in shaping the editorial sensibilities of CBS News.”
If so, it would be a major new development in a pervasive double standard we’ve seen in the past nearly two years. Weiss and her outlet have engaged in rhetoric and professional behavior that would ordinarily never pass muster in a newsroom — but are considered acceptable because they are in support of Israel’s war against Palestinians.
For one, The Free Press has repeatedly spread misinformation. In May 2024, the outlet charged that the UN had “admit[ted]” the civilian death toll was 50 percent lower than what was being claimed, a quickly debunked and borderline willful misreading of a UN document, a misreading that the UN secretary-general’s office swiftly came forward to correct (a fact left out of The Free Press’ piece).
One year later, The Free Press declared the idea that Israel was engineering a man-made famine that was underway in Gaza a “myth,” even as Israel was in its third month of blocking all food, fuel, and medicine into the territory and at least 57 civilians had already starved to death, most of them children. As recently as this past Sunday, another Free Press article argued that “there isn’t mass starvation as claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda,” which flies in the face of not just basic reality, but testimony from doctors, major news organizations with journalists on the ground, and even the conclusion of President Donald Trump, a supporter of the war.
Just this past June, The Free Press charged simultaneously that there had both been no massacre of Palestinian aid seekers, and that, if there was, Hamas may have been responsible. Of course, since then, not only have Israeli soldiers admitted to shooting aid-seekers but U.S. contractors are coming forward to back up their gruesome stories. These accounts are becoming a near-daily occurrence, with over 1,000 Gazans killed at or close to aid distribution sites in the past two months.
In late May, The Free Press even published a puff piece on the group running these virtual slaughterhouses, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), painting it as an unsung success story, despite ample controversy at the time over its reliance on mercenaries and lack of independence. Two months of bloodshed later, condemnation and calls for GHF’s dismantling are widespread, with one former GHF staffer — a retired U.S. special forces officer — saying he had never witnessed such brutality and indiscriminate violence against “an unarmed, starving population” as at GHF’s distribution centers.
All of these pieces are still up, uncorrected on The Free Press website. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.
When it’s not spreading outright misinformation, The Free Press engages in more insidious propaganda. For instance, it has, depending on the public relations needs of the moment, shifted between ignoring, indignantly denying, and justifying Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals.
When a blast in the war’s first month that killed hundreds at al-Ahli Hospital ignited global outrage, The Free Press jumped on evidence that it may have been an errant Hamas rocket to charge again and again and again, even as recently as two days ago, that the media were rampantly defaming Israel through fake news of crimes it had never committed.
Since then, The Free Press has simply ignored the Israeli attacks on hospitals, often openly done and fully admitted to by the IDF, that have left 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza damaged or destroyed, including just this year attacking al-Ahli at least twice. In fact, both the outlet and Weiss personally pivoted quickly from denying Israel would do such a terrible thing to actively justifying its targeting of hospitals.
Of course, the vast majority of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza are simply never discussed by the outlet. The same goes for Palestinian suffering more generally and the massive and ever-mounting Palestinian death toll, which a group of experts last year concluded is likely undercounted by hundreds of thousands. Typically, the only time these topics are discussed by the outlet is to deny them and to lament their negative effect on Israel.
This is hardly surprising, considering new revelations that The Free Press has serially regurgitated content pushed by the Center for Peace Communications — an organization staffed by figures from pro-Israel think tanks and funded by money from pro-Israel donors.
Another largely absent topic: antisemitism, which is a charge The Free Press exclusively reserves for antiwar protesters, college campuses, teachers unions, Peter Beinart, Ireland, and anyone else who expresses pro-Palestinian sentiment, while it dutifully ignores accusations of antisemitism among Trump appointees and nominees and allies who also happen to be supporters of Israel’s war.
That brings us to the conduct of Weiss herself. She has a personal history of both playing fast and loose with the truth and what can only be described as a high degree of tolerance for anti-Arab and Islamophobic bigotry.
Weiss first rose to prominence due to her efforts to get Muslim and Arab professors at Columbia University fired by accusing them of racism, only for the resulting investigation to find “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.” She then later misleadingly claimed she had never tried to get them fired.
The supposedly rabid bigotry of ordinary Muslims is a favorite topic of Weiss, who has previously blamed rising antisemitism in Europe on the Muslim presence there, and warned that European Jews have “reason to worry” because of it. Soon after October 7, she approvingly shared a Free Press article whose central argument was that protests against Israel’s war — dishonestly characterized as hateful antisemitic rallies “celebrat[ing] mass murder in the streets” — were thanks to immigrants from Middle Eastern countries who could be either “80-year-old Armenian retirees or jihadi terrorists plotting another 9/11.” The Free Press later published an error-riddled article explicitly blaming a surge in Canadian antisemitism on Muslim immigration.
At the same time, Weiss has often promoted, often through The Free Press, her “friend” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali believes that “we are at war with Islam,” which she has called “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” that “there is no moderate Islam,” and that it must be “defeated” and “crush[ed],” including by closing all Muslim schools.
Ali has been a favorite of Islamphobic think tanks and neoconservative activists since the Global War on Terror. She has written that “every devout Muslim” at the very least “approved” of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks and wrote a book that argued that Muslim immigration threatens the rights of Western women, partly because of Muslim men’s supposedly rapacious appetite for sexual violence.
Weiss eagerly promoted that book, spending an hour teeing Hirsi Ali up in a question and answer session to hold forth unchallenged about the dangers of ordinary Muslim men. Elsewhere, Weiss has waxed lyrical about her pride in associating with Hirsi Ali, and that she regards someone’s support for her as a “litmus test.”
If Weiss expressed or promoted any of these same views about Jewish immigrants and Judaism, she would likely be blacklisted in U.S. media, and for good reason. Instead, because they are aimed at Muslims, she is now being richly rewarded.
That a major network like CBS is seriously considering giving Weiss and The Free Press an even bigger platform and the imprimatur of mainstream legitimacy — given not just its promotion of anti-Muslim views, but its history of spreading outright, uncorrected falsehoods — is a sad reflection of the degradation of press standards.
And it seems to only be happening because a top media executive regards Weiss’ history of shoddy journalism less important than her support for Israel’s wars.
Various members of the Brazilian government have been trying unsuccessfully to reach their counterparts in Washington ahead of August 1. That is the date Donald Trump has set for the imposition of 50% tariffs on all Brazilian exports unless the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finds a way to meet two very controversial conditions set by the U.S. president.
Those conditions include dropping charges against Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces a possible prison sentence for his role in an alleged conspiracy to undermine the 2022 election and adopting a more lenient stance towards U.S.-based social media companies operating in Latin America’s largest nation.
While Lula’s government has insisted it is willing to negotiate the terms of its bilateral trade relationship with the United States, it regards the first condition as an interference in Brazil’s domestic affairs, violating both its sovereignty and its administration of justice under the 1988 constitution.
The stage has thus been set for a showdown that will materially hurt both nations, raising fresh questions about the global political and economic order Trump is forging.
As Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad has insisted, Trump’s tariff threats make no economic sense. For one thing, Brazil cannot be said to be ripping off the United States, as Trump alleges. The United States has enjoyed a trade surplus with Brazil for almost two decades. Moreover, many Brazilian exports to the U.S. contain parts manufactured by American companies in the United States itself.
For example, 45% of every commercial Embraer aircraft is composed of American-made parts. Those parts would be slapped with reciprocal tariffs if Trump follows through on his threat.
A 50% tariff on Brazilian exports of orange juice, which constitute 75% of the orange juice marketed around the world and some 60% of all U.S. orange juice imports, would almost certainly make that staple in many American households much more expensive, in addition to putting workers at the bottling plants of well-known brands Tropicana and Minute Maid, both major importers of Brazilian juice, out of work. Trump’s stand on behalf of Bolsonaro would also raise the cost of beef, coffee, and other staples for American consumers.
The United States has enjoyed more than two centuries of friendly relations with Brazil. The hostility toward it today, unfortunately, is indicative of Trump’s foreign policy, where, much more so than his first term, he has been eager to weaponize tariffs, using them in the way previous presidents have used unilateral sanctions — to punish and coerce other nations.
As it tries to negotiate with the White House, the Brazilian government has also sought recourse at the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Well beyond the widespread violations of international trade rules,” Brazil’s representative warned at the WTO Wednesday, “we are now witnessing an extremely dangerous shift toward the use of tariffs as a tool to interfere in the internal affairs of third countries.” While the Brazilian official did not directly cite the United States in his complaint, he garnered the support of 40 other countries — not only China and Russia but also key U.S. allies, including the European Union, New Zealand, and Canada — in his thinly veiled denunciation of Trump’s policy.
It is unclear that anything decided at the WTO will compel Trump, of course — his disregard for international institutions is well known at this point. But Brazil’s efforts indicate an investment in a multilateral global order that the United States is now actively undermining. As Celso Amorim, Lula’s principal foreign policy adviser, observed in an April interview:
“What the U.S. sought to do was not to impose one tariff on China, another on Brazil, etc…. That too, but I think they wanted to force bilateral negotiations” to the detriment of existing multilateral forums. While some might see opportunity in this disruption, Amorim concluded, “the breakdown of the multilateral system brings much greater harm than any possible comparative advantage one might obtain.”
In the short term, Trump will probably manage to establish favorable bilateral deals with multiple countries. In the medium to long term, however, he risks permanently undermining the U.S.-led post-World War II global order, pushing nations like Brazil — deeply invested in multilateralism — toward alternative frameworks beyond Washington’s overweening control.
This is where the BRICS, the intergovernmental organization that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and five other Global South middle powers, enter the picture. As Amorim put it in a separate interview in a reflection of the mainstream view of Brazil’s experienced diplomatic corps, “BRICS is the new name for multilateralism. It is BRICS that gives us hope for a truly multilateral world.”
From the Brazilian perspective, the point of the BRICS, of which Lula currently serves as chairman, is not necessarily to replace existing bodies like the UN but to make them more representative and thus more durable. This might not be the objective shared by all BRICS members, but it does reflect Brazil’s aspiration for a bigger say within the existing architecture of global governance.
Trump seems utterly uninterested in engaging productively with the constellation of international associations, as his withdrawal this week from UNESCO indicates. Indeed, some of his key backers at home are rallying behind his aggressive approach towards defiant countries. “If you drop the trial and drop the charges [against Bolsonaro], the tariffs go away,” Steve Bannon, once a close advisor to the president, told the New York Times. When asked how this policy approach differed from extortion, Bannon replied simply: “it’s MAGA, baby…It’s a brave new world.”
The Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) nuclear weapons program, in which the Air Force is moving to replace its old land-based nuclear missiles with new ones, has been troubled from the start.
Running at more than 80% over-budget, the Sentinel’s gargantuan costs and slow development pace even triggered a critical DoD review under the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which says if a program exceeds a 25% cost overrun it must be terminated unless the Pentagon determines it meets the criteria to continue. The DoD insisted the Sentinel would continue.
Rather than consider all of this, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026, which authorizes the DoD’s budget and sets its priorities for the year, is poised to enable the Sentinel program’s gravy-train further. Indeed, House and Senate versions of the legislation, soon to be considered in Congress, would provide it with an additional $400 million and $2 billion in funding respectively.
Given the Sentinel’s track record, experts call the NDAA’s Sentinel funding push budgetary malpractice.
“It is an absolute disservice to American taxpayers for Congress to continue throwing funds in the money pit that they call the Sentinel program,” Mackenzie Knight-Boyle, a senior research associate at the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, told RS.
“The Defense Department has failed to show it is even capable of executing this program,” she added, “with new ‘unforeseen’ challenges cropping up every couple of months and higher and higher cost estimates announced while the program fails to meet benchmarks.”
Efforts toward program oversight in the same legislative package, meanwhile, are flopping. An NDAA amendment by Rep. John Garamendi (D-Ca.), which would have restricted funds for the program until successfully completing Milestone B, failed in a 15-42 vote at the House Armed Services Committee markup preceding its consideration on the House floor.Broadly, proponents say a modernized ICBM program is key to maintaining America’s nuclear triad, a compilation of weapons systems and platforms which together aim to serve as a credible nuclear deterrent against adversarial attacks on American soil. They point out that the Minuteman ICBM, which has been in place decades longer than originally intended, is being phased out, thus needing to be replaced or refurbished.
But other experts increasingly take issue with ICBMs altogether, saying such weapons systems do little for national security while their placement on land invites, rather than deters, adversarial attack. And they assert that technological advances in other parts of the U.S. nuclear triad have proven adequate for nuclear deterrence, rendering the ICBM redundant. To this end, hundreds of scientists wrote to the Biden administration last year to request it retire the use of ICBMs as part of the U.S. nuclear arsenal entirely, calling ICBMs “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy Program, similarly told RS that ICBMs, of any kind, may escalate conflict in the event of an acute political crisis or attack.
ICBMs “pose serious security risks because a president would have only a few minutes to decide whether to launch them on warning of attack, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm,” Hartung explained.
“There is no reason to rush the Sentinel when we should be debating about whether we should build it at all.”
Along this vein, other lawmakers are now challenging the Sentinel program existentially with new legislation, saying the funding sent to it is better used elsewhere.
Namely, senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) introduced the Investing in Children Before Missiles (ICBM) Act of 2025 on July 23, to pause funding for the Sentinel program, and redirect those funds to the U.S. Department of Education. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.) introduced companion legislation to pause development of the new Sentinel program in the house.
“Instead of sinking tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into propping up a relic of our outdated Cold War-era nuclear strategy — and raising the risk of global mass destruction — we can invest more in fostering greater opportunity for our next generation,” Sen. Van Hollen said of the senators’ new legislative push, citing the Sentinel program’s excessive costs and risks to national security. “If there ever was an opportunity for greater government efficiency, this is it.”
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