Gunboats in the age of drones by Mathew Walls

Gunboat diplomacy was once brutally simple, sail a fleet into someone’s harbor, angle the cannons toward the capital, and wait for compliance. From the mid-19th century through the dawn of the 20th, it was a favored instrument of empires. When Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, Japan understood the message. When European powers blockaded ports from Latin America to China, the message was equally clear, power floats.

The question now is whether that logic still works in the 21st century, particularly in the simmering standoff between the United States and Iran.

At first glance, it seems like déjà vu. American aircraft carriers patrol strategic waterways. Iranian fast boats dart through the Strait of Hormuz. Each side stages its theater carefully: missile tests, naval drills, calibrated rhetoric. The setting has changed, satellites, drones, cyber capabilities but the instinct is familiar. Show strength. Signal resolve. Hope the other side blinks.

But modern gunboat diplomacy isn’t about cannons anymore. It’s about perception. In the 19th century, overwhelming force often produced immediate results because the imbalance was undeniable and alternatives were limited. Today, even so-called weaker states possess asymmetric tools that complicate the equation. Iran doesn’t need a blue-water navy to respond to pressure. It has missiles, proxies, cyber units and a deeply entrenched regional network. The United States, for all its unmatched military capacity, cannot simply anchor off a coast and expect political capitulation.

That’s because the battlefield is no longer just maritime it’s informational and psychological. When American warships sail through contested waters, they are not just projecting power; they are broadcasting an image to allies and adversaries alike. When Iran stages missile launches or naval exercises, it is doing the same. Each side performs for multiple audiences: domestic voters, regional partners, global markets. Oil prices react. Diplomats scramble. Social media amplifies.

In this environment, gunboat diplomacy risks becoming performance art, loud, expensive and ultimately inconclusive. The real danger lies in miscalculation. In the 19th century, a show of force might have been enough to compel a treaty. Today, a show of force might trigger an escalation spiral. A drone shot down, a patrol boat collision, a missile test misinterpreted any of these can ricochet across headlines and harden positions overnight. The line between signaling and provocation has grown razor thin.

There is also the question of legitimacy. Gunboat diplomacy once rested on imperial assumptions, might made right. In the 21st century, power still matters but it must be framed within international law, alliances, and public justification. The United States cannot simply coerce without calculating the diplomatic cost. Iran, meanwhile, thrives on portraying itself as resisting external intimidation. A visible show of American force may strengthen Tehran’s narrative more than weaken it.

And yet, the impulse persists. Why? Because deterrence still works. A visible military presence can prevent rash decisions. It can reassure allies in the Gulf. It can remind adversaries of red lines. The problem is that deterrence requires clarity and credibility. If red lines shift or rhetoric outruns intent, the gunboats become hollow symbols.

In the 21st century, coercion is less about forcing surrender and more about shaping choices. The United States might use naval deployments to constrain Iran’s room for maneuver, not to topple its government. Iran might harass shipping not to invite war but to increase bargaining leverage. Both sides are probing for advantage without crossing into full conflict.

But here is the uncomfortable truth; gunboat diplomacy in a nuclear-adjacent, cyber-saturated world is a high-stakes gamble. The more advanced the weapons, the faster the escalation ladder. A crisis that once took weeks to unfold can now erupt in hours.

If there is a lesson from history, it is not that shows of force always succeed. It is that they often work ...until they don’t. And when they fail, the consequences can be catastrophic.

The age of gunboats has not ended; it has evolved. Steel hulls are now backed by satellites and algorithms. Cannons have given way to precision missiles. But the central wager remains the same: that power, visibly displayed, will bend political will without triggering disaster.

Between Washington and Tehran, that wager is being tested in real time. The world can only hope that in this new era, the admirals understand that sometimes restraint is the most powerful show of force of all.

Arsenal of dependence by Thanos Kalamidas

It is one thing for Washington to promote its industries abroad but it is quite another to scold its allies for attempting to stand on their own feet. Yet that is precisely the posture the Pentagon has reportedly adopted in response to the European Union’s renewed push to “buy European” when it comes to defence procurement. The message from Washington sharpened under Secretary of ...War, Pete Hegseth and aligned with the political instincts of Donald Trump is unmistakable; Europe is free to spend more on defence so long as it spends that money in America.

This is not alliance management; it is mercantilism draped in a flag. For years, American officials have hectored European capitals about defence spending. NATO’s two-per-cent benchmark became both mantra and cudgel during the Trump years. Europeans were told they were freeloaders, complacent tenants in a security architecture financed by U.S. taxpayers. Fine. Europe has absorbed the criticism. Russia’s war in Ukraine jolted the continent into action. Budgets have risen. Factories are reopening. Joint procurement schemes are being designed to ensure interoperability and scale.

And now, when Brussels attempts to cultivate its own defence-industrial base, to reduce fragmentation, to build ammunition plants, to invest in next-generation systems, Washington signals retaliation if American firms are “strong-armed” out of contracts. The subtext is as clear as it is contradictory; spend more, but not like that.

This tension exposes a deeper American anxiety. For decades Europe’s military dependence has been a feature, not a bug, of the transatlantic relationship. It ensured influence. It guaranteed markets. It cemented a hierarchy. American defence giants thrived on European orders and European governments, in turn, accepted a degree of strategic dependency as the price of the American security umbrella.

But dependency is a fragile glue for alliances. It breeds resentment on one side and entitlement on the other. When European policymakers argue that relying excessively on U.S. systems, fighter jets, missile defences, drones, creates political vulnerability, they are not indulging in anti-American theatrics. They are responding to reality. The same political movement that demanded Europe “pay up” now warns of punishment if Europe diversifies its suppliers. That is not strategic coherence; it is strategic mood swing.

The irony is that a more capable European defence sector would strengthen, not weaken, the Atlantic partnership. A Europe able to produce more of its own munitions, armored vehicles, and air defences would shoulder a greater share of the burden in Ukraine and beyond. It would reduce pressure on American stockpiles. It would provide redundancy in a world where supply chains are brittle and geopolitics unforgiving.

Yet the current American rhetoric frames European industrial ambition as betrayal. The logic appears transactional; alliance solidarity is measured in purchase orders. “Make America Great Again” becomes less a slogan than a procurement directive.

This approach risks accelerating precisely what Washington fears. If European leaders conclude that American security guarantees are contingent on commercial loyalty, they will redouble efforts to insulate themselves. Strategic autonomy, once a French hobbyhorse, will become a continental consensus. Defence integration inside the EU will be pursued not as an abstract aspiration but as insurance against political volatility in Washington.

There is also a moral dimension. The United States has long championed free markets and competition. To threaten retaliation because European governments choose European suppliers is to abandon that rhetoric when it proves inconvenient. It suggests that “free trade” applies only when American firms win.

Allies are not subsidiaries. They are partners. Partnerships require respect for each side’s domestic politics and strategic calculations. Europe’s desire to rebuild its defence industry is not anti-American; it is pro-European. If Washington cannot distinguish between the two, it risks converting irritation into estrangement.

Great powers secure loyalty not by coercing customers but by cultivating trust. If the Pentagon insists on treating Europe’s rearmament as a zero-sum contest for market share, it may discover that the most enduring retaliation is not tariffs or procurement rules but the quiet, steady erosion of confidence across the Atlantic.

Pipeline politics and the strongman shuffle by Zakir Hall

When Budapest ordered the immediate halt of diesel deliveries to its war-torn neighbour Ukraine, it did more than squeeze a fuel line. It sent a message, one wrapped in grievance, theatrical outrage and the well-rehearsed language of “sovereignty.” The accusation that Kyiv had blocked Russian oil shipments as an act of “political blackmail” might sound like tit-for-tat brinkmanship. But in reality, it is another episode in Viktor Orbán’s long game, balancing on the fault line between the European Union and the Kremlin, while cultivating admirers in Washington who see in him a model of unapologetic strongman rule.

Hungary’s prime minister has turned strategic ambiguity into political currency. He speaks the language of Brussels when the subsidies flow and the language of Moscow when the pipelines matter. Diesel is not just diesel in this context; it is leverage. Energy, in Central Europe, is destiny. By cutting supplies to Ukraine, a country fighting for survival, Budapest signals that it is willing to weaponize geography and infrastructure to score political points.

Orbán frames such moves as defensive. Hungary, he insists, is protecting its national interests. Yet the pattern is difficult to ignore. Time and again, when European unity requires clarity, Budapest offers caveats. When sanctions against Russia demand resolve, Hungary demands exceptions. And when Ukraine needs solidarity, it receives lectures.

The rhetoric of “political blackmail” is particularly rich. Ukraine, under bombardment and existential threat, is accused of coercion for disrupting Russian oil flows, flows that finance the very war devastating its cities. It is a curious inversion: the invaded becomes the manipulator; the enabler of Russian energy transit becomes the aggrieved party. In this upside-down narrative, Hungary is cast as the sober realist amid reckless idealists.

But realism without moral compass becomes opportunism. Orbán has mastered the art of being indispensable yet unpredictable. Within the EU, he plays the spoiler, never quite crossing the line that would isolate Hungary completely, but always hovering near it. Within NATO, he maintains formal commitments while testing patience. And beyond Europe, he cultivates relationships with figures who share his scepticism of liberal internationalism.

It is here that the odd symmetry emerges. Orbán manages to attract both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump into his orbit of admiration. With Putin, the affinity is ideological and strategic: centralized authority, suspicion of Western liberal norms, a preference for transactional politics. With Trump, it is stylistic and cultural, a shared disdain for what they portray as globalist elites and progressive orthodoxies. That one man can appeal to both speaks less about ideological coherence and more about the gravitational pull of strongman politics in an era of uncertainty.

Energy disputes become theater in this broader performance. Cutting diesel deliveries is not merely a logistical manoeuvre; it is a signal to domestic audiences that Hungary bows to no one. It is also a reminder to Brussels that consensus cannot be taken for granted. In a union built on compromise, Orbán’s power lies in his readiness to disrupt it.

Yet disruption has consequences. Ukraine’s war is not an abstract geopolitical chess match. It is a human catastrophe unfolding on Europe’s doorstep. Every lever pulled for tactical advantage reverberates far beyond Budapest. When fuel supplies become bargaining chips, civilians feel the chill long before diplomats feel the sting.

Orbán would argue that Hungary’s first duty is to Hungarians. That is a defensible principle. But leadership is measured not only by the defence of national interest but by the willingness to recognize when those interests are intertwined with the fate of neighbours. In a continent scarred by division, solidarity is not charity; it is self-preservation.

The diesel may flow again. Accusations may soften into negotiations. But the episode underscores a deeper truth: Viktor Orbán thrives in the gray zones of crisis. As long as Europe remains fractured and global politics rewards defiance over cooperation, he will continue to navigate between East and West, pipeline in one hand veto in the other, confident that in the age of strongmen, ambiguity is power.

Berserk Alert! #090 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
For more Berserk Alert! HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

Ma-Siri & Co #118 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Ma-Siri is a mother, a grandmother and a very active social life,
searching for the meaning of life among other things and her glasses.

For more Ma-Siri & Alexa, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

The making of a candidate in Munich by Emma Schneider

When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stepped onto the stage at the Munich Security Conference she did more than deliver remarks on transatlantic cooperation and democratic resilience. She walked into a rehearsal space, one with chandeliers, simultaneous translation headsets and the faint hum of geopolitical anxiety. Munich is not a rally in Queens. It is not a House Oversight hearing engineered for viral clips. It is a gathering of generals, ministers, intelligence chiefs and the sort of think-tank grandees who speak in acronyms. And in that room, Ocasio-Cortez looked less like a backbencher and more like a woman trying on the silhouette of a future commander-in-chief.

The mixed reaction from members of her own party was as predictable as it was revealing. Some Democrats praised her willingness to engage on foreign policy, an arena where progressives have long been caricatured as either naïve or reflexively anti-American. Others winced. They heard imprecision where they wanted doctrine, moral urgency where they preferred calibrated ambiguity. Beneath the polite applause and quiet side-eyes was a shared recognition, foreign affairs may be the last proving ground she has yet to conquer.

Ocasio-Cortez’s political brand was forged in domestic fire. She speaks fluently about inequality, climate justice, health care and the lived experience of working-class Americans. Her rhetoric is animated by moral clarity and a gift for translating structural critique into Instagram-ready prose. But foreign policy is a different dialect. It is less sermon, more chessboard. It requires comfort with tragedy, compromise and the disquieting fact that sometimes every option is bad.

In Munich, she attempted to bridge these worlds. She framed global security in terms of democratic accountability and economic fairness. She argued, in essence, that militarism divorced from social investment corrodes the very societies it claims to defend. It was a familiar thesis, delivered on unfamiliar terrain. The problem, if one is inclined to see it as such, is that global security elites are less persuaded by moral architecture than by force posture and alliance management. They want to know not only what you believe but what you would bomb, sanction or abandon.

This is the vulnerability her critics inside the Democratic Party sense. A presidential campaign is not a podcast. It is a gauntlet of hypotheticals, What would you do if Taiwan were blockaded? If NATO fractured? If Ukraine faltered? If Iran sprinted toward a bomb? The electorate, chastened by decades of war and wary of new entanglements, wants both restraint and resolve. It is an impossible balance and every aspirant must pretend it is achievable.

To be fair, no member of Congress arrives fully formed as a foreign-policy sage. Experience in international affairs is often acquired the way one learns to swim by being pushed in. Ocasio-Cortez has served on committees that brush up against defence and financial oversight; she has travelled abroad; she has spoken forcefully about human rights. But the presidency demands not merely positions, but posture. It demands that allies and adversaries alike believe you understand the gravity of command.

There is also a generational subtext to this moment. Ocasio-Cortez represents a cohort that came of age during the Iraq War’s unravelling and the Afghanistan debacle. For them, scepticism of intervention is not ideology; it is muscle memory. Munich, by contrast, is steeped in the language of deterrence and hard power. The friction between these sensibilities is not a flaw. It is the story of a party and perhaps a country, trying to reconcile its disillusionment with its obligations.

Some Democrats worry that her foray into this arena will hand opponents an easy line of attack: that she is fluent in hashtags but halting in statecraft. Republicans, should she ever mount a presidential bid, would not hesitate to frame her as untested, unserious or worse, reckless. The presidency is the only job in America where the résumé item “influencer” counts for nothing and the title “Commander-in-Chief” looms over every debate stage.

Yet there is another way to read Munich. Ocasio-Cortez did not need to be there. She is safe in her district. Her national profile is secure. By choosing to enter that room, she signalled ambition, not merely for higher office but for intellectual expansion. Politicians who aspire to the Oval Office eventually confront their weak spots. Some avoid them. Others lean in.

The Democratic Party’s ambivalence toward her appearance reveals as much about the party as it does about her. It is a coalition perpetually negotiating between idealism and pragmatism, between the activists who power primaries and the moderates who fret over general elections. Ocasio-Cortez embodies that tension. She is both a lightning rod and a lodestar.

If she does contemplate a presidential run, Munich will not be remembered for any single line she delivered. It will matter as a symbol, the moment she began to test whether her moral vocabulary can be translated into the idiom of global power. The question is not whether she can speak at such conferences. It is whether she can persuade Americans and the world, that she belongs at the head of the table.

For now, Munich was a glimpse, not a verdict. But in politics, glimpses have a way of hardening into expectations. And expectations, once formed, are the true currency of a campaign.

Overnight I turned into a museum #poem by Abigail George

 

What is this weakness inside of me?

Yes, I realise I am weak
I realise

I have my limitations
Self, ego

The road is a miracle
It’s dark

I can’t seem to find my way
The older men are nice

They are kind

The men who are
as old as my father

have intellectual discussions with me

The women ignore me
Their laughter tastes like English mustard

That’s all
Decay

That’s all
that’s left of me.

I wait
for the chops

to defrost
on the countertop

growing older
colder, more afraid

in this
a time of questioning

I read my future
Counting my past’s sorrows

Anxiety’s pre-history
Mad with erosion in my soul

I think I understand
your shy tenderness now

The beast
and roots and the powers

of wilderness in you
Poetry is experience

Vertigo taught me that
I think of all my teachers

while the meat turns into metaphor.

When a scandal becomes background noise? By Virginia Robertson

There was a time when the mere whisper of impropriety near the Oval Office could paralyze Washington for weeks. A single photograph, an ambiguous phone call, an awkward meeting, any of it could ignite hearings, headlines and public outrage. Today, we live in a moment so saturated with scandal that something once unthinkable has been metabolized into the daily scroll, the name of the President of the United States appearing repeatedly in the diaries and notes of a convicted pedophile and the collective reaction is… a shrug.

Not outrage. Not urgency. Not even curiosity at scale. Just noise. In any other era, the revelation that a president’s name surfaced tens of thousands of times in documents connected to a criminal convicted of exploiting minors would trigger bipartisan alarm bells. The demand would not be partisan; it would be reflexive. Investigate. Clarify. Disclose. Not because guilt is presumed but because power demands scrutiny.

Instead, we have drifted into a strange cultural anesthesia. The story has been absorbed into the endless churn of political tribalism. If the president is “your guy,” the allegations are dismissed as conspiracy. If he is not, the outrage is performative, filtered through the same partisan megaphones that have long since eroded credibility. The result is paralysis. No one trusts anyone enough to demand the simplest democratic principle: transparency.

And so the abnormal becomes normal. This is not about presuming guilt. It is about standards. If a school principal’s name appeared repeatedly in the private records of a convicted predator, the community would demand answers. If a Fortune 500 CEO’s name surfaced in similar context, shareholders would insist on investigation. Why is the threshold lower or at least more negotiable, when it comes to the presidency?

The presidency is not a private office. It is the apex of public trust. It carries nuclear codes, intelligence briefings, and global influence. The occupant of that office should be the most carefully vetted individual in the country, not the least questioned because scrutiny is politically inconvenient.

What is perhaps most unsettling is not the allegation itself, but the desensitization. We have grown accustomed to scandal. We have been conditioned by a decade of outrage cycles to conserve our moral energy. Every week brings a new crisis. Every month delivers a new “bombshell.” The public, exhausted, chooses survival over sustained accountability.

But democracies do not survive on exhaustion. They survive on vigilance. The danger here is not only that serious questions might go unanswered. It is that we are normalizing a culture where association with grave criminality does not automatically trigger rigorous, independent review. Where asking for investigation is framed as partisan warfare rather than civic responsibility. Where silence is safer than inquiry.

If there is nothing to hide, then investigation should not be feared. It should be welcomed. Transparency protects the innocent as much as it exposes the guilty. Refusing to demand clarity, however, protects no one except the powerful.

There is also a broader moral hazard. When elites appear insulated from scrutiny, public faith corrodes. Citizens begin to believe that accountability is selective, harsh for the ordinary, flexible for the influential. That perception alone is corrosive enough to destabilize trust in institutions.

And once trust erodes, conspiracy fills the vacuum. We cannot afford to treat serious allegations as background noise simply because they are politically inconvenient or emotionally exhausting. The presidency is not a personality cult, nor a partisan trophy. It is a public trust.

Investigate carefully. Investigate fairly. Investigate fully. Not because we assume the worst but because in a functioning democracy, the most powerful office in the world should never be beyond question.

When scandal becomes ordinary, accountability becomes optional. And when accountability becomes optional, democracy becomes fragile. The normalization is the real story.

Ian Glim #004 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A bewildered soul navigating global complexities armed
only with earnestness and a sharp, sarcastic wit.

For more Ian Glim, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

World Day of Social Justice: A Sense of Direction by Rene Wadlow

On a proposal of the Ambassador of Kyrgyzstzan, the United Nations General Assembly has set 20 February as the World Day of Social Justice. It was observed for the first time in 2009, but is not widely known.  As with other UN-designated “Days”, the World Day of Social Justice gives us an opportunity to take stock of how we can work together at the local, national and global level on policy and action to achieve the goals set out in the resolution designating the Day of “solidarity, harmony and equality within and among states.”

As the resolution states “Social development and social justice are indispensable for the achievement and maintenance of peace and security within and among nations and that, in turn, social development and social justice cannot be attained in the absence of peace and security or in the absence of respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The Preamble to the UN Charter makes social justice one of the chief aims of the organization, using the more common expression of that time “social progress”.  The Preamble calls for efforts “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”.  However, in the preparation of the Charter during the last days of the Second World War, there was no definition given of “social progress”.  There was agreement that social justice was definitely more than law courts plus a social policy. It was easier to recognize social injustice than to define social justice.

The societies created by Nazi Germany and the military in Japan with slave labor and the abolition of workers’ rights were the models of social injustice that the drafters of the UN Charter had in mind along with the consequences in North America and Western Europe of the 1930s depression.

Ideas concerning international efforts for social progress were drawn largely from the experience of the League of Nations and especially the International Labour Organization (ILO), which had been created in 1919.  The representatives from the USA and Great Britain were most influential in the preliminary work on the UN Charter, other European states being occupied by Germany or still in the middle of fighting. Thus US representatives were strongly influenced in their views of social progress by the “New Deal” legislation of President Roosevelt and the British by the outlines of the 1942 Beveridge Plan, named after its main author, Lord Beveridge, which led to the setting up of the first unified social security system. By 1944, with the tide of war turning, the ILO met in Philadelphia, USA, and set out its aims of post-war world employment policies, freedom of association for workers and the extension of social security measures.

Thus from the start in 1945, the emphasis in the UN system had been on social justice as related to conditions of employment and the right to organize which was made manifest in the 1948 ILO Convention number 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize. Progressively, education was included as an aspect of social justice, in part because education is closely linked to employment.  Later, health was added as an element, again because of a close link to employment.

It took much longer but ultimately, gender equality has been included in the aims of social justice as fair employment practices, good education, and adequate health services could often still overlook the existence of women. Even today, can education be the only measure of women’s empowerment? Does reproductive health and rights come under adequate health care?

It is likely that employment, education, health with equality between women and men is as far as government representatives are willing to go collectively in discussing policies and programs of social justice.  Further advances will have to come from the non-governmental sector, though representatives from some governments at times can take a lead. Today, we can still see injustices due to social class, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, age, sexual orientation and disabilities.  There is a reluctance on the part of governments to deal with these issues nationally and an even greater reluctance to deal with them collectively within the UN system.

However, it is too easy to throw back on others responsibilities for injustices, if at the same time one does not realize how each of us shares personally in the benefits of injustice. Thus, we can use the World Day of Social Justice not only to celebrate the advances made but to get a sense of direction for the road to be yet taken.

***********************

Rene Wadlow, Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens

The mast marcher by Markus Gibbons

On February 17, 2026, Jesse Jackson died and with him a certain unmistakable timbre in the American conscience fell quiet. Not silenced, because the echo remains, but quieted in the way a bell does when the rope is finally still. For more than half a century, Jackson was not merely present in the civil-rights struggle; he was kinetic within it, a force that refused to accept the narrow framing of justice as a regional or even national concern. He understood, earlier than most that injustice travels well. And so must those who fight it.

To call Jackson a civil-rights leader feels almost administratively insufficient. He was a translator between eras. As a young protégé of Martin Luther King Jr., he absorbed the grammar of nonviolence and the moral architecture of the Black freedom movement. But where King’s cadences were sermonic and soaring, Jackson’s were improvisational, elastic, and deeply political. He did not inherit a movement at its moral apex; he inherited it in the aftermath of assassination, disillusionment, and fragmentation. And he chose not to mourn its lost purity but to test its adaptability.

Jackson’s genius was to insist that civil rights were not a closed chapter in American history but a living, expanding claim. Through Operation PUSH and later the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he articulated a “rainbow” long before the metaphor became fashionable shorthand for diversity. His coalition was not cosmetic. It was strategic. He understood that the margins are crowded, and that power rarely yields to solitary grievance. Farmers in Iowa, factory workers in Detroit, Black voters in Mississippi, students in California, Jackson imagined them not as separate constituencies but as overlapping witnesses to inequity.

When he ran for president in 1984 and again in 1988, he was widely dismissed as symbolic, as though symbolism were a trivial pursuit. Yet symbolism is the rehearsal for reality. Jackson’s campaigns under the banner of the Democratic Party forced the party and the country, to confront the arithmetic of exclusion. He did not win the nomination but he won something arguably more durable, the normalization of Black presidential ambition. Decades before the country would elect Barack Obama; Jackson had already mapped the terrain, endured the skepticism and endured the caricature.

He was imperfect. This must be said not as a ritual disclaimer but as a recognition of his humanity. Jackson made missteps, some painful and public. He sometimes seemed to court the spotlight, to relish the theater of politics. But perhaps we misunderstand theater. The civil-rights movement was always partly theatrical, a choreography of marches, sit-ins and arrests designed to dramatize injustice so starkly that indifference became untenable. Jackson understood the camera as both adversary and instrument. He wielded it.

What distinguished Jackson from many domestic reformers was his insistence that civil rights did not stop at the water’s edge. He traveled, negotiated, intervened. He met with adversaries and allies alike, often drawing criticism for doing so. But his internationalism was not naïveté; it was consistency. If human dignity is indivisible, then geography cannot be its limit. He saw apartheid in South Africa, authoritarianism in Latin America, and hunger in Africa not as distant tragedies but as variations on a single theme: the hoarding of power at the expense of the vulnerable.

There was something stubbornly hopeful about him. In an age increasingly defined by cynicism, where outrage is monetized and solidarity is fleeting, Jackson remained almost defiantly earnest. He believed in redemption, not just personal but structural. He believed that corporations could be pressured into fairness, that political parties could be expanded rather than abandoned, that young people could be persuaded to see themselves as heirs to unfinished work. Hope, for Jackson, was not a mood. It was a discipline.

It is tempting, in death, to canonize. We should resist that. Jackson was not a saint descending from stained glass. He was a politician in the broadest sense, a practitioner of power, negotiation, compromise, and spectacle. But perhaps that is precisely why his legacy endures. He did not hover above the fray; he entered it. He absorbed its blows. He kept marching.

In the end, Jesse Jackson’s greatest contribution may not be any single policy victory or campaign milestone. It may be the expansion of imagination. He forced America and indeed the world, to imagine a democracy capacious enough to include those it had long excluded. He argued, in speech after speech, that the arc of the moral universe does not bend on its own. It bends because hands push it.

On February 17, 2026, one of those hands went still. The work did not.