(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. El Europarlamento es Paiporta)

The world is changing at dizzying speed, and those who believed they had everything under control in order to maintain their power and their privileges and to guarantee both their arbitrariness and their impunity have entered into panic. It is happening in the U.S., where on 20 January we will experience a day that will be a milestone in the history of this century, with the solemn triumph of a great national movement of weariness, protest and victory over the leftist elites and their web of interests.

In Europe the same thing is going to happen, and whoever has not seen the results of the Austrian, Czech, Italian, French, Dutch elections and all those that will come has not realized that the People’s Party — principal culprit in diverting the national and conservative vote of the European nations toward a left-wing policy — has entered the last chapter of that betrayal which it has been perpetrating for decades.

It is going to be the last time that the People’s Party succeeds in disguising itself as right-wing in order to guarantee the maintenance of the centralist left-wing and climate-catastrophist policy. It will be von der Leyen’s last embrace of all the losers of the elections in order to continue with the failed policy of the previous five-year term of Green Pact, energy and economic collapse, Agenda 2030, ideological hysteria, incentivized immigrant invasion and war against freedom of expression.

The contradictions are blowing up in their hands, as we were able to explain with satisfaction at a gathering of members of Patriots for Europe held in Madrid. Just as the European Parliament resolution on Venezuela demonstrated that the axis of the popular will of the nations in Europe has shifted strongly to the right, it is clear that the struggle for freedom and prosperity is going to place the People’s Party before an existential dilemma. If the People’s Party already hid when the left and Josep Borrell sabotaged the presence of Jeanine Áñez — constitutional president of Bolivia and a political prisoner who was a finalist for the prize proposed by Vox — then with the Prize to María Corina and Edmundo González it has been seen that the cordon sanitaire with which the waning majority tries to asphyxiate the emerging national forces of Patriots, Conservatives and Sovereigntists will end up strangling them instead. And much before this newly begun legislature ends.

Last Wednesday the People’s Party hid when there occurred the gallant and very effective reaction of the patriots, led by Vox, against the contemptible offense to Venezuela that was the invitation and the presence of Zapatero in the European Parliament. Zapatero had to leave the European Parliament like a scoundrel evicted by dignity. Like Pedro Sánchez from Paiporta.

The PP is in panic but also in permanent turmoil with the contradictions that threaten to drown it daily. It wants to present itself as the defender in Europe of María Corina and Edmundo, but they know that history owes the recognition of the president-elect to the Patriots, not to the PP’s partners, all defenders of the murderer Maduro. And they know that they are partners of the partners of the murderer Maduro and his drug-trafficking gang.

Such being the case, next Tuesday the ceremony for the awarding of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize is held in Strasbourg. It will be received from the hands of President Roberta Metsola by the laureate Edmundo González Urrutia and by Ana Corina Sosa, the daughter of the also-laureate María Corina Machado. Her mother, María Corina, the architect of the miraculous electoral campaign and of the great feat of documenting the humiliating defeat of the dictatorship, cannot attend the Parliament in Strasbourg.

María Corina Machado not only cannot leave Venezuela — she has not been able to for almost a decade by prohibition of the regime. She has had to go underground because she is pursued, to be detained, perhaps tortured or even murdered, by the dictator Nicolás Maduro, today the greatest murderer and torturer in America and head of an immense organization of drug trafficking, kidnappings, money laundering and every kind of organized crime.

Well, to that parliament to which she cannot come and gain access to receive the prize, there did arrive, enter and hold a round table on feminism and equality, with a resplendent invitation from President Metsola of the People’s Party, a socialist known as the principal adviser, defense lawyer and protector of this murderer Maduro who detains and kills María Corina’s advisers. Questions of foreign relations with criminal governments or not, foreign investments and various Delcy operations. We are talking about the contemptible former president of the Spanish government by the grace of 11M, great traitor to Spain for his secret agreements with terrorists and separatists and principal architect of the institutional dismantling of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

That is to say, the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, invites — a week before being unable to award the Sakharov Prize to María Corina — the greatest accomplice of the criminal oppressor who has put a price on María Corina’s head.

Roberta Metsola will perhaps not have realized this grotesque act of hers and will not have lost a minute more over that colossal offense of the European Parliament to all Venezuelans, she who was celebrating in Madrid yesterday the Forum Europa 2024 Prize. They say for the defense of the EU. Certainly not for the defense of the D’Hondt law in force in the Parliament and contemptibly violated by her party, the People’s Party, in complicity with its socialist partners, the Greens, the Macronists and the communists.

Because Metsola not only seems not to understand that one can never invite the accomplice of a murderous dictator, but much less a week before wanting to honor the principal representative of the victims of this murderous dictatorship, along with the president-elect of Venezuela, Edmundo González Urrutia. Metsola, like Núñez Feijóo, like all the People’s Party, seem to believe that world and European politics goes on just as in the nineties and that it is enough for them to make their swaps of trading cards with the Socialists so that “life goes on the same.” Nothing is going to stay the same, and the People’s Party will split between those who choose to take part in the reconquest of a new era of freedom and prosperity in the West, in Europe and all of America — south, center and north — and those who sink with the Socialists into the subculture of rancor and failure.

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. Trump moet straks om tafel met Erdogan, de grote winnaar in Syrië. Inzet: Wat gebeurt er met de Koerden?)

After the fall of Assad, Syria is back on the drawing board and ‘warlods’ are eyeing their chances for a land grab. After 53 years of rule over Syria the Assad family has packed its bags and Syria is ‘up for grabs’. Of course there is the frequently expressed wish to make Syria a democratically governed country with all rights for the various groups, on the basis of a constitution that holds human rights high. In the Middle East, wishful thinking unfortunately has a short life, and the hidden agendas are doubly thick.

The current situation is in a certain sense reminiscent of the end of the First World War when the British and French thought about the redistribution of the Ottoman Empire. The British politician and diplomatic adviser Mark Sykes (1879-1919) and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot (1870-1951) drew a few lines through the desert sand. A process that was beautifully described in a 2011 book: A line in the sand by James Barr. The colonial powers promised something everywhere: France and Great Britain got protectorates, there would be an Arab state and a Jewish one. The colonial powers served themselves first; the rest remained a question mark.

How will it turn out for Syria these days? A democratic state, a theocratic republic or a vassal of new masters. To be hoped for is naturally the first; to be feared are the other options.

In fact Syria was already divided up by Turkey, Russia and Iran, with president Assad the vassal of the latter two. UN resolution 2254 of 2015 called for Syria, mired in a civil war in what was called the ‘Arab Spring’, to be transformed into a ‘sovereign, independent, territorial and constitutional Republic’. Three contenders put themselves forward to work out that aim further in the ‘Astana process’, named after the capital of Kazakhstan: Turkey, Russia and Iran, under the leadership of UN envoy Staffan de Mistura.

There followed a variant on the ‘lines in the sand’: in 2019 Syria was divided into four ‘de-escalation zones’. The Syria of Assad, Russia and Iran immediately pulled 3 ‘de-escalation zones’ to themselves. For Turkey a zone remained in the northwest, along the Turkish border. There sat the Syrian opposition with around 4 million refugees, plus remnants of jihadi groups, including the Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, which united in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), under the leadership of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

Under his leadership and with the support of Turkey the rebels moved via Aleppo, Hama and Homs toward Damascus. The Assad regime was already greatly weakened because its pillars of support, Russia and Iran, had other worries on their minds. The Russian president Putin is stuck with Ukraine and Iran seems to be becoming a Goliath in the struggle with Israel. The fragile rule in Damascus became vulnerable. Erdogan sensed the moment well and supported HTS in the advance on Damascus, which perhaps proceeded more quickly than he himself had expected.

Erdogan can now work further on a Syria without Assad. His most important strategic target: the Kurds, a people without their own state. In Turkey around 15 million Kurds live, in Iran 8 million, in Iraq 6.5 million. In the latter country the Kurds have a sort of ‘special status’, a form of autonomy. The Kurds, around 75,000 of whom live in the Netherlands, fell by the wayside when the lines were drawn through the sand; they did not fit into the picture of the British and French.

The government in Ankara fears a strengthened Kurdish striving for independence in Turkey, the greatest nightmare for Erdogan. He does not want a Kurdish state in the neighborhood either. The Kurdish ‘autonomy’ in Iraq is bad enough for the Turks. No more of that.

Erdogan therefore does everything to thwart the Kurds. Turkey even set up a ‘Syrian National Army’ (SNA) that runs entirely on Turkish organization and armament. It is more of a mercenary formation. The Kurds, who in Syria are especially strong in the northeast, have set up the ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF), which has the support of the United States. America has even stationed around 900 men in the region to help the Kurds.

That produces peculiar situations. If Turkey fires on the SDF, it fires on an ally of the United States and possibly hits Americans. These are thus two NATO countries in the desert, each on the other side of the line. Turkey has a total troop strength of 735,000 men; more than Germany and France combined. Turkey meets the NATO 2% norm with ease.

With the implosion of the Assad regime, the weakening of Iran and a Russia bogged down in trench warfare, Erdogan holds the strongest cards. From the United States he currently has little trouble, because president Biden is busy sorting out his family affairs and his wife Jill takes the honors, such as the reopening of Notre Dame.

Donald Trump takes office from 20 January 2025 and will, with his staff, have to delve into the dividing lines through the Syrian sand. He will have to sit down at the table with Erdogan: two ‘strong men’ together. Trump’s staff must first get some remedial lessons about Syria and its history.

And Iran? After Assad the biggest loser. The regime of the ayatollahs has lost the bridge to Lebanon, the ‘arc of terror’, and the rule in Tehran is becoming more isolated than ever. Hopefully the beard-men’s regime implodes; that would be an immense ‘game changer’. With the Iranian revolution of 1979 an enormous ordeal began, in Iran and beyond. It had just as disastrous an effect as the Russian revolution of 1917.

What is going to happen now? In 2011 I was among the observers on behalf of the European Parliament at the first free elections in Tunisia, where the ‘Arab Spring’ began. On the day I arrived, the Libyan leader Gaddafi was shot dead. Joy everywhere. A ‘new era’ would dawn. But it turned out differently. When the votes were counted, the fundamentalist Ennahda (Rebirth) turned out to become the largest party. Tunisia is meanwhile governed by a ‘strong man’: Kais Saïed. The ‘spring’ became winter.

In Syria there may come a constitutional consultation with many groupings, and much pressure from outside, with Turkey in the lead. In the ensuing process the most fanatical, radical and best-organized group usually wins. So possibly the ‘liberators’ of HTS. Important breaking point for Turkey: what role will the Kurds be allotted in Syria? Erdogan watches like a grey wolf.

Israel does not wait around. For safety’s sake it took control of some Syrian border areas, including the Syrian part of Mount Hermon. Anyone who has ever been on the Golan Heights sees the strategic importance of such positions. The Syrian fleet was preemptively destroyed, as were Syrian ammunition storage locations. Where in the Netherlands naïveté is experienced as disarming, in the Middle East it is deadly, as Israel found out on 7 October last year.

Of course I hope that Syria becomes a democratic state, but 14 years after the ‘Arab Spring’ not a single democracy has emerged in the Middle East. Israel is the only democracy in the region, not thanks to but in spite of the lines of the duo Sykes-Picot.

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. Derk Jan Eppink: Dankzij Trump verandert alles op het wereldtoneel. Behalve onze klompendiplomatie)

Donald Trump will not be sworn in for another month and a half, but on the political stage all the players are taking up positions, or shifting them. The White House is a rest home for sitting president Joe Biden, and nothing more has been heard of vice-president Kamala Harris, except that she leaves a hole of millions in an election war chest of around one billion dollars. For the world that is not interesting. Gone is gone. What counts is who is coming.

Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence in Florida, has meanwhile grown into a new center of government, with parties at set times. Trump is meanwhile governing with shots across the bow, the measures he wants to issue on ‘Day One’. He is waiting for the inauguration of 20 January, but is already kicking the ball onto the field. Such as import duties on products from Mexico and Canada, the two neighboring countries with which the US has a free trade agreement: USMCA, the former NAFTA. Trump uses import duties as a means of pressure, also in areas other than trade, such as migration.

During the administration of president Biden around 10 to 12 million migrants entered the US illegally via the southern border. They were subsequently transported to large cities, such as New York. There untenable conditions arose. Under Trump the wall will be completed and Mexico must stop the influx of migrants, the ‘caravans’. If not, import tariffs of 25 percent. The intention had barely been announced before the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum called Mar-a-Lago. According to Trump, Mexico will close the border; according to Sheinbaum, that interpretation was too abrupt but Mexico will take measures. The agenda is set.

With Canada it is the same story, though Trump’s irritation was greater. Canada, under prime minister Justin Trudeau, had lifted the visa requirement for Mexicans, creating a ‘northern route’ for people to travel from Mexico to Canada and thus to the US. The announcement of an import duty led to a shock for Trudeau. He has elections next year and his popularity is waning. Trudeau even traveled to Mar-a-Lago to improve relations with Trump and to avoid import duties. That costs Canadian jobs.

The two never got along. Trump pointed out that Trudeau’s mother was a big fan of Fidel Castro, regularly visited Castro and that Justin may be their son. ‘Look at his hair’. Trudeau just stepped over those remarks; avoiding import duties was of greater importance.

The coming presidency of Trump is also making itself felt indirectly. In Ukraine president Zelensky made a remarkable statement. He said he was prepared to give up the territories occupied by Russia, if Ukraine becomes a member of NATO. Whether that becomes the ‘deal’ is certainly not settled, but Zelensky is preparing for negotiations in which America plays a leading role. Russia too is running into limits and is even calling on support from North Korea, which is supplying 10,000 soldiers. For Moscow, however, the panels are also shifting, because another front is flaring up: Syria.

In the Middle East the balance of power has shifted through the actions of Israel and the stance that Trump will take. He stands fully behind the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was still regularly rapped on the knuckles by Biden. Among Republicans support for Israel is virtually unlimited. For them Israel is ‘us in the Middle East’. In his first term Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The opponents of Israel have been warned.

Israel was contending with three opponents at once: Iran, the architect of terror, with Hezbollah and Hamas as the executors. Israel has considerably weakened all three; Hezbollah and Hamas have been practically decapitated by the elimination of many top figures. The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was even blown up by Israel in the Iranian capital Tehran. An enormous humiliation for the ayatollahs. Moreover, Israel has severely weakened Iran’s positions in Syria. The axis Iran-the Syria of president Assad-Hezbollah-Hamas resembles a bombed-out building.

That has two consequences. Iran sees the arrival of Trump as a reason to change course. Biden tried to cozy up to the ayatollahs, but Trump takes the whip out of the cupboard with numerous sanctions. Meanwhile Iran is beginning to seek support in Europe to talk again about the ‘nuclear deal’. The EU always wants to talk, even when it is utterly pointless, in order to place itself on the chessboard as a ‘diplomatic factor’. The announced Iranian ‘retaliatory actions’ against Israel fail to materialize, because Trump is on his way. Tehran fears that Israel will advocate a daring action with Trump: the blowing up of nuclear installations in Iran. These are hidden deep underground and for an effective bombardment American weapons are needed, plus the president’s assent.

The weakening of the axis Iran-Syria (Assad)-Hezbollah-Hamas led to a vacuum in Syria. In politics a vacuum is usually filled quickly: witness the terror group Tahrir al-Sham – founded in 2017 as a bundling of Salafist jihadists – that launched an offensive against the government army of president Assad to the northwest of the city of Aleppo. Tahrir al-Sham meanwhile controls Aleppo for the most part and receives support from Turkey, which at the same time fights the Kurds, while Assad counts on Russia. In short: the Syrian civil war is flaring up again.

For Russia the presence in Syria is more than symbolic politics, because the port of Tartus is unique for the Russian fleet: a Mediterranean port. It is formally a rented facility for the Russian navy, but de facto a military base and the only one outside the area of the former Soviet Union. As soon as Tahrir al-Sham has taken Aleppo, Tartus could well be the next target.

Moscow has more on its mind than Ukraine. The allies Iran and the Syria of Assad are in a bind, and Tartus is in danger. The ruble is falling because too little hard currency is coming into the country: China pays in ‘yuan’ and India in ‘rupees’. And Trump takes office on 20 January. Quite a to-do list.

The world is reorienting itself. The only country that shot itself in the foot in advance was the Netherlands, by being the first to note that it would arrest Netanyahu if he were to appear here. This as a result of a ruling by the International Criminal Court. Israel has appealed. Most of the Netherlands’ allies took a more cautious stance. The guide nation ‘in splendid isolation’ no longer plays any role in the Middle East, if it ever did. Israel is angry and the US will laugh off the clog diplomacy because the Netherlands has not understood the signs of the times.

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. No gusta el ganador, que lo cambien)

Electoral chaos in Romania. Some demand a recount. And others demand outright that the presidential elections be held again. They did not like the winner and they want another one. The Constitutional Court did not dare this Friday to annul, just like that, this first round of the presidential elections held on 24 November. It will wait until Monday to make a decision, because on Sunday there are the general elections, the parliamentary ones.

If they already feared a result not very friendly to Brussels in these elections as well, with a great result for the AUR party, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, then by annulling the results of 24 November, tomorrow’s results, dictated by rage, could have been even more sinister for the left and the centrism. With a somewhat skillful recount, they may perhaps not manage to knock down the candidate Georgescu, but they may indeed get the center-right candidate Elena Lasconi to lose second place, and therefore the passage to the second round, in favor of the third-place finisher, who was none other than the humiliated socialist prime minister Marcel Ciolacu in these results. Had Lasconi and Ciolacu, Brussels’ candidates, won, there would be no recounts or doubts. This double standard, which is the trademark the European Union has imposed, is far more decisive than the identity and substance of the candidates themselves, supposedly or really ultra and supposedly or really pro-Russian.

A candidate has won, Calin Georgescu, who is not to the liking of those he has to please, of Brussels. They say he is an ultranationalist, an ultra-rightist, that he speaks well of Putin and ill of NATO. And that is why the alarms have gone off among all the politicians and parties in Bucharest, in the high command of the European Union in Brussels, and in all the right-thinking newsrooms of the West.

And quickly a recount has been demanded, when the indications of fraud are the same as in all the elections in Romania. The argument for disqualification is that Georgescu has made great use of TikTok and has had barely any campaign expenses — pure sore-loser excuses. In short, every recount is good. Now all the losers are demanding one for Romania. But let us recall that those who demanded them — Trump and the Republicans — in various American states in 2020 were branded dangerous coup-plotters who refused to recognize the result of the elections. Some went to prison.

In short, Calin Georgescu is not to their liking. And it is understandable. Although those who knew him before he was a candidate have experienced him as a fully Western and European Romanian, who represented his country as secretary general of the Romanian Association of the Club of Rome, worked in the UN Environment Committee in Vienna. He was “personality of the year for a European Romania” by the House of Europe Foundation, a purely Europeanist agency.

In his long professional career in agricultural consultancy, the environment, toxic waste and human rights in the West, representing various Romanian governments, Georghescu had never shown pro-Russian or pro-Putin leanings until he perceived the great opportunity that this electoral niche represented, on account of the Romanians’ resentment toward the Ukrainians and their frustrations with all the politicians tamed by Agenda 2030, the Green Pact and the impositions of an ever more ideologized and authoritarian European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen.

It is more than probable that Georgescu, if he prevails over all the operations that have been set in motion to try to neutralize him, will reveal himself less as a pro-Russian ultra than as a very shrewd candidate who has used, for his success, the weariness with the anti-national progressivism, the impositions of Brussels and the many thieves who parade about there with the blue flag of the European Union.

The truth is that the credibility of the forces protected by the European Commission is nil. And the double standard of progressives and liberaloids has bored all the electorates. Not only in the eastern Balkans. That is why Sunday’s parliamentary elections may be the next fright, and a difficult one to annul. And so too the chances of shoving out the winner of the first presidential round. The national forces, opposed to the social-democratic and centralist steamroller of the majority of People’s Party, Socialists and Greens in Brussels, do not and will not cease to grow, with more or less friendly faces and more or less elegant styles. But the only antidote to the national revolt is a total change of policy in Brussels. And that can be ruled out, given the obstinacy of von der Leyen and her coalition of People’s Party, Socialists and Greens.

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. Derk Jan Eppink: Snel een vredesakkoord met Poetin en daarna de blik richting China: Trump is er klaar voor)

From Washington, after the election of Donald Trump, a new wind is on its way toward Europe to thaw the eastern front in Ukraine. But the sitting president Joe Biden provided some continued frost for a while with the delivery to Ukraine of long-range missiles (350 kilometers), which have meanwhile also been deployed. The Russian president Vladimir Putin thereupon lowered the threshold for the use of atomic weapons, while in The Hague an NSC comedy was staged around Pieter Omtzigt: is he coming back or not?

Trump is sworn in on 20 January 2025 in Washington as the 47th president of the US, but he is already sketching the contours of a new policy now. His motto is ‘Peace through Strenght’, the kind of slogan that recalls the Reagan era (1981-1989).

In the long series of appointments Trump has designated Mike Waltz (50), a congressman from Florida and a decorated soldier, as national security adviser. Waltz can start right away because his position is not subject to Senate approval. According to Waltz the danger comes from the Pacific under a Chinese flag. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine he was in favor of large arms deliveries, but has since changed his mind. He advocates ‘recalibration’, because China is the strategic opponent.

The American position in that region was strikingly captured by the group photo of heads of government who took part in the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Peru. President Biden stood all the way at the back in the corner in the last row. Prominently at the front the Chinese president Xi Jinping. That would not happen to Trump. As a former wrestler he would, if need be, fight his way to the front. In the group photo of the G-20 in Rio de Janeiro Biden was even absent.

In which direction is the American course on Ukraine going? The war is stuck in the trenches like the First World War once was. Every offensive brings great losses. Until recently few in Europe dared to talk about a ‘way out’, because that seemed a betrayal of Ukraine. That sound now comes from the ‘president-elect’. There must be a peace settlement, and that can only come about through the United States.

Europe is once again a hutch with rabbits running around. The Netherlands is admittedly in the leading group of countries that actually support Ukraine, but most other countries profess that support mainly with their mouths, such as France, Italy and Spain. The Germans in turn are always ‘verzweifelt’. ‘The West’ is in practice only as strong as America is. The division of labor between the American president and the NATO secretary-general is crystal clear: Trump is the general and Mark Rutte the secretary.

At the eastern front, understandably, discouragement prevails. According to The Wall Street Journal 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers are said to have been killed. On the Russian side there are no reliable figures; there is talk of hundreds of thousands. Ukraine is exhausted, after the Russian ‘Blitzkrieg’ stalled and turned into a war of attrition that gave Moscow – with more men and materiel – the upper hand.

The war does not seem popular in Russia, and president Putin does not dare risk new rounds of mobilization for fear of resistance. So came the formula of the North Korean troop force of 10,000 men, for which Russia pays in money and raw materials. Russia traditionally saw Ukraine as a ‘region’; not as a state. Through Putin’s invasion Ukraine has become a nation state, with its independence written in blood.

Both countries are weakened, but Ukraine had a hard time of it. Parts of cities and infrastructure have been destroyed, just before winter. Ukrainian citizens want a peace settlement, whatever it takes, and most Russian citizens as well. Trump’s remarks therefore fall on fertile ground. The time is ripe for a ‘peace deal’. And America can enforce that with the will of the president.

Among the Democrats that will was barely there. They regarded Putin as a villain (which is correct) and Trump as his ‘asset’, a kind of pawn. Thus, according to the Democrats, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 elections to Trump because he was on Putin’s leash. That became a myth that the Democrats cherished, but wrongly, because Clinton really lost because she labeled her own base as ‘deplorables’. Now that the Democrats have lost again, the awareness is growing that the real causes lie with the party itself. A step forward.

Trump can put pressure on Moscow with far-reaching economic sanctions if it does not cooperate on a peace settlement. Such as pumping more oil so that the world price drops, and with it Russia’s revenues. Putin fears the power factor Trump and prefers negotiations, partly under pressure from China.

The Chinese model is stagnating, with lower growth, large state enterprises that are in trouble and a real estate crisis caused by a mass migration of tens of millions of Chinese from the interior to the (far too) numerous residential towers in large cities along the Chinese coast. The economy has to keep running, and it runs in China because the country is a major exporter on the world market. The Chinese have meanwhile, quietly, built up a global infrastructure network with ports (also in Europe) and enormous influence in developing countries. At the APEC summit president Xi stood at the center of the group photo, and not for nothing. At the G-20 too.

Negotiations over Ukraine can proceed along well-trodden paths: a ceasefire, demarcation lines, negotiations over territories, the choice for residents along the demarcation line as to which country they want to live in, and hopefully possibilities for family visits. In the border region there have been millions of mixed marriages. The negotiations over the border will proceed with difficulty.

It is unlikely that Russia will give up Crimea. The peninsula in the Black Sea was historically Russian, but was transferred to Ukraine in the 1950s by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. With the breakup of the Soviet Union Crimea fell under Ukrainian authority, but was occupied by Russia in 2014.

For the Donbas too it will be quite a job to draw a map that both parties agree to. Putin wants to divide Ukraine into pieces: a nonstarter. Ultimately there is the danger that the eastern border of Ukraine becomes a new ‘iron curtain’, running from Northern Finland to the bottom of the Black Sea. Then follows the question: may Ukraine join NATO and/or the EU? The latter will be easier, subject to all the accession conditions, than the former.

Europe looks on and was itself considerably weakened in this Ukraine war. On 24 June the EU adopted the 14th sanctions package against Russia, but how effective were all those measures? The sanctions caused the oil and gas price to rise, which within the EU caused a considerable wave of inflation that undermined the purchasing power of ordinary citizens. A high oil price makes Russia (read: rich Russians) richer, but Europe poorer. And that while our energy and climate policy – thanks to all the expenditures described as ‘investment’ – already weakens the competitiveness of European companies.

The most telling example is Germany, which is going backwards economically, with an infrastructure that is crumbling. The political situation in the country is unstable, as in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Meanwhile the EU is a machinery that produces grandiose plans (‘ambitions’), such as the ‘Draghi Plan’ of 800 billion euros, which, however, evaporate because they are unaffordable.

The sanctions against Russia were perhaps a moral imperative, but proved economically and politically destructive. The EU must recalibrate, not through daydreaming but through economic realism: with a modern industrial future and as an innovating trade bloc. The material basis and cultural cohesion of Europe is crumbling, while on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean the economy is being put into higher gear. Under Trump, Europe is not high on the American agenda. It is ‘America First’ and the gaze turns toward the Far East.

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. Pánico en la mayoría menguante)

The European Union is in panic. Because the forces that have run it at their whim as a single party in the “grand alliance of People’s Party, Socialists and Greens,” as the Spaniard Esteban González Pons boasts, lost last June the total supremacy in the European Parliament that legalizes and legitimizes the will of Berlin, Paris and the sanhedrin of the elites. They believed it was a mere jolt. That by having Ursula von der Leyen once again embrace Socialists, Macronists and Greens in a new European Commission with the same aims as the previous one, and by harassing and marginalizing the national and sovereigntist forces that oppose them, they could solve it.

Barely had the legislature begun when they realized that this is not the case and that they have definitively lost control over events. It had never happened to them before. And that has frightened them a great deal. The spectacle with Teresa Ribera is only one more effect of the unleashed nerves. Their long-standing pact between People’s Party and Socialists — not to trouble one another over their appointments beyond what is just enough to keep up the political spectacle that binds them together as currents with different acronyms within the same project — has been blown to pieces.

And it was blown up by a bomb which is fear. It is the panic fear of the Spanish People’s Party, contagious to the Germans and the rest, at the sight of the charges emerging against one of the key pieces in von der Leyen’s new European Commission, which is Teresa Ribera. Not for nothing is she the piece of one of the German woman’s favorite accomplices for all her outrages of the past five years, namely Pedro Sánchez. It is the fear of having to pay for the inconsistency and the permanent fallacy. For the first time they are aware that the fraudulent game of People’s Party and Socialists does not come free. And they all pay for what they do. The difference with respect to the same procedures in all the past legislatures has a name: it is Vox, it is the Patriots, and it is Donald Trump.

There is panic at those forces that advance without cease across all of Europe and that — alas! — are friends of the greatest enemy of the ever more precarious, terrified and waning social-democratic majority of blues, reds and Greens of González Pons and Iratxe García: Donald Trump. The overwhelming victory of the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump, has left knocked out the forces that were until now the unquestionable owners of the European Union. All their conclaves of globalist and corporate power have been traumatized. Their media terminals, always arrogant as bearers of moral superiority and, of course, of power, have for ten days been stammering with confused and disjointed messages in which they do not know whether to go on criminalizing Trump or to ask him for smelling salts. They do not know how to defend positions they believed unquestionable. But they know for the first time that they are in danger.

Those forces gripped by fear, those responsible for the European paralysis, have been left paralyzed. And they cannot prevent the advance of the enemy whom until the day before yesterday they humiliated and ignored as marginal extremists. They cannot prevent the new alternative of the national and sovereigntist forces — which have VOX in their hard core, which is PATRIOTS for Europe — from taking ever sharper shape across the whole political scene.

Some 1,000 days ago, the European Union was very much entertained with its ever so ecological plans to ruin livestock farming in order to reduce gas emissions, to operate on seven-year-old children because they like the color pink, and to destroy nuclear power plants and dams in order to depend a little more on the Russian gas that would reach them in torrents through the Nord Stream that Putin, Merkel, Schröder and their confrères Scholz and Steinmeier had built.

The rulers were playing at gods in their terrarium, doing social engineering with their human beings, whom they plunder to finance the experiments, when the first of the business partners broke the board and invaded Ukraine. Since then many things have happened. And many more are announced. The social-democratic majority of blues, reds, greens and yellows are in total confusion. There are some who ask for shortcuts and want to outlaw all those who are not like them.

It has been 113 German deputies, no less, out of the 773 of the Bundestag, who take on the ridiculous task of requesting, before elections to be held on 23 February, the banning of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which does not stop growing and is already the second-largest in the country. They want to strip a third of the voters in Germany of their rights. In France, the prosecution is mounting a grotesque farce of a demand for convictions and disqualification in order to try to prevent Marine Le Pen from being the first female president of the French Republic. Just as they wanted to prosecute, disqualify and murder Donald Trump, the waning majority in the European Union wants to do away with those who question and threaten it thanks to the awakening of the population. All the national elections held since June reveal that the majority is on its way to ceasing to be one. And that the European Council will be very different very soon, with many governments of the parties that they have marginalized in the European Parliament and from whom they have taken the posts that legitimately correspond to them.

Within a week there are elections in the state of Styria in Austria, and the result will demonstrate that any alliance like the one they are now attempting in Vienna against the force that will win in overwhelming fashion will be short-lived. And on 23 February there are elections in Germany. And the People’s Party of the CDU, led by another one who has revealed himself to be a Núñez Feijóo — Friedrich Merz — has already said that his only aspiration is to lead a government with the Socialists who have sunk the country, together with the Greens and the liberals.

Another embrace of the losers in order to go on doing more of the same that has failed and that has made the EU — which had the same economic strength as the United States in 2008 — today have exactly half. The Germans have received the promise from the favorite party that if it wins everything will stay the same, because it refuses to ally with the right that has occupied the space the CDU abandoned with Merkel. Well, that is the best electoral propaganda for that AfD which, simply by softening its tone, will be the first party in Germany very soon.

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

(This article was written by Shea Bradley-Farrell and appeared in Human Events. SHEA BRADLEY-FARRELL: How Trump ends the Ukraine war in 24 hours)

President Donald Trump’s landslide reelection signals the end of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s firehose of U.S. money, military assistance, and blind support for an ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that has claimed about 1 million casualties . As Trump says, he’s not here to start wars, but to “stop wars.” And millions of Americans, weary of financing the Biden-Harris American “forever war” to the tune of $175 billion (and more promised), can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Can Trump end an almost 3-year-old war “within 24 hours” after taking office, like he claims? Sure. Trump proved in his last administration that he can do the “impossible” that the D.C. establishment is continuously unwilling or unable to do – like personally de-escalating tensions with Kim Jong Un, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, significantly improving Middle East stability with the unprecedented Abraham Accords, or forcing NATO members to pay their share. Yes, Trump can do it.

Trump’s proven leadership strength is exactly why Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy are now communicating that they are both open to discussions.

Barely after ballots were counted, Trump telephoned (separately) both Zelenskyy and Putin, laying the foundation for the strategic plan he will implement for peace. Trump told Putin not to further escalate the war , appeared to assure Zelenskyy of U.S. support (of some nature), and planned a “follow up” to discuss “resolution of Ukraine’s war.”

Trump has excellent leverage with both Putin and Zelenskyy to do so. For one, Putin knows Trump will use “Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe” if needed, and Zelenskyy, who has never been willing to negotiate, cannot continue to fight (even somewhat successfully) without U.S. military aid.

How could the Trump peace plan play out?

First, by signaling the U.S. position by simply calling for immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations – something that no world leader has done since Putin’s invasion, save Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Orbán, who shares a border with Ukraine, is the only world leader to visit both Zelenskyy and Putin to discuss the chance for peace and could act as an effective regional moderator during Trump negotiations. Orbán has interests with both Ukraine and Russia – for example, thousands of ethnic Hungarians and dual citizens live in Ukraine (dozens died in the war) and Hungary’s economy is dependant on Russian energy. Orbán has welcomed over 5 million refugees across his borders from Ukraine, and has a vested interest in the war’s successful end.

Second, by cutting off U.S. military funding to Ukraine, forcing (encouraging?) Zelenskyy to consider the reality of his position and his need for negotiations. The U.S. remains by far the largest donor of military assistance to Ukraine, without which Ukraine arguably could not hold off Russian forces at all.

To date, U.S. Congress has appropriated over $55.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine (weapons, equipment, supplies); Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is Ukraine’s second largest donor of military assistance at about $31 billion . But Germany recently cut aid to Ukraine in half, and its further assistance is uncertain.

In addition, even with billions of dollars that multiple nations have poured into Ukraine, its situtation is increasingly dire – Russia continues to gain territory ( 18% of Ukraine as of October 2024) and recently deployed thousands of North Korean soldiers to Kursk , the Russian territory taken over by an incursion of Ukrainian forces in September 2024.

Third, by negotiating a balance of financial and territorial concessions between Putin and Zelenskyy. Contrary to what the Ukraine-flag-waving U.S. Congress members proclaim, there can be no negotiations without concessions from both sides – including President Zelenskyy.

The exact territorial borders and lines to be drawn are for the future debate, but Russia could retain and consolidate territory it occupies in ethnic Russian areas of Ukraine, but significantly compensate the Ukrainian government for losses in life and territory. In addition, Zelenskyy should be given security guarantees for Ukraine’s future. The Kursk region territory occupied by Ukraine could also be part of negotiations, swapped for some Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces.

Fourth, by guaranteeing NATO neutrality in Ukraine – taking Ukraine NATO membership completely off the negotiating table. This is a very critical part of negotiations, but one that will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth within the visionless foreign policy establishment.

However, the point that Putin’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine was largely provoked by NATO expansion and not uncontrolled desire to expand westward, is a point Trump clearly understands, having remarked that President Joe Biden’s insistance on making Ukraine a NATO member was “going to start a war” and that before that “Russia was never going to attack Ukraine.”

This is, in fact, a historical point of contention , beginning in 1990 with U.S. victory in the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. At this time, diplomatic gestures and political assurances by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (and other Western leaders) created the impression that NATO, in exchange for Russian support of German reunification, would not expand east. But, eastward expansion is exactly what NATO did, creeping ever closer to Russian borders. NATO has, in fact, added sixteen (16) new members since 1990.

In November 2021, at the brink of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, Putin told his foreign ministry to push Biden and NATO for “legal guarantees” regarding Ukrainian neutrality because Western “verbal commitments” had not been kept. Putin’s other concerns were similarly focused on Russian security: the West’s supply of modern lethal weaponry to Ukraine, NATO military infrastruture and maneuvers close to Russian borders, and the presence of U.S. anti-missile defense systems in Romania and Poland. Furthermore contrary to popular assertion, Ukraine, full of government corruption and dependent on Western resources, is not NATO-ready. Rampant corruption in Zelenskyy’s defense ministry is mostly ignored by the media and Warhawks, as well as the fact that he fired top defense officials for “massive procurement fraud” including of ammunition and military food supplies .

A concession for non-NATO membership could be to encourage European allies to speed up Ukraine’s current path for admittance into the European Union (EU). This would have a positive effect on post-war rebuilding efforts, help secure Ukraine’s needed financial support for reconstruction, and take the burden for the effort off U.S. taxpayers who, under the Biden-Harris administration, are now the largest state donor of assistance to Ukraine.

NATO and D.C. Warhawks, and others fooled by the Biden-Harris’ declaration that the Russia-Ukraine war is a “fight for democracy” (in a nation led by an quasi-dictator who outlawed political opponents, cancelled elections, closed churches, and nationalized media), will find these steps for Ukraine’ peace plan hard to swallow. But, these are the steps necessary both to U.S. national interests and the positive future of Ukrainian citizens.

American citizens, committed to almost $200 billion, including paying the salaries and pensions of Ukraine’s public servants, cannot go on indefinitely enabling a war that is dangerously escalating to a broader and possibly nuclear conflict .

And, for Ukrainian citizens – who face the devastation of critical infrastructure, large shortages in troop manpower, worsening population decline, and this year’s record-high civilian casualties – a future of never-ending war is bleak. Yes, President Trump will end this war – and in record time.

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

(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Zege Trump dwingt links Amerika én Europa tot cultuuromslag)

The resounding victory of Donald Trump, with majorities in the Senate and (possibly) the House of Representatives, was barely known before the Democrats fell into a deep depression. How could the electorate be so ungrateful for the blessings of president Biden and his intended successor Kamala Harris? Wealthy ‘celebrities’, such as Sharon Stone, Cher, Taylor Swift, Barbara Streisand, threatened to leave America.

And curiously: the former American ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder (64), threatened (AD, 3 September) to give up his American nationality: he did not want to live in a country where a fascist was in power. After 30 years he wants his Dutch passport back. That requires an ‘integration course’ in which the KNM component (knowledge of Dutch society) can be a notorious stumbling block. Daalder still has some cramming to do.

In the American media there were the usual crying fits such as at CNN and MSNBC, while the regular jokers such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel literally had tears in their eyes. It became clear that the cultural elite lived with their heads in the clouds.

Gnashing their teeth, the better-knowing class had established that the ‘working class’ in the swing states had come within Trump’s reach. He transformed the Republican party, previously mainly a party of ‘country clubs’ and after that of ‘social conservatives’, into a workers’ party. Thus he rummaged in the base of the Democrats. In 2016 with success. This year an extra grab was added: Trump appealed to minorities that the Democrats had counted as the hard core of their own following. Trump scored very well among Latinos, black men, Catholics and Jewish Americans. On this the Democrats, with Harris in the lead, fell through the floor.

Trump’s landslide (312 versus 226 electors) produces a reshuffling of the political field, as Ronald Reagan had done in 1980. A political-cultural shift with far-reaching consequences. The Democrats preached identity politics for years. They divided society into separate little groups: white women, black men, young white men, Latinos, Catholic Americans. They spoke of non-binary gender policy, with ‘men’ in the changing rooms of women. ‘Woke’ became a method to silence people, to make opinion-forming uniform. It became a culture war with ‘cancel culture’ as the stick behind the door. That identity politics, however, caused an identity crisis among Democrats.

The Democrats have to reinvent themselves, and that will take time. The ‘blame game’ has already begun. Nancy Pelosi (84), who was re-elected for the 20th time to the House of Representatives, laid the blame on Biden who, according to her, had stayed on too long. His mental condition was presented too rosily for too long. Biden himself did not notice, and the debate with Trump, which became his downfall, he had also requested himself. Biden is angry at Pelosi because he feels pushed aside, while he himself got in Harris’s way. Such as describing Trump’s voters as ‘garbage’. These are the usual rituals of a lost election. Substantive reflection must follow, and new faces at the top of the party.

It is striking how much the European left is in that same pit. Ideological emptiness through identity politics, though people are less generous with the name of ‘Hitler’ to blacken opponents. Terms like ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ suffice. This vocabulary serves to hide the substantive emptiness. What does the European left stand for? Above all for climate policy. Just like the Democrats, progressive Europe has little eye for the consequences of immigration and the economic problems of the common man. What was once the core of the ideology is now a side issue and replaced by identity politics and a woke agenda.

The merger problems of the PvdA and GroenLinks mark that; of all things around the conflict in Gaza that completely divides the two parties. The Democrats employed two talking points on Gaza: one version for voters in the Arab community and another for the Jewish community. That balloon did not hold up for long. The cultural shift through the election of Trump puts the European left up against the same wall as the Democrats. Moreover, the turnaround in America will accelerate the turnaround in Europe.

Starting in Germany. The premature fall of the government of chancellor Olaf Scholz produces an acceleration. Germans yearn for stability but that is falling away. The elections for a new Bundestag are not far off. The German left, the social-democratic SPD and the Greens, are in a bad position. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is the far right-wing outsider, while the party of Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) is a surprising newcomer. Towering above all this is the CDU/CSU of Friedrich Merz. But his problem is: with which party does he form a government? The AfD is excluded. The rest mostly limp along.

Merz is a capable politician who spent years in quasi-forced exile because chancellor Merkel pushed him aside. From parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag he was demoted to backbencher, left Berlin and settled in Düsseldorf as an asset manager for the American BlackRock, with its headquarters in Manhattan. Only after Merkel’s departure did he return to Berlin. Merz is familiar with America, useful for the relationship with Trump.

Germany is sinking into economic malaise. Where Volkswagen goes, there goes Germany, and later the Netherlands too. Germany is strangling its economy with a failed climate and energy policy, and as the crowning touch the closing of the nuclear power plants. Germany is de-industrializing because energy costs are too high, much higher than in America where they are actually becoming lower. One of Trump’s first decisions is to allow fracking and to drill more oil under the motto ‘drill baby drill’.

Trump widens that gap with Europe. He is leading climate policy – in his own words the ‘green scam’ – to the slaughterhouse: America leaves (once again) the Paris Climate Agreement and reduces the regulatory burden, while the energy supply is increased. This puts the expensive European climate and energy policy under enormous pressure. European competitiveness shrivels.

There is then no other way out than to recalibrate climate and energy policy. The European Green Deal costs 1,570 billion euros annually in ‘investments’ that are paid by companies. The consumer ultimately gets the costs on his plate. Europe must be 90% climate-neutral by 2040; 100% by 2050. Companies that have to make strategic decisions in the coming years will quickly do the math: investing in Europe does not pay. In America it does.

Germany, once the leading industrial country in Europe that is now going backward, will be the first to have to change course. With that a European article of faith goes overboard. It is crucial that the elections in Germany take place soon and Merz becomes chancellor quickly.

In America climate is barely a point of contention; for only 7% of voters. Purchasing power and immigration come first. That is not much different in Europe, but ‘progressive Europe’ is barely interested in that, no more than the Democrats in America. They have now had their lesson. A too-expensive climate and energy policy disregards purchasing power and the financial costs of large-scale asylum migration. That endangers the survival of companies and with it the livelihood security of citizens.

Instead of going hard against that current with an unattainable and unaffordable climate policy, Europe would do better to liberalize the green planned economy with more market principles, more real competition and fewer subsidies. The Green Deal turns the civil servant into an entrepreneur and the entrepreneur into a civil servant. That is an upside-down world. If Europe does not correct itself, America will do it. And in Trumpian fashion.

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. Derk Jan Eppink: Donald Trump gaat Europa op het appèl roepen)

He gets along well with Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán, but with most European heads of government it is a different story. Mark Rutte he will use above all to make the European NATO countries pay more for their defense. Derk Jan Eppink looks ahead from Washington to the second term of ‘comeback kid’ Donald Trump.

Never has a politician risen so powerfully like a phoenix from its ashes as Donald Trump. His victory in the 2016 presidential elections seemed a freak accident. He lost to Joe Biden in 2020 and brought upon himself the stain of 6 January 2021 when his supporters stormed Congress.

Trump seemed finished, got all sorts of trials on his back, prison threatened and during the election campaign he faced two assassination attempts. He was branded by Democrats a ‘nazi’, ‘fascist’ and ‘Hitler’ but nonetheless becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897) with two non-consecutive terms in the White House. Trump, the ‘comeback kid’.

His victory also has to do with the inability of the Democrats to come up with a viable candidate. The party bungled constantly this year. President Biden’s cognitive deficiencies were long covered up and only came to light during a debate with Trump, which Biden himself had requested. It became his Waterloo. The leader of the Western world turned out to be a helpless elderly man who could no longer handle his task. Vice-president Kamala Harris took over the torch but could not develop a profile of her own. Her campaign had something of amateur theater about it. The established media hoisted her on their shield, but the shortcomings of Harris could not be hidden. Voters saw that sooner than the media, now in depression.

The Democrats are due for some soul-searching. Just as in 2016, they lost parts of their ‘coalition of minorities’. Trump broke into their base: among Latinos and black men. He turned the Republican party into a party for the working population, for the common man. The swing states in the Midwest went to Trump. The Republican party became a workers’ party; the Democratic party an association of the higher-educated, better-off and better-knowing intellectuals. In short, a party of the elite. It is a gap that is also visible in Western Europe and in the Netherlands.

What is Trump going to do once he is sworn in on 20 January 2025? He has already paid a lot of tuition in the years after 2016. He has learned above all how not to do it, and made many mistakes in hiring staff. ‘You are fired’ they often heard. The White House seemed a transit house and chaos reigned. During this campaign Trump was more disciplined, as far as possible at least, and he also has an idea of which staff he will need. At the State Department Mike Pompeo may come, who knows how to wield that axe.

Foreign affairs demand almost as much attention from Trump as domestic affairs: the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, trade disputes with numerous countries and the rise of China. In foreign policy Trump has an almost free hand, and with a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives he has little trouble from the Democrats, who are licking their wounds.

Europe, however, can brace itself, because Trump’s irritation with the old continent is great. It stands to reason that he will give a speech in which he serves European countries some ‘tough love’. He believes that European member states of NATO must contribute more. NATO is a cornerstone of security policy for Republicans too, but the fact that the Americans pay the lion’s share of European defense must change.

In his first term Trump already reprimanded European heads of government and seemed like a headmaster calling unwilling pupils to account. During a NATO meeting Trump produced a piece of paper and went through all the heads of government. Countries that paid their share received praise, but the defaulters got a verbal spanking. Above all the German chancellor Angela Merkel: Germany, at 1,5 percent for defense, was not good, not good. Merkel had to undergo this scolding with all her European colleagues present.

Trump is going to crank up the percentage, so it is said in Washington. If 2 percent of GDP as a benchmark is already a lot for many European countries, Trump is going to demand more: 3 percent. A fine assignment for the new secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, to collect the ‘overdue rent’ from European member states on behalf of the real estate owner in Washington DC. There must also be an end to budget tricks to artificially pump up the defense budget. Thus Germany pays the pensions of former GDR officers out of the defense budget. Pure budget pollution.

The European Commission too ends up in the doghouse. In the worldview of Trump (and many American conservatives) the EU is a regional organization like the Organization of American States (OAS). In his eyes Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is an unelected top official who is not on an equal footing with elected national leaders. As a counterpart Trump sees elected heads of government, and with them he does business. He sees nothing in supranational organizations such as the EU, but does in intergovernmental organizations such as NATO.

That attitude does make trade policy with America difficult, because that is the exclusive competence of the EU. Trump wants trade barriers for American companies to be cleared away and accuses the EU of protectionism. It is better if an authoritative head of government discusses that with Trump, because he does not want to see Von der Leyen. But the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will be more to his taste.

The Netherlands is in Trump’s good books, certainly the current coalition with Geert Wilders who even provided the Americans with voting advice for Trump. Such gestures he does not forget. With Germany Trump has less affinity, and that will show. German politics and media are boundlessly negative about Trump, in an almost childish way. East Germany even displays traits of anti-Americanism. With the French president relations are sometimes strained. Trump then threatens, in a dispute, with import duties on, for example, French champagne. Emmanuel Macron then quickly tucks his tail back in.

The head of government with whom Trump has the best relationship is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They are thick friends. The relationship with Poland is strained because Trump is angry at the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, who is busy at high speed doing what his predecessors also did: making life difficult for the media and dismissing judges. The relationship with British prime minister Keir Starmer will also be prickly. The British Labour party sent volunteers to America to help the Democrats with their election campaign. Trump sees that as ‘interference’.

A new theme in Trump’s relationship with Europe is the war in Ukraine. Trump has always said that the Russian invasion in 2022 would not have happened if he had still been president. At campaign rallies he announced that after his election and before his inauguration he would put an end to the war in Ukraine. Raising the question ‘how do we get out of that war?’ is in itself not bad. But how Trump is going to do that, he has not said. Is he going to summon the Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky together? Is he going to put pressure on them with hard sanctions for Russia and fewer weapons for Ukraine?

In any case, Trump’s patience with Europe has run out. And Europe will notice that even more than was already the case in his first term as president.

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. Sánchez decide morir matando)

The cold drop — let us call things by their name — DANA and the rest, which has devastated towns, hamlets, roads and bridges above all in the vicinity of Valencia and caused the terrible human tragedy of hundreds of dead and thousands of shattered lives, ought also to be a colossal deluge that sweeps away a large part of the Spanish political class.

In the first place, of course, it ought to sweep away and sink forever the delinquent government of Pedro Sánchez, which has shown, even more if that is possible than on the countless other occasions in six years, that it will walk over corpses to achieve the only thing that matters to it, which is its survival as a government devoted to systematic abuse and to the enrichment of its members and of related individuals and groups.

Never has the maxim been more true that the government finds no time to govern because it is fully devoted to business. As also that the only thing the government does not steal is time to devote to effective management for the sake of the common good, time for what used to be understood as governing. They are too busy buying loyalties, plundering funds to pay for them, and cutting deals with organized crime to multiply their fortunes across Caribbean islands.

But it is not only negligence, indolence and corruption. This socialist government and its ideological partners in Brussels — who are the People’s Party, the Greens, Macron’s short-skirted liberals and the ultra-left — bear great responsibility for the severity of the floods and of other harmful phenomena of climatic origin. Because they have all embraced the green-climate ideology or theology, they destroy the habitat in the countryside with their regulatory jungle, they prohibit the cleaning of forests and watercourses, they demolish dams and weirs and other resources for taming precisely the excesses of nature in our European landscapes, built up and learned over thousands of years. Now some semi-educated, when not illiterate, politicians, allied with bureaucrats appointed to decide in fields wholly foreign to them, about which they know almost nothing, arrogate to themselves the right to repeal the results of millennial labor and knowledge, to scorn wisdom, customs and common sense, and to issue directives and regulations without cease to fine, repress and persecute practices that had been imposed by experience. And when, as a fruit of their Adamite, arrogant ideology and their contempt for reason, a disaster occurs, out they come — like the truly contemptible Ursula von der Leyen — to use the dead and the waters to turn their mill of the climate-change refrain that would vindicate all the barbarities they perpetrate in the name of preserving the planet.

Barbarities that serve, on the one hand, to curtail freedom and personal autonomy, to impose codes of social discipline in order to subject society to behaviors neither desired nor requested by those affected, and, of course, so that the elites whom those politicians serve may do lucrative business without much competition and always from a position of absolute advantage. The face masks of the Spanish politicians during COVID are only the smallest ice cube of the tip of the colossal iceberg of corruption that accompanies all that ideological verbiage.

These crimes are abominable and, on their own, already deserving of disqualification and prosecution and criminal punishment. But, grave as they are, they pale before what has been demonstrated by this government in these days. With its refusal to impose the state of emergency and to send, as would have been logical, the army and other security forces massively to the region for a great rescue and aid operation, what the government of Pedro Sánchez has wanted is, literally, to let the dead rot in the hands of the Valencian regional government. So as afterward to blame it for the monstrous resulting situation. This has been made crystal clear in the nauseating statements of the defense minister Margarita Robles and other members of that government, as well as by the para-official organ of the Sánchez government for the outrages of disinformation, which is the newspaper El País.

We are not going to speak of the ineptitude of the general services of the State, nor of the incompetence of all the socialist cronies of the favor network who occupy the managerial posts in the administration, because it is a fact that under Sánchez and after the pandemic nothing works except tax collection and propaganda.

And little comment is deserved by the impotence shown by the president of the Valencian regional government, Mazón, and other lamentable behaviors of his government, such as the cruel impertinence of the regional minister Nuria Montes in her orders to the relatives of the dead. They only demonstrate that terrible mediocrity of the Spanish political cadres, brought about by the discrediting of politics, which drives so far away from it the best-prepared and most qualified Spaniards, technically, culturally and perhaps humanly.

The state of emergency, which was inexcusable from the very first moment because of the gravity of the tragedy, plainly national — because it affects several regions and because the effects of the tragedy have a massive national impact. But the Sánchez government has wanted to pass the dead on to the PP government, even if in doing so it multiplied their number. And there lies the crime. Because we will probably come to confirm that many of the dead are not drowned but died in their homes, isolated, or perhaps we can say “murdered by the delay” of a rescue that in every European country without exception would have come sooner. And that was deliberately impeded. Because this murderous delay, which is still going on as this is being written, was avoidable with an immediate deployment of the army to open the supply routes and pull the population out of their entire homes from under tons of mud, reeds, trees and rubble.

This immense Spanish tragedy is set within a process of general degradation under a dictatorship of plunder and lies that already objectively governs and that will soon exercise greater violence with the militia-like turn of the screw at RTVE. This goes from being the propaganda machinery to being the war machinery of a government that, besieged by its corruption, its crimes, abuses, illegalities and its betrayal of the nation, has reached, like Nicolás Maduro, the conclusion that power is the only guarantor of its impunity. If they lose the one, they lose the other, and all those who have been the praetorian guard of the adventurer Pedro Sánchez end up sitting on the bench beside him. To Sánchez we Spaniards do not matter at all, neither alive nor dead. But now Sánchez and his coup-plotting and corrupt government have decided to hold out, to bunker down and to die killing. In the cold drop of Valencia they have just proved 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.