(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. The Weaponry of Words: What Israel vs. Hamas Taught Us About the Fight for Truth)

In war, truth has always been the first casualty. In our time, it may also be the most powerful weapon.

On Nov. 2, the remains of three more Israeli hostages, including Israeli-American Omer Neutra, were returned from Gaza. It was a small mercy amid deep moral confusion.

President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan, announced in September, aimed to end the bloodshed through an immediate cease-fire and the return of all hostages.

Yet the cease-fire remains broken, the hostages are not all home, and Gaza continues to hover between anarchy and illusion.

The recent public executions of eight so-called collaborators with Israel carried out by Hamas following the partial retreat of the Israeli Defense Forces raised eyebrows about the willingness of the terrorist group to disarm and to give up control in the strip.

If Hamas continues to refuse to give up control in Gaza, the hopes for long-term peace would be in fumes, and a likely scenario would emerge in which the Gaza war would morph into a more hybrid model, where increasingly unconventional means would be deployed.

The United States, determined to prevent a complete collapse, has deployed senior officials and established a new military base in Israel’s Kiryat Gat.

But the deeper struggle is not over territory or tactics. It is a struggle over truth. The Gaza conflict has revealed a new front in modern warfare: the weaponization of language itself.

In the 21st century, wars are waged not only with drones, sanctions, and cyberattacks, but also with words. Bombs are no longer the only things that destroy nations — words do as well.

Terminology has become a frontline weapon in hybrid warfare, where the power to define events can be as decisive as a military victory.

The words “genocide,” “resistance,” “occupation,” and “terrorism” carry moral weight. These words shape how conflicts are understood. They influence global perception, determine legal outcomes, and define who is seen as the victim and who is seen as the aggressor.

In fact, few terms in contemporary geopolitics are as contested as “genocide.”Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word genocide in the aftermath of the Holocaust, believed that precise language could help humanity confront evil with moral clarity. He gave the world a vocabulary to describe its darkest impulses so that atrocities could never again be justified or ignored.

That clarity, however, has vanished.

And that is why to classify an event as genocide is to trigger legal obligations, mobilize international outrage, and redefine the legitimacy of the actors involved.

Yet the growing appropriation of this term by advocacy groups, NGOs, and state actors risks diluting its force. The term is now used carelessly by these groups and even governments to describe everything from legitimate counterterrorism operations to political grievances. When every atrocity is labeled a genocide, the word loses its potency, and the international community becomes paralyzed by semantic overload.

The overuse of this word dulls its power and paralyzes the international community in a fog of false equivalence.

Hybrid warfare thrives in this space of ambiguity. States and non-state actors manipulate language to control narratives — Russia, for example, describes its invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” to avoid both legal accountability and moral condemnation.

This distortion is vividly seen in the case of the Pennsylvania-based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. Founded in 2021, the institute has accused the United States of complicity in “genocide” while condemning Israel for targeting Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, and even portrayed Hezbollah as a victim of Israeli “terrorism.”

It has published numerous reports on “Israeli genocide in Gaza,” quoting the Hamas-controlled sources, and even claimed that the brutal murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington by a pro-Palestinian activist might have been “a false-flag operation.”

The irony is staggering. In fact, none of this aligns with Raphael Lemkin’s moral intent, as the man who coined the very term “genocide” was one of the architects of the UN Genocide Convention, and he fought tirelessly to establish rigorous definitions and legal frameworks that could prevent mass atrocities.

His life’s work was rooted in precision and moral clarity. Today, what he envisioned as a tool for justice has been reduced to a political instrument in a global war of narratives.

For an organization to exploit his name in the service of politicized and selective accusations undermines those principles entirely.

Lemkin’s family has recently pursued legal action to challenge this distortion of his legacy, a reminder that the fight over words is as consequential as the fight over territory.

According to several reports, the family’s lawyers addressed Gov. Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations, noting that the Institute “represents itself as an embodiment of Mr. Lemkin’s ideology,” while its “policies, positions, activities, and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin’s belief system.”

The fight over Lemkin’s legacy illustrates a deeper truth. The war for language is the war for reality. When activists and institutions twist definitions, they do not simply influence opinion, they alter the moral architecture of the world.

But this battle over words is not confined to the Middle East. During Trump’s first term, the United States declared China’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang (East Turkestan) to be genocide. This marked a global precedent, and it was a designation that the Biden administration quietly chose to maintain.

The move was both a foreign policy milestone and a rare bipartisan success. China, predictably, rejected the label and described its campaign as “counterterrorism” to justify its repression in Xinjiang.

However, other governments, including the U.K., Canada, and the Netherlands, along with several human rights organizations, have likewise used the term “genocide” to describe China’s campaign against Uyghur culture.

In Iran, the violent suppression of women’s protests is presented as the “protection of cultural values.” Each of these examples underscores a global reality: Narrative control has become a form of geopolitical power. If you can rename evil, you can justify it.

Nowhere is this manipulation more dangerous than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where language itself has become a battlefield.

In the Middle East, throughout the West, and globally, activists and Israel’s critics routinely and increasingly weaponize terms such as “apartheid” and “genocide” not only to condemn Israel, but also to reshape diplomatic debates in capitals across the West, all of this while ignoring Hamas’s strategy of embedding fighters and weapons among civilians, quite literally using them as human shields, and forcing innocent civilians to remain in their homes despite Israel’s warnings to evacuate areas that will be targeted to artificially drive up casualty statistics. Hospitals, schools, and mosques are even used as shields.

Israel has indeed caused civilian casualties in Gaza, but statistically at levels far lower than those of comparable Western military operations like those in Fallujah or Mosul during the Iraq War. One civilian death is too many, yet Israel argues that allowing Hamas to operate unchecked poses an existential security threat.

This debate becomes even more charged when some peace activists openly support Hamas or echo its extremist narratives.

Activists have organized rallies across Western capitals where chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are used, phrases that align with Hamas’s stated goal of eliminating Israel altogether. There is no such thing as coexistence with Hamas in the picture.

Others, meanwhile, downplay Hamas’s violence by reframing it as “resistance” while avoiding acknowledgment of the group’s calls for the destruction of Israel or its treatment of women and other groups under strict Islamist codes.

Some academic institutions have justified the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist massacres as “resistance” against “colonial oppression.”

When universities and advocacy groups frame terrorism as liberation, they cross the line from compassion into complicity. Human rights language, when applied selectively, ceases to defend humanity and contributes to the same dilution of moral clarity that undermines international law. It becomes an instrument of ideological warfare.

The danger of propaganda is that it does not merely distort perception; it reshapes policy.

Propaganda can be as destructive as bullets. When the international community adopts the vocabulary of extremists, it legitimizes their cause and erases the suffering of their victims. Calling Israel’s right to self-defense “genocide” while ignoring Hamas’s genocidal intent is not simply dishonest. It is destructive.

Hamas has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, presenting its vision of an Islamic society as a replacement for the state of Israel.

When activists, NGOs, or institutions adopt language that obscures these realities, they are not merely misusing words — they are actively shaping the battlefield.

The struggle over terminology is not just rhetorical. It is a form of hybrid warfare, determining how conflicts are understood, whose suffering is recognized, and which actors are deemed legitimate.

Raphael Lemkin envisioned a world where words could prevent atrocities. Today, the distortion of his legacy shows that words can just as easily enable them.

In today’s hybrid warfare, victory is no longer measured solely by military strength but by mastery over meaning. To name something whether, “genocide,” “apartheid,” or “counter-terrorism”, is to claim it. To redefine it is to erase it.

When terrorism becomes “resistance” and self-defense becomes “aggression,” moral gravity is turned upside down. Raphael Lemkin once hoped that the right words could save lives. His legacy now reminds us that the wrong words can destroy them.

The conflicts in Gaza, Xinjiang, and Ukraine are not only geopolitical battles. They are part of a broader civilizational struggle over truth itself. The question is no longer who controls land or borders, but who controls meaning.

The twentieth century was defined by industrial warfare. The twenty-first is defined by linguistic warfare. The dictionary has become a battlefield.

Those who care about freedom must reclaim it. The defense of truth begins not with weapons or sanctions, but with words that reflect reality. If we lose the meaning of words, we lose the foundation of everything worth defending.

less top-down control from Brussels, more bottom-up power from local municipalities. Fewer corporates calling the shots, more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) driving the economy

If we want to save democracy in our country, we must decentralise—urgently.

The concentration of power in the hands of a few mega-funds and international platforms such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) is undermining our sovereignty and liberty. What we are witnessing is no longer free-market capitalism, but a corporatocracy: a system in which unelected elites, through financial giants like BlackRock and Vanguard, set the rules—often under the guise of “public-private partnerships” that substitute genuine democracy with networked corruption.

BlackRock and Vanguard collectively manage over $20 trillion in assets and are simultaneously the largest shareholders in 88% of S&P 500 companies. Competition vanishes. When the same entity owns both Ahold and Jumbo, who still advocates for the consumer? What we get is pseudo-competition: rising prices, falling innovation, and a marketplace that serves capital, not citizens. SMEs—the engine of genuine competition and local economic resilience—are systematically outcompeted, absorbed, or stifled through overregulation and bureaucratic hurdles. COVID policies further exacerbated this imbalance, disproportionately harming smaller businesses.

Then there is politics. In Davos, politicians are welcomed with feel-good narratives of sustainability, health, and digital inclusion. But behind those noble slogans lies a model where public policy is converted into a profit mechanism for multinationals. In practice, public-private partnerships (PPPs) bypass parliamentary oversight, award contracts without competitive tendering, and—most alarmingly—shape policy behind closed doors. The WEF may brand this “stakeholder capitalism,” but in reality, it’s shareholder + civil servant = elite consensus. Politicians are promised top jobs; the citizen is excluded. And thus, so is democracy.

Decentralisation is the only path back to true democracy and functioning capitalism. We must dismantle the monopoly power of mega-funds: introduce legislation capping common ownership in any sector at 5%. Impose a concentration tax on funds exceeding

€1 trillion in assets, and channel the revenues into strengthening SMEs through fiscal relief and legal support. No hollow pledges—real action: low-interest loans for local entrepreneurs, tax incentives for cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises, and backing for local banks that are independent of Wall Street and Frankfurt.

At the same time, democratic oversight must be restored. All PPP agreements must be made public—no confidentiality, no backroom deals. Politicians involved in such arrangements should be barred from joining the private partners involved for at least five years. And any agreements made in Davos on behalf of the Netherlands must be subject to full parliamentary accountability—before and after the fact.

Technology can be an ally here: decentralised finance via blockchain enables citizens to fund local projects directly, without money flowing through BlackRock or Goldman Sachs. Let us deploy these tools—for the people, not against them.

Our society is drifting toward a neo-feudal model, where digital elites reign and citizens are managed more than represented. That must be stopped. The Netherlands has a proud tradition of local autonomy and entrepreneurship. It’s time to rebuild on that foundation. Only by returning power to the grassroots—to citizens, municipalities, and SMEs—can we truly reclaim our democracy. The time for half-measures is over. It’s now or never.

Rob Roos is a distinguished fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington, DC-based think-and-do tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. De la mala fe al ridículo)

The policy of the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen is as immense a disappointment for its supporters in the alliance of the People’s Party and the socialists as it is a radical confirmation of all the fears and warnings issued by the forces to the right of the People’s Party. There are now moments in which panic spreads among the People’s Party. So much so that they try to correct themselves, as happened on Thursday when they joined the Patriots, Conservatives and Sovereigntists to impose for the first time a cut to the preposterous impositions of the Green Pact that the People’s Party itself had created with its socialist and green allies.

The disasters already caused by the policy of the social-democratic consensus, interventionist, anti-national and marked by permanent social engineering, are reflected in a general and vertiginous impoverishment of the middle classes throughout Europe, a collapse of security because of its immigration policy, and a sinking of European competitiveness owing to the self-mutilations of the suicidal climate ideology, the Green Pact and its hundred thousand derivatives.

But there are some fields in which the mistaken policy sinks into abysses of embarrassment and blush-inducing ridicule. Foreign policy is one of them. Foreign policy is a national competence which, like so many others, Madame Ursula’s Commission usurps with ever greater effrontery.

The most recent High Representatives for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Mogherini, Borrell and Kallas, who theoretically apply a policy agreed by the 27 countries in the European Council, have devoted themselves to carrying out a policy designed by the ideologised bureaucratic monster of Brussels with all the blemishes and squalor of progressivism. Thus, they openly practise everything from blackmail in order to impose gender and climate ideologies in Africa to the financing with thousands of millions of networks of NGOs that promote wokery, socialism and hatred of the West.

Where this cynical, socialist and liberticidal EU policy perhaps reaches its summit is in Ibero-America. Because there it also comes with a vice added to the ideology of failure and to the ridicule: evident bad faith. That is where one perceives most strongly the very clear will to sabotage every attempt by the Ibero-American nations to climb out of the interventionist, socialist and criminal quagmire that for more than half a century has strangled their freedom, their security and their development and prosperity.

And above all it is there that one clearly perceives that the European Commission and the Brussels bureaucracy prefer an alliance with the criminal regimes of Cuba or Venezuela and their partners such as Gustavo Petro, Lula da Silva and other aspiring tyrants, to supporting Donald Trump’s policy of war on the drug cartels and on all the organised crime that tyrannises these countries under the banner of socialism or progressivism.

The Santa Clara summit in Colombia between the EU and CELAC, that piece of rubbish invented by Cuba and Chavismo in an attempt to hollow out the OAS, was one more proof last week that the whole of European policy in Ibero-America is socialist and colonialist in its promotion of woke aberrations in societies that are much more conservative and still structured.

The failure of participation in the EU CELAC summit in Santa Clara has already been spectacular. Few heads of government, with only seven Europeans. The 60 delegations from 27 European and 33 American countries found themselves, of course, entangled in the manoeuvre of turning that summit into an act of condemnation of “imperialism”, as they call the North American pressure to put an end to the Cartel de los Soles in Venezuela and to the usurpation of the presidency by Nicolás Maduro.

Von der Leyen, Kallas and the EU troop, as well as the countries’ delegates, were not even ashamed to use the summit in the lair of Gustavo Petro, a prominent member of the transnational organised crime organisations that are the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, in order to join in the message of narco-socialism and accuse Washington of violating international law. When they know that only Washington can put an end to the murderous nightmare that is the kidnapping of Venezuela by organised crime. But Maduro will fall and many of his accomplices too. All of them are part of the narco-socialist web and all of them have received massive aid from Brussels against their internal conservative rivals.

Thus, the European Union once again ends up with the losers. If the European nations suffer and are absolute losers under the suicidal policy against their competitiveness and their prosperity that Brussels has imposed on them in its energy, industrial, agricultural, transport and other policies, many Ibero-American nations suffer corrupt and narco-socialist regimes protected by the European Union.

Once again it becomes evident that Brussels concerns itself only with its own power and the interests of its elites, and that it imposes defeat and failure wherever it has influence. By sabotaging the United States and trying to prevent the liberation of Venezuela and of Cuba, whose communist dictatorship it continues to finance directly, the EU not only shows its bad faith but multiplies the ridicule of the loser before history.

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 Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Con Maduro caerán otros)

The only thing that can prevent American military action to behead and liquidate the criminal power that has held Venezuela hostage for the past twenty-five years is for the current supreme chief of that organisation, Nicolás Maduro, to announce, very soon, his withdrawal, resignation, flight or suicide. And that, immediately afterwards, his accomplices, the leading cadres of the narco-socialist regime, civilian and military, should solemnly announce that they accept the results of the elections of 28 July, that they recognise Edmundo González as the legitimate president of the Republic of Venezuela, and that they place themselves at the orders of the government presented by the president and María Corina Machado, the undisputed leader of the great battle that brings the unappealable defeat of the criminal regime.

Then Machado and those responsible for the beautiful and incredible feat of last summer following the elections, with the operation to save the tally sheets, will take up the reins of power. Their chief problem will no longer be Maduro’s hired killers, whose leaders will possibly all die in a single day. They will be replaced as a threat by the hordes of traitors already forming in an attempt to maintain a criminal system as brutal and immensely lucrative as the one that has sustained the regime until now.

If this does not happen, if Nicolás Maduro does not announce his withdrawal, resignation, flight or suicide very soon, other things are going to happen. Forceful and indispensable things. Because, fortunately for all those who still believe in freedom and in the necessity of a commitment to truth for the survival of Western civilisation, in Washington today some people are in charge who consider that the criminals of the transnational regime of narco-socialism are not “merely” a terrible torture lasting a quarter of a century, a monstrous tragedy for three generations of Venezuelans and a political, social and economic catastrophe affecting the entire subcontinent

Maduro’s criminal regime, which is not a government but an organised crime cartel, is a threat to the whole reasonably free world and, what matters most in Washington, it is a ferocious and hyperactive enemy of the United States. And not only because of its fundamental role in mass drug trafficking. Venezuela and Cuba are the two main military bases of all the enemies of the United States installed in its “backyard”. Without forgetting, of course, Mexico, which in the delirious drift of AMLO and Sheinbaum is striving to be ever more of an enemy of its big neighbour to the north. It does not look like a good calculation, even though the cocaine business cartels rule in Mexico City as they have never ruled before.

From China to Iran, Hezbollah or North Korea, from the narco-communists of the cartels of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group to Vladimir Putin and his henchmen, organised crime and destabilising Islamist penetration, all of them have a lair, launch pads and financing in Venezuelan territory and in the great financing fund that is the production and trafficking of cocaine. These do nothing but increase in neighbouring Colombia, whose president Gustavo Petro is by full right very high on the list of Maduro’s accomplices who may share his fate. Although cocaine is the star by volume, to the business of this great transactional orchestra must be added other drugs, trafficking in hydrocarbons in breach of sanctions, and other illegal, semi-legal or even official enterprises.

In Europe there is no country more affected by the international criminal activities of the powerful Cartel de los Soles of Nicolás Maduro, Vladimir Padrino and company than Spain, where they have bought the goodwill of individuals, of groups, of a couple of parties and even of the government when they have needed it.

Spain lives under a government intimately linked to transnational organised crime, to which it renders services as a sanctuary, as a rearguard for investment and laundering and of course as political influence in the European Union. Ever since Pedro Sánchez came to power the socialists have been at every moment the most uninhibited representation, in the European Parliament and in the institutions of Brussels, of the narco and criminal axis of Caracas and Havana, later extended to Bogotá and Brasília. The European Commission, its external service and its embassies, which are a reflection of the alliance of socialists and the People’s Party, are an authentic disgrace as permanent accomplices of all the regimes and forces integrated into the international organisations of narco-socialism such as the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group.

Well, all of that is very probably going to collapse before Christmas. Let us hope only the minimum force will be necessary. That only those who deserve it will die and that Venezuela will make a peaceful transition with a firm and at last legitimate government that neutralises all the threats. The effect of the fall of the narco-socialist regime will without doubt be felt throughout the Americas. The front that has held in check the democracies and all decent people who defend freedom and truth in the countries threatened by this immense federation of forces combining totalitarian vocation and organised crime will thus be left terribly weakened.

Among them, let us insist, must be included the Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez, the PSOE and the whole rabble of separatist, pro-terrorist and communist parties which for years have joined in the Chavista feast of the “bundles” of blood-stained dollars. Maduro’s fall is going to be a very hard blow to a whole world of accomplices the regime made for itself over a quarter of a century. Let us hope that in Spain too it ends up sweeping away those who profited from the suffering and plundering of Venezuelans and who are trying to guarantee impunity for their crimes by methods ever more similar to those of the murderers whose twilight is being announced.

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 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.