(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El mal fario)

The director of this newspaper, Bieito Rubido, has said that Pedro Sánchez is going to end very badly. And the PSOE, today more Sánchez’s gang than his party, has become angry and wants to pursue the director of El Debate judicially for wishing the president ill and, according to them, threatening him with nothing less than a bad end to his life. Put another way, in more colloquial terms, they want to throw the book at Bieto Rubido for putting a bad-luck curse on their beloved leader.

No one can be surprised any longer at the follies of a Spanish socialism that has sunk into leftist radicalism, into generalized and obscene corruption, and above all into an absolutely deranged and hysterical struggle against the truth and against the most obvious realities. There are many politicians who, with greater or lesser success, have tried to deceive Spaniards throughout their history. But no one has ever set out to treat them as absolute imbeciles the way Sánchez’s gang does, obscenely.

In these times of general upheaval in which Sánchez and his ministers are already launched, by way of abuse, insult, crime and arrogance, into a head-on collision with legality, the opposition, and all the sectors of Spanish society that refuse to bless crime and folly, it must be made very clear that Rubido is quite right. And that if he can be accused of anything, it is of being excessively cautious in formulating a prognosis that is, for the rest, fairly evident and foreseeable. Sánchez is going to end badly. Very badly. He will end as a dictator or as a defendant answering for his outrages. And the first option does not exclude the second. Because Sánchez has to end very badly, for the good, the freedom and the future of Spanish society and the Spanish nation.

As Rubido said, in these five days the husband of Begoña Gómez had the golden opportunity to announce his withdrawal and seek a less traumatic way of stepping away from politics. And one that, over time, would make it easier to manage later on, if not his impunity, then at least a certain leniency for him and his circle when Spain once again has a legal and legitimate government, a defender of legality and the Constitution.

But it is clear that Pedro Sánchez’s character and the disorders that define it are his worst enemy when it comes to seeking non-tragic ways of facing his immense and terrible responsibilities for the incalculable damage he has caused to the Spanish people and to the State and its institutions.

Even the most ardent fans of the head of government know today that his pause for supposed sentimental turmoil was nothing but one more piece of baseness. And that he did it with the intention of perpetrating a self-coup that would leave his hands free to strangle the justice system and the media that threaten the impunity and the brazenness with which he himself, his wife, his brother, his family, his ministers and the entire gang that is the Socialist Party have moved and continue to move.

What Sánchez has achieved is that not only Spain, not only Europe, but literally the whole world now knows some of the most sordid aspects of the Spanish head of government’s circle, which resembles a company with management practices proper to establishments for the exercise of prostitution. And that even in the newspapers in principle most friendly to his ideology, it is a constant that the Spanish government comes across as a putrid quagmire composed of very minor beings of the lowest human and moral quality.

Europe shows every day more symptoms of weariness with the arbitrariness and whims of a progressivism that plunges into poverty, falling competitiveness, deindustrialization, educational collapse and ideological ravings that cause pain, insecurity and failure. Sánchez and his party, now irrational and fanaticized, with a government of separatists, communists, terrorists, parasites and traitors, placed themselves at the vanguard of that ideology which generates violence and distress but which is already in full shipwreck because of its failure across the whole continent.

No one is going to help Sánchez, and soon he will not even arouse the pity of his hired guns and his «Charos» suckled by his media and his outlets paid for by everyone. That being so, his only way of surviving will be that of the dictator, of the bunkered dictator immersed in the total conflict of war on the opposition, society and freedom, and with ever more guilt on his back, now with no possibility of return to society. Bieito Rubido was right. He could have resigned and bet on trying to let time make people forget, or at least fade, his responsibilities in the profound existential crisis of Spain that he has so aggravated. He lost the opportunity and he will end badly, very, very badly. And it is not a threat at all. It is an obviousness.

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 Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. US wooing Iraqi PM in bid to reduce Iran's influence)

Next week’s visit to the US by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani will take place in a very complex regional context. Israel’s ongoing military operations in the Gaza Strip have been exploited by pro-Iranian militias to carry out armed attacks against American military bases in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, the US wants to strengthen the capabilities of its partners in the region to confront terrorist organizations. This comes at a time when Washington is seeking to transform its military role in the Middle East, within the framework of focusing on the most potent threats to America’s security and its interests in the international arena.

Several issues will be on the agenda on Monday, when the Iraqi PM holds his first meeting at the White House since he assumed power in October 2022. He will meet US President Joe Biden and many American officials.

US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski said in an interview with Reuters last month that Daesh still poses a threat to the security and stability of the Iraqi state and that the mission of the military coalition led by the US to rout the group is not yet over. Therefore, Washington is focusing on building Iraq’s security capabilities to ensure the permanent defeat of Daesh and allow it to confront future terrorist threats. Since 2012, the US Congress has allocated more than $2 billion of Foreign Military Financing to build Iraqi security capabilities.

However, in January, Al-Sudani stated that the justification for the presence of the US-led coalition in Iraq had come to an end and that there was a need for dialogue with Washington to set a timetable for ending the mission of combating Daesh in Iraq. With the increase in American military strikes against armed militias in the country in response to the attacks on its bases since Oct. 7, pressure has increased on Al-Sudani to remove US troops from Iraq. This is despite the fact that their mission is today limited to providing support and training to Iraqi forces to enhance their capabilities to prevent the return of Daesh and protecting the Iraqi state against the threats of other terrorist organizations.

The US administration opposes any unplanned withdrawal from Iraq, as it fears a complete withdrawal may lead to the return of Daesh, in addition to making Iraq even more of an arena for Iranian influence, thus wasting the efforts that America has made in Iraq over the past two decades.

With the increase in armed operations by pro-Iranian Iraqi militias against American military bases in Iraq and Syria, Washington has, in recent months, urged Baghdad to make more efforts to prevent such attacks. The US administration has called for Iraq to increase security around all military bases that host American forces, prevent the militias from obtaining advanced weaponry, prosecute those who have carried out attacks against American bases and installations in Iraq, and respect the pledge it made to guarantee the security of American diplomatic and military facilities in the country.

The Biden administration also seeks to prevent Iran from using the Iraqi financial system to circumvent US sanctions. Therefore, it restricts Iraq’s access to its funds in America in an attempt to eliminate money laundering, which many trends indicate benefits both Iran and Syria. The US Federal Reserve imposes strict restrictions on international dollar transfers to Iraqi commercial banks.

Washington has also called on Baghdad to reform its financial system to prevent Iran from benefiting from it. Among the most prominent required reforms are improving the oversight of monetary transfers, preventing the financing of Iranian-backed militias and enhancing transparency in the economic system. The Iraqi government has pledged to implement these reforms but little progress has been made so far. The US is pressuring the Baghdad government to act as soon as possible.

The multiple visits exchanged between American and Iraqi officials reveal that Iraq is still a priority in US foreign policy and that it is the cornerstone of regional stability. The Biden administration is focusing on consolidating relations with Baghdad and moving their bilateral relations into a permanent strategic security partnership, as Iraq remains one of the most essential battlefields against terrorism.

America’s search for a stable strategic partnership with Iraq comes within the framework of its policy to limit Iranian influence, which Washington sees as one of the key threats to its strategic interests in the region.

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.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sánchez puede ser mucho peor)

The ferocious campaign against the VOX party, which had its most intense moments between the municipal and the general elections, has not subsided in intensity; it has changed in its forms. When everyone should by now have accepted its failure.

The objective was to finish off this party, and what it has achieved is to demonstrate that a very firm electoral floor has already consolidated and does not give way even under the most adverse conditions possible.

Neither with 90% of the media announcing its disappearance and inventing division, internal discord and desertions, nor with the various private campaigns of assorted enemies, has the desired effect been produced.

Few parties outside the government would have withstood so firmly a campaign so barbaric and intense — one that there has not been in Spain even against parties that defend terrorism.

That does not mean it did no damage. Some of the damage was a boomerang. Because the dent of the asphyxiating harassment of VOX was enough to do great harm to Núñez Feijóo, so much as to deny him the government.

And it was precisely the campaign of the People’s Party and its media that demanded VOX give the PP the majority the latter claimed to have and never had. The self-inflicted defeat, aimed at VOX’s backside, will go down in the annals of blunders in electoral-strategy design.

Never has a party that had won the elections in alliance devoted itself so intensely to harming its only possible ally, to the point of depriving itself of victory.

Not everyone in the other parties has understood this, and of course there are many in several of them, on left and right, who dream of a Spain without VOX, whether by harassment and demolition or by outlawing it.

It is quite possible that there are fools in the PP to whom the outlawing of VOX would seem convenient.

Let them be careful, because if Sánchez goes off to the Valley of the Fallen to do a photo shoot among skulls and bones, he does so, of course, to use the dead in the most miserable way for his propaganda.

But also to visualize that, faced with the catastrophe his government confronts — with a mountain of unheard-of corruption scandals and with Sánchez’s own wife, Begoña Gómez, at the center of the whole plot — he is preparing for a total confrontation with such a civil-war character that it will already be a civil war, though for the moment a cold one.

The propaganda machinery set in motion for the visit to the Valley of the Fallen, which provided from a single official source the images of Sánchez and company advancing through the basilica and the tunnels like conquerors and owners, makes the warlike language clear.

Meanwhile, the friendly media, the most militant ones and the others of more surreptitious propaganda, were again setting their sights on VOX and the «concord laws», which in two regions where this party governs with the PP have replaced the «democratic memory laws» of the Popular Front-style, revanchist sectarianism.

In reality, those concord laws merely recover a spirit of the Transition that treats equally the sides of a war they consider a common tragedy of all Spaniards.

This spirit was abolished, prohibited by Zapatero as soon as he came to government after the 11-M bombings. And today it is a persecuted spirit, because for today’s Popular Front-ists, for the government and all the media of the left’s hegemonic lies, there is only one impeccable side and one demonic side.

The media all ring out that this conflict is because VOX denies relatives the right to recover the bodies of the war’s victims. Which is a miserable lie, whoever the announcer saying it may be. VOX is not against a dignified burial for those who remain in a mass grave. It defends that right for all. For the victims of the Popular Front and for the Nationalist ones, whose remains are often reburied or abandoned in the grave when the Democratic Memory crews identify them as «Francoists».

VOX is against the Democratic Memory Law that serves to finance an immense network of rackets of civil-war revanchism. But above all because it is a totalitarian law that wants to divide and set Spaniards against each other even more, and to impose lies as official and obligatory truths, and to prohibit, persecute and punish truths because they are not to power’s liking.

Sánchez can use that law for a head-on clash that makes it impossible to debate and investigate all the countless crimes of the various criminal schemes developed under his government.

The radical application of Sánchez’s Democratic Memory Law could turn it into something very similar to that Law Against Fascism that the criminal Nicolás Maduro and the no less criminal Delcy Rodríguez pulled out of their sleeve — both with very close contacts with the Spanish government through Rodríguez Zapatero.

That law, just passed by the narco-communist dictatorship, gives entirely free rein to seize, fine and detain — and, in the case of Venezuela, to torture and murder — in absolute arbitrariness, anyone suspected of fascism, of sympathies with conservative forces, or of criticism of Bolivarian socialism.

It is rightly said that the immense majority of Spaniards no longer respond to the left’s lures with hackneyed campaigns against fascism or Francoism. That is true.

But an absolutely incompetent opposition has allowed and helped to consolidate the PSOE’s maneuver of regime change to impose laws with brutal mechanisms of coercion.

They are laws so that a dictator or a regime with an unscrupulous autocrat can have all the power, of absolutely arbitrary use, to persecute the entire opposition it declares an enemy.

They are laws against freedom, against the truth and for dictatorship. And with a tsunami of corruption cases and now manifest diversions, embezzlement of national and European funds that reach his government and his own home, Sánchez is capable of anything.

If he has no serious and convincing warnings to dissuade him, he is capable of trying to threaten all of society in order to keep power, which is now the only thing that grants impunity to himself, to his wife and to that entire council of ministers already under a hundred thousand suspicions. Sánchez may be close to being much worse than until now.

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 Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. “Nuclear War” Book & Jacobson’s Nuclear Confusion)

The new book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobson has received multiple rave reviews. It portrays a scenario in which billions of people die within three days of a North Korean strike on the US with two nuclear warheads. The problem? The US deterrent policy that Jacobsen believes is based on nuclear war fighting, and which relies on an automatic launch on warning strategy if Washington discovers a missile has been launched at the United States.

The nuclear Armageddon story starts with North Korea launching a one megaton bomb that hits the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, described as a “bolt-out-of-the blue strike” for which the US is unprepared. Another nuclear weapon takes out a nuclear power plant in California. The United States immediately responds with a launch of 82 ICBMs at the DPRK but inside a short six-minute window within which the US President supposedly must decide whether and how to retaliate.

Jacobson also argues the US has to use our ICBMs because submarine-based missiles cannot be launched to fit within the six-minute window. And since as she claims, Russia’s early warning satellite and radar system are, unfortunately, not very good, and since the US ICBM range is inadequate to hit North Korea without going over Russia, Moscow incorrectly believes that the US retaliatory missile launch is on its way toward Russia, not North Korea.

Believing that the US launch is a first strike against Russia and Putin having adopted a new policy of “launch on warning of an attack,” Jacobson concludes that “Putin will not wait” for confirmation that nuclear warheads have landed on Russia soil. Russia will then launch a massive nuclear strike on the United States. And this would in turn push the United States into attacking Russia with its on-alert remaining nuclear force [which at the start of the war numbered some 1800 strategic nuclear warheads according to Jacobsen.]

The resulting tens of millions of immediate deaths would then be followed by the breakdown of food and energy supplies and the subsequent death of additional hundreds of millions of Americans and Russians. Even worse, the 300 billion pounds of soot produced by the massive fires brings with it “nuclear winter”, as the sun’s warming rays are blocked out from reaching the earth’s surface. The death of billions of people worldwide results.

In a number of interviews with Vanity Fair and Mother Jones, for example, and in reviews by the New York Times and the Cyber Brief, Jacobson argues that the US has a plan to conduct nuclear war fighting which is automatic and set down as a series of previously adopted requirements that leave US officials little leeway to change the US response.

Jacobson also say that one person, the President of the United States, can make the decision to destroy the world, and can do so even without very much information. And she warns, the military “war mongers” have a very “aggressive culture” that has a predilection to “jam” the President toward a “quickly launching a massive retaliatory strike.”

She argues that any Presidential candidate must therefore be assessed on whether that person is stable and not erratic, including as one reviewer noted, an “unsteady commander should not be in charge.” And this is really important, as the country is “at the brink” of possible nuclear war, the book argues. Not coincidentally, the title of a new series of essays being published by the New York Time is “At the Brink,” which in turn was initiated as a means of fully exploring the nuclear disarmament issues raised by the “Oppenheimer” movie.

Unfortunately, the scenario adopted by Jacobson is a “cooked the books” argument. Her book is filled with seriously misunderstood US policy prescriptions, and a gross failure to understand the basics of nuclear deterrence. She asserts nuclear weapons do not make us strong, and need to be significantly reduced in importance, and instead of modernization the US should seek arms control and disarmament.

Not only that, the scenario adopted doesn’t make any strategic sense as well. Why would North Korea just attack the US with two nuclear warheads, knowing full well the US could turn the DPRK into a parking lot?

While admitting that nuclear deterrence has worked perfectly for roughly 75 years, the book warns deterrence might definitely fail and if it fails, any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how small, will result in all out nuclear war. Jacobson also argues that all US previous military war-gaming, going through multiple scenarios of how nuclear weapons might be used, universally ends in general nuclear war. And thus, she concludes, the US policy of “mutual assured destruction” often referenced as “MAD” is itself “mad” and not reliable as a deterrent strategy!

She is wrong on all counts. The US however does not have a “MAD” nuclear strategy and does not have an automatic series of retaliatory strikes to carry out. The US also does not have a launch on warning strategy or policy, although she correctly notes that Russia does. Thus, the US President does not have to respond within six minutes which seems to be based on the assumption that the US does indeed have a “launch on warning” deterrent strategy.

Furthermore, the US would first try and shoot down the incoming North Korean warhead with its GBI or ground-based interceptors, or if available, a better system that is now being discussed and was unanimously recommended by the Strategic Posture Commission.

Jacobson does have the US shoot four interceptors at the incoming warhead, but the result is rigged: they all miss. She references Dr. Ted Postol of MIT that the US missile defense system is only successful 50% of time even in “scripted tests” but in the real world “cannot be effective” says Jacobson and would have almost a zero chance of intercepting a ballistic missile warhead.

However, in fact the GBI system and all national and theater missile defense systems deployed by the United States actually have been successful in nearly 84% of all tests. And while the GBI deployments in Alaska and California number only 44, that small deployment has been due in large part to disarmament advocates that have opposed all US national missile defenses going back to the 1972 ABM treaty.

Dr. Postol however has also been totally wrong about the high success of the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense that Jacobson explains many Americans with whom she has spoken believe the US can duplicate. The Iron Dome missile defense has indeed shot down an estimated 90% of Hamas and Hezbollah missile launches aimed at Israeli settlements.

This Iron Dome success rate was ridiculed by Dr. Postol as unproven. He explained that the Israelis did not suffer casualties but not due to the effectiveness of missile defense but because Israelis learned to run faster to the shelters. Noted Israeli missile defense expert Dr. Uzi Rubin commented that Postol’s “fortune cookie” analysis was ridiculous and was based on an animus toward missile defense rather than a reliance upon scientific fact.

Apart from trying to intercept the incoming NK warhead, for some reason Jacobson rushes the President to fire back and only with land-based ICBMs. However, there is no reason for the President to respond within a 6 minutes window. Even if NK launched a nuclear missile from a submarine and from just off the coast of North Carolina, for example, the warhead could arrive at the Pentagon much more quickly than from an ICBM, but again, what response by the US would require a near immediate Presidential launch decision, especially when no further North Korean missile launches have been detected?

Furthermore, a much more likely US retaliatory response could be to either launch a SLBM from the Pacific from a US Ohio class submarine. Or if available, a Navy submarine or ship based nuclear armed theater cruise missile, (SLCM-N), a technology development that was a top recommendation of the 2023 Strategic Posture Review Commission.

In these scenarios, there would be no over-flight of Russia territory, the US could still destroy key North Korean targets promptly, including the NK leadership, and would be a relatively limited response. A reasonable result? The North Korean launches do not continue. Armageddon does not ensue.

Contrary to what Jacobson assumes, US deterrent strategy is not about “war fighting” but is to ensure the US is able to credibly respond to any adversary launch of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies, a capability to deter being required across the spectrum of conflict. Such capability is not a “plan for nuclear war” or a “catalyst for Armageddon” as claimed.

It is true that Putin has appeared to have adopted a launch-on warning strategy. But even worse is that his strategy of “escalate to de-escalate” has also been adopted by the Russian leader. Here Jacobsen gets totally confused. It is not as she claims the strategy of the United States to use nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict. In fact, the US military has repeatedly underscored that the enemy introduction of nuclear weapons into a conventional conflict results in “nothing holds”—meaning our conventional war strategies of victory would fail.

And while indeed it was General John Hyten who brought this Russian strategy to our attention, Jacobson mangles the facts. The US nuclear umbrella and extended deterrence over our NATO and Western Pacific allies are not an aggressive and unwarranted “escalate” strategy.

General Hyten warned years ago “escalate to de-escalate” is a Russian not an American strategy. For example, Moscow attacks conventionally, as they did Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. And then if faced with a counterattack which might succeed, Moscow threatens the limited use of battlefield nuclear weapons which former President Yeltsin ordered Russia to develop in 1999. The objective? To get the US to stand down and not come to the defense of an ally attacked by Russia.

Thus, the Russian “escalate to de-escalate” policy is actually an “escalate to win” strategy, as Dr. Brad Roberts has explained. The policy is to secure the fruits of aggression and fundamentally eliminate the US conventional and extended nuclear umbrella.

When during the Cold War, the US would bring its nuclear capability to central Europe if faced with a conventional strike through the Fulda Gap by the Warsaw Pact nations, it was to prevent aggression and war in the first place, not to help aggression succeed.

In conclusion, the scenario offered by Annie Jacobson will scare the uninformed. And if believed might undermine the American public’s support for our nuclear deterrent.

In particular the story is a rigged critic on American ICBMs and Missile Defenses, the two bet noirs the disarmament community has been trying to kill for nearly the past half century.

Jacobson repeats all the criticisms about these systems and weaves them into a threadbare doomsday tapestry. We are told ICBMs can be launched in minutes; ICBMs don’t have adequate range and thus have to fly-over Russia; ICBMs are first strike weapons; ICBMs will end the world; ICBMs cannot be recalled.

Indeed, ICBMs can be promptly launched but that is a positive attribute because it tells an enemy that their key assets cannot remain in a sanctuary free from being destroyed. Given these assets are what they value most, holding such valuable assets at risk is the central plank of US deterrent policy through at least 14 Presidential administrations.

In the 75 years of the nuclear age, no ballistic missile has been launched at the USA. And no launch committee meeting has ever been convened at Strategic Command to evaluate such a launch.

And no President has ever had to decide to launch an ICBM or SLBM.

To eliminate deterrence, or weaken it, without replacing the system with something equally effective, would be a dereliction of duty.

And could indeed put the lives of billions of folks on this planet at risk.

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. EU's world-first AI law to reverberate in America)

The European Parliament last week passed the Artificial Intelligence Act, which is viewed as the world’s first comprehensive law to define the legal aspects of AI. It provides for EU-wide regulations in reference to quality of data, transparency, human oversight and accountability. The law will apply to the providers and developers of all AI systems that are marketed or used within the EU, regardless of whether they are based inside or outside the bloc. Therefore, it will have implications for the use of AI in the US.

The act will impose fines on any company or group violating its rules. The exact amount will be a percentage of the global annual revenue that AI generates. The European AI law is being defended as not stifling innovation. Quite the opposite, in fact, as small and medium-sized enterprises will be adopting AI techniques. This will enhance innovation.

The European law on AI squares well with the main scope of AI, which is to achieve a competitive advantage in e-commerce. This will be gained in the processes of manufacturing, managing human resources, fostering customer relations and promoting advertisements and marketing. In other words, enterprises’ performance will be raised and this can increase profits, lower costs, save time, better collect data and reduce production and distribution errors, among other advantages.

The political history of the new act began in April 2021. It was the culmination of negotiations between the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. Agreement on the text was reached in December 2023. Last week’s vote in the European Parliament turned that political consensus into law.

Most of its bylaws will enter into force two years after its introduction. However, any provision that has to do with the application of prohibited AI systems will be enforced within six months of its signing into law. In addition, any of its stipulations in reference to generative AI will be enforced after one year.

The act will abolish several AI applications that are considered to be a threat to the rights of citizens. These are related to biometric categorization systems that originate from sensitive characteristics. This will also deal with the practice of untargeted scraping of facial images by the internet or in CCTV. Such a practice aims to create a facial recognition database. These AI applications will be forbidden, in addition to the techniques that AI employs to control emotion recognition. These methods are considered manipulative of human behavior and exploit humans’ vulnerabilities.

The law is a direct response to the proposals submitted by average European citizens to the Conference on the Future of Europe in 2021-22. Many of their concerns centered on how to boost the European economic advantage in a few strategic economic sectors. They wanted to improve their ability to access information and data regardless of any particular trait or ethnic, political or religious affiliation.

The European AI Office will now be founded. It will function according to the European Commission’s rules. It will not conflict with the AI authorities and government bodies controlling the AI operations of individual member states. It will rather offer guidance on how European countries can best utilize AI and its capabilities. It promises not to discriminate against any European government or organization using this technology. However, political observers will not rule out a potential conflict involving this office and European entities since the implementation of AI involves complex processes and procedures and they can lead to many conflicts of interest among the people employing them.

Two different reactions have emerged regarding the new European AI Act. Human rights groups have condemned it. The Access Now organization issued a statement saying: “The new AI Act is littered with concessions to industry lobbying, exemptions for the most dangerous uses of AI by law enforcement and migration authorities, and prohibitions so full of loopholes that they don’t actually ban some of the most dangerous uses of AI.”

On the other hand, the UN General Assembly is studying many draft texts as it seeks to announce a statement that can be a general declaration of humankind’s use of AI.

Finally, the European AI Act will have a great impact on any company doing business in the EU. Every American company must review its AI systems before they are used in Europe. This reviewing process could be costly and time-consuming. And American businesses cannot rely on US law because there is no federal legislation that allows or bans certain AI policies. The US government and private sector companies have no other option but to abide by the European law.

The only American alternative to this law would be to rely on state laws and regulations governing privacy in the US. But this would be a very short-sighted approach as far as AI laws in America are concerned. Therefore, the Europeans are far ahead of any other nation or group of nations in providing guarantees on how to use AI the right way.

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.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Delcy y Zapatero, más allá del amor)

Many of you will not know that last Tuesday a Bolivian woman, the former constitutional president Jeanine Áñez, completed her third year in a Bolivian prison.

In lamentable conditions she is serving an unjust and unjustifiable sentence. All the charges against her are falsehoods, fabrications of a narco-communist regime. Many other patriotic Bolivians met the same fate.

What you will also not know is that one day later the former prime minister of Spain, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, arrived in Bolivia.

Anyone who thinks he came to demand the freedom of Áñez and of the hundreds of political prisoners that the regime of Luis Arce already holds in its dictatorial and criminal drift is mistaken.

No, Zapatero came to Bolivia with Delcy Rodríguez, the one of the suitcases that we do not know how many times, in what number, and through how many airports and ports have arrived in Spain in recent years.

Delcy is a criminal drug trafficker banned in Europe, vice-president of the murderer Nicolás Maduro and a very great friend of the Spanish government. What Sánchez, Zapatero, Borrell and the rest of the socialists have with Delcy seems much more important than love.

Also with them was the symbol of narco corruption, the former Colombian president Ernesto Samper, and some other luminaries of the Puebla Group and the São Paulo Forum, the multinational of the symbiosis between the communist movement and organized crime that exploits drug trafficking.

Zapatero and his illustrious company had arrived on a goodwill mission — if that is possible with people of this ilk — a mission of reconciliation or peace among their own. For in Bolivia a war has broken out between the former president Evo Morales and President Luis Arce.

They were friends and Arce was Morales’s minister, but power has these things. Both want to command the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and both want to control the businesses still held by a country sinking into bankruptcy, into the incompetence of its rulers, and into crime. The businesses are the mines and cocaine. And precious little else.

What matters, of course, is the main weapon for the expansion of the entire totalitarian communist movement in the subcontinent, which is cocaine. That the whole Bolivian people suffer ever more, and that its prisoners live wretchedly and die, is not what worries this gang gathered there.

What worries the Puebla Group is that wars among their own greatly harm business. Bolivia is a key country in the massive expansion of the coca business and drug trafficking.

We do not know whether the two Rodríguezes, Zapatero and Delcy, have succeeded in their mediation work. We also know that Delcy, vice-president of the most murderous and torturing regime in America today, is not moved by political prisoners.

They say Zapatero is not moved either, even though he knows about them, because he has spent a decade now in the service of his friend the murderer Maduro in all kinds of matters that are always profitable but never honorable.

Jeanine Áñez, as interim constitutional president, had handed over power to Luis Arce in an impeccable transition at a ceremony in the presence of King Felipe VI on November 8, 2020.

It took the new president only a few months to arrest his predecessor and many others who had done their duty in the violent crisis of November 2018, after the attempted electoral fraud by the communist and drug trafficker Evo Morales and his subsequent flight in the face of the popular uprising.

If Zapatero’s role is repugnant — not only in his visit to Bolivia this week but throughout his entire existence since 11-M, and of course in his very murky role as a fixer for the worst Spanish-American criminals — one must also describe as contemptible the silence on this anniversary of those responsible at the Organization of American States and the European Union, Luís Almagro and Josep Borrell.

Because it was the OAS and the EU that vouched for Áñez assuming the presidency when those ahead of her in rank refused it. In the past three years we have not once heard Borrell demand the freedom of Áñez and of the Bolivian political prisoners. Lately he seems dedicated only to insulting and defaming Israel, once again taking on that role of defender of the Iranian regime and its puppets in Gaza and Lebanon.

Josep Borrell is another who, like Zapatero, has succumbed to the charms of the São Paulo Forum and has campaigned in favor of all its candidates throughout the shameful years in which he has held the supposed representation of the EU’s foreign policy.

All of them are enemies of freedom, all of them linked to the great cartels of the FARC, the ELN, the Venezuelan government and army, the Mexican cartels that are partners of López Obrador and today the owners of half of Ecuador.

All of them have had the official support of the European Union thanks to Borrell, the Spanish government and the PSOE, utterly devoted to the Puebla Group in all its interests.

With special obscenity in the protection and subsidizing of the Cuban dictatorship with European money.

All these sad and lamentable facts would have at least one positive effect if they led Spaniards to understand the true character of the forces that govern under Sánchez.

And to reflect on the colossal danger of this invasion of Europe, through Spain, by Ibero-American organized crime with its ideological banners — a plan forged in its day by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, which began twenty years ago and is today a reality.

Because if the Spanish socialists have so very much affinity with the murderers and torturers with whom they sit down, travel and share suitcases, it should not surprise us that one day they will treat Spaniards as they are treating Cubans, Bolivians, Venezuelans or Nicaraguans.

And if someone now comes and says that in Europe that is not possible, I would answer that in the Europe of the 21st century everything is already as possible as in the 20th.

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 Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. Financial challenges will hamper Trump's election campaign)

Former US President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election, faces a significant dilemma following civil judgments requiring him to pay more than $440 million. As Trump’s legal bills continue to swell — he is also the defendant in four separate criminal cases — his team is examining the options for paying the fines imposed on him amid questions about whether he will be forced to use other sources of financing, sell assets and real estate or even declare bankruptcy, an option six of his businesses have resorted to in the past.

One of Trump’s criminal cases is taking place in New York, where he is accused of making hush-money payments ahead of the 2016 election. The judge supervising the case has set March 25 as the trial’s start date, despite the objections of Trump’s lawyer, who sought to postpone it due to the former president’s competing legal and political obligations.

In Florida, Trump has been charged over his handling of classified documents upon leaving office, while in Washington and Georgia he is accused over his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

Of course, the fines Trump has been hit with threaten the financial liquidity of the former president and billionaire businessman and raise questions about his political future, as well as the fate of his real estate empire.

There are a set of possible options that Trump may resort to when paying the fines, including resorting to the Republican National Committee. His efforts to change its leadership — with the appointment of a new chair to replace Ronna McDaniel and the move of Lara Trump, his son Eric’s wife, to co-chair — are considered by some to be an indication of the possibility of Trump asking the committee to help him pay the fines. However, this would pose a threat to his and the Republican Party’s chances in November’s elections.

If the funds requested in the New York civil fraud case are not paid, the ruling becomes effective immediately and the city can begin seizing Trump’s assets. The judge could order Trump to produce his bank account records or directly seize his proceeds. Even if an appeal is filed against the rulings, it is not common for judges to reduce the fines imposed. Trump also cannot delay paying the fines until after an appeal is heard, as he must place the money in the court’s account. If Trump truly cannot afford these provisions, he should declare bankruptcy.

Forbes magazine estimates the value of Trump’s New York real estate at $690 million. His total wealth is estimated at $2.6 billion, including $870 million-worth of golf clubs and resorts, $190 million in real estate outside of New York City and $640 million in “liquidity and personal assets.” So, there might be a possibility of him paying the fines from cash and personal assets.

One recent report suggested that Trump may resort to selling something, but it does not necessarily have to be real estate, as he could sell some investments or other assets.

He has denied any fraud and denounced the exploitation of the judiciary against a presidential candidate who is ahead in the opinion polls.

It is noteworthy that Trump was given a 30-day implementation period following the ruling on Feb. 16, during which he has to either deposit the fine into the court’s account or obtain a bond. Even if he had $440 million in cash, which is unclear, paying the penalties could wipe out his accounts. Another solution is a GoFundMe campaign that seeks to raise the sum that Trump owes. The campaign has already raised more than $1.3 million. It is being organized by Elena Cardone, a woman from Florida who describes herself as “a mother and an ardent supporter of American values.”

Finally, in comparison to what the Republican Party’s front-runner faces, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have the advantage of being able to raise money together, which their Republican competitors cannot do at this moment. President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and their allies started the 2024 election year with a whopping $140 million in cash, including $46 million available to Biden’s presidential campaign and $21 million to the Democratic National Committee, in addition to $24 million from the Biden-aligned political action committee Future Forward.

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.

India is coming of age – already the world’s most populous nation and democracy, by 2030 at the latest it will become the world’s third largest economy. Prime Minister Modi has set the pace and has become the personal embodiment of India’s success. He leads a self-confident nation, albeit one facing many challenges, and has established his position on the world stage. Modi has shifted India from its old “non-alignment” of the Nehru era to “multi-alignment”. The decades-long links with Russia now include access to oil at discount prices while continuing as a major recipient of Russian defence equipment. But now France has become India’s second largest external defence supplier after Russia, while relations with the United States have steadily improved in the face of the rising challenge of China.

There has now been a complete turnaround in India’s relations with the USA. Previously “due to India’s ideological proclivities as much as strategic calculations” the US was long regarded with suspicion by India. In 2005 Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, was misguidedly refused a visa to the USA. Eighteen years on he was being welcomed to the White House on a state visit, his eighth visit as Prime Minister. US-Indian bilateral trade has increased tenfold since 2000 – from $20 billion to over $200 billion today, making the US India’s biggest individual trading partner.

Four years ago, President Trump and Prime Minister Modi vowed to strengthen a United States-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership, reaffirming the pledge to support the transfer to India of advanced U.S. military and civil technology and India’s permanent membership on a reformed UN Security Council. Last October, President Biden reemphasised this commitment, with cooperative ventures in defence manufacturing and a whole range of advanced civil high technologies.

Foreign Minister Jaishankar, who had been India’s ambassador to Washington 2013-15 following his time in Beijing, readily admits that the hard realities of today’s world mean that the US is now seen as a key partner. While India’s multi-alignment and quest for strategic autonomy mean that it will not bind itself as closely as the US may wish there will be ever-closer mutual commitment in the years ahead. The growing political investment in the Quad, the Indo-Pacific quadrilateral security dialogue embracing India, the US, Japan and Australia, is evidence of this new alignment of geo-political outlook.

In this increasingly transactional world, India will want to see what its friends bring to the table, what capabilities they have, and how reliable they will be. Instead of just talking about China, it is time that the West paid far greater attention to India and its growing capabilities. India is potentially the most vital ally of the West as the world becomes more clearly divided between old-fashioned, aggressive autocracies and the liberal democracies that seek peace with freedom and a better world.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Von der Leyen, notre amour)

The People’s Party in the European Parliament now has its candidate to preside over the European Commission, and it is the current president, Ursula von der Leyen. A Rhineland German, who was a minister under Angela Merkel — first highly controversial in the Ministry of Family, then an uncontroversial catastrophe in the Ministry of Defense — she was a last-minute compromise that Macron and Merkel pulled out of the hat in 2019 after many other failed options.

The People’s Party seems very pleased with the record, because it is putting her forward again. Even though in 2019 she was elected by only 9 votes out of 706, and all thanks to the naive Polish conservatives who believed her promise that at last, with her, the European Commission would respect a right-wing government in Poland. They voted in her favor and against the vote of all their colleagues in the ECR group, among them VOX, and very soon they understood the terrible mistake of having believed this German woman who called herself non-sectarian and open to all ideas and contributions.

The truth is that, in payment for that candid vote in favor, Von der Leyen has been the instigator of a policy of harassment, defamation, disinformation and economic blockade against the conservative government of Poland, until she managed, with Germany’s help, to bring it down. Today Poland is governed by the so-called Civic Platform (OP) of Donald Tusk in alliance with socialists and communists. Yes, Von der Leyen has achieved that historic feat of getting the communists to govern in Poland again. Mind you, in alliance with the partners of the PP and the PSOE.

The seizure of government by Donald Tusk — like Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a man from Von der Leyen’s ranks — has taken place with uproar, the storming of the media, the detention and intimidation of opponents, and the worst disinformation campaign there has been in Poland since General Wojciech Jaruselski left. But Von der Leyen has now gone to Poland and none of the brutal abuses of Tusk’s new government against the new opposition has troubled her. And she has announced to the head of government and his socialist and communist partners that she will shower them with goods, with billions of euros — all that money she had irregularly blocked from the previous government in order to mobilize the electorate against it.

Von der Leyen deceived the Poles, was elected by nine votes and suddenly became the replica of a Greta Thunberg advanced in years, with incendiary speeches against denialism and the far right. The far right being, for her, the conservatives, among them the Poles who had given her their vote in exchange for promises of pluralism and respect. Denialism includes all those who oppose the social engineering inspired by the radical environmentalism and climate hysteria of the Greens and by the interventionism and bureaucratic centralism of the socialists. Who triumph thanks to that unconditional adherence of the European People’s Party under the command of Mrs. Von der Leyen.

Von der Leyen has been the mother of the Green Deal, the implacable guardian of the drift toward a centralist state in which there is ever less subsidiarity and ever more mass controls from Brussels through a web of regulations, laws and directives that make life agonizingly difficult for some sectors of the population and absolutely impossible for others. The social-democratic, environmentalist and woke arrogance of this supposed German Christian Democrat has created the greatest disaffection ever felt toward the European Union. And today even her own party, which has spent all five years of the legislature without protesting the terrible direction policy had taken against agriculture, livestock farming, the agri-food industry, industry in general, research, energy and transport, and all the sectors affected by this regulatory frenzy.

Von der Leyen is not to blame for the fact that the People’s Party and the Socialists vote practically the same, always, in the European Parliament. In as much as 89% of the votes in this legislature, even if now, before the elections, the People’s Party is beginning to find fault with the automatic following of socialists, liberals and greens. Von der Leyen is indeed to blame for having led the Commission and that majority toward a centralist, interventionist and eco-climatic-hysterical ideological radicalism that does infinite harm to the nations.

In Von der Leyen’s favor, it must be said that her radicalism and despotism have done much to open the eyes of ever broader sectors of European societies. And her selection as the European leader of the various nations’ people’s parties, including the Spanish PP, makes it very clear that her intention is to continue with the policy that is causing endless disasters in Europe. The electoral forecasts suggest that Europeans have noticed. The only groups rising in the polls are the two to the right of the PP, which are the ECR with Vox and the Polish conservatives of PiS and Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia on one side, and the ID with Le Pen’s French, the Lega and the AfD on the other. All the rest, including the PP of Von der Leyen and Feijóo, are falling.

That being so, many movements can be expected on the European right, which for the first time can form a majority leaving out socialists, liberals, greens and communists. What is clear is that the PP is heading toward a rupture between those in its ranks who still have something conservative about them and those who are openly social-democratic. And it is clear that Von der Leyen will not count on the votes of the Polish conservatives this time.

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.