(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Duitsland staart na ‘Maagdenburg’ in een zwart gat)

Elon Musk stated this weekend in Welt am Sonntag that Germany stood before the economic and cultural abyss and with that put his finger on the sore spot. Thanks to the attack in Magdeburg, on 20 December, precisely what the German political establishment was trying to prevent happened: migration high on the agenda at the Bundestag elections of 23 February.

The governing parties – the social-democratic SPD and the Greens – and also the liberal FDP, which withdrew its ministers in November, are in a bad position. The Christian Democratic CDU/CSU is positioning itself more sharply, but is struggling with division. The attack is grist to the mill of the anti-migration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Germany stares into a black hole.

With the many Christmas markets in Germany there are many targets for malicious figures. The Saudi citizen Taleb A. raced with a car through the crowd at the Christmas market of Magdeburg. The consequences were terrible: 5 dead and 200 injured, of whom 41 seriously. In the attack by a Syrian knife-wielder in Solingen, at the end of August, three people died. German politics had just recovered from it, hoped for an election battle over economic themes, but the migration problems do not go away. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Magdeburg and was received with booing.

It is remarkable that German media focus not so much on the causes of the attack, but rather on an electoral theme: the ‘political instrumentalization by the far right’. By that the AfD is meant. Most newspapers and weeklies and also the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF immediately directed their reporting at possible ‘disinformation’ about the presumed perpetrator and denounced the ‘far right’.

Alice Weidel, the chair of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, immediately went to Magdeburg and gave a speech on the Domplatz. She demanded ‘echte Aufklärung’, the true facts, because the population’s trust in politics and media is at a low point. Many Germans have the idea that they are being lied to. Weidel drew, according to the police, an audience of 3,500 people, but anyone who saw the footage could conclude that this number was rather stingily calculated.

‘Magdeburg’ could not have hit political Berlin at a worse moment. The government coalition that, because of the party colors red-yellow-green, got the name ‘Ampel’ (traffic light), has fallen apart out of misery. The ‘Ampel’ is without power. The government of Olaf Scholz was actually a continuation of sixteen years of Angela Merkel, but then without Merkel.

It became the continuation of a bankrupt policy in the area of migration and energy and climate policy. Both themes threw the Federal Republic into a real crisis. At the end of June 2024 Germany counted almost 3.5 million ‘refugees’, with various residence titles. In addition there are 1.2 million Ukrainians who are not counted as refugees. With all the consequences thereof for available housing, education, healthcare and safety. As in the Netherlands, but then even worse.

At the same time the energy and climate policy has been causing economic stagnation for five years. ‘Deutsche Wirtschaft am Scheideweg’, concluded the authoritative Ifo Institute in a recent economic forecast. Employers warn of an exodus of companies, a ‘creeping de-industrialization’ because of too-high energy costs. The ‘Standort Deutschland’ is, according to employers, in the mire. Painfully enough it is the former automotive giant Volkswagen that is steadily steering toward the abyss. The closing of the excellent German nuclear power plants turned out to be the greatest stupidity in German postwar history. In the Netherlands the postponement of the construction of new nuclear power plants is an equally great ‘Dummheit’.

Germany is in the whirlpool of both crises: the unease about the excessive increase of asylum seekers and impoverishment through economic stagnation that especially hits less wealthy citizens. The same scenario as the Netherlands.

There are indications of what effect that decline has on the coming Bundestag elections. The mix of various polls gives a picture. The CDU/CSU, led by chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, is polling between 30 and 35 percent. But Merz has to maneuver between the more right-wing partner from Bavaria, the CSU, led by Markus Söder, and the more left-wing minister-president Hendrik Wüst of the most populous federal state North Rhine-Westphalia. Wüst – who grew up in the border region with the Netherlands at the level of Aalten – is not happy with the right-wing course.

Merz, once parliamentary group leader of the CDU, was pushed aside by Merkel in 2002 and left politics. He went to work for the American investment company BlackRock and, according to the weekly Focus, amassed a fortune of around 12 million euros. After Merkel’s departure he returned. The relationship between the two is meanwhile less icy. Merkel even calls Merz ‘lieber Friedrich’.

The SPD is running with the sitting chancellor Scholz, a friendly man but powerless. The SPD is polling between 14 and 18 percent. The party would do much better under the leadership of minister of defense Boris Pistorius. Pistorius is, with his solid, calm and decisive approach, the most popular politician in Germany. But he does not aspire to the chancellorship. So the socialists have to carry on with the burnt-out Scholz.

The Greens are polling between 12 and 14 percent, which, given all the criticism, is not bad. Robert Habeck, the minister of economy and climate, pulls the green cart. Remarkably enough he suggests reopening the German nuclear power plants, but that may be a temporary flare-up until the elections.

The smaller parties dance around the electoral threshold of 5 percent, as does (once again) the liberal FDP, led by Christian Lindner, the resigned minister of Finance. The FDP fluctuates in the polls between 3 and 5 percent. Lindner has to stand out and maintains a discourse under the title: ‘mehr Milei und Musk wagen’, by analogy with the former slogan of SPD chancellor Willy Brandt: ‘mehr Demokratie wagen’. Lindner propagates an ultra-liberal course but showed little of it during his ministership because he was blocked by Scholz.

The Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW) scores in the polls between 5 and 8 percent. Wagenknecht is doing well in East Germany, but has to step it up a notch in the west. Die Linke, the right-hand successor of the former communist party of the GDR, has deflated like a flat tire.

The great unknown: AfD. That party fluctuates in the polls between 18 and 19.5 percent and is especially strong in East Germany. All other parties, except BSW, have excluded the AfD. The AfD sits in a ‘cordon sanitaire’ or rather behind a ‘Brandmauer’. Germans have a strange relationship with ‘walls’.

It is striking that the AfD leadership pushed Alice Weidel (45) forward as chancellor candidate. She is the friendly face of the party, but can also hit back hard. Her partner is a woman, Sarah Bossard. Weidel worked at Goldman Sachs and wrote a dissertation about the Chinese pension system for which she obtained her doctorate cum laude. She is so strong in debate that Habeck does not dare the duel with her. The radical strong man of the AfD, Björn Höcke, remains out of sight. With immigration Weidel has the ‘golden theme’.

There is yet a third factor: Germany is carrying out a reform of the electoral system. The Bundestag, now 736 members, must shrink to 630 members. That exercise is being carried out by henceforth making the ‘Zweitstimme’ central: that vote, cast for a party, determines the number of seats. With the ‘Erststimme’, cast for a person, one delegate is elected in each electoral district, who gets a ‘Direktmandat’. Both votes do not have to be of the same political color and that creates a gap. On that basis the number of delegates was expanded for the party that won too few seats to still get its directly elected candidates – with a Direktmandat – into the Bundestag. The Bundestag got obesity. That is now coming to an end: the so-called Überhang and Ausgleichsmandate are being abolished.

The AfD has few well-known candidates in the electoral districts, but campaigns with a vote-puller, under its own party name, on the desired theme.

Every election has its surprise. On 23 February too?

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Alemania vota y todos tiemblan)

The politicians of the parties of the globalist consensus in the Western democracies are determined to persist with their policies and remedies of the past thirty years in an obstinate attitude of denial in the face of the political earthquake that has first challenged them and today is already leading them slowly toward electoral defeats and marginality. As always, Germany is a case in which everyone must look at themselves, first because of its size and power, and second because it has a European Union tailor-made to impose its policies within it and therefore all its defects, excesses and errors. And the disaster of the European Union over the last five years is clear proof of this.

The rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is so solid and spectacular — its candidate for the chancellery, Alice Weidel, is already the candidate who enjoys the greatest sympathies, above Friedrich Merz of the CDU, Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Robert Habeck of the Greens. Even if the polls are borne out and the winning party is the CDU, its commitment to ally with anyone except the AfD, which occupies the space the CDU abandoned, augurs for the so-called “far right” the enviable role of sole opposition, as Giorgia Meloni was before winning the elections.

In Austria the FPÖ — ally of VOX in the Patriots for Europe group and the party of the same name now presided over by Santiago Abascal — won the elections, but the popular ÖVP, the socialist SPÖ and the liberals of NEOS have been trying since September to form a government against the sole opposition of the FPÖ. Well, in the latest polls this party has risen ten points since the elections and already adds up to more than the People’s Party and Socialists combined. Whether or not the tripartite government of losers is formed in Austria, one can already bet that there will soon be a government presided over by the FPÖ. The Austrian model is not far from the German prospects. Unless they start annulling elections and banning parties with foolish and clumsy pretexts, as some are trying, and not only in Germany. Then democracy is buried and we are talking about other things.

Now the German government has fallen because of its incompetence and because it applied a policy as demented as it was erratic in every field, and made Germany — and, in passing, all of Europe — a poorer, more frightened, more dependent, less free society. And of course much less competitive with the U.S., China and Asia in general, which every day increase their advantage in innovation, technology, competitive power and expansion against a Europe devoted to legislating, regulating and reglamenting everything to the point of asphyxiation, in a way of impeding all dynamism in the national economies that guarantees decadence, weakness and depression.

That is where Germany is now, in that depression which, nevertheless, the once-big parties — today ever more middling and some already very small — seem determined to deepen with the same policy. In Berlin and in Brussels, where the CDU, which commands the European People’s Party with its Ursula von der Leyen in ever more autocratic postures in the European Commission, has once again allied itself with the left and the ecologists, the great authors of the degradation and of the path toward inoperability and bankruptcy. And it has rejected all cooperation with the forces of the emerging right, which week by week keep increasing their weight throughout Europe, a phenomenon that the traditional parties view with panic but without a reasonable response.

The German head of state, Frank Walter Steinmeier, has dissolved the German federal parliament after the fall of the tripartite coalition government of Socialists (SPD), Greens and liberals (FDP), with a failed confidence motion. Thus died the most disastrous government in the history of the Federal Republic since 1949. Although a large part of the ills that have plunged Germany into its worst economic, political and social crisis come from the era of the as-glorified-as-catastrophic Angela Merkel, the disaster of the tandem of the mediocre socialist chancellor Olaf Scholz with the arrogant and ignorant ultra-ecologist green vice-chancellor Robert Habeck is without parallel.

But President Steinmeier thinks that everything must continue on the same course for the good of democracy. Steinmeier — a great friend, by the way, of Vladimir Putin — now celebrates the annulment of the presidential elections in Romania because the winning candidate is attributed with sympathies toward the former friend of Steinmeier, Scholz, Gabriel and so many German socialists that the current German president never hid over twenty years. And the head of state permits himself to speak of interference when Germany has exercised obscene interference in all the European countries and even in the North American elections since 2016. And it has installed puppet governments like the current one in Poland or the one it changed in Italy because it did not like it. Or von der Leyen’s threats to those who do not vote as she wishes, in Italy and other countries. It is not exactly Berlin that ought to bring up interference.

It has been a long time since the long German phase of that illness which is political consensus generated irreparable damage. The Grosse Koalition so praised in other places, the alliance between the traditional social democrats of the SPD and the social democrats converted from the Christian democracy of the CDU — both watched over by that other illness of German idealism turned ecologist fanaticism — in order to govern together or separately but always doing the same thing, has been a time bomb for these parties and for the system itself. The general elections for the new legislature are on 23 February and their mere calling is already cause for alarm. The times have changed radically. As Mikhail Gorbachev said to Erich Honecker, he who does not know how to read the sign of the times will be run over by them. Well, there you have it.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. In Brussel heeft Mark Rutte weer een nieuw masker opgezet)

With his speech on 12 December in Brussels, Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, has put on a new mask, namely that of the hawk. The location was the Concert Noble on the Aarlenstraat, the glittering palace that was once in the hands of the Flemish Farmers’ Union.

The speech sounded alarmist, as if the Russians are on the doorstep. Alarmism was earlier the method in Dutch energy and climate policy, which is currently bogging down in high costs and economic stagnation. Rutte made a Call to Arms amid the glittering mirrors.

The speech was short and powerful, in the American model. The security situation was undoubtedly the worst in his lifetime, said Rutte. He then painted a picture as if all of Europe could be overrun by Russia at any moment. It sounded 1930s-like: Putin was trying to wipe Ukraine off the map. He was trying to push through a fundamental change in the European security architecture that had given us decades of security. He was trying to crush our freedom and way of life. His pattern of aggression was not new. But for too long we did nothing, we did not act. Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014.

In Brussels Rutte said little about the prior history. However: he became prime minister of the Netherlands in 2010 and advocated, just like the German chancellor Merkel at the time, a good relationship with Putin. They kept that up for a long time. For Rutte that relationship only ended with the downing of MH-17 on 17 July 2014. Merkel went on longer with the German Ostpolitik, and only got that thrown back at her after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The cry of the hawk sounds somewhat shrill without self-reflection about that past.

With the new job comes a new mask. The explanation began on 22 November when Rutte paid a visit to the newly re-elected American president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his lavish residence in Florida that has meanwhile become a place of pilgrimage for heads of government, friends and opponents, especially from circles of progressive media who want to cozy up to him. Rutte got his job description worked out in more detail: ‘Europe must pay more to NATO, otherwise….’ There then follow a few reflections that are obvious to some Republicans, such as ‘Europe should just sort it out itself’. In Congress there is, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, a large majority for NATO as a security pact. That enthusiasm is declining, however, if America has to pay the lion’s share.

Thus Rutte was given the clear task: The current norm of 2% is not sufficient. It must go to 3% and preferably even 4%. That is a difficult story for Rutte because Europe worked itself into the economic pit with the energy and climate policy that was once sold to citizens with alarmist stories and scenarios about the end of the world.

According to Trump, that policy is a ‘green scam’ that he himself is going to abolish in America. The voters supported him. Trump is also going to complete the wall between Mexico and the US to stop illegal immigration. Europe, meanwhile, is in the middle of a migration crisis that has produced angry voters and shaky governments.

Germany and France, the two core countries of the EU, have elections in prospect. The German government of Olaf Scholz has fallen and the French prime minister Michel Barnier has been sent home by the French parliament. And then Rutte comes along with his 3% norm; actually the Americans want 4% but at that percentage the new secretary-general applies some fabric softener for now.

He sees no other way out than an alarmist emergency bell: the Russians are coming! Perhaps not in person, but via digital routes to shut down banks, airports, hospitals or ministries. That was his mission on 12 December in Brussels. For the tribute the notables were jostling: the Dutch minister of Defense Ruben Brekelmans, a sympathetic person who, to my knowledge, has no military experience. Fortunately he immediately got support from the, as Trump calls them, ‘television generals’. And of course the highest-ranking Dutch military officer at NATO, admiral Rob Bauer and the current Commander of the Armed Forces (CDS), Onno Eichelsheim.

It is of course a killjoy who nitpicks about that, but the two senior officers served at the time of prime minister Rutte and cooperated, in the best case reluctantly, with the demolition policy that the Rutte cabinet implemented on Defense. Only the then minister of Defense, Hans Hillen (CDA) resisted, but was told by the furious prime minister that he had the choice: comply or resign. The Netherlands sold all its tanks. Among others to Finland, which has recently become a NATO member. So our tanks are, after all, standing at the eastern border of NATO.

For an alarmist message a lot of alarm is needed to create social support. That is being put in position, such as with the announcement that citizens must keep cash at home. In case of digital attacks on banks whereby you cannot withdraw money. Probable culprit: Russia. That is possible, but the strange thing is that beforehand the government advocated precisely the opposite: only card payment was safe.

Queen Máxima was even sent out to promote ‘digital money’, among others in the Third World. If possible a ‘digital euro’ should come that makes cash superfluous, because the latter makes tax evasion easier. In the Netherlands it is now mainly card payment, but in our neighboring countries cash is still king. Now Rutte’s alarm bell is sounding and cash gets a chance again after all. Because… the Russians!

I agree with Rutte that NATO is the cornerstone of our security policy. Is NATO in a bad position? No! After the Russian invasion of Ukraine the number of members has grown to 32, among others with Sweden and Finland. Working in the army is popular again in the Netherlands and socially accepted. The latter has sometimes been different. Our Eastern European allies such as Poland keep strong armies on their feet. With article 5 of the NATO treaty in their pocket, the 3 Baltic states sit protected.

I once worked in the Brussels cabinet of the Estonian EU Commissioner Siim Kallas and visited Estonia. When you are there and look at the map, the world looks geopolitically rather different than in the Netherlands. Good that they are in NATO. Through the NATO enlargement the Baltic Sea has actually become a NATO sea. There now runs an iron curtain from North Norway to the south of the Black Sea. Once the dividing line ran straight through Germany and Berlin.

Furthermore: look at the situation in Ukraine. Putin thought he would be lord and master there in three weeks. That turned out badly. Ukraine stayed on its feet, the Russian army got stuck. There is now a hopeless war of attrition in which Russia has to call on soldiers from North Korea. Russians are actually fleeing mobilization; they do not want to go to the front of the Grim Reaper at all.

With an alarmist discourse Rutte reaps, on defense, the same as Frans Timmermans on climate: disbelief. Fear-mongering works briefly, after that it turns around. Citizens feel deceived and put their foot down at the ballot box. Give an honest picture: substantiate the necessity of a higher defense budget factually and present a plan for, for example, a European arms industry along the Airbus model. Alarmism is a form of panic-mongering.

It is highly peculiar. Rutte preaches a ‘war economy’ and Trump wants to negotiate with Putin and Zelensky about a peace settlement in Ukraine. What would an ordinary citizen in Europe prefer?

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El Europarlamento es Paiporta)

The world is changing at dizzying speed, and those who believed they had everything under control in order to maintain their power and their privileges and to guarantee both their arbitrariness and their impunity have entered into panic. It is happening in the U.S., where on 20 January we will experience a day that will be a milestone in the history of this century, with the solemn triumph of a great national movement of weariness, protest and victory over the leftist elites and their web of interests.

In Europe the same thing is going to happen, and whoever has not seen the results of the Austrian, Czech, Italian, French, Dutch elections and all those that will come has not realized that the People’s Party — principal culprit in diverting the national and conservative vote of the European nations toward a left-wing policy — has entered the last chapter of that betrayal which it has been perpetrating for decades.

It is going to be the last time that the People’s Party succeeds in disguising itself as right-wing in order to guarantee the maintenance of the centralist left-wing and climate-catastrophist policy. It will be von der Leyen’s last embrace of all the losers of the elections in order to continue with the failed policy of the previous five-year term of Green Pact, energy and economic collapse, Agenda 2030, ideological hysteria, incentivized immigrant invasion and war against freedom of expression.

The contradictions are blowing up in their hands, as we were able to explain with satisfaction at a gathering of members of Patriots for Europe held in Madrid. Just as the European Parliament resolution on Venezuela demonstrated that the axis of the popular will of the nations in Europe has shifted strongly to the right, it is clear that the struggle for freedom and prosperity is going to place the People’s Party before an existential dilemma. If the People’s Party already hid when the left and Josep Borrell sabotaged the presence of Jeanine Áñez — constitutional president of Bolivia and a political prisoner who was a finalist for the prize proposed by Vox — then with the Prize to María Corina and Edmundo González it has been seen that the cordon sanitaire with which the waning majority tries to asphyxiate the emerging national forces of Patriots, Conservatives and Sovereigntists will end up strangling them instead. And much before this newly begun legislature ends.

Last Wednesday the People’s Party hid when there occurred the gallant and very effective reaction of the patriots, led by Vox, against the contemptible offense to Venezuela that was the invitation and the presence of Zapatero in the European Parliament. Zapatero had to leave the European Parliament like a scoundrel evicted by dignity. Like Pedro Sánchez from Paiporta.

The PP is in panic but also in permanent turmoil with the contradictions that threaten to drown it daily. It wants to present itself as the defender in Europe of María Corina and Edmundo, but they know that history owes the recognition of the president-elect to the Patriots, not to the PP’s partners, all defenders of the murderer Maduro. And they know that they are partners of the partners of the murderer Maduro and his drug-trafficking gang.

Such being the case, next Tuesday the ceremony for the awarding of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize is held in Strasbourg. It will be received from the hands of President Roberta Metsola by the laureate Edmundo González Urrutia and by Ana Corina Sosa, the daughter of the also-laureate María Corina Machado. Her mother, María Corina, the architect of the miraculous electoral campaign and of the great feat of documenting the humiliating defeat of the dictatorship, cannot attend the Parliament in Strasbourg.

María Corina Machado not only cannot leave Venezuela — she has not been able to for almost a decade by prohibition of the regime. She has had to go underground because she is pursued, to be detained, perhaps tortured or even murdered, by the dictator Nicolás Maduro, today the greatest murderer and torturer in America and head of an immense organization of drug trafficking, kidnappings, money laundering and every kind of organized crime.

Well, to that parliament to which she cannot come and gain access to receive the prize, there did arrive, enter and hold a round table on feminism and equality, with a resplendent invitation from President Metsola of the People’s Party, a socialist known as the principal adviser, defense lawyer and protector of this murderer Maduro who detains and kills María Corina’s advisers. Questions of foreign relations with criminal governments or not, foreign investments and various Delcy operations. We are talking about the contemptible former president of the Spanish government by the grace of 11M, great traitor to Spain for his secret agreements with terrorists and separatists and principal architect of the institutional dismantling of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

That is to say, the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, invites — a week before being unable to award the Sakharov Prize to María Corina — the greatest accomplice of the criminal oppressor who has put a price on María Corina’s head.

Roberta Metsola will perhaps not have realized this grotesque act of hers and will not have lost a minute more over that colossal offense of the European Parliament to all Venezuelans, she who was celebrating in Madrid yesterday the Forum Europa 2024 Prize. They say for the defense of the EU. Certainly not for the defense of the D’Hondt law in force in the Parliament and contemptibly violated by her party, the People’s Party, in complicity with its socialist partners, the Greens, the Macronists and the communists.

Because Metsola not only seems not to understand that one can never invite the accomplice of a murderous dictator, but much less a week before wanting to honor the principal representative of the victims of this murderous dictatorship, along with the president-elect of Venezuela, Edmundo González Urrutia. Metsola, like Núñez Feijóo, like all the People’s Party, seem to believe that world and European politics goes on just as in the nineties and that it is enough for them to make their swaps of trading cards with the Socialists so that “life goes on the same.” Nothing is going to stay the same, and the People’s Party will split between those who choose to take part in the reconquest of a new era of freedom and prosperity in the West, in Europe and all of America — south, center and north — and those who sink with the Socialists into the subculture of rancor and failure.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Trump moet straks om tafel met Erdogan, de grote winnaar in Syrië. Inzet: Wat gebeurt er met de Koerden?)

After the fall of Assad, Syria is back on the drawing board and ‘warlods’ are eyeing their chances for a land grab. After 53 years of rule over Syria the Assad family has packed its bags and Syria is ‘up for grabs’. Of course there is the frequently expressed wish to make Syria a democratically governed country with all rights for the various groups, on the basis of a constitution that holds human rights high. In the Middle East, wishful thinking unfortunately has a short life, and the hidden agendas are doubly thick.

The current situation is in a certain sense reminiscent of the end of the First World War when the British and French thought about the redistribution of the Ottoman Empire. The British politician and diplomatic adviser Mark Sykes (1879-1919) and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot (1870-1951) drew a few lines through the desert sand. A process that was beautifully described in a 2011 book: A line in the sand by James Barr. The colonial powers promised something everywhere: France and Great Britain got protectorates, there would be an Arab state and a Jewish one. The colonial powers served themselves first; the rest remained a question mark.

How will it turn out for Syria these days? A democratic state, a theocratic republic or a vassal of new masters. To be hoped for is naturally the first; to be feared are the other options.

In fact Syria was already divided up by Turkey, Russia and Iran, with president Assad the vassal of the latter two. UN resolution 2254 of 2015 called for Syria, mired in a civil war in what was called the ‘Arab Spring’, to be transformed into a ‘sovereign, independent, territorial and constitutional Republic’. Three contenders put themselves forward to work out that aim further in the ‘Astana process’, named after the capital of Kazakhstan: Turkey, Russia and Iran, under the leadership of UN envoy Staffan de Mistura.

There followed a variant on the ‘lines in the sand’: in 2019 Syria was divided into four ‘de-escalation zones’. The Syria of Assad, Russia and Iran immediately pulled 3 ‘de-escalation zones’ to themselves. For Turkey a zone remained in the northwest, along the Turkish border. There sat the Syrian opposition with around 4 million refugees, plus remnants of jihadi groups, including the Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, which united in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), under the leadership of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

Under his leadership and with the support of Turkey the rebels moved via Aleppo, Hama and Homs toward Damascus. The Assad regime was already greatly weakened because its pillars of support, Russia and Iran, had other worries on their minds. The Russian president Putin is stuck with Ukraine and Iran seems to be becoming a Goliath in the struggle with Israel. The fragile rule in Damascus became vulnerable. Erdogan sensed the moment well and supported HTS in the advance on Damascus, which perhaps proceeded more quickly than he himself had expected.

Erdogan can now work further on a Syria without Assad. His most important strategic target: the Kurds, a people without their own state. In Turkey around 15 million Kurds live, in Iran 8 million, in Iraq 6.5 million. In the latter country the Kurds have a sort of ‘special status’, a form of autonomy. The Kurds, around 75,000 of whom live in the Netherlands, fell by the wayside when the lines were drawn through the sand; they did not fit into the picture of the British and French.

The government in Ankara fears a strengthened Kurdish striving for independence in Turkey, the greatest nightmare for Erdogan. He does not want a Kurdish state in the neighborhood either. The Kurdish ‘autonomy’ in Iraq is bad enough for the Turks. No more of that.

Erdogan therefore does everything to thwart the Kurds. Turkey even set up a ‘Syrian National Army’ (SNA) that runs entirely on Turkish organization and armament. It is more of a mercenary formation. The Kurds, who in Syria are especially strong in the northeast, have set up the ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF), which has the support of the United States. America has even stationed around 900 men in the region to help the Kurds.

That produces peculiar situations. If Turkey fires on the SDF, it fires on an ally of the United States and possibly hits Americans. These are thus two NATO countries in the desert, each on the other side of the line. Turkey has a total troop strength of 735,000 men; more than Germany and France combined. Turkey meets the NATO 2% norm with ease.

With the implosion of the Assad regime, the weakening of Iran and a Russia bogged down in trench warfare, Erdogan holds the strongest cards. From the United States he currently has little trouble, because president Biden is busy sorting out his family affairs and his wife Jill takes the honors, such as the reopening of Notre Dame.

Donald Trump takes office from 20 January 2025 and will, with his staff, have to delve into the dividing lines through the Syrian sand. He will have to sit down at the table with Erdogan: two ‘strong men’ together. Trump’s staff must first get some remedial lessons about Syria and its history.

And Iran? After Assad the biggest loser. The regime of the ayatollahs has lost the bridge to Lebanon, the ‘arc of terror’, and the rule in Tehran is becoming more isolated than ever. Hopefully the beard-men’s regime implodes; that would be an immense ‘game changer’. With the Iranian revolution of 1979 an enormous ordeal began, in Iran and beyond. It had just as disastrous an effect as the Russian revolution of 1917.

What is going to happen now? In 2011 I was among the observers on behalf of the European Parliament at the first free elections in Tunisia, where the ‘Arab Spring’ began. On the day I arrived, the Libyan leader Gaddafi was shot dead. Joy everywhere. A ‘new era’ would dawn. But it turned out differently. When the votes were counted, the fundamentalist Ennahda (Rebirth) turned out to become the largest party. Tunisia is meanwhile governed by a ‘strong man’: Kais Saïed. The ‘spring’ became winter.

In Syria there may come a constitutional consultation with many groupings, and much pressure from outside, with Turkey in the lead. In the ensuing process the most fanatical, radical and best-organized group usually wins. So possibly the ‘liberators’ of HTS. Important breaking point for Turkey: what role will the Kurds be allotted in Syria? Erdogan watches like a grey wolf.

Israel does not wait around. For safety’s sake it took control of some Syrian border areas, including the Syrian part of Mount Hermon. Anyone who has ever been on the Golan Heights sees the strategic importance of such positions. The Syrian fleet was preemptively destroyed, as were Syrian ammunition storage locations. Where in the Netherlands naïveté is experienced as disarming, in the Middle East it is deadly, as Israel found out on 7 October last year.

Of course I hope that Syria becomes a democratic state, but 14 years after the ‘Arab Spring’ not a single democracy has emerged in the Middle East. Israel is the only democracy in the region, not thanks to but in spite of the lines of the duo Sykes-Picot.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Derk Jan Eppink: Dankzij Trump verandert alles op het wereldtoneel. Behalve onze klompendiplomatie)

Donald Trump will not be sworn in for another month and a half, but on the political stage all the players are taking up positions, or shifting them. The White House is a rest home for sitting president Joe Biden, and nothing more has been heard of vice-president Kamala Harris, except that she leaves a hole of millions in an election war chest of around one billion dollars. For the world that is not interesting. Gone is gone. What counts is who is coming.

Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence in Florida, has meanwhile grown into a new center of government, with parties at set times. Trump is meanwhile governing with shots across the bow, the measures he wants to issue on ‘Day One’. He is waiting for the inauguration of 20 January, but is already kicking the ball onto the field. Such as import duties on products from Mexico and Canada, the two neighboring countries with which the US has a free trade agreement: USMCA, the former NAFTA. Trump uses import duties as a means of pressure, also in areas other than trade, such as migration.

During the administration of president Biden around 10 to 12 million migrants entered the US illegally via the southern border. They were subsequently transported to large cities, such as New York. There untenable conditions arose. Under Trump the wall will be completed and Mexico must stop the influx of migrants, the ‘caravans’. If not, import tariffs of 25 percent. The intention had barely been announced before the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum called Mar-a-Lago. According to Trump, Mexico will close the border; according to Sheinbaum, that interpretation was too abrupt but Mexico will take measures. The agenda is set.

With Canada it is the same story, though Trump’s irritation was greater. Canada, under prime minister Justin Trudeau, had lifted the visa requirement for Mexicans, creating a ‘northern route’ for people to travel from Mexico to Canada and thus to the US. The announcement of an import duty led to a shock for Trudeau. He has elections next year and his popularity is waning. Trudeau even traveled to Mar-a-Lago to improve relations with Trump and to avoid import duties. That costs Canadian jobs.

The two never got along. Trump pointed out that Trudeau’s mother was a big fan of Fidel Castro, regularly visited Castro and that Justin may be their son. ‘Look at his hair’. Trudeau just stepped over those remarks; avoiding import duties was of greater importance.

The coming presidency of Trump is also making itself felt indirectly. In Ukraine president Zelensky made a remarkable statement. He said he was prepared to give up the territories occupied by Russia, if Ukraine becomes a member of NATO. Whether that becomes the ‘deal’ is certainly not settled, but Zelensky is preparing for negotiations in which America plays a leading role. Russia too is running into limits and is even calling on support from North Korea, which is supplying 10,000 soldiers. For Moscow, however, the panels are also shifting, because another front is flaring up: Syria.

In the Middle East the balance of power has shifted through the actions of Israel and the stance that Trump will take. He stands fully behind the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was still regularly rapped on the knuckles by Biden. Among Republicans support for Israel is virtually unlimited. For them Israel is ‘us in the Middle East’. In his first term Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The opponents of Israel have been warned.

Israel was contending with three opponents at once: Iran, the architect of terror, with Hezbollah and Hamas as the executors. Israel has considerably weakened all three; Hezbollah and Hamas have been practically decapitated by the elimination of many top figures. The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was even blown up by Israel in the Iranian capital Tehran. An enormous humiliation for the ayatollahs. Moreover, Israel has severely weakened Iran’s positions in Syria. The axis Iran-the Syria of president Assad-Hezbollah-Hamas resembles a bombed-out building.

That has two consequences. Iran sees the arrival of Trump as a reason to change course. Biden tried to cozy up to the ayatollahs, but Trump takes the whip out of the cupboard with numerous sanctions. Meanwhile Iran is beginning to seek support in Europe to talk again about the ‘nuclear deal’. The EU always wants to talk, even when it is utterly pointless, in order to place itself on the chessboard as a ‘diplomatic factor’. The announced Iranian ‘retaliatory actions’ against Israel fail to materialize, because Trump is on his way. Tehran fears that Israel will advocate a daring action with Trump: the blowing up of nuclear installations in Iran. These are hidden deep underground and for an effective bombardment American weapons are needed, plus the president’s assent.

The weakening of the axis Iran-Syria (Assad)-Hezbollah-Hamas led to a vacuum in Syria. In politics a vacuum is usually filled quickly: witness the terror group Tahrir al-Sham – founded in 2017 as a bundling of Salafist jihadists – that launched an offensive against the government army of president Assad to the northwest of the city of Aleppo. Tahrir al-Sham meanwhile controls Aleppo for the most part and receives support from Turkey, which at the same time fights the Kurds, while Assad counts on Russia. In short: the Syrian civil war is flaring up again.

For Russia the presence in Syria is more than symbolic politics, because the port of Tartus is unique for the Russian fleet: a Mediterranean port. It is formally a rented facility for the Russian navy, but de facto a military base and the only one outside the area of the former Soviet Union. As soon as Tahrir al-Sham has taken Aleppo, Tartus could well be the next target.

Moscow has more on its mind than Ukraine. The allies Iran and the Syria of Assad are in a bind, and Tartus is in danger. The ruble is falling because too little hard currency is coming into the country: China pays in ‘yuan’ and India in ‘rupees’. And Trump takes office on 20 January. Quite a to-do list.

The world is reorienting itself. The only country that shot itself in the foot in advance was the Netherlands, by being the first to note that it would arrest Netanyahu if he were to appear here. This as a result of a ruling by the International Criminal Court. Israel has appealed. Most of the Netherlands’ allies took a more cautious stance. The guide nation ‘in splendid isolation’ no longer plays any role in the Middle East, if it ever did. Israel is angry and the US will laugh off the clog diplomacy because the Netherlands has not understood the signs of the times.

Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.