Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Biden greenlit Israel’s strikes in Lebanon, says former Israeli diplomat

 

at 11/7/25 11:37am

The Biden administration reached “side understandings” to allow Israel to continue bombing targets in Lebanon despite a ceasefire reached late last year, according to Michael Herzog, who was then serving as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S.Herzog revealed the handshake deal, which had not previously been confirmed, during a Friday panel at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. One key result of the agreement, which Herzog helped negotiate, was maintaining Israel’s “freedom of action against threats” when other parties are “unwilling or incapable” of containing them, he said. “That was achieved through side understandings with the government of the United States,” Herzog said. “And it’s been implemented in Lebanon.”The revelation helps explain why the U.S. has stayed relatively quiet over the last year about alleged Israeli ceasefire violations, including near daily airstrikes and commando raids against what Israel claims are Hezbollah-related sites in southern Lebanon. These attacks, which have killed at least 100 Lebanese civilians, seem to represent a far cry from the “permanent cessation of hostilities” that President Joe Biden claimed would follow the ceasefire. Rumors of such a deal have circulated over the past year following Israeli media reports about the existence of a “side letter” allowing Israel to “defend itself” against threats in Lebanon provided that Israeli forces notify the U.S. in advance. But Herzog’s comments appear to represent the first official confirmation of the secret agreement — and the clearest indication yet that Israel views the side deal as giving it carte blanche to continue its unilateral air campaign against Hezbollah.Herzog did not explicitly say whether these “side understandings” remain in place under the Trump administration, which, like the Biden administration, has largely ignored alleged Israeli violations of the ceasefire.Herzog’s comments also provide fresh insights ahead of the visit of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to Washington next week, when he will meet with President Donald Trump and discuss, among other things, the possibility of a Syria-Israel security agreement. Israel would “like to apply” a similar side agreement to any deal with Syria, according to the former Israeli ambassador. “It’s important for Israelis to know that they can maintain freedom of action,” Herzog said.

[Category: Qiosk, Ceasefire, Israel, Biden, Lebanon]

— Central Asia doesn't need another great game

 

at 11/7/25 8:13am

The November 6 summit between President Donald Trump and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Washington, D.C. represents a significant moment in U.S.-Central Asia relations (C5+1). It was the first time a U.S. president hosted the C5+1 group in the White House, marking a turning point for U.S. relations with Central Asia.The summit signaled a clear shift toward economic engagement. Uzbekistan pledged $35 billion in U.S. investments over three years (potentially $100 billion over a decade) and Kazakhstan signed $17 billion in bilateral agreements and agreed to cooperate with the U.S. on critical minerals. Most controversially, Kazakhstan became the first country in Trump's second term to join the Abraham Accords.However, behind the big numbers and fanfare of handshakes lies a critical question: is this a real partnership, or just another round of great power competition dressed up in new clothes?The critical minerals trapCritical minerals were at the center of the summit. Trump called Central Asia “an extremely wealthy region” and made it clear that “one of the key items on our agenda is critical minerals.”Before the main meeting with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Central Asian foreign ministers in Washington, “You are looking to take the resources... that God has blessed your nations with, and turn them into responsible development that allow you to diversify your economies.”There’s nothing wrong with building economic partnerships around natural resources. Done right, cooperation can be mutually beneficial. Central Asia holds at least 25 of the 54 minerals identified by the U.S. government as “critical.” The Trump administration wants access to those minerals to diversify supply chains and reduce reliance on China.But when U.S. media frames U.S. engagement with Central Asia as a way to “counter China and Russia” or win a “resources race,” it sends the wrong message. This framing contradicts Central Asian preferences and reinforces zero-sum thinking, turning countries into prizes, not partners. It keeps old habits alive, treating relationships as transactional, not as something lasting or meaningful.Respecting strategic autonomyCentral Asian leaders have made it clear they don’t want to get dragged into another “great game.” They’re finding their own ways to solve problems. Take for example the recent Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border conflict. The two countries resolved the century-long dispute on their own. In March 2025, the respective presidents signed a historic treaty to end the violence, which had killed dozens and displaced thousands.The 2022 Treaty on Allied Relations between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is another good sign. The region is moving past old border disputes and focusing on cooperation, trade, and new regional projects. These developments demonstrate the region’s growing autonomy and that Central Asia isn’t just waiting around for the next big power to swoop in.As political analyst Alexandra Sitenko wrote in RS earlier this year, the Trump administration “would be well advised to take advantage of the increased interaction among Central Asian states, as well as within their widespread network of strategic partnerships and alliances, that includes Russia, China, Turkey and the Arab world.”This fits well with Trump’s 2019-2025 U.S. Strategy for Central Asia that sets the goal of “building a more stable and prosperous Central Asia that is free to pursue political, economic, and security interests with a variety of partners on its own terms.”It’s important not to slip back into a military-first approach. For years, U.S. involvement in the region was dominated by military basing tied to the Afghanistan War. Now that the war is over, the U.S. doesn’t need bases there, and the current approach stands in sharp contrast to the 2001-2021 period, when the U.S. ran operations in Afghanistan out of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.Still, the U.S. conducts military exercises with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As QI’s George Beebe and Alex Little wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “These military activities in a region with a robust Russian security presence are dangerous and unnecessary.” The U.S. should steer clear of new bases and rethink security assistance that could create dependencies.President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, while controversial, was a sound decision that freed the U.S. from costly entanglements and let countries handle their own security challenges. Since then, the Central Asian states have started dealing directly with the Taliban on border issues, economic relations, and humanitarian needs.The Abraham Accords diversionKazakhstan’s announcement that it would join the Abraham Accords introduces a problematic element into an otherwise productive summit. Kazakhstan called the decision “a natural and logical continuation of Kazakhstan's foreign policy course – grounded in dialogue, mutual respect, and regional stability.” The move is largely seen as symbolic. Kazakhstan and Israel have already had diplomatic ties since 1992. So, the announcement looks less about real progress and more about handing Trump a foreign policy headline. Israel cheered Kazakhstan’s announcement. Palestinian officials, not surprisingly, slammed it. The Abraham Accords have been criticized for bypassing rather than advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace in that Israel gets recognition, but there’s no pressure to change its approach to occupation, settlements, or Palestinian rights. Moreover, the Abraham Accords serve to deepen U.S. entanglement in Middle Eastern conflicts rather than support the kind of prudent disengagement that some experts recommend. Now, with Kazakhstan on board, the Trump administration is tying economic partnerships in Central Asia to U.S. policy in the Middle East. This risks pulling these countries into tensions that serve neither their interests nor broader regional stability.A new US approachThe C5+1 framework has the potential to genuinely advance U.S. and Central Asian interests. For Washington, engagement with Central Asia should recognize that the region is not a core U.S. security interest. There’s no reason to pour in huge military or economic resources. This does not mean disengagement, but rather proportionate engagement through diplomacy and economic partnerships (the kind we saw this week in Washington), and, most of all, respect for the independence and choices of Central Asian countries. Right now, there’s a risk of getting carried away just to counter China or Russia. That kind of enthusiasm leads to overreach. Broader U.S.-Central Asia engagement should respect multi-alignment. This means acknowledging that Central Asia’s relationships with Russia, China, and other powers serve national interests and do not require U.S. countermeasures. A pragmatic foreign policy approach would recognize that Central Asia’s economic engagement with China through the Belt and Road Initiative, or continued energy and labor migration ties with Russia, do not inherently threaten U.S. interests. Central Asia's emergence as a more cohesive, autonomous region represents a success story. These countries have peacefully resolved long-standing border disputes, increased regional cooperation, and demonstrated pragmatic diplomacy in managing relationships with multiple great powers. All this gives the U.S. a chance to engage on a healthier footing, through diplomacy and real partnerships. Washington can advance its interests without the overextension, militarization, and zero-sum thinking that have caused problems in the past.

[Category: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Central asia]

— Golden Dome, mission impossible

 

at 11/6/25 10:05pm

The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.Trump says it’s time to resume nuclear testsThe happiest day The Bunker ever spent inside the Pentagon was September 27, 1991. That’s the Friday the first President Bush unilaterally declared, with help (PDF) from his just-departed defense secretary, Dick Cheney, that he would eliminate most short-range nuclear weapons. They also took Air Force atomic bombers off their 24-hour runway alerts. The dying Soviet Union would do the same shortly thereafter. The Bunker will never forget walking on air down those Pentagon corridors nearly 35 years ago, elated that the superpowers were finally backing away from the nuclear abyss.The saddest day, assuming he were still on the beat, would have to have been October 29. That’s when President Trump declared that “because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” The U.S. hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since September 23, 1992. Of course, if The Bunker were still on the beat, he couldn’t be walking down Pentagon corridors — on air, or anywhere else. That’s because he would have refused to sign the diktat (PDF) imposed by Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-Off” Hegseth. The current defense chief disdains any reporting on the U.S. military that he doesn’t dictate and has barred reporters who disagree from the Pentagon.Of course, taking Trump’s Truth Social post at face value is always a risky proposition, especially when it’s filled with errors (no possessive apostrophe after “countries,” for example, for the punctuationistas among us). Not only is there no Department of War — no matter how many times he refers to the Department of Defense that way — the Pentagon doesn’t test nuclear weapons. That job belongs to the Department of Energy, which recently furloughed 1,400 of the 1,800 workers responsible for that mission due to the government shutdown. And there are no “countries” testing atomic warheads these days except for North Korea. Trump repeated his insistence that U.S. nuclear-weapons testing will resume in a November 2 interview on “60 Minutes.” For good measure, he added that both China and Pakistan are secretly conducting such tests, claims that Beijing and Islamabad quickly denied. Incredibly, he’s clashing with Chris Wright, his energy secretary, over the issue.Such messy nuclear messaging is an unforced error in an increasingly edgy world. Global nuclear arsenals and atomic-weapons tests are polarizing issues, for obvious reasons. Supporters embrace testing because it proves the continuing potency of such weapons, and the deterrence they supposedly provide. Those opposed to it believe it simply is another step closer to nuclear war. Given that split, it’s fitting that the final nuclear-weapons test carried out by the U.S. 33 years ago was code-named “Divider.”The “fog of war” is a metaphor that stands for the sheer confusion that envelopes combatants on an ever-changing battlefield. It’s not supposed to be coming from the commander-in-chief, who has plenty of time to double-check what he’s saying. Nuclear weapons remain a threat to civilization. Whenever a U.S. president talks about them, he or she should do so with calmness, clarity, and coherence.These days, anyone can say anythingIf you live in the nation’s capital, you might awaken each morning to WTOP, Washington’s all-news radio station. Beyond traffic and weather, its airwaves are filled with ads for government contractors eager to peddle their wares to the Defense Department and other federal agencies. Recently, there’s been a series of spots from Lockheed, the Pentagon’s biggest contractor, ending with the line: “Ahead of ready.”Ahead of ready?This is the company building the F-35 fighter for the Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy. Here’s what objective observers have been saying about the readiness of Lockheed’s pre-eminent program:“The Lockheed Martin-made F-35A — the cornerstone of the service’s fighter fleet and one of the most expensive military programs in history — has been plagued with reliability and availability issues. In 2021, the fighter was available nearly 69% of the time, according to the Air Force. But the F-35A’s mission capable rates have since plunged, and the jet was ready 51.5% of the time in 2024. The Joint Strike Fighter’s lagging availability has become such a problem that its program executive officer, Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, in 2023 announced a ‘war on readiness’ that seeks to improve how often the F-35 can fly,” Defense News reported in March. “The F-35 program has failed to meet a key readiness metric for six straight years, despite a steady increase in spending to operate and maintain the aircraft, according to a new report from a government watchdog agency,” Defense One reported in 2024.“The F-35 fleet mission capable rate — the percentage of time the aircraft can perform one of its tasked missions — was about 55% in March 2023, far below program goals,” the Government Accountability Office reported in 2023.Where’s the Federal Trade Commission when you need it, at least when it comes to the F-35? The agency’s truth-in-advertising mission is “to stop scams; prevent fraudsters from perpetrating scams in the future; freeze their assets; and get compensation for victims.”Sounds about right.Mission Impossible (cont.)Well, it’s been nearly six months since President Trump announced his plan to build a “Golden Dome” shield to protect the nation from all incoming aerial threats — and to do it for $175 billion before his term ends in 2029. Well, the clock’s a-tickin’, and the folks charged with building the thing still don’t know what it is they’re supposed to be making.“Golden Dome hype meets information vacuum as industry awaits Pentagon direction,” read the October 30 headline over Sandra Erwin’s story in Space News. “The holistic architecture” — its basic blueprint — hasn’t been shared with anyone in industry at this point,” Tom Barton, co-founder of Antaris, a Pentagon missile-defense contractor, told an industry confab. Rob Mitrevski, president of defense contractor L3Harris’ Golden Dome Strategy and Integration (yep, that’s his title) added that “the question still remains, what is Golden Dome?” Well, it’s basically a pie-in-the-sky fantasy designed to make defense hawks feel warm and comfy while impoverishing taxpayers with a false sense of security.“A House of Dynamite,” a new Netflix thriller, focuses on the shortcomings of the current U.S. national missile shield. The flick, according to Bloomberg News’ Tony Capaccio, is giving the Pentagon the vapors. But disinterested experts think it’s pretty accurate.The biggest challenge when it comes to outfitting the nation’s armed forces is to get the biggest bang for the buck. A national missile-defense system won’t make sense until it’s good enough to work and cheap enough to buy. Right now, neither of those is true. And, based on all available evidence, it’s going to stay that way for light-years into the future.So that’s the paradox this week in Pentagon procurement. With or without testing, you know nuclear weapons are going to work, most of the time. And you know that Trump’s shield of dreams won’t. Both are pitiful wastes of money from a world apparently unable to grapple with the challenge of life on this planet.Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently→ Seeing the light…The value of lasers on the battlefield has been hyped for decades, and they are not the “strategic game-changers” their boosters claim, Jules J. S. Gaspard argues in the fall issue of Military Strategy Magazine.→ Disinformation delugeThe West “is losing the information war” to China, Iran, and Russia, and their “global web of news sites, podcasters, media platforms, and influencers,” Artur Kalandarov wrote October 31 on West Point’s Modern War Institute’s website.→ OuthousedSenior civilian members of the Trump administration have been moving into housing on military bases traditionally occupied by the nation’s top military officers, Michael Scherer, Missy Ryan, and Ashley Parker reported in The Atlantic October 30.Thanks for moving into The Bunker for a couple of minutes this week. Kindly invite friends to subscribe here.

[Category: The bunker, F-35, Lockheed martin, Pentagon budget, Golden dome, Nuclear weapons]

— Why Texas should invite Xi Jinping to a rodeo

 

at 11/6/25 10:05pm

Last year, Texas banned professional contact by state employees (including university professors) with mainland China, to “harden” itself against the influence of the Communist Party of China – an entity that has governed the country since 1949, and whose then-leader, Deng Xiaoping, attended a Texas rodeo in 1979.Defending the policy, the new provost of the University of Texas, my colleague Will Inboden, writes in National Affairs that “the US government estimates that the CPC has purloined up to $600 billion worth of American technology each year – some of it from American companies but much of it from American universities.” US GDP is currently around $30 trillion, so $600 billion would represent 2% of that sum, or roughly 70% of the US defense budget ($880 billion). It also amounts to about one-third of all spending ($1.8 trillion) by all US colleges and universities, on all subjects and activities, every year. Make that 30 cents of every tuition dollar and a third of every federal research grant.Moreover, it seems the Chinese made better use of the purloined knowledge than we would have. Compare their growth rate to America’s, or look at Chinese cities, their high-speed railroads, and advanced industries. Then there’s the elimination of mass poverty and the 3.5 million engineers and scientists the country mints every year. Such theft must be akin to stealing emeralds from the Louvre – a zero-sum game. Not only did the Chinese get the good stuff, but they somehow prevented America from using it. How very diabolical.Of course, the figure that Inboden cites is absurd, though I don’t doubt that the US government said it somewhere. Such claims about China (and not only China) have become routine in recent years. The tactic is straightforward. By saturating the information space with far-fetched assertions too numerous and too pervasive to rebut, disagreement, let alone dissent, becomes tantamount to disloyalty, even treason.Yet universities obviously cannot be the secret laboratories of a national-security state. We are, by our nature, open. To the extent that we produce useful knowledge or new technologies, these naturally become the common property of the whole world. That is what “publication” is about. As for American companies, they went to China to make money. Many succeeded. That China got something out of it – at the expense of American workers, we can admit – was part of the deal. It’s called capitalism.We’ve been here before. In the 1950s, “Who lost China?” became a national war cry as ambitious witch-hunters in Congress and elsewhere destroyed the careers and lives of US officials who knew the country firsthand. When my father was serving as ambassador to India in 1961, he cabled the State Department to argue for recognition of the People’s Republic, only to receive this epic reply: “Your views, to the extent that they have any merit, have already been considered and rejected.”And yet, at a conference in 2003, Chester Cooper, a national-security veteran of that era, told me that even then Secretary of State Dean Rusk had privately agreed, saying, “I’m not the village idiot.” The US would have recognized the People’s Republic of China after the 1964 election had John F. Kennedy lived and been re-elected; instead, it was Richard Nixon who opened the door in 1971, and Jimmy Carter who stepped through it in 1977. I was present in the small crowd that greeted the great-but-tiny Deng as he entered the Rayburn House Office Building in 1979.Meanwhile, the sands are shifting once again. RAND, an eminent redoubt of American national-security thought, has published a landmark paper calling for coexistence with China, and for accepting the CPC’s legitimacy. Imagine that. The authors cite similar views held by other top China hands, notably Rush Doshi, formerly of the National Security Council and now with the Council on Foreign Relations, and they carefully correct US mistranslations that made Chinese official documents and statements appear more aggressive than they were. Suddenly, highly placed voices are hinting at what many of us who watch China without the benefit of inside sources have long suspected: that the government of China is mainly concerned with governing China.But what lies behind this apparent thaw? Recent developments in the trade war provide a clue. Recall that China recently announced export restrictions on rare earths and especially on gallium, a by-product of aluminum (and zinc) production that is essential for advanced electronics. China controls over 98% of the global supply of gallium, thanks to its aluminum capacity, which is 59% of the world total and 60 times that of the US. After a half-century of deindustrialization, the US cannot close this gap – and there are no good substitutes for gallium (nor for several other materials that China controls). China has therefore effectively lowered the boom on the prospect of US military confrontation with China.Meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Malaysia this week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent secured a one-year delay on China’s rare-earth export restrictions. With Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan on October 29, Trump confirmed that deal. The postponement is, in effect, probation: China will assess, for a year, whether a new spirit of non-aggression, cooperation, de-escalatory rhetoric, and open trade can take hold. If not, the situation will not be better for the US a year from now, and both sides know it.The long-term history of China’s rise and America’s decline dates back at least to the 1970s: the end of the Mao era in China, and the rise of free-market economics in the US, the high-dollar policy of Paul Volcker, and the arrival of Ronald Reagan. It is not a simple story of America being ripped off, as our president, my governor, and the alarmists in our security agencies, think tanks, and media like to claim. But we are where we are. Even our most obtuse leaders have begun to realize that the US is no longer fully in control.Here in Texas, it would be nice if a few of us who have tracked the situation accurately for decades could reclaim our right to travel and engage professionally with China. We might then begin to reacquaint our local leaders with the real world. And – who knows? – maybe when Xi visits the US next year, we could host him at a rodeo. It wouldn’t be the first time.This article was originally published at Project Syndicate.

[Category: Texas, Threat inflation, China]

— What Trump should know before going 'guns-a-blazing' into Nigeria

 

at 11/6/25 10:05pm

In one weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump not only damaged previously cordial relations with an important African ally, he also pledged U.S. military action in one of the world’s most complex conflict landscapes.On October 31, Trump designated Nigeria, Africa’s largest country by population and one of its economic powerhouses, a “Country of Particular Concern” for the ”existential threat” purportedly faced by Christians in the West African country who he alleged are undergoing “mass slaughter” at the hands of “Radical Islamists.”The following day, he warned that should the Nigerian government continue to allow the killings of Christians, the U.S would immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria and “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing.’” Although this is not the first time Trump has picked on the oil-rich country of some 230 million people, nevertheless the threat of military action is new and stands as an unprecedented escalation. Washington considers Nigeria one of its most important partners in Africa. Until February, when Trump froze foreign aid, Nigeria was ranked third among recipients of U.S humanitarian aid in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, significant cooperation has continued between both countries especially in the arena of counter-terrorism. Since 2017, Nigeria has received U.S security assistance estimated, as of January, at approximately $650 million, including $500 million in Foreign Military Sales. In August, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved a $346 million arms sale to aid Nigeria’s fight against Islamist terrorists and trafficking in the Gulf of Guinea.Rattled by Trump’s threats, Nigeria’s president Bola Ahmed Tinubu disputed Trump’s characterization of the situation in his country while assuring Washington of his commitment to protecting the lives of all Nigerians regardless of faith. Yet for many Nigerians who have watched for years the Nigerian state’s helplessness as insecurity escalates, many are welcoming Trump’s threat to intervene militarily if it can succeed where the government has failed in ending the violence. In reality, Trump’s criticism of Nigeria did not arise in a vacuum. It is the direct result of years of the failure of successive Nigerian governments to protect citizens in the face of endless mass killings of both Christians and Muslims. Of course, when killings persist for years — with little or no consequence for perpetrators, the difference between doing nothing and quiet approval soon blurs.Yet Trump’s suggestion of a religious-driven conflict is a one-dimensional view of the catastrophic situation on the ground. While religion is always in the background of Nigeria’s multiple conflict theaters, it is not always the driving force. On several occasions, religion is only a cover for other primarily economic, environmental, and political factors. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based think tank, the nearly 53,000 civilians killed in Nigeria since 2009 as a result of political violence are people of all faiths. While Nigeria recorded about 389 cases of violence targeting Christians between 2020 and 2025 resulting in at least 318 deaths, there were 197 attacks targeting Muslims within the same period leading to at least 418 deaths. The conflict landscape is complex, cutting across vast geopolitical expanses and overlapping causes. The country itself is almost evenly divided between a Christian-dominated south and a Muslim-dominated north while at its center lies the Middle Belt, home to over 200 ethnic groups where adherents of both religions, and mostly Muslim pastoralists and mostly sedentary Christian farmers, have long lived side by side. In the northeastern part of the country where Boko Haram and the regional Islamic State affiliate (ISWAP) have been waging a bloody insurgency to establish an Islamic caliphate, Muslims are the primary victims of violence. Since 2009, the violence has led to more than 40,000 civilian deaths while forcing more than two million to flee their homes. Boko Haram considers anyone, whether Christians or Muslims, who does not accept their version of Islam as infidels. Meanwhile, the most iconic violent incidents that made Nigeria’s jihadists shoot into global headlines more than a decade ago have predominantly been Christian victims. This includes Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok village in 2014 and, four years later, 110 schoolgirls taken by ISWAP in Dapchi Yobe state. While 104 of the girls were soon released after negotiation (5 were killed during the kidnapping), Leah Sharibu, a young Christian girl, is still being held years after for refusing to convert to Islam. Focus on these stories can create a misleading impression that Christians are the main victims of violence in Nigeria. Indeed, Trump’s own Senior Advisor for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, observed just last month that Boko Haram and ISWAP "are killing more Muslims than Christians."This is not just an argument over numbers. When the raison d'etre for a military action is based on inaccurate assumptions, not only are the chances of success limited, it also raises the risk of the U.S. getting bogged down in another “forever war.” When Trump was asked this week if he was considering a ground invasion of Nigeria or air strikes, he said: “Could be, I mean, a lot of things – I envisage a lot of things.” The U.S. could target Islamist jihadists in the northeast. But any military action outside of Nigeria’s Middle Belt would not protect Nigerian Christians — at least not in the way Trump is promoting it. The Middle Belt is where the Nigerian Christian population has suffered disproportionately in a manner that suggests a systematic targeting. Here for over two decades, sedentary farmers and Fulani pastoralists have been locked in an internecine conflict. Other perpetrators of violence include armed bandit gangs who raid villages, rustle cattle and kidnap victims for ransom. According to new findings by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, out of the approximately 36,056 civilians killed across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, the Fulani militias, considered the world’s deadliest terrorist group, and who operate within the Middle Belt and southern parts of the country “were responsible for a staggering 47% of all civilian killings —more than five times the combined death toll of Boko Haram and ISWAP.” The breakdown of the data shows an alarming disproportionality. Nearly 3 “Christians were killed for every Muslim during this period, with proportional losses to Christian communities reaching exceptional levels. In states where attacks occur, Christians were murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to their population size,” the report said. Yet religion is not the main driving force for this horrific violence. Rather, it is the acute competition for diminishing land and water resources alongside other factors, although the fact that pastoralists are often Muslim Fulanis and sedentary farmers are often Christians sometimes causes observers to consider religion the primary motive. Whether by air strikes or ground forces, American military intervention in Nigeria’s complex terrain carries many risks, particularly extensive civilian harm, the consequence of which is that the situation gets worse than it already is.

[Category: Enewsletter, Trump, Boko haram, Christians, Muslims, Sub-saharan africa, Nigeria]

— Senate vote fails to block Trump attacks on Venezuela

 

at 11/6/25 4:18pm

This evening, the Senate narrowly voted down a War Powers Resolution that would have blocked the U.S. from attacking Venezuela without congressional approval amid fears the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against so-called “narco-terrorists” might escalate into a greater conflict with the South American country.Senators largely voted along party lines to block the resolution, led by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and co-sponsored by 15 other senators, including one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.), which ultimately failed in a 49-51 vote. Paul and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R.-Ala.) were the lone Republicans to vote for the resolution, just as they were the only Republicans to support a previous War Powers Resolution barring unauthorized strikes on boats purportedly carrying illegal drugs in the Caribbean, which also failed.All Democratic senators voted for the measure, including Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), the only Democrat to vote against the failed resolution that aimed to block the boat strikes last month.In the days leading up to the vote, Republican senators, including Todd Young (R-Ind.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Mike Rounds (R.-S.D.) had said they were still reviewing the Trump administration’s legal rationale for its attacks — signaling concerns about the administration’s approach. Despite previously wavering, these Senators held the party line.The Trump administration asserts its ongoing strikes are legal because the boats it is targeting are smuggling illegal drugs into the U.S., and that the people operating them are terrorists. But the White House does not currently believe it has the legal authority to conduct strikes within Venezuela, according to a new report from CNN.Lawmakers from both parties contend the Trump administration has not given them enough information about its attacks and their legality. On the Senate floor leading up to the vote, resolution supporters stressed that any future hostilities in the region — against these boats or Venezuela itself — must first receive explicit congressional approval."There is no more important thing for this Congress to do, than to reassert its responsibility — to accept our responsibility for the powers that were delegated to the United States Congress — particularly about whether we do or don't go to war," Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said this afternoon. Many warned that the ongoing boat strikes could easily escalate into a full-blown war."These operations risk destabilizing the region and provoking direct confrontation with Venezuela. We could be stumbling into another open ended conflict without purpose or plan if the administration intends to escalate towards conflict with Venezuela,” Sen. Jack Reed (D- R.I). stressed. “Congress has a constitutional duty to declare and authorize such action.”“We cannot sleepwalk into another war through incremental escalation while being kept in the dark,” he said. And resolution co-sponsor Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) stressed service members’ lives were at risk, for a possible conflict he deemed “unnecessary.” "We owe it to our service members to only send them into harm's way when vital American interests are at stake. Who is in charge of Venezuela does not constitute such an interest,” Sen. Paul said. "President Trump, do not allow the warmongers in Washington to drag you into an unnecessary war of choice."Although they did not rule out possible future actions, Trump officials told lawmakers Wednesday it does not plan to strike Venezuela currently, and that it does not have a legal justification for attacks against land targets there. Trump has also reportedly expressed concerns about whether striking Venezuela will compel its leader, Nicolas Maduro, to step down. Connor Echols contributed additional reporting.

[Category: Qiosk, Venezuela, Aumf, Narco-terrorism, Caribbean, War powers]

— A sneak peek at how Americans view Trump foreign policy so far

 

at 11/6/25 2:20pm

Like domestic politics, American public opinion on foreign policy is extremely polarized and that is not likely to change soon as new polling from my team at the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group shows striking partisan splits on the top Trump issues of the day.Among the most partisan findings: 44% of Americans support attacks on drug cartels in Latin America, even if they are unauthorized by Congress, while 42% opposed. Breaking down on party lines, 79% of GOP respondents support such strikes, while 73% of Democrats are against them. Americans hold a mixed assessment of how President Donald Trump has implemented his “America First” policies in the first nine months of his second term. Overall, half of Americans think he is performing poorly and more than a third rate his performance as good or excellent. Broken down by party, the contrast is striking: 89% of Democrats say poor, while 53% of Republicans say excellent and 29% say good.We asked about specific policies in the Middle East and Asia, but some of our most interesting findings pertained to how Americans think the president should conduct foreign affairs writ large. A plurality of Republicans (46%) think the most important obligation of the United States government is to protect America from foreign threats (only 13% of Democrats agree). Meanwhile, 40% of Democrats said promoting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law around the world is the most important (only 8% of Republicans agreed).Most Democrats view a rise in authoritarianism that imperils democracy as the greatest threat to the United States. For a plurality of Republicans, the greatest threat is the country losing its national identity due to immigration and free trade. Most Democrats think the best way to achieve peace is through democracy promotion, diplomacy, and international cooperation. Republicans are split between primarily focusing on domestic issues and maintaining overwhelming military strength to defend the United States when necessary.Trump has emphasized his acumen for dealmaking, and he made the case last month that he was deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. As our survey was fielded in October, his administration brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. However, 63% of Americans still do not think he deserves the coveted prize. Nearly all Democrats we surveyed (95%) say he shouldn’t get it, while a slight majority of Republicans (56%) say he should (about one in five Republicans were unsure).There is evidence that when choosing a commander-in-chief, policy specifics may matter less than perceptions of strength. We tried to get a sense of how Americans view Trump’s leadership by presenting a series of descriptors and asking them to select up to two. About half of Democrats think he is reckless and destructive. About half of Republicans think he is tough and intelligent, and about a third consider him a peacemaker. This split reflects the paradox that Trump embodies, somehow reconciling a commitment to peace with aggressive international posturing.Aside from partisan differences on Trump’s military action against alleged narco boats, which so far have killed 67 people, Americans are split along party lines on other specific conflict areas and how Trump is handling them.More than a third of Democrats think the United States should stop supporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza (the survey was conducted before and after the current ceasefire was agreed to on Oct. 10), while about a third of Republicans think the United States should support Israel unconditionally. When asked about their impression of Israel’s operations, half of Democrats say it can be described as genocide but only 8% of Republicans agree. Republicans are most likely to describe it as the destruction of a terrorist organization (51%), followed by a hostage rescue (40%).Meanwhile, after the United States imposed massive trade tariffs on China in April, the Trump administration also announced plans to restrict visas for Chinese students. We found Democrats are overwhelmingly supportive of allowing Chinese students to study at U.S. universities (81%), while a plurality of Republicans are opposed (47%). On Ukraine War policy, 19% overall said Trump was making things worse. On that question, only 40% of Republicans said Trump was making things better, while 72% of Democrats said the opposite.A rare point of agreement emerged on Iran. Should Iran resume work on its civilian nuclear program, which appears highly likely, a plurality of Americans think the United States should impose harsher sanctions, including 50% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats. However, 39% of Republicans also support a return to military action compared with only 10% of Democrats. Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to support U.S. negotiations with Iran (43% vs. 24%).Trump bombed Iranian nuclear sites and targeted alleged drug boats without congressional authorization, yet most Americans think the president should be required to seek approval from Congress before ordering military action overseas. There is some consensus among Americans overall, but the partisan split has grown drastically since we asked the same question a year ago. In 2024, 70% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans agreed that the president should not act without congressional approval. In 2025, 94% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans think the same.A similar split exists on military spending. More than half of Democrats (58%) think the United States should decrease military spending compared with 18% of Republicans, most of whom favor maintaining current spending levels (66%).Another era of common ground is military aid. Amid lively debates over the last several years about U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel, a plurality of Americans, including 58% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans, think the United States has provided too much aid to other countries. When asked about U.S. military presence in four regions (Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Western Hemisphere), more Americans are in favor of decreasing or withdrawing troops than increasing. After lengthy and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans may be ready to reconsider their country’s military commitments abroad. That said, pluralities are still in favor of maintaining the status quo.Trump's “America First” pitch clearly appealed to the American people – he had an edge over the Biden-Harris campaigns on foreign policy. His pledge to end wars and focus on the needs of average Americans clearly resonated, although views of his implementation are deeply polarizing. As the United States wages war on drug cartels and possibly gears up to topple Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, perhaps the greatest test of “America First” and public opinion of Trump is yet to come.

[Category: Us foreign policy, Trump, America first, Gaza, Venezuela, China, Iran, Drug war, Enewsletter, Public opinion]

— Read this Evangelical Zionist leader’s leaked suspense novel

 

at 11/5/25 10:05pm

Writing a novel is a vulnerable experience. After months or years of work, many authors come to view their book as an extension of themselves. So when a writer starts looking for a fresh pair of eyes, it can be hard to decide who to trust. But for Evangelical pastor and Trump adviser Mike Evans, the choice was simple: just ask the Israeli government.Leaked emails reveal that, back in 2018, Evans sought help from Israeli officials on his new novel about an all-out war on Israel, masterminded by a rogues’ gallery of Iran, Hamas, ISIS, and, to a lesser extent, the media. The outline that Evans shared offers a unique look into the thinking of an informal Trump adviser, as well as the Israeli reserve colonel who edited the story (and seemingly received about $1,150 for his troubles).The worldview depicted in the outline, which was never published, is bleak. Iran and Hamas sneak explosives and even Sarin gas canisters into children’s backpacks in order to provoke Israeli soldiers into attacking innocents. When their plan to destroy Israel goes sideways, Iranian officials try to instigate the apocalypse. At the end, our hero’s wife reminds him that all of this fighting is simply inevitable. “[T]hey hate us for who we are,” she intones. “As we are who we are, and they are who they are, things will always be this way.” (Writing in the margins, the Israeli colonel wonders if this may be “overly simplifying the situation.”)Evans, who founded the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, is among America’s most prominent Evangelical Zionists. He is a long-time friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was a “confidant” to several other Israeli prime ministers. In 2017, he joined other Evangelical leaders in laying hands on President Donald Trump in the Oval Office before presenting him with a “Friends of Zion” award. In a 2021 blog post, Evans claimed credit for putting up 220 billboards in Jerusalem calling on Trump to “make Israel great.” The precise extent of Evans’ relationship to Trump is unclear. In Trump’s first term, Evans served on a board of Evangelical advisers to Trump that encouraged the president to focus on religious freedom and support for Israel’s government. Evans broke with Trump in 2022, claiming that the president had “used” Evangelicals in order to get elected. But he appears to have returned to the MAGA fold in the meantime. He hosted Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, for an event earlier this year. And in a January interview, he told an Israeli outlet that, while he doesn’t speak for the president, he knows him “extremely well” — well enough to speculate on Trump’s plans for peace in the Middle East, at least.There is, however, no lack of clarity surrounding Evans’ relationship with Israel. “I told my wife when I married her that there was another woman in my life. I had to be with her a lot,” he once wrote. “Her name was Israel.”But writing has always been Evans’ second passion, judging at least by his wide range of self-published tomes, including such classics as “Showdown with Nuclear Iran,” “Netanyahu: A Novel,” and “What I Learned as a Moron.” The leaked outline, simply titled “Hamas Novel,” never made it to print. But luckily for you, digital ink is cheap, so we’ve decided to share it in full here.Evans did not respond to a request for comment submitted through the Friends of Zion Museum. Reuven Ben-Shalom, the Israeli reserve colonel who edited the story, confirmed in an email that he was paid for providing comments on Evans' book. Ben-Shalom said the edits were a "singular project" done "at the request of a friend."The plot to destroy IsraelLike all good action stories, Evans’ novel begins with a conspiracy. Iranian generals gather around “the Ayatollah,” which apparently refers to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and present their plan for destroying Israel. The dastardly plot revolves around an escalating series of operations, starting with protests in Gaza followed by child-led suicide bombings in Jerusalem and culminating with an invasion of Israel from all sides. If all goes well, then the world will also break with America over its support for Israel and impose sanctions on Uncle Sam. “[W]hat if the strategy does not succeed?” asks one general. “[I]t won’t matter,” responds another. “We will all be dead.”Enter Ben-Shalom, the Israeli reserve colonel charged with editing Evans’ outline. Some of his notes are practical — a “large scale operation” like the one the Iranians propose can’t be “executed in two days,” he warns — while others are more about PR. When Iranian generals plot to “provoke IDF soldiers to shoot” civilians at the border, “as they did in previous protests,” Ben-Shalom warns Evans that this is “buying into a Palestinian agenda” by simply calling them protests.“[T]he riots and attacks were pre-planned and were carried out during a long period of time,” the Israeli officer argues. (During the protests in question, which Palestinians described as a grassroots movement, Israeli forces killed at least 300 Palestinians and injured 30,000 more, according to the United Nations.)The emails, which were released as part of a hack by a pro-Palestine group called Anonymous for Justice, indicate that the Friends of Zion Museum paid Ben-Shalom 3850 Israeli shekels, or roughly $1150 at the current exchange rate, for his edits. Gidon Mor, an Israeli official whose exact job is unclear, appeared to facilitate the relationship between Friends of Zion and Ben-Shalom.As the story continues, Evans rattles off a head-spinning series of pro-Israel tropes about Hamas, Iran, and their influence in the world. In order to prepare for the attack, an Iranian official enters Gaza disguised as a Qatari diplomat, presumably with help from the Qatari government. The operative instructs his Hamas contacts to orchestrate a series of protests, with “Women and children in front” for maximum effect. Soon after, an Iranian advertising executive orchestrates coverage of the protests by subtly informing his gullible network executive friend of plans for a march. “You should look into it,” the secret Iranian agent says. “Get ahead of the competition in breaking the coverage.”Evans goes to great lengths to blur the lines between Hamas members and civilians. In one dramatic scene, he portrays seemingly coordinated maneuvers in which Hamas operatives push protestors to storm a checkpoint as militants fire rockets in support. Elsewhere, agents with Shin Bet, Israel’s internal counterintelligence service, warn that “Arabs have never simply protested. It always turns violent.”Perhaps most confusing is Evans’ view of Islam. On one occasion, an Iranian agent tells Hamas leadership that the plot is “the will of the Ayatollah as prescribed by Allah.” But Hamas, as a Sunni Islamist organization, would have no interest in a Shiite leader’s interpretation of the will of God. Evans goes on to lump together Hamas, ISIS, and al-Qaeda — all of which hate each other on both political and religious grounds — into one big anti-Israel fighting force.The pastor also portrays Iranian leadership as nothing short of insane. When Israeli operatives thwart the first two steps of Iran’s plan, Iranian generals resort to the “Mahdi option,” in which Tehran launches a suicidal war in order to provoke the return of the Mahdi, a messianic figure that many Shiites believe will return to prepare the world for the end times. “[J]ust before we are obliterated, the Mahdi appears to protect us and restore order,” one general says.Near the end of the outline, it becomes clear that Evans wants U.S. support for Israel to go much further than it has in the past. As Israeli soldiers work to beat back Iranian troops, U.S. forces provide close air support in what would be the first ever incident in which Israeli and U.S. soldiers carried out such operations side-by-side. Evans then portrays a series of U.S. airstrikes against targets within both Iran and Israel.Ben-Shalom offers a series of increasingly frustrated notes in this section. “U.S. planes would not support Israeli troops,” he wrote, before chiding Evans a second time for “too much mixing [of] Israeli and American forces.” The third time, Ben-Shalom appears to reach a breaking point, simply commenting “NO” in response to the latest suggestion of joint U.S.-Israeli operations.Evans ends his tale with a tender moment. After saving the children from their own backpack bombs — and thwarting Iran’s invasion — our hero sits with his wife and laments the state of the world. “[T]hey were just kids,” he says as he starts to cry. “They could have all been killed.”But Ben-Shalom has no patience for melodrama. “There was an all-out war with Iran, with a serious threat to Israel, and the only thing on his mind are those kids?” he asks. “Shin Bet save people every day.”

[Category: Netanyahu, Trump, Hamas, Christian zionists, Israel]

— Hegseth wants to make the Pentagon a global arms bazaar

 

at 11/5/25 10:05pm

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will gather defense industry leaders in Washington on Friday to announce a significant organizational change that will in part help streamline U.S. weapons sales to other countries.To do this, Hegseth will reportedly move the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which administers foreign military sales, from the Pentagon’s policy office to the acquisition office. The overarching idea behind Hegseth's anticipated plans is to cut bureaucratic red tape and increase the speed with which technology gets to the battlefield, according to reporters who have seen the six-page memo. But read the fine lines: it is also to force the Pentagon’s acquisition officials, who are supposed to focus their attention on ensuring the United States military has the hardware necessary to be effective, to also “give greater weight to what allies want to buy and make American offerings more competitive,” according to reporting by POLITICO. The effect would be to further blur the already fuzzy public/private line between the government and the defense industry because it would effectively make Pentagon officials design partners with the defense contractors as they try to make their weapons more appealing on the international market.Without this reported organizational change, the American defense industry already does brisk business around the world. Pentagon officials tracked a foreign military sales portfolio of more than $845 billion in 2024, making the United States the largest arms exporter in the world. Weapons contractors generate a great deal of revenue selling their products overseas which is good for their bottom line. The business model by which they operate is unique because the capital used to develop the products they market was not their own. Most American weapons are developed under cost-plus government contracts meaning the companies are reimbursed for the research and development costs and receive an additional fee in profit. This arrangement makes American citizens the venture capitalists in a business investment. Taxpayers provide the seed money to move a product from the drawing board to the market. But unlike traditional venture capitalists who expect a significant return on their investment, the American people rarely see a dime in return.The American people should at least benefit financially from the arrangement. If the government partners with the defense contractors already by acting as sales representatives to overseas markets, the government — and the American people by extension — should be compensated appropriately. At the very least, foreign military sale profits should offset the prices paid by American taxpayers for the same weapons. But that happens only by exception.The Arms Export Control Act passed by Congress in 1976 does require foreign military customers to reimburse the U.S. government for the research and development costs for the American-made weapons they purchase. But the act includes a provision that allows foreign governments to request a waiver for these payments. U.S. defense industry leaders have argued that the reimbursement fees raise the price of weapons sold overseas, which makes their products less attractive on the market and potentially impacting sales, and their company’s bottom lines.The Government Accountability Office conducted an audit in 2018 that found the Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved Arms Export Control Act waivers at a rate of 99% during the previous 6 years.The point can’t be made often enough that the products the defense contractors are selling overseas generally weren’t developed with their own money. Taxpayers covered those costs and the contractors then profit while actively working to prevent foreign customers from reimbursing the American people, thus denying them a return on their investment. The arrangement is good for the defense industry, but a terrible deal for Americans.Making the government acquisition officials adjunct defense industry staffers should not be a priority for the nation’s policymakers. The American people trust Pentagon staffers to look after the best interests of American troops, not the bottom lines of the defense contractors. Rather than spending time considering the international arms market, American acquisition officials should focus their efforts on developing effective tools for the U.S. military that can be delivered on time and within budget — something that Hegseth's plans purportedly addresses. Simply avoiding acquisition failures that have been so characteristic of the past 25 years would do much more to make American arms more appealing on the international market than any organizational change ever would anyway.

[Category: Defense industry, Arms sales, Foreign arms sales, Weapons sales, Weapons industry, Us military]

— Death knell for the Summit of the Americas?

 

at 11/5/25 10:05pm

The government of the Dominican Republic has announced that the X Summit of the Americas (SOA), scheduled to be held in Punta Cana on December 4-5, has been postponed. This is the first time an SOA has been postponed.There is no reason to think that the conditions for holding such a meeting will be better three or six months from now so it’s more likely the summit will be canceled. If so, this might very well ring the death knell of the SOAs, precisely at a time when they are more needed than ever, given the deep differences cutting across the hemisphere.As the premier diplomatic event of the Western Hemisphere, the SOAs have been around for a little over 30 years. They provide a useful, some would say vital, forum for presidents and prime ministers from across the continent to get together and interact with the U.S. president, whom they rarely meet in person. Indeed, the summits were established in the halcyon days of multilateralism in the 1990s, when international cooperation flourished after the end of the Cold War and the sky seemed the limit in terms of what could be achieved in transborder projects.The first SOA took place in Miami in 1994, and the most recent in Los Angeles in 2022. Democratization and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were the initial drivers for their agenda. Yet even after these faded, the idea that there is much to be gained by leaders from the Americas getting together to address common concerns kept them going. After all, it is difficult to say that some of the main challenges faced by countries in the Americas today, like the drug trade, illegal migration, organized crime, and climate change, do not need some form of collective response.The SOAs, of course, build on the idea of Pan Americanism — the notion that there is something beyond the differences in language, history, and level of development that binds the countries of the Western Hemisphere, or the New World, and makes them different from the tired Old World across the Atlantic.This can be a controversial concept. Many on the Left have denounced it as a non-transparent attempt to provide cover for U.S. imperial designs to facilitate the exploitation of Latin America and the Caribbean to benefit American capital. However, this overlooks the fact that in a globalized and interdependent world, regions have their own dynamic, that there are “international neighborhood” issues that need addressing, and that, in the end, it is by talking to each other that we can solve problems and find common ground. And those dialogues will be more fruitful and productive if they are institutionalized and structured, rather than undertaken in an ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment fashion.President Trump dislikes multilateralism and international fora of various kinds — so much so that he skipped the VIII SOA in Lima in 2018, the first time a U.S. president ever did so. And we all saw that after meeting with President Xi in Seoul on the sidelines of the APEC Leaders’ Summit, he left immediately, without attending APEC’s formal proceedings. Indications are that, at least one reason the SOA was postponed this time around, apart from the difficulties in agreeing on a final declaration, which has been the official line, is because Trump was unwilling to commit to attend, which led to the host country’s decision to postpone, and effectively cancel it.Still, the D.R. summit was already on the rocks. A few weeks ago, the Dominican government announced with great fanfare that it would not invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to the summit. This went down like a lead balloon in the region, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum saying that under such circumstances she would not attend and Colombian President Gustavo Petro criticizing the announcement and saying he would not attend either.In this non-invitation, the Dominicans were following the U.S. playbook from 2022 when Washington’s exclusion of the group of countries John Bolton called “the troika of tyranny” led to the ultimate fiasco of the Los Angeles SOA, with the attendance of a mere 23 leaders (out of 35) and no final declaration. Moreover, the D.R. had originally spoken about “an inclusive summit,” code for inviting Cuba et al, but later bowing to strong pressures from the State Department to toe the U.S. line.There is no doubt this whole exercise is a big failure of Dominican diplomacy. You don’t attempt to play in the big leagues if you are not ready to carry the ball across the finish line. More importantly, however, it is also a significant failure of the U.S. State Department. Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau are what is known as “old Latin American hands,” speak fluent Spanish (Landau spent part of his childhood in Chile) and have been managing many Latin American issues on the front burner of U.S. foreign policy, including Panama, Venezuela, the effect of mass deportations, and the U.S.-Brazil spat.Part of their strategy has been to work closely with the smaller Central American and Caribbean countries, as well as with those in South America, like Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay, that are ideologically aligned with the Trump administration.One result of that was a highly unusual and unorthodox recent statement signed by the U.S. and a number of these countries celebrating the defeat of the MAS (or Movement for Socialism) ruling coalition in Bolivia and claiming that the election result will end “the economic mismanagement of the past two decades.”This is a factually incorrect assertion, given that Bolivia from 2010-2019 had one of the best economic performances in the hemisphere, consistently growing above 4 percent a year, except for 2019, when it grew at 2.2 percent, a higher growth rate than that of the U.S.The truth is that these efforts to “divide and rule” by building coalitions with the region’s smaller countries to counter the likes of Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico by pressing the former to follow Washington’s diktat to the letter were bound to end in epic debacles, like now with the 2025 SOA.But the U.S. self-sabotage of the SOA is especially puzzling for another reason. We have heard much about how Washington in the second Trump administration will be retreating from the “pivot to Asia” launched under Obama to prioritize instead the defense and strengthening of the Western Hemisphere. And yes, both Rubio’s initial visits abroad and the issues mentioned above all underscored how the Americas have been front and center in the U.S. foreign policy agenda.But how does this square with boycotting one of the key diplomatic hemispheric institutions, like the SOA? What comes next? Defunding the Organization of American States — as Deputy Secretary Landau did not rule out at the OAS General Assembly in Antigua earlier this year — or closing the Inter-American Development Bank?It may well be that the SOAs have run their course, and that the time has come to give them a decent burial. Many said that the 2022 Los Angeles SOA showed that they were in their last gasp. The problem is that pushing them over the cliff while insisting that, for the first time since World War II, Washington’s top foreign policy priority is the Western Hemisphere is a contradiction in terms.

[Category: South america, Marco rubio, Western hemisphere, Summit of the americas, Enewsletter, Dominican republic]

— With Venezuela, Trump poised to make mistake of epic proportions

 

at 11/4/25 10:05pm

After another week of extra-judicial strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, the U.S. is now reportedly preparing to hit military targets in Venezuela. International condemnation of the strikes has been widespread. For example, Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister of Foreign Affairs and Europe, accused the U.S. of ignoring international and maritime law in an interview on Thursday.But the neoconservative lobby inside the Trump administration is unmoved.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the lead proponent of regime change in Venezuela, has pushed for these actions — allegedly as part of an effort to get tough on drug cartels, framing the Latin American nation through a “narco-terrorism” lens.Washington’s “narco-terrorism” frame has pedigree; the DOJ indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges in 2020, but today’s drug threat picture looks different from that narrative.Strategically, the label misaligns ends and means: it invites military solutions to problems that the DEA and Coast Guard still characterize primarily as law-enforcement interdiction.It also simplifies a complex geopolitical picture, all the while increasing the risk of entangling the U.S. in an open-ended conflict in the Western Hemisphere.The DEA’s 2024–2025 threat assessments identify fentanyl as the top U.S. drug danger, synthesized mainly in Mexico with precursors from China. Meanwhile, UNODC data show record coca cultivation and cocaine output centered in Colombia, with Venezuela functioning primarily as a transit route.Yet, Washington’s “counternarcotics” rhetoric has already translated into military escalation, and with it come significant diplomatic, economic, and political risks.Escalation might threaten U.S. energy interests, particularly Chevron’s limited license to import Venezuelan crude, a lifeline for U.S. Gulf Coast refineries that remain reliant on the country’s uniquely heavy oil.Escalation could also bolster Maduro rather than undermine him. For a leader whose “anti-imperialist rhetoric” enhances domestic legitimacy, U.S. aggression is politically beneficial.Caracas has already surged troops and naval deployments along key coastal routes and encouraged auxiliary mobilization, explicitly linking the moves to U.S. buildups in the Caribbean.While there should be no doubt of the disruptive effects of U.S. escalation with Venezuela, one counterargument is that if Washington were to launch a land invasion, the Venezuelan Armed Forces (FANB) would be no match for U.S. military might. The U.S. military is the most advanced in the world — the FANB, in simple terms, is not. Its loyalty to Maduro is transactional, bought through select privileges rather than commitment to the cause. Public support for the regime is also brittle.However, as the U.S. well knows, military superiority does not necessarily translate into political success, as Iraq and Afghanistan made painfully clear.And even if the regime were to collapse, stabilizing a post-Maduro Venezuela would demand years of costly engagement, something neither the U.S. public nor its leadership appears to have the attention span or political will for.A U.S.-led intervention — even a limited one — would have a destabilizing effect on Venezuela and the region. It risks spilling beyond Venezuela’s borders, drawing Colombia and even Pacific maritime routes into a widening theatre of operations. It could create humanitarian and security vacuums, driving a new wave of migration northward toward the U.S.International refugee organizations now monitor over 6.8 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants across Latin America and the Caribbean, with continued onward movements. A disruption to Venezuela’s security situation could accelerate secondary flows northward, further straining regional reception systems already operating at full capacity.Regionally, Mexico and Brazil have openly criticized U.S. boat strikes and deployments, and U.N. human-rights experts warned that the “war on narco-terrorists” violates the right to life, increasing legitimacy costs for unilateral actions. The recent spat between President Trump and Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, further complicates the regional calculus, since Venezuela’s closest neighbor is key to mitigating the spillover effects of an intervention. Intelligence-sharing and joint policing rely on trust and legitimacy. Escalation would weaken both, undermining the very multilateral approach needed to fight transnational crime, such as drug trafficking, effectively.The “narco-terrorism” frame isn’t new. Still, the use of Aegis warships and lethal interdictions underscores the risk that a rhetorical tool is now driving escalatory military behavior rather than cooperative policing.A wiser approach for Washington is to prioritize intelligence sharing and law enforcement cooperation with allies — rather than rely on destroyer-launched kinetic strikes — and to align with the DEA’s operational strategy and the Coast Guard’s record of interdictions, without provoking backlash against militarization.Lasting stability will come not from escalation, but from diplomacy, intelligence sharing, and collaboration with regional partners and institutions like Interpol to confront the causes, not merely the symptoms, of the problem.The views and opinions expressed in this piece are solely those of the author, and not those of the University of North Texas at Dallas.

[Category: Narco-terrorism, Counterterrorism, Drug war, South america, Venezuela]

— Arab leaders are no longer buying Washington's Iran story

 

at 11/4/25 6:48am

In a striking pivot, the foreign policy establishment of the Persian Gulf is no longer pointing its finger at Iran as the chief menace to Middle East stability — instead, it is now directing that accusation at Israel. That shift was laid bare by Badr al-Busaidi, the Omani Foreign Minister, who chose the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain last weekend — hosted by the UK think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies — as the venue to declare that, “We have long known that Israel, not Iran, is the prime source of insecurity in the region.” This is more than just rhetoric. For nearly four decades, U.S. diplomats, strategists, and official doctrine have cast Iran as the epicenter of Middle Eastern instability, making this Arab reversal a serious alarm bell for Washington. If the region’s power brokers no longer see Iran as the chief source of turmoil, U.S. policy risks drifting badly out of sync, even as many Trump officials continue to recycle old talking points about Tehran’s unmatched role in fueling regional chaos.From the Reagan era onward, U.S. foreign-policy discourse has portrayed Iran as the principal destabilizing force in the Middle East. During the Clinton administration, then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher famously declared that “wherever you look in the region, you see Iran’s evil hand” — a phrase that crystallized a bipartisan consensus enduring to this day.This worldview took shape in the Clinton administration’s “dual containment” policy, which targeted both Iraq and Iran. The underlying logic was simple: Iran and Iraq were the sources of regional instability; Israel was the anchor of stability; and containing the former while supporting the latter would secure the Middle East and pave the way for peace. Ever since, the supposed need to contain Iran’s destabilization served as a central justification for sustaining American military hegemony in the Middle East.The name of the policy has shifted over time, but its essence has endured — with the brief exception of the two years following the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, when Barack Obama’s administration temporarily paused Washington’s containment strategy. Even Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, celebrated as a major policy innovation, ultimately reinforced the same premise: that Iran is the linchpin of regional disorder and that Arab states must align with Israel to contain Tehran.It is not hard to see why an Arab foreign minister would not only reject Washington’s long-standing narrative but invert it — identifying Israel, not Iran, as the chief source of instability. In just the past two years, Israel has launched attacks on seven countries while carrying out what a U.N. commission has described as genocide in Gaza. It has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and devastated large parts of southern Lebanon. When Israeli forces struck Qatar — a key U.S. partner — GCC states could no longer deny that Israeli recklessness posed a direct threat to the entire region.Omani officials argue that Washington’s own policies have helped produce this moment. The U.S. strategy of isolating and containing Iran, they contend, deepened regional polarization and foreclosed opportunities for de-escalation. Had Iran been integrated economically and politically into the region, tensions with the U.S. and Israel might have eased — while also diminishing Tehran’s threat to its Persian Gulf neighbors. Indeed, in his Manama speech, Al-Busaidi called for an inclusive regional security architecture — one that brings Iran, Iraq, and Yemen to the table rather than excluding them.Crucially, Al-Busaidi emphasized that “we have long known” Israel, not Iran, is the main source of regional instability. This makes clear that his statement is not a reaction to events over the past two years alone, but a long‑held view that Arab officials are only now willing to express publicly.When a senior GCC foreign minister — representing Oman, a country widely respected as a diplomatic interlocutor for both Iran and the U.S. — rejects the conventional framing in front of a largely American audience, the implications are profound.This is not to suggest that GCC states no longer see Iran as a challenge or that its policies aren't or haven't been disruptive at times. A study I co-authored with journalist Matthew Petti in 2020 showed that Iran had been one of the most interventionist powers in the region, though its role had been supplanted by Turkey and the UAE since 2015. But if the GCC no longer regards it as the primary threat, its willingness to support U.S. Iran‑centric policies will decline. The Trump administration, pursuing Maximum Pressure 2.0, may discover it has few willing partners in the Gulf. Unless Washington recalibrates its approach, its policy thrust risks drifting sharply out of step with its GCC partners.The Trump administration would be wise to heed Al‑Busaidi’s call for an inclusive regional security framework. Such an architecture would not only help stabilize the Middle East but also allow Washington to shift the burden of regional security onto local states rather than American service members. In short, it could provide a crucial pathway for the U.S. to responsibly reduce its military footprint and finally bring troops home from the region.After 40 years during which Iran bore the lion’s share of blame, the Middle East is signaling a new epicenter of concern. The U.S. must take note — and treat this as an opportunity to retire Iran-first conceptions of instability that have served to keep the U.S. entangled in a region that several presidents in a row have declared no longer constitutes a vital region for U.S. national security.

[Category: Iran, Oman, Gaza war, Qiosk, Israel]

— Cheney, architect of endless war, helped kill our faith in leaders

 

at 11/4/25 5:04am

Dick Cheney has died, according to reports this morning, at the age of 84.A formidable White House and defense department aide (under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) who left to head an equally formidable Texas-based oil company (with vast federal contracts) and then back in Washington as vice president to George W. Bush, Cheney is probably the most symbolic figure of the failure of the post-9/11 wars. In particular, the Iraq War. It was his amassed power and special cadre of operators known as neoconservatives inside the Old Executive Office building and E Ring at the Pentagon, who with strategic treachery dominated the politics and intelligence necessary to march Washington into the invasion of 2003 and to proliferate a Global War on Terror that lasted well beyond his tenure in office.By all accounts it was his midwifed lies over WMDs that got us there, followed by the blunders (not anticipating the Iraqi insurgency), the loss of life (millions), the cost to our treasury, and the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.For it was the exploitation of American grief, fear, and patriotism after 9/11 to pursue neoconservative wars in the Middle East that zapped the people's faith in government institutions. It pretty much destroyed the Republican Party and gave rise to populist movements on both sides of the aisle. It created a generation of veterans harboring more mistrust in elites and Washington than even the Vietnam War era. On the other end of the spectrum, it unleashed mercenary warfare, killer drones, civil wars, and police powers in the United States that have only served make the people less free and more fearful of their government. Thanks in part to Dick Cheney, the Executive, i.e. the president, has more power than ever — to bomb, detain, and "decapitate" any government leader he does not like.There will be many obituaries written for Dick Cheney, all will be scarred with his role in the Iraq War. For a time he was a very, very powerful man and then he went away to retire and help raise his grandchildren. How many hundreds of thousands of American families were unable to do the same, plagued by death, disease, mental injuries, sterility, divorce, addiction, suicide — because of a war that he so relentlessly pushed but should never have been.Cheney's quest for more Executive power and 'Machtpolitik'Cheney first came to national prominence when he served as White House Chief of Staff (1975-77) to President Gerald Ford. In that position, he worked closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to counter and eventually derail Henry Kissinger's strategy of "detente" with the Soviet Union. In that initiative, Cheney and Rumsfeld also worked closely with the Washington-based leaders of the emergent neoconservative movement, a number of them, including Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, working in the office of Washington State Democratic Senator and Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson, to promote, among other things, Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union, and to persuade Ford to convene an ultra-hawkish "Team B" outside the intelligence community to hype the alleged military threat posed by Moscow in order to sabotage a nuclear arms control agreement. Their mutual interest in pursuing a massive U.S. arms build-up and an aggressive foreign policy more generally would form the basis of an alliance between the aggressive nationalism and Machtpolitik of Cheney and Rumsfeld on the one hand, and the Israel-centered neoconservatives on the other that, more than two decades later, would blossom into the notorious Project for the New American Century in 1997 whose ideas and associates would ultimately dominate the George W. Bush's first-term post-9/11 "global war on terror" (GWOT) and the 2003 Iraq invasion for which he always remained unrepentant.In the 1980s, Cheney, who chafed at Congress's post-Watergate restrictions on presidential power, particularly regarding foreign policy, served as Wyoming’s single congressman in the House of Representatives where he became a staunch and powerful defender both of Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies and of the “Reagan Doctrine” of rolling back leftist regimes and movements in the Global South, notably in Central America and southern Africa. A staunch defender of the protagonists of what became the Iran-Contra scandal, a secret operation to sell weapons to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan contras (for whom Congress had expressly prohibited any U.S assistance), he later prevailed on President George H.W. Bush, for whom he served as defense secretary, to issue pardons to those, like Abrams, who were prosecuted or convicted of crimes as a result of their roles in the affair.In the wake of the first Gulf War, Cheney directed his undersecretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, to draft a long-term U.S. strategy, called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), whose global ambitions, when leaked to the Washington Post, provoked a flurry of controversy about the future U.S. role in the world. Among other things, the draft called for Washington to maintain permanent military dominance of Eurasia to be achieved by “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” and by preempting, using whatever means necessary, foreign states believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction. It foretold a world in which U.S military intervention would become a “constant fixture” of the geopolitical landscape, and Washington would act as the ultimate guarantor of international peace and security. One of the document’s principal drafters, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, would later become Vice President Cheney’s highly effective chief of staff and national security adviser during George W. Bush’s first term until he was indicted in October 2005 for perjury in connection with the leak of the identity of a CIA clandestine officer. The draft DPG would essentially become the inspiration for what became in 1997 the PNAC, a letterhead organization launched by neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan that in some ways formalized the coalition of Machtpolitikers like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and John Bolton; pro-Israel neoconservatives like Perle, Abrams, Libby, Eliot Cohen, and Frank Gaffney; and Christian Zionists, such as Gary Bauer and William Bennett.PNAC subsequently published a series of hawkish statements and open letters demanding substantial increases in the U.S. defense budget and stronger U.S. action against perceived adversaries, notably Iraq, Syria, and China. Led by Cheney as vice president and Rumsfeld as defense secretary, many PNAC associates, particularly neoconservatives, took key posts in the George W. Bush administration in 2001, while PNAC, along with the American Enterprise Institute, became the leading group outside the administration banging the drum for invading Iraq and aggressively prosecuting the GWOT.Cheney's influence over foreign policy began to decline in 2005 when it had become clear that the U.S. faced a serious insurgency in Iraq. Several key neoconservatives, including Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of Defense, were dropped as Bush's second term opened, and Libby's departure that October marked a clear setback. Pressed by the Israeli government, Cheney pushed very hard beginning in 2007 on Bush to attack nuclear and other targets in Iran, but his appeals were reportedly rejected outright.Cheney's legacy, however, lives on. His efforts to concentrate power in a "unitary executive" to reverse what he believed constituted a disastrous encroachment by Congress to limit presidential power and his belief that the United States should retain and exercise a right to unilaterally intervene militarily anywhere and anytime in pursuit of its own interests clearly have survived his passing.

[Category: Enewsletter, Iraq, George w. bush, Neoconservatives, 911, Iraq war, Qiosk, Dick cheney]

— Ukraine's 'Busification' — forced conscription — is tip of the iceberg

 

at 11/3/25 10:05pm

“Busification” is a well-understood term in Ukraine and refers to the process in which young men are detained against their will, often involving a violent struggle, and bundled into a vehicle — often a minibus — for onward transit to an army recruitment center.Until recently, Ukraine’s army recruiters picked easy targets. Yet, on October 26, the British Sun newspaper’s defense editor, Jerome Starkey, wrote a harrowing report about a recent trip to the front line in Ukraine, during which he claimed his Ukrainian colleague was “forcibly press-ganged into his country’s armed services.” This case was striking for two reasons; first, that the forced mobilization of troops is rarely reported by Western mainstream media outlets. And second, that unlike most forced conscriptions, this event took place following the alleged commandeering of the Western journalists’ vehicle by three armed men, who insisted they drive to a recruitment center.There, Starkey reported, “I saw at least [a] dozen glum men — mostly in their 40s and 50s — clutching sheafs of papers. They were called in and out of side rooms for rubber-stamp medicals to prove they were fit to fight.”The process has drawn criticism after high-profile incidents where men have died even before they donned military uniforms. On October 23, Ukrainian Roman Sopin died from heavy blunt trauma to the head after he had been forcibly recruited. Ukrainian authorities claim that he fell, but his family is taking legal action. In August, a conscripted man, 36, died suddenly at a recruitment center in Rivne, although the authorities claim he died of natural causes. In June, 45-year-old Ukrainian-Hungarian Jozsef Sebestyen died after he was beaten with iron bars following his forced conscription; the Ukrainian military denies this version of events. In August, a conscript died from injuries sustained after he jumped out of a moving vehicle that was transporting him to the recruitment center. Look online and you’ll find a trove of thousands of incidents, with most of them filmed this year alone. You can find videos of a recruitment officer chasing a man and shooting at him, a man being choked to death on the street with a recruiter’s knee on his neck. Many include family members or friends fighting desperately to prevent their loved one being taken against his will. If videos of this nature, on this systemic scale, were shared in the United States or the United Kingdom, I believe that members of the public would express serious concerns. Yet the Western media remains largely silent, and I find it difficult to understand why. In November 2024, Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov claimed that he would put an end to busification. It is true that Ukraine has been taking steps to modernize its army recruitment and make enlistment more appealing to men under the age of 25. Yet, there is little evidence that those efforts are having the desired effect. And after a year, busification only appears to be getting worse, yet remains widely ignored by the Western press.The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War often reports on Russian force mobilization efforts but not on the dark and desperate aspects that lead to busification. You won’t find reports on this in the New York Times, as it conflicts with the narrative that with support from the West, Ukraine can turn the war around. It leans in instead on stories like Ukraine’s points for drone-kills game or the designer who cut the all-black suit that Zelensky now wears. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is softly banging the drum to recruit 18-year-old Ukrainians, despite this being a toxic political issue in Ukraine.This is because busification is the tip of the iceberg. If the Ukrainians are finding it difficult to encourage young men to join the army voluntarily, then it is proving even harder to make them stay without deserting. In January 2025, it was reported that around 1,700 troops of the Anna of Kyiv 155th mechanized brigade, trained in France and equipped with French self-propelled howitzers, had gone AWOL — 50 of them while still in France. In June 2024, a Ukrainian deserter was shot dead by a border guard while trying to cross into Moldova. In the first half of 2025, over 110,000 desertion cases were reported in Ukraine. In 2024, Ukrainian prosecutors initiated over 89,000 proceedings related to desertion and unauthorized abandonment of units, a figure three-and-a-half times greater than in 2023. More than 20% of Ukraine’s one million-strong army have jumped the fence in the past four years, and the numbers are rising all the time. Desertions appear in part driven by ever-greater shortages of infantry troops at the front line, which means soldiers rarely get rest and recuperation breaks. A lack of sufficient equipment is often blamed. And of course, the widespread and rising desertion rates from Ukraine’s armed forces only seem to provoke more violent recruitment practices and then civilian protests. On October 30 in Odessa, a group of demonstrators against a man’s forced detention overturned the recruitment minibus. The growth of busification and rising desertions also track with a growth in support among ordinary Ukrainians for the war to end. Support for a negotiated end to the war has risen from 27% in 2023 to 69% in 2025. Likewise, support for Ukraine to “keep fighting until it wins the war” — a wholly deluded proposition — has dropped from 63% to 24% over the same period, according to Gallup poll results.President Zelensky often claims that Ukraine’s military predicament is linked to a lack of guns, not a lack of people. Hoping to secure Western support to fight on for another 2-3 years, he’s quiet on whether he will have the troops or the political support to do so. For now, the message seems to be, “Don’t mention the press-gangs, in-detention killings, deserters and waning public support: just give me more money.”

[Category: Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine war, Zelensky, Busification, Recruitment, Enewsletter]

— Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the GOP’s reckoning on Israel

 

at 11/3/25 10:05pm

For years, a debate over Israel has been raging behind the scenes of Republican politics.Then, last week, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts thrust that battle into the open.“Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Roberts said in a widely circulated defense of Tucker Carlson following the podcaster’s friendly interview with avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which focused on American support for Israel. While the right should support Israel in areas of mutual interest, Roberts continued, “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”The short video set off a civil war on the right. Many pro-Israel conservatives, from think tankers like Michael Doran to politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have framed the debate as a question of fighting antisemitism. Fuentes is, after all, an unabashed antisemite. He has openly expressed doubt that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and he has called for “a total Aryan victory.” To drive the point home, Fuentes followed up the Carlson interview with a video slamming “Jewish oligarchy” and complaining about the “Holocaust religion.”Roberts attempted to walk a tightrope by denouncing many of Fuentes’ views in a lengthy statement on X and making the case that the best way to confront these opinions was to debate them. He later explained that he made the video after facing “a lot of pressure” to “cancel Tucker,” and many MAGA leaders have indeed flocked to Roberts’ and Carlson’s defense. But these efforts have only heightened the split, in which most prominent Republicans are now being asked to pick a side.Ten months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the long-simmering GOP debate over Israel has reached its boiling point. On one side, pro-Israel conservatives are leaning into their opportunity to discipline Heritage and sideline Carlson, who has become Israel’s most prominent critic on the right. And on the other side, restraint-oriented Republicans are throwing their support behind Carlson and his view that America First foreign policy should treat Israel like any other state. Hovering above it all is Trump, whose ambiguous positions on Israel have left significant room for interpretation. On the campaign trail, he hinted that his backing for Israel was less than iron-clad. When a crowd called then-President Joe Biden “genocide Joe” because of his support for Israel, Trump demurred, saying “they’re not wrong.” He’s also lamented the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and seemingly blamed Israel for preventing aid from entering the region. At the same time, Trump has maintained a clear pro-Israel stance in office, working closely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and even joining Israeli strikes on Iran back in June.Given this ambiguity, Republicans have had to fight among themselves over what, exactly, it means to be “America First” in the Middle East. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said recently that supporting Israel is “innately tied to America's fundamental interests.” But many on the right, including podcast host Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), view this as a betrayal of the America First ethos, in which foreign commitments of all sorts should be viewed with skepticism.In many ways, this represents a microcosm of Republican debates over foreign policy that have been raging for decades. The GOP had been broadly supportive of Israel for much of the 20th century, but that support was supercharged in the 1980s and 1990s as the neoconservative movement became increasingly influential on the right, according to David Klion, a columnist at the Nation and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of neoconservatism.Even then, the conversation was often as much about antisemitism as it was about Israel. Following a series of debates between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives, right-wing stalwart William F. Buckley stepped in and accused the paleocons, who were more skeptical of unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli government, of indulging antisemitic views. “The neocons won the coalitional fight, at least for a while,” Klion told RS.Such was the state of the debate leading up to 9/11, after which America launched a series of wars in the Middle East with bipartisan backing. The neoconservatives, who didn’t hesitate to use military force in service of purportedly idealistic goals, had won, and the paleocons were left toiling at the margins.But, as the post-9/11 wars became increasingly controversial, the debate over foreign entanglements returned with a vengeance. Trump railed against “reckless foreign interventions” during the 2016 campaign and insisted that he would have voted against the Iraq War if he had been in office at the time. While Trump’s record on foreign policy has been decidedly more hawkish than these comments imply, he has maintained a habit of denouncing wars, suggesting that he sees the position as a political winner. Meanwhile, a growing set of institutions sought to reorient American foreign policy away from war, led by groups like Defense Priorities, the Center for Renewing America, and the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. Prominent paleocon Pat Buchanan also helped found the American Conservative magazine in 2002, which has since served as an anti-interventionist ballast on the right.Throughout this period, restraint-oriented ideas have struggled to break into the elite level of Republican politics. But they’ve been extremely popular among the base. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of Republicans want the U.S. to “pay less attention to problems overseas,” and another survey found that fully 50% of Republicans under 50-years-old have an unfavorable view of Israel — a 15 point jump since 2022.Under Roberts, the Heritage Foundation has made a concerted effort to normalize these beliefs among conservative elites, many of whom had long embraced the neoconservative orthodoxy of the George W. Bush years. Roberts, who describes himself as a “recovering neo-con,” drew sharp criticism from traditional hawks for using his perch at one of America’s most powerful conservative institutions to question military spending and oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine.Like most Republican elites, Roberts had largely avoided taking on the issue of Israel. But the debate continued just underneath the surface. Two years of brutal war in Gaza had led a growing contingent on the right to turn against Israel, with many arguing that it was not in American interests to continue supporting a government as it committed crimes against humanity. Others on the right have made the case that U.S. support for Israel is contributing to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. And, as Trump has slashed USAID and other foreign assistance programs, many fiscal conservatives have grown more frustrated with the billions of dollars that the U.S. sends Israel each year.Carlson has placed himself at the center of this fight, holding positive interviews with critics of Israel while grilling Sen. Cruz over his support for bombing Iran. As Klion explained, pro-Israel voices on the right have tried to use this as a chance “to excise [Carlson] from what’s now considered respectable conservatism.” But that attention has seemingly only led him to double down, as evidenced by his decision to carry out a friendly interview with an outright white nationalist. (Klion added that he felt “a certain amount of schadenfreude” watching the incident play out following years of left-wing warnings about rising antisemitism on the right, adding that the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has hurt the fight against real antisemitism.)Given Carlson’s prominence and persistence, it was only a matter of time before the debate broke open. “I suspect Tucker Carlson is acting as a vehicle for some segment of the American political establishment that is unhappy with the present terms of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” argued Murtaza Hussain of Drop Site News, adding that, given the sensitivity of the issue, Carlson must have felt confident that he “had something backing him up.”Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative, lauded Roberts for his “unbelievably courageous and accurate” comments about the need to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. In Mills’ view, opponents of Roberts and Carlson simply want to “cancel” conservatives who are “anti-Zionist” or “skeptics of Israel.”“We’re not having a debate about white nationalism,” Mills said. “We’re having a debate about conservative think tanks and what should or should not be allowed to be said about U.S. foreign policy in the mainstream of center-right politics.”It remains unclear to what extent this elite debate could lead to changes in U.S. policy. Some skeptics of American support for Israel have found their way into the administration, and Vice President J.D. Vance has come to lead the growing push on the right to reduce U.S. military adventurism. Yet much of Trump’s policy apparatus is still dominated by pro-Israel hawks. Trump himself has continued to listen to prominent pro-Israel advisers and donors, like Miriam Adelson, who still has the president’s ear on Middle East policy. And even as the Heritage Foundation has opened the door to criticizing Israel, it has also supported policies that crack down on anti-Israel speech.Still, Mills sees significant reason for optimism, at least in the long term. While the old guard of the Republican Party remains relatively hawkish and pro-Israel, many younger Trump administration staffers are more skeptical of foreign entanglements. “I sense a natural sympathy for our perspective throughout the administration,” Mills said.

[Category: Republican party, Maga, Tucker carlson, Nick fuentes, Kevin roberts, Heritage foundation, Israel, Enewsletter]

— Hegseth dropped big Venezuela easter egg into Quantico speech

 

at 11/2/25 10:05pm

On September 30, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned nearly 800 of America’s military generals, admirals, and senior enlisted officers to Quantico, Virginia on short notice. Though the unprecedented event was written off by many as a political stunt, a month later, it is clear the gathering was more important than many realized.Of particular note were the speeches delivered by Hegseth and President Donald Trump which offer the clearest articulation yet of how the Trump administration thinks about and hopes to use military power. What’s more, taken together, the two sets of remarks appear to foreshadow both the current U.S. military build-up underway in the Caribbean and what might be on the horizon as U.S. operations there and elsewhere continue.The key moment in Hegseth’s talk came near the end. “The United States has not won a major theater war since the name was changed to the Department of Defense in 1947,” he told the assembled audience, repeating President Trump’s rationale for jettisoning the Department’s old moniker in favor of its new one: The Department of War. “One conflict stands out in stark contrast, the Gulf War,” he continued. “Why? Well, there's a number of reasons, but it was a limited mission with overwhelming force and a clear end state.”Many were puzzled at Hegseth’s call-up of this short-lived military operation from 35 years ago. After all, the first Gulf War, though widely considered a success at the time, ushered in three decades of heavy U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and, in many ways, set the stage for the very “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that Trump had campaigned against.Hegseth’s point, however, was different. The Gulf War, he was telling those listening in person and at home, was an example of how the United States should be using military force going forward. Overwhelming military power that quickly annihilates the adversary, in pursuit of limited goals. Massive force, short duration, quick victory, no long-term commitment. This model, which Vice President J.D. Vance has called the Trump Doctrine, was demonstrated earlier this year in the U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and during Trump’s first term in his assassination of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. Trump’s preferred approach to the use of force is on display again in Latin America, where the U.S. military has increased the frequency and scope of its strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats while a growing American armada loiters off the coast of Venezuela. Today, over ten percent of U.S. deployed naval power, including a carrier strike group and attack submarine armed with Tomahawk missiles, dozens of fighter aircraft including F-35s, and at least 10,000 military personnel are stationed in the Caribbean.The ostensible purpose of this massive accumulation of warships, aircraft, and military personnel is interdicting drugs on their way to the United States (for now by sea and maybe in the near future by land). However, many speculate that the ultimate target is Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, who Trump may hope to drive from power. Some observers have questioned whether the extraordinary amount of military firepower involved in the operation is required, given the relatively limited threat drug smugglers generally or Maduro himself pose to the United States. But the excess is a feature of Trump’s approach, not a bug. As the president said just last week in Japan, under his command, the United States will “blast the hell out of countries” on its way to decisively winning wars. In his own speech on September 30, Trump offered additional context helpful to understanding expanding U.S. operations in Latin America. At Quantico, he spoke of the “war on the enemy within,” which he described as the battle against the foreign drug smugglers and criminal networks that pose a threat to the United States from the inside. In a sense, the U.S. military campaign in the Caribbean today is simply the external manifestation of this inward-focused struggle and a natural outgrowth of Trump’s militarized approach to his immigration agenda, which has expanded over the course of his second term. There is a certain logic to this. After all, the United States should not waste time looking for adversaries abroad until threats emanating from its backyard, often the root causes of domestic ills, are neutralized. Still, the military’s role in ongoing operations in the Western Hemisphere should be scrutinized. It's not clear, for instance, that blowing alleged drug smugglers out of the water one by one or even threatening them on land will dry up the drug trafficking that afflicts U.S. cities. Similarly, Maduro may not respond to the military pressure by stepping down and if he does, military power cannot guarantee what comes after the regime change advances U.S. or the region’s long-term interests. Trump and his advisors may be underestimating the capabilities of Venezuela’s defense force or overestimating the ease with which the U.S. military will achieve its larger political goals.Moreover, the Trump administration’s apparent theory of military force has limits. Large displays of firepower may awe voters or restore pride in U.S. military power after the embarrassing losses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They may even scare small states into bowing to U.S. dictates. But the “overwhelming force, limited objectives” approach applies less well to near peer adversaries capable of matching U.S. military power and unlikely to be so easily dissuaded by U.S. military threats.So how does the so-called “Trump doctrine” apply to competitors like China and Russia? One possibility is that Trump is simply not willing to fight in major power wars given the likely costs and demands of doing so, not to mention the immense political risk and potential for enduring entanglements. This reluctance would be good for U.S. interests even if it is a change in U.S. foreign policy, and it would fit with Trump’s distaste for the long ground campaigns the United States fought in the Middle East after September 11. The other option is that Trump does hope or believe that ominous threats and large displays of military force will work against China or Russia in a future contingency. This is the more dangerous of the two explanations, as this strategy could invite at retaliatory attacks on the U.S. homeland and possibly even nuclear war — a catastrophic outcome. Important questions about how Trump plans to use military power, therefore, remain. Still, we should not forget the gathering at Quantico too quickly. We may look back on it as significant moment in the evolution of the U.S. approach to the use of force.

[Category: Us military, Enewsletter, Quantico, Drug war, Narco-terrorism, Trump, Western hemisphere, Caribbean, Maduro, Venezuela]

— Are American 'boomers' at risk?

 

at 10/30/25 10:05pm

The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.No Trump or Hegseth this week, except for this eye-opening paragraph…The Bunker’s brow is beaded with sweat, suffering another week of PTSD — Post-Trump Symptoms of Derangement. It’s spreading like the plague: Opening a new front in the war on drugs in the Pacific; threatening ground strikes inside Venezuela, and dispatching a carrier offshore (while Congress keeps right on snoozing); Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barring military officials from congressional contacts; a $130 million donation to pay the troops during the continuing government shutdown; recruiting a right-wing press cadre to cover the Pentagon, replacing the heterogeneous mixture that had covered the building since World War II; &c. This fever has to break soon, for The Bunker’s health, as well as for that of the Republic. In the meantime, let’s return to our regularly scheduled programming on how and why we kit out our military the way we do.Are our 'boomers' threatened?Whenever the future of the nation’s nuclear triad is up for debate — as it well should be, seeing as we’re being asked to pay nearly $1 trillion for it over the next 10 years — the focus inevitably turns to the survivability of each of its three legs. Those are the Air Force’s bombers and land-based intercontinental missiles, and the Navy’s missile-launching “boomer” submarines. The purported logic is that if China or Russia is stupid enough to launch a nuclear war against us, at least one of those legs will survive to counter with a devastating retaliatory strike. “Mutually Assured Destruction” — aptly, MAD — in Cold War argot.In typically stupid U.S. government style, all three of those legs are becoming old at the same time. That has led some to argue that the ICBM leg is a relic best consigned to history. We could safely jettison it, the thinking goes, given the invulnerability of the sub-based leg. Well, as predictably as the tides, there are now suggestions that the subs and the nuclear-tipped missiles they carry are increasingly vulnerable to detection and attack. Ergo, it’s too risky to give up the triad-and-true three-legged atomic stool.Tye Graham and Peter W. Singer warned October 15 in Defense One that China is developing “an ‘invisible net’ across the western Pacific, a five-layer, seabed-to-space sensor architecture known as the Transparent Ocean strategy that challenges the ability of U.S. and allied submarines (our ‘black sharks’) to maneuver and hide.”“By the 2030s, the world’s oceans may become as transparent to sensors as the skies became to radar in the 20th century,” adds David Stupples, an electronics whiz at the University of London. “With help from AI [artificial intelligence], multiple transmitters and receivers — mounted on ships, aircraft and USVs [uncrewed surface vehicles] — will be able to triangulate the positions of submarines in real time.”We have seen (PDF) this movie before (PDF). Anti-submarine warfare is a nonstop game of cat-and-mouse, where the advantage shifts between the boomers and the would-be boomer killers. We don’t need all of our missile-firing nuclear submarines to survive to let us destroy another nation that may be out to destroy us. Perpetually pouring money into technologies to maintain a slim edge amid atomic warfare is a fool’s errand. And for too long those in charge, and we who have put them there, have been the fools.En-countering drones because that’s where the money isYou know a military technology has ripened when established powers begin spending money to thwart it. The drone revolution has been long in coming — The Bunker recalls reporting on Lockheed’s Aquila spy drone 40 years ago, and General Atomics’ Predator attack drone 24 years ago. But drone-centric warfare has become de rigueur following its explosion in the skies over Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion, compelling even stodgy military outfits like the Pentagon to react.In recent days:The Army has tapped AeroVironment to build the new Freedom Eagle-1 drone-killing interceptor. It’s designed to shred an incoming enemy drone with a 20-pound blast-fragmentation warhead that detonates as it closes in on the drone, so it doesn’t require a direct hit. L3Harris Technologies has mounted its Vampire™ (just in time for Halloween!) drone-destroyer aboard a GM Defense Infantry Squad Vehicle. Yes, it’s a registered trademark, and it stands for Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment. The company is also developing its rapid-deploying “self-contained VAMPIRE-in-a box,” officially dubbed, of course, the CASKET, for Containerized Anti-drone System with Kinetic Effects Turret (Halloween 2.0!). This system kills enemy drones with guided rockets packing roughly 15-pound warheads (PDF). General Dynamics is partnering with Epirus to build the TRX Leonidas, designed to swat dozens of incoming drones with a single high-powered microwave pulse fired from the back of a military vehicle.The good news is that such microwave weapons might be able to down an attacking drone flock with the push of a single button. The bad news is that it would likely fry any civilian wireless systems — like cell phone networks — nearby.But beyond that is a more fundamental concern: The U.S. military likes to buy, build, and wage war with large and costly platforms — think warplanes, tanks, and aircraft carriers, for starters — that are increasingly vulnerable to swarms of far-cheaper drones. The Pentagon has “a lot of high, high-value targets, like F-35. They’ve got nuclear missiles,” Epirus CEO Andy Lowery warns. “They’ve got this, they’ve got that, and they’ve got a big drone problem.”Exquisite weapons, it seems, are in danger of becoming exquisite targets.Over-emphasizing the war-after-nextThe Bunker has seen a blizzard of Pentagon factoids over the years, so he’s pretty inured to strange data points. Yet here’s one that recently caught his eye: The Air Force’s 2026 budget request is seeking $46.4 billion in research and development funds for future weapons, but only $36.2 billion for those being bought today. (“Only,” of course, being a relative term.)“Recent U.S. defense budgets have disproportionately invested (PDF) in long-term developmental programs at the expense of producing sufficient capabilities available for the near term,” Carlton Haelig and Philip Sheers write in an October 21 report for the Center for a New American Security. “As a result, today’s [U.S. military] is smaller, older, and less capable than at any other time in recent history” they say in Stuck in the Cul-de-Sac: How U.S. Defense Spending Prioritizes Innovation over Deterrence.This trend is rooted in the Pentagon’s pathological push for tomorrow’s silver bullets over today’s lead ones. That leads, among other things, to depleted ammo bins, highlighted by the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the world’s most costly military’s inability to dispatch enough munitions to help Kyiv counter Moscow’s invasion. It has also led to procurement disasters like the F-35 fighter being flown by the Air Force, Marines, and Navy, and the Navy’s foundering fleets of Littoral Combat Ships and Zumwalt-class destroyers.Call The Bunker a frugal ol’ Yankee, but it seems you’ve got to be a dunderhead to be spending $1 trillion a year and ending up with a military that’s increasingly “smaller, older, and less capable.”Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently→ Military-Industrial-Inferiority-ComplexThe arsenal of democracy is sputtering, and Christopher Leonard tries to explain why in this October 27 Politico piece.→ Dead ZeppelinRobert Weintraub detailed 1933’s USS Akron airship disaster that doomed U.S. military dirigibles four years before the more-famous Hindenburg conflagration, in The Atavist Magazine August 22.→ Torpedoing the MallGeneral Dynamics’ Electric Boat division, one of two U.S. submarine builders, has bought the one-time retail shopping mecca known as the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, to house up to 5,000 workers. While the governor and the district’s U.S. representative hailed the move, the CT Mirror reported October 23 that not everyone is pleased. “It’s a real kick in the gut,” said the manager of the Toy Vault, one of the dwindling number of stores left in the mall.Thanks for shopping at The Bunker this week. Appreciate it if you’d forward this on to any nat-sec dweebs in your orbit so they can subscribe here.

[Category: Drones, Pentagon budget, The bunker, Submarines]

— The Gaza ceasefire is falling apart

 

at 10/30/25 10:05pm

Even a limited pause in the unspeakable suffering that residents of the Gaza Strip have endured for two years is welcome, and thus it is unsurprising that the deal on Gaza that was reached in early October was widely and mistakenly termed a “peace agreement.” The deal was instead a prisoner exchange and limited ceasefire. It came about because the slaughter and starvation of Gazans had gone so far that Hamas was willing to give up its scant leverage in the form of the remaining Israeli hostages. With their release, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu removed the main immediate domestic source of opposition to his policies, while the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) got a needed break before resuming operations.No agreement appears close to being reached on most of President Trump’s 20-point “peace plan.” Even less attention is being given to the fundamental causes of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian violence, which involve Israel’s territorial aggrandizement and denial of Palestinian self-determination. Now even the ceasefire is falling apart, less than a month after it began. This also is unsurprising, given that Israel has shown no sign of abandoning objectives that involve the subjugation or elimination of Palestinians and that it has pursued largely through armed force. Right-wing extremists in Netanyahu’s government favor a continued war. Netanyahu probably assured the extremists, as he has done in the past, that the ceasefire would not last.In March, Israel ended an earlier ceasefire, thereby violating an agreement reached in January and precluding its full implementation. Despite this record, Trump has directed all his threats against Hamas, saying that Israel “should hit back” if its troops are attacked and that Hamas will be “terminated” if it does not “behave.”That such threats are mostly misdirected is due not only to the record of who has broken ceasefires but also to each side’s incentives. Hamas has nothing to gain and more to lose from a resumption of the slaughter and starvation in Gaza—which, in addition to the suffering of Gazans, erodes its popular support. A principal accusation against Hamas regarding observance of the terms of the ceasefire is its failure to return more bodies of deceased Israeli hostages. Given the rubble that now covers most of the Gaza Strip and thousands of other bodies, Hamas’s explanation of the difficulty of finding and recovering the Israeli bodies, especially without heavy equipment, is entirely plausible.Hamas’s agreement to the most recent prisoner exchange reflected its assessment that whatever leverage the Israeli hostages may have represented was not preventing Israel from continuing its deadly assault. What could not be accomplished with live hostages is unlikely to be achieved with dead ones.This week Israel “enforced” the ceasefire by committing the largest violation yet, resuming airstrikes, with a wave Wednesday that killed 104 Palestinians, 46 of them children. Some 200 Gazans have been killed since the two sides agreed to halt the fighting.Israel says the initial strikes were in response to a shooting incident at Rafah in which one Israeli soldier was killed. Hamas says it was not involved in the shooting. Even under the Israeli version of the event, the kill ratio of “enforcement” to the incident to which the enforcement supposedly was a response was greater than 100-to-one. The present situation of continued killing amid a supposed “peace agreement” is another chapter in the long story of Israel pocketing immediate gains while forever denying Palestinians either peace or human rights by making ostensibly temporary arrangements permanent. With the Camp David Accords of 1978, Israel got its sought-after peace treaty with Egypt while not implementing the portion of the accords involving Palestinian self-determination. With the Oslo Agreement of 1993, Israel got full recognition by the Palestine Liberation Organization, after which the supposedly transitional Palestinian Authority evolved not into a Palestinian state but instead into an auxiliary to the IDF in administering the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Now, Israel has gotten its hostages back while conceding nothing regarding Palestinian rights, not losing the ability to resume military assaults in the Gaza Strip, and not withdrawing from the entire Strip. This time, the supposedly temporary arrangement that may become permanent involves the “yellow line,” behind which Israel has pulled its forces while still occupying slightly more than half of the Gaza Strip. Expect the yellow line to become in the months ahead a more significant boundary than the green line—which was part of the border of Israel before Israel initiated the 1967 war and which Israel has progressively erased through its de facto annexation of the West Bank. Israeli forces already are digging in along the yellow line, establishing fortifications and building infrastructure on its side of the line that will not serve the vast majority of Gazans, who are confined to the other side.The plan of Israel and the Trump administration, as implicitly revealed by Vice President JD Vance and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner during a press conference in Israel, is to set up a contrast between two parts of the Gaza Strip, confining reconstruction to the Israeli-controlled side of the yellow line while leaving most surviving Gazans in misery in a space that is even more crowded than before the Strip was split in two. The point such an arrangement will make is a continuation of Israel’s longtime contention that the problems of Gaza began only after Israel withdrew its settlements in 2005 and that any space in which Hamas has a governing role is sure to be miserable.Ostensibly this arrangement is temporary, until Hamas is disarmed and removed from any governing role. With no incentives for Hamas to essentially abolish itself in this way, the temporary is likely to continue indefinitely.Meanwhile, the Trump administration is having difficulty recruiting contributors to the international security force envisioned in the 20-point plan. Arab states are especially resistant to getting involved in a situation in which they not only may be caught in the middle of an unresolved conflict but may be seen as doing Israel’s dirty work in confronting Hamas. Without such a force in place, Israel is likely to carry out additional “enforcement” actions itself. It is likely to have Trump’s support in doing so, based on his posture regarding the most recent lethal Israeli attacks.The situation in Gaza for the time being, and perhaps for months and beyond, thus continues to be grim. Most Gazans will still live in an open-air prison, only one that is less than half the size of the one they lived in before. Israeli bombs will periodically continue to fall, similar to the “mowing the grass” Israel has performed in Gaza in the past and that it performs today in Lebanon. And true peace for Israelis and Palestinians will be as far away as ever.

[Category: Israel, Enewsletter, Gaza, Hamas, Palestinians, Trump, Netanyahu, Israel-gaza]

— Is this Trump’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment?

 

at 10/30/25 10:20am

Just two weeks ago, President Donald Trump presided over a grandiose ceremony announcing the end of the war in Gaza. Flanked by dozens of world leaders, Trump told reporters that this accomplishment was “3,000 years” in the making. “It’s gonna hold up, too,” he said. “It’s gonna hold up.”All signs now indicate that Trump may have spoken too soon. Despite the ceasefire, Israel has continued to carry out airstrikes in Gaza, launching a few new attacks each day. Then, after an Israeli soldier was killed in Gaza on Tuesday, Israel mounted a bombing campaign that killed at least 104 people, bringing the total death toll since the ceasefire to 211 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel, which framed these attacks as an effort to enforce the ceasefire, says it now plans to return to the truce. Trump bolstered Israel’s framing, throwing his support behind Israel’s decision to “hit back” while telling reporters that “nothing is going to jeopardize” the ceasefire that his administration helped broker.But many outside observers have seen a gap between Trump’s comments and the reality on the ground. As Frank Gardner of the BBC put it, “this is stretching the definition of ‘ceasefire’ beyond credulity.”The Trump administration initially appeared determined to protect the ceasefire. In the first days after the deal, the U.S. dispatched a series of high-level officials to visit Israel and “Bibi-sit” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. But, as ceasefire violations continue to pile up, Trump’s attention appears to have turned elsewhere.This inattention has left Israel an enormous amount of room to operate, and Israeli officials have not hesitated to take advantage of it. Part of the problem stems from Israel’s belief that it is allowed to unilaterally enforce the terms of truces with its enemies. In Lebanon, Israel has carried out thousands of airstrikes on Hezbollah targets despite a supposed ceasefire from last year, killing more than 100 civilians. And Netanyahu appears determined to repeat that formula in Gaza.Israeli columnist Amit Segal, known for his close contacts with Netanyahu and his allies, directly connected Lebanon and Gaza in a recent interview with the New York Times. The ceasefire in Lebanon is “actually enforced, with heavy fire when necessary,” Segal said. “I think this is what Israelis want from Gaza,” he added. “You can attack from the air once you see a tunnel being built.”Israel has also claimed that Hamas is dragging its feet on returning the bodies of deceased hostages, which Israeli officials view as a violation of the ceasefire. Hamas argues that it is struggling to find the bodies, some of which may be buried under rubble or in tunnels.Further contributing to the erosion of the ceasefire is Israel’s support for armed gangs in Gaza, which have clashed with Hamas in recent weeks. The second phase of the ceasefire is meant to include a full disarmament of Hamas, but the militant group continues to argue that it can’t give up its weapons until it subdues these groups and reestablishes order in Gaza. Between this challenge and Israel’s commitment to continuing its attacks, it appears unlikely that the two sides will ever actually reach a deal on a second phase of the truce.In 2003, President George W. Bush stood before a banner that said “Mission Accomplished” and declared that the U.S. had won the war in Iraq after just six weeks of fighting. But it would be more than a decade before the U.S. finally ended its ground operations in the country. Today, it appears that Trump risks having a “Mission Accomplished” moment of his own.

[Category: Qiosk, Ceasefire, Israel, Trump, Netanyahu, Gaza]

— Reckless posturing: Trump says he wants to resume nuke testing

 

at 10/30/25 7:08am

President Donald Trump’s October 29 announcement that the United States will restart nuclear weapons testing after more than 30 years marks a dangerous turning point in international security. The decision lacks technical justification and appears solely driven by geopolitical posturing.Trump’s declaration comes after months of nuclear threats. The president ordered the moving of nuclear submarines to Russia’s shores back in August and again in October 2025. Just hours before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Trump declared that “because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” It is not clear what he means, since other countries are not nuclear testing, but if the U.S. goes forward with it, such testing would end a moratorium that has been in place since 1992. There is also a question about whether he is calling for the resumption of nuclear explosive testing (conducted by the Department of Energy) or testing nuclear-capable weapons (conducted by the Pentagon).Nevertheless the decision would threaten continued strategic stability and risks triggering a disastrous arms race.Responding to RussiaTrump’s announcement follows Russia’s October 21 test of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic. According to Russia’s Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, the missile was airborne for 15 hours and traveled 14,000 kilometers.This context of the Russian test is crucial, but Russia did not detonate a nuclear weapon. This test, like Russia’s the test of the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo a week later, involved nuclear-powered delivery systems, and are considered nuclear-capable, but do not constitute a nuclear weapons test. Russia hasn’t conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1990. While these new delivery systems are worrying, they do not constitute a resumption of nuclear testing of the kind that Trump now proposes.The timing of President Trump’s announcement could not be worse for nuclear arms control. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last agreement limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, expires in February 2026. For over a decade, New START has kept a cap on deployed warheads and compelled both sides to transparency through data exchanges and inspections. If this agreement expires, there would be no binding limits on the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.Russian President Vladimir Putin said in September 2025 that Moscow would be willing to extend New START’s quantitative limits for a year, as long as Washington reciprocates and “does not take steps that undermine or violate the existing balance of deterrence potentials.” President Trump called Putin’s proposal “a good idea.” Now, with this move to resume testing, Trump is threatening the global nuclear balance.Russia will not take this lightly. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned in October 2025 that “if a country with the capability makes the erroneous decision to conduct nuclear tests, and Washington is clearly in our focus, then we will retaliate immediately.” Putin echoed the same sentiment that Moscow would respond to nuclear tests.Signaling to ChinaChina has been building up its nuclear arsenal, doubling from about 300 warheads in 2020 to around 600 in 2025. Beijing’s proposed 15th Five Year Plan links deterrence to “global strategic balance and stability.” However, Beijing hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. China’s 2025 Victory Day parade rolled out five missile systems that could hit the U.S. mainland. American analysts believe China could have over 1,000 warheads by 2030. Still, growing the arsenal and upgrading missiles isn’t the same as explosive nuclear testing.China maintains that it won’t break its moratorium on nuclear tests and supports the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, even though it hasn’t ratified it. In October 2025, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called China a “responsible nuclear-armed state” and reaffirmed the pledge. Now, Trump’s decision puts China in a tight spot: stick to restraint while the U.S. challenges international norms or initiate its own testing program to keep up.The need for restraint and diplomacyTrump’s move looks like another round of “escalate to deescalate”: the idea that ramping up the threat forces rivals to come to the table on U.S. terms. However, resuming nuclear testing isn’t just a bargaining chip. It’s a gamble that risks undoing decades of restraint, and the world could be a lot less stable because of it.Bringing back nuclear weapons testing appears to be aimed at bringing Russia and China to the negotiation table for a trilateral arms control agreement, something Trump keeps pushing for. However, Beijing has argued that its nuclear stockpile is way too small to be part of any trilateral arms control deal.Crucially, this decision runs counter to the principles of restraint and diplomacy. Instead of using America’s overwhelming advantage in conventional military power and nuclear deterrence to push for diplomatic negotiations, the administration seems set on flexing its muscles. A restraint-based foreign policy would instead focus on reducing nuclear dangers through diplomacy, maintaining the taboo against nuclear use, and building verification regimes.The U.S. maintains approximately 5,177 nuclear warheads, second only to Russia’s 5,459. China has just 600. Moreover, American scientists can now use advanced computer modeling to check if the bombs still work without explosive testing. So, there’s no technical reason to start testing again. Restarting nuclear tests now would almost definitely push Russia and China to do the same. Other nuclear-armed states might follow. It may also provide states that aspire to nuclear-armed status justification to develop their own nuclear weapons programs.The test of President Trump’s “escalate to deescalate” approach will come in the months ahead. If Russia and China answer with their own tests, nuclear restraint could go out the window. What follows isn’t just another arms race. It’s something more complex, riskier, and a whole lot more dangerous than the Cold War, a competition that nearly ended humanity.

[Category: Trump, Putin, Xi jinping, Nuclear testing, Nuclear weapons]

— Sudan's bloody war is immune to Trump's art of the deal

 

at 10/29/25 10:05pm

For over 500 days, the world watched as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) methodically strangled the last major army garrison in Darfur through siege, starvation, and indiscriminate bombardment. Now, with the RSF’s declaration of control over the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) Sixth Infantry Division headquarters in El Fasher, that strategy has reached its grim conclusion.The capture of the historic city is a significant military victory for the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, though it is victory that has left at least 1,500 civilians dead, including 100 patients in one hospital. It is one that formalizes the de facto partition of the country, with the RSF consolidating its control over all of Darfur, and governing from its newly established parallel government in Nyala, South Darfur. The SAF-led state meanwhile, clings to the riverine center and the east from Port Sudan.The Trump administration’s own envoy has now publicly voiced this fear, with the president’s senior adviser for Africa Massad Boulos warning against a "de facto situation on the ground similar to what we’ve witnessed in Libya.”The fall of El Fasher came just a day after meetings of the so‑called “Quad,” a diplomatic forum which has brought together the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates in Washington. As those meetings were underway, indirect talks were convened in the U.S. capital between a Sudanese government delegation led by Sudan’s foreign minister, and an RSF delegation headed by Algoney Dagalo, the sanctioned paramilitary’s procurement chief and younger brother of its leader.The Quad’s joint statement on September 12, which paved the way for these developments by proposing a three-month truce and a political process, was hailed as a breakthrough. In reality, it was a paper-thin consensus among states actively fueling opposite sides of the conflict; it was dismissed from the outset by Sudan’s army chief.Into this quagmire has stepped the Trump administration, with Boulos at the helm. Fresh from brokering a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, the administration believes its deal-making playbook can be replicated in Sudan, but this is a profound misreading of the nature of the conflict and the tools available.The Gaza war, for all its horror and complications, presented a more amenable set of circumstances. Significantly, there is near-total alignment between key regional players, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt sharing a common set of objectives, namely, the removal of Hamas, an end to military operations, and a stable “day after” scenario. This consensus enabled a diplomatic press on both sides, with Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt providing invaluable pressure on Hamas, while the U.S. exerted decisive leverage on Israel to accept the deal.This facilitated the brokering of a clear quid pro quo — hostages for a pause in fighting. The immediate humanitarian catastrophe could thus be addressed in the interim, while the thorny questions of a final settlement were pushed to later phases.Sudan presents the inverse of these conditions, with the primary differentiator being that the U.S is not a hegemon here, but a secondary player in a crowded field of ambitious middle powers. The conflict has become a theater for regional and international rivalries, drawing in the Arab members of the Quad, Iran, Turkey, and even Russia and Ukraine (the former as an arms supplier, the latter reportedly with special forces) all playing out within a collapsed state.Given its lack of channels with the warring parties, the Trump administration’s response has been to apply an outside-in model, one it felt was validated by Egypt's energetic role in brokering the recent Gaza ceasefire. President Trump reportedly tasked Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to “lean on” al-Burhan of the SAF, entrusting him to deliver his ally to the Washington talks.The model, however, begins to falter when the patron’s leverage over their client proves incomplete. It breaks down entirely under the weight of a more critical flaw: the active participation of mediators as arms suppliers to the belligerents, a reality the U.S. has so far been unwilling to counter with its own leverage.This hypocrisy is especially glaring in the actions of the UAE. The ink was barely dry on the Quad’s September roadmap when UAE-supplied drones tightened the noose around El Fasher, enabling its eventual fall. Despite its public calls for an "immediate ceasefire" and a future built on "a civilian transition,” the provision of advanced weaponry and foreign fighters, including Colombian mercenaries reportedly hired through UAE-based firms, makes a mockery of the Quad’s own fifth principle, which provides that “an end to external military support is essential to ending the conflict.”On the other side, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have tilted decisively toward the SAF. Their diplomatic backing has been reinforced by Egypt’s reported provision of arms and intelligence to the army. Hemedti himself accused Cairo of carrying out air strikes against RSF positions in central Sudan last year, on the back of army gains which saw the SAF re-take the capital, Khartoum, and surrounding states. This external fragmentation is mirrored by an even more existential divide on the ground. Speaking in Atbara days after meeting with President Sisi, General al-Burhan delivered a fiery speech rejecting any imposed peace. He declared, "There will be no negotiation with any party," adding that the only acceptable process is one that "restores Sudan's dignity... and removes any future possibility of another rebellion." Al-Burhan clearly is not the pliant actor el-Sisi was supposed to deliver, rather he is the leader of a fragile wartime coalition that defines compromise as betrayal.The army’s defiance is rooted in a framework that sees peace as surrender of the RSF. The SAF clings to the May 2023 Jeddah Declaration and its own political roadmap, which was submitted to the U.N., which presuppose the SAF as the guardian of the state and the RSF as a rebellious subordinate. This framework requires the RSF's complete surrender of its territorial gains as the price of admission to any political process, a non-negotiable for a force that has been in control of huge swathes of territory since the war erupted in April 2023.Conversely, the RSF champions the principles of the 2024 Manama Agreement, the product of secret, high-level talks held in Bahrain between the deputies of the warring factions and facilitated by Egyptian and Emirati intelligence. The accord offers the RSF a pathway to political survival while allowing it to claim adherence to international legal norms, a claim it makes even as its forces perpetrate ethnic killings in El Fasher and after the Biden administration formally determined it committed genocide early this year.The agreement demanded the handover of indicted war criminals to the International Criminal Court, a list that includes the deposed president Omar al-Bashir, who remains in SAF custody. It also called for the top-down reconstitution of the army and dismantling of the Islamist networks that have become indispensable to the army's military survival. Predictably, the talks collapsed, with the army leadership disowning the agreement as its terms targeted Islamist hardliners who form the backbone of its war effort.In such a polarized context, a successful mediation strategy requires more than just convening high-level meetings and issuing joint statements. It demands sustained engagement and requires a willingness to exert real pressure on external patrons, as well as a long-term commitment to supporting a genuinely inclusive political process. The Trump administration, with its focus on quick wins and photo-ops, has so far shown little appetite for such an undertaking.

[Category: Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, United arab emirates, Sudan, Enewsletter]

As of 11/9/25 12:12pm. Last new 11/7/25 1:26pm.