(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. The Seriousness of Unrestricted Warfare)

As former Representative Mike Gallagher writes October 7th in the Wall Street Journal, America must better understand our enemies. The U.S. cannot bribe them to be our friends. North Korea will starve and imprison its people while spending billions on nuclear arms. The Iranian mullahs will similarly murder and imprison their own people while maintaining a multibillion dollar terror network. Détente provided the Soviets billions in liberalized trade benefits even while Moscow “doubled down” on global revolution in El Salvador, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Indochina.

Similarly, the U.S. and its allies gave market access to China thinking this would normalize the CCP.

But all we have done is use American consumption to deliver trillions in intellectual property, technology, and capital to the CCP with which to make “unrestricted warfare” on us.

Now Gallagher concludes that deterrence may yet keep China at bay but as the former head of the House committee examining the Chinese threat explains China is preparing for war, across the board. The U.S. needs to take this threat seriously.

Critical to this threat is the buildup of Chinese nuclear arms. For decades China watchers on the left reassured us that China’s economic growth was nothing more than a “peaceful rise” and its nuclear plans were benign. When three years ago the then commander of the United States Strategic Command laid out the “breath taking” Chinese nuclear expansion, the critics claimed the Admiral was exaggerating to justify building a more modern U.S. nuclear force.

Many on the right spend their day funding the Chinese expansion through raising trillions in investment capital from the United States and pocketing millions in fees.

But in return, the CCP facilitates the massive export of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the U.S. with its criminal Triads in American cities nationwide.

The CCP has what are termed “police stations” in the United States to muscle Chinese nationals, including tens of thousands of military age men who were admitted across our southern border with no vetting.

China has a near monopoly on both the mining and processing of multiple dozens of critical minerals the U.S. needs for its industry, grid, and military weapons, although just beneath our feet the United States has in great abundance–$12 trillion– these same minerals which we have deliberately refused to develop or map or mine or process.

Now it is also true China is losing millions of people as its birth rate has plummeted. Many of its towns and small cities are empty of people and dilapidated. Internally it has tens of trillions of debt it cannot pay. It forcefully harvests organs from its Fulan Gong prisoners to provide for its gerontocracy of big shot party members. But without pause the nation is preparing for war as its modernized military parallels stockpiling of raw materials as its energy and food deficit remain its Achilles heel. These growing weaknesses may make China more not less reckless.

What then what purpose does China’s nuclear weapons serve? They cannot be used in warfare is the refrain from many. But China’s nuclear weapons will reach at least 1500 over the next few years, much faster than previously estimated. And such weaponry serves as a security umbrella under which China believes it can act with impunity. Similarly, it uses economic leverage on trade, rare earths, and other minerals to intimidate U.S. law makers and security leaders to stand down and restrain our policy options to deal with China. Its military might, especially nuclear weapons, serves to bully and coerce America into doing the bidding of the CCP, a point unanimously underscored by the conclusions of the Strategic Posture Commission report of October 2023.

A Ploughshares analysis some years ago ridiculed even the idea of China adding to its military might in order to wage war against the United States. After all it was argued China wants to sell America cell phones not drop bombs on its cities. That is true for now. But China is making war against America in other forms. The current $600 billion trade deficit and capital flows to China help build China’s military. In fact, the previous administration supported buying Chinese company stocks with U.S. Treasuries that in part funded the retirement of America’s military and civilian government workforce. SEC requirements that Wall Street reveal the particular Chinese companies held within mutual funds have been ignored. And while previous policy forced U.S. companies to make fossil energy scarce, expensive and hard to produce in search of global climate change nirvana, at the same time, China’s consumption of coal will according to former Secretary of State Kerry make it impossible to achieve any global carbon or greenhouse gas limits. And China owes the U.S. over a trillion dollars in sovereign debt, a debt on which they have illegally reneged.

Unless deterred, China will on a day of its choosing attack Taiwan and United States interests in the Western Pacific. They will also use EMP and cyber to attack our electric grid. They will simply cut off our mineral raw materials supply. They will seek to crash the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. From our own farmland, they will unleash a biological attack on our agriculture. They will quietly get out of our equity markets. And commit surreptitious terror attacks against our 35 critical infrastructure nodes—railroad crossings, pipelines, and key bridges– previously identified by the Gilmore Commission without which we cannot run our economy.

The U.S. needs across the board deterrence to fight unrestricted warfare. The U.S. cannot have Wall Street send trillions to China to build their “military rise” and expect it to be “peaceful.” The United States must either take CCP threat seriously or suffer the consequences as we did in WWII and on 9-11.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. The New Geopolitical Currency: Metals and Minerals Are the Next Oil)

The next great commodities race isn’t about oil. It’s about copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earths — the metals and critical minerals that underpin the global energy transition.

A quiet but decisive shift is underway as major trading houses are repositioning themselves around the resources that will fuel electrification, renewable energy, and advanced technologies around the globe. This is more than a market trend. It’s a geopolitical realignment.

For over a century, oil defined power. Control over production and shipping routes shaped alliances, foreign policy, and, often, the fate of nations.

Today, as the world, facing increasing uncertainty about its environmental future, accelerates toward decarbonization, those old levers are losing their grip. Critical minerals are emerging as the new strategic assets: finite, concentrated in a handful of regions, and difficult to replace. And China, through years of strategic investment, has built a commanding lead in their mining and processing.

Now, Washington is trying to catch up, declaring critical minerals and rare earths a national security priority and mobilizing financing to build alternative supply chains, which were exposed as highly vulnerable in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Africa — home to nearly a third of global reserves — has emerged as a focal point for this effort. And commodity traders, known for their resilience and adaptability, are moving aggressively to seize this opportunity.

Vitol, a major Dutch multinational energy and commodities trading company which is considered the world’s largest independent energy trader, offers one of the clearest examples of this. After a long hiatus, spanning over a decade, Vitol has reentered the metals market, rebuilding its trading desk and is hiring top talent to trade copper, nickel and aluminum.

Chief Executive Russell Hardy has said that metals are key to understanding the next industrial cycle. Just as the oil and gas boom minted a new generation of millionaires and billionaires, the rare earths boom is poised to do the same. Vitol’s pivot isn’t a hedge; it’s a statement about where the future lies.But they aren’t the only example of companies demonstrating this strategic shift.

Gunvor, the Swiss trading giant long dominant in oil trading is carving out a new presence in physical gold and silver with operations in London and Singapore.

Gold prices have nearly doubled since 2022, and investor appetite remains strong. Gunvor is leveraging long-standing African relationships to build a profitable foothold in precious metals. This isn’t just diversification; it’s a calculated move into sectors where market dynamics and geopolitical leverage overlap.And then there’s BGN International, a Geneva-based trading and investment group with key hubs in Dubai, Singapore and Texas. A quieter, but increasingly ambitious player, BGN is pursuing a similar path.

Traditionally focused on energy and petrochemicals, the company has deliberately expanded into metals and critical minerals.

In September, the company announced the launch of a Geneva-based metals trading desk, accompanied by a new Asia hub in Singapore led by former Squarepoint trader Daniel Yu. This expansion places BGN squarely in the competition for base metals and battery materials — resources that will drive the next phase of industrial growth.Around the same time, BGN rolled out a Texas-based physical trading platform to market African resources in line with American standards.

These steps position the company to compete in the fast-evolving trade of base metals (copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, and lead) and battery materials (which include lithium, cobalt, nickel graphite, manganese and rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium).

BGN has also been reinforcing its operational backbone. From its Dubai base, it has expanded trading capacity and recruited senior talent from firms such as Gunvor and LITASCO (Lukoil International Trading and Supply Company) — the Geneva-based trading arm of Russia’s Lukoil, handling the group’s global oil and energy trading operations — to strengthen its teams in Geneva and the Gulf.

Earlier this year, it signed a 10-year AED 660 million ($180 million) LPG (liquified petroleum gas) charter agreement with Al Seer Marine, adding dual-fuel Very Large Gas Carriers to its fleet.

The implications of these moves are significant. China’s dominance in refining has created a choke point with global consequences.

By building alternative supply chains and trading hubs anchored in Western legal and financial systems, companies like Vitol, Gunvor, and BGN are redrawing the map of influence. BGN’s mix of strategic geography, commercial ambition, and African partnerships points to its emergence as a serious mid-tier player in the minerals space, capable of bridging state power and market demand.

That said, challenges remain. Mining regions are often politically unstable. Processing infrastructure requires immense capital. And building a transparent, traceable supply chains is complex.But the incentives are strong: demand is rising, prices are climbing, and governments are aligning policy to secure supply.

Some major commodity traders and mining companies are even experimenting with the implementation of blockchain and digital ledger technologies to achieve this, although it’s not as the core driver of their current metals and minerals strategies. Trading houses that once made fortunes on hydrocarbons now see metals and minerals as the future core of their business.A new commodities era is undoubtedly taking shape.

From Geneva to Houston, Dubai to Singapore, the world’s most powerful traders are racing to secure the resources that will drive the future of electrification and technological progress. In the twentieth century, oil was power. In the twenty-first, it will be rare earth minerals.

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Mucho más que un Nobel)

Let nobody be surprised at the displeasure felt by all the most prominent vermin of narco-socialism and organised crime at the news that the Nobel Prize has been awarded to María Corina Machado. That the communists, Islamists and depraved terrorist sympathisers of the far left should bark like Pablo Iglesias is normal. They are watching the entire narrative of their criminal ideology collapse. More serious is the case of Pedro Sánchez’s government, in which throughout the whole of yesterday nobody dared congratulate the laureate. Lest Nicolás Maduro or Diosdado Cabello, both in a very foul mood yesterday, should lament out loud having given millions to the Socialist International in order to put Sánchez at its head. Or worse still, that in a great rage they should announce they are suspending all business with so many socialists who have grown rich.

A very uncomfortable situation for a Sánchez who has made a fool of himself in the Middle East, is totally isolated within NATO and may now be on the threshold of all the documents proving the misdeeds committed coming out in Venezuela. For Sánchez, the criminal threat posed by the massive corruption surrounding him in Spain may soon look like a joke compared with what may be building up for them beyond our borders. Pedro Sánchez and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero head a long list of friends and partners of the Venezuelan criminals of the Cartel de los Soles who are now going to go under. And it is going to be difficult for them not to share the consequences as they once shared the business.

This really is a low blow for them. The last thing they expected was this boost of legitimacy for those who are determined to win freedom for Venezuela and therefore to put an end to the criminal organisation of the Spanish government’s cronies.

The Nobel Peace Prize, that award which the European social-democratic forces believed they had so well trained, is suddenly given to MCM, a heroine who has made herself the worst enemy of the international criminal gang of Miraflores which has been buying up social democrats wherever it finds them for the past 25 years. They kidnapped Venezuela a quarter of a century ago under a swinish and cynical soldier named Hugo Chávez Frías. And since then, with his successor Nicolás Maduro and under the tutelage of the Cuban dictatorship, it has developed a State wholly given over to the exploitation of every imaginable field of transnational organised crime, always under the cover of the ideological banner of the left.

This ideological banner is what has provided the criminal organisations in Maduro’s gang with the legal, political and commercial networks needed to develop their projects of political power and criminal business. They have known how to buy, first with oil and later with cocaine and other criminal enterprises, the goodwill and obedience of politicians, academics, public and private bodies, agencies, companies and institutions, NGOs and foreign parties throughout the Americas and Europe. Through their financing of organisations of the São Paulo Forum, the Puebla Group, the Progressive International and the Socialist International, they have placed entire governments at the service of the great drug cartels.

They also made a great many friends in Scandinavia, and it is enough to recall the Nobel Peace Prize given to José Manuel Santos for imposing, against the will expressed by Colombians in a referendum, a peace plan with narco-terrorism that amounted to the disarming of democracy and the handing over to subversion of everything it had never achieved by arms with all its immense murderous brutality. And which has brought Colombia so much closer to the abyss of a narco-state like Venezuela’s. Always supported, by the way, by all the European social-democratic forces, among which the European People’s Party must of course be included. The photographs of Ursula von der Leyen with Delcy Rodríguez or with Gustavo Petro are no accidents. The EU summit with that Chavista invention CELAC is not one either. The European Union has systematically carried out agitation and propaganda for the “progressive” forces in Ibero-America. Under the Italian communist Federica Mogherini and the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell it has been one scandal after another, the massive interference of the EU in favour of the Lulas in Brazil, Boric in Chile, Petro in Colombia, and so on and so forth. As are the ideological forms of blackmail coming from Brussels.

The ideal held by this international of narco-socialism, of achieving an immense Bolivarian dictatorship as a great narco-state stretching from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego as a great anti-imperialist and anti-Western homeland, may strike us as delirious. But there have been moments in the past 25 years when they seemed to be advancing successfully in that direction. With money, with violence and with terror they have successfully interrupted processes of democratic normality and economic and social development such as in Chile. And not a day passes in which they do not try to sabotage Javier Milei in his courageous process of well-being and development in freedom.

Although for the moment many of these criminals continue to be supported by the European Union, in Cuba they are watching their neighbour Maduro’s beard being singed, already harried by the United States fleet, by arrest warrants naming him as head of the Cartel de los Soles, and by the prize to María Corina as another nail in his coffin. And not only in his. The day that regime falls, and its members who wish to redeem themselves begin to talk, accomplices seeking advantages, and there is access to its archives, there will be an earthquake in the political classes throughout the Americas and in Europe. And most especially here in Spain there are a great many people for whom a disastrous criminal horizon will suddenly open up, well beyond, of course, their immediate political death.

For all these reasons the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado is not only a thoroughly deserved award to this great fighter against one of the most criminal regimes in the world. To this dear friend who has done so much, from positions of infinite difficulty, to intensify cooperation with the Spanish forces that defend freedom and democracy in the Americas, which are VOX, the Madrid Forum, Disenso and previously ECR and now Patriots for Europe, the group to which Santiago Abascal has transmitted this transatlantic vocation. Now those who draw close to María Corina in Spain will be legion, including those who had been betting, some directly on the criminal regime with the infinite solvency of the narco trade, and others on a false opposition very comparable to the role of many ultra-centrist politicians in Europe.

It is also a historic milestone and one more proof of the change of political and cultural era the West has entered, one that has spread panic among those who see their model going under and which opens the doors to the hegemony of a worldview that has been marginalised, despised and persecuted for half a century. Since then, since the retreat in surrender without a battle and with the handing over of all their academic, cultural, media and even ecclesial positions by the conservative and national forces after the spirit of 1968 and the triumph of the Frankfurt School, the Nobel Peace Prize has been a faithful reflection of the “zeitgeist”, the spirit of the times dominated by social democracy, relativism and supposedly humanitarian sentimentalism. One need only recall that it was won by the North American presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, without doubt the ones who most weakened the United States and the West and who for that reason were most liked by the European left. The change of era is already here, the end of the neo-Marxist ideological delirium with all the perversions added to it over the years. The progressive bunker and the bewildered figures among its ultra-centrist allies go under electorally every week somewhere in Europe or the Americas.

So much has the situation changed that some believed the prize would be given this year to Donald Trump, who without doubt has more than enough merits, and far greater ones than Obama and Carter, and he has them not only for this year’s spectacular achievements, which also count, but already five years ago when he secured the Abraham Accords. Let nobody be angry that they have not given it to him. Because, the way things stand, it is going to be very difficult for them to deny it to him in the near future. Five years ago it was madness to think of it. But the times are changing a great deal, and for the better.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Embaucamiento suicida)

Half a century from now, if there still exist countries in which it is possible to research, write and debate freely about history, about politics and about the past, people will study with astonishment and disbelief the colossal operation of deception of the whole of the West that we are witnessing. And which yesterday was symbolised by that mass walkout of delegates from the UN Assembly when the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke.

The head of government of a tiny democracy surrounded by bloody despotisms was the object of an affront delivered no longer only by that majority of tyrannies and sinister dictatorships that always wanted to destroy it. Joining in the insult were also the delegates of many Western countries that until recently defended Israel, some of whom even claim to go on doing so, but which with few exceptions have aligned themselves, some in radical and obscene fashion and others more discreetly, with all the forces and countries whose objective is the disappearance of that tiny country from the map.

The UN General Assembly was the ideal place for a piece of villainy of this kind, because there is no place on the globe with a greater concentration of moral filth and totalitarian grime. That is what the UN is for, the organisation corrupt to the marrow that the West pays for in order to destroy the West. The only good thing that could come out of the UN is its dissolution, that noble project of the last century having already been irredeemably perverted until it became an implacable machinery for the promotion of lies and the imposition of criminal policies of social engineering and socialist despotism hostile to Western civilisation, to freedom and to truth. Let us hope that Donald Trump or whoever succeeds him will at some point take the decision to stop paying thieves and tyrants with their armies of functionaries devoted to plans to enslave the last corner of the planet.

This deception of the entire West through the globalisation of the propaganda of a terrorist organisation, one of the most monstrously murderous in the world, could in future be considered the beginning of the main phase of the dismantling of the West as a community of countries based on the cult of common virtues and values grounded in rationality, respect for truth and the freedom of the human being, sacred in his dignity, created in the image and likeness of God, grounded in this Christendom that only Donald Trump recalled in a tribute to the only genocide that is real today, the one perpetrated by the Islamists against Christians in Africa and which interests nobody. They are all focused on a genocide that does not exist and which they have created as the fallacious slogan of that propaganda of total effectiveness which all the media vomit out every day at every hour in every country.

Never has there been a propaganda spell of such dimensions, one whose global reach and political effectiveness makes the enchantment of German national socialism, of fascism or of the communist fever of the soviets look like a clumsy exercise in local entertainment, and which is happening right now to the point of leading the most efficient, best informed and most prosperous societies to self-mutilation, to defencelessness, and to preparing their own destruction from within and from without.

The politicians and rulers of Western countries are in their vast majority mediocre tightrope walkers balancing on the moods of voters. And that within democracies eroded by the permanent invasion of people hostile to freedom and to respect for the human being and who are moreover brothers in the fanaticism of their destructive religious ideology to the terrorists of Hamas, who among them all have become the scriptwriters of the farce. By now they have almost managed to get every Western country to say Hamas is entirely right.

And so they also say the same, that they are right, to the Muslim mobs which every day with greater insolence occupy the public space in the streets of the towns and cities of Western countries. Perfectly organised and motivated in this operation of deception, they have taken the streets to proclaim that the streets are theirs. And in fact they already control more and more neighbourhoods, where they use violence and intimidation whenever they think it necessary, confident of their impunity.

It is no longer a matter of foolishness such as the pressure for the two states they want to impose. When there are no Palestinians who want two states. However much the corrupt figures of the Palestinian Authority may claim otherwise, living as they do off it, and being the authority with the least authority in the world, which without Israel’s protection would be devoured within days by Hamas and other groups, which are the ones that will capitalise on these days of shame in New York. It is a matter of the fact that the arm-wrestle they want to win against Israel is one they are winning against the West. And some of us now trust only that Israel will hold out and win this war as it has to win it, annihilating Hamas as Nazism was annihilated, with all the pain caused by the deaths of German civilians and the destroyed cities. That Israel may win and that Western nations may react and rid themselves of the corrupt, cowardly, weak and foolish people who govern them and begin to learn to defend themselves against the same threat Israel faces, because the existence of those European and American nations of the south, the centre and the north, of the whole West, is as much at stake as the existence of the small Mediterranean democracy.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. Op-Ed: Trump’s Crypto Critics Are Missing the Bigger Picture – The GENIUS Act and America’s Next Frontier)

When history is written, America’s greatest leaps forward are rarely remembered for the critics who doubted them, but for the visionaries who built anyway.

From the steel tracks that bound a continent, to the silicon chips that ignited a digital revolution, progress has always come when rules were clear, opportunities abundant, and the entrepreneurial spirit unshackled.

Today, the frontier is digital finance — and once again, America stands at a crossroads.

As co-founder and former CEO of the American Blockchain PAC, I have long argued that the United States needed a strong, coherent regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and digital assets — one that would unify the conflicting interpretations of our alphabet soup of agencies. Without clarity, innovation would wither, investment would flee, and America’s global leadership would erode.

That is why I view the mainstream media’s reflexive attacks on President Trump’s cryptocurrency agenda as dangerously shortsighted. By dismissing his reforms as a handout to insiders, they ignore the deeper truth: this administration has delivered what no prior government dared to — a comprehensive federal framework for stablecoins through the GENIUS Act.

The GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act), signed into law this summer, is the most consequential piece of crypto legislation in American history. For the first time, it provides a uniform federal standard for stablecoins, mandates 1:1 reserve backing with U.S. dollars and Treasuries, and ensures transparency, consumer protections, and fair competition.

Just as importantly, it removes the cloud of uncertainty that has long hung over developers, investors, and entrepreneurs — declaring, at last, that America welcomes innovation in digital finance.

This clarity is not theoretical. It is transformational.

Consider Immaculata Living in Chicago. What was once a long-neglected school building owned by the American Islamic College is being reborn as a thriving community hub: 235 modern apartments for young professionals and a 22-story residential tower for seniors, complete with wellness services, intergenerational mentoring, and new small business opportunities.

But what makes it historic is not the architecture — it is the financing model. With support from Neem Capital and Nexera, Immaculata Living is poised to become the largest real estate development in the world funded entirely by cryptocurrency. Accredited investors are converting digital assets into property stakes, while community members are purchasing fractional ownership shares in exchange for course credits from the college. It is a living, breathing demonstration of how blockchain can marry financial innovation with tangible community uplift.

Under the old, fragmented regulatory regime, such a project would have been nearly impossible. The risk of being arbitrarily classified as an unregistered security — or shut down by one of several competing regulators — would have smothered it in the crib. But under the GENIUS Act’s framework, stablecoins used in this project are recognized as legitimate, regulated instruments — no longer a legal gray area, but a building block of community development.

This is the bigger picture President Trump’s critics refuse to see.

The GENIUS Act is not about lining pockets — it is about laying foundations. It ensures that stablecoin issuers can innovate responsibly while protecting consumers. It strengthens the U.S. dollar’s dominance by tying digital finance directly to America’s financial system. And most importantly, it creates space for projects like Immaculata Living to flourish — not just in Chicago, but in underserved communities nationwide.

Think about what this means: new jobs, new tax revenues, affordable housing, and generational bridges — all powered by crypto tied to real-world value. For neighborhoods long ignored by traditional finance, this is nothing short of revolutionary.

America has always led when the rules were fair, the vision was bold, and the spirit of enterprise was free to soar. The GENIUS Act is our railroad, our telegraph, our silicon chip moment in the digital age. It is proof that cryptocurrency is not a speculative sideshow but the next great engine of American prosperity.

The lesson is simple: when we regulate with clarity instead of fear, we unlock possibility. President Trump has declared his ambition to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. The GENIUS Act is the scaffolding that makes this vision real. Projects like Immaculata Living are the proof. And the communities they uplift will be the legacy.

The media may prefer to sneer at token prices and hypothetical scams. But the truth is there for anyone willing to see it: With the GENIUS Act, America has reclaimed the mantle of leadership in the digital age. And for the millions of Americans waiting to be included in the prosperity of tomorrow, this is just the beginning.

This is not just a crypto story. It is an American story — of ingenuity, resilience, inclusion, and economic renewal. The GENIUS Act is the scaffolding. Immaculata Living is the proof. And the communities uplifted by these innovations will be the legacy.

When the rules are clear, America leads. We always have. And thanks to the GENIUS Act, we will again, this time on the digital frontier.

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in Human Events. Foreign adversaries are exploiting Charlie Kirk’s assassination to divide America)

America’s foreign adversaries – like the Russian government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the Islamic Republic of Iran – will use every opportunity to exploit a crisis to advance their agendas – overtly, covertly, and clandestinely. Always.

“Asymmetric warfare” by our adversaries uses unconventional tactics to gain advantages over the United States. It includes “influence,” “information,” or “psychological operations,” with the aim to shape public opinion, exacerbate societal divisions, undermine democratic institutions, and advance geopolitical objectives without direct military engagement. Why fight the enemy (at great financial and human cost) when you can collapse them from within?

During the week following conservative leader Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a “tremendous amount of disinformation” was tracked from adversarial nations that exploited Kirk’s death by weaponizing social media platforms and official foreign state media. Over 6,000 mentions of “Charlie Kirk” across state media in Russia, China and Iran were documented, recognized as being messaged for differing audiences – Russia mocked Trump supporters, pushed conspiracy theories, and blamed Zelensky (and Trump) for the assassination, Iran blamed Israel’s Mossad, and China sought to denigrate U.S. reputation and image globally, by portraying the United States as divided and violent.

Worse – anti-Western social media campaigns from Russia-aligned and CCP-supported accounts, including by bots from China, Russia, and all over the world (some of which pose as Americans), were posted to clearly deceive and incite hate, rage, division, and violence among Americans, and to portray the U.S. as a dysfunctional country in decline.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the subsequent hate-filled response by Leftists in the public eye (such as late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel) indicate that psychological operations against America are having an effect.

Other pertinent indications: two assassination attempts in 2024 against President Donald Trump; the rise and cultural/political acceptance of militant, often violent groups like Antifa and BLM; the rise and acceptance of “protestors” chanting “Intifada” on U.S. college campuses in support of the terrorist organization Hamas; the whitewashing of “thousands of often violent” anti-ICE rioters in Los Angeles, deemed “mostly peaceful” by Leftist media and politicians. It is sobering to note that both the anti-ICE and pro-Hamas protests were also backed by foreign state media pushing “narratives of American hypocrisy, instability and decline…”

Since Kirk’s death, Russia-backed groups, including a “disinformation project,” have posted tens of thousands of fake news reports, celebrity quotes, and images “with the intent (of) inflaming passions” between conservatives and the LGBT community, and encouraging discourse about a potential civil war in the United States. Posts have been “widespread” with “high levels of engagement.”

“X” accounts run by the Chinese Communist Party, including a member of its own Propaganda Bureau with over 200,000 followers, posted negative and misleading information about the FBI’s investigation into the assassination. One called Kirk a “radical” and his assassin both “innocent” and “ruthless.” Another (with over 400,000 combined followers) called Kirk a “Nazi scumbag.” Another (with almost 200,000 followers) posted that the U.S. is a “violent country since its founding.” And another (with 82,000 followers) falsely claimed Kirk’s assassin is a “white Christian, conservative, Republican male who even donated to Trump.”

Is this where Kimmel got the idea to mock the conservative movement’s grief over the brutal shooting death of Charlie Kirk, and claim that his assassin was part of “the MAGA gang”?

Foreign influence operations against Americans exploit the open architecture of global online platforms (made more complicated by Obama’s “modernization” of the Smith-Mundt Act) to infiltrate and disrupt target societies. This phenomenon has intensified with the rise of digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), to enable scalable, low-cost campaigns that blur the lines between authentic discourse and state-sponsored propaganda. In fact, it’s easy: fake videos, images, graphics, voiceovers, documents, and accounts can all be used to fool, shape, and incite the American public.

The Active Measures Working Group, a U.S. government interagency organization established during the Reagan administration, was tasked with countering Soviet disinformation. The group altered the perception of disinformation within the national security community. Once thought “inconsequential,” Soviet disinformation was revealed as a real threat to U.S. foreign and domestic interests and to our success in foreign diplomatic conflicts. By exposing Soviet covert operations against the U.S., the working group effectively “raised the political cost [to disseminating disinformation] … by sensitizing foreign and domestic audiences to how they were being duped.”

Ultimately, the working group “negated” much of the Soviet Union’s multi-billion-dollar disinformation efforts, “at little cost to the United States,” helping to bankrupt Russia. A case study of the working group’s effectiveness by the U.S. National Defense University argues for a “dedicated counter-disinformation effort” in the U.S. government today. This is particularly true in the need to counteract foreign information operations that utilize easily accessible and vast online information streams.

Americans should not be ignorant – but aware – of the ongoing unconventional tactics used to undermine the goodness and strength of America and its citizens. The threat and detrimental effects of asymmetric warfare do not stop at deceiving the public, or the spread of public “disinformation” or “false claims.” Our opponents’ full strategic campaign includes destruction – by inflaming division, influencing public opinion, and enraging the minds of American citizens against their government, families, friends, traditions, values, and our founding principles. This is what destroys a civilization. We see this happening all around us, now.

Whatever side of the political aisle you’re on, you are being manipulated. The ubiquitous influence of social media has made the manipulation of Westerners by our adversaries far more effective, all with the intent of undermining the U.S. and pushing its citizens to anger and violent action. Foreign sources of asymmetric warfare against the United States want you to believe their actions are “inconsequential.”

According to reports, the U.S. Departments of State, War, Justice, and Homeland Security all have agencies or task forces combating foreign influence; however, a unified strategy appears to be lacking. Current U.S. initiatives are fragmented, reactive, and lack the singular focus of the Active Measures Working Group from the Reagan era. There must be stronger efforts from U.S. national security leaders to combat foreign influence operations and deceptive communications. Additionally, U.S. agencies must collaborate with tech companies to identify and remove accounts and posts associated with nefarious foreign-state influence groups.

This is critical: The Trump administration needs its own version of the Reagan-era Active Measures Working Group as part of U.S. national security strategy, with the sole purpose of identifying, exposing, countering, and nullifying (read “defeat”) foreign disinformation campaigns that influence American citizens and our current events.

Shea Bradley-Farrell is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Los peligros en la ilusión)

Anyone who has followed the Spanish media, the television channels, the radio stations and the newspapers after the murder of the conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk will have remembered how ETA’s victims were slandered after being gunned down by the gunmen of terror. Some may not remember those victims killed by terrorists who today enjoy freedom, respect when not admiration from their neighbours, and often salaries from the public purse as politicians or pampered civil servants.

Afterwards others took charge of insulting and discrediting the dead man so that nobody would dare defend him and condemn the murder. Since Wednesday night we have seen once again what ETA used to do with rumours about the victims, spread by its organisations, by its newspaper Egin and by its banners and pamphlets, all of it orchestrated by those who today are partners, allies and close collaborators of the head of the government. ETA is part of the government in every sense. It is Sánchez’s most faithful ally. But beyond that it has imposed its way of treating dissenters on every outlet the government controls, which is nearly all of them.

But now we see and hear it in almost every media outlet in the country, all of them obedient because dependent on the government, public and private alike. Suddenly we realise that, with few exceptions, an immense majority of Spanish media today are what EGIN once was, outlets determined to defend what had never been defended by media considered civilised, namely that a victim is so contemptible that they end up being presented as deserving of and guilty for their own death.

It is clear that if the left reaches the conclusion that it has to kill again in Spain because things are going against it, and kills one, three or ten of us who are considered ultras or fascists by the socialist government’s apparatus, we will be duly slandered and criminalised until at least parts of society are brought to feel relief that we have disappeared.

So that the population reaches the essential conclusion they are after: that the political situation, call it hardship, misery, abuses, tension, far-right threat or polarisation, improves with the disappearance of certain protagonists. It is the small tragedy that brings great relief. It is a shame that he died, but it brings us much peace that it happened to him.

After all, that is what it is about, as TVE, the SER and so many others have told us these past days: it is a shame that someone has to resort to such methods, but the victim had done everything to deserve that it be him and not somebody else. And of course, deploring the violence, life goes on and it will be better without people who are far-right, fascist, misogynist, transphobic, Zionist, homophobic or white supremacist.

One has to go back to the communist and national-socialist press of the past to find this clear determination to explain, justify and legitimise the annihilation, the death, of political adversaries. In Spain it already seems normalised. And not only in Spain. In the United States we are seeing abominable reactions of celebration and even enthusiasm at the death of a man who has been caricatured to implausible extremes.

Those who hate Kirk and do not know Kirk hate someone who has nothing to do with the Kirk they have just murdered. But in any case they are pleased because he is dead. The world is facing a change of era that makes many people dizzy. Above all those who have controlled the last 70 years of discourse, power and privilege. We know that those who are afraid of losing what they believed they would hold forever are capable of anything. Many of them, our head of government included, if only to escape prison for the crimes committed by his gang.

That is why we must start from the certainty that, along with the hope of profound change so that Spaniards and all Western nations recover their rights, their freedom and their sense of promise, there comes an imminent danger from a left that believed it did not need to kill much in Spain and that may now reconsider in the light of those expectations.

Nor will it be only here. There have been attacks on Trump, on Villavicencio, on Fico, on Babis, on Kirk, on Uribe, on Bolsonaro. In Germany alone, 95 percent of the assaults on politicians have as their victims the so-called ultras of the Alternative for Germany. They call them extremists and they assault nobody, yet they are assaulted more than anyone. Political violence today is exercised exclusively from the left.

This change of era generates immense hopes, but nobody should conceal the risks it brings with it, because those who have killed in order to win in politics, ETA and the PSOE in Spain as the FARC or the cartels across the Americas, are going to want to kill again because their discourse does not catch on, the young are fleeing them, their failure is obvious and the ideological left is succumbing. That is why we must accept that in many places there will be blood.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.