A few days ago, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation bestowed one of its storied Bradley Prizes on James Hankins, a sometime professor of history at Harvard University, now at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

(Actually, Hankins is the sole author of Volume I of The Golden Thread, which tells the story of the Western tradition from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC through the Renaissance.

Volume II, which picks up the story with the Reformation, is by the historian Allen Guelzo.)

This is the moment when I note for the record that, being the publisher of these magnificent books at Encounter Books, I have what is called in the trade an “interest.” But don’t take my word for the adjective “magnificent.”

The reception of these books has been nothing short of ecstatic. Perhaps the most searching review is by Spencer Klavan and appears in the current number of The Claremont Review of Books.

Listening to Jim Hankins’s remarks at the Bradley event prompts me to reprise a few thoughts about what we are up to with The Golden Thread.

The phrase names not only these two books but also a larger project that Encounter is undertaking with several partners to change the conversation about—well, I was going to say “about education.”

But really, it is about that vibrant thing that the soporific word “education” designates, namely, opening the treasure chest of the past in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.

In foreign policy, timing, leverage, and national interest must guide the strategy of engagement with rising powers.

President Richard Nixon grasped this principle as well as any Chief Executive during his groundbreaking 1972 opening to China.

President Bill Clinton, however, failed his test when he championed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) in 2000.

President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to Beijing revives the Nixonian tradition of pragmatic, interest-driven diplomacy with a foreign adversary—engaging from strength while delivering concrete American wins—while actively correcting the structural imbalances and strategic vulnerabilities created by the failures of past policies.

Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.

After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.

Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.

It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent—and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.

True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.

So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

President Donald Trump has been compared to many historical figures, by opponents (who claim he’s another Adolf Hitler) and by boosters (who cite Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt).

With his blockade of Iran, though, maybe we should start comparing him to Gen. Winfield Scott.

In the mid-19th century,

Scott was America’s preeminent military mind, the architect of victory in the Mexican War and the “Grand Old Man of the Army.” As the Civil War loomed, he developed a plan to defeat the Confederacy with the smallest number of casualties possible.

He called it the Anaconda Plan — and like its namesake it was about applying a squeeze, and squeezing hard, until its object was squeezed to death.

Rather than winning a single decisive battle or a series of major confrontations, Scott wanted to cut the Confederacy in two by seizing control of the Mississippi River, while choking off the South’s foreign trade — upon which it was enormously dependent for both money and materiel — with a naval blockade of its Atlantic and Gulf ports.

Scott’s plan had few takers at the beginning, when enthusiasts on both sides thought the war would be finished in months, with daring cavalry charges and the like.

But when that didn’t happen, the plan became the basis for the Union war strategy — and it worked.

The South was beaten on the battlefield, but its loss came in no small part because it was being economically squeezed on all sides.

Today, Trump is following a similar strategy both at home and abroad.

They built the trap. Now they’re standing in it. A Virginia court blocked the Democrat’s redistricting map. The left screams “activist judge.” They built this weapon – now it’s pointed at them.

On April 22, 2026, a circuit court judge in Tazewell County, Virginia issued a ruling that sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party’s midterm strategy. Judge Jack Hurley declared all votes cast in the previous day’s redistricting referendum “ineffective” and barred state officials from certifying the results or taking any action to implement the new maps that Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature had passed.

The map in question was not a minor adjustment. It was gerrymandered to favor Democrats in ten out of eleven congressional districts and, if implemented, would have handed the left a structural House advantage heading into November’s midterms.

The Democratic response was immediate and predictable. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones vowed to fight the order, declaring “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have veto power over the People’s vote.”

The attorney general of a state that spent years building the legal architecture for federal judicial intervention in electoral processes was now complaining that a judge had intervened in an electoral process. The irony is not subtle. It is, however, historically significant in a way that most of the coverage being produced right now is completely missing.

Some 98 percent of the 10 million residents of Hungary are ethnically Hungarian, and Hungarians speak, well, Hungarian.

Almost no one else does. So when Hungarians chattered among themselves about the April 12 general election, their EU neighbors read into the chatter what they chose.

Voters knew that 4-term prime minister Viktor Orban had exceeded his sell-by date. His government had grown stale, sclerotic, and shady around the edges. The globalists only really knew that Orban opposed illegal immigration and was a friend of Donald Trump.

For them, that was enough to open their hearts and their checkbooks. One time Orban ally, the 45-year-old Peter Magyar opposed Orban. A win for Magyar was thus a rejection of Trumpism, a triumph of good over evil, democracy over fascism, open borders over nationalism. Hoorah!

They all fell. . . . and better still, the left paid for its own humiliation,