Good morning! Today is Monday, May 18th 2026, and this is The American Conservative's Morning Brief. Scott Greer warns in TAC that America's debt crossing 100 percent of GDP went unmourned because the country has lost the spirit of sacrifice, with voters demanding more services, lower taxes, and no entitlement reform all at once. Peter Van Buren defends his public membership in the controversial Ben Franklin Fellowship, arguing that decades of failed internal reform at the State Department have made outside pressure on the eighteenth-century institution unavoidable. From Mozambique's first premium cigar brand to a stalled EU–African Union summit in Luanda, Eldar Mamedov argues Europe's moral lecturing is losing ground to Chinese trade, and that America should follow Thomas Massie in trading aid for open markets. and now for the details. We begin this morning with a sobering fiscal milestone. America's national debt has now surpassed one hundred percent of GDP, a threshold crossed last month with little public alarm. Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget told the Wall Street Journal the country is "headed toward uncharted territory," calling it "a scary place to be." As Scott Greer writes in The American Conservative, the silence that greeted this milestone is itself the story. Greer argues that tackling the debt would require a measure of public sacrifice that simply doesn't exist in today's America. He points to the growing movement to abolish property taxes — now a live issue in at least thirteen states, with nearly eighty percent of Texas voters backing property tax breaks last year. The National Association of Counties warns that eliminating property taxes would gut public services in nearly half of Florida's sixty-seven counties. Greer notes the same pattern at the federal level. Polling consistently shows Americans favor spending cuts in the abstract, but oppose nearly every specific cut when asked. According to a recent YouGov survey, only foreign aid and ICE lacked plurality support for increased funding. Americans want more services, lower taxes, and no changes to Social Security or Medicare. Greer's conclusion is that reviving the spirit of John F. Kennedy's call to national service — asking what one can do for one's country — is the only path out. Without a renewed sense of common good and public-mindedness, he writes, "no one gets anything." Turning to the State Department, a controversy is brewing over a private reform group called the Ben Franklin Fellowship. The New York Times reports that veteran diplomats and congressional Democrats are alarmed by the group's growing influence inside Foggy Bottom. Eric Rubin, who recently led the American Foreign Service Association, compared it to "the equivalent of a Communist Party cell in Soviet government ministries." Peter Van Buren, writing in TAC, has come forward as a public member of the Fellowship and offers a very different account. Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran and whistleblower, argues that the department has resisted meaningful reform for decades under administrations of both parties. He traces a long history of failed efforts — from the 1975 Murphy Commission, to the Foreign Service Act of 1980, to Madeleine Albright's management initiatives, Condoleezza Rice's "transformational diplomacy," and Hillary Clinton's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Each, he writes, ran aground on institutional inertia. Van Buren is candid about his own role, particularly in the consular field, where he says he was instructed for years to issue visas in ways that ignored the clear letter of immigration law. He frames the Fellowship's work as overdue outside pressure on what he calls an eighteenth-century institution optimized to conduct diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. Even Maren Brooks of the Foreign Service association, writing during the Biden years, acknowledged a culture of risk aversion and "putting in the time." Van Buren's argument is that when internal reform fails repeatedly, outside pressure becomes inevitable. From Africa now, and a meditation on aid, trade, and the limits of moral lecturing. Eldar Mamedov, a former European Parliament staffer, recounts a recent trip to Mozambique where he encountered Bongani — the first African premium cigar, founded by a Lebanese entrepreneur named Kamal Moukheiber who left a London finance career to build a tobacco company in a country known mostly for cashews and civil war reconstruction. Mamedov contrasts this entrepreneurial reality with what he witnessed in Brussels, where, he writes, the EU's joint parliamentary assembly with African states functions more as a luxury travel program than a serious diplomatic forum. He recalls a 2022 visit to Addis Ababa where African Union officials patiently explained to European delegations why their calculus on Russia and Ukraine could not be reduced to a binary moral choice. At last November's EU–African Union
