At Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised assembled generals “maximum lethality” and no “stupid rules of engagement.” Under his leadership, the newly rebranded Department of War would “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill.” Troops would be held to the “highest male standard,” he said. “Weak men won’t qualify.”

Hegseth also restricted anonymous whistleblower and discrimination complaints and limited how long past misconduct can be held against a service member, weakening internal rules and oversight processes the military had built over decades.

Months later, with the Iran war underway, he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. was “punching (Iran) while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” He has also said the U.S. will give “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies, language legal experts say can constitute a war crime under international law.

Hegseth calls his military doctrine the “warrior ethos.”

Historians of fascism have catalogued similar rhetorical patterns — strongman posturing, contempt for constraint — for decades.

I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.

The fascist theory of war

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

The closed circuit

Consider Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Before becoming Hitler’s foreign minister, he was a wine salesman whose years in Canada became his qualification for understanding America. He attached himself to Hitler and was rewarded with a top seat in his government, where Ribbentrop’s signature contribution was overruling the diplomats who warned that Americans would fight if pushed too far by the Axis.

The Nazi view prevailed: Americans were too racially mixed, too soft, too consumed by money to be dangerous. When Germany declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, it did so partly on that disdain for what Hitler called a “mongrel nation.” Ribbentrop was among the most consequentially wrong foreign ministers in modern history – he’d also misjudged Britain’s willingness to join the war over the invasion of Poland – still, he kept his job.

The ideology that produced Ribbentrop’s overconfidence also produced the Nazi theory of the Eastern Front: that Slavic peoples – fundamentally inferior and tainted by Bolshevism – would collapse within weeks. But the Red Army didn’t collapse. Hitler fired the officers who reported as much and demanded more of the same operations that had already failed. Operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to take weeks, stretched to years.

Attempting to match Hitler’s conquests and assert dominance over the Mediterranean, Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 with shorthanded divisions, in mountain terrain and at the start of winter, because he believed Italian spirit would overwhelm Greek resistance in two weeks. His generals had doubts, but many did not express them. The Greeks counterattacked, but Mussolini blamed his generals’ “insufficient will,” the only kind of failure his theory allowed. Germany had to intervene.

What the leader said happened

Connected to the fascist superiority complex is a contempt for feedback, creating a closed information system that can’t register failure, tolerate disagreement or revise a plan. Strategy requires accurate reporting, even when the news is bad, and the willingness to be wrong. Fascist regimes punish the first and refuse the second.

German high command was still reporting a controlled advance in November 1942 when its 6th Army, some 330,000 soldiers, was being encircled at Stalingrad. Hitler had declared the city practically taken; the press never reported the Soviet counteroffensive that surrounded it. When the remnants finally surrendered on Feb. 2, 1943, it was a turning point in the war – Germany’s first catastrophic defeat on the Eastern Front, from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.

Mussolini bragged about his mighty army of 8 million soldiers while 3.5 million – the real number – were being routed on three fronts in as many years.

Imperial Japan fused racial supremacy with a military code that forbade surrender and treated anyone who did as subhuman. Loyalty to the emperor was absolute; questioning his depiction of reality was betrayal.

In that environment, officers had every incentive to lie up the chain of command when reality on the ground did not match what leaders wanted to hear. For example, after the Battle of Midway, a catastrophic defeat for Japan in June 1942, naval headquarters filed reports that bore little resemblance to what happened. Later that year, the Imperial Navy told Tokyo they had sunk twelve American ships near today’s Taiwan when they had merely damaged two.

Two years of retreat later, the kamikaze program – which sent some 3,900 pilots to their deaths in suicidal crashes against Allied ships – was the logical conclusion: Let pilots prove their loyalty by dying.

John Broich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Pope Leo XIV has just declared artificial intelligence one of the defining moral challenges of our time, in his first encyclical: a formal letter intended to guide moral, social and theological thought. Titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), it argues technology must serve humanity, rather than concentrate power or weaken human dignity.

He presented it at the Vatican alongside AI developer Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that companies like his need moral guidance to guard against “incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing”, the New York Times reported.

“Technology is not simply a tool,” read the roughly 42,300-word open letter. “When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

It warns that AI is never truly neutral, but “takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”. And it calls for ethical oversight, social justice, protection of workers, responsible governance and peace.

Automated warfare

The encyclical criticises the use of AI in warfare, calling for imposing the “most rigorous ethical constraints” on weapons developed using AI.

As governments invest heavily in autonomous military technologies and AI-assisted defence systems, the “growing ease” of deploying them makes war more likely and “less subject to human control”, it warns. This “violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense”.

The letter also criticises the growing concentration of technological power, and systems that reduce people to data or economic functions. It promotes what it calls a “civilisation of love”, centred on human dignity, solidarity, truth, compassion and the common good.

Pope Leo’s response to the the AI revolution deliberately references his predecessor Pope Leo XIII’s response to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), in 1891. Though Magnifica Humanitas was released on May 25 2026, it is symbolically dated May 15, the date of Rerum Novarum.

Industrial Revolution to AI Revolution

An encyclical is not an ordinary papal statement. Traditionally addressed to bishops and the wider Catholic world, it is one of the Catholic church’s most authoritative teaching documents.

The pope no longer has the direct political power the papacy held in the 19th century. But papal teaching still carries moral weight across a global Catholic network of schools, universities, charities, hospitals and community organisations.

The Vatican cannot regulate AI. It cannot write safety standards, police data centres, or force companies to disclose how their systems work. But it can help shape the moral terms of the debate. For more than a century, Catholic social teaching has influenced public arguments about work, inequality, poverty, human dignity and the ethical limits of economic power.

Although popes issued encyclicals long before the modern era, Rerum Novarum made social encyclicals globally influential.

It confronted exploitative labour conditions, widening inequality, and conflict between workers and employers. Pope Leo XIII defended workers’ rights and argued that wealth carried social responsibilities. He criticised both unrestricted capitalism and revolutionary socialism.

The document influenced debates about labour rights and economic justice well beyond the church. In Australia in 1907, Justice H.B. Higgins drew on Rerum Novarum when establishing principles for a fair living wage.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical attempts to do for the AI age what Rerum Novarum did for the industrial age: provide a moral framework for a technological transformation reshaping work, power and human relationships.

Human dignity in the age of algorithms

Pope Leo XIV argues human rights are not granted by governments or corporations: they arise from the intrinsic dignity of every person. Technologies should serve humanity rather than reduce people to data, economic units or optimisation problems.

He builds on Pope Francis’ critique of “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions”, in his 2015 encyclical. It, too, warned of the risks of technology.

Pope Leo XIV argues moral responsibility can’t be transferred to automated systems, regardless of how sophisticated they become. He also rejects transhumanist ideas that human limitations should be technologically overcome, arguing vulnerability, dependence and imperfection are essential to being human. Relationships, care, solidarity and compassion are not weaknesses. “Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”

Running throughout the encyclical is a contrast between a “culture of power” and a “civilization of love”. One treats technology primarily as a tool for domination and control. The other places human dignity, justice and care at the centre of social life.

Why this matters

The significance of Magnifica Humanitas lies in its ability to shape public conversation and moral imagination. Moral frameworks matter. They influence what societies fear, what they tolerate, what they defend – and what they refuse to sacrifice.

Governments are investing in AI capability while still developing frameworks for transparency, accountability and safe deployment. Businesses are adopting AI tools at speed. Schools and universities are rethinking assessment, authorship and learning. Workers are being asked to adapt to systems they did not design and often cannot challenge. And citizens are increasingly governed, assessed and targeted by automated systems they may never see.

Pope Leo XIV’s intervention reminds us the central question is not whether AI will be powerful: it already is. The question is whether that power will be made answerable to human dignity.

The future of AI will not just be decided in laboratories, boardrooms or parliaments. It will also be decided by the moral limits societies are willing to set. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical is an attempt to draw those limits.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Going into the war in Iran, the Israeli government seemingly had two intertwined goals: to bring down the Islamic Republic and rid Israel of its Hezbollah problem.

The logic went that the Lebanese Shiite group – which has posed a persistent threat to Israel for 44 years – would finally succumb if stripped of its Iranian benefactor. After all, Israeli attempts to destroy Hezbollah through direct military action had not been effective, nor had internationally supported disarmament efforts.

But as the United States and Iran continue to negotiate over an agreement that might put an end to their war, the Israeli-Lebanese front remains as active as ever. Israel has increased strikes and incursions deeper into Lebanon, while Hezbollah is targeting the Israeli military deployed in southern Lebanon and the civilian population in northern Israel.

Worse, from the Israeli government’s perspective, is that Iran has found a way of turning its survival and newfound leverage over the Strait of Hormuz into protecting Hezbollah. Tehran is currently conditioning a potential deal with Washington on a complete halt of Israeli hostilities in Lebanon – a move clearly designed to safeguard the political and military standing of Hezbollah, its primary proxy.

Since full-scale war returned to Lebanon on March 2, 2026, it has had a massive humanitarian cost. As of June 1, over a million Lebanese have been displaced and more than 3,300 killed since the beginning of March. On the Israeli side, 24 soldiers and 4 civilians have been killed in the same time period.

Israel seeks to decouple its Lebanon front from the wider regional conflict, aiming to maintain its military campaign against the Shiite organization independently of broader U.S. negotiations with Iran. But whether it will able to do this is uncertain. The Trump administration has largely excluded Israel from the specifics of its Iranian dialogue while attempting to restrict Israeli operations in Lebanon to strikes in the country’s south and the Bekaa Valley and prohibiting attacks on state infrastructure. The ordering of attacks on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 1 lays bare the limits to U.S. pressure.

And ultimately, the resolution of this conflict rests upon how President Donald Trump chooses to navigate Iranian demands concerning the future of Lebanon.

As a historian of Israel and Lebanon, I have studied cycles of violence between these parties since 1982, and have noted recurring patterns in which Hezbollah has emerged emboldened, maintaining its dominance over Lebanese society as an Iranian proxy. Contrary to Israeli hopes, Iran’s patronage of Hezbollah has not been ended by the Iran war. And to confound issues, continued Israeli occupation of Lebanese land could grant Hezbollah the necessary justification to sustain its narrative of resistance at the cost of the broader Lebanese population.

A wounded but not dead Hezbollah

While significantly weakened as a result of more than two and a half years of war with Israel, Hezbollah continues to wield considerable power in Lebanon.

After a ceasefire in November 2024 – following the full-scale war in September-October of that year – ostensibly stopped fighting, a new Lebanese president was elected and a new government was established in February 2025.

That ended a three-year political deadlock generated by Hezbollah’s effective veto power over successive Lebanese governments since 2008. Even since the formation of a government in 2025, however, the Lebanese state has been unable to effectively make progress in disarming Hezbollah as stipulated in the November 2024, armistice agreement that ended that previous round of fighting.

Instead, Iran invested significant efforts to prop up its Lebanese proxy. Tehran even sent senior officers of its Revolutionary Guard soon after the November 2024 ceasefire to assume the command of the Shiite organization, which lost many of its leaders at the hands of Israeli assassinations and targeted strikes.

These efforts are paying off for Tehran now, as seen through Hezbollah’s ability to challenge Israel militarily.

With the beginning of this most recent war in March, the Lebanese prime minister banned Hezbollah’s operations, while the president condemned the group for dragging Lebanon into a conflict that most Lebanese rejected.

But, as in the past, the government has been unable to effectively rein in Hezbollah. A telling case came on March 24, 2026, when Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry declared the Iranian ambassador a persona non grata, ordering him to leave the country.

Iran and Hezbollah defied the order and the ambassador refused to leave the embassy in Beirut.

This example also suggests that the hopes for revitalized state capacities after the current Lebanese government came to power in February 2025 – the first government since 2008 not controlled by Hezbollah – may have been premature.

Gaza via Lebanon

Employing what some have called a “Gaza model” in Lebanon, Israel has effectively created a new security zone in south Lebanon by occupying Lebanese territory, razing to the ground whole villages that Hezbollah had used for military purposes and clearing out most of the population from the area.

But Israel has occupied south Lebanon in the past: first in March 1978, during the Litani operation, and then again from 1982 to 2000. The failure of these occupations should raise alarms in Israel. Neither resulted in lasting security improvements and instead left indelible, traumatic scars on Israel’s collective consciousness, creating the image of Lebanon as a quagmire into which Israel has been repeatedly drawn.

The government of Netanyahu is now leading the country into another potential quagmire in Lebanon.

The news about the Israel Defense Forces’ occupation of the Beaufort castle in south Lebanon on May 31 should bring grim memories for Israelis. That castle remains entrenched in the collective memory of Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon in 1982-2000 as a symbol of its failure. Netanyahu, however, packaged Israel’s occupation as a sign of strength, stating that “we have returned stronger than ever.” History suggests otherwise.

History repeats itself

Netanyahu is driven in large part by Israeli domestic affairs.

A majority of Israelis support the continuation of the war against Hezbollah. Moreover, with national elections scheduled for October 2026, Netanyahu needs to show some success in at least one of the multiple military fronts he has intentionally kept open since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

With Netanyahu seemingly failing to achieve his aims in Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah provide him with an opportunity to keep a state of emergency in Israel, which he needs for his own political survival.

But failure in Iran makes achieving Netanyahu’s goal in Lebanon that much harder. The government in Tehran seems to have found significant leverage over the U.S. and Israel. And under these conditions, Tehran would not give up on Hezbollah, which remains its most important regional asset.

Diplomacy is the only way out of this imbroglio. And while it would not likely lead to the disarming of Hezbollah and to the Israel’s full withdrawal from south Lebanon, it remains the only constructive way forward.

At the behest of the Trump administration, Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors met to discuss a diplomatic understanding between two countries that have never had official relations. And on May 30, military representatives of the two countries met in Washington, D.C.

For the first time since 1983, the Lebanese government has agreed to negotiate directly with Israel over a long-term political agreement, including the possibility of finally demarcating their shared borders. Hezbollah, as expected, has vehemently opposed these negotiations.

What we are seeing currently unfolding in Lebanon is another testament to the failure of the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran. Yet a war that began with lofty promises of a new Middle East may end up with a worse version of the old Middle East – an emboldened Islamic Republic, a new Israeli occupation of south Lebanon and a Hezbollah, while weaker than before, still entrenched as an armed militia outside of Lebanese state control and working in concert with Iran.

Asher Kaufman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Going into the war in Iran, the Israeli government seemingly had two intertwined goals: to bring down the Islamic Republic and rid Israel of its Hezbollah problem.

The logic went that the Lebanese Shiite group – which has posed a persistent threat to Israel for 44 years – would finally succumb if stripped of its Iranian benefactor. After all, Israeli attempts to destroy Hezbollah through direct military action had not been effective, nor had internationally supported disarmament efforts.

But as the United States and Iran continue to negotiate over an agreement that might put an end to their war, the Israeli-Lebanese front remains as active as ever. Israel has increased strikes and incursions deeper into Lebanon, while Hezbollah is targeting the Israeli military deployed in southern Lebanon and the civilian population in northern Israel.

Worse, from the Israeli government’s perspective, is that Iran has found a way of turning its survival and newfound leverage over the Strait of Hormuz into protecting Hezbollah. Tehran is currently conditioning a potential deal with Washington on a complete halt of Israeli hostilities in Lebanon – a move clearly designed to safeguard the political and military standing of Hezbollah, its primary proxy.

Since full-scale war returned to Lebanon on March 2, 2026, it has had a massive humanitarian cost. As of June 1, over a million Lebanese have been displaced and more than 3,300 killed since the beginning of March. On the Israeli side, 24 soldiers and 4 civilians have been killed in the same time period.

Israel seeks to decouple its Lebanon front from the wider regional conflict, aiming to maintain its military campaign against the Shiite organization independently of broader U.S. negotiations with Iran. But whether it will able to do this is uncertain. The Trump administration has largely excluded Israel from the specifics of its Iranian dialogue while attempting to restrict Israeli operations in Lebanon to strikes in the country’s south and the Bekaa Valley and prohibiting attacks on state infrastructure. The ordering of attacks on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 1 lays bare the limits to U.S. pressure.

And ultimately, the resolution of this conflict rests upon how President Donald Trump chooses to navigate Iranian demands concerning the future of Lebanon.

As a historian of Israel and Lebanon, I have studied cycles of violence between these parties since 1982, and have noted recurring patterns in which Hezbollah has emerged emboldened, maintaining its dominance over Lebanese society as an Iranian proxy. Contrary to Israeli hopes, Iran’s patronage of Hezbollah has not been ended by the Iran war. And to confound issues, continued Israeli occupation of Lebanese land could grant Hezbollah the necessary justification to sustain its narrative of resistance at the cost of the broader Lebanese population.

A wounded but not dead Hezbollah

While significantly weakened as a result of more than two and a half years of war with Israel, Hezbollah continues to wield considerable power in Lebanon.

After a ceasefire in November 2024 – following the full-scale war in September-October of that year – ostensibly stopped fighting, a new Lebanese president was elected and a new government was established in February 2025.

That ended a three-year political deadlock generated by Hezbollah’s effective veto power over successive Lebanese governments since 2008. Even since the formation of a government in 2025, however, the Lebanese state has been unable to effectively make progress in disarming Hezbollah as stipulated in the November 2024, armistice agreement that ended that previous round of fighting.

Instead, Iran invested significant efforts to prop up its Lebanese proxy. Tehran even sent senior officers of its Revolutionary Guard soon after the November 2024 ceasefire to assume the command of the Shiite organization, which lost many of its leaders at the hands of Israeli assassinations and targeted strikes.

These efforts are paying off for Tehran now, as seen through Hezbollah’s ability to challenge Israel militarily.

With the beginning of this most recent war in March, the Lebanese prime minister banned Hezbollah’s operations, while the president condemned the group for dragging Lebanon into a conflict that most Lebanese rejected.

But, as in the past, the government has been unable to effectively rein in Hezbollah. A telling case came on March 24, 2026, when Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry declared the Iranian ambassador a persona non grata, ordering him to leave the country.

Iran and Hezbollah defied the order and the ambassador refused to leave the embassy in Beirut.

This example also suggests that the hopes for revitalized state capacities after the current Lebanese government came to power in February 2025 – the first government since 2008 not controlled by Hezbollah – may have been premature.

Gaza via Lebanon

Employing what some have called a “Gaza model” in Lebanon, Israel has effectively created a new security zone in south Lebanon by occupying Lebanese territory, razing to the ground whole villages that Hezbollah had used for military purposes and clearing out most of the population from the area.

But Israel has occupied south Lebanon in the past: first in March 1978, during the Litani operation, and then again from 1982 to 2000. The failure of these occupations should raise alarms in Israel. Neither resulted in lasting security improvements and instead left indelible, traumatic scars on Israel’s collective consciousness, creating the image of Lebanon as a quagmire into which Israel has been repeatedly drawn.

The government of Netanyahu is now leading the country into another potential quagmire in Lebanon.

The news about the Israel Defense Forces’ occupation of the Beaufort castle in south Lebanon on May 31 should bring grim memories for Israelis. That castle remains entrenched in the collective memory of Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon in 1982-2000 as a symbol of its failure. Netanyahu, however, packaged Israel’s occupation as a sign of strength, stating that “we have returned stronger than ever.” History suggests otherwise.

History repeats itself

Netanyahu is driven in large part by Israeli domestic affairs.

A majority of Israelis support the continuation of the war against Hezbollah. Moreover, with national elections scheduled for October 2026, Netanyahu needs to show some success in at least one of the multiple military fronts he has intentionally kept open since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

With Netanyahu seemingly failing to achieve his aims in Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah provide him with an opportunity to keep a state of emergency in Israel, which he needs for his own political survival.

But failure in Iran makes achieving Netanyahu’s goal in Lebanon that much harder. The government in Tehran seems to have found significant leverage over the U.S. and Israel. And under these conditions, Tehran would not give up on Hezbollah, which remains its most important regional asset.

Diplomacy is the only way out of this imbroglio. And while it would not likely lead to the disarming of Hezbollah and to the Israel’s full withdrawal from south Lebanon, it remains the only constructive way forward.

At the behest of the Trump administration, Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors met to discuss a diplomatic understanding between two countries that have never had official relations. And on May 30, military representatives of the two countries met in Washington, D.C.

For the first time since 1983, the Lebanese government has agreed to negotiate directly with Israel over a long-term political agreement, including the possibility of finally demarcating their shared borders. Hezbollah, as expected, has vehemently opposed these negotiations.

What we are seeing currently unfolding in Lebanon is another testament to the failure of the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran. Yet a war that began with lofty promises of a new Middle East may end up with a worse version of the old Middle East – an emboldened Islamic Republic, a new Israeli occupation of south Lebanon and a Hezbollah, while weaker than before, still entrenched as an armed militia outside of Lebanese state control and working in concert with Iran.

Asher Kaufman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Like Americans today, the people living in the United States in 1826 were preparing to celebrate a milestone for their country. July Fourth of that year marked the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

As what was known as the “Jubilee” of American independence approached, Americans realized that the founding generation was dying off. They wanted to take advantage of the founders’ insight while they still could.

This meant soliciting memories and advice from the signers of the Declaration, only three of whom were still alive. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the men most closely associated with the independence movement, yet they both lay dying and both declined invitations to attend the festivities planned for July Fourth.

But they were able to answer letters from younger men interested in their perspective on the revolution and subsequent history they had helped shape.

As an Adams scholar and someone interested in how he is remembered, I have studied with interest his response to the questions posed to him. He also wrote a good deal about the revolution to his friend and onetime rival, Jefferson.

These two men – who had worked well together during the American Revolution – could not have been more different. Both had thought long and hard about what the American Revolution meant to them. They did not always agree.

If Americans today are looking for a unified vision of their country in their own 250th celebrations, they will not find it with Adams or Jefferson.

Rival friends

After the Revolutionary War, Adams and Jefferson became political rivals. They disagreed about how powerful the federal government should be and on foreign policy at a time when England and France, once again at war, were presenting challenges to the new country..

Jefferson founded the Democratic-Republican Party to counter the influence of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party. While Adams never formally aligned with the Federalists, he agreed with many of their policies, especially on foreign policy.

As a result, the friendship between Adams and Jefferson unraveled. For years, they did not speak or correspond until a mutual friend, Benjamin Rush, encouraged their reconcilation.

On New Year’s Day, 1812, Adams was the first to reach out. He used the excuse of sending to Jefferson a pamphlet written by his son, John Quincy, saying that it was from “One who was honoured in his youth with Some of your Attention and much of your kindness.” Adams continued, in casual language, to tell Jefferson about the family and wished him a happy new year.

Jefferson responded warmly, telling Adams, “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind.”

From that time on, the two wrote to each other on a regular basis, discussing every topic imaginable, from agriculture to religion. Yet it was clear that their past rift was on Adams’s mind when he wrote, “You and I, ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”

In the process, they revisited the days when they worked together to form a new nation. As they reflected on the meaning of the United States’ birth, they agreed that writing a history of the American Revolution was next to impossible.

Adams wrote to Jefferson: “Who shall write the history of the American revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”

The problem, as Adams saw it, was that so much was done in secret. Nobody recorded the debates and speeches of the Continental Congress, the governing body during the revolution. Therefore, how could a true history ever exist?

Jefferson agreed. After restating Adams’ question about who could write a true history, Jefferson’s response was “nobody; except merely it’s external facts.”

On this, they could agree. On some of the specifics, they did not.

Fundamental difference

In old age, Adams remembered vividly how he convinced Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. One historian has argued that Adams’ memory seems a bit too clear, and suggested that he was working to elevate himself in the process of telling the story by claiming that he alone persuaded a reluctant Jefferson to take on the task.

However, scholars still accept Adams’ version of this event. Jefferson remembered the incident differently, stating that he was urged by the entire committee charged with producing the declaration, not just Adams, to take on the task and that he was happy to comply.

More important than the details was the ultimate interpretation by these two men of what they had accomplished 50 years before.

What their letters written after the Jubilee committee’s invitation reveal is a fundamental difference in their attitudes about the human spirit. Adams wrote that he appreciated the invitation and was sorry to decline. He called the birth of the U.S. “a Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race.”

Yet he also demonstrated his realistic view of human beings when he wrote that the independence movement would “form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or abuse of those political institutions by which they shall be shaped by the human mind.”

Adams understood that people interpret history according to their own circumstances. He was a realist who could not bring himself to accept the fundamentally optimistic view that humanity was always moving toward liberty.

Jefferson, on the other hand, was hopeful about the revolution’s impact on the world. He believed that the declaration would be “the Signal of arousing men to burst their chains.” The entire letter to the Jubilee committee offered an optimistic view of the future in which the human race was always progressing toward freedom.

When Adams and Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, their lives took on new meaning. In eulogizing them, House member Daniel Webster told the American public: “They are no more. They are dead. But how little is there of the great and good which can die! To their country they yet live, and live forever.”

Now, 200 years later, Americans still look to these Founding Fathers for inspiration. However, what Adams and Jefferson demonstrate is not unity. Instead, they exemplify the capacity for people to disagree and yet work for a common cause.

Marianne Holdzkom is affiliated with the Adams Memorial Foundation. She is an Adams Memorial Foundation Scholar, but receives no compensation from them.

If we do the maths, the target readership for this teen adaptation of Jacinda Ardern’s bestselling memoir A Different Kind of Power were at primary school when she was prime minister.

Those were the days when Ardern’s “stardust” – as her particular brand of political magic was described – saw her reach extraordinary heights of popularity, both at home and abroad.

But, as we know from the adult edition of her memoir, Ardern had always struggled with the self-confidence and self-belief we normally associate with effective leadership.

Review: What If You Could – Jacinda Ardern (Penguin)

Facing down this imposter syndrome informs the new book much more than the various events she had to contend with during her time in office. Dedicated to “the leaders of tomorrow – who just don’t know it yet”, it is more accessible and immediate, with much less political detail.

Ardern always wanted her original memoir to speak to her 14-year-old self, dedicating it to “the criers, worriers and huggers”. What If You Could expands on that, spinning her life experiences and challenges into a self-affirming guide to following dreams, being strong and ultimately creating a different kind of power.

No celebration of impossible standards

Deftly adapted by New York-based writer Ruby Shamir, the book spends no time dwelling on COVID. Ardern’s time working for Tony Blair in London is gone. Leaving the Mormon church is summarised in one sentence. But both books begin with pivotal bathroom moments.

In A Different Kind of Power, Ardern is in her friend’s toilet, taking a pregnancy test while waiting to learn if she can form a coalition and therefore become prime minister.

This time, she is in a high school bathroom stall before a debating competition, so nervous she’s cut her finger trying to open the jammed door. Cleverly, these different prefaces are united by the same passage:

My whole life I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough. That at any moment I would be caught short, and that meant no matter what I was doing, I had no business doing it.

Instead, Ardern believed she was more suited to working behind the scenes. She wasn’t tough enough, was too “idealistic and sensitive” for the political front line.

And so the passages from the original memoir about her connection with Ernest Shackleton and the heroic age of Antarctic exploration are also gone. Despite her own achievements – one of New Zealand’s youngest ever prime ministers, a woman in a male-dominated world who gave birth while still in office – the book avoids any celebration of impossible standards.

Rather, she turns inward toward the psychological terrain, describing her feelings of being an imposter and the nagging fear of being exposed as a fraud.

Near the end of What If You Could, Ardern speaks directly to “everyone who doesn’t fit the old mould”. She encourages young people to channel the challenges of imposter syndrome into something positive:

In fact, all of the traits that you believe are your flaws will come to be your strengths. The things you thought would hold you back will in fact make you stronger, make you better. They will give you a different kind of power and make you a leader that this world, with all its turmoil, might just desperately need.

Read more: In her memoir, Jacinda Ardern shows a ‘different kind of power’ is possible – but also has its limits

Corrective mantras to self-doubt

If there is a whiff of the self-help genre here, it is also a welcome change from the kind of inspirational literature commonly aimed at young readers throughout modern history – heroic tales of courage, bravery, physical prowess and intelligence.

Aimed at encouraging good citizenship, often their goal was as much to encourage conformity, service and, if necessary, sacrifice.

More recently, however, books for young adults have tended to focus on individual agency, engaging readers by directly asking “what would you do?” The subjects may still be on pedestals, but the message is that you can follow in their footsteps and change the world.

To that end, each of the 17 chapters of What if You Could has a key aspirational heading that sets out a challenge and guides the reader beyond their own self-imposed limits: what if you could be sensitive and show you care, what if it’s okay not to have all the answers, what if you could face your fears.

The absence of question marks in the book’s title and chapter headings is deliberate. Each serves as a corrective mantra to wash away self-doubt.

Ardern affirms the power of traditionally gendered qualities such as being sensitive and caring. And she grounds her own progressive politics in the language of answering calls for change and doing things differently.

Her most personal feelings are explored in chapters about facing your fears, choosing your own path and following your passion, all of which address imposter syndrome and insecurity.

The final chapter echoes a currently fashionable self-affirmation catchphrase, “I am enough”, reframed here as “what if doing your best is enough”.

Ardern then returns to those high-school years and recollections of how hard being young can be. But adult life can be difficult too, she says, so you need to “be kind to yourself”.

No doubt there will be those for whom such notions – “you are not weak, you are human […] you are enough, just as you are” – will be reminders of why they resisted Ardern’s politics in the first place.

But in this time of global conflict, political cynicism and mean-spiritedness, they also represent a graceful, positive sentiment that world leaders – current and future – could do worse than adopt.

Katie Pickles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

On July 5, 2026, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is encouraging its American members to participate in a special fast: a day to “express gratitude for religious liberty and to pray that it be strengthened throughout the world,” in the words of its top three leaders.

The fast will coincide with the United States’ semiquincentennial celebrations. For Latter-day Saints, the 250th anniversary commemorations are not merely a historic milestone for the country, but an opportunity to reflect on their faith’s relationship to the American experiment. In the church’s early decades, that relationship often tested the boundaries of religious liberty – and the church’s own understanding of that principle has been evolving ever since.

Divine plan

From the faith’s beginnings in the 1830s, founder Joseph Smith frequently emphasized the significance of religious liberty. In one 1843 sermon, for example, Smith explained that “civil and religious liberty … were diffused into my soul by my grandfathers,” both of whom had fought in the war of independence.

Smith’s personal connection to the Revolution and the nation’s founding documents were central to the faith’s developing theology. Latter-day Saints believe that their church is a restoration of Jesus’ “only true and living church,” and that America’s founding helped make that possible. In other words, Mormonism exists because of the United States, specifically its tradition of religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment.

According to this logic, America’s founding was a crucial part of God’s divine plan, accomplished by chosen servants. Its founding documents are treated with reverence, especially the Constitution.

One of Smith’s own revelations declared that God “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose,” suggesting divine intervention.

‘Kingdom of God’

However, Latter-day Saints soon came to doubt whether the United States was truly a land of religious freedom.

Early on, the small Mormon church faced persecution – especially in Missouri and Illinois, where state-sanctioned mobs forced members to flee. After Smith was killed by a mob in 1844, his successor, Brigham Young, decided to lead Latter-day Saints outside the country’s borders into present-day Utah, which was then northern Mexico.

Yet on their path to the Great Basin region, the federal government enlisted a group of church members to serve in the Mexican-American War. Known as the Mormon Battalion, they marched into Mexican territory under an American flag with only 13 stars. It was a symbolic protest: the U.S. they hoped to represent was the one that existed during the American Revolution, not the one with 28 states that had chased them out. They saw their own church, not the current government, as the revolutionaries’ true inheritor.

Once the war was over, the U.S. annexed much of Mexico’s land, including the Utah region. For about two decades the church had latitude to establish what it called its “Kingdom of God” in the West, in line with church doctrine. But the federal government soon cracked down, particularly on the church’s commitment at the time to polygamy and theocracy: beliefs that Mormons insisted were protected by the First Amendment.

The ensuing legal and political battles lasted for four decades, testing the boundaries of American religious liberty. Only after the Supreme Court ruled against a church member with two wives in 1879, and Congress passed legislation to further enforce anti-polygamy laws, did the church publicly forfeit the practice in 1890.

Yet even amid these struggles, Latter-day Saint devotion to the founding generation continued. In 1877, for example, Wilford Woodruff, who later became president of the church, declared that he had received a vision of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The signers “gathered around me, wanting to know why we did not redeem them” by offering them Latter-day Saint ordinances for the deceased.

Though Woodruff’s vision has become the subject of Mormon folklore, it represents how deeply a certain strain of Americanism became woven into church culture in the 19th century. Just as Smith’s revelations had done a generation before, this vision and the sentiments behind it elevated the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to quasi-scripture.

Shifting focus

During the 20th century the church continued to “Americanize,” such as by embracing U.S. capitalism and participating in the two-party system. Talk about religious freedom shifted away from primarily seeking protection for religious minorities toward protection for their own theological commitments as part of a Christian mainstream.

By the mid-1900s, church leaders had embraced a conservative view of politics and law that championed limited government. Paralleling broader American attitudes during the Cold War, which pitted “godless” Soviet communism against American democracy and freedom of religion, Latter-day Saints used the language of religious freedom to advocate for their own interpretations of religion’s role in the public square.

Latter-day Saint leaders’ list of perceived threats evolved from New Deal legislation and civil rights protections to abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and, finally, homosexuality – similar to other conservative Christian groups’ concerns. The church got involved in a number of legal cases and campaigns opposing same-sex unions.

Since the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, the church’s public policy stance has focused on compromise, balancing protection of religious liberties with protection against discrimination for LGBTQ+ people in housing and employment.

A global church

What becomes clear across the past two centuries is that definitions of religious freedom have substantially changed, including for Latter-day Saints. In the 19th century, church members focused on protecting all minority religious groups like themselves against the Protestant majority. Today, the church’s messaging on religious freedom, at least in the United States, usually concerns protecting beliefs that clash with secular progressivism and LGBTQ+ protections. Overall, its approach has largely aligned with the religious right.

Equally significant, a majority of the church’s members now live outside the United States, and it is eager to present an image that is less American and more universal. Instead of elevating the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as quasi-scripture, leaders tend to highlight principles of religious freedom that are applicable across the globe.

The July fast will highlight “the importance of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and how these documents support religious freedom,” but it will also call for expanding liberty around the world. The day will be an opportunity for Latter-day Saints to reflect on their own place in the American story – a place that is still being defined.

This article has been updated to clarify how Joseph Smith was killed.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Ever since U.S. commandos successfully removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela on Jan. 3, 2026, speculation has been growing that “Cuba could be next” on the list of the Trump administration’s targets.

“We’ll take over Cuba almost immediately,” President Donald Trump mused during a speech in Florida on May 1. “On the way back from Iran, we’ll have … the USS Abraham Lincoln come right by Cuba, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, we give up.’”

It’s hard to say whether such remarks are just bluster. While the White House has been trying to coerce Cuban authorities into negotiated political and economic concessions through a de facto oil blockade since January, Trump has also reportedly grown frustrated by the Cuban government’s ability to outlast months of sustained U.S. pressure.

That has not stopped many Cubans and Cuban Americans from eagerly predicting a military operation’s success or insisting that such a U.S. action is necessary.

Their tool of choice? Not battle plans or political manifestos, but artificial intelligence. For weeks, Cuban social media feeds and WhatsApp groups have been filled with armchair fantasies of deliverance from communist rule made with tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, Runway and ChatGPT. In some clips and images, the island nation is represented as a female captive or a child being freed by an American protector. In others, magically renovated cityscapes feature statues and portraits erected in Trump’s honor, replacing revolutionary iconography.

It is easy to dismiss such animations as online trolling. But as a historian of Cuba, I noticed something troubling when my colleague Jorge Damian de la Paz sent me a selection of these digital illustrations and reels. Their visual language eerily mirrors classic U.S. political cartoons during Cuba’s final war for independence against Spain in the late 19th century. That imagery went on to justify U.S. meddling in Cuban affairs for decades.

A fraught history

In the 1890s, American illustrators at publications such as Puck, Judge and Harper’s Weekly similarly portrayed Cuba as a feminized victim: weak, vulnerable, often racialized as nonwhite and incapable of securing freedom on her own. They imagined grateful tropical citizens celebrating future American liberators for defeating their Spanish overlords and bestowing the benefits of “civilization” on Caribbean life.

Such tropes were not innocent. They helped generate the cultural consensus that legitimized U.S. intervention in the Cuban war in 1898 – known by most Americans as the Spanish-American War. They also shaped Cuba’s postwar order: four years of U.S. military occupation, an imposed amendment to Cuba’s first constitution authorizing future American military action to preserve stability, and decades of political and economic dependence on the United States.

Taking their cue from heroes of the independence struggle such as José Martí, many Cubans grew to resent this asymmetrical relationship with the North, even as they fell in love with imported American consumer products and cultural pastimes. Especially by the 1930s and 1940s, mainstream political movements on the island all sought to, at a minimum, rebalance the extent of U.S. influence over Cuban life. Their failure to do so was part of what propelled Fidel Castro’s radical nationalist revolution to power in 1959.

Reversing course

But today, formal and informal polling suggests that significant numbers of Cubans and Cuban Americans seem willing to welcome, or at least tolerate, the explicit U.S. intervention that most of their forefathers rejected.

AI-generated expressions of these views do not appear to be coming from staunchly anti-communist exiles in South Florida alone. Comments and reposts suggest they are resonating among Cubans living on the island, many of whom are desperate for “something, anything” to put an end to the worsening blackouts, shortages and societal paralysis that have made daily life feel like purgatory.

If a U.S. military operation is the only way to escape, one friend in Havana told me, “que sea rápido” – let it be over quickly.

What’s distinct about AI is that it is providing this fatalism with a visual vocabulary rooted in imperial attitudes from the 1890s. This makes sense when you consider how the technology works: Generative AI systems have been trained on enormous, often U.S.-centric archives of historical photographs and other materials. They easily reproduce the old cultural and political prejudices seen in these digital repositories.

As a result, image and video generators appear to be spitting 19th-century American discourses back at 21st-century Cuban users. The most extreme iterations of the imagery even resurrect a long-dormant idea from more than a century ago: the outright annexation of the island as a U.S. state. In so doing, AI provides narrative fuel for the Trump administration’s efforts to rewind the clock to an era when Washington condescendingly treated Latin America as its “backyard.”

Deprivation and desperation

The depth of Cuba’s predicament today helps explain why these images are going viral.

Long before the Trump administration cut off oil supplies, Cubans were enduring their worst economic, political and social crisis in three decades. Botched internal reform efforts, repression of dissent, and mass migration profoundly eroded faith in Cuba’s Communist Party leadership and institutions in recent years. This has been particularly true since the island’s tourist-heavy economy was hit hard by COVID-19 and 2021 mass protests rocked more than 50 towns and cities.

Of course, plenty of Cubans in Cuba still blame the long-standing U.S sanctions regime, and Trump’s unprecedented additions to it, for many of their problems. Not all are willing to accept change at any cost.

But Cuban officials’ defense of national sovereignty in the face of mounting U.S. threats rings increasingly hollow. Cuba hasn’t held a truly competitive election in nearly 80 years and has been ruled by a one-party state for 65. Under those circumstances, political independence does not rest on the consent of the governed. It’s also hard for a country to claim sovereignty when its economy relies so strongly on external patrons, such as Russia, China, Venezuela (until January) and even the United States. Despite the embargo, Cuban Americans send hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances, food, medicines and other goods annually.

The seduction of rescue

Yet even if fantasies of rescue are understandable, they should be deeply concerning to anyone who cares about Cuba’s future.

The danger posed by AI images is not simply that they normalize the idea of a U.S. military intervention that could cost Cuban lives. It is that they replace deeper civic imagination with spectacle and clickbait.

AI is offering visions of liberation without requiring Cubans to grapple with the far more difficult dilemmas that any real transition would entail. Those questions include how to rebuild institutions, restore trust, confront inequality, reconstruct the economy, forge reconciliation and negotiate competing political visions after decades of polarization and authoritarianism.

Prolonged desperation, coupled with authorities’ stubborn refusal to open the island’s political and economic systems, has narrowed some Cubans’ political horizons to the point where they outsource their own salvation rather than imagine it from the bottom up.

The coming weeks may determine whether digital fantasies turn into concrete policy or remain wishful thinking. But one thing is certain: AI images of U.S. military intervention in Cuba reveal that many Cubans and Cuban Americans have given up on defining change on Cuban terms. That choice could mean the difference between a Cuba that once again becomes a U.S. client state and one where Cubans reclaim ownership of their nation’s future.

Michael J. Bustamante does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Pope Leo XIV has just declared artificial intelligence one of the defining moral challenges of our time, in his first encyclical: a formal letter intended to guide moral, social and theological thought. Titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), it argues technology must serve humanity, rather than concentrate power or weaken human dignity.

He presented it at the Vatican alongside AI developer Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that companies like his need moral guidance to guard against “incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing”, the New York Times reported.

“Technology is not simply a tool,” read the roughly 42,300-word open letter. “When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

It warns that AI is never truly neutral, but “takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”. And it calls for ethical oversight, social justice, protection of workers, responsible governance and peace.

Automated warfare

The encyclical criticises the use of AI in warfare, calling for imposing the “most rigorous ethical constraints” on weapons developed using AI.

As governments invest heavily in autonomous military technologies and AI-assisted defence systems, the “growing ease” of deploying them makes war more likely and “less subject to human control”, it warns. This “violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense”.

The letter also criticises the growing concentration of technological power, and systems that reduce people to data or economic functions. It promotes what it calls a “civilisation of love”, centred on human dignity, solidarity, truth, compassion and the common good.

Pope Leo’s response to the the AI revolution deliberately references his predecessor Pope Leo XIII’s response to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), in 1891. Though Magnifica Humanitas was released on May 25 2026, it is symbolically dated May 15, the date of Rerum Novarum.

Industrial Revolution to AI Revolution

An encyclical is not an ordinary papal statement. Traditionally addressed to bishops and the wider Catholic world, it is one of the Catholic church’s most authoritative teaching documents.

The pope no longer has the direct political power the papacy held in the 19th century. But papal teaching still carries moral weight across a global Catholic network of schools, universities, charities, hospitals and community organisations.

The Vatican cannot regulate AI. It cannot write safety standards, police data centres, or force companies to disclose how their systems work. But it can help shape the moral terms of the debate. For more than a century, Catholic social teaching has influenced public arguments about work, inequality, poverty, human dignity and the ethical limits of economic power.

Although popes issued encyclicals long before the modern era, Rerum Novarum made social encyclicals globally influential.

It confronted exploitative labour conditions, widening inequality, and conflict between workers and employers. Pope Leo XIII defended workers’ rights and argued that wealth carried social responsibilities. He criticised both unrestricted capitalism and revolutionary socialism.

The document influenced debates about labour rights and economic justice well beyond the church. In Australia in 1907, Justice H.B. Higgins drew on Rerum Novarum when establishing principles for a fair living wage.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical attempts to do for the AI age what Rerum Novarum did for the industrial age: provide a moral framework for a technological transformation reshaping work, power and human relationships.

Human dignity in the age of algorithms

Pope Leo XIV argues human rights are not granted by governments or corporations: they arise from the intrinsic dignity of every person. Technologies should serve humanity rather than reduce people to data, economic units or optimisation problems.

He builds on Pope Francis’ critique of “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions”, in his 2015 encyclical. It, too, warned of the risks of technology.

Pope Leo XIV argues moral responsibility can’t be transferred to automated systems, regardless of how sophisticated they become. He also rejects transhumanist ideas that human limitations should be technologically overcome, arguing vulnerability, dependence and imperfection are essential to being human. Relationships, care, solidarity and compassion are not weaknesses. “Humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”

Running throughout the encyclical is a contrast between a “culture of power” and a “civilization of love”. One treats technology primarily as a tool for domination and control. The other places human dignity, justice and care at the centre of social life.

Why this matters

The significance of Magnifica Humanitas lies in its ability to shape public conversation and moral imagination. Moral frameworks matter. They influence what societies fear, what they tolerate, what they defend – and what they refuse to sacrifice.

Governments are investing in AI capability while still developing frameworks for transparency, accountability and safe deployment. Businesses are adopting AI tools at speed. Schools and universities are rethinking assessment, authorship and learning. Workers are being asked to adapt to systems they did not design and often cannot challenge. And citizens are increasingly governed, assessed and targeted by automated systems they may never see.

Pope Leo XIV’s intervention reminds us the central question is not whether AI will be powerful: it already is. The question is whether that power will be made answerable to human dignity.

The future of AI will not just be decided in laboratories, boardrooms or parliaments. It will also be decided by the moral limits societies are willing to set. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical is an attempt to draw those limits.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.