What would a US/Israel operation in Tehran look like? Research carried out two decades ago offers some answers

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested Friday in Los Angeles in connection with a protest that interrupted a Sunday service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 18, authorities and his attorney said. Agents with the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations carried out the arrest as part of a federal case tied to the disruption. The arrest marks a high-profile turn in a case that has drawn national attention and fresh debate ... Read more

Change to the Harrods redress scheme risks personal information being shared with the Fayed estate, warn survivors

Newly publicized text messages are shedding light on a closed criminal case involving former Central Valley High School teacher McKenna Kindred, who engaged in a months-long sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student in 2022 and later pleaded guilty to reduced charges in 2024, authorities and court records indicate. The messages, circulated this week by multiple outlets, outline explicit contact between the married teacher and the teenager before a mid-November 2022 encounter at her Spokane-area home ... Read more

Among Palestinians and their supporters, perceptions of bias are not paranoia, but a form of institutional literacy The post How UpScrolled Must Resist Capture: A Map of the Nine Pressure Points appeared first on Global Research.

A Jan. 17 article on Quartz Markets by Catherine Baab reports that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America returned nearly all of their 2025 profits to shareholders. The post The Wealth Concentration Engine: Rethinking America’s Financial Plumbing appeared first on Global Research.

Calls for Americans to “speak out” by former Democrat presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton after the death of paramedic Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on January 24 are fueling tensions at a time when emotions are running high on both … The post Obama and Clinton Add Fuel to the Fire Following Killing of Minneapolis Paramedic appeared first on Global Research.

No one is safe from the ‘Russian propaganda’ sanctions – even those who never touch Russian sources. Baud is one of nearly 60 public figures under sanctions from the EU To read this article in the following languages, click the… The post ‘We Are Back in the Middle Ages’: Colonel (Ret) Jacques Baud. How the EU Literally Starves Dissenting Experts appeared first on Global Research.

Five Burger King employees were arrested after a fight inside the restaurant on Deans Bridge Road escalated Thursday afternoon, Jan. 22, when one worker pointed a gun at another during a dispute over two co-workers arriving late, authorities said. The Richmond County Sheriff’s Office said multiple units and EMS responded to the fast-food location after a report of shots fired. Deputies arrived to find several employees fighting; no gunfire was confirmed. Franchise officials terminated the ... Read more

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the second round of the trilateral Russian-Ukrainian-US talks in Abu Dhabi will be held on 1 February. The post Five Insights into the Trilateral Russia-Ukraine-US Talks appeared first on Global Research.

The United States should cease extensive cooperation with its European NATO allies, as the Old Continent only seeks protection but does not support the White House’s policies and harshly criticizes President Donald Trump’s claims regarding Greenland, according to an article … The post “Transatlantic Strategic Divorce”: US Media Explains Reasons for Division among NATO Allies appeared first on Global Research.

Rex 84: FEMA’s Blueprint for Martial Law. The Roadmap Towards “Police State America” By Allen L Roland and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 30, 2026 The Cheney/Bush administration has a plan which would accommodate the detention of large numbers of … The post Selected Articles: Rex 84: FEMA’s Blueprint for Martial Law. The Roadmap Towards “Police State America” appeared first on Global Research.

It was stated that a sonic or other energy weapon was used during the abduction of Maduro, which paralyzed the soldiers guarding him. The post The Worldwide Dangers of U.S. Sponsored “Electronic Totalitarianism” appeared first on Global Research.

We’re all very accustomed to the Kiev regime’s “PR victories” and attempts to shift attention away from the fact that its forces have suffered (and continue to suffer) catastrophic losses in a fight against a technologically superior opponent. However, the … The post Kiev Regime’s PR Victories: Doubles down on war propaganda to hide heavy losses appeared first on Global Research.

When Donald Trump took office as president, he set his greatest foreign policy goal as preventing China from replacing the USA as the world’s largest economic power. His predecessor, Joe Biden, was pursuing the same aim when he rejected … The post World War and Trump’s Power. “He Seeks Absolute Military Superiority”. $1.5 Trillion Military Budget in 2027 appeared first on Global Research.

They will escalate their war against Russia at sea, deploying their navies to enforce trade blockades, ship sabotage and seizures. The post “Global Sea War”: Trump’s New Strategy for Regime Change appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name. To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to … The post The US Meat Supply May Soon be Widely Contaminated with mRNA Proteins From Biotech “Vaccines” appeared first on Global Research.

The app ranked second overall in downloads behind ChatGPT and first among social networking platforms. The post Palestinian-owned app soars to top of rankings as antisemitic content spirals out of control appeared first on World Israel News.

The app ranked second overall in downloads behind ChatGPT and first among social networking platforms. The post Palestinian-owned app soars to top of rankings as antisemitic content spirals out of control appeared first on World Israel News.

Forty years since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, seven since the election of a president who praised its torturers, and three since said ex-president attempted a coup of his own, it can be tempting to diagnose the whole country with a sort of national amnesia. This is, after all, the most optimistic explanation for

The IDF said the arrival of the USS Delbert D. Black was pre-planned and part of ongoing cooperation between the Israel Defense Forces and the United States military. The post US missile destroyer docks near Eilat amid Iran tensions appeared first on World Israel News.

The IDF said the arrival of the USS Delbert D. Black was pre-planned and part of ongoing cooperation between the Israel Defense Forces and the United States military. The post US missile destroyer docks near Eilat amid Iran tensions appeared first on World Israel News.

A US official told Reuters that the USS Delbert D. Black entered the region within the past 48 hours, increasing the number of American destroyers in the Middle East to six, alongside an aircraft carrier and three littoral combat ships. The post Trump says he has spoken with Iran, as war appears imminent appeared first on World Israel News.

A US official told Reuters that the USS Delbert D. Black entered the region within the past 48 hours, increasing the number of American destroyers in the Middle East to six, alongside an aircraft carrier and three littoral combat ships. The post Trump says he has spoken with Iran, as war appears imminent appeared first on World Israel News.

Houthi Islamic scholar Habib Al-Haddar said the Islamic war against Jews would continue until ‘Judgment Day’ and called to be martyred in jihad. The post WATCH: Houthi Islamic scholar urges jihad against Jews and Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

Houthi Islamic scholar Habib Al-Haddar said the Islamic war against Jews would continue until ‘Judgment Day’ and called to be martyred in jihad. The post WATCH: Houthi Islamic scholar urges jihad against Jews and Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

Sen. John Fetterman said Hamas imposed the Gaza war on Israel, stressed that bringing the hostages home was paramount, and argued U.S. support for Israel is a moral and strategic duty—not a partisan issue. The post WATCH: Sen. Fetterman discusses rising antisemitism in Congress and expresses support for action against Iran appeared first on World Israel News.

Sen. John Fetterman said Hamas imposed the Gaza war on Israel, stressed that bringing the hostages home was paramount, and argued U.S. support for Israel is a moral and strategic duty—not a partisan issue. The post WATCH: Sen. Fetterman discusses rising antisemitism in Congress and expresses support for action against Iran appeared first on World Israel News.

With Gvili’s return, Hamas is no longer holding any hostages in the Strip for the first time since 2014. The post Israel returns bodies of 15 Palestinians to Gaza after IDF recovers remains of Ran Gvili from Strip appeared first on World Israel News.

With Gvili’s return, Hamas is no longer holding any hostages in the Strip for the first time since 2014. The post Israel returns bodies of 15 Palestinians to Gaza after IDF recovers remains of Ran Gvili from Strip appeared first on World Israel News.

In Trump’s America, with so much breaking news for the media to cover, it might have seemed odd to observe the presence of journalists and photographers staking out the Crown Heights apartment of a new City Hall appointee — heading a small office that doesn’t even have any official staff — for days at a

Hamas claimed after the IDF operation, in which Gvili’s body was located in a cemetery in northern Gaza, that it had provided Israel with information that contributed to his recovery. The post Trump credits Hamas in return of hostages, says group will disarm appeared first on World Israel News.

Hamas claimed after the IDF operation, in which Gvili’s body was located in a cemetery in northern Gaza, that it had provided Israel with information that contributed to his recovery. The post Trump credits Hamas in return of hostages, says group will disarm appeared first on World Israel News.

Sources said the man is not Jewish and had been visiting multiple yeshivas while making similar claims. The post WATCH: Footage shows suspect in Chabad ramming inside the building weeks before attack appeared first on World Israel News.

Sources said the man is not Jewish and had been visiting multiple yeshivas while making similar claims. The post WATCH: Footage shows suspect in Chabad ramming inside the building weeks before attack appeared first on World Israel News.

Germany recorded more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — nearly double pre-Oct. 7, 2023, levels. The post Most Europeans consider antisemitism an ‘important’ problem, say Gaza war influences views of Jews: EU survey appeared first on World Israel News.

Germany recorded more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — nearly double pre-Oct. 7, 2023, levels. The post Most Europeans consider antisemitism an ‘important’ problem, say Gaza war influences views of Jews: EU survey appeared first on World Israel News.

Over the past decade, conservatives have railed incessantly against “woke” educators for indoctrinating young people into believing that the United States was forged through conquest, racial domination, and imperial violence, all of which is historically uncontroversial. In red states, legislators have introduced and passed bills to restrict what can be taught in the classroom about

It all sounds wonderful, but Kushner inadvertently alluded to what might torpedo the whole plan. The post Will Kushner’s Gaza Peace Plan succeed or fail? – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

It all sounds wonderful, but Kushner inadvertently alluded to what might torpedo the whole plan. The post Will Kushner’s Gaza Peace Plan succeed or fail? – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

The man who rammed his car into Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights was charged with a hate crime after being arrested by NYPD officers following the assault. The post WATCH: Man who rammed his car into Chabad HQ charged with hate crime appeared first on World Israel News.

The man who rammed his car into Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights was charged with a hate crime after being arrested by NYPD officers following the assault. The post WATCH: Man who rammed his car into Chabad HQ charged with hate crime appeared first on World Israel News.

In late August, a twenty-year-old Romanian fascist admirer filmed himself as he attacked a Nepalese food-delivery worker. “Go back to your country, invader!” he shouted as he punched the migrant’s face. Around the same time, a brawl erupted between Romanian and foreign employees at an IKEA factory. Meanwhile on Facebook, an MP for the leading

Iranian leadership that believes it is fighting for survival at home has a greater incentive to test boundaries abroad, raising the risks for American forces, partners, and commercial shipping. The post Iran’s protest crackdown is an American national security problem – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.

Iranian leadership that believes it is fighting for survival at home has a greater incentive to test boundaries abroad, raising the risks for American forces, partners, and commercial shipping. The post Iran’s protest crackdown is an American national security problem – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.

The letter is meant to bolster the Lemkin family's months-long bid to pressure the institute to drop Lemkin's name. The post Prominent Holocaust scholars denounce Israel-bashing nonprofit named after Holocaust survivor appeared first on World Israel News.

The letter is meant to bolster the Lemkin family's months-long bid to pressure the institute to drop Lemkin's name. The post Prominent Holocaust scholars denounce Israel-bashing nonprofit named after Holocaust survivor appeared first on World Israel News.

A Mossad agent stationed in Iran during the 12-day war revealed how he set up a weapon system that successfully destroyed a ballistic missile launcher aimed at Israel. The post WATCH: Mossad agent stationed in Iran reveals details about covert operation appeared first on World Israel News.

A Mossad agent stationed in Iran during the 12-day war revealed how he set up a weapon system that successfully destroyed a ballistic missile launcher aimed at Israel. The post WATCH: Mossad agent stationed in Iran reveals details about covert operation appeared first on World Israel News.

The lawsuit claims the IRS and Treasury failed to enforce adequate safeguards, supervise contractors, or prevent foreseeable risks, ultimately enabling the breach. The post Trump suing IRS & Treasury for $10 billion over tax record leak appeared first on World Israel News.

The lawsuit claims the IRS and Treasury failed to enforce adequate safeguards, supervise contractors, or prevent foreseeable risks, ultimately enabling the breach. The post Trump suing IRS & Treasury for $10 billion over tax record leak appeared first on World Israel News.

This video production was first released in February 2021. It was almost immediately the object of censorship by Vimeo, which closed down our account in March 2021. Thanks to Vaccine Choice Canada it was published on Rumble. Global Research remains … The post Covid Documentary: The Most Devastating Crisis in Human History appeared first on Global Research.

U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Wednesday that he was sending an 'armada,' headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, toward Iran to force the regime to make a deal. The post Iran ‘weaker than it has ever been,’ Rubio says appeared first on World Israel News.

U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Wednesday that he was sending an 'armada,' headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, toward Iran to force the regime to make a deal. The post Iran ‘weaker than it has ever been,’ Rubio says appeared first on World Israel News.

A 23-year-old Anaheim woman has been charged with murder after police found her 55-year-old boyfriend decapitated inside her apartment during an August welfare check, officials said. The suspect, identified as Alyssa Marie Lira, was arrested in Mexico last week and brought back to Orange County to face the charge. Prosecutors said Lira faces one count of murder with a felony enhancement for personally using a weapon. The victim was identified as Enrique Gonzalez-Carbajal of Santa ... Read more

An 18-year-old Northwood man was charged with reckless homicide Saturday after a 15-year-old girl was shot and killed inside a Northwood apartment late Friday, authorities said. The girl, Symini Rai Moore, was pronounced dead at the scene. Police identified the suspect as Jakob Heintzelman, who was taken into custody the next morning as detectives began interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence. The shooting has rattled Woodville and nearby communities where Moore was known as an honor ... Read more

… The post Bô Yin Râ: “The Specter of Freedom.” Part XI appeared first on Global Research.

Bombshell: Pfizer’s “Secret” 2021 Declassified Report. CALL FOR IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF COVID “VACCINE” Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 22, 2026 Why Venezuela’s Military Did Not Fight Miguel Santos García, January 4, 2026 The Bush Family and the Mexican Drug … The post This Month’s (January) Most Popular Articles appeared first on Global Research.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy". Benjamin Netanyahu The post October 7, 2023: Is Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”? They Let It Happen? Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”? appeared first on Global Research.

Article first published by Global Research on May 23, 2023. Minor revisions on June 15, 2024 ***     Absolutely stunning, An Astute Intelligence Op.  A++. The election of Zelensky in 2019 was intent upon acquiring the ethnic Russian vote … The post Video: A Jewish-Russian Proxy President: Zelensky Transformed into a Neo-Nazi. appeared first on Global Research.

We are dangerously close to a situation where ~ if the American people took to the streets in righteous indignation or if there were another 9/11 ~ a mechanism for martial law could be quickly implemented and carried out under REX 84. The post Rex 84: FEMA’s Blueprint for Martial Law. The Roadmap Towards “Police State America” appeared first on Global Research.

A driverless Waymo struck a child near an elementary school on Jan. 23 during morning drop-off, prompting a federal investigation into how the autonomous vehicle performed in a crowded school zone, officials said. The child suffered minor injuries and was able to stand and move to the sidewalk as witnesses called 911, according to statements released this week. Federal regulators said Thursday they have opened a preliminary evaluation of the incident to examine the vehicle’s ... Read more

Executive Summary: On January 20, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated that cargo flows between Azerbaijan and Armenia would soon take a direct route that bypasses Georgia (Facebook/radiotavisupleba, January 21). According to Aliyev, Armenia has also raised the possibility of using Azerbaijani territory for cargo transportation between The post Georgia Considers Position in New South Caucasus Transit Era appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On December 4, 2025, Russian security forces killed Stanislav “Spaniard” Orlov—the commander of the Russian neo-Nazi private military company (PMC), Española—during his attempted arrest in temporarily occupied Sevastopol (Telegram/@milinfolive, December 19; Telegram/@astrapress; Vazhnye Istorii; Current Time, December 22, 2025). The incident is one of the most high-profile killings within Russia’s pro-war “Z-community” in The post Kremlin Continues to Eliminate PMCs and Semi-Autonomous Volunteer Units appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: Officials in Moscow and Russia’s federal subjects have been struggling to reintegrate veterans of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. Reintegration efforts intensified in recent months after a Kremlin official made a report, which Moscow has since denied, that 250,000 veterans have not found work (Radio Svoboda, January 26). Unemployed veterans are The post Giving North Caucasus Veterans Land in Homelands Could Trigger Conflict appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On January 13, Nigerien authorities revoked the operating licenses of dozens of fuel transporters and tanker drivers who refused to continue deliveries into Mali amid escalating jihadist attacks along the Niger–Mali corridor. The decision followed months of mounting pressure from Bamako, which accused regional partners of failing to uphold the Alliance of Sahel The post Sahel’s Eternal Yesterday: Chosen Traumas Sustain Jihadist Violence appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On November 7, 2025, a 17-year-old Indonesian student bombed his high school, SMAN 72, in North Jakarta. Authorities have not categorized the case as  “terrorism,” but rather “memetic violence.” The authorities based this categorization on the attacker’s apparent non-ideological, but copycat-style, in which he drew inspiration from both far-right extremists—such as the 2019 The post SMAN 72 School Bombing in Indonesia appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has aimed to widen the geopolitical rift between the so-called Global South and the West. The Kremlin seeks to circumvent oil-related sanctions, while weaponizing threats posed by Uzbek and Tajik militants of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) to portray Kyiv and The post Russia’s FSB Exploits ISKP Threats to Pressure Central Asia appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On November 4, 2025, Finnish police arrested several individuals in southeast Finland on suspicion of terrorism-related offenses. Authorities later confirmed that the suspects were three Kurdish men believed to be linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They were accused of financing terrorism by collecting money from the Kurdish community in Finland since The post Kurdish Diaspora Complicates PKK’s Peace Deal with Türkiye appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On December 7, 2025, Benin nearly became the latest country in Africa’s expanding “coup belt” to experience an overthrow of the country’s leadership (African Business, December 13, 2025). During the coup attempt, soldiers under Lt. Col. Pascal Tigri’s leadership seized control of the state broadcaster and claimed they had ousted President Patrice Talon The post Benin Coup Plot Tests Cross-Border Counterterrorism Readiness appeared first on Jamestown.

Anti-Russian persecution in Europe continues to grow significantly, affecting even public figures and state officials. Recently, Austrian politicians proposed in parliament that the country’s former foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, have her citizenship revoked due to alleged “ties” with Russia. … The post Anti-Russian Persecution in Europe. Austrian Lawmakers Propose to Revoke Citizenship of Former Foreign Minister appeared first on Global Research.

February marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The legacy of Gibbon’s fundamental thesis can be found in President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (November 2025).  Both argue that Western civilization is on a dangerous course unless it returns to the traditional civic virtue and patriotism that made it strong. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was an English author, politician, and historian.  His writing was informed by a variety of life experiences, including military service, travel across Europe, and conversion to Catholicism (and re-conversion to Protestantism).   His Decline and Fall was a lifetime achievement.  Published in six volumes between 1776-1789, those who have not read it often have a mistaken impression about the history that it covers and a misperception about Gibbon’s analysis.  The historical period covered in Decline and Fall is primarily from 98 A.D. to 1590 A.D., in other words from the time of the Antonine emperors (e.g., Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, etc.) through the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D., and yet following developments in Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium).  Gibbon’s extensive inquiry into the Byzantine Empire and the medieval Roman Catholic Church, is where most of his criticism directed at institutional Christianity occurs. Of course, in the background for Gibbon, is the history of republican Rome through the early empire.  Gibbon argued that the long decline of Rome’s cultural character and social virility was caused by a loss of civic virtue, what Cicero called “civitas” and what we might today call a sort of confident, active patriotism that is rooted in one’s religious and moral tradition.  Gibbon saw the loss of Roman civilizational values –  the ideas of personal responsibility, virtue, and active citizenship – associated with the earlier period as in long-term decay by the time of the Antonines.   First among the causes of that loss, despite periods of reform and recovery, was the decadence of Rome’s elite culture that turned away from a sort of Stoic, agrarian ethic of the Roman republic to an increasingly hedonistic and extravagant lifestyle.  This caused massive private and public debt, which in turn resulted in an economic situation where the state continued to subsidize the lifestyle of its citizens: “bread and circuses.”  A second contributor to the loss of Roman civic virtue was the dilution of what it meant to be a Roman citizen. As the empire expanded a set of reforms allowed easy entry into being a Roman citizen with few responsibilities or clear commitments.  Rome ceased to assimilate new people groups into the values of republican Rome, and thus the spread of empire, unmanaged immigration, and, according to Gibbon, cultural changes due to popular Christianity, all contributed to a decline in what Roman identity was all about. Gibbon’s argument about the loss of civic virtue can be found in President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS).    The NSS begins dramatically: “How America Went Astray” and “President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Corrective.”  Part of the way that the country went astray was disastrous spending without restraint and purpose: “elites overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.” The “corrective” is two-fold.  Part of it is a refocusing on America’s “core, vital national interests,” which include some ideational components.  The second has been to dispose of unhelpful elements such as gender ideology imposed on the armed services and uncontrolled borders with mass migration. All of this can be overcome when we begin with a focus on “the God-given rights of [American] citizens and prioritize their well-being … soft power based on pride in our past and our identity … and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health [and] … families.” President Trumps 2025 identifies five core national interests: a stable and prosperous Western Hemisphere; a vigorous response to attacks on the U.S. economy by foreign actors with a special focus on the Indo-Pacific; a reinvigoration of the Western alliance “while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity;” prevent any adversary from dominating the Middle East; and, ensure U.S. technology and standards … drive the world (economy) forward” (e.g., AI, quantum computing, biotechnology). Comments about Europe’s “crisis of confidence” in the NSS are reminiscent of Gibbon.  Trump’s NSS is written in the context of declining European fertility rates and simultaneous mass migration.  Statistics suggest that in the coming decades, Sweden will be 30% Muslim and much of Western Europe will be 15-20% Muslim.  It may be that the two dominant ideologies of younger Europeans are either a radically progressive, neo-Marxist, statist, climate activist mentality, or, for a minority, that of the Islamists who have made some inner cities in the UK, Brussels, France and elsewhere off limits to public authorities. This seems to be what the NSS is referring to when it asks whether tomorrow’s European leaders of NATO have the same commitments to the convictions of the North Atlantic Charter as those who originally signed it?  When one considers how much Europe has sacrificed its energy security to Russia, at least until very recently, the criticisms inherent in the NSS make sense.  Moreover, when one looks at not just the dramatic decline of Christian practice in Europe, but government attacks in London and elsewhere on Christians, it seems as if America is losing its civilizational allies. In contrast, the NSS trumpets America’s “soft power and cultural influence” alongside its economic, military, financial, and diplomatic power.   Furthermore, a crucial “means” to America’s “ends” is the “courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people.” To understand President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, one cannot fixate on the critics’ tweets that it is too short, too America First, or lacking in length and elegance.  The criticisms that it is solely focused on hard power and selfish American materialist interests is just wrong.  One must engage the ideational elements that undergird that strategy. Gibbon helps us here by emphasizing culture, values, and civic virtue.  Like Gibbon, the authors of the NSS see a civilizational loss of civic virtue in the West, but see America has having turned a corner and energetically seeking reform in our culture and institutions.  This element of the NSS is worth our consideration, discussion, and debate.

Support for Ukraine is losing backing among European politicians, many of whom see this policy as misguided. The illegitimate Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, is seen as an uncomfortable figure among European parliamentarians due to his insistence on a “military … The post Zelensky “You Are Losing the War, Sign A Peace Agreement with Russia”. Italian Deputy PM Matteo Salvini appeared first on Global Research.

Australia’s former Prime Minister and faithful Pentecostal Scott Morrison never passes up the chance to express an opinion if it will net him a reward. As one of various politicians of the right (and far rightist) hue invited by Israel’s … The post The Preaching Pentecostal: Australia’s Former PM Scott Morrison in Israel appeared first on Global Research.

Trump's peace council represents a revolution from above. Trump rules like a king, mixing politics and private business. The whole world accepts this without complaint. The post Trump’s Board of Peace: Foxes Manage the Chicken Coop appeared first on Global Research.

Women disproportionately locked up as number of English and Welsh prisoners held on remand rises by 44% in 10 years

From Thucydides to Trump, “might makes right” still shapes foreign policy. The era of institutions is waning; the era of power again holds sway. The aphorism asserts that having superior strength or power gives one the ability to control society … The post US Hegemony Shifts to Raw Power appeared first on Global Research.

Music making is a social achievement. Its technical skills are reproduced and disseminated through communities of musicians, its instruments are products of industry, and its performance routinely involves coordinated, collaborative effort. While a guitar or piano is often a musician’s own, the means of musical production far exceed the bounds of personal property. Music depends

Exclusive: Leaked “Board of Peace” Resolution Outlines U.S.-Led Plan to Rule Over Gaza By Jonathan Whittall, January 28, 2026 The so-called Board of Peace that President Donald Trump officially launched in Davos, Switzerland last week is developing sweeping plans … The post Selected Articles: Exclusive: Leaked “Board of Peace” Resolution Outlines U.S.-Led Plan to Rule Over Gaza appeared first on Global Research.

The wave of protests that rocked Iran earlier this month was one of the biggest challenges the Islamic Republic has faced since the revolution of 1979. The state security forces appear to have contained the protests after harsh repression that resulted in thousands of deaths, but the country is still facing a deep economic crisis

There are controversial interpretations of the real and ultimate reasons for the direct and extremely unilateral intervention of the West, and primarily the USA, in the "Kosovo Crisis" of 1998‒1999. The post The “Racak Case” (January 15th, 1999): The “False Flag” to Start the NATO Aggression on Serbia and Montenegro appeared first on Global Research.

Zohran Mamdani surely never thought that being mayor of New York City would be easy. Still, in his first month in office alone, he has had to confront daunting challenges, in addition to the usual harassment from mainstream media and the right-wing tabloids. Not long after being inaugurated, the new mayor has had to contend

Firms can get direct access to tech minister and No 10 advisers in exchange for sponsoring tech event, brochure says

The small Central American nation of El Salvador has of late assumed an outsize role in the western hemisphere. With a vengeful and reckless Donald Trump back at the imperial helm, Nayib Bukele, an elder-millennial advertising executive and crypto enthusiast, has fostered a productive alignment with Trump’s punitive politics. El Salvador’s relationship with the United

For every $1 that the three largest immigration deportation and prison companies donated to GOP campaigns in 2024, these private contractors stand to reap more than $11,000 in increased annual revenue in 2026, according to damning new research. This epic payout, thanks to GOP leaders’ accelerated taxpayer spending on border enforcement and imprisonment, comes as

In recent years, after a series of strategic blunders and ideological retreats, a familiar script has reemerged on the European left. To win again, we are told, the Left must embrace what some present as a “populist” strategy: reclaim the language of nation and patriotism, turn away from so-called “identity politics,” and rally a supposedly

Roland Steadham, the longtime chief meteorologist at Boise’s CBS2, was killed Tuesday morning when a small plane crashed onto the icy Payette River after striking a power line, officials said. He was 67. A second man aboard also died. The aircraft went down just before 11 a.m. near a stretch of river northwest of town, drawing firefighters, deputies and federal investigators to the rural scene. Steadham’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from colleagues and ... Read more

A man boarded an Air France flight at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport without a valid boarding pass and refused repeated commands to leave, prompting the captain to deplane passengers before police escorted him off the jet, according to an FBI affidavit filed this week. The man, identified in court records as Qais Ahmad Tillawi, faces federal counts of interfering with flight crew and entering an aircraft in violation of security requirements. Investigators said the ... Read more

A 25-year-old man shot and killed his former girlfriend, a 20-year-old student at the Aveda Institute South Florida, before shooting himself in the school’s parking lot Tuesday afternoon, Davie police said. Officers arrived minutes after 2 p.m., found two people with gunshot wounds beside a white car, and later confirmed both had died. Police said early evidence points to a domestic dispute that spilled into the open lot on South University Drive. The shooting halted ... Read more

A 22-year-old man has been charged after a 4-year-old girl died from a self-inflicted gunshot inside a Lansing residence on Jan. 21, authorities said. Investigators allege the firearm had been left unsecured in the home; the child was pronounced dead at the scene despite resuscitation efforts. Ingham County prosecutors said the case centers on allegations of improper gun storage and illegal possession. The defendant, identified in charging documents as Maliki Pendergrass, is accused of felony ... Read more

Executive Summary: In November 2025, U.S. officials and delegates from all five Central Asian countries reiterated their commitment to advance cooperation under the C5+1 format, established in 2015, by focusing on critical materials, transport links, and economic resilience (The Astana Times, November 8, 2025). The November 6, 2025, summit in Washington marked the second time The post C5+1 Reframing Russia’s Position in Central Asia appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On January 4, Azerbaijan and Türkiye signed a new 15-year-long energy contract. Thirty-three billion cubic meters (bcm) of Azeri gas will be exported to Türkiye over the 15-year period from the Absheron field in the Caspian Sea, operated by TotalEnergies, with the Azerbaijani State Oil Company (SOCAR) and the United Arab Emirates’ Adnoc The post Azerbaijan and Türkiye Sign Energy Contract appeared first on Jamestown.

House Democrats just helped their GOP colleagues advance a bill establishing a taxpayer-supported corporate lobbying committee within Wall Street’s top regulatory agency, whose only purpose would be to give an even greater voice to pro-corporate and big business concerns. Several of the lawmakers pushing the bill are heavily funded by businesses overseen by the regulator,

Back in 2024, I wrote about a curious case at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was pursuing exotic legal theories that would, if adopted by the NLRB or courts, curtail the rights of workers across the country. This included the theory that the then–general counsel of the

Recent debates over war, imperialism, and domestic state violence have fueled speculation about fractures in the MAGA coalition. But MAGA’s divisions may not seriously threaten the durability of Donald Trump’s image-driven politics, which spans foreign adventurism and ICE deployments and is comfortable with coercive power. Still, these fractures merit close attention — especially insofar as

Over the last several weeks, tensions over the future of Greenland have raised the risk of a military confrontation between the United States and its NATO allies, even as all sides say they hope to avoid war. Earlier this month, several European NATO members sent small military contingents to the semiautonomous Danish territory for what

JERUSALEM. A long time ago—though it now feels like a different world—I woke up one October morning to the news that Hamas had crossed into Israel, murdered hundreds of civilians, and abducted 251 people into Gaza. What initially registered as shock soon revealed itself, for Israelis, as catastrophe. A foundational assumption—that the state could protect its people—collapsed in a single day. That catastrophe reached a formal conclusion this week with the return of the last hostage. I was fortunate to be here in Israel for the moment. Thousands gathered in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, where a giant digital clock had stood for nearly two years, counting the days, hours, and minutes until every captive was brought home. The clock had become a national symbol of grief and hope. Week after week, Israelis rallied beneath it, demanding that their government do more. The country was plastered with faces and names. The nightly news became a liturgy of anguish, as parents, spouses, and children spoke to a nation holding its breath. While this unfolded, Israeli soldiers moved through Gaza—house to house, room to room—fighting men who had nothing left to lose. Many did not return. Beneath the ground, the hostages endured what we now know to have been systematic physical and psychological abuse. Cut off from the world, they lived with questions that no human being should have to carry alone: Is my wife alive? Are my children alive? Will I ever leave this place? Outside Israel, life went on. The world absorbed the war as news: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. Some stood with Israel as it prosecuted an impossible fight; others aligned themselves with its enemies. But almost no one grasped what it meant to live as an Israeli during these two years. Being here this week, I was struck by how deeply that period shattered—and reshaped—the Israeli psyche. I am not sure Israelis themselves recognize it yet, but they are different. The country is different. Assumptions that once anchored daily life have died. Sources of confidence long taken for granted have been set aside. Even the meaning of Israel as a Jewish state has subtly but decisively shifted in the minds of its citizens—sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. Israelis remain resilient, even optimistic at times: about a future beyond Iran’s regime, about expanded peace with the Muslim world, about the courage of a generation that pulled itself back from the abyss. But the change is undeniable. This week, as the hostage clock finally went dark, thousands gathered to mark the closing of a grim chapter. There were cheers and tears, relief and exhaustion. The moment coincided with the IDF’s recovery of the remains of Ran Gavili, a hostage whose body was discovered after a painstaking process of exhumation in Gaza. In a video that spread rapidly online, the soldiers who found him stand in a circle and sing Ani Ma’amin—the ancient declaration of Jewish faith in God, in the people of Israel, and in ultimate redemption. The sight of a diverse unit, many not outwardly religious, singing those words over recovered remains spoke more eloquently than any speech. It pointed to one of the most intriguing developments in Israel since October 7: a quiet but unmistakable turn toward tradition and spirituality. Israel has always been more traditional than outsiders assume, even among its secular population. But something new is happening. Some who were secular have become traditional. Some who were traditional have become religious. At the same time, others—wounded by loss and disillusionment—are more convinced than ever that Israel’s God is an illusion. The ferment beneath the surface is palpable. What is emerging is not consensus, but confrontation—with mortality, meaning, and identity. As an outsider, I am struck by another reality: Israelis are living with a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder, and in large measure have not yet had the chance to acknowledge it. Part of the reason is simple. The war is not over. Soldiers are still fighting and dying in Gaza. The army and air force continue daily operations in Syria and Lebanon. Even as Israelis gathered to close one chapter, the threat of new dangers—from a destabilizing Iran—hovered in the background. There has been no pause in which to grieve. No space in which to rest. The darkness of October 7 has begun to recede, but the light has not yet broken. History suggests that great struggle brings great clarity—that catastrophe burns away illusions and clears the ground for new growth. Something new is indeed taking shape in Israel. But what it is, and what fruit it will bear, remains uncertain. One thing, however, is clear. The people of Israel remain, as they so often have, on the forward edge of history. Political upheaval, moral fracture, and spiritual reckoning tend to reach the Jews first, who absorb these shocks like the prow of a ship cutting through the sea; only later do those shocks diffuse outward into the wider world. What is now forming within Israeli society—under the weight of trauma, war, and unresolved questions of identity—will not remain confined there. To watch this society closely is not to observe a distant conflict, but to glimpse the kinds of challenges that are likely to confront the rest of us in time.

Labor and patient rights are under attack in New York City. We write as nurse leaders at three of the biggest hospitals in the city: Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and New York-Presbyterian. For months during contract negotiations between the hospitals and our union, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), management has stonewalled us on our

The foreign policy community is currently taking in the Trump administration’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and wondering whether its bluster on seizing Greenland will translate into anything concrete. Experts have noted that both seem to have emerged from its recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) and the self-styled “Donroe doctrine,” which asserts US hegemony over the Americas. Conspicuously lacking from the NSS, however, is any reference to international religious freedom (IRF) promotion.  The International Religious Freedom campaign The IRF community—a loose network of activists, scholars and religious organizations advocating for greater official attention to religious freedom abuses—has been active on this issue since the late 1990s, sometimes working with the US government, other times criticizing it. The community came together as a bipartisan and multifaith efforts to advocate for and shepherd the 1999 International Religious Freedom Act through Congress. This act established an office of religious freedom in the State Department, led by an Ambassador-at-large, directing the State Department to monitor religious repression around the world and recommending states to be designated “countries of particular concern” (CPC). It also set up the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a nongovernmental watchdog agency.  IRF advocates were often frustrated with official US dedication to religious freedom promotion, however. IRF advocates noted the lack of progress on limiting religious repression. Tom Farr—the first director of the State Department’s IRF office who later ran Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center and then the Religious Freedom Institute—argued US support for religious freedom is “mainly rhetorical,” lacking a clear strategy. Specifically, the IRF community settled on three priorities: CPC designation, quick appointment of an IRF ambassador, and consistent release of the annual IRF reports. I remember numerous meetings in which advocates would bemoan the failure of the Obama administration to act on these priorities. The IRF reports were frequently delayed, and the administration seemed hesitant to act on religious freedom violations with CPC designations.  Religious freedom in the US national security strategies Despite this frustration with tangible action on IRF, it has been incorporated into 21st century US foreign policies, specifically through various NSS. Most NSS content encompasses what Peter Feaver describes as “the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state’s deliberate effort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools” to pursue a state’s “national interest.” Religious freedom, however, has been part of this discussion as well.  A powerful example is the 2002 US National Security Strategy. This document presented the George W. Bush administration’s sweeping vision for America’s place in the post-9/11 world. A major part of it was its connection between US national security and the promotion of human rights around the world. This included religious freedom. When discussing the need to defend human dignity, the NSS included “religious and ethnic tolerance” as part of this. It also pledged the United States would “take special efforts to promote freedom of religion and conscience and defend it from encroachment by repressive governments.” In early 2017, during the first Trump administration, then-Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech stating that international religious freedom promotion would be a priority for the Trump administration. This was reflected in the 2017 NSS, which pointed to religious freedom as a key value of the United States and listed “protecting religious freedom and religious minorities” as a key priority. The Trump administration quickly appointed former Senator Sam Brownback as Ambassador-at-large while the State Department organized a Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, which resulted in the Potomac Declaration, codifying steps the United States would take on IRF. Pence’s office also directed USAID to direct aid towards persecuted Christians.  What the 2025 National Security Strategy suggests about Trump’s IRF policy The 2025 NSS, however, presents a stark contrast when it comes to IRF. The only mention of religious freedom was a slightly confusing statement that it would oppose “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.” Tellingly, it says nothing about defending persecuted Christians. This is in line with the second Trump administration’s broader de-emphasis on human rights. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the State Department cut many of its experts on human rights, which would affect its IRF monitoring and advocacy. The Trump administration has also directed the State Department to emphasize “national sovereignty” over human rights. Trump nominated pastor and former Congressman Mark Walker to be the Ambassador at large for IRF (although he has not yet been confirmed). Unlike previous ambassadors, Walker’s only religious freedom-related work was his demand that the House chaplain have children, effectively excluding Roman Catholics.  To be fair, Trump has taken some steps relating to IRF. Specifically, he has spoken out on systematic violence against Nigerian Christians, and designated it a CPC. He also launched air strikes against purported Islamic State sites in Nigeria, intended to protect that country’s Christians.  What this suggests for IRF advocacy The absence of IRF in the 2025 NSS should be a warning sign for IRF advocates.  In Trump’s first term, IRF advocates could make a valid case for working with the Trump administration, even as some of Trump-45’s policies were directly contradictory to the values of the IRF community. For example, Trump implemented a travel ban that targeted majority-Muslim countries, tried to deport Christians to countries where they would be persecuted, included anti-Muslim activists on his staff, and was silent on Russia’s persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yet, IRF advocates could claim these lamentable actions did not negate the concrete steps Trump had taken on their policy priorities. Moreover, based on my private conversations with several IRF advocates, they recognized the issues with Trump on religious freedom, but argued the institutional access they had gained would allow them to address these problems. Trump’s NSS should demonstrate these hopes have been quashed. It not only fails to emphasize IRF; it lays out a set of priorities for the United State that are in direct contrast to IRF promotion. And the Trump administration has undermined its earlier IRF initiatives in other ways, such as its cuts to foreign aid, which are harming Middle Eastern religious minorities. Even the strikes on Nigeria do not represent a serious commitment to IRF, as it is difficult to say what they accomplished and they were not followed up by sustained engagement to help Christians in that country. Whither IRF advocacy? This leads to the important question: what should the IRF community do now? One could argue that continued connections to the Trump administration allow for some influence, and official attention to crises like Nigeria’s provide a foundation for sustained IRF engagement. This, however, should sound familiar, as it is what IRF advocates argued in the first Trump administration. And as we are now seeing, it did not work. I would argue it is time for the IRF community to adopt a prophetic model of engagement with Trump. The community would stop trying to work with the Trump administration and instead call out its lack of concern for IRF. This is based on the Biblical concept that trusting in immoral leaders rather than God will undermine your own cause. I recognize some may not wish to go that far. I also recognize that this may come off as a bit entitled, failing to recognize that compromise is necessary in any political endeavor.  A more moderate approach, which has been simmering among IRF advocates for some time, would be reformulating the metrics through which progress is measured. Chris Seiple, a longtime IRF advocate, wrote on the distinction between “advocates” and “builders” in the IRF community. Advocates call attention to religious freedom abuses and develop the metrics for success. Builders, by contrast, engage with government officials and religious communities to build trust and lay the foundation for religious freedom. While Seiple called for cooperation between the two, re-focusing IRF advocacy on religious engagement may both be more effective—as I have previously argued—and resolve the political tensions involved in cooperating with US administrations. A “builders”-focused IRF campaign would not rely on either/or institutional steps like quickly appointing an effective IRF ambassador. Instead, it would require long and gradual processes of engagement with both US and foreign policymakers. As a result, the IRF community would not be well-served by attacking policymakers due to the ongoing nature of the “building” process. At the same time, this approach requires a robust diplomatic and humanitarian effort by the US government, so it would be difficult to mollify advocates with discrete institutional steps. The IRF community thus has options. But maintaining the status quo—focusing on institutional access above all else—cannot be one of them.

Senate Democrats are right now formulating a list of conditions they say must be fulfilled for them to consider providing votes for more funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One of those items could be Democratic legislation that is already written and introduced in Congress: a bill to end qualified immunity for ICE agents, so that communities can hold

In the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents’ increasingly lawless and violent rampage through Minneapolis, those defending their abuses have claimed they are rooted in a respect for law enforcement. To second-guess ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s murder of Renee Good or the Border Patrol agents who

It was not uncommon practice in medicine just a short time ago to withhold particularly distressing information from patients about the seriousness of their conditions. This left misled patients confused about treatment and prospects of recovery. Concerned husbands were entrusted with medical information that professionals judged too distressing to tell their wives. Confused and scared patients were left at the mercy of medical professionals in an age where agency and consent were not priorities.  Fortunately, the prevailing wisdom in the medical community (and the law, for that matter) no longer endorses this approach. Not only are patients individuals with the right to make their own healthcare decisions, a realistic and sober-minded encounter with reality allows those with catastrophic diagnoses to face their futures with resolve. It turns out that a clear diagnosis allows for clear-headed treatment decisions. Not only is this true for individual ills, it is also true for social ills. To eradicate a cancer from the human body or from the body politic, we must face the nature of the cancer, the prognosis, and the risks of ignoring it. For far too long, we’ve failed to face the reality of the scourge of antisemitism in the West.  In November 2005, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 60/7, which established January 27 as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This date was chosen to correspond with the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp near Oświęcim, Poland.  Even the generation that witnessed the Holocaust couldn’t truly grasp the enormity and scale of the event. There wasn’t even a word to describe the crime committed by Nazi Germany until the term “genocide” was coined in 1948. And a still yet-to-be completed research project undertaken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999 has uncovered tens of thousands of previously undocumented sites across Europe where the murder, violence, and dehumanization of the Holocaust took place. So, it is clear that this is a laudable and necessary day of remembrance. But just like the physicians of an earlier era, Resolution 60/7 fails to identify the root of the problem. It reminds us that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It urges measures to “prevent future acts of genocide.” But never once is “antisemitism” mentioned.  It makes no explicit reference to antisemitism, but references more generic motivations of “hatred, bigotry, racism, and prejudice.” While other groups fell victim to Nazi Germany’s murderous rampage across Europe, we know that only the “Jewish Question” gave rise to the “Final Solution.” The U.N. resolution was introduced by Israel and eventually passed by consensus, a mechanism that did not require a formal vote. As such, the resolution passed without dissent and it can be claimed that it was unanimously supported. The complex of factors that saw this resolution come to life is not difficult to reconstruct. Consensus, and especially unanimity, is nearly impossible to achieve in the U.N. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted and ultimately adopted by the U.N. following World War II, it had to be very carefully crafted so as not to run afoul of the communist world’s lack of intention to integrate it into national laws and the Muslim world’s opposition to Western liberal conceptions of religious freedom. The result is a document that mimics the structure and content of the U.S. Constitution, but lacks any real universality because of interpretive ambiguity intentionally built in. There is not much of a “legislative record” for Resolution 60/7, but if it follows the typical pattern for such things at the U.N., it could not have passed had it explicitly connected the Holocaust with antisemitism. The resolution had to reflect the accepted Holocaust narrative that has emerged in the last forty or fifty years.  Yes, there were other groups that suffered significant persecution during the Nazi period in Germany and beyond. Some were violently repressed along racial lines, and others along social and political ones. But the Holocaust itself was the delivery of a campaign promise. It was the culmination of Germany’s electoral process. The National Socialist Party came to power democratically by politically organizing around the Jews. Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, and communists, all indisputable targets of persecution, were secondary considerations in the Nazi political rhetoric.  The universalized narrative of the Holocaust that reduces the motives of perpetrators to hate and intolerance allows present-day antisemitic political posturing to go unchallenged. If the world were to admit that the end result of a blatantly antisemetic political project was the destruction of more than one third of the world’s Jewish population, then decent people would be morally obligated to question why antisemitism is allowed to foment on the left and right, across the Muslim world, and more recently in the calls to “globalize the intifada” on the streets of Western capitals and university campuses.  The surge of antisemitism and the apathy of much of the world is so intimately tied to anticolonialism, critical theory, and the demonization of the Western liberal project that it can’t be challenged and must be neutralized. The radical Islam of U.N. member states like Qatar and the need to appeal to growing Islamist voting blocks in western nations  mean that there are many forces acting within the U.N. that cannot  abide a counter-narrative based in reality. So, once again, political action and language must be  organized around and against the Jews in order to achieve political ends.  All of this is not to say that much good can’t be realized by the widespread observation of such a day of remembrance. The news cycle that surrounds it, even if it is relatively disinterested and weak, still provides a platform to oppose antisemitism specifically and even criticize the dominant social and cultural narratives that allow it to persist. Those of us who truly desire to see the eradication of the world’s oldest hate, for Jewish communities to live in peace alongside non-Jewish neighbors, and for Israel to be secure can always use the occasion to speak, write, and organize. But part of that speaking, writing, and organizing must include clarity and honesty about the nature of the corrosive social cancer that threatens all of us, and not just the Jews.

A year ago, the New York Times released a list of cities that had seen the sharpest rise in property taxes in recent years. Indianapolis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, Orlando, Dallas, Denver, and Fort Worth topped the list. All of the cities saw around a 45–65 percent increase since 2019 in their median property tax

What work does it do, the spectacular and superfluous excess of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence, cruelty, and killing on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and most recently Minneapolis? As much as its immediate political and psychological ends are evident, the violence’s enduring effects on the arc of future democratic, emancipatory political projects

The most common reaction to The Testament of Ann Lee is to note that you’ve never seen a movie like it. True enough! It’s about the founding of the Shaker religious movement by the title character, an eighteenth-century Englishwoman who came from laboring-class poverty and found spiritual inspiration in the Evangelical revival of the era.

President Donald Trump declared in a New York Times interview that he “doesn’t need international law.” Asked if anything could constrain his use of power, Trump responded, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”   For Trump, then, obedience to international law, and to one’s “own morality,” are the only things that can inform decisions in matters of international relations, revealing a hole in his thinking, and likewise, a deficit in public discourse.    International law has come to be considered an almost sacred source of moral direction and standards in international affairs.  And yet, especially over the past several decades, malign actors have corrupted and abused international law and shown its weaknesses as a system without underlying moral support, and without serious penalties.  International law has not stopped wars of aggression or civil wars, much less the denial of individual rights, both of which are increasing around the world.  What is more, international law is today often invoked to defend aggression and human rights violations, and is twisted to confer legitimacy upon despotic regimes. As a result, international law, and the “rules-based international order,” are losing legitimacy, revealing a dangerous vacuum.  In fact, Trump doesn’t need international law, but he and all national leaders need a framework of universally valid moral principles, and the capacity to apply reason in bringing those to bear on decisions.  In other words, they need natural law.  Natural law refers to transcendent, timeless and universal moral precepts that should inform rulers and citizens alike, to which positive law should conform.   While often abused by kings and popes, the failure to constrain absolute power has commonly been seen as an abuse of natural law.   Natural law is the source of standards regarding the moral equality of all people, and the protection of human rights and dignity.  The fundamental basis for evaluating the legitimacy of regimes thus lies in principles derived from natural law. The abduction of Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro has been widely criticized as a violation of international law, but it can be justified on the basis of natural law.  John Locke, perhaps the primary influence on America’s political creed, considered international relations an ungovernable state of nature, and presumably would have been deeply skeptical of international law or any form of global governance.  But he also wrote that a civil state would be justified in intervention abroad in order to prevent an egregious violation of natural law.  While the seizure of an illegitimate and destructive despot in order to bring him before a court may have rational and moral grounds, any intention to plunder Venezuela’s resources, and to support the continuing denial of natural rights by Maduro’s henchmen would suggest that the abduction was a good thing, consistent with natural law, but done for the wrong reasons.    International law emerged on the foundation of natural law.  The 17th Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, considered the grandfather of the “rules-based international system,” sought to keep alive natural law values, following the decline of Christendom, in the form of international rules to regulate the conduct of war. But subsequent proliferation and rationalization have created a transnational legal superstructure far removed from its sources in religious and national ethical culture, which no longer furnish discourse.   The reification of international law seems to have short-circuited our capacity for moral reasoning, severed our connection to tradition, and hollowed out its lessons.   Natural law is now only dimly perceived as a shadow on the walls of our cave. Reference to natural law may be rare in liberal democracies, where freedom is often now taken for granted, but its obduracy can be seen among many for whom it is denied.  It is noteworthy that contemporary political movements against repressive regimes generally make reference not to abstract international law and anodyne human rights standards, but to constitutional and vivid moral principles from their own traditions, to show that authoritarians have usurped power; that they violate moral standards spiritually rooted in the society, and show disrespect and distrust of the people.  From Venezuela to Belarus to Iran, these movements seek a return to order, to moral and institutional norms, where excessive and lawless control has disordered traditional society.   Perhaps President Trump’s words will help reveal a need to understand, and respect the natural law ideas that animated the country’s founding.  America’s strength has not been built on military power alone, but on policies that more often than not, demonstrated respect for the rights and dignity of other peoples.  Many could cite counter-examples, but America has been widely admired as a superpower that used its influence to promote and defend liberty and democracy.  In doing so, America’s leaders have not been motivated mainly by an obligation to follow international law, and they have occasionally violated or twisted international law when they felt it necessary.  Our best leaders have been guided by moral standards from natural law traditions.  With freedom increasingly challenged, and moral distinctions blurred by the contradictions of international law, attention to natural law is more important than ever.

Palantir hired four Ministry of Defence officials last year. Then it won its biggest ever contract with the department

From ICE to Gaza, Palantir is complicit in violent US hegemony. Why do we keep giving it contracts?

The White House is putting itself in a position to fight more wars overseas while controlling dissent at home

“Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.” – Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (July 5, 1926). After China’s ill-fated accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its day in the sun during the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, Xi Jinping consolidated his grasp on power as head of the Chinese Communist Party. A debate began to form among the chattering classes. You could call it the Beijing Consensus vs the Washington Consensus. The Beijing Consensus, that centralized economic and political decision making could move faster and see farther than its decadent, decentralized, dysfunctional democratic adversaries, always struck me as a warmed-over Cold War Soviet debate; a question, historically speaking, that had been settled. But I was wrong. Today, it seems, the Beijing Consensus is winning, and the Washington Consensus – the Free World – is on the back foot. Xi Jinping’s new consensus is really not new, but a return to something old: one driven by blood and soil nationalism, by spheres of influence and predatory, tributary diplomacy, and by aggressive wolf warrior diplomacy. At War with Ourselves: Civilizational Erasure and American Decline I don’t want to appear too unsympathetic. This debate erupted in the West just as the sub-prime crisis hit, in the heart of two enduring wars in the Middle East, and the crescendo of the Islamic State. The Arab Spring, which seemed to offer optimism, in fact turned out disastrously; red lines were named and crossed, a region already deep in chaos descended further into darkness. Perennial and existential problems of American politics – entitlement reform, immigration – were left only for courageous politicians disinterested in reelection. Now let’s add to that the geopolitical chaos of Russia’s invasions, the pandemic accelerant, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the inflation, the instability, the fear. We could understand, maybe, why the Beijing Consensus began to look romantic. Bipartisan dysfunction on the most pressing political questions placed the legitimacy of the whole system in question. Maybe Xi Jinping had it right. Maybe in order to beat them you must join them.  This is more or less how I read the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, a belated Christmas present to close 2025. While there are specific arguments that I think are right, the overall premise that the United States of America is a declining power seems culturally and politically terminal to me. The solutions that it reaches for are premised on this decline, and yet they are also ones which will accelerate rather than reverse it. I would not accept the premise, and so I would doubt the efficacy of the solutions. In the debate between the Beijing Consensus and the Washington Consensus the conclusion is not simply one of rhetoric or theatre: there is a right and a wrong answer, and history here is our guide. As Calvin Coolidge put it, “these ideas are not more modern, they are more ancient.” And no progress will be made in this direction. It is ironic that just as the Americans accuse the Europeans of civilizational erasure, they do so from a position of such fragility, insecurity, and anxiety about their own sources of civilizational strength. It cannot only be that the goal is to goad Europeans into better policy – higher defense spending, more serious immigration debates. These goals are worthwhile, but as the opinions made public by Signal-Gate suggest, somewhat conclusively, that the contempt in which Europeans are held by members of the administration is not a strategy: it is very genuine. It is culture war by other means, taken global. There seems to be a real conviction, among some, that the welfare states of Sweden and Norway are more of a threat to American influence and power than the blockade exercises of the Chinese navy around the island of Taiwan. There was a multicultural moment, and a certain myth attached to it as part of the postwar order. It is probably best encapsulated in the premise that more economic and political integration would create stronger ties and wealthier states. It guessed that the wealthier and more integrated states became in the international order, the more their interests would align, the more they would evolve elements of both liberalism and democracy. This was Fukuyama’s much misunderstood and maligned argument about the “end of history”: not that no other options were available, or that liberal democracy was inevitable, but that some mixture of liberal democratic capitalism was the best system discovered to date for delivering long run prosperity and justice. That was the main point Fukuyama made, and he was – I strongly believe – correct.  This got mixed up into inevitability: that richer societies would become more plural and democratic, more liberal and more alike. This was actually not a stupid idea, but it was wrong. It did happen in some places. It did appear to be happening in others. But it was wrong for exactly the reasons Fukuyama suggested in that same article it might be: religion and nationalism. So, Europe and America, and the West generally, overspent the peace dividend of the end of the Cold War, over-invested in the myth of multiculturalism, and began to focus their energy and their power on more mundane political problems.  I have noticed some Americans, I think here especially of Vice President Vance, tend to focus on idealism and naiveté which conspired to produce European impotence in the face of the unexpected return of Russian imperialism, Chinese, and now also American belligerence. A few short years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s Angela Merkel was still imagining a new gas pipeline – Nord Stream 2 – to feed the continental economy. She badly misunderstood what was happening. But she was not the only one, and while the Americans came to this realization a few years before the Europeans, they also have been caught flat-footed in the now well recognized deficiencies of their defense industrial base and the, how else to name it, catastrophic immigration wars spilling out across American streets. The overstretch was a feature, not a bug, of American diplomacy in the unipolar moment because the presumption was the dividends would pay back a hundred-fold – like Germany, like Japan. The principles were not wrong. But the prediction was. In other words, wealth and welcome are not enough: the political infrastructure of pluralism must have some recourse to virtues, to principles, apart from which no amount of money or hospitality will make for peace or prosperity. This rediscovery and retrieval of the sources of the American founding lands at an auspicious time – the 250th anniversary of the great Declaration. I have not lost confidence in the enduring moral weight and political, and yes geopolitical, convictions of that Declaration. I pray the Americans themselves will rediscover that confidence, for which so many of them have died, and for which the world – including my home, Canada – owes them very much. Spheres of Influence: Tributary Diplomacy Retrenchment is a very understandable human response to an experience of loss or fragility. This is such a commonly understood problem, in fact, that much of the postwar order was designed to prevent a relapse into the conditions that were diagnosed as having catalyzed the Great Depression and ultimately the Second World War. The central goal of the United Nations, of the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF, World Bank, and the G.A.T.T. (in 1995 W.T.O) was to manage and mitigate these entirely natural responses.  In a world where suddenly unexpected threats emerge, where scarcity appears more common, and where potential challengers grow in size and ability, retrenchment seems an easy and obvious response. Ross Douthat in his book Decadence argues that liberalism’s defeat is, in part, owed to liberalism’s victory. American postwar hegemony did create a world in which very imperfect and yet nonetheless remarkable economic and technological growth took place. And America’s geopolitical position became a victim of its own success. President Trump’s beta-test for these grievances made a first appearance in the 1980s, when Japan appeared on the threshold of world economic domination. Japan’s miraculous recovery was the result of enormous investment on the part of postwar America. Yet the United States, too, got richer. Much, much richer. This is macroeconomics 101: it is not a zero-sum game. Japan does not need to lose for America to win. Both can win. Both have won.  The NSS does not use the term spheres of influence, though it appears now and again in official government statements. It is a slippery term, that Stephen Walt complains in Foreign Policy its critics and its advocates get wrong. It is somewhat unintelligible apart from a clear understanding of national interest, a core Realist concept. And I would say that national interest itself is not always empirically and materially self-evident, it depends also on identity.  Into that confusion arrives the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, not unlike Theodore Roosevelt’s own. The original 1823 doctrine was an essentially anti-imperial argument, although one which ironically depended on the British Navy. Roosevelt’s corollary was also anti-imperial intent but designed to keep European creditors out of the hemisphere, placing the obligation on the United States to interfere if needed. It was a corollary that had, it’s fair to say, rather mixed results.  The Trump Corollary is focused on drugs, immigration, border control, and pushing other belligerent or peer powers out of the hemisphere. This is one of the implicit places the Chinese geopolitical rivalry appears, whose challenge is largely articulated in terms of trade in the rest of the NSS. Soft and cultural power are mentioned, but with the collapse of USAID and the chaos in other soft power agencies (Radio Free Europe, for example) it is hard to imagine what resources exactly are being called upon.  President Trump’s critics have long been wrong to call him isolationist, though retrenchment is still an accurate way to describe his goals. Iranian nuclear facilities will still be bombed. So will militants in Nigeria. Breathtaking operations in Venezuela designed to bend regimes to purpose, and reestablish American deterrence are on the menu. But these are short run, smash and grab, low investment high return strategies. PEPFAR, the shamefully demolished program of President George W. Bush, which gave hope and medication to so many in sub-Saharan Africa suffering from the scourge of HIV/AIDS, that’s off the menu. High theatre, short attention span politics can extract and intimidate in the short run, but it is a recipe for the very weakness and decadence the NSS decries in the long run. It is not the stuff of an “American dream.”  It is baffling to see all this described as winning. It is winning, I suppose, like calling the forty-yard line a touchdown. If you shrink the game and reduce your scope, if you accept the premise that you can’t make it that far anymore so anywhere down the field is a victory, sure, I guess that’s winning. It sounds like handing out participation trophies after kindergarten soccer games to me.  Wolf Warrior Diplomacy Deng Xiaoping famously said to hide your strength and bide your time. Xi Jinping has decided that time is up. The moment has arrived to theatrically boast about your strength and crush your opponents into concessions through a whirl of intimidation. China calls it Wolf Warrior Diplomacy.  This diplomacy, too, is driven by grievance, which – also – carries a double irony, since China’s accession into the international economic order, effected by President Nixon, and finally realized fully in 2001, is responsible to a great degree for China’s unparalleled rise to prosperity and power. Yet self-defeating aggression is often the calling card of Chinese diplomacy. I say self-defeating because China, also, is not in a vacuum. In fact, if anything China’s neighbors are far more capable than America’s. India, Japan, Australia, these are large, substantial economies, some of whom are not only technologically and economically competitors, but in the case of India even demographically. China has not risen in a vacuum. And the more it has boasted and bent the region – its sphere of influence – to its will, the more that region has labored to find new partners, new allies, new ways to balance its rise.  This is textbook realism. Aggressive geopolitical and economic behavior will produce a balancing counter-effect. What can Canada, or Mexico, or Denmark, or Germany do? In the short run, very little. These countries, too, have drunk deeply on the peace dividend of the post-Cold War. Their – our – industrial bases are anemic. Our economies are so deeply enmeshed into American markets that mere threats of tariffs are enough to cause our currencies to tumble. We have, in the oft used phrase in the White House, few cards to play.  But this is not a game of cards. Aggressive mercantilism and zero-sum economics make everyone poorer, everyone weaker, and everyone more divided. And while it is true that, for example, we Canadians or the Germans have been “free riders” on the goods of American security, that dependence has not come without American benefits. It has bought America not only credibility but also deference in international affairs. This deference seems cheap, because it is not going anywhere soon. Not yet. As Churchill memorably intoned, the Germans are either at your feet or at your throats. For 80-years they have been at the feet of the United States of America, and they have been there not because of imperial oppression, but because the American-led international order has been good for them, it has been worth it. Forced into reigniting their defense industrial base, the Europeans, the Canadians, they may not be much to think about in 5-years, maybe not even 10, but what about in 15? Suddenly these allies may no longer be quite so pliable to American interests. An outbreak of independent thought and interest may suddenly afflict these otherwise reliable tributaries, who – paying their own bills – no longer find the same kinds of common cause and interests as they once did. It is a weaker world. A more dangerous world. And a world in which the United States of America will finally have no need to indulge in future fantasies of narcissistic insecurity; it will already simply exist. Mark Carney’s Davos Doxology My Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech about some of this at Davos this past week. In it he called for a foreign policy driven by values, by likeminded countries who believed in likeminded things. He called an end to the rules based liberal international order, which – to paraphrase Voltaire – was neither liberal, nor international, nor an order, much of the time. But he argued for the retention of its basic goods: for countries who are defined by, who love, the old principles of that order to rebuild it together. Call it mini-multilateralism, pluri-lateralism, or, as Carney referred to it, a coalition of the willing. He also called it, ironically echoing page 8 of the NSS, pragmatic and principled.  I think Mr. Carney is basically right. And although he, too, hardly mentioned China’s geopolitical threat, implicit – also – in his argument is a coalition of states which precludes the brutal autocracies that dot the globe but fill human rights councils and refugee commissions in today’s mega-multilateral institutions. It is time, he said, to start being honest with ourselves. This does not mean, crucially, one cannot do any business or diplomacy with such regimes – Mr. Carney just returned from China and Qatar. But it does mean we have different expectations, different dependencies, and different supply chains with those we know we can trust, and those who have proven we cannot. The fact of the matter is that the United States of America can and should be the champion of any such bloc. It is the origin and the architect of much that has now been passed on to many of the other states of the international system. These states owe their prosperity and their security in great measure to these American investments. But now, perhaps, like Great Britain’s own seeding of America’s rise to power, America will recede but remain. And I pray that coalition will make a world not fit for Xi Jinping and his Beijing Consensus, but for the “just and durable peace” of the American Declaration and its glorious vision of liberty and justice.

No one is safe. ICE expansion exposes the long deadly history of state violence against Black bodies at home and abroad

Last summer, we traveled to Sloviansk, a free city in the Donetsk Oblast of eastern Ukraine. There we met Oleksandr Pavenko, the pastor of the Transfiguration of the Lord Pentecostal Church. This church is special for a number of reasons. The building once served as a center for atheistic Soviet “Ministry of Culture” and currently functions as one of the largest aid centers in the region, providing food, water, and clothing for the needy throughout the entire city. It is near where in 2014, members of the “Russian Orthodox Army” kidnapped Pastor Pavenko’s two sons and brutally tortured them before murdering them and burning their bodies—all for being evangelical Christians opposed to, or even just insufficiently supportive of, the Russification of western Ukraine. That church now sits at the center of a debate unfolding far from Sloviansk. As negotiations proceed to end Russia’s war, some argue that Ukraine should cede all of Donetsk to Moscow, including this city, despite Russia’s inability to seize the region militarily after years of fighting. Under this scenario, Sloviansk would be subject to Russia’s “Yarovaya” law, which forbids publicly preaching the Gospel inside Russian territory unless part of the state sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church. As we document in A Faith Under Siege, Putin’s forces have seized and shuttered evangelical churches throughout Ukraine. Pastor Pavenko’s church would suffer the same fate. He and his fellow church leaders would become marked men, perhaps joining the dozens of other pastors and priests murdered by Russia during their invasion. While Putin has engaged in a far-too successful propaganda campaign against wherein he casts himself as the defender of Christendom against a decadent West, the truth is that he has a completely amoral, utilitarian approach to religion: it is good when it serves him, bad when it doesn’t. We applaud the Trump administration’s push to find a durable end to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. President Trump has stated that he wants his legacy to be as a peacemaker, a goal consistent with America’s moral and strategic interests.  But peace is not achieved by redrawing borders in ways that reward Putin’s aggression or by consigning religious communities to repression. The loss of the Donetsk region to Russia is not a foregone conclusion. Since the beginning of 2025, Russian forces have made only limited territorial gains in eastern Ukraine, often measured in hundreds of meters rather than kilometers, despite committing substantial manpower and artillery. Western and Ukrainian estimates consistently place Russian losses since the full-scale invasion in the high hundreds of thousands killed and wounded, with particularly heavy attrition in Donetsk. No wonder Putin is pushing so hard to grab this “fortress belt” by diplomatic means after continuing to fail using force. Forcing Ukraine to cede territory would not only endanger millions, but it is directly contradictory to the advancement of international religious freedom, one of President Trump’s core foreign policy principles. During his first term, he issued an Executive Order on Advancing International Religious Freedom, making the protection of believers a central aspect of U.S. foreign policy. He has continued to elevate this priority in his second term, most notably in Nigeria, where U.S. counterterrorism action and State Department pressure have been utilized in response to Islamist violence targeting Christian populations. The Ukraine negotiations can build on that same principle: that America stands for peace through strength, and that the freedom to exercise one’s faith without fear is absolutely essential to any conceivable peace settlement. Supporting a just and lasting peace in Ukraine not only defends a democracy and contain an adversary—it also protects the right of millions of Christians to worship freely in their own homeland.  President Trump is the only one who can deliver something truly historic: ending the war and preserving the freedom of millions. He can strengthen his legacy as a champion for global religious freedom and as a peacemaker. But a peace that leaves Christians behind would be a peace in name only, while violent injustice continues to proliferate behind a new Iron Curtain. Pastor Pavenko, who recently lost yet another son to the Russians, knows what awaits him and his church if the Russians return. When we spoke to Pavenko recently about when he would consider leaving, he said that he asked the Ukrainian soldiers defending Sloviansk the same thing. They told him, “we stay as long as the church stays, we leave together.” President Trump should insist on a settlement that requires no one to leave and no churches to close. The only way to ensure a peace that lasts is an end to the war that ensures that believers across Ukraine are not doomed to dark and faithless days under Russian occupation. 

A city can be conquered long before its flag is lowered. Sometimes it is conquered by cold. On January 11, 2026, Reuters reported that more than 1,000 apartment buildings in Kyiv remained without heating after a major Russian strike, as officials warned temperatures could drop to -20°C (-4°F) while attacks on energy infrastructure continued. That is what disorder looks like when it enters ordinary rooms: radiators gone silent, families improvising warmth, the grid turned into a battlefield.  Moments like this expose a persistent fracture among American Christians. When the world grows harsher, we tend to flee toward one of two moral shelters: Crusading moralism, where US power is treated as a redemptive instrument—history’s lever, pulled hard enough to force justice. Fatigued withdrawal, where power is treated as inherently contaminating—so disengagement becomes a sacrament of “clean hands.” Providence exists to reject this false choice. It examines global statecraft with Christian Realism and argues that American Christians have a duty to interpret America’s vocation in the world today. It also states the balancing act plainly: responsibility as an alternative to isolationism, with prudential limits to intervention. If your foreign policy requires America to be either the world’s redeemer or the world’s bystander, you are not practicing Christian ethics—you are trying to escape history. Christian realism refuses that escape. It insists both that coercion can be morally necessary in a fallen world and that coercion is never morally safe. Christian realism is not “hawk” or “dove.” It is a theological diagnosis: God reigns; man sins; therefore politics is morally necessary and morally dangerous at the same time. Evil is real, and moral self-deception is real—especially when power is involved. Providence’s own origin story matters here: it draws inspiration from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christianity & Crisis legacy, founded to argue that moral responsibility can require American leadership against totalitarian aggression. The point is not national innocence. It is moral accountability in a world where abdication has victims. So Christian realism begins where pride hates to begin: with repentance—an insistence that our moral vocabulary does not sanctify our instruments. Foreign-Policy as Vocation What’s missing from Christian foreign-policy talk is the category of vocation in acknowledging that most faithfulness is not dramatic or flashy; it is sustained work under constraint. Scripture’s counsel is clear: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” That is not advice for self-actualization. It is a command for fidelity. Statecraft is vocational work: budgets, alliances, logistics, intelligence assessments, and tradeoffs among imperfect options. Christians recoil because the work feels morally “dirty.” Christian realism replies: dirty hands are not proof the task is illegitimate but only proof the world is fallen. If your political theology has no room for faithful work inside imperfect institutions, you will oscillate endlessly between messianism (politics must save) and monasticism (politics must vanish). Vocation offers a third posture: serve seriously without worshipping outcomes. The Daniel option: faithful presence without worship The biblical pattern most relevant to a superpower is not triumphal conquest. It is faithful presence. In Daniel 1, a captive is trained in Babylonian customs and placed into public service, yet he refuses to let his service to Babylon define him. In Daniel 6, Daniel becomes politically indispensable and then refuses when idolatry is demanded of him. This is the Daniel option: service without worship; resistance without retreat. Joseph supplies the companion case. Genesis 41 is holiness expressed through administration—famine planning, storage, distribution—competence ordered toward preserving life at scale. And Jeremiah gives the exile ethic Christian realism keeps recovering: seek the welfare of the city; pray for it; in its welfare you will find your welfare. The alternative to the Daniel option is not purity. It is abdication, which in many contexts is an invitation to predation. Peace is not a mood; it is the tranquillity of order Modern politics treats “peace” as a feeling—reduced tension, fewer headlines, calmer markets. Augustine gives Christian realism a definition more useful for statecraft: peace is “the tranquillity of order.“ Peace is moral architecture: restraint of violence, stability for ordinary life, space for families to work, worship, raise children, and build. Order is not ultimate. But in a fallen world, defending order is often the precondition for mercy. This definition rebukes both extremes. Crusades cannot engineer a just civil and economic order through moral fervor even as retreat from the exercise of power cannot pretend order is morally irrelevant. When heating systems are targeted in winter, as in Ukraine, disengagement comes with a death count. Use worldly tools without worshipping worldly gods The Christian realist insight is that it is admissible to use the tools of the world without worshipping the gods of the world. Augustine’s “spoils of the Egyptians” principle argues that Christians may appropriate what is true and useful in pagan learning and repurpose it to serve God without adopting pagan idols (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine). Modern statecraft has its “Egyptian gold”: diplomacy, deterrence, intelligence, sanctions, alliances, industrial capacity, and the slow work of building institutions. Each tool arrives with temptations attached. Coercion can become cruelty. Secrecy can become deceit. Deterrence can become domination. “National interest” can become national egoism. Christian realism does not demand Christian abstinence from tools. It demands Christian moral restraint in using them. Just war is restraint: warmaking ordered toward peacemaking If peace is order, coercion can be tragically necessary against aggressors. But Christian realism refuses to make war holy. This is why Providence emphasizes just war reasoning as a Christian realist discipline. Providence editor Marc LiVecche’s formulation is worth memorizing: “right intention casts warmaking as peacemaking.” Force is never an end in itself. It must be ordered toward a just peace—limited, discriminating, accountable. The classical tradition’s guardrails are intentionally hard. A widely cited articulation insists that legitimate defense by military force requires “rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy”—including last resort, proportionality, and reasonable prospects of success (Catechism 2309). Christian realism is not “use power.” It is “use power penitentially.” The chokepoint age: how power actually works now Christian realism is not merely a theology of war. It is a theology of how power touches ordinary life—often through systems that look boring until they break. Ukraine: winter war and civilian endurance.  Kyiv’s heating crisis is a reminder that modern war targets the systems that make normal life possible. Abstention is not clean hands. It is a choice with victims. Taiwan: hybrid coercion without declared war.  Reuters reported that Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan’s key infrastructure averaged 2.63 million attacks per day in 2025, with some synchronized with military drills as part of “hybrid threats” designed to paralyze society. Reuters also reported Taiwan’s assessment that Chinese war games sought to undermine global support for the island. Christian realist are not obliged to one tactical script. But they are obliged to see the moral shape of coercion: predators probe for seams; deterrence and alliances can be instruments of peace when ordered toward preventing conquest rather than feeding pride. Red Sea: chokepoints, insurance, and hidden punishment.  Modern power increasingly works through routing decisions, war-risk premiums, and insurance—the quiet levers that punish ordinary people first. Reuters reported ships with US, UK, or Israeli links paying 25–50% more in war-risk premiums to transit the Red Sea. Reuters also reported specialized Red Sea cargo war insurance launched as costs rose by hundreds of thousands of dollars for a one-week voyage. And Reuters reported Maersk completed its first Red Sea voyage in nearly two years in December 2025—a cautious sign of possible normalization after prolonged disruption. This is not “mere economics.” Chokepoints become weapons; shipping becomes hostage; downstream victims include the poor through price spikes and shortages. Christian realism learns to see supply chains as part of the moral architecture of order. America’s vocation: stewardship, not innocence Providence’s founding argument for Christian civic responsibility avoids utopian language. It speaks instead of defending goods that are “never completely secure,” and of the ongoing calling of Christians to seek peace, liberty, and justice in every age. That framing implies a sober truth: America’s vocation is not to be morally spotless. It is to be responsible. Call it stewardship: strong enough to deter predation, humble enough to confess limits, disciplined enough to restrain means, steady enough to bear costs rather than exporting them to the weak. Christian realism is responsibility without messianism—peacemaking without illusions.

The 1970s were a perilous time for the West. The United States, riven with internal divisions, skyrocketing inflation, urban blight, and failed wars abroad, wrestled with a crisis of confidence not unlike today. Two unlikely figures—both European-born professors with thick accents from the Old World—promised to bring order out of the chaos: Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.  The former was destined to be the foil to the latter. Kissinger, caricatured as “Super K” by the media that he fervently courted, has been the subject of numerous biographies and portraits, many focusing on his role as President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Kissinger’s articulation of realpolitik stood in sharp contrast from much of the American tradition of foreign policy.  But as Edward Luce notes in his highly readable new biography, Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet, Brzezinski was an important figure in his own right. As President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski was at the helm during a period when America’s role in the world was very much up for debate. Carter’s was the first full presidency after Watergate and the subsequent resignation of Richard Nixon. A former one-term Georgia governor, Carter promised a breath of fresh air for a country overcome with revelations of political corruption, CIA skullduggery, and the fiasco of Vietnam. Yet, Carter was soon overwhelmed by events. Ultimately, instead of fixing the nation’s problems, his idealism and penchant for micromanagement contributed to the sense that he was not up to the moment. But Carter’s failures weren’t for a lack of trying. Indeed, Carter had some tremendously capable advisers, Brzezinski foremost among them. Born in Poland in 1928, Brzezinski arrived as a young child in Canada just as his native country was invaded by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. His parents were members of the Polish nobility, his father a diplomat. Unsurprisingly, Brzezinski displayed an interest in foreign affairs from an early age. As an adolescent, his diary was dotted with more entries on World War II than girls or music. Like Kissinger, another émigré from war-torn Europe, Brzezinski had a keen appreciation for the inherent fragility of the world. He had seen firsthand how it could all come apart. But unlike his future rival and sometime collaborator, Brzezinski remained an optimist. Contrasting the two, Luce cites the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” wherein “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Kissinger, Luce argues, was the hedgehog: he interpreted the world through one big idea—realist equilibrium with the Soviets and the management of great-power rivalry. Brzezinski was more foxlike, drawing on multiple factors (nationalism, ideology, internal legitimacy) and therefore more readily anticipating the Soviet system’s brittleness. In this sense, it was Brzezinski, not Kissinger, who had the more accurate vision. And as Luce documents, he had it for years. Long before he was Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski foresaw the Soviet Union’s collapse. Indeed, perhaps the most illuminating portions of Luce’s biography are the chapters that focus on Brzezinski’s long and uneven  path to power. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski spent years toiling in academia, largely at Columbia University, studying the very problems that he would one day be tasked with solving. Like his Harvard counterpart, “Zbig” as his friends called him, longed for power and influence, coveting friends and allies on his way to the top of the greasy pole. As Luce recounts, he even displayed a talent for intrigue, undertaking some rather underhanded methods in order to get President Lyndon B. Johnson to take certain positions on West Germany.  But ultimately, Brzezinski wasn’t nearly as Machiavellian as his German-born rival. He was more consistent in his positions and less willing to flatter his opponents or the media (the two were often synonymous). Unlike Kissinger, Zbig had no problem making enemies, and was often strident and forthright in his positions. Yet by the time that he took office, Brzezinski’s foremost rival wasn’t Kissinger. Rather, it was Cyrus Vance, Carter’s distinguished, but largely hapless, Secretary of State. A former Wall Street lawyer, Secretary of the Army, and Deputy Secretary of Defense, Vance was a scion of the so-called “Wise Men,” the aristocratic class of Americans who helped set up America’s national security architecture at the dawn of the Cold War. Like a number of those men, such as Chip Bohlen and Averill Harriman, Vance preferred a more conciliatory approach to the Soviets. Zbig did not.  From the onset, Carter was warned that having Vance and Brzezinski as the two dueling figures of his foreign policy would be a recipe for disaster. The two men were diametrically opposed on nearly everything—“oil and water” as one contemporary observed. And Vance’s State Department was particularly prone to leaks, many of them attacking Zbig. Carter was torn between the two, undercutting his effectiveness. What emerges is a portrait of a well-meaning, if indecisive, president. As Soviet aggression became harder to ignore, Carter sided more and more with Zbig, yet Carter’s response was viewed as too little and too late and his legacy as weak and ineffective sealed. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. Communism was on the march in the Third World.  The Islamic Revolution deposed the Shah in Iran, helping create the modern age of terror and leading to a hostage crisis that crippled an already weakened presidency. After leaving office, Brzezinski continued to be a force in policy debates. He kept pushing for a harder line against the Soviet Union and later Russia and was unafraid to buck his party to do so, even crossing the aisle to endorse George H.W. Bush in 1988 and declining to support Al Gore in 2000. In the 1990s, while others were basking in the glory of America’s victory in the Cold War, Zbig had the foresight to recognize the dangers of a Russo-Chinese alliance, warning that America’s short attention span would prove costly. But in other respects, notably the Israel-Islamist conflict, Brzezinski was less prophetic. That conflict was—and is—inherently religious; it wasn’t a territorial dispute that Western-style compromises and give-and-take can solve. Reared on European history, Brzezinski often proved incapable of grasping the dynamics of that troubled region.  Luce ably chronicles a complicated man. What emerges is a portrait of someone who was uncompromising in a town where the opposite is often expected; a trait both admirable and counterproductive. It certainly makes for good reading. And with the clear parallels between Zbig’s era and our own, it is a reminder of the necessity of thoughtful policymakers who can think strategically about the world and America’s place in it.

In recent months, Islamist extremists’ killing of Christians in Nigeria have captured international headlines. When President Trump called for U.S. military support to protect Nigeria’s Christians and later delivered on those words, his actions reverberated far beyond Western audiences. While many endorsed the strikes on extremist strongholds, African and Chinese media reframed them as “civilizational aggression”; Western intrusion disguised as defense of freedom, and when Trump ordered the capture of Nicolás Maduro, Beijing drew from the same propaganda playbook, attacking the United States as a blatant bully. In this recasting, Western civilization—rooted in Judeo-Christian belief—remains imperious and dangerous. Beijing’s alternative narrative, amplified in major African and Chinese outlets, elevated “non-interference” as the superior moral path to peace. Citing China’s Foreign Ministry, Chinese media condemn U.S actions as violations of “civilizational equality” and instances of “naked hegemonic bullying,”  while denying the plight of persecuted Nigerian believers as a fabrication by American conservatives.  A Civilizational War Despite China’s deep financial and military investments in Global South countries, its hard power remains limited in these areas, especially militarily. What Beijing can do is launch aggressive propaganda warfare against the United States, with civilizational struggle at the core of CCP’s narrative.   Chinese state media and scholars often portray  U.S. interventions as a “civilizational push,” claiming Washington’s appeals to democracy masked a “God-given” belief in Western hegemony. Chinese diplomats declared that “the American empire cannot coexist with other civilizations,” while Beijing poses as the protector of “civilizational sovereignty,” an atheistic Marxist state presenting itself as guardian of peace, religious diversity, and tolerance against a civilization grounded in faith.  Underneath this rhetoric lies a clash between two beliefs. On one side stand Western Judeo-Christian convictions that all humans are created equal in God’s image and thus possess inherent dignity and rights that no state can revoke. On the other stands Marxism’s claim that history is driven by class struggle and material power: individuals are not bearers of inalienable rights but instruments in a collective struggle, with rights supplied and withdrawn by the Party. Xi’s Four Initiatives: A Civilizational Strategy From Africa to Latin America and beyond, Xi Jinping’s Global Civilizational Initiative (GCI) is reshaping how religious societies understand civilization, sovereignty, and their relationship with China. The goal is to sell China’s “non-interference” model as morally superior to Western ideas of democracy, rule of law, and human rights, while defining which religions or civilizational views are acceptable and which must be limited.  The GCI sits alongside the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Governance Initiative as pillars of the CCP’s long-term strategy to reshape global order. As a Marxist, atheist regime that views religion as  a source of instability, Beijing shows little genuine concern for African Christian or Muslim welfare.  Yet Xi presents China as the post-colonial answer to Judeo-Christian civilization—a model that promises dignity granted by a regime rather than a Creator, order sustained by surveillance and suppression, and equality without individual rights. The GCI’s softer language of equality and pluralism obscures its Marxist origins and the CCP’s domestic practice of religious control.   By recasting “religion” as mere “culture,” the CCP blurs the spiritual and moral stakes of belief. It portrays the atheist state as a respectful partner while labeling Western defenders of religious freedom and democracy as intrusive moralizers. For the West, human rights arise from the conviction that all humans are created equally by God and thus possess inherent freedom of conscience, worth, and dignity. The CCP’s Marxist atheism denies individual rights, granting moral legitimacy only to the collective—and its representative, the Party—as the arbiter of social freedom, with individual liberty expendable when it conflicts with Party interests.  The CCP notion of “civilizational equality” is therefore a bluff. Behind talk of cultural diversity lies a monopoly on interpretation: Beijing decides which “civilizations,” religions, and truths are legitimate. The CCP reframes western intervention as aggression while exporting an authoritarian model that denies genuine pluralism, praising regimes like Maduro’s for upholding a “multipolar civilizational order” defined by Beijing.  Weaponizing Post-Colonial Grievance  Xi’s key instrument for winning hearts in the Global South is post-colonial grievance. Many nations still bear deep scars from Western racial hierarchies and imperial history. China presents itself as a fellow victim of colonial humiliation that rose through self-reliance and CCP-led class struggle. Xi’s message flatters Global South elites by offering equality and “brotherhood” without Western interference—while replacing the Judeo-Christian ethics with a Marxist relativism in which power and material interests, not God-given rights, determine truth and justice. The GCI is a calculated tactic: downplay spirituality, emphasize cultural heritage, and tap into resentment toward the West and demands for equal partnerships.   Many Global South leaders do not see the Marxist-atheist hand beneath this otherwise benign civilizational rhetoric.  Behind the scenes, Party-aligned universities, schools devoted to Marxism, and think tanks translate Xi’s domestic ideological campaigns into exportable frameworks for Africa, the Arab world, and beyond. Their conferences, publishing platforms, and “people-to-people” exchanges produce language about civilizational exchange that dilutes explicit Marxism while preserving its assumptions about class struggles. Elites encounter curated environments designed to “tell China’s story well,” hearing constant reassurances that Beijing respects religion, culture, and sovereignty more than Washington. This propaganda pays strategic dividends. The uncritical media coverage in the Global South of Beijing’s support for authoritarian governments—even as Christian massacres are denied or downplayed—often comes from outlets cultivated through direct investments, all-expenses-paid exchange programs, “friendship” collaborations with Chinese propaganda agencies. The CCP builds loyalty with global South diplomats, academics, business leaders, through curated dialogues and paid showcase tours that tout Chinese civilizational governance and “harmonious” religious and ethnic relations.  At the core, this is a war over what it means to be human. Beijing defames a civilization that believes in God-given human dignity while propagating another that claims legitimacy and peace emerge only from class struggle, guided by a Party that decides whose rights count.  Carrots Abroad, Sticks at Home  Beijing’s civilizational bluff is exposed by its domestic practice. Abroad, the CCP’s global outreach uses carrots to preach civilizational coexistence; at home, it uses sticks—surveillance, regulation, and ideological instruction—against its own religious communities. Chinese Christians have faced a new wave of repression since October, marked by intensified surveillance, closures of unregistered churches, and detentions of prominent pastors.  This escalation coincides with the rollout of the September 2025 “Norms for Religious Personnel Online Conduct”—the most restrictive internet regulations to date for Chinese believers. Under the new rules, all online religious activity must conform to CCP doctrine, prohibit foreign contact, restrict individual usage of online tools for religious purposes, ban religious education for minors, forbid religious outreach, further limiting faith in digital space. Further AI-enabled surveillance supercharges these efforts. Why Washington and Its Partners Should Care Xi’s GCI is not an abstract cultural theory but a sophisticated campaign harnessing post-colonial grievance, Marxist doctrine, and new technology. It assures developing nations of respect for religious diversity, sovereignty, and partnership while exporting a domestic template of control that normalize authoritarianism and sideline Western influence. When Washington Speaks out for persecuted Christians or defend the rule of law, Beijing counters with propaganda by accusing the United States of “God-given” arrogance and bullying, while depriving its own citizens from practicing religion freely. Washington and its allies must put moral clarity at the heart of engagement.  Religious liberty should be a core element of the United States’ strategy toward the Global South, not a peripheral cause.  Diplomacy should expose the Marxism nature of CCP’s civilizational push, revealing the inconsistency between Beijing’s rhetoric abroad and its domestic action. Finally, the United States and its partners should empower Global South communities by recognizing and countering propaganda while articulating their own visions of freedom rooted in the belief of equal worth of every human.

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