The “Ick!” factor is obviously very high on everything to do with the infamous “Epstein files.” Which, depending on which Republican is spinning at the moment, may or may not exist. And if they exist Obama and Hillary Clinton forged them.
Here’s Congressman Jamie Raskin, who is a Democrat who actually believes Democrats should fight for their own side and their own constituents. He also understands the importance of creating larger narrative frameworks for Democratic issues. Many Democratic politicians and political consultants have all-but-completely lost sight of the latter.
Here he talks about his own strategy of working the Epstein files issue. (1)
Kyle Kulinski breaks down Trump’s Epstein panic this week: (2)
And here are two different perspectives on how the Epstein-files issue seems to be playing among the Republican base, which is also the Trump/MAGA base. Digby Parton looks at the ways in which this issue is uncomfortable for the Trump Republicans. (3) She recalls that conspiracy-obsessed Republican rank-and-file went nuts over the bizarre Pizzagate scandal, a rightwing fantasy about a child-prostitution ring they said was rung by Hillary Clinton.
You can imagine how excited they all became when Epstein was exposed back in 2018 with the publication of a three-part series in the Miami Herald revisiting his 2008 conviction for sex-trafficking that had been swept under the rug and subsequently ignored by some very powerful people who continued to associate with him. The intrepid reporter who investigated and wrote that story, Julie Brown, was motivated to look into it when President Donald Trump nominated Alex Acosta the U.S. Attorney who had given [Epstein a very favorable sweetheart deal in that case to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Here was a real life, elite, pedophile sex trafficker with many, many friends in high places. Q was right! They were ecstatic when Trump’s Justice Department took up the case and arrested Epstein in 2019. Soon the world would know the whole truth. Except Jeffrey Epstein, the most high profile prisoner in the country, friend of presidents and billionaires, was somehow able to commit suicide in his cell. For an awful lot of people that didn’t pass the smell test, igniting a whole new set of conspiracy mongering.
So initially, some of the Trumpistas were unpleasantly surprised when Trump posted a ant calling the infamous Epstein files a Dem-u-crat conspiracy:
[W]hen Trump rudely dismissed their concerns in a cabinet meeting and then admonished them on Truth Social in a long rant blaming Obama and Clinton, demanding that they focus on the scandals he wants them to focus on, the crushing betrayal was personal. Never before has a Trump post received such a massive negative response on his own platform.
Jess Piper, a rural Democratic activist in Missouri who has an informative Substack blog, took a different look: (4)
There is anger on the right about the Epstein mess, but it’s not trickling down to the everyday Trump supporter.
I know because I talk to MAGA voters every day. I am related to them. They don’t listen to influencers if the message doesn’t align with what Trump says.
But there is a distinct cultish aspect to the MAGA movement, aka, the current Republican Party. She notes:
Trump can control their thoughts and emotions when he speaks directly to them. He can pressure them to conform to his lies. He can remind them that there is no questioning him.
No criticism. No critical thinking.
I recently asked a Trump supporter what he thought of the non-release of the Epstein files that Trump promised. He said it was a cover-up. It’s not Trump’s fault, but it is likely Pam Bondi’s fault.
Blame a woman. As old as time.
It’s the deep state. It’s Biden. It’s the Clintons. It’s Soros. It’s the ever-present evil Democratic child-abusing and child-eating cabal.
So, what’s going on here? Why would Trump supporters talk incessantly about the Epstein files and his jailhouse suicide and the wealthy men who abused little children and then just shake their heads at the news that the files were no longer files — in fact, there were no files?
They are indoctrinated.
She opens her column with the cult issue: Trump is “leading a cult and doing what every cult leader does: whatever he wants …”
“Cult” is not an overstatement. Steven Hassan regularly discuss the cult aspect of the Trump movement in his YouTube podcast. (5)
But Digby’s perspective and Jess Piper’s aren’t mutually exclusive. I assume based on current US politics that something like a third of the country is even downright authoritarian or at least open to dictatorial-type government. And that’s the aspect Jess is addressing. In terms of a Democratic narrative and campaign focus, she is emphasizing that Democrats need to focus on voters who are actually persuadable, who have views and attitudes to which the Democrats can appeal while still being Democrats. But she invokes a religious analogy to explain why Democrats can’t waste their time and energy trying to find issues which will achieve the impossible, i.e., persuading devoted cult members to change their opinion in an upcoming election:
Why won’t the Epstein mess change their minds? How can we flip them? What message can we bring to a Trump voter to change their thinking?
I’m going to say this as gently as I can: You can’t. You can’t change a three-time Trump voter.
Think about this: Why can’t you just knock on your Catholic neighbor’s door and convert them to Mormonism? Why can’t I talk my Baptist mom into being an atheist? Because religion is often tied up with someone’s identity.
And so is Trumpism.
The Democratic Party nationally is still stuck in a weird kind of time warp where it’s always 1992. The hottest “alternative media” star was Rush Limbaugh on his talk radio show. California was still a swing state, so Presidential candidates need to appeal to conservative Southern states. And, as the infamous 1992 Florida election showed, Florida was also still a swing state. So they are still trying to coopt Republican issues and telling themselves that “the fever will break” in the Republican Party. Obama declared thirteen years ago Tau, Byron during his 2012 reelection campaign, after four years of escalating radicalism in the Republican Party: "I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” (6)
Unfortunately, the “fever” has been driving Republican fantasies in a big way since 1964. And under Trump, it’s become a full-blown cult. And, yes, the Republicans will continue to come up with some moral-panic issue like The Trans. And whichever issue they pick will probably have something to do with bathrooms. The Democrats are not going to out-moral-panic the Republicans among their hardcore base. But those voters don’t care how many women Trump has slept with, with out without their consent. And they don’t care if he was best friends with a mega-sleazebag like Jeffrey Epstein.
And the Democratic Party consultant class seems to be stuck in a mode of targeting voters according to issue sets. Which is perfectly fine as far as it goes. But what leaders like Jamie Raskin are emphasizing is that the Democrats need to put those issue appeals in the context of an overall narrative the defines the Democratic identity and also sounds like the Democrats are willing to actually fight the Republicans politically.
Trying to mealy-mouth about Democratic issues rather than actively defending and promoting them surrenders half the battle to Republicans from the get-go.
Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed into law a measure approved by the Republican state legislature to overturn a provision passed by a solid majority of voters last November on providing paid sick leave.
The now-struck provision, which went into effect in May but will cease at the end of August, required employers to give workers one hour of earned paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, and 56 hours (or just seven days) of paid sick time per year. Businesses with fewer than 15 employees were only required to give workers 40 hours per year.
In a statement touting how “conservative leadership” supports Missourian “families,” Kehoe called the provision, which would have helped an estimated 728,000 private sector employees in the state, “onerous.” (1)
Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report discussed this, including a clip of a Missouri state senator Rick Brattin (R) from last November explaining why we shouldn’t have direct-democracy devices like initiatives and referenda. (2) Because, you see, those things are democratic, and democracy is un-American!
This is a real throwback to segregationist thinking around after the Supreme Court ordered public school integration in 1954.
Brattin: This is one of those things of the problem with direct democracy. This is exactly what our Founders were expressly against when they formed this nation. We’re a constitutional republic with individual representation confined by Constitutional restraints of what government can and can’t do.
And for us to think that the Founders had in their mind’s eye that we would be putting in front of every single voter and every single time with every single policy measure for them to decide whether or not this was good policy or not.
[That vote was about requiring employers to pay sick leave, not a complete rewrite of all the laws of Missouri.]
Especially when the people casting the ballots for measures such as this, they have no skin in the game whatsoever when it comes to these sorts of measures. No realization of the detriment or the harm it may cause to the very own bottom dollar. Because they may not even understand what these provisions, what these measures would do to their employer.
Because at the end of the day, most people casting these votes on these measures, they don’t own businesses. They don’t understand what’s required to keep the bottom line, to keep people employed.
We’re not a direct democracy. And we oughta stop telling our kids that we’re a democracy. First and foremost, ‘cause we’re not a democracy, we’re a republican form of government. We say the pledge every day, we say “to the republic for which it stands,” not “the democracy for which it stands.” And especially not the direct democracy for which it stands.
And people can moan and they can groan, but it’s the ones who moan and groan who probably not the ones signing the front of the checks that employ the people, that are going to have to bear these costs.
This guy sounds like a John Birch Society character circa 1960. Both in the condescending, smarmy tone of his comments and also because he’s promoting one of the Birchers’ favorite notions, one they used in particular to argue against equality for Black citizens and against school integration.
But now that the vintage 1950s thinking and attitudes of Trump’s political mentor Roy Cohn dominates the Trumpified Republican Party, it’s worth having at least a passing understanding of this nonsense.
This “we’re a republic not a democracy” trope was adopted by the John Birch Society, which immediately after its founding in 1958 became for years the mothership for crackpot rightwing conspiracies and railing against segregation and everything else they didn’t like as a Communist plot. But it wasn't exclusive to the Birchers.
Before saying a bit more about that, it is important to have a critical attitude toward the lawmaking process, including the particular challenges presented by initiatives and referenda. Those were favorite reform device promoted and widely enacted during the Progressive Era to provide a popular democratic check on corrupt officials and party bosses.
But like every other democratic institution, if Big Money is given free play to influence them, they can also interfere and damage democratic processes and individual rights. If lobbyists can spend unlimited funds campaigning for or against one, they can distort the outcome. And without some reasonable regulation of what they can cover and what not, they can also wind up embedding features into the law that few voters even realized were part of it.
But that’s not what Brattin’s little lesson on Bircher political philosophy was about.
A “republic” but not a “democracy”?
The core of the argument is the ahistorical fantasy that the Founders made some sharp distinction between GOOD republicanism and BAD democracy. It’s nonsense. Democracy was around in ancient Athens and there was such a thing as the Roman Republic. And if you cut and paste enough, you could surely find things said by Americans in speeches or the press in the last three decades of the eighteenth century that refer to the impracticability of having an Athens-style town-meeting direct democracy in a modern nation. And also references to the danger of republics being undermined by strong leaders using plebiscitary methods to undermine the Roman Republic.
Even today, democratic political theory at least pays some attention to the ancient origins of democracy. (3)
During the long period between the Fall of Rome in 476 and the American Revolution of 1776, many governments had come and gone in the European space. There was the Magna Carta of 1215. There were the Italian city-states like those of Genoa and Pisa, also called “communes.” And going into the modern era, there was also the expansion of the formal representation for the nobility and the propertied classes. And some very bloody wars of religion in the 15th and 17th centuries. All of these produced practices and theories of legitimate political representation, limitations on government, and the rights of ordinary people that formed the thought-world of the American Founders.
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to put the theories of Locke and Montesquieu into practice, they understood they were building a democratic republic, i.e., a representative government not controlled by a king or queen that allowed for broad popular representation by the people of the country.
“Broad” in that context meant that free men with some amount of property were allowed to vote. But in the world of 1787, that was seen as radical democracy. (In the US, the reform movement that surged in the 1830s included successful demands to reduce property qualifications for voting.)
But the Americans of that time essentially used the terms “republic” and “democracy” interchangeably. There were republics in the world of 1787 in which royalty had to share power to some real extent with representative bodies elected by wealthy male members of the nobility. And republic was used to refer to a country ruled by some kind of representative body without a king. Even today, the United States has a (momentarily seriously challenged) democracy with no king, and so is known as a republic. Sweden has a strong system of representative democracy but still has a formal royal sovereign, and so it is the Kingdom of Sweden.
What we now know as the liberal democratic tradition sees representative government and the rule of law as intrinsically connected. Rule of law in this concept is not the same as rule by law, which kings and dictators can also use. Representative institutions and individual rights need laws to protect them. But in the democratic perspective, for laws to be legitimate they must also be made by representative institutions.
And there is a continual tension between liberal democracy and capitalism, even though they both developed together. (4) Liberal democracy is not the same as economic liberalism in the sense of “free-market” capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism as practiced by Argentina’s current crackpot government under Javier Milei, or as advocated by the dystopian fantasies of billionaire Tech Bros, is actively hostile to democracy.
Claire Connor wrote an insightful political autobiography chronicling her life growing up in a John Birch Society family, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right (2013). In it, she describes one of her college professors at the University of Dallas, a rightwinger named Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967), who espoused a version of the republic-not-a-democracy nonsense.
She cites a 1965 paper of his (5) that is basically a “highbrow” polemic in favor of racial segregation, which the Supreme Court had held to be unconstitutional in public schools in 1954. But Southern states were still maintaining segregated schools more than a decade later and waging what they called a “Massive Resistance” (6) campaign to keep them forever.
Such “highbrow” conservative arguments tended to be abstruse, tendentious, pompous, and boring. Kendall’s 1965 article was no exception. He argues, for instance, “’Liberty,’ from moment to moment, will have to mean that amount of ‘liberty’ (or ‘freedom’) that the laws, as legislated under the system, provide for.” Kendall’s approach in that piece seems to be to try to get across the idea that any change in the law to provide more “freedom” - his quotation marks were meant to convey a sneering attitude toward the concept – was inherently unjustified. And also apparently to put his readers to sleep.
How there could have ever been a legitimate American Revolution against Britain under such an understanding is hard to see. In fact, as Connor describes her former professor’s view, he actually wasn’t so hot on this whole American Revolution thing:
Willmoore Kendall used his lectures to drive home one of his core ideas: the Constitution of the United States stood head and shoulders above the Declaration of Independence in importance. He passionately believed that the "all men are created equal" clause from the Declaration was never a defining idea in American governance. In fact, he went so far as to declare the whole business of individual rights and equality to be "false, liberal criteria."
Kendall said the defining principle of the United States was "self-government by virtuous people deliberating under God." Those virtuous souls were the ones who spoke in the first three words of the preamble, "We the People." …
Kendall left little doubt that he would have preferred an America governed in the old colonial way. So what if slaves had finally been set free at the cost of a terrible civil war and women had fought 130 years to get the vote? Those good old days when noble white men of high moral principle and great wisdom ruled the country were, in his view, the golden era of the American republic.
In Kendall's political philosophy, demands for individual liberty and equality-including any expansion of voting rights-were radical and dangerous. Ultimately, he reasoned, the pressures of liberty and equality would transform our constitutional government into a totalitarian one. [my emphasis]
This is the kind of stagnant pit of half-baked ideas and sleep-inducing tendentious arguments from which the notion of the US as “a-republic-not-a-democracy” comes. And those ideas and arguments are used to justify the antidemocratic attitudes of authoritarians, white racists, and xenophobes.
(3) I heard a scholarly presentation years ago at Santa Clara University in California that saidthat the phrase in the US National Anthem calling the US as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” was taken from a popular play about ancient Sparta, which was assumed to have embodied a strong sense of patriotic public service. But I was unable to confirm that independently while preparing this post.
(4) “Democracy and neoliberal capitalism are two systems that are interconnected, but whose elements require in part different and sometimes contradictory rules.” Metz, Markus & Seeßlen, Georg (2025): Blödmaschinen II: Die Fabrikation der politischen Paranoia, 111. Berlin: Suhrkamp. My translation to English.
(5) Kendall, Willmoore (1965): The Civil Rights Movement and the Coming Constitutional Crisis. The Intercollegiate Review 1:2, 53-66. (02/01/1965). Anyone choosing to read through these 14 pages of turgid prose would be well advised to have an ample supply of coffee on hand.
(6) See: Day, John Kyle (2014): The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie (2018): Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press.
The German government has been performing more border controls than usual this year.
It’s basically a way for the center-right and center-left parties to show they are being “tough on immigration.”
The center-right and center-left European parties are having a hard time breaking away from the idea that if they just bitch and moan about immigrants like the rightwing parties do, that will attract voters away from the far-right parties like Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD). Despite the experience of countries including Britain, France, and Italy over the last decade and a half showing such policies just reinforce the far-right xenophobic framing and help the far-right parties, they can’t seem to give up the addiction to dumb messaging.
The current policies of the Trump 2.0 regime in the US have shown how xenophobia and dishonest hysteria over immigrants can be used as a key rallying point to undermine democracy and the rule of law and to implement a distinctly authoritarian system. The Trumpist budget bill just passed by Congress vastly expands the increasingly lawless ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). As Judith Levine describes:
The press had been focused on the wealth gap the budget turns into the San Andreas fault. It had been dutifully mentioning increases in funding for the military – to an unprecedented $1.3tn – and “border security”.
Set aside for a moment that phrase’s implication, that the US is being invaded – which it isn’t – and it is still not apt. The jurisdiction of the federal police force that this budget will finance promises to stretch far beyond immigration; its ambitions will outstrip even the deportation of every one of the nearly 48 million immigrants in the country, including the three-quarters of them who are citizens, green-card holders or have temporary visas.
The colossal buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will create the largest domestic police force in the US; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. Ice will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, Ice – perhaps under another name – will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable. It is hard to imagine any president dismantling it. [my emphasis] (1)
On that last point, the Democrats really should commit to abolishing ICE in its current form. Redo the whole thing. Require that ICE agents making arrest adhere to at least the minimal standards of legal conduct required of regular police officers. (The latter need to be expected to observe such standards better than they often do, as well.) The Republicans are always going to accuse the Democrats of being “soft on crime,” so why not do the right thing on ICE and push back on Republicans defenses of ICE misconduct with well-publicized Congressional hearings and persistent messaging about how we can’t have masked thugs carrying combat-grade rifles who don’t even identify themselves kidnapping people off the street.
Border controls in the “Schengen Area” of Europe
The German border-control stunt is 99% a public relations stunt. It mostly slows cross-border traffic, the ease of which under the normal EU regulations has been and remains one of the most popular features of the EU. And for business, a very practical one. Border controls slow down cross-border shipments. And free movement of people and goods within the EU is a basic legal principle of the whole arrangement.
The German Tagesschau reports that even police unions are complaining about what a waste of time and resources this whole stunt is:
A lot of effort for a few rejections at the borders: The police union criticizes the tightened controls, which lead to millions of hours of overtime. The Polish government is also disgruntled.
The police union has once again criticized the heightened controls at the German borders. The effort is disproportionate, they say, and there is a risk of long traffic jams during the holiday season. The chairman of the federal police district of the police union (GdP), Andreas Roßkopf, told the Augsburger Allgemeine: "The number of rejections of asylum and protection seekers is actually very low, but the effort for the federal police is huge."
The official figure of 285 rejections at the borders by the end of June is now offset by 2.8 million overtime hours in the Federal Police. "This puts an enormous strain on the motivation and health of the employees," Roßkopf warned. The trade unionist called for the intensity of border controls to be reduced as quickly as possible. (2)
The particulars here involve something that pretty much everyone at all familiar with the EU immigration system and laws knows is a chronic problem. It known as the “Schengen system,” from the 1985 Schengen Agreement. The “Schengen Area” is larger than the EU. Non-EU member Switzerland, for instance, is part of the Schengen zone. It means that the country of first arrival for people not citizens of a Schengen country checks their passports. Once admitted to the Schengen zone, people are allowed to travel freely to other Schengen countries without having a separate visa for the individual Schengen country they are entering.
The Schengen Agreement predates the formal founding of the European Union in 1993. For people with visas and commercial traffic, this makes the process of visiting the Schengen Area much easier and much more efficient than having only national border controls. It also makes the process cheaper and more easily manageable for individuals countries’ governments.
But the Schengen rules apply also to asylum-seekers, who are often refugees without visas. Since the country of first entry is responsible to process asylums claims, that means countries like Germany or Austria or the Netherlands can dump the responsibility for those requesting asylum onto the Schengen border countries like Poland, Greece, and Hungary.
Without going into the details, the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015-2016 showed this was unworkable when it came to large influxes of refugees. One of the bizarre ironies of the current situation is that the EU – to the surprise of many – handled the influx of Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion of 2022 in a very different way, even though at its peak it was something like three times as many refugees as in the 2015-16 “crisis.” (3)
For one thing, they didn’t treat them technically as refugees. Even before the 2022 war began, Ukrainians were allowed to travel visa-free in the EU for three months. The stays have been extended repeatedly with the Ukrainians enjoying the status of protected persons. So the EU has shown itself able to deal with a refugee problem much bigger than that of 2015-16 without losing their minds over it.
But for non-Ukrainian refugees, the Schengen system means that that the countries on the outer border of the Schengen area is responsible for processing refugees’ asylum requests. And that also mean housing them, maintaining them, and integrating them into the host country while the asylum applications are processed. At the same time, international law requires that when a person enters another country and requests asylum, the receiving country is required to give them due process of law in processing the asylum claim and to support them during the process. And not just international law, the same rights for the politically persecuted are founded directly in the German Constitution (called the “Basic Law”).
The obvious practical solution would be some kind of official sharing of the settlement of refugees. Angela Merkel’s government in Germany adopted that practice on an emergency basis in 2015. That was a practical immediate solution but also a problematic one in that it was basically a one-time national decision to solve an EU dilemma.
That’s the background of the Kabuki theater with the German border controls with Poland. It lets the German government say, “Look! We’re preventing asylum-seekers who should have registered in Poland from coming into Germany.” It’s a problem with the international law on asylum. And it’s also a problem for the EU. Because it’s certainly reasonable for a country like Poland to expect practical solidarity from its EU partners. (In the 2025 geopolitical context, it’s a critical consideration that Poland has the largest army of any EU country.)
As Tageschau reports:
Germany has already been carrying out random checks at the border with Poland since October 2023. Shortly after the new [German] federal government [under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz] took office, [German] Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt ordered further strengthened controls on May 8. Asylum seekers should be turned away. This led to criticism from the governments of Germany's neighboring states. In response, Poland introduced border controls on Monday.
(3) I’m trying to be conservative on the numbers here. It could well have been as much as five times higher at its peak. The number of refugees during the so-called border crisis of 2015-16 commonly cited is 1.1 million. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) provides extensive statistics on Ukrainian refugees. <https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine> But they can be challenging for non-demographers (like me) to interpret, not least because they have to be viewed in the context of border crossings to and from Ukraine to a particular country.
As of this writing, UNHCR estimates 5.1 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe, which includes Russia. The website notes that the number in Russia could last be estimated in June 2023, at which time it stood at 1.2 million. The UNHCR Ukraine Situation Flash Update #42 of 03/07/2023 <https://webarchive.archive.unhcr.org/20250602164356/https://reporting.unhcr.org/ukraine-situation-flash-update-42>estimated at that time there were 8.1 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe including Russia.
Nonproliferation expert Joe Cirincione looks at why the Trump-Netanyahu policy on the Iranian nuclear program has been so bad and gives a lot of context on the Iranian nuclear program and its international context. (1)
As he notes on his Substack, part of the interview discusses “the unintended consequences of this 12-day war: the risk of dragging us back to the nuclear anarchy of the 1950’s, when many nations - friends and foes - sought nuclear weapons.” (2)
That retrogression has been going on since the Cheney-Bush Administration. The JCPOA was a major step back in the right direction. Trump 1.0 cancelled it, the Biden Administration couldn’t be bothered to renew it, and Trump 2.0 has brought it to this point.
And he gives a good broad review of the development of the nuclear nonproliferation program after the Second World War.
He appears in the video to misspeak in referring the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iranian nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the US, as having lasted for 25 years. Actually, it was finalized in 2015 during the second Obama Administration.
This is the speech President Kennedy gave in 1963 announcing the first nuclear arms-control treaty, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: (3)
As he observed in that speech, “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms. Each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension.”
(3) President Kennedy radio and television address on the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July 26, 1963. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy YouTube channel 07/26/2020. <https://youtu.be/F1zoWjQ6wAI?si=8s9KdSM-2fUS9rQO> (Accessed: 2025-10-07).
I’m sure that since the current Russia-Ukraine War started in February 2022, I’m sure I’ve posted more videos featuring Über-Realist John Mearsheimer than any other person.
That’s partially because he’s been doing at least one podcast per week pretty much every week since then, and sometimes several in a week. Although I’ve never been able to fully buy into his particular “offensive realist” theory of foreign policy, his insistence on focusing on cynical but real national calculations large countries often provide the pragmatic, real-world analysis of international situations that US policymakers have far too often ignored.
He and his “defensive realist” colleague Stephen Walt intensely criticized the Iraq War waged by the Cheney-Bush government starting in 2003 on the basis of its grotesque lack of realistic understanding and calculations used in starting and conducting the war. Foreign policy can be realistic and immoral. The Iraq War policy was one of numerous US interventions that could be described and both unrealistic and impractical as well as immoral.
In the case of US support for Israel over the decades, both Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the often-unconditional support by the US of Israel’s policy violates the guidelines of the realistic approach they advocate, viewing US support of Israel as having been to the detriment of US national interests. Mearsheimer has also been explicit in stating his view that the US supporting Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as immoral.
Mearsheimer also pays close attention to the military situation and to diplomacy. In this recent interview, he expresses what seems to be real astonishment at the plain incompetence of the Trump 2.0 regime’s diplomacy on Ukraine and the Middle East. (1)
Beginning at 23:00 in the video, Mearsheimer says, referring to Trump 2.0’s public and private diplomacy:
I mean, this is the gang that can't shoot straight. I mean, what else can you say?
Trump has basically failed to deal with the Ukraine problem and he's failed to improve relations with Russia as he promised he was going to do. It looked like he was off to an auspicious start at the beginning of his term, but everything has kind of gone to hell in a hand basket.
And we're in this real mess now. And what's staring him in the face - and you don't want to underestimate this - is defeat in Ukraine. Right? The Russians are slowly but steadily rolling back the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians are in real trouble. All of these attacks that Trump is talking about where Ukraine is really getting pounded are having an effect.
And I believe at some point the Ukrainians are going to collapse and the Russians are going to win an ugly victory. And this is going to be done on Trump's watch. And he knows that. He's not so foolish as not as to fail to understand that what happened in Afghanistan with Joe Biden, where that defeat was dumped in his lap, is going to happen in all likelihood with regard to Ukraine.
He's going to be seen as the President who lost Ukraine and he has nobody to blame for himself but himself for the mess he's in.
He also thinks that the neocons are now dominant in the Trump 2.0 Administration. I’ve never had much hope that the America Firsters would strike a distinct course from the neocons, because America Firsters are essentially nationalistic militarists, which is what the neocons are, as well, though the latter go through the motions of putting a more respectable democratic façade on it. How much a genuine “restrainer” viewpoint has ever had much clout in Trump 2.0 is questionable.
It's usual for scholars like Mearsheimer and others who have a role as authorities on foreign policy to speak as though they are advising policymakers on the preferable course of action. But here Mearsheimer is blunt about what a diplomatic mess Trump 2.0 is. He also makes a basic liberal-philosophical point about the need for rule of law. And specifically about how Trump doesn’t understand or practice it.
It's usual for scholars like Mearsheimer and others who have a role as authorities on foreign policy to speak as though they are advising policymakers on the preferable course of action. But here Mearsheimer is blunt about what a diplomatic mess Trump 2.0 is. He also makes a basic liberal-philosophical point about the need for rule of law. And specifically about how Trump doesn’t understand or practice it.
Former Israeli diplomat Daniel Levy has this current update on the brutality and “the criminal and genocidal intent” of the Netanyahu government in the ethnic cleansing Israel is current conducting in Gaza with the full support of Trump 2.0. (2)
Nicholas Vrousalis has a helpful perspective on the concept of “technofeudalism,” which at least suggests that capitalism has already been replaced by a different economic system based on “cloud capital.” (2) He reviews two books on the subject, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy by Cédric Durand (2024) and Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis (2024).
The technofeudalism argument assumes that users of a website are giving the site owners via the Internet “cloud” information about themselves, which the owners use for their business benefit and profits, and therefore the users are unpaid serfs for the website owners.
Users as serfs, cloud capital owners as feudal lords
Vrousalis notes: “But attention is not a productive activity; my Facebook activity does not constitute work.” He argues that users “are almost certainly wronged in other ways - manipulated, dominated, robbed of their data - but they are not exploited.” Or, to use the familiar phase of Marx (which he derived from Adam Smith), they are not producing surplus value for the owners of capital.
Rentiers and financialization
The economies of advanced countries have been heavily financialized in recent decades, bringing all sorts of problems for those economies. Vrousalis reminds us, “Progressive economists agree that capitalism, since the late 1990s, has become increasingly financialized — or better, rentierized. John Maynard Keynes’s fantasy that low interest rates would bring about the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ has failed to materialize.”
But neither employees of tech companies nor the users of their services have a feudal-type situation with the cloud companies, one in which the companies have an ownership-type relationship with the companies like feudal lords had with their serfs and the property on which the serfs worked.
Secular decline in profit rates
He summarizes a third aspect of the Varoufakis-Durand “technofeudalism” concept this way: “The cloudalists can, through a combination of political corruption and cheap money, preserve their dominance without completely destroying the basis of capitalist reproduction.”
This has to do with an economic concept not so often discussed in the financial press called the “secular decline in profit rates.” (2) This has to do with various factors in economic processes. In Marxist economics, a driving factor in this secular decline is automation. Because only human labor can generate surplus value in that view, the more efficient companies become, the less human labor is required and that puts downward pressure on profit rates. It’s a fascinating if convoluted set of arguments involved that I won’t go further into here.
Vrousalis describes the Varoufakis-Durand take on this topic: “Advocates of the technofeudal hypothesis believe that the cloudalists can, through a combination of political corruption and cheap money, preserve their dominance without completely destroying the basis of capitalist reproduction.”
And he argues for what he calls the “faucet theory” in rejecting that concern, i.e., “other things equal, when money is cheap, the cloudalists will turn to rents and rely less on profit; when money is dear, they will turn from rents to productive investment. All the while, their d ecision will largely depend on labor costs.” It’s not so clear how this addresses the secular decline of profits concern. In this case, the Varoufakis-Durand approach seems to take the secular decline of profits more seriously than Vrousalis’ explanation does.
But Vrousalis makes an important point about the dystopian TechBro futurism, which he describes as “the ideological affinity between a feudal ethos and the technolibertarianism that pervades Silicon Valley,” i.e., the TechBro dystopian futurism we hear from people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He thinks Durand and Varoufakis give that ideological aspect short shrift:
As a theory of the state, much of contemporary American libertarianism consists in the idea that all political power emanates from private power — the sum total of private property and contract. This is a feudal idea in the sense that feudal ideology only recognizes private power as the source of legitimate power. The contrasting idea of a public power acting exclusively in the name of free and equal citizens is an innovation of modernity. Given its commitment to that form of libertarianism, Big Tech is ideologically aligned with a feudal account of the state, which also explains its distrust of democracy, its penchant toward anarchism, and its love for Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. But these affinities are true of all libertarians of that vintage, not just technolibertarians.
Varoufakis can be quirky. But he knows an awful lot about how international finance and currencies work. In this 17-minute video, he explains his own take on technofeudalism: (3)
Notes:
(1) Vrousalis, Nicholas (2025): Technofeudalism Is Just Capitalism. Catalyst 9:1, 102-110.
No one can say whether the hastily announced end of the war in the Middle East was once again only a bluff or whether there soon could be a further escalation. Or whether there really will be a turning point because Iran has been successfully prevented from building nuclear weapons. Nothing is certain with Trump. (1)
This has been very little to indicate that the “nothing is certain” part of Trump’s diplomatic style has any notable conscious strategy of ambiguity behind it. He just changes his mind all the time, depending on what reality-TV impulse is striking him at the moment.
But it seems like wishful thinking to assume that “Iran has been successfully prevented from building nuclear weapons.” On the contrary, the “twelve-day war” in which Israel and the US attacked Iran has given the Iranian government maximum incentive to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush worked hard to do away with the international nuclear-arms-limitation arrangements. Obama partially reversed it, Trump 1.0 trashed it, Bide did little to restore it, and now Trump and Netanyahu have taken a big new step to wreck it further.
At this writing, we’re trying to see if Trump 2.0 can get Netanyahu to agree to a new ceasefire which Netanyahu himself will break in his usual pattern.
Sultan Barakat and former Israeli diplomat and current Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas discuss the current precarious situation here: (2)
Pinkas served from 2000 to 2004 as the Israeli Consul General in New York and had positions as a senior foreign policy advisor to the Israeli government.
The Iranian historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov in this interview discusses the ongoing genocide Israel is committing in Gaza: (3)
Bartov describes the current situation this way:
Q: The Israeli government says that it does its utmost to avoid civilian casualties while fighting an enemy which uses civilians as shields. Is that an argument that in your opinion is as valid today as it was 18 months ago?
Bartov: Absolutely not. It's absolutely not true. And not only that, to say that there is fighting, that there's a war going on in Gaza itself is a misnomer. There is no war. There are a few guerilla units that come out every once in a while and fire an RPG rocket or shoot some sniper fire, but there is no real fighting. And the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is saying it itself. It's admitting that, when you have, as your screen says, close to 58,000 people dead, of whom between 60 and 70% are civilians, half of them children, at least.
And some estimates bring it up 100,000 with an estimated 130,000 wounded, many of them severely mutilated. Then one cannot say that the IDF is doing everything it can to prevent such losses. The IDF is involved right now in completely flattening Gaza and the Minister of Defense just today, Minister Katz, said that the plan of of Israel with the IDF, of course, is to concentrate people in a so-called humanitarian town, which would look everything like a concentration camp over the ruins of the city of Rafa that has been entirely flattened. [starts at 4:30 in the video]
Drop Site News has a report of 07/08/2025 that discusses the military proficiency of the guerrilla fighters on the Palestinians side in Gaza in more detail than we often hear about them. (4)
And Israel’s leading Cassandra voice has a sobering take on the moment: (5)
(5) Trump gives Israel "carte blanche" for Gaza atrocities: Gideon Levy. Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 07/08/2025. <https://youtu.be/Xub5-1xLYpI?si=xAwdcdnWoqAwW0Ym> (Accessed: 2025-08-07).
I suddenly got the idea yesterday to ask Microsoft’s Copilot AI function, which constantly begs me to use it, “Write two paragraphs in the style of William Faulkner summarizing the confused thinking of President Donald Trump during his second Presidential term.”
To which Copilot cheerfully replied, “Certainly, Bruce. Here's a Faulkner-inspired take—dense, winding, and raw with psychological texture.“
Opinions may vary on the result. But for me - Faulkner has been my favorite writer for most of my life - it sounds more like an impression of Hunter Thompson on acid:
In those latter days when the light turned amber and the corridors of power swelled with echo and murmurs of men once loyal, now dubious, he stood among them—his mind not quiet, never quiet, a storm of grandeur laced with suspicion, claiming the past and mortgaging the future as though it were one continual press conference broadcast to the silence of loyal watchers, blurred not by fact but by fervor, the truth becoming elastic, stretched taut across golf carts and teleprompters, where one decision canceled the next like the tide of some misshapen campaign forever running toward a second victory, the memory of the first swollen with grievance, sealed not with triumph but with the insistence of its own retelling. He thought in pronouncements, loops of certainty that defied chronology, that bent history backward to resemble a mirror held not for reflection but for reassurance, a flash of self made myth.
And so in those hallways half-lit by flickering screens and advisors grown weary not from battle but from translating impulse into governance, he persisted—speech a slurry of conviction and contradiction, of tweets and treaties tangled like weeds around the solemn pillars of precedent. Time did not move forward for him, it circled—a carousel of enemies fabricated and emboldened, allies praised and dismissed, loyalty a currency whose inflation matched the rhetoric, unanchored and shifting, while beneath it all beat that unyielding need, not for legacy but for immediacy, for spectacle, for the applause that washed away doubt like rain off marbled stone. His thoughts did not progress but revolved, a constellation where he was both axis and observer, bewildered by the stars but naming them nonetheless.
But even I would have to admit that it’s cute.
Still, the actual Faulkner would have worked in a dog peeing on Trump’s leg into the account. In his novel The Mansion (1959), he has a dog pee on the leg of a demagogic rightwing, Clarence Snopes in the novel, possibly modeled on the notorious Mississippi racist Senator Theordore Bilbo. (1) And he would have included a reference to the depravity of Trump’s political mentor, Roy Cohn, lawyer for Joe McCarthy and the New York Mob and also the federal prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
So I asked Copilot to work in Roy Cohn. The result was an improvement:
He remembered him, not as a man but as a force, an echo housed within marble offices and whispered threats, slick-haired and unrepentant, teaching that victory was not earned but seized, seized without apology, seized with the snarl of litigation and the grin of deflection. Roy, they said his name like a warning, like an instruction, and Trump carried him, not in memory but in method—deny everything, admit nothing, counterattack always. And so from the rose garden to the rally stage he ruled not in policy but in posture, a stance learned long ago at Cohn’s knee, where power was an unyielding theater and loyalty a blade honed against truth. The Constitution was not a document but a foil, a thing to maneuver around, to suspend beneath executive will, shaped not by governance but by combat’s geometry, each line drawn not for clarity but for control.
By the second term the lessons were not lessons—they were instincts, ancient and immediate, lived not in strategy but reflex, and it showed in the selection of men not for merit but for allegiance, the appointment of chaos as doctrine, the embrace of spectacle as shield. The nation did not move by consensus but by will, a singular will projected outward with Roy’s voice embedded, scratchy and spectral, nudging from a past that refused to stay buried. And as dissent blossomed like mold across the marble floors he strode not to explain but to dominate, to reroute history through litigation and repetition, the gospel of Cohn alive in the vitriol, in the absolution denied to others yet claimed for the self, the empire a mirror not of the people but of the mentor—merciless, theatrical, unrepentant.
Notes:
(1) Adams, Percy (1964): Humor as Structure and Theme in Faulkner's Trilogy. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 5:3, 211. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207358>
These are real debates. And Europe has a lot at stake on their outcome. (1)
Excellent point from Shahin Vallée and Joseph de Weck: “History teaches us that the political choice has never been about guns or butter, but rather guns or taxes.”
If European leaders and political parties want rearmament to be something other a new excuse for more austerity for the majority of Europeans, they will have to be up a real fight to stop than from happening.
Neoliberal ideology seems to induce the practical equivalent of brain rot in its enthusiasts, as they note here:
For some experts, the only way to build a warfare state that can deter Russia is to slash social spending. After all, goes the misleading argument, governments in the 1990s splashed the savings from defence on expensive welfare promises
Even before the Nato agreement in The Hague, the public were being softened up for the new reality. In a TV address in March, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, warned citizens that in a “more brutal” world, they would have to make budget sacrifices. Macron ruled out higher taxes. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, decided to scrap a public holiday to finance higher defence spending. The UK has cut savagely into its international development aid budget for the same reason.
They state their non-neoliberal response this way: “The “new normal” of higher defence spending should thus also be funded by increasing taxes, especially on corporate income, high wealth and capital gains. This won’t be possible without limiting tax competition at a Europe-wide level.”
One of the most famous anti-militarist books of the 1930s in the US was War Is A Racket by a retired Marine general, Smedley Butler. (1)
Gen. Smedley Butler (1929)
It takes some imagination now to recall how strongly an anti-militarist sentiment became dominant in the US during the 1920s and 1930s. That position had both left and right versions. The rightwing version stemmed from the anti-Wilsonian Isolationists who successfully blocked the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles by the United States. The Republican Isolationists tended to be deeply suspicious of the kind of liberal internationalism that Wilson and the Versailles Treaty represented. Their position was essentially nationalist and one that generally held in contempt the notion of the US being bound by international law. The fact that the Versailles Treaty really was disastrous is not any kind of validation of the Isolationists’ blinkered perspective.
When I refer to Trump and the MAGA crowd as rightwing isolationist, it’s because their fundamental outlook – leaving aside the question of whether Trump himself can even formulate a foreign-policy strategic outlook in his own head – is lawless nationalism. The nastiest moment of rightwing isolationism in the US was when famous figures like Charles Lindbergh openly declared their admiration for Hitler Germany. Woody Guthrie wrote a memorable polemical folk song about “Lindy” and the America First movement: (2)
The ”Wheeler, Clark, and Nye” in the lyrics referred to rightwing isolationist Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri
Former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote a long treatise presenting a post-World War II Old Right Isolationism that was actually first published in 2011: Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. He had begun writing it in 1944 and completed the manuscript in 1963.
Another look of the Old Right isolationism that became an important current of rightwing sentiment after the Second World War is provided by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), one of the five books published on the results of the famous Studies on Prejudice project directed by Max Horkheimer. (3)
But there was also plenty of criticism of militarism from the left and progressives, too. One of Smedley’s most famous statements was published in 1935 in a socialist magazine, Common Sense:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. [my emphasis] (4)
The left generally was critical of American militarism in the 1930s but were also aware of the bad acts and strategic dangers coming from Mussolini in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Hitler Germany’s threats to its neighbors, notably during the Spanish Civil War. Longshore workers’ unions and other, for instance, demanded embargoes of scrap metal shipments to Japan, which had militarily attacked the Chinese territory of Mongolia in 1931.
There was a particular twist in the views of some of the left when the Soviet Union entered into the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939, aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. For both the Germans and the Russians, it was a cold-bloodedly realist foreign policy move. Hitler got to start his war against Britain and France without having to worry about the Soviets opening a two-front war against them. (5)
The German journal Osteuropa devoted a full issue in 2009 to that agreement (5), drawing on the documentation available in 2009, which obviously provided much more detail on the negotiations and the motives of the major actors than was publicly available in 1939. Their front cover provided this symbolic framing:
But part of the deal was cooperation on political propaganda and publicity. So publications from Soviet-aligned Communist parties that either directly followed the official Comintern (the Soviet-headed world organization of Communist Parties) positions or took some direction from them reflected tended to represent the British-French war against Hitler Germany as an “imperialist” war for which they and not the Axis powers were primarily to blame.
The leading American author Theodore Dreiser published a book in 1941 called America Is Worth Saving, which took a similarly critical view of the cause of Britain and France, though with considerably more literary flair than other left-leaning writers generally achieved in their pamphlets. For instance, he poked fun at the chronic fascination of Britain for Americans - which of course continues to this day:
We are as a people what Professor Freud calls masochistic. Our greatest thrill is being kicked in the tail - as long as England, the object of our blind adoration, does the kicking. In fact our national motto in so far as our relation to dear old England is concerned is: "Kick me again, daddy!" Kick me and kick me again, please.
A few weeks after Germany invaded Poland, the head of the US Communist Party 1930-1945, Earl Browder, evaluated the situation this way:
Capitalist Germany, imperialist Germany, is at war with capitalist-imperialist Britain and France. Even those who slander the Soviet Union admit by their very slanders that it is unreasonable to expect the imperialist powers to maintain peace, and by inference demand that the socialist Soviet Union should promote peace among them. …
This war is a continuation of the last World War, with no difference in essence or principle. It is brought about by the fundamental contradictions of monopoly capitalism. It is an expression of the general crisis of the capitalist system, and in turn it deepens and intensifies that crisis. ...
As a consequence, one of the first developments is the rapid disappearance of the differences between the so-called democratic and fascist capitalist states, which become indistinguishable insofar as their dictatorial character is concerned ... (6)
I picked an Earl Browder quote to get the chance to mention one of the more interesting factoids of the current, moment which is that Earl was the grandfather of Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, who is currently one of the West’s most prominent critics of Putin’s regime in Russia.
When the “so-called democratic and fascist capitalist states” of the USA, Britain, and France made an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1944, Earl Browder and his party quickly recognized it as a war between the “democratic” camp of the Allied side and the fascist Axis powers.
Because pragmatic calculations of national interests, based on inherently limited knowledge of the full intentions of other countries, is such a prominent reality in world politics, it would be hard to say that Earl Browder’s either before or after Germany’s invasion of Poland was entirely wrong. Britain and France in 1939 were playing hard-nosed pragmatic politics, too, although it’s easy to make the argument in retrospect that they were playing it badly. Britain and France really were looking at the advantages they might derive from Germany and the Soviet Union pulverizing each other in a war. It’s also true that if they had rejected the Munich deal with Hitler in 1938, they would have had to go to war with Germany in 1938 – but they would also have been able to make a common practical cause with the USSR immediately, therefore going to war with Germany over the Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland with a far better position than that in which they did go to war just a year later over Germany’s invasion of Poland.
The shadows of the past today
All of this provides some important historical context for understanding the current debate over European rearmament and the various ways of viewing it politically. All we can say with very large confidence at the moment is that the European countries – most of them, anyway – see Russia as a new kind of threat, one at least more urgent than they did in 2021 or even 2024. The second Trump Presidency has increased that urgency by the Orange Anomaly openly declaring that he will not publicly state his commitment to previous NATO defense arrangements, and by his military threats against NATO members Denmark and Canada.
A great deal of routine diplomacy involves blowing smoke at other countries.
But the current European concerns, however much hot air they may generate, are real and substantial. And so we are already in the beginning of what promises to be years of debate in Europe about military buildups and their costs as well. And the “guns and butter” debate is made much harder by the notorious conservative European position of making a fetish out of deficit-reduction and treating taxing billionaires as a sacred neoliberal taboo.
Ben Wray in the social-democratic Jacobin takes on the current guns-and-butter debate in Europe. (7) And he raises important points that need to be addressed. One is that part of what is happening is a reliance on “military Keynesianism” by Germany and other European countries, which is a way that Germany in particular can have the manufacturing of military equipment replace the decline of car production.
And he makes three important points about military Keynesianism: one, it has a lower “multiplier effect” on the economy than most other types of public spending. Two, the need for (or addiction to) high military spending will tempt political and economic elites to try to sustain “a constant state of war.” Three, “Europe and Germany simply do not have the technological prowess to compete with the United States as a producer of cutting-edge military hardware and software.”
But those are all matters on which European policymakers have choices. The reason economists give for the lower “multiplier effect” of military spending compared to civilian outlays is that military production is capital-intensive. But a big part of what makes it so is that private military producers are allowed obscene profits and the kinds of cost overruns governments don’t allow with, say, companies renovating highway bridges. The risk is there, but Europeans governments can reduce that risk if they set that as a serious goal.
Yes, governments will be tempted to look more favorably on military interventions if they have larger militaries. But this is not inevitable, governments have a choice. If they copy the US and drastically underfund diplomatic infrastructure while letting the Pentagon gouge itself and its private contractors, they will face the same problem that has become chronic in the US: if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But Europe is not going to be the chief actor in a new “unipolar” moment like the US had for decades after 1989. Unlike the US where Trump can seriously threaten to seize Greenland from Denmark by military force in a 19th-century style imperial land-grab, the EU will not be in a position to threaten to seize Florida, even if the EU countries are acting in close coordination with Britain and Türkiye.
Still, France has been tempted way to often to muck around with military interventions in some of its former African colonies. So Germany’s much-discussed “pacifism” will need to put brakes on such blundering moves.
And when it comes to Europe and Germany not having “the technological prowess to compete with the United States as a producer of cutting-edge military hardware and software.” So what? They don’t have to export advanced military technology to big swaths of the world. The immediate need is to establish a European ability to provide such supplies to Europe itself to remove their current dependence of American military equipment. And if they can kick the austerity habit – by no means a given – they can hire a lot of the scientific and technological talent that won’t be going to the US in the same numbers as before. They can even attract American scientific and technical talent among people who would rather live in a place where masked goons with no identifying clothing carrying combat weapons can snatch people off the street at the discretion of freaks like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem.
Wray rightly criticizes European leaders who refuse to make a clean break with Israel over the genocide in Gaza. It would be a disastrous mistake for European countries to tie themselves to the whims of whatever religious fanatic and/or warmonger is running the Israeli government at any give time. Given the long and complicated history involved there, Germany in particular will find it a challenge to say “no” to Israel. Failing to do so could lead them to the same kind of disasters that the US has encountered with the Iraq War and maybe again now with Netanyahu’s jihad against Iran.
Here Wray refers to “Israel’s value to Western imperialism.” Israel is definitely a settler-colonial state, currently engaged in a vicious ethnic cleansing. But it’s “value” as an instrument of Western foreign policy. It has all too often been a complication and impediment to Western nations pursuing even legitimate national interests. A rerun of the Iraq War in Iran would be incredibly damaging to the US or other Western nations foolish and irresponsible enough to go along with it. It might benefit Israel’s settler-colonial interests as conceived by Netanyahu.
The Russian threat?
Wray brings up the entirely legitimate concern:
[For EU Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen, military Keynesianism and the centralization of power in Brussels - so-called “ Commission-ization ” — is predicated on there being an existential threat to Europe. Despite the lack of evidence that Vladimir Putin plans to attack NATO members, continually hyping up this threat is politically indispensable to the militarization agenda in Europe.
Fear of Russia has been useful for the purposes of Western governments and others as well. Including China. There was a relatively short but real war between the Soviet Union and China in August-December 1929, chronicled by Michael Walker in The 1929 Sino-Soviet War: The War Nobody Knew (2017). The long rivalry of the Sino-Soviet split that began in the 1950s occasionally resulted in border skirmishes but fortunately never became a full-blown war. But the Soviets certainly served as a bogeyman for China during that period.
In the 19th century, from Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia on, Tsarist Russia was seen - rightly – as a bulwark of reaction willing to support imperial and royal government in Europe against democratic movements. That image persisted well into the 20th century. The fear was a key factor, probably the decisive factor, in Kaiser Bill’s Imperial German government persuading a majority of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to support his war against Russia. Which of course came to be known as the “ur-disaster” of the 20th century.
And the Soviet Union was always a bogeyman image for Western powers right up until 1989, except during the period of the World War II alliance and its immediate aftermath.
So the ability of Western warmongers to use Russia as the threatening image of The Enemy is not new. And concern about it being used and misused in the immediate future is entirely realistic. But the ironic saying also applies: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”
Russia is currently in an adversary situation with Russia. Russia did illegally invade Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, however much foolish American actions and diplomacy – most notably the 2008 NATO declaration that Ukraine would join NATO in the future even though no immediate plans for that were in process - may have made that event more likely than more sober approaches would have.
But it will take some serious diplomacy on the part of European countries to mitigate the conflict without simply abandoning Ukraine to subjugation and partial annexation by Russia. And it will also take serious diplomacy from the United States on the issue, which we have no evidence at the moment that we can expect from the Trump 2.0 regime. Anne Applebaum recently wrote, “But thanks to quieter decisions by members of [Trump’s] own administration, people whom he has appointed, the American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace—not merely in rhetoric but in reality.” (8)
There’s nothing in the abstract wrong with good relations between the US and Russia. On the contrary. On the contrary, a stable condition of “peaceful coexistence” would be highly desirable. But it takes complicated diplomacy to get from here to there. And Trump is no Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump is not working on creating a “Common European Home.” There’s little evidence that he is capable of thinking in terms of such a strategic concept. And as John Mearsheimer has been emphasizing, Trump’s diplomacy over the Russia-Ukraine War has been abjectly incompetent. As Applebaum puts it:
Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer who became Trump’s main negotiator with Russia despite having no knowledge of Russi0an history or politics, regularly echoes false Russian talking points and propaganda. He has repeated Putin ’s view, which he may have heard from the Russian president himself, that “Ukraine is just a false country, that they just patched together in this sort of mosaic, these regions.” Witkoff has also seemed to agree with Putin that Ukrainian territories that voted for independence from Moscow in 1991 are somehow “Russian.”
This is not a serious way to conduct diplomacy. If we look back to ground-breaking moments in the US relationship with the USSR during the Cold War, from the Berlin Airlift to the SALT nuclear-arms-control treaties to the reunification of Germany, it took real diplomacy to achieve those things. Reality-TV posturing will never be good enough.
(8) Applebaum, Anne (2025): The U.S. Is Switching Sides. The Atlantic 04/07/2025. <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/putin-trump-russia-ukraine/683414/> (Accessed: 2025-05-07). Applebaum makes it clear that she is speaking for herself in her articles, books, and speeches. But she has also been married for decades to Radosław Sikorski, currently the Foreign Minister of Poland.
FRANCE 24 has a report giving some more detail on rightwing Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s surprising recent announcement on her plans to increase the numbers of workers who can come live and work legally in Italy.
She hasn’t renounced her previous plans that have been legally blocked that were meant to display her hostility toward asylum-seekers. But it does sound like she is trying to deal with the practical realities of Italy’s need for immigrants. (1)
This in itself doesn’t mean that she and her far-right party will give up anti-immigrant demagoguery. But it is a reminder that reality makes strong claims to be noticed.
And the reality is that Italy needs more immigrants. Like every other country in the EU.
Part of this may also be an adjustment by Meloni to the new geopolitical situation in which European countries see that there is an urgent need to establish a new continental defense arrangement that will make them able to defend themselves independent of the United States. Unlike many rightwing European parties – including one of her own coalition partners, the Lega – Meloni is not pro-Russian in her foreign policy orientation.
So this may be part of her strategy to position herself as one of the leaders of the new geopolitical arrangement taking shape in Europe.
She began her turn to a not-Russia-friendly position in 2021. (2) Earlier this year, she compared Putin’s regime in Russia to the Third Reich:
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stood by earlier comments from the country’s president likening modern day Russia to Nazi Germany, adding the Kremlin had offended “the entire Italian nation” after a spokesperson blasted the comparison on Friday.
President Sergio Mattarella drew a parallel between the “wars of aggression” that prompted World War II and the “current Russian aggression against Ukraine” in a speech last week, saying “this was the project of the Third Reich in Europe.”
Kremlin spokesperson Maria Zakharova belatedly condemned the comparison on Friday, calling Mattarella’s comments “blasphemous inventions.”
Meloni shot back the same day, standing by Mattarella’s remarks.
“The insults of the spokeswoman … offend the entire Italian nation, which the head of state represents,” Meloni said. “I express my full solidarity, as well as that of the entire government, to President Mattarella, who has always firmly condemned the aggression perpetrated against Ukraine.” (3)
Okay, this is a surprise. And I should start by saying the devil is in the details on such things.
But Georgia Meloni’s rightwing government in Italy just proposed what on the face of it sounds like a practical, sensible and liberal change to Italian immigration policies.
The Italian government of Prime Minister Giorga Meloni on Monday drafted a new package of measures with immigration quotas for the coming years. According to this, more than half a million immigration permits are to be issued in the next three years. The decree, which affects seasonal and non-seasonal workers as well as domestic workers and caregivers, aims to adjust the level of immigration to the needs of the labour market.
Cooperation with the countries of origin and transit of migration to Italy would be promoted in order to facilitate legal migration and combat illegal immigration. Entry of workers with high professional qualifications will also be promoted. (1)
If the actual proposal is anything like the Standard’s description of it, this will set members of other far-right parties will start foaming at the mouth and rending their clothing in the Biblical manner.
Meloni’s party, the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia/ Fd’I) has what Britannica politely but accurately calls “neofascist roots.” Alexander Brown in 2023 described a little more bluntly how much in the line of political descent from Mussolini’s Fascist Party, i.e., the one that gave fascism its name:
Mussolini’s death did not signal the end of fascism in the land of its birth. For although the postwar constitution forbade the reformation of the National Fascist Party (PNF), it took barely a year for diehards of the ancien régime to found a successor: the Italian Social Movement (MSI). [Meloni joined the MSI at age 15.]
The reconstitution of the Fascist party thus went forever unchecked. On top of that, there would be no reckoning, no Nuremberg trials, no “defascistization” process of the kind seen in Germany. Indeed, the birth of the MSI on Boxing Day 1946 made Italy a unique case among the defeated nations; in no other was a party founded in continuity with the fascist regime permitted to contest elections.
So began Italy’s ambivalent relationship with its legacy of fascism. In the following decades, the MSI, an out-and-proud neofascist party, would become a fixture of everyday politics. There are 416 fascist monuments still standing in Italy. Streets dubbed after fascists retain their maiden names. And, as the political careers of Mussolini’s granddaughters Alessandra and Rachele demonstrate, having that surname on a poster can be more of a help than a hindrance when it comes to getting elected. (2)
And, as he also writes, Fd’I is a “direct descendant of the neofascist MSI.”
Meloni until last December was the head of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Group, a caucus of parties in the European Parliament. (3) Some of the worst of the European far-right parties like Germany’s AfD and Austria’s FPÖ and not part of this caucus. But the membership is seriously dubious collection of parties, including Meloni’s Fd’I, the Sweden Democrats, and Poland’s notoriously authoritarian Law and Justice Party (PiS).
Meloni’s previous policies on immigration and refugees has previously been typical of the xenophobic posturing of other far-right policies. Just last year, she had been pushing a rightwing policy that she was holding up as a model to other EU countries. (4) That policy has already been limited by legal and practical problems.
So we’ll have to see what actually develops with this seemingly new turn on Meloni’s latest immigration plan.
This brief Deutsche Welle report from earlier this year gives a glimpse at Meloni’s previous immigration policies. (5)
