Why I believe Washington, DC is still the modern world’s Capital

When I visited the US for the first time ever in my life in 1993 as a young officer for training at Fort Bliss, TX, among Americans and international officers, I was touched by the culture and civilization of a diverse nation, particularly when I met my host family, who were a World War Two veterans’ family. Through this family, I saw the ideal American strong society, which reflects the values of the USA.

Democracy, Individual Freedoms and Rights
Fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press—these values are the cornerstone of American society’s strength.

Along with technological advancement and economic growth, the U.S. is known for its cultural diversity, with people from various ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds contributing to its identity as a melting pot.

American values—liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness—are central to the American ethos. The U.S. global influence and leadership play a significant role in global politics, economics, and diplomacy. Also, the U.S. military and strategic influence maintain a strong military presence and strategic alliances around the globe.

These pillars collectively shape the identity and functioning of the modern American nation. To be honest, I found this spirit when I attended the GIIS last conference, met with leaders, ambassadors, diplomats, politicians, media, fellows from around the globe—all came to Washington DC, hoping and knowing that their voices will be heard and their thoughts will be considered. Thanks to the GIIS leadership for these achievements.

MG Mahmoud Hassanin (Egypt Army – Retired) is a distinguished fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington, DC-based think-and-do tank.

The active shooter incident in Midtown Manhattan on July 29, 2025 by Shane Tamura has put a magnifying glass on Mamdani’s defund the police policy and, at a broader level, the continuing erosion of support for law enforcement in America. Since George Floyd’s death after his arrest on May 26, 2020 in Minneapolis, MN, the nation’s far left leaders used his death to supercharge their historical narrative of police brutality and law enforcement is inherently racist. They are committed to use this as one of their political tools. Many left wing politicians have seized on this as an opportunity to advocate and in some instances, condone the anti-police movement. Worse, law enforcement has been defunded, vilified and forced to work with fewer resources. Unfortunately, violent demonstrations in many major cities amounting to billions of dollars in damage have resulted.

With this backdrop, law enforcement at both the local and federal levels struggle for support from law makers and the public. The men and women in BLUE in this country are now forced to justify their once lauded public service as a vital pillar of the nation’s communities against the left’s misplaced and short-sighted ideology seeking to placate an uneducated constituency.

This recent active shooter incident in New York City, once again, brings light to the critical importance of a fully supporting the men and women of the New York City Police Department. Despite Trump’s re-election and the GOP taking the House and Senate, the anti-police and anti-ICE headwinds remain strong.

Democrat nominee for New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s policy of defunding the NYPD and reducing its ranks is not just misguided, it’s reckless. In fact, it’s such a bad idea that even the NYC Sanitation Department would toss it out with trash. Where is the common sense in stripping away the very institution responsible for maintaining public safety and supporting those officers working the streets?

Policing is inherently local. In a city as complex and vibrant as New York, the NYPD is the backbone of our quality of life, economic vitality, and community stability. Without it, the city risks descending into chaos. Mamdani wants social workers to fill the NYPD. Social workers have a vital role, but they are not equipped to respond to active shooter situations or violent crimes. Expecting them to replace trained officers in high-risk scenarios is not just unrealistic, it’s dangerous. Mamdani wants to do away with Strategic Response Group (SRG), the very unit that responded to the active shooter incident. SRG specializes in civil unrest, riot/protest control, active shooter among other policing duties. Why is Mamdani so against SRG? Is it because these police are trained in the use of long guns? Wear protective gear on their person that is used to protect them against criminals that use guns against police? Doesn’t Mamdani realize that SRG units and patrol officers tend to be younger in time on the job and eventually end up as detectives in a numbered squad, Special Victims Unit, Homicide, etc.

These policies, rooted in ideological extremism, ignore the reality of life on the streets. Criminals don’t care about laws or consequences. They prey on the vulnerable. Weakening the NYPD only emboldens them. Mamdani’s approach would continue to turn New Yorkers into prey, leaving them defenseless in the face of rising violence. Mamdani speaks about utopia, just as Karl Marx spoke and wrote about the state being equal for all. Except the perpetrators are not equal and deserve their due in the justice system.

Let’s be clear: elections have consequences. If voters continue to support candidates who push anti-police agendas, they must also accept the outcomes—more crime, less safety, and a diminished quality of life. Just look at the results in districts like AOC’s in Queens. Are these policies truly working for the people on the ground?

It’s time for common sense to prevail. New York City needs strong, courageous officers, not fewer of them. It’s the voter’s responsibility and accountability to demand and support the men and women in BLUE. Politicians are sound bites and appeasers to either gain or retain power. Mamdani is neither a politician nor a person for the people. His policies speak for themselves.

The deeper problem with the Mamdani movement is the left’s leaders are strategizing ways to leverage his momentum to regain power—not only in New York but in other blue sates and beyond. This urgent threat is not confined to New York–look at Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Marc Black is a Senior Law Enforcement Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy. He is a retired Detective Investigator from the New York City Police Department (NYPD), where he built a distinguished career spanning counterterrorism, arson and explosion investigations, computer crimes, and intelligence.

J. Lawrence Cunningham is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy. He is a retired United States Secret Service Agent, where his 20-year career encompassed supervisory roles in all aspects of Secret Service jurisdiction.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Mil disfraces de la tiranía)

Europe finds itself in a state of alarm, declared by nobody, but so taken for granted by so many that it gives rise to political operations extraordinary in their irregularity, in their audacity and in the immense dangers that many of them entail. The trial of strength between the social democratic majorities of the two traditional parties and the growing forces of the new right has entered a very virulent and bitter phase. The former, greatly alarmed by the trend the elections are marking, have decided that anything goes. With the political debate lost, the parties of the left, which see themselves threatened and cast as the great losers, are seeking to resort to extra-political methods in order to check adversaries they did not reckon with only a decade ago and who now dispute the majority and the power with them in more and more countries.

Under the protection and the funding of Brussels, the Popular and Socialist parties and their satellites are assembling every kind of extra-political mechanism to try to halt the “far right”. A term by which they in fact refer to all the conservative and national parties that do not go along with social democracy, with social engineering, with wokeism and gender ideology, and with climate change as a pretext for interference, controls and the curtailment of liberties. The methods used supposedly to defend democracy are mechanisms of tyranny and they do away with every elementary condition of a democracy. Beneath the banner of democracy there arise a thousand different disguises for tyranny, which seek to defend a system of a single ideology but one already in irreversible shipwreck.

In Poland, for example, the OP party of Donald Tusk, a member of the European People’s Party, which came to power thanks to massive interference by the European Commission and the Berlin Government, has allied itself with the left to form an antidemocratic, repressive and abusive Government absolutely comparable to the delinquent and unconstitutional Government of Pedro Sánchez with his socialists, communists and terrorist and coup-plotting allies.

In France the favourite to be president is disqualified from office, turning into a crime for that purpose what for hundreds of MEPs were in their day no more than administrative errors. In Romania they outright steal the presidency from the man who had won it, on the ridiculous and false pretext, soon forgotten, of Russian interference. And in fresh elections they install a perfect woke president who owes everything to Brussels, like Donald Tusk.

And in Hungary they are preparing, for next April’s elections, the umpteenth assault to try to finish off Viktor Orbán and put in his place a puppet of Brussels and of Germany, like Tusk once again, whose name is Peter Magyar and who belongs to the People’s Party, but who would govern with socialists and the far left. In Austria, Berlin and Brussels have prevented a right-wing Government led by the FPÖ party even though it won the elections by a wide margin and today almost doubles the second-placed party. From outside, a Government of the People’s Party with the dying losers of the Socialist Party was imposed.

Nevertheless it is Germany, logically, that is the setting for some of the most significant of these operations of social democratic and globalist bunkerisation aimed at trying to prevent the change of era and to ignore the popular will. Unheard-of things happen there. It is in Berlin that the latest episode reveals the strategy of the left throughout Europe. It is there that deputies of the traditional centre-right party, the CDU, of the European People’s Party, rebelled last week against an agreement by their leaders with the socialists to elect new judges of the Constitutional Court. They say they did so because one left-wing candidate is unbearably radical in seeking abortion up to the day of birth.

But beyond an act of rebellion against Chancellor Friedrich Merz for pursuing an election that is ethically unacceptable to them, what they in fact did was to block, for the moment at least, the assault on the Constitutional Court by an ever more radicalised SPD left, intended to cement by summary means a banning of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which has already comfortably passed 25%, in several states exceeds a third and in one comes close to an absolute majority.

The AfD, in continuous growth and expansion, is the only existing potential partner of the CDU for a conservative coalition and for a real change of course, not merely the cosmetic one of today. That radical change and liberating change of tack is what Germany needs in order to emerge from the degradation and the economic collapse imposed by the red-green ideology, thanks precisely to the complicity of the CDU, the party of Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Helmut Kohl, which under the disastrous Angela Merkel turned into another social democratic force like the SPD, harvesting conservative votes for social democratic and radical ecological policies.

The irruption of the AfD onto the political stage has radically changed the situation. Logic dictates that when this latest attempt at a coalition between the SPD and the CDU, with a policy indistinguishable from that of left-wing governments, fails, the cadres of the CDU will opt to break the cordon sanitaire around the AfD. The vote against the left-wing judge was a first stirring in that direction and against a chancellor locked in an embrace with the SPD. Once that antidemocratic veto on an alliance with the AfD, self-imposed under pressure from the left, is broken, they could move towards that grand alliance of the German right which today already commands an immense majority, in a CDU-AfD or AfD-CDU coalition. Banning the AfD, which is practically impossible without a very militantly left-wing Constitutional Court, would leave Germany without an alternative to governments of an ever more radical, intolerant and irrational left. And the CDU would be condemned to be a party held prisoner or a satellite of a systematic left-wing majority within an already socialist system. And a majority of the voting population, that of the AfD or of the alliance with the AfD, would be definitively outside the system.

The unheard-of uprising of the CDU deputies against Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in refusing on Friday to vote for the radical socialist candidate Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, has blocked that whole process. The rebels insist that it is because of this candidate’s brutal position on the question of respect for life, since she defends a right to abortion up to the very day of birth. The CDU deputies said that this position is incompatible with the position of their Christian Democratic party, but also with that of the Constitution, which speaks of the absolute dignity of human life.

The German Parliament, the Bundestag, was going to vote through that partial renewal of the Constitutional Court without any great upset. The candidates had been agreed within the leadership of the federal government coalition between the CDU and the SPD, where ideologically the left always prevails. That very Friday morning Chancellor Merz believed it to be little more than a formality that would help to give at least the appearance of normality to an ever more unpopular Government whose only efficient achievement has been to send soaring a debt that until recently was prohibited.

The colossal indebtedness in which the new Government is immersing itself ceased to be prohibited thanks to a far-fetched manoeuvre that led to the necessary constitutional change being voted on by the Parliament of the previous legislature, because in the new one there was no majority for it. Everything is exceptional manoeuvring, bordering on illegality and unconstitutionality, but in any case fully immersed in political indecency. If in every European country the levels of irregularity now being imposed on institutional relations and on the exercise of executive power are alarming, in Germany they are doubly so, because its rigour and scruple had very concrete reasons in the marking of a difference from a shadowy past. Certainly what they are allowing themselves today has never been seen in German institutional politics since the founding of the Federal Republic on the ashes of National Socialism.

Since they are not allowed to make pacts with the AfD, the CDU builds majorities on the other side and, if necessary, buys them from the green and communist far left. That too is what the parallel budget they have arranged within the coalition is for. If something has to be given to the Greens, they are given 100 billion in ecological transition, which is nothing but financing for the ruin of industrial Germany. Or they are granted the anchoring in the Constitution of the preposterous objective of “climate neutrality”, because when it comes to clowning of that sort the Christian Democrats are as enthusiastic as authentic social democrats.

The German economy is in its death throes just as it was under the previous left-wing Government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which foundered resoundingly without finishing the legislature. This week six large chemical companies have announced factory closures or relocation to the United States. But it makes no difference, because the problem is not the immigration that is plunging municipalities and the social security system into insecurity, anxiety and ruin. The problem is not the industrial dismantling, the disaster of research and development that is fleeing to the United States, and the abandonment of agriculture.

At the borders little or nothing has changed with the immigration that Merz promised to stop dead before the elections, only to go back on it within hours, on election night itself. And the discontent of the population grows, the two governing parties lose strength in the polls and the AfD keeps growing, the party to the right of the CDU with which Merz refuses to form a coalition that would command a very broad majority. The Merz Government is going to sink sooner rather than later.

What seems clear is that ever more people in the CDU know that Germany will no longer withstand another attempt at survival by way of the scaffold that is the lethal embrace with a dwindling social democracy. A socialism that sees its salvation only in the banning of the parties of the right, which are ever more the majority throughout Europe. A ban that would serve to keep the Popular parties permanent hostages of its drift towards a tyranny that despises the will of the majority and prevents any possibility of change. And it is in radical change that the only way out lies, towards a recovery and reconstruction that would avert the European disaster, with a European Union trapped in a system in terminal crisis from its overdose of ideology, hyper-regulation and lack of freedom, which was imposed by Germany on Brussels and which today has in Germany one of its principal victims.

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 Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in Human Events. Under Trump foreign policy is a return to sovereignty for the US and global nations)

President Donald Trump has disrupted the decades-long accepted status quo of U.S. foreign policy, bringing about positive change in U.S.-foreign relations. But while any change can be uncomfortable, Trump’s drastic cut of irrelevant foreign aid and his laissez-faire sovereigntist approach to foreign policy has sent many “experts” rushing to fetch the smelling salts.

Context for Trump’s actions is needed.

I first realized the importance of actively protecting both U.S. national sovereignty and the sovereignty of other countries during the Obama administration. At that time, I was a professional in international development in Africa and the Middle East. I was shocked to uncover through my research that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent billions of taxpayer dollars funding Leftist NGOs to promote “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) ideologies, abortion, and other programs that interfered in foreign elections and politics. And most Americans had no idea.

This was the agenda of the Deep State and liberal Left, not of the American people. Yet, anti-American sentiment was growing worldwide.

Later, as I built an international affairs department as vice president of a Washington, D.C. policy organization, I was frequently approached by members of parliament from Central Europe, ambassadors from South America, religious leaders from Africa, and United Nations (UN) delegates from all over the world, asking for help against these so-called U.S. foreign “aid” programs. They were often afraid to refuse programs that (in their own words) trampled on their sovereignty, cultural beliefs, and religious freedom, simply because U.S. money would also be withheld.

During President Trump’s first term, I took proof of these programs to the U.S. Congress, the White House, and the State Department. For example, a USAID-UN joint initiative for school children taught LGBT principles – like the program “Purple My School” (the color of transgenders) within the broader initiatives “Being LGBT in Asia” and “Being LGBT in Eastern Europe.” I also obtained USAID curriculum that encouraged trainees to measure their gender or sexual identity “feelings” on a daily scale, complete with pictures of transgenders. These were only a couple of examples.

Although many Congress members agreed that these programs (no matter their position on LGBTQ activism) had no business in U.S. foreign aid, few had the courage or will to stop the funding.

During this time, I also learned from collaboration with the Hungarian embassy in D.C. that the leadership of the European Union had little regard for the sovereignty of conservative-based nations, particularly the family-based, traditional countries of Central Europe.

A picture of modern-day colonialism emerged: Western governments and organizations still believe that power and wealth grant them ultimate decision-making authority over smaller, poorer, and less developed countries. All in the name of “aid and assistance.”

However, when I visited Hungary later, in 2019, to speak at the Demographic Summit, I learned that no matter how hard they are pushed, Hungarians will never relinquish their national identity or the ability to make their own decisions. In fact, I wrote a book about this, titled “Last Warning to the West: Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda,” published by the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest.

During research for the book, I interviewed a young Hungarian law student whose words to me summed up Hungarian national identity and resonated with me as an American. He said, “Fighting for our sovereignty is our identity.”

His simple words described how Hungarians overcame a thousand years of war, occupation, and oppression – from Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Habsburgs, German Nazis, and Soviet Russians – to remain Hungarian firmly. His words also described how Hungarians still fight today against the biased political elite of the European Union, who will not recognize Hungary’s right to refuse to support the ongoing, costly Russia-Ukraine war, radical gender ideologies, mass unchecked immigration, and foreign political and election interference.

In fact, for refusing EU pressure, Hungary has received public and unjust labels of “authoritarian” and “democratic backsliding” and sanctions of billions of dollars for so-called violations of the “rule of law.” What a load of bunk.

President Trump, in his first administration, emphasized the importance of respecting others’ national identity at the 2018 UN General Assembly. He said, “Each of us here today is the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition, and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on earth. … I honour the right of every nation in this room to pursue its customs, beliefs, and traditions.”

To their credit, I worked with the first Trump administration to create a more focused and sovereignist approach to foreign policy and aid. But for USAID, it was too little, too late. USAID’s corrupt framework remained when former President Joe Biden took office, and his USAID was like the Obama administration’s on steroids — including funding Hamas and transgender ballroom dancing in Peru. What a disgrace.

I was also astonished by the overt antagonism shown by the Biden administration towards the 1,000-year-old nation-state of Hungary. Former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, like EU politicians, routinely tried to humiliate Hungarians for making sovereign decisions, especially their position on the “big three” of war, gender, and migration.

Samantha Powers, then chief of USAID, arrogantly vowed to protect her version of “rule of law” in Hungary, based on radical leftist concepts. Since Powers mainly met with liberal opposition in Hungary, including LGBT rights activists, her moves were considered preparatory for “a color revolution” by the Hungarian government and conservative media.

Anti-American sentiment in Hungary, our NATO ally, may have reached an all-time high.

It was clear that in his first term, President Trump understood the importance of protecting national sovereignty; however, he now recognizes the urgency of this issue.

Recently, in Saudi Arabia, he outlined a very different approach to foreign policy and aid, criticizing decades of reckless Western intervention. He said that the “so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” and that the interventionalists, neocons, and liberal nonprofits intervened in “complex societies that they didn’t even understand themselves.” On the other hand, he applauded the prosperity of the high-tech, industrial “modern Middle East” built by the people of the region themselves, who are developing “sovereign countries” and pursuing their “own unique visions” in their way. He also noted that their success did not come from rejecting their heritage, but rather from embracing their national traditions.

And he is right.

President Trump has addressed a decades-long problem in U.S. foreign relations, where overzealousness, ignorance, and arrogance often cause the U.S. to push beyond healthy boundaries, disregarding our partners’ heritage, culture, and experiences. Don’t misunderstand—we are proud to be American. We must defend our heritage. But we can be partners — even leaders — without being unbendable, unteachable, or uncompromising. We do not need to be involved in every war, conflict, and situation.

Thankfully, today, Trump’s foreign policy focuses on what is important: defending America, supporting our allies, and promoting “the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace.” These should always be the goals of U.S. foreign policy, not reckless interference in foreign domestic affairs or taking on problems that are not our own.

Trump’s “Peace Through Strength” coupled with his “Peace Through Prosperity” is a realistic approach to foreign policy. It promotes strong American leadership, but is rooted in mutually beneficial economic relationships, serving as the foundation for negotiating international peace and stability. The Abraham Accords of the first Trump administration are clear proof that mutual economic interest can overcome even strong ideological differences.

For example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which refused to recognize Israel as a sovereign state, did, however, acknowledge the wisdom of joining a trade agreement with Israel—and to its great advantage. In 2020, before the Accords, Israel-UAE bilateral trade was $180 million; by 2021, it had exceeded $1 billion.

Now, however, the Trump administration is criticised for being more interested in making money than promoting foundational American values. But this is objectively not true.

President Trump had no problem confronting South African President Cyril Ramaphosa about the reported genocide of Boer farmers. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly rebuked the German government’s politically-motivated oppression of opposition party Alternative für Deutschland, saying it was “tyranny in disguise.” U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich made quite a stir when he called out the self-centered politicians orchestrating the decline of free speech in Europe and the use of lawfare against political opponents.

And true to his word, President Trump uncovered USAID’s corruption and (to quote Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary) the “covert agents, shadow institutions, money laundering machinery, and the funding of politics and politicians in foreign countries.” As Orban stated, “The whole Soros Empire is standing naked before us.”

After years of frustration from the lack of response I received from U.S. leadership about the corruption of USAID, the Trump administration (in only a few months) reduced the mammoth machine to about 18% of its former funding and put what was left under the authority of the State Department. They also removed DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), otherwise known as extreme “wokeism,” from the U.S. Department of Defense, which directly affects relations with foreign partners in U.S. security cooperation.

These changes are all to the U.S. advantage: promoting national sovereignty through U.S. foreign policy improves our public diplomacy and image around the world, works to maintain the respect of our allies and adversaries, and guards U.S. taxpayers by making sure that foreign policy reflects the will of the people, not an extreme Leftist political ideology.

And while the sovereignty of other nations is important to this administration, thankfully, in direct contrast to Joe Biden, so is the sovereignty of the United States. This is why President Trump, in his first 100 days, reduced illegal border crossings nationwide by 93%, demands fair trade for the U.S, and asks that Europe share more of its responsibility for NATO.

The U.S. now has leadership that is philosophically aligned with conservative nations, promoting and embracing the importance of a sovereign nation-state. The question to consider now is “How can the U.S. continue to support the sovereignty of our allies?”

The strength of President Trump’s pro-sovereignty position itself gives support. The cooperation of the Brussels and American elite has become less relevant. The funding of liberal nonprofits by the “transatlantic Deep State” is being dismantled by our administration and that of (for example) Hungary, Slovakia, and Georgia.

But more is needed to solidify future success.

First, President Trump’s policies, which drastically changed the direction of U.S. foreign aid, should become part of U.S. law. Funding with U.S. foreign aid should be defined more narrowly within the Foreign Assistance Act and others, and implemented with clear oversight, transparency, and accountability measures (like program monitoring and evaluation), with emphasis on humanitarian assistance and economic development.

Second, the sentiments expressed by Rubio and Vance, reflecting the traditionally shared U.S.-European principles of free speech and citizen-led governments, must become official U.S foreign policy and backed by strong implementation. For example, Rubio’s words to the German government, calling for a “reverse course” regarding the AfD, are a positive example that could be instituted more broadly and consistently.

And third, the U.S. must proactively endorse and support our allies, being emphatic to reinforce successes wherever they achieve a significant victory— in the ballot box, the courthouse, or on the world stage. The globalist Left is never afraid of celebrating and synchronizing activities, and neither should we be afraid.

Today, our strength lies in valuing our differences while actively embracing the common values that unite us. A notable example is the 250-year-long connection between Hungarians and Americans. The “Father of the U.S. Calvary”, Michael Kováts, was a Hungarian who trained the Continental Army in Hungarian hussar tactics. Kováts also courageously fought for and gave his own life in the service of American independence during the Revolutionary War. He is buried and memorialized in the U.S. at The Citadel military academy.

The Post-Cold War status quo is no more. A new era of sovereigntist nationalism grounded in liberty, prosperity, and peace has been forged by President Donald Trump, and his patriotic allies are rallying to his banner.

Dr. Shea Bradley-Farrell spoke about the sovereigntist turn of U.S. foreign policy under the Trump administration at the first international conference of Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office “Fight for National Sovereignty” in Budapest, June 24, 2025.

Shea Bradley-Farrell 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. Siameses en pánico)

Dramatic though they are, and welcome for many reasons, those displays of weariness and anger by Spaniards that are increasingly being shown in public are not the most significant thing about these frenetic moments in Spanish public life. They are the reflection of the rage accumulated by that ever more desolating daily experience that we live worse and worse. Joined to the certainty that we have a Government fundamentally dedicated to stealing, to concealing its crimes and to preserving power by fraud in order to guarantee itself impunity.

It is indeed very important that the residents of a neighbourhood in Sabadell should take the decision to restore a little order where there is now only chaos and systematic mistreatment of the decent, law-abiding citizen by the worst, by delinquents and abusers, whether native or invaders. As it is that hundreds of residents of Alcalá should now demonstrate as a matter of routine, even though they are beaten for it, to demand the closure of one of those focal points of terror, crime and filth with which the Government is seeding the whole of Spain.

What makes the moments we are living through not merely decisive politically but historically transcendent is that the guardians of the system have gone into panic. That same system which has sunk into the swamp of greed and corruption beneath banners of delirious ideology to the point of being hijacked at its summit by the underworld, by the criminal depths and by high organised crime. The collapse of the left-handed Siamese twin is so abrupt, so brutal and merciless, that the right-handed twin has seen that he must hold him up and keep him on his feet so that the whole body does not fall and drag them both into the abyss.

These days we have every element needed to understand the sheer completeness of the failure of this sui generis Spanish two-party system, whose satellites are not, as in other countries, parasitic ideological parties but outright enemies of the Spanish nation. Their pacts have led to this permanent logic of total corruption which is now bringing about the fall of their most vulgar representatives.

On one side, the socialists are trying, by now in an absolutely useless way, to put a new face on something which, gaunt and sick, represents nothing but fraud, swindle and crime. The coming volleys of accusations, many of them arriving from the other side of the Atlantic, will show the extent to which Spain has been hijacked by transnational organised crime and used over these decades, and used effectively, as a bridgehead towards the general penetration and multiplication of international illegal business in Europe and beyond.

On the other side there is the congress of the Partido Popular, which is already taking shape as the founding act of the new social democratic party that is to take on the role of keeping the general racket standing now that those who spoke for it are sinking into disrepute and into jail. The party that is now the “reformist centre” is preparing an operation of broad understanding, I am sorry, of grand coalition, State pacts or a fix-up among elites, gathering together the interests of all those who wish to avoid too many fire hoses being called for and “doing too much damage to one another”.

For the first time in Spain, the game of the big parties, which has been a tacit pact above and below the Constitution, is going to be posed openly in the face of the threat they perceive, for the first time in history since 1978, of a genuine alternative. Now they really have seen the wolf’s ears, they have gone into panic and they are going to seek “common solutions” to prevent Spain from producing that real change which would leave them marginalised in disrepute and naked in failure.

Spaniards already know very well, in spite of the parallel reality invented by the media of the system, that the collapse of their security, of their social well-being and of their quality of life has a great deal to do with those centres that symbolise the invasion, no longer merely tolerated but incentivised, by populations radically alien and hostile to our way of life.

They are the centres for unaccompanied foreign minors, or not, through which they channel an illegal immigration that is an immense business in which the governing mafia takes part. With this business it diverts vast quantities of public money into its own pockets, directly or through organisations ridiculously called NGOs (non-governmental) when every one of them lives off the public purse. All of them of a more or less radical leftist ideology, they live off national, regional or local governments and off the European Union, the great European corrupter in its use, for social engineering and ideological pressure, of funds supposedly dedicated to humanitarian ends.

Because the incentivised invasion is not only a lucrative business. It is also an effective political and demographic operation of destruction of the social fabric and of the national community in towns and neighbourhoods. The admirable Giovanni Sartori earned the hatred of his once-admiring socialists when he denounced the fact that the immense danger of Islam for our freedom and civilisation lay in the fact that, beyond a very low percentage, under 15%, Muslim immigrants began to occupy, control and dominate the public space.

Today, when in many European neighbourhoods they treble that percentage, they impose their will at whim and are gradually taking over local authority thanks to the complicity of the entire left. In the United Kingdom they already occupy and control the town halls and the budgets of almost all the large cities, beginning with London. In Spain nothing else awaits us, unless there is a change of course and the great operation of reconquest of our homeland, of the territory, of sentiment and of the spirit, begins.

But the breakdown of the system that leads us to sense a new political era in Spain, and generally throughout the West, is not due solely to the incentivised invasion of hostile populations or to the infinite greed of abusive castes that are the scum thrown up by many decades of systematic campaigns to discredit the virtues.

It is also due to that anti-national obsession, to the perverse ideology of degrowth and its totalitarian social engineering that leads to the Green Deal and to this systematic destruction, carried out with genuine viciousness, of Western ways of life. As also to the despicable cult of convenience of those who called themselves defenders of order, of principles and of conservative virtues. The false defenders have been worse enemies of freedom and truth than the socialism discredited in its Bolshevik version. That socialism, conveniently modified in its forms, in its more or less social democratic versions, has effectively dismantled the defences of civilisation.

Now the revolt has broken out against the absolute derangement and the unreason that have declared war on common sense, as can be seen across the whole left and among those who emulate it three days late. As can be seen in every plenary session of the European Parliament and in the whole still-hegemonic political message of the social democratic two-party system in the European Union of Mrs Ursula von der Leyen.

Nothing about the future is written nor predetermined in its ending, and it may still be that the Siamese twins save themselves together and go on imposing on Western civilisation that suicide in which Spain is out in front. The changes needed to prevent it are deep, difficult and many of them traumatic. But there are at last good signs that in Spain too the nation refuses to die. Neither exterminated beneath an invasion, nor murdered by criminal separatist enemies, nor by a slow and deceitful euthanasia induced by an ultra-centrist, multicoloured socialism.

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. Estamos mucho mejor)

We are better off today than before, even though we are sunk as never before. We are better off than before because ever more Spaniards know that we are sunk, whereas until five years ago, although we were already sinking further every day, there was still no awareness of it. Today, perhaps, even a majority of Spaniards are already conscious that we are governed by organised crime. And that the steps which have brought us to the abyss were never taken in good faith nor with the least respect for the general interest. They were taken out of convenience for Spanish and foreign criminal interests.

It is precisely the foreign links that are very important in explaining the drift of the socialist governments, first of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and afterwards, in brutal fashion, those of Pedro Sánchez, towards ideological, political and executive positions much closer to the Ibero-American political spheres of narco-communism.

There are many Spaniards who support or sympathise with Santiago Abascal and who cannot quite understand why a leader of the opposition in Spain, within a reality as putrid as this one under Sánchez, should have devoted so much interest and activity to cooperation with the anti-communist forces and the enemies of narco-socialism in Ibero-America. The fact is that the leader of VOX was the first political leader in Spain to understand the extent to which the transformation of the Spanish political struggle since the start of the century is due to Spain having become the initial battlefield in Europe where organised crime intends to move to take total control, as in Venezuela or Mexico.

Organised crime moreover counts, thanks to its leftist banners, on the support, whether foolish, deluded or malicious, of the globalist forces of the European Union. The photograph of Delcy Rodríguez with Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, with the Venezuelan criminal barred from setting foot on European soil, is quite a symbol. The EU has been the greatest ally of all the candidates of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group in Ibero-America. And the protector of their criminal regimes, the supreme example being that of the communist dictatorship of Cuba, subsidised by Brussels.

If the organised crime of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group have used the bonds of Hispanidad to make Spain the bridgehead of this totalitarian project with their strange allies of supposedly impeccable democrats in Europe, then the immense treasure that is Hispanidad and its infinite ties must be used for the reconquest of freedom both in America and in Europe, where we are losing it in floods every day and not only in Spain.

With Hispanidad, freedom, anti-communism and hope as their banner and with a mandate from Abascal, the Disenso Foundation together with the Madrid Forum set out to create these synergies for an effective fight against the expansionism and the brutality of that organised crime with an ideology which has emerged in past decades from the fusion of the communist movement with the drug cartels.

The great success of VOX in Ibero-America with the Madrid Forum and with the Disenso Foundation, which has literally wiped off the map foundations that have been present in Ibero-America for decades and with immense budgets, is due to the firmness, clarity and readiness to fight that they have shown. Qualities that so distinguish them from those forces which, in their eternal search for harmony with socialism, ended up either swallowed, defeated or murdered by it.

The Madrid Forum is inspired by the same non-negotiable spirit as the Iberosphere Summit that the Patriots group in the European Parliament is organising in Madrid this coming week: there is nothing to discuss with socialism. Socialism is a plague, a disease of the soul as Javier Milei says, and it must be defeated.

That is why the fight against narco-communism is the same fight as the one against Pedro Sánchez and against Zapatero and against their friends Maduro, Petro and Díaz Canel, who are, when all is said and done, the ones who hold the keys to the oil and to the cocaine. As also to the great deal of laundering that can be done in the Caribbean or in China. And until now also in Iran which, let us not forget, is another of the partners that helped Zapatero so that he could begin the institutional dismantling of Spain, make his alliance with ETA and with the Catalan coup plotters. As it was also a help afterwards to Sánchez with that small Venezuelan-Iranian product that is Pablo Iglesias, with whom he formed the first government of this personal and criminal project which must take Sánchez to the dock when this long excursion ends, an excursion that began with the Peugeot and ends in a colossal tragedy, in a criminal apotheosis and infinite damage for Spaniards.

We are better off today than before because we are already witnessing the greatest crisis of that joint project of regime change of Spanish socialism and organised crime, which has been functioning and advancing ever since this alliance came to power after the explosion of the 11M bombs of 2004. It is a power that in reality this alliance never relinquished, even though its representatives and its government presided over by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero spectacularly lost the elections to a Partido Popular that obtained an absolute majority with 186 deputies.

The seven years of Rajoy’s government, first of emergency and afterwards of corruption and indolence, neither bent nor braked the coup project of socialism and its criminal allies at home and abroad. And not precisely because the Partido Popular lacked the possibility, the necessary time and the overwhelming absolute majority that were required for a radical change in the course and the discourse of politics in order to save Spanish democracy and stop its enemies. It had the resources but it did not know what for.

When the nightmare of Sánchez’s criminal band and its allies is over, let us hope in peaceful fashion and without the criminals being able to use other methods from a not-distant past, Spaniards must be very conscious that they cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. Those who wish to change Sánchez for a grand project of harmonisation with the socialists will once again commit the errors that have always led to tragedy. The fall of the delinquent government must bring with it a radical change in the forms of government. Everything else is to go on along the agonising route designed by the enemies of Spain so that it should disappear into the hands of organised crime in various taifas, under different flags.

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. Deterrence: Peace Through Strength Works)

The United States relies on deterrence to protect our country from all enemies foreign and domestic. The police and border patrol protect our cities and borders by deterring criminals and their associated organized criminal cartels.

The U.S. military, including all five services from the USAF to the Marines and Coast Guard, protects our nation’s interests and sovereignty and our allies overseas through displays of deterrent forces that give pause to our enemies.

However, there are pressures in the U.S. that are deliberately proposing the U.S. stop deterrence both internal to and external to the United States even atop the already serious loss of deterrence to date.

For example, HASC Chairman Mike Rogers explained at a recent hearing on the Mideast and Africa that:

“American deterrence in the Middle East and Africa eroded under the last administration. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened our adversaries. The Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran only made matters worse. After Hamas’ barbaric onslaught, Iran opened a second front—activating the Houthis to strike Israel and disrupt global trade. Since 2023, the Houthis have launched hundreds of attacks on U.S. warships and commercial vessels. Yet, instead of holding the Houthis accountable, the Biden administration pulled them off the terror list.”

Previous administrations said Ukraine was either of no security interest to the United States (2014) or feared (2022) Russian escalation to the nuclear level and therefore reduced weapons provided to Ukraine and failed to develop any strategy to win the war against Putin and Moscow.

These policies in the view of our adversaries were interpreted as a show of weakness and of a limited faith in conventional or nuclear deterrence in 2014 and 2022. America thus sent signals to Moscow that Russia largely remained in a sanctuary free from Ukraine attack. What possible incentive would Moscow then have to negotiate a settlement that restored Ukraine sovereignty?

The same foreign policy mistakes were duplicated with respect to Iran. Taking Iran proxy Hamas off the terror list, providing $100 billion in frozen oil and gas funds back to Iran, and undermining Israel deterrent capability against Iran, collectively again took the U.S. deterrent off the table dealing with Iran proxy terrorism and missile strikes for example, and the Iran objective of exporting its Islamic jihad revolution worldwide.

There is a domestic corollary as well. Leaving the U.S. border largely open to those seeking illegal entry and providing them residency rights by the multiple millions took our border deterrent off the table.

Over 2021-4 ten-twelve million illegal aliens crashed our borders but with approximately 8-10 million given permission to remain in the United States and many to receive Medicaid and food stamps, as well as work permits on top of a free plane ride to the city of their choice.

Multi thousands of these aliens are criminal elements escaping law enforcement in their origin country, while smuggling drugs and engaging in human trafficking to the tune of at least $42 billon each year.

The United States took border deterrence off the table, and as consequence 107,000 Americans dye of drug overdoses annually, escalating crime hits our cities, while the U.S. has lost some 400,000 young unaccompanied migrant children, many of whom are believed to being sexually trafficked.

The Trump administration restored border deterrence quickly as the laws on the books allowed enforcement and return of deterrence. Adding thousands of ICE and border patrol officials plus detention centers are all in the reconciliation budget and will allow the continued enforcement of border security.

Foreign policy deterrent choices have also been correctly identified by the new administration. But no laws on the books are alone adequate to win back deterrence. Both major new investments and strategies are needed.

On Ukraine the administration determined there was no strategy to win and thus a cease fire was superior to turning Ukraine into an extended Verdun.

On Iran the administration correctly laid out the options. A negotiated agreement is possible but only one which ends the fiction that Iran has a right to enrich uranium. Or the United States and Israel either together or separately will take whatever military action necessary to put Iran’s nuclear enrichment technology out of business.

But the most serious threat is to take deterrence off the table involves our extended nuclear deterrent. Writer Annie Sorensen’s book “Nuclear War: A Scenario” called all U.S. nuclear deterrent strategy immoral, unworkable and therefore “mad”! Following suit, global zero and other disarmament groups support doing away with U.S. nuclear deterrent including unilaterally taking down 400/700 of the strategic nuclear delivery vehicles allowed by the New Start treaty. One new book describes the U.S. nuclear deterrent as “temporary.”

U.S. nuclear deterrent strategy holds at risk key enemy leadership, security and military assets, and has done 100% successfully for some 7 decades. It has emphasized having a secure second strike nuclear strike capability. How strange then that abolitionists want to change U.S. policy to “no use” of nuclear weapons even in retaliation to first being attacked by nuclear weapons. This would literally take down the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Unilaterally.

Deterrence has worked because the country has always (but often late) made the necessary investments. Today the new defense budget adds funds for key nuclear assets including the Sentinel ICBM, the Columbia submarine, the B-21 Raider strategic bomber plus the D-5 missile and LRSO. And work is being done to build a sea launch cruise missile, new NC3 and the entire warhead building enterprise. The total modernization investment of $27 billion, out of a total federal nuclear effort of $62 billion, is a modest investment out of a Federal budget of $6.8 trillion or .39%.

Modernization thus comes to a relatively modest $350 billion over the next decade, far less than the projected CBO numbers of over $1 trillion. Proposed FY26 defense spending is $870 billion including DoD and NNSA, and thus with nuclear modernization spending (not sustainment of legacy systems) at a reasonable annual cost of 3.5%.

Nuclear Deterrence has worked extraordinarily well even in the midst of crises. After Berlin in 1961, President Kenndy credited the Polaris submarine small warhead developed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for giving the U.S. the technological edge to stand down the Soviet threat to attack the U.S. military forces in Berlin. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear Armageddon, but as President Kennedy later said the deployment of the new Minuteman I missile at Malmstrom USAF base was “my ace in the hole” that resolved the crises peacefully.

The U.S. Minuteman deployment was just in time; the very same day the U.S. intelligence community determined the Soviets had employed nuclear armed offensive missiles in Cuba. The Minuteman deployment gave the U.S. the leverage to blockade Soviet trawlers bringing missiles to Cuba and remove the existing missiles as well.

In short, key U.S. nuclear technology development, part of ongoing Eisenhower and Kennedy administration modernization, saved the world from nuclear disaster.

Peace through strength works. It’s called deterrence. And modernization is deterrence, thus the urgent need to deploy as soon as possible the current modernization plan put forward to Congress for FY26 and beyond.

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

Immigration: ‘Ordinary Dutch people feel that their country is being occupied and they pay the price.’ (Photo by Niels Wenstedt/BSR Agency/Getty Images)

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