Connexion
Sen. Rand Paul blessed Rep. Thomas Massie's move to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, saying that Republicans need someone with "courage."
The post Rand Paul: Thomas Massie ‘Doing the Right Thing’ to Oust Mike Johnson as Speaker appeared first on Breitbart.
Rep. Mike Gallagher's (R-WI) betrayal of his constituents will continue at least one day longer.
The post The Betrayal Continues: Mike Gallagher Postpones Quit Date to Help Deep State Pass Ukraine Aid Scheme appeared first on Breitbart.
President Joe Biden announced he “strongly” supports the House foreign aid package as Republicans rapidly turn on Speaker Mike Johnson over efforts to combine several supplemental bills into a single rule with a lack of border security legislation in the package.
The post Biden ‘Strongly’ Supports Johnson’s $95 Billion Foreign Aid Package appeared first on Breitbart.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has pushed back against the growing use of industrial policies.
The site of a building destroyed by a Russian missile strike, according to Ukrainian officials, in Chernihiv, Ukraine, on Wednesday.
A member of Ukraine’s 17th Tank Brigade near the front line in the Donetsk region in January.
House Republicans’ dissatisfaction with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is rapidly growing as Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA) and Jim Banks (R-IN) are sharing their frustrations about what Banks called “insanity” in Johnson’s foreign aid framework, which includes over three times as much money for Ukraine as it does for Israel while neglecting the U.S. Southern border.
The post House Dissatisfaction with Johnson Explodes over Foreign Aid ‘Insanity’ that Neglects Southern Border appeared first on Breitbart.
Conservatives are apparently no longer welcome in Europe. What’s next?
Chaos erupted at the National Conservatism conference (“NatCon”) in Brussels today when police ordered the event to be shut down for causing a “public disturbance.”
Hundreds of attendees gathered in the EU capital to hear speeches by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage, the UK’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and more right-wing figures and politicians.
Back on April 13, the organizers of NatCon shared that the conference would be moving to a different location after their host caved to political pressure from politicians such as Brussels’s Mayor Phillipe Close.
Even after finding a last minute replacement venue, NatCon shared that they were still facing pressure to cancel the event altogether, just hours leading up to its start.
As the conference opened, Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts NatCon, said to the crowd, “This is now the third event space where we have attempted to host a National Conservative Conference in Brussels. This is an age in which we can’t expect basic decency or grace from those who are our political opponents.”
The conference proceeded over the next few hours, with a slew of speakers having their chance to address the audience. When Nigel Farage took to the stage, he and his audience did not know what was about to happen. His words were ironically foreshadowing: “If anyone said to me that Brexit wasn’t the right thing to do—leaving this place, recognizing you can’t be a democratic, sovereign nation state and be a member of this monstrous union—they would now tell me: WE WERE RIGHT TO LEAVE!”
However, just minutes into his speech, the Brussels police arrived at the scene, citing “public disturbance” as the reason for shutting the event down.
Police blockaded the venue, telling attendees that if they left, they would not be allowed back in. According to NatCon, “Delegates have limited access to food and water, which are being prevented from delivery. Is this what city mayor Emir Kir is aiming for?”
Saurabh Sharma, president of American Moment and executive director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, who had chaired a panel discussion at the event, shared an image of the chaos on X:
Brussels Police are holding NatCon Brussels 2 hostage. They know that it would be a circus to frog-march us out of here—so they just won’t let people come in.
— Saurabh Sharma 🇺🇸 (@ssharmaUS) April 16, 2024
The conference will continue—either here or elsewhere. pic.twitter.com/L0gq5s9sxS
Gladden Pappin, President of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, told The American Conservative,
Brussels has been hounding Hungary for supposed rule of law violations for years. But today in the heart of the European Union, the mayor of Brussels forced the National Conservatism conference out of two venues and is trying to expel it from a third, against the will of the owner. Brussels police have barricaded the doors of the conference location, citing the mayor’s criticism of the ideas being discussed and claiming that the conference is under antifa threat. Conference attendees can leave but not return. This is the reality of liberalism: while draping itself in “norms” and the “rule of law,” it has become an aggressive ideology bent on excluding conservative viewpoints. Unfortunately for them, the truth can’t be excluded.
Hazony also spoke to TAC, saying, “We decided to hold NatCon Brussels 2 because Europe is facing a choice between preserving independent nations or descending into totalitarian liberal tyranny. This ridiculous suppression of political speech only underlines this truth. Make no mistake, this is the entrenched political cartel in Brussels doing everything in and out of their power to stop any challenge to their rule.”
Rod Dreher, resident of Hungary, speaker at NatCon, and TAC contributing editor, told TAC via email, “The Islamo-left municipal government, collaborating with Antifa, are showing the world the kind of Europe they will impose if they aren’t stopped. I never imagined I would live to see something like this in the free and democratic West. Yet here we are. Nothing anybody will have said from the NatCon stage will speak as powerfully about the dark realities of the moment as what the Brussels authorities have done.”
While stuck inside the venue, the speakers are carrying on with the event. The question remains: Is free speech still a reality in the European Union? And when will this dark force of suppression make its way across the Atlantic?
The post Inside the Attempt to Cancel NatCon Brussels appeared first on The American Conservative.
The aid package that Mike Johnson is advancing mirrors the $95 billion aid bill the Senate passed two months ago.
And will the U.S. be dragged along for the ride?
In August 1961, during a period when tensions between Washington and Moscow were at a high point, Admiral Konstantin I. Derevyanko penned a letter to Premier Krushchev. His purpose was to alert Krushchev to what the Admiral called the “nuclear romanticism” of the Soviet General Staff. The Admiral’s words still carry the force of logic and common sense and are still worthy of our attention today:
Which planet do these people [the Soviet General Staff] intend to live on in the future, and to which Earth do they plan to send their troops to conquer territories?… By this indiscriminately massive use of nuclear weapons on a small and narrow area like Western Europe, we would not only be accepting millions of radioactively contaminated civilians, but, because of the prevailing westerly winds, would also be radioactively contaminating millions of our own people for decades—our armed forces and the populations of the socialist countries, including our own country as far as the Urals.
According to an unnamed official of the U.S. Government, President Joe Biden has told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States will not participate in a counterstrike against Iran. This is gratifying news.
Israel does not contemplate operations against Iran or any other state that challenges Israel’s bid for strategic dominance in exclusively conventional military terms. In other words, for Israel’s national leadership, the use of a nuclear weapon is always on the table. Israel’s fundamental deterrence is still asymmetric nuclear capability.
Until now, Washington’s unconditional support for any action Netanyahu wants to take has made Washington an accomplice in Israel’s deliberate slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s Arab population and in the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria, a violation of international law. This collaborative support erodes the power and authority of the American People.
It’s time to ask whether American national interest and common sense are finally intruding in the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy. No one in the United States, Europe, or Asia benefits economically, politically, or financially from a regional war in the Middle East that closes the Straits of Hormuz and potentially invites direct Russian military intervention on Iran’s side. Is it also possible that Biden might object to the destruction of life in Gaza?
In this connection, the revelation that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin allegedly asked Minister Yoav Gallant, his Israeli counterpart, to inform the United States in advance of any possible counterattack by Israel is small comfort. Americans should not forget that Netanyahu wields considerable influence on the Hill, and in the mainstream media. Already legislators are falling all over themselves to send additional billions to Israel while U.S. borders remain open, Americans die of fentanyl poisoning, criminality rises, and children are being trafficked.
It may be too soon to answer the question of whether U.S. foreign policy is changing. Why? Because Israeli Media reports that there were intense debates during the last two meetings of the Israeli war Cabinet on whether to launch a large-scale strike against Iran. Such an attack would likely target Iranian command-and-control, potential long-range missile sites, airbases, naval bases, and oil infrastructure. On the other hand, there was reportedly a discussion about an Israeli response that might be more “measured” to prevent a wider regional conflict.
What Americans know is that Iran targeted Israeli military installations, not Israel’s population. And Iran used a small fraction of its arsenal and very few of their newest weapons. Hezbollah effectively sat out the event. Though it is speculated that two Israeli airfields and possibly an intelligence station on the Golan Heights sustained some damage, the entire Iranian operation had a theatrical air about it.
No one was surprised. Certainly not the Israeli air forces or their colleagues in the U.S. and British air forces. As noted above, with few exceptions, most of the 300-plus drones and missiles were intercepted and shot down.
Nevertheless, Iran understood what was required to overwhelm Israeli and allied air defenses. We may infer that there was also a desire in Tehran to avoid escalating the conflict. Consider what would happen if Iran launched 1500 drones and 800 ballistic missiles over several hours, or even days. Iran made its point. It’s simple: Iran can destroy Israel. Tehran created new conditions of deterrence that favor Iran.
Iran announced through their UN mission that they consider the issue of the Israeli strikes on their consular offices in Syria closed. But nothing is solved. Little has changed. A million are starving in Gaza, and Americans should expect the Israeli campaign of murder and expulsion in Gaza to resume shortly.
As a result, Netanyahu will demand the subjugation or destruction of Iran or any Muslim entity that challenges Israeli strategic dominance. For Netanyahu it’s a matter of existential importance to Israel. Yet the U.S. did not commit to attacking Iran. This is unacceptable to Netanyahu, and he will work to alter Washington’s position.
Under the circumstances, Washington should expect Israel to employ whatever military power is at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, to destroy Iran’s strategic power. Destroying Iran’s underground nuclear facilities has been a goal for a very long time.
Moscow, however, will not tolerate a devastating attack on Iran. The question is whether Biden will tolerate such an attack and continue to indulge Israeli operations in Gaza. Perhaps Biden should pause to read Admiral Derevyanko’s 1961 advice to Krushchev before he answers.
The post Will Israel Go Nuclear Against Iran? appeared first on The American Conservative.
“We’re going to try again this week,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday about voting on a bill to aid Israel.
Eighty-six House Republicans on Friday voted against an amendment to require a warrant for surveillance of Americans' communications.
The post Eighty-Six House Republicans Vote for Warrantless Surveillance of Americans appeared first on Breitbart.
Turkish conservatives must adapt in the face of voter dissatisfaction.
In 1977, Israel witnessed what was termed the “mahapach,” a Hebrew word for upheaval or revolution, as the right-liberal Likud party ended 28 years of left-center governance. A similar seismic shift seems to be unfolding in Turkey, echoing through the corridors of power in Ankara to the streets of Istanbul and beyond. The 2024 local elections in Turkey have emerged as a watershed moment for the nation’s conservative and nationalist factions, indicating a tectonic shift in the political landscape that may have profound implications for the country’s future.
On March 31, 2024, Turkey’s local elections set a different tone from past polls. The People’s Alliance, a coalition composed of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), experienced a notable setback, losing control over several key municipalities. This marked a departure from the fervor that characterized the May 2023 General Elections, with the repercussions of this electoral outcome poised to significantly influence the role of political actors in Turkish society.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP) emerged as the primary victor, relegating the AKP to second place—a development viewed as a severe blow by Turkish conservatives and right-wingers. Various factions within these groups have speculated on the reasons behind their defeat; a prevalent theory suggests that the electorate aimed to send a stern message to the ruling elite due to the country’s economic downturn. This perspective finds resonance within the context of Turkish right-wing politics, where the relationship between conservative social groups and their political representatives is not based on mutual exchange.
A deep-rooted trust in strong leadership, coupled with an unwavering belief in the leader’s infallibility, fosters an organic bond between the leader and his party, rendering internal reforms challenging. Additionally, the mystical reverence for the state held by Turkish conservatives discourages public dissent. In this vein, the local elections presented an unprecedented opportunity for Turkish conservatives to voice their political discontent in a dramatic fashion, relegating the ruling party to the opposition benches at a local level.
Moreover, the 2024 local elections signify a setback for the Turkish right at large, with the exception of the New Welfare Party (YRP), led by Fatih Erbakan, which seemed to defy the trend by embracing the political legacy and rhetoric of his father, Necmettin Erbakan. The YRP’s platform, focusing on anti-vaccination, nationalist-Islamist themes, and a number of other distinct policy propositions, unexpectedly attracted up to 7 percent of the vote. Disenchanted AKP supporters found refuge in the YRP, buoyed by the belief that such a shift would not undermine the AKP’s standing. Post-election analyses, however, indicate that the People’s Alliance’s vote share hovered around 49 percent, with the anti-Erdogan coalition slightly leading at 50.2 percent. Despite the contraction of mainstream right-wing parties, this does not necessarily denote a paradigm shift among the right-wing electorate.
The relegation of AKP to second place has ignited fervent debate among Turkey’s right-wing circles. While some attribute this decline to economic malaise and poor candidate selection, a broader analysis reveals macro-scale factors at play. The genesis of AKP can be traced back to societal divisions between the periphery and the center, propelled by the capitalist transformation of the Turkish economy and the centralization of state bureaucracy. As the political voice of the marginalized, AKP initially rose to prominence. Over time, however, the party’s pivot towards conservative and nationalist rhetoric led to the alienation of its pragmatic and liberal elements, culminating in the creation of a new “other.”
The “iron law of oligarchy,” by which decisions by a select party elite began facing rejection at the grassroots level, and an identity crisis within conservatism underscore a complex milieu. The conservatives’ prolonged tenure in power, coupled with an increasingly intimate relationship with the state apparatus, has engendered a new political orthodoxy, sidelining dissenters as security threats. Moreover, the inability of the conservative ideology to adapt to changing circumstances, gravitating towards a geopolitical revisionist stance, has surfaced as a salient challenge.
The central dilemma for advancing a conservative agenda in Turkey revolves around the political and geopolitical ramifications of Islam. AKP’s challenge in crafting a comprehensive conservative doctrine is compounded by transnational religious affiliations, notably the concept of the ummah. This global Islamic solidarity occasionally hampers the full realization of a national identity, as demonstrated in debates over Turkey’s trade relations with Israel. AKP’s foreign policy rhetoric since the Arab Spring, aimed at addressing the ummah’s issues under Turkey’s stewardship, has witnessed a recalibration post-2020, yet its societal echoes persist.
Looking ahead, the ramifications of the 2024 elections for Turkey are poised to be far-reaching, particularly in shaping Turkey’s engagement with global powers like the U.S. ahead of the 2028 elections. Turkey’s economic reliance on external financing underscores the necessity of strengthening partnerships with the EU and the U.S. A potential alignment between Erdogan and a Trump-led U.S. could foster cooperation on regional and global fronts, sharing a mutual understanding. This could, consequently, bolster Erdogan’s influence within the realm of domestic politics.
Nevertheless, a glaring deficiency within Turkish conservatism is the lack of engagement with conservative factions beyond its borders, contributing to the stagnation of its domestic agenda. Fostering ties with American conservatism could serve as a pivotal step in rejuvenating Turkey’s conservative movement.
While the local election results in Turkey spell a significant setback for the conservative-nationalist bloc, it is imperative not to overlook the nearly 49 percent vote share secured by the right. This percentage embodies the most significant political capital for the right wing as it gears up for the 2028 elections, signaling that the conservative base, although shaken, remains a formidable force in Turkish politics.
The post The 2024 Turkish Elections Were a Warning for the Global Right appeared first on The American Conservative.
Israeli soldiers in Gaza last month.
Conservatives and progressives on Friday are demanding that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) allow for amendments to curb surveillance abuse during next week's spy powers reauthorization fight.
The post Conservatives, Progressives Demand Amendments During Spy Powers Fight to Curb Surveillance Abuse appeared first on Breitbart.
On June 2, Mexico will elect a new president.
The era of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is coming to an end. Most Americans, particularly those following the disastrous events at the southern border, are likely to say good riddance to the cantankerous AMLO, who is completing a six-year term and legally prohibited from running again.
The Mexican leader has been the hemisphere’s loudest voice in promoting a universal “right to migrate,” sometimes colluding with President Joe Biden to help migrants illegally enter the United States, and sometimes masterfully manipulating him.
Although he will leave office by October 1, AMLO will almost assuredly be succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, his protégé candidate who is fully expected to continue his administration’s policies.
For months, Sheinbaum has held a commanding lead in Mexico’s national polling, and most experts predict she will easily win the June voting. She is campaigning cautiously, confident that AMLO’s endorsement and popularity—he has almost 60 percent approval levels—will carry her to victory.
Sheinbaum is an experienced politician, who proved her leadership mettle, and won AMLO’s support, by previously serving as mayor (governor in function) of the greater Mexico City capital region (population 22 million).
Sheinbaum’s personality is cut from a different cloth than AMLO’s. She has an academic background, holding a hard-science Ph.D., and tends toward a less combative approach than the outspoken AMLO. However, she very much shares his leftist vision: critical of so-called “neoliberal” economics, while advocating the radical-chic woke agenda that is everywhere in leftist politics. Predictably, she ordered a statue of Christopher Columbus to be taken down in the capital.
If Sheinbaum is elected, the identity-politics-driven international media story will headline her status as Mexico’s first Jewish-heritage woman president. The gushing reporting about her identity will help sweep AMLO off Mexico’s national stage, but Sheinbaum’s expected electoral victory, unfortunately, will certainly further entrench his political agenda.
Sheinbaum has embraced AMLO’s views on immigration: borders should be porous and the priority is addressing “root causes.” When it comes to handling Washington, Sheinbaum is more analytical, but her first instinct is an AMLO-like defense of Mexican sovereignty. She may have some differences on environmental policies with the Mexican president; AMLO is fine burning fossil fuels, while Sheinbaum, the green physicist, is deeper into climate change orthodoxy.
While there are several candidates running, Scheinbaum’s main opponent is Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech-industry businesswoman and former senator who heads a coalition put together by Mexico’s two main opposition political parties, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional). Gálvez is seeking to restore something of the pre-AMLO dynamic in Mexican politics; although she brings a new twist as an indigenous-heritage woman, that era is not likely coming back.
For decades, the PRI and PAN dominated Mexican politics in an establishment manner similar to our own Democrats and Republicans. It was in 2018 that AMLO finally overturned their dominance when his insurgent party, known as Morena (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional), took him to the presidency in a landslide victory.
AMLO discredited both the PRI (the old statist, establishment left) and the PAN (conservative and business-oriented) as Mexico’s corrupt ruling class. The fact that the two previously dominant parties, once bitter rivals, have come together, somewhat desperately, to nominate Gálvez says volumes about how much AMLO has remade Mexican politics.
One key element of the AMLO realignment was his large expansion of federal welfare and pension plans. In modern Dickensian Mexico, some 20 million workers are in the informal economy that creates 30 percent of national income. AMLO has brought this significant and neglected segment of society into the welfare state for the first time, an effort that doubtless undergirds his popularity.
The left praises AMLO’s welfare policies for “institutionalizing” Mexican support programs, like FDR’s in the 1930s. The country’s conservatives and the old establishment liberal-left, on the other hand, condemn his policies as populist vote-buying, a disreputable political tactic nevertheless regularly used to win Mexican elections.
All of this contributes to why Gálvez has a hard path to victory. She has already gone to Washington to suggest that the Organization of American States (OAS) send election observers to Mexico.
Gálvez would be marginally preferable to Sheinbaum when it comes to U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. Gálvez does talk about collaboration on the common frontier, and she might, at least rhetorically, open up to a better law-enforcement partnership. But her security vision has little in common with securing the border in an American sense.
While Gálvez denounces the unprecedented human trafficking that is taking place in both countries, her immigration “solution” is more visas and legal work opportunities for foreigners, particularly Mexicans, in the United States. This is not surprising, since Mexicans living in el Norte can still vote in Mexico’s elections.
Mexico’s endemic corruption is another major campaign issue that directly impacts the U.S. national interest, because our large southern neighbor is both our greatest commercial trading partner and source of migrants. Both candidates, of course, denounce corruption, but neither proposes viable solutions because everybody is out of ideas.
Sheinbaum is almost philosophical, rejecting the notion that Mexican corruption is a “matter of culture”; she improbably calls for “peace dialogues” among governors, judges, and police to address “impunity.” Sheinbaum claims, dubiously, that fundamental change is already under way as AMLO’s administration is not only setting a new tone, but has begun to historically remake the country—AMLO pompously calls it the “Fourth Transformation”—by overturning corrupt privileges deeply embedded in Mexican society.
Gálvez of course rejects Sheinbaum’s positive spin and has made credible charges that AMLO is no different than past presidents, specifically accusing his adult sons of illicitly profiting from the government-led, massive construction effort of the Maya train line in southern Mexico. This train line is AMLO’s signature infrastructure project, and its costs have ballooned from about $8 to $28 billion as contractors wheel and deal.
Gálvez’s criticism is certainly more valid than Sheinbaum’s optimism. Mexican society, by measures like Transparency International’s annual rating, is still hopelessly sunk in widespread corrupt practices. These continue despite Mexico’s success in attracting significant new foreign investment and trade, which comes to the country mainly because of its nearness to the U.S. market. Outsiders who seek to do business with Mexico—and increasingly Chinese businessmen are first in line—simply navigate around corrupt practices or participate in them.
Where AMLO has succeeded on the corruption issue, however, is in fiercely defending his own, highly valuable, personal reputation as being incorruptible. For millions of Mexicans, accustomed to watching their politicians become vastly wealthy (sadly, not unlike in the U.S.), AMLO’s clean record, if it is indeed true, is something remarkable. It certainly helps Sheinbaum’s campaign as she, too, is substantially free from charges of illicitly using politics to become wealthy.
In this context, AMLO has been a grandmaster of symbolic acts that his grassroots supporters never forget. For example, he canceled Mexico City’s massively over-budget new airport project (thought to benefit the corrupt rich); he refused to use and sold off the president’s luxury jet, a Boeing 787 “Dreamliner”; and he never took occupation of the chief executive’s elaborate living quarters known as “Los Pinos.”
While this was brilliant political theater, no president’s policies can remake a country as vast and complex as Mexico, particularly on corruption, in a handful of years. There is a case to be made, perhaps, that the long road of reversing Mexico’s ingrained corruption must start by examples from the top. Certainly, nothing else is working. Sadly, however, when it comes to daily governance issues, such as overhauling the country’s dysfunctional criminal court system, AMLO’s gameplan is as empty as those of Mexico’s previous presidents.
Perhaps there is no higher U.S. national interest than curbing transnational organized crime from using Mexico to strike into our country. Mexican politicians, of course, approach their widespread criminality crisis differently, but they acknowledge that “insecurity” is the main concern this election cycle, which includes campaigning for Congress, state, and local offices, too.
Mexico’s 2024 election kickoff was accompanied by the murders of two local candidates, tragically symbolizing how violence infects all aspects of Mexican national life. Understandably appalled and frightened, most Mexicans are resigned to their fate that, no matter who is elected president, the country is likely to continue to just muddle through in dealing with a gigantic national crisis.
Both candidates have called for a larger National Guard, since Mexican state and local police are unreliable or even part of organized crime. Gálvez is recommending doubling the number to 300,000 guardsmen, but the record of the National Guard, first created by AMLO to replace the corrupted Federal Police, has been unimpressive. AMLO basically backed away from his own National Guard strategy, gradually moving towards putting more and more authority in the Mexican military to deal with crime (and many other issues).
The national armed forces should not be in the forefront in the fight against organized criminals, but Mexico’s disastrous law-enforcement performance—corrupted police forces, dysfunctional courts—reflects a vicious societal struggle that more resembles guerrilla war than a crime wave. No state security institutions except the army and marines seem capable of keeping things from getting even worse. It is certain that la Presidenta Sheinbaum will have nothing behind the curtain to deal with this national catastrophe.
When Mexico’s voting is over, and elected candidates take office, there will be little hope, unfortunately, that U.S.–Mexican bilateral relations will get a meaningful new start. More than a new president in Mexico, what is needed is a new chief executive in the White House. We need an American president who will reverse the Biden administration’s calamitous open-borderism and use forceful U.S. diplomatic leverage to focus Mexico’s political leadership, whoever it is, on our mutual security problems.
The post Mexico’s Presidential Election Will Not End the Nation’s Crisis appeared first on The American Conservative.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, reiterated that Ukraine will one day join NATO. It is a meaningless, almost theological gesture—practically pagan hymn-chanting at this point. Blinken knows his promise to be untrue. European allies know it to be untrue. The majority of Americans either don’t care about Ukraine or are actively opposed to further engagement in Europe. The Republicans are a changed party, as evident from thunderous responses from Republican senators. Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance tweeted, “This is completely irresponsible. Ukraine should not join NATO, and to invite them during a war is to invite our nation into war. Do you want American ground troops in Ukraine? If not, we must push back against the idea that Ukraine should join NATO.” Senator Lee echoed the sentiment, tweeting (with a link to an op-ed published in these pages), “NATO can have Ukraine. Or the U.S. But not both.”
It is, of course, deeply cynical to dangle the NATO carrot in front of Ukraine especially, when NATO did not let them join after the Bucharest summit and will not in future. The argument goes that NATO members will welcome Ukraine only once they have solved their existing security issue, i.e. join a defensive alliance when the need for defense is over. To any sane person, that sounds absurd—that would mean the security issue will not be solved in this lifetime, and it will continue to be a frozen conflict. Russia has no incentive to end the simmering conflict in Ukraine unless Ukrainian neutrality is legally guaranteed, and will continue to bleed Ukraine dry until there are no men left to fight.
To argue against unlimited expansion of NATO and the EU goes against liberal theology and the current raison d’etre for both the organizations. To say openly that there will be no expansion and the club will remain closed, because (despite weakness) Russia is a major power and Russian tacit veto in her backyard matters, will be tantamount to admitting that norms are nonsense, the world is anarchical, realism is still the best path to equilibrium and great power peace, history hasn’t ended, and only great powers matter in foreign policy—which is to say, all is as it has always been.
To admit that publicly is verboten, regardless of how true it is. Hence all this incoherence from an administration that argues that the U.S. will not send troops to Ukraine and start a third world war, while arguing that the U.S. will be treaty bound to defend Ukraine someday and risk a third world war. It makes no sense, but such is the current grand strategy of the preeminent great power of the world.
Naturally, this nonsense is purely for domestic consumption. Yet the result is a continuation of false hope for Ukraine and Georgia, one that may lead to their extinction as states. There will not be any NATO cavalry over the hills (although not for lack of trying by some). The best we can do is seek a compromise making Ukraine and Georgia neutral buffers, similar to Austria during the Cold War. But for that, Washington needs bolder leadership to admit some hard truths and render some strategic coherence.
The post Antony Blinken Plays Politics with Ukraine’s NATO Membership appeared first on The American Conservative.
Soldiers of the 32nd Mechanized Brigade in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine on Monday. Ukraine hopes for a formal invitation to join NATO.
During a 30-minute call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Biden went further than ever in pressing for change in the military operation.
A market in the suburbs of Moscow, where many people from Central Asian countries, such as Tajikistan, work.
While normal people were celebrating Easter this past Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson was on Fox News to tout the upcoming push for Ukraine aid in the lower chamber. The particulars are still vague, but no less disturbing for that.
The point I’d like to fix on here is that Johnson seems to think structuring the aid as a loan is a live option. I guess it’s manuring season in Louisiana. As we’ve written before, a zero-interest waivable loan is just a grant by another name—a name that, lawmakers hope, will bamboozle the American people into thinking they’re not really handing out more money to Ukraine.
“Once Ukraine gets back on its feet, they will be an economic powerhouse because of their access to mass deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas,” claimed Sen. Lindsey Graham in support of the idea.
If any poor booby in Congress thinks this will be a bona fide loan, I advise that he exert the supreme effort to use his noggin. If Ukraine is such a prospective powerhouse because of its natural resources and human capital, why wasn’t it a massive European success story before the outbreak of the war? If the good senator from South Carolina proves to be wrong, the loans will be a significant drag on Ukraine’s fisc—as every war loan and indemnity in history has been, from the settlement of the Haitian revolution up until now. Forcing Ukraine to continue payments will keep it weaker and less able to defend itself without American help, the Ukraine boosters, now hard-headed realists, will argue. Why not give them a fighting chance with the forgiving stroke of a pen?
This is, frankly, goofy. It’s also insulting. As I wrote when the proposal was first floated, I think further Ukraine aid is not a good idea; I think it is out of step with the priorities of the American people; I also recognize that sometimes, in a representative democracy, your position loses. Fine. But trying to get around the “representative democracy” part by pulling a fast one instead of making the case for the policy you really want—that should be punished.
If Republican leadership allows this to go through, there should be consequences—ultimately from the voters, but also from any legislators who have something approaching a principle. The House motion to vacate rule is still there. Why not give it a spin again, for old times’ sake?
The post Ukraine ‘Loans’ Are Still a Rip-Off Job appeared first on The American Conservative.
What we like is democracy, and what we don’t like is autocracy—or worse!
Is every democracy the same, or are they all different?
This is the question that confronts us when we look at the results of Sunday’s local elections in Turkey. The ruling coalition’s senior party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), was dealt significant setbacks, particularly in the large cities where their support has been slipping for some years—Erdogan’s home city of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), the leading opposition party, strengthened its hand; in particular, the young, popular mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, roundly defeated the AKP challenger, 51 percent to 40 percent. The opposition’s performance, combined with anemic turnout, looks like a rebuke of Erdogan’s unsuccessful efforts to control Turkey’s worst economic crisis in a generation.
This all has been greeted with cheers by the Americans who have been anxious to dub Erdogan an autocrat and project upon him our own domestic team sports. But the results undercut one of the central ideas about the “autocrat”—namely, that he has been a serious threat to Turkish democracy.
Erdogan is a moderate Islamist whose cultural and social policies would be out of place in Paris—Paris, France or Paris, Texas. At the same time, those views, for which Erdogan spent time in jail in the ’90s, are agreeable to many Turks, especially among the rural working class. The Turkish census reports that 99.8 percent of Turks are Muslim—wouldn’t you expect French-style laicism to be kicking against the pricks at least a little? Not even the French are 100-percent on board with French-style laicism, and, until recently, “Christian democracy” (on which Erdogan modeled AKP) was a live movement in much of Europe.
Even as he pursued conservative cultural policies, Erdogan implemented a robust economic program that encouraged foreign investment in Turkey. He is the only Turkish head of government who has never missed an IMF grant disbursement for regulatory noncompliance. He aggressively pursued closer integration with the European economy, up to and including EU membership. In his Westward-facing early career, he also worked at length to lay to rest Turkey’s two longstanding PR issues: the Kurdish question and the Armenian genocide. (The failure to resolve each of these is complicated and would require two more separate, full-length columns.) This all is to say that Erdogan, his party, and his program have been, in the eyes of the Turkish people, forward-facing and consequently popular with voters.
It is true that Erdogan has engaged in some anti-democratic behavior in the past few electoral cycles; there are reports this week of AKP chicanery in the southeast, particularly in the city of Van, where the Kurdish nationalist party HDP won the municipal election prima facie. In the 2017 constitutional referendum, there was suspect behavior in the vote-counting (more on this below). But the preponderance of Erdogan’s changes—to the judiciary, to the constitution, to the military—have been carried through because he has in fact been massively popular for long periods of his political career. The democratic element of the system has asserted itself against the undemocratic elements; what we see now is, in large part, the use of power that he acquired electorally and then consolidated electorally.
When Western liberals condemn Erdogan as anti-democratic, especially to score points against a certain Republican presidential candidate, it isn’t just wrong; it begins to resonate uncomfortably with certain elements of their domestic propaganda. Two of the strains in Turkish politics are Kemalist secularism, which is predominantly urban and elite, and Islamism, which is predominantly rural and popular. Western audiences have always preferred the first, which is comfortably European, but it has been enforced by largely undemocratic, certainly not Western democratic, means: the derin devlet, the “deep state”—yes, that’s where the term came from. When Turkey’s politics have run too hot or too unsecular, elite institutions have stepped in to keep things from getting out of hand—including, thrice, by military coup against the government. The Western liberal preference in fact runs against Turkish democracy. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, people—read it!
(As a kicker: Erdogan’s 2017 constitutional referendum, which converted Turkey into a presidential system under a united head of state and head of government, did just squeak through under suspicious circumstances—namely, the certification of a large number of irregularly processed ballots. Since when do American liberals think irregularly processed ballots in a tightly contested election are undemocratic?)
It doesn’t make for rousing partisan journalism—Americans especially like a movie with white hats and black hats—but most world leaders are a mixed bag, and most of them hold power by some amount of popular assent. We may find distasteful Erdogan’s Islamism, or his constitutional changes, or his harassment and suppression of the opposition press. (I have a friend who worked for the English version of Zaman and had to make a speedy exit from Ankara after its closure.) But, especially as Turkey has shown itself capable of delivering an electoral black eye to the ruling party for its failures, it is difficult to say that there is exactly a crisis of democracy afoot. If we insist on doing so, and then relating it back to events at home, we may not like the parallels that emerge.
The world is very large and very old, and its various peoples have come up with many different ways of living. This is a difficult lesson for Americans, who have a penchant for projecting the ideologies of our peculiar conservative-revolutionary, Enlightenment-era merchant republic onto the canvas of the world. Jefferson backing the French Revolution, Wilson knocking the crowns off the royal heads of Europe, nation-building in the Middle East—we have a long history of assuming that everyone is an American on the inside. This is a dangerous assumption. Turkish politics will always look different from American politics, just as Marylander politics will always look different from Iowan politics. But for the American liberal, the more dangerous equation is liberal values with democracy—a brittle fiction that will tend to be outed.
The post Turkey’s Wild Elections Confound the ‘Autocracy’ Narrative appeared first on The American Conservative.
The only way to ensure permanent peace is to convince all major groups that their success requires mutual respect and cooperation. It is a lesson that Americans could ponder.
A quarter century has passed since Kosovo broke away from Serbia after a brief but bitter civil war. NATO abandoned its defensive mission and intervened “out-of-area” to oust the Serbian military and later force Kosovo’s independence. The new nation is very different than the once disputed and battered territory.
Nevertheless, the scars of war were evident on my recent visit. Kosovo’s losses, though less than in some other conflicts, such as Ukraine, were still painful. Some 13,000 people died and more than a million people were displaced. Kosovars must address the ethnic and religious divisions which remain and continue to hamper their advance. Helping light the way is the group Hardwired Global, which works around the world to break down barriers between communities and peoples.
Although the war is long over, Pristina and Belgrade remain at odds politically. The latter refuses to recognize Kosovo’s secession. Nearly half of the world’s governments, including five members of the European Union, also reject Kosovo’s statehood. Most consequential is Russia’s refusal to allow Pristina to join the United Nations. This gives Moscow continuing influence in Serbia, unsettling the European Union as war rages in Ukraine.
Moreover, deep divisions remain within Kosovo. Belgrade’s defeat led to violence against the once dominant ethnic Serb population and flight of many to Serbia. The remaining ethnic Serbs are concentrated in Kosovo’s north, adjoining Serbia, and they continue to resist Pristina’s authority. This has led to violence between ethnic Serbs and Albanians, and military posturing by both Belgrade and NATO, which retains an occupation force in Kosovo. While no one expects hostilities to erupt, the specter of further violence has increased regional tensions.
Kosovo cannot escape its history. Memorials to dead heroes abound. Politics long was dominated by former insurgents. Even today the country is rated as only “partly free” by Freedom House. Some of the victors participated in criminal networks, causing Europeans to call Kosovo a “black hole.” Although this problem has eased, the economy remains weak despite substantial outside aid and investment.
Children have no direct memory of the war but live with the war’s reality. I visited a school named after a graduate who died fighting as a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army. His bust stood outside and several paintings of him were hung inside. There are few moderating counterpoints to promote reconciliation among former enemies.
Kosovo was historically home to moderate Islam, but Kosovars with whom I talked worry about growing fundamentalism. One complained that “Islamic radicalism is growing among the young and was promoted from outside.” Another called the situation “very dangerous.” He cited the malign role of Turkey, which he believed had superseded Saudi Arabia in promoting extremism. Both governments have constructed mosques and supported imams.
A third Kosovar believed his country had made “space available for Islamic radicalism,” and that “Kosovo gets into trouble when it flirts with Islamists.” According to Kosovo Online: “An increasing number of Albanians in Kosovo believe that political Islam is the only solution to the accumulated world problems. Data from recent research indicate that in the past 25 years, dozens of young Albanians from Kosovo have been educated in religious schools in the Middle East. Many of these schools promote radical Islam, and some of their followers have been convicted in Kosovo for promoting terrorism.”
Indeed, Kosovo may be Europe’s most worrisome flashpoint outside of the continent’s borders with Russia. The lack of normalization of relations between Pristina and Belgrade makes it difficult to bring either into the European Union. Efforts to fully integrate the Balkans into the larger continental order remain stalled.
Into this world has stepped Tina Ramirez, founder of Hardwired International. A former congressional staffer and political candidate, she has spent years fighting against religious persecution in other nations. I have traveled with her to South Sudan, Kurdistan, and most recently Kosovo. There are many good organizations which stand up for the oppressed, some of which I have also accompanied overseas. Hardwired, however, is unique with its focus on education to combat intolerance, hatred, and all manner of “isms.”
Hardwired noted that Kosovo’s history has left “a fractured society with limited prospects for social and economic development.” One common strategy is to isolate communities, which often lessens current tensions but fails to mitigate long-term hostilities. Alternatively, in Kosovo, warned Hardwired, “imposed secularism has only increased tensions, particularly among conservative religious communities.” Such efforts inadvertently reinforce the message of extremists.
In contrast, Hardwired confronts contending beliefs head-on, offering respect while encouraging not just toleration, but understanding and cooperation. The focus is the classroom, and the process begins with teachers. I watched adults of varying beliefs and from diverse communities discovering, first, the possibility, and second, the necessity of working together despite diverse beliefs.
The process usually begins with religious minorities recognizing the importance of supporting one another. Members of religious majorities also come to realize the moral worth of those who believe differently, and the importance of treating them as equals. It is impossible to reach everyone, of course, but I was struck on my visit to Kosovo with the number of teachers and trainers who talked about how Hardwired’s curriculum helped transform their personal thinking.
One told me that she changed her mind and came to understand “why I should respect” other believers. “Now I am open to learn about them.” Indeed, she added, “we need to cooperate with one another. Religion doesn’t matter.” Another teacher spoke of his students, who learned to be “respectful of people of other religions, races, and other things.”
Such stories were oft-repeated. Most impressive were the admittedly skeptical who came to embrace the Hardwired training program. The organization does not try to convert people to Christianity. The program is effective because it respects the beliefs of all and focuses on creating a safe environment for everyone. In such a world Christians and others are freer to talk about their faith. Hardwired does not attempt to suppress belief but instead seeks to increase communication and understanding among faiths. Its objective is to thereby ease religious and political conflict.
Kosovo is steadily increasing the number of teachers equipped to lead their students in lessons on the importance of respecting the lives and dignity as well as freedom of conscience of all. This in turn helps ease the mistrust and fear still evident among many children as well as adults. Teachers and students then hold events for their families and larger communities. In this way Hardwired seeks to transform the nation.
Obviously, there are few shortcuts to overcoming years of conflict and hatred. Students sometimes were skeptical, even hostile, at the start. Yet most eventually were moved by the training. The most powerful remedy to the divisions evident in Kosovo and elsewhere is to bring people together to confront their fears and hostilities. One of the teachers spoke of flashbacks from the war. He lost a cousin and his family was forced to move: “We suffered a lot. So the training affected us personally.” Another spoke of how the lessons forced him to decide “how I will implement diversity and pluralism in my own life.”
Of course, it isn’t enough to have a good message. People must listen to it. In this case students generally respond well. One teacher noted how “kids ask if they can do it again.” Other teachers noted how the program caused participants to break out of their cliques and work together and in groups. She asked Hardwired to do more: “We desire that the students have another challenge so they can expand themselves.” She saw a “mind change” in those who participated in the program.
Today, Hardwired operates mostly in ethnic Albanian areas, since it has established a cooperative relationship with local educational officials. Ramirez hopes to expand into ethnic Serbian areas. Students there also need to learn how to engage “the other.” Such training may be the best hope for eventual willingness of both communities to live together in not only peace, but also harmony.
Hardwired’s work obviously doesn’t negate the need for a political modus vivendi between Kosovo and Serbia looking toward the future rather than the past. Nevertheless, Hardwired’s training is helping to construct a foundation for political reconciliation. The only way to ensure permanent peace is to convince all major groups that their success requires mutual respect and cooperation. It is a lesson that Americans need to take to heart as well.
The post Why Care About Kosovo? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Ukrainian soldiers training in the country’s Donetsk region on Monday.
Some Western officials have said that when an attack failed to materialize immediately after a U.S. warning, Russia appeared to have lowered its guard.
The only viable path forward for Israel remains a peaceful, if not amicable, two-state solution.
Last month it was reported that the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson planned to invite Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to address Congress. Details were vague, but the move was clearly timed as a rebuke to the Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who in a highly remarked speech days earlier called Netanyahu a disaster for Israel and the United States and asked the Israelis to vote him out of office. In a ringing endorsement of the two-state solution, he called on the United States to “use its leverage” to move Israel in that direction.
In response to Schumer, the former President Donald Trump asserted that the New York senator used to be pro-Israel but now sees where voters in his party are heading and has become “anti-Israel.” The Democrats now “hate Israel,” according to the former president.
In a tactical sense, it’s easy to see why Republicans like to stir this pot. Democrats are profoundly divided between their “donor class”—nominally progressive, disproportionately Jewish, and very pro-Israel—and much of their progressive activist class, which, after trending anti-Israel for years, has lurched towards an increasingly hardcore anti-Zionism after the Hamas attack and Israel’s response. Of course Trump’s claim that Schumer is anti-Israel is ludicrous, as Trump certainly knows; one doesn’t have to go back far to recall that Schumer sided with Netanyahu over President Obama when the latter was trying to negotiate a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
The problem with the Republicans playing their Netanyahu card is that Schumer’s position is essentially correct and Netanyahu’s woefully wrong. While the Republican party is certainly wiser on most contentious issues right now, it would make a grievous error by embracing Netanyahu. It’s precisely what the GOP did in 2002 when it decided that Netanyahu was the man to listen to in the “war on terror” and embraced completely the Israelis’ position on Iraq, for the invasion of which he was an influential and seemingly ubiquitous cheerleader. (To be fair, he had a lot of company.)
An interesting window into Netanyahu’s worldview comes not from his public statements, but from a private talk he gave to Israeli West Bank settlers in 2001; he did not know he was being recorded. The settlers were worried about the Oslo peace process, which, if it led as anticipated to a Palestinian a state on the West Bank, would terminate their freedom to seize land there.
Not to worry, Bibi told them: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily.” He went on to explain how he had undercut the peace process during the Clinton administration when serving his first term as prime minister. “I said I would [honor the Oslo accords], but I’m going to interpret them in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders,” Bibi explained.
Netanyahu now states his opposition to a Palestinian state openly; less certain is whether he remains as confident as ever about moving America in his preferred direction. But Speaker Johnson certainly shouldn’t help him.
The Gaza war isn’t about the two-state solution, of course, but the peace process failure looms heavily in its background. Hamas is a terrorist organization, which has opposed dealing with Israel in any form and calls explicitly for its elimination. It did shockingly well in Palestinian elections in 2006, capitalizing on Palestinian discontent with Fatah, the main Palestinian nationalist organization, which, under Yasser Arafat, had played the Palestinians’ main card—a willingness to recognize Israel and make peace with it—and had nothing to show for it: No Palestinian state, and seemingly little possibility of a state, 13 years after the historic handshake on the White House lawn. This is not the place to parse the failure of the various negotiations that came close to finalizing a two state solution—except to say that an accurate reading of record shows that the blame does not, contrary to Washington conventional wisdom and Israeli propaganda, lie exclusively with Arafat and his successors.
My two visits to Israel-Palestine came shortly after this initial Hamas victory, which after various coups and counter-coups led to Hamas being left in control of Gaza. The Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah on the West Bank remained committed to a two-state solution; there the center of gravity was Salam Fayyad, who served as finance minister and later prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in the 2000s. A University of Texas PhD in economics and a former IMF official, his mandate was transforming the Palestinian Authority from a political/resistance organization into an entity that could efficiently govern.
It was a daunting task, state-building without sovereignty. I was traveling with an American-based Christian peace group (then, but apparently no longer, strongly and openly committed to a two-state solution, an evolution which mirrors much of the left). On one trip, we spent quite a bit of time with members of Fayyad’s well-educated team, sub-cabinet officials of a government-in-waiting that had very limited authority. Were these people happy that Israel had won a war against their ancestors sixty years prior? No, of course not. But they recognized Israel’s strengths, admired its economic dynamism and freedoms, and were ready to make the best of the situation to improve the lives of their own people. I don’t doubt that they believed if things went well for a few decades—and they were determined that it would—their kids would be able to visit the beaches of Tel Aviv.
Fayyad and the PA were formally and genuinely committed to non-violence; Hamas is quite obviously not—which explains why Bibi Netanyahu has long preferred Hamas to the PA, helping to ensure the former was fully-funded while exacerbating the weakness and dependence of the latter. So long as the Palestinians were divided, any peacemaking could be kept far from the agenda.
The Hamas attack of October 7 exposed that absurdity of the Netanyahu strategy and was understandably perceived by Israel as an existential threat. But while almost all of Israel is committed to Hamas’s destruction, Netanyahu and much of his government seem to be seeking more ambitious war aims—an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip, and possibly the expansion of Israeli settlements there. Israel is finding that you can’t kills tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the age of modern internet communications without being accused of genocide, a reality that the American strategic air corps never had to confront during the Second World War.
That comparison raises another: Are the residents of Gaza more or less responsible for their government than the citizens of wartime Germany and Japan? Were there—are there—Gazans who took note of their attractive beach-front property domicile and the great material progress made in the last decades by some of the Arab Gulf states and thought, “Maybe we could do better than being the dupes of violence-celebrating Islamist cult?”
Israel’s war in Gaza and the heavy concomitant civilian casualties are considered woefully excessive by much of the world, so in pursuing this tactic Netanyahu risks turning Israel into a kind of global pariah. This may be the single greatest threat to Israel’s existence: Most of the diplomatic progress Israel has made in the past half century is due to the fact that it is, among other things, an economically dynamic and modern, scientifically advanced and genuinely attractive state, which is due in great part to its most talented tenth of citizens. But these are Israelis who would be desirable citizens virtually anywhere in the world. Many would not raise their families in a pariah Israel. An Israel without them—an Israel more dominated than it is now by religious zealots who believe Israel has no need of friendship from the world’s democracies—would not fare well.
Israel is not, however, only economically dynamic and scientifically advanced; its occupation of the West Bank legitimately brings into play another word, “apartheid.” A visitor to the West Bank, noting the system of controls put on Palestinian movement, the dual system of laws that govern Jews and Arabs, cannot help but be aware of the relevance of the word. At the same time, as Israeli propagandists rightly point out, the Arab citizens of Israel proper are the only Arabs in the Mideast who can vote in free and fair and contested elections. During the first weeks of the war, many Israelis were moved and perhaps surprised by how readily Israel’s Arab citizens rallied to their state’s flag, although, as the war drags on with increasing civilian casualties and Israel’s government and so-called friends (Jared Kushner recently mooted possibility that Gaza could be turned into into a nice resort area if only its inhabitants could be removed), reports of that goodwill seem to be diminishing.
In the end, it is hard to see a viable path forward for Israel that does not involve genuine political empowerment followed by genuine statehood for the Palestinians. Republicans used to recognize this; George H.W. Bush in part lost his re-election bid because he tried to pressure Israel not to build settlements on the West Bank. (The Israel lobby turned on him.) The Republicans who now embrace Netanyahu—and, at this point, that includes most of them—are doing Israel no favors, and, by tying American prestige to the most extremist government Israel has ever had, are doing the United States no favors either.
The post The GOP’s Bibi-Backing Could Backfire appeared first on The American Conservative.
"Well-trained ... ninjas" from Chile are burglarizing wealthy Americans in the Detroit, Michigan, suburbs after using the Visa Waiver Program to get into the United States, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard says.
The post Sheriff: ‘Well-Trained’ Chilean ‘Ninjas’ Robbing Rich Americans After Getting into U.S. through Visa Waiver Program appeared first on Breitbart.
A view across Lake Osisko in the northern Quebec mining town of Rouyn-Noranda.
Hank Silver in Paris this month. The opportunity to work on a project like the renovation of Notre-Dame Cathedral comes “once in a millennium,” the carpenter said.
Macron’s comments about boots on the ground may hold more than meets the eye.
Russia’s “Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Area of Nuclear Deterrence,” a high-level strategic document, says that Russia “hypothetically” could allow the use of nuclear weapons only “in response to aggression using WMD [weapons of mass destruction]” or if there is “aggression using conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is threatened.”
Responding to France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s February 6 statement that “no option should be discarded” in ensuring the defeat of Russia, including “troops on the ground” in Ukraine, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said that “we are ready to use any weapon, including [tactical nuclear weapons], when it comes to the existence of the Russian state and harm to our sovereignty and independence. Everything is spelt out in our strategy, we have not changed it.”
Macron replied that France is also a nuclear power. “We must first and foremost feel protected,” Macron said, “because we are a nuclear power.” He then added, “We are ready; we have a doctrine [for the use of nuclear weapons].”
France is ready to send troops into Ukraine “to counter the Russian forces” and even to prepare for nuclear war. In a March 19 opinion piece in the French paper Le Monde, General Pierre Schill, Chief of the French Army Staff, declares that “nuclear deterrence safeguards France’s vital interests.” Reminding the world of France’s “international responsibilities” and “interests” and “defense agreements,” he says that “the French army is preparing for the toughest engagements, making this known and demonstrating it.”
But what do the French really mean by saying they are “preparing for the toughest engagement” and that Europe must be “ready” to have “troops on the ground” in Ukraine?
Macron has said that NATO must not discard the option of “troops on the ground” to ensure that “Russia does not win.” But win what? Does Macron want to ensure that Russia does not defeat Ukraine for Ukraine’s sake, or does he mean that Russia should not win in Ukraine for the subsequent defense of Europe?
Macron said that the time was coming “in our Europe where it will be appropriate not to be a coward” and that it is time for a “strategic leap.” He pressed Germany to send their long-range Taurus missiles, reminding them that they once said, “‘Never, never tanks; never, never planes; never, never long-range missiles’…. I remind you that two years ago, many around this table said: ‘We will offer sleeping bags and helmets.’”
When it came to the option of sending troops into Ukraine, Macron said that anyone who advocates “limits” on how the West helps Ukraine “chooses defeat.” He insisted that “if the situation should deteriorate, we would be ready to make sure that Russia never wins that war.” Europe must be “ready,” he said, “to reach the means to achieve our objective, which is that Russia does not win.”
It sounded as if Macron was talking about Russian victory in Ukraine again when he considered the threshold for sending troops. “We’re not in that situation today,” he said, but “all these options are on the table.” Following a March 7 meeting with parliamentary parties, Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party, reportedly said that “Macron referenced a scenario that could lead to intervention [of French troops]: the advancement of the front towards Odessa or Kiev.”
Macron’s objective again seemed to solely be Ukraine when he said in a March 14 interview, “We are doing everything we can to help Ukraine defeat Russia, because I will say it very simply: there can be no lasting peace if there is no sovereignty, if there is no return to Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including Crimea.”
But, against all these apparent narrow references to Ukraine, Macron’s subsequent discussions of the threshold for troops sounded more as if they were about the defense of Europe than of Ukraine. He said that “war is back on our [i.e. Europe’s] soil” and that Russia is “extending every day their threat of attacking us even more, and that we will have to live up to history and the courage that it requires.”
On March 14, Macron, again expressing his position that sending troops from NATO countries is an option that should not be discarded, said that “to have peace in Ukraine, we must not be weak.” This time, he gave as his reason that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “existential for our Europe and for France.”
He proceeded to say that “it wouldn’t be us” who would trigger such a move and that France would not lead an offensive into Ukraine against Russia. “It would be Russia’s sole choice and sole responsibility,” he said. And then he added, “If war was to spread to Europe,” it would “be weak, to decide today that we would not respond.”
But even if Macron means defending Europe from Russia, does he mean from an actual attack or simply a potential attack?
With several of his aforementioned statements, Macron sounds like he means that Europe must be ready to defend against an actual attack from Russia after it defeats Ukraine. Yet elsewhere, Macron sounds like he is referring only to a potential attack, saying that Russia must not be victorious in Ukraine because that “would reduce Europe’s credibility to zero” and would mean that “we have no security.”
Interpreting Macron’s motives may be even more difficult than ascertaining his statements’ bare meaning. Why would Macron express the previously inexpressible and risk crossing the red line of a third world war?
It is of course impossible to know Macron’s mind, so any analysis is speculative. But there are at least three possibilities.
The first is that the intended target of his comments is not Russia at all, but the U.S. and Germany. With American war funding struggling against a congressional dam and Germany refusing to send Taurus long-range missiles, Macron may be trying to apply psychological pressure to his allies to send Ukraine more money and weapons assuming they would find that option more palatable than going even further and sending troops.
The second is that the intended target of his comments is Russia. In this possibility, the goal is to create “strategic ambiguity.” The purpose would be, as explained by one French diplomat, so that Russia, as it advances west in Ukraine, cannot rely on the assumption “that none of Ukraine’s partner countries will ever be deployed” to Ukraine.
The French newspaper Le Monde reports that “Macron’s office explained that the aim is to restore the West’s ‘strategic ambiguity.’ After the failure of the Ukrainian 2023 counter-offensive, the French president believes that promising tens of billions of euros in aid and delivering—delayed—military equipment to Kyiv is no longer enough. Especially if Putin is convinced that the West has permanently ruled out mobilizing its forces.”
The third possibility is that the intended target of his comments is Europe. Europe must prepare for the possibility of a Trump administration weakening its commitment to Europe and NATO. That would leave Europe with more responsibility for the defense of Ukraine and of itself. While Germany has been the economic leader of Europe, France has seen itself as the security leader.
One diplomat told Le Monde that while Germany “is afraid of escalation…. France wants to give the impression that it isn’t afraid.” Macron “may have wanted to make it clear to Scholz that their two countries are not in the same league” as Macron positions France to be the security leader of Europe in a post-Biden Trump-led world.
Macron has opened the door to the discussion of Western troops on the ground in Ukraine. With the risks that come with opening that door, it will be important for everyone to clarify both Macron’s threshold and his motivation for sending troops to Ukraine.
The post Is France Ready to Fight Russia? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Joseph Wu, the foreign minister of Taiwan, said that if the United States abandoned Ukraine, China would “take it as a hint” that sustained action against Taiwan will cause the United States and its allies to back off.
The population of the United Kingdom rose between 2011 and 2022 to an estimated 67.6 million, an increase of over four million people.
The post UK Population Rose by More Than 4 Million Since 2011 to Record 67.6 Million Amid Mass Migration appeared first on Breitbart.
Milei has made strides toward pushing back the left—but is his time running out?
On December 10, 2023, Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, was sworn in as president of Argentina.
Milei, best known for the hair that he claims is combed by Adam’s Smith invisible hand and an eccentric and irascible demeanor, promised to end the country’s economic woes—prevalent in the last 80 years but heightened in the last couple of decades—by launching a full-blown libertarian economic program of privatization, deregulation, and tight monetary policy. On the way, he would rid the country of the unholy marriage between socialism and wokeism that has assaulted Argentine institutions over the last 20 years.
After 100 days in power, has “the wig,” as he is known, laid the foundations for a libertarian populist revolt, or is his project showing early signs of foundering?
Milei is a culture warrior, which is why, despite being a radical libertarian, he has rallied conservatives and nationalists behind his agenda. But make no mistake: Most Argentines voted for him hoping he would fix the economic mess the country has been in since the early 2000s.
On the macroeconomic side, some of the measures are working. Monthly inflation fell in both January and February, after reaching its highest point in decades in December.
Milei promised to achieve a budget surplus (before interest payments) of 2 percent this year, after last year’s 3 percent deficit. So far, so good: The first two months of the year brought surpluses, the first in more than a decade.
Moreover, Argentina has an exchange control. Milei has not eliminated it yet, seeking to reduce the gap between the official and black market exchange rates (it now sits at around 20 percent) and improve the macroeconomic output of the country before eliminating it. Foreign reserves have increased by over $7 billion and the country-risk index has dropped significantly.
But this all has come at a cost.
Milei reduced energy and transport subsidies drastically. He also cut down on transfers to provinces. And, even though he has been raising spending on retirement pensions, he has done so by less than inflation, which means that, in real terms, he has also cut down spending.
In the first handful of days in his government, he devalued the peso by over 50 percent, causing inflation to skyrocket.
This has of course worsened the situation for Argentines, at least in the short term. Fifty percent of the country is in poverty and the economy is set to shrink by 4 percent in 2024.
Milei has been clear since day one that things in Argentina had to get worse before they got better; so far, his approval ratings are still relatively high, sitting close to 50 percent. He has achieved this because most Argentines believe the “caste”—the left-wing elites of the country—are to blame for the economic woes.
How long will Milei’s popularity last? That remains to be seen.
One of Milei’s key problems is that he doesn’t have enough parliamentary support for some of the most radical proposals in his agenda, such as labor reform and some deregulation policies. In fact, his party only holds seven seats in the Senate (which has 72 senators), and 41 representatives (which has 257), hardly enough to pass any kind of legislation.
He depends on PRO, the party of former president Mauricio Macri, some smaller parties that hold some seats in the House, and some breakaway members of opposition parties to pass legislation, which has proven difficult in his first 100 days in government.
In less than two years, Argentina has midterm elections, renewing parts of both houses of Congress. If Milei’s plan to stabilize the country’s economy has not worked by then, he may suffer a defeat that will end up derailing the rest of his term.
In fact, Milei’s lack of legislative support has not allowed him to take advantage of his popularity to pass essential elements of his agenda.
His first 100 days of government have been marked by two main measures: the Omnibus Law and the DNU.
Milei sent to Congress an all-encompassing bill with 664 articles that covered everything from fishing permits and privatization of state companies to shutting down the National Theatre Institute and reforming the pension system. This gave the opposition, and even some of his supporters, enough reason to pick the law apart, until Milei eventually withdrew it. He will likely try to pass it as individual laws, slowing down the process of reform.
Milei’s DNU (Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia, Decree of Necessity and Urgency in English) was passed in December and was almost as all-encompassing as the law above. It covered labor market regulations, increasing interest on credit card debt, and reforming pharmaceutical companies.
Being a presidential decree, it technically does not need congressional approval. However, if both houses of Congress vote against the measure, they can strike it down. The Senate already voted against Milei’s decree, but until the House follows—and it is unclear whether it will, as Milei might reform the decree to garner some support—the decree remains on its feet.
Labor reform is key to Milei’s success. After the state bureaucracy built by the Peronist left, the trade unions are perhaps the most significant element of the “caste” Milei seeks to tear down. Mauricio Macri, today one of Milei’s most important allies, was president between 2015 and 2019 and tried to enact some of the same reforms; he was derailed by both the Argentine congress and the all-powerful labor unions that constantly called for strikes against Macri and to close main roads of the country.
Unions in Argentina are closer to a mafia than to organizations built to defend worker’s rights. For example, the truckers’ union has had the same president, Hugo Moyano, for 36 years. His eldest son is the vice president, while a daughter and a son are part of the work. Another son used to run a union for toll workers before becoming a congressman. The family has owned some of the most important football clubs in the country and has a political party close to the Justicialista Party, the traditional Peronist party in Argentina.
This family, allied with the traditional left of the country, is able to freeze the transport of food and oil in the blink of an eye, as they did under Macri.
Milei, so far, does not seem intimidated. He has shown a very un-libertarian impulse to wield state power to achieve his political ends—and this is what scares the left and makes the populist right stand by his side.
Milei’s long-term goal is dismantling most of the Argentine state. Make no mistake, he sees himself as an Argentine Reagan, tasked with becoming a libertarian hero. Many of his economic formulas seem to come out of the IMF rulebook, and he believes in international free trade with passion. Without the antics, Milei might seem like a product of an American think tank.
But what makes him different is his muscular use of state power. Milei is not afraid to wield public power—whether with far-ranging decrees or by using legitimate force to stop protests that threaten the stability of the state and his reforms—to achieve his political goals.
This has been particularly clear with unions: Milei tried to pass legislation to make union affiliation voluntary (it is currently compulsory and automatic) and also wants to allow companies to fire workers who take part in street blockades during protests. However, both are still frozen in the courts with all his labor reform until the Supreme Court decides on the matter.
Similarly, he has suspended all government publicity in media for a year, which was the main source of income for many privately-owned media outlets that served as parasitic propaganda entities on behalf of the government.
For years, Peronism enlarged the number and size of organizations that depended on the state through government funds or beneficial regulations. These organizations entered into a parasitic relationship with the “caste.” Milei has started eliminating these privileges. Lawyers are now not needed in some fast-track divorce procedures, which used to be an easy source of income. Artists relied on government funds to produce works that no one saw, and Milei gutted them. Fishermen and sugar producers relied on regulations, subsidies, and tariffs to sell their products, and unions depended on the automatic enrollment and payment of dues of their members to continue accumulating power.
Moreover, even though he is playing it smart (for example, by delaying the elimination of the exchange control or discussions on the dollarization of the economy), he is riding his popularity to enact the strongest, most painful reforms he needs to pass.
He does face a big challenge: If Congress stops his decree and does not pass his reforms (or they are stopped by the courts), Milei may run out of time. The Argentine people are becoming poorer by the day and their patience might not be great enough to wait until he can strike a deal in Congress or to see if he wins a congressional majority at the midterm elections.
He has floated the idea of holding a referendum to pass his reforms. Even if it is a non-binding consult, it might put enough pressure on some congress members to accept part of his reforms, and he seems popular enough to win such a referendum.
Also, his goal of maintaining a fiscal surplus might prove to be harder than expected. The recession is affecting tax revenues, and savings on energy subsidies were due to deferrals, not a budget reduction.
Milei has another front of opposition: provincial governors. None of them are members of his party, and many rely on generous discretional transfers from the central government, which Milei has reduced dramatically. Governors hold a significant level of power within their parties, meaning they can influence members of Congress from their parties to not negotiate with Milei and also continue challenging his agenda in the courts.
The last major challenge he faces comes from within: Milei’s banner is the economy, but his brand also includes the fact that he is a culture warrior, which is why he was able to garner support from conservatives and nationalists despite his defense of gay marriage and drug legalization in the past.
He quickly delivered by closing the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, which was widely considered a do-nothing organ that existed simply to keep members of the ruling party as employees and fund left-wing propaganda. Milei also banned “inclusive” language and any reference to “gender perspective” in government documents and eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity.
Nevertheless, these were mostly symbolic measures. Milei has not been shy to use state power to cut relations with its parasitic entities and eventually reduce its size. On the socio-cultural side, he seems to do the same: eliminate, cut down, reduce. But if Milei wants to fight the culture war and enact a long-term change, it seems that negative movements, focused on reduction and elimination might not be enough.
If he fails at his task of reforming the Argentine economy, his presidency will end up feeling like a fever dream. And to succeed, he might have to let his populist impulses overtake his libertarian mind.
The post One Hundred Days of Libertarian Populism in Argentina appeared first on The American Conservative.
The New York City Council is begging an appellate court to authorize more than 800,000 foreign nationals to vote in the city's municipal elections.
The post New York City Council Begs Court to Authorize Voting Rights for 800,000 Foreign Nationals appeared first on Breitbart.
Russia has already shown that Western ostracism is not necessarily fatal.
Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory in Russia’s presidential elections will act as a mandate to the Kremlin for fighting the Ukraine war to completion. At the same time, attacks on Russian territory have expectedly increased over the past several weeks as Kiev’s strategic position has steadily deteriorated. In addition to targeting civilian population centers with missile and drone strikes, forces of the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) have also unsuccessfully attempted to invade and consolidate territory in the direction of Belgorod; such attacks were meant to coincide with the elections and intended to demoralize Russian citizens, thereby increasing pressure on the Putin regime by sending the message that the current administration does not have things under control.
All of this is and was predictable. What is less clear, however, is how the Western world will respond to the increasingly poor prospects for the Ukrainian war effort moving forward. In a March 15 meeting with the highest-ranking members of the Russian security and defense services, Putin specifically referred to the involvement of “foreign mercenaries” and Western-backed Ukrainian forces in the attacks on Belgorod and Kursk. In his initial remarks to the country upon winning reelection, the Russian president again referred to troops from NATO countries operating in Ukraine, and warned of the potential for escalation to “full-scale World War III.” These statements were made only several days after Putin declared in an interview that he would not rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons, should certain “redlines” be crossed in Ukraine.
But such heightened rhetoric is hardly surprising in response to recent statements by Western leaders. Most notably, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has doubled down on his insistence that the possibility of eventually involving foreign troops in Ukraine is indeed possible, if not likely. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski—husband of Atlantic columnist and prominent spokeswomen of the neoliberal order, Anne Applebaum—lauded Macron’s statements, and reiterated the latter’s evaluation that NATO troop deployments may eventually be called for.
At the same time, the pressure campaign to punish Russia has failed to result in Moscow’s international ostracization, and instead served to accelerate the geopolitical reorientation of the non-transatlantic world. Russia may be just one (and by no means the strongest) of multiple centers of power in this emerging alternative to the “rules-based order”; it has nonetheless illustrated the conditions that must be established in order to successfully break with that previous order, as well as the characteristics of the developing new one.
For one, the Russian economy has largely been able to weather the massive sanctions regime launched against it. A large part of this has been due to its massive capacity for military production. Per the Wall Street Journal, the percent of federal expenditures devoted to defense related industries has jumped by 14 percent since 2020; tank production is 5.6 times greater than it was before the war, and ammunition and drone production are both 17 times greater. NATO intelligence likewise estimates that Russia is currently producing about 250,000 artillery shells per month, which is three times greater than U.S. and European production levels combined.
The broader economic effect of having the country on the war footing has been to stabilize GDP and soften the effect of the sanctions for the Russian population. Russia’s economy beat expectations by growing at 3.6 percent in 2023, higher than all other G7 countries. The IMF predicts growth levels of 2.6 percent this year, twice as much as its previous forecasts; this looks particularly favorable when compared to the 0.9 percent growth level predicted for Europe. And while inflation remains rather high, its effects have been somewhat mitigated by an all-time low unemployment rate of 2.9 percent.
The Russian rouble has likewise proved to be more resilient than expected. The percent of Russian export settlements being conducted in the U.S. dollar or the euro has plummeted from around 90 percent at the beginning of 2022 to less than 30 percent today; meanwhile, those in the rouble have increased from about 10 to more than 30 percent, with the share of transactions being conducted in other currencies—mostly the Chinese renminbi—higher than 40 percent. Despite Western boasting of its campaign to destroy the rouble, the currency has remained relatively stable despite temporary fluctuations, disproving the promises of its impending demise thanks in large part to capital controls (and perhaps an element of loyalty on the part of Russia’s exporting firms).
There is of course legitimate criticism that an economy built upon weapons production inevitably siphons investment from other sectors; Russia’s inflation level may also be representative of the more widespread systemic dangers of relying on massive state spending to keep things running hot. Still, as long as Moscow is able to keep revenue coming in, its deficit should remain manageable.
No single factor in keeping that revenue flowing and subsequently fortifying the Russian economy is more significant than that of its energy trade. At the same time, no single example stands as a better representation of Moscow’s defiance to the West’s punitive measures than the circumvention of Washington’s $60 price cap. Instituted around the beginning of 2023, the intention was to punish Russia by decreasing its revenue from the oil trade; the mechanism through which these caps are enforceable is that Russian ships transporting oil use Western maritime insurance and financial services.
Expectedly, enforcement was largely ineffective at the outset, although the United States has since attempted to crack down. For instance, Washington pledged to increase its enforcement of the oil caps at the end of 2023, with sanctions placed on two tankers due to their flouting of the regulations last October. Most recently, oil shipments headed to India were rerouted to China due to New Delhi’s apprehension of tougher enforcement.
Almost exactly one year since the sanctions really started to bite, and Russian seaborne crude shipments remain high. Even with its massive budget amid the significant defense spending mentioned earlier, Moscow’s current deficit remains manageable at somewhere between 1 and to 2 percent, and the massive windfall from oil revenues will certainly keep the state coffers buoyed for the foreseeable future. Despite temporarily falling below $60/barrel for its Ural crude blend at various points over the past year, the average price has stayed above the price cap; and after starting off 2024 at around $60, the price per barrel at present stands close to $80.
The politics around the oil trade further demonstrates Russia’s hardly isolated position in the international economy. Increased revenue based on such prices as those listed above can be expected for at least the next several months—if not beyond—as OPEC and its partners initiate coordinated oil cuts that will drive up prices. Cuts will take place over the next several months, with Russia choosing to focus on decreasing production rather than exports. One factor in the latter decision is that Ukraine and its Western backers recognize the independence and geopolitical maneuverability that the oil trade gives to Moscow, and have therefore specifically targeted refining facilities with drone and missile strikes as part of their attacks on Russian territory. The cuts to production could provide the needed space to implement repairs.
Of course, the U.S.-led West still exerts enormous influence on the world stage, as represented by India’s denial of the shipments of Russian crude in the face of mounting pressure. Yet Russia at present remains near the top of India’s oil imports, specifically due to the discounted prices since the start of the Ukraine war; New Delhi started off the year with a 41 percent year on year increase of shipments from Russia. It is hard to believe that India will permanently shun Moscow at the behest of Washington, rather than figure out a way to circumnavigate the sanctions regime.
India may look to the United States in helping to balance China, but Russia’s growing relationship with both of the two Asian heavyweights has provided leverage in its geopolitical maneuvering. (Xi and Modi were both among the first to call and congratulate Putin on his electoral victory, as was Mohamed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.) The diverted Sokol oil shipments from India ending up in China is likewise no coincidence; Beijing subsequently set a record for the amount of Russian oil imports for a single month in March. A major meeting between Xi and Putin has also been scheduled for May; it is to be the Russian president’s first trip abroad since winning reelection. Putin reaffirmed that the two leaders share a similar outlook in international relations, ensuring that bilateral cooperation between the two nations will continue to expand in the coming years.
Meanwhile in Europe, Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko announced this past Sunday that his country will refuse to prolong a five-year deal on the transport of Russian gas through pipelines in its territory. The agreement expires on December 31, and besides attempting to harm Moscow’s revenue flows further, the halt in gas transits is undoubtedly intended to leverage Ukraine’s position between Russia and energy-hungry NATO members.
The hardball tactics are logical, as Kiev needs to do all it can to tip the scales in favor of greater Western intervention. Over the past several decades, the United States has continually placed Moscow in a position either to accept the fait accompli of NATO expansion at the expense of Russian security interests, or to escalate with force and suffer the consequences of increased economic and political ostracization. This disincentive to avoid escalation has been effectively removed. Explicating the altered state of international relations is not cheerleading for the Russian position—although it may be treated as such by those who disingenuously present any realistic assessment of the situation as “appeasement”—but rather illustrating how Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world.
Now, it is Russia that has the West on the horns of a dilemma: It can either watch the Kremlin achieve its strategic objectives, guaranteed in a one-sided negotiated settlement or through the continued attrition of Ukrainian forces, or it can escalate with force. Putin’s statement regarding nuclear weapons was not mere rhetoric—it was the Russian president defining the limits of the current conflict from a position of authority.
Anything short of total Ukrainian victory is therefore an implicit admission that the “rules-based” economic and political order has been irreversibly altered. Despite getting the premises right, Putin may have subsequently erred in his conclusion that Western leaders understand the Ukraine war as a mere matter of improving their tactical position. With the likelihood of official NATO deployments increasing by the day, the world stands on edge to see where things go next.
The post The ‘Rules-Based Order’ Is Already Over appeared first on The American Conservative.
The other options are abandonment and a perpetual military presence.
Thanassis Cambanis argued that the United States should withdraw from Syria as it acknowledges its real priorities and makes hard tradeoffs. On the other hand, former U.S. Special Envoy to Syria James Jeffrey believes that the U.S. has multiple missions in Syria and should not withdraw. Both authors have valid points and advocate for different strategic objectives for the U.S.
To achieve both goals, the U.S. should make a tactical compromise and work with Turkey in Syria. The U.S. partnership with the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) was described as temporary, transitional, and tactical by officials. Now is the time to act on this official rhetoric.
Although the viewpoints of Thanassis Cambanis and James Jeffrey may appear to contradict each other, the United States can still withdraw from Syria and accomplish its regional objectives. By collaborating with Turkey, a NATO ally, the U.S. can exit Syria while continuing its efforts to eliminate ISIS, limit Iran’s influence, and support the political process in Syria.
The primary hurdle in reaching a Turkish-American agreement is the fate of the Syrian Kurds. The precise definition of “Syrian Kurds” is crucial in overcoming this obstacle. Generally, in the U.S., the Syrian Kurds are considered synonymous with the YPG-led SDF. In reality, the YPG does not speak for most Syrian Kurds and is mostly controlled by Turkish Kurds.
Many Syria discussions often focus on the SDF without delving into its true nature. As highlighted by former CIA officer Nicholas Spyridon Kass, it is crucial to recognize that the SDF essentially represents the Syrian faction of a well-known, originally Marxist, U.S.-designated terrorist group hailing from Turkey: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Over four decades, the PKK has perpetuated a violent and totalitarian revolutionary agenda centered around its incarcerated leader, Abdullah Ocalan. This organization has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and clashes, targeting Turkish security forces, Kurdish civilians, and others, resulting in a reported death toll of approximately 40,000 since its inception in 1984. Notably, the YPG functions as the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, further emphasizing the interconnectedness of these groups.
It is highly unlikely that the U.S. will be able to convince Turkey to accept the YPG-dominated SDF. Any attempts to push for a peace process between the SDF or the PKK with Turkey are doomed to fail. It will not gain any support in Ankara. On the contrary, any such suggestion motivates Turkish decision-makers to search for alternative solutions, including unilateral military operations. The Turkish president recently stated the desire to launch another military incursion into Syria. The failed peace process with the PKK serves as a strong reminder never to attempt it again.
If the U.S. wishes to promote cooperation with Turkey in Syria, it must support Syrian Kurds who are acceptable to Turkey and who represent the majority of Syrian Kurds. The Syrian Kurdish National Council is a pre-existing organization that meets these criteria and should be favored over the YPG.
The Syrian Kurdish National Council is a political umbrella that includes several Syrian Kurdish political parties. It has a close relationship with the Iraqi Kurdistan region, and both the Iraqi Kurdish regional government and the Syrian Kurdish National Council maintain good relations with Turkey. The Syrian Kurdish National Council has offices in Istanbul and Erbil and is recognized as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition. Turkey has chosen it as the Kurdish representative of the Syrian constitution committee. The Rojava Peshmerga is the armed branch of the Syrian Kurdish National Council. They were expelled from Syria by the YPG and are now based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Since then, they have been trained and restructured by the Iraqi Zarawani Peshmerga and have fought ISIS. They have also been deployed to disrupt PKK logistical lines in northern Iraq.
The United States, after abandoning the YPG, should require Turkey to work with the non-YPG factions of the SDF and the Syrian Kurdish National Council. As part of the agreement between the U.S. and Turkey, some form of local governance should be secured for the Syrian Kurds. These efforts should be further strengthened with the assistance of Iraqi Kurdistan. Erbil should be involved in certain aspects of the agreement related to the future of Syrian Kurds. Erbil, a trusted partner of both the U.S. and Turkey, can support the Syrian Kurdish National Council in establishing the new order.
American-Turkish collaboration offers several potential benefits. The U.S. can find a way to withdraw from Syria while also supporting Syrian Kurds and Arabs who are acceptable to Ankara instead of the YPG. It is important to ensure that this collaboration does not lead to conceding Syria to Iran or abandoning the political process for Syria. Bluntly, the U.S. has three options: abandon its goals in Syria, commit to working with Turkey, or commit to an endless presence in Syria.
The U.S. cannot maintain a presence in Syria indefinitely. However, the U.S. reluctance to cooperate with Turkey in Syria may ultimately benefit Iran. If the U.S. withdraws, the only obstacle to Syria becoming a puppet state of Iran would be Turkey. The SDF, which the YPG dominates, would probably make a deal with Damascus and align with Iran. Given the recent regional escalation due to the Gaza conflict, it is worth considering what this would mean for Israel’s security. Additionally, Russia may be too preoccupied with its invasion of Ukraine to counter Iran’s growing influence in Syria.
The decision of the U.S. to cooperate with Turkey would help in achieving strategic objectives such as eliminating ISIS, limiting Iran, and adopting an effective approach towards both goals. This decision could have geostrategic importance in addition to accelerating the new momentum in Turkish-American relations, even beyond Syria. It is particularly important in light of the invasion of Ukraine, as resolving the biggest dispute between the two largest armies in NATO would be useful.
If the U.S. decides to withdraw from Syria without coordinating with Turkey and instead withdraws after making a deal with Damascus or continues to stay in Syria, Turkish-American relations will suffer. As I explained elsewhere, Syria—which has a 565-mile border with Turkey—is a major concern that could negatively impact the new momentum in Turkish-American ties.
Given the current systemic situation in Syria, I foresaw that the U.S. would have no other option but to either give up Syria to Iran or collaborate with Turkey. Thus, I drafted a comprehensive plan that outlines how both NATO allies could work together in Syria. The proposed roadmap involves a transitional period where the Turkish and American spheres of influence in Syria are combined. The Turkish army will move into regions where the U.S. has a presence in Syria. The Arab non-YPG elements, the Rojava Peshmerga, and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army will form a decentralized unity in Syria.
After the military transition period, elections will be held across this united territory, where locals will elect their local councils. Following this, a bi-chamber parliament, consisting of local council representatives and the legitimate political Syrian opposition, will elect the Syrian Interim Government (SIG). The SIG will be restructured and function as the primary interlocutor of the U.S. and Turkey in Syria.
With this, the Syrian conflict will transform a three-axis conflict into a two-axis conflict. This development opens the path towards implementing UN Security Council resolution 2254. The SIG areas would benefit from trade with and via Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, oil revenues, and international investments. To pressure the Assad regime and its backers, Iran and Russia, the sanctions against Damascus will be upheld. With each day passing, the negotiating power of Damascus will diminish. This will incentivize Russia and Iran to convince the regime to engage in the political process.
After the end of the transition period, the responsibility of fighting ISIS in Syria will be handed over to Turkey and the SIG. Additionally, the presence of Turkish military forces will prevent Iran from extending its influence over Syria and taking control of the oil fields. The longstanding Middle Eastern principle of Turkey and Iran never being present in the same area would apply, as evidenced by the Turkish–Iranian border being the oldest in the region.
Looking ahead, the Iranian land bridge connecting Tehran and Beirut runs through the important town of Abu Kamal. The PKK leaders depend on Iran to escape Turkish airstrikes, fleeing from the Iraqi parts to the Iranian parts of the Qandil Mountains. Because of this, the YPG-dominated SDF have been hesitant to attack Abu Kamal. This new situation would present policy options that could potentially cut off the Iranian land bridge from Syria to Iraq completely.
After withdrawing troops from Syria, the United States could maintain its air superiority in the region by using NATO assets stationed in Turkey, airfields in Kuwait, and bases in Jordan. With no American troops on the ground in Syria, Iran-backed Shia militias’ ability to target U.S. military personnel would be reduced. The U.S. air dominance would also assist U.S. allies in Syria.
This new approach to combating ISIS would represent a significant shift in perspective. While the current strategy centers on battling ISIS, it falls short of eradicating the group. The YPG-dominated SDF may indeed engage in anti-ISIS efforts, yet they also benefit from the continued existence of ISIS as it bolsters their legitimacy. Without the ISIS threat, they risk losing crucial support from the U.S. and their main source of legitimacy.
The current strategy aimed at defeating ISIS is unlikely to eliminate ISIS due to this legitimacy paradox. To address this issue, a new approach will be taken in the new period where Arabs and the reformed SIG will lead the fight. ISIS is no longer capable of launching assaults like it did in 2014. Now, the root causes of their existence must be tackled with political representation, legitimacy, popular support, and the region’s economic revival.
The strategy to fight ISIS in 2014–2019 had to transform after the de-territorialization of ISIS, but it didn’t. That strategy facilitated a minority rule over the Arab majority, alienating the local Arab tribes who had already revolted. In the new period, once the initial transition is complete, the new fighting force will likely be more capable and more locally embedded than the current SDF with the support of the U.S. and Turkey. As a result of the tradeoff, Turkey will be responsible for ensuring that the strategy against ISIS is working.
In this new phase, the reformed SIG and local councils must address the ISIS threat. As local governance grows, social tensions are expected to diminish, reducing the pool for extremist recruitment. This strategy aims to tackle the root causes of ISIS in Syria. ISIS members and their families will face prosecution according to Syrian law in the courts of the SIG. Unlike the approach of the YPG-dominated SDF, the SIG adheres to Syrian legal standards for prosecuting crimes.
For the U.S. to honor its commitments to not only the Syrian Kurds but to all Syrians who still hope for a political solution, it must change tactics while maintaining strategic objectives. If the U.S. doesn’t work with Turkey, it will hand over control of Syria and the YPG-dominated SDF to Iran, either soon or at a later date.
The post The U.S. Should Work With Turkey to Leave Syria appeared first on The American Conservative.
American interventions only destabilize Haiti further.
Haiti’s simmering political crisis reached a boil late last month when local armed groups, led in part by ex-cop Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, declared war on Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s government. In just a few weeks, these disparate gangs have forced Henry to step down and enter impromptu exile in Puerto Rico as unrest wracks his country.
But fear not—as Haiti descends into political chaos, Washington’s brightest minds have developed a two-pronged plan to fix it. It’s a classic of the genre.
The Biden administration’s plan revolves around a Kenyan-led police intervention to restore order, which the United Nations Security Council approved last year. On the political side, the U.S. is leading talks in Jamaica to install a transitional council that would take Henry’s place until new elections can be held.
But there’s a catch. Anyone who wants a seat on the council must agree to an international intervention, leaving all Haitians opposed to such a move out of the conversation. Worse, Kenyan courts have serious reservations about sending their police to fix a crisis abroad; following Henry’s resignation, authorities in Nairobi have said they will consider deploying security forces only once a new government is in place and a fact-finding mission can be conducted. This is perhaps why the U.S. has haltingly begun to entertain the idea of sending American troops as part of an international coalition to restore order.
If all of this seems a bit illogical, that’s because it is. In a world wracked by crises, the U.S. has little to gain by imposing a half-baked plan on a country that has long opposed American intervention in its internal politics.
And, as POLITICO revealed this week, “half-baked” may be a bit generous. A 33-page planning document that the White House has been circulating in Congress gives no real detail about how the UN force would be funded, how Kenyan forces would work with local police to beat back the armed groups, and whether foreign troops will engage directly in the fighting. Indeed, it doesn’t even give a clear timeline for success, saying only that the mission will start with a nine-month mandate that can be renewed as needed. Little wonder, then, that congressional Republicans are blocking funds for the vaguely defined effort.
The best path forward is far simpler. As was the case in Afghanistan, the U.S. can best serve Haiti by taking a step back and allowing Haitians to decide their own future. As Jake Johnston—a Haiti expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research—recently told me, the tortured history of U.S.-Haitian relations leaves no other choice. “You can’t impose the government from an external source or power,” Johnston said. “It’s not going to work in the long run, however much we might want it to.”
Conversations about Haiti tend to focus on images of chaos and poverty, but few Americans ask where that chaos comes from. In reality, much of Haiti’s current woes stem from shoddy, short-sighted U.S. policy. Over the past century, consecutive American governments have posed as the island nation’s savior only to undermine its hopes for democracy at every turn.
Haiti’s financial woes date back originally to its founding in 1804, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines squared off against Napoleonic France and, beyond all odds, won independence for his countrymen. The upstart nation got the cold shoulder from its neighbors, many of whom feared that the successful slave revolt in Haiti would inspire copycats across the Western hemisphere.
Haiti would only reach a modus vivendi with Western powers when it agreed, under threat of a new invasion, to pay France a kingly sum to recognize Haitian independence. The ransom strangled Port-au-Prince for over 100 years, forcing Haitian leaders to fork over most of their annual tax revenue just to service the debt.
While President Woodrow Wilson preached sovereignty for all nations, he sent U.S. troops to occupy Haiti in 1915. Wilson’s reasons were twofold: Policymakers feared that chaos in Haiti could threaten U.S. security, and American banks held a great deal of Haitian debt. In short order, U.S. occupation forces rewrote the country’s constitution (including new provisions that legalized foreign ownership of Haitian land and established a national army) and set out to control its political scene, an arrangement that would hold until America’s withdrawal in 1934.
The U.S. continued an uneasy but often close relationship with Haitian authorities in the ensuing years. Washington lent support to a notorious father-son dictatorship from 1957 until 1986, when military leaders forced dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier into exile. A shaky transition gave way to the country’s first ever democratic elections in 1990, won by a leftist Catholic priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
American officials were opposed to Aristide’s redistributionist, left-wing agenda and often accused him of being an authoritarian in democratic clothing. His tenure only lasted a few months before a new coup, backed by intelligence agents who had worked closely with the CIA, forced him into exile. The priest managed to claw his way back and win election again in 2000, only to be deposed in a second coup in 2004, with the alleged backing of U.S. officials anxious to see Aristide leave power.
Things have only gotten worse since. A UN force occupied the country from 2004 to 2017 in a mission that helped stabilize the security situation but also led to a massive outbreak of cholera. When elections took place just months after the 2010 earthquake, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton allegedly intervened to help elect Michel Martelly—an erratic former pop singer who pushed the country toward authoritarianism. (American officials also went to great lengths to oppose Aristide’s return to Haiti despite his continued popularity, as WikiLeaks cables revealed.)
The past few years have been no different. When Martelly was pushed out, the U.S. backed his successor Jovenel Moïse to the hilt, including when he dissolved parliament and began ruling by decree. Following Moïse’s 2021 assassination, American officials threw their support behind Henry as Haiti’s rightful ruler, even though he had only been named prime minister two days before the killing and had never been sworn into office. With U.S. backing, Henry followed in the authoritarian footsteps of his predecessors and gradually lost control of the country.
This history leads to an inescapable conclusion: When Washington puts its finger on the scales of Haitian politics, chaos ensues. This brings us back to the current crisis.
In short, years of corruption and poor governance have empowered armed groups to act like neighborhood mafias, providing some services to local communities while shaking down shop owners for protection money and warding off police attention. These disparate gangs have at times worked with the government, as in 2018 when they helped break up a popular protest movement.
Popular hatred for Henry’s regime led the local armed groups to attempt to overthrow the government last year, but their effort faded within weeks following disagreements over a path forward for the country. This year’s effort has been much more successful, though significant doubts remain about whether the gangs will manage to hold the line this time around. If they do, any military intervention from abroad will likely lead to a protracted civil war.
The latest flare-up in violence is certainly concerning for Haitians, who now face a breakdown of social order that has only worsened food insecurity in the cash-strapped country. Gang violence has pushed at least 300,000 people from their homes over the past year, and some form of humanitarian aid remains necessary to prevent total collapse.
But we have to accept the fact that U.S. intervention—military or political—isn’t going to make the situation better. Haitians are the only ones capable of solving their own crises. It’s time that foreign powers give them the space to try.
The post The U.S. Should Let Haitians Decide Their Own Future appeared first on The American Conservative.
President Biden traveled to Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu days after the Oct. 7 attack.
Why do Americans still pay to defend South Koreans?
The possibility of Donald Trump returning to the Oval Office has set off hysterical wailing across the Atlantic and Pacific. American allies used to cheap-riding on the U.S. for their defense fear a second Trump administration would either demand greater contribution or drop Washington’s defense guarantee entirely.
Although European complaints about the possible loss of American military welfare have received the most public attention in recent weeks, South Korean officials are no less concerned about having to take over responsibility for their nation’s defense. Hence the imminent start of negotiations over the Special Measures Agreement, or “host nation support” for the U.S. garrison in the South.
The settlement won’t take effect until 2026. The two governments are rushing the talks to lock in a sweet deal for the Republic of Korea in case Trump wins in November. During his administration, he set off a tsunami of South Korean whining and whinging by threatening to withdraw American troops if the ROK didn’t contribute substantially more for Pentagon protection. Negotiations broke off and the newly installed Biden administration immediately took Seoul’s side, preserving the generous U.S. defense subsidy. Undoubtedly, American taxpayers will again get a raw deal.
Unfortunately, the alliance costs more than money, and the risks for America are steadily increasing. The Korean War was a terrible, bloody affair. But at least the battlefield was an ocean away from the U.S. Until recently, a renewed conflict would also have been fought “over there,” limiting Americans’ exposure. Despite the near certainty that the allies would prevail, casualties probably would be very high, much greater than in the Iraq or Afghan campaigns. Nevertheless, the U.S. homeland would remain secure.
No longer. First, diplomacy on the peninsula is dead, having suffered an apparently mortal wound with the failure of the 2019 Trump-Kim summit. Since then, talks between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and both Washington and Seoul have ceased. The Biden administration’s desperate begging for Pyongyang to engage have been contemptuously rebuffed. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un’s sister referred to a statement of President Joe Biden’s as a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage.” (Which, in truth, characterizes most of what the president says these days.)
Even worse has been the DPRK’s treatment of South Korea. Pyongyang long viewed the Koreas as one nation, with the peninsula’s southern lands to be eventually “liberated.” Kim recently abandoned settled policy and proposed revising the North’s constitution to define the ROK as his nation’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.” Although Kim disclaimed any intention to initiate hostilities against the South Koreans, he set “national policy to occupy their territory in the event of” an undefined “contingency.”
If the issue was only bluster, no one would take much notice. North Korea has long been the world’s number one in issuing insults against its foes. Yet Pyongyang now can count on Chinese support. Although Beijing long opposed the North’s nuclear ambitions, it evidently sees Washington’s containment policy toward the People’s Republic of China as a greater threat. Thus, the PRC has shown no willingness to back U.S. sanctions or other coercive measures, despite the Biden administration’s pious claims that they are in Beijing’s interest. Indeed, Biden’s repeated statements that he would defend Taiwan has given China a possible reason to back North Korean military action against the South.
Perhaps even worse, the North has gone all in with Russia, reviving a relationship that was near moribund in recent years. North Korea is thought to have provided substantial shipments of artillery shells for Moscow’s use in Ukraine. In return Pyongyang can expect Russia to shield it from the impact of sanctions and reward it financially. Much more is possible, including technical aid in missile and nuclear development. Such assistance would be highly provocative, but the U.S. and its European allies have provided advanced weapons to Kiev that have caused tens of thousands of Russian deaths. Moscow might believe that turnabout is fair play.
As tensions have risen, so has talk of war. Some Korea scholars fear that Kim might be planning military action of some kind, contending that “the situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950.” Their fears have gone mainstream. Reported the New York Times: “That new drumbeat of threats, while the United States and its allies have been preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has set foreign officials and analysts wondering whether the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has moved beyond posturing and is planning to assert more military force.”
Provocations appear on the rise. In February, Pyongyang staged an artillery exercise near disputed islands west of the peninsula, triggering a South Korean drill in response. The actions revived memories of a deadly North Korean assault in 2010 that killed four ROK civilians.
Despite the perhaps predictable fear-mongering, Kim appears to be fully rational, if sadly brutal. The North’s Supreme Leader explained, “As long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth, and imperialism and the anti-North Korean maneuvers of the U.S. and its followers remain, our road to strengthening our nuclear force will never end.”
War would be a wild gamble for his regime and dynasty. China has shown no interest in fomenting armed conflict, Russia wouldn’t benefit from doing so and is busy in Ukraine. The U.S. remains capable of massive retaliation and, as yet the DPRK probably can’t target the American mainland. Most importantly, Kim is unlikely to empty his ammunition stocks for Moscow’s war if he is planning one of his own.
Still, no one should feel comfortable. Kim claimed that he “does not want war, but will not avoid it.” And Kim has set forth a formidable arms development program, topped by plans to deploy tactical nukes, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs). If successful, Kim will possess an arsenal that will allow him to both use nuclear weapons on the battlefield and target the American homeland.
Washington can ill afford to add to its current defense burdens. The U.S. faces manifold social problems, lagging domestic investment, burgeoning entitlement programs, and rising federal deficits. It still possesses the world’s most powerful military but will find the cost of acting as globocop and dispensing defense welfare to populous and prosperous allies around the world ever tougher to bear.
Moreover, in a few years any war would no longer likely remain on the Korean peninsula, or at least in Northeast Asia. Any American president would have to ask whether South Korea was worth risking the American homeland. Of course, Washington retains an overwhelming nuclear deterrent, so a first strike on the U.S. would result in the DPRK’s destruction. However, Pyongyang could threaten to inaugurate Armageddon if Washington entered a Second Korean War and threatened to defeat and occupy the North, overthrowing the Kim regime. The DPRK might even use tactical nukes in battle and dare the U.S. to respond. Would an American president decide that the ROK’s defense was worth the loss of one or more U.S. cities and hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans?
Recognizing that South Koreans are understandably skeptical that the answer is yes, Washington has been desperately trying to convince them that so-called “extended deterrence” remains viable. Last year the two governments issued the so-called Washington Declaration, by which U.S. officials promised to allow the immolation of America’s cities and slaughter of America’s citizens if things go bad on the peninsula. It’s a hard sell because even South Koreans recognize that this is an irrational policy. How many of them would voluntarily risk their territory and population to save the U.S.? The policy makes no more sense for Americans.
Although Trump’s push for a dramatic increase in host nation payments, to some $5 billion annually, was better than the status quo, it wouldn’t justify the current one-sided “Mutual Defense Treaty.” American military personnel shouldn’t be rented out, even to wealthy friends. Washington should put its money and people’s lives on the line only when Americans have something vital at stake. They don’t in Korea. That doesn’t mean a conflict wouldn’t be truly awful, a humanitarian tragedy, economic disaster, and geopolitical challenge. But Americans would remain secure, though unsettled. The impact of the war wouldn’t justify the costs of intervening, especially against a nuclear North Korea.
As unsettling as this conclusion might seem, there is good news: the ROK. It required aid to survive North Korea’s initial invasion and later threats, but took off economically in the 1960s; today it enjoys a GDP more than 50 times that of the DPRK. The South also has a vast technological edge, twice the population, and far greater international support. Obviously, the ROK could defend itself from the North if it chose to do so.
Fear of North Korea, concern about China, and worries over U.S. abandonment have spurred Seoul to spend more on its own defense, even under the previous, liberal Moon administration. Although the North enjoys a quantitative edge, South Korea possesses an increasingly competent and sophisticated military. Today the ROK is among the world’s top ten military spenders. But it could do much more.
The most complicated issue is nuclear deterrence, but there is strong public support in the South for developing its own nuclear weapons. There also is increasing political backing. In fact, last year ROK President Yoon Suk Yeol observed that “if the issue becomes more serious, we could acquire our own nuclear weapons, such as deploying tactical nuclear weapons here in ROK.”
This possibility triggers hysteria among nonproliferation advocates, but it is more important for America to end extended deterrence, and the resulting nuclear threat to the U.S., than it is to enforce nuclear nonproliferation. Washington has declared failure in the past—regarding India, Israel, and Pakistan, most obviously. Rather than imperil relations in a hopeless quest to reverse the irreversible, the U.S. has accommodated new international powers. North Korea is an acknowledged, if not formally recognized, nuclear power. Why not accept the South into the club? This might not be a good solution, but it increasingly looks like the best available.
Which ties back to the latest SMA negotiation. Instead of forging ahead, as if the alliance is immutable and permanent, the U.S. and ROK should transform it into a cooperative agreement between equals. After which America’s troop presence would be phased out. Host nation support should be adjusted accordingly, starting high and dropping to zero when the last American comes home.
There is much to criticize about Donald Trump’s presidency. Nevertheless, he had a better understanding of the Korean peninsula than did his predecessors or successor. It was stupid not to engage the North for decades. It was equally stupid to subsidize the South for decades. Before the onset of the latest SMA negotiations would be a good time to rethink the alliance’s future. And stop expecting Americans to defend South Koreans.
The post Fearing Trump, South Korea Prepares to Pay Its Fair Share appeared first on The American Conservative.
As the Israel-Palestine crisis twists and turns, Washington risks being borne back ceaselessly into the past.
“‘Hotel California’ should be the official song of the Biden administration,” former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller recently told the Washington Post. “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.” Miller, a negotiator in the Oslo Accords and the Israel–Jordan Peace Treaty, quoted the Eagles’ classic in reference to the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. As the U.S. looks to put the region in the rearview mirror after disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, heightened American involvement in the Israel–Gaza war is causing a chain-reaction of military repositioning throughout the region.
In his State of the Union address, President Biden called the war in Gaza “heartbreaking.” While Biden claimed Israel has the right to defend itself, the president has grown increasingly frustrated with Israel’s prosecution of the war under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Palestinians in Gaza remain in dire need of food, water, medicine, shelter, and other basic goods, Biden announced he is “directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast.”
“This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” the president claimed, while adding that “no U.S. boots will be on the ground.”
In the day that followed, however, reports clarified that while the undertaking might not put boots on the ground in Gaza, the construction of the floating pier would require more than 1,000 U.S. troops right off the coast. The pier could take approximately two months to build.
But it’s not just 1,000 U.S. troops that have made their way to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration has been moving assets throughout the region since Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel last October. The primary objective of the initial repositioning was to deter Hezbollah from opening a new front in the war with Israel from Lebanon. Two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford, each with a 5,000-member crew, made their way to the Middle East. So too did more air defense systems, a squadron of F-16s, and ships from the Bataan amphibious ready group.
In March, as the Biden administration planned its next steps and sought to broker a ceasefire, the Army dispatched several ships, such as the USAV SP4 James A. Loux, the USAV Monterrey, USAV Matamoros, and USAV Wilson Wharf, from Virginia to assist in the pier’s construction. The crews make up part of the Army’s 500-soldier commitment to the pier’s construction.
As the ships departed, Army Brig. Gen. Brad Hinson told members of the media, “We will not be on the shore but we will be on the pier and that pier can extend anywhere out from shore from 800 feet up to 2000 feet.”
On land, there has not been a significant increase in America’s footprint in the region since the Israel–Gaza war began. Although America’s wars in the Middle East have formally ended, 45,000 pairs of boots remain on the ground there. An estimated 13,500 troops are stationed in Kuwait, 9,000 in Bahrain, 8,000 in Qatar, 3,500 in the UAE, 3,000 in Jordan, 2,700 in Saudi Arabia, still 2,500 in Iraq, 2,000 in Turkey, 900 remain in Syria, and another few hundred are stationed in Oman. Just under an additional 1,000 troops were deployed to the region in October in response to the war in Gaza, including “a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery from Fort Bliss Texas, Patriot batteries from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Patriot and Avenger batteries from Fort Liberty, North Carolina, and associated air defense headquarters elements from Fort Bliss and Fort Cavazos, Texas,” according to Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.
Admittedly, the 45,000 troops deployed throughout the region is a far cry from the 160,000 troops deployed to Iraq and the 100,000 in Afghanistan during the height of the war on terror, but 45,000 landed and an unknown number of troops at sea, is an awful lot for a nation supposedly at peace.
“After 20 years of forever wars in the Middle East, we should we be trying to find ways to extricate ourselves from this part of the world just like we did with the Trump-Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan,” William Ruger, President of the American Institute for Economic Research and former Trump nominee for U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told The American Conservative. “It seems like policymakers imbued with a kind of primacist worldview are unwilling to restrain themselves and appreciate that we need to be prioritizing Asia over other regions of the world.”
Attacks on American troops in the region thus far have not caused the Biden administration, or the hawkish establishment in Washington, to question whether or not the American empire is still overextended in the Middle East. On January 28, three Army Reserve soldiers perished in a drone attack on the Tower 22 military installation in Jordan near the borders of Syria and Iraq. Forty more were injured. Over a four-month span, from October 2023 to February 2024, U.S. troops in the region have come under attack more than 160 times, injuring 80 more soldiers. Overextension has created a soft underbelly for Islamists and militants to slash, all the while risking further escalation via U.S. involvement. And U.S. strikes on the suspected perpetrators have done little to deter further action, such as U.S. strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen.
“The last time the United States inserted itself directly into a conflict between the Israelis and various Palestinian factions, nearly 250 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers died in Lebanon 40 years ago,” Dan Caldwell, Public Policy Advisor for Defense Priorities, told TAC. “The move by the Biden Administration to establish this pier unnecessarily risks American lives and opens the door to the United States getting more deeply involved in the conflict in a way that doesn’t benefit either the United States or the Israelis. I also worry that this could lead to yet another permanent commitment in the Middle East at a time when we need to be deprioritizing the region.”
“Clearly Americans are both sympathetic to the need of Israel to create security for itself after October 7, but they also, I think, are worried about the plight of innocent people in Gaza,” Ruger said. “Diplomacy seems like a better answer than creating a situation that could lead to more Americans being in harm’s way.”
The post Biden Continues to Imperil U.S. Troops in the Middle East appeared first on The American Conservative.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, center right, was in Germany on Tuesday for the start of a semiregular meeting of nearly 50 nations who are supplying Ukraine’s forces.
The weekend election offered neither a credible challenger nor a credible successor.
Vladimir Putin cruised to victory in the Russian presidential elections this weekend, receiving a higher share of the vote than in any of his previous four contests, around 88 percent. This election held few surprises but was notable for two absences: a credible opponent and a credible successor.
The lack of opposition is easy to explain. Western observers tend to blame Kremlin suppression of dissent, but the simpler explanation is that the majority of Russians are happy with the way the country is governed at present. A Levada poll last month showed 75 percent of respondents think Russia is headed in the right direction.
Seriously challenging Putin would require two things: an alternative vision for Russia and an individual to represent it. Obviously the second half of that equation is difficult in a country where being an opposition leader carries serious personal risks, including hostile attention from authorities. But the first half is missing, too. It is not as if there is an ideological alternative to Putinism that enjoys widespread support among the Russian people and merely lacks a politician to champion it. Western liberalism was tried in the 1990s (at least as the Russians understand their recent history). The appetite for trying it again is nil.
The lack of a successor is harder to explain. Putin is 71 years old. He probably expected to be handing over the reins of power at this point in his career. That hasn’t happened.
There are three reasons why we should not anticipate that Putin will indicate a successor anytime soon. The first is the ongoing war in Ukraine. It is thought that one of the reasons Putin chose to invade Ukraine when he did was that he wanted to resolve that ongoing challenge to Russian security before handing over power. He considered it dishonorable to saddle his successor with such a fiendishly difficult and constantly worsening problem. Or, to put it another way, he did not want such a formidable problem to be handled by an untried leader.
The second reason is the conspicuous failure of Putin’s past efforts at naming an heir apparent. Dmitry Medvedev, to whom Putin handed over the presidency in 2008, was a disappointment in office, conceding too much to the West and failing to adequately defend Russia’s interests on the international stage, at least as Putin saw things. Since leaving the presidency, Medvedev has been a different kind of disappointment, veering too far to the opposite end of the political spectrum and attracting mockery for his hardline nationalist pronouncements.
The final reason is Putin’s own history. When he was chosen as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, it was at the very last minute. Yeltsin had cycled through several other potential heirs as the end of his career approached, rejecting each of them one by one. When he announced his resignation in 1999, few people knew the name of the man to whom he handed power. Putin therefore has personal reasons for thinking that a good successor does not need to be paraded in advance like a debutante in order to succeed in office.
So we are stuck with Putin for the foreseeable future. There is a silver lining, though. As noted above, Putin’s priority now is to reach a stable settlement of the Ukraine question, one that he feels comfortable handing over to the next guy. That means he may not press the Ukrainians to agree to a lopsided peace agreement. The Russians could probably demand a humiliating peace deal given their current battlefield advantage, but Putin might agree to concessions if those concessions promised to lead to an enduring equilibrium.
The Minsk agreements, which ended the last war in Ukraine, were treated by the U.S. and its allies as a holding pattern to give us time to prepare for the next war. If we decide this time to prepare for a lasting peace instead of looking ahead to round three, we may find that Putin is prepared to cooperate in that effort. On the other hand, the longer we keep the Ukraine situation unresolved, the longer we will be stuck with him.
The post Stuck With Putin for the Foreseeable Future appeared first on The American Conservative.
Australia’s Northern Territory was the first to legalize assisted dying, and Aboriginals did not approve.
Unless Canada’s government reverses course, in March 2024, the nation’s doctors will be permitted to kill patients with mental disabilities or assist them in dying. Proponents hail Canada’s leap into the bioethical unknown as a bold step towards true equity in end-of-life medicine. Montreal psychiatrist Mona Gupta admits that “some cases might be difficult” but, on the whole, excluding people with mental disorders from access to medical aid in dying “sends the message that they are not entitled to make choices about their own lives the way everyone else is.”
Dr. Gupta might want to rethink her position after reading Caitlin Mahar’s The Good Death through Time. Mahar’s focus is Australia’s Northern Territory, which in 1995 became the first political jurisdiction in the world to permit doctors to assist people in dying. White Australians who supported the legislation were shocked to discover that Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, where they make up roughly a quarter of the population, didn’t share their enthusiasm for medically assisted death. It wasn’t simply that Indigenous people were reluctant to exercise their choice to have doctors help them die. They also felt there was something incompatible between modern notions of a right to die and “the aboriginal way.”
“I have quite a bit of understanding of white man’s ways, but it is difficult for me to understand this one,” one of them said. The common refrain in Aboriginal communities was that medical aid in dying (MAID) was “whitefella business.”
As a result, Mahar argues, Aboriginal people avoided or delayed seeking medical treatment out of fear that a trip to the local clinic might end with a lethal injection. That fear might have been unrealistic, but, as Mahar points out, they were rooted in the larger truth that “conceptions of death and dying are not timeless or universal.” Reforms like Canada’s are “culturally specific,” in Mahar’s words, and not simply the latest extension of global human rights when it comes to end-of-life decisions.
Mahar’s book is the latest in a series of scholarly attempts to find out how and why in recent years governments and courts in some countries have legalized what used to be called medical murder or assisted suicide. Mahar correctly notes that, until the late Victorian era, a good death or “euthanasia” was customarily defined as making patients as comfortable as possible while helping them prepare for death. Typically, doctors did not attend the dying. What Mahar calls “the ideal of the good Christian death” was largely respected. Doctors tended to believe it was “equally criminal to accelerate by one hour the death of a person as to cause it,” in the words of one Victorian physician.
Big changes occurred in the late 1800s. As physicians became more adept at easing pain with narcotics, the definition of a good death increasingly included the elimination of painful suffering. What started as a way of alleviating the fear of a painful death bred its own kind of terror. “As methods for assuaging pain have improved,” Mahar writes, “we appear to have become more fearful of suffering.” As the twentieth century unfolded, the aim of removing fear and suffering grew increasingly popular and support for medically assisted death mounted.
Which brings us to the unprecedented flurry of euthanasia legislation in various Western countries since the 1990s. Canada is playing catch-up to places such as The Netherlands, which has made MAID accessible to youngsters between the ages of twelve and sixteen with parental consent, adolescents as young as sixteen, and adults “tired of life.” In 2020, the Dutch approved mercy killing for children between one and twelve. Meanwhile, in Australia, the concept of medicalized death culminated in the 2017 Voluntary Assisted Dying Act, which made Victoria the first Australian state to legalize medically assisted dying and triggered a wave of similar laws across the country.
It is certainly true, as Mahar notes, that this state of affairs exists because of widespread fears, especially among the elderly, that death will be a painful, protracted, and undignified experience. She is also correct to maintain that the “vision that holds sway in modern Western societies is not natural or universal but the product of specific—predominantly white, middle class, ableist—cultural and historical milieus.”
This was evident years ago in the early days of the Hemlock Society, the first American grassroots organization in support of assisted suicide. Hemlock’s members were described as “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” living in largely white retirement villages. By contrast, MAID has never caught on among African-Americans, among whom it consistently polls lower than among white Americans. One American physician told the New York Times that blacks view assisted suicide as a state-sponsored way of disposing of “throwaway lives.” To them, like Australia’s Aborigines, MAID is indeed “whitefella business.”
Mahar’s historical analysis reveals that, time and again, legalizing the medical murder of consenting, terminally ill patients is the “thin edge of the wedge” and MAID, once enacted, is extraordinarily difficult to regulate in practice. Yet advocacy groups have powerful resources at their disposal. Besides generous funding from corporations and philanthropic foundations, American groups such as Compassion and Choices rely heavily on sympathetic media coverage. Mahar notes how Australia’s MAID activists found the media to be an “invaluable” resource. They cultivated contacts with writers, reporters, and producers, and in return media bombarded the public with human interest stories about people in pain who wish to end their lives with medical assistance.
Above all, Mahar’s book is a welcome reminder that all major religious communities around the world reject the notion that people should be killed to relieve the pain of dying. Even Reform Judaism, liberal in many ways, bans both assisted suicide and death by lethal injection. Euthanasia activists may not like to hear it, but, as Mahar concludes, celebrating these practices as exercises in “equity” and “choice” amounts to a form of cultural “bigotry.”
Ian Dowbiggin, the author of two books on the history of euthanasia, teaches history at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. He receives no financial support from any group with a public stance on the issue.
The post Euthanasia in the Outback appeared first on The American Conservative.
Customers at an internet cafe in Quezon City, Philippines, can play games that reward players with cryptocurrency tokens.
The wisdom of LBJ’s resident contrarian George Ball is as relevant today as it was in the Vietnam era.
The phrase “the Wise Men” referring to the American postwar foreign policy elite was popularized by the authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas nearly 40 years ago, in a book of the same name.
Isaacson and Thomas chronicled the lives of “six friends” who, they claim, shaped American foreign policy in the postwar era. Yet of these 20th century giants, perhaps the wisest of their number received second billing. Indeed, I would argue today that George W. Ball (1909–1994) is among the least heralded of that generation of diplomats and policymakers. But Ball, who came to be known as “the Devil’s Advocate” within the Johnson administration for his tenacious opposition to the American war in Vietnam, deserves another look—especially today, with the Biden administration leading the country into a proxy war against Russia, a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and military action against the Yemeni Houthis, among other foreign misadventures.
Ball’s career in public service spanned half a century, from the 1930s to the 1980s. And everywhere one looks, from the New Deal to Lend Lease, from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to the birth of the European Steel and Coal Community, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Vietnam, one will find George Ball.
Such was the esteem with which Ball was held by his contemporaries that by 1980, our country’s wisest diplomat, George Kennan, was expressing to the era’s most famous historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., his wish that Ball be named Secretary of State. But that exchange took place nearly 45 years ago, and in the intervening years, Ball has fallen quite unfairly into obscurity alongside other giants of the era, including Charles “Chip” Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson.
As early as 1961, Ball warned President John F. Kennedy that, with regard to Vietnam, “Within five years, we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” To which Kennedy responded, “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.”
So who was George Ball, and how did he foresee that things would go so wrong before everyone else?
Ball, a brilliant, self-assured product of the American Midwest, was part of the wave of bright young New Dealers who came to Washington in the middle 1930s. Initially posted to Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, he came to represent a species of Democrat that has nearly vanished, a foreign policy hand who intuitively understood the interplay of power, of interests, and of nationalism in an anarchic world. His early forays into foreign affairs came through his work on Lend Lease, the Strategic Bombing Survey, and then, fortuitously, through his work with the architect of the European Coal and Steel Community, Jean Monnet. Needless to say, the French experience in Vietnam in the 1950s, during which time Ball served as the French government’s chief legal counsel in the U.S., was not a happy one. In his memoir, The Past Has Another Pattern, Ball recalled that he
had listened to innumerable French military and civilian experts discuss their nation’s plans, fears and doubts…. From that experience, I concluded — and have never ceased to believe—that we should rigorously avoid land wars in Asia.
President Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam met immediate opposition from Ball, who was by then serving as undersecretary of state. The series of memos and briefings put together by Ball throughout the mid-1960s were so prescient that years later the journalist and author David Halberstam observed that, “Someone reading his papers five years later would have a chilling feeling that they had been written after the fact, not before.”
As early as 1964, responding to the argument that American “credibility” was on the line in Southeast Asia, Ball wrote to the president that “what we might gain by establishing the steadfastness of our commitments, we could lose by an erosion of confidence in our judgment.” We were, in those years, in constant danger of, in Ball’s words, “becoming the puppet of our puppet.” The national security advisor McGeorge Bundy felt that what was really at stake was the country’s image abroad, or as he put it, “the confidence of America’s allies and America’s self-confidence.” Looking back on that period, when all of the president’s top advisers, including Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk counseled greater American involvement on that basis, Ball noted,
America had become a prisoner of whatever Saigon military clique was momentarily in power. Like a heroine in an eighteenth century novel who gets her way by fainting if anyone spoke crossly, each clique understood how to exploit its own weakness. If we demanded anything significant of it, it would collapse; so we never made any serious demands.
Does any of that sound familiar?
The arguments from the pro-interventionists of the Vietnam era are eerily, indeed, wearingly similar to those advanced in our own time in favor of further U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Rusk and the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., advocated for more boots on the ground on the basis of their belief that if we failed to stop the Communists there, there was no telling how far they would go. President Biden’s warning in his recent State of the Union address that, “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” is simply a warmed-over recitation of the Domino Theory, which remains, all these decades later, nothing so much as a fantasy—and one that that becomes all the more dangerous the more one believes it.
Given the risks as laid out so cogently, so painstakingly by Ball, why did Johnson and his men insist on moving forward? Why didn’t McNamara, who for years privately expressed grave reservations, step forward and challenge the escalatory policy of the President?
Part of the answer lies with the fact that the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy was driven by the fear of an influential foreign lobby. In a 1968 interview with the pioneering oral historian Jean Stein, Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland found it “amazing” how
all of the top persons were deceived in Vietnam each time they would go over. It was partly the holdover atmosphere from the McCarthy era…the people in the State Department who should have been speaking out were scared to death. No one except George Ball seemed to question and speak out against our policy. They’d seen the power of the China lobby…the young, inquisitive objective voices in the State Department were so scared by what happened…and by the purges by Dulles, Congress, and others during and after the McCarthy era.
Today, the role of ideological enforcer is played not by the China Lobby but by the Captive Nations lobby, led, of course, by the most fanatical interventionists in Washington. Anyone doubting that such a lobby exists might refer themselves to the current controversies roiling the Helsinki Commission on Capitol Hill. In such an atmosphere, where even relatively meek expressions of dissent are drowned out and condemned by pro-interventionists, one must wonder how many within the administration or on the Hill are dissuaded from speaking out by a fear of being smeared as apologists for Russia.
Johnson’s last secretary of defense, Clark Clifford (who emerged as a voice of dissent once Ball left State in September 1966) shrewdly observed that “individuals sometimes become so bound up in a certain course it is difficult to know where objectivity stops and personal involvement begins.” Clifford’s analysis applies with equal force to the current coterie of new cold warriors who seem to place foreign interests well before the interests of the United States.
Ultimately, however, one must concede that Ball’s opposition to Vietnam was ineffective: By the end of 1968 the US had 549,000 troops in Vietnam. Ball later wrote that he had “no inflated view” of the effectiveness of his advocacy. “I like to think that I somewhat slowed down the escalation,” but even so, “I provided no more than a marginal constraint on the momentum.”
The temptation, then, might be to say: So what if Biden does or doesn’t have a Devil’s Advocate of his own?
Given the risks involved, it is far better to have a truth-teller like Ball on the inside, even if he, as Ball was, is faced with insuperable opposition. After all, the pressure on the President to escalate remains immense. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has in recent weeks repeatedly signaled his determination to send boots on the ground should the Russians break through the current line of contact. The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, who has deep ties to the American political establishment, recently expressed his view that “the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine is not unthinkable.” And within the U.S. establishment the war drums beat as loudly as ever, with articles in organs like Foreign Affairs urging the president to send military advisers to Ukraine.
Indeed, the U.S. has been a co-belligerent in all but in name for some time; after all, three weeks prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, national security reporter Dan Dorfman reported that “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian government targets.” And more recent revelations from the New York Times indicate that US involvement on the ground has been more robust than often assumed.
In the end, the absence of a Devil’s Advocate, means, inevitably, as Ball put it, “no restraints and no alternatives.” And alternatives to war are needed now more than ever.
The post Where Is Joe Biden’s ‘Devil’s Advocate’? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Like their counterparts in America, Ireland’s grandees are failing to come to terms with the revolt of the public.
Dublin Castle was remarkably quiet on March 9, as the results of Ireland’s latest highly publicized referendum campaign became clear. The courtyard stage was empty, and only a smattering of “opposition” campaigners showed themselves. Both proposed constitutional amendments—one targeting motherhood, the other, marriage—failed in a landslide.
The referenda were scheduled symbolically on International Women’s Day, and the celebration at the Castle was intended as a victory lap for “inclusion” and anti-sexism. An American onlooker might have recalled Hillary Clinton’s Election Night party beneath a glass ceiling in 2016.
The Irish result mirrored Clinton’s loss in the degree of shock it inflicted on the political class. Ireland’s government ministers, establishment journalists, and bloated NGO ecosystem had seemed invincible. “It was our responsibility to convince the majority of people to vote ‘Yes,’ and we clearly failed to do so,” said Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar.
Maria Steen, a lawyer and “No” campaigner, delighted in “a great victory for common sense” and a “rejection of a government that seems more concerned with social-media plaudits than actually getting on with the business of governing the country.”
Nearly 68 percent of voters rejected the 39th Amendment, which would have redefined families to include “durable relationships” outside marriage; the wealthy Dún Laoghaire in suburban Dublin was the only constituency to vote in favor. Nearly 74 percent rejected the 40th Amendment, which would have nixed references to motherhood; all constituencies voted “No.” Polls consistently showed both proposals would pass.
By contrast, the successful referenda to legalize same-sex marriage (62 percent for, in 2015) and abortion (66 percent for, in 2018) reflected the establishment forces’ untrammeled power. Those celebrations, naturally, took place at the Castle.
This year’s referenda featured the same cast. The National Women’s Council of Ireland, which receives 80 percent of its funding from taxpayers, was arguably the central “nonstate” player; its NGO coreligionists included pro-abortion, pro-migration, and LGBT activist groups, as well as a host of nominally apolitical outfits. In the political sphere, Minister of Equality Roderic O’Gorman asserted that “any organisation that sees itself as progressive and as wanting to advance progressive change” would have to explain a decision not to support the “Yes” campaign. The Irish Examiner published this particularly hubristic headline: Why the upcoming referenda are important for the climate. In all, the government spent €23 million on the referendum campaigns.
Irish societal resistance was minimal until last November, when riots occurred in Dublin after an Algerian migrant stabbed three children and one adult outside a primary school. The event precipitated a belated debate over the government’s largely unchecked open-border and migrant-entitlement policies. Antagonism has proliferated since then. In one demonstration that the ruling class has been slow to adapt to opposition, Varadkar and two other cabinet ministers walked out of a press conference after a journalist from independent outlet Gript posed an unwelcome question.
When the results were announced, some government figures saw the writing on the wall. Fianna Fáil parliamentarian Willie O’Dea, for example, asserted his party should “get back to basics.” He implored, “Start listening to the people, stop talking down to them and stop listening to the out-of-touch Greens & NGOs.” O’Dea’s approach has not been representative.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said her party would “return to” the subject of “sexist language” in the constitution if her party enters government after the next elections. She had previously insisted wording of the motherhood amendment did not go far enough and that her party would seek to re-run the referendum if it failed.
The prevailing narrative from politicians and media pundits has been that the public did not understand the wording of the referenda. (These claims, of course, never materialized after the same-sex and abortion referenda, which exhibited smaller result margins.) This Irish Examiner cartoon neatly captures elite sentiments. “The yes side botched the campaign, leaving voters confused, uncertain and uninspired,” explained the Guardian. “The amendments were difficult to explain and understand.” The journalist and “Yes” campaigner Alison O’Connor decried the machinations of “far-right elements”—a common refrain from Dublin’s halls of power.
One might expect government figures, for all their defiant talk, to internalize this humiliating defeat. Early indications suggest the opposite. Finance Minister Michael McGrath declared the government would proceed with its controversial “hate-speech” legislation, which stalled in the Senate last year. It would entail prison sentences for those merely possessing “hate” material (a meme saved to a phone, for example). Intent to distribute would carry a heavier penalty, and for this the burden of proof would fall on the accused. “We shouldn’t ignore the reality that there is a problem in parts of society, particularly on social media, and we don’t want to be a country that is tolerant of people inciting hate,” protested McGrath.
At least two Fianna Fáil parliamentarians are urging the government not to pursue this course. Yet, such voices have doubtful abilities to rein in policy, and no major party on the Irish political scene is likely to tack significantly to the right. Aontú and the Irish Freedom Party offer some much-needed visibility on the Irish right, but both are in their fledgling stages, and their opponents are many.
Though the fruits of its labor have only recently become obvious to the outside world, Ireland’s globalist Left began accumulating power decades ago, when the country was outwardly still traditionalist and Catholic.
“From the late 1960s…a derivative establishment—counter-revolutionary and increasingly anti-Catholic—worked to eradicate any vestige of stirring of autonomous Irish thinking, action or behaviour,” wrote Irish philosopher Desmond Fennell. “And the recommended [policy direction] was always some kind of conformity with the current New York-London mores, or further subjection to dictates from Brussels. It was like Bulgaria, say, during the years of Soviet domination – except that there wasn’t a Communist Party dictatorship to rationalise the herd-like behaviour and the trampling on the people’s humanity and autonomy.”
John O’Sullivan observed that “an Irish identity built on the Catholic Church had collapsed, and the nation—or, rather, its cultural elite—was looking for a new identity in which Catholicism was treated as something between an embarrassment and a threat.”
This new identity has suffered its first notable setback. How will Irish society—now altered demographically, socially, and politically—respond?
At least 11 Irish government ministers, including the Taoiseach, are scheduled to travel to the United States for St. Patrick’s Day this weekend. They will wear green, hobnob with the diaspora, and celebrate an Ireland that exists mostly in memory. Perhaps, though, after the festivities subside and the Guinness wears off, they will find yet another version of the country upon their return.
The post Stung by Defeat, Irish Elites Double Down appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Marines are being transformed to look a lot more like the Houthis.
In the five months since the beginning of the Israeli-Gaza war, the Houthi group in Yemen has undertaken strikes against ships transiting the Red Sea; in response, the United States and allies have conducted retaliatory air strikes. While the episode marks the latest American use of force in the Middle East, the military exchanges will resonate in the Indo-Pacific. The Marine Corps has wholly reshaped itself for conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific, but the outcome in the Red Sea will determine whether this was wise.
Last September, the Houthi movement marked the ninth anniversary of its seizure of power with a parade showcasing its military in the capital city of Sanaa. Like other non-state forces, the Houthis are an irregular force that relies on asymmetric methods—especially missiles and uncrewed aerial vehicles. The arsenal on the parade grounds that day, however, evinced an unexpected level of sophistication.
The procession featured a combination of known and newly unveiled cruise and ballistic systems capable of carrying warheads weighing between 100 and 500 kilograms for both ground and maritime strikes. The fleet of uncrewed combat aerial vehicles possessed explosive, fragmentation, and penetrating warheads.
According to a 2024 Defense Intelligence Agency report, the missile and uncrewed vehicles provide the Houthis with the ability to strike targets at ranges of 2,000 and 2,500 kilometers, respectively. At the time, observers feared Houthi military improvements would complicate regional diplomacy.
The next month, the Houthi leadership declared its solidarity with besieged Palestinians in Gaza and began targeting Israeli ships in the Red Sea. By December, Houthis expanded the target list to include all international commercial shipping bound for Israel.
On January 26, the Houthis launched its first attack on a U.S. Navy warship. On February 19, the Houthis shot down an American uncrewed aerial vehicle. On March 6, a Houthi missile strike on a commercial ship resulted in three fatalities, the first since the attacks began. According to the Red Sea Attacks Dashboard, the Houthis have undertaken approximately 50 attacks since October 19.
Initially, the United States responded by intercepting missiles and UAVs, and organizing a multi-national coalition to patrol the waterway. Then, on January 11, the United States led partners in undertaking its first retaliatory air strikes by bombing sixty targets at sixteen different locations. Since then, the United States has launched more than forty strikes against Houthi targets.
Nonetheless, retaliatory strikes have not deterred the Houthis. After a decade of a punishing war with Saudi Arabia and coalition partners, the Houthis are a battle-hardened and resilient fighting force.
Mentored and armed by Iran, the Houthis have developed indigenous arms manufacturing, robust logistics and smuggling networks, and deception tactics, including the use of decoy targets, false electronic emitters, and physical concealment. Similar to Hamas, the Houthis rely on underground hideouts to store weapons and survive air attacks.
In general, the Houthis simply provide few targets for retaliation. The Houthis do not maintain large arms caches and their weapons are hidden in urban areas. The group launches its missiles and UAVs from trucks that fighters immediately drive away.
Where the lethality and resilience of elusive irregular fighters on an austere landscape wreaking havoc on a globally critical waterway has aggravated the West, the United States Marine Corps has found inspiration.
In March 2020, the Marine Corps declared its future force would similarly be small, mobile, lethal, and undetectable light infantry teams on remote islands engaging hostile navies with anti-ship missiles and UAVs—for all intents and purposes, a Title 10 Houthi force.
The transformation initiatives—Force Design 2030—is designed to return the service to its naval expeditionary origins, an imperative demanded by the proliferation of precision-strike and persistent sensor capabilities in general and the ascent of the PRC in particular.
To inform its transformation, the Corps has formulated the concept of a Stand-In Force to confront the enemy below the threshold of war and ensure friendly ingress to contested areas. In essence, a Stand-In Force will turn the anti-access/area denial strategy on its head.
To this end, the Corps has begun redesignating ground regiments as Littoral Regiments. The converted units comprise 1,800 to 2,000 Marines in three main elements: a combat team organized around a long-range anti-ship missile battery; an anti-air battalion with air defense, surveillance, and early warning; and a logistics battalion.
The Corps has concurrently reduced the number of infantry and artillery units. Most controversially, the service has eliminated significant elements of its force structure and equipment, particularly its armored battalions and tanks and aviation squadrons and aircraft.
A robust intellectual debate has been underway in defense media since its announcement, but the current clash in the Red Sea introduces the following, more urgent questions: If the U.S. deters and severely diminishes the Houthis as a regional threat, would the outcome invalidate the Marine Corps’ transformation goals? Alternatively, if the Houthis persist and outlast American air strikes, would that outcome validate the service’s goals?
Fortunately, the answer to the former has already been provided by the Commander-in-Chief. When asked whether the airstrikes were working, President Biden bluntly responded, “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
The president’s rare honesty may have unmasked the futility of American foreign policy, but it did not certify the Marine Corps’ redesign. What works for the Houthis against the U.S. in the Red Sea will fail the Marines against the PRC in the western Pacific.
Most obviously Yemen is not an island and, as such, provides a rear area to which the Houthis can retreat; in the Pacific, the Marines will have no rear to which they can retreat. Even if one considers the 58,000 square miles of Yemen under Houthi control an “island” surrounded by equally sea and desert, the mountainous topography sustained the group amid the 24,000 air raids launched by Saudi Arabia between 2015 and 2022.
In contrast, the Solomon Islands, an archipelago whose alignment the U.S. deemed worthy of diplomatic competition vis-à-vis the PRC, is just over 11,000 square miles—across 1,000 islands. Stand-In Forces is an apt moniker since Pacific islands will only provide Marines room to stand in place and little room to maneuver.
Furthermore, the Red Sea may be critical to global trade, but it is only incidental to America’s national security. The U.S. can only dispatch so many forces before it risks becoming vulnerable to a second crisis. In contrast, the PRC deems the western Pacific integral to its national security and would likely employ a “Powell Doctrine with Chinese characteristics.”
The PRC has not waged war since 1979 and whatever circumstances have finally prompted it to use its military for the first time in decades will probably be deemed existential. So, if the PRC discovered Marines in a given atoll potentially impeding its movements, it will probably not hesitate to expend an overwhelming number of its advanced missile arsenal to ensure their elimination.
To its credit, the Marine Corps critically examined the precepts of the National Defense Strategy and the challenges posed by the proliferation of advanced technologies and rise of the PRC and conceived of a transformation in line with the tradition of adaptability and innovation that have been the service’s hallmark. Nevertheless, the engagement in the Red Sea will illuminate the way forward to a course correction for America’s indispensable crisis-response force.
The post Does the Yemen Conflict Show the Future of the Marine Corps? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Macron talks of defeating Russia. Instead, Washington and Brussels should concentrate on bringing the conflict to a peaceful end.
France wants to go to war with Russia, or so it seems. Perhaps the French President Emmanuel Macron imagines himself Napoleon reincarnated in his determination to make the continent a Weltmacht. Macron recently insisted that Europeans “should not exclude that there might be a need for security that then justifies some elements of [military] deployment.” Indeed, not only did he argue that “nothing should be ruled out,” but he added, “We will do anything we can to prevent Russia from winning this war.”
The most important NATO members, led by Washington, rejected his suggestion. Nevertheless, Macron, whose bombast contrasts sharply with his government’s miserly contribution of about a billion dollars to Ukraine, doubled down, receiving support from allies at the other end of the military spectrum, including Czechia, Estonia, and Lithuania. For instance, the prime minister of Estonia, with all of 7,200 men and women under arms, insisted that “everything is on the table to help Ukraine beat Putin.” As in the past, NATO states with the least military capabilities seemed most ready to proffer grandiose plans for using other members’ militaries.
The U.S. and several NATO allies already are deeply involved in the proxy war-plus against Moscow. Providing a plethora of weapons to kill thousands of Russians is provocative enough. In the past, both Washington and Moscow played the game—Afghanistan and Vietnam, respectively, come to mind. Yet in neither case were the neo-belligerents so public about their direct involvement and ostentatious in their celebration of the deadly results.
To start, many foreigners fighting with Ukraine against Russia are unofficially deployed. Explained former Pentagon official Stephen Bryen, “Now the Russians are saying that many of the so-called ‘mercenaries’ in Ukraine are, in fact, highly trained NATO soldiers. They wear Ukrainian uniforms with national patches identifying them. They are ‘necessary’ to operate the high tech weapons NATO has sent to Ukraine. When the Russians recently took over Avdiivka they found bodies of these mercenaries, some American and some Poles.”
A few weeks ago, Russia claimed to have killed French combatants in an airstrike. Paris called the report “disinformation,” but its denial was widely disbelieved, especially now. Added Bryen, “Most of the deaths of NATO personnel are covered up. When they are reported at all, they generally say that the ‘volunteer’ was providing medical assistance.”
Other allied forces operate more openly. German Chancellor Scholz revealed that both France and the United Kingdom had troops assisting in the use of high-tech weapons transferred to Kiev. Observed Scholz: “What the British and French are doing in terms of target control and support for target control cannot be done in Germany.”
The UK admitted the truth, criticizing Scholz only for leaking the information. London has assisted Ukraine in destroying Russian war ships. Moreover, international affairs specialist Michael Brenner explained, the UK’s “specialized personnel have been operating the Storm Shadow missiles (counterpart to the French SCALP) employed against Crimea and elsewhere. MI-6 has taken a lead role in designing multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge and other critical infrastructure.” Rumors circulated that British personnel were assisting with the air defense unit which downed a Russian plane carrying Ukrainian POWs.
Such activities are widespread. Le Monde reported, “Since the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine, numerous state actors associated with Western intelligence services, often with military status, have been present in the country. Undercover diplomatic personnel, advisers for Ukraine, and members of special forces have inherently played a role since the start of the war.”
Macron’s proposal to escalate the conflict triggered an allied war of words. He suggested that his critics were craven weaklings: “We are surely approaching a moment for Europe in which it will be necessary not to be cowards.” His government was reportedly considering sending Special Forces to aid Ukraine in its air defense operations.
The U.S. also has personnel on the ground in a training role and more. Two German generals whose conversation was tapped by Russia observed that “we know that many people with American accents in civil clothing are running around there.” Apparently, a lot of them. Explained Brenner:
Roughly 4–5,000 Americans have been performing critical operational functions from the outset. The presence of a majority predates by several years the onset of hostilities 2 years ago. That contingent was augmented by a supplementary group of 1,700 last summer which was as a corps of logistic experts advertised as mandated to seek out and eradicate corruption in the black-marketing of pilfered supplies. The Pentagon people are sown thought the Ukrainian military from headquarters planning units, to advisers in the field, to technicians and Special Forces. It is widely understood that Americans have operated the sophisticated HIMARS long-range artillery and the Patriot air defense batteries. This last means that members of the U.S. military have been aiming—perhaps pulling the trigger on—weapons that kill Russians.
The CIA also has played an active role in Ukraine’s defense:
CIA officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use. “Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,” said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.
U.S. officials anonymously but publicly took credit for killing Russian generals and sinking Russian ships. Washington is one of the prime suspects in the attack on the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg encouraged escalation too, arguing that “it will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, but the country has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.” The issue is not just the range of the planes, but who would fly them. Moscow assumes NATO would also provide pilots, however unlikely that might seem to Americans. But then, Russians flew planes on behalf of North Korea against the U.S. and Egypt against Israel.
Some Ukraine partisans would push the boundary of potential casus belli outward. Foreign troops could play a variety of non-combat roles in Ukraine, but all would risk drawing NATO into the fray. Paris admitted that one purpose of introducing troops would be the hope that the “presence of French soldiers or [those] of other nations would potentially protect certain areas of the Ukrainian territory.” That is, the French military operating in a war zone would become a human shield behind which Ukraine could freely attack Russia while avoiding retaliation. Rather like President Woodrow Wilson’s ludicrous claim that one American on board immunized a British reserve cruiser carrying munitions through a war zone, one French soldier in Kiev, Odessa, or Kharkiv would immunize an entire city from attack. That would be ridiculous, of course, with French soldiers choosing to enter a war zone. However, Paris already has complained to Moscow about killing its citizens in Ukraine.
The hawkish former Rep. Adam Kinzinger would turn this doctrine into U.S. policy, contending that, with a missile strike some 500 feet away from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and visiting Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Odessa, “Russia just got within 150 meters of an article 5, with news of the strike in Odessa almost hitting the Greek Prime Minister.” Even more so, presumably, he would expect America to go to war if a U.S. politician grandstanding with Zelensky in Kiev or U.S. soldiers training Ukrainians elsewhere perished in a Russian strike.
Why the widespread enthusiasm for lighting the fires of what could become a nuclear World War III?
In an odd sense, we are paying a price for the fact that Putin has failed to escalate. Washington and its allies began cautiously, hesitant to act as Ukraine’s armorer. However, as Putin ignored military provocations, NATO governments unleashed a deadly munitions cascade, costing the lives of thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of Russian personnel. So far, despite sharp criticism from the nationalist right, Putin has rejected escalation. France’s foreign minister now confidently insists that the allies can send troops “without crossing the threshold of belligerence.”
In similar circumstances, would Washington be as restrained as Russia has been? Four years ago candidate Joe Biden said what many Americans were thinking: “I don’t understand why this president is unwilling to take on Putin when he’s actually paying bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.” That story wasn’t true, but Washington was filled with demands for retaliation. Imagine if Moscow had emptied its armories and shipped everything to the Taliban, provided missiles to strike U.S. territory, sent personnel to Afghanistan to operate Russian weapons, ran intelligence operations for the insurgents, and openly debated introducing Russian troops to aid the Taliban. Washington would do something, and probably a lot, in response.
In this regard, Western states have benefited from Putin’s apparent belief that Russia is winning, so presumably he refuses to risk widening the war. (The invasion has been costly, but he evidently believes that he will nevertheless achieve his objectives.) Yet the allies say they are determined to prevent Moscow from triumphing. Some insist that sufficient support be rendered to ensure Ukraine can negotiate a favorable peace. Others, like Macron, talk of producing a Ukrainian victory. All of Kiev’s friends hope to expose Putin’s ambitions as folly.
Ukraine’s future obviously is an existential interest for Ukrainians, but is not, despite the florid rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic, for Americans or Europeans. Indeed, popular support for Ukraine on both sides of the Atlantic is thin and declining. As time passes, this drop is likely to accelerate.
In contrast, the Russian government and its nationalist backers also see Ukraine’s status as an existential interest. So in all likelihood does Putin, in assessing both his historical reputation and, more immediately, his political survival. If the allies openly join the battle or enable systematic attacks on Moscow and other major Russian cities, serious threats against Crimea, or virtual destruction of Russian military units, Moscow’s relative quiescence is unlikely to continue. For Putin, defeat truly is not an option. And given the Russian military’s lower threshold for use of nuclear weapons, the consequences could be dire for all.
Allied aid has helped the Ukrainian people preserve their independence from Moscow’s assault. Yet the Napoleon-wannabe Macron talks of defeating Russia. That is a fool’s errand likely to result in a broader and more destructive conflict. Instead, Washington and Brussels should concentrate on bringing the conflict to a peaceful end.
The post Does ‘Little Napoleon’ Macron Want to Lead Europe into War with Russia? appeared first on The American Conservative.
If the TikTok bill were to become law, it would likely deepen a cold war between the United States and China over the control of important technologies.
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