What It Means for Europe to Go It Alone on Defense

The Guardian editorialized on March 4 of this year:

Mr Trump is in a hurry [on negotiations over Ukraine] – hence his angry threat that Mr Zelenskyy “won’t be around very long” if he doesn’t cut a deal. This came after the Ukrainian president suggested on Sunday that the end of the war was “very, very far away”. ...

The US has already undermined central pillars of Sir Keir Starmer’s approach – maintaining military support for Kyiv and economic pressure on Moscow, and creating a “coalition of the willing” to guarantee Ukrainian security. Mr Vance derided “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, then claimed that he was not referring to Britain or France.

European leaders must continue trying to buy time, deferring further US perfidy, and hasten rearmament for themselves and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, announced a proposal, including changes to EU fiscal rules, which she said could mobilise nearly €800bn for defence spending. A rival operator to Starlink is in talks with European leaders about satellite services. …

[T]his is an administration which moves abruptly and erratically. Ukraine and Europe are racing against the clock, not knowing when zero hour will arrive. It is likely to be sooner rather than later. [my emphasis] (1)

That was an early comment on the policy conception in Europe that they cannot count on the US under Donald Trump to provide the same security commitments for NATO that they did until the Trump 2.0 regime came to power.

Judge Napolitano recently interviewed Alex [bleeping!] Jones which is plain bad judgment. Jones isn’t remotely like an authority or worthwhile analyst on, you know, anything at all. Napolitano also regularly interviews Max Blumenthal, once a talented analyst, but long since a professional crank. The way Max went with his career is a shame. His 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party was really a competent piece of work on an important topic. His current Grayzone project has earned a lot of criticism for its lack of journalistic rigor. (1) (I’m trying to be polite here.)

There are various commentators that I would generally call actual “isolationists” who are taking basically a position that the US shouldn’t push back on anything Russia is doing, at least not in Europe.

In my “Generally Dubious” I would include the following: Max Blumenthal, Alistair Cooke, Larry Johnson, Aaron Maté, Douglas Macgregor, Craig Murray, Rand Paul, Scott Ritter, Jeffrey Sachs.

Overlap: Daniel Davis, Gilbert Doctorow (?), Chas Freeman, Scott Horton (of Antiwar.com) , Michael McFall, Ray McGovern, Lawrence Wilkerson.

Good: William Astore, Andrew Bacevich, Juan Cole, Matt Duss, Tom Engelhardt, John Feffer, Daniel Levy, Gideon Levy, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt.

Here is the kind of casting that makes me highly dubious about a podcast: Karin Kneissl, Alexander Mercouris, and Glenn Diesen on “The Duran.” (2)



Who are they, you may ask. Karin Kneissl was the Austrian Foreign Minister under the relative short-lived center-right/far-right coalition government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (2017-2019). Kneissel got married when she was in office, and she invited Vladimir Puttin to the wedding. Which Putin attended, and did a dance with her. Which ended with the Foreign Minister literally bowing down on one knee to Putin. She moved to Russia in 2023. Sebastian Kurz is now part of Peter Thiel stable of well-funded serfs. Mercouris and Diesen aren’t quite so dubious as she is. (Yes, I know that’s “damning with faint praise.”)

This interview that John Mearsheimer did on the Trump-Zalenskyy meeting in February (3) provides an example of what I take to be Mearsheimer’s focus on big-picture power-balancing questions, while he seems impatient with analyzing negotiation processes. So he seems sympathetic to the idea that the US needs to improve relations with Russia for the purposes of power balancing against China because that’s what his “realist” theory would lead us to expect to be the direct policy is likely to take.



Notes:

(1) The Guardian view on the US suspension of military aid: Ukraine and Europe’s race against time. Guardian 03/04/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/04/the-guardian-view-on-the-us-suspension-of-military-aid-ukraine-and-europes-race-against-time> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).

(2) Europe's Growing Irrelevance - Karin Kneissl, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen, The Duran YouTube channel 03/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/LPN0VmCgTpI?si=-fYHf67ap8iRMhgD> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).

(3) Trump Zelensky Clash - John Mearsheimer In … An Exclusive Interview With CNN-News18’s Zakka Jacob. CNN-News-18 (India) YouTube channel 03/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/o9sVv1Jv_8g?si=aQgKMGuQx_Do3r2c> (Accessed: 2025-26-08). The interview is truncated at the end.]

Anti-imperialist theories from the 20th century

The 2025 ZEITGeschichte edition on imperialism that I’ve been discussing provides brief essays on several important theoreticians and politicians that had major influence on the concept of imperialism. Three of them are Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

Lenin’s book written in 1916 and published in 1917, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, became a canonical Marxist-Leninist text, not least because of the central role Lenin played as the first leader of the Soviet Union and the related Communist movement. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote disparagingly of Lenin’s book, “Not even a committed disciple could think it an impressive document, although many have risen to the challenge. It is assertive and contentious, and, though short, it is very tedious. Nor is it original.” (1)

Despite that grumpy characterization, the point in itself isn’t that controversial from the economic viewpoint. Its historical significance is more in its political conclusions in that critical moment. Much of the Lenin’s analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism into a “finance capital” form had been elaborated at length by a leading Austrian Social Democrat, Rudolf Hilferding, in his 1910 book, Finance Capital. (2)

Hilferding would later serve as Germany’s Finance Minister for just under two months in August-October 1923, where he had the thankless task of dealing with the hyperinflation, which was in reality was a nasty consequent of the ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles in its treatment of Germany. He was a member of the German Reichstag and served again as Finance Minister in 1928-29.

In Finance Capital, he had written:

The progress of industrial concentration has been accompanied by an increasing coalescence between bank and industrial capital. This makes it imperative to undertake a study of the processes of concentration and the direction of their development, and particularly their culmination in cartels and trusts. The hopes for the `regulation of production', and hence for the continuance of the capitalist system, to which the growth of monopolies has given rise, and to which some people attribute great significance in connection with the problem of the trade cycle, require an analysis of crises and their causes. (3)

The period of 1870-1900 is widely recognized as a period of dramatic concentration of power and wealth in which large companies and major banks achieved a theretofore unprecedented consolidation of wealth and power. That is remembered in the US as the Gilded Age, where Jesse James and his gang could become popular heroes for robbing trains, the railroad companies having become a major symbol of this new concentrated power. Nob Hill in San Francisco is to this day a kind of monument to the robber barons of the Gilded Age.

1936 Thomas Hart Benton painting of a Jesse James train robbery

PBS has a two-hour documentary of that period: (4)

The economist Thorstein Veblen memorably depicted and mocked the pretentions of the Gilded Age upper class in The Theory Of The Leisure Class (1899).

Lenin presumably labeled finance capital as the “highest stage of capitalism” because it was the latest one, and the more militant Social Democrats hoped and expected that the capitalist social and economic structure would soon be overthrown. The ZEITGeschichte sketch of Lenin’s theory notes:

The war in which the world is sinking right now [he wrote] is the "great imperialist" one for him. Lenin [in the book] works his way through "tsarism" in his native Russia, which afterward would strive to plunder Germany, Austria and Turkey and to defeat England in Asia. The Tsar wanted to subjugate the Balkans and "conquer Galicia [now part of Ukraine], … in order to hold down the Ukrainian people". The way out, Lenin wrote at the end of 1916, was a "civil war of the working class for socialism."

Galbraith found it very understandable historically that the Great Imperialist War – then known as the Great War, now as the First World War – brought nationalist tensions to a head in the Russian Empire of the time.

[W]e think of the years following World War II as the time when the colonial empires came to an end. This is another vanity of our day [1977]. It was in Eastern Europe after World War I that the great retreat from imperialism began. …

Out of [the various empires’ fear of an imminent war] had come the alliances. Austria [the Habsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian Empire] had turned to Germany for the industrial support and the disciplined, reliable military force that Germany could provide. On her side, she offered her large, though excessively diversified, supply of military manpower. Russia reached out to France for financial and engineering help in building her railroads and industry. France and Britain saw in Russia a vast reserve of armed manpower. This manpower, in the early days of World War I, led to the innumerable references to the Russian steamroller. It was meant to roll inexorably over Germany. Instead it rolled back on Russia herself. [p. 136, my emphasis]

The brief sketches of Rosa Luxemburg and MLK, Jr. focus on some of the wider factors leading to imperialist wars and actions. The Lenin and Hilferding theories certainly see the need in the “finance capital” era for capitalist economies to seek greater profits as a causal factor pushing their countries to engage in overseas expansion and armed competition with each other. That factor was very obviously at work in the late 19th century and the pre-World War I years. This could be understood in a deterministic way in which “finance capital” and “imperialism” are equivalent. Luxemburg also saw the importance of the economic changes at that time and wrote about them in her Accumulation of Capital (1913).

But obviously there are people who make actual decisions about wars and are selecting among options when they do so. The ZEITGeschichte sketch of Luxemburg noted that she was prominent in the debates among the German Social Democrats (SPD) about supporting war credits for Germany, which she opposed but for which a majority of SPD parliamentarians voted in favor even though they had formally considered capitalist-imperialist wars as drastically opposed to the class interests of workers. But that is a reminder that patriotism and nationalism are powerful drugs that influence war policies along with more rational or pecuniary motivations.

The sketch of Martin Luther King, Jr. notes his outspoken criticisms of the Vietnam War and cites his famous statement:

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

King expressed his support of human rights and his opposition to imperialism in terms of Christian, humanistic, and democratic values and not explicitly in social-democratic terms as Luxemburg and Lenin did. But morality is also an important factor in decisions to go to war as well as in decision to stop them.

In his famous speech of April 1967 on the Vietnam War, He said:

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the [civil rights] struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. (5)

Walter Crane and his classic image of 19th century imperialism

I’ve been posting recently on the topic a 2025 ZEITGeschichte edition on imperialism. It highlights several notable figures in criticizing imperialism and the war it generates. I’ve written about John Atkinson Hodges’ books on imperialism that were quite influential in shaping Western debates over it. Hodges was one of several figures the ZEITGeschichte edition highlights.

Another of them is a British artist Walter Crane, who drew a colonial map of the world that appeared in 1886 in a weekly called The Graphic. It included a number of images incorporating British imperialist stereotypes of the time.

The ZEITGeschichte author writing about it, Judith Scholter, finds an interesting and ironic twist to the fact that Crane’s map from The Graphic became such an iconic image of the glorious British Empire:

Walter Crane was a British illustrator an prominent representative of the Arts-and-Craft Movement in Great Britain, which wanted to reconcile the beauty of art with the usefulness of craftwork. Crane was a member of the socialist Fabian Society; he condemned ruthless profit-seeking, because it degraded the utility of products and the value of labor.

The newspaper The Graphic in which the map appeared was thought of as liberal and reform-oriented. In this sense, the robe of Atlas [bottom-center] is adorned with a sash with the inscription “Human Labor” [on the top of Atlas’ head]. Above the scene [top of map]; there are three virgins in Jacobin caps floating with the words “Freedom,” Fraternity, and “Federation”.

The antiwar movements in the decades leading up to the First World War, peace movement included advocates of socialism as well as reformers with more of a moral or humanitarian focus. Of course, humanity has known about the horrors of war for millennia, so that was not a new recognition peculiar to the nineteenth century.

As a sidebar on the Blogspot version of this blog explains, one of the most important pacificist advocates of the time was Berta von Suttner (1843-1914), who won the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize winner. In fact, she was a friend of Alfred Nobel, who supported her pacifist activism, and she was likely was an important influence on his establishing the peace prize.

She was "one of the most famous women of her time" (Suddeutsche Zeitung) and "the best known Austrian political activist woman at the beginning of the 20th century." (Anton Pelinka) Von Suttner founded the Austrian Society of Friends of Peace (1891) and the German Peace Society (1892). She wrote an influential antiwar novel Lay Down Your Arms! (1889), which by 1905 had gone through 37 editions. She edited an antiwar journal by the same name that began publication in 1892. She rightly feared that a world war would occur. She was also active for women's rights and vegetarianism. Von Suttner died a few days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand's fatal encounter with Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.

In the United States, the Spanish-American War, which found the US supporting the independence of Cuba from Spain in line with the Monroe Doctrine and led the US to wage a bloody colonial war in the Philippines also gave rise to an American peace movement and an Anti-Imperialist League that included Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), the psychologist and philosopher William James, David Starr Jordan, and labor leader Samuel Gompers. (1)

The European Social Democratic parties generally regarded wars between capitalist nations as a form of class war that was a danger to the lives and freedom of their working-class voters. That sentiment and understanding was real. But when it came to supporting wars of their own country – or their own capitalist class, as they put it – nationalism was still a very powerful drug. As John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:

In 1870, [German Chancellor] Bismarck, who had once made overtures to [Karl] Marx to put his pen at the service of his fatherland, went to war with [French Emperor] Napoleon III. In a prelude to the vastly greater drama of August 1914, the proletarians of the two countries showed themselves far from being denationalized; instead they rallied to the defense, as they saw it, of their respective homelands. Then, as later, nothing was so easy as to persuade the people of one country, workers included, of the wicked and aggressive intentions of those of another. [my emphasis] (2)

Notes:

(1) Zack, Aaron (2024): The American Anti-Imperialist League at Faneuil Hall. Boston National Historical Park 01/09/2024. [pre-Trump 2.0]. <https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/anti-imperialist-league-fh.htm> (Accessed: 2025-21-08).

(2) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1977): The Age of Uncertainty, 105. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Why playing the far-right’s game on immigration is self-destructive for non-far-right parties

DMZ News (Die Mittlländische Zeitung) recently described the political experience of the last 10 years on the politics of xenophobia:

The mistake of wanting to beat right-wing populism with its own weapons will probably never be acknowledged. Why should they, because the textbooks are all written and they show how it works? The more you use these weapons, the more they change you and in the end you don't recognize your opponent anymore because you've become the same.

This spiral cannot be stopped in a society that is so receptive to this primitive construction. The part of the story repeats itself. Only the resulting catastrophes are likely to be different. In the short term, we will see what the new patriarch of the so-called Western world [Trump] will create. In which the heads of government of Europe had to coordinate beforehand how to throw honey at him in the correct dose, so that he would even listen before you tell him something that he does not intend to deal with on his own. (1)

There is ample evidence from the politics of various European countries, including Austria, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, as well as in the US, that when left and center-left parties try to show they are just as hostile to foreigners as the far-right, it strengthens the far right. Because xenophobia is their most polarizing issue in recent years, and for the left and center parties to accept their framing rather than challenging it directly and calling out the inevitably lies used to justify it winds up enhancing the credibility of the far right.

Britain’s Keir Starmer is busily squandering his Labour Party majority in Parliament by playing that same fool’s game:

"We risk becoming an island of strangers," declared British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on May 12, as he presented his White Paper proposing measures to "take back control of our borders." …

Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, has clearly adopted the rhetoric of the anti-immigration right, which has historically always opposed immigration to the country – whether Russian Jews at the end of the 19th century, refugees fleeing Nazism in the 1930s, immigrants from the British colonies and the Commonwealth after World War II, Ugandans of Indian origin in the 1970s, citizens from European Union countries at the beginning of the 21st century or the people "illegally" crossing the Channel today. The list is endless. So is that of the anti-migrant parties. The most recent of these, Reform UK, stands out as the first to enter the British Parliament. [my emphasis] (2)

Here is a clip of journalists pressing Starmer on the issue back in May: (3)



Owen Jones reams Starmer over this demagoguery on this issue in this commentary from May and stresses how counter-productive and wrong that is for left and left-center parties: (4)

 

Notes:

(1) Klöckner, Julia & Specht, Kirk (2025): Wenn Politik die Waffen des Rechtspopulismus nutzt: Lektionen aus den USA und Europas gefährliche Spiralbewegung. DMZ News 08/23/2025. <https://www.dmz-news.eu/2025/08/23/wenn-politik-die-waffen-des-rechtspopulismus-nutzt-lektionen-aus-den-usa-und-europas-gef%C3%A4hrliche-spiralbewegung/> (Accessed: 2025-23-08-2025). My translation to English.

(2) Panayi, Panikos (2025): 'Starmer has clearly adopted the rhetoric of the anti-immigration right'. Le Monde 06/04/2025. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/06/04/starmer-has-clearly-adopted-the-rhetoric-of-the-anti-immigration-right_6742012_23.html#> (Accessed: 2025-23-08).

(3) Journalists lay into Keir Starmer for right-wing pivot on immigration. PoliticsJOE YouTube channel 05/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/EnKQzqAlfTY?si=WRob1GZI9JAj5jVY> (Accessed: 2025-23-08).

(4) Keir Starmer Goes Full ENOCH POWELL - Is He Britain's Most Dishonest Politician Ever? Owen Joes YouTube channel 05/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/oxiJibgs26Y?si=jmgenPxuJp0CH9HJ> (Accessed: 2025-23-08).

Headlining a genocide

A lot of the articles in Haaretz are behind subscription.

But they have a page collecting titles and images from 14 articles on “Inside the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The list of the article titles alone tells a dramatic story about the current genocide in progress against Palestinians:

• 'Starvation Is Everywhere': Virtual Tours of Gaza Clinics Expose the Scale of the Horror 08/21/2025
• Dates Are 'Luxury' – and Other Ways Israel Hinders Aid Trucks From Reaching Starving Gazans 08/12/2025
• Gaza's Brutal Food Aid 'Olympics': Leaked Videos, Satellite Images Show Cruel Chaos at Food Distribution Hubs 07/29/2025
• 'I Miss Eating Till I'm Full': Gaza's Children Strive to Survive With Little Food and Destroyed Homes 07/21/2025
• 'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid 06/27/2025
• No Cancer Care, No Dialysis, No Power: Gaza's Health System Is on the Brink of Collapse 07/10/2025
• The Mathematics of Starvation: Why Aid Can't Fix the Lethal Shortage of Food in Gaza 07/23/2025
• 'They Don't Look Like Humanitarians': Who Are the Opaque U.S. Military Contractors Hired to Guard the New Gaza Aid Project? 05/22/2025
• One Day, Three Diaries From the Brink of Famine in Gaza, Where Even Rotten Food 'Feels Like a Victory' 05/19/2025
• 'Dead Children's Area': American Surgeons Return From Gaza and Can't Forget the Nightmare 04/118/2025
• Testimonies: IDF Responsible for Lethal Shootings Near U.S.-led Aid Site in Gaza 06/05/2025
• 'The Gates of Hell Are Open Night and Day': Malnutrition, Illness and Lack of Drinking Water Plague Gaza 04/09/2025
• Over $140 Million a Month: The Secret Source Funding Gaza Humanitarian Aid 05/29/2025
• 'Starve or Die': Over 170 NGOs Urge End to U.S.-backed Gaza Aid Program, Call to Restore UN System 07/01/2025.

The beginning of this week’s horrors in Palestine

It’s Monday, so we have news that Israel is bombing Yemen again. In this Deutsche Welle English report, (1) Netanyahu is quoted as saying, “Whoever attacks us, we attack them. Whoever plans to attack us, we attack them.”

His actual policy is more like: When we feel like attacking somebody, we attack them.

This is reckless hubris on Israel’s part. But as long as Trump 2.0 continues to fund Israel’s wars and genocide, Israel isn’t yet experiencing the full impact of the blowback on Israel.

But Israel also found time to bomb one of the remaining functioning hospitals in Gaza, a reported here by France 24: (2)

I’m sure Israeli hasbara (information operations) would spin this by saying, look, after all this time there was still a hospital there to bomb, so that shows the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are obviously The World’s Most Moral Army.

Middle East Eye notes, “Four journalists were killed in the attack, including Mohamed Salama, a contributor to Middle East Eye who had produced numerous video reports since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza in October 2023.” (3)

His most recent exclusive report exposed that the body of a 10-year-old boy- killed while trying to receive aid at the controversial Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) - had yet to be recovered. Salama also worked with Al Jazeera.

Amira Hass warned late last week:

My friends in Gaza will likely soon be ordered to "evacuate" from their makeshift shelters and be "absorbed" into the southern part of the Gaza Strip – just as my parents were once "evacuated and absorbed": my mother to Bergen-Belsen, my father to a ghetto in Transnistria.

The army's flattened language of lies pollutes every report, every discussion. This is not my exhausted, starving friends' problem. It is ours, the Israelis'. So is the outcry of the willfully blind and hard-hearted who insist: "You should never compare."

The Minister of War, Israel Katz, made a promise, and he's keeping it: The mission of moving and transporting, concentrating and crowding, compressing and crushing hundreds of thousands more human beings into a tiny scrap of land in Gaza's south is going ahead, undeterred by protests, condemnations or historical parallels. (4)

She emphasizes that the discontent among Israelis about Netanyahu’s war polices and his drive to make Israel a straight-up authoritarian regime are not, for the most part, directly opposing the wars and genocide:

The Kaplan Street protesters have one remaining lever to derail the decisive plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, plans bound up in the Putin-style regime overhaul: a mass refusal to participate in these campaigns of destruction and expulsion.

And Haaretz in an editorial reports on the openly criminal rhetoric that leading officials are using:

The barbaric destruction [of the West Bank village of al-Mughayyir] was a response to an attempted terror attack near the settlement of Adei Ad, in the course of which a civilian suffered minor injuries, the army said. At the scene, IDF Central Command head Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth said every West Bank village should "know that if they commit a terror attack, they will pay a heavy price, and they will experience a curfew and siege." (5)

Collective punishment such as targeting an entire city or town in retaliation for an attack somehow associated with it is a clear war crimes. Not that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or the US Republican Christian Zionists supporting his current policies care in the least about international law.

The general stated openly that the actions would target not the shooter, who fled, but the entire village.

Bluth went further, saying that in addition to efforts to find the shooter, the army is undertaking "shaping actions" aimed "to deter everyone, not only this village but every village that tries to raise a hand against any of the residents. The village carries out an attack. No problem. You want the spotlight, we can turn on a spotlight." This isn't about a specific incident, it's a declaration of collective punishment.[my emphasis]

This is not some drunk in a bar shooting off his mouth. It’s the general heading of IDF’s Central Command. And the editorial concludes:

Bluth is importing to the West Bank the pattern of action the IDF is employing in Gaza – flattening to the foundations. Israel is marching with its head held high to the international court in The Hague, and along the way is accusing anyone who dares point a finger at it of antisemitism.

Notes:

(1) What's driving the renewed escalation between the Houthis and Israel? DW News YouTube channel 08/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/dEaVEtJWdYw?si=KpRddIA_aIhj6KON> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(2) At least 20 killed, including five journalists, in Israeli strikes on Gaza's Nasser hospital. France 24 08/25/2025. <https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250825-at-least-15-killed-including-four-journalists-in-israeli-strikes-on-gaza-s-nasser-hospital> Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(3) Israel bombs Khan Younis hospital, killing journalists and rescue worker. Middle East Eye 08/25/2025. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/israel-bombs-khan-younis-hospital-killing-journalists-and-rescue-worker?nid=427184&topic=Israel%2527s%2520genocide%2520in%2520Gaza&fid=547431> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(4) Hass, Amira (2025): Europe and Arab States Are Asleep. Soon, Anything That Moves in Gaza City Will Be Killed. Haaretz 08/228/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-08-22/ty-article-opinion/.premium/europe-and-arab-states-are-asleep-soon-anything-that-moves-in-gaza-city-will-be-killed/00000198-ce07-dc9d-abd9-dfdf235f0000?gift=105876fd8aec4a6886a3295e89bf42d8> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(5) Uprooting Thousands of Trees in the West Bank, Israel Is Marching to The Hague With Its Head Held High. Haaretz editorial 08/25/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-08-25/ty-article-opinion/after-razing-gaza-the-idf-is-uprooting-thousands-of-trees-in-the-west-bank/00000198-ddc3-d4c6-afdf-dddf59370000> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

German politics and the geopolitical alignment

Stephen Szabo has a helpful take on the changes in European geopolitics, and for Germany in particular, that Trump’s distancing from its formal NATO allies and also by the war and genocide that Israel is currently conducting.

The left-right positioning on major boosts to the German military gets a bit garbled in high-level generalizations. There are left criticisms of the current rearmament drive. But the Left Party itself has been split over high defense spending. German feminist activists have also been split on the issue.

The recent policies of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius to revive the military, including the observation of Veterans Day, are important in ending this isolation and reviving support for a democratic military. The reintroduction of conscription is also being discussed. This concern for the revival of German militarism, to which Trump briefly alluded during the Merz visit to the White House, is not shared by Germany’s allies in NATO, who are looking for Germany to take on a much larger role. This includes even one of its greatest victims from World War II, the Poles. [my emphasis] (2)

This change in German priorities for military spending did not suddenly appear with the beginning of the Trump 2.0, though it has certainly accelerated it. Stephen Milder wrote in 2023 about how the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine had affected the political framing of higher defense spending in Germany:

In reality, the actual watershed isn’t the sudden appearance of “war in Europe” for the first time since World War II—a breathtaking instance of historical amnesia, erasing not just the hot wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia but also decades of militarization during the Cold War. The real, deeper change has elicited little commentary: the culmination of Germany’s transformation over the last three decades from a post-fascist country—which seemed to have overcome its Nazi past on account of its “culture of peace,” as historian Thomas Kühne has put it—to a post-pacifist country eager to ramp up defense spending and convey a posture of readiness to fight back against heavily armed aggressors. [my emphasis] (3)

The current phase of the process raises some issues that historical ironies in themselves. The far right in Germany (principally the AfD, Alternative for Germany) is very pro-Putinist in its foreign policy orientation and also makes a show of being enthusiastic for Israel’s current war on the mostly-Muslim Palestinians. As Szabo points out:

It has become clear that the Trump administration is not simply concerned about free-riding on defense but is actively opposing those elements in German society that Americans would have supported until this year. America is no longer a partner but is now an adversary for those in Germany who don’t want to forget the past and understand the cost of trying to sanitize it. Vance, Musk, and Steve Bannon seem to not understand or don’t care that the elements they are now encouraging in Germany have roots in political and cultural anti-Americanism that go back to the Third Reich and were nurtured in Communist East Germany. The AfD, the most important component of this movement, is pro-Russian and anti-NATO. It is divided in its reaction to Trump’s embrace and would clearly be opposed to a close relationship with any administration in Washington. It is ironic that while the American administration has its own version of a campaign against anti-Semitism, it is strengthening those forces in Europe. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Berger, Magdalena (2025): Frauen, lasst die Waffen liegen – zumindest für Deutschland. Jacobin 06/06/2025. <https://jacobin.de/artikel/feminismus-bundeswehr-krieg-frieden-zetkin-baerbock-wehrpflicht-waffenlieferungen-frauenrechte> (Accessed: 2025-14-08).

(2) Szabo, Stephen (2025): Germany’s New Confrontation with the Past. The National Interest 08/11/2025. <https://nationalinterest.org/feature/germanys-new-confrontation-with-the-past> (Accessed: 2025-14-08).

(3) Milder, Stephen (2023): The Alarming Stakes of German Rearmament. Boston Review 01/11/2025. <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/ukraine-and-the-eclipse-of-pacifism/> (Accessed: 2025-14-08).

What is “Peace President” Trump up to lately in Latin America?

Telma Luzzani reports in the Argentine El Destape:

This week, on Argentine soil, Latin America received a new warning of automatic alignment on pain of risking a military intervention by the Pentagon. The striking thing is that, despite how dangerous this threat is, almost no one heard about it. Why? The media – astutely – did not disseminate it. There are plans that are best kept secret.

Cautious or not, the U.S. escalation in our region is obvious. As the U.S. Navy deploys more than 4,000 Marines and several warships off the coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea, and as President Donald Trump orders preparations for the use of military force against Mexico, Colombia, Haiti and El Salvador (under the pretext of the war on drugs) in the south of the continent, in Buenos Aires, the head of the [Pentagon’s Southern Command, aka, SOUTHCOM, Admiral] Alvin Holsey, led a meeting with all the South American defense ministers to demand obedience and give them instructions. [emphasis in original] (1)

SOUTHCOM’s own report on the conference includes the following, which combines rhetoric against drug trafficking with warnings about terrorist organizations, and strategic concerns about China.:

Holsey warned that challenges and threats that “span the Andean Ridge to the Strait of Magellan are growing more complex.”

"The expanding scope, scale, and strength of transnational criminal organizations throughout the region is a top concern. Currently, 33 U.S. sanctioned groups, including recently designated 10 foreign terrorist organizations, are operating in the Western hemisphere, engaged in illicit trafficking of drugs, weapons, commodities, wildlife and persons that earn them $358 billion a year in revenue. Not only do these activities finance the expansion of their criminal enterprises, but they perpetuate a cycle of violence and corruption that threatens the citizen security and the integrity of our democracies,” said Holsey.

Holsey also shared his concerns of China’s influence in the region.

“The Chinese Communist Party continues its methodical incursion in the region, seeking to export its authoritarian model, extract precious resources, and set the theater with potential dual use infrastructure, from ports to space,” Holsey said.

“Their presence and influence have far reaching consequences across all domains, particularly in the Southern Cone where vital sea lines of communication, such as the Strait of Magellan and Drake Passage, serve as strategic choke points and may be used by [China] to project power, disrupt trade, and challenge the various sovereignty of our nations, or neutrality of the Antarctic,” Holsey said. [my emphasis] (2)

Of course, the US officially and in practice treats China as its most significant competitor for power and influence in the world.

But the wording in the SOUTHCOM press release that stresses the Chinese Communist Party of meddling in South America – yes, a cynical chuckle is appropriate in seeing the Pentagon whine about outside influence in Latin America - is notable phrasing. It’s a throwback to Cold War rhetoric about the Foreign Enemy using local Communist parties to challenge US influence. There have been political groups in Latin America that admired some form of the Chinese revolution model, most notably (and most notoriously) the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas in Peru. (3) But China is not heading anything like the Soviet-headed Communist International, or even the current Russian active cooperation with far-right politicians in Europe and the US. Business interests and state-to-state cooperation like the BRICS group are the main methods of exerting international influence outside of military power.

Whether the particular mention of the Chinese Communist Party has any real significance is impossible to say from the press release itself. But that framing is worth watching.

In the case of the Trump Administration, it definitely is using a conflation of narcotics trafficking with a military threat to justify possible armed intervention in Latin America. (And even in US cities!)

But direct military action against Mexico or Venezuela or El Salvador would be reckless and irresponsible. Not to mention illegal, something about which the Trump 2.0 Administration cares nothing at all. Also, El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele is one of Trump’s favorite foreign leaders, right up there with Vladimir Putin. I suppose if Bukele were in danger of being overthrown, Trump might intervene in Chile-1973 style to keep him in power.

Venezuela has lots of oil, and that is always at the front of the minds of US policymakers. Lorenzo Santiago recently looked at Trump 2.0’s hostile policy toward Venezuela:

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Thursday, August 14, that he is sending troops to the southern Caribbean Sea to carry out military operations in the region. He said the goal is to arrest Latin American drug traffickers and linked one of these groups to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Rubio reinforced, without presenting evidence, the White House narrative that Maduro is the leader of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), an alleged criminal organization. On July 25, the U.S. State Department classified the group as an international terrorist group.

Rubio reinforced, without presenting evidence, the White House narrative that Maduro is the leader of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), an alleged criminal organization. On July 25, the U.S. State Department classified the group as an international terrorist group.

One doesn’t have to be any particular fan of Nicolás Maduro to see that a US military attack or a US-backed coup against Venezuela is an exceptionally bad idea.

Scripps News reports on the Trump 2.0 military threat to Venezuela: (5)

Notes:

(1) Luzzani, Telma (2025): El Pentágono marca territorio en Sudamérica: la advertencia militar que pasó bajo radar. El Destape 24.08.2025. <https://www.eldestapeweb.com/internacionales/comando-sur/el-pentagono-marca-territorio-en-sudamerica-la-advertencia-que-paso-bajo-radar-20258240547> (Accessed: 2025-24-08). My translation to English.

See also: Head of U.S. Southern Command returns to Argentina. Buenos Aires Herald 08/18/2025. <https://buenosairesherald.com/world/international-relations/head-of-u-s-southern-command-returns-to-argentina> (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

(2) U.S., South America Defense Leaders Discuss Regional Threats. U.S. Southern Command Public Affairs 08/21/2025. <https://www.southcom.mil/MEDIA/NEWS-ARTICLES/Article/4282417/us-south-america-defense-leaders-discuss-regional-threats/> (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

(3) See: Lovell, Julia (2019): Maoism: A Global History, Chapter 7. London: The Bodley Head.

(4) Santiago, Lorenzo (2025): U.S. Send Troops to Southern Caribbean in New Threat to Venezuela. NACLA 08/20/2025. <https://nacla.org/u-s-sends-troops-to-southern-caribbean-in-new-threat-to-venezuela/> (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

(5) US Navy destroyers deployed near Venezuela as Trump seeks to combat drug cartels. Scripps News YouTube channel 08/20/2025.<<https://youtu.be/xKUwhQIyhS4?si=x27khPwBVWZFrZaE>; (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

More on that Alaska Trump-Putin meeting

Thanks to the Russo-Ukraine War and now the war and genocide in Gaza, I’m addicted to John Mearsheimer’s commentary, which he provides now several times a week on various podcasts.

Here are Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti with him assessing the Alaska fiasco last Friday after it was over: (1)

Although his “realist” theory of international relations can sound in the abstract as though it’s saying that countries are driven by cold geopolitical calculation. later in the video, he makes an emphatic point about the moral imperatives decisionmakers have when confronted with something like the ongoing Gaza genocide.

Amy Goodman interviews Mearsheimer and Bernie Sanders’ one-time foreign policy adviser Matt Duss in this August 15 interview on Trump Russia-Ukraine diplomacy. The two of them obviously respect each other a great deal, though Matt does make it a point to argue with him about interpreting what Putin was trying to signal in a 20201 speech on Russia history, i.e., whether it was a threat to take over all of Ukraine. But they are in agreement about what a mess Trump’s diplomacy is. (2)

The Austrian Russia expert Gerhard Mangott recently posted on X/Twitter about Trump faceplant diplomacy. The last line: “Is evevyone happy now?”

Notes:

(1) John Mearsheimer BREAKS DOWN Trump Putin Summit. Breaking Points YouTube channel 08/16/2025. <https://youtu.be/q31nwnbNMmo?si=FhmHa0Od6rHSDYtu> (Accessed: 2025-16-08).

(2) John Mearsheimer vs. Matt Duss: A Debate on Trump-Putin Summit, Ukraine, Russia & Paths to Peace. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 08/15/2025. <https://youtu.be/VyWTNuXCcmk?si=Sm8cGXrvpeC7aPgy> (Accessed: 2025-16-08).

Russia and how neocons see it

Garry Kasparov is a one-time Wunderkind Russian chess champion who has also been an active dissident against the Russian government for years. He founded an NGO called the Renew Democracy Initiative in 2017, whose leadership includes “public figures from a variety of ideological backgrounds, including, among others, Kasparov, Linda Chavez, General Ben Hodges, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, General Stanley McChrystal, Anne Applebaum, Bret Stephens, and Bill Kristol.” (1)

Although RDI’s activities apparently focus on democratic governance issues, it’s pretty clear that it is, uh, at least receptive to neocon foreign policy prescriptions. As Wikipedia also notes:

In November of 2023, RDI hosted its first annual Frontlines of Freedom Conference to address transnational repression. The event was hosted in partnership with Freedom House, Johns Hopkins University, the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, PEN America, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, among others.

Kasparov recently posted on Substack Notes a comment that should make all good neocons happy:

This turns the Munich Analogy into geopolitical metaphysics. Russia invaded Ukraine, which was and is not a NATO member. None of the NATO countries had a mutual-defense treaty with Ukraine. But the NATO countries provided massive military, political, and diplomatic support to it in its conflict with Russia. Including the much-overrated economic sanctions.

Why would Russia see that as anything but a sign that NATO countries would take a direct attack on a NATO member state as anything but a serious threat to their security that would trigger the mutual-defense clause? “Credibility” may be the most overrated concept in Western foreign policy discussions. But it seems very credible at the moment that at least the NATO members (except Trump’s US) are very serious about pushing back against any Russian territorial aggression against their own countries and those of their NATO partners.

In other words, the fact that NATO countries haven’t gone directly to war with Russia over Ukraine does not mean that Russia can assume they are unwilling to stand by their very-long-time NATO commitments. I would agree that NATO decisionmakers were more than a bit arrogant and even reckless in treating NATO expansion as a kind of “freebie” that would not likely result in heightened tensions with Russia. But there seems to be no good reason that Russian decisionmakers would conclude that European NATO members, even without the full support of the US, are not deadly serious about their NATO defense commitments.

There are plenty of valid questions and criticisms around the policy NATO followed since the Russian buildup in preparation for an invasion of Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2002.

I do think that there has a been a serious amount of threat inflation around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s perfectly possible to see various and even contradictory elements in evaluating Russia’s current situation: Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in 2022 after having illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and having promoted partisan warfare against Ukraine in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces).

NATO declared officially in 2008, against very public protests from Moscow, that both Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of NATO. Russia regarded that prospect, especially with Ukraine, as an existential security threat. Russian leaders in taking that position were likely indulging in their own version of threat inflation. Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders have signaled indirectly that they might someday want to make all of Ukraine part of Russia. Russia’s government is a corrupt dictatorship dominated by Putin, a talented political operator who is willing to resort to imprisonment and assassination against opponents he finds annoying. The Russian army has committed serious war crimes in Ukraine, including mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children and sending them to Russia.

But neocons typically look at a messy combination of facts like those and retreat into their baseline position of: It’s always 1938! And Neville Chamberlain is always on the verge of giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler! And when he does it will start a new world war!!

The European view of Russia, which has historically largely been shared by the US, has been that it’s a grim autocracy which is a constant threat to its neighbors. And that was partly a reality-based view. In addition, after the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 established a new international arrangement in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, Russia’s Czar actually became a guarantor of the old (i.e., non-democratic) regimes in Central and Western Europe.

And that was a lasting impression across the political spectrum. A majority of the German Social Democrats in 1914 voted to support war credits out of fear that a Russian victory in the war would suppress democratic governance and reinforce autocracy in Germany and much of Europe. The Russian bogeyman has been a powerful image in Europe for the last two centuries.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 which produced a Communist government in Russia flipped the bogeyman image from a rightwing to a leftwing one. And the Soviet government and Communist Party did proclaim themselves to be the vanguard of the world socialist revolution which would overthrow capitalist system in Europe and America. Once it became clear around 1923 that there was not likely to be a Communist revolution in Germany anytime soon, the USSR showed itself willing and able to make hardheaded pragmatic deals in foreign policy that did not place top priority on generating revolutions in other countries. (For that matter, Lenin’s acceptance of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918 was a bluntly pragmatic decision.)

Ideology does matter, because it shapes the way the public and decisionmakers process information and set goals, But the current international system is one of sovereign states. And, as the “realist” foreign-policy theorists constantly stress, that international system imposes certain kinds of considerations on its participants. That doesn’t mean that countries have no options from which to choose. It means that they don’t have complete control over the system that defines the practical options at any given time.

And a perpetual problem is that foreign policy in all countries is made by human beings. If the TechBro dystopian visions of a world run by AI systems like Skynet in the Terminator movies actually come true, maybe they will make more competent decisions that flesh-and-blood actors. Maybe.

Ideology is a factor in foreign policy, as we see in the Authoritarian International that somehow manages to put American fascists, European antisemites and authoritarians, along with Israel and Russia into some kind of anti-democracy trend. But, unlike the elaborate doctrinal pronouncements with which Soviet leaders concerned themselves, the current capitalist (and, yes, imperialist) Russian regime does not have anything like the old Soviet Communist approach of ideological aspirations. The modern-day Kremlinologists have to sort through a variety of conservative Christian religious positions and amorphous romantic nationalist views to get a picture of what the current ruling ideology may be at any given time. Some figures like Alexander Dugin are at least known in the West as influential Russian ideological thinkers. But they don’t provide some clear master plan for a coherent “Putinist” ideological outlook.

There was a cynical saying associated with the Nixon Administration back in the day – another regime with definite authoritarian tendencies but also a cold pragmatic streak when it came to foreign policy – “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

Obviously, diplomatic signaling often takes the form of “what we say.” So policymakers can’t ignore that. But everyone needs to be cautious about neocons trotting out scary-sounding snippets of Russian statements to justify their own it’s-always-1938” perspective.

Notes:

(1) Renew Democracy Initiative. Wikipedia 03/11/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Renew_Democracy_Initiative&oldid=127987273> (Accessed: 20205-22-08).

Demanding people believe the unbelievable - Netanyahu version

Two Haaretz columnists, Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson, give a memorable description of an important aspect of authoritarian rule that Benjamin Netanyahu has put on display with his absurd denials of the extremely well-documented starvation campaign he’s been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza. A campaign that Netanyahu’s and Israel’s hasbara (information operations) flat-out deny is occurring. They describe what one has to pretend is believable in order to swallow the official claims:

The claim that there is no starvation in the Strip does not stand on its own. It rests on additional assertions. For example: After 22 months of bombings, Hamas has managed to recruit actors willing to pretend that they are desperately chasing food trucks, some even agreeing to be shot to death by the IDF in service of the campaign; children are pretending to be waiting for exhausting amounts of time for food to be distributed; parents are staging footage of themselves scrounging for crumbs in the sand; doctors are giving false testimony while nurses enter fake data from clinical examinations; countless residents are using AI to produce images showing they have lost weight; and, finally, journalists from around the world are in on the deception. It's all a performance. The entire world is acting in the service of Hamas. [my emphsis] (1)

Michaeli and Hasson do their job as journalists and cite the actual evidence, including referring to:

[A] document produced by the UN coalition of experts known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, considered to be the leading authority on identifying mass hunger. Two weeks ago, it determined that "the worst-case scenario of famine" is unfolding in Gaza and noted that one in three people there goes entire days without eating. Additional documentation has been disseminated by the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam (which works to end hunger and poverty worldwide),Save the Children and many other reputable sources. Most of these organizations have field staff in Gaza who directly monitor and also treat starving children.

The main argument that Israel clings to is that the emaciated youngsters are suffering from preexisting conditions. First, this claim is accurate only with respect to a very small number of them. Indeed, starvation first strikes the most vulnerable, those who require special nutrition or depend on a properly functioning healthcare system. But even in the case of a young person with preexisting conditions – severe malnutrition is generally not inevitable. [my emphasis]

They ask their Israeli readers to imagine themselves in the place of the Palestinians as a way of seeing what an absurd claim the Israeli government and its leaders are making.

But this is an example of what we still call an Orwellian situation, referring to George Orwell’s famous book 1984. Authoritarian rulers expect their populations to believe or at least pretend to believe even obviously false and absurd claims. It’s something that cult leaders also do. Cults have specific social and psychological dynamics, but they make particular use of the dynamics of mass psychology that also function in political and mainstream religious institutions.

Still, it’s important to understand the specifics of individual efforts to justify particular political action. And when it comes to genocide, it’s a critical element of understand it, much less trying to put a stop to it.

Michaeli and Hasson make this suggestion for how Israelis can attempt to gain a more realistic perspective on the situation than the huge fiction painted by Israeli hasbara:

Here's a thought experiment for anyone who still believes that there is no mass starvation in the Strip. Take the entire population of Jerusalem – including children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled – and now add everyone living in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Move them all to live in tents on beaches, or in the streets or in abandoned buildings, with no electricity, no running water, no cooking gas, no refrigerators or cupboards –and only one toilet for every 100 to 200 people. They will live intents that are gradually falling apart, while rivers of sewage flow between them. Around them will be swarms of mosquitoes, rats and wild dogs.

Freud made a famous and, for him, uncharacteristically optimistic Enlightenment observation about people’s ability to work their way to reality, even when there are strong social and psychological impediments to doing so:

We may stress as often as we like that the human intellect is powerless in comparison to the human instinctual life, and be correct about this. But there is something special about this weakness; the voice of the intellect is mild, but it does not rest until it has made itself heard. In the end, after countless repeated rejections, it makes its point. This is one of the few points on which one can be optimistic about the future of humanity, but its significance in itself is not small. (2)

That hopeful note is small comfort at the moment for the children and adults being deliberately starved to death by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government right now.

But it’s important for journalists like Yarden and Hasson and for activists against the genocide to insist on the reality and to refute the cultish propaganda on the Israeli government is currently insisting.

Here is a current report from Kyle Kulinski on the situation. (Note: Kyle doesn’t always stick to safe-for-the-office language.

Notes:

(1) Michaeli, Yarden & Hasson, Nir (2025): 'There's No Hunger in Gaza,' Say Netanyahu, the Israeli Army and Media. Meanwhile, Starvation Worsens. Haaretz 08/14/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article-magazine/no-hunger-in-gaza-say-netanyahu-the-israeli-army-and-media-as-starvation-worsens/00000198-a8a1-d539-a5b8-fdf186180000?gift=382b33cda3b0478c83dee51e2738c9a8> (Accessed: 2025-21-08).

(2) Freud, Sigmund (1927): Die Zukunft einer Illusion. In: Sigm. Freud Gasammelte Werke, Band 14. Werke aus den Jahren 1925-1931 (1948), 377. My translation to English.

(3) Here’s Exactly How Israel Is Starving Gaza To De@th [sic]. Secular Talk YouTube channel 08/14/2025. <https://youtu.be/B1mwWpniv_Y?si=JH1cZHWIPMD1z1M3> (Accessed: 2025-21-08).

John Mearsheimer and Denys Pilash on the two Ukraine-related summits of the last few days

The ever-provocative and very well-informed John Mearsheimer appeared a second time in a few days on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, along with a Ukrainian social democraty, Denys Pilash. (1)



Monday’s meeting in the White House really was a kind of meeting featuring the US, Ukraine, and collective “Europe.” Not the whole EU, but its top official, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, was part of the European group.

Mearsheimer remains highly dubious that any immediate peace settlement is highly unlikely.

Russia doesn’t take the talk about “NATO-like” security guarantees very seriously at the moment. It makes negotiating sense for Ukraine to continue to insist on that. But it’s not likely to happen in the immediate future.

But the indications from the EU countries are that they will continue to provide military and diplomatic support for Ukraine, even if Trump somehow manages to wash his hands of the whole thing.

Pilash tries at the end to make an argument against Mearsheimer "realist" brand of foreign policy analysis. But he doesn't have time to get out more than a couple of bullet-points in this exchange.

Notes:

(1) Will Russia-Ukraine War End with Diplomacy or on Battlefield? John Mearsheimer vs. Denys Pilash. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 08/14/2025. <https://youtu.be/U6C93pCdCHA?si=Ei_pEvZGb1vFCmaR> (Accessed: 2025-19-06).

More parsing of the Alaska summit

Anatol Lieven at Responsible Statecraft analyzes the post-Alaska state of Trump 2.0 diplomacy on the Ukraine war titled, “Why Trump gets it right on Ukraine peace.” The piece itself seems to offer a best-case perspective on Trump’s blundering, amateurish diplomacy. But the headline is misleading Lieven’s actual argument.

But he makes an important point about the current moment, which is that Ukraine’s formal position that there must be a ceasefire before peace negotiations begin doesn’t in itself make a lot of sense outside of tactical negotiation strategy.

The Russian side made clear from the very start of negotiations that they would not agree to an unconditional ceasefire. Indeed it would have been completely illogical for them to do so, given that military pressure on Ukraine, and advances on the battlefield, are by far the most important leverage that Russia can bring to bear at the negotiating table.

The refusal to recognize this on the part of Western analysts and European governments betrays either an inability to understand obvious realities or a desire that the war should continue indefinitely, in the hope that Russia will eventually accede to present Ukrainian conditions for peace. That would make sense if Ukrainian conditions were realistic, and if developments on the battlefield were in Ukraine’s favor. But some of Ukraine’s demands are completely unacceptable to Moscow, and Ukraine and the West have no way of compelling Russia’s agreement, since it is the Russian army that is advancing (albeit slowly) on the ground and the West cannot provide soldiers to supplement Ukraine’s increasingly outnumbered and depleted forces. [my emphasis] (1)

The word “unconditional” is doing a lot of work there. Obviously, unless one side just unilaterally declares a ceasefire, there would have to be some understandings between the conflict parties about the timing and parameters of it would be. Even the Israelis have been doing that with Hamas – though the routine outcome is that Israel, the more powerful party, breaks the ceasefire unilaterally and says it’s all Hamas’ fault.

Lieven’s essay argues that from Ukraine’s and the West’s viewpoint, “the best that can realistically be hoped for is a combination of deterrents and incentives that will discourage a return to arms for a long time to come.” He also writes:

None of this should be taken as saying that all of Russia’s conditions are acceptable or should be accepted. Putin appears to have dropped one impossible demand, that Ukraine withdrawal from the whole of Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces. The remaining Russian demand is for the Ukrainian army’s withdrawal from the part of Donetsk that it holds, in return for Russian withdrawal from much smaller parts of Kharkiv and other provinces.

Trump is reportedly advising the Ukrainian government to accept this. They are refusing to do so, which is very understandable, but also mistaken if by accepting this they can get a stable peace and Russian compromise in other areas — notably, in Moscow’s demand for Ukrainian “demilitarization.” For realistically speaking, the Ukrainian army seem to be in the process of losing this land anyway. [my emphasis]

I’ve been assuming that Ukraine’s demand for an “unconditional” ceasefire was more a political talking point than a serious condition for negotiations. It would be an “unconditional” event only if Russia decided unilaterally to just stop its war. As a political polemic that’s understandable, as Lieven also suggests. At this point, though, Ukraine’s best hope for stopping the war in the short term would be to agree to some such deal as Lieven suggests.

But it’s also hard to imagine how that could occur without the US, the major European countries, and Russia all establishing agreements and incentives to discourage both Ukraine and Russia from restarting the conflict. And as Lieven also discusses, the prospect of NATO countries themselves actually stationing troops in Ukraine as a security force is unlikely in the extreme, at least in any immediately foreseeable near term.

Lieven’s comment that European countries might be operating “on a desire that the war should continue indefinitely” if no outright Ukrainian victory is possible is discordant note in the current reporting on the war. But it’s also clear that the US and its European allies have been thinking about the prospect of potentially weakening Russia by dragging out the current war over Ukraine as long as feasible.

Eric Frey, an Austrian journalist who follows US politics closely, takes note of the ineptness of Trump’s diplomacy in Alaska:

[Putin] has completely convinced Donald Trump of his ideas for an end to the Ukraine war and led the President of the United States around like a schoolboy. Putin's so-called peace plan calls for Ukraine to give up its strongest military defenses without a fight and in return receive vague promises from a man [Putin] whose word has never been worth anything. (2)

Then he turns to immediately talking about the Munich Analogy, which made me want to tune out completely. But I was amused by this: “Does he really want to go into the history books as a second Neville Chamberlain, as Neville Chambertrump?” Dorky, but somehow cute.

But since I am very confident that Trump has never in his life read even a single history book, I doubt Trump cares what history books will say about him. At least not as long as his cult followers continue to adore him.

The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Houvcl also puts a somewhat hopeful spin on the result of Alaska’s meeting. Not one that I find entirely convincing, but worth hearing: (3)

Notes:

(1) Lieven, Anatol (2025): Why Trump gets it right on Ukraine peace. Responsible Statecraft 08/17/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-ukraine-russia-agreement/> (Accessed: 2025-17-08).

(2) Frey, Eric (2025): Putin hat Trump vorgeführt, aber den Krieg noch nicht gewonnen. Standard 17.08.2025. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000283725/putin-hat-trump-vorgefuehrt-aber-den-krieg-noch-nicht-gewonnen> (Accessed: 2025-18-08). My translation to English.

(3) Russia Expert Katrina vanden Heuvel on Trump Summits with Putin, Zelensky. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 08/18/2025. <https://youtu.be/jgvrc1SzSsc?si=xJeULWT5Anhudws3> (Accessed: 2025-18-08).

An arcane concept in the high-level meetings over Ukraine

An esoteric concept that came out of the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska was “Article 5-like guarantees.“ Article 5 of the NATO Treaty commits all members states to come to each others’ defense if they are attacked by another country.

That cryptic concept emerged from a claim by Trump’s Special Envoy to Everywhere Steve Witkoff that Putin would be willing to accept outside powers giving Ukraine “Article 5-like” security guarantees. (1)

Somehow, this would mean that while Russia would not accept NATO membership for Ukraine, they would accept Ukraine getting the mutual-defense commitment from NATO members. Or rather something “like” that.

I’m not going to give myself a headache trying to parse what that mystical concept may mean until it clearly becomes a serious talking point in negotiations with Russia.

This Deutsche Welle report takes a look at what may happen at the scheduled negotiations with European leaders on Monday. One of the commentators, Anchal Vohra, mentions something that we don’t hear enough in such reports, which is that the EU Treaty also has a mutual defense clause. Which raises the question of why Russia would be willing to accept EU membership of Ukraine but not NATO membership. (1)

In her explanation, Vohra mentions that the NATO commitment includes a clause about how that commitment would be consistent with each country’s own constitutional requirement. (Which if we want to take the US Constitution on its face would require a Congressional declaration of war for the US to play such a role, but let’s not go there right now.) She alludes to that in her comments.

And she says that some analysts argue that the EU Treaty’s self-defense clause actually is more binding in its wording than NATO’s. (To my non-expert eyes, it certainly reads that way.) But when we’re talking about commitments to go to war directly with Russia, it’s hard to imagine the EU countries would make so that without non-EU members Britain and the US supporting the action explicitly. In any case, Western military preparations for a possible war with Russia are currently based on a command structure dominated by the US.

Notes:

(1) ‘Sviunovskiy, Gregory (2025): Witkoff claims Trump-Putin meeting victory, says 'Article 5-like' security on the table for Ukraine. Politico 08/17/2025. <https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/17/witkoff-trump-putin-meeting-article-5-security-ukraine-00512890> (Accessed: 2025-17-08).

(2) Security guarantees for Ukraine: What could the US and the EU offer? DW News YouTube channel 08/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/puWXKNy4dKY?si=fxmOzrb_Ek5kd_f4> (Accessed: 2025-17-08).

How Netanyahu’s authoritarian government propagandizes for its starvation policy in Gaza

Two Haaretz columnists, Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson, give a memorable description of an important aspect of authoritarian rule that Benjamin Netanyahu has put on display with his absurd denials of the extremely well-documented starvation campaign he’s been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza. A campaign that Netanyahu’s and Israel’s hasbara (in formation operations) flat-out deny is occurring. They describe what one has to pretend is believable in order to swallow the official claims,

The claim that there is no starvation in the Strip does not stand on its own. It rests on additional assertions. For example: After 22 months of bombings, Hamas has managed to recruit actors willing to pretend that they are desperately chasing food trucks, some even agreeing to be shot to death by the IDF in service of the campaign; children are pretending to be waiting for exhausting amounts of time for food to be distributed; parents are staging footage of themselves scrounging for crumbs in the sand; doctors are giving false testimony while nurses enter fake data from clinical examinations; countless residents are using AI to produce images showing they have lost weight; and, finally, journalists from around the world are in on the deception. It's all a performance. The entire world is acting in the service of Hamas. [my emphasis] (1)

Michaeli and Hasson do their job as journalists and cite the actual evidence, including referring to:

[A] document produced by the UN coalition of experts known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, considered to be the leading authority on identifying mass hunger. Two weeks ago, it determined that "the worst-case scenario of famine" is unfolding in Gaza and noted that one in three people there goes entire days without eating. Additional documentation has been disseminated by the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam (which works to end hunger and poverty worldwide),Save the Children and many other reputable sources. Most of these organizations have field staff in Gaza who directly monitor and also treat starving children.

The main argument that Israel clings to is that the emaciated youngsters are suffering from preexisting conditions. First, this claim is accurate only with respect to a very small number of them. Indeed, starvation first strikes the most vulnerable, those who require special nutrition or depend on a properly functioning healthcare system. But even in the case of a young person with preexisting conditions – severe malnutrition is generally not inevitable. [my emphasis]

They ask their Israeli readers to imagine themselves in the place of the Palestinians as a way of seeing what an absurd claim the Israeli government and its leaders are making.

But this is an example of what we still call an Orwellian situation, referring to George Orwell’s famous book 1984. Authoritarian rulers expect their populations to believe or at least pretend to believe even obviously false and absurd claims. It’s something that cult leaders also do. Cults have specific social and psychological dynamics, but they make particular use of the dynamics of mass psychology that also function in political and mainstream religious institutions.

Still, it’s important to understand the specifics of individual efforts to justify particular political action. And when it comes to genocide, it’s a critical element of understand it, much less trying to put a stop to it.

Michaeli and Hasson make this suggestion for how Israelis can attempt to gain a more realistic perspective on the situation than the huge fiction painted by Israeli hasbara:

Here's a thought experiment for anyone who still believes that there is no mass starvation in the Strip. Take the entire population of Jerusalem – including children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled – and now add everyone living in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Move them all to live in tents on beaches, or in the streets or in abandoned buildings, with no electricity, no running water, no cooking gas, no refrigerators or cupboards –and only one toilet for every 100 to 200 people. They will live intents that are gradually falling apart, while rivers of sewage flow between them. Around them will be swarms of mosquitoes, rats and wild dogs.

Freud made a famous and, for him, uncharacteristically optimistic Enlightenment observation about people’s ability to work their way to reality, even when there are strong social and psychological impediments to doing so:

We may stress as often as we like that the human intellect is powerless in comparison to the human instinctual life, and be correct about this. But there is something special about this weakness; the voice of the intellect is mild, but it does not rest until it has made itself heard. In the end, after countless repeated rejections, it makes its point. This is one of the few points on which one can be optimistic about the future of humanity, but its significance in itself is not small. (2)

That hopeful note is small comfort at the moment for the children and adults being deliberately starved to death by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government right now.

But it’s important for journalists like Yarden and Hasson and for activists against the genocide to insist on the reality and to refute the cultish propaganda on the Israeli government is currently insisting.

Here is a recent report from Kyle Kulinski on the situation. (Note: Kyle doesn’t always stick to safe-for-the-office language.) (3)

Notes:

(1) Michaeli, Yarden and Hasson, Nir (2025): 'There's No Hunger in Gaza,' Say Netanyahu, the Israeli Army and Media. Meanwhile, Starvation Worsens. Link to full article: Haaretz 08/14/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article-magazine/no-hunger-in-gaza-say-netanyahu-the-israeli-army-and-media-as-starvation-worsens/00000198-a8a1-d539-a5b8-fdf186180000?gift=5da281389ce44e9ca50d7650020a8f8b> (Accessed: 2025-15-08).

(2) Freud, Sigmund (1927): Die Zukunft einer Illusion. In: Sigmund Freud. Gesammelte Werke XIV (1948), 377. London: Imago Publishing Co. My translation to English.

(3) Here’s Exactly How Israel Is Starving Gaza To Deth. Secular Talk YouTube channel 08/14/2025. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1mwWpniv_Y> (Accessed: 2025-15-08).