(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. The Right Path to Better Deterrence)

Is the West in increasing danger of being attacked with nuclear weapons, whether from a nuclear armed state or a terrorist organization? And if the nuclear threat has accelerated, is the current U.S. deterrent strategy adequate and cost-effective to prevent any such attack? And does an alternative strategy seeking abolition make sense?

Nuclear dangers have indeed increased. And nuclear weapons have become key elements of state strategy particularly with respect to Russia, China, North Korea and potentially Iran. Most importantly has been the adoption of an “escalate to win” options where nuclear weapons are introduced into a conventional conflict.

To counter these threats, U.S. deterrence strategy is in transition along multiple paths. Legacy deterrent forces represented by the U.S. nuclear Triad are being both significantly upgraded and replaced. The Administration and Congress understand the country is lacking in theater nuclear forces and is seeking to remedy that shortfall with the development of such technologies as nuclear capable sea and air-based medium range cruise missiles. The nation’s nuclear command, control, and communication (NC3) is also being upgraded to overcome cyber and other threats. And the nation’s nuclear legacy warheads are being replaced as service life extensions have run their course.

This effort has been moving forward since roughly the middle of the Bush ‘43’ and beginning of the Obama administrations, but lacked the urgency required to move forward quickly. The good news is that the current administration has repeatedly made the case that such modernization is of the highest national priority and will be accelerated.

Most importantly, the U.S. is not initiating any kind of arms race. Far from it. The U.S. program of record including upgrading the entirety of the U.S. nuclear TRIAD is consistent with the 2010 New START arms control agreement, even though it expires within the next year. The modernized force as currently planned is even smaller than the current legacy force—two fewer submarines (12 vs 14) and 48 fewer (192 vs 240) sea-launched ballistic missiles.

The U.S. has not modernized its nuclear deterrent for three decades and will not complete the task until somewhere between 2042-50. A little more than half of the current cost of U.S. nuclear deterrent investment is for sustaining and maintaining the current legacy systems. As modernization accelerates, that will change as the legacy systems are retired and the modernized systems come into the force. These legacy systems include 400 Minuteman III (1970), 14 Ohio class submarines (1982), twenty B2 and 40 B52 strategic bombers (1997 and 1962), along with 240 D-5 SLBM (1990) and LSRO or cruise missile (1982).

Unfortunately, the U.S. went on an extended procurement holiday and simply stopped upgrading its nuclear deterrent after the collapse of the USSR, except for a service life extension for the Minuteman missile and most of the Triad’s warheads. Thus, extending the life of the current nuclear deterrent will still be required for some decades, probably through 2042-50.

Can We Afford Survival?

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis answered this question in the affirmative. He got the numbers right. However, popular narratives claim the U.S. is spending $1.7-2.0 trillion over the next 30 years on nuclear modernization and are routinely cited by Congressional opponents of nuclear modernization and their global zero accomplices. Such estimates are bogus.

Modernization is actually a smaller part of the nuclear expenditures than the support needed for our legacy system. According to Senator John Hoeven, a senior member of the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the new Sentinel ICBMs, Columbia class submarines, B21 Raider bombers, LRSO or cruise missiles, and the upgraded D-5 SLBM missiles, will collectively cost $17.1 billion this fiscal year (FY2025), and shortly after 2030 peak and begin to decline as modernization moves forward.

The research, development, and acquisition costs of the new ICBMs, submarines and their missiles, the nuclear portion of the new bomber, as well as new warhead and NC3 work, are $350 billion over the next decade. That comes to 3.5% of a ten-year flat DoD budget, and some .4/10ths of one percent of the projected 10-year Federal budget or one out of every $257,000 spent by Uncle Sam. This modernization is not “nice to have.” Its “have to have.” The only other choice is to rust to obsolescence as Clark Murdock once quipped as the current legacy forces are aging out. The choice is thus between recapitalization of the force or going out of the nuclear deterrent business. Our legacy force is between 28-63 years old and will be 45-80 years old when fully replaced. If this qualifies as “arms racing,” every tortoise in the United States could qualify for the Olympic 100 yard dash!

Deterrence Strategy

A plethora of global zero enthusiasts—the Arms Control Association, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Ploughshares, Global Zero, the Carnegie Endowment—have embraced Annie Jacobsen’s thesis in her “Nuclear War: A Scenario” that current U.S. deterrent strategy is as Jacobsen writes, “Mad” and no longer viable.

Her thesis, long also held by those who support abolition, is that any initial use of nuclear weapons, however limited, will quickly escalate to an all-out nuclear war, which in turn will trigger “nuclear winter,” and billions of people around the globe will die. Part of her thesis is that the U.S. military has a built-in bias toward using nuclear weapons, and they will collectively “jam up” the President to unleash the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal no matter how limited an initial attack is on the United States.

For abolitionists, nuclear weapons are only good to “show deterrence” but cannot ever be used in retaliation should deterrence breakdown. That this essentially reduces our deterrent to a “bluff” seems to have been missed by the abolition folks, as well as the obvious consequence that if adopted a “no use” strategy means no U.S. adversary will now take our nuclear “deterrent” seriously. The corollary is that numbers also don’t matter because for the United States nuclear weapons won’t ever be used first or second, in a retaliatory manner.

However, as numerous U.S. military officers have testified to Congress, every war game concludes that “nothing holds” when our enemies introduce nuclear weapons into a conventional military conflict. “Nothing holds” means all the assumed advantages the U.S. holds on the conventional battlefield disappear. This is the rationale behind the adoption of “escalate to win” strategies by Russia and China. They believe the threat of introducing nuclear force into a conventional conflict will drive the United States out of the conflict and force the United States to stand down.

Conclusion

As the U.S. searches for the right strategy to secure deterrence in this troubling new nuclear age, there are five principles we should keep in mind.

First, without nuclear modernization we are out of the nuclear business—and facing unilateral disarmament.

Second, deterrence fails, and the U.S. loses if enemy nuclear weapons are introduced into a conventional conflict. The U.S. thus needs better deterrence at every level of conflict, especially involving theater nuclear forces.

Third, discarding a nuclear retaliatory option reduces nuclear deterrence to bluff.

Fourth, the United States is modernizing but only “racing” to get to where it already is—the 2010 New START allowed level of warheads.

And fifth, abolition doesn’t make sense. Particularly the daunting task of all nuclear powers abolishing their nuclear arsenals simultaneously. As the leader of North Korea is reportedly to have said when asked by a U.S. representative to join an effort to abolish nuclear weapons— “sure, you first.”

But unilaterally eliminating U.S. nuclear weapons as a deterrent force–as abolitionists are proposing– only invites more war, as such weakness is provocative.

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 Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Derechos para los árboles, no para los humanos)

More than 40 European parliamentarians have crossed the Atlantic and travelled to Lima to hold the twice-yearly summit of the Euro-Lat Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together members of the European Parliament with members of the three Ibero-American transnational parliaments. It is one more of the very many mass-delegation trips the European Parliament undertakes at immense expense and habitually with scant results, when not null or, worse still, laughable.

It is always good for parliamentarians from different regions of the world to see one another. Although it would be advisable that they be real parliamentarians and not the hired thugs of dictatorships, as are the supposed deputies of the supposed parliaments of Cuba and Venezuela who were present there, to the shame of everyone. But well applauded by the European socialists. Of course, the European People’s Party, which now provides the president of the European side of the EuroLat Assembly with Gabriel Mato, is as complicit in the insufferable attendance of dictatorships’ hired thugs at the EuroLat summits as the socialist Javi López was in the last legislature. In the final document all the allusions to dictatorships in America disappeared.

In spite of all this, attendance is imperative. Even though many of the debates are grotesque precisely because of the control the left holds over these gatherings, the attendance of the national, patriotic and conservative forces, committed to the fight against narco-socialism and the organised crime of the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group which control the entire Ibero-American left and by now no small part of the European one, is very important. Today there is, thanks to Vox, a very firm and mobilised interest among those European forces in carrying the cultural and anti-socialist battle to these forums as well, which until little more than five years ago were courtesy meetings where the European side was entirely Spanish and in which the left imposed all its messages and the Populars considered themselves satisfied if they managed to strip out of the joint reports and documents a few passages made preposterous by communists and radicals.

That is why, withstanding all the revulsion generated by the spectacles of corrupt consensus enjoyed by the dwindling majority of Populars, Socialists, Greens and Communists in the European Parliament, attendance at these gatherings is little short of obligatory. If only in order to raise one’s voice at some moment against the follies forged there in messages from the Ibero-American left which the European social democratic consensus is accustomed to dilute a little and then take on as its own.

The follies are not minor ones. And many no longer come only from Andean or Central American communists but from European ecologists and socialists. It says everything that the greatest achievement of this gathering should have been to prevent the approval of an absolutely delirious and little short of diabolical report that seeks to grant rights of their own to trees, plants, rivers and, of course, animals.

That is the European left today, with which the Populars have pacts in the European Parliament in order to snatch every post from the groups to their right, especially from Patriots, in which Vox is integrated. Vox in fact had the right, under the D’Hondt system, to occupy a vice-presidency of the European Assembly of EuroLat, and it was snatched away by an agreement between Populars, Socialists and the far left.

That left is the one that wants to give rights to trees, though not to the Spanish olive trees they are uprooting by the hundreds of thousands, but denies them to Venezuelans, to Cubans, to Bolivians and Nicaraguans. They want rivers to have the right not to be dammed or channelled, but they support the repression of narco-socialism throughout Ibero-America which leaves ever more thousands of political prisoners without rights and dismantles institutions as a team coordinated with Pedro Sánchez in Spain.

This report was signed not by some lunatic chieftain and witch doctor from the ranks of Evo Morales but by a Spanish socialist MEP, César Luena, a socialist from La Rioja who amuses himself with his co-religionists by seeking forceful ways to destroy every possibility of living off the land, of maintaining a profitable and viable agriculture and of achieving growth, increased well-being and prosperity. Luena was not alone. All the socialists and the European left supported this lunatic report, which was defeated thanks to Ibero-American votes together with the European centre and right.

This same Luena is the rapporteur of the preposterous and criminal European Nature Restoration Regulation, which takes shape in a terrifying picture of social engineering and destruction of infrastructure with a radical and anti-human vision of ecology. With a farewell to ethnocentrism and to all respect for the interests of human beings and of peoples and nations, in one monstrosity and the other he seeks to do away with a nature at the service of man and to sacrifice the human being for the sake of a nature that comes to hold rights of its own. The socialists want to promote the legal recognition of animals, mountains, rivers and trees as subjects of law, placing them on an equal footing with human beings.

So the Lima summit ended with socialists who lost their bid to give rights to nature in order to strip human beings of every right to exploit crops, animals and plants and natural resources so as to live reasonably from them. But it is as well that everyone should know that they lost thanks to reasonable deputies from the Hispanic countries. And that they should remember that these socialists, who between corruption and ideological delirium are a mortal danger to any nation and society, continue to maintain a firm coalition, as Esteban González Pons likes to say, with the European People’s Party.

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. Defending America or Inviting an Attack?)

Many Americans want to avoid entangling the USA in unnecessary foreign wars. They also want the government to spend money smartly. But given the serious nuclear and missile threats facing the United States, meeting such objectives will take clear thinking and smart strategy.

One new idea from research analysts at the CATO and Quincy Institutes to both save money and avoid wars is to stop the Golden Dome missile defenses now being proposed by the Administration.

These critics have adopted the strange idea that the U.S. will use a missile defense shield not to defend the country but to hide behind such defenses while making dangerous preparations for a first strike against the Russians and Chinese.

Years ago, this was described by Ploughshares Joe Cirincione as a “first the shield and then the sword” strategy. Such critics opposed even the Congressionally initiated limited shield of 44 interceptors the Bush administration deployed in California and Alaska twenty years ago to defend against missile attacks from states such as North Korea and Iran.

So, these missile defense critics are now standing reality on its head. The good guys—the United States—are really the bad guys. And nations whom we thought were evil— such as North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China—are now understandable, even benign—they may be planning to attack us but only because the “evil” U.S. is planning on building defenses.

Just so you understand, let me go over this again. For the United States, the critics now contend that building a defense would apparently be riskier than not building any defense at all. The United States would be making the world more dangerous because Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, fearing the U.S. was planning to strike first, would plot to get in the first punch. So, to prevent such a pre-emptive strike, the United States has to make it easy for the bad guys to strike us first.

Now the critics’ logic is not clear, but apparently by eliminating any defense of our homeland from ballistic or cruise missiles in the first place, the bad guys would refrain from ever attacking us. Sort of a “peace through submission” strategy. Leave the U.S. at risk, totally vulnerable, as we can then rely on enemy totalitarian powers and their terrorist agents to solely decide whether to keep us safe. Strangely, on this the critics such as Joe Cirincione agree with China and North Korea—the Golden Dome says Pyongyang would be “highly dangerous” and “could be used for offensive purposes” while Beijing says Golden Dome will “start an arms race.”

The opponents also think the Golden Dome defenses won’t work because they assume the technology being sought will be based on the Israel Iron Dome missile defense technology. Even though Israel has successfully intercepted thousands of incoming missiles and rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah over many years, those destroyed targets have not been intercontinental ballistic missiles of hypersonic speed.

However, the Israeli accomplishments were still extraordinary. Its interceptors were able to shoot down rockets even updating their software in real time. Given the very limited number of terrorist rockets and missiles that have broken through Israel’s defenses, the coercive and blackmail nature of the terrorists weapons have been much diminished. Even though perfect protection isn’t possible, the central purpose of missile defenses was nonetheless achieved.

Critics, however, still insist that since the U.S. would probably be defending against much longer range missiles, Golden Dome cannot duplicate the Israeli success. And that high speed missiles coupled with decoys and counter measures can spoof a defense unlike shorter range rockets.

But to date tests show the missile defenses against long-range missiles succeed as high as seventy percent of the time, and against all missiles and rockets, even upwards of more than ninety percent in the real world. And unlike many critics, missile defense proponents such as Uzi Rubin, Hank Cooper and Trey Obering have actually directed the building of real-world workable missile defense systems including elements in space. Which are now deployed around the world. And with a technology now vastly more capable than when missile defenses such as SDI were first proposed.

Now is the United States shaking up international stability by building the Golden Dome? Actually, the United States has shown remarkable restraint in building only 44 missile interceptors to protect the continental United States. While also markedly reducing our deployed nuclear forces from near ten thousand strategic long range systems to 1550 under New START, while also in 1991 simultaneously and unilaterally eliminating over 90% of our theater nuclear systems.

Despite U.S. restraint, Russia and China have major dual use defenses deployed in far greater numbers than any U.S. systems. According to the Atlantic Council, “Russia’s and China’s extensive development of homeland missile defenses gives lie, to an extent, to [the] contention that U.S. missile defenses are uniquely destabilizing.” Further explains the Council, “Numerically extensive Russian and Chinese missile defenses… could alter the strategic-forces balance with the United States if not accounted for in U.S. strategic forces policy.”

In addition, critics don’t understand the likely missile threats the U.S. seeks to neutralize and why such a challenge can be met. An effective EMP threat, for example, could be from a single missile. A terror attack aimed at a major American city could be a few missiles surreptitiously launched from the sea, from a freighter with a pop-up missile. Russia could be threatening an escalate to win strategy, as Putin has done in Ukraine, where an attack might involve a limited number of missiles aimed at U.S. forces or allied bases overseas. In addition, Russian LRCM performance in Ukraine shows severe survivability issues with up to 70-90% being intercepted by missile defenses. And an attack could be inadvertent or accidental, and by definition limited, where a missile defense would be a great protective asset.

Now an attack on the United States involving an all-out massive use of missiles could also occur. And to be sure, defenses could not stop 100% of such an attack. Although defenses could defeat or blunt or seriously complicate any attempted disarming strike. However, Russian development of nuclear attack options such as escalate to win but short of an all-out disarming strike is seriously worrisome. As James Howe argues, Russia is deploying nuclear forces to conduct selected nuclear execution options on adversary nuclear forces, bases, admin/political centers and war production with the objective to limit damage, control escalation and achieve victory. Missile defenses such as Golden Dome makes such attacks less likely to succeed or heighten the uncertainty in the minds of the attackers, which is the essence of deterrence. Adding a theater nuclear capability such as a Navy based cruise missile also would strengthens deterrence.

Nonetheless, the ability to intercept one or a limited number of missiles could be the difference between the survival of a nation or its destruction. As former House Speaker Gingrich has explained, an EMP attack could send the United States economy back to the early 18th century. And defenses need not protect the airspace above Paraguay or Lichenstein or the Himalayas and can be deployed preferentially to target missiles launched from Russia, China, North Korea or Iran.

The 2003 Gilmore Commission concluded it was critical that the U.S. protect thirty two of its most important infrastructure nodes, the destruction of which would cause widespread harm amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars and even millions of lives. And whose destruction former IRGC head Soleimani explicitly referenced as an Iranian objective. Israel’s ability to defend its nation from Hamas and Hezbollah missiles and rockets reportedly prevented in 2015 what was estimated to be a possible two-thirds sudden drop in Israel’s GDP.

Our adversaries may in all likelihood seek to surreptitiously attack the United States. That is the basis of the decades long tactics of terrorists and their state sponsors. Nation state sponsors of terror and wars of national liberation hide their shadowy role precisely to avoid retaliation, and to render impotent U.S. deterrent capabilities. Defense helps solve that dilemma and buys the defending nation the time and space to eventually strike back. That strengthens not weakens deterrence.

Such future surreptitious attacks are not going to be a massive, all-out missile attack the U.S. can see coming. Any deliberate such enemy attack with multiple hundreds or more warheads [the Armageddon option] would only be coming from China or Russia. Both would understand that any such attack would probably immediately precipitate a massive U.S. retaliatory response that would essentially cripple and destroy the leadership and key military assets of the bad guys. Any such initial strike on their part would thus be suicidal. And adding a robust U.S. defense against just such an attack further complicates the objectives of these rogue attackers, making any such attack even more suicidal.

Opponents of missile defense are apparently blind to these geostrategic realities. Yes, the U.S. territory to be protected is indeed vastly larger than Israel. But Israel has protected its country from literally many thousands of missiles, rockets and drones, while the U.S. would most likely have to protect itself largely from multiple dozens of such missiles, a technology challenge we can win.

To be clear, few are arguing that a massive attack against the United States involving thousands of warheads can be effectively stopped by missile defense. That Armageddon type attack would definitely invite a major U.S. retaliatory strike, and one potentially involving a retaliatory strike of more than one thousand nuclear warheads of all kinds. The U.S. is markedly improving its nuclear deterrent to stop just such threats. Golden Dome is not a substitute but an adjunct to this deterrent capability.

Thus, proceeding with Golden Dome adds to deterrence and involves collectively putting together in a layered approach some dozens of existing and new missile defense systems, sensors, interceptors and other technologies, many acquired over the past four decades.

All can now be fully developed, tested and integrated, and put into the field, especially in space. Interceptors are now defending the United States and its allies here and abroad, involving air, land and sea missile and air defense components including Patriot, Aegis, THAAD, Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, and GBI’s, as well as ground and sea-based sensors and radars. Golden Dome will integrate everything and add the key missing technologies such as space based and laser technologies.

In conflicts involving Ukraine, Korea, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, spanning nearly four decades, the United States and its allies have used missile defense for protection or had it available to deter attacks. Thousands of lives and billions in treasure have literally and proactively been saved. Thus, the slander from one Quincy analyst that missile defense is a multi-hundred billion dollar scam is itself a scam.

Apart from how missile and air defenses have worked in the real world, does missile defense make arms control more difficult and create grave strategic instabilities, as critics assert? What does history tell us?

First, the United States signed the ABM treaty ban on defenses in 1972 at the insistence of the Soviets. The Soviets first pushed for the ban in late 1968 as they wanted to catch up with the American offensive forces as they trailed by multiple thousands of strategic warheads. The Nixon administration sold the SALT “arms control” and ABM agreements as a package. Since U.S. missile defenses would be unavailable to limit Soviet first strike capabilities, such offensive capabilities would have to be curtailed through “arms control” or SALT, which was added as an executive agreement to the ABM treaty.

Nonetheless the promises of SALT were false. There was no real arms control but a joint agreement to build up to an agreed upon but very high level. The Soviets deployed at least 3000 SS-18 ICBM first strike offensive warheads despite the ban on defenses, the opposite of what had been promised. In fact, the SALT process codified massive increases and not decreases in Soviet strategic warheads, amounting to a Soviet growth to over ten thousand strategic nuclear warheads from a base of roughly two thousand.

A 1983 net assessment by the U.S. DoD projected Soviet strategic forces by 1993 would reach 24,000 warheads under the SALT process. The Reagan/Bush START reductions became a reality only with the end of the Soviet empire and the leverage the USA created with its offensive modernization, investment in SDI and economic warfare against Moscow.

Ironically, many of the opponents of both SDI and now Golden Dome supported at the time a 1980 Moscow initiated nuclear freeze just as the USSR was completing its nuclear modernization. While simultaneously opposing much of the Reagan-era American nuclear modernization which was just beginning.

Subsequently, some decades later in 2002 the United States finally got rid of the ABM treaty. Shortly afterward, in 2002 and then in 2010, respectively, the United States proceeded to sign two treaties cutting nuclear warheads, under the Moscow and New Start treaties, which reduced strategic nuclear weapons in Russia and the United States from 6000 to 1550, or by 75%. Russia commented at the time that eliminating the ABM treaty was of no adverse consequence.

With the defensive ban in place in 1972, deployed offensive nuclear weapons went up 500%. With defenses possible, after 2002, deployed strategic offensive weapons were cut 75%.

It may be that the era of arms reductions is now over. But we now have the ability to counter a Chinese buildup with both nuclear expansion and a robust defense. And also counter an emerging Russian nuclear breakout, both of which reflect the hegemonic ambitions of Moscow and Beijing. With a combination of offense and defense capabilities, the U.S. does not necessarily have to match Russia and China warhead for warhead but still work to improve deterrence.

Long before the ABM treaty was junked, Russia built its own defenses as now reportedly has China. Blaming America for Russian and Chinese hegemonic ambitions is right out of the propaganda playbooks of the Kremlin’s SVR and Chinese Ministry of State Security. The United States needs to get on with building up its security and dismissing the foolish idea that we are the bad guys and the bad guys are good.

As former defense official and defense expert Pepi DiBiaso explains, “the Golden Dome signals a welcome interest in more comprehensive air and missile defenses for the homeland. It aims to move beyond the missile defense policy framework established decades ago in a far more benign strategic threat environment. That policy narrowly confined the homeland defense posture to a small number of ground-based interceptors and radars to defend against a handful of ballistic missiles from regional powers.

DiBiaso concludes: “Given the ascendance of Russia and China as significant great power competitors, the role of missile defense should be realigned to provide a measure of protection from any adversary who might seek to threaten or strike the United States.” Alternatively, eliminating defenses puts U.S. security at high risk and would give the totalitarian powers and enemies of the United States a big head start in securing hegemonic power over the free world.

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 Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. The Current Nuclear State of Affairs)

With the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, and for now the passing of the immediate danger of a nuclear conflict in South Asia, it would make sense to review the current world-wide nuclear state of affairs, especially as we honor those who sacrificed to protect our freedoms.

Much of the recent news has concentrated on the buildup of China’s nuclear forces and the Russian threats to use their nuclear forces against Ukraine and its allies. In addition, there have been reviews of North Korean missile tests and to what degree Iran has enriched uranium.

Although all serious developments, what is missing is an appreciation of what these four rogue states wish to do with their nuclear capability, whether numbering in advance centrifuges or dozens, hundreds, or thousands of nuclear warheads.

As has been often argued, numbers do matter in the nuclear balance. And thus, increasing numbers should be of growing concern to US security analysts.

But what is it that these states wish to do with these nuclear weapons? That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Three of the four are seeking to build “empires” of sorts while the fourth (North Korea) is a cooperative adjunct of the other three and undertakes whatever the three require.

President Putin has said he does not wish to re-create the Soviet Union. However, he apparently does want to re-create Russia as an empire, including and particularly incorporating Ukraine, the Baltics, Finland, and much of Eastern Europe. Russia is not only terrorizing Ukraine with drones and missiles but also engaging in sabotage and cyber war against nations in eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

China sees its rightful place in the international firmament as the world’s hegemon having a right under heaven to be the world’s premier power, even as Gordon Chang has cautioned, including dominion over outer space, the moon, and even Mars to achieve these goals. China has unleashed unrestricted warfare against the United States and its allies especially in the economic field and harms our social cohesion with what Xi calls a reverse opium war.

Iran is guided by its constitutional mandate to export its violent and terrorist Islamic doctrine through the use of multiple proxy, terror organizations, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

After 56 years of such terror, Iran has caused the death of tens of thousands at a cost of multiple trillions of dollars. Contrary to popular belief, Iran’s terror campaigns are not going to be settled with the adoption of an unattainable but pretend two state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Iran seeks to build an Iranian condominium of allies in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria as well as Gaza and the West Bank with which to attack Israel and US interests in the Middle East. That Israel and the United States have seriously eroded this Iranian objective is good news, but the bad news remains that Iran fiercely holds onto this objective.

As long as the United States maintains military forces in the Republic of Korea, North Korea will probably not invade. However, North Korea‘s role is to pin down American resources in and around the Republic of Korea and Japan, in order to force the United states to provide resources in the area while Chinese created conflict is initiated elsewhere in the western Pacific, particularly with respect to Taiwan. You can be sure that the CCP will cleverly use North Korea as a proxy force to make it all the more difficult for the United States to defend its other allies in the region.

In addition, it is well known North Korea and Iran cooperate on missile and nuclear technology developments. North Korea and Russia cooperate similarly, as well as having the former provide troops for Russia’s war against Ukraine. In addition, North Korea serves as China’s agent whenever the CCP decides to create military mischief somewhere against American interests. And China buys Iran and Russia energy, helps Iran arm the Houthis piracy, and underwrites most of the North Korean economy.

These enemy forces in Europe, the Middle East and Asia confront the United States with serious military threats that cannot be thwarted by any US quick pivot to Asia. All our allies must pivot as well to all three geographic areas as the United States cannot deter these threats alone. That is why the administration as far back as 2017 pushed hard to get NATO to the 2%GDP defense level and why now in 2025 that goal has rightly extended to 5%.

Europe has a GDP closing in on $20 trillion, with a population of 449 million, and a per capita income of $62,000. America’s Indo-Pacific allies number two billion people, with a GDP of $20 trillion and a per capita income reaching $34,000 in the Republic of Korea and Japan, $84,000 in Singapore and $10,000 in India.

All can contribute to freedom’s collective security which is precisely what the Administration is seeking, and putting America first is not putting the US alone. The US investment in defense is now approaching $1 trillion which is necessary to protect our security and deter bad “hombres.” When measured in what it would cost the United States to buy the military fielded by China and Russia, the US defense spending matches but does not exceed Moscow and Beijing. Given the United States has global obligations and security requirements, the resources applied to defense and security make sense but cannot be expected to meet all our collective and joint security needs. Real allies pull their own weight and do not depend solely on their friends for security.

Together America and her allies can pivot to the growing dangers. And if proceeding with the moral clarity of peace through strength, we can protect our security through deterrence and welcome indeed many future decades of peace and prosperity.

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 Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. A vueltas con los aranceles del maligno)

Donald Trump has said that if there is no trade agreement with the European Union right now, then from 1 June the US will apply tariffs of 50% on all products coming from the European Union. The North American president thus displays his displeasure with the manner of the European Commission in negotiations that contrast with those other countries have carried out with the US swiftly and soundly, and which have concluded in bilateral trade agreements.

The European Commission is led by Ursula von der Leyen and a great many other people who have so scorned, insulted, caricatured and ridiculed Donald Trump and his team that it is proving wholly incapable of accepting a new reality in which its hostility towards the president, its arrogance, its haughtiness and its pretended moral superiority are terribly counterproductive. They will probably now redouble their insults against Trump and his government, and all the European media that are well-paid mouthpieces for those Brussels positions will cry out to high heaven.

A problem added to the initial ill disposition and to all the implicit technical difficulties lies in the fact that the European Commission charged with negotiating sees in the other party, in Trump’s government, an ally of its worst enemies: the conservative and patriotic forces that are growing in Europe and threatening to wrest political hegemony and power from this two-party system of Populars and Socialists which, with its liberal, green and communist satellites, governs in the EU and has controlled all the institutions, including the European Parliament, since its foundation.

With the permanent growth of these patriotic, sovereigntist and conservative forces, which enjoy the express sympathies of members of the North American government, Brussels’ hostility towards Trump is also part of its obsession with not losing total control of the EU and the power which, for the first time in the history of the EU, it sees endangered. The European Union spends billions on propaganda for its policy, financing media outlets and NGOs in a manner that is not even always legal. This highly ideological propaganda, directed against the conservative and national forces, has also always been violently anti-Trump.

That is well known in Washington and it does not help. But the criteria Washington is applying have in none of the cases so far, many already resolved, been ideological. The US insists that the tariffs it is imposing are an absolutely proportionate and reasonable response to all the thousand barriers and impediments, whether tariff, fiscal or regulatory, that the European Union imposes on its products and its services. And it is in this field that we are going to see for the first time this clash between two economies that call themselves free-market but which in Europe has been converted into a frenetic regulatory and interventionist race, into something very far from any freedom at all.

The jungle of interference, regulations, laws, directives and impositions in the name of a delirious, ideologically motivated social engineering have made Europe a closed economy even for Europeans themselves. Hence its growth, productivity and well-being have been stagnant for years.

The truth is that the North American tariffs, if indeed they arrive, will be a response to that ideological bunkerisation which the governing elites and the bureaucratic apparatus of the EU have imposed throughout Europe under Germany’s baton, an apparatus that is today already more ideological than the Central Committees of the Soviet orbit and their commissions for the five-year plans.

European countries have now been suffering for many decades the general deterioration of the economy, of industry, of education, of health care and many other fields because of the mistaken, ideological, irrational, self-harming and often suicidal policy of Brussels. But now it may be that they suffer in traumatic fashion this failure of a policy and the incapacity, the absolute impossibility, of the European Commission to defend effectively the interests of the countries it claims to represent.

Because what they say in Washington is very true: that many European countries do not know how their national interests are being negotiated by the European Commission. And many may be certain that their interests are being sacrificed to the interests of other countries, or to ideological positions and global political conveniences that the European Commission is pursuing.

Giorgia Meloni is the one who, from her Italian government, is making the greatest efforts to ensure that Brussels, with its whole bureaucratic and technical apparatus made up of highly ideologised, anti-conservative, anti-American and of course furiously anti-Trump personnel, does not turn the need for radical changes into a war with the US that would be suicidal for many European sectors and regions. In that case the European countries will suffer catastrophically that surrender of sovereignty which had been presented to them as a joining of forces that would improve their negotiating position. On the contrary, that cession of sovereignty has left their interests in the hands of powerful forces which have different and even contrary interests when it comes to negotiating with the US.

The crisis opened between a Trump administration and a European Commission whose principal mark of identity, apart from hypocrisy and failure over all these past years, is hostility towards Trump, may lead many European sectors and many European regions to disaster. Let us hope that the European Commission, pressed by some reasonable governments in the EU and by reality and necessity themselves, will reconsider its positions. It is true that on many questions they are being required to climb down from some of the ideological positions they have most developed, see the whole climate and energy hysteria, and which have done the most damage to the development of the European economies.

If a good agreement is reached, the European nations will have things to thank Trump for. If total war is reached, the European nations will have to ask themselves whether things would not have gone much better for them in a negotiation of their own, as the United Kingdom has done swiftly and successfully, rather than being represented by some who are in no way defending the specific interests of certain nations.

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. Eight Deadly Nuclear Sins)

The critics of U.S. nuclear modernization have a set of nuclear catechisms of which they accuse America’s nuclear enterprise of being guilty. The latest rendition of this was by Jimmy Tobias in the Nation magazine. He cites eight deadly nuclear sins. They are: (1) The U.S. is starting an arms race; (2) America’s allies are contributing to the arms race as well; (3) The U.S. is needlessly expanding its nuclear arsenal; (4) For dozens of American aerospace companies, nuclear weapons are simply a profit making business of $1.7 trillion; (5) ICBMs are on a dangerous hair trigger alert; (6) ICBMs are nothing more than a sponge to draw enemy missiles away from hitting U.S. cities but would still lead to tens of millions of U.S. deaths; (7) The U.S. is not pursuing arms control with enough vigor; and (8) Threatening retaliation as the basis for nuclear deterrence is wrongheaded and must be discarded.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Well first he actually starts off by—albeit grudgingly– getting one thing right. He cites Dr. Jil Hruby, the recently retired Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administrator, laying out the nuclear threats to the United States: Russia, Hruby said, “has in recent years stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus; withdrawn its ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and lowered its threshold for nuclear weapons use. It also seems to be exploring new nuclear-weapons delivery technologies, including space-based weapons. Further south, China is rapidly expanding the size of its nuclear arsenal and appears to be moving away from a no-first-use policy for launching nuclear weapons. North Korea persists in building up its nuclear program, rattling the region with its regular missile tests, while Pakistan is developing its own intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities, and Iran continues to enrich uranium.”

But then Tobias turns to blaming America and its allies for contributing to what he describes as a nuclear “disequilibrium.” But while Russia, China and North Korea are adding hundreds of warheads annually, the only U.S. ally adding warheads is India, which one analysis has guessed that New Delhi has added all of 8 warheads to its arsenal since 2023, reaching 172 warheads compared, for example, to 160 in Pakistan.

The U.S. on the other hand is adding no new warheads to its strategic long-range nuclear arsenal. The nuclear program of record, fully adopted by Congress in December 2010, builds only to the 2010 New START arms control level of an official 1550 warheads (but actually around 1800-1900 if bomber weapons are actually counted.) No new theater nuclear weapons are being acquired, and all such weapons except a couple of hundred gravity bombs in Europe were eliminated unilaterally by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 in the UPI, or Unilateral Presidential Initiative.

In the decade after the end of the USSR, the United States stopped production of the Ohio class submarine, the Peacekeeper (MX) missile, the SICBM or Midgetman missile, and the B2 bomber. The U.S. did continue production of rocket motors for the D-5 missile and begin to extend the life of the Minuteman missile. The D-5 motors were the only such rocket motor production line open in the country for civilian and military space purposes or for the U.S. nuclear Triad.

In 2002 and 2010, the U.S. and Russia signed two arms control deals that brought strategic force levels in the United States down from 6000 to 1550 warheads. While Russia agreed to these deals, current strategic force levels held by Moscow now exceed the New START numbers considerably, even as all inspections required by the New START agreement of 2010 have been terminated by Moscow.

So, who is doing the arms racing? Certainly not the United States and its allies.

Russia embarked on its massive nuclear modernization effort at least as far back as April 1999 when President Yeltsin ordered the development of 10,000 low-yield, small, highly accurate battlefield nuclear weapons, along with the full modernization of Moscow’s strategic nuclear forces. As of today, U.S. Strategic Command says that Russia’s modernization force acquisition is 92% complete.

China’s decision to build up a nuclear force numbering well over one thousand nuclear weapons was probably made no later than 2008-9. According to Dr. Chris Yeaw, Dr. Rich Fischer, and Dr. Mark Schneider, China is building to a force of nuclear weapons exceeding 3000 by 2035-40, including dual use theater missile forces and a complete Triad of strategic nuclear weapons.

North Korea is adding to its nuclear arsenal even as the Republic of Korea remains within the confines of the NPT or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and under the U.S. nuclear deterrent umbrella which Tobias wants to jettison.

Now does the U.S. nuclear force modernization cost too much?

Here again the numbers used by critics don’t make sense. The $300 billion estimate by Tobias for 100 B21 bombers is nonsense. The nuclear bomber cost is only a proportion of the conventional force, or the 20 bombers assigned to the nuclear mission. An adjusted bomber cost plus $140 billon for Sentinel, $130 billion for Columbia and $30 billion for upgrading the D-5 SLBM brings the platform costs to around $325 billion over three decades, to which one can add the costs of replacing the warheads and nuclear command and control. Both submarines and ICBMs are projected to last to 2070-80 which implies an average annual acquisition cost of less than $10 billion. Total costs for the next 30 years for the nuclear platforms and warheads and NC3 will probably reach $400 billon, with the remaining 2/3rds of all costs consisting of operations, maintenance and sustainment of the current legacy forces. Which must be spent unless the U.S. goes out of the nuclear deterrence business.

Is our ICBM force dangerous or destabilizing?

ICBMs are in key respects actually the most stabilizing part of our nuclear deterrent. The ICBM force has been on alert now for over 60 years and not once has the President ordered a missile to be launched. In fact, President Kennedy said the initial deployment of the Minuteman missile at exactly the same day the U.S. intelligence community discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, was “my ace in the hole,” that allowed the U.S. to pressure Moscow to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and avoid nuclear Armageddon. And having a new Minuteman missile, solid fueled, on alert 99% of the time, able to reach targets throughout the USSR, also enabled the U.S. to withdraw its liquid fueled rockets from Turkey which was part of the secret deal made with Moscow.

The Minuteman is not a sponge, but a target set impossible for Moscow to credibly threaten given the U.S. geographical expanse of the 400 Minuteman silos compared to Russia’s arsenal of 1550-1800 nuclear warheads—assuming that Russia is complying with the New START agreement. If Moscow breaks out of the 2010 agreement, the U.S. does have the ability to add warheads to both its ICBM and SLBM arsenal, up to around a new total of 3100 warheads over a period of four-plus years. And the U.S. could protect its silos with the Golden Dome missile defense, which increases the U.S. retaliatory capability and thus stabilizing deterrence for the United States and its allies.

To launch a Minuteman missile requires a launch conference to be held by top defense officials assessing an enemy missile launch, followed by an assessment of the target where the enemy missile will strike, and only then after such real confirmation, does the President decide if and when to launch a U.S. retaliatory strike. And in the event of an enemy strike of U.S. assets overseas, the issue of prompt launch does not even arise.

Is the U.S. not seeking arms control?

Here the record is clear. The U.S. initiated the SALT process. Moscow insisted on banning missile defenses, even as offensive nuclear arsenals grew multifold under the SALT process. It was the United States that pursued the START reductions process and the INF treaty. And it was the USSR and then Russia that violated them all.

The United States put the Moscow or SORT treaty on the table and New START. The Trump administration has indeed noted that with major further reductions in nuclear weapons, the U.S. and others would not need to completely modernize our nuclear arsenals. But it takes two to tango, and in this world, it will take at least three (China, Russia and the U.S.) to tango. And the Trump administration has been clear: the only current alternative in the absence of major arms control or abolition, is to fully modernize its deterrent under a peace through strength umbrella.

But China and Russia have shown little interest in arms control; China said if the U.S. reduced its arsenal unilaterally to China’s level, they might begin to talk. As for Russia, much of their arsenal including thousands of warheads, are not even limited by the New START agreement, while only a few hundred theater weapons in the U.S. arsenal aren’t covered. Experts now estimate that Russia and China combined will have more than four-fold the level of nuclear weapons as the United States under current trends by 2035.

Ending Retaliatory Nuclear Deterrence

Finally, this essay calls for the U.S. to jettison its nuclear retaliatory doctrine for deterring the use of conventional, chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against the United States. Implicitly that would have the United States rely solely on its conventional capability to deter our enemies. But as every miliary expert has testified to Congress, relying on conventional force in the face of an adversary using nuclear weapons, does not hold water. All the assumptions the U.S. makes re prevailing with conventional forces go out the window. The U.S. would lose every fight. Deterrence thus disappears and enemy aggression then becomes a fait accompli. In short, jettisoning our current deterrent strategy is a nuclear sin of the first order.

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 Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. Is Nuclear Modernization Bankrupting the Country?)

CBO has once again published a ghost story trying to scare Congress and the public into jettisoning our nuclear modernization efforts due to estimates that the $1 trillion ten-year cost of such an effort is not affordable. Daryl Kimball, the head of the Arms Control Association, echoes these conclusions with a call to reign in the “skyrocketing” costs of nuclear modernization. He calls for the Sentinel ICBM program to be eliminated and instead keep the legacy Minuteman III ICBM force as a means of saving money.

Kimball references a 2014 Rand report that recommended the MMIII missile system go through a life extension program, to be followed after a number of decades by a new missile system, then known as the GBSD (ground based strategic deterrent) and now the Sentinel.

In fact, the USAF requested, and Congress approved in the late 1990s a near decades long effort to redo the guidance and propulsion systems for MMIII. Both were replaced and the system was given a life extension to keep the land based deterrent in the force “through 2030” as required by law. And the USAF will now continue to keep MMIII on alert until fully replaced by the Sentinel, now estimated by 2050.

However, Kimball ignores that the MMIII missile, including its guidance and propulsion elements, have a service life that is not unlimited and cannot be in force through 2080 which is the current plan for Sentinel. This is also true of the ICBM warheads, as now retired NNSA administrator Dr. Jill Hruby explained at a Hill seminar in 2023.

As noted, the Sentinel is designed to be deployed through 2080, which brings its annual average cost to $2.8 billion, which is hardly unaffordable. The MMIII missiles will continue in operation as previously reported but as a total force the MMIII ICBMs have to be replaced, especially as the cost of operation and sustainment continues to escalate. The HASC just passed reconciliation legislation added $500 million for MMIII enhancements including guidance and propulsion work, test and repair equipment, ground mechanical and electrical needs, and infrastructure.

Without Sentinel, the ICBM force would eventually have to stand down. But the Strategic Command requirements is a force of very close to 400 ICBM warheads on daily alert with the ability to penetrate defenses and operate more efficiently. A MMIII force being retired and trending toward obsolescence does not provide that. And as previous studies have revealed, replacing the current ICBM on alert warheads with those on submarines, as one alternative, would cost over $100 billion. If one replaces the 800 ICBM warheads Sentinel could have if deployed with a partial force of multiple warheads per missile, the acquisition costs to buy submarines and SLBMs instead would be north of $200 billion.

Kimball also misses that the CBO cost numbers are not for modernization alone. Nearly 60-65% are for operations and sustainment of the current, New START bounded force. The CBO estimates also do not include any additional buildup in nuclear forces except for some modest RDT&E for the SLCM-N. Otherwise the CBO report is an estimate of the program of record as agreed to by the US Congress and the Obama administration in December 2010 during negotiations over the 2010 New START treaty and subsequent Senate ratification of the agreement. Hardly a dangerous start to an arms race as the planned force fits entirely within the framework of the New START arms control agreement.

To their credit, Arms Control Today (ACT) correctly reported the cost of the bomber leg of the Triad has not “skyrocketed” but has fallen dramatically. Reports ACT, the B-21 program is, according to the nominee to direct DoD acquisition, “a successful acquisition program by all accounts,” as the five-year production costs have fallen 28 percent from $19.1 billion, as estimated in fiscal year 2023, to $13.8 billion in fiscal 2025.

In short, some two-thirds of the CBO budget estimate is the cost of the nuclear deterrent without any platform modernization that so worries Kimball. And whatever “arms race” Kimball thinks the current program of record is undertaking was initially agreed to in 2010, not 2023 or 2025, and as noted within the boundaries of the New START arms agreement.

Much of the cost Kimball worries about is for critically needed elements of the nuclear deterrent which have to be upgraded even if the US did not build a single new bomber, ICBM, SLBM, submarine or cruise missile. The warheads for the entire TRIAD also have to be replaced, as mentioned above, and the nuclear command and control needs to be fully upgraded to overcome, for example, current cyber and other threats while ensuring complete command of the nuclear force by US officials. These efforts come to fully one-third of the costs identified by CBO, with close to another third for the operations and sustainment—not modernization—of the current legacy and nuclear force, which is now between 30-55 years old.

A significant part of the increase in costs CBO identified is that years of high acquisition over the ten year estimate replaced years of low level research and development, which is normal during the acquisition process.

If one looks at the research, development, and acquisition costs of the new ICBMs, submarines and their missiles, the nuclear portion of the new bomber, as well as new warhead and NC3 work, the $350 billion over a decade comes to 3.5% of a ten-year flat DoD budget, and some .4/10ths of one percent of the projected Federal budget or one out of every $257,000 spent by Uncle Sam. The annual FY25 budget cost for these platforms comes to $17.1 billion according to Senator John Hoeven (R-ND), a member of the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee which handles these programs, or 2% of the current defense budget.

And while it is true all elements of the nuclear Triad including warheads and command and control are being modernized or replaced, the purpose is to sustain and make credible nuclear deterrence. The cost to upgrade our nuclear deterrent simultaneously is due to the US Congress and subsequent administrations– after the collapse of the USSR– putting off or kicking the modernization can down the road, with the full throated support of Mr. Kimball and his arms control colleagues. That “holiday from history” as retired USAF General Garret Harencak called it, had serious consequences, indeed. Given the nuclear threats cascading around the globe, the American nuclear upgrades come not a moment too soon. More delay will simply play into the hands of our nuclear armed enemies and undermine our assurances of our extended deterrent to our allies.

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 Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Ochenta años después)

Last Thursday marked 80 years since the military defeat of German National Socialism and the end of the Second World War in Europe. One of the most monstrous pages in the history of humanity was thus closed. Generated, let us remember, by monstrous European ideas and with European criminal actors, always in the Europe of the Enlightenment. In the European Parliament in Strasbourg a debate was held on this occasion which demonstrated once again not only that memory fades with time, but that today’s politics is in fact already deaf to the echoes of history.

On 8 May 1945 a war of colossal overlapping tragedies came to an end in Europe. And the origin of this collapse of humanity lay in Germany. It was the nation that considered itself the people of poets and thinkers, the vanguard of development, of culture and of civilisation, that was the initial cause of this war of aggression and of the immense and terrifying exceptionality of the industrialised genocide that was the Holocaust. It was a qualitatively unique operation because it poured the priority interest and effort of a modern State into the extermination of another people, the Jews.

A priority that many times eclipsed the war effort itself of a Germany already surrounded by enemies and with a war that was turning against it precisely when the “final solution” was being organised.

The criminal frenzy of National Socialism arises from the arrogance of a totalitarian idealism that places human utopia above respect for the sacredness of human life, until it falls into the black hole of total crime.

They intended to achieve an ideal world free of imperfections and weaknesses. “Am Deutsche Wesen soll die Welt genesen”, the German essence shall heal the world, is a motto that still resonates and is not National Socialist but the product of Romanticism and of the unstoppable advance of emotions and feelings over rationality in the political and cultural life of the Germans. Very few in Strasbourg recalled the supremacist origins of this war in which, in the end, one criminal ideology would fight another very similar one that had the decisive advantage of counting the defender of freedom as an improbable ally.

Of the perception of superiority always latent in the largest people of Europe we had a contemporary replica, tragic for the Germans and for the entire continent, many years later. It was when Angela Merkel threw all prudence and responsibility overboard and announced an opening of borders that became a call to all those fleeing their countries, for whatever reason, to seek refuge in Germany, the heart of Europe.

Merkel issued the call from Germany, but one can only get there by crossing many other European countries that neither wanted open borders nor were moved by the wave of sentimentality promoted by Merkel, her Government and the German media, by then all of them in lockstep. Thus was caused a colossal immigration wave that has been the worst blow dealt to the cohesion, the security and the well-being of the Germans in exactly 80 years.

“Wir schaffen es!”, said Merkel in that cry of hubris, “We are going to manage it!”. That delirious display of arrogance, with its proclamation that Germany would take in anyone who wished to come, was not far from the chants of the 1930s in which it was promised that the German conquest of the world would make happy all those who deserved it.

Nor is it very far from the infinite arrogance of the Green movement, which has been the promoter and which has led all the traditional German parties into a policy of irrational radical environmentalism and into a climate hysteria that has led all of Europe into an energy, industrial, agricultural and cultural policy turned against the real interests of the European peoples.

The damage of that messianic message, so arrogant, sentimental and romantic, has been infinite. But it is already as internalised in German society as other obsessions were at other moments, and it ended up imposing the concept of “climate neutrality”, which in a delirious act by the new Government led by Friedrich Merz has been included in a reform of the German Basic Law.

A reform carried out, by the way, in a crooked and dishonest operation that resorted to an already nonexistent majority of a Bundestag already disavowed by the February elections, because the new balance of forces in the new Bundestag made this reform impossible. In any case, Germany’s suicidal policy, whose effects it is already suffering severely, was transferred, with the full complicity of Emmanuel Macron’s inane globalism in Paris, to the whole European Union, especially in the last six delirious years of the German Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission. As was easy to anticipate in a rational analysis, and as the conservative forces, still a minority in the European Parliament, had already warned, this policy symbolised by the Green Deal has turned out to be destructive and suicidal in the race to compete with other regions of the world that have sober development projects. The European Union is ever poorer and the citizens of its countries less free. And the advantage in development and growth of the United States and even China increases without cease.

All of this is a gift of German Romanticism, as is even Marxism and of course National Socialism: the incorrigible vocation of the Germans to want to correct, occupy, save or educate the rest of their neighbours and of the world. In the rest of the world they have paid no attention whatsoever to this new wave of redemptive ecologist ideology. But in Europe they have imposed it with devastating effects.

Returning to the colossally lethal effects of the previous German experiment, it must be recalled that the war which ended 80 years ago killed 60 million. Nazism, which planned a Third Reich of a thousand years, lasted 12 years. Nazism, as an ominous criminal ideology, ceased to exist as a political project.

But communism remained, the other redemptive ideology invented by Germans in pursuit of the ideal world, which generates only the most monstrous hells. Communism murdered a hundred million in little more than a century, it remains alive and present today in many parliaments and it governs, for example, in Cuba, in Venezuela and also in Spain. Because many do not want to remember that on 8 May one part of Europe was liberated, the part that had the good fortune of being liberated from Normandy and from Africa by North American forces and their allies. The other part of Europe merely exchanged one murderous tyranny for another, and this second one far longer-lived. Because it did not even die after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of the Central European, Baltic and Balkan countries that had suffered 40 years of the terror of Soviet socialism.

Communism and its totalitarian project transformed itself, through many diverse mutations, into vegan, carnivorous and cannibal socialism, according to the damage and the violence and coercion applied to achieve its ends. In the developed world it applied the counsel of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, which had placed all the serpent’s eggs in the universities of the North American elites in the 1930s and 1940s and afterwards again in Europe. And thus it went on conquering every field of human activity, from the university to primary education, information, the media, communication, culture, the Church and then the parties, no longer only those of the left but also those which were the conservative and Christian Democratic parties of the so-called centre-right. All of them today form, together with the economic, financial, legal and cultural ruling classes that emerged from all those universities and whose personal interests have adapted to the pressure of permanent ideological coercion, a broad front in which the majority would be offended if called communist, but which has ends that are those of socialism and of the end of individual liberty and of the Western civilisation of democracies and plurality. Call it social democracy if you wish, but the exceptional thing is that once again, starting from Germany, they managed to spread and conquer practically the entire political spectrum of the Western countries. Today the CDU is far to the left of the SPD of the 1960s after its Bad Godesberg congress.

The authentic plurality represented by the existence of options different from the social democratic parties is now fought without scruple by the European Union, using public money to destroy all those who oppose its anti-national project. By means of social engineering, of collectivist egalitarianism, of the destruction of the reference values of Western civilisation and of massive ideological coercion in Europe, they are using the path of vegan socialism to take us to the same place towards which the carnivorous socialism of more brutal forms of regime, or the outright cannibal socialism of Cuba, Venezuela, increasingly Spain, but above all China, are heading. Because China is in reality the object of their envy. The way the regime of the Chinese Communist Party treats its citizens is what the great transformers of the Davos Forum, from Bill Gates to Klaus Schwab, have so applauded.

To confront this colossal liberticidal offensive, we, the defenders of freedom and truth, have resources. It is fundamental to know that the alternative is, sooner or later, hell, whether socialist or Islamist. And that it is necessary to be afraid of what may await our children in order to lose the fear of the consequences of acting now. One spur to that is the tribute, 80 years on, to so many millions of victims of the totalitarian redemptive ideologies of the 20th century, criminal projects which must always be fought, however seductive their forms may appear. Because all of them have the same end: to eradicate in the individual the yearning for freedom and truth that the human being who knows he has a soul will always possess.

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

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Doctrinair, wereldvreemd en geen kiezersmandaat: logisch dat ‘Uschi’ bij Trump niet in de smaak valt)

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has drawn a great deal of power to herself in the EU, but the White House is keeping her outside the door for the time being. Ursula, ‘Uschi’ to intimates, needs Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for a reception in Washington. The Italians made sure that Von der Leyen, at the pope’s funeral, ‘accidentally’ ran into President Trump, in a plea for an invitation. Rather sad for the woman at the top of the Brussels power pyramid.

In Brussels Von der Leyen lives in self-chosen isolation. She is the first Commission president to live on the top floor of the Berlaymont, the headquarters of the European Commission. Her office is on that thirteenth floor. Next to it she has had a small apartment furnished as private quarters. On the same floor are also the Commission’s meeting room and the restaurant for breakfast and lunch. Some call this ‘Spartan’, but in fact Von der Leyen has ‘eingebunkert’ herself.

By way of a special lift she reaches the garage with her official car and driver. During rides to the European Parliament she can see Brussels, where she was born in 1958, through tinted windows. Nobody can see her. The rapid decline of Brussels escapes her; the Brussels municipality of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode has been Islamised and is the poorest municipality in Belgium. The mayor, Emir Kir, is a notorious denier of the Armenian genocide. Anyone who lives like that for six years is ‘out of touch’. Queen at the top, a court of yes-men but a stranger in Europe.

In 2019 she was elected Commission president with a minimal majority of nine votes. Originally the Commission operated a collegiate form of government. The president sought consensus. One did so in a somewhat more ‘top down’ way, such as Jacques Delors; another drew conclusions after open debate, such as Romano Prodi. The enlargement of the number of member states changed the chemistry. Manuel Barroso bossed around like a company director. The Luxembourger Jean-Claude Juncker was, after his alcoholic refreshment rather early in the day, quite often off track. His chief of staff Martin Selmayr ruled the roost.

The Protestant Ursula Albrecht (her maiden name) put the helm about. She constructed a power pyramid with herself at the top, assisted by chief of staff Björn Seibert, her former planning aide at the German ministry of defence. Ursula feels ‘called’, as if she had been appointed by God.

Her father Ernst Albrecht was in 1958 one of the first officials of the European Commission and rose to become director-general for Competition. From 1976 to 1990 he was highly respected as minister-president of the German state of Lower Saxony. In 1986 Ursula Albrecht married Heiko von der Leyen, scion of an aristocratic family in the Moselle region. With that resounding name she went into politics herself. She eventually became minister of defence in the Merkel government. Under her direction the Bundeswehr sank to an ‘all time low’.

In her current second term as president, Von der Leyen stands untouchable at the top. The Commission structure is so fragmented that organised criticism is barely possible. The information channels operate on a ‘need to know’ basis, at best. Von der Leyen has gathered institutional power, but lacks vision, insight and perspective.

During a meeting of her European People’s Party (EPP) on 30 April in Valencia she spoke as if it were a feel good session. She praised the Spanish citizens for their ‘calm in the dark’ during the ‘unprecedented power cut’. The government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had boasted of an electricity grid that was ‘100 percent renewable’. Spain as a guiding country. Then came a black-out. The real cause of it is the climate policy of the European Union. But naming the truth is heresy.

Her speeches sound like fairy tales, full of platitudes, usually ending in the trilingual profession of faith: ‘Long Live Europe, Es lebe Europa, Vive l’Europe’. Von der Leyen is a convinced European federalist, thinking that every EU fund leads with historical inevitability to the European State. Doctrinaire thinking permeates German politics. GDR leader Erich Honecker said on 14 August 1989, three months before the fall of the Wall: ‘Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf’.

In the Commission Von der Leyen intervenes directly, certainly when it concerns herself. In Lower Saxony, where the family resides, farmers complained in vain about the wolf plague. Livestock was bitten to death by wolves that enjoy ‘protected status’ in Europe. Until a wolf killed Dolly, Von der Leyen’s thirty-year-old favourite horse. She demanded revenge. Von der Leyen set Commission officials to work to lower the protected status of the wolf. Manfred Weber, chairman of the EPP group in the European Parliament, was told by the powerful Commission president to cooperate with a reduced protection. Hunters in Lower Saxony set out to liquidate the ‘murderer of Dolly’. That did not succeed during the hunting season, however. The big bad wolf escaped.

Von der Leyen’s isolation takes its revenge above all in the relationship with the Trump administration. During her speech in Valencia she said: ‘Global markets are now shaken by the unpredictable tariff policy of the US administration. US tariffs on the rest of the world are at their highest in a century.’ In reality EU tariffs on American products are double the American tariffs on products from the EU. Her words will not speed up an invitation from America.

It goes deeper. American conservatives only take seriously leaders who have been elected ‘by the people’. Von der Leyen was appointed by EU heads of government and the French president; not by European voters. For Trump the EU is a regional organisation like the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU). In that protocol order Von der Leyen is a ‘senior official’. For her that is lèse-majesté.

Meloni, by contrast, has the right credentials: elected by ‘il popolo’ and conservative. She is in every respect the opposite of Von der Leyen: born and raised in the Roman working-class district of Garbatella. Mother from Sicily; father from Sardinia. Her father ran off with another woman. At 15 Giorgia joined the youth wing of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), an organisation with roots in Italian fascism. What Von der Leyen had thrown into her lap, Meloni had to fight for step by step. After a passage through right-wing parties she eventually founded her own party: Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), or ‘Brothers of Italy’, the first words of the Italian national anthem. In Rome I once attended a Fratelli demonstration. It was abundantly clear: ‘la Sorella’ (sister) was the absolute boss of the Fratelli.

Meloni is helping Von der Leyen where Trump is concerned. Her fixer is the Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani (71), who sat for 22 years in the European Parliament and was a member of the European Commission for eight years. Tajani, an amiable and shrewd figure, knows in Rome and Brussels, to put it in the Flemish way, ‘God and little Pierke’. It was a small trick to get Von der Leyen ‘accidentally’ to Trump.

Is Meloni the ‘airlift’ for Von der Leyen out of charity? No, economically Italy is doing well, partly thanks to the more than 200 billion euros from the corona recovery fund. The money poured in. Meloni’s right-hand man, the likeable Raffaele Fitto from Apulia (the heel of Italy), became European Commissioner, responsible for regional policy and the spending of money from EU funds, such as the corona recovery fund. For Meloni too the rule is: ‘Prima l’Italia’.

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

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. How to Stop Arms Racing)

How to Stop Arms Racing: Modernization, Sustainment and Disarmament Options

One search engine has 18 million entries for the charge that the United States is triggering a nuclear arms race by modernizing its nuclear forces. But apparently, if the United States just maintains its current nuclear force, and builds nothing new, it will still trigger a nuclear arms race. So writes Stephen Young from the Union of Concerned Scientists while adding that building a modern force will simply exacerbate the deteriorating international security environment.

Explains Young: “The geopolitical risk perception is more complicated and has become profoundly more so since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. In 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced proposals for multiple new types of nuclear weapons, focused on defeating U.S. missile defenses. In 2021, China’s new land-based missile silos were uncovered, with 250 or more eventually spotted. In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and since then has made frequent nuclear threats and posture changes, including stationing nuclear weapons in Belarus.”

Then Young asks whether any of these adversary actions could have been stopped if the U.S. had expanded its nuclear capability including for example building 80 nuclear pits a year, a key part of the United States current nuclear modernization plan of record.

Apparently, Young is under the strange perception that a modernized deterrent is meant to stop arms racing or in this case, stop Russia and China from having their own modernized nuclear forces. As opposed to the idea that the U.S. wisely modernizes its legacy, old nuclear force to sustain and improve deterrence. Nothing more.

But Young seems to think even replacing legacy systems–soon to become obsolete– is not a good idea. He declares: “The answer to all those questions is a clear and resounding no. Russia and China are taking those actions because they already fear the United States and its massive, lethal, and threatening nuclear and conventional military forces.” According to Young, as noted earlier, moving now to resume pit production and make new nuclear weapons only exacerbates the problem, accelerating an already budding nuclear arms race.

However, Mr. Young is only the latest within the disarmament community to warn the country that the United States is causing a current nuclear arms race with the Russians and Chinese. For decades, the disarmament community believed if the U.S. builds more or updated nuclear capability, that’s bad. If the U.S. builds missile defenses, that’s also bad. If the U.S. builds better and safer nuclear warheads, that’s bad. The implication being that if the U.S. showed restraint, the arms race could be slowed, maybe ended.

But in a remarkable twist, Young says even if the U.S. stopped modernization completely, the Russians and Chinese would also keep building. Why? Young says what they fear is the current legacy U.S. nuclear and conventional capability which is “threatening” to them.]

But if that is the case, how does the U.S. become non-threatening? If doing nothing creates an arms race, then does getting rid of our nuclear and conventional arms bring the race to a halt? Young implies the way to stop the arms race is for the U.S. to disarm.

So, on the one hand Young implies the U.S. didn’t cause the expansion of the nuclear capability in Russia and China with our own modernization, a reversal of the common disarmament community charge over many decades.

But Young switches to blaming the United States for simply having old legacy forces which really scare Beijing and Moscow. And that is causing an arms race.

Young apparently now agrees with former Secretary Harold Brown who quipped about arms racing— “We build, they build. We stop; they build.”

In summary, Young seems to think both that the U.S. is pursuing an arms race with our current modernization effort, implying we are forcing China and Russia to follow suit. But without modernization, the U.S. would have to rely on the current legacy forces. That force is very old and will go out of service relatively soon even though it costs considerably more each year to sustain and operate.

Young simultaneously believes that whether we build or not build, we are not able to effectively restrain Chinese and Russian nuclear force building. Can we exercise any more restraint? After all, we have legacy forces built in 1961 (B-52), 1970, (MMIII), 1982, (Ohio sub), 1992 (the D-5 SLBM), and 1997 (the B2 bomber), currently 28-64 years old. The only option we have is to get out of the nuclear business altogether. That is called disarmament. Others would call it surrender.

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