The whole idea of a “nationalist international” is weird on its face. But there are lots of weird things about the radical right in all kinds of countries. But as Juliette Bretan reminds us, this was the case with the fascists movements and governments of the 1920s and later:
For all their authoritarianism, nationalism, and racism, the Nazis made considerable efforts to appeal to other countries for support, and kindle fascist thinking, during the interwar era. And there were times when it looked as if this strategy would work. Nazi Germany capitalized on existing dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles, which was almost universally seen as unfair before the ink had even dried. The party promoted an anti-liberal and antidemocratic politics that in fact proved rather popular across national borders. They also flattered international supporters and foisted their ideas on the world at every opportunity. In the US alone, there were numerous fascist hubs. An organization called the Friends of New Germany was established in the 1930s by a German immigrant to the United States; it later became the German American Bund and received support from Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess. The American architect Philip Johnson reviewed Mein Kampf (1925) positively and reported from Germany on the “stirring spectacle” of the Nazi invasion of Poland. (1)
Doctrines matter to political movements. But political parties and political movements aren’t schools of philosophy. And their focus on national power means that they inevitably have to pick friends and enemies in particular situations. Mussolini and Italian fascism were a major model for Hitler. His failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich in 1923 was an attempt to copy Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922. Mussolini continued to be the senior political partner in the Germany-Italy relationship immediately after Hitler took power. He was also the model for Engelbert Dollfuss’ “Austrofascist“ regime, which Austrian and German Nazis attempted to stage a coup against that government. Mussolini backed Dollfuss against Hitler and threatened to send Italian troops to Austria to block a German takeover.
1935 became a turning point, though, when Italy found itself financially dependent on Germany once Italy began its colonial war against Abyssinia/Ethiopia. And the dependence grew in 1936 when Germany and Italy joined to actively support Franco’s rebels in the Spanish Civil War. Before the end of the Second World War, Mussolini was reduced to heading a rump state controlled by the Germans.
Hitler’s government could be ruthlessly pragmatic, most dramatically in the 1938 Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union, ideologically the Nazis’ worst enemy. (Obviously, the Soviets could also be ruthlessly pragmatic!)
Angel Munárriz reported on today’s de facto Trumpist International, a key player in which is the American Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) reporting on a CPAC conference in Buenos Aires in 2024:
CPAC is an example of that desire to weave together the alliances that [far-right anarcho-libertarian Argentine President Javier] Milei praises. But the clean-cut and smiling [Matt and Mercy Schlapp] are far from alone in this endeavor. “The international integration of the far-right through think tanks and allied foundations [intends] to drag the parties into their positions: neoliberal in economic terms and reactionary in social terms. This is a phenomenon that dates back to the 1970s in the United States but has spread to Latin America and Europe. It’s now experiencing a strong acceleration,” explains Anna López, a professor of political science at the University of Valencia.
One of the entities that’s stepping on that accelerator is the Political Network for Values (PNfV). Two days before the meeting in Argentina, the PNfV held a summit in Madrid, where European, American, and African far-right figures gathered. Many activists participated, as well as politicians from two of the three far-right parties represented in the European Parliament. There were also smaller delegations from the European People’s Party bloc. The most prominent political leader present was José Antonio Kast, the runner-up in the 2021 Chilean presidential elections. He was among a list of 50 speakers, some of whom are defenders of conversion therapy and opposed to abortion even in cases of rape. (2)
The shadow of Bush and the regional conflagration he ignited have loomed over the events of the past week, though the inevitable comparisons have gone unacknowledged or been angrily rejected by the White House.
Trump had, after all, campaigned as a leader who would end America’s “forever wars” begun by Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. His Maga movement was built on antipathy to foreign entanglement, and the president himself spent much of 2025 lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
In the space of a few months, however, the “peace president” became the first US leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary. (1)
I don’t think we can call the Peace President an ideologue. Because that implies some kind of coherent thinking. He’s a talented demagogue who as President is focused – to the extent he can focus on anything for long – with self-enrichment. For him, everyone from US soldiers killed in battle to his own followers are “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump, who allegedly studied economic or business or something in college, probably doesn’t know who John Maynard Keynes was and has undoubtedly never read any of his books. But this famous quote of Keynes does fit the Orange Anomaly well: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
Trump’s political mentor, the hardcore rightwing gay Mob lawyer Roy Cohn, was a huge influence on him. And Trump’s militaristic and nationalistic bluster is a clear example of that ugly corner of American political history. It’s not about “staying out of other people’s conflicts” or anything like that. It’s about the US being able to throw its military weight around without regard to law or principles.
The typical “isolationist” gripe about the war in Vietnam fit easily when braindead slogans like, “We never should have been there in the first place. But now that we’re there, we ought to win it!” What they meant by that pretty much came down to more bombing and killing more Vietnamese and killing them faster. Probably the most notorious version of this argument is associated with Air Force Gen. Curtis “Nuke” LeMay:
The quote is usually attributed to Curtis LeMay, the scowling Air Force general who incinerated two thirds of Japan’s cities in World War II and was disappointed when Kennedy wouldn’t let him do the same to Cuba. In his 1968 memoir he suggested that rather than negotiating with Hanoi, the United States should “bomb them back to the stone age,” by taking out factories, harbors, and bridges “until we have destroyed every work of man in North Vietnam.”
LeMay, however, had cribbed it from a June 1967 column by humorist Art Buchwald, who used the phrase to caricature the Goldwater Republican attitude toward Vietnam. The 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad had already tarred Republicans as inveterate bombers, but the joke came from Buchwald’s association of bombing with time travel. [my emphasis] (2)
Fantasizing about big bombs making big booms as the only way to make war is central to make of the rightwing hawkish positions. Although at least some of them manage to present a less bombastic image at times.
Curtis “Nuke” LeMay (1906-1990)
Joshua Leifer has provided a good succinct description of Trump's worldview, primitive though it may be:
Trump has unequivocally committed to a vision of muscular American global dominance, in which the U.S. acts unrestrained by international law, enforcing its will through the exercise of overwhelming military force.
In truth, Trump's deviation from precedent was always overstated. He campaigned and won – twice – on the promise to repudiate the neoconservatives' foreign policy legacy. In doing so, he dispensed with the moral language of promoting democracy and human rights that had long legitimized U.S. foreign interventions (the neoconservatives themselves having demolished respect for international law most spectacularly with the invasion of Iraq in 2003). Yet Trump never eschewed the basic belief that the United States should remain the dominant global power.
What he has done instead is rearticulate American hegemony in the jargon of a crueler worldview, according to which those with more power have their way with those who have less. "My own morality," Trump said last January, after the attack on Venezuela and abduction of its president. "It's the only thing that can stop me." (3)
Since there is not a lot obvious evidence for his own “morality,” that’s effectively his way of saying that he doesn’t think he is restrained by anything other than uncooperative flunkies.
A big part of the challenge in evaluating Trump's approach to foreign policy comes from the fact that he obviously has no clear strategic foreign-policy vision other than a bullying image of what US power is, combined with his desire to corruptly use his office to further enrich himself and his crime family.
To the extent he was something resembling foreign policy strategy, he’s eager to help Netanyahu’s Israel wreck even more of the Middle East.
I tend not to post Kyle Kulinski videos because his target market seems to be young men who are open to a left-leaning political narrative. And part of his style is to use a fair amount of profanity of the kind that would fit in a drinking party of twentysomething guys. And he definitely gives an energetic presentation.
This is one that mentions among other things that the US in Iran appears to be adopting Israel-in-Gaza tactics like targeting hospitals and schools. A reminder that the US needs to start giving much more attention to international law and to a sensible calculation of its national interest than to Israel’s approaches, which has involved during Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran into fragmented failed states. (1)
Kyle also cites several polls that highlight the very unusually low level of initial approval from the US public. Except for Trump cultists, of course.
I guess saying that Trump’s rhetoric on the war is delusional is pretty much like arguing that the sun rises in the east. But in a complicated situation like this in a war that will have long-lasting consequences in the volatile Middle East, Trump’s reality-show pantomime of international diplomacy is super-risky. There’s an old saying (that’s generally true!) that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one. We see that right now in the Russia-Ukraine War, in which Trump’s pseudo-diplomacy hasn’t produced any progress toward some kind of workable peace agreement.
Trump himself is mainly interested in diplomacy because it can be used as a tool to enrich himself and his crime family. See: Gaza reconstruction plan and Board of Peace.
Speaking of Ukraine, when the Russia invasion of February 2022 occurred, a serious Western initiative might have brought about a pause that would have allowed for a diplomatic solution. The negotiations around a proposed Istanbul Protocol in April 2022 will no doubt get quite a bit of scrutiny in the history of that war that might have been an off-ramp. Russia, of course, was conducting an illegal invasion. But it’s also the case that part of the Biden Administration and the US foreign-policy establishment saw the war as a way to strategically weaken Russia. And that hope probably contributed to their disinclination to pursue that diplomatic route. (BTW, those same considerations are also in the minds of European leaders today, because that’s what foreign ministries are there to think about.)
A responsible US Administration would be putting huge attention into halting the current Iran War. But responsible US Administrations would have cut off arms supplies to Israel as soon as it was clear that Israel was committing genocidal acts in Gaza. But obviously neither the Biden nor the Trump Administrations did so.
Juan Cole, the historian who is also an expert on Shi’a Islam, is always an excellent sources on Middle East news. He recently did an interview whose transcript he has also made available. (2)
It was never clear what the goal of this war was. The likelihood that you could achieve regime change by bombarding people from the air was always very low. It has very seldom happened in history, and it hasn’t happened this time. [my emphasis]
He was probably being a bit cautious there. I don’t know of any case in which we could say regime change was ever brought about by bombing. Early theories of air warfare like Hugh Trenchard and Guilio Douhet saw strategic bombing as a kind of magic weapon, which could be used against enemy civilians in a way that would make them rise up and overthrow their own government in a matter of weeks.
It may be kind of a “boys with toys” problem. New flying ships! Bombing civilians directly! Nobody could endure that for long! The American fascination with “shock and awe” is similar in a lot of ways. Ironically, the experience from Britain and Germany with the bombing during the First World War provided very good reason to doubt the magical power of even that very early version of shock-and-awe..
Cole:
To the extent that a popular opposition was building against this government in the streets in January, by bombarding the country, that movement has had the steam taken out of it. You can’t go into the streets if you’re afraid of being bombed, and moreover you look like a traitor if you’re demonstrating against the government when it’s under bombardment. [Something that has been known – and repeatedly forgotten – since the First World War.] So the idea of regime change in this way was always foolish, and it hasn’t happened. It’s not likely to happen. The goals of this bombardment have been to weaken Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities. It may well be that many of the launchers have been taken out, but Iran still seems to be able to put large numbers of drones out there. The Shahed drones are striking all over the region. So even that goal, so far, seems distant. [my emphasis]
Cole is very clear at the big influence Israel has on US foreign policy. And it’s pretty obvious that the current arrangement has done far more damage to American interests overall than any benefit it has provided. But Cole also discusses the way the US does see positive value – and least in an imperialist sense – from its partnership with Israel:
The US political establishment, however, sees Israel as a kind of aircraft carrier on land for the United States in the Middle East — a tool with which the US can achieve its objectives. Among those objectives are dominating the energy resources of the region and ensuring that there are no challenges to US predominance of the sort that Iran represents. To that extent, I think Trump is somewhat unusual in being willing to be led by Netanyahu. But we saw in Gaza how Biden declined to tell the Israeli government to cease its genocide. I think that the two governments have been joined at the hip for some time. …
I think the Israeli government took the lead on pushing for this war at this time. But I maintain that it wasn’t a hard sell in Washington. The political elite in Washington has hated the Iranian government for 47 years. It has been a thorn in the side of US interests in the region. The US petroleum companies, I think, bear as much blame as anybody else for this war, because they want to get into Iran and develop its petroleum, and they can’t do it as long as that government is there - there are sanctions on that government. There is every reason to think that they were pressuring Trump to do this as well. There is also a Christian white nationalist constituency in the United States which is very wedded to an alliance with Israel and which hates Iran — they’re hoping to turn the Iranians into evangelical Christians. [And/or kill a lot of them off!] There are a lot of ill-considered reasons for which the US is involved in this, but I don’t think it should be forgotten that oil is predominant. There’s a reason the dictatorship in Burma hasn’t been attacked by the United States. [my emphasis]
This war is not “all about oil.” But it is also about oil and the greed of the oil corporations.
Cole closes with: “This is becoming - it has the hallmarks of a world crisis. Even though ‘world war’ is too strong a term, it is certainly a world crisis, and the longer it goes on, the bigger the crisis will be.”
Chris Hedges has a sobering podcast with Alistair Crooke discussing the Iran War. (3)
The Council on Foreign Relations currently has a webpage providing updates on Iran War news.
Notes:
(1) BREAKING: GROUND TROOPS DEPLOYING?! UN PEACEKEEPERS HIT! SCHOOLS ATTACKED! US MISSILES DESTROYED! Secular Talk YouTube channel. <https://youtu.be/ctACnfMXat4?si=99M8KaIywhPwNIjU> (Accessed: 2026-07-03).
(3) Can Israel & the U.S. Sustain Iran's Military Power? (w/ Alastair Crooke). The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel 03/07/2026. <https://youtu.be/YL8rXeNkXsQ?si=WUdcNy2D7XOzF2jE> (Accessed; 2026-07-03).
Our media environment is constantly changing. But the kind of high-quality podcasts featuring actual experts and serious analysts is something we didn’t have available in anywhere close to this degree during the early years of the Iraq War.
I’m sharing a few recent examples. Starting with this one of Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, both experts on authoritarianism. Snyder mentions here the aspect of the moment that has surprised me so much: the fact that US opinion polls show virtually no initial burst of popularity for this current war. (1)
Omer Bartov, an excellent American-Israeli historian and genocide expert (who has been very critical of Israel’s genocide against Gaza) in an interview with Daniel Davis: (2)
Bartov discusses among other things the seemingly near-unanimous support of the current war among Israelis. The mutual influence of the US and Israel on each other’s foreign policies is nothing new. But the current Iran War is the riskiest military adventure the US has so far undertaken at the urging of the Israeli government. But it’s not that Israel is simply driving the bus. The US has done some things on Israel’s behalf that were clearly not in the best interest of the US, including the shameful support from both the Biden and Trump Administrations for the Netanyahu government’s genocide against Gazans that began in 2023 after Hamas’ “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack. But Israel has also helped the US in some of its goals in the Middle East. The current Iran War has been Netanyahu’s dream for decades, as he recently commented himself. And US neoconservatives have wanted a war against Iran for decades as well, for reasons not entirely identical with Netanyahu’s.
The following is David Rothkopf hosting Joe Cirincione, Jon Wolfsthal and Ed Luce. Cirincione’s comments are particularly interesting: (3)
This is an interview with Foreign Affairs by Nate Swanson and Richard Haass (two separate interviews, same video). Foreign Affairs is the longtime journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the stereotypically Establishment international relations journal. Richard Haass was president of the council for 20 years, which gives him the highest of Establishment respectability ratings. I don’t always agree with him but he’s well-informed and leans more to the liberal-interventionist side than the neocon orientation. He’s not interventionist on the current Iran War: (4)
And here is Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of the US Army in Europe. His commentary in support of Ukraine in its current war with Russia tends to be too much of the rah-rah side for me. Which is to say, he tends to downplay the military advantage that Russia currently has in the war. But his commentary here on the Iran War is good. I’m also not ready to go with Third World War talk. But having the US collapse foreign policy into a reality show starring a mentally ailing Orange Anomaly has really been, uh, disturbing. (5)
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who had high-level experience the reckless Iraq War, is not impressed with the approach to this war that the Orange Anomaly and his “Secretary of War” Pete Kegsbreath are taking: (6)
(Since the Iran War is going to be part of our daily news for weeks, months, and very possibly years, l’m posting on something different for this edition.)
Bart Ehrman is a Biblical scholar who does regular podcasts on his professional topic. His background is interesting. He began his career as a conservative Christian believer in the fundamentalist, “born-again” tradition. Over time, he evolved into a non-believer.
But that change didn’t remove his fascination and professional commitment to secular scholarly research in his chosen field. It’s worth remembering that the Young Hegelians of the early 19th century like Bruno Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach focused heavily on critical Biblical scholarship. Their secular scholarship on the Bible was one reason they were known as Left Hegelians. Friedrich Engels at one point considered writing a book on Biblical scholarship in the tradition of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841). But his scholarly interests wound up going in a different direction.
That was part of a modern trend toward an increasingly secular understanding of religion and how it has functioned historically. Not a universal trend, obviously, as we see in the persistent appearance of religious fundamentalist movement in today’s world, and not just among Christians.
How this relates to Bart Ehrman’s podcast and scholarly projects is that he gives a historical picture of how ideas evolved and how they influenced history in ways that makes us still have interest in them today. Here he talks about ethics in the ancient Western world, not so much on Christianity. He talks about Aristotle’ ethics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics.
If you pay attention to such things, this is an interesting and accessible presentation. (1)
In the previous episode in this particular series, “Love Thy Stranger: The Radical Origins of Western Compassion,” it talks about how hospitals began as a Christian undertaking. This piqued my interest because the late Austrian philosopher-theologian Ivan Ilich as argued that hospitals in the form that we know them were something Christian Crusaders learned about from the Muslims. But organized spots devoted to caring for the sick arguably goes back long before the Christian era began.
Ilich presumably thought there was something distinct about the kind of institutions that the Muslims operated:
Religion continued to be the dominant influence in the establishment of hospitals during the Middle Ages. The growth of hospitals accelerated during the Crusades, which began at the end of the 11th century. Pestilence and disease were more potent enemies than the Saracens in defeating the crusaders. Military hospitals came into being along the traveled routes; the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John in 1099 established in the Holy Land a hospital that could care for some 2,000 patients. It is said to have been especially concerned with eye disease, and it may have been the first of the specialized hospitals. This order has survived through the centuries as the St. John Ambulance. (2)
(2) Piercey, W. Douglas & Fralick, Pamela C. & Scarborough, Harold. "hospital". Encyclopedia Britannica 02/19/2026. <https://www.britannica.com/science/hospital> (Accessed: 2026-04-03).
The famous liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is often quoted as saying, “All wars are popular for the first 30 days.” (Although I’m having trouble pinpointing the source!)
Still, it’s a reference to the well-known rally-round-the-flag reactions of public opinion when their countries initially go to war. And the wars are invariably for important reasons – or at least that’s the story governments like to tell. In a very recent interview with historian Anne Applebaum, Charlie Sykes addresses the fact that there seems to be little enthusiasm for the initial days of the current Iran War.
John Kenneth Galbraith had this explanation for the phenomenon of initial enthusiasm:
Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.
But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor [US] adventures in Grenada [1983] and Panama [1989-1990], nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse [to public support]. (1)
He goes on to recall, “World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter.”
It was a standard part of the historical narrative that was widespread patriotic enthusiasm in Germany for the war in its initial days. In more recent decades, historians Holger Afflerbach and Gordon Martel have provided a more cautious evaluation, emphasizing that the Kaiser’s government felt the need to heavily promote patriotic enthusiasm.
But, anthropology or not, there doesn’t seem to be the usual enthusiasm among the American public that we would expect to see at the beginning of such a conflict, which has huge implications for the US and the Middle East.
Six out of ten Americans disapprove of U.S. military action against Iran, according to a new CNN survey. Fifty-six percent of Americans think the president is too willing to use military force, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll fielded over the weekend. If public opinion had a strong bearing on U.S. foreign policy, then this would be a blinking-red indicator that the new war is neither sustainable nor desirable—an all-around destructive campaign.
That the president has failed to make a coherent argument in favor of the Iran strikes, to seek congressional approval, or to make any outreach to the public may well end up backfiring. (2)
John Mearsheimer ably explains what a bad idea for the US the current war on Iran is. He now describes Trump as a “unilateralist” in foreign policy. (3)
Notes:
(1) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992): The Culture of Contentment, 166-167. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(2) Guyer, Jonathan (2026): The Blowback From an Unpopular Iran War. The American Prospect 03/03/2026. (Accessed: 2026-03-03).
(3) Prof. John Mearsheimer: Is Trump’s War Beyond Control? Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom YouTube channel 03/03/2026. (Accessed: 2026-03-03).
The European nations currently in NATO are currently preoccupied with the huge project of developing new collective defense structures and domestic defense manufacturing capabilities to adjust to Trump’s anti-NATO and anti-Europe policy shift.
NATO, despite its changes over the decades, has always had the primary purpose of deterring any military attack from Russia/the Soviet Union. It was also a power magnifier for the United States, a fact which Trump and his unilateralist supporters don’t seem to understand or care about.
Europe’s current drastic readjustment
In the often-grim game of great-power politics, countries engage in an ever-evolving process of calibrating and recalibrating threats and potential threats. They also have to engage in an elaborate process of signaling and reading signals that countries send to each other, not least in their military capacities and priorities. Russia currently is engaged in a big war of aggression against Ukraine and has been since 2022, with a prelude in the illegal seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia also sees its international interests as involving what it calls its “near abroad."
The NATO countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were once part of the Soviet Union proper, as were Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and others. NATO allies Poland and Hungary were part of the Warsaw Pact and therefore of the USSR’s European field of influence. The USSR used military force against both to boost Communist control in those nations and reinforce Soviet dominance in foreign policy.
None of this means that Russia has any immediate goal or intention of taking over or attacking any of those countries. But all countries have to evaluate both the intentions of international adversaries and their capabilities. The former is broadly considered the concern of foreign policy officials and analysts, the latter primarily a concern for the military. There was a huge chance in 1989 and immediately following years to dramatically limit and reduce military capabilities and to pursue various arrangements to improve political relations on both sides of the former Cold War. They were only partially fulfilled and inadequately pursued. But that’s a much longer story.
Joe Cirincione wrote on February 4 about a sad milestone that is now already past:
[T]his week, the New START treaty will expire. It is the last nuclear reduction pact remaining. For the first time since 1972, when Richard Nixon negotiated the first treaty limiting US and Soviet nuclear weapons, there will be no limits and no inspections on the two nations that possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arms.
As a result of multiple accords, negotiated and supported by Republicans and Democrats for 54 years, the nuclear arms race was restrained and then (with Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1988 and George H.W. Bush’s Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991) reversed. We went from almost 70,000 nuclear weapons at the height the Cold War in the mid-1980’s to about 12,000 today.
That era is over.
There have not been any further treaties negotiated since Barack Obama’s modest New Start treaty in 2010. Neither Trump nor Putin appear interested in nuclear restraint. Under Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the United States is now committed to spending $2 Trillion on new nuclear bombers, missiles, submarines and warheads. A likely result of the end of New Start is that “Trump will sign off on more money for new nuclear arms,” writes Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. [my emphasis] (1)
And the current war against Iran along with Russia’s war against Ukraine provide a strong incentive for more countries to acquire nuclear weapons to deter attacks from rogue nuclear imperial powers.
It’s also a huge new security issue for Europe because a key part of the West’s nuclear deterrence strategy against Russia has been the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) assumption that if either Russia or the US initiated a nuclear war against the other they would know that the other side would retaliate with a comparable nuclear strike. That assumption extended to all of NATO with the US providing the most important part of the “nuclear umbrella” for all of NATO. European NATO members can no longer count on the US maintaining that guarantee for Europe.
That means that western Europe’s two nuclear powers, France and non-EU member Britain, will need to compensate for that long-term loss of confidence in the US position. It also means Europe is having to increase its conventional military forces, which it is now doing. That is a grim matter and makes public scrutiny and criticism of military programs more important than ever. If the post-1989 European situation had gone a different way, things could have been very different.
In this current, rapidly-evolving security environment in Europe, European leaders are in a complicated balancing act. Developing a more robust defense structure as a deterrent against current or future malign Russian intentions means that they have to set up a real alternative to current NATO structures, which have been built around American command structure, weapons (2), and intelligence capabilities. And that can’t be done overnight. At the same time, they have to been concerned with explicit US military threats against European powers, likely the recent threats of war against Denmark.
The Iran War and the European strategic pivot
Which means that they have a strong incentive to not only downplay diplomatic disagreements among themselves, but also to avoid alienating the US, at least as far as that is possible given the current extremely erratic and reckless President.
EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas has been striking a cautious tone as in this Bluesky thread:
It would be welcome to see the Europeans collectively through the EU or some substantial portion of it to condemn the illegal war of aggression launch by the US and Israel against Iran. You know, values-based-world-order and all that. It’s also worth saying that the Nuremberg Trials established the concept of “aggressive war,” i.e., unprovoked attacks on other sovereign nations, as a war crime. Stephen Ratner wrote in 2007:
Aggression in international law is defined as the use of force by one State against another, not justified by self-defense or other legally recognized exceptions. The illegality of aggression is perhaps the most fundamental norm of modern international law and its prevention the chief purpose of the United Nations. Even before the UN, the League of Nations made the prevention of aggression a core aim; and the post-World War II Allied tribunals regarded aggression as a crime under the rubric crimes against peace. [my emphasis in italics] (3)
The world – including the United States – does need a stable set of international laws and standards. So does everyone else.
Beth Griech-Polelle writes:
International law is still limited by international politics, and we must not pretend that either can live and grow without the other. But in the judgment of Nuremberg there is affirmed the central principle of peace that the man who makes or plans to make aggressive war is a criminal. (4)
After their responses to the Gaza genocide, it’s a safe bet that Europe will not be collectively demanding war crimes trial against US officials on charges of planning and waging a war of aggression against Iraq. Although they certainly should!
Still, as this report from Scott Lucas from the Polish news channel TVP World notes (5), the British government has raised international-law concerns over the US-Israeli attack on Iran. Albeit in about the most delicate sense of saying it was up to the US to lay out the legal justification for the war. (At least it’s not like Tony Blair shamelessly assisting the US attack on Iraq in 2003.)
In general, the Europeans are showing various degrees of public restraint in their public statements on the issue. Europe does have things like this to worry about: “Russia Attacks a NATO Country in a War Game. It Doesn’t End Well.” (6)
And not so very long ago western Europe’s two nuclear powers (Britain and France) together with Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and Italy issued a public statement on X/Twitter warning the US that they were ready to stand by their mutual defense commitments to Denmark if it was attacked by the US. That list includes western Europe’s two nuclear powers (Britain and France) and the countries with its six biggest conventional armies: Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Poland and Italy. That deterred an American attack, at least for the moment. But they are also playing a delicate diplomatic game. At least the Europeans, unlike Trump, are very capable of doing actual diplomacy. NATO member Türkiye has also had friendly relations with Iran.
This short Reuters article reports on the British Prime Minister providing reassurance to the government of Cyprus:
[British Defence Secretary John Healey] cited two missiles fired in the direction of Cyprus, although he added: "We don't believe they were targeted at Cyprus."
Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had called him to discuss regional developments.
"(Starmer) confirmed clearly and unequivocally that Cyprus was not a target," Christodoulides said on X.
"We are maintaining direct communication. All relevant authorities are fully engaged and monitoring developments closely." (7)
(3) Ratner, Stephen (2007): In: Gutman, Roy et al, eds. Crimes of War 2.0: What the Public Should Know, 37. New York: W.W. Norton.
(4) In: Griech-Polelle, Beth (2020): The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and its Policy Consequences Today, 2nd Edition, 16. Nomos: Baden-Baden.
(5) Scott Lucas on TVP World: What happens next after US-Israel strikes on Iran? Scott Lucas Worldview YouTube channel 05/01/2026; affiliated with Lucas’ website EA Worldview. <https://youtu.be/zORei9n-yqY?si=fI4kehKLQgCrD1DC> (Accessed: 2026-01-03).
Gosh, and it seems like just yesterday Trump was going declaring the end of armed conflict in the Middle East: “I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace.” (1)
Now he’s declared a regime-change war on Iran acting together with Israel. “Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have all been targeted by Iran’s counterattacks after the strikes by the U.S. and Israel.” (2)
EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Kaja Kallas – who for whatever reason is still posting on an X/Twitter account – issued this diplomatic boilerplate:
Iran’s regime has killed thousands. Its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes, along with support for terror groups, pose a serious threat to global security. The EU has adopted strong sanctions against Iran and supported diplomatic solutions, including on the nuclear issue.
I have spoken to Israel’s Foreign Minister Saar and other ministers in the region. The EU is also coordinating closely with Arab partners to explore diplomatic paths.
Protection of civilians and international humanitarian law is a priority. Our consular network is fully engaged in facilitating departures for EU citizens. Non-essential EU personnel are being withdrawn from the region.
Stasa Salacanin looked at European policy on Iran just before the beginning of the current war:
In late January, the Council of the European Union adopted a new sanctions package targeting Iranian officials and entities implicated in serious abuses, imposing asset freezes and travel bans. In a landmark shift in policy, EU foreign ministers unanimously designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization. The move places the IRGC alongside al-Qaeda, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and Hamas on the EU’s terrorism list, subjecting it to sweeping financial restrictions and prohibitions on material support.
The European Parliament reinforced this approach with a strongly worded resolution condemning Tehran’s repression and insisting that any normalization of EU–Iran relations be conditioned on measurable progress in human rights and democratic reform. …
Although Europe has often exercised caution in its dealings with Iran in the past, EU officials and member states adopted a markedly different tone following last year’s Israeli attack on Iranian targets. The EU did not condemn the strikes, and [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz openly praised them, remarking that Israel was doing Europe’s “dirty work.” As such, Europe has struggled to present itself as a credible and independent diplomatic actor. [my emphasis] (3)
A major war in Iran will of course generate new refugee flows which Trump-friendly parties in the EU will attempt to use to undermine European democracies. How successful they will be with that goal depends critically on whether center-left and center-right parties are willing to confront with the far-right, Trump-friendly parties with practical and humane immigration policies and to push back directly against xenophobic propaganda.
Iraq, where the US intervention two decades ago wound up putting a pro-Iranian Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad, will of course face challenges with the new Iran war, unless of course a sudden burst of caution and/or panic leads the Trump regime to pull out of this reckless war.
Here is a backgrounder from prewar days, i.e., two days ago, on the conflict, in which Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols discuss the prewar situation: (4)
Trump’s rhetoric in his announcement of the new US war against Iran sounded remarkably like neocon boilerplate.
Let’s not forget that Trump’s lead negotiators with Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, obviously failed to negotiate a diplomatic settlement. We’re now 13 months into the current Trump Presidency in which actual diplomacy is not considered necessary for foreign policy.
What could possibly go wrong?
China’s support for Iran is real, multifaceted, and in some ways more sustainable than military intervention; it just operates on a different strategic wavelength.
At the UN Security Council, China has consistently deployed its most potent weapon: the veto-wielding power of principle.
In an emergency meeting last month, Chinese Ambassador Sun Lei delivered a stark message to Washington: “The use of force can never solve problems. It will only make them more complex and intractable. Any military adventurism would only push the region toward an unpredictable abyss.” (5)
It’s worth remembering the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988. It was long and nasty. Those the days when the US was happy to see Saddam Hussein Iraq taking on Iran. It was “the longest conventional war of the twentieth century and the most lethal war since World War II” up until then. (6)
The eight-year war … illustrated the horrific carnage of conflicts fought in defiance of international laws and norms concerning war. Human-wave attacks, missile attacks, and chemical weapons including lethal nerve gas, blister-agent mustard gas, and chemical fires killed one million soldiers on the battlefields and wounded many thousands of others. Hundreds of thousands of civilians suffered casualties, and millions became refugees.
Amos Harel of Haaretz recently made one of the saddest comments about the state of present-day Israel that I’ve seen: “the public already looks as though it has become accustomed to an eternal war, and has come to terms with it.” (1)
Currently we seem to be on the verge of war with Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is reportedly encouraging an attack on Iran after supposedly having talked Trump out of an earlier one. That switch was a tactical one. Netanyahu’s default position for decades has been to push the US to oust the Islamic regime in Iran. According to Dahlia Scheindlin, the Israeli government is backing Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last, brutally dictatorial Shah ousted by the revolution in 1979, to be a new (and presumably Israel-friendly) ruler of Iran. (2)
She cautions about reckless optimism that overthrowing the current Iranian regime. But Netanyahu’s government sees it as an advantage for Israel to have chaotic conditions in nearby states. Israel is continuing its war against the people of Gaza, albeit at a lower rate of intensity than 2023-2025 at the moment. They have accelerated their violent illegal annexation of the occupied territory of the West Bank.
The pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia in Lebanon has been weakened along with the whole nation of Lebanon, which Israel continues to attack sporadically. Thanks to the military intervention in Syria by Israel and the US, Syria is fragmented. One of the positive-by-chance parts of Israeli military salvos into Syria – which have included more illegal occupation of Syrian territory – has been their pragmatic decision along with the US to back the Kurdish militias, which for several years has been the ruling power in the Rojava region. That has been the scene of genuinely positive democratic development in recent years.
But Israel is now pulling back from that support. The new Islamic government of Syria is now pushing to reassert control over Rojava, while Türkiye is ramping up its own military push against Kurds in northern Syria.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is wasting no time rallying the country around a common cause: destroying Rojava. “A strategic alliance with the US can only be possible if we wipe out terrorists from the north of Syria,” Erdoğan declared in December. “We have done so in Afrin and in Shengal. We have buried them in the trenches they had dug and we will continue to do so. If they don’t leave, we will make them disappear because their existence disturbs us.”
Erdoğan is itching to wage war across the border, against the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the enclave commonly known as Rojava. The revolutionary region’s political program shares many similarities with the HDP’s [a left opposition party in Türkiye] electoral platform in Turkey, which promotes egalitarianism, peace, and radical democracy. (3)
Let’s pause to remember how the war in Iraq that the Cheney-Bush Administration began in 2003 was going to bring peace, stability, and democracy to the whole Middle East.
It’s possible that a new war with Iran will be avoided, hopefully so. But it’s notable that the ever-erratic President Trump set a ten-day deadline last for Iran to reach an acceptable deal, a timeline that should be expiring this weekend or the beginning of next week.
It’s also important to remember that the Trump 2.0 regime’s diplomatic professionalism is virtually non-existent on two of the key crisis issues of the moment, the Russia-Ukraine War and attacking Iran. Trump’s special envoys for both of those, Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have been amateurish and ineffective in their diplomatic initiatives. Trump can’t seem to establish any differentiation between actual diplomacy and private grifting. And the latter always seems to take priority.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Christian Zionist Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has been “putting out fire with gasoline,” to borrow a phrase from a David Bowie song by suggesting publicly that it would be fine with him if Israel were to take over even much more of the Middle East than the territory of the former British colony Mandate Palestine. Including apparently large parts of Iraq and Egypt along with all of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. (4)
Soumaya Channoushi points out, “Some [Christian Zionist] interpretations envision borders extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing territory in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, countries that together are home to hundreds of millions of people.”
This is what the clown-show MAGA diplomacy of our Peace President looks like. The nightmare clown show.
Chuck Todd was never my favorite TV pundit. His main talent was keep everything superficial and framed consistently within whatever the acceptable Washington Beltway narrative was at any given moment.
So I was almost impressed when I listened to his brief summary of how Hitler took over dictatorial power in Germany with the help of conservatives. He managed not to botch it! Good going, Chuck! (1)
He manages to get it right that leading German conservatives like President Paul Hindenburg and Franz von Papen were key to making Hitler Chancellor. He also mentions that the Nazi Party never got a majority in Parliament, even in 1932 when Hindenburg was practicing authoritarian rule already. Chuck even works in that in the last election in 1932 – which was the last even semi-free election in the Weimar Republic – Hitler’s NSDAP won fewer parliamentary seats that it did earlier in the year.
His description of the role of the conservative Center Party, which joined the Nazis to vote in the Enabling Act of 1933, could have been a little stronger. This is a capsule description of the Enabling Act from the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2)
Chuck even manages not to mangle the historical parallel to Trump. Though not surprisingly he keeps it within the confines of what would be easily digestible for timid liberals.
There’s a worthwhile book about the month preceding Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Hitler’s 30 Days to Power: January, 1933 that is a reminder of how deeply involved conservative, non-Nazi politicians were in the process. Blaine Taylor summarized it in a review of the book:
How this stunning turnabout of Hitler’s fortunes [in January 1933] occurred is the thrust of this excellent, engaging new book by the author of German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler and Germany from Partition to Reunification. Basically, the story centers around the chancellor who served just before Hitler – army General Kurt von Schleicher – and the trio of men who advised the aging President and World War I Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. These advisers included Hindenburg’s son and military adjutant, Oskar (whom Hitler called “the personification of stupidity”), former Chancellor Franz von Papen and longtime presidential secretary Otto Meissner.
Brought to power and then dumped by his friend Schleicher, Papen vowed to get even. He cut a deal with Hitler in which the latter would become chancellor, and Papen would serve as vice chancellor. In 1934, Hitler had Schleicher shot during the famous Nazi blood purge, but Papen survived to become ambassador to Austria and then to Turkey. Tried at Nuremberg as a war criminal, he was acquitted. Oskar von Hindenburg and Meissner also survived the Third Reich and de-Nazification trials by the West German government.
The cardinal error of all these men in bringing Hitler to power was that they thought they could tame the radical Nazis by saddling them with the minutiae of actual government power. [my emphasis] (3)
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz have been doing a series on the Legal AF YouTube channel in which they mostly analyze current political issues but sometimes focus on historical analysis, too. It’s associated with Meidas Touch News, a left-leaning news group begun in 2020. By today’s standards of media evolution, it may already qualify as “legacy media.”
I haven’t heard an explanation of what the “AF” in the title stands for. Atrial fibrillation maybe? (Irregular heartbeat: Trump certainly is causing irregularities in the legal system.) It’s obviously often used as an safe-for-the-office abbreviation for a popular phrase for emphasis.
Blumenthal served in the Clinton Administration and was known there for promoting centrist, “third way” politics. At least in the 1990s, “third way” did at least have an aura of flexible liberalism with special attention to race and gender equity. There is still a Third Way Foundation committed to things like defending privatized health insurance and neocon foreign policies. (1) The No Labels group in the US would also fall into this general category.
But Sidney Blumenthal is also one of the best and most critical-minded analysts of rightwing ideology. His 1986 book The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power was an important analysis of Reaganism and neoconservatism. Wilentz is very good at untangling the threads of the historical development of democratic ideology and practice.
This recent discussion by the two of them focuses on tools the Democrats can use right now in the fight against Trumpism drawing on US historical experiences. (2)
The Democrats have a number of issues they can use to their benefit as long as the Chuck Schumers of the world don’t bore everybody to death with blather about “bipartisanship” instead. And if they take one or both Houses of Congress in the November elections they can do so much more visibly. Some obvious examples:
Immigration reform, i.e., a practical and liberal immigration reform
Limits on ICE suppression of dissent and presence at polling places
Demand to “abolish ICE”, certainly to abolish the current set of personnel working for it
Publicize and legislate against the Republicans’ voter-suppression strategy
Push hard on Medicare expansion in the context of pushing back again cuts to Medicaid and demanding new controls on private health insurance
Focus on ICE crimes and the Epstein scandal cover-up to stress the need to restore rule of law
Tax billionaires fairly, i.e., lots more than now
Emphasize the need for affordable housing by, for example, holding extensive hearings on private-equity funds driving up home prices by buying large amounts of residential housing as speculative investments
Go after Trump’s airheaded tariff policies by publicizing over and over that tariffs are a tax on American consumers
The Republicans are currently using the filibuster as an excuse to not do something their partisans would like to do. That doesn’t happen very often, but it’s nice to see when it does happen. (3)
It’s almost never good to see when the Democrats use it as an excuse for their failures to deliver on important promises. They used it to kill the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in 2021. The filibuster is just a Senate rule that can be changed or abolished, or set aside for an individual bill, by a majority vote in the Senate. The structure of the Senate – two Senators for each state – already gives an advantage to smaller and more conservative states. The filibuster just compounds it. The rule is almost never used to defend progressive or liberal goals. If the Republicans use it as an excuse to kill Trump’s voter-suppression measures, that will be one of the few cases it served a decent purpose.
The centrist-Democratic Center for American Progress (CAP) accurately described the filibuster’s function in 2024:
Since the end of the 19th century, the filibuster—a political procedure used in the U.S. Senate by one or more members to delay or block legislation—has emerged as a preeminent institutional tool used to deny rights and liberties to tens of millions of Black and brown Americans. Over the past two centuries, it has been abused repeatedly during some of the darkest periods of America’s history to prevent the passage of legislation that would protect the civil rights and voting rights of Black Americans, including to block anti-lynching legislation. (4)
The Peace President is arranging forces and making public statements threatening Iran with war again:
It is unlikely that the world's ailing hegemon would move the largest aircraft carrier on the face of the earth out of the Caribbean, where it had been previously stationed, to the Middle East, if it did not intend to use it. Each day, the U.S. has redeployed substantial quantities of military tonnage to its bases surrounding the Persian Gulf. What has already functioned as an outlandishly expensive negotiating tactic is now in place as the infrastructure for not only a single round of strikes, but a prolonged campaign.
CBS News reported on Wednesday that national security officials informed U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday that American forces will be ready to attack as early as Saturday. There is very little standing in the way of what threatens to be a catastrophic war. (1)
The Iranians have the option of closing the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s key trading routes. They also have a substantial missile force with which they can strike Israel, and Israel’s defensive interceptor missile supply is reportedly seriously depleted.
Scott Lucas describes why military attacks on Iran doesn’t support the protesters or bring more support to the dissidents. For the reason that has been seen again and again, when a country is attacked the government can count on a nationalist-patriotic reaction. As we saw on a large scale during the Second World War in Britain and Germany, and as we saw in the Vietnam War, massive aerial bombardment even over a long term don’t create any immediate mass immediate demand to overthrow the regime. In practice, when cities are bombed, people have to rely immediately and heavily on their neighbors and their government to deal with the death and destruction caused by the bombing. Even people who hate the regime.
Lucas asks, “So where’s the President of Peace now?” (2)
As Joshua Leifer puts it:
Currently, there are almost no forces, domestic or international, that might act as a brake on Trump's war ambitions. In the U.S., media coverage of the build-up to a potentially calamitous war has been anemic. To the extent that it exists at all, it is almost entirely devoid of discussion of the international legal ramifications and geopolitical consequences of the president's unilateral decision to attack another country that is home to roughly 90 million people. [my emphasis]
But he continues immediately to say, “The American public has been demoralized into submission by unceasing chaos at home, leaving Trump with less reason to worry about foreign policy backlash than his recent predecessors.”
Seriously? The mass protests and the calamitous fall in Trump’s popularity and the very unusual Republican setbacks in elections in the last few months say to Leifer that the American people are “demoralized”? Does being angry and disgusted really translate to “demoralized”?
I wouldn’t put it that way …
Also, it’s not as though every other country in the world thinks it’s a-okay for the US to illegally bomb Iran in pursuit of regime change. We see this is a dispute between the US and Britain over the island of Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia is a British territory in the Indian Ocean that the US has been able to use for military operations. “Numerous air operations were launched from Diego Garcia during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), U.S.-led strikes on Afghanistan (2001), and the initial phase (2003) of the Iraq War.”
Trump is withdrawing his support for a deal involving Great Britain over the Chagos Island, also in the Indian Ocean, for which Britain wants to hand over control to Mauritius. Britain Prime Minister Keir Starmer is stating that Britain will not allow US forces to use bases on Diego Garcia for an attack on Iran, which appears to be impending.
This is one more effect of the Trump regime’s hostility to its NATO allies and the subsequent European recognition that they can no longer count on the US to support its mutual-defense commitment under the NATO Treaty – although the European governments are phrasing it more diplomatically!
There is a website called EU vs. DisInfo that is devoted to debunking false propaganda claims from Russia. It’s an official EU project.
In an article from January 23, they identify some current claims of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in what they describe as his “annual press conference.” (1) The headline describes the presser as a “FIMI offensive.” FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference.
EU vs. Disinfo aims to be accessible to a wide audience. But I find its commentaries sometimes superficial. (I’m trying to be generous here!) But it does provide a useful guide to some of the stories the Kremlin has been recently stressing, which the website organizes under the following headings:
Making it personal: Lavrov singled out several European leaders for special mention: EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, EU Foreign Policy High Representative Kaja Kallas, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Immanuel Macron, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Since the European NATO countries are currently supporting Ukraine its defensive war against Russia, and since Russian leaders consider the EU and especially NATO a threat to them, the Russian Foreign Minister criticizes some senior European figures. Obviously something that requires deeper analysis!
The article alerts us that a devious FIMI trick is at work here: “The personal targeting of individuals rather than policies is a classic FIMI technique designed to weaken public confidence in democratic decision-making and depict EU leaders as irrational and dangerous.” Mentioning a foreign leader’s name is a devious intelligence trick? Who knew?
Casting Germany as a returning danger: I suppose it could be helpful to someone just beginning to follow international news about Europe to learn that Russia has been known to link Germany with its Nazi past. The article explains this meant that Lavrov was trying “to claim the moral high ground by casting Europe rather than Russia as the heir to past aggression” with that reference.
The EU as a hostile force: Also standard Russian rhetoric. Though its official position over years has been that NATO membership for countries like Ukraine is a much bigger problem than the EU in their eyes. And that is entirely credible.
The same old falsehoods about Ukraine: This category is fairly obvious and the article does provide some links for further information. But the fact that countries make unflattering propaganda about other countries with which they are at war is not exactly a new phenomenon in the world.
Targeting the near-abroad: Lavrov grumped about Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldova. Also nothing particularly new and not especially interesting in itself.
The coloniser in Ukraine condemns colonialism: Imperial powers are hypocritical. I suppose this might come as a shock to, say, fifth-graders.
The disinformation goes on, and on: This one at least gives me an excuse to use my favorite I.F. Stone quote about governments and war; “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”
It’s good to have an accessible debunking site for checking things of this kind. But EU vs. Disinfo provides pretty rudimentary analysis. When I checked the various hot links in the article, all of them led to other EU vs. Disinfo pieces. The very first one links to itself. (?!)
One of the most positive moments of the last years was the video that Sen. Mark Kelly, Sen. Ellisa Slotkin and four other sitting Members of Congress released two months ago to remind everyone in the military and the intelligence services that they are not only not required to follow illegal orders, they have a distinct legal duty to refuse illegal orders. (1)
Nan Levinson explained in December:
On enlistment, everyone in the military takes an oath of loyalty not to a person, a party, or any form of politics, but to the Constitution. Enlistees in all branches also pledge to obey orders from their officers and the president. As stipulated in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), it’s clear that this means only lawful orders. Officers take a slightly different oath: they, too, swear to support and defend the Constitution, but their oath doesn’t include anything about obeying orders from their superiors or the president, presumably because they’re responsible for giving orders and ensuring that those orders are lawful. Officers reaffirm their oath whenever they’re promoted. Across the board, the UCMJ, the Nuremberg Principles, and the U.S. Constitution establish the right and responsibility of servicemembers to refuse illegal orders or to refuse to participate in illegal wars, war crimes, or unconstitutional deployments. [my emphasis] (2)
Refusing to participate in a war on the broad grounds that it is un-Constitutional is a trickier process than disobeying a specific illegal order, e.g., an order to deliberately murder civilian noncombatants.
I remember back in 1989 when Oliver North was a hero to conservative Republicans because of his legally dubious role in selling arms to the Iranian mullahs – who were supposed to be our deadly enemies of the day. I went to a speech he gave in San Carlos, CA in 1989, which attracted many of his admirers at the time. (3) During the question session, one of his fans stood up and said it was terrible that he was being charged with a crime because he was just following orders.
Quoting from memory here, North responded immediately by saying, “No! Of course no one should follow an illegal order!” And he went on to say, “My contention is that I was never given an illegal order.” It’s a safe bet that his attorneys had coached him on not screwing up his defense by signing on to an I-was-just-following-orders alibi. But what he said then was a straight-up statement of the law. Just like the Members of Congress who repeated the same legal truism that inspired Trump to threaten to hang them.
During the Nuremburg Trials back after the Second World War, the Allied prosecution of war criminals based itself on laws that were formally binding on German soldiers and officers. The pre-1933 Weimar Constitution had never been formally abolished (until V-E Day’s unconditional German surrender). And there were no charges made at Nuremberg based on ex post facto laws.
The defense lawyers tried hard to find instances in which German soldiers disobeyed illegal orders and were subsequently severely punished or executed. Amazingly enough, they couldn’t find any. And the German Wehrmacht kept stereotypically obsessive-compulsive records!
The same was true of the Einsatzgurppen (reserve police battalions) that Christopher Browning wrote about in his 1992 book on them.
The “I was just following orders” alibi was and is what is politely called “b******t”. Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg wrote about William Calley’s massacre at My Lai (Vietnamese name: Son My).in his 1970 book Nuremberg and Vietnam. The US commander, Hugh Clowers Thompson, who first intervened to stop the massacre, gave his forces (legal) orders to fire on Calley’s troops if they didn’t stop murdering civilians. In 1998, Thompson was awarded the Army’s highest award for bravery, the Soldier’s Medal, for his actions to stop the mass murder at Son My. As Taylor described it:
It appears certain that the troops had been told to destroy all the structures and render the place uninhabitable; what they had been told to do with the residents is not so clear. However that that be, the accounts indicate that C Company killed virtually every inhabitant on whom they could lay hands, regardless of age or sex, and despite the fact that no opposition or hostile behavior was encountered.
This was murder, not collateral damage or the “fog of war.” It was a criminal act, and , Hugh Clowers Thompson who stopped the massacre were doing their duty under military law. The fact that the current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth – who prefers to called himself the Secretary of War – tried to misuse his office and the federal justice system to prosecute sitting Members of Congress who are also military veterans for publicly stating the plain nature of the law is a dramatic illustration of how much the Trump 2.0 regime hates the entire concept of the rule of law.
VA News carried a report on Thompson and his medal in 2022:
On March 16, 1968, Thompson and his crew members, Spc. Glenn Andreotta and Spc. Lawrence Colburn, were conducting a routine reconnaissance mission. When they saw U.S. soldiers shooting at unarmed civilians, they intervened. Thompson later recalled thinking, “I was pretty upset. What was going on wasn’t right.”
Thompson landed the helicopter in the area between advancing U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. He convinced the soldiers to stand down while he gathered a small group of women, children and elderly and escorted them to safety with the help of other UH-1 Huey pilots. However, about 500 Vietnamese civilians had already lost their lives.
Upon returning to base, Thompson reported what he witnessed, and the Army issued a cease-fire order preventing any further attacks on civilians. He was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions but threw the citation away because it presented a fabricated version of events that occurred at My Lai. He continued to fly reconnaissance missions until his helicopter was shot down and crashed. He broke his back and had to be evacuated to a hospital in Japan. He returned to the United States in 1968. (4)
Notes:
(1) Sen. Elissa Slotkin and 5 more YouTube channel 11/18/2025. We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community... <https://youtu.be/Fk9Gh3qwW4I?si=X4A2ycicVPG_Tm_r> (Accessed : 2026-17-02).
(2) Levinson, Nan (2025): Doin’-the-Right-Thing Rag: Who’s Responsible When a Military Order is Illegal? (Don't Ask Donald Trump!) TomDispatch 12/16/2025. <https://tomdispatch.com/doin-the-right-thing-rag/> (Accessed : 2026-17-02).
