Britain’s Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer – Labour is allegedly a left-center party - is pandering to xenophobes. He posted this on Elon Musk’s X/Twitter platform on July 23:
With a “left” party like this, who needs fascist xenophobes?
The Austrian left writer and activist Natascha Strobl replied on Bluesky on the same day: “Labour is digging its own grave with the increasingly scurrilous right-wing course.” (my translation to English)
Britain is one of the countries that has had the experience of centrist parties embracing xenophobic talking points and that redounding to the benefit of the far-right. It’s inhumane and it’s dumb politics – dumb, that is, if they actually want to defang the far right, which in Britain right now is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party. And they have a real shot at taking the place of the Tories, the Conservative Party, as one of the two normally leading parties. And in a system like Britain’s and America’s with winner-take-all electoral districts, that could be a serious and longterm setback for the Tories.
And for democracy in Britain: “Even if you ignore the asylum issue (which you shouldn't or don't have to): What does that mean? A Labour prime minister sends data to employers so that they can take action against employees? In one of the worst industries ever?“
What does she mean by food delivery drivers are working in “one of the worst industries ever”? Presumably something like this:
The big delivery apps have not only reduced the fees paid to drivers, but removed peak hour “boosts”, paid during heavy rain or at the weekends. “I know very experienced drivers who have been doing it longer than me, who are now working 10 or 11 hours a day …”
Pay is the only thing they have any ability to influence through striking. Conditions are out of their control. Food is regularly stolen from the backs of bikes and mopeds. The lack of sick pay means they work through illness. “Right now, there’s a guy with a broken leg working. My neighbour was working with a broken finger for two weeks. When he had to turn left, he had to use his arms. He couldn’t afford to stay at home.” (1)
Gosh, I wonder why apparently this industry relies so much on immigrants and asylum-seekers to do this work? It’s a mystery.
Notes:
(1) Malik, Nesrine (2024): When your food comes via a delivery app, the exploitation is baked right in. Guardian 02/19/2024. (Accessed: 2025-25-07).
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer picked newly-elected Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin to deliver the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s ersatz State of the Union message on March 4. She’s a former CIA officer who is currently staking out a position as 1992-style Clintonian centrist.
Before getting into her nostalgic pitch, I want to mention that she face-planted pretty dramatically recently on the issue of the genocide in Gaza. (1)
Early on, she resurrects Bill Clinton’s signature phrase “work hard and play by the rules.” Because everyone right now is oozing with nostalgia for 1992? She appeals to “shared values bigger than any one party.” She says that Americans all share three “core beliefs”: (1) “the middle class is the engine of our country”; (2) “strong national security protects us from harm”; and (3) “our democracy, no matter how messy, is unparalleled and worth fighting for.”
All this in the first two minutes. “Middle class” is the safest phrase in American politics. Because everyone who is in the “middle” between being homeless living on the street and being billionaire TechBro oligarchs is happy to call themselves “middle class.” It’s safe because it essentially means nothing. It just gives ConservaDems a chance to repeat they are in “the middle.”
She wants to bring down the prices on “groceries, housing, health care.” She wants to put price controls on grocery store chains, ban private equity firms from buying up scads of residential housing, and institute Medicare for All … oh, wait, she doesn’t mention any of those things. But at least she says she’s thinking about “groceries, housing, health care.”
She does manage to say that Trump will make all those things more expensive and wants to pass a huge tax cut for billionaires, which of course he and his loyal lackeys in Congress have done. But the word “Republican” appears in the address twice. Once in the opening part where she says her daddy was a Republican and momma was a Democrat, adding “but it was never a big deal because we had shared values that were bigger than any one party.” The other time is when she’s says “Democrats and Republicans should all be for … securing the border.”
This blather about Bipartisanship and Reaching Across the Aisle is actually a legacy of the 1970s, when the liberal/conservative dividing lines in Congress actually were spread across parties, with Southern segregationist-minded Democrats making common cause with rich-people-shouldn’t-have-to-pay-no-taxes Republicans and liberal Democrats making coalitions with a now-long-extinct species known as “liberal Republicans,” on both foreign and domestic issues. You can google Mark Hatfield and Jacob Javits to see that the long-ago political phenomenon of “liberal Republicanism” actually did once exist.
But that essentially ended with the Reagan Revolution of 1981. The party alignments in Congress coalesced fairly quickly along ideological lines, with Democrats pursuing big-donor money still often inclined to support conservative economic policies. California Congressman Tony Coelho, who became chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1980 was an avatar of that phenomenon.
On the national level, the Democratic Party was also affected by the fact that California was a swing state between Democrats and Republicans since the Second World War until 1994. That year, the Republicans pushed a xenophobic initiative known as Proposition 187, which won but which Democrats fought against and lost. Because of the xenophobia the Republicans displayed, voter participation among Latinos went up and the percentage of Latino voters going Democratic both increased. Because the Democrats had the good sense to fight for their own side in that instance, California has been a safe state for Democrats since, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Governorship being a quirky exception. Also, Proposition 187 was such a hack job that the courts almost immediately nullified most of it.
Bill Clinton had won the California in 1992. But the national Democratic Party has kept acting as though California was open to vote for Republicans Presidential candidates and as though the Democrats were still competitive in Texas and Florida.
The only rational reason to make that calculation is the idea that big donors demand conservative positions from Democratic Presidents. and John McCain’s bipartisan “reach across the aisle” rhetoric in his 2008 Presidential run – generally not matched by his stone conservative voting record and belligerently hawkish foreign policy – at least made sense because he knew he needed to appeal to voters who were not Dick Cheney fans.
Speaking of which: why in the name of Heaven Kamala Harris’ campaign thought it was a great idea to highlight the fact that anyone named Cheney supporter her Presidential campaign in 2024 is likely to remain one of the great enigmas of Presidential politics.
The March speech highlights some of the key weaknesses of a neo-Clintonian centrist politics in 2025 and the foreseeable future. Because you wind up repeating a laundry-list of issues without tying it all together with a distinctive Democratic narrative and conveying no clear sense of Democrats being willing and able to fight for their own side.
Meanwhile, the Republicans – not just Trump, the Republican Party – are out there shouting: ILLEGAL ALIEN BROWN PEOPLE AND TRANS TEENAGERS ARE GOING TO EAT YOU ALIVE!!!
Oh, and of course, Slotkin expresses her concern about increasing national debt. The reality is that everyone claims to be concerned about the national debt. But nobody votes based on the national debt.
There are some words and phrases the Democrats should just drop entirely from their vocabulary. Not because of “wokeism” – one of the dumbest polemical constructions of all time – but because it steps on the Democrats’ own messaging and branding. Those would include the following: bipartisanship, reaching across the aisle, Ronald Reagan, national debt, Cheney. And if they have to use the names Reagan or Cheney, it should always be in a negative context.
Slotkin turned 16 years old in 1992, making her a downright youngster in today’s US Senate.
So how did she manage to get stuck in a time warp where it’s perpetually 1992?
This is another speech of hers that seems to be mired in 1992 nostalgia: (1)
Here she picks up on the Ezra Klein “abundance” theme that basically says the solution to all our problems is to do away with those pesky local regulations on home-building. Deregulation! Free enterprise! Yeah, all these dang safety regulations about electric wiring and such, that’s the real problem. And if we say “middle class” and “work hard and play by the rules” over and over again, we can recreate 1992!
Come to think of it, though: FOX News didn’t exist in 1992, so that would be progress if they disappeared from the scene.
This is another interview with Israeli-American historian and specialist on the Holocaust and genocide Omer Bartov about the current genocide under way in Gaza with the full support of Peace President Trump’s government. (1)
Über-Realist John Mearsheimer is willing to participate in a wide range of podcasts, from grumpy conservatives to flaming lefties. He seems to have a good sense of the ideological leanings of his interview partners, like the prominent academic Russophile Glenn Diesen. He seems to enjoy the exercise of navigating distinct ideological perspectives from his interviewers.
I’ve listened to so many of his interviews and speeches over the last three years or so that I don’t react with “huh?” to as many of his comments as I once did. He has a provocative style. But what may sound at first like callous cynicism about how great powers make foreign policy decisions, is actually his “realist” frame of reference. But he is also broadly committed to liberal values and does make moral judgments as well about political decisions.
And he’s also not deterministic in his thinking. In fact, he has often been very critical of US foreign-policy decision-making because it too often ignores practical lessons from experience in a way that leads to less-then-optimal policies. And he also takes account of the fact that foreign policy makers are human beings, with all the limitations that condition involves. And he’s aware that political, emotional, and sentimental considerations – especially when they have effective lobbying operation supporting them – can and do lead decision-makers to make careless, dumb, or reckless calls. And he’s very aware of material considerations of military power and of the need for competent diplomacy.
Having said all that, I’ll add my usual warning notice: if you listen to an interview with the length of the two I’m including below, and you don’t hear Mearsheimer say something that irritates you – you’re probably not paying attention.
This one is a weekly appearance on the podcast of Andrew Napolitano, who’s well to the right on a lot of issues and usually opens his show with an annoying and dubious-sounding goldbug investment pitch, where they are mainly talking about US-Israel policy: (1)
We get a flash of Mearsheimer’s emotional outrage over the Gaza genocide in that one. And he also talks specifically about Trump’s strange and less-than-competent behavior on the Israel-Gaza issue.
This is an over-two-hour interview with smug MAGA isolationist and heir to the Swanson food fortune, Tucker Carlson: (2)
And if that’s not enough Mearsheimer for a while, here he is talking to a consciously left podcaster, Katie Halper, beginning at 17:30 in this video: (3)
(2) John Mearsheimer: The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It. Tucker Carlson YouTube channel 07/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/2VXbY4V7LCk?si=8lUjquiozVNLWM8T> (Accessed: 2025-31-07).
Al Jazeera discusses European defense spending in a report featuring Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe Eurasia Group. This is going to be a very prominent topic in European politics for the next few years. (1)
He mentions the idea of a common European fund for defense, which could play a useful role in a rearmament project.
Binoy Kampmark recently commented on how seriously Wahington’s European allies take the signs that they cannot rely on the US as a reliable ally, referencing Trump’s 2025 visit to a NATO meeting in the Hague:
The confidence trickster [i.e. conman, in this case Donald Trump] was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO. President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily on defence, inflating the margins of sense and sensibility against marginal threats. Never mind the strain placed on the national budget over such absurd priorities as welfare, health or education.
The marvellous [sic] irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump’s perceived unreliability and capriciousness when it comes to European affairs. Would he, for instance, treat obligations of collective defence outlined in Article 5 of the organisation’s governing treaty with utmost seriousness? Since Washington cannot be relied upon to hold the fort against the satanic savages from the East, various European countries have been encouraging a spike in defence spending to fight the sprites and hobgoblins troubling their consciences at night. (2) [my emphasis]
The current German government is even willing to back away from austerity economics, one of the sacred cows of German economic policy for decades now.
A total of 847€ billion is on the table by 2029. The defense budget is planned to grow gradually to 152.8€ billion by 2029. By comparison, in 2024 it was 51.95 billion euros. The share of defense spending to Germany's gross domestic product (GDP) would thus increase from 2.4% percent in 2025 to 3.5% percent in 2029.
In 2025, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) will be able to hire 10,000 new soldiers and 1,000 civilian personnel. "It is a clear signal that we are strengthening the troops," said [Finance Minister Lars] Klingbeil [SPD]. Chancellor Friedrich Merz also referred to the significantly higher military spending in his government statement in the Bundestag on Tuesday.
"We are not doing this, as is sometimes claimed, to do a favor for the US and its President a favor, we are doing this out of our own view and conviction, because we have to fear that Russia will continue the war beyond Ukraine," he stressed. Germany, according to Merz, is "back on the European and international stage". This "new determination" is "registered in the world and warmly welcomed by our partners and friends." (3)
The current European commitment to boosting their defenses seems genuine. How well they will do it, how much funding they will divert from civilian programs and infrastructure, who much they will be willing and able to build up domestic defense industries, how much politics will become militarized, whether countries like Germany and Poland will develop their own nuclear weapons – these issues will be playing out on a grand scale.
There is also the critical political and strategic question of how Europe in its own judgment will judge Russian capabilities and intentions. That Russia is now what the old Soviet Union would have called a capitalist imperialist country is clear. And their current ideology doesn’t make much pretension of international solidarity or liberal internationalism. So we can expect pressures from their own military-industrial complex similar to those in the Western countries when it comes to armaments and foreign policy. But getting entranced by hawkish obsessions about some kind of genetically-fixed Russian obsession with expanding their borders would be a big mistake for Western countries.
And, at the moment, there seems to be a widespread assumption that Russia and China are some kind of solid, hostile bloc trying to undermine the US and European governments, which is a very bad sign. Making policy, especially military policy, based on realistic information is extremely important. Underestimating real threats would obviously be problematic. For the US in particular, but also more than ever for European nations, having well-staffed foreign ministries with deep expertise on potential adversary nations is critical. If all potential adversaries and threats are seen through a primarily military perspective, you wind up with the problem of “if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Nuclear weapons proliferation is also a real and concrete threat to the whole of humanity. And that means that governments who otherwise hate each other need to work out meaningful deal to control and reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. A big nuclear war would certainly “own the libs,” which seems to be the guiding concept of politics for Trumpistas. But it would also be very bad even for the most devoted MAGA chuds and even for sacred corporate profits.
I’m surprised that we don’t see the old term for tea-leaf-reading of Russian issues, “Kremlinology,” being used much for the current situation. But having good Kremlinology, and Sinology, are important. And that’s why having competent civilian foreign-policy resources is so important. Some of the current analysis about Russia, even in serious academic and foreign-policy work, amounts to speculation about speeches or books by some crank Russian scholar or intellectual who was once seen shaking hands with Vladimir Puttin 20 years ago, and how they are sinister echoes of some 19th century Russian philosopher and how that means the current Russian government is just like Peter the Great. Or something.
A bad basis for formulation serious and realistic foreign policy.
Also, good (?!) old-fashioned power politics would suggest that it would be in Europe’s interest to pursue better relations with China as a power-balancing move in relation to Russia and the US. And assuming Russia is always going to be a hostile military threat to Europe has led to bad results in the past. For American foreign policy in particular, threat inflation has been a chronic problem for decades. (4)
Notes:
(1) Why is NATO boosting defence spending and can Europe afford it? Counting the Cost. Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 06/26/2025. <https://youtu.be/oWDaF10TFFQ?si=hSeiMQhTTmWqg3lP> (Accessed: 2025-18-07).
(4) See, e,g,: Record, Jeffrey (2002): Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.
How many prominent leaders who are today dodging and ducking and weaving on the US – and German - support for Israel’s genocide in progress in Gaza will later say, “I was always opposed to what Netanyahu was doing …”?
MSNBC reports – excuse me, runs an opinion piece:
Even now, as Israel starves civilians and shoots many of those who try to obtain what little food is available, Democrats are either calling what Israel is doing a strategic mistake or using the passive voice to describe an “unfolding” famine. And always there’s the reiteration of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, even though that has nothing to do with Israel’s humanitarian obligations under international law. Former President Barack Obama, a gifted writer, released an evasive statement that starts with a throat-clearing caveat calling for “a return of all hostages” and refuses to name Israel as the agent behind the starvation of Gaza. No Democratic leader in Congress has called for the United States to cut ties with Israel, nor do they acknowledge that Israel unilaterally withdrew from the ceasefire with Hamas. [my emphasis] (1)
It may be an “opinion” piece. But that paragraph is reporting facts.
Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin was picked by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to deliver a response to Trump’s joint address to Congress in March. Her interview this week with Breaking Points shows what a dilemma mealy-mouthing about something like the current genocide is for Democrats, at least. (2) The Republicans, riding their own tidal wave of xenophobia and Christian Zionist zealotry, are mostly more than happy to support Israel’s current policy. The relevant portion begins at 11:00 in this video:
Israeli columnist Gideon Levy apparently sees no need to mealy-mouth about what is going on.
It is no longer possible to beat around the bush and avoid giving an answer. We can no longer hide, evade, mumble, mollify and obscure. Nor can we hang on to legal sophistry about the "question of intent" or to wait for the ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which may only be handed down once it's too late.
It's already too late. That is why the time has come to call the horror by its name – and its full name is genocide, the extermination of a people. There is no other way to describe it. In front of our horrified eyes, Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. It did not begin now; it began in 1948. Now, however, sufficient evidence has accumulated to call the monstrous child in the Gaza Strip by its full name. [my emphasis] (3)
Levy is commenting on recent reports by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).
This marks the first time that Israeli human rights groups have officially determined that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The groups are now calling on the international community to take action against the Israeli government to stop these atrocities.
The B'Tselem report opens with a strong condemnation of Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel, noting that the group's assault included numerous war crimes and likely crimes against humanity.
The report also states that Israel's response was exceptionally brutal, resulting in widespread killing, destruction, displacement and starvation on a massive scale. …
"Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers about the nature of the assault on Gaza have expressed genocidal intent throughout," it added. [my emphasis]
Intent is a key element of the crime of genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. This has been the hardest element to establish in considering whether events of mass killing or ethnic cleansing are part of a genocide. Both are war crimes but by themselves don’t fulfill the standard of genocide.
Numerous Israeli leaders have openly expressed genocidal intent. And actions can also speak for themselves. As Levy writes:
When you destroy 33 out of 35 hospitals – the intent is transparent, and the debate is over. When you systematically erase entire neighborhoods, villages and cities – the doubts as to your intentions have come to an end. When you kill dozens of people every day waiting in line for food – the method has been proven beyond any doubt. When you use starvation as a weapon – no question marks exist any longer.
Nothing is missing any longer to understand that what is happening in Gaza is not the collateral damage of an ugly war – it is the objective. The mass starvation, destruction and death are the goal, and from here the path to the conclusion is short: genocide. [my emphasis]
(4) B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (2025): Our Genocide: B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel: Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip 07/28/2025. <https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20250728_our_genocide> (Accessed: 2025-31-07).
The ZEITGeschichte edition on imperialism that I’ve been discussing highlights four notable figures in criticizing imperialism and the war it generates.
One is the British economist J.A. (John Atkinson) Hodges, who the publication labels “the liberal.” Hodges covered the Boer War in South Africa and published critical books on the then-current state of war politics, including War in South Africa (1900); Psychology of Jingoism (1901), and Imperialism: A Study (1902), the latter being by far his most famous work.
The sketch of Hobson also notes that he held some anti-Jewish stereotypes. “Clearly anti-imperialism has never been a protection against antisemitism,” the sketch of him notes. Hobson argued that the capitalist economic system created strong pressures for military expansionism, citing the notorious British colonialist and Cecil Rhodes, whose name Britain’s African colony Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) carried and who was a co-founder of the De Beers diamond company, as an example of a financier who looked to colonial expansion as a major source of profit. Hobson was scarcely a “Third-Worldist” romantic. He considered “colonial primitive peoples” as inferior. But he also strongly criticized the war-producing dynamics of capitalist developments circa 1900.
One chapter in Hobson’s book was titled, “Imperialism and the Lower Races.” Though in the text the phrase “lower races” is put in quotation marks. And while he wasn’t using the language of our “postcolonial” times, Hobson did challenge the cynicism of the imperialists’ rhetoric of civilizing the natives:
In considering the ethics and politics of this interference, we must not be bluffed or blinded by critics who fasten on the palpable dishonesty of many practices of the gospel of “the dignity of labour ” and “the mission of civilization.” The real issue is whether, and under what circumstances, it is justifiable for Western nations to use compulsory government for the control and education in the arts of industrial and political civilization of the inhabitants of tropical countries and other so-called lower races, Because Rhodesian mine-owners or Cuban sugar-growers stimulate the British or American Government to Imperialism by parading motives and results which do not really concern them, it does not follow that these motives under proper guidance are unsound, or that the results are undesirable.
The Imperialismus issue features an 1882 cartoon showing Rhodes standing astride the continent of Africa.
Critics of imperialism in this era saw that tensions between European powers were rising and that those carried a risk of great-power war, which of course began in 1914 after Austrian Archduke Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand made his ill-fated trip to Sarajevo.
One of the symptoms of the tensions that eventually led to the Great War of 1914-18 was the Morocco Crisis of 1904-06, follow by another in 1911. These were “two international crises centring on France’s attempts to control Morocco and on Germany’s concurrent attempts to stem French power.” (1)
Hobson clearly argued that the economic developments were driving a very cynical and brutal process of colonialization at the time. And that the competition between great powers for imperial control over other nations was creating a major danger of great-power conflict.
The nature of the competition was partially regulated by international agreements. Hobson wrote:
he series of treaties and conventions between the chief European Powers, beginning with the Berlin African Conference of 1885, which fixed a standard for the “amicable division” of West African territory, and the similar treaty in 1890, fixing boundaries for English, German and Italian encroachments in East Africa, doubtless mark a genuine advance in the relations of the European Powers, but the objects and methods they embody throw a strange light upon the trust theory. If to the care of Africa we add that of China, where the European Powers took common action in “he interests of civilization,” the future becomes still more menacing. While the protection of Europeans was the object in the foreground, and imposed a brief genuine community of policy upon the diverse nations, no sooner was the immediate object won than the deeper and divergent motives of the nations became manifest.
And he proceeds directly to elaborate on how “[t]he entire history of European relations with China in modern times is little else than one long cynical commentary upon the theory that we are engaged in the civilization of the Far East.” It is often remarked today how much China’s present strategic outlook is still marked by the history of the Century of Humiliation of 1839-1949:
China was subjected to defeat, intervention, and exploitation by foreign powers in what is known as the Century of National Humiliation (百年国耻). The guiding ambitions of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] today - chiefly strengthening the nation against foreign influence and rectifying the wrongs inflicted upon China - are deeply rooted in this national narrative propagated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). (2)
MoveOn posted on Instagram this X/Twitter message of July 21 from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey:
Markey was linking to this story:
Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at jails operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) in the state since January, chronicled by the advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.
Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.
“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.
Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. [my emphasis] (1)
I recalled this when reading the following analysis from the late Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer:
[A]lthough the Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, they developed it in new ways. Especially novel was the intricate procedure by which they deprived inmates of their "normal" human attributes by systematic humiliation, which reached its peak in their use of what may be called excretionary control - total humiliation by controlling human excretions. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this development is that, to date, no Nazi document has been found that points to a discussion of how to humiliate victims. The conclusion is inevitable: humiliation was not the result of planning but of a consensus that did not require orders or bureaucratic arrangements. In other words, probably the most extreme form of humiliation known to us was the natural result of the Nazi system. [my emphasis] (2)
I don’t mean by quoting that to imply in any way that senior officials at ICE should not be held accountable for their crimes and abuses. Trump may be using that agency as a chief way of eroding the rule of law more generally. But it’s the responsibility of ICE officials up to its Director Todd Lyons and his boss Kristi Noem who thinks shooting puppies is fun to take precautions to make sure their agency isn’t committing criminal acts. And when they do, to make sure the criminals are fired from the agency and prosecuted.
I know at one level it’s laughable to say such a thing about the depraved characters running that agency. But it is their responsibility. And they should be held accountable for their lack of actions against this kind of cheap sadism. No matter how much the MAGA chuds get off hearing about it.
The Guardian report also talks about how the ICE sadists use the “excretionary control” Bauer mentions: “At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers or adequate food.”
And Republicans present themselves as the party of Jesus Christ. Listen and watch to see how many of the good Christian white folks in the Republican caucuses in Congress condemn this conduct. Hint: you’ll have to be very patient before you hear any of them doing that. If you’re placing bets on how many will, it would be wise not to pick a number with double digits.
But it’s not hard to say. They can simply use Sen. Markley’s phrase: “This is a violation of basic human dignity.”
But all the Republicans in Congress know that already. The question is how many of them will straightforwardly condemn this.
Peter Beinart is the Editor-at Large for Jewish Currents who has done a lot of solid critical analysis of Israel’s current situation in the Gaza genocide and the various other wars in which it is more-or-less currently involved: the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen.
In this video, he discusses the current conflicts with Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the left-liberal Zionist group, J Street. J Street is part of what is now commonly called the Israel Lobby, but it has taken a more critical view of Israel’s policies on Palestine than some of the more famous players in the Lobby, like AIPAC or Christians United For Israel. (1)
The discussion gives a glimpse of the larger American Jewish discussion and debate over the current situation.
The following video has Dean Obeidallah interviewing the Israeli-American historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov. (2) (I recently posted another Bartov interview here.)
Ryan Cooper also warns about the maximum goals of the real existing policies of the State of Israel:
One of the most grisly humanitarian crises in history is happening right now in Gaza. The Israeli military has reduced the enclave to ruins with constant bombing—killing perhaps 59,000 people in the process, at least three-quarters of them civilians, and 18,000 of them children. Gaza’s economy is buried in the rubble, and it is desperately short of food, water, and medicine. Thousands of tons of aid are sitting just miles away from Gaza’s border, but the Israeli government refuses to let most of it through. On the contrary, at the handful of aid stations that remain, Israeli troops are routinely massacring dozens of people queueing for food. A total of 1,000 people have been killed seeking food since May, according to the United Nations, mostly near sites operated by the shady American contractor Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has taken over aid distribution from the U.N. [my emphasis] (3)
The number of Palestinians killed in the current war is certainly understated in most reports because the conditions in Gaza don’t allow for any kind of reasonably definitive count of how many people have died there as a directed result of war and genocide since October 2023.
Cooper’s following description of the situation is on the mark:
In short, the Israeli government, with considerable support and backing from the United States, is deliberately and explicitly causing a famine in Gaza, and for good measure gunning down starving Gazans as they beg for their lives.
The endgame for Israel’s war against Palestine is coming into view: a Greater Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River (and perhaps beyond), created by the destruction of Palestine and the genocide of its people. Unless Israel is stopped, Gaza will be bombed and starved until the entire population is either dead or shipped off somewhere. Then the West Bank will receive the same treatment. [my emphasis]
One of the most cynical criticisms from the pro-genocide advocates during this war has been accusing antiwar activists who use the slogan “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” of advocating the killing of all Jews in Palestine when the official goal of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the goal of his government is just that, except for the “free” part.
Cooper also cites the findings of a poll in May that shows how jaded and supportive of the Israeli government’s current war and it’s the way it is being waged most Israelis were at the time of the poll, as reported here by Haaretz:
A recent survey of Israeli Jews reveals a growing comfort with the idea of forcibly expelling Palestinians – both from Gaza and from within Israel's borders. The poll also found that a significant minority supports the mass killing of civilians in enemy cities captured by the Israeli army. These disturbing trends reflect the radicalization of religious Zionism since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and the failure of secular Israeli Jews to articulate a vision that challenges Jewish supremacy. …
According to the results, 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp rise from a 2003 survey, in which support for such expulsions stood at 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively. (4) [my emphasis]
(2) Omer Bartov- Prof of Holocaust and Genocide Studies-tells brutal truth of what is happening in Gaza. Dean Obeidallah Show YouTube channel 07/28/2025. <https://youtu.be/yt065Soixn8?si=YoM73_KSpP49h1hP> (Accessed: 2025-28-07).
The stolidly-establishment Council on Foreign Relations recently published an analysis by Thomas Graham, author of Getting Russia Right (2023). He writes:
Three historical impulses provide insight into Putin’s ultimate goals: the impulse to expand control to enhance security, to return to … Russia state lands that were lost for various reasons, and to reunite the three branches of the greater Russian nation. Putin has used elements of all three narratives in his rhetoric since before he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. (1)
What he refers to as the “three branches” means Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Belarus is certainly in a close alliance with Belarus. As to how much of a “vassal state” it is, opinions may vary. It’s worth remembering that the “vassal state” is a feudal concept:
In feudal times, a “vassal” (from the medieval Latin vassallus, a servant) was not a low-born serf, but one who held land on condition of allegiance to a prince or king. ...
But “vassal” very quickly came to mean anyone in a subordinate position of power to another. Shakespeare calls himself a “vassal” to his lover as well as a “slave” in Sonnet 58, and Pope Pius V testily declared Elizabeth I a “vassal of iniquity”.
In the old language of international affairs, a “vassal state” was often obliged to pay money to its superior, and usually expected to provide military assistance on demand. (2)
To borrow from John Mearsheimer, who describes his version of “offense realism” in foreign policy as based on the observation that great powers are particularly sensitive to another great power acquiring power and influence in what they consider their neighboring area. As an example, just this year, the Trump 2.0 regime has threatened military against Mexico and Panama, and implicitly against Canada. It’s also demanded that Brazil flush its rule of law down the drain when it comes to prosecuting the attempted insurrection that their authoritarian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro incited. And, as Mearsheimer often points out, the US has still never forgiven Cuba for the 1962 Missile Crisis. (Though Obama did ease sanctions on Cuba when he was President.)
So, yes, Russia does pay attention to what goes on with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and – oh, yeah – China and Japan. Feigning surprise about that is popular among hawkish types. But it’s also more than a little silly.
The non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact were often referred to as vassal states of the Soviet Union. And the USSR did dominate their internal politics in a major way. But if by “vassal” state we mean that vassals pay financial tribute to the dominant country, it’s dubious if they qualified. A major reason for the collapse of the USSR was that it was a great financial burden for them to subsidize the other Warsaw Pact nations.
Graham goes to one of those broad historical generalizations about Russia in a formulation suggesting the kind of historical essentialism that so often clouds Western thinking:
Even after [Putin] annexed four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia - in the fall of 2022, he continued to insist his goal was not territorial conquest but security. That is disingenuous, for territory and security have been inextricably intertwined in Russian strategic thinking for centuries. The question is how much territory Putin believes Russia has to dominate in order to feel secure. [my emphasis]
It's not as though strategic considerations from earlier centuries are fully irrelevant today. The Monroe Doctrine which still governs US strategic thinking about Latin America was first adopted by the John Quincy Adams Administration of 1825-1829. And while that framework is still used by the US, American policy has varied considerably over those two centuries. It’s been nearly 180 years since the US forcibly annexed one-third of Mexico’s territory in what Americans call the Mexican War of 1846-1848. And the US has meddled in Mexican politics way more than it should have since then – including military intervention during the Mexican Revolution of 1810-1821. But that doesn’t mean that the US is still looking to annex Mexican territory. But since Trump 2.0 is threatening to seize territory from Panama, Canada, and even Denmark (Greenland), the longer history is relevant to understanding the current strategic picture.
The same is true of Russia and China. The fact that Ukraine was once part of the Russian Empire and then of the Soviet Union does not tell us that Russia’s current goal is the physical conquest of all of Ukraine. In fact, Graham describes Russia’s likely goal in the war at the moment in much the way Mearsheimer does, i.e., keeping immediate control of at least four eastern Ukraine provinces and the Crimean Peninsula (which is still legally part of Ukraine) and installing a friendly government in Kiev. Graham:
For the moment, the limits of Putin’s ambitions are difficult to discern. To be sure, he has been clear from the beginning that he wishes to subjugate Ukraine. How much of the country he wants to formally annex is uncertain, but he would strip any part of Ukraine that lies beyond Russia’s direct control of genuine independence and sovereignty, reducing it to a vassal state, such as Belarus is today. [my emphasis]
Russia is not occupying or annexing any part of Belarus. We can speculate about whether Russia’s supposed Grand Vision Of History means that is what obtuse Russian-nationalist publicists want. But that’s not what Russia is doing right now.
Beyond Ukraine, Putin has denied any aggressive intent or designs on any state’s territory. But his repeated threats of dire consequences for European states that step up their support to Ukraine, as well as his escalating campaign of disinformation and sabotage across Europe, have understandably raised concern. Prevalent among Western commentators is the view that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will undoubtedly turn his sights on other states of the former Soviet Union, such as the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—all of which are NATO members. At the extreme, some believe he even intends to restore the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in eastern Europe through covert operations or direct military assault on former Soviet Bloc countries, such as Poland. [my emphasis]
Phrases like “some believe” and “raised concern” generally require closer scrutiny. Among Trumpistas in America, “some believe” in Alex Jones’ claim that there are lizard people from outer space walking around disguised as Earthlings. But while it may be a fact that “some believe” that, it doesn’t make the claim any kind of accurate description of reality.
That wording is also disingenuous when it comes to the Baltic states. Both the NATO and EU treaties include them, and both treaties include a mutual-defense clause. Foreign policy realists like George Kennan warned in the 1990s that the further east NATO expanded, the more likely it would be that Russia would regard that as a security threat. We can quibble as to whether that is rational or nice for Russia to react that way. But if we picture Mexico, Canada, and Cuba joining a military alliance with China that includes a mutual-defense clause, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture the freakout even the most stiffly establishment foreign-policy analysts and policymakers would have. (I.e., they would lose their minds.)
As Kaarel Pürimäe reminded us last year:
Arguing against [Bill] Clinton’s decision [to expand NATO] was the last significant thing Kennan did in his life. In October 1996, at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, Kennan reacted to a talk by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, calling the plan of NATO enlargement a ‘strategic blunder of epic proportions’. In an article in the New York Times the following year, he famously argued that it ‘would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. Kennan expected that NATO expansion would give rise to undemocratic and anti-Western forces in Russia and would lead to another Cold War, but was certain that official Washington would persist. He was right: it proved easy for Clinton to ignore not only Kennan, whose credibility was undermined by his long-standing opposition to NATO, but, more remarkably, the majority of the U.S. foreign policy and scholarly establishments.
Kennan’s warnings are cited as prophetic by scholars who view NATO expansion as a fateful miscalculation. Intellectual sources of the criticism vary, but most tend to point out the anachronism of preserving a Cold-War institution made to contain an adversary that no longer existed. It is argued that by expanding NATO, which in Russia was viewed as a threat to its status, if not security, the United States betrayed the West’s most ardent supporters and gave ammunition to anti-Western, nationalist, and neo-imperialist voices in that country. [my emphasis] (3)
In the case of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania – which were part of the Soviet Union - every European policymaker knows what it would mean in a very practical way if Russia actually started seizing territory there (Estonia is currently cited as the most likely candidate) and what that would do to the ever-treasured Credibility of both alliances if their Western allies didn’t respond militarily in an active way.
By the way, it’s also a safe presumption that any Russian civilian or military strategist who doesn’t spend 12 hours a day every day toking joints also realizes that the Western powers see things that way.
Graham’s concluding recommendations for four policy measures and general strategic considerations are pretty much safe and bland generalizations. Like: “In the best-case scenario, Russian rulers could even reinterpret Russian history to develop a new narrative for Russia’s greatness and global mission that appears less threatening to its immediate neighbors.”
The Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing is continuing. And it’s being reported live on television for the world to see. Here’s a report from Owen Jones discussing that set of facts: (1)
Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the actual scholarly experts on the exceptionally grim subject of genocide. In retrospect, when we look back at the early statements of Israeli officials immediately after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, those statements look like part of a genocidal plan.
Bartov here explains why he was initially reserved in describing this as a genocide until he saw a pattern of action by the Israel government and armed forces that confirmed the genocidal intent of those earlier statements. (2)
In this grim field, “ethnic cleansing” can be a feature of genocide and is a crime in itself. But the UN Genocide Convention does not make ethnic cleansing itself equivalent to genocide. It’s a comment on the sad state of humanity that it was only after the Second World War that ethnic cleansing came to be considered an illegitimate action. The peace treaties after the First World War, the Potsdam Agreement among the Allies during the Second World War, and the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact) of 1939 all endorsed large-scale ethnic cleansing. (3)
The United States has been supporting this genocide under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. There is no excuse for either of them for doing so.
Germany is the second-largest military supplier of Israel. And it’s now in the 2025 version of the long process of “working through” the Holocaust. A large part of that effort has been to support the State of Israel with minimal criticism. That has the perverse result that now Germany finds itself supporting a very public genocide that has gone on for a year and a half and gets worse by the day.
Bartov comments in his interview about something which I had not heard addressed this way until now. He claims that various museums and historical groups that focus on Holocaust remembrance have declined to criticize the current genocide under way. He makes a comment that surprised me, which is that he thinks it’s very possible going forward that while Holocaust studies and genocide studies have been interconnected fields, that they may now become two separate fields that don’t actively cooperate and interact with each other as they have in the past.
It has long been a matter of discussion whether the Holocaust is a particularly Jewish issue or a more general one. The ecumenical theologian Hans Küng discussed the Jewish religious angle on that question in his 1995 book Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, three decades ago. And the discussion continues to evolve. Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust scholar who headed Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum’s International Institute for Holocaust Research from 1995-2000 and founded the Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal, insisted that the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust such as gays, Sinti and Roma, and the developmentally disabled be understood as victims of the Holocaust.
Bauer passed away in 2024. In December 2023, he wrote:
History does not repeat itself, and we would agree that the events of October 7, however horrific, are distinct from the Holocaust. Hamas, whatever its murderous ideology and the unimaginable atrocities it has committed, should not be seen as a modern-day reincarnation of the Nazis. In contrast to the popular tendency to view the Holocaust and that Black Shabbat [October 7 Hamas attack] as almost equivalent, comparative analysis in history entails the recognition of both similarities and differences. While the two terrible events share certain similarities, such as the chilling brutality of the killings, the underlying ideological hatred, and even the voices that deny these crimes, fundamental differences between the two events are immense. (4)
(2) "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 07/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/QfmW0AQWV5E?si=m5gkWCXfbG4yW2tx> (Accessed: 2025-25-07).
(3) Schwartz, Michael (2013): Ethnische „Säuberungen“ in der Moderne. Globale Wechselwirkungen nationalistischer und rassistischer Gewaltpolitik im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. München: Oldenbourg.
(4) Bauer, Yehuda (2023): Preserving historical integrity: a call to avoid politicising the Holocaust. Jewish Chronicle 12/08/2023. (Accessed: 2025-25-07).
The bimonthly history magazine from Die Zeit just published a new issue on imperialism, using the topic to help frame the new situation in Europe in which the US has more-or-less declared European security as something Trump 2.0 doesn’t care about.
The cover features a grumpy Trump, a smirking Putin, and a confidently grinning Xi Jinping standing over a globe with Putin pointing to Europe. Ranged behind them are ghostly images of Kaiser Bill (Germany’s Wilhelm II), Napoleon, and the mythical Britannica. (Britannica was the Roman name for their British province.) The issue’s subtitle is The Return of Power Politics: Struggle Over the World from 1800 Until Today..
The German political scientist Herfried Münkler discusses the general topic of empires in an interview.
Analytically, large imperial areas are one model of world order, and state systems are the other. The central problem of state systems - such as the ancient Greek poleis or the European nation states - is that they often wage war among themselves. In contrast, empires can claim to be relatively stable orders of prosperity and peace. It is no coincidence that longer periods of peace such as the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana, the Pax Britannica or even the Pax Mongolica are named after empires. (1)
There were empires in the ancient world, like the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great and, of course, the Roman Empire. Later there would be the Mongol Empire, the Sassanian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and various other. These were political agglomerations ruled by an emperor, with various levels of royalty and nobility forming part of a hierarchy of rule.
The period we now call the Age of Imperialism is used for a more restricted timeframe:
Imperialism has been present and prominent since the beginning of history, and its most intensive phase occurred in the Axial Age [1st Millennium BCE]. But the concept of the Age of Imperialism refers to the period pre-dating World War I. While the end of the period is commonly fixed in 1914, the date of the beginning varies between 1760 and 1870. According to Historians Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé, the widespread use of the term "Age of Empire" for this specific period reflects a Eurocentric bias in terms of time. (2)
European colonialism was obviously a huge part of the history of empires – colonies being the “periphery” of the imperial “metropole.” Anja Fries dates the European version from 1415 “with the capture of the Moroccan coastal city of Ceuta by Portugal.” (3) There are very few formal colonies left in today’s world. (Seventeen, to be exact.) The UN’s list of “non-self-governing territories” (euphemism for colonies) include places like the Malvinas/Falkland Islands which rightly belong to Argentina, Gibraltar which rightly belongs to Spain, and American Samoa. (4)
The symbolism is a bit garbled, but the theme is that the world is now becoming multipolar, which is also known as “the end of America’s unipolar moment.” But it doesn’t hurt to know about the history of imperialism for the last 225 years or so. As long as we don’t have to listen to a lot of nonsensical comparisons to the Roman Empire. Münkler says in polite language that those comparisons aren’t much more than literary flourishes.
There has been a lot of intensive tea-leaf-reading over Russian intentions during the last decade. And there promises to be more of it for the indefinite future. How the rest of Europe deals with Russia – which itself has both European and Asian parts – has been an obsession for several centuries.
Münkler has this to say about in relation to the Russian problem:
We are witnessing the return of an imperial policy that was no longer thought possible after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/90. At that time, political scientists and historians were almost unanimously of the opinion that the era of the large empires was over. In fact, however, empires have never lost their appeal.
This is a cautionary example. Since 1989, the US has been involved in the First Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War that began in 2001 and which became America’s longest war, the Iraq War, and various interventions in places like Libya and Syria. In fact, the “unipolar moment” of 1989-2022 became one in which the US was more free to make various kinds of military interventions than prior to that. What constitutes “imperialism” has evolved since the days of Alexander the Great. So historical analogies always need to be treated with caution.
I plan to do some additional posts drawing on this Imperialismus issue of ZEITGeschichte.
Notes:
(1) Münkler, Herfried (2025); »Bis Russland resigniert« (Interview). ZEITGeschichte 4-2025, 114-119. My translation to English.
Seymour Hersh just reported on what he makes sound like a US coup plan against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the current Ukrainian Ambassador to Britain, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi:
Zaluzhnyi is now seen as the most credible successor to Zelensky. I have been told by knowledgeable officials in Washington that that job could be his within a few months. Zelensky is on a short list for exile, if President Donald Trump decides to make the call. If Zelensky refuses to leave his office, as is most likely, an involved US official told me: “He’s going to go by force. The ball is in his court.” There are many in Washington and in Ukraine who believe that the escalating air war with Russia must end soon, while there’s still a chance to make a settlement with its president, Vladimir Putin.
There are indications that Zelensky knows what is coming. He has just shifted or fired three officials: the minister of defense, the prime minister, and the ambassador to the United States. As the US official told me, Zelensky “is beginning to read the danger signs.”
What happens next, the official added, in terms of political violence inside Kiev and elsewhere, depends largely “on the degree to which the population has reached the point where they have no other choice. Zelensky will not go willingly but feet first. Herein lies a US internal debate. Smart side says let the Ukrainians sort it out by themselves and not get the CIA involved to seal the deal. So far, good sense drives the policy. But some unnamed leaders are impatient and this will take time—more than fifty days.” [my emphasis] (1)
I don’t know what to make of this. And it’s easy to imagine numerous ways that someone might spin a story like this to a reporter. Hoping that Zelenskyy and his government may take it as a serious threat is obviously one of them.
Or, it could be some neocon trying to paint Zelenskyy’s critics as Russian dupes or willing collaborators:
Meanwhile, I was unable to learn whether Putin was aware of the US desire to push Zelensky out, but I did learn that Zaluzhnyi has maintained a working relationship with Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces and a Putin confidant. Gerasimov, as I have previously written, was one of the few to know in advance that Zaluzhnyi would tell the Economist that the war was stalemated.
Given the stunning inept diplomacy and ham-fisted actions that we’ve seen during Trump 2.0 so far, the idea that this crew could pull off something so complicated as a coup on behalf of the Russians or on behalf of some Peace President master plan to end the war seems like a real stretch of the imagination.
Hersh also reports a US official telling him is getting desperate to end the war because of the level of Russian casualties:
I have been provided with new Russian casualty numbers, from carefully evaluated US and British intelligence estimates, that show that Russia has suffered two million casualties—nearly double the current public numbers—since Putin started the war in early 2022. “Putin is not afraid of losing power, but he is losing popularity,” the US official said, “and Donald Trump is Zelensky’s supplier and the only one who can keep the Ukraine war going. Who’s got real power? It isn’t Zelensky. His only lifeline is the US. Trump is asking, ‘How do we get the pissants to stop? He thinks he’s the only one who can make the deal.
Given the chaotic mess of the current administration, it wouldn’t surprise me if wild schemes, like this one sounds to be, were kicking around inside it.
But since doesn’t have the diplomatic talent to answer an annoying question from a reporter in an awful way, pulling off a plan this elaborate is very difficult to imagine from the Trump crew. But it may win him the Nobel Prize for Botched Coup Plans.
Or maybe his people suddenly discovered the coup of 1963 against South Vietnam’s endorsed by the Kennedy Administration and decided to try to duplicate it in Ukraine. The coup was supposed to better enable to let the South Vietnamese defeat North Vietnam and the Vietcong. That part really didn’t work out so well.
In a speech to Chatham House in March of this year, Zaluzhnyi made the following opaque remarks:
It was through Ukraine, which seemingly lost the ability to solve the problem of war on its own in 2023, mainly due to the fears of our partners, that forced Russia to openly create the so-called Axis – the Axis of Evil. Who is part of this Axis – you all understand perfectly. And it was then, back in 2024, when these countries were concluding strategic agreements, that it was necessary to consider whether this was a continuation of the policy of revising the current world order system. …
Human and economic losses in Ukraine, spending resources on war, migration, sanctions policy, lack of cheap energy resources and markets, as well as other problems have become a colossal economic burden for the economies of all sides involved in the war, slowing down their development and creating risks of already global crises.
After all, the war in Ukraine has practically exhausted the economic and industrial “margin of strength” in most countries, especially Russia, the United States, and Europe. They really lack resources to continue military actions, while the deployment of weapons production turned out to be excessive if agreements to end hostilities were reached.
Thus, we can assert that there are formal reasons for revising the world order today. The starting point for such a revision, of course, can be considered the future end of the war in Ukraine and the formation of a new world order precisely according to its results. Indeed, the old world order itself is already almost completely destroyed today. For example, it is obvious today that the White House has questioned the unity of the Western world. In addition, Washington is already trying to shift the security and defence of Europe to their own forces, without the United States. (2)
We’ll see what develops. But Hersh’s report is at least worth noticing for reference in the near term.
Robert Kaplan gives us a timely reminder of how important nuclear nonproliferation is:
A big reason why no one has dropped or fired a nuclear weapon in wartime in the 80 years since Nagasaki—a remarkable fact that almost no one would have thought possible at the time—is the fear of its consequences, aka Mutually Assured Destruction: If you blow us to smithereens, we’ll blow you to smithereens.
Yet in another sense, in the decades since, military officers and civilian strategists have tried to work around Truman’s warning—have tried to figure out how to turn the bomb into “a military weapon.” In the early days of the Nuclear Age, the top generals, like Curtis LeMay, the first head of the Strategic Air Command [the real-life version of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper], did so with a ruthless attitude: War was about killing people and destroying countries, so the bigger the bomb, the better. However, later on, some strategists thought about how to fight a nuclear war because they calculated doing so was the best way to deter such a war from happening. (1)
Through the 1990s, there was still a largely bipartisan understanding and assumption that nuclear arms control was a good and necessary element of national security policy.
But now, writes Ross Anderson, “The decades-long effort to keep nuclear weapons from spreading across the planet may be about to collapse.” (2)
Trump was very impressed with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during his first term. But Trump’s supposed efforts to get an nuclear nonproliferation agreement with his friend Kim – they wrote each other “love letters,” Trump said – just failed. And North Korea now has nuclear weapons. As Anderson notes, this is not something which South Korea has failed to notice:
Kim Jong Un has ruled as dictator in Pyongyang for 13 years, during which he has often threatened the South with reunification by force, and, more recently, outright annexation, just as Vladimir Putin has attempted in Ukraine. Kim is quickly expanding his nuclear arsenal. He already has dozens of warheads, and has threatened to use them not only as defensive weapons of last resort, but in a first strike that would turn Seoul into a “sea of flames.”
For decades, the threat of intense U.S. retaliation helped keep Kim’s father and grandfather from invading the South. But Kim rules at a time when Pax American looks to be winding down. Under Trump, the United States is now reported to be considering pulling troops out of South Korea, though administration officials have denied that. “The Korean people do not know if the U.S. commitment to them is real,” Heo told me. They may soon decide that to deter Kim, they need nuclear weapons of their own. [my emphasis]
The nuclear threat is not going to be maintained by Iraq War-style “wars of liberation” or by US-promoted revolutions against government controlling nuclear weapons.
And Trump in his first term just blowing off the effective arms-control agreement with Iran (JCPOA) virtually guarantees that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.
This is an issue where rational calculation and a realistic evaluation of their national interests on the part of countries like South Korea can lead to more proliferation. But the more countries that acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that others will acquire them, as well. And the overall risk of nuclear war rises, even though it may be entirely practical and reasonable for South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterring North Korea, it exposes both countries to the risk of catastrophic levels of destruction that wouldn’t otherwise be the case.
But for nuclear arms control worldwide to be successful, the existing nuclear powers – particularly the US, Russia, Britain, and France will also have to consistently and permanently respect the national sovereignty of countries that agree to forego building their own nukes. At this point, the opposite has been the case for Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and now Iran.
Trump’s blowhard talk about abandoning NATO allies – and literally threatening two of them, Denmark and Canada, with military attack and annexation – also make US allies like South Korea ask questions about how reliable US support for them is in the case of a war with nuclear-armed North Korea.
One of the worst consequences of the “unipolar moment” of the United States in the post-USSR world that that it has created huge incentives for countries to accelerate the nuclear arms race. It didn’t have to be this way. After 1989, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and South Africa all agreed to dispose of their nuclear weapons. Now the proliferation train is up and running again.
Anderson also notes that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a cornerstone agreement against the spread of nuclear weapons, could fall apart:
Indeed, the entire Non-Proliferation Treaty regime could unravel altogether. When Israel, India, and Pakistan went nuclear, they were not part of the Non- Proliferation Treaty (nor are they today), but South Korea is a member in good standing and Japan is, in some sense, the treaty’s soul. If those two countries flout the agreement, it will have effectively dissolved. Jake Sullivan, the former U.S. national security adviser, told me that the risk of a global proliferation cascade wouldrise “considerably.” The initial regional cascades are easy to imagine. The American pullback in Ukraine has already made Poland and Germany a lot more interested in going nuclear. If the Iranian nuclear program survives Israel’s attacks and develops a weapon successfully, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will likely want arsenals as well. The number of countries that have nuclear arms could quickly double. [my emphasis]
And, as Eric Ross recently reminded us:
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to two billion lives worldwide. (3)
Robert Gates was the US Secretary of Defense 2006-2011. The means he served as Shrub Bush’s and Dark Lord Cheney’s SecDef. And then Obama kept him on in the position, which in itself was an unusual step for the President of a different party coming into the White House. This was an early signal that Obama was not especially interested in de-militarizing US foreign policy.
I find this interview interesting I providing a 2000’s neocon take on the current Russia-Ukraine War. Katie Couric can do good interviews. But she really seems to be “phoning it in” here. (1)
Gates cites a figure that “Russia” (the USSR) suffered only 15,000 deaths in its years of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, and that seems to be a reasonable estimate. He uses it to emphasize how much larger the Russian losses in the current war have been.
But that take on the Soviet-Afghan War steps on a favorite neocon article of faith. Which is that the US-backed jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan – we called Afghan jihadists “brave patriotic freedom fighters” at the time – was so unpopular and damaged the USSR so badly that it collapsed entirely. And that very imaginative reading of that history still informs Western assumptions about Russian politics and the utility of sponsoring a proxy war against Russia.
Gates recites a favorite conservative cliché that the US public’s tolerance for military conflicts depends on how long it lasts and how many casualties. On the one hand, this is a banal observation. Even dumb wars normally enjoy a rally-round-the-flag effect in public opinion for at least a few weeks. But that perspective that Gates recites as though it were common knowledge is actually an ideological argument in favor of using massive firepower in wars.
The argument goes that the more the US relies on airpower in a war, the less unpopular the war will be over time because this supposedly minimizes US casualties. His predecessor as SecDef in the Cheney-Bush Administration, Don Rumsfeld, was particularly fond of this kind of argument which fed into the popular trend in US military thinking of the time that carried the label Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). (2)
In the Iraq War, it was supposed to allow the US to decapitate Saddam Hussein’s government by relying on bombs and other high-tech assets, allow the US to quickly install a new US-friendly government, and do it all with a minimum of “boots on the ground” and do it all very quickly.
After the US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the RMA mantra somehow was no longer fashionable.
One of the long-standing ideological justifications for this is an argument made by political scientist John Mueller in his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (1973). It’s an argument I’ve never found particularly persuasive.
Gates isn’t exactly the most impressive foreign policy advocate. But it’s worth paying attention to arguments that may be bad but are still sadly influential.
To his credit, though, he does debunk the effectiveness of the Israeli-US so-called Twelve Day War again Iran this year in restricting the Iranian nuclear program. But he also seems to think that encouraging regime-change in Iran is still a good idea.
And he’s downright mealy-mouthed about Trump’s outrageous use of US soldiers and federalized National Guard forces in Los Angeles.
This year has already seen the beginnings of a major reorientation of European defense policy. The European members of NATO – and Türkiye, if one doesn’t consider it part of Europe – realize they cannot depend on the US to stick by its previous, decades-long commitment to defending Europea in case of a Russian aggression on a member state.
One of the giant issues involved in this is nuclear deterrence. The “balance of terror” in the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) concept has been that both the US and Russia/USSR knew that if they initiated a nuclear attack on the other, they would also be hit with a full-on nuclear attack. And this “nuclear umbrella” has also in the past extended to Russian use of nuclear arms in Europe.
The case of Stanislav Petrov, known (rightly) as “the man who saved the world” – or who at least saved humanity – illustrates what a miracle it is that we’ve gone almost exactly 80 years without an atomic bomb being used in wartime.
Stanislav Petrov (1939-2017), who made the key decision that the human
race should still be around after 1983
In a present-tense account of his life, Stella Kleinman writes:
Petrov retires from the research institution [where he then worked] to care for his wife as she battles cancer. After she passes away in 1997, he lives alone in Fryazino, a suburb of Moscow, with his army pension. At one point he resorts to growing potatoes to feed himself. He is haunted by the [1983] affair, claiming that nuclear weapons require human actions and that “a person can always make a mistake.”
“Petrov argues that only the complete elimination of nuclear weapons by all countries will spare the world from an eventual strike. Petrov does not trust people, nor does he trust machines. What he trusts least of all is a person who becomes a cog in a machine.” (1)
But it was and is a critical aspect of preventing nuclear war to reduce the amount of nuclear arms in the world. But the post-1989 world, and the United States in particular, frittered away the opportunity to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. Donald Trump, with his first-term decision to pull out of the JCPOA nonproliferation agreement with Iran and his decision this year to join Israel in a joint “twelve-day war” against Iran, just set back the nonproliferation cause even further. The fact that Trump probably has only the most rudimentary understand of either nuclear arms control or the international nonproliferation regime is also not a promising sign.
The New START treaty of the US and Russia is the most important nuclear-arms limitation agreement currently in force. Under the Biden Administration, both countries agreed to extend it until February 5, 2026. (2) What Trump 2.0 decides to do with that treat next February could very easily be the most consequential decision he makes. Short of starting a nuclear war himself, of course.
Tara Dordenko wrote earlier this year:
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining bilateral arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, will expire one year from today, on February 5, 2026. New START legally limits the number of long-range nuclear weapons both countries can deploy. Moreover, it seems unlikely that a follow-on agreement will be negotiated and finalized in the year remaining. [my emphasis] (3)
It would certainly be in the interest of Europe – and the rest of the world – for this agreement to be extended.
The issue of a European “nuclear shield” involves France and Britain cooperating to make a credible commitment to Mutually Assured Destruction against a Russian nuclear attack since the American one has already lost much of its credibility.
It will also inevitably include discussions that have already begun about whether Germany and Poland should develop their own nuclear arsenals as deterrence.
The MAD concept of deterrence is a framework that does not have to do with Russian or US intensions. It’s a truism, not always observed as strictly as it should be, that civilian officials are responsible for measuring the intentions of potential adversaries while the military concentrates on the capabilities. Nuclear missiles are capabilities. And even if relations between Russia and the US, and between Russia and Europe, were on the friendliest of terms, the fact that the other side has the capabilities of making a devastating nuclear attack still have to be taken into full account.
That’s why verifiable limitations on the number and types of nuclear weapons are so critical. But as long as those capabilities are there, the civilian policymakers will have to take full account of that fact.
That need for defense cooperation between the EU nations and Britain also has larger implications. Timothy Garton Ash recently wrote:
Just like Tony Blair a quarter-century ago, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has talked of Britain being a “bridge” between Europe and the US. But what kind of a bridge can it be today, when the UK is outside the EU and Trump is putting in question the whole transatlantic relationship, with a special animus towards the EU?
There was only ever one way to take Brexit to its logical conclusion, and that was to become an offshore Greater Switzerland, a north European Singapore. To seek profit wherever you could find it, whatever those states were doing to their neighbours or their own citizens; to be a nation with the morals of a hedge fund. Ironically enough, the European country that comes closest to this cynical “multialigning” is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a full member state of the EU. But this was never a serious option even for the majority of Brexiters, who had five or six different (and generally vague) visions of what a post-Brexit Britain should be. For most Britons, it would be completely incompatible with our sense of what Britain should do and be in the world. (4)
In other words, the new geopolitical situation is presenting European nations including Britain with pressing choices to be made – and not just about strictly military issues alone – that did not seem so pressing when Joe Biden was still in the White House. Such as possibly rejoining the EU.
Garton Ash laments that Starmer is “[s]trangely maladroit in domestic politics.” But:
His cabinet is full of individuals who, like him, seem well-intentioned, competent and decent. A little boring perhaps – but a glance at the Trump administration shows you there are worse things than that. The UK has a heap of problems, but so does every European country I know. British democracy has survived the stress test of Brexit better than US democracy is surviving that of Trump. Socially and culturally, there is still much to be said for Britain’s everyday tolerance, creativity and humour. [my emphasis]
Yes, it’s becoming common in European political commentary to point to Trump’s 2.0 regime as a cautionary tale about how democracy can be undermined. Sadly, with good reason.
