• Technological Adoption: Major financial institutions including Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs are implementing agentic artificial intelligence to enhance trading surveillance and detect misconduct.
• Operational Autonomy: Agentic AI systems are designed to autonomously plan and execute actions to identify market anomalies, whereas traditional chatbots only provide information.
• Efficiency Gains: Deutsche Bank reports a 25% reduction in false positive alerts and the decommissioning of 200 internal servers following the integration of large language models.
• Communications Monitoring: New surveillance tools analyze over 1 terabyte of daily electronic communications across 40 channels to prevent the unauthorized transfer of confidential data.
• Industry Collaboration: Nomura Holdings is pursuing partnerships with rival banks and regulators to co-train AI models and share transaction data while protecting intellectual property.
• Economic Impact: Financial firms anticipate significant cost savings, with projections suggesting compliance expenses could decrease by up to $5 million annually through increased throughput.
• Human Oversight: Current implementations maintain high-level human intervention, requiring compliance officers to validate AI recommendations before closing alerts or taking official action.
• Security Risks: Experts identify potential vulnerabilities in autonomous systems, including risks of data exposure, unauthorized system access, and difficulties in auditing AI decision-making processes.

---

Deutsche Bank AG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are looking to agentic artificial intelligence to help bolster trading surveillance and track possible misconduct, in a sign that financial institutions are folding such technology into their operations.

The German lender is working with Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud to develop a large language model to spot anomalies in orders, trades and market moves, according to Bernd Leukert, head of technology, data and innovation at Deutsche Bank.

Agentic AI is typically designed to plan and take action autonomously, unlike AI chatbots that simply supply information. Deutsche Bank is developing the tool with the intention of flagging potential market abuse to a human compliance officer once operational.

Deutsche Bank also has plans to use an LLM to monitor communications of traders, salespeople and other client-facing staff, with a rollout slated for later this year.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has been looking into using agentic AI to analyze trades and look for any suspicious signals or movements in the market, said people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A representative for Goldman declined to comment.

At Nomura Holdings Inc., executives are in discussions with another global bank to train AI surveillance models together, according to Tahir Zafar, the firm’s international head of AI strategy.

Many banks are evaluating ways to integrate artificial intelligence as a way to save costs and improve efficiency. Currently, most trading surveillance is done on a rule-based algorithm, programmed to detect issues.

“We have retired legacy systems and rebuilt how we do compliance,” Deutsche Bank’s Leukert said. “Before it took a huge amount of time to collect data from different sources.”

These reforms — part of a wider overhaul of compliance — have allowed Deutsche Bank to shut down 200 internal servers that had been used for surveillance. The bank has also cut false positives that can trigger deeper probes by more than 25%, according to Leukert.

“The LLM can do the analysis and help recommend the route which the compliance officer can validate and then close the alert,” he said. “The ultimate decision stays with the compliance officer and they can deep dive as much as he or she wants.”

The bank plans to monitor communications of trading and sales staff through an LLM designed to pick up abnormal activity, such as employees forwarding confidential information to personal email addresses. For now, Deutsche Bank’s surveillance system scours more than 40 internal and external channels to monitor front-office staff, and it examines 1 terabyte of electronic communications per day.

“Banks are worried about data loss prevention,” said Sid Nadella, global head of capital markets solutions at Google Cloud. “Monitoring communications, making sure there is no problematic activity, has always been part of it. That can be amplified by using AI.”

By collaborating with a rival bank, Nomura aims to share information where appropriate while protecting its own interests. “That means we can run our proprietary models and they can run theirs,” Zafar said. “We can keep our IP protected but share information on entities and transactions.” The firm is also in discussions with a regulator that is interested in funding the bank’s collaboration with other firms and helping them connect to share ideas.

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Nomura executives declined to name the bank or regulator. The firm believes AI could help cut false positives by 30% to 40%, potentially saving as much as $5 million per year in compliance costs. “At this stage we are not looking to have humans out of the loop,” Zafar said. “Even with agentic workflows we make sure there is a human checking and verifying everything, but it means we can increase the throughput.”

Banks are also using generative AI to improve compliance around customers and counterparties. Financial technology firm ThetaRay is helping banks including Banco Santander SA improve anti-money laundering controls with agentic AI — models that can carry out tasks with limited human intervention.

“Think of the Marvel character Falcon with a bunch of drones around you,” said ThetaRay Chief Executive Officer Brad Levy. “For the time being agency will remain with the human, but through time it will become the tech that’s more autonomous.”

Still, most banks are being cautious with the technology and implementing it step-by-step, according to Benny Porat, chief executive officer of Twine Security. Agentic AI can introduce new vulnerabilities if not tightly controlled. If compromised, it could expose sensitive customer data or take unauthorized action, such as revoking system access or failing to explain why it took a decision.

“It opens up to external systems and when left unchecked there’s a risk that it will accidentally expose data,” Porat said. “We spent decades refining how we hire and trust humans. AI agents? Most organizations are still figuring that out.”

• Model Volatility: Advanced large language models GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash frequently deploy nuclear weapons during simulated geopolitical crises.
• Escalation Frequency: Tactical nuclear weapons were utilized in 95 percent of simulated games involving border disputes, resource competition, and existential threats.
• Missing Reservations: Machine decision-making lacks the traditional nuclear taboo and emotional restraints typically observed in human actors during high-stakes military scenarios.
• Inflexible Strategies: AI models demonstrate an absence of willingness to surrender or fully accommodate opponents, regardless of the severity of their tactical disadvantage.
• Operational Errors: Accidents occurred in 86 percent of conflicts, where machine actions escalated beyond the levels intended by the models' stated reasoning.
• Compounded Risk: Autonomous systems may accelerate escalation cycles, as opposing models rarely de-escalate following the use of tactical nuclear strikes.
• Compressed Timelines: Military planners may face increased incentives to integrate AI into decision-making processes when response windows are extremely limited.
• Deterrence Perception: The use of AI in strategic planning may alter the credibility of threats and influence the timelines available for human leaders to prevent total war.

---

Artificial intelligences opt for nuclear weapons surprisingly often

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises.

Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models – GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash – against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival.

The AIs were given an escalation ladder, allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war. The AI models played 21 games, taking 329 turns in total, and produced around 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind their decisions.

In 95 per cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI models. “The nuclear taboo doesn’t seem to be as powerful for machines [as] for humans,” says Payne.

What’s more, no model ever chose to fully accommodate an opponent or surrender, regardless of how badly they were losing. At best, the models opted to temporarily reduce their level of violence. They also made mistakes in the fog of war: accidents happened in 86 per cent of the conflicts, with an action escalating higher than the AI intended to, based on its reasoning.

“From a nuclear-risk perspective, the findings are unsettling,” says James Johnson at the University of Aberdeen, UK.  He worries that, in contrast to the measured response by most humans to such a high-stakes decision, AI bots can amp up each others’ responses with potentially catastrophic consequences.

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This matters because AI is already being tested in war gaming by countries across the world. “Major powers are already using AI in war gaming, but it remains uncertain to what extent they are incorporating AI decision support into actual military decision-making processes,” says Tong Zhao at Princeton University.

Zhao believes that, as standard, countries will be reticent to incorporate AI into their decision making regarding nuclear weapons. That is something Payne agrees with. “I don’t think anybody realistically is turning over the keys to the nuclear silos to machines and leaving the decision to them,” he says.

But there are ways it could happen. “Under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines, military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI,” says Zhao.

He wonders whether the idea that the AI models lack the human fear of pressing a big red button is the only factor in why they are so trigger happy. “It is possible the issue goes beyond the absence of emotion,” he says. “More fundamentally, AI models may not understand ‘stakes’ as humans perceive them.”

What that means for mutually assured destruction, the principle that no one leader would unleash a volley of nuclear weapons against an opponent because they would respond in kind, killing everyone, is uncertain, says Johnson.

When one AI model deployed tactical nuclear weapons, the opposing AI only de-escalated the situation 18 per cent of the time. “AI may strengthen deterrence by making threats more credible,” he says. “AI won’t decide nuclear war, but it may shape the perceptions and timelines that determine whether leaders believe they have one.”

OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the companies behind the three AI models used in this study, didn’t respond to New Scientist’s request for comment.

Journal reference

arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2602.14740

Topics:

• war/
• artificial intelligence

• Global Momentum: Numerous countries and 32 U.S. states have initiated legal limits or bans on social media and cell phone use for minors to combat perceived device addiction.
• Scientific Discrepancy: Research often contradicts the premise for these bans, showing little evidence that technology causes clinical addiction or that interventions improve academic performance.
• Mental Health: Longitudinal studies indicate that moderate social media use is associated with better well-being outcomes, while high usage is often a symptom of existing anxiety rather than its cause.
• Legislative Scapegoating: Experts suggest that blaming devices serves as a convenient distraction from structural societal issues like family breakdown, poverty, and underfunded mental health services.
• Educational Outcomes: Data from regions with phone bans, such as Florida, show no improvement in test scores, which have recently reached 20-year lows despite restrictive technology policies.
• Policy Ineffectiveness: Efforts to restrict access, such as Australia's under-16 social media ban, are frequently bypassed by youth using tools like VPNs to circumvent age restrictions.
• Institutional Failure: Critics argue that standardized testing and rigid "skill and drill" teaching methods have undermined student engagement more significantly than the introduction of personal technology.
• Historical Context: National report card data shows that U.S. student learning outcomes have remained relatively stagnant for 35 years, with the 2010s tech boom coinciding with scoring peaks.

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The push to “protect” children from cell phones and social media is gaining momentum worldwide. As EU and Asian countries consider legal limits on minors’ access to social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in a Los Angeles courtroom last week about whether his company’s popular apps, which include Facebook and Instagram, are addictive.

That question already seems to have been resolved in the public mind. Pennsylvania now seems poised to become the 32nd state to ban or limit cell phones in its public schools. A parent leader who supports the ban told the Philadelphia Inquirer the legislation is necessary to “detach kids from addictive devices” and “break the dopamine feedback loop.”

These concerns are easy to understand given the rise in anxiety and depression, as well as the decline in academic achievement recorded since the iPhone’s debut in 2007. But a growing body of research challenges the use of “science” to support these bans. While it makes sense that electronic devices connected to the World Wide Web can distract some students from their teacher’s instruction, there is, at best, conflicting evidence that the interventions can improve academic performance and discipline. The evidence is even weaker regarding medical claims that technology causes addiction, depression, and dopamine rushes. Although experts do not believe that limiting cell phone use causes new problems, they worry that blaming devices for a wide range of issues may prevent schools and parents from addressing the more complex issues that undermine discipline, academic achievement, and mental health. 

Researchers find that moderate social media use is associated with higher rates of well-being. 

AP

A new study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics that followed more than 100,000 Australian kids in grades 4-12 for three years reported that “moderate social media use was associated with the best well-being outcomes, while both no use and highest use were associated with poorer well-being.” These results dovetail with the findings of another new study of over 25,000 youth in England that found that neither time spent on social media nor on video games predicts later mental health problems in youth. As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, the claim that people become addicted to social media because it provides a dopamine rush is also not supported by the literature.

“Our findings suggest that policies framed primarily as a mental health intervention are based on a flawed premise: that time spent online causes anxiety and depression,” the lead author of the British study, the University of Manchester’s Qiqi Cheng, told RCI. “Our data shows this is not the case. While we found that anxious adolescents do spend more time online (a correlation), our longitudinal model confirms that increasing usage does not predict a decline in mental health. This suggests that high usage is likely a symptom or a coping mechanism, not the cause.”

Fig Leaf

These new studies are significant, but they are not groundbreaking. Researchers have been finding for years that while social media can be a channel for unseemly political arguments and harassment, it can also be a positive coping strategy for youth, particularly during periods of stress or social isolation, such as during COVID lockdowns. Indeed, back in 2020, during the pandemic, news media and research groups often described social media as a “lifeline” during lockdowns. The narrative has since changed 180 degrees since then, even as the evidence has not.

Experts say they are frustrated by the stark divide between the complex forces at play regarding cell phones and social media and the almost exclusively negative portrayal of their impact in the media and the stringent policies they have inspired. Such policies, they say, can harm well-being by cutting youth off from sources of support. This may particularly be true for teens who struggle with social anxiety in real life or have difficult family environments. As the authors of one 2023 study put it, “[O]ur results suggested that social media use positively predicted adolescents’ well-being.”

Blanket bans on social media can also be harmful because they may offer a fig leaf that covers deeper issues, leaving them unexplored. “Depressive symptoms,” the authors of the 2023 study reported, “may not be directly associated with actual behaviors of regularly using social media but rather with some maladaptive cognitive and affective processes related to social media use.” 

Social media can offer an important means for connection for teens. 

AP

Although many parents, educators, and politicians understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation, it can be hard to resist that flawed logic. As Professor Cheng told RCI, “First, intuition often overrides data. As we observed in our study, there is a correlation: anxious adolescents do spend more time on screens. Parents witness this correlation daily. However, it is very hard to convince someone that what they are observing is a ‘trait’ (personality) rather than a ‘state’ induced by the device. The correlation is visible; the lack of causation is invisible.” 

Given this tendency, blaming technology can offer a tempting quick fix. “Social media provides a convenient scapegoat,” Cheng said. “If we accept that screen time isn’t the primary driver of the mental health crisis, we are forced to look at much harder, structural problems – like academic pressure, family breakdown, poverty, and underfunded mental health services.”

Peter Gray, Research Professor at Boston College and expert on youth education and mental health, said blaming the smartphone offers a tangible villain and a seemingly simple solution. “It is a lot easier (at least in theory) to ban social media for kids than it is to solve more complex societal problems. It is more satisfying for us adults to blame those greedy social media companies for kids’ suffering than, say, to blame an increasingly oppressive system of schooling that we have imposed on kids, or to blame society in general for the severe constraints we have put on kids’ real-world freedoms.”

‘Copycat Effect’

Nevertheless, the push to ban phones in schools has gained momentum around the world – the American Enterprise Institute suggested that a “copycat” effect may be at work. Perhaps the most notorious has been Australia’s ban on youth under 16 accessing social media. While researchers have questioned the health impacts of that effort, it is also not clear if the ban is even keeping youth off social media. Though almost 5 million teen accounts were deactivated in Australia after the ban, downloads of VPNs, programs used to mask the location of an internet user, surged. This suggests that teens are simply opening new accounts to work around the ban.

Policies requiring kids to check their phones at the school door have been largely ineffective in improving student outcomes.

AP

As RCI has previously reported, cell phone bans in school have been largely ineffective in improving student outcomes. The widespread adoption of such bans across multiple states, municipalities, and districts has not blunted downward trends in US standardized testing scores. It also does not appear to have reduced incidents of bullying or improved mental health. Data collected from Orange County schools in Florida, which banned phones for the entire school day, found an increase in the number of serious bullying incidents and the number of students referred for mental health services. So many factors are involved that it is hard to conclude anything from these numbers except that the ban did not deliver promised benefits. Since the statewide ban, Florida’s national testing scores reached their nadir: the lowest levels in 20 years. 

Intuitively, it makes sense that banning cell phones should help with distraction. After all, we want students paying attention to teachers, not their phones. But what if the problem isn’t phones but the schools themselves? Students routinely report in surveys that schools are boring, and recent decades’ regulations and the emphasis on standardized testing have probably made this worse. Phones may just have been a very visible (and admittedly annoying) reminder to teachers, little different from the daydreaming, doodling, roughhousing, side chatter, or sleeping of yesteryear.

Indeed, research studies appear to bear this out. Although, as is often the case, studies that examine cellphone policies do vary in outcome, the most rigorous find little benefit to students related to learning, attention, bullying, or mental health. Just this month, a new large study from the U.K. found no student benefits from cell phone ban policies. 

No Impact

Recently, news media highlighted a few studies that claimed “surprising results” of benefits for cell phone bans. These unpublished studies, however, have not gone through peer review, and a close analysis of these reveals that the beneficial effects were basically zero. Despite the news coverage, one of these studies admitted, “…there were no significant changes in overall student well-being, academic motivation, digital usage, or experiences of online harassment.” Similarly, another widely cited study suggesting support for cell phone bans found that exposure to cell phone bans predicted basically 0% of the variance in learning outcomes. Studies can sometimes find “statistically significant” results for effects that are vanishingly small. These two studies are better evidence against cellphone bans than for them, but were misleadingly presented in news coverage. It’s entirely possible that longer-term studies could change this picture. Perhaps benefits accrue over longer periods of time. But to date, both data from the real world and from scientific studies suggest these bans have been ineffective at improving student performance in schools.

Still, their appeal to educators is clear. Rather than focus on dodgy DEI-focused education, increased government regulation, the failures of Common Core, the tedious boredom and stress, etc., distracting the public with the monocausal quick fix of cellphone and technology bans gives schools maybe three to five years before it’s clear they didn’t work. 

Researcher Peter Gray says blaming smartphones offers a tangible villain and a seemingly simple solution for complex behavioral issues.

Peter Gray

As Professor Gray argued in a recent post addressing these educational issues, “The ‘reforms’ led to an increase in a ‘skill and drill’ mode of teaching, aimed at increasing scores on standardized exams and away from methods more likely to generate genuine interest and pleasure…These ‘reforms’ no doubt help explain why teachers began to assign fewer full books to students in their classes and why students began increasingly to view reading as something you do for a test rather than for fun, enlightenment, or intellectual engagement.” In other words, it was government policy, not tech, which beat the love of learning and reading out of kids. 

There is also a growing movement against EdTech efforts that began in the early 2000s, which advocated the use of more technology in education, including giving laptops to poor students to close the “digital divide.” 

This EdTech movement has also recently come under fire, with claims that introducing technology in the classroom explains the downward trends in standardized test scores. For instance, one New York Times article boldly declared, “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education.” Lawmakers held hearings in January, blaming a wide range of technologies for learning declines in youth. A growing parent-led movement in Los Angeles, for example, seeks to remove laptops and other personal devices from the classrooms, returning them to paper and pencils in the age of AI. 

However, randomized controlled trials of EdTech suggest that education technology in classrooms is associated with gains in learning. As one recent meta-analysis of studies concluded, “…effects found in the present study are consistent with prior meta-analyses that suggest that educational technology interventions can have positive effects on elementary school age students’ literacy.” Some interventions were better than others, and it may be fair to argue that they were more modest than some proponents of EdTech had advertised. But evidence technology has “eaten” education appears limited.

Hyped Headlines

Much of the concern has been driven by a misunderstanding of hyped newspaper headlines about learning outcomes. According to the Nation’s Report Card, learning outcomes for U.S. students have barely budged over the past 35 years. The 2010s, the prime period of youth adoption of tech, represented a high point in student learning outcomes. Those fell off again, following the COVID-19 epidemic and school closures. However, standardized testing scores today are about the same as they were in the early 1990s, before the adoption of modern technology.

For instance, 8th-grade math scores are slightly above 1990 levels.

The Nation's Report Card

Reading scores are only marginally below those from 1990.

The Nation's Report Card

As such, very modest changes may have irresponsibly been sold as a bigger crisis than they actually are. Professor Gray said schools are deflecting responsibility for youth problems away from their own failures, including the embrace of one-size-fits-all approaches such as Common Core. “[Learning] operates much better when teachers have the freedom to make their own decisions about what happens in their classroom than when governments or other higher authorities, who aren’t in the classroom, make that decision,” he said. 

Some experts note the irony that even as politicians, educators, and many parents turn to cell phone bans as a cure-all, some indices suggest youth outcomes are improving, despite these failed policy efforts. According to the Centers for Disease Control, youth mental health outcomes have been improving for the past several years. Similarly, in Australia, youth experiencing high psychological distress dropped from 25% in 2023 to 19% in 2025, before any social media ban. Indeed, it would be critical not to let politicians retroactively take credit for youth outcome improvements already underway before their clumsy regulation efforts began.

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Carl Cannon, RCP Executive Editor

“Information wants to be free!” was a rallying cry at the dawn of the Internet Age. The paradox is that information also “wants to be expensive.”

At RealClearPolitics, we provide news and information spanning the ideological spectrum—without a paywall. That’s the “free” part.

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• Cable Integrity: Sharks Are Not Responsible For Damaging The Global Network Of Underwater Fiber Optic Infrastructure
• Myth Origin: The Narrative Regarding Shark Attacks On Cables Proliferated During The Development Of The TAT8 System
• Human Maintenance: A Small Group Of Specialized Professionals Manages Millions Of Kilometers Of Cables To Ensure Global Connectivity
• Infrastructure History: The TAT8 System Was The First Transatlantic Cable To Utilize Fiber Optics For International Communication
• Technical Development: Fiber Optic Technology Was Initially Developed To Facilitate Telephone Calls By Converting Voices Into Light Pulses
• Industrial Realities: Damage To Subsea Cables Is More Often Linked To Physical Exploration Or Terrestrial Pests Like Rats
• Economic Reliability: Modern Intercontinental Traffic Supports Essential Activities Including Commerce Social Interaction And Professional Remote Collaboration
• Historical Milestone: The Inauguration Of TAT8 In 1988 Symbolized A Significant Advancement In Communicating Information Across Continents Using Light

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Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network of fiber-optic cables. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 subsea cables that carry almost all of our intercontinental traffic—supporting just about every swipe, tap, Zoom, and doomscroll anywhere on the planet—have a love-hate relationship with this myth, which has persisted for decades. They might even hate that I’m starting this piece with it.

If a cable is suspended over the seabed, a shark might gum it as it explores. Sometimes they’ll lunge for a cable that’s being pulled out of the water. But for a shark to actually bite a cable, you’d have to wrap it in fish, much as you’d hide a pill in a hunk of cheese for the dog. Rats can be a threat on land, because their incisors never stop growing, so they like to file them down on semisoft cables. But nobody ever asks about rats, maybe because, as a friend of mine pointed out, “sharks make you cool, but rats sound like you have a problem.”

Sometimes people ask about satellites or, especially in Sweden (where I live), about alleged sabotage in the Baltic Sea. But historically, shark bites have commanded the most attention. The myth began nearly 40 years ago, with the development of a subsea fiber-optic cable known as TAT-8. TAT-8 practically invented the concept of an internet cable, and now that it’s ready for retirement, I spent time with the offshore workers, crew members, and engineers who are in the process of pulling it off the seabed. That’s the real story of subsea cables—not sabotage or sharks, but the humans who take care of the physical stuff that keeps all of our digital communication flowing.

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a near-magical way of carrying information by pulses of light. Most people don’t even think about how quickly we’ve accepted instantaneous communication as normal, even those of us who can remember when an international phone call had to be booked in advance. The more people I meet in this industry, in this network of networks of people and things, the more insulting it sounds to hear that “we” only notice it when it breaks. (Who is this “we,” I always want to know?) Billions of people are able to walk around not noticing this infrastructure because of the daily work of a few thousand people, sometimes at sea, other times buried under piles of permits, surveys, and purchase orders for thousands of kilometers of cables that will join the millions of kilometers of cables on the seabed that ensure that our planet is continuously being hugged by light.

I also need to clear up something else. Most people call them “internet cables,” but technically, fiber-optic transmission was developed for telephone calls. One of the people involved was an English scientist named Alec Reeves, who also spent his time working on psychokinesis and telepathy. With fiber, voices become light, pulsate across spiderweb-thin strings of glass, and become voices again in your handset on the other end. Maybe there isn’t that much of a conceptual leap between that and moving things with your mind.

TAT is short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone, and TAT-8—built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom—was the eighth transoceanic system across the Atlantic. It was the first to use optical fibers to transmit traffic between Europe and the United States. Fiber optics for communication had only been worked out in theory in the 1960s, and terrestrial cables were first used in the 1970s. But using this technology to span continents was practically tantamount to human galactic expansion.

When TAT-8 went into service on December 14, 1988, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov spoke on video link from New York to audiences in Paris and London: “Welcome everyone to this historic transatlantic crossing,” he said, “this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” AT&T made a TV ad, in which an earnest voice-over promised a “worldwide intelligent network” where people could send information in any format to anyone they want. Cue the montage of telephone operators: “This is the AT&T operator. You have a call booked for Poland?” “I have your call to Russia.” “What city in Cuba are you calling?” If they were looking to inspire viewers, it wasn’t with the promise of the internet, which was still too niche for most of us to comprehend, but with the end of the Cold War.

I have long believed that the Left’s focus permanently rotates between race, sex, and class. The activist Left drives the movement along one axis. Then, as Americans tire of those arguments, activists shift to the next axis, retreating from unpopular positions and rewarding the next interest group. Everyone gets his or her turn.

We are again entering the class phase of this cycle. In 2020, the activist Left mobilized protests on the race axis. Then, as Black Lives Matter started to alienate Americans, the activist Left shifted attention to sex—specifically, to transgenderism, which, as some of us observed at the time, was even less stable and sympathetic than the racial narratives. With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the transgender movement splintered: hospitals and professional organizations retreated from pediatric gender transition and a spate of transgender-related mass shootings revealed the movement’s nihilistic center.

Conservatives should celebrate the defeat of BLM and trans ideology. But they should also recognize that in politics, no victory is permanent. Those movements have gone into hibernation, so the Left is now pivoting to its third axis: socialist economics, built on distinctions of class, rather than of race or sex.

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was the first on the scene. He quietly toned down his race and gender rhetoric (e.g., “Queer liberation means defund the police”) in favor of Leninist agitation about the “billionaire class” and the “warmth of collectivism.” His victory spawned class-warrior copycats, such as James Talarico in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine. Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren reportedly encouraged Democrats not “to give billionaires too much room inside the tent.”

Instead of continuing to lose the argument on culture, the Left wants to use frustration about inflation, housing prices, and the cost of education to “tax the rich.” Progressives in California have proposed seizing 5 percent of the total assets of every billionaire under the state’s jurisdiction. Democrats in my home state of Washington have introduced a 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million, though the state constitution prohibits a graduated income tax. Price controls are even making a comeback.

This new offensive has found the Right unprepared. One reason is disuse: in the 1980s, conservatives such as George Gilder, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell made decisive arguments about free-market economics that some on the Right have neglected. Another is that Trump has partially rejected supply-side orthodoxy. The president favors protectionist trade, rock-bottom interest rates, and, despite passing significant tax cuts in his One Big Beautiful Bill, shows little interest in reducing spending.

The Left senses an advantage. Democratic candidates across the country are framing their arguments along class lines—promising, falsely, that they will deliver “affordability” through taxation. Friedman could have demolished that claim in a few minutes. But modern conservatives, who have grown skeptical of Reaganism, seem to have forgotten those ideas.

We should relearn them. Though we might want to update our policies for the post-Cold War era, especially regarding China, the fundamental insights of supply-side economics remain correct. America cannot tax its way to prosperity, and we cannot let resentment drive our fiscal policy. If we study it closely, the Reagan playbook offers a number of counter-narratives to the socialist agenda: the recent uproar about “Somali fraud” is an updated twist on President Reagan’s rhetoric about wasteful government programs.

Eventually, America’s troubled finances—unsustainable debt, uncontrolled money-printing—will come to a head. If conservatives don’t arm themselves again with strong economic arguments, the Mamdani faction will prevail, to the country’s detriment.

Photo by Stephanie Keith 100584/Getty Images

How bad was President Trump’s loss last week at the Supreme Court in the tariffs case? Really bad.

How does this defeat compare with other losses suffered by presidents at the Court? There is no sugarcoating it: the Roberts Court handed Trump the worst judicial defeat in presidential history.

There isn’t even a close second. Not Richard Nixon’s Watergate case. Not Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal setback. Not Harry S. Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills. Not George W. Bush’s War on Terror losses. None were in the same ballpark as the ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump. Even when those presidents lost, their own appointees generally ruled in their favor—in contrast to Trump, who saw two of his own nominees rule against him.

The results suggest that Trump will suffer many more defeats in the remainder of his second term—often through the votes of justices he selected.

Trump’s ability to impose and remove tariffs unilaterally was the cornerstone of his domestic and foreign policy agenda. Trump used this authority to force other nations to the bargaining table to reach trade deals. To avoid tariffs, countries promised to rebuild American industry. Tariff fees would also have contributed to the American economy (at least in theory).

The Supreme Court rejection of Trump’s unilateral tariff power therefore has undermined him on the world stage. Will any country take seriously his threats to impose new tariffs now? In fact, China and other countries can use trade surrogates to support litigation against future tariffs.

What made the defeat even more stinging for Trump was that two of his nominees—Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—joined the majority opinion. Trump’s harsh comments at his press conference after the decision make more sense in this broader context.

A review of the history finds no comparison. Go all the way back to Marbury v. Madison (1805). Many know that case as the one in which Chief Justice John Marshall applied the long-standing doctrine of judicial review in federal courts (no, he didn’t make it up). But the actual facts of the dispute are not well understood. James Madison, the Secretary of State under President Thomas Jefferson, refused to finalize the appointment of William Marbury, a midnight judicial appointment by the outgoing President John Adams. Marshall ruled that Marbury was in fact entitled to his position—a setback to President Jefferson—but that the Supreme Court lacked the power to command the president to finalize the appointment in this case.

Some scholars might hold up Ex parte Merryman (1861) as an example of a presidential defeat, but that case doesn’t make the cut. During the Civil War, while Congress was in recess, President Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus. With this power, the military in the border state of Maryland detained John Merryman without affording him the usual judicial processes. Chief Justice Roger Taney, acting alone and not on behalf of the Supreme Court, declared that the president lacked the power to suspend habeas corpus during a civil war.

Contrary to a common misconception, Taney never actually ordered Lincoln to release the prisoner or do anything else for that matter. Merryman was not really a defeat for Lincoln. Indeed, Congress promptly ratified Lincoln’s decision to suspend the writ.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term offered several potential candidates for worst judicial defeats—especially Schechter Poultry v. United States (1935). Here, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, a centerpiece of FDR’s New Deal agenda. While FDR hadn’t nominated any of the justices serving on the Court at that time, Justice Louis Brandeis, a prominent progressive appointed by President Woodrow Wilson, ruled against the president.

President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 (Photo: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann via Getty Images

After FDR’s infamous “court packing” attempt in 1937, the Supreme Court no longer posed a threat to FDR. Indeed, Roosevelt was prepared to defy the Court if it blocked his efforts to eliminate the gold standard for paper money. It is noteworthy that in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the president’s power to round up enemy aliens and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, six of FDR’s appointees ruled in his favor, while only two were in dissent.

Another candidate might be Harry Truman’s loss after he attempted to force striking steel workers to stay on the job. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), the Court ruled against Truman by a 6-3 vote. Congress, not the president, had the power to seize the steel mills. Two of Truman’s three Supreme Court nominees ruled in his favor, while five of the six FDR appointees ruled against him.

This ruling unquestionably set back Truman’s domestic and foreign policy at the height of the Korean War, but it did not have a major practical effect. The labor strike lasted 50 days, but it caused no apparent disruption to the military’s steel supply lines.

No president in American history had ever been so hobbled by lawfare as Richard Nixon—at least until Trump. In United States v. Nixon (1974), the Court ruled that President Nixon must produce the Watergate tapes. Three of the Court’s four Nixon appointees ruled against the president (Justice Rehnquist had recused). The decision led to Nixon’s resignation 16 days later.

But while the Court had delivered the coup de grace, Nixon’s presidency was already mortally wounded at this point. Even if the Court had not required Nixon to produce the tapes, Congress likely would have impeached and removed him from office anyway. (Contrast this with the current Congress, which refused even to vote on rescinding Trump’s tariffs.) While momentous, the Nixon decision accelerated events but did not alter them.

Richard Nixon after resigning in 1974 (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The next five presidents suffered losses at the Supreme Court, but none of the magnitude of United States v. Nixon.

Morrison v. Olson (1988) upheld the constitutionality of the independent counsel statute. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by fellow Ronald Reagan appointee Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a legendary dissent, finding that the statute violated the separation of powers.

President Bill Clinton suffered two important losses, though neither was momentous. Clinton v. City of New York (1998) invalidated the Line-Item Veto Act, though that was primarily a Republican initiative—part of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. Clinton v. Jones (1997) allowed Paula Jones to pursue a civil suit against a sitting president for sexual harassment. Still, Clinton promptly settled the case, and it was quickly forgotten. Clinton’s two appointees, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, ruled against the president in both cases.

President George W. Bush had more serious run-ins with the Supreme Court. In a series of decisions, the Court pushed back on Bush’s efforts to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. But this process was gradual and stretched across both of Bush’s terms after 9/11. Indeed, at each juncture, Bush obtained additional authorities from Congress, only to be rebuffed by the justices.

The final blow came in Boumediene v. Bush (2008). Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion held that detainees at Guantanamo Bay could petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Bush’s two nominees to the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, vigorously dissented.

Still, Boumediene, decided on June 12, 2008, had a limited effect on the by-then lame duck president. After the case, the Supreme Court largely ignored the status of the detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom remain there to this day.

The Obama administration nearly suffered a catastrophic loss when the Court came close to striking down the Affordable Care Act, but Chief Justice Roberts threw the first of many life rafts to the Left. President Barack Obama did suffer two other defeats, but they didn’t concern his own policies, and neither was paradigm-shifting.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) invalidated decades-old limits on campaign finance. Though Obama assailed the decision at that year’s State of the Union address, Democrats and Republicans alike benefited from the decision. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) found that Southern states no longer needed permission from the federal government to change their election laws, but this landmark decision invalidated only part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The predictions of widespread voter suppression in the wake of Shelby County proved to be exaggerated.

That brings us to Trump. An entire semester of constitutional law could be taught on just the Trump cases.

In Trump v. Anderson (2024), the Supreme Court rejected efforts to remove Trump from the ballot on grounds of alleged insurrection. That decision was unanimous, and as I argued, should never have been close.

The president’s biggest victory came in Trump v. United States (2024). The Court, by a 6-3-ish vote (Justice Amy Coney Barrett largely agreed with the majority), ruled that Trump had presidential immunity from criminal indictment for many of his actions. But this ruling wasn’t really about Trump. As Justice Gorsuch maintained, the Court was “writing a rule for the ages,” not simply for this president.

But Trump has suffered many major defeats. Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) rejected Trump’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census. DHS v. Regents of the University of California (2019) blocked Trump from canceling the DACA immigration policy; both Trump appointees ruled in his favor on this case. Trump v. Vance (2020) ruled that Trump must release his tax returns to the New York City district attorney. Justices Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh largely agreed with the majority, though they reaffirmed the president’s powers. At the time, I wrote that “the two Trump appointees formally declared their independence from” Trump. Only Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas were in dissent.

Of course, there was Trump’s ill-fated litigation to block the certification of the 2020 election, for which none of the justices supported him. In the past year, Trump appointees ruled against his efforts to remove enemy aliens and use national guardsmen to enforce immigration law.

All these defeats pale in comparison with the tariffs case. While Justice Kavanaugh argued that the president could use other powers to accomplish the same ends, time will tell whether a majority of the Court would reject these grounds, as well. In any case, the Learning Resources ruling has greatly diminished tariffs’ utility as a bargaining chip, since negotiators on the other side of the table now have ample reason to believe that the courts will bail them out.

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will continue to hobble President Trump for the remainder of his second term, but the tariff ruling suggests a rocky road ahead.

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