Japan transformed from an expansionist military power to a pacifist state within a decade after World War II, adopting a firmly non-nuclear posture after suffering atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet Japan possesses one of the most advanced civilian nuclear infrastructures in the world, technically capable of creating nuclear weapons.

As debates in the United States intensify over alliance commitments and burden-sharing, questions about the credibility of America’s extended deterrence are growing. If that credibility weakens, Japan may find itself increasingly alone in deterring China, North Korea, and Russia.

As Japan becomes more militarized, nuclear pacifism may begin to be replaced with nuclear realism.

Japan is already reinterpreting elements of its postwar restraint, evident in the modernization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the acquisition of long-range counterstrike capabilities for “deterrence by punishment.” Will Japan do the same with nuclear weapons?

The nuclear threshold is near

Japan lacks nuclear warhead expertise, dedicated delivery systems, and secure nuclear testing infrastructure, but it does have the industrial, material, and financial resources to begin a nuclear weapons program.

Japan possesses full-scale nuclear fuel cycle facilities, accumulating over 45 metric tons of separated plutonium, enough to make thousands of nuclear weapons. Japan is projected to increase reliance on fast breeder reactors; these reactors produce more plutonium than they consume.

Japan is also building facilities that eliminate the need to outsource its spent fuel for reprocessing, allowing Japan to domestically produce separated plutonium. Some analysts estimate that Japan could develop a small nuclear arsenal within a year.

Despite Japan’s nuclear latency, it has not crossed the nuclear threshold. Other than public consensus and constitutional restraints, Japan is held back by technical and financial costs. Japan needs to develop nuclear weapons design expertise, delivery systems, and secure infrastructure, all financially and politically costly endeavors.

Furthermore, Japan’s civilian nuclear facilities operate under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. That makes it difficult to run a clandestine nuclear weapons program. While the costs are substantial, they are not prohibitive for a country with Japan’s industrial and technological capacity. Given its advanced nuclear power program and infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated military, Japan can develop the technical requirements for a nuclear weapons program in short order.

Hedging nuclear bets

Japan is a nuclear latent power, so the central issue is intent. Japan adopted what strategists call “insurance hedging,” entailing a cost-benefit analysis of U.S. extended deterrence to determine whether relying on U.S. nuclear weapons is worth the risk of Japan not having its own. Should U.S. extended deterrence fail or be perceived as too weak, Japan will claim insurance by developing nuclear weapons for its own protection.

Japan became an insurance hedger for two reasons: It wants the option to develop nuclear weapons and does not want to forgo U.S. extended deterrence. Japan relies on U.S. extended deterrence for security, but pursuing nuclear weapons could remove Japan from America’s nuclear umbrella.

RELATED: Trump’s Iran gamble: Peace Prize or Persian Gulf firestorm

Photo by Tajh Payne/US Navy via Getty Images

Insurance hedging allows Japan to stay within U.S. extended deterrence while preparing for the possibility of abandonment or failure by the United States. Nuclear latency serves as leverage. If U.S. security guarantees weaken, Japan would retain the ability to respond independently.

Nuclear latency was always the plan

Japan’s nuclear latency is not an accident. As early as the 1950s, Japan deliberately preserved nuclear latency while relying on the United States for deterrence. Japan understood the deterrence value of nuclear weapons, especially in a security environment surrounded by nuclear powers and potential nuclear powers.

For Japan, the United States would serve as its nuclear deterrent, which allowed Japan to maintain its pacifist posture. Nuclear pacifism is still dominant in Japanese strategic culture, but as Japan becomes more militarized, nuclear pacifism may begin to be replaced with nuclear realism.

If U.S. extended deterrence no longer offers Japan the protection it needs, and domestic consensus against nuclear weapons is resolved, Japan could shift in favor of nuclear weapons. To create the JSDF, Japan reinterpreted Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution; Article 9 is an explicit “Renunciation of War” mandating that Japan never maintain “war potential.” Japan once reinterpreted Article 9 to build the Self-Defense Forces. Reinterpreting nuclear pacifism would be far more controversial, but not unprecedented.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

​Japan, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear power, Usa, China, Military buildup, Japan self defense forces, Pacifism, Nuclear deterrence, Opinion & analysis, National defense, Self-defense, War, Pacific ocean 

The combined bombing campaign that began in Iran Saturday morning, decapitating senior leadership and hammering military targets across the map, may look like a massive undertaking.

And it is — for Israel.

Iran looks like an existential threat.

It is — for Israel.

An invasion does not run on slogans. It runs on fuel.

For the United States, the existential threat sits elsewhere. Iran has financed and fueled anti-American violence for 47 years — from the 1979 hostage crisis to the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, from Hezbollah and the Houthis to the IED pipeline that chewed up Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Trump on Saturday morning laid out a clean rationale for turning the mullahs’ war machine into mulch and ending, once and for all, Tehran’s nuclear obsession.

Still, the bigger strategic picture points east — to China.

Beijing’s global ambitions rise and fall on one commodity that keeps modern economies alive and modern militaries moving: oil. If you want to understand why pressure on Iran matters beyond the Middle East, start with the tankers.

Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for Taiwan by 2027. Call it an invasion timeline or call it a readiness deadline — the intent reads the same.

China has spent years preparing the battlefield: artificial islands to extend maritime control, relentless air and naval exercises that rehearse the encirclement of Taiwan, and a missile force built to hunt U.S. ships and push America back behind the horizon.

That missile layer — DF-21s and DF-26s — supports the bigger concept: anti-access/area denial. China wants to make U.S. intervention costly, slow, and uncertain. It wants American commanders staring at a clock they cannot beat.

Washington answered with its own doctrine and its own race against time. The U.S. built concepts like AirSea Battle doctrine and pushed Agile Combat Employment — a dispersed, resilient approach designed to survive missile salvos and keep aircraft flying. The Air Force started rehabilitating old Pacific airfields and expanding access across Guam, Saipan, and especially Tinian, because the next war in the Pacific will punish concentration.

Then Orange Man Bad made two moves in two months that hit Xi exactly where he lives. Not more nasty rhetoric on Truth Social or posturing. Logistics.

First, the United States seized Nicolás Maduro and dumped him in a Brooklyn jail. That operation did more than embarrass a dictator. It jolted the real-world flow of Venezuelan crude — and with it, a slice of China’s import stream that Beijing prefers to keep quiet, rebranded, and discounted. Analysts peg Venezuela’s contribution to China’s seaborne crude imports in the low single digits, roughly 3% to 5% depending on the year and the counting method. In Beijing’s world, even “small” percentages matter when the margin for error narrows.

Second, the joint strike campaign against Iran instantly put a hand on another lever: Iranian exports.

RELATED: Israeli officials say Khamenei is dead. Update: Trump confirms.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

China buys the bulk of Iran’s shipped oil. Various trackers place Iranian barrels at roughly 10% to 15% of China’s seaborne crude imports in recent years. Tehran sells because it needs the cash. Beijing buys because it wants the discount. Trump’s move did not need to “block” every barrel to land the message. It only needed to introduce uncertainty, disruption, rerouting, insurance spikes, interdiction risk, and political friction. Oil markets react to fear faster than to facts.

Put the two together, and the math starts to hurt: a meaningful share of China’s oil — not symbolic, not academic — now sits under pressure from U.S. action in Venezuela and Iran.

That creates a Taiwan problem.

An invasion does not run on slogans. It runs on fuel. It runs on shipping. It runs on industrial output. It runs on a domestic economy that stays stable while the military gambles. Xi can build missiles all day long, but he cannot launch an island war on an economy gasping for discounted crude.

So yes, the current Iran campaign matters for the obvious reasons: international terrorism, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the nuclear program. Those are legitimate reasons for “Epic Fury.”

Trump’s larger play hits the supply lines that make China’s invasion timetable plausible.

In only two months, Trump has put Xi in the position of a man getting a testicular palpation from a recalcitrant physician in a hurry.

Do not distract him. He might clench.

I think Trump wrote a book about it, or he should. Call it “The Art of the Squeal.”

​Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, Iran, China, Ayatollah ali khamenei, Dead, Xi jinping, Taiwan, Oil, Missiles, Missile defense, Venezuela, Nicolas maduro, Grand strategy 

On Sunday, February 22, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, who authorities say breached the secure perimeter of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort armed with a shotgun and a gas can, was reportedly shot and killed by the United States Secret Service. President Trump was not at his Florida residence at the time of the incident.

Christopher Rufo, BlazeTV co-host of “Rufo & Lomez,” has been surprised by the lack of public outrage about this third assassination attempt on President Trump.

“What I found so fascinating is that this story, which in any other time period in American history would be a huge national story [and] dominate headlines, seemed to pass through the news without much of a blip,” says Rufo.

But this story should be of interest to everyone, he argues, not only because “anyone who is attempting an assassination against the president of the United States represents a fundamental threat to the political order,” but also because there seems to be a strange and dangerous pattern at play.

Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot President Trump in the ear at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally back in July 2024, and Austin Martin have some striking similarities, Rufo suggests.

Both were “bookish, young, white men, glasses, had some trouble, you know, fitting into the kind of high school social order. … The reporting indicated that at least at some point in their recent past they were pro-Trump or pro-MAGA. Then they have, for whatever reason, some psychological break, and they end up trying to assassinate the president,” he explains.

“The evidence to me suggests that online radicalization is at least a significant part of this.”

But co-host Jonathan Keeperman thinks there’s another factor fueling the recent political violence: the “copycat effect.”

Once people “see someone doing something that is getting attention, the attention-seeking person then will just go copy that same behavior because what they actually want, what they’re actually after, is that kind of attention,” he says.

“And so by ignoring these people, by pushing them out of the headlines, we’re actually preventing more of this from happening in the future,” he suggests.

Keeperman also ponders the possibility that by trying to sleuth around and identify what’s fueling these acts of political violence we’re actually doing more harm than good.

“We’re in a fallen world with fallen people, and they’re lunatics, and they commit violence, and it’s terrible, and it’s tragic. But maybe, actually, our insistence that there’s something more to mine from this … or there’s some meaning beyond just the fact that they’re lunatics, is itself a kind of conspiratorial delusion that we’re enacting in order to make sense of what is otherwise insensible,” he posits.

But Rufo isn’t convinced that attention-seeking or unpredictable lunacy is the root of the political violence we’re seeing. To hear his counterargument, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Rufo, Rufo & lomez, Chris rufo, Jonathan keeperman, Blazetv, Blaze media, Austin tucker martin, Thomas matthew crooks, Trump, Trump assassination attempt, Political violence 

President Donald Trump exchanged threats with remnants of the Iranian regime ahead of the second day of the joint U.S.-Israeli regime-change strikes on the West Asian nation.

Tehran, evidently keen to test Trump’s resolve despite losing most of its military and political leaders in Saturday’s assassinations, sought to make good on its tough talk with continued retaliatory strikes in the region, killing at least three Americans, at least nine Israelis, and multiple victims in neighboring Arab states.

‘We will hunt you down, and we will kill you.’

The U.S and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on Saturday, aerially assassinating Iran’s top brass — including the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the head of Iran’s foreign intelligence unit, and the regime’s adviser on the war with Israel — and destroying hundreds of “regime targets” including an Iranian Jamaran-class warship.

Following confirmation that their dictator, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the initial strikes, multitudes of Iranians gathered in Tehran’s Enghelab Square to mourn his demise while remaining elements of the regime vowed revenge.

Iran promptly responded with retaliatory strikes in Bahrain, Qatar, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, and Oman — in several cases targeting U.S. military assets.

Abolfazl Shekarchi, a spokesman for the Iranian military, stated, “God willing, we will give a lesson to the U.S. and Israel that they have not experienced in their history,” reported the Iranian state-linked Tasnim News Agency.

RELATED: Israeli officials say Khamenei is dead. Update: Trump confirms.

Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images

Amidst more bluster from Iranian regimists who formed a transitional council to lead the country following Khamenei’s death, President Donald Trump noted on Truth Social shortly after midnight on Sunday, “Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever hit before. THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”

Like Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made abundantly clear precisely what fate awaits those who’d target American forces: “We will hunt you down, and we will kill you.”

Iran — whose media alleged that over 200 people, including 145 children, were killed in the initial joint U.S.-Israel strikes — did not heed Trump’s warning.

On Sunday morning, the decapitated regime launched another wave of missile and drone attacks on Israel and American military assets, including the U.S. Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly claimed in a statement on Sunday that the Iranian military will continue to act “with power” and “frustrate the enemies as always.”

Pezeshkian reportedly also characterized the attacks “by the American-Zionist axis” as a “declaration of open war with Muslims, especially Shiites in the world.”

Amid the latest round of Iranian retaliation strikes, U.S. Central Command indicated that “as of 9:30 am ET, March 1, three U.S. service members have been killed in action and five are seriously wounded as part of Operation Epic Fury.”

‘These are painful days.’

“Several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions — and are in the process of being returned to duty,” CENTCOM noted further. “Major combat operations continue and our response effort is ongoing.”

After bombarding Tehran overnight, the Israeli Air Force announced late Sunday morning that it had “begun another wave of strikes in the heart of Tehran.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “Our forces are now striking at the heart of Tehran with intensifying force, and this will only grow even stronger in the coming days. That said, these are painful days.”

The U.S. has similarly executed another round of strikes against Iran, reported CBS News.

Trump told CNBC on Sunday that the American operation in Iran is “moving along very well, very well — ahead of schedule.”

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​War, Regime change, Regime, Iran, Tehran, Khamenei, Arabian sea, Centcom, Foreign entanglements, Donald trump, Israel, Iranian, Politics 

The New Testament didn’t just shape Christian belief — it shaped early Christian life. And with it came a set of names that feel surprisingly modern and usable, even if most of them never made it into mainstream naming culture.

Here are 10 New Testament names worth a second look.

1. Phoebe

Romans 16:1-2

Phoebe was a deaconess in the early church and the trusted courier of Paul’s letter to the Romans — likely the first person to read and explain it.

Her name means “bright” or “radiant.” Familiar today, but often disconnected from its biblical roots.

Famous Phoebes: Phoebe Cates, Phoebe Waller-Bridge

2. Silas

Acts 15–18

Silas was a missionary companion of Paul, sharing imprisonment and persecution during the church’s earliest expansion.

Derived from Silvanus, meaning “wood” or “forest,” Silas is biblical without sounding overtly religious.

Famous Silases: Silas Robertson, Silas Marner (fictional)

3. Clement

Philippians 4:3

Mentioned briefly by Paul, Clement later becomes associated with Clement of Rome, one of the earliest Christian leaders outside Scripture.

The name means “gentle” or “merciful,” with strong early-church pedigree.

Famous Clements: Clement Attlee (British prime minister)

4. Justus

Acts 1:23; Colossians 4:11

Justus appears multiple times in the New Testament as a respected believer and associate of Paul.

Meaning “just” or “righteous,” the name is sturdy, Roman, and underused.

Famous Justuses: Justus von Liebig (chemist)

5. Junia

Romans 16:7

Junia is praised by Paul as “outstanding among the apostles,” making her one of the most intriguing figures in the early church.

Her name is Roman, elegant, and only recently rediscovered by modern readers.

Famous Junias: Mostly confined to antiquity

6. Aquila

Acts 18

Aquila, alongside his wife Priscilla, was a teacher and missionary who helped instruct Apollos.

The name means “eagle.” Strong, Roman, and distinctive.

Famous Aquilas: Aquila Kyros (composer)

7. Rhoda

Acts 12

Rhoda is the servant girl who famously forgets to open the door for Peter because she’s too excited about announcing his arrival.

Her name means “rose.” Brief appearance, lasting charm.

Famous Rhodas: Rhoda Janzen (author)

8. Apphia

Philemon

Apphia is greeted by Paul as a respected member of the church, likely a leader within her household.

Soft, domestic, and genuinely rare.

Famous Apphias: None — true deep cut

9. Tertius

Romans 16:22

Tertius is the scribe who physically wrote Paul’s letter to the Romans and signs the letter himself.

The name literally means “third.” Historically fascinating, practically bold.

Famous Tertii: Mostly confined to antiquity

10. Sosthenes (most uncommon)

Acts 18; 1 Corinthians 1:1

Sosthenes appears as a synagogue leader who later becomes a Christian associate of Paul.

The name means “of safe strength.” Impressive, ancient, and very much for the brave.

Famous Sosthenes: Almost exclusively ancient figures

See our list of 10 underrated Old Testament names here!

​Baby names, Abide, Lifestyle, Bible, Christianity, Faith, New testament 

According to an old African proverb, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre is concerned this same dynamic is playing out among America’s younger generations today. Many young people feel scorned by policies and systems that favor older generations and immigrants while barring them from owning homes, starting families, and pursuing careers.

As housing prices skyrocket, wages remain flat, jobs get shipped overseas, and immigration transforms the workforce, political figures keep touting record stock-market levels as evidence of widespread economic success. But inflating asset values is far from the same thing as genuine national well-being.

If something doesn’t give soon, will our young folk lose hope in the system and start trying to destroy it?

On this episode of “The Auron MacIntyre Show,” Auron dives into this pressing question.

“The French Revolution was horrific, but it happened in part because the king really was making bad decisions. The Russian Revolution was an absolute nightmare, but it did happen because the czar was not doing a good job and was ignoring the needs of the people,” says Auron.

“The systems you’re operating have to benefit most of the people involved because if they don’t, there will eventually come a time where everyone either checks out or decides that they don’t want to play this game anymore,” he warns.

When this happens, the results usually end up being “much worse” than the original predicaments that caused them.

Right now, the younger generations are being given the same advice that made older generations financially successful: “Work harder,” “[increase] your skill set,” “[put] your time in,” and “[make] wise financial decisions.”

While this is still “good advice to the individual,” says Auron, it’s no longer applicable to the masses due to how policies have shifted over time.

“You can’t keep running the entire economy for Boomers and the laptop class. … There has to be a buy-in or eventually people will get violent or apathetic — and you can’t be angry or surprised when that ultimately happens,” he says.

“The affordability issue is going to be the issue. It just is. Like that and immigration are going to be one and two for probably the next 10 years at least, and so any Republican administration, any Trump administration, any (let’s hope) JD Vance administration — they’re going to have to address this problem,” Auron urges.

To hear more of Auron’s analysis, watch the video above.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist’s commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The auron macintyre show, Auron macintyre, Affordability crisis, Stagnant wages, Housing market, Blazetv, Blaze media 

I did not arrive at this argument as a theorist or as a commentator looking for a clever angle. I arrived at it through the wreckage of 2020.

After I investigated the November 2020 election in Arizona and Nevada, the Department of Justice subpoenaed me. In February 2023, I spent six and a half hours testifying before a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. That experience did not change my political outlook. It changed my sense of how exposed the country has become — and how unwilling key institutions have been to confront the exposure directly.

Do Americans still govern themselves, or do we merely perform self-government while hostile forces — foreign and domestic — shape outcomes behind a screen?

The debate returned with new urgency this week. The Washington Post reported Thursday that election integrity activists are urging the Trump administration to issue an executive order on elections. It’s about time. Executive action has become the only plausible instrument for a rapid national response, because the states have entrenched incentives to resist meaningful reform and foreign enemies have worked diligently to undermine and defeat us.

For anyone with eyes to see, war has come. It has not arrived in the form Americans expect when they hear the word. It does not always appear wearing uniforms, wielding declarations, or mobilizing divisions. It arrives through political warfare, cyber capabilities, influence operations, and domestic agitation. It arrives through a border that stops functioning, a culture that stops teaching civic loyalty, and an election system that produces outcomes a large share of the country considers illegitimate.

A global conflict now runs through the heart of America’s public life. Communist China and other hostile regimes mean the destruction of the United States, and they pursue that goal with patience, strategy, and resources.

Alongside that global conflict, a domestic conflict has hardened into something close to open civil war, with one side committed to sovereignty, law, and national continuity, and the other side increasingly willing to use institutional leverage, street agitation, and demographic transformation to break the existing order.

This domestic conflict matters for a practical reason: It makes free and fair elections difficult if not impossible to conduct in 2026 and 2028 absent radical steps to secure them.

Can America have a fair election in 2026?

Three fronts define the challenge. First, the United States must conduct elections that Americans can recognize as legitimate. Second, Immigration and Customs Enforcement must regain the ability to deport the millions of illegal aliens who entered the country during the Biden years, despite organized resistance. Third, foreign enemies must be denied the ability to wage war on America through cyber sabotage, influence operations, and electoral interference.

These fronts converge on one question: Do Americans still govern themselves, or do we merely perform self-government while hostile forces — foreign and domestic — shape outcomes behind a screen?

Start with elections, because everything else depends on them.

Self-government requires two things that cannot be faked. First, a border defines citizenship. Second, an election defines consent.

A republic cannot survive without both. Yet Americans now live under conditions that invite doubt about each: a border that failed catastrophically, and an election system that many citizens no longer trust.

Fair elections demand friction. They demand procedures that annoy activists and frustrate bureaucrats. They demand a system that ordinary citizens can understand. A voter should show identification, vote on a paper ballot, and watch that ballot be counted by human beings under observation by other human beings.

Perfection will never exist. The point is not perfection. The point is transparency, auditability, and public confidence grounded in procedures citizens can see and grasp.

For most of American history, paper ballots provided that confidence. Americans knew what happened in the counting room because the counting room did not function like a proprietary black box. Election modernizers sold the country a different idea: Computers make things fast, efficient, and secure. The experience of the last decade, culminating in 2020, has left that promise in ruins.

RELATED: ‘Dead on arrival’: Chuck Schumer says Dems will ‘go all out’ to defeat voter ID bill

Photo by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A massive intelligence failure

Since November 2020, the corporate legacy media has insisted that the U.S. election system operates as “absolutely secure” and that widespread fraud does not exist. That claim collides with common sense.

The vast majority of Americans now vote through an election ecosystem built on machines, scanners, tabulators, centralized databases, and software layers that few officials can explain and fewer citizens can independently audit. This ecosystem does not eliminate fraud. It relocates fraud into places the public cannot easily see.

Electronic voting systems invite manipulation because they rely on computers. Computers obey code. Code gets written, altered, updated, patched, and maintained by people with incentives, biases, and vulnerabilities. Any system dependent on code and opaque tabulation invites distrust — and it invites actors with resources to exploit it.

Hardware alone raises the first national security issue. Election machines rely on electronic components manufactured in communist China or Taiwan. China is an enemy nation. A hostile regime’s manufacturing ecosystem should not sit inside critical infrastructure, and elections sit at the heart of critical infrastructure. When Americans hear that the parts driving their voting system originate in China, many react with disbelief. That reaction is rational.

Software raises a second issue. Major election technology has been developed, maintained, or designed across foreign jurisdictions — Venezuela, Canada, Serbia — with American developers in the mix. Even when parts of that reporting prove disputed or exaggerated in public debate, the broader fact remains: A modern electronic election system creates a sprawling supply chain of hardware and software dependencies that pushes election integrity far outside the direct control of any voter, precinct worker, or local official.

An enemy regime does not need to ‘flip votes’ to win. It can accomplish its goals by shredding trust, delegitimizing outcomes, and pushing Americans toward internal conflict.

Ownership and investment raise a third issue. The purchase and financing structures surrounding major election vendors have generated persistent public questions, including questions about foreign investment exposure and the presence of overseas investors with legal obligations to their own regimes. The press largely refused to investigate those questions in any serious way after 2020. Instead, it treated the questions themselves as illegitimate — which encouraged distrust rather than resolving it.

How did such systems enter American elections in the first place?

The answer points to intelligence and counterintelligence failure.

Modern warfare is not limited to bombs and bullets. Modern warfare includes political warfare, cyber operations, influence campaigns, and the exploitation of social fractures. Any hostile regime with the ability to damage American legitimacy has an interest in doing so. An enemy regime does not need to “flip votes” to win. It can accomplish its goals by shredding trust, delegitimizing outcomes, and pushing Americans toward internal conflict.

U.S. counterintelligence should treat election seasons as high-value windows for hostile activity, because elections present the most valuable target in American political life. Yet the United States behaved as if such threats belonged in the realm of conspiracy rather than standard national-security planning.

Warnings existed before 2020. HBO’s 2020 documentary “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections,” produced primarily in 2019 by Finnish computer programmer and documentarian Harri Hursti, laid out vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

The film included Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), each of whom criticized election technology and raised concerns about trust, auditability, and system integrity. The documentary’s premise focused on the fear that Russia would steal the election for Donald Trump. In other words, prominent Democrats publicly argued that electronic systems could not be trusted — right up until those arguments became politically inconvenient.

The documentary’s partisan framing does not matter. The underlying point does: A computer-based system can be manipulated, and the mere possibility of manipulation creates a legitimacy crisis for any contested outcome. A republic cannot function when half the country believes the outcome was engineered by an opaque system.

The ‘most secure election’ canard

So did the 2020 election turn on electronic manipulation?

Many Americans concluded that it did, and they did so because 2020 produced anomalies too glaring to ignore. Yet a thorough federal investigation never followed.

The federal government had rightful authority to investigate election-system vulnerabilities. The FBI could have pursued fraud and foreign interference. The DHS, through its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, treated election systems as critical infrastructure. Yet a week after the election — during a national outcry over procedures, chain of custody, observation access, and statistical anomalies — CISA Director Chris Krebs declared 2020 “the most secure election in American history.” Even granting him good faith, that claim outpaced what any official could responsibly know so soon.

Other institutions looked away. Attorney General Bill Barr declined to pursue serious claims. Trump’s White House lawyers and advisers, even those acting in good faith, lacked the expertise and institutional leverage needed to conduct a forensic inquiry across multiple states with complex systems. Many figures around Trump seemed unwilling to risk their careers or reputations on a fight that would trigger institutional retaliation. Conventional thinking did the rest: Americans struggle to imagine a national election stolen in plain sight, so they default to official assurances.

That vacuum created a predictable outcome: Private citizens stepped in.

Some acted from patriotic concern for the republic and a desire to find the truth. Others took advantage of the crisis. Some appeared to function as disinformation agents — whether knowingly or not — by flooding the public with claims so sensational that they discredited serious inquiry. The “satellite” stories and overseas melodrama that circulated after 2020 served that function. They distracted from real questions and gave the establishment an easy excuse to dismiss anyone demanding transparency as a crank.

RELATED: 3 debunked Democrat claims about the SAVE America Act

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Private efforts did surface real issues, and three of those deserve attention because they remain unresolved and because they point to reforms that do not depend on proving any single theory about 2020.

First, Americans learned how foreign-linked, opaque, computer-based voting systems had become standard. Citizens do not need a technical degree to grasp the problem. A system that depends on foreign supply chains, foreign-linked software development, and proprietary tabulation cannot command broad public trust. That fact alone constitutes a crisis for a republic.

Second, the 2020 election demonstrated how mail voting can be exploited at scale. Universal mail ballots moved through broken voter rolls, weak chain-of-custody practices, and uneven signature verification. COVID became an excuse for suspending or weakening procedures that existed for a reason: they protect legitimacy.

Clark County, Nevada, offers an example. Under normal settings, its signature-verification system rejected large numbers of ballots. Election officials reportedly lowered the resolution settings, contrary to accepted procedures, until nearly any signature could pass. That decision converted signature verification into a formality. Officials then treated this relaxation as a practical necessity. Citizens experienced it as a violation of the rules.

Third, private investigators in several states identified batches of paper ballots that did not match standard stock or standard folding patterns consistent with mailed ballots. Ballots that arrive flat, unfolded, and printed on different paper invite suspicion of outside mass printing. Even when officials insist on benign explanations, the failure to address the optics and the forensics with urgency undermines trust.

Taken together, these issues required an information campaign to persuade Americans that 2020 was conducted fairly. That campaign did not succeed. Large numbers of Americans believed the election was stolen or unfair. The Biden administration governed under a cloud of contested legitimacy, and the country absorbed four years of anger, cynicism, and institutional fracture.

That experience leads to a basic conclusion: An election system that requires a nationwide propaganda effort to sustain credibility is not a healthy system.

‘Too big to rig’

A common retort now surfaces: If the system was rigged in 2020, how could Trump possibly have won in 2024?

Two explanations fit what Americans saw.

First, a second theft risked systemic crisis. The country watched what happened after 2020. Many Americans believed the election had been stolen. They watched the anger. They watched the institutional crackdown. A repeat in 2024 could have produced a political breakdown that would have paralyzed governance across the country. Even actors with capacity to manipulate outcomes would have had to consider the consequences.

Americans should not have to live in a state of permanent suspicion, asking whether unseen forces fought over tabulation pipelines and database integrity.

Second, unprecedented monitoring and deterrence efforts likely raised the costs of misconduct. Trump predicted a victory “too big to rig.” That line became a strategy: Overwhelm the system with turnout, recruit and train observers, litigate in advance, pressure states for reforms, and limit the number of ballots floating through the mail. Even if 2020 did not turn on cyber manipulation, the mere perception that it might have done so forced new defensive measures in 2024.

Either way, the central point stands: Americans should not have to live in a state of permanent suspicion, asking whether unseen forces fought over tabulation pipelines and database integrity. A free people deserves an election system that does not invite that question.

The Constitution assumes a union of one people with a functioning constitutional order. That assumption is now strained. Progressive states increasingly treat federal authority as illegitimate on immigration and law enforcement. Elected officials in California, Illinois, New York, Washington, Oregon, and other states have signaled hostility toward the Trump government and toward the idea of enforcing border sovereignty. Those attitudes bleed into election administration, because election administration has become another front in political warfare.

Congress has taken partial steps. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, requiring proof of citizenship, and the Make Elections Great Again Act, mandating voter ID, move in the right direction. Yet those steps do not remove the core vulnerability: electronic voting systems and electronic tabulation.

A system without electronics removes entire classes of risk. It also restores something modern reformers discount: visible legitimacy.

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A common-sense proposal

The country needs a clean national standard for federal elections: paper ballots, Election Day voting, transparent counting, and credible oversight.

Congress could impose such a standard. Congress likely will not, at least not in time for 2026. That reality pushes attention toward executive action.

One option is direct and blunt: The president should prohibit electronic voting machines and electronic tabulation in federal elections, invoking national security and foreign-interference risk.

President Trump already recognized the danger of foreign interference. Executive Order 13848, issued Sept. 12, 2018, declared a national emergency with respect to foreign interference in U.S. elections and authorized sanctions. That framework is triggered after an election. Americans learned in 2020 that post hoc remedies come too late. The country needs preventive action before the next vote.

A new executive order should declare that foreign supply-chain exposure and the risk of foreign cyber and influence operations make electronic voting systems unacceptable for federal elections. The goal is not to accuse every state of corruption. The goal is to remove the tool that makes corruption scalable and invisible.

A second executive action should mandate a uniform protocol for federal elections across the states:

Paper ballots, printed and secured under strict chain-of-custody rules.Photo identification for in-person voting.Voter rolls audited and cleaned to reflect real voters.Election Day voting as the norm.Absentee ballots limited to military voters and genuinely confined citizens.Counting conducted by humans under observation by credentialed observers.Transparent reporting at the precinct level in real time.Livestreamed counting wherever feasible to increase confidence and deter misconduct.

This system is not fancy. That’s part of its appeal. It replaces complexity with clarity. It makes manipulation difficult because manipulation requires people, presence, and risk.

Blue states will resist. Some on the left and right might scream about “states’ rights.” The very idea that states have rights has lingered far too long in American politics.

Election integrity cannot be separated from immigration enforcement. Both turn on the same principle: citizenship and sovereignty.

States do not have rights. Natural rights belong to citizens, not state governments. State governments hold delegated powers and duties. When state systems undermine citizens’ rights — including the right to participate in a credible election — the federal government has a duty to protect the constitutional order.

Article I, Section 4 assigns states authority over the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections, subject to congressional alteration. That clause presumes good-faith administration inside a stable union. It did not anticipate election systems dependent on foreign-linked technology, hostile supply chains, and opaque software. Remember: The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

A third, indispensable step must follow: federal oversight.

State election boards disqualified themselves in 2020 by treating citizen observation as illegitimate and by creating closed systems that blocked transparency. Americans watched officials cover windows during counting in Philadelphia. That image damaged confidence more than any argument could repair. When officials treat observation as an enemy, they signal that legitimacy is negotiable.

Federal oversight should include well-constituted teams of observers with legal authority to monitor chain of custody, ballot handling, and counting procedures. Those teams should include lawyers, trained observers, and experienced election administrators. Federalized law enforcement can provide security and enforce access rules.

One drastic but increasingly necessary option is the federalization of each state’s National Guard during federal elections, with a narrow and disciplined mission: secure facilities, protect chain of custody, enforce lawful observer access, and deter intimidation or obstruction by any side. The goal is not militarization. The goal is legitimacy in a period when legitimacy has become a target.

Critics will call this authoritarian. Critics will say it overrides federalism. Critics will claim it inflames tension. Those critics miss the current reality: The existing system inflames tension precisely because it generates doubt.

Paper ballots counted in public calm tension. Electronic systems managed behind bureaucratic walls inflame tension.

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Why this is absolutely necessary

Election integrity cannot be separated from immigration enforcement. Both turn on the same principle: citizenship and sovereignty.

Over four years, the Biden administration facilitated an invasion of the United States by an estimated 15 to 25 million illegal immigrants. Blue-state governors aided and abetted this effort through sanctuary policies and open defiance of federal enforcement. This was not a routine policy dispute. It was a deliberate attempt to transform the country politically and culturally. The strategy had a clear political logic: create a new demographic reality, then use that reality to entrench power.

No serious person doubts the long-term plan behind mass illegal migration: regularize the status, grant legal residency, and push toward citizenship. Even if that path takes time, the political intent is obvious. A massive new voting population would permanently alter the political balance of power in favor of open borders and against national continuity.

If the illegal immigrants are not made citizens, the next phase follows: turn deportation into a trigger for civil conflict. That conflict is already taking shape in the resistance to ICE operations. Activists and political officials treat immigration enforcement as illegitimate. They mobilize street pressure to block lawful federal action. They use the language of “human rights” to justify lawlessness.

In parallel, American culture has produced generations of citizens who no longer see themselves as heirs of a constitutional republic. Many now see themselves as political actors engaged in permanent struggle against “systems.” They do not treat citizenship as a loyalty. They treat it as a tool. When pop figures declare that no illegal immigrants exist on “stolen land,” they echo a narrative taught for decades: America is an illegitimate country that must be dismantled or reduced.

This ideology fuels the street-level insurrection now forming around immigration enforcement. Add professional agitators — Antifa networks, hard-left organizations, Islamist activist groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and communist organizations — and the result is predictable: chaos, intimidation, and violence in major cities.

Americans can argue about policy outcomes for the rest of their lives. They cannot argue forever about whether votes were counted honestly and still remain one country.

ICE faces a logistical reality. Deporting tens of millions requires manpower, detention capacity, transport capacity, and employer enforcement that makes illegal employment untenable. The current number of ICE agents cannot accomplish this alone. Even if the administration doubles agent capacity to 44,000, success depends on collapsing the job market for illegal labor. Without employer enforcement, millions of illegal immigrants will bet on survival in the underground economy until 2028, hoping for amnesty under the next Democrat administration.

This reality intersects with elections. A country cannot run a credible election while tens of millions of illegal immigrants remain embedded in communities — including key swing congressional districts — while activists and elected officials defy enforcement, and while the meaning of citizenship erodes. Election integrity becomes a secondary casualty of a deeper sovereignty crisis.

National security magnifies the urgency further.

At minimum, roughly 200,000 Chinese nationals entered the country during the Biden-era migration surge. The vast majority of them were military-age men. Some of these men have the appearance of members of a military force. Communist China has declared political warfare against the United States and has the capability to sabotage critical infrastructure, from power grids to water systems. If hostile operatives sit inside the country at scale, what stops them from targeting soft points in civil life: malls, theme parks, public events, transport nodes?

A nation cannot treat this as a hypothetical. America must treat this as an operational planning problem.

A lack of decisive action sends signals. It signals to illegal immigrants that they can wait out enforcement. It signals to the insurrectionist left that street violence will succeed. It signals to hostile states that the United States lacks the will to defend its own sovereignty.

In this environment, President Trump’s insight that elections may need to be “nationalized” deserves serious consideration.

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A final consideration

Communist China spends tens of billions annually on intelligence and influence operations inside the United States. It has declared a people’s war against the United States and has built a cyber force tied to the People’s Liberation Army that approaches 1 million personnel. It operates through partners and proxies — including cyber-capable regimes such as Iran — and it has relationships with authoritarian governments that have served as nodes in the election-technology ecosystem, including Venezuela.

Even if every component of the U.S. election system were designed and built inside the United States, electronic systems would still carry unacceptable vulnerabilities. Any networked system can be penetrated. Any tabulation system can be targeted. Any system that produces outcomes through proprietary code and opaque databases invites distrust — and provides adversaries with leverage.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has taken a keen interest in election vulnerability, including the ongoing investigation in Georgia. Her mandate includes preventing foreign intelligence services from influencing American elections. Her recommendations will matter. So will the willingness of the administration to act on the principle that legitimacy is not a public-relations problem. It is a national security problem.

America’s enemies wage political warfare to undermine confidence in the U.S. political system. America must respond with counter-political warfare and with reforms that deny adversaries their most useful tool: doubt.

This returns us to the war framing because the war framing describes the stakes without exaggeration.

The United States is not drifting through a normal partisan season. The United States is fighting for continuity as a sovereign republic. Foreign enemies want Americans to lose confidence in their own system. Domestic radicals want Americans to lose confidence in their own inheritance. Both sides benefit when elections produce outcomes that half the country cannot accept.

A republic cannot survive repeated legitimacy collapse.

The remedy is not complicated. It is common sense.

Paper ballots. Election Day, not week. Photo ID. Clean voter rolls. Human counting under observation. Transparent reporting that citizens can verify. Federal oversight strong enough to deter obstruction and fraud. An executive posture that treats election integrity as national defense, not as a procedural hobby left to 50 different bureaucracies.

Americans can argue about policy outcomes for the rest of their lives. They cannot argue forever about whether votes were counted honestly and still remain one country.

It is clear that our enemies engage in political warfare to undermine the confidence Americans have in our political system. We must wage a robust counter-political warfare campaign to thwart our enemies. This has not been a consideration of American policymakers in the past. No large-scale challenge such as the vulnerability of our voting system existed during the Cold War. This challenge exists now, and how America addresses it over the coming months may well decide the future of our republic. Let us pray that common sense prevails.

​Opinion & analysis, Elections, Election integrity, Save america act, Donald trump, 2020 election, Stolen election, Election fraud, China, Chinese communist party, Chinese influence, National security, Voting, Voting irregularities, Electronic voting machine, 2026 midterms, Intelligence, Political warfare, Illegal immigration, Illegal aliens voting, Invasion, Joe biden, Open borders, Mass deportations, Nationalization, Antifa, Democratic party