(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Derk Jan Eppink: Snel een vredesakkoord met Poetin en daarna de blik richting China: Trump is er klaar voor)

From Washington, after the election of Donald Trump, a new wind is on its way toward Europe to thaw the eastern front in Ukraine. But the sitting president Joe Biden provided some continued frost for a while with the delivery to Ukraine of long-range missiles (350 kilometers), which have meanwhile also been deployed. The Russian president Vladimir Putin thereupon lowered the threshold for the use of atomic weapons, while in The Hague an NSC comedy was staged around Pieter Omtzigt: is he coming back or not?

Trump is sworn in on 20 January 2025 in Washington as the 47th president of the US, but he is already sketching the contours of a new policy now. His motto is ‘Peace through Strenght’, the kind of slogan that recalls the Reagan era (1981-1989).

In the long series of appointments Trump has designated Mike Waltz (50), a congressman from Florida and a decorated soldier, as national security adviser. Waltz can start right away because his position is not subject to Senate approval. According to Waltz the danger comes from the Pacific under a Chinese flag. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine he was in favor of large arms deliveries, but has since changed his mind. He advocates ‘recalibration’, because China is the strategic opponent.

The American position in that region was strikingly captured by the group photo of heads of government who took part in the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Peru. President Biden stood all the way at the back in the corner in the last row. Prominently at the front the Chinese president Xi Jinping. That would not happen to Trump. As a former wrestler he would, if need be, fight his way to the front. In the group photo of the G-20 in Rio de Janeiro Biden was even absent.

In which direction is the American course on Ukraine going? The war is stuck in the trenches like the First World War once was. Every offensive brings great losses. Until recently few in Europe dared to talk about a ‘way out’, because that seemed a betrayal of Ukraine. That sound now comes from the ‘president-elect’. There must be a peace settlement, and that can only come about through the United States.

Europe is once again a hutch with rabbits running around. The Netherlands is admittedly in the leading group of countries that actually support Ukraine, but most other countries profess that support mainly with their mouths, such as France, Italy and Spain. The Germans in turn are always ‘verzweifelt’. ‘The West’ is in practice only as strong as America is. The division of labor between the American president and the NATO secretary-general is crystal clear: Trump is the general and Mark Rutte the secretary.

At the eastern front, understandably, discouragement prevails. According to The Wall Street Journal 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers are said to have been killed. On the Russian side there are no reliable figures; there is talk of hundreds of thousands. Ukraine is exhausted, after the Russian ‘Blitzkrieg’ stalled and turned into a war of attrition that gave Moscow – with more men and materiel – the upper hand.

The war does not seem popular in Russia, and president Putin does not dare risk new rounds of mobilization for fear of resistance. So came the formula of the North Korean troop force of 10,000 men, for which Russia pays in money and raw materials. Russia traditionally saw Ukraine as a ‘region’; not as a state. Through Putin’s invasion Ukraine has become a nation state, with its independence written in blood.

Both countries are weakened, but Ukraine had a hard time of it. Parts of cities and infrastructure have been destroyed, just before winter. Ukrainian citizens want a peace settlement, whatever it takes, and most Russian citizens as well. Trump’s remarks therefore fall on fertile ground. The time is ripe for a ‘peace deal’. And America can enforce that with the will of the president.

Among the Democrats that will was barely there. They regarded Putin as a villain (which is correct) and Trump as his ‘asset’, a kind of pawn. Thus, according to the Democrats, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 elections to Trump because he was on Putin’s leash. That became a myth that the Democrats cherished, but wrongly, because Clinton really lost because she labeled her own base as ‘deplorables’. Now that the Democrats have lost again, the awareness is growing that the real causes lie with the party itself. A step forward.

Trump can put pressure on Moscow with far-reaching economic sanctions if it does not cooperate on a peace settlement. Such as pumping more oil so that the world price drops, and with it Russia’s revenues. Putin fears the power factor Trump and prefers negotiations, partly under pressure from China.

The Chinese model is stagnating, with lower growth, large state enterprises that are in trouble and a real estate crisis caused by a mass migration of tens of millions of Chinese from the interior to the (far too) numerous residential towers in large cities along the Chinese coast. The economy has to keep running, and it runs in China because the country is a major exporter on the world market. The Chinese have meanwhile, quietly, built up a global infrastructure network with ports (also in Europe) and enormous influence in developing countries. At the APEC summit president Xi stood at the center of the group photo, and not for nothing. At the G-20 too.

Negotiations over Ukraine can proceed along well-trodden paths: a ceasefire, demarcation lines, negotiations over territories, the choice for residents along the demarcation line as to which country they want to live in, and hopefully possibilities for family visits. In the border region there have been millions of mixed marriages. The negotiations over the border will proceed with difficulty.

It is unlikely that Russia will give up Crimea. The peninsula in the Black Sea was historically Russian, but was transferred to Ukraine in the 1950s by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. With the breakup of the Soviet Union Crimea fell under Ukrainian authority, but was occupied by Russia in 2014.

For the Donbas too it will be quite a job to draw a map that both parties agree to. Putin wants to divide Ukraine into pieces: a nonstarter. Ultimately there is the danger that the eastern border of Ukraine becomes a new ‘iron curtain’, running from Northern Finland to the bottom of the Black Sea. Then follows the question: may Ukraine join NATO and/or the EU? The latter will be easier, subject to all the accession conditions, than the former.

Europe looks on and was itself considerably weakened in this Ukraine war. On 24 June the EU adopted the 14th sanctions package against Russia, but how effective were all those measures? The sanctions caused the oil and gas price to rise, which within the EU caused a considerable wave of inflation that undermined the purchasing power of ordinary citizens. A high oil price makes Russia (read: rich Russians) richer, but Europe poorer. And that while our energy and climate policy – thanks to all the expenditures described as ‘investment’ – already weakens the competitiveness of European companies.

The most telling example is Germany, which is going backwards economically, with an infrastructure that is crumbling. The political situation in the country is unstable, as in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Meanwhile the EU is a machinery that produces grandiose plans (‘ambitions’), such as the ‘Draghi Plan’ of 800 billion euros, which, however, evaporate because they are unaffordable.

The sanctions against Russia were perhaps a moral imperative, but proved economically and politically destructive. The EU must recalibrate, not through daydreaming but through economic realism: with a modern industrial future and as an innovating trade bloc. The material basis and cultural cohesion of Europe is crumbling, while on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean the economy is being put into higher gear. Under Trump, Europe is not high on the American agenda. It is ‘America First’ and the gaze turns toward the Far East.

Derk Jan Eppink 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. Pánico en la mayoría menguante)

The European Union is in panic. Because the forces that have run it at their whim as a single party in the “grand alliance of People’s Party, Socialists and Greens,” as the Spaniard Esteban González Pons boasts, lost last June the total supremacy in the European Parliament that legalizes and legitimizes the will of Berlin, Paris and the sanhedrin of the elites. They believed it was a mere jolt. That by having Ursula von der Leyen once again embrace Socialists, Macronists and Greens in a new European Commission with the same aims as the previous one, and by harassing and marginalizing the national and sovereigntist forces that oppose them, they could solve it.

Barely had the legislature begun when they realized that this is not the case and that they have definitively lost control over events. It had never happened to them before. And that has frightened them a great deal. The spectacle with Teresa Ribera is only one more effect of the unleashed nerves. Their long-standing pact between People’s Party and Socialists — not to trouble one another over their appointments beyond what is just enough to keep up the political spectacle that binds them together as currents with different acronyms within the same project — has been blown to pieces.

And it was blown up by a bomb which is fear. It is the panic fear of the Spanish People’s Party, contagious to the Germans and the rest, at the sight of the charges emerging against one of the key pieces in von der Leyen’s new European Commission, which is Teresa Ribera. Not for nothing is she the piece of one of the German woman’s favorite accomplices for all her outrages of the past five years, namely Pedro Sánchez. It is the fear of having to pay for the inconsistency and the permanent fallacy. For the first time they are aware that the fraudulent game of People’s Party and Socialists does not come free. And they all pay for what they do. The difference with respect to the same procedures in all the past legislatures has a name: it is Vox, it is the Patriots, and it is Donald Trump.

There is panic at those forces that advance without cease across all of Europe and that — alas! — are friends of the greatest enemy of the ever more precarious, terrified and waning social-democratic majority of blues, reds and Greens of González Pons and Iratxe García: Donald Trump. The overwhelming victory of the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump, has left knocked out the forces that were until now the unquestionable owners of the European Union. All their conclaves of globalist and corporate power have been traumatized. Their media terminals, always arrogant as bearers of moral superiority and, of course, of power, have for ten days been stammering with confused and disjointed messages in which they do not know whether to go on criminalizing Trump or to ask him for smelling salts. They do not know how to defend positions they believed unquestionable. But they know for the first time that they are in danger.

Those forces gripped by fear, those responsible for the European paralysis, have been left paralyzed. And they cannot prevent the advance of the enemy whom until the day before yesterday they humiliated and ignored as marginal extremists. They cannot prevent the new alternative of the national and sovereigntist forces — which have VOX in their hard core, which is PATRIOTS for Europe — from taking ever sharper shape across the whole political scene.

Some 1,000 days ago, the European Union was very much entertained with its ever so ecological plans to ruin livestock farming in order to reduce gas emissions, to operate on seven-year-old children because they like the color pink, and to destroy nuclear power plants and dams in order to depend a little more on the Russian gas that would reach them in torrents through the Nord Stream that Putin, Merkel, Schröder and their confrères Scholz and Steinmeier had built.

The rulers were playing at gods in their terrarium, doing social engineering with their human beings, whom they plunder to finance the experiments, when the first of the business partners broke the board and invaded Ukraine. Since then many things have happened. And many more are announced. The social-democratic majority of blues, reds, greens and yellows are in total confusion. There are some who ask for shortcuts and want to outlaw all those who are not like them.

It has been 113 German deputies, no less, out of the 773 of the Bundestag, who take on the ridiculous task of requesting, before elections to be held on 23 February, the banning of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which does not stop growing and is already the second-largest in the country. They want to strip a third of the voters in Germany of their rights. In France, the prosecution is mounting a grotesque farce of a demand for convictions and disqualification in order to try to prevent Marine Le Pen from being the first female president of the French Republic. Just as they wanted to prosecute, disqualify and murder Donald Trump, the waning majority in the European Union wants to do away with those who question and threaten it thanks to the awakening of the population. All the national elections held since June reveal that the majority is on its way to ceasing to be one. And that the European Council will be very different very soon, with many governments of the parties that they have marginalized in the European Parliament and from whom they have taken the posts that legitimately correspond to them.

Within a week there are elections in the state of Styria in Austria, and the result will demonstrate that any alliance like the one they are now attempting in Vienna against the force that will win in overwhelming fashion will be short-lived. And on 23 February there are elections in Germany. And the People’s Party of the CDU, led by another one who has revealed himself to be a Núñez Feijóo — Friedrich Merz — has already said that his only aspiration is to lead a government with the Socialists who have sunk the country, together with the Greens and the liberals.

Another embrace of the losers in order to go on doing more of the same that has failed and that has made the EU — which had the same economic strength as the United States in 2008 — today have exactly half. The Germans have received the promise from the favorite party that if it wins everything will stay the same, because it refuses to ally with the right that has occupied the space the CDU abandoned with Merkel. Well, that is the best electoral propaganda for that AfD which, simply by softening its tone, will be the first party in Germany very soon.

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 Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in Human Events. SHEA BRADLEY-FARRELL: How Trump ends the Ukraine war in 24 hours)

President Donald Trump’s landslide reelection signals the end of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s firehose of U.S. money, military assistance, and blind support for an ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that has claimed about 1 million casualties . As Trump says, he’s not here to start wars, but to “stop wars.” And millions of Americans, weary of financing the Biden-Harris American “forever war” to the tune of $175 billion (and more promised), can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Can Trump end an almost 3-year-old war “within 24 hours” after taking office, like he claims? Sure. Trump proved in his last administration that he can do the “impossible” that the D.C. establishment is continuously unwilling or unable to do – like personally de-escalating tensions with Kim Jong Un, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, significantly improving Middle East stability with the unprecedented Abraham Accords, or forcing NATO members to pay their share. Yes, Trump can do it.

Trump’s proven leadership strength is exactly why Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy are now communicating that they are both open to discussions.

Barely after ballots were counted, Trump telephoned (separately) both Zelenskyy and Putin, laying the foundation for the strategic plan he will implement for peace. Trump told Putin not to further escalate the war , appeared to assure Zelenskyy of U.S. support (of some nature), and planned a “follow up” to discuss “resolution of Ukraine’s war.”

Trump has excellent leverage with both Putin and Zelenskyy to do so. For one, Putin knows Trump will use “Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe” if needed, and Zelenskyy, who has never been willing to negotiate, cannot continue to fight (even somewhat successfully) without U.S. military aid.

How could the Trump peace plan play out?

First, by signaling the U.S. position by simply calling for immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations – something that no world leader has done since Putin’s invasion, save Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Orbán, who shares a border with Ukraine, is the only world leader to visit both Zelenskyy and Putin to discuss the chance for peace and could act as an effective regional moderator during Trump negotiations. Orbán has interests with both Ukraine and Russia – for example, thousands of ethnic Hungarians and dual citizens live in Ukraine (dozens died in the war) and Hungary’s economy is dependant on Russian energy. Orbán has welcomed over 5 million refugees across his borders from Ukraine, and has a vested interest in the war’s successful end.

Second, by cutting off U.S. military funding to Ukraine, forcing (encouraging?) Zelenskyy to consider the reality of his position and his need for negotiations. The U.S. remains by far the largest donor of military assistance to Ukraine, without which Ukraine arguably could not hold off Russian forces at all.

To date, U.S. Congress has appropriated over $55.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine (weapons, equipment, supplies); Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is Ukraine’s second largest donor of military assistance at about $31 billion . But Germany recently cut aid to Ukraine in half, and its further assistance is uncertain.

In addition, even with billions of dollars that multiple nations have poured into Ukraine, its situtation is increasingly dire – Russia continues to gain territory ( 18% of Ukraine as of October 2024) and recently deployed thousands of North Korean soldiers to Kursk , the Russian territory taken over by an incursion of Ukrainian forces in September 2024.

Third, by negotiating a balance of financial and territorial concessions between Putin and Zelenskyy. Contrary to what the Ukraine-flag-waving U.S. Congress members proclaim, there can be no negotiations without concessions from both sides – including President Zelenskyy.

The exact territorial borders and lines to be drawn are for the future debate, but Russia could retain and consolidate territory it occupies in ethnic Russian areas of Ukraine, but significantly compensate the Ukrainian government for losses in life and territory. In addition, Zelenskyy should be given security guarantees for Ukraine’s future. The Kursk region territory occupied by Ukraine could also be part of negotiations, swapped for some Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces.

Fourth, by guaranteeing NATO neutrality in Ukraine – taking Ukraine NATO membership completely off the negotiating table. This is a very critical part of negotiations, but one that will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth within the visionless foreign policy establishment.

However, the point that Putin’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine was largely provoked by NATO expansion and not uncontrolled desire to expand westward, is a point Trump clearly understands, having remarked that President Joe Biden’s insistance on making Ukraine a NATO member was “going to start a war” and that before that “Russia was never going to attack Ukraine.”

This is, in fact, a historical point of contention , beginning in 1990 with U.S. victory in the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. At this time, diplomatic gestures and political assurances by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (and other Western leaders) created the impression that NATO, in exchange for Russian support of German reunification, would not expand east. But, eastward expansion is exactly what NATO did, creeping ever closer to Russian borders. NATO has, in fact, added sixteen (16) new members since 1990.

In November 2021, at the brink of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, Putin told his foreign ministry to push Biden and NATO for “legal guarantees” regarding Ukrainian neutrality because Western “verbal commitments” had not been kept. Putin’s other concerns were similarly focused on Russian security: the West’s supply of modern lethal weaponry to Ukraine, NATO military infrastruture and maneuvers close to Russian borders, and the presence of U.S. anti-missile defense systems in Romania and Poland. Furthermore contrary to popular assertion, Ukraine, full of government corruption and dependent on Western resources, is not NATO-ready. Rampant corruption in Zelenskyy’s defense ministry is mostly ignored by the media and Warhawks, as well as the fact that he fired top defense officials for “massive procurement fraud” including of ammunition and military food supplies .

A concession for non-NATO membership could be to encourage European allies to speed up Ukraine’s current path for admittance into the European Union (EU). This would have a positive effect on post-war rebuilding efforts, help secure Ukraine’s needed financial support for reconstruction, and take the burden for the effort off U.S. taxpayers who, under the Biden-Harris administration, are now the largest state donor of assistance to Ukraine.

NATO and D.C. Warhawks, and others fooled by the Biden-Harris’ declaration that the Russia-Ukraine war is a “fight for democracy” (in a nation led by an quasi-dictator who outlawed political opponents, cancelled elections, closed churches, and nationalized media), will find these steps for Ukraine’ peace plan hard to swallow. But, these are the steps necessary both to U.S. national interests and the positive future of Ukrainian citizens.

American citizens, committed to almost $200 billion, including paying the salaries and pensions of Ukraine’s public servants, cannot go on indefinitely enabling a war that is dangerously escalating to a broader and possibly nuclear conflict .

And, for Ukrainian citizens – who face the devastation of critical infrastructure, large shortages in troop manpower, worsening population decline, and this year’s record-high civilian casualties – a future of never-ending war is bleak. Yes, President Trump will end this war – and in record time.

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 Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Zege Trump dwingt links Amerika én Europa tot cultuuromslag)

The resounding victory of Donald Trump, with majorities in the Senate and (possibly) the House of Representatives, was barely known before the Democrats fell into a deep depression. How could the electorate be so ungrateful for the blessings of president Biden and his intended successor Kamala Harris? Wealthy ‘celebrities’, such as Sharon Stone, Cher, Taylor Swift, Barbara Streisand, threatened to leave America.

And curiously: the former American ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder (64), threatened (AD, 3 September) to give up his American nationality: he did not want to live in a country where a fascist was in power. After 30 years he wants his Dutch passport back. That requires an ‘integration course’ in which the KNM component (knowledge of Dutch society) can be a notorious stumbling block. Daalder still has some cramming to do.

In the American media there were the usual crying fits such as at CNN and MSNBC, while the regular jokers such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel literally had tears in their eyes. It became clear that the cultural elite lived with their heads in the clouds.

Gnashing their teeth, the better-knowing class had established that the ‘working class’ in the swing states had come within Trump’s reach. He transformed the Republican party, previously mainly a party of ‘country clubs’ and after that of ‘social conservatives’, into a workers’ party. Thus he rummaged in the base of the Democrats. In 2016 with success. This year an extra grab was added: Trump appealed to minorities that the Democrats had counted as the hard core of their own following. Trump scored very well among Latinos, black men, Catholics and Jewish Americans. On this the Democrats, with Harris in the lead, fell through the floor.

Trump’s landslide (312 versus 226 electors) produces a reshuffling of the political field, as Ronald Reagan had done in 1980. A political-cultural shift with far-reaching consequences. The Democrats preached identity politics for years. They divided society into separate little groups: white women, black men, young white men, Latinos, Catholic Americans. They spoke of non-binary gender policy, with ‘men’ in the changing rooms of women. ‘Woke’ became a method to silence people, to make opinion-forming uniform. It became a culture war with ‘cancel culture’ as the stick behind the door. That identity politics, however, caused an identity crisis among Democrats.

The Democrats have to reinvent themselves, and that will take time. The ‘blame game’ has already begun. Nancy Pelosi (84), who was re-elected for the 20th time to the House of Representatives, laid the blame on Biden who, according to her, had stayed on too long. His mental condition was presented too rosily for too long. Biden himself did not notice, and the debate with Trump, which became his downfall, he had also requested himself. Biden is angry at Pelosi because he feels pushed aside, while he himself got in Harris’s way. Such as describing Trump’s voters as ‘garbage’. These are the usual rituals of a lost election. Substantive reflection must follow, and new faces at the top of the party.

It is striking how much the European left is in that same pit. Ideological emptiness through identity politics, though people are less generous with the name of ‘Hitler’ to blacken opponents. Terms like ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ suffice. This vocabulary serves to hide the substantive emptiness. What does the European left stand for? Above all for climate policy. Just like the Democrats, progressive Europe has little eye for the consequences of immigration and the economic problems of the common man. What was once the core of the ideology is now a side issue and replaced by identity politics and a woke agenda.

The merger problems of the PvdA and GroenLinks mark that; of all things around the conflict in Gaza that completely divides the two parties. The Democrats employed two talking points on Gaza: one version for voters in the Arab community and another for the Jewish community. That balloon did not hold up for long. The cultural shift through the election of Trump puts the European left up against the same wall as the Democrats. Moreover, the turnaround in America will accelerate the turnaround in Europe.

Starting in Germany. The premature fall of the government of chancellor Olaf Scholz produces an acceleration. Germans yearn for stability but that is falling away. The elections for a new Bundestag are not far off. The German left, the social-democratic SPD and the Greens, are in a bad position. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is the far right-wing outsider, while the party of Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is a surprising newcomer. Towering above all this is the CDU/CSU of Friedrich Merz. But his problem is: with which party does he form a government? The AfD is excluded. The rest mostly limp along.

Merz is a capable politician who spent years in quasi-forced exile because chancellor Merkel pushed him aside. From parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag he was demoted to backbencher, left Berlin and settled in Düsseldorf as an asset manager for the American BlackRock, with its headquarters in Manhattan. Only after Merkel’s departure did he return to Berlin. Merz is familiar with America, useful for the relationship with Trump.

Germany is sinking into economic malaise. Where Volkswagen goes, there goes Germany, and later the Netherlands too. Germany is strangling its economy with a failed climate and energy policy, and as the crowning touch the closing of the nuclear power plants. Germany is de-industrializing because energy costs are too high, much higher than in America where they are actually becoming lower. One of Trump’s first decisions is to allow fracking and to drill more oil under the motto ‘drill baby drill’.

Trump widens that gap with Europe. He is leading climate policy – in his own words the ‘green scam’ – to the slaughterhouse: America leaves (once again) the Paris Climate Agreement and reduces the regulatory burden, while the energy supply is increased. This puts the expensive European climate and energy policy under enormous pressure. European competitiveness shrivels.

There is then no other way out than to recalibrate climate and energy policy. The European Green Deal costs 1,570 billion euros annually in ‘investments’ that are paid by companies. The consumer ultimately gets the costs on his plate. Europe must be 90% climate-neutral by 2040; 100% by 2050. Companies that have to make strategic decisions in the coming years will quickly do the math: investing in Europe does not pay. In America it does.

Germany, once the leading industrial country in Europe that is now going backward, will be the first to have to change course. With that a European article of faith goes overboard. It is crucial that the elections in Germany take place soon and Merz becomes chancellor quickly.

In America climate is barely a point of contention; for only 7% of voters. Purchasing power and immigration come first. That is not much different in Europe, but ‘progressive Europe’ is barely interested in that, no more than the Democrats in America. They have now had their lesson. A too-expensive climate and energy policy disregards purchasing power and the financial costs of large-scale asylum migration. That endangers the survival of companies and with it the livelihood security of citizens.

Instead of going hard against that current with an unattainable and unaffordable climate policy, Europe would do better to liberalize the green planned economy with more market principles, more real competition and fewer subsidies. The Green Deal turns the civil servant into an entrepreneur and the entrepreneur into a civil servant. That is an upside-down world. If Europe does not correct itself, America will do it. And in Trumpian fashion.

Derk Jan Eppink 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 Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Derk Jan Eppink: Donald Trump gaat Europa op het appèl roepen)

He gets along well with Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán, but with most European heads of government it is a different story. Mark Rutte he will use above all to make the European NATO countries pay more for their defense. Derk Jan Eppink looks ahead from Washington to the second term of ‘comeback kid’ Donald Trump.

Never has a politician risen so powerfully like a phoenix from its ashes as Donald Trump. His victory in the 2016 presidential elections seemed a freak accident. He lost to Joe Biden in 2020 and brought upon himself the stain of 6 January 2021 when his supporters stormed Congress.

Trump seemed finished, got all sorts of trials on his back, prison threatened and during the election campaign he faced two assassination attempts. He was branded by Democrats a ‘nazi’, ‘fascist’ and ‘Hitler’ but nonetheless becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897) with two non-consecutive terms in the White House. Trump, the ‘comeback kid’.

His victory also has to do with the inability of the Democrats to come up with a viable candidate. The party bungled constantly this year. President Biden’s cognitive deficiencies were long covered up and only came to light during a debate with Trump, which Biden himself had requested. It became his Waterloo. The leader of the Western world turned out to be a helpless elderly man who could no longer handle his task. Vice-president Kamala Harris took over the torch but could not develop a profile of her own. Her campaign had something of amateur theater about it. The established media hoisted her on their shield, but the shortcomings of Harris could not be hidden. Voters saw that sooner than the media, now in depression.

The Democrats are due for some soul-searching. Just as in 2016, they lost parts of their ‘coalition of minorities’. Trump broke into their base: among Latinos and black men. He turned the Republican party into a party for the working population, for the common man. The swing states in the Midwest went to Trump. The Republican party became a workers’ party; the Democratic party an association of the higher-educated, better-off and better-knowing intellectuals. In short, a party of the elite. It is a gap that is also visible in Western Europe and in the Netherlands.

What is Trump going to do once he is sworn in on 20 January 2025? He has already paid a lot of tuition in the years after 2016. He has learned above all how not to do it, and made many mistakes in hiring staff. ‘You are fired’ they often heard. The White House seemed a transit house and chaos reigned. During this campaign Trump was more disciplined, as far as possible at least, and he also has an idea of which staff he will need. At the State Department Mike Pompeo may come, who knows how to wield that axe.

Foreign affairs demand almost as much attention from Trump as domestic affairs: the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, trade disputes with numerous countries and the rise of China. In foreign policy Trump has an almost free hand, and with a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives he has little trouble from the Democrats, who are licking their wounds.

Europe, however, can brace itself, because Trump’s irritation with the old continent is great. It stands to reason that he will give a speech in which he serves European countries some ‘tough love’. He believes that European member states of NATO must contribute more. NATO is a cornerstone of security policy for Republicans too, but the fact that the Americans pay the lion’s share of European defense must change.

In his first term Trump already reprimanded European heads of government and seemed like a headmaster calling unwilling pupils to account. During a NATO meeting Trump produced a piece of paper and went through all the heads of government. Countries that paid their share received praise, but the defaulters got a verbal spanking. Above all the German chancellor Angela Merkel: Germany, at 1,5 percent for defense, was not good, not good. Merkel had to undergo this scolding with all her European colleagues present.

Trump is going to crank up the percentage, so it is said in Washington. If 2 percent of GDP as a benchmark is already a lot for many European countries, Trump is going to demand more: 3 percent. A fine assignment for the new secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, to collect the ‘overdue rent’ from European member states on behalf of the real estate owner in Washington DC. There must also be an end to budget tricks to artificially pump up the defense budget. Thus Germany pays the pensions of former GDR officers out of the defense budget. Pure budget pollution.

The European Commission too ends up in the doghouse. In the worldview of Trump (and many American conservatives) the EU is a regional organization like the Organization of American States (OAS). In his eyes Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is an unelected top official who is not on an equal footing with elected national leaders. As a counterpart Trump sees elected heads of government, and with them he does business. He sees nothing in supranational organizations such as the EU, but does in intergovernmental organizations such as NATO.

That attitude does make trade policy with America difficult, because that is the exclusive competence of the EU. Trump wants trade barriers for American companies to be cleared away and accuses the EU of protectionism. It is better if an authoritative head of government discusses that with Trump, because he does not want to see Von der Leyen. But the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will be more to his taste.

The Netherlands is in Trump’s good books, certainly the current coalition with Geert Wilders who even provided the Americans with voting advice for Trump. Such gestures he does not forget. With Germany Trump has less affinity, and that will show. German politics and media are boundlessly negative about Trump, in an almost childish way. East Germany even displays traits of anti-Americanism. With the French president relations are sometimes strained. Trump then threatens, in a dispute, with import duties on, for example, French champagne. Emmanuel Macron then quickly tucks his tail back in.

The head of government with whom Trump has the best relationship is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They are thick friends. The relationship with Poland is strained because Trump is angry at the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, who is busy at high speed doing what his predecessors also did: making life difficult for the media and dismissing judges. The relationship with British prime minister Keir Starmer will also be prickly. The British Labour party sent volunteers to America to help the Democrats with their election campaign. Trump sees that as ‘interference’.

A new theme in Trump’s relationship with Europe is the war in Ukraine. Trump has always said that the Russian invasion in 2022 would not have happened if he had still been president. At campaign rallies he announced that after his election and before his inauguration he would put an end to the war in Ukraine. Raising the question ‘how do we get out of that war?’ is in itself not bad. But how Trump is going to do that, he has not said. Is he going to summon the Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky together? Is he going to put pressure on them with hard sanctions for Russia and fewer weapons for Ukraine?

In any case, Trump’s patience with Europe has run out. And Europe will notice that even more than was already the case in his first term as president.

Derk Jan Eppink 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. Sánchez decide morir matando)

The cold drop — let us call things by their name — DANA and the rest, which has devastated towns, hamlets, roads and bridges above all in the vicinity of Valencia and caused the terrible human tragedy of hundreds of dead and thousands of shattered lives, ought also to be a colossal deluge that sweeps away a large part of the Spanish political class.

In the first place, of course, it ought to sweep away and sink forever the delinquent government of Pedro Sánchez, which has shown, even more if that is possible than on the countless other occasions in six years, that it will walk over corpses to achieve the only thing that matters to it, which is its survival as a government devoted to systematic abuse and to the enrichment of its members and of related individuals and groups.

Never has the maxim been more true that the government finds no time to govern because it is fully devoted to business. As also that the only thing the government does not steal is time to devote to effective management for the sake of the common good, time for what used to be understood as governing. They are too busy buying loyalties, plundering funds to pay for them, and cutting deals with organized crime to multiply their fortunes across Caribbean islands.

But it is not only negligence, indolence and corruption. This socialist government and its ideological partners in Brussels — who are the People’s Party, the Greens, Macron’s short-skirted liberals and the ultra-left — bear great responsibility for the severity of the floods and of other harmful phenomena of climatic origin. Because they have all embraced the green-climate ideology or theology, they destroy the habitat in the countryside with their regulatory jungle, they prohibit the cleaning of forests and watercourses, they demolish dams and weirs and other resources for taming precisely the excesses of nature in our European landscapes, built up and learned over thousands of years. Now some semi-educated, when not illiterate, politicians, allied with bureaucrats appointed to decide in fields wholly foreign to them, about which they know almost nothing, arrogate to themselves the right to repeal the results of millennial labor and knowledge, to scorn wisdom, customs and common sense, and to issue directives and regulations without cease to fine, repress and persecute practices that had been imposed by experience. And when, as a fruit of their Adamite, arrogant ideology and their contempt for reason, a disaster occurs, out they come — like the truly contemptible Ursula von der Leyen — to use the dead and the waters to turn their mill of the climate-change refrain that would vindicate all the barbarities they perpetrate in the name of preserving the planet.

Barbarities that serve, on the one hand, to curtail freedom and personal autonomy, to impose codes of social discipline in order to subject society to behaviors neither desired nor requested by those affected, and, of course, so that the elites whom those politicians serve may do lucrative business without much competition and always from a position of absolute advantage. The face masks of the Spanish politicians during COVID are only the smallest ice cube of the tip of the colossal iceberg of corruption that accompanies all that ideological verbiage.

These crimes are abominable and, on their own, already deserving of disqualification and prosecution and criminal punishment. But, grave as they are, they pale before what has been demonstrated by this government in these days. With its refusal to impose the state of emergency and to send, as would have been logical, the army and other security forces massively to the region for a great rescue and aid operation, what the government of Pedro Sánchez has wanted is, literally, to let the dead rot in the hands of the Valencian regional government. So as afterward to blame it for the monstrous resulting situation. This has been made crystal clear in the nauseating statements of the defense minister Margarita Robles and other members of that government, as well as by the para-official organ of the Sánchez government for the outrages of disinformation, which is the newspaper El País.

We are not going to speak of the ineptitude of the general services of the State, nor of the incompetence of all the socialist cronies of the favor network who occupy the managerial posts in the administration, because it is a fact that under Sánchez and after the pandemic nothing works except tax collection and propaganda.

And little comment is deserved by the impotence shown by the president of the Valencian regional government, Mazón, and other lamentable behaviors of his government, such as the cruel impertinence of the regional minister Nuria Montes in her orders to the relatives of the dead. They only demonstrate that terrible mediocrity of the Spanish political cadres, brought about by the discrediting of politics, which drives so far away from it the best-prepared and most qualified Spaniards, technically, culturally and perhaps humanly.

The state of emergency, which was inexcusable from the very first moment because of the gravity of the tragedy, plainly national — because it affects several regions and because the effects of the tragedy have a massive national impact. But the Sánchez government has wanted to pass the dead on to the PP government, even if in doing so it multiplied their number. And there lies the crime. Because we will probably come to confirm that many of the dead are not drowned but died in their homes, isolated, or perhaps we can say “murdered by the delay” of a rescue that in every European country without exception would have come sooner. And that was deliberately impeded. Because this murderous delay, which is still going on as this is being written, was avoidable with an immediate deployment of the army to open the supply routes and pull the population out of their entire homes from under tons of mud, reeds, trees and rubble.

This immense Spanish tragedy is set within a process of general degradation under a dictatorship of plunder and lies that already objectively governs and that will soon exercise greater violence with the militia-like turn of the screw at RTVE. This goes from being the propaganda machinery to being the war machinery of a government that, besieged by its corruption, its crimes, abuses, illegalities and its betrayal of the nation, has reached, like Nicolás Maduro, the conclusion that power is the only guarantor of its impunity. If they lose the one, they lose the other, and all those who have been the praetorian guard of the adventurer Pedro Sánchez end up sitting on the bench beside him. To Sánchez we Spaniards do not matter at all, neither alive nor dead. But now Sánchez and his coup-plotting and corrupt government have decided to hold out, to bunker down and to die killing. In the cold drop of Valencia they have just proved it.

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 Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in Human Events. SHEA BRADLEY-FARRELL: Kamala Harris has encouraged the largest sex trafficking operation in history)

Border security and immigration are critical issues for the November 5th election, and Americans must make an informed decision when voting. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ administration has claimed for four years that its “immigration policies” are “safe, orderly, and humane” for the millions flooding to U.S. borders. In reality, Harris presides over the largest human and sex trafficking scheme in history—and women and girls bear the brunt of it.

In 2022, eight hundred and ninety-five (895) illegal immigrant deaths on the Southwest Border (on U.S. territory) were reported by CBP , over 3 1/2 times the amount of deaths recorded in 2020, the last year of the Trump administration. Although 2022 is the last year of available reliable statistics, the numbers are sure to have risen. In addition, 22,000 rescues of individuals in distress occurred.

The majority of the deaths are due to exposure or to drowning and occurred in the sectors of Del Rio and Rio Grande Valley, Texas. And, a disturbing new trend has occurred: more women and girls are dying . In fact, the percentage of female deaths tripled , from 9 percent in 2020 to 27 percent in 2022. These figures suggest more women and girls are migrating illegally , incentivized by the Biden-Harris administration’s “catch and release” program and exploitation of U.S. asylum policies.

Alison Anderson, the wife of a U.S. Border Patrol agent of 16 years, has lived with her family on the Texas-Mexico border for almost a decade, first on a ranch near Big Bend National Park and then in Del Rio. Alison reported to me in an interview how she observes the exploitation of women firsthand:

“The groups, left on the U.S. side by the coyotes working for the cartels are mostly males…there are maybe two females in a group of forty. Countless women have been abandoned who refused to sleep with the males in the group … or because they are not physically strong enough to keep up…(and) they have no water or food … We’ve found pregnant eighteen year olds abandoned. We’ve found raped and brutalized and beaten teenagers abandoned and wandering around.”

Alison says she also sees those who “are the real victims—the women that get raped by over a dozen men and are left, and still haven’t been discovered. Their bones have been scattered by the critters and there’s nothing left of them.”

Although there is little to no data on human and sex trafficking at the U.S. border, eyewitness reports from Border Patrol, emergency medical professionals, and doctors highlight the increasing problem of females that enter the U.S. illegally—children, teenagers and women— being raped, abused, or sexually assaulted in some way.

A study done by Doctors Without Borders (2015-2016) sheds some light on the abuse migrants endure on their way from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) into Mexico. In this scenario, one out of three are sexually assaulted, including rape, assault and forced nudity. Over 68 percent report being victims of some type of violence.

Alison shares one of many stories where she and her husband discovered victims, this time a young child:

“My husband worked on a toddler, like eighteen months, a little girl from Brazil, who was pulled out of the river here. He was doing chest compressions on her while her ‘mother’—I use that term very loosely—was in the back of a Border Patrol vehicle complaining about not being warm enough…unfortunately we were not able to save her, she was under the water too long… she had been savagely brutalized [by rape, the horrific details of which have been left out] … It was suspected the ‘mother’ used her as payment to cross the river…These are the stories that nobody hears about.”

Little attention is given to the inhumanity of the human trafficking facilitated and encouraged by the border policies of Kamala Harris and her administration.

Few in Harris’ administration or the media even acknowledge it, an emergency medical services professional working on the border told me in an interview. He underlines with sadness how illegal immigration on the U.S. southern border, facilitated by brutal Mexican cartels, “dehumanizes” people. How many “broken young women,” who—hopeful for a new life and having paid thousands of dollars to the cartels—will comply “with anything” to be trafficked across the border. How women and children are raped, shot, and exploited in “drop houses” on the U.S. side of the border. He notes how women wear bar-coded bands on their wrists—labeled like livestock—so that they and the money they owe can be tracked by the cartels.

This EMS professional has worked at the Firefly Border Patrol Processing Center at the Texas-Mexico border (between Del Rio and Eagle Pass). He says this about the female victims that he routinely treats: “Their design is to get to the U.S., and it’s the price they pay for going through. They’re either going to pay upfront (with money), or pay afterward with indentured servitude or sex service, but someone’s got to pay. What’s strange is that our government facilitates it. Once they cross the border, they get them where they need to go.”

Alison Anderson says that the rape victims she sees are often afraid of retaliation “or worse” by the cartels if they “speak up about their experiences,” and will keep silent to protect other family members that want to come to the U.S. She describes their experiences:

“One female in particular came through the ranch and was a wreck emotionally. She did confide in a Border Patrol agent that she had been raped and the location was very close to our house … Shortly after, two teenage girls were found that had been raped and left for dead. One was barely responsive and the other, when (Border Patrol) went to help her, acted violently because of the trauma she had been through.”

Without public awareness of how these women and children are physically and psychologically damaged by being trafficked across U.S. borders, there will be no support structure for the victims.

The EMS professional warns that these “broken young women … are ‘product,’ labeled and tracked by the cartels…and now they’re ours—going to school with our grandkids, in our systems and our communities…Beyond the economic impact (on American communities) it’s going to have tremendous psychological and health impacts—for years and years.”

In addition to the tragic impact on U.S. border communities , the toll on U.S. state, local, and federal law enforcement has not been effectively analyzed or considered. A senior Border Patrol official in McAllen, Texas, reported to me in 2022, that suicide rates, domestic violence, and alcoholism are significantly higher now among Border Patrol agents than before Biden-Harris took office.

Agents have been “greatly impacted” by observing on a daily basis the abuse of illegal aliens by the Mexican cartels—the rapes, killings, and assaults in the “drop houses” located on the U.S. side of the border, where illegals await trafficking into the interior of the United States.

The past four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s willful destruction of U.S. borders have been a brutal and dark period in U.S. history, in stark contrast to the values and principles of American sovereignty, integrity, and security. American citizens must know the truth before casting their ballots on November 5th.

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 Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Derk Jan Eppink: Niet het kabinet-Schoof zit in een Europees isolement, maar de dromers van GroenLinks-PvdA)

Anyone listening to the delegates of the left-wing opposition and the voices of the progressive media would think that the Schoof cabinet is in complete isolation in Europe. With a prime minister who stands like a lost soul in the doghouse corner of the Council building in Brussels, outdone by his colleagues with the remark: ‘Back to the polder and shame on you’. But anyone who looks closely at the spectacle at the recent European summit of heads of government must conclude: the opposite is the case.

A different wind is blowing through Europe and the Schoof cabinet is a trendsetter, however much the progressive family dislikes it. The previous cabinet, Rutte IV, had already set the turn in motion, even with D66 on board. The then state secretary for Asylum and Migration Eric van der Burg (VVD) signed, on 15 May, together with fourteen other European member states, a ‘joint letter’ about ‘new solutions’ to counter ‘uncontrolled migration’. That letter described the situation, with a rapid increase in the number of migrants, as ‘unsustainable’. Goal: ‘thinking outside the box’.

During last week’s European summit the heads of government stepped up the pace further, under the leadership of the Netherlands, Italy and Denmark. The latter two countries are led by women who know how to get things done: the conservative Giorgia Meloni and the social democrat Mette Frederiksen.

The three initiators brought the political leaders of Austria, Cyprus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Malta and Slovakia to the table with them. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was also present. She directs the bureaucratic machinery, because without the Commission there is no starting point for European legislation. Coalition-building is compulsory fare in European politics. The rest is poetry.

So who is isolated then? Progressive Netherlands, which has entrenched itself in an intellectual and political self-isolation, as a bastion on the moral high plateau. In the assumption that changing migration and asylum policy cannot and must not happen. But it does happen, see the ‘Schoof table’. Europe has changed since the European elections, but that process has passed progressive Netherlands by. All the sacred cows that the PvdA and Groen Links invoke out of their merger reflex are being ‘filed vertically’ in Brussels, headed for the wastepaper. That is of course painful, but whoever, as the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev once said, is too late, is overtaken by history. In this case at the ballot box.

What is happening now is not new in Europe. The active Kati Piri, foreign affairs spokesperson for GroenLinks-PvdA, must know that too. The legal services of the European Commission and the European Council are inventive. What seemed impossible yesterday is feasible tomorrow. The Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene once said: ‘Under high pressure everything becomes fluid’. The Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, former president of the European Union, had wanted for some time for the European migration and asylum rules to be suspended for the protection of the Polish border with Belarus and Russia (Kaliningrad). Finland wants the same for the 1,600-kilometer-long border with Russia. And so it came to pass.

And what about the southern border of the European Union? Italy is moving the reception of asylum seekers and the assessment of asylum applications to Albania. Upon rejection these locations become ‘return hubs’, a system that already somewhat resembles the method Hungary applies: detention at the border, assessment and (in most cases) deportation.

The trend is: as few asylum seekers as possible within the EU, handling of asylum requests in third countries and return to a safe region outside the EU. The best thing would be to handle asylum requests in, for example, Africa and to organize reception in cooperation with local countries. That spares asylum seekers a long, sometimes deadly, journey to Europe, organized by criminal gangs.

The aim of the current talks is to bring forward elements from the Migration and Asylum Pact of May this year, which only takes effect in 2026, and to start implementing them immediately. The pressure is great and the legal services will surely find a way.

Step by step we are moving toward ‘fortress Europe’. That is not how it is sold in Brussels, but that is what it comes down to. The external border of the EU in Southern Europe will come to resemble that with Russia and Belarus. There are of course differences, but the intention is the same: a hard border. In other words, a real border.

Now progressive Dutch people will say: but Germany, France, Belgium and Spain were not at the table with Schoof. The explanation is simple. The German chancellor Olaf Scholz leads a cabinet with the greens who, after the murderous attack in Solingen, are themselves in a political death struggle. The rudder was turned among our eastern neighbors: border controls, certainly for half a year, deportation of 28 Afghans who had committed crimes, cuts to benefits and expulsion of illegals. German socialists and greens have been forced to make a turnaround that is indigestible for the merger party GroenLinks-PvdA. On 28 September next year there are Bundestag elections in Germany.

In France prime minister Michel Barnier has already announced a stricter asylum policy, although the French constitution states that asylum requests must be handled on French territory. But then again, Corsica is also France. Belgium, under the possible new federal prime minister Bart De Wever, will immediately join the ‘Schoof group’.

The Spanish socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez is the only outspoken critic, but he will not keep that up for long. Now that Italy is taking drastic measures, the influx there is falling, but it has shifted to Spain, where the number of asylum seekers is increasing sharply. Sanchez thinks the newcomers can go to work, but he does not know his own economy. Spain has the highest unemployment in the EU: 11.3 percent. Youth unemployment is 27 percent. Spanish voters are not waiting for the arrival of immigrants.

The Schoof table will get busier because the facts are imposing themselves on the heads of government. The voter is making his voice heard, throughout Europe, on the same theme. The migration pressure will not disappear any time soon. Africa now has 1.2 billion inhabitants; by 2100 that number is estimated at around 4 billion. The migration pressure will persist throughout this century and beyond. Open or even porous borders lead to the self-abolition of Europe.

What about the isolation of progressive Netherlands? All energy is directed at the fall of the sitting cabinet and that apparently feels like a warm bath. Result: an inward-looking gaze, denial of the angry outside world and for the rest willful deafness. Even PvdA leader Frans Timmermans, former first vice-president of the current European Commission, is remarkably silent. Or is there a quarrel in the merger party?

There is certainly something to improve about the Schoof cabinet, and its governing capacity in particular could be raised. But the claim that the Netherlands is isolated in Europe with this cabinet does not hold water. The Netherlands is helping to set the trend in Europe, is part of the conversation, sits at the table and builds coalitions, while progressive Netherlands has found its refuge in dreamland.

Derk Jan Eppink 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 Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. OPED: What’s The Best Way to Avoid Nuclear War?)

In 1984 Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick scorched the Democratic Party for always “blaming America first” for the problems in the world. The American people took to her charge and voted fifty states to one to re-elect President Ronald Reagan.

Five years later, the USSR collapsed, all of Eastern Europe joined the free world, and freedom appeared to be on the march. In the Americas by 1991, every nation had a near democratic government with the exceptions of Haiti and Cuba.

Fast forward to 2024, now forty years later, the Ambassador could now give that speech but instead of talking just about the leftist part of the Democratic Party, she could be describing conservative members of the CATO Institute.

In a September 12 essay, Doug Bandow, a CATO Senior Fellow, writes that the United States has to avoid and not fight future nuclear wars but that to do so the United States has to recognize the wars that might reach its shores are being kindled by US foreign interventions. In short, America is the real bad guy in this narrative.

Most importantly, the US is guilty of pursuing “global primacy.”

In the Middle East, we gave weapons to Israel which were used for the “brutal destruction” of Gaza, and thus in retaliation, the Houthis in Yemen attacked commercial shipping in response.

The US is regularly attacked by Iranian militias in Iraq, but it is our fault for being there in the first place. The US “enables” Israeli attacks on Iran which “triggers” retaliatory strikes. Overall writes Bandow, the US does much to “encourage” conflict in the Middle East.

In Europe, the US has “recklessly violated” assurances to Moscow including that NATO would not expand following the unification of Germany. Ukraine engaged in a reckless act of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline, so why shouldn’t Moscow attack Ukraine? As for Russia, they were never interested in threatening Europe even throughout the Cold War, and their interest in Ukraine is to establish a protective sphere of interest while the US is risking nuclear war to oppose.

And in the Pacific, Taiwan is an existential interest to China and being only 100 miles offshore from the mainland, is hardly of any real interest to the United States. The PRC disputes with the Philippines are only territorial and about small islands and similarly should not be of interest to the United States. The US commitment to the Philippines causes unnecessary concern in China and could lead to armed conflict. After all the US was wiling to go to war over Cuba in 1962 so we should understand why China is so concerned with Taiwan. As for North Korea, Bandow asserts that North Korea is “perpetually threatened” by the United States: and quips Bandow, every time the US flies a strategic bomber over the Korean peninsula, Kim Jong In probably adds a few nuclear bombs to his inventory.

Defending our allies with an extended deterrent in all these cases risks bringing nuclear retaliatory attacks onto the US mainland. And given the “aggressive US policy” says Bandow, none of these nuclear armed nations can afford to back down.

During the early years of the Cold War the US could threaten nuclear destruction without consequence. That all changed in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Today, the US is the one threatening the core interests of contending great powers including maritime control in the case of China, a buffer zone with respect to Russia and territorial integrity of North Korea.

Writes Bandow, all three—Russia, China and North Korea– have no designs on the United States. They pose no threat and have no territorial disputes with the United States.

However, putting more countries under our nuclear umbrella, does make the US a threat to China, Russia and North Korea. See defending our allies from invasion is bad form.

In reality, these three axis of evil simply want the right to invade and kill their neighbors, but Bandow cleverly says well there is no reason China should be “penned” inside its territory or that Putin’s Russia should not also “influence” its neighbors, and North Korea be free to terrorize the ROK.

So, Bandow thinks it would be better for the US to simply drop its extended deterrent strategy and avoid unnecessary war and bring its troops home. After all, he says the oceans are big and wide and the US has friendly neighbors.

The result could of course be that our allies such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine all build their own nuclear weapons and protect themselves.

Then the US can pretend that through surrender, the world will be safer and the United States would successfully safeguard its homeland.

As we contemplate NW Asia with China, Russia, the NPRK, the ROK, Japan and Taiwan all with nuclear arsenals.

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 Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. Will Harris’ campaign strategy lead her to electoral success?)

Kamala Harris’ campaign team is employing different strategies in the final weeks running up to the 2024 US presidential election. Two prominent tactics are distancing herself from President Joe Biden and borrowing themes from Donald Trump’s campaign. This raises several questions. Why is Harris’ campaign pursuing these strategies? Will they help her win the White House on Nov. 5?

Many Democratic leaders believe that President Biden has hindered rather than helped the party’s prospects in 2024. Among them is former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who reportedly pressured Biden to exit the race after his poor performance in a debate against Trump early in the summer. His economic record is not impressive and several wars have occurred during his presidency, such as the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and between Russia and Ukraine.

Historically, friction often arises between the staff of a sitting president and their vice president when the latter runs for president. This occurred in 2000, when Vice President Al Gore distanced himself from President Bill Clinton, particularly after Clinton’s involvement in several ethical scandals. In 2024, a similar dynamic is playing out. Harris recognizes that Biden’s approval ratings are low, so she is seeking to differentiate herself from him, especially in style. She aims to restore confidence among Democrats who have lost faith in Biden. Her campaign portrays her as a change-maker, conveying that the old guard of the Democratic Party is fading and that she represents the new face of change.

Additionally, political observers have noted that Harris is borrowing several themes from her opponent’s campaign. For example, she has adopted Trump’s idea of eliminating taxation on tips for restaurant workers. Republican strategist Frank Luntz commented: “Harris is taking pages out of the Republican playbook … There’s an important use of language, especially her focus on small business issues and describing herself as a capitalist. If you listen to these general statements, she sounds like a moderate Republican. The challenge for the Trump campaign is to move away from character attacks and focus on specific issues and her claims.”

On national security, Trump criticizes Biden and Harris for emboldening America’s adversaries, such as China, Russia and Iran. Harris has used a similar tactic by accusing Trump of being a weak leader that no foreign head of state respects. She said last month: “It’s well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy. He admires dictators and wants to be a dictator himself.”

However, these tactics are not necessarily winning over the American public. A political strategist noted that borrowing from an opponent’s playbook and relying on personal attacks can be tiresome to voters, who are “tired of the same old playbook, filled with lies, grievances and name-calling.” A complete political separation between Harris and the Biden White House is impossible, as she still needs the Democratic base to win the election. For millions of voters, she represents the preservation of Biden’s legacy. Moreover, Harris cannot fully agree with Trump on economic policies. For instance, while Trump intends to interfere in Federal Reserve policy, Harris firmly disagrees with this approach.

Ultimately, the scope of issues in any presidential campaign should surpass policy differences between a sitting president and their vice president when the latter is running to succeed them. It is also unlikely that voters will see little distinction between two presidential candidates simply because one borrows some themes from the other.

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