(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. Op-Ed: Muslim Americans Could Be Key Addition to the MAGA Movement)

The year began with a stark reminder of the challenges facing America. A shocking terror attack in New Orleans, perpetrated by an American-born extremist, underscored the persistent threat of radical ideologies.

Despite former President Trump’s decisive actions against and defeat of ISIS during his first term, the specter of extremism has not been eradicated as the group’s radical ideas continue to spread.

Predictably, some far-right pundits wasted no time in casting a wide net of blame, targeting an entire religion and calling for a draconian crackdown on mosques. While such sweeping generalizations are counterproductive, it’s equally critical to scrutinize the role of organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Although CAIR swiftly condemned the New Orleans attacker, the organization’s track record raises questions. Its past associations and controversial statements have often drawn criticism from those who view it as more focused on political agendas than meaningful reform.

This tension underscores a broader challenge: how to foster a transformative alliance between Muslim Americans and the MAGA movement without ignoring the complexities within Muslim leadership structures. In this effort, groups like the Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA) stand out as key allies for the Trump administration.

MALA has consistently demonstrated a commitment to promoting pluralism, individual freedom, and a constructive dialogue that bridges divides. Their emphasis on empowering Muslim Americans to engage in civic and political life aligns naturally with the MAGA movement’s vision for a revitalized and united America.

Groups like the International Quranic Center (IQC), the Islamic Supreme Council of America (ISCA) and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy have also been critical of CAIR, accusing it of promoting Islamist agendas and failing to represent the diversity of Muslim-American viewpoints.

Additionally, figures like Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell have played a pivotal role in building this coalition. Leading up the election, through Arab Americans for Trump, recognizable by their tagline “Yalla,” Grenell worked to unite Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Eastern Christians, particularly in Michigan.

This electorate proved crucial in Trump’s victory, flipping a traditionally blue state red and showcasing the political strength of such alliances.

This is a breakthrough for the Republican Party and should not be taken lightly. Now is the time for MAGA to foster and cultivate the relationship with Muslim Americans and bring them back to the Republican Party which is where the majority of them roosted prior to 9/11.

Muslim Americans: An Unexpected but Natural Ally

In the 2020 election, 21 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Trump, surpassing support for Vice President Kamala Harris. This was not a statistical anomaly; it was a reaction to the Democratic Party’s repeated failures.

Under Democratic leadership, anti-Muslim hate crimes surged by 70 percent in just six months. Sacred spaces were desecrated, Muslim-owned businesses destroyed in riots, and communities were left with hollow promises instead of real solutions.

President Biden’s “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate” was too little, too late. It read more like a hasty attempt to placate than a substantive plan. Discontent reached a boiling point during the Gaza conflict, where Biden’s handling drew sharp criticism from CAIR and drove his disapproval among Muslim Americans to a staggering 98 percent.

Contrast this with Trump’s policies, which resonate deeply with the conservative values held by many Muslim Americans. Limited government, strong family structures, economic empowerment, and a commitment to ending endless wars—these principles align with the aspirations of Muslim immigrants seeking to preserve their faith and the American Dream.

Trump’s efforts to broker peace in the Middle East earned him respect long before the idea of a Gaza ceasefire became remotely plausible.

And make no mistake, Hamas has agreed to return the remaining hostages because of Trump. Sadly, the majority of those hostages are no longer thought to be alive.

A Shared Vision for America’s Future

This alliance is about more than politics; it’s about preserving the pillars of faith, family, and freedom. And it has the potential to reshape American politics. Muslim Americans and MAGA supporters share a desire to resist destructive ideologies, protect traditional families while resisting attacks on them, defend unborn lives, and uphold religious liberty.

They envision an education system that prioritizes learning over indoctrination and a society where the next generation can thrive.

However, this partnership requires significant changes on both sides. Muslim Americans must critically evaluate their historical loyalty to the Democratic Party, which has often taken their votes for granted.

The MAGA movement, for its part, must confront and reject the Islamophobic rhetoric that has alienated potential allies. Before 9/11’s surge in anti-Muslim sentiment, Muslim voters were a reliable Republican constituency. A return to this shared history is not only possible but necessary for America’s future.

The Path Forward

The stakes have never been higher. America is at a crossroads, and the opportunity to unite diverse communities under the banner of shared values cannot be squandered.

For the MAGA movement, forging a genuine partnership with Muslim Americans is not just strategic; it is a moral imperative. By focusing on common ground and fostering mutual respect, this alliance can rebuild communities, restore moral foundations, and chart a path toward national renewal.

With faith, family, and freedom at its core, this coalition has the power to heal a divided nation. Together, Muslim Americans, organizations like MALA, Arab Americans for Trump, and MAGA supporters can seize this final chance to make America whole again.

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

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La senda de los mazazos)

The European People’s Party is on edge for many reasons. The first is, of course, the panic of its German component, the CDU/CSU, which is heading with an already failed candidate into an election it believed it had won hands down and which is approaching on 23 February like a nightmare. The CDU believed it could keep a good grip on the situation created by the fall of the three-party government of socialists, greens and liberals, the worst government in the history of the Federal Republic, which has brutally aggravated the already very precarious situation of all these years of social democratic and green consensus under Angela Merkel, a chancellor who has in the end turned out to be, and few apart from her now dispute it, a curse for Germany and for Europe.

In any case, Friedrich Merz has shown himself to be as weak now as he was when Merkel crushed him as a rival in the succession to Helmut Kohl. If, because of the failures of the three-party government of the inept social democrat Olaf Scholz, his party enjoyed a comfortable lead and majority of almost twenty points over the second most voted party, that gap with the second party today is seven points.

What is terrifying for them is that this second party is Alternative for Germany, the only party that has a programme for a change of policy for Germany. Merz would not be worried if the socialists or the greens were closing in on him, because he has already said that he is going to govern with one of those two parties, both increasingly left-wing and both resounding failures. Or with both, if the numbers do not add up. An alliance with the socialists and the greens would bring the same policies as the government that has just collapsed for causing the worst economic, political, social and security crisis Germany has suffered since 1949.

In any case Merz has solemnly announced that he will not make a pact with Alice Weidel, the candidate of the Alternative (AfD), which with its collective leadership has run an excellent campaign, has put the party in order and under discipline, and has not allowed the secret services or the lies of the press to mount another operation against them in a campaign orchestrated by a media landscape even more monolithic and more submissive to the orders of social democratic consensus politics than the Spanish one. That being so, the AfD’s message has been delivered by the CDU itself: if you want change in Germany you have to vote for Alternative for Germany. Because all the others are going to end up governing together, doing the same thing as until now.

If you want a vote to put an end to the incentivised invasion, to open up spaces of freedom and deregulation for people and for businesses, to restore freedom of opinion, to expel from the country those who live in a massively parasitic way and are the protagonists of the main crime and violence, so that common sense is restored as is happening in other countries and especially in the United States, you have no choice but to vote for Alice Weidel. And the CDU’s suicidal message is taking hold, and it is already clear that even if it beats the AfD by a few points and forms a government, when that government dies an ignominious death like the previous one, the AfD will be close to an absolute majority.

Hence the panic in Europe, which takes shape in all kinds of absurdities such as now, in an unprecedented resolution on Venezuela in which the People’s Party members have been left practically alone with Maduro’s accomplices, who are the Spanish socialists.

The People’s Party in Spain is an expert at falling into these traps that now grip all the parties of its group and the CDU in particular. It already allowed itself to be led into a trap by the socialists and by its own fears, complexes and ghosts, a trap that cost Alberto Núñez Feijóo the leadership of the government. That was in that ill-fated July when the soothsayers and the advisers on polls and radio convinced him that he could destroy Vox and keep all its votes for a government on his own. Ambition burst the sack, and that opened the door to the criminal government we have today under Pedro Sánchez.

Beyond the national tragedy of having a government dedicated exclusively to its own survival in power in order to prolong its impunity through the criminal cover-up of its earlier offences, the PP failed in its struggle to destroy Vox. That has come at a high price, because it means the total failure of Feijóo’s in itself pathetic strategy of seeking to destroy the only conservative force in Spain from positions that are increasingly social democratic and close to the left. The hammer blow to the PP that is the unstoppable rise of all the parties to its right, which sooner rather than later will confront it with the existential dilemma of division, has been redoubled by the hammer blow of the victory of Donald Trump, whom they attacked, defamed and despised just as much as the socialists and communists did.

And another simultaneous and terrible hammer blow is the great victory in Austria of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), Vox’s partner in PATRIOTS. After an attempt by the whole consensus brigade to form a government of three parties against the winner of the election, which was the FPÖ, they have had to acknowledge their failure, and the head of state, the sectarian green Alexander Van der Bellen, has had no choice but to comply this time with the constitution and entrust the formation of a government to the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl.

Within a few weeks we will foreseeably have in Austria a government in which the FPÖ will be the leader and by far the largest party, and the People’s Party will be the junior partner, which, given the results but above all given the subsequent polls, will have little chance of halting a policy of real change. The FPÖ, which won the election with 28 per cent, is already approaching 40 per cent. The PP keeps falling. This hammer blow from Vienna, like all the others, ought to advise the members of the European People’s Party to reconsider their attitude in the face of their catastrophic results. Since that is not happening, one must assume that they will carry on down this road of hammer blows that they bring upon themselves for having chained their fate to the parties of the left, which are already going down the drain of history.

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

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Met Donald Trump krijgt Nederland nieuwe kansen in het Witte Huis)

With the inauguration, this coming Monday, of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, a political and cultural ‘Wende’ begins in world politics. The fault line runs between the pursuit of the ‘national interest’ that Trump espouses and the multilateralism that Europe advocates, with an eye to ‘global governance’.

Trump’s aim is not a ‘Metternichian order’ with a balance of power, as in Europe after the Congress of Vienna (1815), but the ‘Trumpian world order’ with American leadership under the motto ‘America First’. In short: the new ‘Sheriff in Town’.

In Western European ears that sounds like a modern version of the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that European colonial powers used to impose their will on recalcitrant peoples. Such as Trump’s remarks about the purchase of Greenland, at Denmark’s expense.

For the Danish government that is alarming, an offer they hoped would never come. America has at one time or another bought a sizeable part of its own territory. Such as the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ in 1803, west of the Mississippi, from France. In 1819 America bought eastern Florida from Spain. From tsarist Russia in 1867, the enormous Alaska.

Trump wants Greenland in the shop window. He is already putting pressure on the Danish government, because he does not rule out military intervention. And that toward a fellow NATO member state. The Danish king is giving Greenland a larger place on his coat of arms and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says that Greenland is ‘not for sale’. But she leaves the door ajar: ‘It is also important what the inhabitants of Greenland themselves want.’ Suppose there is a referendum and a majority of Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants accept America as protector. That makes more of an impression than Denmark.

Anyone who looks at the globe from above sees that Greenland, for the Dutch a ‘far away show’, is a large island (six times Germany) between North America and Russia. Strategically important, because it is the flight path of intercontinental missiles. Moreover, of the 34 critical raw materials, 25 are to be found in Greenland. Where there are raw materials, China comes around the corner, and Russia is close by. Trump wants to plant the American flag before it is too late. Geopolitics begins with geography, and power politics is his method.

In his first term Trump was successful in dealing with the ‘bad boys’ of the world order: Russia, China, the Taliban, Iran, North Korea. Vladimir Putin kept quiet. Perhaps Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump had still been president. China has a longer-term goal: to be the strongest power in the world in 2049, one hundred years after the founding of the People’s Republic. The sinologist Michael Pillsbury published a book about it: The Hundred-Year Marathon. China has a strategy: it fills every vacuum unnoticed, however small. The China of Xi Jinping, by now ‘president for life’, exercises patience. At present the country is struggling with a property crisis. The economy is sputtering. Better to wait four years until Trump is gone.

Iran also kept quiet during Trump’s first term. As did the Taliban. America dropped the MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) near their headquarters. When Trump disappeared in 2021, the Taliban went into action again and reconquered Afghanistan. The North Korean potentate, Kim Jong-un, never gave up his nuclear weapons.

With Trump’s return the ‘bad guys’ know what time it is. Trump threatened that ‘all hell will break out’ if Hamas did not release the Israeli hostages before his swearing in. Hamas had understood the message and gave way. Not under pressure from Joe Biden, but through the words of Trump and his draconian threat.

Iran can count on the hard approach. The reign of terror in Tehran that once constructed the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel, by way of Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, is a ‘sitting duck’. Iranian allies in the Middle East have been liquidated; the relationship with Russia has soured. It is not out of the question that Israel will take out the Iranian nuclear installations, with Trump’s blessing and with precision bombs from America. The disappearance of the ayatollah regime would be a ‘game changer’ in the Middle East. With the Iranian revolution in 1979 the worldwide radicalisation of Islam began, right into the streets of Western Europe.

For quite some time Trump has been promising a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. His advisers mention a period of 100 days. It is evident that Europe itself can achieve nothing, apart from sanctions packages that mainly weaken its own economy. Ending the war in Ukraine is a matter for the ‘Great Powers’, such as America and Russia; for the second not because of the economy but because of the possession of 6,500 nuclear warheads. Europe looks like the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, a weak entity with a great deal of trumpet music and marching operetta armies.

Europe would do well not to lecture Trump, but to look at what America’s turnaround actually consists of. Trump II is better organised than Trump I. Susie Wiles (67), the first female chief of staff in the White House, holds the reins firmly. Whoever leaks is out. Trump is far more disciplined than before. His ministerial candidates are getting through the Senate hearings fairly easily. If he wants to make the turn to the right durable, he will have to work purposefully for four years.

After his inauguration Trump will launch about a hundred ‘executive orders’, a kind of decree. The border with Mexico will be practically closed. Americans want an end to the flow of illegal immigration, of well over 12 million people during Biden’s presidency. That influx caused enormous problems, above all in large cities, often run by Democrats.

Climate policy is going into the shredder as a ‘green scam’. Trump wants to curb inflation by raising energy production, under the motto ‘drill baby drill’. It is likely that America will leave the Paris Climate Agreement again.

Woke, the contemporary cultural revolution, is being scrapped at the American federal government; many large companies had already done so. It would be good if European countries followed that example. The ‘California model’ went up in flames; Hollywood and its surroundings burned to the ground. That was not attributable to climate change but to ‘progressive mismanagement’: woke personnel policy, irresponsible nature policy and failing water management. ‘Woke’ is ‘broke’.

In reality Trump has only two years. In 2026 come the midterms with the re-election of Congress, where Trump now has narrow majorities. He has to ‘deliver’ in a short time. In the field of foreign policy he has practically a free hand, but domestically the room is limited. He has to steer a tax-cut bill through Congress quickly, and even campaign for it in the districts of recalcitrant party colleagues.

Trump’s view of Europe is limited. His guests at the inauguration are above all conservative and nationalist politicians, such as Tino Chrupalla (AfD), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Éric Zemmour (Reconquête) and Tom Van Grieken (Vlaams Belang). A pity that the attendance of Geert Wilders did not work out. Trump sees Europe through the lens of nation states. For him the EU is a regional organisation, like the Organization of American States (OAS). European states can play a larger role, but most are strongly divided internally, Germany and France above all.

The Netherlands gets a chance to raise its profile more strongly in Washington with a ‘right-wing’ cabinet. Doors will open more easily in Trumpian circles. Appropriate emotional intelligence is required, though, by not immediately taking the measure of Americans, above all Trumpists. Begin by listening.

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 Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Krijgt Oostenrijk dan toch een ‘Volkskanzler’?)

Herbert Kickl (56), leader of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), stands on the threshold of the Bundeskanzleramt in Vienna. He was given the assignment of forming a new Austrian government by President Alexander van der Bellen (80), a Green no less. Austria is going through what the Netherlands went through last year. And for the third time at that.

In the parliamentary elections of 29 September last year, the FPÖ became the largest party in Austria for the first time. Christian Democrats (ÖVP), Socialists (SPÖ) and Liberals (NEOS, in full ‘Das Neue Österreich’) sat down at the table together to keep the ‘Freiheitlichen’ outside the door. After three months it blew up behind closed doors so violently that the formation attempt failed. The Liberals walked away angry because the economic reforms were ‘too thin’. Hard measures were needed, because Austria is exceeding the budget deficit of 3 percent, the European norm. With Socialists, cutting spending is difficult. Christian Democrats and Liberals have a majority of one seat in the Austrian parliament. ‘Unworkable’, they concluded. President Van der Bellen had to knock on the door of the man they all wanted to avoid: Herbert Kickl.

In the Netherlands the PVV became the largest party in 2023. But Geert Wilders did not become prime minister, because a government at arm’s length had to be formed, with the parliamentary group leaders as the school board. Austria does not work that way. Kickl got the bone on his plate and he intends to strip it. Van der Bellen, who hates Kickl and his FPÖ, had no other option. The ÖVP, the only partner that qualifies, faces the same impasse the CDA faced in 2010. The party is internally torn, but the situation is more hopeless than on the previous occasions, in 2000 and 2017. The ÖVP was the largest then and called the shots over its junior partner, the FPÖ.

The roles are now reversed. Kickl read the ÖVP the riot act: ‘No games, no tricks, no sabotage and no obstruction. Otherwise there will be new elections and we are ready for them.’ ‘Neuwahlen’ are a nightmare for the Christian Democrats, because according to opinion polls the FPÖ would grow even larger and the ÖVP shrink even further.

In 2000 the ÖVP, with Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, was still lord and master. The FPÖ, then led by Jörg Haider, had to bow. He himself took no seat in the government. He bombarded it from the outside, quarrelled at home and eventually left his party to found a new one. In 2008 he was killed in a car crash, heavily under the influence. Politically speaking, Haider was an eternal adolescent. Because of the split, the FPÖ sank in the polls. Although Kickl, like Haider, came from Carinthia and was his pupil, he did not follow the ‘Obmann’ in his split.

In 2017 the FPÖ grew like wildfire again because of the migration crisis. The party, by then led by Heinz-Christian Strache, was needed once more. This time it was the young ÖVP politician and chancellor candidate Sebastian Kurz (38) who came knocking. It clicked with Vice-Chancellor Strache, and Kickl became interior minister. In 2019 Strache’s career went into a nosedive because of the Ibiza video, which, and the timing was good, had been secretly recorded two years earlier. The party leader, then still in opposition, discussed proposals with a woman who presented herself as the niece of a Russian oligarch. It concerned a ‘deal’ cum ‘dirty trick’ not unusual in Austria, whereby government contracts are awarded in exchange for positive publicity. Strache resigned, Kickl was dismissed on the spot by Kurz, and after that the remaining FPÖ ministers left as well. The party fell into a deep hole again.

The new leader of the FPÖ became… Herbert Kickl. At first sight not a charismatic figure. A small build, and too ascetic for a party where the beer flows abundantly, as in the bygone days of the ‘Burschenschaften’, student associations with a national-conservative character.

Kickl rebuilt the party from the ruins, and received a gift while doing so: covid. He painted government policy, including vaccinations and lockdowns, as an ‘attack on freedom’. He presented himself as the future ‘Volkskanzler’, which immediately set off alarm bells among opponents. Was there not also that other Austrian, A. Hitler, who once proclaimed the same? Kickl said he wanted to present himself as the chancellor ‘für den kleinen Mann’, in order to protect him against ‘Staatsgewalt’ and against the immigrating outside world. Austria was to become ‘eine Festung’. Kickl himself does not come across as a tribune of the people. He speaks with sharp formulations, purposefully and in a calm tone. No blustering torrent of words.

After the swearing in of those elected, the Austrian parliament became a bastion of the FPÖ, which supplied the speaker in Walter Rosenkranz, the highest office of the Republic after the president. With 57 members, of whom 13 women, the FPÖ group became the largest. Rosenkranz struck at once with his first foreign guest: Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. As if the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy (1867-1918) were making its re-entry. The speaker had the European flag removed from the reception salon and invited no parliamentary groups other than the FPÖ. I cannot see Dutch parliamentary speaker Martin Bosma pulling such stunts any time soon.

Relations changed not only domestically, with the FPÖ as the largest party, but abroad as well. There are now numerous right-wing governments, in various versions (the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden), while in France and Germany the front women Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel are hammering on the gates of power.

It has become far more difficult for the European Commission and the European Parliament, in which the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) form the third group, to nail Austria to the cross as they did in 2000 and 2017. Among European heads of government, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the Madonna of conservative Europe. Whoever offends her gets it back in a double portion. Just ask French President Emmanuel Macron.

The most pressing theme in the negotiations in Vienna is indeed European: the budget rules, in particular the 3 percent norm for the budget deficit. Before the elections the government said the deficit was 2.8 percent, but shortly afterwards it turned out to be 4 percent! That meant 18 billion in extra cuts. The liberal NEOS wanted hard measures; the Socialists dug in their heels and the ÖVP looked toward the FPÖ. So Kickl, as formateur, gets the 18 billion euro invoice pushed under his nose. FPÖ and ÖVP have already agreed to cut 6.3 billion euros in order to avert a so-called ‘excessive deficit procedure’ by the European Commission, and with it a downgrade of Austrian creditworthiness on the financial markets.

The negotiations with the FPÖ are reminiscent of those with the PVV. The first thing the FPÖ heard from ÖVP negotiator Christian Stocker: ‘Ein Öxit kommt nicht in Frage’. Öxit is the Austrian variant of Brexit and Nexit. Kickl may voice criticism, but there is a hard limit.

The FPÖ criticises sanctions against Russia and, like the PVV, will have to change course. Vienna of course hopes the blessing will come from elsewhere: a peace settlement via Donald Trump. And a ‘Bundeskanzler Kickl’ will have to abide by the rule of law. In short: constitutionality, à la Pieter Omtzigt. Remarkable: immigration is barely a point of contention, except that the ÖVP uses a different vocabulary. Most important: will the ‘Kickl mayonnaise’ set, as far as mutual trust is concerned?

That is relevant, because in December an old acquaintance suddenly appeared on the German ARD talk show of Sandra Maischberger: Sebastian Kurz. He said he was happy in business, but ruled nothing out. Admittedly he has meanwhile received a suspended sentence of eight months in prison for making false statements. A trial over the buying of newspaper advertisements in exchange for positive opinion polls, along the lines of the Strache method, is still running.

Kurz and Kickl have buried the hatchet, they say, but if formateur Kickl fails and thereby provokes ‘Neuwahlen’, the ÖVP still has one vote-getting cannon standing ready: Sebastian Kurz!

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. Solo vale el voto amable)

Former commissioner Thierry Breton is threatening that the European Union will annul any election held in a European country whose results it considers the fruit of outside interference. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously have to do it if it is necessary in Germany”, he proclaimed on television with the assurance of a man who has already talked it over with the people who matter and who can make it happen.

What Breton is saying is that the European Union, presumably the European Commission in agreement with the losers of the respective elections, just as has happened in Romania, will annul, using the argument, justification or pretext of foreign interference, any election whose results do not ideologically satisfy Brussels.

The former French commissioner, known for his outbursts against freedom of expression, expressed this absolute contempt for the sovereignty and democratic will of the EU’s member countries while commenting on the debate held on the X network between the owner of that network, Elon Musk, and the candidate for the chancellorship of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD). The traditional parties, all of them now on the left of the political spectrum, brand the AfD as far right. When in reality it occupies the entire conservative space left orphaned by the CDU when Angela Merkel took the party of Adenauer and Helmut Kohl to the centre-left, pushing socialists and greens toward ever greater radicalism in their interventionist and social engineering theses, which have brought Germany to its worst economic and social crisis since the Second World War.

Europe’s power elites, among whom Breton plays a very prominent role, are in a panic after the catastrophe of the parties of the social democratic consensus in Austria. There the FPÖ won the election. In an operation applauded from Brussels and contrary to custom, to the rule and to logic, the head of state, Alexander van der Bellen, denied the FPÖ the right to try to form a government and gave it to the second most voted party, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). The ÖVP tried to build a three-party coalition against the FPÖ with the socialists and the left-wing liberals, but after months of negotiations they failed. Among other reasons because the polls showed that the public was responding with ever greater support for the FPÖ. In three months the FPÖ has gone from 28 per cent in the election to 39 per cent in the latest polls. The other parties and the discredited Van der Bellen had to entrust Herbert Kickl’s FPÖ with the task of forming a government.

What in Austria is a nightmare for the elites would in Germany be hell for them. That is why they appear to be announcing already that Europe’s elites are claiming for themselves the right to decide which electoral results suit the future of their peculiar democracy and which do not. And the latter are annulled, with the pretext of outside intervention.

That is exactly what has happened in Romania, where weeks after this scandal, more befitting Nicolás Maduro than Europe, there is not a single piece of evidence that there was Russian interference in the annulled elections. What is more, a week later the legislative elections were held with a result that struck them as acceptable and nobody complained. Why would Russia interfere in the presidential election and not in the legislative one, which forms the government and is far more significant politically?

On the contrary, there is a great deal of information indicating that it was the governing party of Marcel Ciolacu itself, the PSD, the so-called social democratic party that takes in the survivors of the communist apparatus, that was cheering on and promoting the candidate Calin Georgescu on social media, believing that he would be the easiest candidate to beat in the second round. But they underestimated the collapse in the popularity of the prime minister, who believed his passage to the second round was assured and was beaten by the centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi, so that the entire left and the old mafia apparatus were left without a candidate in the second round. That being so, they turned to their old president of the Constitutional Court who, as in Spain, is a lackey of the prime minister, and instructed him to correct his position. And if on the Tuesday after the election he said that everything had been correct, by Friday he had detected enough Russian interference to annul the election. Breton makes it clear that this coup d’état and theft of an election that has taken place in Romania was carried out under the baton of Brussels.

This used to be called “the Brezhnev Doctrine”, as older readers will recall. This direct threat to the popular will of the European nations reveals the true drift of the power of the bureaucracy controlled by those elites. It had already shown itself in other forms of abuse, such as Von der Leyen’s threats ahead of elections, for example in Italy, warning the electorate not to get its vote wrong because it would suffer the consequences. This has happened on a massive scale in other countries, and the interference of Brussels and Berlin in Poland, for example, has been scandalous and brutal. The ideological discrimination coming from the European Commission is already a scandal and a genuine act of brutality. Under Von der Leyen it already behaves openly like an authoritarian government toward its provinces, punishing and rewarding according to ideological submission, when in reality its legal function is that of a mere administrator of the decisions of the European Council formed by the sovereign nations.

It is not known in what capacity Breton speaks this way when he is no longer commissioner of anything. He is officially devoted to his lucrative businesses and connections with the big technology and telecommunications industry, which incredibly were no obstacle to his serving as commissioner for the Internal Market, despite such obvious and obscene conflicts of interest.

Take note that Breton was speaking in the royal plural, or perhaps as the representative of that unelected elite which controls the whole European bureaucracy, feeds the media and regards itself as a sanhedrin that would act as the real government of the European Union above the European Commission. We shall see what happens. For now all we know is that the AfD in Germany keeps rising and the CDU, the People’s Party, keeps falling. A year ago more than 20 points separated them. Today barely eight points separate them. If this continues, with Alternative for Germany showing itself moderate, reasonable and politically intelligent while the CDU remains stubbornly intent on displaying as its highest ambition a return to governing with the socialists or the greens in order to go on doing the same thing that has led to the disaster of insecurity, poverty, precariousness and exhaustion, they may urgently have to look for some outside interference. But if they annul an election in Germany as Breton threatens, they are annulling the European Union. And in one blow.

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. Elon Musk schudt het Duitse dekbed op)

Germany is bracing for the ‘conversation’ on X between Trump confidant Elon Musk and the AfD parliamentary leader in the Bundestag, Alice Weidel. With his 211 million followers, Musk can cast a very wide net. Meanwhile the German political elite sits trembling. Musk praises Weidel because he sees the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a saving angel that Germany’s large parties have sealed off behind a cordon sanitaire. It is the first time a prominent American has come to shake up the German bed, and with such enormous media reach, right before the elections.

The British have already had their portion. Through his X account Musk took aim at the British establishment by calling on King Charles III to dissolve parliament. He also demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The occasion was reporting on sexual violence by mainly Pakistani groups against underage British girls. The ‘grooming’ practice among Pakistanis was already known, but the authorities remained lax. Labour above all, which governs cities in the English Midlands such as Birmingham, covered up the appalling practice of gang rapes with a cloak of charity. According to Musk, Starmer’s government is a ‘group of gangsters’.

The leader of the Reform UK party, Nigel Farage, tried to soften Musk’s statements, but got nowhere. On X, Musk, who had earlier wanted to donate 100 million dollars to Reform UK, announced that Farage had to go. Tommy Robinson, a British anti-Islam activist sitting in an isolation cell for opinion offences, was to be brought into the party leadership. Farage rejected that idea outright, because it would mean the end of Reform UK, on account of two captains on one ship.

Musk’s missionary actions in Great Britain stem from the fact that he is a committed ‘natalist’, an advocate of high birth rates. Musk argues for large families and is himself the father of 12 children, by 3 women. Such numbers would be ‘hors catégorie’ even for the Vatican. He hammers on the point that Western Europe is going under because of low birth rates. Through high immigration figures, Western Europe is de facto abolishing itself. As a family man he openly denounces Pakistani sexual violence against many thousands of girls, with hard swipes at the lax British establishment. Starmer and his party colleagues look the other way. Musk’s tweets were fed by understandable anger and revulsion alive among British citizens.

Is Musk’s punitive expedition a personal whim, or is there also a political dimension? In 2016, Donald Trump as incoming president was already making critical statements about the Germany of Angela Merkel. He denounced her ‘welcome culture’, as well as the closing of German nuclear plants and the dependence on Russian gas. On 28 September 2018 Trump repeated the latter point during the UN General Assembly in New York, but he was laughed at by the German delegation, including the German foreign minister Heiko Maas. The facts proved Trump right. His relationship with the British Conservative government was good, above all with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. That changed with the arrival of Starmer.

Both Starmer and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accuse Musk of ‘interference’. Scholz, however, regularly hands out ‘voting advice’ abroad, as in France. Labour sent 100 paid activists to the United States to support Kamala in her election campaign. The lead candidate of the German Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, called an opinion article by Musk in Welt am Sonntag ‘intrusive and presumptuous’. If, however, Merz does not run a right-wing campaign and lets himself be swayed by the left, he will make the AfD bigger all by himself. The legendary Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss (1915-1988) invariably said: ‘to the right of me there is no room’. That room has now appeared. The AfD dived into it.

It is striking that Trump no longer carries out disruptive actions himself, but leaves them to Musk with his network of 211 million followers. Musk is the ‘bad guy’ (a role that suits him) and Trump watches from the sidelines. A strategic division of labour.

Musk nurses more irritation about Germany: his investments in the ‘Tesla Gigafactory’ in Grünheide in the German state of Brandenburg. An investment of 4 billion euros with 12,500 employees. It is the largest electric car factory in Europe. But Musk is getting stuck in German red tape and resistance from environmental activists. They camp in tents on new construction sites because trees are being felled. An attack was carried out on the power supply so that production lay idle for days. Employees no longer dare walk outside the company grounds in Tesla clothing.

Musk sees how Germany is bogging down in indecisiveness and in the terror of environmental activists who always praised electric cars in the fight against climate change. Musk himself is not a climate sceptic: he supports the same goal. He started Tesla back in 2003, when climate policy was still in its infancy. Which testifies to a farsighted entrepreneurial eye.

Nor does Musk come from conservative circles. Born in South Africa in 1971, he knew apartheid. His father Errol fought apartheid on the Pretoria city council, as a member of the ‘Progressive Party’ (PP). At eighteen Musk left with his mother for Canada and afterwards studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania in America. There he stayed.

Musk became known for his entrepreneurial talents with SpaceX (spaceflight), Starlink (satellites), Tesla and related enterprises. He is driven. His management style is characterised by terms such as: micromanager, autocrat, tirades. He comes across as an overactive teenager, thinks faster than he can speak, and is autistic (Asperger’s), like Greta Thunberg, whom he follows on X. Once Musk has a goal in view, he keeps drilling. Trump is narcissistic and loves the mirror. From a psychological point of view, an intriguing pair.

Until recently Musk voted for Democrats; in 2016 for Hillary Clinton, in 2020 for Joe Biden. One personal core theme drove him into politics: freedom of expression. He turned against political correctness, bans on speech and thought, and above all against ‘woke’, which became a religion among Democrats. Musk went into resistance in favour of ‘freedom of speech’. In April 2022 he bought Twitter for 43 billion dollars and rechristened the company X. In fact X is one of the largest media companies in the world, if not the largest.

With X, Musk fills a gap in America created by the decline of what he calls the ‘legacy media’, the ‘old media’. ‘Progressive media’ above all supported Democrats by every means; even Joe Biden’s malfunctioning was ingeniously covered up. Until his fatal debate with Trump. The New York Times and the Washington Post were badly exposed. CNN and MSNBC saw their ratings collapse by 50%. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, News Corp, with Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, remains on its feet. Progressive media lost the trust of the public. With X, Musk is taking over the debate, and exporting it worldwide.

So the ‘Musk method’ has arrived in Western Europe. Germany is a stumbling block for both Trump and Musk. For Trump it is personal; for Musk ideological. They want more resolve and less know-it-all posturing. For Starmer there is no respect. Macron they leave untouched, because he devalues himself. Meloni is their lady; Orban their darling. Of the Netherlands there is no picture, though Wilders appears on the radar.

From 20 January onwards Musk will throw himself into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to take the knife to the American federal bureaucracy. In official Washington D.C. the chips will fly, because the arch-enemy is nothing less than the ‘Deep State’. ‘High Noon’ is on the way!

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 Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Duitsland staart na ‘Maagdenburg’ in een zwart gat)

Elon Musk stated this weekend in Welt am Sonntag that Germany stood before the economic and cultural abyss and with that put his finger on the sore spot. Thanks to the attack in Magdeburg, on 20 December, precisely what the German political establishment was trying to prevent happened: migration high on the agenda at the Bundestag elections of 23 February.

The governing parties – the social-democratic SPD and the Greens – and also the liberal FDP, which withdrew its ministers in November, are in a bad position. The Christian Democratic CDU/CSU is positioning itself more sharply, but is struggling with division. The attack is grist to the mill of the anti-migration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Germany stares into a black hole.

With the many Christmas markets in Germany there are many targets for malicious figures. The Saudi citizen Taleb A. raced with a car through the crowd at the Christmas market of Magdeburg. The consequences were terrible: 5 dead and 200 injured, of whom 41 seriously. In the attack by a Syrian knife-wielder in Solingen, at the end of August, three people died. German politics had just recovered from it, hoped for an election battle over economic themes, but the migration problems do not go away. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Magdeburg and was received with booing.

It is remarkable that German media focus not so much on the causes of the attack, but rather on an electoral theme: the ‘political instrumentalization by the far right’. By that the AfD is meant. Most newspapers and weeklies and also the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF immediately directed their reporting at possible ‘disinformation’ about the presumed perpetrator and denounced the ‘far right’.

Alice Weidel, the chair of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, immediately went to Magdeburg and gave a speech on the Domplatz. She demanded ‘echte Aufklärung’, the true facts, because the population’s trust in politics and media is at a low point. Many Germans have the idea that they are being lied to. Weidel drew, according to the police, an audience of 3,500 people, but anyone who saw the footage could conclude that this number was rather stingily calculated.

‘Magdeburg’ could not have hit political Berlin at a worse moment. The government coalition that, because of the party colors red-yellow-green, got the name ‘Ampel’ (traffic light), has fallen apart out of misery. The ‘Ampel’ is without power. The government of Olaf Scholz was actually a continuation of sixteen years of Angela Merkel, but then without Merkel.

It became the continuation of a bankrupt policy in the area of migration and energy and climate policy. Both themes threw the Federal Republic into a real crisis. At the end of June 2024 Germany counted almost 3.5 million ‘refugees’, with various residence titles. In addition there are 1.2 million Ukrainians who are not counted as refugees. With all the consequences thereof for available housing, education, healthcare and safety. As in the Netherlands, but then even worse.

At the same time the energy and climate policy has been causing economic stagnation for five years. ‘Deutsche Wirtschaft am Scheideweg’, concluded the authoritative Ifo Institute in a recent economic forecast. Employers warn of an exodus of companies, a ‘creeping de-industrialization’ because of too-high energy costs. The ‘Standort Deutschland’ is, according to employers, in the mire. Painfully enough it is the former automotive giant Volkswagen that is steadily steering toward the abyss. The closing of the excellent German nuclear power plants turned out to be the greatest stupidity in German postwar history. In the Netherlands the postponement of the construction of new nuclear power plants is an equally great ‘Dummheit’.

Germany is in the whirlpool of both crises: the unease about the excessive increase of asylum seekers and impoverishment through economic stagnation that especially hits less wealthy citizens. The same scenario as the Netherlands.

There are indications of what effect that decline has on the coming Bundestag elections. The mix of various polls gives a picture. The CDU/CSU, led by chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, is polling between 30 and 35 percent. But Merz has to maneuver between the more right-wing partner from Bavaria, the CSU, led by Markus Söder, and the more left-wing minister-president Hendrik Wüst of the most populous federal state North Rhine-Westphalia. Wüst – who grew up in the border region with the Netherlands at the level of Aalten – is not happy with the right-wing course.

Merz, once parliamentary group leader of the CDU, was pushed aside by Merkel in 2002 and left politics. He went to work for the American investment company BlackRock and, according to the weekly Focus, amassed a fortune of around 12 million euros. After Merkel’s departure he returned. The relationship between the two is meanwhile less icy. Merkel even calls Merz ‘lieber Friedrich’.

The SPD is running with the sitting chancellor Scholz, a friendly man but powerless. The SPD is polling between 14 and 18 percent. The party would do much better under the leadership of minister of defense Boris Pistorius. Pistorius is, with his solid, calm and decisive approach, the most popular politician in Germany. But he does not aspire to the chancellorship. So the socialists have to carry on with the burnt-out Scholz.

The Greens are polling between 12 and 14 percent, which, given all the criticism, is not bad. Robert Habeck, the minister of economy and climate, pulls the green cart. Remarkably enough he suggests reopening the German nuclear power plants, but that may be a temporary flare-up until the elections.

The smaller parties dance around the electoral threshold of 5 percent, as does (once again) the liberal FDP, led by Christian Lindner, the resigned minister of Finance. The FDP fluctuates in the polls between 3 and 5 percent. Lindner has to stand out and maintains a discourse under the title: ‘mehr Milei und Musk wagen’, by analogy with the former slogan of SPD chancellor Willy Brandt: ‘mehr Demokratie wagen’. Lindner propagates an ultra-liberal course but showed little of it during his ministership because he was blocked by Scholz.

The Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW) scores in the polls between 5 and 8 percent. Wagenknecht is doing well in East Germany, but has to step it up a notch in the west. Die Linke, the right-hand successor of the former communist party of the GDR, has deflated like a flat tire.

The great unknown: AfD. That party fluctuates in the polls between 18 and 19.5 percent and is especially strong in East Germany. All other parties, except BSW, have excluded the AfD. The AfD sits in a ‘cordon sanitaire’ or rather behind a ‘Brandmauer’. Germans have a strange relationship with ‘walls’.

It is striking that the AfD leadership pushed Alice Weidel (45) forward as chancellor candidate. She is the friendly face of the party, but can also hit back hard. Her partner is a woman, Sarah Bossard. Weidel worked at Goldman Sachs and wrote a dissertation about the Chinese pension system for which she obtained her doctorate cum laude. She is so strong in debate that Habeck does not dare the duel with her. The radical strong man of the AfD, Björn Höcke, remains out of sight. With immigration Weidel has the ‘golden theme’.

There is yet a third factor: Germany is carrying out a reform of the electoral system. The Bundestag, now 736 members, must shrink to 630 members. That exercise is being carried out by henceforth making the ‘Zweitstimme’ central: that vote, cast for a party, determines the number of seats. With the ‘Erststimme’, cast for a person, one delegate is elected in each electoral district, who gets a ‘Direktmandat’. Both votes do not have to be of the same political color and that creates a gap. On that basis the number of delegates was expanded for the party that won too few seats to still get its directly elected candidates – with a Direktmandat – into the Bundestag. The Bundestag got obesity. That is now coming to an end: the so-called Überhang and Ausgleichsmandate are being abolished.

The AfD has few well-known candidates in the electoral districts, but campaigns with a vote-puller, under its own party name, on the desired theme.

Every election has its surprise. On 23 February too?

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. Alemania vota y todos tiemblan)

The politicians of the parties of the globalist consensus in the Western democracies are determined to persist with their policies and remedies of the past thirty years in an obstinate attitude of denial in the face of the political earthquake that has first challenged them and today is already leading them slowly toward electoral defeats and marginality. As always, Germany is a case in which everyone must look at themselves, first because of its size and power, and second because it has a European Union tailor-made to impose its policies within it and therefore all its defects, excesses and errors. And the disaster of the European Union over the last five years is clear proof of this.

The rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is so solid and spectacular — its candidate for the chancellery, Alice Weidel, is already the candidate who enjoys the greatest sympathies, above Friedrich Merz of the CDU, Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Robert Habeck of the Greens. Even if the polls are borne out and the winning party is the CDU, its commitment to ally with anyone except the AfD, which occupies the space the CDU abandoned, augurs for the so-called “far right” the enviable role of sole opposition, as Giorgia Meloni was before winning the elections.

In Austria the FPÖ — ally of VOX in the Patriots for Europe group and the party of the same name now presided over by Santiago Abascal — won the elections, but the popular ÖVP, the socialist SPÖ and the liberals of NEOS have been trying since September to form a government against the sole opposition of the FPÖ. Well, in the latest polls this party has risen ten points since the elections and already adds up to more than the People’s Party and Socialists combined. Whether or not the tripartite government of losers is formed in Austria, one can already bet that there will soon be a government presided over by the FPÖ. The Austrian model is not far from the German prospects. Unless they start annulling elections and banning parties with foolish and clumsy pretexts, as some are trying, and not only in Germany. Then democracy is buried and we are talking about other things.

Now the German government has fallen because of its incompetence and because it applied a policy as demented as it was erratic in every field, and made Germany — and, in passing, all of Europe — a poorer, more frightened, more dependent, less free society. And of course much less competitive with the U.S., China and Asia in general, which every day increase their advantage in innovation, technology, competitive power and expansion against a Europe devoted to legislating, regulating and reglamenting everything to the point of asphyxiation, in a way of impeding all dynamism in the national economies that guarantees decadence, weakness and depression.

That is where Germany is now, in that depression which, nevertheless, the once-big parties — today ever more middling and some already very small — seem determined to deepen with the same policy. In Berlin and in Brussels, where the CDU, which commands the European People’s Party with its Ursula von der Leyen in ever more autocratic postures in the European Commission, has once again allied itself with the left and the ecologists, the great authors of the degradation and of the path toward inoperability and bankruptcy. And it has rejected all cooperation with the forces of the emerging right, which week by week keep increasing their weight throughout Europe, a phenomenon that the traditional parties view with panic but without a reasonable response.

The German head of state, Frank Walter Steinmeier, has dissolved the German federal parliament after the fall of the tripartite coalition government of Socialists (SPD), Greens and liberals (FDP), with a failed confidence motion. Thus died the most disastrous government in the history of the Federal Republic since 1949. Although a large part of the ills that have plunged Germany into its worst economic, political and social crisis come from the era of the as-glorified-as-catastrophic Angela Merkel, the disaster of the tandem of the mediocre socialist chancellor Olaf Scholz with the arrogant and ignorant ultra-ecologist green vice-chancellor Robert Habeck is without parallel.

But President Steinmeier thinks that everything must continue on the same course for the good of democracy. Steinmeier — a great friend, by the way, of Vladimir Putin — now celebrates the annulment of the presidential elections in Romania because the winning candidate is attributed with sympathies toward the former friend of Steinmeier, Scholz, Gabriel and so many German socialists that the current German president never hid over twenty years. And the head of state permits himself to speak of interference when Germany has exercised obscene interference in all the European countries and even in the North American elections since 2016. And it has installed puppet governments like the current one in Poland or the one it changed in Italy because it did not like it. Or von der Leyen’s threats to those who do not vote as she wishes, in Italy and other countries. It is not exactly Berlin that ought to bring up interference.

It has been a long time since the long German phase of that illness which is political consensus generated irreparable damage. The Grosse Koalition so praised in other places, the alliance between the traditional social democrats of the SPD and the social democrats converted from the Christian democracy of the CDU — both watched over by that other illness of German idealism turned ecologist fanaticism — in order to govern together or separately but always doing the same thing, has been a time bomb for these parties and for the system itself. The general elections for the new legislature are on 23 February and their mere calling is already cause for alarm. The times have changed radically. As Mikhail Gorbachev said to Erich Honecker, he who does not know how to read the sign of the times will be run over by them. Well, there you have it.

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. In Brussel heeft Mark Rutte weer een nieuw masker opgezet)

With his speech on 12 December in Brussels, Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, has put on a new mask, namely that of the hawk. The location was the Concert Noble on the Aarlenstraat, the glittering palace that was once in the hands of the Flemish Farmers’ Union.

The speech sounded alarmist, as if the Russians are on the doorstep. Alarmism was earlier the method in Dutch energy and climate policy, which is currently bogging down in high costs and economic stagnation. Rutte made a Call to Arms amid the glittering mirrors.

The speech was short and powerful, in the American model. The security situation was undoubtedly the worst in his lifetime, said Rutte. He then painted a picture as if all of Europe could be overrun by Russia at any moment. It sounded 1930s-like: Putin was trying to wipe Ukraine off the map. He was trying to push through a fundamental change in the European security architecture that had given us decades of security. He was trying to crush our freedom and way of life. His pattern of aggression was not new. But for too long we did nothing, we did not act. Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014.

In Brussels Rutte said little about the prior history. However: he became prime minister of the Netherlands in 2010 and advocated, just like the German chancellor Merkel at the time, a good relationship with Putin. They kept that up for a long time. For Rutte that relationship only ended with the downing of MH-17 on 17 July 2014. Merkel went on longer with the German Ostpolitik, and only got that thrown back at her after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The cry of the hawk sounds somewhat shrill without self-reflection about that past.

With the new job comes a new mask. The explanation began on 22 November when Rutte paid a visit to the newly re-elected American president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his lavish residence in Florida that has meanwhile become a place of pilgrimage for heads of government, friends and opponents, especially from circles of progressive media who want to cozy up to him. Rutte got his job description worked out in more detail: ‘Europe must pay more to NATO, otherwise….’ There then follow a few reflections that are obvious to some Republicans, such as ‘Europe should just sort it out itself’. In Congress there is, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, a large majority for NATO as a security pact. That enthusiasm is declining, however, if America has to pay the lion’s share.

Thus Rutte was given the clear task: The current norm of 2% is not sufficient. It must go to 3% and preferably even 4%. That is a difficult story for Rutte because Europe worked itself into the economic pit with the energy and climate policy that was once sold to citizens with alarmist stories and scenarios about the end of the world.

According to Trump, that policy is a ‘green scam’ that he himself is going to abolish in America. The voters supported him. Trump is also going to complete the wall between Mexico and the US to stop illegal immigration. Europe, meanwhile, is in the middle of a migration crisis that has produced angry voters and shaky governments.

Germany and France, the two core countries of the EU, have elections in prospect. The German government of Olaf Scholz has fallen and the French prime minister Michel Barnier has been sent home by the French parliament. And then Rutte comes along with his 3% norm; actually the Americans want 4% but at that percentage the new secretary-general applies some fabric softener for now.

He sees no other way out than an alarmist emergency bell: the Russians are coming! Perhaps not in person, but via digital routes to shut down banks, airports, hospitals or ministries. That was his mission on 12 December in Brussels. For the tribute the notables were jostling: the Dutch minister of Defense Ruben Brekelmans, a sympathetic person who, to my knowledge, has no military experience. Fortunately he immediately got support from the, as Trump calls them, ‘television generals’. And of course the highest-ranking Dutch military officer at NATO, admiral Rob Bauer and the current Commander of the Armed Forces (CDS), Onno Eichelsheim.

It is of course a killjoy who nitpicks about that, but the two senior officers served at the time of prime minister Rutte and cooperated, in the best case reluctantly, with the demolition policy that the Rutte cabinet implemented on Defense. Only the then minister of Defense, Hans Hillen (CDA) resisted, but was told by the furious prime minister that he had the choice: comply or resign. The Netherlands sold all its tanks. Among others to Finland, which has recently become a NATO member. So our tanks are, after all, standing at the eastern border of NATO.

For an alarmist message a lot of alarm is needed to create social support. That is being put in position, such as with the announcement that citizens must keep cash at home. In case of digital attacks on banks whereby you cannot withdraw money. Probable culprit: Russia. That is possible, but the strange thing is that beforehand the government advocated precisely the opposite: only card payment was safe.

Queen Máxima was even sent out to promote ‘digital money’, among others in the Third World. If possible a ‘digital euro’ should come that makes cash superfluous, because the latter makes tax evasion easier. In the Netherlands it is now mainly card payment, but in our neighboring countries cash is still king. Now Rutte’s alarm bell is sounding and cash gets a chance again after all. Because… the Russians!

I agree with Rutte that NATO is the cornerstone of our security policy. Is NATO in a bad position? No! After the Russian invasion of Ukraine the number of members has grown to 32, among others with Sweden and Finland. Working in the army is popular again in the Netherlands and socially accepted. The latter has sometimes been different. Our Eastern European allies such as Poland keep strong armies on their feet. With article 5 of the NATO treaty in their pocket, the 3 Baltic states sit protected.

I once worked in the Brussels cabinet of the Estonian EU Commissioner Siim Kallas and visited Estonia. When you are there and look at the map, the world looks geopolitically rather different than in the Netherlands. Good that they are in NATO. Through the NATO enlargement the Baltic Sea has actually become a NATO sea. There now runs an iron curtain from North Norway to the south of the Black Sea. Once the dividing line ran straight through Germany and Berlin.

Furthermore: look at the situation in Ukraine. Putin thought he would be lord and master there in three weeks. That turned out badly. Ukraine stayed on its feet, the Russian army got stuck. There is now a hopeless war of attrition in which Russia has to call on soldiers from North Korea. Russians are actually fleeing mobilization; they do not want to go to the front of the Grim Reaper at all.

With an alarmist discourse Rutte reaps, on defense, the same as Frans Timmermans on climate: disbelief. Fear-mongering works briefly, after that it turns around. Citizens feel deceived and put their foot down at the ballot box. Give an honest picture: substantiate the necessity of a higher defense budget factually and present a plan for, for example, a European arms industry along the Airbus model. Alarmism is a form of panic-mongering.

It is highly peculiar. Rutte preaches a ‘war economy’ and Trump wants to negotiate with Putin and Zelensky about a peace settlement in Ukraine. What would an ordinary citizen in Europe prefer?

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.