Present at the Destruction
Trump is destroying the foundations of the unprecedented peace, security, and prosperity that the United States essentially built 80 years ago, and has enjoyed ever since.
By Robert Zubrin
Over the past three weeks, President Donald Trump has launched a massive attack on both the Atlantic alliance and the international system of free trade. The harmfulness of these moves cannot be overstated. To understand why, some background is necessary.
The United States has a pretty good track record at winning wars, but there is only one important conflict in recent memory where we also won the peace. Fortunately, this singular victory occurred in conjunction with the largest of them all, World War II.
The postwar peace was the result of an extraordinary work of American statecraft. It occurred because a very serious and smart group of men realized that, if the fruits of the hard won victory were not to turn rotten again, the flaws in the world system that had led to the global conflagration needed to be corrected. So they created two critical institutions.
The first was the Western alliance, later formalized as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide for the collective security of the democratic world, and thereby decisively deter any future totalitarian aggression.
The second was a system of international free trade, formalized as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later renamed the World Trade Organization), to enable global economic recovery and prosperity, thereby ensuring the continued stability and growing strength of the democracies themselves.
These two pillars of the postwar order—NATO and GATT—lay the foundation of a world so much more peaceful and prosperous than the prior chaos that one its leading architects, Truman Administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson, entitled his memoir “Present at the Creation.”
The creators of the postwar order built on the basis of hard won knowledge. Free trade is necessary for economic prosperity for the same reason that long distance transport is. Everyone understands that advances like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad greatly accelerated American economic development by cheapening internal transportation costs.
But imagine that the government put a tax on movement via such systems so that they cost more to deliver goods than previous methods of transportation. In that case, the great canals and railroads would be rendered as useless as if they had been physically destroyed, and US economic development would have been crippled. Similarly, international tariffs do as much harm to the world economy as would be done by sinking all the most advanced merchant ships. Thus it was the trade war, initiated by the US Smoot-Hawley tariff bill and similar measures taken by foreign governments that made the Great Depression great.
The creators learned from this. Similarly, they also learned from the debacle of the 1930s what happens when democracies abandon their collective security arrangements and allow tyrants to start picking off their weaker members one at a time. So they put in place something that was called “the Free World,” within which enterprise and trade could prosper, without fear of either excessive intergovernmental interference or external attack.
The result was the greatest period of economic growth that the world has ever seen. America was transformed from poverty-riddled depression America to suburbia America, with a vast middle class owning homes, cars, and televisions and sending their children to college.
Europe and Japan were completely rebuilt, with South Korea, Taiwan, and numerous other previously undeveloped countries lifting themselves out of hunger and desperation as well. Furthermore, despite the continued existence of two very dangerous totalitarian potential adversaries, the general peace was preserved.
As a result of this profound success, whatever the differences between the two major parties may have been on other issues, these two fundamental bedrock principles underlying the creation and continuation of the post-1945 world order have remained uncontroversial among serious political leaders for the eight decades ever since.
Unfortunately, Trump has now completely abandoned this policy. He is moving to impose massive tariffs against all our trading partners, including not only our geopolitical adversaries but our closest and most economically interdependent allies.
Furthermore, in the past week, he and his spokesmen, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance have made a series of statements indicating that not only are they prepared to abandon support for the defense of Ukraine and pull all US troops out of Europe, but to break the economic sanctions that are limiting the growth of Russian military might.
Even worse, Vance went so far as to offer support for the Moscow-aligned German Alternative fur Deutschland Alt-Right party, and to condemn the Europeans for trying to prevent the takeover of their countries by such Quisling organizations.
Going even beyond this, the administration has gone out of its way to announce its divorce from the broad set of values that bind the civilized West together. Disgracing America, it has proclaimed its desire to implement a program of ethnic cleansing of Gaza, threatened Canada and Denmark with annexations, tried to blackmail Ukraine into surrendering its rare earth mineral reserves, and offered to invite mass murdering war criminal Vladimir Putin to visit America as a special guest of the president the United States.
These moves have been so alarming that as I write these lines, European leaders are moving to hold emergency summits to try to arrange for their common defense in the face of American betrayal.
Americans need to understand: The reason why the United States is a superpower, and not just another big power, is because of our alliances, and in particular our alliance with Europe. Together with Europe we can overmatch the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea Axis. Without it, we cannot.
It is for this reason that the central thrust of Soviet foreign policy from 1945 onward was to break the Atlantic alliance. It is for this reason that the Kremlin now proclaims its goal to be the establishment of a “multi-polar world” in which each of the three major powers gets to dominate its own sphere of influence. Under this plan, the United States would get North America, Russia gets Eurasia “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” China gets East and South Asia, and the rest can be up for grabs.
This is a formula for economic depression and world war.
Is the Pax Americana worth preserving? Do we prefer the world as it has been since 1945 to the world as it was before 1945? Will anyone in the Republican Party still fight to help preserve and improve that world?
Or will their epitaph be “Present at the Destruction?”
Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author. His most recent book, The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet, was published by Diversion Books in 2024. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Kyiv Post.
In the news
(From Claire)
Kremlin to announce ‘Russian Victory Over NATO’ on February 24.
Americans and Russians have been holding secret talks on Ukraine in Switzerland for months.
US refusing to co-sponsor UN motion backing Ukraine ahead of war anniversary, diplomats say.
Trump gave Europe three weeks to sign off on Ukraine “surrender,” says Finish MEP. (I’m not sure this can be taken seriously. He wouldn’t have been in these talks, and it hasn’t been reported by anyone else.)
Where is Trump leading us in his courtship of Russia?
By engaging directly with the US, Russia elevates itself as a power on par with Washington, normalizing relations with Trump’s administration. This pattern has repeated across multiple US administrations, going all the way back to George H.W. Bush. Each time, the US has had to learn the hard way that Russia, under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and now Putin for the past 25 years, is adept at exploiting Western outreach. Trump already attempted a Russia reset once and failed, yet he’s trying again. Historically, the US has not fared well in these engagements. Unlike Trump, who is starting over as if previous negotiations never happened, Russia won’t reset. They will bank every concession already granted and push for more.
Trump is selling Ukraine down the river, and Europe with it. The Trump administration has forced us to face up to harsh new realities and their challenges for Ukraine, Europe, and the world generally:
Hegseth, Vance et. al sent a clear message to Europe that it can no longer rely on the US security backstop. That penny, or dollar cent, dropped, but also with Vance’s speech, I think the euro cent also finally dropped that Europe does not share the same values nor interests as Trump’s USA. …
Putin will surely see Trump as a soft touch, a weak, incompetent negotiator, and will push for maximum concessions from Ukraine, including limitations on its future military capability, regime change in Kyiv, or even constitutional changes in Ukraine to essentially ensure Russia’s veto on its future orientation. That is a recipe for state failure in Ukraine. Herein either Russia will exploit the limitations on Ukraine’s future military capability to invade again, or the lack of security in Ukraine will ensure its failed future economic development, which will mean future economic, social and political weakness, again to be exploited by Putin.
The nightmare now for Europe is Ukraine’s state failure, which would mean tens of millions of Ukrainians refugees moving West (straining the political, social and economic fabric of Europe, further fueling the far right), and Russia subsuming Ukraine’s now enormous and effective military industrial complex. The combination of Russia and Ukraine’s military industrial complexes—first and second now in Europe—would be an absolutely existential threat to Europe.
Tanker carrying Russian oil hit with mysterious blasts, Italian prosecutors open terrorism investigation: The Malta-flagged Seajewel was the latest Russian crude tanker to suffer unexplained explosions around the waterline during transit of the Mediterranean, while anchored in Italy. The Seajewel is owned by a Greek company and was loaded with Russian crude oil for export to Europe in evasion of sanctions on Russia.
“Russia is an existential threat to Europeans,” says Emmanuel Macron. (My translation):
… The mini-summit can, in fact, be perceived as a response to the violent speech against Europe of US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich security conference—a speech that massively destabilized the Europeans.
[A point of convergence] highlighted by Emmanuel Macron was that Ukraine had to be present at all discussions that affected it, and that as soon as the security of Europeans was at stake, the Europeans had to be partners. It is important that no discussion preempt the choices of Ukraine, which is fully sovereign, whether it is the European Union or NATO, and also, the security guarantees to be provided should involve the transatlantic alliance.
“Russia constitutes an existential threat to Europeans given the actions it carries out in various fields … on the border of Poland, the games it plays with migration, cyber attacks against almost all the countries of Europe, attacks in certain countries—which the British have experienced—by information and manipulation of daily information in all European countries, by the manipulation of electoral processes in Romania, to name just one, by explicit threats in its nuclear doctrine. And Russia’s considerable ongoing rearmament must lead Europeans to react regardless of what is happening elsewhere and American positions.”
Untested Trump team given lessons in diplomacy by elite Kremlin negotiators:
The first-ever formal face-to-face talks between top Kremlin officials and US President Donald Trump’s negotiating team in Saudi Arabia ended in a diplomatic defeat for Washington as Russia doubled down on demands that amounted to a call for Ukrainian capitulation to end its three-year-old full-scale invasion while flatly rejecting mild concessions the US asked for.
During the talks, US delegation leader Secretary of State Marc Rubio proposed a moratorium on civilian energy grid strikes by both Russia and Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in comments following the meetings said the US suggestion was unnecessary as Russia’s armed forces hit only Ukrainian military targets and have never attacked Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Less than 12 hours after the talks had ended, Russia launched almost 150 kamikaze drones aimed at Ukraine’s energy grid.
Disbelief and anger: Ukrainians react to Trump’s ‘‘absurdity.” Trump on Tuesday appeared to blame Kyiv for the fact that Russia invaded it nearly three years ago, sparking the deadliest war in Europe since the end of World War II.
… Wearing a white hat and fur coat, 65-year-old Svitlana was also in disbelief that the leader of the United States could fall for “Moscow’s narratives.” “Talking to this scumbag Putin... A thief, Hitler of the 21st century— I think it’s very, very wrong,” she said. Trump’s statements looked as though they were delivered straight out “of the Moscow Kremlin,” Svitlana said. “It’s as if they are writing it all for him ... He is under the influence.”
Zelensky is not “important” to negotiations on ending war, Trump says.
Vance floats US troop withdrawal from Germany over free-speech concerns.
Justice Department to drop discrimination case against Elon Musk’s SpaceX
… We are about to start living in a world where a war criminal orders the execution of unarmed prisoners of war kneeling before their killers and then proudly spreads footage of the massacre through his own propaganda channels. A world where people are beheaded or bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers, where children’s oncology hospitals are bombed, where power stations are destroyed in the dead of winter to freeze millions of civilians to death, where a drone packed with explosives is deliberately aimed at the sarcophagus of a nuclear power plant during the most critical security conference. And no one is held accountable for any of it.
Yes, the disgust you feel reading these lines is absolutely justified—and to Ukrainians, it has long been familiar. From now on, this feeling will slowly become a part of your daily life, too. Because even a so-called peace agreement—however humiliating — will not deliver what matters most: the punishment of war criminals and the condemnation of their atrocities.
Instead of facing prison or isolation, the aggressor will take a seat at prestigious international gatherings, dictating his own terms. A murderer whose crimes have been captured on camera millions of times in the most documented war in human history will not stand trial but will instead laugh in our faces. And it makes you want to scream: This cannot be!
This is exactly what we felt three years ago, in February 2022. We wanted to shake the world awake, to scream until someone listened. The West sympathized with us, helped us, but refused to acknowledge the truth: this war was against them, too. Today, that terrifying realization is finally dawning on Europeans, as it becomes clear to all that if war comes, America will not fight for Europe, and NATO no longer works.
Tragically, it wasn’t Vladimir Putin’s crimes or Ukraine’s warnings that woke Europe up—it was Donald Trump. This geopolitical shift—what is, in reality, America’s betrayal—has forced Europe to face a conclusion that was already obvious three years ago.
The reason for the global chaos we now see—where Trump openly speaks about occupying Greenland and makes it clear that Europe is no longer under America’s security umbrella—is painfully simple. It is the unpunished evil of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. That is what ultimately shattered the world order and erased all rules.
… This is now a world of mockery, humiliation, and the brazen trampling of not just political norms but the moral and ethical values that define Europe itself. The evil genie has been let out of the bottle, and with each passing day, it grows stronger, bolder, more aggressive. Does anyone still doubt that if it is not stopped, not punished, it will attack again after some so-called peace agreement? And next time, it likely won’t be just Ukraine.
He’s not kidding about this. He’s preparing to invade Canada.
Nearly a third of Canadians view US as an “enemy country.”
63 percent of Ukrainians approve of Zelensky as president
Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudonyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. … The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.
A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department. But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.
… Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by US and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.
Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing US weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. …
Trump hands the world to China. Xi Jinping could only have dreamed of such rapid destruction of American power:
American global leadership is ending. Not because of “American decline,” or the emergence of a multipolar world, or the actions of U.S. adversaries. It’s ending because President Donald Trump wants to end it.
Just about all of Trump’s policies, both at home and abroad, are rapidly destroying the foundation of American power. The main beneficiary will be the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has been planning for the moment when Washington stumbles and allows China to replace the United States as the world’s superpower. That Trump is willing to hand the world over to Xi—or doesn’t even realize that’s what he’s doing—shows that his myopic worldview, admiration for autocrats, and self-obsession are combining to threaten international security and, with it, America’s future.
Incompetence leavened with malignity:
… The Trump administration seems not to realize that the Russians are the ones in trouble, not us; that they are the ones with a faltering economy, a stalemated war, and more than three-quarters of a million casualties. Most important, the administration refuses to see Russia under President Vladimir Putin for what it is: a predatory dictatorship bent on rebuilding an empire on the bodies of its former subjects. …
The negotiators displayed mainly incompetence, as well as cringeworthy servility to their master in the White House. Trump’s part, though, was pure malignity. Shortly after the meeting ended, he criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, lied about the latter’s polling numbers, and said, in a particularly callous remark, that Ukraine had had a seat at the table for three years. How being invaded and having your civilians tortured, raped, and slaughtered counts as a seat at the table is beyond understanding.
,,, The Trump administration seems to have some notion of the conduct of foreign affairs as being a set of deals, chiefly with America’s enemies, while administering kicks to America’s friends and allies. As a vision it is, in some reasonable sense of the word, evil. It is also appallingly dumb, and one wonders that intelligent men such as Rubio, Waltz, and Witkoff can bring themselves to articulate the demands that it implies.
Like so much of the Trump administration’s program, this will ultimately end in real disaster for others—quite possibly including the overrunning of Ukraine—and in political disaster for itself. … At a deeper level, these policies will give aid and comfort to America’s enemies, which will never be partners; shatter the alliances that have made us strong; induce fearful former allies to align with the Chinese and develop nuclear weapons; and demoralize the men and women who have to implement policy.
… In such a situation, the least of our concerns may be the souls of those who have chosen sycophancy despite their better selves and previous service. But they will pay a price. I knew a few of those who served in Trump’s previous term. Many of them ended up psychologically damaged, people who had no doubt once believed in integrity and an idea of America and then sacrificed them. History will treat them with contempt, and more important, they will never be whole again.
An interview with Former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Richard Shirref:
Shirref: “Trump is parroting Putin’s line, and one has to ask, “What on Earth has Putin got on Trump for the president of the United States to be, frankly, in bed with an indicted war criminal who has committed the most appalling atrocities in in Ukraine?”
Interviewer: I know you say, “What kind of kompromat do the Russians have on him … Is it possible he’s saying these things for his political base? Or even that he’s trying to shape the negotiations? Is it possible that it’s not what he says, but what he does?
Shirref: If he’s trying to shape the negotiations he's not going the right way about it, because he’s giving Russia everything that Russia wants. … They could not be more delighted in Moscow. Every banner headline is absolutely thrilled, and Putin is now rubbing his hands with glee and toasting Trump with vodka. …
Interviewer: What do you see as the future of NATO, at the moment, at this stage?
Shirref: Well, it’s difficult to see, because the Americans have effectively driven a coach and horses through Article Five … This week is a different world from last week. Last week, there was still a world where there was a sense of the Pax Americana. Now the Pax Americana is firmly finished.
It’s one thing to hear it from newscasters and another to hear it from the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. No enemy could have done more harm to us in the past few weeks than we’ve done to our ourselves.
As Trump shuts down USAID missions, officials warn Ebola outbreak in Uganda will spread:
[H]ealth officials in the US fear the shutdown of USAID missions may have disastrous results, as the stalling of foreign aid has forced delays in what they said was the “chaotic” early US response to Uganda’s swelling Ebola outbreak. … More than a dozen Americans in Uganda are also among those so far known to have been exposed … There is no vaccine or treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration for Sudan virus. This Ebola strain has been fatal in at least 41 percent of reported cases during past outbreaks …
The pause has resulted in understaffed contact tracing and screening of departing international travelers in Uganda, one US official said, since many experts funded by the US around the region have been laid off or ordered to stop work. … “It puts the world at risk,” said one USAID official in a message. “I’m not an alarmist, but this is very bad.”
President Trump has also ordered the US withdrawal from the WHO, which was paired with a demand for all U.S. government staff to immediately sever collaboration with the UN agency that is helping to coordinate the response within the country. A US health official said that CDC usually works closely with the WHO and a country’s health authorities, often meeting daily to coordinate the response to outbreaks like this.
The growing outbreak in Uganda has also left some state and local health authorities befuddled with the “radio silence” from the CDC … In past outbreaks, CDC officials were quick to start ramping up preparedness for the possibility of cases spreading to the US. External meetings and information sharing that health authorities usually rely on to communicate with CDC officials were canceled amid the communications “pause” across the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. … The CDC was able to publish a travel alert on Wednesday about travel to Uganda, but it left out links and information from the WHO’s updates about the outbreak.
Falsehoods fuel the right-wing crusade against USAID:
The video falsely claiming that the United States Agency for International Development paid Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine appeared to be a clip from E!News, though it never appeared on the entertainment channel. … Within hours it drew the attention of Elon Musk, who reposted it. So did President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.
… The dismantling of [USAID] has been accompanied by a torrent of anger online from right-wing influencers and accounts that are promoting false claims and conspiratorial thinking. … The flurry of attacks also underscored once again how much Republican views have increasingly converged with propaganda emanating from the Kremlin or with narratives aligned with its international goals, especially on Mr. Musk’s platform.
The false video about the celebrities appeared to be the work of an influence campaign that has produced dozens of similar fakes about Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. “Russian anti-Ukraine propaganda has thoroughly infiltrated certain communities on X,” said Darren L. Linvill, a researcher there, who traced the spread of the faked clip from its origin on X through a network of accounts that has distributed Russian fakes before.
… By Wednesday afternoon, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister and authoritarian leader, echoed the claims swirling in the United States, writing on X that payments to Politico somehow financed “basically the entire left-wing media in Hungary”—a viral post that received more than 26 million views. Soon the idea spread to the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump used his Truth Social account to criticize the government’s news subscriptions—payments that had occurred during his first presidency as well—as “payoffs” for “creating good stories about the Democrats.” “This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history!” he wrote in all-caps on Thursday morning as other users demanded criminal investigations.
… For Russia and China, the American conservative uproar over USAID has been met with startled glee. … Chen Weihua, a prominent bureau chief and columnist for the state news organization China Daily, cited reports about the agency’s funding as vindication for China’s previous claims. He suggested that the BBC’s reporters in China were “all bought” by the Central Intelligence Agency and the British secret service, MI6. “If you have questions why BBC reporters in China keep smearing China all these years and talking BS, you might find answers now,” he wrote on X. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia banned USAID grants in 2012 and expelled the agency’s workers, accusing the United States of funding opponents of his rule.
[The fake video] appeared to be the work of an influence campaign known to researchers as Operation Overload or Matryoshka, after the Russian nesting dolls, according to Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub. … After the video appeared on the X account, articles about its claims appeared on the sites of at least two Russian news organizations, Tsargrad and Pravda. The video was picked up by a number of accounts that have previously shared Russian disinformation, but soon expanded … By Thursday, users on TikTok and Mr. Trump’s Truth Social platform had shared the video as commenters expressed outrage and called for USAID to be eliminated.
Flights diverted off Australia as Chinese navy conducts “show of force.” The Chinese exercises also are occurring during a visit to Australia by the top US commander in the region, who recently criticized China and its increasingly “sophisticated” naval exercises in the Pacific.
This is what happens when the DOGE guys take over. Inside the federal agencies where Elon Musk’s people have seized control, fear and uncertainty reign:
A terrible milestone in the American presidency. Trump switches sides in the war for freedom.
Barred from running for a third term, Trump keeps talking about it
The West is over. In the Trumpian era, Europe is on its own. Trump and JD Vance are clear: the US is no longer an ally, but an antagonist to democratic values.
In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear:
In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard—by means legal or otherwise—to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.
… As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk.
… “The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” said a US official closely watching DOGE activity. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The Swedish authorities have launched a sabotage investigation after an undersea telecoms cable was damaged in the Baltic Sea, the latest in a string of cases of damaged undersea infrastructure in the region connected to hybrid attacks and Russia’s shadow fleet
Hamas butchered our children. Now their days are numbered:
On Thursday, Israel faced another horrifying chapter in the ongoing hostage crisis. After 503 days in captivity, the remains of Oded Lifshitz, Ariel Bibas, and Kfir Bibas were returned, alongside a fourth body that was not that of Shiri Bibas. The fate of Shiri remains unknown, leaving her family and the entire country in a state of anguish and rage. But this was not just another tragedy—this was barbarism, a war crime of the worst kind.
Forensic reports have now confirmed what we all feared: Hamas did not just abduct these children; they brutally murdered them in captivity in November 2023. Kfir Bibas was just ten months old. Ariel was four. “The two children were brutally murdered in captivity by terrorists in November 2023, just a month after their abduction,” the forensic reports stated. The terrorists who carried out these acts are monsters, devoid of any human decency. This was not collateral damage, not an unfortunate consequence of war—this was intentional, cold-blooded murder. … They paraded our children’s remains like trophies, and then, as if to add another layer of horror, they failed to even return their mother’s body. “Instead of returning Shiri, the mother of Kfir and Ariel, Hamas returned an unidentified body, as if it were a worthless shipment,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations wrote on X. This is a new low, an evil and cruelty with no parallel.
Israel must respond with the full force of its power. This is no longer just about retrieving hostages; this is about eradicating a force of pure evil. There is no justification, no rationalization, and no compromise to be made with those who revel in the suffering of innocents.
Another Nazi salute. It’s becoming a habit.
 | A guest post by
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I would just note that the unprecedented peace and prosperity that Trump is alleged to be destroying have been dwindling away for some twenty years now. He may, perhaps, be their gravedigger, but plenty of pallbearers have have carried those corpses to the cemetery.
What, for instance, did Obama do when V. Putin swallowed up Crimea? He tut-tutted and wrung his hands. What did Biden do when Russia invaded Ukraine proper? He talked tough, then hemmed and hawed and second-guessed himself and dribbled out just enough aid to Ukraine to prolong the war. Oh, and Obama abandoned Iraq. Biden abandoned Afghanistan. And must I really get into the Biden Administration’s utterly despicable behavior over 10/7 and the Gaza War?
Trump’s responsible for what he does, going forward. But let’s not forget who set the table for the world situation he inherited: a cabal of utterly incompetent fools.
“The United States has a pretty good track record at winning wars…” (Robert Zubrin)
No we don’t. The United States hasn’t won a shooting war in 80 years. Maybe what Mr. Zubrin had in mind was our victory in extracting a hundred or so medical students from Granada or arresting Manuel Noriega in Panama. Or maybe what Mr. Zubrin has in mind is redefining the twin defeats in Iraq as successes. If he does, his opinion is a minority opinion. Most intelligent Americans understand that American policy in Iraq was a catastrophic failure engineered by two morons with the surname Bush.
Like Claire Berlinski, Mr. Zubrin fails to understand why the Pax Americana or the rules based liberal order is collapsing before our eyes. The authors of its demise are all Europeans not Americans.
It’s our European “allies” who are so pathetically weak that they can’t even measure up as bit players in sustaining the liberal world order. They expect the United States to single-handedly bear every burden and spare no expense in sustaining that order while they live the life of languid sybarites calling balls and strikes from the sidelines. Yet our European “friends” like Claire and Mr. Zubrin can’t understand why millions of Americans are fed-up with Europe.
The American Vice President was right; there is no liberal world order when key allies who are supposed to help sustain it arrest citizens for praying silently in the vicinity of abortion clinics. There is no liberal world order when those same key allies imprison citizens for tweets the government doesn’t like. Shouldn’t it be obvious that the liberal world order is fraying when European factotums cancel elections they’re afraid they might lose? Can we celebrate a liberal world order when secular societies that were once Christian look down on all religions but happily tolerate Islamic extremism and too often, Jew-hated? As the Vice President aptly stated, it hardly seems like a defense of a liberal world order when self-righteous defenders of that order welcome tens of millions of immigrants from nations that despise all of the most important facets of liberalism.
Can anyone think of a bigger joke than the idea that the European nations might come together to defend the liberal world order on their own? As the Vice President mentioned, Europe’s big three, the UK, France and Germany, are increasingly illiberal. Their illiberality is approaching that of Claire’s favorite bagaboo, Hungary; in fact, they may have surpassed it.
Even if Europe wasn’t increasingly illiberal, how are Europe’s “big” three supposed to police the liberal world order? The UK’s battleships won’t float. The French Army hightailed it out of Africa like scared little school girls. Germany is so hopeless and pathetic that it has nothing to contribute. Frau Merkel’s famous claim, “yes we can” seems like a cruel joke. A better credo for the Germans would be “no we can’t.”
In light of Europe’s increasingly illiberality and the disastrous condition of its military readiness, why shouldn’t the United States look to its own affairs? Focusing on our hemisphere seems far more likely to enhance American power that a vain attempt at resurrecting the European corpse.