Russia-Ukraine War and no end in sight

I’m planning to visit a museum exhibition in the next couple of weeks on the Peasant War of 1525-26. That was an early-modern uprising of farmers and townspeople to defend their rights against nobles and big landowners and the Church officials both Catholic and Protestant who backed them. It was an early democratic revolt by the standards of democracy then emerging. One of the most important leaders was Thomas Münzer, an earlier Reformation theologian, who broke with Martin Luther over Luther’s bitter opposition to the rebellion.

I’m not sure why the artist of this image portrays the rebels as looking like stereotypical cavemen.

Translation: “Heroic and Enlightened: The Peasants’ War in the Mirror of Art and Dictatorship”

It’s easier to come up with dramatic descriptions to define events of long ago in broad characterizations than it is with more recent or ongoing ones. Like the Russia-Ukraine War.

Robert Skidelsky, biographer of John Maynard Keynes and Member of the British House of Lords, recently took a look at the messy state of affairs in the current war. One of five issues he discusses in connection with the current, rapidly evolving state of European collective defensive is “military Keynesianism,” the concept of boosting economic growth and health by using heavy government spending to stimulate the economy. He cites a recent policy brief from the Centre for European Reform (CER) that discusses the current policies and relevant issues. (2)

The CER report argues that the current European approach:

... lacks a clear framework to prioritise harmful dependencies and find the most growth-compatible way to address them – and too narrow, by not systematically contemplating support for trade diversification or improvements to Europe’s business environment to boost European investment.

The report looks at a wide range of trade and investment challenges that Europe currently faces, including stimulative measures taken to boost economic growth. Skidelsky focuses his comments on the type of growth stimulus used and draws these conclusions:

[M]uch of the EU’s rearmament agenda is being justified through the language of security, yet in practice functions as an attempt to revive Europe’s weak productivity and failing industrial base - an industrial strategy masquerading as a defence imperative, in effect a post-pandemic and post-stagnation strategy of military Keynesianism. From this perspective, the insistence on an existential Russian threat functions not simply as a strategic assessment but as political cover for a massive industrial mobilisation that EU leaders hope will restore European economic competitiveness. [my emphasis]

And he points to the problems of using an external military threat to justify measures to move away from the neoliberal, austerity dogmas that have unnecessarily limited Europe’s growth and underfunded its social security networks:

I agree that Europe needs new sources of growth, but the attempt to smuggle industrial policy in under the banner of a war footing—by cultivating fear and exaggerating threats—is neither honest nor acceptable. Manufacturing a warlike mindset to legitimise economic renewal may be politically convenient, but it corrodes democratic debate and risks locking Europe into a perpetual militarisation that has little to do with Europe’s real economic challenges. [my emphasis]

Since austerity policies have been a serious drag on growth and general prosperity in the EU for 25 years or more, the perceived need to focus on increased military spending has the positive effect of discrediting austerity policies. Large-scale military spending does not normally provide the same kind of stimulative effects on economies that raising wages and salaries broadly does. But the shock of the drastic US political change in attitude toward Europe, with its major implications for long-standing collective-defense policies, actually is helping to discredit austerity economics.

At the same time the danger that Skidelsky perceive in “threat inflation – or, less politely paranoia” is also real. There is a real and practical problem in the need to reconfigure European defensive capabilities as a long-term balancing strategy against potential Russian threats that does require military spending increases. But Britain and other European powers are also not immune to threat inflation coming not only from sloppy evaluations of real foreign-policy considerations but also from the allure of profits to weapons manufacturers that come from large increases in military spending.

Threat inflation has been one of the worst plagues for American foreign policy since the Second World War. It has done a lot of damage to the US position and to the countries where the US waged unnecessary wars based on sometimes wild overestimations of potential exterior threats. Not every military dustup or terrorist attack needs to be treated like a new edition of Pearl Harbor 1941.

Skidelsky singles out recent appeals by one of his fellow House of Lords members, Georg Robertson, who served as the NATO Secretary General from 1999-2003, who in 2020 argued that NATO had “a ‘moral obligation’ to support the US if it does to war against Iraq.” And he “defended the US president, George Bush, who he said was committed to acting through the United Nations to disarm the regime of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.” (3)

It's safe to say that this is not a person whose past judgment shows him to be especially perceptive when it comes to foreign threat evaluations. And today he’s saying, “we need to be worried as a country as a whole that if Russia got the space to reconstitute its armed forces - and it’s already doing so - but if it could on a grander scale, then clearly the rest of Europe is in danger.”

Skidelsky offers this reality check:

Yet [Robertson’s] presentation of the Russian threat is weird. He presents Russia as economically failing, militarily inept (“advancing one millimetre at a time” in Ukraine), and demographically imploding (“the younger generation being eliminated”), while simultaneously arguing that Russia is an existential threat not just to its neighbours but to Europe as a whole (the UK is “directly in the crosshairs”).

These two claims cannot both be true. A state suffering acute demographic decline, a stalled military, and a failing economy cannot simultaneously constitute a multi-theatre threat to Europe. The case achieves its bare minimum of plausibility by suggesting that the Russian threat against which we have to arm ourselves takes the form of “greyfare” rather than warfare: activities such as cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, sabotage, political meddling, and proxy operations—actions just below the threshold of war, which in fact obliterate the distinction between peace and war. But it is absurd to argue that such threats, which may well exist, justify spending an extra 4% of GDP on “whole-society” defence. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, in Ukraine ...

At the moment, it looks like the war will continue until Russia is tired of doing so. This would presumably be when they decide they have sufficient control of enough of Ukraine to keep the unconquered parts in the condition of a rump state, one left with an unresolved conflict that will require efforts to support an internal resistance in the Russian-occupied areas and that also limits Ukraine’s development and its ability to conduct an independent foreign policy.

If conditions were right, having a ceasefire in the regular military conflict for a number of years could be a hopeful solution compared to years of active warfare between the Russian and Ukrainian regular armed forces. Putin won’t be in office forever, and neither will Trump.

So there is no obvious immediate prospect for an extended ceasefire, much less a substantive peace agreement.

Nikolay Mitrokhin writes in the Osteuropa blog on the war:

Ukraine has agreed with the US and European states on a negotiating position and a possible course of action after a ceasefire. The territorial question is still unresolved. But in any case, Russia is unlikely to agree with these positions. The current course of the war therefore has a major influence on the course of the talks. The Ukrainian army is still under pressure. Moscow expects that its negotiating position will improve in the coming months. More likely than a ceasefire on the ground is a partial moratorium on air and sea warfare brokered by Turkey. [my emphasis] (4)

The organization publishing the longtime academic journal Osteuropa – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e.V. - is classified by Russia as an “unwanted organization” and an “extremist organization,” so it’s safe to assume it does not have a pro-Russian bias!

Notes:

(1) Skidelsky, Robert (2025): Ukraine - the delusion of the warmongers. Lord Robert Skidelsky’s Substack 12/15/2025. <https://robertskidelsky.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-delusion-of-the-warmongers> (Accessed: 2025-15-12).

(2) Berg, Aslak & Meyers, Zach (2025): Resilient Growth-Aligning Productivity and Security 08-Dec-2025. CER website. <https://www.cer.eu/sites/default/files/pb_resilient_growth_AB_ZM_5.12.25.pdf>

(3) Robertson says Nato 'morally obliged' to back war. The Guardian 12/26/2002. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/26/iraq> (Accessed: 2025-15-12).

(4) Mitrokhin, Nikolay (2025): Sprechen und Schießen. Osteuropa blog 16.12.2025. <https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/blog/sprechen-und-schiessen/> (Accessed: 2025-17-12). My translation to English.

Europe and the US National Security Strategy (which apparently has a sort of secret protocol)

This is a helpful general discussion of Europe’s current geopolitical challenges. (A big subject to cover in 26 minutes!) (1)

Defense One just published a report on what it describes as a “longer version” of the new 2025 National Security Policy (NSS), noting that “the unpublished version also proposes new vehicles for leadership on the world stage and a different way to put its thumb on the scales of Europe’s future—through its cultural values.” (2)

While the publicly released NSS calls for the end of a “perpetually expanding NATO,” the full version goes more into the details of how the Trump administration would like to – quote - “Make Europe Great Again,” even as it calls on European NATO members to wean themselves from American military support.

Working from the premise that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” because of its immigration policies and “censorship of free speech,” the NSS proposes to focus U.S. relationships with European countries on a few nations with like-minded—right-wing, presumably—current administrations and movements.

Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the U.S. should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union].”

“And we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” the document says. [my emphasis]

Sounds like a Make Europe Whiter project. And of course this is the kind of what we might call a “race-based international order” that would be appealing to characters like Stephen Miller and Opus Dei fan J.D. Vance.

That list of four countries is an odd one. Austria does have a significant pro-Russian rightwing party, the “Freedom” Party (FPÖ) that for years had a formal Friendship Agreement with Putin’s United Russia Party. And its former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who is trying to make a political comeback, is part of TechBro-billionaire Peter Thiel’s stable of politicians along with J.D. Vance. But Austria’s financial and military ties to Western Europe are extensive and being part of a Russian-dominated coalition is unlikely to appeal to most voters. Austria is still officially “neutral” and proud of its role in international institutions, including hosting the UN Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna.,

Hungary under Viktor Orbán is pretty pro-Russian and is not currently functioning as a democracy. But whether Hungarians generally would be willing to accept leaving the EU for a close alliance with Russia is a whole different question. As much of a brat as Orbán has been in EU affairs, Hungary still benefits substantially from its EU membership. And since Orbán’s policies have made the country notable poorer during his current long run in power, bailing out of the EU would be self-destructive.

Italy’s current Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who Trump calls an “attractive young woman,” is not pro-Russian in her and her party’s foreign-policy orientation. Italy also stands to benefit internationally from its increased importance in defense matters, having one of the six biggest armies in Europe. Also, amazingly enough, despite having made her career since she was a teenager in literal neofascist politics, she is currently pushing a downright pragmatic and seemingly even liberal policy on immigration – we’ll see how longs she sticks to that! – and xenophobia is Russia’s and Trump’s main issue to disrupt EU politics.

And Poland? With the largest active-duty army in Europe? A “frontline” state with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus? The Trump team wants to peel them off from the EU to be part of a pro-Russia grouping? Poland has, as they say, “a history” with Russia that makes that a problematic scenario. To put it mildly.

The investigative journalist I.F. Stone had a famous saying, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Apparently some of the current White House team need to check the stash they’re using.

NATO and the US

The public NSS does not explicitly rule out an expansion of NATO. But it almost does, stating as a priority for US policy toward Europe: “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” (p. 27, my italics).

Trump and his team have been practicing some of the most bumbling diplomacy the US government has ever experienced.

But this opens an interesting possibility for negotiations over the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO countries in the past have been reluctant to permanently rule out adding new members to NATO, and Ukrainian membership in NATO is seen by the Russian government as a major red line not to be crossed.

But admitting new NATO members requires a positive vote from all current NATO members. Europe can no longer count on the US in an actual military confrontation with Russia, so European security needs to be restructured to include Britain and French nuclear deterrence against Russia and the close and active cooperation of the militaries of especially Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Italy.

Since the official foreign policy of the US is now preventing NATO from being seen as “a perpetually expanding alliance,” The Trump 2.0 regime could on its own make an explicit agreement with Russia not to allow Ukrainian NATO membership, which would remove Russia’s main red line, at least for the time being.

Of course, the Russians can see just like everyone else that Trump’s diplomatic convictions are fickle and unreliable and not actually based on any coherent strategic concept. And that his foreign policy negotiations aim primarily at securing lavish bribes for himself and his family.

But the idea of the US promising a veto on Ukrainian membership does offer an interesting possibility for a temporary agreement on a ceasefire that could offer benefits to both sides.

Getting beyond chronic euro-pessimism

European leaders and strategists are now deep into the kind of readjustments discussed by by the panel in the video above.

We’ll see lots of discussions like this over the next few years. But they are already getting beyond the long-terms clichés that, oh, the EU is a mess, the European countries can’t agree on anything important, their economies are too weak and uncompetitive. That discussion is one in which we can see analysts looking for substantive possibilities that before.

Cynicism about the EU’s ability to operate is common among EU citizens, and far-right parties who are opposed to EU membership and to the EU’s support for democracy and the rule of law try to promote such cynicism and defeatism. But there is also a lot of support for European unity, the common market, and the freedom of movement across internal borders.

And for all the complications in making major decisions for the EU, it actually does an amazing job of pulling together and implementing major policies. Including policies that make it attractive as a model and a partner to countries in the east like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova and to those in the West Balkans.

It’s worth keeping in mind the famous saying that may have come from Otto von Bismarck – or possibly from some long-forgotten state senator in Illinois during the 19th century: "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

Law-making and policy making in any kind of democratic system always involve a lot of “muddling through.” And the EU has a remarkably good record of doing that!

The changed security situation in Europe with US unreliability under Trump and the more general changed priority for the US regarding China as its primary strategic challenge creates a strong incentive for close military cooperation between the five nations mentioned including Britain, which is not an EU member. And even though the EU Treaty includes a mutual defense clause and the EU has a small, nominal official army, the EU’s decision-making structure effective includes it from being directly in charge of collective European defense for the immediate future. But it’s not as though European nations were unable to form defensive and wartime alliance even long before the EU existed.

The need for practical realism in politics and economics

Judging the potential threat from Russia involves evaluating both Russia’s capabilities and its intentions. Russia stands in an adversary relationship with most of the EU countries – Hungary being the most important exception at the moment – and even the most antimilitarist governments would have to take account of the potential military threat from Russia.

The threat of a Russian invasion of Europe is highly unlikely. But sabotage of both the cyber- and old-fashioned sabotage of hard targets and dangerous irritations like drone incursions are happening at a relatively low level and will continue. The possibilities of Russia making attempts to seize limited territory in Estonia or Lithuania (the Suwałki Gap to Kaliningrad) are real. But despite its big advantage at the moment in the war with Ukraine, they have a big military challenge to handle there. And taking actions like seizures of territory in NATO member countries would be a huge risk for Russia, that could even result in the careening Trump 2.0 government to flipflop back to a bigger involvement in Europe.

Propaganda operations by both Europe and Russia will continue to be part of the game. But the more direct subversion of European democracies by both Russia and the US via far-right nationalist parties is more substantive and more challenging to combat. In this case, both Putin and Trump 2.0 are promoting the same xenophobic, far-right parties. That’s a challenge the Europe will have to counter with security measures and financial controls.

But that’s primarily a political challenge. And European centrist parties, including Macron’s in France and Keir Starmer’s in Europe, will have to stop playing the game of pandering to xenophobic parties and movements by protecting and defending the rule of law and pushing back directly against their nationalism and eugenic propaganda. Doing things like the following is the exact opposite of that:

When Keir Starmer and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, argue that asylum protections must be rewritten for a new “era”, they are not simply adjusting policy. They are reshaping the moral ground our societies stand on.

Their message is clear: hardening rules so that fewer people receive protection is the way to restore confidence in their leadership. They present this as measured and responsible, even progressive. But what they propose is not a new centre ground; it is a retreat into a politics that regards some lives as less worthy than others.

And there is a dreadful irony in seeing such a message conveyed just as the UK justice secretary, David Lammy, and Richard Hermer, the attorney general, travel to Strasbourg on International Human Rights Day – an occasion created to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the recognition, set down by the postwar generation, that dignity must not depend on borders, status or political fashion. (3)

Ironically, as noted above and as Paul Ronzheimer of the tabloid BILD recently observed in the German ZDF network program Phoenix, the rightwing Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has actually adopted a notably more pragmatic policy on immigration and asylum, including welcoming immigrants currently in Germany. As with all immigration policies, the devil is in the details. But on its face, this policy embraces at least part of the approach to burden-sharing on immigration/refugee issues that the EU and Britain badly need to put into practice. (4)

But at this point, both the US and Russia are committed to a policy of undermining democracy, the rule of law, and internal European cooperation. And xenophobic nationalism is their chief issue to use as a tool to achieve those aims. Pandering to it rather than fighting it is a losing strategy – at least for parties who care about preserving democracy and the rule of law.

Meeting the challenges of expanding European military capabilities, bolstering their economies, and improving living standards for working people will require a departure from the dogmatic austerity economics on which European oligarchs have so far successfully demanded.

And that also means fixing the major deficiencies in the euro currency zone, e.g., the lack of common responsibility for state borrowing by eurozone members, to forestall future debt and currency crises in the eurozone.

The discussions going on now will be interesting to revisit five years from now. Because much of what is open to choices now will look a lot more like an inevitable process leading from now to then. Choices based on good sense and careful attention to facts are generally sounder than ones made on fantasy, or on blind optimism or pessimism.

I find myself reading less from the Responsible Statecraft site than I have over the last few years. Because they seem to be running more fluff like a piece by Eldar Mamedov, who makes from frankly strange arguments, like this one: “Europe’s mainstream made no serious effort to engage with the diverse MAGA world, including its anti-war paleoconservatives and libertarians. They preferred the comfort of their old Atlanticist echo chamber.” (5)

Dude, the hardcore MAGA crowd and Trump himself hates European democracies as much as they hate democracy and the rule of law in the US. And the faction he calls “anti-war paleoconservatives” are particularly committed to that view, clinging as they do to the tattered remnants of Old Right isolationist thinking from the 1950s, which at its core really was and is narrow-nationalist militarism. And Mamedov’s immediately following paragraph comes right out of the “paleoconservative” talking points:

Why? Because true strategic autonomy is terrifying to them. It would require what they have consistently failed to do: think seriously about defense, which is first and foremost about the sober assessment of threats, not just more funding for defense contractors. It is also the practice of complex, nuanced diplomacy with adversaries — something the Europeans seem to have unlearned.

This kind of dismissiveness just regurgitates the superficial and lazy cynicism that too often dominates supposedly serious commentary about European security politics. And throwaway references to defense contractors can often be a way to avoid talking about the very real improvements that need to be made in both the US and Europe on regulating defense contractors. (And some of their work needs to be done by state-owned industries.) Which gets back to the plague of austerity economics, which somehow often manages to comfortably coexist with lack of proper regulation of defense contractors and war profiteers.

Notes:

(1) A Continent of Power: Does Europe Know Its True Strength? DW News YouTube channel 12/11/2025. <https://youtu.be/yFRqbWWjmH8?si=67t7kP_XxQlXVueR> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

(2) Myers, Meghann (2025): ‘Make Europe Great Again’ and more from a longer version of the National Security Strategy. Defense One 12/09/2025. <https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/12/make-europe-great-again-and-more-longer-version-national-security-strategy/410038/?oref=d1-homepage-river> (Accesssed: 2025-12-12).

(3) Valdez-Symonds, Steve (2025): Starmer is lobbying Europe to join him in watering down the ECHR. This illiberalism will harm us all. The Guardian 12/10/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/10/starmer-europe-human-rights-uk-prime-minister-echr> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

(4) phoenix persönlich: Paul Ronzheimer zu Gast bei Inga Kühn. Phoenix YouTube channel 12.12.2025. <https://youtu.be/86uKRfEYXf8?si=tDKRHbhf3yH2B_X5> (Accessed: 2025-12-12).

(5) Memedov, Eldar (2025): Euro-elites melt down over NSS, missing - or ignoring - the point. Responsible Statecraft 12/11/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/europe-nss/> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

Antisemitism, Israel and the Republican Party

The event that we’re currently calling Israel’s horrific Gaza war of 2023-24 is widely and rightly considered an act of genocide. It is probably more accurately understood as an intensive phase of an ongoing genocide.

One of the political effects of the Gaza war has been to highlight how much the Israeli government in its rhetoric has made remembrance of the Holocaust synonymous with support for Israel, and antisemitism equivalent to criticism of Israel. The genocide expert Omer Bartov has noted that the field of Holocaust studies and genocide studies are in danger of becoming distinct fields due to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians and the reluctance of institutions dedicated to studying and commemorating the Holocaust to criticize Israel’s actions or to recognize what has happened as an act of genocide.

Natasha Soffer-Roth looks at how problematic it has become that Israel reflexively equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Hardline rightwingers in Europe and the US have found a way to identify with the far-right Netanyahu government of Israel via Islamophobia according to the formula “We hate Muslims and Muslims hate Israel so we can’t possibly be antisemitic.”

Soffer-Roth recently analyzed how the Republican Party’s embrace of the real, old-fashioned kind of antisemitism has (inevitably) become problematic for the Trumpsters. At this point, the Republican Party is nearly identical with the Trump cult, as shown by the recent excommunication of Marjorie Taylor Greene – herself a nasty antisemite is the real sense. She uses an analogy to the Lousi Renault character in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,”

Last month, following a cozy, long-winded chat between the far-right commentator Tucker Carlson and the pro-Hitler influencer Nick Fuentes, a whole team of Louis Renaults fanned out across conservative media and gatherings to express outrage at the apparent sudden appearance of antisemitism within their ranks. Almost as soon as the interview aired, a number of conservatives began pressuring the Heritage Foundation — the Trump-aligned think tank behind the authoritarian blueprint Project 2025 and its anti-antisemitism spin-off, Project Esther — to cut its long-standing close association with Carlson.

The critique was at least in part due to the fact that Carlson’s platforming of antisemitism was not accompanied by the usual pro-Israel sentiment that the American (and global) far right often relies on to deflect from its bigotry against Jews. In fact, a sizable portion of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was dedicated to criticizing Israel, its reliance on U.S. support, and Christian Zionists. (1)

The old-fashioned kind of Jew-hating associated with the original American First movement (2) is very much still present in the kind of antisemitism espoused by creeps like Fuentes.

Rick Perlstein, the historian who is a genuine authority on the Republican Party and its relationship to the Radical Right over the decades, wrote in 2024 about the measures that police directed against anti-genocide protesters in the US since October of 2023:

Concerns for the “safety” of Jewish students has become a rhetorical commonplace in elite discussions of campus politics these days: “Jewish students of all political beliefs,” Theo Baker, son of New York Times superstar Peter Baker, tells us in The Atlantic in “The War at Stanford,” “have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets.”

It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. You know who has good reason to fear for their safety? People, many of them Jews, getting pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting high-powered rifles aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state who surely have been told by the people giving them orders to be ready to shoot because of all the “dangerous” things that are going on amid those protesters’ tents.

Sure, offensive things have happened to protesters. And that’s awful. But when I told some Chicago neighbors about all the Judaism going on down in Hyde Park, they were frankly shocked to hear it: They watch Morning Joe, from which they got the impression that Jew-hate was the overwhelming leitmotif of this whole protest thing. (3) [my emphasis]

A big part of this weirdness is a product of the embrace by the Republican Party and the Israel lobby of American Christian Zionism. For people paying attention, this toxic mixture of Christian fundamentalists claiming to be philosemites and old-fashioned, hardcore Jew-hating and antisemitic conspiracy theories is not new. Michael Lind did an excellent analysis 30 years ago of the case of Pat Robertson, longtime Christian Right leader who promoted a crassly antisemitic theory of world politics of the type we now find in Mike Huckabee, current US Ambassador to Israel. (4)

Soffer-Roth’s description of the game being played inside the Trump/Republican Party is on the nose: “Republicans and their allies have mainstreamed far-right antisemitism while systematically downplaying it; at the same time, they have portrayed anti-Jewish prejudice as a uniquely left-wing problem to fuel a persecutory, authoritarian agenda [of the Republicans’ own].”

And she gives an excellent summary description of how this has been working:

Still, the far right — from the GOP to the dense constellation of Christian and Jewish lawfare, policy, and political advocacy groups — has spearheaded the acceleration of this push over the past decade. Making the fight against antisemitism predominantly about defending Israel has proven an incredibly effective way to advance various parts of the right-wing agenda: from attacking higher education, to targeting immigration and immigrants, to attempting to criminalize swaths of the left as terrorist sympathizers. [my emphasis]

The hard-right turn of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – which was never exactly a bastion of left-ideology, though they did take a more liberal stance in the past - is one aspect of this grim development, as Mari Cohen and Alex Kane described in 2023, “No matter how the specifics play out, it’s clear that the ADL’s efforts to appease Trump and MAGA have backfired - failing to pacify the right, while further alienating liberals.” (5) And they note:

Former ADL employees—some of whom requested anonymity to protect their professional standings—said the organization had distanced itself from liberal allies so much that few are eager to stick up for it, even against an administration they oppose. “The retreat from the broader civil rights work that the ADL has done for generations diluted coalitional strength and has seemingly isolated the organization,” said Robert Sills, the ADL’s former national director for state and local government affairs. …

Indeed, six former ADL staffers told Jewish Currents that under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s ten years of leadership, the organization’s attention has shifted to focus primarily on the alleged threat that Palestinian solidarity activists pose to the Jewish community - an evolution that accelerated after the October 7th attacks.

The ADL even sank to defending Elon Mush’s Hitler salute celebrating Trump’s re-election.

 
Notes:

(1) Soffer-Roth, Natasha (205): The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters. +972 Magazine 12/09/2025. <https://www.972mag.com/gop-antisemitism-israel-carlson-fuentes-heritage-trump-maga/> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

(2) Lindbergh. Woody Guthrie-Toxic YouTube channel 05/19/2015. <https://youtu.be/BzLOTHciIKI?si=qPQalp8eO3mWbI6n> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

(3) Perlstein, Rick (2024): The New Anti-Antisemitism. The American Prospect 05/08/2024. <https://prospect.org/2024/05/08/2024-05-08-new-anti-antisemitism-college-protests-gaza/> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

(4) Lind, Michael (1995): Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory. New York Review of Books 02/02/2025. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/02/02/rev-robertsons-grand-international-conspiracy-theo/>

(5) Cohen, Mari & Kane, Alex (2025): The ADL Tried to Appease MAGA. The FBI Cut Ties with Them Anyway. Jewish Currents 12/10/2025. <https://jewishcurrents.org/the-adl-tried-to-appease-maga-the-fbi-cut-ties-with-them-anyway> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).

Europe-US-Ukraine-Russia

Here are a couple of John Mearsheimer updates on the current European situation in relation to the US, Russia, and Ukraine.

Here I’ll repeat the warning that I use about every other time I post a Mearsheimer video: If you listen to 20 minutes of one of his interviews and you don’t hear something that irritates you, you’re almost certainly not paying attention. This first one goes a full hour.

This interview focuses mostly on the Russo-Ukraine War, though they do discuss Venezuela near the end. (1)

That interview includes a clip of Volodymyr Zelenskyy from March 2022 talking about how there are some strategists in the West who would see an advantage in prolonging the war against Russia in order to weaken Russia. He was making the case, then as now, that the West should provide maximum assistance to Ukraine. He added a bit of shaming to the pitch by mentioning that cynical calculation.

But cynical or not in the minds of policymakers, that is still very much a reality today. That doesn’t mean that European leaders won’t wind up making better choices. But it’s an obvious consideration that European leaders thinking they need to bolster their defensive capabilities against Russia would see just such a potential advantage in prolonging the war.

As things stand, it does seem like the best that the world generally could reasonably hope for at this point would be a ceasefire in place that both sides would be committed to maintain with no formal, permanent territorial concessions on their part. Trying to frame a peace agreement as a New York real estate deal, which Trump’s Administration has proposed, is a non-starter for Ukraine.

The “rules-based international order” may not have been what American politicians like to claim it was. But the notion that internationally recognized borders cannot legitimately be changed by force is a basic tenet of international law. German leaders were convicted at Nuremberg for the crimes of waging “aggressive war,” a formulation based on the formal international law as well as the “customary martial law” of the time. “Aggressive war” included wars to seize another country’s legal territory.

Mearsheimer and Daniel Davis also talk about the Ukrainians’ decision – following the insistence of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson - to walk away from the negotiations that took place in early 2022 about a potential agreement with Russia. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but it is an important part of the history to ask whether ending those talks at that time was the best approach.

This interview from the same day runs about 25 minutes. (2)

Notes:

(1) John Mearsheimer: Ukraine & NATO Shoving Trump to the Side. Daniel Davis-Deep Dive YouTube channel 09/12/2025. <https://www.youtube.com/live/PgnOZth4bA4?si=zDXV_Wt652Z1ZWjN> (Accessed: 2025-09-12).

(2) Prof. John Mearsheimer: Can Europe Save Ukraine? Judge Napolitano-Judging Freedom. 09/12/2025. <https://www.youtube.com/live/cIkh_ZXs1Og?si=a-x_cgsM6a5brKgp> (Accessed: 2025-09-12).

Hyperventilating over Trump's new National Security Strategy (Though Trump himself probably hasn’t even read it)

Olga Lautman of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) takes a look at the new Trumpista US National Security Strategy (NSS) in which she judges:

Last week’s release of Trump’s National Security Strategy made one thing brutally clear and that is that the United States is no longer fully shaping its own foreign policy. … [A]n American president has published an official strategy that openly attacks America’s closest allies, encourages the collapse of Europe’s stability, and advances Russia’s strategic objectives point by point - a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview disguised as U.S. doctrine. (1)

For me this immediately called to mind a comment that Gerhard Mangott of the University of Innsbruck made in a lecture I recently attended. Mangott is a historian of Russia and his presentation was on the Russo-Ukraine War. Someone asked him if he thought Ukraine was a democracy, and he immediately said no. He mentioned the big corruption problems and also that national elections have been postponed because the Ukrainian Constitution suspends elections during an active war.

That opinion isn’t actually that controversial, though Ukraine’s boosters would often dispute that. The 2025 edition of the widely used V-Dem ratings rates Ukraine as an “electoral autocracy” (for 2024). Chatham House rates it as “Partly Free.”

He also advised people to remember that multiple things can be true at the same time. For instance, one can assume that Ukraine is not a democracy and also that the Ukrainian public has shown itself supportive of democracy.

Which is not just true for Ukraine policy! It immediately came to mind when I started reading Lauman’s piece.

For instance, for the portion quoted above, I would note that the following two things can be true:

• Trump 2.0 may be making improved relations with Russia a priority and there are good reasons to hope for such an outcome.
• Advancing Russian strategic objectives is a bad thing for the US if those objectives are seriously disadvantageous to the US and a good thing if they enhance US interests. Nuclear arms-control treaties are an example of the latter.

A lot of the NSS may align with Russian priorities without it being “a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview disguised as U.S. doctrine” or that “the United States is no longer fully shaping its own foreign policy.”

I know this kind of thing is obviously part of how people talk about politics. But calling the new NSS “a wholesale adoption of Putin’s worldview” is just paranoid polemical talk that sounds an awful lot like an updated version of the John Birchers who thought Dwight Eisenhower as President was a Communist agent of the Soviet Union.

She continues the habit when she writes:

The language is pure Kremlin propaganda. Europe, the NSS claims, is facing “civilizational erasure,” and the culprit, no surprise, is the ‘European Union’ — now recast as a threat to “political liberty,” a narrative lifted word for word from the information operations Moscow deployed for Brexit, Le Pen, the AfD, and every other attempt to subvert elections across Europe over the past decade.

Except for the first sentence, I said pretty much the same thing in my first reaction to the NSS. The Trump Administration is inclined to support far right parties in Europe but it’s not simply a matter of copying Russian propaganda statements. Trump and Stephen Miller and many of the other folks in Trump’s Ship of State share the ideology of those far-right parties. Not every danger to democracy in the US comes from Russia.

The other problem with this kind of polemic is that it presents Trump, an old man with visibly fading mental acuity and probably serious physical health problems, as a stealthy Russian agent, or the functional equivalent. But it misses an obvious and key fact: his diplomacy is spectacularly incompetent. No one can count on him to stick with an international agreement even in a press conference announcing it. He has no strategic vision other than collecting bribes.

Trump’s advantage to Russian foreign policy is not that he’s taking orders from Moscow – even though he often seems to consider Putin a reliable counselor. His real advantage to them is that he can’t conduct a coherent foreign policy and they can take advantage of the policy drift in many ways.

The Russians are certainly glad to see the major weakening of NATO that Trump has produced. Including threatening war against fellow NATO members Canada and Denmark (the latter over Greenland).

Notes:

(1) America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia. Unmasking Russia 12/07/2025. <https://olgalautman.substack.com/p/americas-foreign-policy-now-alligns> Accessed: 2025-08-2025).

The risks of Democratic “centrism” (which often means supporting *Republican* positions)

Asad Haider wrote nine years ago, “Barack Obama … provided an exceptional moment of hope: a charming, erudite, and cosmopolitan leader to calmly guide us to even lower circles of surveillance, inequality, and war,” coming to office as he did after the often-radical conservative of the Cheney-Bush Administration and its wars and generally bad policies. (1)

But Obama was never the active reformer that many of supporters thought he was or at least hoped he would be.

This address to the Congressional Black Caucus during his first Presidential term in 2011 is a good example of how Obama packed what were generally centrist positions as uplifting and very much in the progressive tradition. (2)

When addressing primarily Black audiences, Obama had a habit of scolding them in at least part of the presentation. That was also true of this particular one, which came 11 months or so since the midterm elections that went badly for Democrats in Congress.

Frank James reported on it for NPR:

After running down a list of his administration's accomplishments on behalf of middle and lower income Americans and calling for passage of his jobs bill, Obama concluded his speech by saying:

I expect all of you to march with me and press on. (Applause.) Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. (Applause.) Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We've got work to do, CBC. (Applause.)

For some, it was another example of a tone perceived as patronizing from Obama when he speaks to primarily African-American audiences. (3)

James comments, “To some, the whole bedroom slipper image seemed to play into historic stereotypes of black laziness.”

You will search long and hard to find any Obama speeches addressing billionaire donors in a similar manner: Quit’yer whinin’! You have more money than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes and yet you oppose public schools and health insurance for ordinary people?!!

So it’s worth paying attention when politicians use inspiring rhetoric but make a point of opposing progressive goals. I’ve praised California Governor Gavin Newsom’s when he actually is fighting for democracy and against Trump and his ICE goons. But, as the Sacramento Bee recently pointed out, reporting on a state ballot measure for 2026 to raise taxes on billionaires, something that is very popular among voters and particularly among Democratic voters:

The measure, which was filed with the attorney general’s office in October, would impose a one-time 5% tax on Californians with assets worth $1 billion or more. The funding would be used to backfill cuts to health care and food assistance programs that were part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Its backers – labor unions representing health care workers and the leader of one of the state’s largest nonprofit providers – argue the revenue would come from just 200 California billionaires and would stabilize hospitals and community clinics, along with the jobs they provide.

Similar wealth tax proposals have failed to get far in the legislature under opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who’s used his bully pulpit to defend the current setup of the state’s progressive tax structure. [That is, he’s opposed raising taxes on billionaires.]

Newsom will also be opposing the new ballot measure, said adviser Dan Newman, who recently set up a committee called “Stop the Squeeze” with colleague Brian Brokaw to fight the initiative. The California Business Roundtable last week set up its own committee in opposition.

But a wealth tax could get more debate among Newsom’s potential successors – especially with affordability and wealth inequality front-of-mind for voters. [my emphasis] (4)

Democratic voters need to pay attention to what their elected officials and candidates are actually saying and what they are actually doing.

And with the murders of fishers off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, it’s important to remember that Obama enthusiastically embraced targeted assassinations. That not a justification for Trump and his loopy Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doing what they are doing. But it is important to recognize that the individual-assassination programs were something that Obama proudly advocated and endorsed.

Brian Michael Jenkins noted in 2016: “Obama can claim credit for ordering the military raid that killed Osama bin Laden - to many, his only significant counterterrorism achievement - and for pursuing an aggressive policy of drone strikes and special operations aimed at taking out terrorist commanders.” (5)

Virtually nobody regrets the fact that Bin Laden is no longer with us. But there were serious questions about whether that operation was really meant to capture him or assassinate him. There would have been big advantages to capturing him alive and putting him on trial for murder before US courts.

U sing drone strikes to kill terrorist commanders began with the previous administration, but became a major component of Obama's counterterrorist efforts. The strikes enabled the United States to directly attack terrorist organizations without taking on counterinsurgency or nation-building missions. Drone strikes also remain directly under White House control. With advice from the intelligence community and military commanders, the president determines the target. As Obama has said, “I am pretty good at killing people.” A future president may not want such direct involvement. [my emphasis]

Amandla Thomas-Johnson also wrote in 2020, “As Obama reportedly told senior aides in 2011: “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine’.” (6) Blair McClendon reported the same quotation in The Guardian.

A President really should not be bragging publicly (or even privately) about how good he or she is at “killing people.” It encourages contempt for basic laws against murder and for the laws of war.

Thomas-Johnson:

Obama’s drone policy has been viewed as a significant blemish on his reputation as a president, with some regarding it as the most dangerous aspect of his legacy. ...

Defending his policy, Obama wrote that the often young men and boys he targeted “had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory”.

“They were dangerous," he writes. "The world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.” ...

[R]ights groups have consistently questioned the legality of such strikes and their precision, and have argued that well into Obama’s presidency, dozens of civilians were being killed in the ruthless pursuit of a single target.

Obama’s drone policy has been viewed as a significant blemish on his reputation as a president, with some regarding it as the most dangerous aspect of his legacy. [my emphasis]

She also reports:

Reprieve, the London-based rights group, has pointed out that the US regards all military-age males - boys and men over the age of 16 - in a strike zone as legitimate targets unless evidence is brought to light after their death proving them innocent.

This has allowed US officials to controversially claim low civilian casualty figures and a high number of militants killed. [my emphasis]

This is Obama in 2013 after being re-elected defending his targeted-assassination drone strikes. (7) In this excerpt he stresses how legal he claims they are. But this was also very much a precedent for the Trump-Hegseth strikes on fishing boats with essentially the same argument: these people are not actively engaged in military hostilities against the US or its allies, but they might be doing something now or in the future that might endanger Americans, so we’re just going to kill them for the time being.

That’s Obama showing his coldest and least uplifting side.

Notes:

(1) Haider, Asad (2016): The Art of Politics. Jacobin 07/28/2016. <https://jacobin.com/2016/07/dnc-bernie-hillary-thatcher-miliband-miners-labour> (Accessed: 2025-05-12).

(2) Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Phoenix Awards Dinner. The Obama White House YouTube channel 11/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/swlaZJ2RbBw?si=8iyoZP3Dicvzf6uF> (Accessed: 2025-06-12).

Text: Remarks by the President at Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner 09/24/2025. (Obama White House archive). <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/24/remarks-president-congressional-Black-caucus-foundation-annual-phoenix-a> (Accessed: 2025-06-12).

(3) James, Frank (2011): Obama' 'Stop Complaining' Order To Black Caucus Causes Stir. NPR 09/26/2011. <https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2011/09/26/140802831/obama-stop-complaining-order-to-cbc-fires-up-some-folks> (Accessed: 2025-06-12).

(4) Nixon, Nicole (2025): Coming in 2026: A battle over California billionaire tax proposal. Sacramento Bee 12/01/2025. <https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article313211082.html> (Accessed: 2025-06-12).

(5) Jenkins, Brian Michael (2018): President Obama's Controversial Legacy as Counterterrorism-in-Chief. RAND Corporation 08/22/2016. <https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2016/08/president-obamas-controversial-legacy-as-counterterrorism.html> (Accessed: 2025-06-12). Note: The RAND Corporation is not known as a booster of Muslim terrorism or of Ghandian pacifism. To put it mildly.

(6) Thomas-Johnson, Amanda (2020): Middle East Eye 11/16/2020. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/obama-defends-deadly-drone-campaign-new-book> (Accessed: 2025-06-12).

(7) Barack Obama: 'drone strikes have saved lives'. The Guardian YouTube channel 05/24/2013. <https://youtu.be/6Upd96OSBPk?si=3gA46w83vEk9b-BS> (Accessed: 2025-08-12).

The newest US National Security strategy

The Trump 2.0 Administration issued a new National Security Strategy basically in the dead of night. (1)

Emma Ashford writes, “The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) dropped on Thursday night at 10:00 PM, a time more usually reserved for the kind of news dump that you want reporters to avoid.” (2)

It’s from the Trump 2.0 Administration. So it includes things like declaring that there is now a “’Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” that declares the US will “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” It continues, “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

So, I guess that at least means Canada and Mexico still get to keep their own land and resources?

The entire concept of a Trump National Security Policy seems a bit bizarre, since his main concept of such a policy is, where can I get the next bribe? At the end she comments, “does any of this matter? It‘s hard to say.“

She notes:

[T]he document also goes further, blaming US elites for pursuing global ideals and, in doing so, undermining the US national interest in trade, migration, and security policy. To that end, the culture-war issues in here are not purely a domestic sop; they actually reflect how the administration thinks about US foreign policy since 1991.

Her assessment here is really, uh, generous, even in pointing out some of the sillier things in it:

The emphasis on peacemaking in this strategy is and remains a new priority, largely distinct from the first Trump administration. Despite all the cynicism, however, this genuinely appears to be a priority for the president himself, who is portrayed as the key actor in peace and diplomacy — America’s diplomats at the state department are AWOL from these peace processes. The document goes as far as to describe Trump himself as the “President of Peace.” [p. 5 in the original] Perhaps, as it is nearly Christmas, we might adapt a Handel oratorio to the Prince of Peace to further make the point? [my emphasis]

The language of the NSS echoes European far-right nationalism here:

The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests. (p.9, my emphasis in bold)

Those sovereignty-sappers presumably include favorite far-right bogeymen like the United Nations and the European Union. Ashford writes of the NSS’ references to European policy:

There’s more in here on European domestic politics than there is on American domestic politics at times, a choice the NSS justifies by noting correctly, that it’s in America’s interest to have a strong Europe. But in building upon the themes that caused such a furore in JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech — including the notion of a Europe that has culturally lost its way and explicitly suggesting that the US government might support certain political parties or movements within Europe — it’s fair to say this document is going to raise a lot of eyebrows in European capitals. [my emphasis]

As a reminder, our Opus Dei Vice President in that Munich Security Conference speech expressed his and the Administration’s sympathy for the far-right German party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). He didn’t mention the AfD by name. But it was very clear to everyone that was what he was saying.

This report including an interview with Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook of the Bertelsmann Foundation: (3)

Ashbrook discusses more details about the Trump 2.0 regime’s active encouragement of the antidemocratic far-right parties.

Notes:

(1) National Security Strategy of the United States of America. November 2025 (issued 12/04/2025). <https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf> (Accessed; 2025-05-12).

(2) Ashford, Emma (2025): Civilization, Nation, Strategy. What Is To Be Done? 12/05/2025. <https://emmamashford.substack.com/p/civilization-nation-strategy> (Accessed; 2025-05-12).

(3) Is Trump’s new National Security Strategy a ‘wholesale break' with US foreign policy’? DW News YouTube channel 12/05/2025. <https://youtu.be/d1z137gpqSo?si=pXAKxv0thksN9iJ6> (Accessed; 2025-05-12).

The current round of diplomacy around the Russo-Ukraine War

Oleksandr Kyselov, “a Ukrainian left-wing activist and a research assistant at Uppsala University” has a concise, realistic summary of the current state of the peace negotiations over the Russo-Ukraine War in the social-democratic Jacobin. (1)

After nearly a year of Trump 2.0, I’m continually impressed with how Trump’s lack of diplomatic competence and missing ability to think strategically in foreign policy makes it almost unthinkable that any half-decent peace, much less a settlement, of the Ukraine conflict. Because Russia would need assurance of US buy-in on things like economic sanctions, (no) NATO membership for Ukraine, and the disposition of the frozen Russian financial assets.

And even if Puttin is almost certainly pleased at most of the chaos Trump is causing, he also surely sees that any agreement with the deteriorating Trump Russia might make could well be abandoned by the Trump Administration within a week or a month.

This English-language panel discussion from Deutsche Welle deals with the issue of Trump’s diplomacy which seems to give very high priority to business deals over broader security and strategic interests: (2)

Oleksandr Kyselov clearly isn’t happy with Russia’s position. But his description of Russia’s geopolitical attitude toward Ukraine is a basically realist one:

Russia’s fixation on Ukraine’s neutrality predates the invasion. It was articulated most clearly in Moscow’s December 2021 draft treaties, which requested that not only Ukraine but the entire former socialist bloc be treated effectively as a buffer zone. It is the main one of the “ambiguities of the last 30 years” (as the twenty-eight points call them) that the Kremlin aims to settle. This obsession with keeping Ukraine out of NATO isn’t about “indivisible security” but a Russian sphere of influence in which smaller states’ security needs are ignored. Ukraine is the test case for whether Moscow can veto its neighbors’ foreign policy, in a Monroe Doctrine with a Russian accent. [my emphasis}

I do think he overstates the idea that Moscow expected “the entire former socialist bloc” to be treated as more-or-less a militarily neutral zone. Russia wasn’t happy about NATO expansion. But NATO membership for Ukraine was the major tripwire for Russian great-power security concerns.

He gives this summary of Ukraine’s perspective of what any acceptable ceasefire agreement would have to include:

Ukraine cannot regain all occupied territories by force under current conditions. But neither can it afford to grant Moscow irreversible rights over them. Kyiv’s position is limited to refusing recognition while accepting the line of contact as a reference point for future negotiations, and excluding military means from dispute settlement.

He argues that public opinion in Ukraine has moved toward accepting a pause in the conflict as it long as it doesn’t formally recognized Russia’s conquests as formal and permanent.

By the second half of 2025, according to Kyiv International Institute of Sociology polling, popular attitudes had shifted further. While under 20 percent are ready to accept the Kremlin’s terms and only 39 percent would agree with US recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, over three-quarters could live with freezing the conflict at the current front lines.

He rightly notes that the current proposed plan central to the public discussion – at the moment cut down to a 19-point plan - could be no more that “a pause before the next war begins.”

And he also gives some practical instances of long-term ceasefires with unresolved territorial claims. None of which are terribly encouraging for Ukraine in the current situation:

Precedents exist for lasting ceasefires even when underlying territorial claims remained unresolved — Cyprus since 1974, Korea since 1953, Kashmir since 1972. But Cyprus has United Nations peacekeepers and foreign troops on both sides. Korea has one of the world’s most militarized borders. Kashmir sees regular outbreaks of violence, prevented from full war only by nuclear deterrence. None offers templates for sustainable peace in Ukraine fitting the deals [currently being] discussed. [my emphasis]

This won’t be resolved quickly. And it’s hard to imagine any practical solution being reached with Donald Trump as the head of the US government. But I would add that it makes a lot of sense for Europeans to keep in mind the possibility.

Notes:

(1) Kyselov, Oleksandr (2025): Ukraine Faces an Imperial Carve-Up. Jacobin 12/04/2025. <https://jacobin.com/2025/12/ukraine-russia-war-concessions-trump> (Accessed: 2025-04-12).

(2) Trump’s secret business deals with Putin—profit over peace? DW News YouTube channel 05.12.2025. https://youtu.be/TPaBGtAccog?si=mv0G5u8hsED-S5xi> (Accessed: 2025-04-12).

Regime change in Venezuela – a huge mess that Trump 2.0 may be about to make

The agitation and threats by the Trump 2.0 Administration is continuing with demands for regime change.

If and when the US invades Venezuela, it’s worth remembering how the regime change operation in Iraq in 2003 started out.

The International Crisis Group in a report on June 11, 2003 addressed the situation as of eight weeks of the US seizing the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Complete with the famous ritual toppling, organized by the US for its publicity value, of a Saddam Hussein statue:

Eight weeks after victoriously entering Baghdad, American forces are in a race against the clock. If they are unable to restore both personal security and public services and establish a better rapport with Iraqis before the blistering heat of summer sets in, there is a genuine risk that serious trouble will break out. That would make it difficult for genuine political reforms to take hold, and the political liberation from the Saddam Hussein dictatorship would then become for a majority of the country’s citizens a true foreign occupation. With all eyes in the Middle East focused on Iraq, the coming weeks and months will be critical for shaping regional perceptions of the U.S. as well. [my emphasis] (1)And it’s always good to remember what investigative journalist I.F. Stone had to say about wars: “All governments lie.” Those three words are often quoted. It’s not often quoted with the rest of the sentence in Stone’s 1967 book, In a Time of Torment: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

Given Trump’s own personal mental deterioration and the stunning incompetence of his diplomacy this year, an actual invasion and regime-change attempt in Venezuela is virtually guaranteed to be a major disaster.

Deutsche Welle reports in a report featuring warmongering ghoul Elliot Abrams and AP reporter Ellen Knickmeyer: (2)

Abrams was a leading adviser on Venezuela during Trump 1.0. Not at all to Joe Biden credit, he also picked Abrams as a member of a public diplomacy commission.

Abrams, who was assistant secretary of inter-American affairs from 1985 to early 1989, later pleaded guilty to two charges of illegally withholding information from Congress – including his role in soliciting $10m from Brunei – during two October 1986 hearings, one before the Senate foreign relations committee and a second before the House intelligence committee. (3)

Knickmeyer in the interview starts off her comments by referring to her experience during the Iraq War.

 

Notes:

(1) International Crisis Group (2003): Baghdad: A Race Against the Clock. Middle East Briefing 06/11/2003. <https://www.crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/baghdad-a-race-against-the-clock.pdf>

(2) US' ‘next step could be to hit targets inside Venezuela’ to prompt overthrow of Maduro | DW News YouTube channel 12/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/TwVJwmc9xJc?si=5UoGeJogz4P6izzO> (Accessed: 2025-04-12).

(3) Yang, Mary (2023): Biden to nominate Elliott Abrams, who lied over Iran-Contra, to key panel. Guardian 07/08/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/08/biden-elliott-abrams-iran-contra-venezuela> (Accessed: 2025-04-12).

How Trump’s Eternal Peace Plan for the Middle East is going

Haaretz headline, Dec. 1: (1)

Zvi Bar’el reports:

Israel's military actions in the past several days raise questions about its true intentions in Lebanon and Syria. They all ostensibly seek to demonstrate determination to remove threats to Israel's security.

The moves include the assassination of Hezbollah chief-of-staff Haytham Ali Tabatabai, the daily strikes against so-called targets in Lebanon, preparations for a ground campaign and the arrest of Syrian activists on the Syrian Golan Heights, which escalated into a real battle. But anyone who tries to reduce the incidents into their basic components will struggle to find a consistent policy or orderly strategy. The throughline points to one dangerous goal – keeping Israel in a permanent reality of war that serves the political wishes of the government and its leader. [my emphasis]/>

He goes on to explain that the Lebanese government of “President Joseph Aoun insisted on a basic historic principle of consolidating all arms under the government's exclusive control.” Which means he is trying to get the Hezbollah militias to surrender their arms.

On its face, there’s nothing unusual in a government insisting that it has a legal “monopoly on violence” in its own territory. “Max Weber claimed that the ‘monopoly of the use of legitimate violence’ is the decisive criterion that distinguishes the modern state from all others.” (2)

But the Shi’s group Hezbollah has a long history now of maintaining its own militia. And Iran has seen it as a close ally.

And, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu continues to pursue his White Whale, Iran:

Roughly six months after Operation Rising Lion against Iran, a senior European diplomat warned Monday that Israel is likely to carry out a military strike on Iran within the next 12 months. …

[The official] emphasized that Israel should also engage diplomatically. “Smart politics would mean giving the Lebanese something—some signal that Israel’s footprint will be reduced if they do what they’re supposed to. There has to be more than just military action. Everyone needs to ask how we can help Lebanon—its government and army—do what’s needed and ensure Hezbollah doesn’t regain strength. I hear Iran hasn’t stopped supplying them with weapons.”

The envoy also voiced concern over the situation in the West Bank, pointing to a rise in nationalist violence and Israeli government moves to expand settlement construction. (3)

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, onetime feminist icon, now ridicules criticism of Israel’s government for committing genocide, just after 11:30 in this video: (4)

Owen Jones recently summarized Hillary’s grimly hawkish foreign policy record: “Young Jewish Americans are turning on Israel because they are ignorant of history and being brainwashed by TikTok, according to Hillary Clinton.” (5)

Hillary Clinton, a vocal supporter of the Iraq war, is here claiming that gullible young people are taking foreign policy stances based on bogus information.

Some might argue that if you were a US politician who voted to support the biggest Western foreign policy catastrophe of our time, which plunged Iraq into blood and chaos, as well as killing and maiming thousands of young American soldiers, you should just grovel for forgiveness before disappearing forever in disgrace - let alone stop commenting on foreign policy issues.

At the time, Hillary Clinton, who clearly sees herself as a towering figure when it comes to US foreign policy, was a Senator, and in her speech in support of granting authorisation to George W Bush to invade Iraq, she said: “I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt.” [my emphasis]

Notes:

1) Bar’el, Zvi (2025): Instead of Seeking Deals, Israel Prefers Keeping Syrian and Lebanese Fronts Hot. Haaretz 12/01/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-12-01/ty-article/.premium/instead-of-seeking-deals-israel-prefers-keeping-syrian-and-lebanese-fronts-hot/0000019a-d985-df9e-ab9e-ffeffec10000?gift=f67be60cf0f2490a81d51d1fcb2d4be2> (Accessed: 2025-01-12).

St. Reagan as an enlightened alternative to Trump? Please spare us …

There is a tradition in American political commentary to compare rightwing extremists of the present to conservatives of 20 or so years before and compare the former unfavorably to the latter, who were taken to be conservative but sensible and responsible. Richard Hofstadter set the model for this in his The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965).

An essay by Torben Lütjen in the last week’s issue of the highbrow German weekly Die Zeit picks up the habit. He presents Ronald Reagan as Der gute Amerikaner (The Good American). (1) The online version shows Reagan sitting at the Presidential desk bathed in some kind of divine light, or something similar.

The opening paragraph reads as follows:

When America no longer knew where to go, a man from the entertainment industry appeared to the country as a savior and promised to make it great again as a candidate for the Presidency. He was considered a political lightweight, intellectually unfit to lead a world power. When he made it to the White House, against all odds, half of the country continued to vehemently reject him. They saw him as a cold-hearted turbo-capitalist who, out of opportunism, had also gotten to bed with the Religious Right. Moreover, the new President was simply embarrassing to many Americans, and the fear was not entirely unjustified: It was not only in Germany that people turned up their noses in indignation and considered the President to be the incarnation of everything that went wrong in the USA: the greed of Wall Street, the stupefaction of shallow American pop culture, religious fanaticism, and the glorification of brute force. [my emphasis]

The point of that argument is to offer Reagan as someone who looked like a disastrous choice but who really practiced a more humane version of conservatism. The point of such comparisons is that reactionaries of days past can offer inspiration for the Republicans to again become a responsible democratic political party.

None of us should kid ourselves about St. Reagan. He was a rightwing who pandered to some of the most hardcore rightwingers in the US body politic.

None of us should kid ourselves about St. Reagan. He was a rightwing who pandered to some of the most hardcore rightwingers in the US body politic.

To be fair, Reagan was never quite the stone reactionary that Trump’s political mentor New York Mob lawyer Roy Cohn, was. “Not as bad as Roy Cohn” is about the lowest possible bar for political decency imaginable. Although I guess “not as bad as Jeffrey Epstein” might be a contender.

Reagan had a career in show business and made films in support of the war effort during the Second World War. He actually was kind of a lefty just after the war, getting involved with peace activists types in Hollywood. His account of how he met his second wife, the actress Nancy Davis was that she had been invited to join the Communist Party, and someone suggested it with Reagan. The later story was that the CP confused her with another Nancy Davis, though last I heard, no one had figured out who that other Nancy Davis was.

Reagan was a leader of the Screen Actors Guild, the main actors’ union. But when the postwar Red Scare heated up and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started searching for Reds in Hollywood, Reagan willingly cooperated with them. He was later rewarded by the Hollywood moguls by sweetheart real estate deals that made him wealthy. This is a similarity with Roy Cohn, who made a reputation as a Red-hunter before devoting his career to being legal counsel for mobsters.

Reagan later became the host of the TV show GE Theater, a TV series sponsored by its namesake General Motors, which brought him before a broad TV audience as a benign and respectable personality. He became heavily involved with Republican politics, campaigning for rightwing Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and warning how Lyndon Johnson’s sinister plans for Medicare would wipe out American liberty forever.

He managed to get elected Governor of California campaigning against dope-smoking hippies and antiwar demonstrators and “Berkeley.” He won a second term so that he served as California Governor from 1967-1975, succeeded by a young Jerry Brown. This meant that he actually served eight year as Governor of the largest state in the Union before he became President, a qualification that Donald Trump certainly didn’t have.

Reagan was a much slicker rightwing demagogue than Trump. He promoted hard-right economic policies and was devoted to ever-increasing military budgets, an aggressive anti-Soviet foreign policy and some irresponsible and reckless policies like support for the far-right Contras fighters opposed the then left-leaning government of Nicaragua. Which in turn led him to the disastrous “Iran-Contra” deals which provided weapons to the Iranian mullahs who were supposedly America’s deadly enemies in those days. Oh, yeah, the circumstantial evidence is very strong that Reagan as a candidate made an arrangement with Iran in 1980 to not release the American hostages they were holding until after the election, an arrangement of which the Iran-Contra dealings were likely an extension.

Reagan successfully raised the Social Security retirement age, doing so by postponing the date for decades at which the full retirement age would rise from 65 to 67. In the ensuing decades, the availability of private pensions which had been a staple of the postwar “welfare-capitalist” system of roughly 1945-1975, so that the decrease in Social Security coincided with a trend that made Social Security, which had been envisioned as a supplement to private pensions, became the primary retirement income for a far larger number of people.

His military policy included the “Star Wars” project of trying to achieve a antiballistic-missile-system that would provide a protective shield against nuclear missiles. If there has been a example of a greater boondoggle in the history of the world, I couldn’t say what that might be. Trump has been talking up the same nonsense.

And he contributed mightily to promoting Christian nationalism as a force in the Republican Party.

But Reagan did have a couple of solid policies that Trump will never have. One was that he liberalized national immigration policy in a pragmatic recognition of how “non-documented” immigration had become a key feature of the economy, something he learned as Governor of California. Neither the two Bushes nor Clinton nor Barack Obama achieved anything so constructive in immigration policy. Reagan never staged the kind of Gestapo scenes of attacking Latinos that has become a signatory feature of Trump 2.0 fascism.

And the effect of those pinko peace-activist groups with which Ronnie and Nancy associated themselves apparently had some lasting effects. Because when Michael Gorbachev was ready to made expansive new nuclear-arms-control agreements and to pursue friendlier relations with the West, Reagan was willing to go along with what was a hopeful and successful reduction in US-Soviet tensions.

But Reagan clearly had an authoritarian streak, as well. And the “respectable callousness” he promoted as a key part of his politics of trashing poor people had toxic and long-lasting effects. And, oh yeah, we should give him due credit for initiating the homelessness crisis in California with his cutbacks on mental health facilities as California Governor.

Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney were two of the most key figures putting the US on the road to Trumpist authoritarianism, for which more and more “respectable observers” are now using the correct term of “fascism” to describe. It was Reagan’s mission to turn the US into a paradise for antisocial billionaires like Elon Mush and Jeff Bezos.

So, please spare us the nonsense about the good ole days of respectable and responsible Reaganite conservatism. It’s a fairy tale. And a dishonest one, at that.

And, yes, Reagan’s “respectable callousness” included encouraging white racism, which was one of his most toxic contributions to American political life.

Notes:

(1) Lütjen, Torben (2025): Der gute Amerikaner. Die Zeit 27.11.2025, 50-51. My translations to English. <https://www.zeit.de/2025/50/ronald-reagan-usa-praesident-demokraten-republikaner-donald-trump>

Hitler’s “Kristallnacht” pogrom, 1938

November 9 is the anniversary of the so-called “Kristallnacht” pogrom in 1938 against Jews, directed by Hitler’s government which then had been in power almost six years. That was the point where the Nazis basically outlawed Jews in Germany. It didn’t happen the day after Hitler took power.

As the editors of kurz & knapp from the Bundeszentreale für Politische Bildung (BPB) explain:

The term "Reichskristallnacht" was used by the non-Jewish majority population shortly after the event, but is said to have originated "in the Berlin vernacular". The term was widely used in Germany until the 1980s, and it still persists in other European languages today. It alludes to the broken glass panes during the pogrom. However, the term trivializes the fact that the violence was also directed against people to a large extent. Many scholars therefore refer to it as a euphemism and no longer use it. (1)

“Novemberpogrom” and “Reichspogromnacht” are also used in German now for the event.

Many German Jews assumed that the Nuremburg Race Laws of 1935, bad as they were, would mean a stabilization in their situation. Which to some it was for several years. Those notorious laws were heavily modeled on the Southern segregation laws in the US and also on the highly racially-biased US immigration laws established in the 1920s.

This 13-minute English video from Deutsche Welle explains the “Kristallnacht” event. (1)

As the video explains, November 9 was also the anniversary of German democracy in 1918, ending the Imperial government of “Kaiser Bill” /Wilhelm II), Hitler staged his failed “Beer Hall Putsch” attempt in Munich in 1923 on November 9.

What is often called “the fall of the Berlin Wall” in 1989 also occurred on November 9. The wall didn’t literally “fall” anywhere that day. The East Germans just stopped enforcing the transit restrictions to West Berlin, acting on a misunderstanding of a formal government directive. German Unification Day is a national holiday, but it falls on October 3, the date where the legal unification of the country took effect in 1991.

The stereotypically (but not really) stodgy Encyclopedia Britannica has a good brief article on the 1938 pogrom, including this summary illustration (2):

Michael Berenbaum writes in the Britannica article:

Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram to all police units informing them that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent “Aryan” properties.

The Britannica article also includes a 3-minute video summary. Berenbaum:

The pretext for the pogroms was the fatal shooting in Paris on November 7 of the German diplomat Ernst C by a Polish-Jewish student, Herschel Grynszpan. News of Rath’s death on November 9 reached Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany, where he was celebrating the anniversary of the abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. There, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, after conferring with Hitler, harangued a gathering of old storm troopers, urging violent reprisals staged to appear as “spontaneous demonstrations.” Telephone orders from Munich triggered pogroms throughout Germany, which then included Austria.

Governments planning an action like this don’t always have to stage some kind of so-called “false flag” operation to use as justification. As in this case, they can wait until something like Vom Rath’s assassination happens and use that as an excuse.

It’s also important to keep in mind the progression of events that led from Hitler’s initial appointment as Chancellor by conservative/reactionary President Hindenburg in early 1933 to Kristallnacht and to the even greater horrors of war and Holocaust that came after it. Those include:

• The Reichstag Fire and Hitler’s Emergency Decrees (1933)
• The progressively more severe political repression against other parties and against internal Nazi dissent (e,g,, the so-called Night of the Long Knives against Ernst Röhm and his supporters)h of 1934)
• The failed coup attempt in Austria (1934)
• The Nuremburg Race Laws
• The growing dependence of Mussolini’s Italy on German aid (1935ff,)
• Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936)
• Annexation (Anschluss) of Austria (1938), and the Münich Agreement of Sept. 30, 1938.

Notes:

(1) Redaktion (2023): Novemberpogrom 1938. kurz & knapp 31.10.2025. <https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/542301/novemberpogrom-1938/> (Accessed: 2025-01-12). My translation to English.

(2) November 9: A Day of Destiny? DW History and Culture YouTube channel 11/08/2023. <https://youtu.be/ord6GwMKz2I?si=4OIhs_zb1Ul3qIKT> (Accessed: 2025-30-11).

(3) Berenbaum, Michael. Kristallnacht. Encyclopedia Britannica 11/23/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Kristallnacht> Accessed: 2025-30-11). (Accessed: 2025-30-11).