Adrian Feinberg

Can’t sleep. Thinking about the full-body Scientology ads on my DC Metrobus route.

Just finished Dag Johan Haugerud’s superb Oslo Stories Trilogy, and can’t get over how much Ella Øverby resembles a young Sandrine Bonnaire. #Filmsky

Dreams (2024) vs. À Nos Amours (1983)

Who Killed the Liberal International Order? A contested idea has seen many alleged deaths.

From Kosovo to Greenland, FP’s Nick Danforth conducts a postmortem on the liberal international order.

Screenshot of a post from an account called “Goyim Bureau of Investigation,” labeled as a parody account. The post shows a two panel meme using a man standing at a whiteboard. In the first panel, text on the board reads “The world is run by Jewish pedophiles.” In the second panel, the text reads “We need to do more than just post edgy memes. It’s time for physical removal.” The figure’s face is replaced with a skull-like cartoon with glowing red eyes and a black helmet bearing a fascist-style symbol. The post includes engagement metrics showing over 100,000 views.

Screenshot of a tweet by David Miller stating that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad superspy and referring to a so-called “Jewish Empire.” The tweet claims that media institutions protect Jewish power and compares mainstream media unfavorably to online influencers. Below the tweet is an embedded post from “Sneako Updates” showing a paused video clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored, with multiple commentators on screen and Sneako appearing in a smaller window. Engagement metrics show tens of thousands of views.

THREAD 🧵:

The Epstein files are real. The antisemitism they're fueling is also real.

And right now, the second part is getting almost no attention.

That doesn’t mean pro-democratic oppositions should attempt to downplay the threat of wannabe authoritarians or avoid discussing democracy at all. But it does mean that more tangible issues (affordability, security, corruption, etc.) are better for winning elections.

In most backsliding liberal democracies, the answer is usually no. People have vastly different conceptions of what democracy even is, and most rely on a simplistic definition based on elections and majoritarian rule.

There’s a robust literature on whether or not it’s strategic to make democracy the center point of an opposition campaign against an illiberal executive.

While President Trump’s plan for Venezuela is a serious departure from decades of previous U.S. policy, it has roots in a model from the early 20th century. And that doesn’t look good. @oliverstuenkel.bsky.social and @alsfeinberg.bsky.social explain ⬇️

The U.S. Plan for Venezuela Has a Precedent. It’s Not Good. Lessons from early twentieth-century “fiscal receivership” efforts should be a warning for Venezuela.

🆕Washington wants to manage Venezuela’s oil reserves.

That experiment was tried in Latin America and the Caribbean before—by Theodore Roosevelt. It failed by the 1930s.

@oliverstuenkel.bsky.social and @alsfeinberg.bsky.social lay out the history of U.S. fiscal receivership @carnegieendowment.org⏬

The U.S. Plan for Venezuela Has a Precedent. It’s Not Good. Lessons from early twentieth-century “fiscal receivership” efforts should be a warning for Venezuela.

Despite what Elliott Abrams would have you believe, the US’s history of intervening in Latin American economic affairs is not all that rosy.

Venezuela may be no different.

Read Oliver Stuenkel and I break down the history of U.S. fiscal receiverships:

carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

This seems like a broader problem for right-wing populist parties in their ascendancy. As establishment conservatives defect to ride the wave of public sentiment, parties like Reform will more or less end up resembling the establishment institutions before them.

I mean the guy co-founded YouGov!

How many Nadhim Zahawis can join Reform until voters realize that their right-wing populist party is itself an extension of the political establishment?

I.e. It’s pretty clear that gentrification is a supply-side issue. But collective migration rights discourse would have you believe that shaming recent college grads for living in Bed-Stuy is a more productive politics!

Not that it matters, but I think a return to a classic liberal conception of freedom of movement would be healthy for public discourse.

People are wont to move no matter their group belonging! Politics should start from that assumption. Identity-based restrictions on movement are bound to fail.

And, to a much lesser extent, left-wing discourses about gentrification and settler colonialism have placed similar strictures around who can migrate where.

The populist right in the US and Europe pretty openly believes that people from the “Third World” don’t possess the same right to migrate as Westerners.

It’s interesting that, as migration and mobility have become the center point of public debate, both right and left have moved away from a framework of individual rights to one of collective rights.

I think it makes sense as a self-preservation mechanism, because they’re otherwise damned by their own logic of contamination.

Working at the Israeli bakery and shaking my head so they know I don’t approve type stuff!

Loved this from @mikealbertus.bsky.social in The Atlantic today. It seems to me that the Venezuelan opposition will struggle to capitalize on popular upset with Rodríguez’s capitulations to U.S. domination. Hard to both celebrate Maduro’s ouster and denigrate its foreseeable consequences.

Milei’s Midterm Miracle Did Argentine voters endorse their president’s economic overhaul—or cow to Trump’s threats?

(Gift link, in case you feel like perusing some news from several months ago!)

Happy to see this piece in print in the Winter 2026 issue of @foreignpolicy.com.

White nationalist insanity aside, this cosmology does have a more interesting, more humane corollary on the academic left:

There’s some false nostalgia here, too.

“No regime change” wasn’t exactly a hard and fast rule of the liberal international order.

The “precedent” Trump is creating in the eyes of some
American observers has long existed in the minds of Chinese and Russian decision-makers.

This sort of argument about “setting a precedent for Russia and China” always strikes me as flimsy. Revisionist powers don’t need to wait around for some pretext to behave revisionistly! They can just invent one!

Chile elected José Antonio Kast in Sunday's presidential runoff, setting up the most conservative government in the Chile's democratic history.

Ahead of the runoff, @oliverstuenkel.bsky.social spoke about the growing signs of a rightward shift in Latin America www.instagram.com/reel/DRiJEjz...

Milei’s Midterm Miracle Did Argentine voters endorse their president’s economic overhaul—or cow to Trump’s threats?

With the final votes counted in Argentina’s midterm elections, Milei has found his expectations exceeded and his mandate renewed. foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/29/m...

Milei’s Midterm Miracle Did Argentine voters endorse their president’s economic overhaul—or cow to Trump’s threats?

🆕Argentina’s midterms gave Javier Milei's far-right party an unexpectedly strong showing.

But the election also exposed a new global norm: U.S. partisan interventionism. @oliverstuenkel.bsky.social and Adrian Feinberg write for @foreignpolicy.com ⤵️

Good article. Despite the authors' reservations about democracy multilateralism that is too ideologically narrow, their explanation for why earlier attempts at more global eforts did not take off suggests that different efforts by smaller "affinity groups" of governments would be an OK development.

The New Democracy Defenders With U.S. democracy support receding, progressive leaders from Spain and Latin America have pioneered a global initiative to combat backsliding. Can it succeed?

With the U.S. pulling out of democracy support, leaders from Spain and the Americas have formed a new global initiative to protect democracy. But these leaders face challenges at home and abroad.

@oliverstuenkel.bsky.social and Adrian Feinberg explain: carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...