This interview by Katie Couric with Richard Haass, the former longtime president of the Council on Foreign Relations, discusses various issue related to the latest magical-thinking peace plan from Peace President Trump for the Russo-Ukrainne War.
What foreign policy wonks seem to be saying openly much more often that the Trump 2.0 diplomacy is incompetent. Incompetent as in technically bumbling and ignoring the most basic conventions of diplomacy to the point that other nations cannot expect any agreement to be maintained in a way that would be conventionally assumed.
And that’s a big part of the discussion here: (1)
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarian regimes, discusses how such governments often wind up acting in arbitrary and chaotic ways. She recently wrote:
Autocrats thrive on chaos and disruption, even if they claim they are bringing stability to the nation. They specialize in doing unexpected things, some of which were previously unthinkable, and in shaking up the system in the interest of pushing through their agendas and consolidating their personal power.
Claims of the strongman’s efficiency are meant to cover up the upheaval generated by his impulsive nature and his constant reshufflings of government to prevent anyone else from gaining too much power. Hitler resembled many later leaders in being an indecisive and insecure ruler behind his all-powerful Führer facade, his opinions sometimes reflecting the last person he had spoken to, while Mussolini would keep his spin doctors busy by saying one thing in the morning and its opposite that afternoon. [my emphasis] (2)
Notes:
(1) Trump's Russia-Ukraine Peace Plan: Why Key Allies Are Furious and What It Means for Global Stability. Katie Couric YouTube channel 11/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/VQnslLoxLSk?si=W7UqKtKDdR3usQjX> (Accessed: 2025-25-11).
Hans Rauscher in Der Standard (Vienna) just published a grim reminder of the strength of the far right in European politics, including in Austria and Germany:
He cites a new book from German historian Götz Aly:
Aly with icy realism: "An eloquent and shrewd tribune of the people, who uses the fears and frustrated hopes of a majority of the population and promises wonderful future prospects that can be achieved with a little toughness, will also be able to push through his ideas in the future." Incidentally, the rule [of Hitler’s Nazi Party] was largely achieved and secured with "rulers who are still used today and will certainly continue to be used". (1)
Vague references to the possibility of history repeating itself can get stuck at such a high level of generalization can easily get stuck in the stage of a pious reflection if they are not put into a specific context both on the end of the state of affairs to be avoided and of the possible forms and goals of the history-repeats-itself event. Aly has written extensively about the National Socialist Period before. Rauscher describes Aly‘s new book Wie konnte das geschehen? Deutschland 1933 bis 1945 [How Could That Happen? Germany 1933-1945] as a magnum opus on Hitler’s regime of over 800 pages.
In the spirit of the famous comment apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, “history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme,” we ca recognize that Charlie Kirk’s murder this year was a very different event that the Reichstag Fire in 1933. But at the same time we can see how the Trumpists tried to use his death as a symbolic warning of the dangers of democracy being allowed to continue.
We can also look at parts of American history – colonial war against native peoples, segregation and Jim Crow, racially-discriminatory prison systems – and see elements of fascism like that in Hitler German or Mussolini’s Italy. We can look at how the German Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 were heavily modeled on US segregation laws and racially discriminatory immigration laws. But it’s still important not to assume that similar developments in the US or Europe in the present will somehow directly mimic those developments. (Except, of course, when they do!)
Rauscher continues:
In a year or two, we could be asking ourselves the question: How could this happen again? How could a series of democracies tip back into authoritarian rule?
The tipping point in the West has almost been reached. Donald Trump is dismantling liberal democracy of (and seems to be forcing the Europeans plus Ukraine to make a "deal" with Putin reminiscent of the subjugation of Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938). In the leading European countries of France, Germany and Great Britain, there is a threat of takeover by the right-wing extremists. [my emphasis]
The Munich Analogy is the classic cautionary tale against framing current events as essentially like past ones. The Munich deal was a bad one for a number of reasons. But it’s been reduced in common usage – and all too often in its use by professionals and scholars – to a tale of a testosterone contest between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain.
In this current context, it’s difficult to see how Ukraine accepting defeat for the present would lead to World War Three. But that’s no reason for Ukraine or its European partners to accept a bad deal. In any case, the current 28- point Trump/Witkoff plan is obvious a non-starter.
It’s also important not to conflate the foreign policy aspect of the authoritarian threat to European democracies with the internal ones. It’s standard practice for large powers to try to exploit troubles within adversary countries. But those problems are primarily based in internal political and social issues. A bunch of clever TikTok videos are not going to incite people to revolt against stable democratic governments. Which is not to say that governments should be indifferent to political “information operations” by hostile powers. But it’s also important for European democracies to have a reality-based view of what Russian intentions and capabilities are.
One important factor that pro-democracy parties left, right, and center have to keep in mind and have to stop being so feckless about. That is the fact that xenophobia and cheap nationalism are key elements in the program of the rising far-right parties. The pro-democracy parties have to fight against those positions. Mealy-mouthed “triangulation” by trying to coopt the xenophobic sentiments is a loser strategy.
The Dutch political scientist and expert on rightwing populism Cas Mudde recently wrote about how that approach has repeatedly failed to strengthen the left-center parties:
The 21st century has so far seen two simultaneous electoral developments in western Europe: the decline of social-democratic parties and the rise of far-right parties. This has created the powerful narrative that social democrats are losing votes to the far right, in particular because of their (alleged) “pro-immigration” positions. And although research shows that their voters mainly moved to centre-right and green parties, social-democratic parties have been chasing this mythical “left behind” voter ever since.
Research by social scientists overwhelmingly shows that adopting far-right positions leads neither to electoral success for centrist parties nor to electoral defeat for far-right parties. But this has not stopped centre-left advisers, politicians and strategists. Whenever my colleagues and I refer to this research, someone will point to the alleged success of the “Danish model”. The lure is so great that even as polls were predicting the loss of Copenhagen, Britain’s Labour government ignored internal opposition and introduced a number of policies designed to emulate Denmark’s extremely stringent asylum rules. [my emphasis] (2)
Center-left parties need to stop playing this dumb game and get serious about fighting xenophobia.
A Germany with Europe's largest army, equipped with cutting edge tanks, missiles and jets, is a far cry from the shambolic Bundeswehr derided for its low morale and outdated equipment. That military power is tied to political and economic heft - and Europe will have to adapt to a dominant Germany.
Germany does not now have the biggest army in Europe or the EU. (2) Even if we leave Russia and Ukrainne out of the count.
The fiscal realities are changing, too. With Paris struggling with debt above 110 percent of GDP and a deficit north of 5 percent, Berlin’s borrowing power gives it freedom that its neighbors can only envy. Poland is also fighting to keep public spending under control, exacerbated by the explosion in defense spending.
One EU official called the shift in Germany’s military potential “telluric,” or Earth-moving. Another diplomat put it more directly: “It’s the most important thing happening right now at EU level.” [my emphasis]
Europe will be working over the next few years toward a collective-security after Trump has convinced them that the NATO mutual-defense treaty is no longer one they can trust the US to honor. Not even in a confrontation with Russia. Or in Trump’s case, especially not in a conflict with Russia.
The big lift
This is a big lift. The EU countries will be very much involved, but the EU itself will not be the main coordinating body - although the EU Treaty does have a mutual defense clause. But the EU’s small collective military force will not be a new version of NATO Central Command.
Two major factors here are that Britain will need to be directly involved in new security agreements, and it is no longer an EU member. If Europe has to provide its own substitute for the US nuclear deterrent against Russia, they would want to have the two nuclear powers Britain and France to cooperate closely on playing that role.
Europe also has an incentive – whether they take it seriously enough or not – to change the current arrangement in which the NATO conventional defense forces are heavily dependent on American equipment, American satellites and intelligence capabilities, and on a command structure dominated by the US. That also means that Europe will build up its own domestic defense industries to achieve the necessary independence from the US.
The European countries with the largest armies are Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain. So, yes, Germany will have to build up its military capabilities.
This is a topic on which it’s important to remember that multiple things can be true at the same time. Even when they sometimes sound inconsistent. The fact that Germany has a very practical need to build up its military can be true at the same time that we recognize that anyone familiar with the basics of 20th century history – including Germans – will find it hard not to feel a bit of the heebie-jeebies at seeing headlines saying things like “Germany Undertakes a Massive Rearmament Program.”
Politico’s “Germany first” label for their picture for the story is a reminder of that. So is the reference quoted above that “Europe will have to adapt to a dominant Germany” - although “a dominant Germany” in economic policy is a very practical consideration, as noted below. Germany’s conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz is playing footsie with xenophobic anti-immigrant talk. But Germany isn’t presently pursuing anything like an analogy to the Trump 2.0 regime’s America First fascist/Christian nationalist course.
Rearmament and Austerity Economics
As the Politico article notes, Germany’s financial resources will be particularly important to the larger European rearmament effort. And this may be the biggest risk that Germany presents to the expansion of European military capabilities. Because Germany has been chronically committed to austerity economics. Including a reluctance to tax billionaires to support the common good.
It was a bad idea anyway. And it’s even more risky for countries in the eurozone, because the problems in the structure of the euro currency zone that caused the euro crisis of 2001-2015 are still there. They muddled through that one at serious cost to a sense of European solidarity.
Or, to hark back to President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (3)
In other words, there will be lots of guns-vs.-butter debates over developing new European security arrangements. Austerity economics and a new euro crisis will not help make Europe safer or make it easier to maintain the kind of new security arrangements that are necessary to put in place.
The Obama Administration changed US National Security Policy in 2011 to define competition with China as the main security priority of the US. Which means a relative shift in American foreign policy priorities away from Europe. But it was the current Russo-Ukraine War that brought about the current state of US-Europe relations in which the US appears to be, at best, a far less reliable security partner.
It's always important, including with the Ukraine war, to keep in mind that multiple things can be true at the same time and that different political and strategic narratives may make different uses of that reality. It can be true that “color revolutions” can be primarily domestic phenomena and also that the US or another country sought to influence it.
It can be true that the US was reckless in a very practical sense in its open backing of the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 and that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was an illegal act that was a serious act of international aggression.
It can be true that Putin’s government overestimated the threat posed by potential NATO and EU membership for Ukraine, and that the Cheney-Bush Administration acted foolishly and recklessly by insisting on a formal NATO declaration in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would definitely at some point become NATO members.
Peace President Trump’s latest move in favor of a 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine presents the same caution that multiple things can be true simultaneously. From CNN:
A new Trump administration plan for the end of the war in Ukraine would see Kyiv cede territory to Russia, US “de facto” recognition of Crimea and other Ukrainian territory forcibly seized by the Kremlin as Russian, and limits to the size of Ukraine’s military, according to a draft of the plan obtained Thursday by CNN.
The draft’s veracity was confirmed to CNN by a US official. Many of the ideas put forward in the 28-point plan have been rejected in previous negotiations by Ukraine and European officials and would be seen as concessions to Russia.
US officials said the plan was still being worked on, and that any final agreement would require concessions from both sides, not just Ukraine. Some of the points being circulated now – including some that appear weighted toward Moscow’s demands – are not final, officials said, and will almost certainly evolve. During a Thursday afternoon briefing, the White House press secretary said the plan remained “in flux.” (4)
In this case it can simultaneously be true that freezing the conflict in place as apparently envisioned in this plan is the best that Ukraine could hope for at this moment and that this plan is hopeless, for the likely reasons described in this Times Radio podcast by Sir Ben Wallace, Britain’s Secretary of State for Defence 2019-2023. (5)
It's always been the case that Ukraine would need some kind of security assurances and clear aid commitments from the US and/or Europe to agree to even a long-term armistice. And Zelenskyy’s government would have a hard time agreeing to a de facto surrender, which is what this plan sounds to be.
As Ben Wallace emphasizes, Trump 2.0 has been strikingly incompetent at diplomacy. We see that in his Eternal Peace Plan for Israel-Gaza, which at this point is in practice consists only of a ceasefire that Israel is very clearly not observing. Although the Trump family stands to get some substantial bribes out of the thing, however incompetent to actual international diplomacy may be.
In geopolitical calculations, there are substantive strategic and international-law grounds for the US and Europe to not accept any explicit recognition of Russian sovereignty over the conquered territory in Ukraine, including Crimea. In the context of a larger reset of US-Russia relations, one could picture some formula in which Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea would be established both formally and practically but with Russia having long-term basing rights for its Black Sea fleet there. But we’re a long way from that.
Another coldly pragmatic is still very much in play. In the view of the Biden Administration, there was a value in having Russia involved in an active, protracted war in Ukraine. That partly has to do with the almost mystical belief by many American foreign policy analysts that the Soviet war in Afghanistan was a key factor, even the decisive one, in the end of the USSR, I would argue that neither the Obama nor the Biden Administrations fully exploited the potential for improving relations with Russia. Of course, Russia is its own country and its calculations of its own security interest don’t always agree with official American views on the subject.
European nations do perceive a security interest in supporting Ukraine as much as feasible. In the absence of a substantive long-term settlement of the current war, that’s a practical consideration that even the most peace-oriented European governments would have to take into account. Russia, and the USSR before it, were and are known for their hard-nosed negotiation style and their willingness to engage in the kind of provocations that Ben Wallace describes in his interview. He doesn’t talk about the kinds of Western provocations that are surely taking place at the same time. But he does explain them in a way that gives a glimpse of the kind of jockeying that major powers engage in all the time.
European nations, with some exceptions like Hungary at the moment, have good reason to take Russia’s diplomatic and military moves seriously. In the “it can also be true that …” category, European governments can make the judgment that Russia has no intention of committing serious military aggression against Europe but also take care to realistically evaluate Russia’s capabilities to do so. (It is often said that evaluating a potential adversary’s intentions is the job of civilian officials while evaluating their capabilities is that of the military. Although in practice, that division of labor isn’t nearly so sharply defined.)
But that also means that European officials will be very much aware of the potential benefit of a prolonged active war between Russia and Ukraine to potentially weaken Russia and to give themselves more time to build up a more credible European deterrence capability.
John Mearsheimer recently did an interview on the Rachel Blevins podcast. (1) It gives him the chance to present a big-picture view of his “offensive realist” view of international relations. His most famous book is the one he co-authored with “defensive realist” Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007).
Although I find Walt’s version of realism easier to digest because it tends to take a more positive view of international law, the two tend to come out on the same side on major foreign policy questions. In this interview, Mearsheimer talks about his focus on the behavior of major powers and their focus on the challenges of “peer competitor” powers asserting their geopolitical influence in the other great power’s perceived area of influence. (1)
But he does misstate one thing in the interview when he says that the Nixon Administration orchestrating a coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende’s government in 1973, which initiated along dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. In light of the current Presidential campaign in which a candidate from the Communist Party is in a runoff with a far-right admirer of Pinochet’s dictatorship, it’s worth commenting on this a bit further.
Allende was the head of Chile’s Socialist Party which competed with the Chilean Communist Party. The Communist Party was not part of Allende’s administration, i.e., it had no ministers in the government. In Chile’s Congress, the Communists “tolerated” Allende’s government, meaning they voted for his proposals. Allende was not a 1973-style Maoist or a follower of Soviet Communist Party Chair Leonid Breshnev.
His real sin in the Nixon Administration’s eyes was that he nationalized Chile’s copper mines, giving the mine owners what Allende’s government considered fair compensation. One of the big ironies of that situation is the Pinochet’s dictatorship retained state ownership of the copper mines.
Mearsheimer mentions that almost in passing, and it’s possible that he was intending to say that’s how Dick Nixon and Henry Kissinger claimed to see it. They knew better, of course. But that was a blooper on Mearsheimer’s part there. Those don’t pop up very often!
In this interview with on Gaza with Helena Cobban, Mearsheimer talks about the strange Resolution 2803 that the UN passed this week and about Gaza more generally. (2) Cobban has been reporting on the Middle East for decades and analyzing events there for a long time, including at her Globalities website.
The text at the YouTube site says:
In this episode of Gaza & the World, Professor John Mearsheimer spoke with Helena about the fallout from UN Security Council Resolution 2803. He described the resolution as a disgrace that denied Palestinians any real path to self-determination. Moreover, he said the measure placed Gaza under the control of the United States and Israel, while excluding Palestinians from shaping their own future, and he noted that the resolution demanded the disarmament of Hamas even though international law affirmed the right to resist an illegal occupation.
In a report for The Guardian, Julian Borger calls Resolution 2803 “one of the oddest in United Nations history.” (3)
Israeli political scientists Dahlia Scheindlin analyzes the resolution in Haaretz, noting that it “has satisfied few people other than Trump himself.” (4)
Which is a pretty strong statement on how bad it is. “Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported the resolution, which uses the dreaded word "statehood" for Palestinians, with only half his soul: He expressed his enthusiasm on his official, prime ministerial English-language X account.”
After Israel’s genocidal war phase of 2023-2025 – the genocide itself continues – it would be reasonable to expect that the great powers and leading European countries haven’t take more initiative to restrain the Netanyahu’s government’s actions. So far, we have a theoretical real estate project and a theoretical peacekeeping program and no substantive agreements by the key parties on the major elements of Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan.
But, as Scheindlin notes:
There are better reasons than Netanyahu's hostility to Palestinian self-determination to be skeptical of the resolution. For instance, it only inches towards answering myriad questions about how one of the key foundations of the cease-fire's next stages – the International Stabilization Force (ISF) – will work in practice.
Others think the resolution clarifies its real intention quite clearly: Zaha Hassan, a senior fellow at the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Haaretz that the resolution "essentially endorsed a new occupying entity for Gaza involving an American and Israeli partnership."
Who knew that Trump’s Eternal Peace Plan could be so complicated?
(1) Russia DOMINATES on the Battlefield + China's RISE Challenges the US: Prof. John Mearsehimer. Rachel Blevins YouTube channel 11/18/2025. <https://youtu.be/C_OHAqTu_oo?si=vrnTBhRQbua1vz5J> (Accessed: 2025-20-11).
(2) Gaza & the World Episode 5 featuring Prof. John Mearsheimer: The UN Resolution That Betrayed Gaza. Just World Educational <https://youtu.be/RCswuQLbC2Y?si=6uP_0z9pvfjJZfg6> (Accessed: 2025-19-11).
Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum finds it necessary to remind Peace President Trump that Mexico – the biggest trading partner of the US - does not give the Trump regime to invade their country.
"I have told (Trump) on all occasions that we can collaborate, that they can help us with the information they have, but that we operate in our territory, that we do not accept an intervention by any foreign government," the Mexican president said during her morning press conference. …
Sheinbaum recalled that, even after those conversations, the U.S. government released a statement in which it was clear that they would only intervene if Mexico requested it. "We are not going to ask for it because we do not want interventions from any foreign government," he remarked.
Sheinbaum's statements come a day after Trump mentioned his desire to launch attacks on cartels in Mexico. [emphasis in original] (1)
In the same press conference, the Peace President also repeated military threats against Colombia and Venezuela. In recent weeks, the Trump 2.0 regime has murdered of dozens of people in fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela and also Colombia, not presenting any evidence of their claims the boats were smuggling drugs. Even if they were, unprovoked attacks on such vessels are a violation of international law and really are just plain murder.
Trump said in the press conference:
Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It’s okay with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs. Mexico is, look, I looked at Mexico City over the weekend. There’s some big problems over there. If we had to, would we do there what we’ve done to the waterways? You know, there’s almost no drugs coming in through our waterways any more. …
Colombia has cocaine factories where they make cocaine. Would I knock out those factories? I would be proud to do it, personally. I didn’t say I’m doing it. But I would be proud to do it. Because we’re going to save millions of lives by doing it. (2)
We shouldn’t get used to the idea that it’s normal for the President of the United States to threaten to go to war with Mexico and Colombia in a press conference in a way that sounds like he pulled it out of his rear end on the spot.
I’ll be looking forward to seeing how many Republicans in Congress will criticize him for such reckless threats, or even the ditsy manner in which he made them.
As Ryan Grim explains in the report, what happened in Mexico City last weekend was an opposition demonstration during which some demonstrators tried to force their way into the Presidential Palace. The BBC reported:
At least 120 people - 100 of them police officers - have been injured in clashes during anti-government protests in Mexico City, police said.
Thousands of demonstrators marched in the Mexican capital on Saturday to protest against violent crime and President Claudia Sheinbaum's government.
Sheinbaum said the marches, which also took place in other cities, had been funded by right-wing politicians who oppose her government.
The rally was organised by Gen Z youth groups, drawing support from citizens protesting against high-profile killings, including the assassination just weeks ago of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Manzo - who had called for tough action against cartels. (3)
(3) Comerford, Ruth & Anbarasan, Ethirajan (2025): Thousands protest against government in Mexico as clashes leave 120 injured. BBC News 11/15/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8vm30rr78o> (Accessed: 2025-19-11).
So, we have a US President who has nothing resembling a conventional strategic vision for US foreign policy. A President who flip-flops constantly in his commitments, whether the question is whose side is he on today in the Russia-Ukraine War or on tariffs.
It would be tempting to say that Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan for Isrrael-Gaza is already metaphorically a smoking ruin. And for those Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese who continue to be under attack from Israel, it’s not even metaphorical.
And now he appears to be about to go to war against Venezuela.
The US has said it will designate a putative Venezuelan drug cartel allegedly led by Nicolás Maduro as a foreign terrorist organization, as the Trump administration sent more mixed messages over its crusade against Venezuela’s authoritarian leader.
The move to target the already proscribed group, the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), was announced by Marco Rubio on Sunday. ...
But shortly after Rubio’s pronouncement, those hopes were undermined when Trump hinted he might be prepared to negotiate with Maduro representatives. “We may be having some conversations with Maduro, and we’ll see how that turns out. They would like to talk,” Trump told reporters.
Asked if he would rule out US troops on the ground in Venezuela, Trump said “no I don’t rule out that.” (1)
This DW News report is mostly an interview with James Story, who was US Ambassador to Venezuela 2018-2023. He this interview he gives the standard neocon talking points about how we need to help the Venezuelan people replace their government. (2)
The word “oil” does not get a single mention in the ten-minute report. Because, of course, the US as always is primarily concerned with democracy, Juman rights, and the national integrity of our Latin American neighbors. Deutsche Welle often has informative reports. But this one just brings on a hardcore hawk to hype regime change in Venezuela.
Using the forever drug war has long been used for reckless and illegal US interference in Latin America, although there is a real US interest in reducing the vast narcotics trade. A serious nationwide shift in the paradigm on counter-narcotics to a heavy emphasis on addiction treatment would actually be the single most effective element in such an approach. Chas Freeman in the video below also alludes to this needed policy shift.
Drastically reducing illegal arms sales from the US to Mexico would also make the whole situation less damaging. But as long as the US preserves its dominant policy of unlimited proliferation of small arms, that illegal arms trade will also be impossible to drastically reduce.
But the Trump 2.9 regime is so far pursuing a neocon war policy of accusing the Nicolas Maduro’s government of directing the drug trade in Venezuela and, because of the violence involved with the trade, labeling it “narco-terrorism.”
Greg Grandin describes what he calls Trumps’s Murder Incorporated policy of deliberately killing fishers on unsubstantiated allegations that they are drug smugglers:
Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.
Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea. The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has been presented or charges brought suggesting that those ships were running drugs, as claimed. The White House has simply continued to release bird’s-eye view surveillance videos (snuff films, really) of a targeted vessel. Then comes a flash of light and it’s gone, as are the humans it was carrying, be they drug smugglers, fishermen, or migrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have already been killed in such attacks.
The kill rate is accelerating. In early September, the U.S. was hitting one boat every eight to ten days. In early October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was every day, including four strikes on October 27th alone. [my emphasis] (3)
Tom Engelhardt in his introduction to the Greg Grandin column observes, “When it comes to the United States of America and its presidents, while Donald Trump is now distinctly upping the ante, there’s nothing faintly new about the disastrous ‘war on drugs’.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff talks about the possible influence of Israeli efforts in the push for a regime change war in Venezuela: (4)
Chas Freeman also calls attention to how Trump’s threats against Venezuela have led Britain’s MI6 intelligence services and the government of Colombia to seriously restrict their cooperation with the US on the drug war.
The Chilean Presidential election on December 14 should be an especially interesting one. It’s a runoff between a Communist candidate and one from the Chilean Republican Party. The latter is, appropriately enough in the American political vocabulary, a hard right party.
Deutsche Welle reports in English: (1)
The text summary to the report notes: “The election campaign was dominated by concerns over rising crime and immigration in Chile, with calls from the right for mass deportations. Speaking to supporters after polls closed, Jeanette Jara criticized her right wing opponents' [José Antonio Kast‘s] fear-based campaigns.”
Jara served as the Labor Minister in the outgoing government of the headed by the Unidad por Chile (Unity for Chile) electoral coalition. As Página/12 reports:
Jeannette Jara's triumph in Chile's first round of elections has a bittersweet taste for the left. The Communist candidate won with 26.8% of the votes over the far-right José Antonio Kast, who achieved 23.96%. Both will contest the second round on December 14. In a surprising third place was the right-wing populist Franco Parisi with 19.61%, outside the predictions of the polls, and displacing the far-right libertarian Johannes Kaiser, who obtained 13.93%.
"Don't let fear freeze your hearts. Do not believe in imaginary solutions, heads that hide behind armored glass. Our future is in our children," Jara told supporters gathered outside the bunker near La Moneda Palace in the center of the capita city. The candidate of an alliance made up of left-wing and center-left parties defended the policies of Gabriel Boric's government, including reducing the working week to 40 hours, increasing pensions and the minimum wage. [emphasis in original] (2)
It’s not encouraging to see that well over half the voters supported far-right candidates. Especially when they can see the catastrophic effects of Argentine President Javier Milei’s crackpot Trumpista-style rightwing policies next door in Argentina.
José Antonio Kast is very much in the Trump political mentality, like El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.
On the other hand, as Steve Ellner has observed, Trump’s success and his crassly imperialist attitude toward Latin America has also galvanized the left in many parts of Latin America.
When Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January 2025, the Pink Tide governments in Latin America were losing ground. The approval rating of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, reached the lowest of his three presidential terms, while that of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro was a mere 34 percent. And in the wake of the fiercely contested results of the July 2024 presidential elections in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro found himself isolated in the region.
Now, less than a year later, the political landscape has shifted. Trump’s antics — such as his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, the weaponization of tariffs, and aggressive military actions in the Caribbean and Pacific — have revitalized Pink Tide governments and the Left in general. Latin America has reacted to Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine with a surge of nationalist sentiment, mass demonstrations, and denunciations from political figures across most of the spectrum, including some on the center right. [my emphasis] (3)
Notes:
(1) Chile elections: Communist Party candidate Jeanette Jara appears to be in lead. DW News YouTube channel 11/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/Gi589t64T2w?si=1GoqzUMyg5M3YvYV> (Accessed: 2025-17-11).
When I started watching this video conversation (1) between Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau about the euro.
Varoufakis can be quirky. His concept of the present state of capitalism as “technofeudalism” has always struck me a bit hazy, even though he’s addressing real issues with what he call “cloud capital” in the current iteration of the digital age.
But he and Munchau were generally on the mark in analyzing the euro crisis.
The two agree that the euro crisis never really ended, meaning primarily that the problems in the construction of the euro currency remain and can be expected to have new acute phases of crisis
What we mostly remember as the euro crisis took place basically from 2009-2015 and featured a complicated debt crisis that featured countries that were insultingly derided as the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). In countries like Germany, France, and Britain, this included a wave of nationalistic contempt for their fellow EU countries.
Sneering at foreigners is much easier than putting a bit of effort into understand something about how a currency zone works. It does require a bit of effort. But currency zones are not new in the world in the 21st century. In a group of countries with separate currencies, there will be country-to-country differences -growing in productivity growth. If a country’s productivity grows more slowly than another’s, the slower-growing country can devaluate its currency in relation to that of the faster one without thereby damaging the weaker country’s internal economy.
Within a country with a common currency, the same process occurs. Some regions have higher productivity growth than others. That imposes “real devaluation” in the slower regions, i.e., wages and salaries fall. In countries like the US or Britain with an “optimal currency area” (OCA), the real devaluation is mitigated by transfer payments from the richer areas to the poorer via the national budget. This is the function of the much-discussed fact that Democratic (*blue*) states pay much more in federal taxes than Republicans (“red”) states. While the red states receive much more in federal funds than they contribute.
Just saying “Lazy Greeks!” is much easier that actually, you know, thinking.
This is why economists tend to consider a common budget for the whole currency zone to be an essential part of an OCA. Otherwise, a currency crisis can set off the kind of xenophobic hostility and contempt that was so evident in the richer countries during the 2009-2015 period.
Another feature of an OCA is common debt instruments for the currency zone. We saw in the previous crisis (or as Varoufakis and Munchau would presumably say), in that earlier phase of the chronic and ongoing euro crisis, that can lead to national debt crises. A country borrowing in its own currency cannot go bankrupt. If the national currency devalues against the dollar or other yardstick currency, the borrowing country can still pay back the debt in its own currency no matter how devalued. Their interest rates may go through the roof. But default is essentially not possible.
What the eurozone has, however, is individual countries borrowing money with bonds denominated in euros. That means, among other things, that an individual country can default on its debt. And absent a common eurozone budget out of which the interest and principal payments will be made, that will force real devaluations for the countries will the slower-growing productivity, i.e., cuts in public and private spending that produce declines in most people’s standard of living.
That risk is still there. And we’ve seen the kinds of economic and political problems that causes.
The last big round brought bitter divisions within the EU. It also overlapped with the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015-16, which the far-right parties exploited to raise their political profiles. The overlapping messes also led to Brexit.
In the new geopolitical environment, the EU does not need periodic recurrences of the 2009-2015 phase of the currency crisis.
And, in general, if the EU countries are going to develop a more self-reliant defense industry without impoverishing large parts of their citizens, they need to fix the glaring gaps in the euro currency zone. And they need to confine Angela Merkel-style austerity economics to the proverbial dustbin of history.
Notes:
(1) Will the Euro collapse? - Yanis Varoufakis & Wolfgang Munchau - The Econoclasts. UnHerd YouTube channel 11/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/macQgpfG8CU?si=xZs1kGu9DwifkXCe> (Accessed: 2025-14-11).
Anyone who has read a few of my posts here has gotten a hint that I’m a hopeless history geek.
In the US, we have a Constitution that goes back to the 18th century that frames in institutional legal terms the government we have. Obviously, the Constitution has changed with various Amendments, the first ten of which were immediately enacted by the first Congress in the 1790s. There are identifiable elements of today’s US Constitutional law that go back to the Magna Carta tradition in English law, a tradition that began in 1215.
Understanding what those mean, even in very official judicial proceedings, requires knowing something about the concrete historical situations in which those emerged. And historical symbols and images are always important to collective identities, even if we are conscious of how those understandings are often developed long after the historical events themselves. And the emergence of modern nationalism involved defining national identities based on historical experiences defined as a source of pride and identity.
The nihilistic, Know-Nothing Trump 2.0 Administration is not only threatening war in large parts of the Western Hemisphere and Nigeria. It’s also waging an ideological war on professional and honest history. The New Republic this year devoted a large part of its September issue to describing and evaluating that ideological war, which affects large parts of our national infrastructure for teaching and understanding history. (1)
As Edward Ayers writes there:
The fuller American past would not flourish without Americans who take on the responsibilities of the past as careers. The historians of the National Park Service daily work at the boundaries of celebration and commemoration, on the borders of history and memory. They know that their devotion and years of continual education will not be repaid with high salaries and will sometimes be disrupted or even ended for political purposes. Across the nation at our historical parks, sites, battlefields, and more, interpreters from the NPS explain the complexities of American history to visitors of all political persuasions, without favor or evasion. Park historians work at the birthplace of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Japanese internment camps in California. They interpret ancient archaeological sites and the three locations of the 9/11 attacks. Their work is inspiring and essential.
Kevin Levin at his Civil War Memory blog, now in its 21st year and now on Substack (of course!(, has been following the pressures that the Trump regime is putting on the National Park Service to interfere with its efforts to present honest history to a very interested public.
This is a part of a larger effort at ideological guidance on the part of the Trumpistas, which Molly Worthen describes in her New Republic contribution as “the current campaign to cripple and humiliate universities.” Although much of her article is a repetition of tired conservative claims about ivory tower eggheads, she does make the case for the value of liberal-arts education along with scientific and professional training.
This is an old tension between power and institutions of learning. Think of Socrates being condemned to death for spreading a lot of irritating, fancy new ideas to the innocent young people of Athens. In more recent times, present-day economies and societies depend critically on scientific and technological developments. And the schools, colleges, libraries, and museum that are indispensable parts of that ability can’t be run on the same principles as a family real estate business.
History is about facts and factual events. But it’s a complicated and challenging field to understand even in a general sense. And when it’s reduced to celebrating superficial patriotism and nationalism – much les the white Christian nationalist version preferred by Trumpists - it amounts to no more than cheap ideology.
As a social media meme I’ve seen several times recently puts it, “If the history you’re reading makes you feel exclusively proud and happy, you’re not reading history. You’re reading propaganda.”
Or as Hegel put it in the pre-social media dark ages, ““The history of the world is not the ground of happiness, because the periods of happiness are blank pages in it.” Not so often quoted is what immediately follows, “the object of history is, at the least, change.” (2)
William Sturkey in his New Republic piece expresses optimism for the field that records that so-often-unhappy history, despite his justifiably dark view of the Trumpists’ attitude toward history:
Trump 2.0’s flawed and racist approach to history will probably offer little in the way of substantive change for serious historical study. The Trump allies promoting censorship are only interested in prevention, not innovative creation, ceding the field to those of us who really do care about honest history. And unfortunately for Trump and his supporters, the censors can’t reach everywhere. Knowledge today comes from many quarters. Millions of students may be blocked from learning American history in public school classrooms [!!!], but the Trump administration cannot completely block them from accessing American history from other venues. [my emphasis]
Trump issued an Executive Order in March called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” a title which appropriately enough sounds like a teaser for a FOX News show. (3)
The Organization of American Historians (OAH) made this statement a few days later:
The recent Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” represents a disturbing attack on core institutions and the public presentation of history, and indeed on historians and history itself. The directive seeks to limit the ways in which history is taught to the public and understood, especially by discouraging the incorporation of perspectives that might challenge simplified, one-dimensional, and biased views of American history. The implications of this order are far-reaching and challenge the historian’s profession to its very core. It proposes to rewrite history to reflect a glorified narrative that downplays or disappears elements of America’s history—slavery, segregation, discrimination, division—while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.
This is not a return to sanity. Rather, it sanitizes to destroy truth. [my emphasis] (4)
Their statement also notes, “The Executive Order is especially insidious in that it is an attack not just on history, but on the very values of intellectual curiosity and engagement that vital democracies demand of their people.” [my emphasis]
Notes:
(1) Trump Against History. The New Republic Sept. 2025, 14-37.
(2) Hegel, G.W.F. (2015): Gesammelte Werke 27:1, 54 (Nachschrift Hotho, 1822-23). Düsseldorf: Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste. My translation from the German.
I’ve hardly posted anything about the Epstein case. Other than to refer to a Charlie Pierce comment in a 2019 column about the alleged suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in prison:
Absolutely nobody is going to believe any official story that comes out about this. …
How in the hell do they let this happen? The guy was incarcerated in the Manhattan Correctional Center. He already had made one try. He had to be on suicide watch. And the suicide happens the day after a massive document dump in which a woman who said she was one of Epstein's victims implicates an entire brigade of celebrity "clients," up to an including some European royalty? There almost can't be a dog more reluctant to hunt than this one. (1)
The ”ick” factor on the Epstein story is very high. But we live in the Trump Era, so it’s part of the daily news now.
Now we’re getting more substantive information and it is already a big problem for Trump. So we can’t really avoid it any more, even though I would certainly prefer to. But this is what our American ruling class is like. Here’s a report from Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinkski on the latest: (2)
David Cay Johnson, a genuine expert of Donald Trump from way back, is convinced the Epstein scandal is going to be very damaging for Trump, even though his cult followers seem to be unconditionally loyal to him. (3)
Also, Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain have some substantive documentation on the long speculation that Jeffrey Epstein was working closely with Israeli intelligence:
[T]he House panel also released a new cache of documents from Epstein’s estate containing direct evidence of Epstein’s links to Israeli intelligence: Epstein’s personal calendars reveal that a senior Israeli intelligence officer, with personal ties to former CIA Director Leon Panetta, lived at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment for multiple stretches between 2013 and 2016. When cross-referenced with emails leaked from the inbox of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a portrait emerges of Epstein at the nexus of high-ranking intelligence officials in both the U.S. and Israel. (4)
For some reason, all this brings to mind this Warren Zevon song about a guy who’s thinking he’s seriously cornered: (5)
I don’t see how the Senate Democrats’ deal for a continuing resolution is anything but a surrender to Republicans. Here’s part of the deal that master Democratic strategist Chuck Schumer arranged (an arrangement that included Schumer himself voting against it):
Senators whose phone records were sought by Special Counsel Jack Smith would gain authority to sue for millions in damages under a provision buried in the Senate-advanced deal to reopen the government.
The spending measure, which cleared a Senate procedural hurdle Sunday night, would create a private right of action allowing senators who’ve been searched—without their knowledge—for their communications data to bring civil lawsuits against the US government and potentially individual federal employees. [my emphasis] (1)
While Democratic Governors, elected officials, and activists are fighting to protect the rule of law against the Trump 2.0 regime, Schumer arranged a deal that includes something like this.
The substance and the appearance on this were really bad.
The Democrats didn’t need to make a “deal” – actually, in this case, an abject surrender. The Republicans have majorities in the House and Senate. Trump himself was publicly calling for the Republicans to end the filibuster rule that was always terrible but which Republicans began to use so aggressively that it became a de facto practice that the Senate needed to have 60 votes to pass anything.
But instead of forcing the Republicans to eat the responsibility for their own blockade of the budget after the Democrats had stood up to them for weeks and scored a remarkable streak of election victories in last week’s off-year elections – which was about as strong an indication as we could have that lot of voters were rewarding the Democrats for fighting the Republicans, including fighting the Republicans on the shutdown - the Senate Democrats … stopped fighting. Surrendered. They didn’t even wait a full week after last week’s election to fold completely, including endorsing the Republicans’ attack on the rule of law mentioned above.
And I don’t see how the Republicans will take any other lesson from this than to see that the Democratic Senate will fold on anything the Republicans solidly back – and the party is now the Trump cult so they will back pretty much anything and everything Trump wants – during the remainder of this two-year Congressional session.
The Democrats had massive credibility among the public after last week’s elections. And Chuck Schumer and his fellow “how quickly can we surrender?” They bargaining position was better than before the election. But and his fellow “how quickly can we surrender?” Dems just tossed that advantage away. Why would Trump or Republicans take the Democrats seriously now in any such standoff until at the earliest a new Congress is elected? They just saw Chuck Schumer completely fold this week when the Democrats’ leverage was as strong as it has been during this whole shutdown fight.
Josh Marshall tries to find a silver lining in the Democrats’ capitulation:
There’s a key distinction I was trying to draw in what I wrote [previously]. And that is there’s a difference between the deal itself and where the deal leaves Democrats and the broader anti-Trump opposition. This deal shows us that Democrats still don’t have the caucus they need for this fight that will be going on at least through this decade. [Does he mean the Senate Democrats won’t be able to achieve anything until 2031?!?] But the shutdown also accomplished a lot. And not withstanding the WTF fumble at the 10-yard line, it’s still a dramatically different caucus than we had in March. To me it’s a proof of concept that worked. Democratic voters need to keep demanding more, keep up the pressure and keep purging the Senate caucus of senators who are not up to the new reality. [my emphasis] (2)
The key element of the “deal” to which the Democrats caved in is that the Republicans agreed to hold a vote in December on a bill to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, the issue on which Democrats took their stand until this week’s cave-in. This would prevent a drastic increase in health insurance premiums, an increase which Trump is already using to discredit the entire “Obamacare” approach.
In other words, the Democrats caved in for a pledge by the Republicans to hold a vote on ACA subsidies which the Democrats have to be assuming they will lose.
How this is anything but an abject surrender by Chuck Schumer and his alliance of semi-Democratic Senators is very hard to see. NPR reports:
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Sunday that he would hold a vote by mid-December on a bill of Democrats' choosing to extend the expiring [ACA] subsidies. Thune has said throughout the shutdown that Republicans would only negotiate on the subsidies once the government was open.
"This deal guarantees a vote to extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which Republicans weren't willing to do," Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wrote in a statement. "Lawmakers know their constituents expect them to vote for it, and if they don't, they could very well be replaced at the ballot box by someone who will."
But the majority of Senate Democrats disagreed that this was the best deal they could get, doubting that Republicans would agree to extend the subsidies without the pressure of an ongoing shutdown. After Democratic victories on Election Night last week, some senators said it was a mistake to back down. [my emphasis] (3)
It’s important to stress that, beyond the genuine fecklessness of Chuck Schumer, outcomes like this are what we get on a regular basis for a system dominated by money in politics. That is a problem that Congress will never, ever be able to fix unless they dispense with Schumer’s politics of surrender.
And that will require major pressure from the party’s electoral base to accomplish.
The team at The American Prospect were not happy with the surrender. Bob Kuttner:
Coming out of Tuesday’s election blowout, the Democrats were riding high and unified. They won big in places like New Jersey that were supposed to be close. Republicans were taking increasing blame for the government shutdown, now in its sixth week. The Republicans were fracturing, with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) wanting a deal and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) stonewalling. And Trump’s rants made him increasingly irrelevant.
Less than a week later, it is Democrats who have given it all away, and Democrats who are fractured. ...
In this topsy-turvy political era, let’s see whether self-defeating House Republicans save self-defeating Senate Democrats from themselves. [my emphasis] (4)
David Dayen weighs in on what he calls “the Cave Caucus.” That label could refer to the Schumer allies’ propensity to cave in to Trump and his cult followers in the Senate. Or to their comfortably relaxing in a cave controlled by big-money donors. He writes:
On the details, I do agree that the existing dynamics, particularly with air travel chaos and the Trump administration losing ruling after ruling on food assistance (including one just last night), were actually pushing Senate Republicans to bow to their president and eliminate the Senate filibuster, or at least create some semantic carve-out for government spending that would end the filibuster in all but name. The [Democratic] Cave Caucus was likely mindful that their power to dictate events is tied to the rule by minority in the Senate, and they stepped in front of that process like human shields. [my emphasis] (5)
He goes on to note the provision to reverse Trump’s firing of federal workers just squeaked through the surrender negotiations. But that also meant that “the Cave Caucus decided to reverse Trump’s firings of federal workers, in a way that reveals their options to use the power of the purse.”
But after rolling the Democrats so badly, and successfully replacing the story of the Democrats’ scoring electorally against the Trumpists by fighting for their own side, will Trump actually implement the reversal? Will he stop his illegal practice of sequestration of appropriated funds? And if he doesn’t, what will Congress do? Chuck Schumer just flushed his best chance for forcing the rogue Administration to comply down the toilet by showing he’s willing to back down when his side’s own negotiating position was at a maximum.
Jeet Heer describes the Schumer surrender this way:
Many Democratic lawmakers acknowledged that the deal does not come close to fulfilling the party’s promise to defend healthcare spending. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “I don’t think that the House Democratic Caucus is prepared to support a promise, a wing and a prayer, from folks who have been devastating the health care of the American people for years.” Representative Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the deal was a “betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them. Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise—it’s capitulation.” Senator Elizabeth Warren described the deal as “a mistake.”
In an interview … on Sunday, Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive strategy group, spoke of the way the deal is politically damaging to the Democratic Party’s brand. She noted that the exit polls from the elections show that “Democrats were benefiting a lot from pressing their historic advantage on healthcare and from fighting to lower healthcare costs. It really helped there be a message that Democrats were running on, but with consonant actions.” Owens added that affordability has been a dominant issue over the last few election cycles, both helping Trump win in 2024 and costing Republicans this year after Trump’s failure to solve the cost-of-living crisis. She argues that if Democrats “now surrender, I just don’t think they have credibility on cost of living.” [my emphasis] (6)
The Democrats took a strong stand against the health insurance sabotage on which the Republicans insisted. Their stand was popular and showed its popularity at the polls.
And Check Schumer folded. He couldn’t even wait a full week after the election to capitulate.
Schumer and the Cave Caucus looking a lot like Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robing about now: (7)
It’s worth recalling that in August there was a big shooting incident in Georgia at a Centers for Disease Control building. There were a lot of shots fired but no one was injured or killed, except for the shooter who committed suicide.
The shooting started just before 5 p.m. Friday at a CVS drugstore directly across from the CDC’s main entrance. DeKalb County police officer David Rose arrived as White fired on the CDC complex; on Tuesday, investigators confirmed Rose was fatally shot by White. …
Of the nearly 500 shots fired, about 200 struck six CDC buildings on the campus, which is located near Emory University on the eastern edge of Atlanta.
Most of those shots were fired by a long gun, investigators said – one of the five weapons White had stolen from his father. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has determined all the firearms belonged to White’s father. (1)
There was some indication from documents the shooter wrote that he was an anti-vaxer. But apparently there was no evidence that he explicitly linked those beliefs to the attack, though it was a CDC building he attacked. So that’s certainly a plausible assumption.
This guy committed an act of terror that could very well have killed many people.
But the Trump 2.0 regime wants to label people who criticize brutal ICE raids as “terrorists”?
Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Jr., seemed to want to minimize the potential violent fanaticism that could be generated by anti-vaxxer conspiracy talk:
Jeff Williams, who oversees safety at the CDC, told employees there is “no information suggesting additional threats currently.”
“This is a targeted attack on the CDC related to COVID-19,” Williams said. “All indications are that this was an isolated event involving one individual.” …
Kennedy toured the CDC campus on Monday, accompanied by Monarez. “No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,” Kennedy said in a statement Saturday, without addressing the potential impact of anti-vaccine rhetoric. ...
Although law enforcement officials have made clear the shooter was targeting the public health agency over the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy said in the interview that not enough is known about his motives. He described political violence as “wrong,” but went on to criticize the agency’s pandemic response.
“The government was overreaching in its efforts to persuade the public to get vaccinated and they were saying things that are not always true,” Kennedy said. [my emphasis] (2)
The antivaxxer movement, which was given a major boost by an ill-advised decision by a decision by the respected British medical journal Lancet to publish a (later retracted) article in 1998 alleging a link between children receiving measles-mumps-rubella vaccinations. (3)
Donald Trump encouraged anti-vax pseudoscience during his firm Presidential term. And with RFK, Jr. now as the Trump 2.0 HHS Secretary, promotion of pseudoscience received a powerful boost at the same time they are reducing some of the important public health initiatives the federal government has provided in the past.
Anti-science conspiracy theories are not confined to the far right and few of them produce direct violent attacks like that of the CDC shooter. But there is a lot of fuzzy thinking out there, which the radical right in particular has political reasons to encourage.
But so far, antivaxxer extremist violence has not yet produce the kind of death toll that COVID inflicted during the pandemic, as Michael Mann and Peter Hotez put it:
Anti-vaccine activism took an even darker turn during the COVID-19 pandemic when more than 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they refused COVID-19 vaccines during the delta and BA.1 omicron waves of 2021–2022. This occurred when the anti-vaccine movement fell under a new banner of “health freedom” in conservative circles. [my emphasis] (4)
And they warn:
Anti-science is now a lethal force that threatens human civilization. We can no longer fight climate change and pandemics unless we can find a means to defuse the anti-science bomb that threatens our future. So far, we are losing this battle. While time remains, the window of opportunity is beginning to close ...
An animation from the New York Times explains the basic approach of the antivaxxers: (5)
(4) Mann, Michael & Hotez, Peter (2025): A Triple Threat to Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics, and Anti-Science: Skeptical Inquirer 01:2025, 21.
(5) How Anti-Vaxxer’s Logical Fallacies Brought Measles Back, a Fool House Rock. New York Times Opinion YouTube channel 03/11/2019. <https://youtu.be/Z5MjKrqbLGQ?si=J3KQWytjgVc5azl0> (Accessed: 2025-09-11).
Barack Obama discussed the issues of democratic retrogression in a presentation in October. Here are some key points:
“I’ve become increasingly concerned about the rising wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe,” Obama said in a video introducing the conversation, which took place in London.
The comments were a veiled, if clear, rebuke of not only the current US administration but also some of the leaders Trump has aligned himself with since taking office. …
[T]he former president offered an acknowledgment that sclerotic bureaucracies and unresponsive politicians had, in many ways, ushered in a global populist wave.
“In the United States, for example, there will need to be laws that are changed so that action can be taken more effectively, more quickly to respond to problems in a lawful way,” Obama said during his discussion. “I think what we’ve seen is that when people are frustrated, they’re willing to take any action, even if it’s unlawful, because at least there’s a sense of, something’s happening. That’s something that I think everybody has to internalize at this point.”
He acknowledged that centrist politicians had, in many instances, lost the pulse of voters and allowed some of the populist anger to take hold.
“A big challenge is that the governments themselves, whether center-right or center-left, were losing touch with people and weren’t delivering on some of the basic hopes and dreams of people, so you get frustrated with government, period,” he said. “That obviously then opens the door for right-wing populism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anger, grievances.”
He said wealth gaps and … complex modern economies had left people feeling “as if they don’t have control, and they feel as if their politicians often don’t have control over all the different forces there.” And he said social media was “very good at making people fearful of or angry about those who don’t agree with them.” [my emphasis] (1)
Obama is obviously intelligent and often eloquent. His comments are welcome to defenders of US democracy. And they vaguely hint at perspectives that could be helpful in pushing back against Trumpista authoritarianism.
But what he says in the above quotes also tiptoes around what the political and social pushback against authoritarians needs to be. For instance, why should Obama stick to what the CNN reporter calls “a veiled, if clear, rebuke” to Trump and other authoritarian leaders? Why doesn’t he just be clear about his points without the “veiled” part?
Comments like, “I think what we’ve seen is that when people are frustrated, they’re willing to take any action, even if it’s unlawful, because at least there’s a sense of, something’s happening” would certainly count as vague. But clear? That is something very like what European conservative politicians say when they want to try to position themselves for coalitions with xenophobic, far-right parties. A strategy which has very consistently led to strengthening the far-right parties.
And what sort of criminal actions does he have in mind that people would understandably take when they “are frustrated”? Would Obama defend people staging “bread riots” in the US if people soon start facing serious food deprivation because of Trump’s refusal to continue providing food stamps to qualified recipients in the current moment? A safe guess would be: no!
And why would generically being “frustrated with government” lead specifically to “right-wing populism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anger, grievances”? Do violent goons join ICE to beat, kidnap, and terrorize anyone they think looks Latino because they are frustrated filling out their income tax form? The problem with a completely vague diagnosis like “frustrated with government” doesn’t say anything about what are sensible concerns, as opposed to people being angry because they think there are too many people around who don’t look like Real Amuricans?
And when he says people “frustrated with government” because of “wealth gaps” and “complex modern economies,” what does that tell anyone the political framing or concrete policies that would address such frustration while defanging rightwing demagoguery? Does Obama advocate major redistributive measures to reduce the wealth of billionaires and increase incomes of working-class people? Measures like facilitating the formation of unions or setting national living-wage requirements, neither of which occurred during his Presidency? (The last increase in the federal minimum wage, to $7.25 an hour did take place in 2009 during the first year of Obama’s Presidency but it was mandated by the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007.)
Vague platitudes about “frustration or people feeling a loss of control just don’t tell us a whole lot about the politics of authoritarianism.
How could an American politician address such concerns in a more helpful and motivating manner? Well, here’s Al Gore this year: (2)
Gore can "bring it" when he wants to. I’m sure Gore knows he's poking the wannabe-"highbrow" Trumpistas in the eye by explicitly praising the Frankfurt School and Theodore Adorno and Jürgen Habermas specifically.
There's a bizarre rightwing theory pushed by people like Christopher Rufo is that the Frankfurt School spawned "political correctness" and "wokeism" and DEI as part of a decades-long Jewish Commie plan to undermine the White Man. This crackpot narrative even blames the Frankfurt School for creating “postmodernism” philosophy, which is just a bonkers claim.
Various figures associated with the Frankfurt School were Jewish and influenced by Marxist ideas, including Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Jürgen Habermas who Gore specifically mentions is currently 96 and is considered one of the leading public intellectuals in the German-speaking world, even the leading one. A student of Adorno’s, he is considered one of the Second Generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. The current Britannica article on him describes him as “the most important German philosopher of the second half of the 20th century.” (3)
It's a demented conspiracy theory. But the St. Charlie Kirk crowd takes that stuff seriously.
(2) Gore compares Trump administration's actions to Nazi Germany's attacks on the truth. NBC News YouTube channel 04/22/2025. <https://youtu.be/9uQoXRHsu2U?si=baAPmmQcP6asVayZ> (Accessed: 2025-07-11).
Israeli political economist Arie Krampf has described Netanyahu’s long-range perspective for Israel as follows:
Israeli political economist Arie Krampf has described Netanyahu’s long-range perspective for Israel as follows:
What I call the Netanyahu doctrine is based on geographic, institutional, and even mental separation between Israel as a globalized economy and Israel as a state that occupies a territory and engages in a territorial conflict. Elsewhere I have called this doctrine “hawkish neoliberalism,” a doctrine based on the premise that free markets must be harnessed to serve the national purpose. ...
The future of the Netanyahu doctrine also depends on the course of the Israel–US relationship because Israel remains significantly dependent on the US. Israel’s ability to forge independent relations with China and Russia has limits due to US concerns with technology transfer. It could be the case that after Russia’s war in Ukraine, a revitalized West led by the US will pressure Israel to realign its foreign policy, despite its increased financial independence. [emphasis in original] (1)
At this point, though, it’s hard to imagine the Trump 2.0 Administration pressuring Israel to realign its foreign policy, beyond trying to keep Israel from even more blatantly showing to the world that Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan is not stopping its ethnic cleansing campaign and genocide against the Palestinians, as they continue to absorb illegal occupied into what Netanyahu party and government call Eretz Israel, i.e., from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea.
While progress in getting concrete agreements about Everlasting Peace Plan matters like the proposed peacekeeping force for Gaza is so far very slow (to put it mildly), Netanyahu and his allies are eagerly pursuing their goal of transforming Israel into a more and more authoritarian state. A former Military Advocate General, Yifat Tomer-Yurushalmi, was arrested and now moved to house arrest over the leak of video showing Israeli Defense Force (IDF) abusing prisoners. The real crime in the eyes of the Israeli right was not the criminal abuse, but the attempt to prosecute the crime and revealing it to the public. (2)
As the video illustrates, there is widespread support in the IDF and from Netanyahu’s government for the kind of torture of prisoners which the disputed video seems to show.
As Yossi Mekelberg of Chatham House says in the video:
The background of all of it is they [the pro-Netanyahu rights is trying] to dismantle the legal system, the judiciary as we know it in Israel, in order to derail Netanyahu's corruption trial. This is this is a kind of the fundamental issue here and for this they are ready to ruin the foundations of Israel[‘s] democratic system and harm also the gatekeepers.
He goes on to say that this incident:
... shows what he said [is] the completely moral bankruptcy of Netanyahu. It's not the release of the clip that undermines Israel. It's what is alleged to happen there [that] is the problem. And there are other cases that are not investigated. Whether the killing of journalists, killing of medical personnel, there are so many other cases that not investigated.
That's what compromises Israel morality.
The events of the last two years have severely undermined Israel’s image and credibility in the United States, including among American Jews. So the Netanyahu government is rushing to try to repair the damage by shoring up its propaganda (hasbara) operations, including among the critical Republican constituency of Christian nationalists.
It’s always important to keep in mind the bizarre twist that fundamentalist Christians like US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Christian United For Israel (CUFI) in membership the largest group in the Israel Lobby in the US, essentially believe that God’s plan for Jews who do not convert to Christianity is to have them burn in Hell for eternity.
Amid a sharp drop in support from the conservative right, Israel has hired firms to conduct not just "hasbara [public diplomacy] campaigns" but also campaigns targeting millions of Christian churchgoers, bot networks to amplify pro-Israel messages online, and efforts to influence both search results and the responses given by popular AI services like ChatGPT.
Among the experts recruited is a former campaign manager for Donald Trump and many of the other firms are linked to the Republican party or Evangelical communities, indicating that Israel is focusing massive efforts on communities once considered automatically pro-Israel. Among the campaigns' goals is fighting antisemitism, which has risen alongside the decline in support for Israel. Together, these campaigns signal a new phase in Israel's post-war public diplomacy strategy, and a shift in the way it uses agents - both AI and human influencers - for hasbara abroad. [my emphasis] (3)
This has always been a big risk for Israel to rely so heavily as it does on political support from American Christian nationalists and on rightwing parties and factions, including in Europe. Because those are the very factions in US and European politics that are the most influenced by actual anti-Semitism. (4)
Joshua Leifer has written about the loathsome politics of the far-right hardliner Nick Fuentes, currently being promoted by Tucker Carlson, a well-known Republicans media figure.
The Christian right in the United States is now in the midst of a fundamental ideological transformation. "Carlson and Fuentes' statements reflect a growing trend among American Christians away from a Judeo-Christian ethic that privileges the Hebrew Bible and certain Judaic ideals, and toward more Greek and Pagan traditions that emphasize Christian power and virility and look down on Judaism and Israel," explained Eliyahu Stern, a scholar of religion at Yale University and author of the forthcoming book, "Nowhere Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right, 1977–October 7." …
The immediate response by the Heritage Foundation – the flagship conservative think tank that is now driving much of the Trump administration's policies – revealed the magnitude of this shift. In a defiant, if also strange, video posted on X, Heritage president Kevin Roberts mounted a defense of Carlson and his choice to bring Fuentes on his show. And he did so not with the old Republican talking points, but in the new fighting jargon of Christian nationalism.
"My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and America always," Roberts said. "Conservatives," he continued, "should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington." (5)
The posture of the Republican Party and far-right parties in Europe that claim to support Israel as an anti-Muslim ally is essentially: We hate Muslims and Muslims hate Jews and that means we can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.
Leifer warns, “The catastrophic war in Gaza reduced Israel to a U.S. protectorate. Now, Israel's fate increasingly rests in the hand of an American right that sees Israel as not as an asset but as a burden, and Jews as foreign adversaries of the West.”
Meanwhile, we have new developments in the Eternal Peace Plan: (6)
(6) Ben Ari, Lior (2025): Israel steps up strikes on Hezbollah as Lebanon fears renewed conflict in the south. Ynet Global 11/06/2025. <https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b1fyhb5kzg#autoplay> (Accessed: 2025-07-11).
