The Chimes, a Dickens novella which was first published in 1844, one year after the well-known A Christmas Carol. The story involves the disillusionment of Toby “Trotty” Veck, a poor working-class man who works as a casual messenger or ‘ticket-porter’. Dickens goes to great lengths at the beginning of the story to detail Trotty’s poverty […]
Many of us have associated Charles Dickens with the Christmas Carol, published in 1843. But did you know that it was not the only Christmas story he wrote. The Chimes was published in 1844 and features a Christmas story from another angle, and a unique one as well. A look at a review of the story here.
We have talked a lot about the National Security Strategy and the Social Media Rule for foreign travellers entering the US. However in this piece by Kat Romanesko, the policy goes much, much deeper than that. It includes phone contacts, emails, everything that we had once considered private but is now wide open.
Including all the affairs a person had in the past decade…..
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Somewhere between Ellis Island and the TSA line where a man once tried to smuggle a rotisserie chicken in his pants, the United States decided it had not yet sufficiently embarrassed itself. So now we are planning to ask every visitor from 42 of our closest, most patient allies to cough up five years of social media history as the new entry fee to the land of freedom, fireworks, and whatever flavor of national humiliation the week brings.
It is a bold move from a government that already cannot run a website during open enrollment without setting something on fire. Now they want millions of visitors a year to hand over the digital diaries where their most questionable thoughts, memes, and wine-fueled late-night comments live. This is our new frontier. We used to build highways and moon rockets, now we build forms that ask Danish tourists if they ever subtweeted an American senator.
The whole thing reads like a satire but unfortunately carries the weight of federal regulation. The proposal now requires anyone using ESTA to report five years of social media handles, five years of phone numbers, ten years of email addresses, IP data, family contact information, a few biometrics, and possibly the name of their childhood imaginary friend if they ever posted about him online. Legally speaking, all it takes is a published rule, a 60-day comment period, and an administration confident that the courts will not stop them from turning the border into the world’s most awkward digital confession booth.
The best part is watching people ask if they can simply delete things from their phones. Sweet summer children. Deleting an app is like hiding your diary under your mattress when the FBI already photocopied every page. TikTok still has your drafts. Meta has your deleted posts and your first three crushes’ phone numbers. Google has every video you watched when you were supposed to be working. Reddit has that comment you made on a sleep-deprived Tuesday when you were arguing with a stranger named “HotDogTruthSeeker.” The platforms keep it all. They always have. This is why their servers are located in warehouses the size of Rhode Island.
I expect the tourism ads will adjust accordingly. “Visit America,” they’ll say. “Please send us your biometric profile, your internet footprint, your list of exes, and all photos you have ever taken of brunch. Statue of Liberty optional.” ESTA, the pre-authorization system that lets citizens of 42 countries visit the U.S. for up to 90 days without a visa, is now the place where all this new digital interrogation will live. Other countries require you to be up to date on your routine immunizations or show a simple vaccine card, which seems reasonable enough when the goal is to prevent, say, measles from making a surprise comeback. But here we are, inventing a brand new travel requirement where the United States demands something far weirder, your digital medical medium chart for the soul. Europeans will shrug and go to Portugal instead, where the only question asked is whether you want your wine as a glass or as a jug.
And here we sit, watching our leaders insist this is all in the name of national security, even though we have already seen how well this government handles anything involving security, technology and judgment. The policy is less about safety and more about teaching the world that privacy is a fairy tale and that visiting the United States now requires the emotional vulnerability of a middle school sleepover combined with the suspicion of a parole meeting.
This is where we are headed. Third world country energy with first world arrogance. A government that pardons sexual predators while interrogating tourists about their Instagram handles. A travel system redesigned to catch the kind of person who once posted a spicy meme but will inevitably miss the kind actually planning something dangerous. It is the American way. If there is a wrong tool for the job we will find it, sharpen it, and swing it proudly.
So gather your handles, your usernames, your old burner accounts from the early Facebook years. Gather every email you ever used to sign up for a free trial of anything. Gather your patience. But mostly gather your understanding that this is not about protecting America. It is about shaping it into a place where surveillance feels normal, and where asking someone for five years of their digital life is treated like asking whether they packed their own bags.
Welcome to the new standard. Pack light. Travel honest. And for the love of God do not let them find your Reddit history.
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As mentioned previously, the National Security Strategy, released on December 8th, looks at American interests in the form of the Monroe Doctrine, 2.0, where American interests lie in the Americas and Europe should stay out of this. In addition, it sets up a possible military conflict with China for the rarest minerals the country has. However, in this essay, Jeffery Sachs looks at the NSS as all but Machiavellianistic, something that was last seen with Hitler, when he pitted one European country against another before taking them one by one and starting WWII at the same time.
Feel free to share as he requested and comment as you wish.
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The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) recently released by President Donald Trump presents itself as a blueprint for renewed American strength. It is dangerously misconceived in four ways.
First, the NSS is anchored in grandiosity: the belief that the United States enjoys unmatched supremacy in every key dimension of power.
Second, it is based on a starkly Machiavellian view of the world, treating other nations as instruments to be manipulated for American advantage.
Third, it rests on a naïve nationalism that dismisses international law and institutions as encumbrances on US sovereignty rather than as frameworks that enhance US and global security together.
Fourth, it signals a thuggery in Trump’s use of the CIA and military. Within days of the NSS’s publication, the US brazenly seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil on the high seas—on the flimsy grounds that the vessel had previously violated US sanctions against Iran.
The seizure was not a defensive measure to avert an imminent threat. Nor is it remotely legal to seize vessels on the high seas because of unilateral US sanctions.
Only the UN Security Council has such authority. Instead, the seizure is an illegal act designed to force regime change in Venezuela. It follows Trump’s declaration that he has directed the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela to destabilize the regime.
American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened—structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.
The NSS, in other words, is not just an exercise in hubris on paper. It is rapidly being translated into brazen practice.
A Glimmer of Realism, Then a Lurch into Hubris
To be fair, the NSS contains moments of long-overdue realism. It implicitly concedes that the United States cannot and should not attempt to dominate the entire world, and it correctly recognizes that some allies have dragged Washington into costly wars of choice that were not in America’s true interests. It also steps back—at least rhetorically—from an all-consuming great-power crusade. The strategy rejects the fantasy that the United States can or should impose a universal political order.
But the modesty is short-lived. The NSS quickly reasserts that America possesses the “world’s single largest and most innovative economy,” “the world’s leading financial system,” and “the world’s most advanced and most profitable technology sector,” all backed by “the world’s most powerful and capable military.”
These claims serve not simply as patriotic affirmations, but as a justification for using American dominance to impose terms on others. Smaller countries, it seems, will bear the brunt of this hubris, since the US cannot defeat the other great powers, not least because they are nuclear-armed.
Naked Machiavellianism in Doctrine
The NSS’s grandiosity is welded to a naked Machiavellianism. The question it asks is not how the United States and other countries can cooperate for mutual benefit, but how American leverage—over markets, finance, technology, and security—can be applied to extract maximal concessions from other countries.
This is most pronounced in the NSS discussion of the Western Hemisphere section, which declares a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
The United States, the NSS declares, will ensure that Latin America “remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” and alliances and aid will be conditioned on “winding down adversarial outside influence.” That “influence” clearly refers to Chinese investment, infrastructure, and lending.
The NSS is explicit: US agreements with countries “that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage” must result in sole-source contracts for American firms. US policy should “make every effort to push out foreign companies” that build infrastructure in the region, and the US should reshape multilateral development institutions, such as the World Bank, so that they “serve American interests.”
Latin American governments, many of whom trade extensively with both the United States and China, are effectively being told: you must deal with us, not China—or face the consequences.
Such a strategy is strategically naive.
China is the main trading partner for most of the world, including many countries in the Western hemisphere. The US will be unable to compel Latin American nations to expel Chinese firms, but will gravely damage US diplomacy in the attempt.
Thuggery So Brazen Even Close Allies Are Alarmed
The NSS proclaims a doctrine of “sovereignty and respect,” yet its behavior has already reduced that principle to sovereignty for the US, vulnerability for the rest. What makes the emerging doctrine even more extraordinary is that it is now frightening not only small states in Latin America, but even the United States’ closest allies in Europe.
In a remarkable development, Denmark—one of America’s most loyal NATO partners—has openly declared the United States a potential threat to Danish national security.
Danish defense planners have stated publicly that Washington under Trump cannot be assumed to respect the Kingdom of Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland, and that a coercive US attempt to seize the island is a contingency for which Denmark must now plan.
This is astonishing on several levels. Greenland is already host to the US Thule Air Base and firmly within the Western security system. Denmark is not anti-American, nor is it seeking to provoke Washington. It is simply responding rationally to a world in which the United States has begun to behave unpredictably—even toward its supposed friends.
That Copenhagen feels compelled to contemplate defensive measures against Washington speaks volumes. It suggests that the legitimacy of the US-led security architecture is eroding from within. If even Denmark believes it must hedge against the United States, the problem is no longer one of Latin America’s vulnerability. It is a systemic crisis of confidence among nations that once saw the US as the guarantor of stability but now view it as a possible or likely aggressor.
In short, the NSS seems to channel the energy previously devoted to great-power confrontation into bullying of smaller states. If America seems to be a bit less inclined to launch trillion-dollar wars abroad, it is more inclined to weaponize sanctions, financial coercion, asset seizures, and theft on the high seas.
The Missing Pillar: Law, Reciprocity, and Decency
Perhaps the deepest flaw of the NSS is what it omits: a commitment to international law, reciprocity, and basic decency as foundations of American security.
The NSS regards global governance structures as obstacles to US action. It dismisses climate cooperation as “ideology,” and indeed a “hoax” according to Trump’s recent speech at the UN. It downplays the UN Charter and envisions international institutions primarily as instruments to be bent toward American preferences. Yet it is precisely legal frameworks, treaties, and predictable rules that have historically protected American interests.
The founders of the United States understood this clearly. Following the American War of Independence, thirteen newly sovereign states soon adopted a constitution to pool key powers—over taxation, defense, and diplomacy—not to weaken the states’ sovereignty, but to secure it by creating the US Federal Government. The post-WWII foreign policy of the United States government did the same through the UN, the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization, and arms-control agreements.
The Trump NSS now reverses that logic. It treats the freedom to coerce others as the essence of sovereignty. From that perspective, the Venezuelan tanker seizure and Denmark’s anxieties are manifestations of the new policy.
Athens, Melos, and Washington
Such hubris will come back to haunt the United States. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides records that when imperial Athens confronted the small island of Melos in 416 BC, the Athenians declared that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Yet Athens’ hubris was also its undoing. Twelve years later, in 404 BC, Athens fell to Sparta. Athenian arrogance, overreach, and contempt for smaller states helped galvanize the alliance that ultimately brought it down.
The 2025 NSS speaks in a similar arrogant register. It is a doctrine of power over law, coercion over consent, and dominance over diplomacy. American security will not be strengthened by acting like a bully. It will be weakened—structurally, morally, and strategically. A great power that frightens its allies, coerces its neighbors, and disregards international rules ultimately isolates itself.
America’s national security strategy should be based on wholly different premises: acceptance of a plural world; recognition that sovereignty is strengthened, not diminished, through international law; acknowledgment that global cooperation on climate, health, and technology is indispensable; and understanding that America’s global influence depends more on persuasion than coercion.
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About the Author: Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
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