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In U.S. political talk, Iraq is often treated as a “finished chapter.” The invasion is history, the occupation is history, and even the war against ISIS is presented as something largely completed. Yet in 2025, Iraqis are still living with the consequences of decisions made in Washington, and U.S. power in their country is not disappearing – it is simply changing shape.

In U.S. political talk, Iraq is often treated as a “finished chapter.” The invasion is history, the occupation is history, and even the war against ISIS is presented as something largely completed. Yet in 2025, Iraqis are still living with the consequences of decisions made in Washington, and U.S. power in their country is not disappearing – it is simply changing shape.

In September 2024, the United States and Iraq announced that the U.S.-led coalition’s military mission would end by September 2025 and evolve into a bilateral security arrangement, with hundreds of troops expected to leave and most of the rest by the end of 2026. But that announcement was never a promise of full withdrawal. It was a plan to rebrand and resize the presence, not to end it.

By October 2025, the Pentagon confirmed that the mission was being “scaled back,” not closed. Troop levels are dropping from about 2,500 to under 2,000, and most U.S. personnel are being repositioned to the northern city of Erbil in the Kurdistan Region, while a smaller presence remains in Baghdad under the label of “security cooperation.” Combat may no longer be the official role, but foreign soldiers are still on Iraqi soil, shaping the country’s security architecture.

At the same time, Washington just opened the largest U.S. consulate in the world in Erbil – a massive $796 million compound spread over 50 acres. Official statements describe this as an investment in “a sovereign and stable Iraq.” For many observers, it also looks like a signal that the United States intends to entrench long-term economic and political influence in the north, even as troop numbers are trimmed elsewhere.

Iraqi leaders themselves have linked foreign troop presence to internal instability. Last month, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said that bringing all weapons under state control will not be possible as long as a U.S.-led coalition remains in the country, because some armed factions justify their existence as “resistance” to that foreign presence. In other words, continued deployment of foreign forces makes disarming militias harder, not easier.

For ordinary Iraqis, this is layered on top of decades of war, sanctions, occupation, and extremist violence. Many carry memories not only of local actors’ abuses, but also of U.S. airstrikes, night raids, and notorious scandals like Abu Ghraib. Human Rights Watch has documented how Iraqis who were tortured and abused in U.S.-run prisons are still waiting for any form of compensation or official redress, two decades after their suffering became public. Those individuals are not statistics; they are people trying to rebuild lives while the government that harmed them refuses even basic accountability.

U.S. influence in Iraq today is not limited to bases and advisors. It is also economic and political. Earlier this year, when drone attacks by Iran-aligned militias hit U.S.-linked oil installations in Iraqi Kurdistan, Washington responded by pressuring Baghdad to reopen a key oil export pipeline to Turkey that had been shut since 2023. According to Reuters reporting, that pressure included threats of sanctions against Iraqi officials until the deal favored U.S. energy interests and partners. Such episodes show a pattern: military vulnerability is used to justify ongoing presence, and that presence is then used to extract leverage over Iraq’s economic choices.

Iraqis deserve more than a shift from one form of foreign control to another. Ending formal “combat missions” while keeping troops, enormous diplomatic compounds, and economic pressure tools in place does not amount to real respect for Iraq’s sovereignty. A genuinely different approach from the United States would start with admitting the harm caused since 2003, offering concrete compensation and support to Iraqi survivors of U.S. abuses, and committing to a clear, time-bound end to military deployment.

It would also mean redirecting resources from bases and weapons toward reconstructing schools, hospitals, water systems, and trauma services in communities damaged by past wars. And it would mean engaging with Iraqi civil society – journalists, community organizers, women’s groups, youth movements – without trying to steer their politics.

Iraq has the right to shape its own future without foreign soldiers in the background and foreign governments pulling economic strings. As long as U.S. power in Iraq is only resized and rebranded instead of reduced and held accountable, the chapter that began with invasion remains open – not for policymakers in Washington, but for the people who still live with its consequences every day.

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Sophia Gonzalez is an American activist and political analyst focusing on U.S. strategy, Middle East affairs, and global security. A peace and human rights advocate, she writes to challenge interventionism and promote diplomacy.

Masked officers conduct immigration raids. National Guard troops patrol American cities, and protesters decry their presence as a “fascist takeover.” White supremacists openly proclaim racist and antisemitic views.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Masked officers conduct immigration raids. National Guard troops patrol American cities, and protesters decry their presence as a “fascist takeover.” White supremacists openly proclaim racist and antisemitic views.

Is the United States sliding into fascism? It’s a question that divides a good portion of the country today.

Embracing a belief in American exceptionalism – the idea that America is a unique and morally superior country – some historians suggest that “it can’t happen here,” echoing the satirical title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 book about creeping fascism in America. The social conditions required for fascism to take root do not exist in the U.S., these historians say.

Still, while fascist ideas never found a foothold among the majority of Americans, they exerted considerable influence during the period between the first and second world wars. Extremist groups like the Silver Shirts, the Christian Front, the Black Legion and the Ku Klux Klan claimed hundreds of thousands of members. Together they glorified a white Christian nation purified of Jews, Black Americans, immigrants and communists.

During the 1930s and early ‘40s, fascist ideas were promoted and cheered on American soil by groups such as the pro-Nazi German American Bund, which staged a mass rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in February 1939, displaying George Washington’s portrait alongside swastikas.

The Bund also operated lodges, storefronts, summer camps, beer halls and newspapers across the country and denounced the “melting pot.” It encouraged boycotts and street brawls against Jews and leftists and forged links to Germany’s Nazi party.

Yet the Bund and other far-right groups have largely vanished from public memory, even in communities where they once enjoyed popularity. As a sociologist of collective memory and identity, I wanted to know why that is the case.

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The Bund in New Jersey

My analysis of hundreds of oral histories of people who grew up in New Jersey in the 1930s and ‘40s, where the German American Bund enjoyed a particularly strong presence, suggests that witnesses saw them as insignificant, “un-American” and unworthy of remembrance.

But the people who rallied with the Bund for a white, Christian nation were ordinary citizens. They were mechanics and shopkeepers, churchgoers and small businessmen, and sometimes elected officials. They frequented diners, led PTA meetings and went to church. They were American.

When they were interviewed decades later, many of those who had seen Bundists up close in their communities remembered the uniforms, the swastika armbands, the marching columns. They recalled the local butcher who quietly displayed sympathy for Nazism, the Bund’s boycotts of Jewish businesses, and the street brawls at Bund rallies.

German American interviewees, who remember firsthand the support the Bund enjoyed before the U.S. entered World War II, 50 years later laughed at family members and neighbors who once supported the organization. Even Jewish interviewees who recalled fearful encounters with Bundists during that period tended to minimize the threat in retrospect. Like their German American counterparts, they framed the Bund as deviant and ephemeral. Few believed the group, and the ideas for which it stood, were significant.

I believe the German Americans’ laughter decades after the war was over, and after the revelations of the mass murder of European Jews, may have been a way for them to distance themselves from feelings of shame or discomfort. As cognitive psychologists show, people tend to erase or minimize inconvenient or painful facts that may threaten their sense of self.

Collective memories are also highly selective. They are influenced by the groups – nation, community, family – in which they are members. In other words, the past is always shaped by the needs of the present.

After World War II, for example, some Americans reframed the major threat facing the U.S. as communism. They cast fascism as a defeated foreign evil, while elevating “reds” as the existential threat. Collectively, Americans preferred a simpler national tale: Fascism was “over there.” America was the bulwark of democracy “over here.” This is one way forgetting works.

Communities will remember what they have forgotten or minimized when history is taught, markers are erected, archives are preserved and commemorations are staged. The U.S. has done that for the Holocaust and for the Civil Rights Movement. But when it comes to the history of homegrown fascism, and local resistance to it, few communities have made efforts to preserve this history.

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Remembering difficult pasts

At least one community has tried. In Southbury, Connecticut, community members erected a small plaque in 2022 to honor townspeople who in 1937 organized to keep the Bund from building a training camp there. 
The inscription is simple: “Southbury Stops Nazi Training Camp.”

The story it tells provides more than an example of local pride – it’s a template for how communities can commemorate the moments when ordinary citizens said “no.”

When Americans insist that “it can’t happen here,” they exempt themselves from vigilance. When they ignore or discount extremism, seeing it as “weird” or “foreign,” they miss how effectively such movements borrowed American idioms, such as patriotism, Christianity and law and order, to further hatred, violence and exclusion.

Research shows that some Americans have been drawn to movements that promise purity, unity and order at the expense of their neighbors’ rights. The point of remembering such histories is not to wallow in shame, nor to collapse every political dispute into “fascism.” It is to offer an accurate account of America’s democratic vulnerabilities.

The year 2025 has not been a great one for U.S.-Chinese relations. Tit-for-tat tariffs and the scramble over rare earth elements has dampened economic relations between the world’s two leading economies. Meanwhile, territorial disputes between China and American allies in the Indo-Pacific region have further deepened the intensifying military rivalry.

(THE CONVERSATION) — The year 2025 has not been a great one for U.S.-Chinese relations. Tit-for-tat tariffs and the scramble over rare earth elements has dampened economic relations between the world’s two leading economies. Meanwhile, territorial disputes between China and American allies in the Indo-Pacific region have further deepened the intensifying military rivalry.

This rift has often been portrayed as a clash of opposing ideological systems: democracy versus autocracy; economic liberalism versus state-led growth; and individualism versus collectivism.

But such framing relies on a top-down look at the two countries premised on statements and claims of powerful leaders. What it obscures is that both superpowers are administered by the same kind of professionals: career bureaucrats.

We are an international team of researchers investigating bureaucratic preferences and behavior. Earlier this year, we hosted a two-day workshop with participants from China, the United States and other countries to compare bureaucratic agencies’ responses to global challenges.

Our research and that of others shows that, despite the ideological standoff at the leadership level, officials in China and the U.S. are shaped by comparable incentives and dynamics that lead them to act in surprisingly similar ways. In other words, when it comes to the women and men who carry out the actual work of government – from drafting regulation to enforcing compliance – China and the U.S. aren’t really that different.

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Separated by politics, not practice

That’s not to suggest there aren’t differences in aspects of China’s and the U.S.’s bureaucratic base.

China’s system is more centralized, with a larger civil service of around 8 million employees as of 2024. The U.S. bureaucracy is more decentralized across federal, state and local levels and employs fewer bureaucrats, with around 3 million federal employees in 2024.

Still, comparative research on bureaucracies around the world shows that civil servants act similarly when confronted with complex problems, regardless of political system or policy field.

Whether they are municipal bureaucrats in Brazil, foreign aid officials in Germany, Norway and South Korea, or international civil servants at the United Nations, they all operate within the constraints of politically embedded organizations while pursuing their individual careers. In other words, they want to get ahead in their jobs while navigating constantly changing political winds.

Bureaucrats in the U.S. and China also navigate changing demands from their political leaders while seeking to gain expertise and progress in their careers.

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Managing public expectations

Foreign aid, environmental management and pandemic governance in the U.S. and China provide telling examples of these parallels.

At first glance, the approaches of China and the U.S. to the use of foreign aid may appear as complete opposites. The former established the China International Development Cooperation Agency in 2018. Since then it has expanded and evolved its engagement abroad.

By contrast, the U.S. abolished USAID earlier in 2025, slashed its foreign aid budget, and moved remaining staff members into the State Department.

It would therefore seem that the U.S. and China are on opposing trajectories. Yet, the current moment obscures similarities between foreign aid bureaucrats in the two countries. Their tasks entail satisfying political objectives, overseeing taxpayer-funded projects abroad, and managing domestic public expectations.

The expertise required of these bureaucrats is to increase their country’s “soft power” while avoiding the appearance of wasting scarce funds abroad amid looming domestic needs.

With foreign aid admonished by the Trump administration as wasteful politics, officials in Washington are under unprecedented pressure to pursue financial diplomacy that recognizably serves U.S. interests while supporting foreign leaders whom the president considers allies. This agenda shift moves the U.S. closer to the Chinese foreign aid principle of seeking mutual benefits.

Meanwhile, Chinese aid officials are pivoting away from prioritizing large-scale infrastructure projects and toward a purported “small but beautiful projects” approach that centers on the well-being of beneficiaries. 
This pivot aligns their thinking with “softer” topics emblematic of U.S. foreign aid until 2024.

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The logic of blame avoidance

The case of bureaucratic responses to environmental pollution scandals is equally instructive. Again, one might expect bureaucrats in the U.S. and China, operating within different governance systems, to approach the problem differently.

In practice, however, bureaucrats in both countries are often motivated by an urge to avoid blame.

Rather than building on policy success stories, they tend to seek to deflect criticism for policy failures onto others. The underlying reason is so-called asymmetric payoffs: Success stories may lead to short-term public acclaim; policy failures jeopardize entire careers.

In China, the anti-air pollution measures introduced in Hebei province, which borders the capital Beijing, provide a prime example of the logic of blame avoidance. When the central government in 2017 urged provincial officials to reduce air pollution by banning coal heating, the officials’ overzealous implementation was motivated by a desire to shield themselves from potential blame from national leadership.

As a result, the needs of Hebei residents were ignored, with schoolchildren shivering in unheated classrooms. Rather than assuming the blame, both national and local officials shifted the focus onto middle-class Beijing residents, who were pilloried in the media for prioritizing clean air over the well-being of others.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the city of Flint, Michigan, had been reeling from decades of industrial decay and financial distress. The state government appointed an emergency manager who implemented cost-cutting measures, including switching the city’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. This change resulted in lead contamination and widespread health impacts, escalating into a national scandal. As in Hebei, all parties – from state regulators to local officials and environmental agencies – blamed each other in an attempt to avoid responsibility.

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Careerism as constraint

Parallel bureaucratic behaviors also became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. In China and the U.S. alike, public officials worked at the forefront of implementing public health guidelines. The Chinese response was said to benefit from an “authoritarian advantage,” allowing its authorities to impose drastic measures rapidly and comprehensively.

However, evidence-based policymaking was constrained by political preferences and bureaucratic careerism – the drive of officials to prioritize actions that help them get promoted.

It produced similar dynamics to those observed in the more decentralized U.S. setting. In both China and the U.S., bureaucrats were risk averse and anxious not to fall out with supervisors and political leaders.
The Chinese approach resulted in a decrease in public trust, a phenomenon that has also been unfolding in the U.S.

And much like their American counterparts, Chinese bureaucrats initially scrambled together information from a cacophony of political and expert voices. This indecision blunted their response to the viral outbreak in the decisive early days of the pandemic, even though it was eventually replaced by an official narrative emphasizing efficiency and success. In both systems, bureaucratic delays had detrimental consequences for public health.

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An anchor of stability

Amid the heightened geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington, it is important to remember that all powers rely on capable administrations to implement political directives. Politics set the tone, but bureaucrats shape reality.

And the modus operandi of Chinese and American bureaucrats has remained strikingly stable over the years – driven primarily by incentives rather than ideology. This similarity is increasingly being reflected by converging leadership styles at the top of each political system.

U.S. President Donald Trump resembles Chinese President Xi Jinping in his campaign-style politics and the cult of personality that many political observers see developing around him.

There is a definite upside to similar bureaucratic behavior. It renders the two superpowers more predictable in periods of increasingly heated political rhetoric.

For national leaders’ proclamations to have any effect, large bureaucratic organizations need to translate political content into national and international action. Not only does this take time and resources, but erratic announcements are dissipated by bureaucratic routines.

And that provides an anchor of stability in volatile times.

Across the world, governments are tightening controls on speech, expanding surveillance and rolling back rights once thought to be secure.

By Kate Kenny, University of Galway 
and Iain Michael Fraser Munro, Newcastle University

(THE CONVERSATION) — Across the world, governments are tightening controls on speech, expanding surveillance and rolling back rights once thought to be secure.

From anti-protest laws and curbs on workers’ rights to the growing criminalization of leaks and dissent, the trend is chilling: People who speak out about government wrongdoing are increasingly vulnerable, and the legal systems that once claimed to protect them are now used to punish them.

We are researchers who study whistleblowing, which is when employees disclose information in the public interest about wrongdoing they have witnessed at work. Our new book draws on firsthand accounts from whistleblowers in national security, intelligence and government in the U.S., Australia and the U.K., among other countries. Their experiences show the limits of legal protections, but also the power of networks, solidarity and collective resistance in the face of institutional secrecy.

In this moment of democratic backsliding, whistleblowers show that civil disobedience – breaking the law to uphold the public good – remains an essential principle of political and moral life. They also show how legal reform and support networks designed to protect whistleblowers are critical for protecting accountability and democracy itself.

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The limits of legal protections

The whistleblowers featured in the book, including former CIA officer John Kiriakou and Craig Murray, the former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, learned the hard way that legal protections can end precisely where power begins. Both revealed grave human rights abuses – torture, kidnapping, imprisonment and complicity in war crimes – and both were prosecuted rather than protected.

Their stories underline a paradox: Even as new whistleblower protection laws have proliferated in many countries, prosecutions of national security and intelligence whistleblowers are on the rise. In national security contexts, where no public interest defense is permitted, laws meant to protect whistleblowers have become another weapon of “lawfare” – used to silence, bankrupt and criminalize.

For example, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the U.S. torture program in 2007. The Bush administration initially declined to prosecute him, but this changed under the Obama administration, which imprisoned Kiriakou in 2013 for 30 months. Kiriakou’s refusal to participate in the CIA program of “enhanced interrogation” of terrorism suspects, which included waterboarding, and his later decision to publicly confirm the CIA’s use of torture were acts of conscience. Yet it was he, not the torturers, who went to prison as a result of his disclosures.

The pattern is familiar. From Chelsea Manning in 2010 to Edward Snowden in 2013 and Daniel Hale in 2016, prosecutions under the U.S. Espionage Act and equivalent statutes elsewhere signal a broader shift: Making the powerful transparent is redefined as treason. The prosecution of national security whistleblowers who reveal crimes of the state continues to be an ongoing problem, as highlighted by more recent cases, including Reality Winner and David McBride.

When the law is used to enforce secrecy and punish dissent, the moral terrain shifts. Civil disobedience becomes not only justified but necessary. Human rights lawyers have commented that whistleblowers and journalists who work with them are being subjected to increasingly harsh treatment by the state, including imprisonment and on occasion torture.

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From traditional media to networked whistleblowing

Historically, whistleblowers relied on the press to act as an intermediary between them and the public, as well as a protector because of the publicity they offer. But as investigative journalism has been hollowed out – starved of resources and constrained by political and corporate pressure – this model has faltered.

As journalist Andrew Fowler, one of our book’s contributors, wrote, “It may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources.” Across the globe, attacks by governments on journalists criticizing strongman leaders become more brazen.

In 2010, Manning blew the whistle on U.S war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many major outlets turned Manning away before WikiLeaks provided the infrastructure to publish what mainstream media would not. 
Her disclosures raised the public’s awareness of government complicity in war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere. Such stories also reveal how reluctant mainstream journalism can be when confronted with power.

More recently, in 2016 McBride blew the whistle on members of the Australian SAS who murdered civilians in Afghanistan. He was sentenced to prison in 2024 and is currently serving a sentence of five years and eight months for his disclosures of war crimes.

This decline in formal protections has given rise to an ecology of “networked whistleblowing”: decentralized alliances of whistleblowers, activists and independent journalists using encrypted tools to share information and protect sources. While these networks can offer safety in numbers, they also carry risks – of being co-opted or exploited by those in power, and of being framed collectively as enemies of the state for their attempts to hold the powerful to account.

Yet they also represent a profound reimagining of public accountability in a digital age where secrecy is structural and systemic, demonstrating the force of people working together.

As the traditional institutions of democracy falter, our research shows these alternative infrastructures embody a new form of democratic practice: horizontal, distributed and defiant.

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New alliances supporting whistleblowers

The whistleblowers whose stories appear in our book did more than expose wrongdoing. They built communities of care and resistance – new institutions to protect truth-telling itself.

Each of them, after suffering retaliation and exclusion, turned outward: campaigning for reform, mentoring others and building cross-sector alliances. Their transformation from individual insiders to collective activists reveals a crucial insight: Legal reform alone isn’t enough. What sustains truth-telling isn’t the promise of protection from above but solidarity from below.

Strengthening and supporting these alliances would help preserve freedom of expression and the right to know. That means supporting cross-border networks of journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders who can collectively safeguard disclosure when national laws fail. It also means recognizing whistleblowing as a public good.

At a time when many democracies are retreating from openness, these whistleblowers remind us that law and justice are not the same thing. When laws entrench secrecy or punish dissent, we believe breaking them can be an act of civic virtue. Civil disobedience can renew democratic life by holding power to account.

Kiriakou’s conclusion in his chapter resonates beyond the intelligence world: “We all have to fight. It’s the only way we are going to change anything.” His words recall a longer lineage of civil disobedience – from suffragettes to anti-war protesters to environmental activists – each confronting systems that refused to hear them until they broke the rules.

The cases in our new book illustrate how quickly law can be used to enforce secrecy rather than accountability during periods of democratic backsliding. They also highlight the practical conditions that make truth-telling possible – including collective support that extends beyond any one country’s legal system.

President Donald Trump is reportedly setting his sights on a Christmas peace deal in the Ukraine-Russia war.

(THE CONVERSATION) — President Donald Trump is reportedly setting his sights on a Christmas peace deal in the Ukraine-Russia war.

The timing is apt. Every December, political leaders reach instinctively for the language of goodwill. Meanwhile, diplomats the world over use the season to host parties at which gift-giving and booze are used to help foster friendships.

The notion that the holiday season might bring a respite from conflict has deep roots in history. Medieval “Christmas peace” laws in northern Europe at one point punished crimes committed during the season with harsher penalties, enshrining in law a cultural sense of expectation for quiet and restraint.

Finland still reads the Declaration of Christmas Peace each Christmas Eve – a ceremonial reminder of an older hope that violence might briefly ebb.

Today’s “Christmas diplomacy” – that is, a range of statements and efforts to encourage peace and warm relations between nations — updates the tradition for statecraft.

Sometimes, such diplomacy really does open a window for talks. Sometimes it is a cultural reflex. Sometimes it is pure theater. And sometimes, the season’s distractions are exploited for war and violence rather than peace.

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The most famous of them all

The Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain was signed on Christmas Eve. It was a signal that both sides were ready to convert seasonal sentiment into durable peace.

But the most famous example of the season interrupting conflict is the Christmas Truce of 1914. After months of fighting along parts of the Western Front in World War I, soldiers on opposing sides left the trenches to sing, retrieve the dead and share a moment of humanity before returning to the industrial warfare from which many of them would never return.

This act was repeated during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, when a small number of American and German soldiers struck a temporary truce in the Hürtgen Forest during Christmas 1944.

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A seasonal opening to dialogue?

More recently, governments and nongovernmental actors have leveraged the holidays to open the door for future peace negotiations.

In Northern Ireland, for example, the Provisional IRA repeatedly declared Christmas ceasefires, most notably in December 1974 when it announced a halt to operations from Dec. 22 through early January. While the truce ultimately collapsed, it reflected a recurring pattern during The Troubles in which Christmas provided a culturally resonant moment to signal openness to dialogue.

A similar logic was observed more recently in Colombia, where in 2022, the National Liberation Army (ELN) declared a unilateral Christmas ceasefire, explicitly tying the pause in hostilities to ongoing peace 
negotiations with the government.

In both cases, Christmas functioned not as a sentimental interruption to war, but as a strategic moment to legitimize restraint and probe whether diplomacy could bring an end to the underlying conflict.

But as with any temporary ceasefire, Christmas truces can be prone to violations. During the Vietnam War, warring parties in 1971 agreed to a 24-hour Christmas truce. A report from The New York Times the following day included allegations of 19 violations by the Vietcong and 170 by American and South Vietnamese forces.

The holidays can also serve as an opportunity to catch an enemy off guard.

Seven years before the short-lived 1971 Christmas truce, Vietcong fighters chose Christmas Eve to launch an attack on a hotel where U.S. officers were celebrating. Two Americans were killed and 28 were injured.

The Soviet Union launched its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, and Israel’s 2008 Gaza operation began on Dec. 27. The logic here is that in late December, political bandwidth in national capitals is thin, diplomatic machinery moves more slowly and the opportunity for surprise is greater.

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‘Tis the season for …

Christmas diplomacy can therefore be used to encourage peace – or war.

It can also be used to deepen existing bilateral friendships.

A well-known example is Norway’s annual donation of Christmas trees to the United Kingdom. The practice began in 1947, when Oslo sent a giant spruce to London’s Trafalgar Square as a thank-you for British support during World War II. It has since become a ritualized expression of common history, shared sacrifice and enduring alliance.

And embassies around the world host Christmas receptions that function as informal diplomatic spaces – occasions where tensions ease, conversations flow more freely and difficult issues can be broached in a more relaxed setting.

These practices do not resolve crises but lay important groundwork for goodwill and access.

Christmas diplomacy endures because it stands at the crossroads of culture, power and politics. The season brings with it a set of expectations about restraint and goodwill that leaders can invoke, diplomats can exploit and adversaries can either honor or abuse.

he fatal stabbings of filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, the photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, have sparked widespread grieving.

By Naomi Cahn, University of Virginia 
and Reid Kress Weisbord, Rutgers University - Newark

(THE CONVERSATION) — The fatal stabbings of filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, the photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, have sparked widespread grieving. This tragedy, discovered on Dec. 14, 2025, is also increasing the public’s interest in what happens when killers could inherit wealth from their victims. That’s because Nick Reiner, their son, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder four days after the couple’s deaths at their Los Angeles home.

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What’s the ‘slayer rule’?

All states have some form of a slayer rule that prevents killers from inheriting from their victims. While the rules differ slightly from state to state, they always bar murderers from profiting from their own crimes.

Simply put, if you’re found guilty of killing someone or plead guilty to their murder, you can’t inherit anything from your victim’s estate.

In some states, this might go beyond inheritance and apply to jointly held property, insurance policies and other kinds of accounts.

Most of these slayer rules, including California’s, apply only to “felonious and intentional” killings, meaning that they don’t apply if you accidentally kill someone. Although there doesn’t have to be a guilty verdict by a judge or a jury, or a guilty plea from the accused, there must be some finding by a criminal or civil court of an intentional and felonious killing.

These rules, known as slayer rules, have a long history in the United States. They became more prominent following an 1889 murder case in New York state, in which a 16-year-old boy poisoned his grandfather to get an inheritance that was written into his grandfather’s will.

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How often are slayer rules invoked?

It’s hard to say for sure. As far as we know, nobody’s tried to keep track.

Slayer rules come into play whenever someone who would otherwise inherit assets from an estate is convicted of or found liable for murder, and the slayer is entitled to inherit from the victim.

These tragic cases almost always involve murders committed by relatives. Many of the high-profile ones have been tied to murders that occurred in California.

Famous disinherited murderers include Lyle and Erik Menendez, the Californians known as the Menendez brothers. In 1996, a jury found them guilty of the first-degree murder of their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. The Menendez brothers’ parents, who were killed in 1989, had a fortune that today would be worth more than $35 million.

The brothers, who became eligible for parole but were denied it in 2025, have been in prison ever since.

Once there has been a finding of an intentional and felonious killing, even if the slayer is later released on parole – or even if they serve no prison time at all – they would still not inherit anything.

In practical terms, that means if one or both of the Menendez brothers were to win parole in the future, they would still be ineligible to inherit any of their parents’ wealth upon their release from prison.

California’s slayer rule also meant that salesman Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, in 2002, couldn’t collect the money he would otherwise have been due from her life insurance policy.

Peterson has been in prison since 2005.

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What can block its application?

In the absence of a murder conviction, the slayer rule may not apply. For example, a conviction for a lesser criminal offense, such as manslaughter, might allow the accused – or their lawyers – to argue that the killing was unintentional.

This exception could be relevant to the prosecution of the Reiners’ murders if it were to turn out that Nick Reiner’s defense can show that substance abuse or schizophrenia rendered him insane when he allegedly killed his parents at their Los Angeles home.

On the other hand, under California law, even if there is no conviction the probate court administering the murder victim’s estate could still separately find that the killing was intentional and felonious. That civil finding would bar the slayer from inheriting without a criminal conviction.

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Does this only apply to families with big fortunes?

Slayer rules apply to anyone who kills one or more of their relatives, whether their victims were rich, poor or in between.

When large amounts of money are at stake, cases tend to garner more attention due to media coverage during the criminal trial and subsequent inheritance litigation.

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Who will inherit Rob Reiner’s and Michele Singer Reiner’s wealth?

It’s too soon for both the public and the family to know who will inherit ultimately from the Reiners.

Wills are typically public documents, although the Reiners may have also engaged in other types of estate planning, such as trusts, that do not typically become public records. And celebrities with valuable intellectual property rights, such as copyrights from the Reiners’ many film and television properties, tend to establish trusts.

Assuming that, like many parents, the Reiners left most of their fortune – which reportedly was worth some US$200 million – to their children, including Nick, then California’s slayer statute may come into play. The couple had two other children together, Romy and Jake.

Rob Reiner also had another daughter, Tracy Reiner, whom he adopted after his marriage to his first wife, the actor and filmmaker Penny Marshall.

It’s also likely that the Reiners included charitable bequests in their estate plans. They were strong supporters of many causes, including early childhood development.

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Might the slayer rule apply to Nick Reiner?

It’s much too soon to know.

It is important to emphasize that the wills and other estate planning documents of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner have not yet been made public. That means what Nick Reiner might stand to inherit, if the slayer rule were to prove irrelevant in this case, is unknown.

Nor, with the investigation of the couple’s deaths still underway, can anyone make any assumptions about Nick’s innocence or guilt.

And, as of mid-December 2025, an unnamed source was telling entertainment reporters that Nick Reiner’s legal bills were being paid for by the Reiner family.