Britain and the EU countries on the Iran War

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)

Notes:

(1) Cirincione, Joe (2026): The Greatest Nuclear Threat. Strategy & History 02/04/2026. <https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/the-greatest-nuclear-threat> (Accessed: 2026-01-03).

(2) Europe has the weapons, but still needs America to wage war. Politico EU 02/12/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-us-defense-plan-weapon-donald-trump/> (Acessed: 2026-01-03).

(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).

(6) Europe does have things like this to worry about: “Russia Attacks a NATO Country in a War Game. It Doesn’t End Well.” Politico EU. <https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/13/russia-nato-wargame-germany-simulation-00778818> (Accessed: 2026-01-03).

(7) Reuters (2026): Britain says it is for US to set out legal basis for Iran strikes 03/01/2026. <https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-it-is-us-set-out-legal-basis-iran-strikes-2026-03-01/> (Accessed: 2026-01-03).

Peace President Trump’s regime-change war in Iran

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.

Notes:

(1) Tait, Robert (2025): Trump dreams of ‘everlasting peace’ as acolytes drop heavy hints to Nobel committee. Guardian 10/09/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/09/trump-nobel-peace-prize-gaza> (Accessed: 2026-28-02).

(2) Attacks spill over into Gulf region. Politico EU 202/28/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/us-israel-strike-iran-live-updates/#id_1320384> (Accessed: 2026-28-02).

(3) Salacanin, Stasa (2026): Europe’s Hard Lin on Iran: Principle, Politics, or Peril? Foreign Policy in Focus 02/27/2026. <https://fpif.org/europes-hard-line-on-iran-principle-politics-or-peril/> (Accessed: 2026-28-02).

(4) Why Pick a Fight With Iran Now? The Atlantic YouTube channel 02/26/2026. <https://youtu.be/3HGea_nezZc?si=et41YFEDIhxDUUoh> (Accessed: 2026-28-02).

(5) Wong, Nelson (2026): Will China come to Iran's rescue? Middle East Eye 02/27/2026. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/will-china-come-irans-rescue> (Accessed: 2026-28-02).

(6) Burch, Kurt (2003): Iran-Iraq War. EBSCO Knowledge Advantage. <https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/iran-iraq-war> (Accessed: 2026-28-02).

Israel’s perpetually grim state as of this week – with maybe another war with Iran coming very soon

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.

Notes:

(1) Harel, Amos (2026): As War With Iran Looms, Israel Isn't Watching Trump's Plans for Strikes From the Sidelines. Haaretz 02/20/2026. Gift link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-02-20/ty-article/.premium/as-war-with-iran-looms-israel-is-not-watching-the-u-s-from-the-bleachers/0000019c-77cf-d618-a19d-77efe7c80000?gift=ec76e7662565436fb21758d76f1cfcfb> (Accessed: 2026-26-02).

(2) Sheindlin, Dahlia (2026): Israel Backs Reza Pahlavi to Rule Iran. That's a Dangerous Gamble. Haaretz 02/24/2026. Gift link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-02-24/ty-article/.premium/israel-backs-reza-pahlavi-to-rule-iran-thats-a-dangerous-gamble/0000019c-9043-dab1-adbe-ba6b9f570000?gift=e582fc1aeedb4fdeba119d0c44d9b67a> (Accessed: 2026-26-02).

(3) Burc, Rosa & Oveisy, Fouad (2026): Rojava Is Under Existential Threat. Jacobin 02/22/2026. <https://jacobin.com/2019/02/rojava-united-states-withdrawal-syria-erdogan> (Accessed: 2026-27-02).

(4) Ghannoushi, Soumaya (2026): Mike Huckabee lifts the veil on US backing for Israeli expansionism. Middle East Eye 02/26/2026. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/mike-huckabee-lifts-veil-us-backing-israeli-expansionism> (Accessed: 2026-27-02).

Chuck Todd on a Trump-Hitler Parallel

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)

Notes:

(1) Echoes Of 1930s Germany In Trump’s Second Term. The Chuck ToddCast YouTube channel 02/24/2026. <https://youtu.be/F09KgV7OYpE?si=Dib6SxSx7Q2hzUP1> (Accessed: 2026-25-02).

(2) The Enabling Act. <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-enabling-act> (Accessed: 2026-25-02).

(3) Book Review: Hitler’s 30 Days to Power: January 1933. HistoryNet 08/12/2001. <https://historynet.com/book-review-hitlers-30-days-to-power-january-1933-henry-ashby-turner-ww2/> (Accessed: 2026-25-02).

Blocking Trumpist voter-suppression efforts

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)

Notes:

(1) Lacy, Akela (2019): PHRMA is Funding a Democratic Think Tanks Trying to Derail Medicare for Akk. The Intercept 04/26/2019. <https://theintercept.com/2019/04/26/medicare-for-all-democrats-phrma/> (Accessed: 2026-22-02).

(2) Trump & MAGA Face FATAL RECKONING as Nation Has Had ENOUGH. Legal AF YouTube channel 02/11/2026. <https://youtu.be/6zg1ZXGhPl8?si=8ALn1ecnkAupmCSk> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

(3) Carney, Jordain (2026): Filibuster fight comes full circle as GOP faces internal pressure on elections bill. Politico 02/10/2024. <https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/10/senate-filibuster-gop-save-act-00775393> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

How the Racist History of the Filibuster Lives on Today. CAP 04/29/2024. <https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-the-racist-history-of-the-filibuster-lives-on-today/> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

Peace President Trump and Iran – and an impending new war?

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!

Notes:

(1) Leifer, Joshua (2026): Trump Is Hurtling Towards a Catastrophic War in Iran, and Almost Nothing Can Stop Him. Haaretz 02/19/2026. Gift link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-02-19/ty-article/.premium/trump-is-hurtling-towards-a-catastrophic-war-in-iran-and-almost-nothing-can-stop-him/0000019c-753e-d631-a3de-7dbef7bd0000?gift=92ca5f3acc5a4e90bb0d7c8a83ea6258> (Accessed: 2026-20-02).

(2) Trump Epstein abuse claims explode as key file ‘snuck through’-Scott Lucas. The Trump Report YouTube channel 02/19/2026. <https://youtu.be/O3HLHncXe1E?si=S-7fHpLVydSU9diP> (Accessed: 2026-20-02).

(3) Britannica Editors (2026): Diego Garcia. Encyclopedia Britannica 02/20/2026. <https://www.britannica.com/place/Diego-Garcia-island-Indian-Ocean> (Accessed 2026-20-02.)

Visiting the EU vs. DisInfo site

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. (?!)

Notes:

(1) Lavrov’s 2026 presser: a three-hour FIMI offensive against Europe and its leaders. EU vs. Disinfo. <https://euvsdisinfo.eu/lavrovs-2026-presser-a-three-hour-fimi-offensive-against-europe-and-its-leaders/> (Accessed: 2026-14-02).

Legal military orders

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).

(3) Miller, Johnny (2014): North's speech draws cheers and jeers in San Carlos. SFGate 06/15/2014. <https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/North-s-speech-draws-cheers-and-jeers-in-San-5548481.php> (Accessed: 2026-17-02).

(4) America250: Army Veteran Hugh Thompson Jr. VA News 11/17/2022. <https://news.va.gov/111176/america250-army-veteran-hugh-thompson-jr/> (Accessed : 2026-17-02).

Mearsheimer and friends on current politics, foreign and otherwise

I cite John Mearsheimer so often that I feel like I need to restate that I have a kind of love-hate relationship to his commentary. He is famous for his “offensive realist” view of international relations, which stresses the dominant influence of the security considerations of major powers on the international state system.

But like his colleague the “defensive realist” Stephen Walt, he also has a commitment to democracy and to avoiding wars. He also is an educational product of the service academies, which means in his case that he also pays close attention to military capacities, which is a big part of what has made his commentary of the Russia-Ukraine War so informative over the last four years (and counting).

Part of his style, which undoubtedly must have made him a great teacher, is to frame his ideas in a provocative way which forces the listener to focus on what he’s saying and think about different possibilities of what that might mean. In this discussion with Glenn Loury and Robert Wright, he gives his realist view of how Donald Trump is a menace to democracy and why that’s a bad thing. (1)

For people who have mostly heard only his pragmatic power-politics takes on things, they may ask, wait, is this an AI fake or something? Because Mearsheimer starts off sounding like a combination of Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder talking about the urgent Trumpist threat to democracy. (Which certainly is a huge threat!) Mearsheimer actually is one of the most-AI-faked political commentators right now. (2) But this one is legit. He often posts a notice at his Substack page when a new interview goes up on YouTube.

Most of the discussion is about the politics of current US foreign policy. But Mearsheimer here also has comments on the current news superstructure in America. The roll of Trumpista billionaires in the current US media landscape also comes up.

And there is an actually decent discussion of the current politics of antisemitism in the US political environment.

Notes:

(1) Mearsheimer on Gaza, NATO, and the New American Empire-Glenn Loury & John Mearsheimer. The Glenn Show YouTube channel 02/06/2026. <https://youtu.be/zCk_BMwXjmA?si=TsVkURcnFPk5AXEF> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

(2) Mearsheimer, John (2026): My Fake AI Problem. John’s Substack 02/05/2026. <https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/my-fake-ai-problem> (Accessed: 2026-07-02).

Chomsky and the Epstein files

MS Now has a report by Zeeshan Allem on the surprising fact that leftwing academic Noam Chomsky appears in the Epstein files in numerous places, though “Chomsky has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes.” (1)

The trove of new Epstein emails released Jan. 30 reveal that Chomsky was not merely one of the many intellectuals whom the late sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein invited to salons, but a confidant to Epstein. In an email dated February 2019, Chomsky counseled Epstein on how to deal with the public relations and legal crises Epstein was dealing with in the wake of a bombshell 2018 Miami Herald report. The newspaper had tracked down more than 60 women who said they were abused by Epstein, and exposed how Epstein had struck a shockingly soft deal with Florida prosecutors in 2008 that allowed him to avoid sex trafficking charges.

“The best way to proceed is to ignore it,” Chomsky wrote to Epstein.“That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.” In that note, he expressed sympathy to Epstein for “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public.” (1)

Aleem comments, “Chomsky, 97, is one of the most influential, if not the most influential, left-wing intellectuals of the past century.” It’s not exactly clear what that means. In the century since 1926, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara were alive, to just take some of the most famous Communists leaders. I suppose we could say that none of those were intellectuals, though Stalin studied theology in a seminary, Castro was a lawyer, and Guevara was a doctor. The Frankfurt School figures Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas were also influential thinkers and academics like Chomsky.

Chomsky is a linguist who also wrote extensively about politics and media. One of his most influential books on politics and media was one he co-authored with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), which called attention to insufficiently critical reporting on US foreign affairs and wars in particular in the mainstream media.

Vivek Chibber wrote in 2024 for the social-democratic Jacobin about Chomsky’s relentlessly capitalist-critical approach, in a good analytic piece which carries a title that seems overblown in light of Chomsky’s poor judgment over Epstein, “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Giant”:

He has liked to quote Adam Smith, whom he takes to be one of the most perceptive theorists of capitalism: the holders of wealth, Smith observed, follow “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” This “vile maxim,” Chomsky pointed out, ought to be the anchor for any political analysis of modern society. ...

What is true in domestic affairs will also hold true in foreign policy. Chomsky has summarized his approach very clearly: “If we hope to understand anything about the foreign policy of any state, it is a good idea to begin by investigating the domestic social structure: who sets foreign policy?... What is true in domestic affairs will also hold true in foreign policy. Chomsky has summarized his approach very clearly: “If we hope to understand anything about the foreign policy of any state, it is a good idea to begin by investigating the domestic social structure: who sets foreign policy? … those designing it are of course the same crew that designs domestic policy. Both domains — the national and the international — are therefore dominated by the capitalist class. “If we do not adopt Smith’s method of ‘class analysis,’” Chomsky warns, “our vision will be blurred and distorted. Any discussion of world affairs that treats nations as actors is at best misleading, at worst pure mystification, unless it recognizes the crucial Smithian footnotes.” [my emphasis] (2)

Unfortunately, Chomsky’s commentary sometimes sounds almost fatalistic. Describing Chomsky’s position, Chibber writes:

[T]o achieve any kind of say in political and economic life, workers and ordinary citizens have to find a way of banding together, to collectively take on the power of their bosses and their political servants in the state. But this is of course not only hard, but dangerous — bosses aren’t fools, and as soon as they see even the glimmer of a challenge, they do whatever is necessary to squelch it. And so, for most working people, the sensible thing to do is to keep their head down and do what they have to in order to keep their heads above water. This, in turn, means that challenges to power will be the exception, not the rule. [my emphasis]

But as he also makes clear Chomsky’s work has proved very helpful for left-leaning critics in understanding economic influences on foreign policy and of the role of intellectuals and the media in influencing it.

Aleem concludes:

Chomsky is unable to provide new comments on the latest Epstein revelations [due to health issues]. But the circumstances and his actions suggest he may have turned a blind eye to Epstein’s conduct because Epstein was an extraordinary resource for him, such as when Epstein brokered a meeting between Chomsky and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Chris Hedges who definitely leans left as well provides this brief report on the Chomsky-Epstein connection: (3)

(Hedges’ commentary ends on a fairly jarring note.)

Notes:

(1) Aleem, Zeeshan (2026): Noam Chomsky tainted his legacy with his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. MS Now 02/11/2026. <https://www.ms.now/opinion/epstein-files-chomsky-valeria-email-cancel-criticism> (Accessed : 2026-11-02).

(2) Chibber, Vivek (2024): Jacobin 06/18/2024. <https://jacobin.com/2024/06/noam-chomsky-media-theory-elites> (Accessed : 2026-11-02).

(3) Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein and the Politics of Betrayal. The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel 02/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/sGZ1Arv7Yww?si=xfWi5oPmKTVe89KB> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

The bad news from Israel and Palestine keeps coming

Trump’s Everlasting Peace Plan in the Middle East has been having some rocky going:

The Gaza Strip today resembles a wounded, bleeding animal, set upon by a pack of predators, each trying to tear off the fattest possible piece.

Businesspeople, private companies, states, international bodies, militias and terrorist organizations are all competing with one another to reap gains – political, economic, or reputational. Cynical interests and good intentions fuse into a seething mix. (1)

And, you may ask, how is that Gaza ceasefire going?

On Tuesday night, a company commander in the reservist Alexandroni Brigade was seriously wounded in northern Gaza. Israel responded with an airstrike in which more than 20 Palestinians were killed, among them Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders who took part in the October 7 massacres.

It was the second heavy bombing of Gaza in less than a week. Since the declaration of the cease-fire last October, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed in the Strip.

U.S. generals ask their Israeli counterparts to explain every bombing, and also the clashes between the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinians. The Americans go into details but rarely intervene. (2)

But, Peter Beinart points out, the Peace President in Washington still has high hopes for his Gaza plans. 

A glance at the +972 Magazine website shows one story after another about the Israeli government’s hostile attitude toward Palestinians, those who live in Israel and are Israeli citizens and those who live – or struggle to survive – in Gaza and the West Bank, both areas that Israel has illegally occupied since 1967. Three examples:

U.S. secretly deporting Palestinians [from the US] to West Bank in coordination with Israel

With or without a ceasefire, Israel is still targeting Gaza’s journalists

‘Israel is using organized crime to control Palestinian citizens’

The latter story is about how the Israeli government looks the other way why organized gangs prey on Palestinian citizens, who are not treated as equal to Jewish citizens:

In 2023, the homicide rate among Palestinian citizens of Israel was the third highest in the OECD. Last year, Palestinians accounted for 252 of Israel’s 305 murder victims, despite making up just 21 percent of the population. And since the start of the new year, little has changed: In less than a month, 18 Palestinian citizens of Israel have already been killed in incidents linked to criminal networks.

In response, Palestinian citizens are stepping up their efforts to combat the spread of organized crime and the state’s inaction against the perpetrators — which many see as a deliberate policy. There were demonstrations across the country this week, from Sakhnin to Umm Al-Fahm, culminating in a general strike on Thursday called by the Union of Arab Mayors and the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens.

This new wave of protests began in Sakhnin, led by small business owners and local leaders, and quickly spread to dozens of Arab towns, even drawing support from a few Israeli institutions (such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The strike concluded with a mass demonstration in Sakhnin, where more than 50,000 people gathered. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Rozovsky, Liza (2026): Netanyahu Faces a Reckoning in Gaza as Trump's Triumph Exposes Israel's Postwar Failure. Haaretz 02/05/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/gaza/2026-02-05/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-faces-a-reckoning-in-gaza-as-trumps-triumph-exposes-israels-postwar-failure/0000019c-2cd6-d5a5-a9dc-7df646170000> (Accessed: 2026-06-02).

(2) Harel, Amos (2026): Netanyahu Gives the IDF More Leeway to Attack as He Hopes Trump Fumbles on Peace in Gaza. Haaretz 02/06/2026. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-02-06/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-gives-the-idf-more-leeway-to-attack-as-he-hopes-trump-fumbles-on-peace-in-gaza/0000019c-3335-d37f-affc-77b5ad560000> (Accessed: 2026-06-02).

Comparing today’s authoritarian countries

Social science methodological disputes from 56 years ago sound like about as dry as subject as one could imagine. I suppose it is possible to imagine something drier, though nothing comes immediately to mind.

Still, such discussions are a part of the academic enterprise, even if they induce more than their share of involuntary eyerolling.

I’m bringing this up because I just came across a reference to a political science paper from 1970 by Giovanni Sartori of the University of Florence. It has to do with comparing historical and political phenomena across time and among different countries. (1)

Sartori (1924-2017) was a leading Italian political scientist who was well known for his work in comparative politics. We have been hearing a lot in recent about comparative politics in discussing democratic and authoritarian regimes and how democracies die. The best-known prototype for that process is, of course, how Hitler and the Nazis established their Third Reich by destroying the democratic constitutional order of the Weimar Republic.

But political science and politics are not physics or chemistry, even though “chemistry” plays a big role in politics. Classifications of regime types is a well-known political science practice. But it is not as straightforward as distinguishing between iron and gold, or between protons and neutrons. And, as physical scientists are very aware, even such physical classifications are not as precise as many people might imagine. The famous physics question of whether a proton is a wave or a particle is a reminder.

The V-Dem Institute produces a classification of regime types that is widely used by academics and journalists that rates nations into four categories: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, electoral autocracies, and closed autocracies. In their 2025 report, the USA counts as a liberal democracy, the UK as an electoral democracy, Hungary, Russia and Ukraine as electoral autocracies, China and North Korea as closed autocracies. (2)

During the Cold War, there was a dominant narrative in the US and other Western countries of a division between the Free World and the Communist World. Or at least between the Free World and everybody else. The definition of the Free World was, uh, generous. It included Suharto’s Indonesia, the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), and Pinochet’s Chile, among others for whom that designation was questionable. Certainly not every “Free World” nation would qualify for today’s V-Dem rating of “liberal democracy.”

The Cold War designations were successors of the Second World War classifications in which the alliance of the US, Britain, the USSR, and China was formerly called the United Nations, though it is normally referred to as “the Allies,” as it was also during the war. The other side was called the Axis, or the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, although their formal alliance was called the Tripartite Pact. Soon after the war, the term “totalitarianism” became fashionable in the West as a way to refer to commonalities between fascism and Communism. The term “authoritarianism” was established in political science by the famous postwar Studies in Prejudice project lead by Max Horheimer, previously the director of the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School. They used the world “authoritarianism” as basically a synonym for fascism. These days the term is commonly used to refer to countries that V-Dem would presumably call electoral autocracies and closed autocracies.

But the lumping of fascism and Communism together was always problematic at a theoretical and practical level. One could argue that both were dictatorships and therefore essentially the same. We call also argue that all the countries in the world have governments, so they are all also basically the same. Both arguments are about equally meaningful, aka, not much help.

Fascism and Communism in the early half of the 20th century considered each other as diametrical opposites. But they did come out of very different traditions, fascism being a lineal successor to the antidemocracy trends of the 19th century espoused by theorists like Franz von Baader, Juan Donnsos Cortés, Thomas Carlyle, and Friedrich Schelling (in his later work).

Democracy, Fascism, Socialism

Socialism, aka, social democracy grew out of the radical democratic tradition of the French Revolution and utopian projects like those of Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Senri de Saint-Simon. The famous 1848 pamphlet from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, had very limited circulation during the 1848 democratic and national revolutions in Europe. And the broad trend of which Marxism was a part was known aas social democracy and socialism. Politics being what it is, there were numerous variations on what the correct doctrine of that movement should be. But 19th century social democracy was generally focused on creating parliamentary republics. And the leading advocates in Europe for what V-Dem today would classify as liberal democracy were the Social Democratic parties, including the Labour Party in Britain.

The political philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) wrote a book while living in Austria called The War Against the West which was published first in English in 1938, though he had finished it before 1938 and the annexation of Austria by Germany. The book’s focus was analyzing the political content of Nazi political statements and propaganda positions directly s based on their own speeches and publications. One of the features he elaborates is that the centrality of Nazi hostility to Communism was justified theoretically by describing it as the inevitable product of democracy.

The Communist doctrine promoted by the USSR in those days saw fascism as something distinct from Communism and also from liberal democracy. The Soviet-led Communist International officially defined fascism in 1935 as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” based on the Italian and German versions of that time. (The year 1935 was the turning point at which Germany became the senior partner in their cooperation with Fascist Italy.)

Marxist theory generally saw parliamentary democracy as a particular form of rule by the capitalist class, one that did offer genuine freedom and influence to the larger population but still subject to major limitations imposed by the capitalist economic system and class structure. The social-democratic version of this vision assumed that the governmental form of socialism would be a parliamentary democracy.

There have been literally millions of pages written since 1848, including many analyses and polemics about where a full socialist or communist society would have a “state” in the sense of states in capitalist countries at all.

To add an additional wrinkle, Hitler’s Nazi Party was modeled on Mussolini’s Fascist Party. But the shortened of “Nazi” was used for the NSDAP, which stood for National Socialist German Workers Party. Hitler had added the word “Socialist” to the name in the early 1920s because the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Communist Party were the leading parties for urban working-class voters and he hoped sticking “Socialist” in the name would help attract some of them. That wasn’t particularly successful, and German politics up until 1933 was marked by bitter hostility between the Nazis on the one hand and the Socialists and Communists on the other. But this hasn’t stopped today’s Trumpistas in the US from saying, “The Nazis had ‘socialist’ in their name so they were leftwingers like you, libtards, not us rightwingers!” In any contest for the Dumbest Trope In Politics, this has to rank very high on the list.

But to sum up: Nazism and other forms of fascism were and are explicitly anti-democracy. Just as much so as billionaire techlord Peter Thiel, who declared already back in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” (2) Thiel dated democracy’s fall from capitalist grace, moaning, “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.” As a good “libertarian,” his mighty mind perceived that the problems were wimmin and welfare loafers: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Wimmin and minorities just spoil everything, now don’t they?!

There really is, to put it politely, a contradiction between capitalism and democracy. The malign influence of anti-democracy billionaires like Thiel himself is dramatic proof of that. But the notion that freedom is identical with capitalism is dystopian. The classical socialists wanted to democratize the economy via democratic government taking ownership and/or effective control over major industries and financial institutions, aka, the “means of production.”

After the Communists came to power in Russia in 1917 and what had been the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union, the abolished competitive elections with two or more political parties. This pattern was also followed in the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and the People’s Republics in eastern Europe including Yugoslavia. They did not function as liberal democracies, though their ideologies argued they were practicing a higher form of democracy. In other words, they formally claimed to be part of the democratic tradition.

It’s notable in this regard that Mikail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union who considered himself a Communist up until his death in 2022, had made a major move to establish contested elections along social-democratic lines in his last years in power.

Comparison of today’s authoritarian systems to earlier ones

Which brings us back to the challenge that Giovanni Sartori was addressing in 1970, comparing types of regimes. In making such comparisons, we have to get along without the mathematical certainties of physical science. As he put it, “My sympathy goes, instead, to the ‘conscious thinker,’ the man who realizes the limitations of not having a thermometer and still manages to say a great deal simply by saying hot and cold, warmer and cooler.” And he notes that “the pre-1950 vocabulary of politics was not devised for worldwide, cross-area travelling.” (His essay also addresses the challenges for political science in trying to be scientifically neutral and value-free, very much a contested concept in the field at the time.)

The point that Sartori was making in at some length in academic language is that it is valuable and necessary to look at meaningful similarities in political processes in various countries over time to come up with meaningful insights about similarities in political processes across different countries. To use the V-Dem terms of today, we can meaningfully compare political concepts, structures, and processes between, say, the United States and Great Britain even though one is a kingdom with a hereditary monarchy as the head of state of a parliamentary democracy and the other is not.

Using computer statistical analysis to process quantitative data was in a comparative stone-age in 1970, when it really did take a whole room, maybe a fairly big room, to get the kind of computing power and speed that we hold in our hands with today with our smart phones. What Sartori was stressing is a problem that persists, which is that to use quantitative data to better understand political phenomena requires having a meaningful conceptual framework in which to understand the results of statistical analysis. It’s an everyday matter in politics to discuss what observed and measured empirical trends mean. For instance, we know that in the 2024 Presidential elections a higher percentage of Latino voters shifted to vote for Trump. And that today the polls and some scattered election results indicate that Latino votes are shifting away from Trump. But, despite the confident interpretations of the data that political consultants are inclined to give to their clients when designing campaign messages and strategies require applying some kind of conceptual framework and classification to the raw empirical data.

Sartori quotes the economist Joseph Spengler: "[T]he introduction of quantitative methods in economics did not result in striking discoveries" To which Sartori expands: “While formal economic theory is by now highly isomorphic with algebra, mathematical economics has added little to the predictive power of the discipline and one often has the impression that we are employing guns to kill mosquitos.”

When it comes to comparing types of political regimes, or comparing past regimes to current ones, there is no quantitative measure that will give us the kind of definitive answer we might expect in a chemical analysis or a medical diagnosis. But when today we see far-right parties take Viktor Orban’s regime as a model for an authoritarian government, that doesn’t mean that they all want to adopt Hungarian as their own national languages. But we can still make meaningful comparisons between, say, Vladimir Putin’s methods of controlling wealthy oligarchs by means of bribery and threat and the occasional accident of unfavored oligarchs falling out of high windows and Orban’s approach which doesn’t so prominently feature oligarchical suicides.

Put another way, two people having an identical height doesn’t tell us whether one is a man and the other is a woman. Just as two people being identical twins doesn’t mean that both are the same height. (I’m fond of that last example because when I met two identical twins for the first time when I was five years old or so, the only way I could tell them apart was that one was slightly taller than the other.)

Sartori makes this comment which is very important in approaching classifications and comparisons of political systems:

While classifying must abide by logical rules, logic has nothing to do with the usefulness of a classificatory system. Botanists, mineralogists and zoologists have not created their taxonomical trees as a matter of mere logical unfolding; that is, they have not imposed their "classes" upon their animals, any more than their animals (flowers or minerals) have imposed themselves upon their classifiers.

Bottom line: Yes, it’s perfectly valid to compare Trump’s Gestapo to its German and Italian models.

Here’s an entirely appropriate case of classification of a particular political phenomena: (4)

Notes:

(1) Sartori, Giovanni (1970): Concept Misinformation in Compartive Politics. American Political Science Science Review 64:4. <https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/chenry/core/Course%20Materials/Sartori/0.pdf>

(2) V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2025, 14. <https://www.v-dem.net/documents/61/v-dem-dr__2025_lowres_v2.pdf>

(3) Thiel, Peter (2009): The Education of a Libertarian. Cato Unbound 04/13/2009. <https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/> (Accessed : 2026-10-02).

(4) The F-Word | Folk Protest Song Against Trump, MAGA, and Fascism. The Resistance YouTube channel 09/20/2025. > (Accessed: 2026-10-02).

Xenophobic ideology

Judith Kohlenberger is a sociologist at the Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna who heads the Research Institute for Refugee and Migration Management (FORM) (Forschungsinstitut für Migrations- und Fluchtforschung und -management). She has been making numerous public and media appearances recently to discuss her reality-based version of immigration issues.

In Europe in the US and some other countries, malicious demagoguery and general hate-mongering against immigrants from far-right parties whose commitment to democracy is dubious, are similar to claims that are all too familiar to Americans who hear the Trump cult’s anti-immigration rhetoric. Like the Trump regime’s version, this xenophobic agitation aims to undermine confidence in democratic political systems.

Kohlenberger recently posted on Facebook (01/31/2026: my translations from German): (1) 

Demographic change is not only one of the greatest but also one of the most ideologically contested challenges of our time. This was also shown by the exchange [I had] with the British demographer Dr. Paul Morland, known for his thoroughly provocative theses. As a migration researcher, I am of course particularly interested in the fact that the "theory" of the Great Replacement, invented on the drawing board of the extreme right (in quotation marks, because it is anything but a scientifically sound theory), was able to enter the political and social mainstream within a very short time. [my emphasis]

The Great Replacement Theory is one of the more prominent of the poisonous conspiracist narratives in the far-right gutter – which these days reaches into the White House:

[It is] in the United States and certain other Western countries whose populations are mostly white, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging, in one of its versions, that left-leaning domestic or international elites, on their own initiative or under the direction of Jewish co-conspirators, are attempting to replace white citizens with nonwhite (i.e., Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Arab) immigrants. The immigrants’ increased presence in white countries, as the theory goes, in combination with their higher birth rates as compared with those of whites, will enable new nonwhite majorities in those countries to take control of national political and economic institutions, to dilute or destroy their host countries’ distinctive cultures and societies, and eventually to eliminate the host countries’ white populations. Some adherents of replacement theory have characterized these predicted changes as “white genocide.” [my emphasis] (2)

Trump himself pimps this sleazy theory. From 2024:

When former President Donald Trump told millions of Americans during Tuesday's presidential debate that "our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," he was not just repeating a baseless claim intended to undermine the results of the upcoming 2024 election. 

He was also echoing the latest iteration of a once-fringe racist conspiracy theory that has now become mainstream in the Republican Party. The conspiracy — known as the "great replacement" — claims there is a plan to bring nonwhite immigrants into the United States and other Western countries to replace white voters to achieve a political agenda. [my emphasis] (3)

The current buildup by the Trump regime to deploy ICE/CBP Gestapo hooligans to intimidate voters from going into polling places to vote this year. Kohlenberger:

Behind this [Great Replacement Theory] is a recipe that is as simple as it is dangerous: "They" are becoming more and more, while "we" are becoming fewer and fewer. At the same time, it will not be possible to maintain our labor markets, our social and pension systems without migration, as all demographic forecasts show us. A resource-oriented migration debate and a non-völkisch, dynamic understanding of belonging ([in which] "those" who come, become part of the "we") is therefore not only a humanitarian imperative of humanity, but [is] also economically without alternative in the long term. 

After all, relying solely on measures to boost the birth rate of the native population to such an extent that they could stop or reverse the demographic transition is [a concept] oblivious to the future - even a migration-averse country like Hungary has recognized this and has begun to recruit seasonal workers (many of whom will probably stay permanently) on a large scale. Radical isolationism can only lead to insignificance of one’s own country. [my emphasis]

Spain recently decided to normalize the status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants including asylum seekers living there. Xenophobia can be contagious. So can obvious pragmatism and realism in the context of the rule of law: (4)

 

Notes: (1)  

 (2) Duignan, Brian (2025): "replacement theory". Encyclopedia Britannica 08/232025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/replacement-theory> (Accessed: 2026-08-02).

(3) Joffe-Block, Jude & Yousef, Odette (2024): How Trump is relying on a racist conspiracy theory to question election results. NPR 09/13/2024. <https://www.npr.org/2024/09/13/g-s1-22583/trump-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory> (Accessed: 2026-08-02).

(4) Spain approves plan to grant legal status to thousands of migrants lacking right to stay. Euronews YouTube channel 01/27/2026. <https://youtu.be/LNEisoZLIH8?si=F89eFEIx5XnbEzsl> (Accessed: 2026-10-02).