(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Elon Musk y nosotros)

In Spain today it is almost as difficult to read a political news item about the United States that is not riddled with falsehoods and manipulations as it is to hear a truth about Pedro Sánchez’s real character on Televisión Española. That is why the most useful thing to do when reading information about Donald Trump’s administration and its policy is to guess between the lines what might come close to the truth in that purée of prejudices, disqualifications, suppositions elevated into unquestionable realities, slanderous theories and gratuitous conclusions.

It is certainly shameful, but let nobody believe that the German press, for example, is much better; since the disastrous reign of Angela Merkel it has had a unanimity unlike anything seen since the spring of 1945. Nor should anyone believe that those European sources which in principle have a duty to strive not to be tendentious are much less so. Like the whole interminable spectrum of the media fed by the European Commission and its tentacles in order to try to convince Europeans that everything they can see with their own eyes going utterly wrong is in fact going divinely.

And to get them to see that the only thing good Europeans must do is go on applauding the winning team of the grand alliance of People’s Party members, socialists, liberals, greens and communists. And pay taxes, of course, without complaining, while they put up with the deterioration of their living conditions at work, in their bank account, in their children’s school, in the safety of the streets.

But let us return to the Spanish media’s capacity to disfigure reality to comic levels. It turns out that Elon Musk has now made good on his announcement of three months ago that he would go back to devoting more time to his companies, after spending the promised hundred days entirely absorbed in the enormous and epic tasks of running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

With DOGE, Elon Musk and his team have done a job nobody would have believed possible before, which is to analyse urgently and exhaustively the spending of the federal administration of the United States and to apply, virtually, the real chainsaw that Javier Milei, the Argentine president, gave him in January.

Elon Musk has cut hundreds of billions of dollars from spending, which he has saved the taxpayer. And he has also brought to the surface a whole world of abuses, frauds, embezzlements and black holes through which fortunes were draining straight out of the federal budget, in many cases for decades and in some for as long as centuries.

Musk has shown how billions were squandered, embezzled and outright stolen, channelled to ideological rackets, to thousands of supposedly non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that lived off the government, and to associations, companies and individuals who have lived embedded as permanent parasites in the federal structures.

Musk has brought to light the criminal scandal of USAID, the development aid fund that devoted billions, disguised as humanitarian aid, to organisations, media outlets and pressure groups, all of them globalist, left-wing and woke, which carried out their activities of interference, pressure and propaganda all over the world.

The whole progressive racket has of course wept a great deal, because the goose that laid the golden eggs has been taken away from them. That some injustice has been committed is likely in this massive emergency felling of the jungle of subsidies. Those will be put right in due course. But it has demonstrated for history that the monster of institutionalised corruption can be confronted peacefully and simply by administrative means.

Elon Musk has been and is a hero of our time, however much people may wish to defame or ridicule him. Not only did he make and does he make the only electric cars that make sense, alongside the Chinese mini-cars. Not only does he launch rockets that come back down and park themselves, which is a marvel. He spent a fortune on ending the left-wing monopoly on social media. He bought a digital platform, Twitter, that was in the hands of an ever more totalitarian left which intervened brutally against all the conservative forces and especially against Donald Trump. And it was Musk who made it possible for Trump’s message to triumph this time against the unanimous and mendacious chorus of the lying globalist caste that was orchestrating the show with the senile and absent old man.

Musk, who came, like all the great magnates of Silicon Valley, from the complicit progressive milieu with no principles other than ambition, underwent a personal development that took him to positions of defence of conservative values and a very healthy hostility toward the whole woke plague. And since then he has sacrificed an immense amount of his own money to help the United States, and the rest of the West as well, recover some freedom of expression.

He said from the outset that he would be in the administration to help Donald Trump for just the right amount of time, because what he wants is to go to Mars. He is without doubt the person who has done most to help Trump reach the presidency, and to do so, as he knew as a businessman and a visionary, it was necessary to make enemies. He knew there would be many of them and that this would also be immensely costly for his own businesses and for his shareholders. He accepted that, just as he has accepted that the left, always violent when it loses, would set about burning Tesla dealerships and factories to the applause of some and the barely disguised satisfaction of most of the media of the globalist caste.

This enormous labour of patriotism for the exclusive benefit of the American taxpayer is a colossal act of benefaction that he knew very well would cost him dearly. “This is an expensive job”.

Meanwhile, in the Spanish media they have concocted a marvellous film about the break-up, the collapse and the failure of what has in reality been a superb and perfect piece of work. A political and cultural phenomenon of the first magnitude in which the only jarring note is the criminal revenge of a left dispossessed of the channels for robbing taxpayers and financing, from positions of absolute advantage, its struggle for a regime with no alternative. They all wish bankruptcy on him for it. I do not think Musk fears the bankruptcy of his companies, and if he were to go bankrupt he is young enough to succeed with others. But he has entered history not because of his money but because of the use he has made of it and his commitment to a project against theft and, above all, against the lie.

I therefore take this opportunity to express my infinite gratitude to a man who has accepted that saving civilisation is well worth a steep fall on the stock market. And he has certainly helped to ensure that, at least on social media, the monopoly of the self-interested versions of reality dictated by the globalist left, once again ever more abusive and totalitarian, has been broken.

Many of us here in Spain value it especially, in a country where the great fortunes and the powerful businessmen, with the very rarest and most honourable exceptions, are always submissive to power to the point of shame and nausea, and show patriotism only if there is business to be done in it. Over the past 40 years, the only nations that have had great donors and patrons in Spain are the ones that do not exist. To the Spanish Nation the rich have devoted nothing but contempt.

With the small change of a few of them a powerful national media alternative could be created to put an end to the near-monopoly (I write from within an exception) of a media landscape that is corrupt, mendacious and contemptible in its submission to a government that is by now openly criminal, illegitimate, abusive and unconstitutional, a government that has had no majority for a budget for two years but still has money to buy its survival, its impunity and its continued plunder of the public purse. That is why they attack Elon Musk so much. Because his example could do a great deal to help end the nightmare in which our homeland lives and ceaselessly degrades.

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 Johannes Vervloed and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Eindelijk een breuk met de stoffige erfenis van Jan Pronk)

The Dutch tradition of an idealistic foreign policy, with the emphasis on grand vistas, humanitarian inspiration and development aid, appears to have come to an end. In a letter sent to the House of Representatives on 4 April, the Schoof cabinet comes with a new foundation: the Dutch interest. That is a caesura of the first order.

A telling detail: although the cabinet also devoted a news release to the change of course, the letter to parliament itself was harder to trace online. Was the reversal not supposed to come across as too drastic?

The ‘national interest’ is taken for granted everywhere in the world, but in our country it was for a long time a dirty word. Thirty years ago, in the spring of 1995, the then VVD parliamentary leader Frits Bolkestein launched the proposition that our foreign policy ought to be ‘grafted’ onto it. At the time that was something entirely new. In Bolkestein’s words: ‘Never does a politician pride himself on having fought like a lion for the Dutch interest at a summit conference. If Prime Minister Kok were to give a television talk against the background of the national flag, he would be jeered at.’

After thirty years the ‘Dutch interest’ now seems to have moored after all. The cabinet’s letter is signed by the ministers of Foreign Affairs (Casper Veldkamp, NSC), Defence (Ruben Brekelmans, VVD), Foreign Trade and Development Aid (Reinette Klever, PVV) and Justice and Security (David van Weel, VVD). It shows the wish to conduct an integrated foreign policy.

That was very different, in particular in the years 1973-2020. In the first half of that period the PvdA figurehead Jan Pronk was minister for Development Cooperation in three cabinets (Den Uyl, Lubbers III and Kok I). He did not coordinate his policy with colleagues. There was no question of an all-embracing foreign policy in which development cooperation too serves the national interest. On the contrary, that was seen as ‘unethical’. With fatal consequences.

Not only were opportunities missed for Dutch business in the so-called concentration countries for development cooperation. Dutch aid was even no longer welcome. This in contrast to the French, who left not a penny unused to secure contracts for French business with development aid. Pronk involved himself so intensively with human rights in Indonesia that President Suharto refused Dutch aid.

It was not only the ministers of Economic Affairs, Transport and Water Management and Development Cooperation who often could not get along. Between Foreign Affairs and Justice too there was no contact, let alone cooperation. Thus the social security treaty (transfer of child benefit and all sorts of other allowances) with Morocco was not used to move the country to take back rejected asylum seekers with a Moroccan passport. That too was supposedly ‘unethical’.

At the Dutch embassies there was no cooperation either. The representatives of the various ministries, transport counsellors, agricultural counsellors, defence, trade and other technical attachés, received their own instructions and also reported only to their own department. Formally the ambassador was responsible for everything the embassy did. In practice that was a sham.

The letter to parliament of 4 April is mainly about Dutch missions and operations abroad, with as a new basic rule: ‘In every deployment the Dutch interest is leading’. In the past that was quite often emotion, and that is often a bad counsellor. Let us remember the fall of the Srebrenica enclave, now almost thirty years ago. The presence of the Dutch Dutchbat could not prevent more than 8,000 Muslim men from being murdered in 1995. The operation was a mission impossible, fed by emotions, both in politics and in the media. The Netherlands ‘had’ to intervene in the bloody civil war in the former Yugoslavia; the commentators of de Volkskrant and NRC demanded it almost daily.

The angle of the letter to parliament is a coordinated ‘realistic foreign policy’ with an eye to the security interests of the Netherlands. It is striking that the deployment in Ukraine is parked, while this contains a large chunk of the defence capacity, with a growing budget. The Netherlands anticipates a possible contribution to ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine, is studying ‘every serious option’ and ‘rules nothing out’. The vision on this large theme remains hazy.

Anyone who looks at the world map can identify two direct security interests for the Netherlands: free passage in the Red Sea and illegal immigration. Blocking that passage directly affects Dutch economic interests. But fighting the culprits, the Houthis in Yemen (an extension of Iran), is left almost entirely to the Americans. While more than 40 percent of the traffic is destined for Europe, and only 4 percent for the US. A leaked discussion in the White House recently showed that senior staff members of President Trump are fed up with the European attitude.

The Americans have a point. They do the ‘heavy lifting’. The Netherlands at least does something, albeit at a safe distance. It is considering the ‘possible deployment of a naval vessel’ and sent five staff members to the Western ‘Combined Allied Forces’ in Bahrain. In that case one sends, pardonnez-moi le mot, ‘meeting admirals’ but no firepower.

But it can be worse. Germany, the export country par excellence, is not taking part and neither is Denmark, even though the Danish company Maersk was until recently the largest container shipping line in the world. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are likewise clearing off, out of fear of attacks by the Houthis.

In the Red Sea there is a direct economic national interest for the Netherlands. The cabinet calls the meetings in Bahrain ‘the sending of a message’. The Netherlands is formally part of the coalition. Can it not do more than issue the message ‘we are here’?

With illegal migration the same argument applies. The Netherlands tries to counter illegal immigration and drug smuggling through contacts with coastal states in West Africa. Very useful, but that effort is qualified as ‘a foot in the door’. More ambition is not forbidden. In the Sahel the Netherlands was active between 2013 and 2023 in the UN mission Minusma in Mali, at France’s request. But the French were chased out of French-speaking Africa by radical Islamic insurgents. The mission in Mali failed.

The next frontier is the Mediterranean. Is it possible for the Dutch navy to patrol the Mediterranean together with Italian colleagues, at the EU’s external border, in order to block the passage of illegal migrants? A ‘foot in the door’ policy is insufficient. Libya is a transit zone and illegal migration to Europe has to be stopped there already.

Most missions revolve around giving a ‘signal’ because they become smaller the further from home they are deployed. The mission in the Pacific touches a Dutch interest, because it concerns a growth region with increasing world trade. A small mission, by contrast, is mainly showing the flag, ‘putting out a message’ and gathering information. Useful but thin. In Bosnia there may be a larger mission with an infantry company, with a view to stability in the Western Balkans, in 2015 an important (and totally porous) immigration route. The missions in Armenia, Moldova and Georgia are certainly necessary, as small democracies in the region. Just like Israel in the Middle East; an aspect that is too little recognised.

In any case: from a political point of view the cabinet’s letter to parliament is a great leap forward. Hopefully the intentions will actually be converted into effective and workable policy.

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. Undoing Deterrence: The March Toward Armageddon)

The disarmament community in their pursuit of global zero makes a number of faulty assumptions. For example, they assume all retaliatory uses of nuclear weapons will quickly lead to the massive exchange of nuclear weapons and trigger a civilization ending nuclear winter. They assume even the use of a single nuclear weapon could devastate a large area from EMP damage and cause widespread panic and mass migration and would escalate to an all-out nuclear exchange as well. In short, no nuclear use, however limited, can be managed or controlled.

Thus, even the current U.S. deterrence strategy of nuclear retaliation, often referenced as a secure, second-strike capability, is dismissed as unworkable.” Consequently, we are told the U.S. can no longer rely upon such a deterrent strategy, as it is dangerous, immoral and a highly unreliable “war fighting” strategy that will not keep nuclear weapons from being used.

The only alternative? Ban all nuclear weapons, as called for by the United Nations treaty outlawing nuclear weapons as agreed to by the UN General Assembly.

In short what the disarmament community has concluded is that nuclear deterrence as now practiced is really a bluff. No rational (“sane”?) American President would order any nuclear retaliatory strike. Since any retaliatory use of nuclear weapons would trigger wholesale nuclear war, such a response has to be discarded. This means that a nuclear armed adversary of the United States could first use nuclear weapons against the United States without fear of a proportionate United States military response. And for all intents and purposes this would leave the enemy’s nuclear forces in a sanctuary free from American retaliatory nuclear strikes.

Absent the current deterrent strategy, what then should the United States do in the face of China and Russia adopting a strategy of escalation to win, or using limited numbers of nuclear weapons to either forestall conventional defeat or secure conventional victory? [Let alone the threat of a massive, pe-emptive strike that worried the United States through much of the Cold War.] As many U.S. military officers have explained, this is serious business, as once nuclear weapons are introduced into a conventional conflict, all the United States assumptions about prevailing in a conventional conflict “don’t hold” or go out the window.

Now both Russia and China have often claimed to have a minimal deterrent strategy, and assert they would not use nuclear weapons first, and threaten only a massive retaliatory strike if hit with nuclear weapons. But then how to explain the decree issued by President Yeltsin in April 1999 declaring for Russia to build highly accurate low yield small battlefield nuclear weapons, plans which the current President (Mr. Putin) has implemented over the past 25 years? Or China’s threat to Japan to repeat the World War II atomic strikes should Japan come to the defense of Taiwan?

Similarly, the disarmament community has ignored the very large current Chinese buildup of nuclear weapons, even claiming hundreds of newly discovered silos were nothing more than prospective energy producing windmills. When subsequently American high ranking military officials confirmed the very real “breathtaking” Chinese build in Congressional testimony, the military brass were falsely accused of warmongering.

What is most dangerous is that advocates of zero nuclear weapons don’t tell us what is to replace current deterrent policy while nations figure out how to get to zero—even though that goal has not been formally adopted by any power possessing nuclear weapons. Without deterrence of any kind, the likelihood of nuclear weapons use will actually increase as the current deterrent strategy would be revealed as just bluff. Especially at a time when America’s enemies are markedly building up their nuclear forces and increasing the salience of nuclear weapons in their national security strategies.

Worse however is the juvenile idea that diplomacy can substitute for current deterrent strategy. But diplomacy leading to what? If China and Russia threaten to use limited nuclear strikes for coercive purposes, what “diplomacy” changes that? As Dr. Kissinger once explained, “A free standing diplomacy is an ancient American illusion. History offers few examples of it. The attempt to separate diplomacy and power results in power lacking direction and diplomacy being deprived of incentives.” Or in a pithier manner, as Senator Malcolm Wallop put it, “Diplomacy without the threat of force is but prayer.” If the United States takes its nuclear forces off the deterrent table, whatever diplomacy we might exercise is going to ring hollow.

Advocates of better diplomacy argue that diplomacy is meant to help us discover the “underlying causes” of why nations have nuclear weapons. It is assumed the U.S. can root out the reason China and Russia are building larger nuclear arsenals just by talking to them.

Well, the United States would first have to figure out the origins of the CCP’s hegemonic ambitions. And its declaration that the moon and Mars to say nothing of Taiwan and the South China Sea, are Chinese territory! Or Russian centuries old paranoia that believes the only secure Russian borders are those that perpetually expand. Or why the end of the USSR was a great tragedy.

If one explores the disarmament literature, the most common explanation for Russia and China’s aggressive stance in world affairs is that “America made them do it” an interesting version of Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s 1984 refrain “They always blame America first.””

There are six common complaints by the global zero advocates.

First the United States started an arms race, although we simply replaced legacy nuclear forces allowed by the 2010 New Start agreement.

Second, the United States built or will build 44-66 missile defense interceptors in Alaska and California, although it is perplexing how dozens of interceptor missiles somehow threaten multiple hundreds and even thousands of enemy warheads.

Third, the U.S. was mean to North Korea, although all the U.S. did was call them out for cheating on the Agreed Framework.

Fourth, the U.S. withdrew from the INF treaty, although Russia was serially violating the treaty terms.

Fifth, the United States withdrew from the JCPOA, but that was because Iran never came clean, as required, on its nuclear military activities.

Sixth, Washington too energetically supports the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and Israel, but since when was helping your democratic allies a sin.

Given this mindset, it is not a wonder that the “solutions” pushed by the disarmament community to jumpstart a movement towards global zero start with unilateral USA concessions which, just coincidentally, involve taking down USA nuclear capability whether cancelling the LRSO, the Sentinel or Minuteman III, the JSF or F-35, the SLCM-N, or the B-61 warhead. And not proceeding with any missile defense, dropping our hostile policy toward Iran and North Korea, and restore the INF and the JCPOA.

In short diminishing USA nuclear capability just as China and Russia are markedly expanding their nuclear capability is somehow going to turn out as a successful strategy that reduces strategic instability and magically restores deterrence. Although such unilateral restraint has never previously worked. And weakness is provocative and can lead to war. And a United States shed of a deterrent strategy will indeed be perceived as weak.

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 Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Dankzij de politieke uitverkoop van Friedrich Merz blijft links in Duitsland aan de bal)

The Bundestag elections of 23 February, which according to opposition leader Friedrich Merz would mark a break with the Merkel era, are resulting in a Merz government that continues Angela Merkel’s policy, albeit without Merkel.

The election result partly forced him into it, but Merz gave up his key points even before the negotiations with the SPD on a new German government had begun. Many CDU/CSU voters feel betrayed. But Merkel praises Merz, her former rival whom she brutally sidelined twenty years ago. She recently told Deutschlandfunk: ‘He has shown that he has einen absoluten Willen zur Macht.’

This week the right-wing populist AfD became the largest party in Germany in the polls for the first time. Alice Weidel, AfD parliamentary leader in the Bundestag, characterised the Koalitionsvertrag as a ‘Kapitulationsurkunde’.

The formation document of Christian democrats and social democrats is called Verantwortung für Deutschland, a somewhat unimaginative title for a coalition agreement. It is a bureaucratic epistle in which the fifth ‘grand coalition’ between CDU/CSU and SPD takes shape. Markus Söder, the somewhat comical-seeming leader of the Bavarian CSU, called it a ‘possible bestseller’.

Merz does not take office as chancellor straight away, because he will probably not be elected by the Bundestag until around 7 May. He needs 316 of the 630 votes. The SPD is first holding a members’ consultation on the coalition agreement; that written procedure runs until the end of April. The CDU is holding a ‘small party conference’ with party notables and the CSU keeps it simple: the party executive decides.

The most important ministerial posts have already been settled. Besides the chancellor, the CDU gets the ministers of Economic Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Education, Public Health, Transport and Digitalisierung und Staatsmodernisierung. The SPD signs for the deputy chancellor, Finance, Defence, Justice, Employment, Environment, Housing and Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung. The CSU harvested the Interior, Agriculture and Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt. The German ‘mission control’ for space travel is based in Oberpfaffenhofen in Bavaria.

In the programme of the Merz government the guiding hand of the SPD is visible. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as a ‘Koalitionsvertrag auf Bewährung’: a coalition agreement on probation. SPD and CDU/CSU act as though they love each other, because there is no alternative.

Before the Bundestag elections Merz excluded the AfD, with the result that he became the hostage of the SPD, which works closely with the Greens behind the scenes. The social democrats, who plunged in the elections from 25.7 to 16.4 percent, have to be ‘greener than green’, otherwise the Greens will poach even more voters. The German ‘abgehängten’ (the equivalent of the Dutch ‘afgehaakten’) ended up with the AfD.

The lurch to the left that Merz made is clearly visible in the 1,000 billion euros of debt that Germany is taking on for ‘investments’ in, among other things, defence (500 billion euros) and infrastructure (the same). Money is the political lubricant par excellence, and Merz hoped with this golden gift to force the SPD into moderation. That hardly happened. In economic terms Merz is pinned down on a left-wing course, and on the promised stricter immigration policy the coalition agreement produces a great deal of ‘soft law’, open to several interpretations.

Merz’s biggest economic assignment is to breathe new life into Standort Deutschland. The German economy has been struggling with a recession for three years. Competitiveness is being undermined by high energy prices. From 2011 Chancellor Merkel pushed through the Atomausstieg. A disastrous stupidity. The best solution is to bring the shut-down nuclear power stations back into operation. But Atomkraft does not appear anywhere in the coalition agreement. Merz is putting all his cards on a Wasserstoffwirtschaft.

It is a desperate grab from the world of fairy tales. The fable of ‘green hydrogen’ to make industry sustainable was once commended by European Commissioner Frans Timmermans with his Green Deal. Hydrogen is not an energy source that is pumped out of the ground, but has to be produced, precisely by using a great deal of energy. That energy is taken from wind turbines, and that is why it is called ‘green’. Many hydrogen projects have been announced worldwide but most have been scrapped again: too expensive.

The hydrogen philosophy recalls the formula once propagated by Lenin: Soviet power + electrification = socialism. In current terms: planned economy + hydrogen = climate neutral. The second formula is just as lame as the first. Germany is launching a Wasserstoffwirtschaftswunder, while Merz during the election campaign called for the nuclear power stations to be reopened. He moved effortlessly to the outdated hydrogen philosophy of socialists and greens. Password: weiter so.

Voters expect that Merz brought home his points on restricting migration. That turned out to be the case only to a very limited degree. There may be an end to the policy of mass admission. The red-green government of Olaf Scholz, for instance, flew 37,000 Afghans to Germany for family reunification. That programme has been suspended. Germany wants to increase the ‘willingness to return’ with migration agreements. A safe country that cooperates can then count on a more generous issuing of visas by Germany. The group of ‘safe countries’ is being expanded with Algeria, Morocco, India and Tunisia.

Germany ‘consults’ neighbouring countries when expelling unwanted foreigners at the German border. But those neighbouring countries, and Germany has nine of them, generally do not cooperate. The coalition agreement states that migrants will be deported in the case of ‘serious crimes’. But what is serious? They are also eligible for deportation when they display ‘not insignificant criminal conduct’. What does that mean? The SPD has built many escape clauses into migration. Deportation is made more difficult by juridification. Migration policy will turn out stricter than with the Greens, but on the basis of this coalition agreement it will not be much stricter in practice.

A contradictory part of the agreement is the goal of Bürokratieabbau, because it is precisely the ‘green economy’ that by nature has all the character traits of a planned economy. The government leads a subsidy-driven economy, and companies do not compete against each other with their best products, but with each other, for more subsidies. If those subsidies then stop because of excessive costs, the activity collapses of its own accord; see the subsidising of electric cars. A basis for market forces is lacking.

The new government wants to reduce bureaucracy by 25 percent. That is the Abbauziel. There will even be Bürokratieabbaugesetze. But anyone who reads the coalition agreement sees that the German government is going to do more and more and interfere in everything. Such as in the public debate.

From the opposition there will undoubtedly be criticism, which is normal. Merz senses trouble; only one third of citizens still trust him. The SPD in any case dislikes critics, as the outgoing minister of the interior Nancy Faeser, a former Antifa activist, has already openly shown. The coalition agreement contains a striking phrase: ‘The spreading of untrue assertions of fact is not covered by freedom of expression’. Disinformation will therefore be tackled ‘stringently’. Faeser recently took an advance on that: she had a citizen arrested who had posted a caricature of her on social media.

Among the Genossen of the SPD, Faeser can be counted in the ‘grim left’ department. Humour and German politicians are unfortunately not communicating vessels. It is, however, a sign on the wall. Germany is setting out on the path of repressive tolerance.

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

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La histeria del coro)

Now that anti-Trump hysteria has become a civic duty in Europe as well as a moral commandment, it is clear that only a few heroes in Europe are going to understand that the American president Donald Trump is not playing the hooligan, as many of the agitated members of the political and media chorus of Spain’s two-party system believe. He does not want to harm the world out of sheer malice, nor because he is an idiot, nor because he wants to make himself rich, as the biggest fools around here say. Rather, Trump is doing what he promised: turning upside down a system he considers definitively failed and which has degenerated in a way so unfavourable to his homeland that it has turned the United States into a loser left picking up everyone else’s tab.

He takes such an analysis of the world situation very badly, and so do the people he has this time chosen with care to help him in this colossal undertaking, and so do the more than 77 million Americans who voted for him to make this radical voyage across stormy waters toward another trade order, one less unfavourable and which they consider fairer. He does it because he believes it is necessary and because he believes he is able to do it. There will be those who want to stop him, such as China. Or they will reach an agreement. Others may perhaps wake up after decades of living off past earnings. And others will sink and suffer the consequences of being weak despite having had the opportunity and the means not to be.

Only those who thought that in this second term President Donald Trump was going to be that naive businessman who signed up every traitor who flattered him and every adviser who, out of other people’s interests, sold him placid plans, ought to be surprised. That, after a first term spent surrounded by the disloyal and by saboteurs, riddled with betrayals and Sadducean traps of the deep state. And after four years of ordeal in which they have tried to sink him, imprison him and murder him several times.

Donald Trump and his team are going to do many things that displease us and harm us, in the best case only during the first, most turbulent stages of the changes and the negotiations. Because his plans are very ambitious, they pass through phases that will be painful, and everyone is going to suffer, including Americans of course, and as always the weakest will suffer most.

And if we Europeans are among the weak, it is not the fault of Donald Trump, who defends his own interests and those of his compatriots, but of our rulers, who for many a decade have been obsessed with imposing on Europe a path of failure, of irrationality and of lies as a permanent discourse.

The European leaders of that great single party of social democracy that runs the European Union have spent almost ten years insulting Trump and helping all his enemies. Now, instead of seeking solutions by dismantling their own barriers and with deep amendments to their attitude toward the United States, they throw themselves into an escalation of rage and declaratory fury that leads nowhere. When they ought by now to be radically changing their policy, clearing the sinister regulatory jungle of their own making that is the worst enemy of agriculture, of industry, of transport, of trade itself, of energy, of research and of practically every field of human activity.

On the contrary, the reaction from Brussels of the “alliance of the shrinking majority” is a war against the European forces that are moving away from the falsely so-called “Europeanist” path of Brussels centralist and socialist imposition, of social engineering and of contempt for the interests of the nations and for the identity of Europeans; the single party of People’s Party members, socialists, greens and communists has begun to treat them as fifth columnists for Donald Trump. Those forces grow day by day, election after election, and the only answer from Brussels is to retreat into its bunker and attack those forces with measures of censorship, repression and antidemocratic restriction of freedoms and rights. If they have been practising this policy for years, Trump’s victory has intensified the aggressiveness, because it has set off panic in the ranks of an ever weaker social democratic hegemony, even though its most solid pillar, the European People’s Party, continues to benefit from the misunderstanding of many voters.

It is Donald Trump, a businessman who ten years ago was without ideology, who has assumed, with his now unquestionable conquest of the Republican Party in the United States, the leadership in the defence of many of the values that the national and conservative forces have been defending for decades, even if from positions of great weakness, when not of marginalisation. Today their positions have advanced to the point where they can claim power in many countries, and they will go on taking it however many traps, disqualifications and propaganda against them they encounter.

We are going to go through a very turbulent time in which the forces of the single party in Europe will continue to deteriorate but will resort to forms of authoritarian government, of coercion and repression, that in the European Union we would have considered unthinkable. In Spain, a government of permanent abuse and generalised corruption has begun its offensive to try to crush resistance to the criminal policies that keep it in power in complicity with the enemies of the State.

Germany has no government, and we shall see whether in the end it has the CDU-SPD coalition now being prepared. Friedrich Merz’s weakness has already led to speculation that he could end up the victim of an operation that leaves him out of power. But if they are preparing anything, it is the agenda of repression and propaganda against the national forces of the right such as the AfD, which is on the point of becoming the most voted party. The forces stigmatised as “far-right” or “Trumpist”, after having been “pugilists”, “fascists” and the other usual epithets of the virtuous platform of synchronised opinion, will have to endure with patience the conversion of Trump and his policies into a propaganda weapon of Brussels against the national forces, as the invasion of Ukraine by the criminal regime of Vladimir Putin has already been.

The European Commission has just admitted that it uses public money to finance NGOs and media outlets to act against the conservative democratic forces that resist the Green Pact, socialism and the suicidal policy of Agenda 2030, of which the EU is the spearhead throughout the world. And it is so to the misfortune of Europeans, poorer every day and less free every day. But there we are; meanwhile, all the usual media and the usual parties live in the delightful consensus that everything is Donald Trump’s fault.

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. JD Vance had gelijk in München: kritiek op immigratie wordt weggezuiverd in Europa)

Republican leaders have a negative image of Europe, as emerged recently from the conversations during the military attack on the Houthis in Yemen. Unintentionally, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic witnessed it in the chat conversation. The opinions about Europe did not mince words, but in the meantime Europe is confirming those opinions itself. See the disqualification of Marine Le Pen in France.

The Americans have to protect free passage through the Red Sea, while only 4 percent of the transport is destined for America and 40 percent for Europe. America has to do battle again and again with the Iran-backed Houthis, while European countries would rather clear off.

Vice President JD Vance could no longer restrain himself during the air strike, which was followed from the White House. ‘I just hate bailing Europe out again.’ He pointed to the great importance of free passage through the Red Sea for Europe, and the small importance for America. ‘I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.’

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded in the same vein. ‘I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.’ Then Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff of the White House and responsible for policy planning, responded: ‘If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.’

The three are in the vanguard of the Republican party and were born in the 1980s. Vance in 1984, Hegseth in 1980 and Miller in 1985: during the years of President Ronald Reagan. For their parents the Second World War was a binding experience at home, and also with Europe. The veterans passed the story on, but that story has fallen silent and the cultural bond has faded.

Vance and Hegseth grew up in the Midwest, and Miller in California, where his Jewish forebears ended up after emigrating around 1903 from tsarist Russia, from an area that is now Belarus. Miller’s models were conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and David Horowitz. During Trump I, Miller was the architect of the immigration ban from certain Islamic countries. His uncle called him the ‘immigration hypocrite’.

The three see in Europe political weaklings, military softies, economic profiteers and cultural capitulation. As vice president, JD Vance is the most outspoken and addressed the annual security conference in Munich on 14 February. Vance’s vision, delivered before the complacent audience in the hall, which had the traits of a ‘mutual admiration society’, caused a crackling short circuit.

Vance’s thesis came down in short to this: Europe concedes too much to massive immigration, which leads to a strong curtailment of freedom of expression. The audience was shocked, the chairman of the conference in tears. Vance had broken a taboo, but is meanwhile being proved abundantly right.

In Europe, opposition leaders are literally being silenced, such as Marine Le Pen with 2 years of house arrest (ankle bracelet) and the loss of her political rights, which means she cannot take part in the presidential elections of 2027. The punishment has a political timing and is out of all proportion.

It has happened more often that money from the budget of a member of the European Parliament was used to pay staff at the party office. Former member of the European Parliament Sylvie Goulard put employees, paid with European money, to work on French elections. She became minister of defence, but the scandal came out and she had to resign. No prison sentence, but she was appointed vice president of the French central bank. She was, after all, a great supporter of President Macron.

President Trump called Le Pen’s conviction a ‘big deal’. Vance’s words have come true. Mass immigration dominates the political agenda in virtually all West European countries; the East European leaders were wiser. ‘Progressive’ rulers, both political and cultural, are going ever further in curtailing opposition and freedoms. Criticism of immigration is purged away or even criminalised.

In Germany the proposal to hit the AfD with a ‘Parteiverbot’ has been put back on the agenda of the newly elected Bundestag. The ban procedure was set in motion in the previous parliamentary term by Marco Wanderwitz, a Christian democrat from Saxony. He was not re-elected, but Carmen Wegge (SPD) has taken over the initiative. She wants the German Constitutional Court to rule that the AfD is ‘Verfassungswidrig’ (unconstitutional), after which the party ban would follow.

The AfD has meanwhile become almost the largest party in Germany in the polls, after prospective chancellor Merz promised voters a right-wing policy but is going into partnership with the SPD, taking on enormous national debts, and achieving little in the restriction of illegal immigration.

After his speech in the Bayrischer Hof hotel in Munich, Vance had a conversation with Alice Weidel, the AfD’s parliamentary leader in the Bundestag. In doing so he stuck up a middle finger at the German political elite.

Within the Republican party Vance, Hegseth and Miller will not receive a word of criticism. On the contrary. The political base has become culturally more conservative and sees Europe as ‘worse than the Democrats’. There is only one country that American conservatives stand squarely behind: Israel. For conservatives Israel is not abroad but at home: that is ‘us in the Middle East’.

The image of Europe held by the coming generation of Republicans contrasts even with that of President Trump. The moral aspect plays less of a role for him; as a moral preacher he lacks credit. Trump sees Europe through the lens of money. His father was a property dealer in Queens and sent his young son Donald on his first mission: collecting rent from defaulters. He is now doing that in NATO.

Trump is irritated by Europe, above all because it contributes too little to NATO. During a NATO session in Brussels he called European leaders on the carpet, among them Angela Merkel. In front of her European colleagues she got a political box on the ears: ‘Angela, 1.5%, not good Angela, not good’. The member states have to pay. Japan gets virtually no criticism, because the Japanese pay the largest part of the costs of the military presence of the United States. Only the Europeans are the notorious ‘free riders’, as Obama already put it.

Trump also experiences the differences within Europe. Great Britain is the historic ally, which contributes and has a professional army. Italy, with Prime Minister Meloni, has the right political credentials. Eastern Europe and the Baltic states are the biggest fans of Trump. French President Macron uses all his charm to please Trump; their meeting in the Oval Office ended better than Zelensky’s.

There is one large country with which it does not click: Germany, of all countries the land of Trump’s ancestors, who prefers to invoke his Scottish forebears on his mother’s side. Germany is unanimously anti-Trump; in politics, the media, cultural life and education. In Germany a carnival procession is one big anti-Trump parade. Public broadcasters such as ARD and ZDF are virulently anti-Trump. The Germans do not ask themselves the question: where would we be now, without America?

It is essential to keep America on the continent, because Germany and France are (again) beginning to go off the rails. The young guard of conservative Republicans could not care less.

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. Without ICBMs: A Prescription for Nuclear War)

Mr. William Hartung of the Quincy Institute wants to kill the ICBM leg of the Triad, or the Sentinel missile system and he cites a new Stimpson Center report calling for just such an outcome.

However, without the Sentinel missile, the current Minuteman III will eventually go out of business over the next decade and one-half. That means no ICBMs in the near future.

Now Hartung wants to do all of this unilaterally, even in the face of a breathtaking nuclear build up by China and a Russia that can now breakout of the New START treaty limits by multiple thousands of additional nuclear warheads.

Hartung says more nuclear weapons are bad but seems oblivious to any possible effect of a combined Russia-China force of over 5000 long-range strategic nuclear warheads would have on the strategic balance around 2035.

Apparently if the United States builds more warheads– which Hartung says we are now doing by modernizing our Triad– that is a bad thing. But if Russia and China do so its apparently without consequence for the United States. And if the US deliberately cuts considerably below even the projected China level, as killing Sentinel could very well do, apparently nothing in the strategic balance could go wrong.

The mistakes and misunderstandings Hartung makes are legion. Here is the top dozen:

1. The cost of modernization of our nuclear deterrent is not $1.7 trillion but actually $400 billion over the next three decades according to the Union of Concerned Scientists; the majority of the cost is for the current legacy force sustained for the same three decades;
2. The Sentinel is not part of a secret plot to build more weapons—the Triad system as well as the B21 bomber and its LRSO, as well as the Columbia SSBN and its compliment of D-5 missiles all fit within the warhead ceilings allowed by the 2010 New START treaty of 1550 countable warheads;
3. There are probably not any joint arms control limits as Russia no longer allows inspections as required;
4. Without Sentinel or MMIII, and with the remaining current force structure, the US would only be able to deploy a maximum of 1536 strategic missile warheads through 2042; even with roughly 50%-67% deployed at sea at any one time, the US might have only 20% of the total strategic force of China-Russia deployed strategic warheads by early next decade; a condition we have never had to face in the 80 years of the nuclear age;
5. Unmentioned by Hartung is that the US has only one hundred theater nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, zero in the Middle East and zero in the Pacific, and thus is at least at a 20 to 1 and probably 40 to 1 disadvantage re Russia’s theater force;
6. Hartung seems also oblivious to Russia’s current major coercive nuclear capability which the elimination of the Sentinel would worsen;
7. The cost of replacing the on-alert ICBM warheads to just maintain New START warhead levels would be around $160 billion if done through submarines and SLBMs, which would actually cost more than the current modernization effort;
8. If the MMIII ICBMs were also eliminated, the US would have all of about one dozen nuclear assets, the elimination of which would disarm the United States—three bomber bases, two submarine bases and some 4-8 submarines at sea at any one time is not a robust force;
9. Reports are that China has developed new technology that could make the oceans transparent and make a submarine only deterrent for the United States totally susceptible to a one-technology-failure undermining of its entire nuclear deterrent;
10. What Hartung proposes would eliminate all leverage the United States needs to successfully seek some kind of nuclear arms control into the future;
11. Absent a new theater nuclear capability such as the SLBM-N, which Hartung disparages, the US and its allies in Europe and Asia become total victims of Putin and Xi and their common escalate to win use of nuclear weapons for purposes of extortion and coercion; and
12. According to Senator Hoeven, the total cost of the new elements of the Triad—B21, the D-5, the Sentinel, the LRSO, and Columbia class SSBN— is $17.4 billion, which comes to one-third of all annual nuclear spending, 1.8% of the defense budget proposed by the Senate majority, 1% of discretionary spending, and .026% of the Federal budget.

By comparison, the Federal government is victim of annual fraud that GAO says are15 fold these modernization costs. The newly calculated projected cost of meeting the Paris Treaty global climate objectives has climbed to $257 trillion through 2050 or $10.3 trillion a year which stands at 60 times the annual cost of the modernization costs of the B21, LRSO, the Columbia, the D-5 missile, and the Sentinel ICBM.

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