(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. How US Presidents Countered the Cold War Soviet Nuclear Threat)

(Washington DC) In 2017 former Dartmouth College professor and nuclear policy expert Tom Nichols wrote “The Mirage of Knowledge” about the apparent disregard or antipathy many Americans have for “experts.”. In an essay published by the Harvard Magazine in March-April 2018, Lydialyle Gibson followed up and reviewed Nichol’s book. She emphasized how the Trump administration epitomized the disdain for experts, noting the former President’s supposed nonchalant attitude about not having a “foreign policy” expert upon whom he relied as evidence that foreign policy expertise was being belittled and its necessity downplayed.

Professor Nichols was particularly worried that when it came to preserving nuclear deterrence, experts were needed, and the strong rhetoric he deemed reckless between the former President and North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un should not replace the calm diplomacy of nuclear experts necessary to preserve peace.

While experts have their place, the assumptions held by the experts need illumination but are often not revealed, let alone challenged. By their nature, assumptions go beyond facts. We can all agree current US oil production is at eleven million barrels a day. But there are no “facts” that can tell you for sure what oil production could be a decade hence and what impact that would have on US Middle East policy.

Part of the continued questioning of “experts” goes beyond the foreign policy sphere for sure. The media-designated covid vaccine experts over the past three years got much wrong. As is now understood, the pandemic was not one of the unvaccinated. Masks were not needed. Schools did not have to be closed. And society was gravely harmed, unnecessarily, by the shutdown—a shutdown the advocates are now (after the fact) fast running away from.

As noted, on foreign and security policy, including nuclear deterrence, there is not a mechanical or science right way to do things. Even those things we did successfully that in retrospect everyone now supports, were not automatic, such as the April 1948 Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO a year later in April 1949. Isolationist sentiment was strong in America, but with the Berlin blockade and the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, the Senate overcame those concerns and easily approved NATO 83-13.

But a short year later, after getting NATO and the Marshall Plan right, the experts failed miserably. On January 12, 1950, the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, just six months after signing the NATO Instrument of Accession, declared the ROK to be beyond our defense perimeter. To partially remedy US reticence about supporting the ROK, the administration instead sent a military assistance proposal to Congress. Alas, by a vote of 197-195 the House initially turned President Truman down. But in March, Congress thankfully reversed itself and approved $10.2 million in military assistance.

In a subsequent report to Truman in April, however, US intelligence “experts” assumed there was no urgency, as North Korea did not have the military capability to invade the South unless accompanied by massive Soviet forces, and they explained there was no indication of such Soviet forces in North Korea.

With the ROK totally unprepared, with the previously approved US military aid not yet available, the communist North sent 80,000 well-trained troops south in an invasion on June 25, starting a war that would eventually claim the lives of four million people, including 35,000 American soldiers.

Having learned this sad lesson in history from my year of studying abroad at Yonsei University in Seoul, Republic of Korea, I looked forward to working in the US Senate where my national security background could be brought into the real world. What I did not know was over the next decade, United States would go off trolly on a host of important national security policy decisions.

Particularly important between 1970-80 were “arms control” deals amidst a slowed and truncated nuclear modernization; the misestimates of Soviet defense spending and the failure of the policy of containment; the unfortunate adoption of détente and peaceful coexistence; the creation of the what was termed the “Middle East peace process;” the oil embargo and diminished oil security; and the much-heralded US opening to China.

In all these areas, the experts adopted policies that failed or backfired. When examined carefully, such bad decisions had a common origin: the conventionally held assumptions of the credentialed “experts” turned out to be wrong. But because the assumptions remained largely opaque, the assumptions were rarely if ever examined, and thus not challenged, the misguided assumptions remained firmly imbedded in US security policy. When the assumptions were later jettisoned, policies that were adopted succeeded.

While the 1972 SALT I deal was routinely described as the first “arms control” agreement between the US and the USSR, more accurately the SALT agreements were deals that gave the good housekeeping seal of approval not to arms control but to a huge buildup of nuclear weapons by the Soviets.

Years later, during the 1991 Senate deliberations on the START I treaty, the extent of the Soviet buildup became clear. Senator Dan Coats explained that the Soviets during the SALT process, had built their arsenal of deployed strategic (long-range) nuclear weapons to 13,300 warheads, some six-fold more than when the SALT I treaty was signed in 1972.

Not only did SALT endorse a huge Soviet buildup, but the companion ABM Treaty (1972) eliminated defenses from deployment, defenses against China having been proposed by Secretary of Defense McNamara in 1967. This is why Brezhnev as the Communist Party General Secretary demanded of President-elect Nixon in late 1968 that all missile defenses had to be banned as they were highly destabilizing. With the ABM agreement, Brezhnev got what he wanted, giving future Soviet heavy, multi-warhead ICBMs an unimpeded free ride to their US targets, while SALT gave the Soviets breathing room and thus time to build heavy missiles with which to coerce the United States.

A key plank in Reagan’s campaigns in 1976 and 1980 was opposition to the buildup of Soviet arms the SALT process erroneously described as “arms control.” Reagan supported nuclear modernization, missile defense and marked reductions in nuclear weapons and a roll-back policy toward the Soviet Union. By the winter of 1980-1, the US still did not have a new B1 or B2 bomber, a new Ohio-class submarine, or a new Peacekeeper/MX ICBM. In almost every defense budget for the previous decade, nuclear modernization funds were cut, spindled or delayed, with the entire nuclear deterrent increasingly at risk.

Reagan’s agenda was embraced by the American people in a landslide election. This was apparently lost on the experts. As his first news conference as President, the first question was from the AP White House reporter who asked Reagan whether he would continue to support détente and peaceful coexistence. The second question was whether the President would continue to abide by the SALT II treaty, (which had not been ratified by the US Senate but withdrawn from consideration by then President Carter).

When President Reagan assumed office and pushed nuclear modernization, missile defense and nuclear weapon reductions, simultaneously, as he promised he would do, the White House was accused by the media and many in Congress of opposing arms control, “upsetting” détente and engaging in an unsettling “arms race.”

Subsequently Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter scenarios and the Catholic Bishops nuclear freeze campaign dominated much of the news coverage on nuclear forces. Based on studies of dust storms on Mars, Sagan predicted that even a limited use of nuclear weapons on earth would kill billions. He and the disarmament community were aided by the Catholic Bishops in particular who also argued for the freeze, while declaring in addition that nuclear deterrence itself was immoral.

The experts said reductions proposed by Reagan– what would later be enshrined in the INF and START I treaties– were not credible, as the Soviets would never accept such deals. Reagan’s proposals were thus described as a “trick.” As if Moscow was justified in deploying thousands of new SS-20 missiles armed with nuclear weapons aimed at Western Europe and the Western Pacific and that calling for their elimination was somehow unjust.

The Washington, D.C. disarmament community created “Sane-Freeze;” a constellation of “arms control” groups opposed to Reagan’s nuclear arms control proposals as well as the administration’s nuclear modernization efforts. While eventually Congress did support Reagan, the media, Hollywood, academia, and the experts in the professional so-called arms control community did not, buying into the expert narrative that Reagan’s nuclear policies were, by implication, not sane. [It should be explained that at the time of the nuclear freeze, the Soviet nuclear forces were nearly fully modernized while the US had not yet built its first Ohio-class submarine, B-2 or B-1 strategic bomber or Peacekeeper ICBM. That is why Moscow supported the freeze.]

Despite this opposition narrative, especially by the credentialed experts in nuclear policy, Reagan secured the support of Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands to deploy the Pershing and GLCMs in Europe, with the initial research and development funding put into the FY1982 defense budget for the first time by any President, in contrast to the previous weak rhetorical commitment to the missile deployments by previous administrations.

Particularly important and central to Reagan’s success was the long fight in Congress over the deployment of the Peacekeeper ICBM. It was finally concluded in May 1985 when the US Senate by a vote of 55-45 unfenced the Air Force funding for the missile, but only after a legislative requirement that all 15 previous consecutive votes in the House and Senate had to also favor unlocking the Peacekeeper funding, including a 28-27 cliff-hanger vote in the full House Appropriations Committee. By October 1987, the Peacekeeper was initially deployed, remarkably at exactly the time (1974) projected by USAF General Aloysius Casey when as head of the Ballistic Missile Office he introduced the first research and development funds for the missile.

The successful arms control deals of the INF and START I upended Gorbachev’s plot to intimidate NATO in part through the SS-20 deployments, while the Peacekeeper deployment along with the rest of the US strategic Triad partially closed the window of vulnerability created by huge Soviet ICBMs. As Angelo Codevilla explained, and the historically close Houe vote demonstrated, winning the Cold War I and ending the Soviet empire were indeed a near thing.

George Kennan’s 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow on the sources of Soviet behavior correctly noted the Soviet penchant for empire building and its totalitarian expansive measures seeking to defeat the United States. Kennan’s prescription to deal with the Soviets came to be known as “containment” where the US (it as assumed) would contain or stop Soviet aggression. Kennan explained in a subsequent 1947 Foreign Affairs essay that the key was to “contain Soviet expansive tendencies.”

If the US was in fact embracing containment, the post WWII period would be the first test. Stalin cleverly snookered the Western powers and ended up in control of all of eastern Europe, plus half the Korean peninsula, key Japanese islands and northern Manchuria.

Luckily, the US switched gears and in 1950 Truman secured the UN support for going to Korea and protecting the ROK. While Kennan had no illusions of rolling back the Soviet empire, [the first rollback of communist territory since 1917 was the 1983 liberation of Grenada]. In fact, Kennan would subsequently not even support the containment envisioned by his 1946 “long telegram” as he opposed Truman’s Korea “police action.”

While certainly the US fight to protect South Vietnam was definitely within the parameters of “containment,” the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the subsequent Congressional cutoff of all military assistance to South Vietnam, threw containment fully out the window. After Indochina fell to communism, Soviet led coups and wars of national liberation led to the collapse of nearly two dozen additional nations from Angola, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Grenada, Afghanistan, and Guinea Bassou, as they went over to the Soviet empire, many of them located on shipping routes critical to the economic lifeline of the western economies.

Add to that the Soviet failed attempts to flip Columbia, El Salvador, Indonesia and other key nations, the 1970s was indeed a decade where under the banner of détente and peaceful co-existence the Soviet empire expanded greatly and the US went into retreat. Critical to Soviet success was the creation of a hollow military force in the US as defense spending declined markedly.

Those seeking greater US military power created the Committee on the Present Danger, arguing as did Johnny Foster, the DDR&E Secretary of Defense, that Soviet military spending was nearly 30% of its GDP, not the paltry 4-6% estimated by the experts in the intelligence community. Foster finally convinced then CIA Director George Bush to review Soviet military spending, and only after great difficulty did the experts modestly adjust their estimates of Soviet defense spending, arguing that pushing up US defense spending in response would “imperil détente.”

With the US in retreat, Moscow itself believed “the correlation of forces” was bending dramatically in favor of the Soviet Union, and thus the idea that the US was successfully implementing any kind of “containment” policy was poppycock. Yet the media and academia are filled with homages to Kennan and containment as somehow the key to the eventual collapse of the USSR a full decade hence.

In reality, again against the recommendations of the “experts,” President Reagan jettisoned détente, and instead of containment adopted “roll back” of the Soviet empire. The US and its allies, particularly Great Britain, went after the Soviet empire on all fronts. As Warren Norquist detailed in his 2001 “How the United States Won the Cold War”, Reagan adopted a seven-point plan:

• Supporting internal disruptions within the USSR, especially in Poland.
• Promote freedom through public diplomacy.
• Dry up Soviet sources of hard currency.
• Overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race.
• Stop the flow of western technology.
• Raise the cost of the wars the USSR was supporting; and
• Demoralize the Soviets and generate pressure to change, which will eventually implode the rotten Soviet empire.

Needless to say, the architects of this peace through strength strategy paid no attention to the credentialed experts descending on Washington urging such things as a nuclear freeze, a continuation of détente, an abandonment of SDI, and ending military assistance to El Salvador and the Nicaraguan democratic resistance.

Détente and Peaceful Co-Existence (1969-79)

Juliana Pilon explains that détente and peaceful coexistence were frauds perpetuated by the Soviet bloc to trick the West into making mass concessions. While pretending to adopt a less hostile approach to the United States, the Soviets actually funded and armed guerilla war throughout the Southern Hemisphere while also funding terrorist groups in Europe and the United States.

Throughout the 1970s, the Soviets brought forth a cascade of nations that flipped to the Soviet bloc, starting with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and culminating with the fall of Nicaragua and the invasion of Afghanistan. Overall, some 21 nations fell to communism, many through so-called “wars of national liberation.” And as an unexpected bonus, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the coming to power in Iran of what is now the government chiefly responsible for terrorism worldwide.

So thorough was Soviet détente propaganda, that the very first question President Reagan was asked at his first Presidential news conference was whether he was still in favor of détente and peaceful coexistence. That the new President had campaigned twice on a platform to jettison détente was apparently lost on the AP reporter that asked the question. Of course, President Reagan, to a collective gasp from the assembled reporters, said he was not in favor of détente and peaceful coexistence as his idea of the Cold War was “we win and they lose.” The new President explained he was never in favor of the détente policy to begin with and how could the US be in favor of a policy that was totally one-sided and simply a screen behind which the Soviet Union engaged in war against the West?

The second question asked was whether the President would abide by the SALT II nuclear treaty limits even though the agreement had never been approved by the US Senate, and in fact had been withdrawn from Senate consideration by former President Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though there was already considerable Senate opposition to the treaty.

The President reiterated his call for major cuts and reductions in deployed nuclear forces, again characterizing the SALT process as a build-up of nuclear forces and certainly not a process of reductions or arms control.

The experts and conventional wisdom assured us that the conflicts in the Middle East were centrally about providing the Palestinians a state. As former President Clinton would claim in 2014, terrorism would largely disappear if the Palestinians received a state, and that to do so was simply a matter of securing enough Israeli concessions. The “Middle East peace process” was central to this goal, as even Israel went so far to embrace just such a paradigm in the Oslo process in 1993.

The result was not peace. Over time, the terrorists including those from the PLO gave us Intifada I, II, III and IV. In addition, came Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iranian sponsored terror attacks on the World Trade Center, 1993 and 2001, the 1983 terror bombing of our Marine Barracks and Embassy in Lebanon, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1976 in KSA, the US embassy bombings in 1998 in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and eventually 9-11.

This was followed by the military disaster in Libya initiated by terror attacks on US facilities, and then the subsequent creation of ISIS, all part of a mosaic of continued Iran terrorism in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, caried out by the Iran sponsored Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

On the other hand, when the Trump administration took the centrality of a Palestinian homeland off the table, defunded the PLO, waxed ISIS, and identified Iran as the source of terrorism in the Middle East, (and not Israel), the Abraham Accords resulted, precisely what the experts told us would not be possible. Iran was defunded with its foreign exchange holdings falling to $3 billion from over $100 billion, the head of the IRGC was killed, and the US was finally moving in the right direction along with its allies in the Middle East.

The assumption that the roots of terrorism were based on the lack of a Palestinian state was firmly linked to a blind spot among experts who refused to see terrorism as a state-directed enterprise chiefly with roots in the Soviet Union and their subsidiaries in Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Terrorism was directed towards achieving state objectives, one of which was to destroy the West and decouple the US from NATO. It had nothing to do with a Palestinian state. After all, the PLO and then the PA have never accepted any of the multitude of offers of a two-state solution.

This blindness came directly to light following Clare Sterling’s 1981 “The Terror Network” which convincingly portrayed the Soviet Union as the prime bank and armory for terrorism, a claim Secretary of State Alexander Haig repeated in early 1981 Hill testimony.

To settle the subsequent media and political uproar, as experts cited repeatedly by the media assured the public that Haig and Sterling were terribly mistaken, Congress required the intelligence community to determine whether the Soviet Union was in fact the prime sponsor of state directed terrorism or whether terrorism roots were not state directed but largely based on a legitimate grievance of there being no Palestinian state. As one former President argued, what else but terrorism could poor Palestinians use when they had no jets to match Israeli Phantoms or F-14s?

The CIA initiated a study and received word back in 1981 from agency “experts” that indeed the USSR was not a state sponsor of terrorism. To prove their case, the experts provided to the Director of the CIA (Casey) editorials from TASS and Pravda “proving” the USSR was not in support of terrorism. The report further emphasized that if Moscow was a terror sponsor, then détente would be in jeopardy and certainly Moscow would not risk that!

A stunned Casey put together a new team including intelligence official and future Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who using CIA staff, determined that indeed the Soviets were sponsors of terrorism, and as he explained in his book “Duty,” published in 2014, the Soviets were even greater terror sponsors than his assessment to DNI Casey reported.

With the Iran created oil embargo of October 1973, the eventual adopted narrative by the experts was that the western world was too profligate in its use of energy and most particularly fossil fuels, that energy growth had to be severely limited, as environmentally sound energy policy required major reductions in US energy consumption and the adoption of a state of energy scarcity.

President Carter said that natural gas would be depleted by 1990, and enjoined utilities from using it. Reprocessing spent fuel was prohibited by the Energy Department as well and the nuclear power industry balance sheets went from black to red overnight.

While Middle East oil companies and producers were the bad guys, the key culprits were American consumers. Automobiles needed to get more miles per gallon, and homes needed to be better insulated. The expert narrative was that the US was simply running out of oil, so we had to use less, as imports climbed to 50% of US consumption.

Now experts often underscored US oil production had peaked. It was true that as petroleum geologist King Hubbard of Humble Oil had predicted, conventional oil and gas production had indeed peaked in 1970 at 10 million barrels per day. But little attention was paid to Hubbert’s other side of the story. Hubbert told me in 1975 that unconventional oil and gas was probably plentiful but at the time environmentally and economically prohibitive to produce.

As fracking proved, after three decades of decline, US oil production rose to 13 million barrels a day in November 2019, just before the pandemic induced economic turn-down, giving the US energy sector the role of the world’s swing producer of energy, an independence not enjoyed by the US for many decades.

But in 1979, global oil prices doubled due to the turmoil in Iran. In 1980, with the Iran-Iraq war taking another 4 million barrels of oil a day off the world market, prices continued to sharply climb, but President Carter only criticized Americans for “self-indulgent consumption” while urging everyone to wear a sweater.

In 1981, in one of his first acts, President Reagan fully decontrolled oil prices. With market prices now world-wide, non-OPEC petroleum production began to exceed that of OPEC and allowed offshore drilling and production increased US supply markedly, with imported oil falling to just 28% of consumption. Later in his Presidency got the KSA to markedly increase oil production, and contrary to expert opinion, the economy boomed and the price of gas dropped from $35 to $15 a barrel.

Eventually the technology of fracking would take hold in the United States, again to the surprise of “experts” to where now 70% of all oil and gas consumption in the US is from fracking produced oil and gas. Natural gas turned out to be plentiful, with upwards of 38% of all US electricity now produced from natural gas. From 1 million barrels a day in 2010 to 4 million barrels a day, fracking produced oil in 2015 exceeded the production of every OPEC member except KSA.

Overall, US production reached 13 million barrels per day in November 2019, but with production now lower at 11 million barrels a day, gasoline prices have now at least doubled, and the US is again heavily dependent on imported petroleum. Drill baby drill worked.

But now, unfortunately, we have gone back to the same experts who were decades ago proclaiming the moral virtue of energy scarcity and insecurity. And still beholden to legislation and energy policy from the 1970s, with an emphasis not on production but minimizing consumption, on top of which the country has appended a massive mis-directed multi-trillion-dollar campaign to end all fossil fuel use, which now accounts for 80% of all US energy use.

With President Nixon visiting China an opening was created for extensive US-China economic relations and eventually a diplomatic thaw. The expert conventional wisdom was two-fold: Nixon was seeking China’s help over time to offset the power of the Soviet Union, and more economic trade with China would create the middle class in China conducive to a more democratic and less authoritarian government.

In pursuit of that goal, the US government spent tens of billions over more than four decades in supporting entities throughout Chinese society and government. One trip of mining specialists from the Department of the Interior sought to help China better manage the safety of its underground coal mining, which even today provides 70% of the energy China consumes annually. When asked to describe the efforts made to rescue miners after a mine explosion, a serious problem in China, the Chinese hosts casually explained there were no efforts made, which dumbfounded the Interior experts.

This is a good metaphor for understanding nearly half a century later how wrong US assumptions were that the CCP does not seek a growing moderate middle class let alone democratic principles with which to adopt. Mike Pillsbury’s “100 Year Marathon” explains in detail the highly misleading US assumptions that led not to a moderating China in world affairs but the growth of what is now understood to be the most formidable military and economic threat to the United States.

The decade of the 1970’s has long been considered bad for US security policy. The United States lost in Indochina and Latin America. The Palestinians kept demanding a state from the “river to the sea,” while terrorism here at home and abroad climbed sharply. Two recessions occurred with long gas lines. Crime was rampant. The Chinese were paying elements of the Black Panthers to assassinate police according to an FBI report to the White House. Illegal immigration began to get the attention of the government, the military was “hollow,” and economic “stagflation” emerged, with 14% inflation and a 21% prime rate.

What changed? Well, US policy makers changed the assumptions under which they lived. Gas turned out to be plentiful as drillers went out and produced energy the country had repeatedly been assured did not exist. Crime was contained as petty and serious criminals were locked up, a novel idea! Starting in 1981, the tax and regulatory burden on Americans was dramatically lowered and over the next four decades, economic growth, job creation and the stock market reached highs not previously envisioned.

Terrorist groups got waxed, inflation and interest rates were tamed, and immigration laws were largely (although not completely) observed. The military received the resources it needed, drugs and alcohol were removed from the barracks, and a volunteer force was established and well-funded. The US military won extraordinary fights with the Iraqi army twice, and took down the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the latter with a combination of horse warriors, B-52s and JDAMS engaging in close combat support.

By the end of 2019, a record number of Americans (156 million) were employed, inflation was a little more than 1%, unemployment of certain minority groups and women, especially those with only a high school education, hit record lows, and the poverty rate reached a low level not seen since records have been kept.

Much that was successful over the past five decades was implemented and proposed to great criticism by the “experts,” while the policies and strategies pursued by the “experts” often did not work and even made things worse. The difference in policy choices was largely a matter of assumptions brought to the policy table by various policy makers. While often declared deplorables and clingers, cold-warriors and hawks, Amen corner friends and unsophisticated, the “expert deniers” turned out to be right, and the credentialed experts wrong.

Angelo Codevilla in “America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations” codified “the disarray resulting from the Progressive management” of US security beginning some 75 years ago. Although largely concerned that the US get back to the foreign policy principles espoused from George Washington to Teddy Roosevelt, the added assessment of what assumptions underlined the Progressive agenda was needed. That is why this essay was created, hopefully to guide the country back to sound and successful policies, whether overseas or here at home.

The media often leads with the “unexpected” whether job growth, energy prices, weapons deployed, that such experts did not foresee, or expert economists did not predict, or expert diplomats found surprising. No one ever asks why the media keep asking the same experts the same questions when the “experts” routinely don’t get things right!

There is much sense in the American people. They may not know how to physically design or construct a bridge, but they understand in the words of our founder George Washington, the need for “reflection and choice” and to place the nation’s policy on moral “immutable foundations.”

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 Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in The European Conservative. Nationalism and Freedom: Thirty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall)

A little more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Warsaw Pact countries became free to develop their own form of democratic government and reclaim their national identities. Yet today, many Westerners have no sense of this history, no memory of how desperately citizens of Soviet-occupied nations fought for the right to control their own destinies, exemplified by East Germans—women, children, and men—machine-gunned down as they fled over fences to the West, choosing death rather than to live under totalitarian control.

A healthy fear and utter rejection of totalitarianism and communistic behavior are waning in the Western world. Forced obedience and conformity, a basic characteristic of Marxist communism, is showing up in Western governments, education, and social structures. At the same time, political and academic elites promote a self-loathing of national sentiment, history, and the foundations of Western civilization. Do our citizens even realize it? And how long can we remain free?

Reagan’s last bastion for freedom, the United States, “with no other source of power except the sovereign people” is currently ruled by the Biden administration and its ‘state-controlled’ media that rejects most American constitutional principles and the rule of law, applying leftist illiberal ideologies as the only one truth. Civil liberties are trampled under vaccine mandates and selective FBI raids against political opponents. The government infiltrates private citizens on Facebook and Twitter to suppress freedom of speech and conscience. January 6th protestors remain in jail for exercising their First Amendment right to dispute an election. Yet BLM, Antifa, and repeat criminals ransack our cities and go unpunished.

To our north, Canada’s Justin Trudeau rewrites history by claiming his despised vaccine mandates were only “incentives” and “protections,” making his public admiration of China’s dictatorship more understandable. Across the Atlantic, European governments label social and religious differences as ‘hate speech’ or ‘discrimination,’ using legal force to control what people say and do.

The European Union applies sanctions to (punishes) sovereign nations like Hungary that promote traditional marriage, family roles, and parental rights. The U.S. ambassador to Hungary shuns diplomacy and antagonizes Hungary for this stance, and for protecting Hungarian prosperity and promoting peace to end the war in Ukraine. In many countries and in many ways, national sovereignty has been handed over to the EU, and member states have lost control over borders, economies, and communities.

Despite the trend, Hungarians have not forgotten the value of their recently acquired freedom, or their reclaimed national identity. I am writing a book about Hungarian national sovereignty for the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest, and have interviewed Hungarians from all walks of life about this very subject. And, according to them, it is the West that left them, and not the other way around. While under Nazi (1944-45) and then Soviet (1945-1991) occupation, Hungarians longingly dreamt of the life of freedom found in the U.S. and Western Europe—they could not wait to be a part of it. But perhaps the most striking thing Hungarians told me is that the rhetoric coming out of the U.S. reminds them of “the Soviet days.”

Despite the woke world’s obsession with the glorification of ‘identities,’ our national and God-given identities are under attack all over the West—biological sex, religion, and family structures in particular. Social lies like ‘misgendering’ and ‘critical race theory’ have become truth mandated by government institutions. Educational systems and political activists sideline parents, taking control of children’s bodies and mental health. A characteristic of communism, in its evil, is its devaluation of tradition and history, and deconstruction of the truth until there is nothing relevant, nothing to believe in or hold sacred. This is exactly what the Soviets did to Eastern Europe.

Historian Mária Schmidt writes in From Country to Nation: Thirty Years of Freedom, that as the Soviet Union weakened, “nations under their yoke felt an ever-increasing urge to take possession of what belongs to them—their national pasts.” Occupied states had had their histories “expropriated” and reinterpreted by communists obsessed with possessing the past. Communists claimed an exclusive right over it and clung to it tooth and nail. They imposed their Marxist-based view of history everywhere as compulsory, undisputed, and unrivaled.

Cultural symbols, national heroes, and holidays were replaced; pride in national achievements was taken away; social institutions and private businesses were suppressed or abolished; intellectual curiosity and achievement were driven into underground hideaways, where people met secretly to read books. The state replaced tradition, family, and religious authority. Communism dictated one political party, one national language, one history, one ideology, one truth.

In Against the Tide, Sir Roger Scruton writes about present-day Eastern Europe saying, “It is hardly surprising … that people cling to their national sentiments, because these were the only form of belonging that the communists could not extinguish.” Resistance of member states, like Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, to the EU’s top-down decision-making power, must be understood in this historical context. Sovereignty and freedom, when the memory of their absence is achingly fresh, are more precious.

Nationalism, the outcome of nurtured national identity, is in its truest form an essential part of building and maintaining democracy; nationalism is based on common identity, common values, and the acceptance of a shared responsibility by the citizens of a nation. Scruton wrote:

Political wisdom, [Edmond] Burke argued, is not contained in a single head. It does not reside in the plans and schemes of the political class, and can never be reduced to a system … It is a partnership …a continuous trust that no generation can pillage for its own advantage.”

It is within this system, Yoram Hazony explains in The Virtue of Nationalism, that nations take an “independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference” within an international order. The loyalties we maintain to our own nation and heritage, our common traditions, community, and country, all guide and inform how we make laws, shape norms of religion and education, regulate our economy, and defend our nation.

Like many things, national sentiment can also be exploited by bad actors and political movements. Nazism and ethnic cleansing are evil perversions of national sentiment, driven by a lust for power. Both Nazis and communists used national sentiment for their own accumulation of power, while suppressing the nationalist uprisings that did not suit their agenda in Eastern Europe. From the Baltics to the Black Sea, nationalist anti-communist movements persisted despite Soviet oppression that killed, imprisoned, and displaced hundreds of thousands.

For today’s leftist leaders adhering to communist and totalitarian behavior, the rising nationalism of the past eight years clearly contradicts their pursuit of a homogenous, international order that would sweep communist control around the world. As Schmidt wrote, “nationalism is the Achilles heel of Communism.” And so, within modern-day communist propaganda, national identity and sentiment become code words for “Nazi.”

So where are we—thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union?

Hungarian-born-turned-American-citizen Balint Vazsonyi warned us about our slide into communism twenty-five years ago. Vazsonyi escaped to America after the failure of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet occupation. He experienced firsthand the socialism Nazis and Soviets “used as a pretext for just about anything—for the confiscation of people’s belongings, for determining what could and could not be taught in the schools, for pronouncing what did or did not happen—and what should have happened—in the course of history.” And he watched as both dictatorships “interned or executed the leadership of all other political organizations.”

In 1998, in America’s Thirty Years War: Who is Winning? Vazsonyi wrote about growing hostility in the U.S. toward American traditions of English origin and warned against embracing the communism he escaped. He explained that Anglo-American political philosophy, on which democracy and Western civilization are based, holds people as ultimately sovereign, and the state serves the people; in contrast, Franco-Germanic political philosophy (speaking from a historical, not ethnic, perspective), from which communism and totalitarianism stem, places the state over individual rights and dignity, and people derive their rights from the all-knowing state.

So, which one will we choose? As Vazonyi concludes, “As yet, our hands are on the controls. The tools are there, we still retain our national memory, and tens of millions remain in possession of their common sense.” So true for us today! But we must awaken from the slumber of complacency or ignorance, and choose the freedom, liberty, and sovereignty that our Western nations, though never perfect and always perfecting, have been built upon. Our freedom, and the freedom of generations, depend upon it.

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 Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. The only glimmer of hope in Sudan)

The outbreak of violence in Sudan last week, which is now simmering between the country’s two most powerful military leaders and their forces, was sadly predictable. The alliance of convenience between the two warlords — built on a shared contempt for the democratic aspirations of Sudanese civilians — has crumbled into a battle for supremacy, in which civilians suffer collateral losses.

After the popular revolt that toppled Omar Bashir in 2019, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan — the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces — and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemeti — the commander of the Rapid Support Forces — overcame bureaucratic and ethnic prejudices by championing a common cause. Unfortunately, their partnership was built on undermining, delaying and obstructing Sudan’s transition to democratic civilian rule. The two leaders sought to evade accountability for crimes dating back to the genocide in Darfur and the recent massacre of more than 120 unarmed protesters in June 2019.

Above all, their arrangement was based on the shared understanding that the Sudanese army would never be accountable to civilian authorities. But they have yet to decide which leader will end up at the top once civilians are permanently sidelined. For the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, the partnership has been very successful. They pretended to be partners of the Sudanese civil parties while exploiting their bickering; they have derided international partners who support a civilian-military transitional government; and they pretended to be responsible parties on the world stage by pledging to participate in counterterrorism operations and declaring their support for the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with Israel.

The Sudanese Resistance Committees — the tireless, decentralized protest movements that were the primary engine of Bashir’s ouster — generally remained suspicious of the two military leaders. Still, the international community adopted what it convinced itself was the only realistic approach — dealing with the two warlords. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces were firmly embedded in all aspects of Sudanese life. Dagalo, in particular, sought to enrich himself, including through mining schemes with the Russians. Avoiding severe consequences for repeated acts of impunity that might have led to change, the West has instead appeased and courted the two warlords.

In October 2021, during Jeffrey Feltman’s tenure as the first US special envoy to the Horn of Africa, he and his team of American diplomats held a series of meetings to address what Al-Burhan and Dagalo insisted were their concerns about the transitional arrangements. In a closing session that included leaders and civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the US delegation presented ideas for easing tensions and addressing some of the leaders’ concerns to renew momentum behind the civil-military partnership. The two commanders and Hamdok adhered to the plan proposed by the Americans. But five hours later, despite US support for the compromises they favored, the two leaders staged a coup, arresting Hamdok, his government and dozens of others.

The American team tried to work with the two commanders in good faith, but their move showed that they never intended to reciprocate.

Since then, history has repeated itself over and over again — the armed forces and RSF leaderships have made commitments, only to break them later. More recently, the UN, the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development facilitated discussions on forming a civilian government.

The Quartet — the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — helped broker a framework agreement. One can argue whether the formation of a civilian government in early April, as planned during these discussions, would be sufficiently credible in the eyes of the resistance committees. But that is all in the past now, as the Sudanese army and the RSF have given up on negotiations and decided to go after each other instead. Al-Burhan and Dagalo seem to be fighting a fight to the death.

With impressive speed, regional leaders agreed to send a team of three heads of state to Khartoum, showing that Sudan’s neighbors know that the region, too, would suffer in the event of an all-out civil war. The African Union, the UN, the EU and the US can be expected to support this initiative, and such support will be essential. But given that the international community has been deeply tarnished by its insistence on working with the same leaders responsible for the recent violence, the region will have to take the lead.

A ceasefire based on power-sharing between the two warlords will not be stable and it is not easy to ignore the Sudanese people’s aspirations for democracy and civilian rule. Even at the peak of Al-Burhan and Dagalo’s partnership, brute force did not defeat the resistance committees. Until now, civilians in Sudan have been facing a united front composed of Al-Burhan and Dagalo. Assuming it survives, it is understood that the civilian authority will better confront a security apparatus that is likely to be divided and fractured and less able or willing to impose its rule. This outcome may be unlikely, but it is the only glimmer of hope one can find in this horrific tragedy.

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.

On the evening of Sunday, September, 5, 1999, two pairs of Arab terrorists planned to plant bombs on a pair of intercity buses filled with passengers, destination Jerusalem. One car headed for the Haifa terminal and the other for the terminal in Tiberias. Prior observation had revealed that these buses were not routinely searched by Israeli security. One team member of each pair would board a bus, and place a luggage bomb with 15 kilos (33 lbs.) of explosive in the baggage compartment. Each member would get off the bus at an interim stop and rejoin his comrade, whose vehicle was to follow the bus. Upon retrieving the bomber, each car would escape before the simultaneous Jerusalem detonations at 6:30 PM on Sunday, September 5.

Enter Father Time. At 5:30 PM the car headed for Haifa was at a rest stop, while one member got a cup of coffee, en route to a 6:30 PM date with destiny in Haifa, the bomb exploded, killing his partner in the car. Sixty miles away, in downtown Tiberias at almost the exact moment, the second bomb detonated in the car, killing both. Each blast destroyed much surrounding property, but neither harmed innocents.

Israel, a global outlier, had returned to Standard Time early on Friday, Septernber 3. But the Palestine Authority, along with most countries, including most Arab countries, did not return to Standard Time until early on Sunday, September 5. Both bombs had been assembled by West Bank Palestinians, and were set to detonate at 6:30 PM West Bank local time. The recipient terrorists had neglected to check for this temporary time discrepancy. Thus, both bombs detonated at 5:30 Israeli local time, an hour early. Daylight Saving Time, that fateful day, lived up literally to its name.

The story of Daylight Saving Time (DST)—an “s” added to Saving is deemed equally acceptable though formally incorrect—was superbly told by author David Prerau in Seize the Daylight (2005). The pre-DST tale of time travails begins with the ancients, and before getting to DST traverses several intermediate phases. Author Prerau traces the evolution of time measurement from the sundial, though Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the 1883 adoption of Standard Time, after which the prolonged saga of DST commences in 1905. A more detailed examination of the road to Standard Time is presented in author Clark Blaise’s Time Lord (2000). Between these two books we can ride a whale of a tale, in which prominent crusaders play benign versions of Captain Ahab, with far greater success than Herman Melville’s doomed protagonist in Moby Dick.

Sun Time: “God’s Time” Meets Sundial. Prerau divides the history of time’s intersection with humanity into four phases: (1) Sun Time; (2) Mean Time; (3) Standard Time; and (4) Daylight Saving Time. Sun Time is also known as God’s Time and/or Nature’s Time; the role humans played was simply that of passively measuring time. The latter trio involved humans creating new measures of time to meet the evolving needs of societies.

We begin with two ancient civilizations: Sumer, nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Mesopotamia then, Iraq today); and Egypt, whose ancient capital was Thebes, by the west bank of the Nile. Obelisks were erected to guide the activities of religious worship and government officials. At least 3,500 years ago, Egyptians subdivided time by using the sundial. Noon was marked by the longest shadow, vertically lined with the tip of the obelisk. This measure was essentially unchanged for 3,000 years. Later, Hipparchus (ca. 190-120 B.C.), the Greek astronomer, cartographer and mathematician, divided the Earth into 180 parallel horizontal lines (later, latitude) and 180 parallel vertical lines (later, longitude). These longitudinal lines became known as meridians, after the Latin meredies—midday—as along each meridian line the noon hour is the same.

Ca. 1270 marked the advent of the mechanical clock. In his book, The Measure of Reality, author Alfred W. Crosby writes that the division of time into units of one hour reflected a recognition that unlike days, which are bounded by the natural events of light and darkness, and unlike calendars, which are encrusted with customs and traditions—holidays—hours are an arbitrary duration and thus readily definable by utilitarian criteria. The ancients had thought of time as a continuous flow; the need for more precision led during the High Middle Ages to learning regard time as a series of discrete quanta. Public clocks used bells to guide urban dwellers, where most commerce flourished and thus were in need of regularity. The English word “clock” is derived from the French cloche and the German Glocke, for bell. The next step was the escapement, an oscillating mechanism for precise mechanical alternation between tick and tock. Crosby adds that in the 17th century, the final steps in fixing calendar time came with counting years, per the Jesuit scholar Dominic’s Petavius (B.C/A.D and C.E./B.C.E.), and migrating from the 4th century Julian to the 18th century Gregorian calendar.

The public clock, usually in a town square, first appeared in London in 1292, Paris in 1300 and Padua in 1344. A 14th century Cairene astronomer and mathematician, Abdul-Hassan al-Marrakushi, used trigonometry to create the mathematical 24-hour day, which by the end of the 15th century had spread throughout Europe. Until the 16th century, most clocks had one hand, striking the time by quarter-hour. Individual town times were called “apparent solar time.”

The oldest working clock is some 600 years old, an “astronomical clock” in Prague’s Old Town Square. It uniquely uses 24-hour time, and can still locate the Sun, Moon and stars; it is a collection of four distinct clock faces. One goes by Bohemian Time, used during the middle ages; a second face shows German Time, adopted in Europe in 1547, still in use today as Central European Time; a third face shows Ancient Babylonian Time, which divides daylight into twelve segments; the fourth face shows the Sun’s position in relation to Earth, day and night. (For these and other Times, see this website.)

Mean Time: Greenwich Melds Astronomers and Sailors. Navigation for thousands of years was by dead reckoning, using the stars. It was only by sighting stars that navigators could locate ships in terms of latitude (distance, north or south, from the equator) and longitude—distance, east or west, from a designated prime meridian. Mean Time was first used as a temporal yardstick in Geneva, in 1780; other Swiss towns followed suit. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was ultimately chosen by the British (rather than London) because the Greenwich observatory was used by the Astronomer Royal, a position established in 1675, to make accepted calculations. Setting up the system melded time and space in measurable distances and time zones.

By the late 19th century, 90 percent of the world’s shipping used the Greenwich prime meridian; the other 10 national prime meridians represented a mere 10 percent of global shipping traffic. Eight were centered on European cities (Paris, Berlin, Rome, Cadiz, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm and St. Petersburg), with Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo as outliers. Thus, Greenwich is situated at 0 degrees Longitude.

Standard Time: Railroad Timetables Defeat Farmer Stables. The first railroad time was London Mean Time, adopted in 1840 by Britain’s Great Western Railway. In 1848, Britain became the first entire country to adopt GMT. Its motive force was the dramatic increase in speeds of communication, via wire telegraph; and travel, via the steam engine. The Victorian Age was made possible by what Blaise calls the Age of Gauges, each of which is

. . . an intricate conversion device, a kind of translator between unspoken languages. Scales, thermometers, watches, fuel pumps . . . . Like crude computers, they monitor one set of operations and convert it to a different data flow—to time, to temperature, to volume, to cost, to profit, to depletion.

The dominant propulsion system on railway tracks was the locomotive, which could be steam-, electric-, or diesel-powered. On Oct. 6, 1829, Robert Stephenson’s “Rocket” steam locomotive, which incorporated myriad technical innovations, won a competition by drawing a 20-ton load 70 miles in 10 hours. Blaise notes that from the 1830s, rates of land/water travel increased geometrically—eventually, a hundredfold—what one historian called “a change in the rate of change.” Increasing speeds and distance covered gave birth to increasing travel confusion, as travelers saw their watches diverge more from local time.

In 1842, Toronto became the first city to draw its time computation by telegraph “magnetically signaled” from a nearby observatory; in 1848, Britain became the first country to put the entire country on one time signal, from the Greenwich Royal Observatory. In 1868 the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. followed suit for the entire U.S. As the industrial revolution spread throughout industry, the need for precise timing and convertible formats grew; the time-and-motion studies that drove Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” of mass production led to explosions in capitalist innovation, albeit at a high cost in worker health and welfare.

In 1845, Sandford Fleming sailed from Liverpool to Newfoundland; the trip took 48 days. His return trip, in 1863, aboard the steamer Great Eastern, took 8 days. The impetus for finally ending the worldwide dominance of “God’s Time” was when Fleming missed a Bandoran, Ireland train in the summer of 1876, due to a misprint in the schedule, as to AM or PM.

Each railroad had its own timetable and choice of time to follow. A passenger taking the train from Pittsburgh to Buffalo had to figure out all relevant timetables. Trains originating in Pittsburgh ran on Philadelphia time, adjusting for the sundial position, its five degrees of longitude set Pittsburgh clocks 20 minutes behind Philadelphia’s. But the Pittsburgh to Buffalo train originated in Columbus, Ohio, another three degrees longitude west, making for 12 additional minutes earlier. Arriving in Buffalo, the hapless traveler faced three different time zones, as Buffalo had three railroads serving it, and they all ran on different local times. Wisconsin operated with 38 different local times. Travelers riding the rails from Maine to California faced more than 20 timepiece adjustments. At mid-century, America had 144 different local times.

All this changed on April 8, 1883, at the General Time Convention of the American Railroad Association; fittingly, the meeting was held in St. Louis, where six official railroad times were observed. A railroad man, William Allen, offered a division of what became, by 1912, the 48 contiguous states, into four time zones, beginning at Longitudes 75, 90, 105 and 120 degrees: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. Adoption would replace 50 railroad time standards then prevailing. At 2 AM, Sunday, November 18, 1883, America’s railways migrated to a unified continent-wide standard time; the 2 AM conversion time was chosen because it would be least disruptive, as passenger loads were lowest, and hence fewer trains ran. Blaise notes that within days—astonishing given limited communications of the day—70 percent of schools, courts, and local governments adopted Standard Time. But the federal government did not accept the change until—NOT a misprint—1918.

The Oct. 1-22, 1884 Washington. D.C. Prime Meridian Conference (PMC) divided the 24-hour day into 24 time zones, each of roughly 1,000-miles distance; this enabled the 360-degree circumference of the Earth to be divided in 15-degree segments. Also defined then was the International Dateline, the universal day that reset the calendar, and the 24-hour clock. Solar time travelled from east to west, covering 12.5 miles per minute.

Wireless telegraphy and undersea cables greatly increased the need to track global time regularity. The first transatlantic cable linking Newfoundland and Britain operated briefly in 1856; two more durable cables were laid in 1866. Fleming’s crowning achievement came with the opening of the worldwide transpacific cable. In 1902 Fleming sent a pair of messages from Ottawa to Sydney, Australia, one eastward via Newfoundland, with intermediate routing via London, Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, and India; and one westward via Vancouver, transiting to Sydney via Fiji. Australia replied to each message. Total transit times: eight hours. Blaise notes that the entire routing went through British territory—either Commonwealth countries of imperial colonies. (The apogee of the Empire upon which the sun never set was reached upon the British victory at Omdurman, Sudan, Sept. 1-2, 1898; one participant was a subaltern named Winston Spencer Churchill.)

Sunlight Time: DST’s Temporal Twists and Turns. Prerau marks 1444 as the first time that a clock was advanced one hour—not to save daylight, but to save the Swiss town of Basel. Invaders planned to attack when the town clock struck noon. The tower watchman learned of imminent attack and, unable to notify defenders in the minutes that remained, he manually advanced the clock by one hour. When the attackers heard only one bell rather than twelve, they were confused. Defenders rallied and drove them out of town. It was to be 472 years before Daylight Saving Time made its global debut, and it took a world war to force its adoption.

Having publicly rhapsodized over the joys of daylight in London (1757) and then while serving as an envoy in Paris (1784), Benjamin Franklin became the first to propose government action to address the matter. He did not, however, seek resetting of clocks. Rather, he proposed that the government impose a tax on shuttered windows when there is natural light outside; limit candle supplies; stop coaches after sunset; and ring all church bells upon first light, to wake everyone up.

Yet two problems remained unresolved: the rotation of the Earth’s axis, creating a series of sunrises and sunsets; and the 23.5-degree tilt of the Earth’s rotation, which alters daily the local time of sunrises and sunsets. Such seasonal variation gives us the winter and summer solstices, for the year’s shortest and longest days; and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when days and nights are 12 hours each, with local times varying daily between those dates.

The idea for seasonally-altered DST originated with a British MP, William Willett, whilst riding his horse one summer morning in countryside south of London; he rode alone, near his fellow townsfolk sleeping in Chislehurst. He thought if workers rose an hour earlier, they’d make use of natural light instead of working late in artificial light. Opposing the idea: farmers who needed to wait until after morning dew in order to harvest wheat; plus scientists and astronomers who rejected tampering with astronomical time. He brought his idea to Parliament in 1907, but it died there, as did subsequent efforts. When the House of Commons did pass a couple bills, each time the prime minster, Herbert Asquith, spoke against them. Willett died March 4, 1915, his dream unfulfilled.

Enter World War I. By then, World War I was in full swing. As the conflict widened and casualties mounted, wartime necessity required reducing unnecessary energy consumption, and keeping lights off an extra hour reduced demand for energy. First to adopt DST was Wilhelmine Germany, on April 6, 1916; other continental European nations rapidly followed suit. With Asquith ending his opposition to DST, it took Parliament all of six weeks to pass a DST bill, on May 15, 1916; the King consented two days later, and DST went into effect 2 AM Sunday, May 21. The Summer Time Act of 1916 had a provision authorizing renewal votes, and in 1917 renewal was made automatic for the duration of the War. Upon the Great War’s end (Nov. 11, 1918), when the Summer Time Act came up for renewal in 1919, it was dropped.

America was next. Two cities, Detroit (1907) and Cleveland (1909) were unhappy with being cast into the Central Time zone. They sought to have their cities included in the Eastern zone. Doing so would give their residents an extra hour of daylight year round. The Cleveland City

Council adopted Eastern Standard Time in 1914, with Detroit’s City Council following suit in 1915.

The first group to propose national adoption of DST was the National Daylight Association of Cincinnati. They approached President William Howard Taft two months after Taft entered the Oval Office; Taft and his Cabinet suggested that the group start locally, and later go to Congress.

Corporations and labor unions, often antagonists, united to push for DST. Railroads were content with Standard Time, and adamantly opposed imposition of the added complexity DST would add to their timetables. One argument they advanced was that there were 1,698,818 railroad clocks and watches that would have to be adjusted.

Things were in stasis until America entered the War on April 6, 1917. Congress stepped into the breach, but it was not until March 19, 1918 that President Wilson signed the Standard Time Act of 1918, which included the Daylight Saving Time Act; DST began on March 31, to run April through October. Detroit adopted Central Time for the months of DST, giving it two hours of added sunlight, but Cleveland, closer to the Eastern Time zone, did not. Upon the War’s end, immediately Congress sought to repeal DST. Twice President Wilson vetoed the bills, but the third time proved a charm. Passed by large majorities in both Houses, the second presidential veto was overridden, and on Aug. 20, 1919 Wilson signed the DST repeal bill.

Yet DST remained a live political issue: On May 23, 1922, a Washington, D.C. radio station broadcast the first-ever nationally broadcast political debate on DST. The audience decided who won (the author does not say).

But cities and states were still free to adopt local DST. In 1920, only two states, New York and Massachusetts, elected to keep DST. (In 1921, New York repealed statewide DST, but New York City kept it.) In 1926 the U.S. Supreme Court chimed in, per Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dismissing a challenge to the constitutionality of the Massachusetts DST law. The aptly-named Connecticut town of Hazardville marked 1927 by adopting three local time zones: churches and shops adopted full DST; farmers kept EST; while mills, which dealt with both town and country, chose 30-minute DST.

South of Baltimore, where rural interests dominated until recent times, only Raleigh, North Carolina adopted DST, and only for four days in 1932. But by the late 1930s, 15 states with one-quarter of the population observed DST. The newly-formed (1934) Federal Communications Commission ruled that in areas where multiple radio stations shared spectrum frequency bands, if any local station followed Standard Time, all had to do so. When in Sept. 1938 a major (cat 3) hurricane rocketed up the east coast, slamming hardest into the northeast, the prevalence of DST aided recovery efforts.

During the interwar period (1919-1939), most European countries abandoned DST. Notable exceptions were Britain, which enacted permanent summer DST in 1925, and the Soviet Union, which adopted year-round DST in 1930.

Instant Replay: World War II. During World War II, the identical arguments that prevailed a quarter-century ago again did so, and DST was widely adopted. Britain extended its normal Summer Time, eventually running from late February to early November. After the war it reverted to peacetime DST, but the severe winter of 1947 forced adoption of emergency winter DST; in 1948 it reverted to Summer Time. America waited until after Pearl Harbor to return to DST; on Feb. 9, 1942 the country went on year-round DST, to be terminated six months after the War ended. A few localities did not follow suit. Congress decided not to wait for the six-month expiration, ending nationwide DST four weeks after V-J Day, on Sept. 30, 1945. But by 1947, 50 million Americans, about one-third the population, continued to observe DST.

Postwar Travails. The postwar period descended into what Time Magazine called, in 1963, “a chaos of clocks.” In 1964, DST began on 19 different dates and ended on 14 different dates. One year Iowa was saddled with 23 combinations of standard and DST; Hopkinton banks opened on DST and closed on standard time. Intercity bus service, at one point, took passengers through seven time zones–one change every eight minutes—during a 35-mile ride from Steubenville, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia! Rural dominates in northern Idaho took time variance to its logical end-point: observing—NOT making this up—door-to-door variances.

In the wake of the Time article, a movement for a nationwide return to summer DST gathered momentum, and in 1966 the Uniform Time Act of 1966 went into effect, but with a provision allowing states to exempt themselves upon passage of a state law. By 1971, four states—Arizona, Indiana, Hawaii and Michigan—had passed such laws. Indiana’s decision to allow two western areas to use CST, and the rest of the state to use EST, and also use DST in a single zone led Congress in 1972 to pass a specific exemption for such states. Eleven other states had multiple time zones, but none enacted partial DST zones.

The year 1973 was a genuine annus horribilis: the first Arab oil embargo, the summer Watergate hearings, resignation of the vice-president over corruption, and the firing of a special prosecutor investigating the president (only to be replaced by a new one). The term “energy crisis” entered the political lexicon. Once again, to conserve energy, Congress acted. The Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act mandated a full two-year DST, from Jan. 1974 through Oct. 1975.

In the first two-weeks of Winter DST, schoolchildren were killed in the now-darker morning by cars in six states. But the killer of year-round DST was Florida, where over several weeks (presumably more than two) eight kids were killed, versus two during the same period in 1973. That did it. Photos of dead children aired on national television proved anew that pictures are worth a thousand words; there were no photos of kids who would have been hit by cars given darker afternoons, to provide a competing narrative.

Congress repealed year-round DST, with Standard Time resuming Oct. 27, 1974, and DST resuming Feb. 23, 1975. The Dept. of Transportation conducted a study that found three modest benefits from DST: energy conservation, traffic safety and crime reduction. Upon expiration of the 1973 bill, the nation returned to the 1966 UTA rules. A renewed push for longer DST began in 1984, driven by fast food businesses and recreational interests. The result was inclusion of a three-week extension of the advent of DST, to early April in the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1986.

21st Century Revival. In 2005, Congress passed a second extension of DST. With the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and energy conservation a major goal, the Act added five weeks to DST: four in March and one in November—the latter giving Halloween merchants and trick-or-treaters the benefits of twilight to better ward off evil spirits of darkness.

American DST now runs eight months, from early March though early November. Amtrak pauses its trains for one hour in the fall changeover, as trains cannot leave the station before their published scheduled departure; when DST resumes, trains depart at 2 AM Sunday, and try to make up lost time en route. Overseas, Continental Europe adopted uniform start and end times for DST in 1996, with Britain joining in 2002.

Sunlight Forever: Permanent DST? Several states, including California and Florida, have passed year-round DST, to go into effect if Congress adopts nationwide DST. On March 15, 2022, by unanimous voice vote the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act. To allow the railroads to adjust their timetables, the bill had set November 2023 as the date full DST was to be adopted—the clocks would not have been set back. Senators cited the inconvenience of changing clocks twice annually. But the DST bill died in the House.

Sen. Marco Rubio reintroduced the bill in the 118th Congress, on March 3, 2023; with Republicans now in control of the House, a companion bill was introduced by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), a move blocked by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 117th. The new bill exempts Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the northern Marianas Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.If the new Congress adopts year-round DST, the earliest implementation would be November 2024; if done in the second year of the new Congress, implementation likely would be in November 2025.

Millennium Extravaganza. Worldwide time zones made possible a singular global event: the celebrations that collectively marked Millennium New Year, January 1, 2000. (Calendar purists complained that the true Millennium milestone would be January 1, 2001; the calendar went from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D.—there was no Calendar Year 0.)

Lucky viewers were able to watch celebrations serially as the year moved westward. The common denominator was Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), described as

Coordinated Universal Time—is the 24-hour time standard used as a basis for civil time today. All time zones are defined by their offset from UTC. The offset is expressed as either UTC- or UTC+ and the number of hours and minutes.

Primarily, UTC is based on mean solar time at the prime meridian running through Greenwich, UK. For every 15 degrees of longitude east or west, mean solar time changes by 1 hour. Two time components are added together to translate mean solar time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC): International Atomic Time (TAI) measured by atomic clocks and Universal Time (UT1), the actual length of a day on Earth.

In theory, the UTC offsets countries use should reflect the local mean solar time. However, many time zone boundaries are distorted by geographical and political factors.

Claimants for the first to reach 2000 were legion, sundry islands located near the International Dateline (IDL), at UTC+14; the U.S. nuclear attack submarine Topeka (SSN 754) stationed herself at 400 feet depth underneath the intersection of the IDL and the equator. The first major industrial nation to cross the mark was New Zealand, at UTC+13. The last place to cross into the 21st century—uncontested—was Samoa, UCC-11. For those who arose at the proper hours, it was possible (the author did so) to observe myriad celebrations around the globe. It was an impressive and exciting demonstration of the interlinked wonders of communications and satellite broadcast technologies. displayed on viewers’ television sets.

Bottom (Time) Line. The 5,500 years since Egyptians first used the sundial to divide time into artificial segments have seen the growing need for precision—now, nano-precision. By 2005 much of the world had reached worldwide time-zone equilibrium, a process that formally began in 1883. Time precision grows of necessity, as billions of computers, phones and robots proliferate globally. The modern cesium-ion atomic clock carries precision to a measurement loss of one second every 10,000 years by using 20 billion pulses per second.

But the drive to make DST countrywide hinges not on the need for precision, but on desires for convenience and emotional equilibrium. The year-round DST bill’s chances in the 118th Congress may hinge on whether people in the fall hate four months of afternoon darkness more than they love an extra hour’s pre-dawn slumber.

John Wohlstetter is author of Sleepwalking With the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed. 2014)

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Could Putin’s “Escalate to Win” Nuclear Threat Strategy Work?)

(Washington D.C.) The war against Ukraine initiated by Russian aggression 13 months ago has been accompanied by multiple threats from the Russian leadership, including President Putin, to initiate the use of nuclear weapons against the United States, NATO or Ukraine itself, threats that are linked to NATO support to Ukraine of military hardware.

The threats from Russia are taken as serious given Moscow’s adoption of a strategy often referred to as “escalate to win” where Russia decides to use limited nuclear weapons, probably of the theater or tactical type, in the Ukraine region to counter a losing conventional fight and achieve some kind of “victory” usually not clearly delineated. Thus, NATO has decided to split the difference: arm Ukraine with weapons but not involve NATO forces.

But there is a larger strategy at play and it involves both Russia and China.

First, irrespective of the outcome of the war against Ukraine, Moscow’s current gambit is to eventually secure the US withdrawal of theater nuclear weapons from a number of NATO nations where American fighter planes are armed with what are a couple of hundred nuclear gravity bombs.

Second, Putin’s ruse is to claim the moral high-ground by declaring that all Russian theater nuclear weapons are on Russian soil, unlike similar US nuclear weapons, not withstanding the fact that at a minimum Russian theater nuclear forces outnumber those of the United States by at least 10 to 1 or as much as 25 to 1.

Third, having a monopoly of theater nuclear forces in the European theater is Moscow’s objective, which would seriously tear apart of the fabric of the US extended deterrent or nuclear umbrella over our non-nuclear NATO allies. For its part, the US has never adopted a no-first use pledge but which some in Europe might believe was US policy by default if the US withdrew our theater nuclear forces from Europe. Even though it has also been long-standing US extended deterrent policy that our central strategic nuclear forces are a critical part of extended deterrence not only in the European theater but also in the Middle East and Western Pacific.

Fourth, Putin knows that Russian regional nuclear weapons can reach much of Europe, while US regional or theater nuclear forces if only stationed in the continental United States could not of course reach any part of Europe or western Russia. Such US forces would simply be a non-factor in any crisis or conflict having to do with the European-Russian border. Exactly Putin’s goal.

Fifth, this strategy is not exactly new. The Soviet Union previously and now Russia has centered its foreign policy strategy around one critical objective—destroy NATO and de-link the United States from Europe. This was the point of the Soviet era deployment of SS-20 missiles in Europe (and Asia) that the US responded to along with key NATO allies Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Italy when President Reagan deployed the Pershing and Ground-Launched Cruise missiles culminating in the surprise adoption by the USSR of Reagan’s arms proposal to zero out all such intermediate range forces in the INF Treaty of 1987.

Even though the Russians violated the INF treaty by deploying prohibited INF range missiles, it was not until the Trump administration that the US called Mocow on this and withdrew from the INF agreement. After all, you cannot have a bilateral treaty when there is only one party abiding by the agreement.

Sixth, Putin has also added a new twist to his campaign of nuclear blackmail. Citing the Ukraine coalition forces use of depleted uranium shells, Moscow has attempted to make the “aluminum” part of artillery shells somehow equivalent to using nuclear weapons. Putin has thus begun preparing a site in Belarus for the implicit “retaliatory” future deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, in violation of numerous agreements to which Moscow is party.

The President of Belarus, Mr. Lukashenko, now claims he was unfairly pressured in 1991 to get rid of the Soviet era nuclear weapons located on Belarus soil when the Soviet Union collapsed. And that this somehow makes it consistent with sound strategic policy and law that Belarus can possibly host Moscow’s nuclear weapons planned for deployment later this summer.

Seventh, it is true that Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all gave up their nuclear weapons at the break-up of the USSR, in return for a security guarantee from the West that their territorial integrity would be respected, a pledge Russia itself also adopted, including a formal agreement with Great Britain and the United States to protect Ukraine’s independence and security. Some analysts have suggested that the folly of giving up such weapons in 1991 [and by Libya and Iraq) is now clear, but without realizing that if the good guys we support—Ukraine—have a right to deploy nuclear weapons, the same argument can be made that the bad guys—whom we may be at war with including Iran, for example,—also can make a claim to have a right to deploy nuclear weapons as well because of potential aggression.

Apparently, China received a pledge from Putin at the summit of the two leaders that Russia would not deploy nuclear weapons outside of Russian territory, a pledge that Putin apparently would break if Moscow deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus. On the surface, it appears Putin broke his pledge but something more important is taking place that may explain Russia’s behavior.

China may have understood the pledge was good window dressing. But more importantly, China is worried the South Korean or ROK government is continuing to seek a stronger extended nuclear deterrent pledge from the United States, especially given the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal, both short range and longer range missiles and different types of nuclear weapons. The President of ROK while also pledging fealty to the NPT or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that prohibits the ROK from developing its own nuclear weapons, has called for the US to redeploy American nuclear forces on the peninsula to counter the expanding North Korean nuclear threat, although it would not include nuclear weapons built by the ROK.

The US Department of Defense apparently opposes any deployment of US nuclear forces to the ROK territory. This is interestingly the opposite of China policy. In 1981, as former US Air Force Secretary Tom Reed revealed in his book, The Nuclear Express, that China’s leadership secretly and deliberately adopted a policy of transferring nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Libya. An intact nuclear warhead may also have been transferred to Pakistan as part of such a deal. The A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan, what has been termed “Nukes R Us” facilitated the transfer of such weaponry, with the full support of the Pakistani government, which is allied with China against India.

China got what it wanted which was nuclear weapons in North Korea. Pakistan got help with ballistic missiles. China also hoped the North’s nuclear capability would split the ROK-USA-Japan alliance as conflicts would emerge among the three nations of the Pacific on how to deal with the North Korean threat. Unable to reach agreement of how best to counter the DPRK threats, China hoped the US would take the advice of Doug Bandow and others and withdraw our forces from the ROK in order not to involve the US in a possible war on the Korean peninsula. The argument being that a conflict could involve North Korean long-range rockets incinerating with nuclear weapons some portion of American cities such as Los Angeles or Seattle.

The result China hoped for has not materialized. In fact, the opposite has occurred. The ROK-Japan-US alliance is stronger. Australia has also become stronger especially with the agreement to deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States. Although Australia might sign the UN resolution to make nuclear weapons illegal and thus undermine the US extended deterrent just as it is being strengthened.

The worrisome Chinese buildup is both nuclear and conventional. China too has massively increased its naval shipbuilding and its advanced aviation. Most breathtaking as Admiral Charles Richard, who just retired from heading Strategic Command, explained, is China’s building of more than 400 land based ICBMs at least 360 of which are new. General Anthony Cotton, the new commander of Strategic Command explained in Congressional testimony that China is actually seeking nuclear superiority over the United States in some nuclear areas, and has surpassed the US already in the number of ICBM launchers in their nuclear force.

China, too, has regional or intermediate range missiles by the thousands. It may soon (2030-35) have 1500+ long range strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the minimum of 400-500 which is what they are reported to have today.

The Chinese Navy is larger than the US Navy and because of modernization and budget requirements, the US Navy and US Air Force is getting smaller first before the recently added funding for modernization bears the fruit of an expanded force structure toward the end of this decade. In even the best case, given currently projected defense budgets and plans, a second military window of vulnerability is opening between the US on the one hand and China on the other.

What then should the United States do? Well, when assessing both Russian expansion and modernization of their nuclear forces, some like James Acton are worried the Russian expansion and by implication the Chinese expansion are nuclear “gifts” that US hawks will use as the rationale to push for the expansion of US nuclear forces.

Other analysts such as Darrell Kimball of the Arms Control Association, has cleverly called for a nuclear freeze, originally a Soviet era 1979-80’s idea from Moscow soundly rejected by the US and the Reagan administration. A freeze on warheads even today would give Russia and China as much of an advantage of 8500 to 3400 warheads over the United States.

Ironically, if adopted by Washington, a freeze would actually be an American gift bonanza to Moscow and China. First, Russia has completed the modernization of its nuclear forces to the 90+% level according to the Kremlin; (2) China would expand its forces while a freeze were being negotiated making the strategic balance worse; and (3 disarmament advocates would do everything to stop US modernization as the US is now just beginning to bend metal and build submarines, bombers and ICBMs, all of which as nuclear platforms get initially deployed later in this decade.

As the disarmament community argued in 1981, a hoped for freeze deal would of course have to pause or freeze the US nuclear modernization effort, and not “further” upset the strategic balance. And of course, in 1981, the US was just beginning the nuclear modernization effort of “peace through strength” even as the USSR was toward the completion of another nuclear modernization effort.

Without a monopoly of regional nuclear weapons in Europe and the Western Pacific, Putin and Xi may not be confident they can achieve their objectives including destroying Ukraine independence and engulfing Taiwan into the PRC, even if needed to do so by force.

Senators Roger Wicker and Jim Risch, the ranking members of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, respectively, recently made the important point that removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine was part of an explicit guarantee of Ukraine security. Providing weapons to Ukraine does not violate that agreement, in fact it reinforces it and thus the US is now treating Putin’s nuclear threats as bluff. But within limits.

The US and NATO also know that if NATO forces directly engage Russia, as opposed to military weaponry used by Ukraine, then all sorts of red lines get broken and a nuclear conflict becomes a big possibility. However, as Senators Jim Risch and Roger Wicker also explained in a seminar at the Hudson Institute, yielding to nuclear blackmail re arming Ukraine will simply invite more blackmail. And while we are providing assistance there has to be a strategy to win and the means available to do so. Here the US nuclear deterrent must be second to none. To deter Putin from using nuclear weapons in the Ukraine region or beyond and China from using nuclear weapons in the Western Pacific as well.

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 Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Inside the Nuclear Threat: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran)

(Washington D.C.) North Korea has fired over 100 ballistic missiles of all kinds in the past 12 months over or near Japanese and South Korean territory, some seven-fold greater than in the previous half-decade.

China has built 360 new ICBM silos in Western China, now exceeding the number of ICBM launchers in the United States, while sending a surveillance balloon across the United States in violation of American sovereign airspace.

Iran has according to the United Nation’s IAEA enriched uranium to 84%, within a few percent of the weapons grade fuel needed for a nuclear warhead, sufficient quantities of which they can produce in a month for a dozen warheads.

And Russia continues to threaten the use of nuclear force against the US, NATO and Ukraine should the US not refrain from supplying weapons to Ukraine and have recklessly forced down a USAF surveillance drone operating in international waters.

And so, this is the news in early 2023 as the United States intelligence community seeks to “connect the threat dots” and calculate the threats the country faces. While cataloguing specific actions or “dots” makes some sense by what one might describe as the “four brothers mayhem”, there is rarely a strategy framework discussed from which the American people can judge the seriousness of events.

For example, media descriptions are usually of the “look at this additional provocation” variety when describing missile tests, for example. But actually, the Russians and Chinese, Iranian and Korean hostile acts are not to provoke the US to retaliate in kind and attack. The very opposite in fact. The four hostile nations are seeking to divide the US alliances in the Western Pacific, in central Europe, and in the greater Middle East. And to persuade the US to retreat in any future military crisis, and to force the United States to withdraw from key geographic regions where the United States military now regularly operates.

The strategy and objectives of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran also cannot be ameliorated by more talking or diplomacy or arms control. Talking about peace does nothing about these nations arming for war. Though the four may not want to fight the United States, they want to fight Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea or Saudi Arabia and other Gulf State Arab nations, but without the US military presence. Winning without fighting is not as some would believe not fighting. It is not fighting the United States with its very formidable conventional and nuclear forces. But it is fighting our allies.

Russia is trying to intimidate the US from sending advanced weaponry to Ukraine, and to a degree Moscow’s threats have succeeded to truncate or delay US military assistance to Ukraine in a timely manner.

North Korea’s continued belligerence has certainly strengthened the US-ROK-Japanese alliance, creating conditions under which the three Pacific alliance partners have significantly enhanced military preparedness, spurred on by what the ROK population sees as a weakness in the US extended deterrent.

China has run roughshod over international rules in the South China Sea, and repeatedly violated US and Taiwanese airspace, while building motors for Iranian drones provided to Russia for use in Ukraine, while building a coercive nuclear capability to help push the United States around, while seeking at least in part superior nuclear capability than the United States.

As for Iran, its Navy ships visited Brazil and it has exercised its military with the Chinese and Russians, while massively supporting its own major military buildup by deploying the largest inventory of missiles of any nation in the Middle East.

The most important central characteristic of each nation’s recent behavior has not been its relative recklessness although that has been present. But their uniform pursuit of what Dr. Keith Payne has called “nuclear coercion” —threatening to use nuclear weapons to secure the fruits of aggression even as the four mayhem brothers seek to keep the United States from entering any conflict on the part of its allies—whether Ukraine, South Korea, Taiwan or Israel.

Of further importance is that the four nations are cooperating along the lines of joint military operations, exercises and arms sales.

Without a robust presence in the Pacific, the US cannot protect Taiwan or have a leadership role in the direction of the five billion people and $55 trillion in GDP the Indo-Pacific will achieve in the next two decades. While North Korean aggression can deflect the US attention from Taiwan, China can move against the island along with help from a cooperative Russia.

As for Europe, Russia in turn has hoped to strip NATO of its eastern most members, starting with engulfing Ukraine from which it could open all of eastern Europe to once again become Russian satellites unwilling to help the United States keep Europe safe and whole. While adding 40 million Ukraine citizens plus very large natural gas and grain resources to Moscow’s exchequer to make up in part for the declining Russian population and economy.

Iran and its missile inventory and eventual nuclear weapons could then cement its domination of Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, and from these centers of military power, surround Saudi Arabia and other western allied Gulf States and thus have hegemonic control over 75% of the world’s conventional hydrocarbons. This would provide China with its long sought guaranteed access to petroleum and natural gas supplies at preferential prices.

And also, hep allied Russia with indirect control over the oil and gas of the region which Moscow—not a member of OPEC but one of the largest exporters of petroleum in the world– has referred to as Russia’s patrimony. With such vast oil resources under indirect Russian/Chinese control, the world’s reserve currency could then switch from the US dollar to the Chinese renminbi, a long sought objective of the CCP.

Finally, the four rogue states can also make life miserable for the United States in our own hemisphere. Iran Navy vessels have docked in Brazil and have long reported to be interested in building a missile base in Venezuela, the exact distance from which an Iranian Sahab missile can reach Miami. China controls access to both ends of the Panama Canal and is building a new base on the Atlantic coast of Africa from which to project power across the ocean.

Geographic control over key real estate is critical to the successful implementation of the grand hegemonic strategy of these four nations or “brothers’ mayhem”. There is, however, certainly nothing inevitable about their success. But there is no automatic “arc of history” that bends toward the US and its allies. For liberty and freedom to prevail requires a counter strategy rooted in a realistic understanding of how serious these brutal dictatorships are about their goals, and how US political, diplomatic, economic and military capabilities must be brought to the struggle for the US to prevail.

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. Climate justice remains a theory on paper)

Before delving into the subject of climate change and how to reduce its risks, it is necessary to know exactly what it is. Climate change is mainly represented by long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. These shifts may be partially natural and occur due to changes in the solar cycle and radiation levels. However, human activities have, since the 19th century, been the fundamental cause of climate change, due to the large amounts of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, burned for various household uses, in factories and for land, sea and air transportation. This has resulted in greenhouse gas emissions being released into the atmosphere. These wrap around the globe, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere.

There are significant repercussions due to the phenomenon of climate change for all countries and regions in the world. But it is more dangerous for developing countries due to the widening phenomenon of desertification and their lack of financial and technological capabilities to confront the effects of climate change. This requires the provision of generous aid by developed, industrial countries so that developing countries can adapt and move toward greener economies to limit the effects of climate change. This is known as climate justice.

Effective solutions can be found to help adapt to climate change and economic benefits can be achieved if the process of improving and protecting the environment occurs. For this goal, global agreements have been concluded to guide progress and sustainable development, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement. There is a package of measures that must be taken, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the effects of climate change, along with the conversion of energy systems from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind.

The UN believes there is an urgent need to find a large coalition of countries to bring emissions to net zero by 2050. Emissions must first be reduced by 45 percent by 2030 if the world is to limit warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And fossil fuel production must decrease by about 6 percent per year between 2020 and 2030.

Observers believe that the best solution is achieving climate justice. Reports indicate that the annual cost to developing countries of loss and damage due to climate change will be between $290 billion and $580 billion by 2030.

However, climate justice has remained only a theory on paper. In practice, developed countries’ recognition of climate justice has not translated into a significant injection of money or aid, as reports indicate that the financing flows for international adaptation destined for developed countries are five to 10 times less than the estimated need.

Therefore, it can be asserted that efforts to fight the negative repercussions of climate change require both will and proper administration. A report issued by the UN indicated that the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy is a cornerstone in this matter, and this means not approving new oil and gas fields or coal mines so that all fossil fuel-fired power plants can be phased out by 2040.

Few countries have realized the importance of climate justice but, in this context, Saudi Arabia has launched many national strategies concerned with the environment and climate, such as its National Energy Strategy. The UAE, which will host the COP28 climate change summit later this year, has developed the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy and a carbon neutrality strategy.

Thanks to the recent important steps taken in this direction, the demand for fossil fuel energy sources will decline in the long run, which will limit the phenomenon of greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating climate change and its dangerous repercussions for the planet and its people.

This shift must not impede developed countries from financially supporting poor countries to limit the desertification phenomenon or providing them with assistance and advice. They must also highlight the importance of installing and using home solar energy systems with the help of civil society organizations and various companies. Without this step, it is not possible to reduce the impact of climate change or confront its huge repercussions. It is not the responsibility of a specific country.

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 Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. Not even ‘Robin Hood’ Yassin Fawaz can save Lebanon from its rulers)

The political and economic crises in Lebanon reveal the ruling political system’s state of denial. So great is their delusion, the political elite for a time maintained, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the causes of Lebanon’s woes were foreign in nature.

But the truth always comes out and it was demonstrated by the Oct. 17 revolution in 2019: That the problems with the Lebanese political system come from within because that system adopted and mainlined corruption.

The Lebanese people took to the streets and erected a gallows in Martyrs’ Square in the center of the capital, Beirut. In so doing, they removed the fig leaf that the elite used to mask their illusions — a fig leaf that included the idea that the Amal Movement, a nominally peaceful Shiite establishment party, and Hezbollah, an international terrorist group, are fundamentally different.

The political elite sold those illusions, hidden behind that fig leaf, to Lebanese citizens, who were forced to become prisoners of an economic crisis classified as the worst financial disaster to befall any country in more than a century. This is what prompted Western countries to take the initiative in an attempt to save what could be salvaged, with the support of the US.

The Lebanese were told that, to be helped, they must first help themselves — and the Americans and others in the West bet on the people to bring about vital political change. They hoped that this would happen in the parliamentary elections that took place in May 2022, especially as they included, for the first time, candidates who offered a political and economic vision for the salvation of Lebanon and its people.

Perhaps the well-known Lebanese American businessman Yassin Fawaz (known as King Rolodex on social media and in the streets) could have been part of the necessary changing of the guard. Some said that, rather than Amal’s candidate for speaker of the parliament — Nabih Berri, an 85-year-old man who has been in office since 1992 — Fawaz, who represents the youth, could have taken the role.

But those who are part of the corrupt system in Lebanon had other ideas. Berri is Hezbollah’s man. Fawaz was intimidated and eventually forced into electoral oblivion because he was an enemy of the corrupt establishment and Hezbollah, which brought about the country’s collapse.

Fawaz ran as a Shiite candidate in last year’s parliamentary elections. He did so as an independent, stating that he could not run a real campaign as it was not a real election — because Lebanon does not have real democracy. This is something the people understand, he said.

If we had a real democracy, politicians would not remain in office forever. They would feel the consequences of their role in disasters such as the Beirut port explosion and the financial crisis. But until this changes, everything in Lebanon, including the media and politics, will continue to be controlled by the politicians and the establishment — people who have been in power forever.

Some have described Fawaz, who combines charismatic eloquence with political activism and philanthropy, as the “Robin Hood of Lebanon.” They say he is authentic in a way the elites cannot match because he is genuine, with no links to the corrupt political class. His castigation of the people who voted for the same old politicians in last year’s election went viral and struck a chord.

For many Lebanese, if Fawaz is Robin Hood, the country itself and its government is the villainous Prince John, robbing them of their savings, imposing harsh charges and rationing services. Fawaz can strive to raise awareness of poverty in Lebanon and help the people he meets, but lasting salvation for those who are suffering lies solely in the hands of the state — if it were willing to help. Robin Hood cannot save the kingdom on his own.

Observers see and know that Hezbollah is the cause of the economic collapse in Lebanon and the country’s isolation from its Arab neighbors. Hezbollah’s weapons, its terrorism, its military adventures in Syria and elsewhere abroad, and its leadership’s influence on the repression of Arab countries all contribute to Lebanon’s poverty and isolation.

As a result of all this, the crisis has deepened. The corrupt elite have blocked the political horizon for resolving the situation. The failure of the system in Lebanon to implement the structural reforms of the economy and politics that were promised to the international community, together with the elite’s procrastination, have led to disaster.

Lebanon’s leaders have had to be dealt with harshly and this has meant an international policy of imposing sanctions on all who obstruct political and economic reform, not to mention their disruption of vital government work.

Those affected by this package of sanctions include the head of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gebran Bassil, a minister who stood in the shadow of his father-in-law — former President Michel Aoun — and basked in his reflected glory, thinking himself responsible for the accomplishments that earned the credit.

He is one of the reasons for Lebanon’s transformation into a failed state, due to the enormous waste and plentiful corruption at the Ministry of Energy, which he presided over. Much other responsibility can be laid at the feet of Bassil’s political team, which did whatever it wanted for more than a decade. Half of the Lebanese public debt is the result of the costs of supplying electricity and other arbitrary plans.

Still the politicians were not deterred, so it has been necessary for those in the international community who want to see reforms to escalate their efforts to target the Lebanese political and economic system.

Sources in the US have indicated that the administration of President Joe Biden is close to imposing sanctions on Riad Salameh, the governor of the country’s central bank, Banque du Liban, after the Treasury Department raised concerns about his relationship with Hezbollah and links between Hezbollah financiers and the bank.

American officials are confident in their assessment of Salameh’s relationship with Hezbollah. Some have linked this with the US Treasury’s decision to impose financial sanctions on money service company CTEX Exchange.

Its board of directors is headed by economist Hassan Moukalled, who is considered to have close links to Hezbollah on the one hand and the Russian business community on the other. He also has an excellent relationship with the governor of Banque du Liban, which granted him a banking license in March 2020 in the midst of the economic and financial crisis. Moukalled’s company was reportedly carrying out exchange operations for the benefit of the central bank, in coordination with Salameh.

The Treasury said it was sanctioning Moukalled and CTEX for facilitating the financing of Hezbollah through the company’s exchange centers.

It is clear that the crisis in Lebanon can only be resolved through a decisive and firm approach. The question now is not whether Lebanon’s Robin Hood and his friends can ride to the rescue and save the country but, sadly, will we be faced with more painful decisions caused by the corrupt political system?

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 first appeared in the American Spectator Magazine: https://spectator.org/the-2022-titanic-vote-iceberg-ahead-or-are-we-already-sinking/)

The history surrounding the April 15, 1912 peacetime sinking of the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic has been exhaustively documented. The primary historical takeaway has been that the ship’s builders, and its boosters in government and industry, had fallen prey to technology hubris: ships could be built to withstand the worst natural hazards and calamities that Mother Nature could throw at them. A massive iceberg in the North Atlantic put paid to such conceits, with over 1,500 on board sent to their deaths in the briny deep. In the wake of last fall’s catastrophic mid-terms, the GOP may be discovering that the electorate—at least, those that went to the polls, inhabit political worlds different than imagined, different than polls suggested, and, above all, different than standard diagnoses indicated.

Many post-election diagnoses identify bad candidates, lack of positive issues, focus on 2020 election, Donald Trump, poor allocation of limited campaign resources, etc. All these points carry some salience. But they miss—excuse the pun—the elephant in the room: failure of GOP and independent voters to keep uppermost in mind what mid-terms above all represent: a referendum report card on the performance of the president.

In ordinary times this focus is less significant, and voters may choose to focus on the candidates on the ballot—Congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial candidates—even, at times, key high-visibility mayoral races. In the presidential year of 1960, the Kennedy-Nixon debates showcased remarkably similar positions; a common expression of the choice was Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In such times, off-year elections have less saliency.

Not so in 2022. Not when the country is seen the worst performance of a president’s first two years since at least the Civil War. Many have said that had President Biden purposefully set out to damage America, he hardly could have done worse; some indeed have asserted that he intentionally sought to weaken America. Who is correct on this proposition matters not at all.

What mattered most was stopping the president from another two years of inflicting catastrophic damage: (a) roaring inflation, the highest in 40 years; (b) runaway spending, added trillions to the national debt, already at record levels; (b) replacing a net energy surplus in 2020—the first in 70 years, with renewed dependence on foreign oil—necessitating tin-cup tours seeking access to increased oil production exports; (c) a literally open border, with record millions streaming across our undefended southern border—without screening for terrorists, or for Covid, despite such screening being supported by 80 percent of the voters;(d) allowing crossings by migrants under indentured servitude to the drug cartels and annually importing enough fentanyl to kill every American; and (e) an epic crime wave underway in America’s large cities.

With such calamities unfolding, a Red tsunami was essential, to keep to a minimum further damage during the president’s term. Instead we have what is barely a sidewalk puddle. This happened because Republican and independent voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers for the only poll that matters, cast in the voting booth. In doing so they voted for two more calamitous years. This holds regardless of their motives; voting machines tally actual votes, not the reasons behind voter choices.

In order to stop the president and his minions on Capitol Hill, the GOP needed enough of a margin to lose wavering Republican votes; unlike the Democrats, who have the internal discipline of a totalitarian party, the GOP has a bigger tent. Thus, John Boehner, who ascending to the House Speakership, in the wake of a GOP landslide in 2014, could not keep his flock in line with 255 votes; the Democrats can run the House with 218 votes. The House is now 221-214 Republican, and while Speaker Kevin McCarthy is off to a good start, the narrow margin will often severely limit what the GOP can accomplish. The 51-49 Senate means the Democrats can confirm another passel of hard-leftist judicial nominees, a collection of Kentanji clones.

Thus, voters unable to set aside their reservations about GOP candidates as to their positions on specific issues delivered what the president and his legislative leadership interpret as a mandate to continue the policies that are impoverishing, sundering and literally endangering the republic. In these highly partisan times—now arguably the most deeply divided since the Civil War—voters should have felt an overriding obligation to above all limit further vast damage inflicted on America by the party in power.

Democrats are further energized because: (a) despite blatant election fraud, an Arizona judge dismissed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit; (b) most voters gave Biden what amounts to an ungentlemanly C—instead of a failing grade; (c) the GOP ran poorly with independents, winning 38 percent, way below the 51 percent Democrats won in 2018; (d) a hyper-partisan mainstream media deliberately covered up the border chaos with words calculated to obfuscate, leaving most voters blissfully unaware of the massive influx of illegals—unprecedented in modern times; (e) the government’s admission that it cannot even locate records of 378,000 migrants taken into custody—a number greater than a plurality of poll respondents gave for total 2021-2022 border crossings; (f) an avalanche of bogus asylum claims, creating de facto mass amnesty.

The full extent of the mainstream media immigration news blackout is made clear in this detailed description by Never-Trumper Andy McCarthy:

Broadly speaking, the country does not know how bad the situation at the border is. As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur points out, in recent polling by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, just 13 percent knew that there were over 2 million illegal border crossings per year. Not only did the remaining 87 percent significantly underestimate the number of illegal entries, but more than half of them believed the number to be less than half a million.

McCarthy goes further, charting a course to bypass media disinformation and set the stage for Republicans winning on 2024 what they utterly failed to do in 2022. His article gives the staggering numbers for illegal migrants during Biden’s first 23 months: at least 6 million, or 2,600 per day. But that doe not allow for the steep increase in 2022, as it took months for the cartels to organize caravans, etc. McCarthy explains the results to date, and the likely consequences to come:

To provide some perspective, during the Obama–Biden years, the Department of Homeland Security regarded it as a crisis if the number of illegal-alien encounters inched up to 1,000 per day, which computes to 365,000 per year. “A thousand [per day] overwhelms the system,” Obama’s former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, acknowledged in a 2019 interview. At the time, the Trump administration was dealing with four times that amount due to a surge in border arrivals by alien family units and unaccompanied alien minors. (The surge was caused by the refusal of congressional Democrats to cooperate in Trump’s signature border-security priority; it was quelled, as Rich Lowry related, because Trump induced cooperation from other countries.)

Thanks to Biden’s wholesale adoption of transnational-progressive radicalism, we are now at seven times the number that Johnson conceded would constitute a crisis. Post–Title 42, we could find ourselves at 18 times that amount, or perhaps even more — and remember, that’s just the apprehensions, not the got-aways.

There is more. Three major polls released in late January/early February present sobering numbers: (a) a majority of voters call lack of leadership the top political issue; (b) a majority also say that President Biden has accomplished little, citing the economy, border crossings and Russia/Ukraine; (c) 41 percent say that their personal finances have worsened under Biden—the worst number in 37 years.

Then there is New York City, 41 percent of whose voters name crime as their top issue, miles ahead of affordable housing (17%), homelessness (12%), inflation and immigration (both 8%). Crime ranks first for 63 percent of GOP voters, 53 percent of independents and 30 percent of Democrats. Forty percent feel “less safe,” 53 percent, “about the same” and 8 percent feel “safer.” Mayor Eric Adams, 13 months into his mayoralty, is 21 points underwater, 57-36 percent; his disapprove number is 78 percent for GOP voters, 63 percent with independents and 48 percent among Democrats. With robbery up 32 percent, rape 11 percent and burglary 29 percent, who can blame them? Gov. Kathy Hochul refuses to blame “get out of jail free” bail “reform” for the rise. Yet NYC voters voted for Hochul over Lee Zeldin, who promised to fire Manhattan’s woke D.A. on his first day in office if elected. Had Zeldin even made the high-30s in the city, he’d have been elected governor. NYC Voters could have sent a message to Democrats nationwide with an upset win by Zeldin. Instead they voted—wittingly or unwittingly—for continued rising crime and unsafe streets.

Something is afoot here: Voter attitudes like these would normally signal a Red wave. Yet voters would not send a message to the Oval Office occupant. Either they opted to accept two more years of catastrophic decline, or they believe that Biden will improve. But a president who reads, as Biden did—the 2022 mid-term result as an endorsement of his policies—in his State of the Union speech, he asserted that “the State of the Union is strong”—is far more likely to double down than trim his sails.

A longtime conservative commentator wrote of the elections that Republican candidates failed on two counts: (a) they did not offer solutions to the problems created by the Biden administration; (b) they addressed abortion solely in terms of federalism—avoiding the substance of the issue. His article missed the boat, so to speak, on both counts. The party out of power cannot pass anything; at best, it can explain why the party in power is messing up. It is only in presidential election years that the party out of power must offer alternatives which, if the party captures the presidency, and wins a sufficient majority in Congress, it can pass and implement.

The party’s message that should suffice in off-year elections is: The first rule of the hole is to stop digging. Had the GOP made tsunami-level gains in 2022, it would have been positioned to stop the president’s program; and with the Senate, it could have forced the president to appoint left-wing moderates, instead of radicals like Kentanji, to the federal bench. A Red tsunami would have shocked Democrats in Congress facing re-election in 2024 to re-evalute their chances if they back the administration.

As to the second point: Federalism is a bedrock foundation of conservative governance. President Reagan made it a central theme of his presidency. And within each state, the principle of subsidiarity pushes solutions down to local levels. The whole point of the Dobbs decision was that Roe v. Wade had taken from the states their rightful role in determining social policy. The states are supposed to be laboratories where policies can be tried, and results tabulated, as to what policies work best. The importance of federalism is best illustrated by the Trump policy of, after a couple months of lockdown, letting the states pursue their own solutions. Had that not been done—had Hillary, or any other imaginable Democrat, been president—a national lockdown policy would be been imposed, following Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer (with, of course, a “we’re royalty“ exemption—rules for thee but not for we—for the president and pals). The courts would never have ruled against the lockdown policy in the absence of empirical evidence that anti-lockdown states were doing as well, even better, than lockdown states. Federalism thus saved America from a health policy tyranny.

Bottom Line. The off-year election is the one chance voters have during a presidential term to send a distress message to the occupant of the Oval Office. They chose not to do so in 2022. They will suffer, and deserve, the consequences (along with those who voted Republican and alas do not deserve the pain almost certain to come). As for 2024, all bets are off.

The 2022 election had all the elements in place for a Red tsunami. And the GOP did win 3 million more votes in House races, but did not get a commensurate return. Turnout was 46.5 percent. The latter number surprises. One would think that with all the bad news, and a president voters blamed for multiple calamities, voters would have understood the need to check the White House, and turn out in large enough numbers to flip both houses. But they did not see it that way.

True, there will be fewer GOP incumbent Senate seats at stake in 2024, and more opportunities for pickups. But given the gap between voter attitudes and how they voted, retaking the White House, keeping the GOP House micro-majority while electing a GOP Senate will likely be a tall order.

Which brings us back to RMS Titanic. What Henry Wadsworth Longfellow famously called “our Ship of State” may already have hit the iceberg.

John Wohlstetter, a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, is author of Sleepwalking with the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed. 2014)

(This article was written by Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. West should not wait to give full support to Iranian protesters)

The Iranian proverb “spring does not come with one flower” applies to the fourth package of sanctions recently approved by the foreign ministers of the EU countries in response to a vote by the European Parliament that called for them to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

The European calculations did not live up to the hopes of the Iranian people, who have risen up in protest at the regime’s killing of Mahsa Amini. Their protests have now turned into a revolution against the mullahs’ regime, which has been repressing the Iranian people for four and a half decades. The brutality with which the uprising is being repressed — as the authorities’ criminality has reached the point of shooting demonstrators in the eyes, as if they want to extinguish the light of the truth — has firmly established that this regime only understands the language of killing and oppression.

Although the sanctions package affected 37 entities affiliated with the mullahs’ regime, the decision did not live up to the European Parliament’s recommendation of designating the IRGC. This group is the Iranian regime’s thickest and most brutal stick. It is the one whose crimes transcend Iran’s borders. Its criminality inside and outside of Iran must be brought to an end.

If the politicians are falling short of calling the IRGC a terrorist organization, a court in an EU member state should issue a concrete legal conviction. This leads us to the question: What are European courts waiting for? Especially since the IRGC’s violations are visible from Iran to Yemen, passing through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, along with its intervention in the Ukraine war on the side of Moscow, which it is providing with drones.

The EU retains scant hope of reviving the Iran nuclear deal, which has been suspended since the US withdrawal under former President Donald Trump in 2018, based on the background of Tehran’s lack of commitment. Trump discovered early on that this regime does not understand mild language and diplomacy, and must instead be dealt with firmly.

In line with its strategy, Washington announced late last month the imposition of new trade restrictions on seven Iranian entities that effectively contributed to the production of drones that Russia has used to bomb Ukraine. The Department of Commerce said that these companies engaged in activities that threatened the US’ national security and foreign policy.

Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives last month approved, by 420 votes in favor to just one against, a resolution condemning the suppression of demonstrations and protests in Iran, as well as supporting the protesters in achieving their demands. Rep. Claudia Tenney said: “In this resolution, we condemn the gross violation of human rights by the Iranian regime in its suppression of the demonstrators who rose bravely against this terrorist regime to demand their rights.”

It is worth mentioning that Washington also imposed a package of sanctions on many senior Iranian officials.

Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, addressed the Iranian people, saying: “Be strong because freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” For his part, CIA Director William Burns said during a meeting at Georgetown University in Washington: “The turmoil resulting from the widespread protests in Iran has led to confusion in the Iranian regime.” He also praised the “courage” of the Iranian women who are disappointed with the conditions in their country.

It has been proved that the mullahs’ regime in Iran is the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Therefore, the international community must move with greater force to counter this oppressive regime. The bombing of weapons factories in Isfahan and other cities, in addition to the bombing of convoys in Al-Bukamal, Syria, are just noise — it is time to mute them and unleash the freedom of the Iranians with full support.

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.