(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. The Seriousness of Unrestricted Warfare)

As former Representative Mike Gallagher writes October 7th in the Wall Street Journal, America must better understand our enemies. The U.S. cannot bribe them to be our friends. North Korea will starve and imprison its people while spending billions on nuclear arms. The Iranian mullahs will similarly murder and imprison their own people while maintaining a multibillion dollar terror network. Détente provided the Soviets billions in liberalized trade benefits even while Moscow “doubled down” on global revolution in El Salvador, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Indochina.

Similarly, the U.S. and its allies gave market access to China thinking this would normalize the CCP.

But all we have done is use American consumption to deliver trillions in intellectual property, technology, and capital to the CCP with which to make “unrestricted warfare” on us.

Now Gallagher concludes that deterrence may yet keep China at bay but as the former head of the House committee examining the Chinese threat explains China is preparing for war, across the board. The U.S. needs to take this threat seriously.

Critical to this threat is the buildup of Chinese nuclear arms. For decades China watchers on the left reassured us that China’s economic growth was nothing more than a “peaceful rise” and its nuclear plans were benign. When three years ago the then commander of the United States Strategic Command laid out the “breath taking” Chinese nuclear expansion, the critics claimed the Admiral was exaggerating to justify building a more modern U.S. nuclear force.

Many on the right spend their day funding the Chinese expansion through raising trillions in investment capital from the United States and pocketing millions in fees.

But in return, the CCP facilitates the massive export of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the U.S. with its criminal Triads in American cities nationwide.

The CCP has what are termed “police stations” in the United States to muscle Chinese nationals, including tens of thousands of military age men who were admitted across our southern border with no vetting.

China has a near monopoly on both the mining and processing of multiple dozens of critical minerals the U.S. needs for its industry, grid, and military weapons, although just beneath our feet the United States has in great abundance–$12 trillion– these same minerals which we have deliberately refused to develop or map or mine or process.

Now it is also true China is losing millions of people as its birth rate has plummeted. Many of its towns and small cities are empty of people and dilapidated. Internally it has tens of trillions of debt it cannot pay. It forcefully harvests organs from its Fulan Gong prisoners to provide for its gerontocracy of big shot party members. But without pause the nation is preparing for war as its modernized military parallels stockpiling of raw materials as its energy and food deficit remain its Achilles heel. These growing weaknesses may make China more not less reckless.

What then what purpose does China’s nuclear weapons serve? They cannot be used in warfare is the refrain from many. But China’s nuclear weapons will reach at least 1500 over the next few years, much faster than previously estimated. And such weaponry serves as a security umbrella under which China believes it can act with impunity. Similarly, it uses economic leverage on trade, rare earths, and other minerals to intimidate U.S. law makers and security leaders to stand down and restrain our policy options to deal with China. Its military might, especially nuclear weapons, serves to bully and coerce America into doing the bidding of the CCP, a point unanimously underscored by the conclusions of the Strategic Posture Commission report of October 2023.

A Ploughshares analysis some years ago ridiculed even the idea of China adding to its military might in order to wage war against the United States. After all it was argued China wants to sell America cell phones not drop bombs on its cities. That is true for now. But China is making war against America in other forms. The current $600 billion trade deficit and capital flows to China help build China’s military. In fact, the previous administration supported buying Chinese company stocks with U.S. Treasuries that in part funded the retirement of America’s military and civilian government workforce. SEC requirements that Wall Street reveal the particular Chinese companies held within mutual funds have been ignored. And while previous policy forced U.S. companies to make fossil energy scarce, expensive and hard to produce in search of global climate change nirvana, at the same time, China’s consumption of coal will according to former Secretary of State Kerry make it impossible to achieve any global carbon or greenhouse gas limits. And China owes the U.S. over a trillion dollars in sovereign debt, a debt on which they have illegally reneged.

Unless deterred, China will on a day of its choosing attack Taiwan and United States interests in the Western Pacific. They will also use EMP and cyber to attack our electric grid. They will simply cut off our mineral raw materials supply. They will seek to crash the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. From our own farmland, they will unleash a biological attack on our agriculture. They will quietly get out of our equity markets. And commit surreptitious terror attacks against our 35 critical infrastructure nodes—railroad crossings, pipelines, and key bridges– previously identified by the Gilmore Commission without which we cannot run our economy.

The U.S. needs across the board deterrence to fight unrestricted warfare. The U.S. cannot have Wall Street send trillions to China to build their “military rise” and expect it to be “peaceful.” The United States must either take CCP threat seriously or suffer the consequences as we did in WWII and on 9-11.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. The New Geopolitical Currency: Metals and Minerals Are the Next Oil)

The next great commodities race isn’t about oil. It’s about copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earths — the metals and critical minerals that underpin the global energy transition.

A quiet but decisive shift is underway as major trading houses are repositioning themselves around the resources that will fuel electrification, renewable energy, and advanced technologies around the globe. This is more than a market trend. It’s a geopolitical realignment.

For over a century, oil defined power. Control over production and shipping routes shaped alliances, foreign policy, and, often, the fate of nations.

Today, as the world, facing increasing uncertainty about its environmental future, accelerates toward decarbonization, those old levers are losing their grip. Critical minerals are emerging as the new strategic assets: finite, concentrated in a handful of regions, and difficult to replace. And China, through years of strategic investment, has built a commanding lead in their mining and processing.

Now, Washington is trying to catch up, declaring critical minerals and rare earths a national security priority and mobilizing financing to build alternative supply chains, which were exposed as highly vulnerable in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Africa — home to nearly a third of global reserves — has emerged as a focal point for this effort. And commodity traders, known for their resilience and adaptability, are moving aggressively to seize this opportunity.

Vitol, a major Dutch multinational energy and commodities trading company which is considered the world’s largest independent energy trader, offers one of the clearest examples of this. After a long hiatus, spanning over a decade, Vitol has reentered the metals market, rebuilding its trading desk and is hiring top talent to trade copper, nickel and aluminum.

Chief Executive Russell Hardy has said that metals are key to understanding the next industrial cycle. Just as the oil and gas boom minted a new generation of millionaires and billionaires, the rare earths boom is poised to do the same. Vitol’s pivot isn’t a hedge; it’s a statement about where the future lies.But they aren’t the only example of companies demonstrating this strategic shift.

Gunvor, the Swiss trading giant long dominant in oil trading is carving out a new presence in physical gold and silver with operations in London and Singapore.

Gold prices have nearly doubled since 2022, and investor appetite remains strong. Gunvor is leveraging long-standing African relationships to build a profitable foothold in precious metals. This isn’t just diversification; it’s a calculated move into sectors where market dynamics and geopolitical leverage overlap.And then there’s BGN International, a Geneva-based trading and investment group with key hubs in Dubai, Singapore and Texas. A quieter, but increasingly ambitious player, BGN is pursuing a similar path.

Traditionally focused on energy and petrochemicals, the company has deliberately expanded into metals and critical minerals.

In September, the company announced the launch of a Geneva-based metals trading desk, accompanied by a new Asia hub in Singapore led by former Squarepoint trader Daniel Yu. This expansion places BGN squarely in the competition for base metals and battery materials — resources that will drive the next phase of industrial growth.Around the same time, BGN rolled out a Texas-based physical trading platform to market African resources in line with American standards.

These steps position the company to compete in the fast-evolving trade of base metals (copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, and lead) and battery materials (which include lithium, cobalt, nickel graphite, manganese and rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium).

BGN has also been reinforcing its operational backbone. From its Dubai base, it has expanded trading capacity and recruited senior talent from firms such as Gunvor and LITASCO (Lukoil International Trading and Supply Company) — the Geneva-based trading arm of Russia’s Lukoil, handling the group’s global oil and energy trading operations — to strengthen its teams in Geneva and the Gulf.

Earlier this year, it signed a 10-year AED 660 million ($180 million) LPG (liquified petroleum gas) charter agreement with Al Seer Marine, adding dual-fuel Very Large Gas Carriers to its fleet.

The implications of these moves are significant. China’s dominance in refining has created a choke point with global consequences.

By building alternative supply chains and trading hubs anchored in Western legal and financial systems, companies like Vitol, Gunvor, and BGN are redrawing the map of influence. BGN’s mix of strategic geography, commercial ambition, and African partnerships points to its emergence as a serious mid-tier player in the minerals space, capable of bridging state power and market demand.

That said, challenges remain. Mining regions are often politically unstable. Processing infrastructure requires immense capital. And building a transparent, traceable supply chains is complex.But the incentives are strong: demand is rising, prices are climbing, and governments are aligning policy to secure supply.

Some major commodity traders and mining companies are even experimenting with the implementation of blockchain and digital ledger technologies to achieve this, although it’s not as the core driver of their current metals and minerals strategies. Trading houses that once made fortunes on hydrocarbons now see metals and minerals as the future core of their business.A new commodities era is undoubtedly taking shape.

From Geneva to Houston, Dubai to Singapore, the world’s most powerful traders are racing to secure the resources that will drive the future of electrification and technological progress. In the twentieth century, oil was power. In the twenty-first, it will be rare earth minerals.

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow 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. Mucho más que un Nobel)

Let nobody be surprised at the displeasure felt by all the most prominent vermin of narco-socialism and organised crime at the news that the Nobel Prize has been awarded to María Corina Machado. That the communists, Islamists and depraved terrorist sympathisers of the far left should bark like Pablo Iglesias is normal. They are watching the entire narrative of their criminal ideology collapse. More serious is the case of Pedro Sánchez’s government, in which throughout the whole of yesterday nobody dared congratulate the laureate. Lest Nicolás Maduro or Diosdado Cabello, both in a very foul mood yesterday, should lament out loud having given millions to the Socialist International in order to put Sánchez at its head. Or worse still, that in a great rage they should announce they are suspending all business with so many socialists who have grown rich.

A very uncomfortable situation for a Sánchez who has made a fool of himself in the Middle East, is totally isolated within NATO and may now be on the threshold of all the documents proving the misdeeds committed coming out in Venezuela. For Sánchez, the criminal threat posed by the massive corruption surrounding him in Spain may soon look like a joke compared with what may be building up for them beyond our borders. Pedro Sánchez and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero head a long list of friends and partners of the Venezuelan criminals of the Cartel de los Soles who are now going to go under. And it is going to be difficult for them not to share the consequences as they once shared the business.

This really is a low blow for them. The last thing they expected was this boost of legitimacy for those who are determined to win freedom for Venezuela and therefore to put an end to the criminal organisation of the Spanish government’s cronies.

The Nobel Peace Prize, that award which the European social-democratic forces believed they had so well trained, is suddenly given to MCM, a heroine who has made herself the worst enemy of the international criminal gang of Miraflores which has been buying up social democrats wherever it finds them for the past 25 years. They kidnapped Venezuela a quarter of a century ago under a swinish and cynical soldier named Hugo Chávez Frías. And since then, with his successor Nicolás Maduro and under the tutelage of the Cuban dictatorship, it has developed a State wholly given over to the exploitation of every imaginable field of transnational organised crime, always under the cover of the ideological banner of the left.

This ideological banner is what has provided the criminal organisations in Maduro’s gang with the legal, political and commercial networks needed to develop their projects of political power and criminal business. They have known how to buy, first with oil and later with cocaine and other criminal enterprises, the goodwill and obedience of politicians, academics, public and private bodies, agencies, companies and institutions, NGOs and foreign parties throughout the Americas and Europe. Through their financing of organisations of the São Paulo Forum, the Puebla Group, the Progressive International and the Socialist International, they have placed entire governments at the service of the great drug cartels.

They also made a great many friends in Scandinavia, and it is enough to recall the Nobel Peace Prize given to José Manuel Santos for imposing, against the will expressed by Colombians in a referendum, a peace plan with narco-terrorism that amounted to the disarming of democracy and the handing over to subversion of everything it had never achieved by arms with all its immense murderous brutality. And which has brought Colombia so much closer to the abyss of a narco-state like Venezuela’s. Always supported, by the way, by all the European social-democratic forces, among which the European People’s Party must of course be included. The photographs of Ursula von der Leyen with Delcy Rodríguez or with Gustavo Petro are no accidents. The EU summit with that Chavista invention CELAC is not one either. The European Union has systematically carried out agitation and propaganda for the “progressive” forces in Ibero-America. Under the Italian communist Federica Mogherini and the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell it has been one scandal after another, the massive interference of the EU in favour of the Lulas in Brazil, Boric in Chile, Petro in Colombia, and so on and so forth. As are the ideological forms of blackmail coming from Brussels.

The ideal held by this international of narco-socialism, of achieving an immense Bolivarian dictatorship as a great narco-state stretching from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego as a great anti-imperialist and anti-Western homeland, may strike us as delirious. But there have been moments in the past 25 years when they seemed to be advancing successfully in that direction. With money, with violence and with terror they have successfully interrupted processes of democratic normality and economic and social development such as in Chile. And not a day passes in which they do not try to sabotage Javier Milei in his courageous process of well-being and development in freedom.

Although for the moment many of these criminals continue to be supported by the European Union, in Cuba they are watching their neighbour Maduro’s beard being singed, already harried by the United States fleet, by arrest warrants naming him as head of the Cartel de los Soles, and by the prize to María Corina as another nail in his coffin. And not only in his. The day that regime falls, and its members who wish to redeem themselves begin to talk, accomplices seeking advantages, and there is access to its archives, there will be an earthquake in the political classes throughout the Americas and in Europe. And most especially here in Spain there are a great many people for whom a disastrous criminal horizon will suddenly open up, well beyond, of course, their immediate political death.

For all these reasons the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado is not only a thoroughly deserved award to this great fighter against one of the most criminal regimes in the world. To this dear friend who has done so much, from positions of infinite difficulty, to intensify cooperation with the Spanish forces that defend freedom and democracy in the Americas, which are VOX, the Madrid Forum, Disenso and previously ECR and now Patriots for Europe, the group to which Santiago Abascal has transmitted this transatlantic vocation. Now those who draw close to María Corina in Spain will be legion, including those who had been betting, some directly on the criminal regime with the infinite solvency of the narco trade, and others on a false opposition very comparable to the role of many ultra-centrist politicians in Europe.

It is also a historic milestone and one more proof of the change of political and cultural era the West has entered, one that has spread panic among those who see their model going under and which opens the doors to the hegemony of a worldview that has been marginalised, despised and persecuted for half a century. Since then, since the retreat in surrender without a battle and with the handing over of all their academic, cultural, media and even ecclesial positions by the conservative and national forces after the spirit of 1968 and the triumph of the Frankfurt School, the Nobel Peace Prize has been a faithful reflection of the “zeitgeist”, the spirit of the times dominated by social democracy, relativism and supposedly humanitarian sentimentalism. One need only recall that it was won by the North American presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, without doubt the ones who most weakened the United States and the West and who for that reason were most liked by the European left. The change of era is already here, the end of the neo-Marxist ideological delirium with all the perversions added to it over the years. The progressive bunker and the bewildered figures among its ultra-centrist allies go under electorally every week somewhere in Europe or the Americas.

So much has the situation changed that some believed the prize would be given this year to Donald Trump, who without doubt has more than enough merits, and far greater ones than Obama and Carter, and he has them not only for this year’s spectacular achievements, which also count, but already five years ago when he secured the Abraham Accords. Let nobody be angry that they have not given it to him. Because, the way things stand, it is going to be very difficult for them to deny it to him in the near future. Five years ago it was madness to think of it. But the times are changing a great deal, and for the better.

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.