Trump’s Iran gamble: Peace Prize or Persian Gulf firestorm



Even after his theatrical State of the Union address, President Trump remains the only person who knows for certain whether the United States will strike Iran. That ambiguity does not signal confusion. It reflects a negotiator’s instinct: The threat of force often carries more value than force itself.

As a massive American armada gathers in the Persian Gulf — the region’s largest naval deployment since 2003, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford — the White House is also signaling that it still prefers a grand bargain to a regional war. For a president who has long said his legacy will rest on ending “endless wars” and who plainly covets a Nobel Peace Prize, a diplomatic breakthrough that dismantles Iran’s nuclear ambitions without a shot fired would be the ideal outcome.

The Geneva talks are more than another diplomatic set piece. They will test whether Trump’s 'art of the deal' can work against one of the most entrenched regimes in the Middle East.

The tension in Washington is palpable, and the president’s frustration is starting to show through his inner circle.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, recently offered a revealing glimpse during a briefing on the Gulf buildup. Referring to the sweeping mobilization of ships, personnel, and equipment, Witkoff said Trump is "curious" that despite the gathering of this massive armada, Iran has not yet "capitulated.”

That remark gets to the heart of the standoff. The strategy is pure Trump: maximize leverage, restate the “zero enrichment” red line, and wait for the other side to conclude that its only path to survival runs through a signed deal. But the clerical regime in Tehran has proved more stubborn than even Trump appears to have expected.

As the third round of negotiations began in Geneva on Thursday, there were real reasons for cautious optimism, even as rumors of a “multi-stage interim deal” continued to circulate.

For all its revolutionary bluster and posturing over ballistic missiles, the Iranian regime is facing a deep internal crisis. The mass protests that erupted in late 2025 and continued into early this year — with a fresh wave of student-led strikes reported this week — have badly shaken the system. Even after a brutal crackdown and sweeping internet blackouts, the grievances have not disappeared. The economy is in ruins, the rial has hit record lows, and the public has no appetite for a full-scale war with a superpower.

Inside Tehran, the divisions are growing. Hard-liners within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still posture about delivering a “regret-inducing” response to American pressure. More pragmatic figures, however — reportedly now led by veteran negotiator Ali Larijani — are speaking more openly. They understand that a war with the United States could mean the end of the Islamic Republic itself. Reports suggest that even figures close to the supreme leader are searching for an off-ramp that preserves the regime’s core interests while winning enough sanctions relief to calm a restive population.

RELATED: ‘Can’t let that happen’: Trump stresses red line for Iran but holds out hope for peaceful resolution

Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

The regional picture also favors Washington. Across the Gulf, Arab capitals are watching with a mix of anxiety and quiet approval. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others do not want their cities caught in the blast radius of a regional war. But they are also weary of Iran’s regional meddling and nuclear progress. They want Tehran checked without turning the Gulf into a battlefield. That gives Trump useful diplomatic cover to keep the pressure campaign in place while leaving the Geneva door open.

The Geneva talks are more than another diplomatic set piece. They will test whether Trump’s “art of the deal” can work against one of the most entrenched regimes in the Middle East.

By combining military pressure, economic punishment, and the lure of a sweeping agreement, Trump has pushed Tehran into a corner. The regime is learning that this White House has little interest in the incremental half measures of the past. Washington wants a broader settlement — one that reaches beyond the nuclear file to the wider balance of power in the region.

If a deal comes this week, it will likely come because Tehran concludes that domestic collapse poses a greater danger than diplomatic humiliation. For Trump, that would amount to a crowning achievement: proof that his transactional style can deliver where decades of conventional diplomacy failed.

In the high-stakes contest between Washington and Tehran, the winner may not be the side with the biggest fleet. It may be the side that best understands the other’s breaking point.

Where in the Constitution is ‘the interagency’ anyway?



Americans have some sense of how close the world came to a large-scale nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But today’s lapdog press has failed to tell the public how close the deep state dragged us to the jagged edge of conflagration through its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

Only after Joe Biden — and the autopen — left the White House last year did the New York Times tell some of the story. That account, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” drawn from hundreds of interviews with military and intelligence officials, revealed what the deep state tried to conceal: just how perilous the global American military empire’s proxy war with Russia became.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness.

The escalation of the empire’s provocations and Russia’s evolving nuclear doctrine turned into a deadly pas de deux. “The unthinkable had become real,” the Times reported. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.”

Now the Times has provided another look — fresh evidence long withheld — of the deep state’s efforts to subvert the Nixon White House. The essay, “Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now,” by reporter James Rosen, details a 13-month Pentagon spying operation against Nixon’s National Security Council.

Bristling at “policies they abhorred” — including détente with the Soviet Union, Vietnamization, Nixon’s China opening, and a reduced military share of federal spending — the deep state went straight to work.

Under orders from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer and others, a Navy enlisted man spied on the National Security Council, rifling through Henry Kissinger’s and Alexander Haig’s briefcases and desks, copying and stealing classified documents. “Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into NSC wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized.”

In all, an estimated 5,000 documents were delivered to the top brass.

Nixon learned of the Joint Chiefs’ espionage. The newly revealed material is evidence that, as Rosen writes, “Watergate had not arisen in a vacuum.”

Many informed people know that the deep state panicked when John F. Kennedy tapped the brakes on the Cold War. Among some, it remains an article of faith that his peace initiatives led to his assassination. In the Nixon case, Rosen writes, the lead federal investigator said what he was uncovering felt like “Seven Days in May,” the novel and film about a coup to stop a president pursuing détente.

It’s a mistake to think the deep state belongs only to history — to figures like Allen Dulles, the CIA chief who helped lead the subversion of Kennedy, or the Pentagon brass in this new Nixon account, or, even more recently, to John Brennan at the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom lied to Congress about deep-state activities.

RELATED: Just hundreds of people control Earth’s future. What do they want?

Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Without number are the lesser officials and petty bureaucrats who serve the deep state. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer in Trump’s first term, is one such. Instrumental in the effort to impeach Trump, Vindman testified before Congress that he was alarmed that the president was “promoting a false and alternative narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”

The “views of the interagency”? What is an interagency? By what constitutional means and process of deliberation does it arrive at its consensus? Who are its members? Whom do they represent, and how are they selected? Is there a vote — secret or otherwise? By whom? Does it require a plurality or a majority? Who profits from its decisions? Where can citizens find the rules by which it must abide?

By any other name, Vindman was talking about the deep state — which I detail in my new book, “Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole” — as the executive arm of the global American military empire. Operating without rules, it is, as Arthur Schlesinger described the CIA to Kennedy, “a state within a state.” Its only consensus is the growth of the empire.

Like the mythical Augean stable, the deep state is a foul mess of illegality, waste, and corruption that has lingered for decades. Tasked with cleaning it as one of his 12 labors, Hercules knew better than to try to clean it bit by bit, shovelful by shovelful. Instead, he diverted rivers to wash away the overwhelming mess in a day.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness. The renewal of our free and prosperous republic awaits a diversion from our imperial trajectory. It awaits America coming home — and ending its global military empire of lies.

What’s Greenland to us?



The late, great Angelo Codevilla had a way of cutting through the fog of foreign policy.

In the Claremont Review of Books in 2019, he asked, “What’s Russia to us?” He didn’t ask because he had any special admiration for Russia. He asked because Washington had turned Russia into a utility: a convenient villain that justified budgets, scolded dissent, and kept the governing class in charge. Codevilla’s point was simple but brutal. Strategy begins with interests. Interests require discrimination. Most of what passes for “grand strategy” amounts to habit and vanity.

Greenland touches national defense. Greenland touches Arctic geography. Greenland touches the supply chain for advanced systems. Those facts don’t bend around Davos etiquette.

That question — his question — fits the Greenland uproar better than any of the Davos hand-wringing last week.

European leaders want this story to be about Trump’s manners and apparent recklessness. They want it to be about “norms,” about “tone,” about the precious feelings of the alliance. They want Americans to believe the true scandal lies in a U.S. president speaking too plainly or belligerently.

Trump did speak plainly. In Davos on Wednesday, he pushed for “immediate negotiations” to acquire Greenland and ruled out the use of military force. He also floated a “framework” tied to Arctic security after meeting NATO’s secretary general, while walking back tariff threats that had rattled allies and markets.

Fine. Trump being Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But Europe’s reaction should surprise people, because it revealed how unserious the continent has become — even about something as serious as Greenland.

Instead of handling business like adults — hard bargaining among allies over a piece of real estate that actually matters — European capitals staged indignation, offered lectures, and then produced the usual substitute for seriousness: a symbolic “show of force” meant for domestic consumption.

The numbers tell the laughable story. Sweden sent three officers. Norway sent two. Finland sent two liaison officers. The Netherlands sent one naval officer. The U.K. sent one officer. France sent around 15 mountain specialists. Germany sent a reconnaissance team of 13. Denmark led with about 100 troops. Reuters called it “modest.” That word was kind.

But that’s the European governing class in a nutshell for you: Perform alarm, then perform resolve, then declare victory over a crisis they helped manufacture.

All of this theater tried to sell one idea: Greenland needs protection from the United States.

Preposterous.

Greenland matters because it helps defend the United States. Pituffik Space Base — some Americans may still know it as Thule — sits where U.S. forces can track threats coming over the pole. The Arctic doesn’t care about European speeches. Missiles don’t fly around Greenland out of respect for allied etiquette. Geography dictates capability, and Greenland sits where the map says it sits.

RELATED: Pressed on Greenland, Trump tells Davos the US has weapons he ‘can’t even talk about’

Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images

Europe’s commissioners understand that. They just hate saying it out loud because it reminds them of the arrangement they prefer to obscure: America provides the real security; Europe provides the indignant boo-hoo commentary.

The Greenland tantrum exposed another reality that should make America’s sensible policy planners sweat, assuming they still exist: The industrial foundations of power have become strategic again, and the West has behaved like an empire that forgot how to build.

Rare-earths sound like an investor pitch until you remember where they go. Modern weapons systems and advanced electronics depend on them. We need minerals you have likely never heard of — neodymium, dysprosium, samarium, and yttrium — to keep our F-35s flying and our missiles precision-guided.

But the supply chain runs through the part nobody wants to talk about: processing and refining. China dominates that bottleneck — especially the heavy rare-earth elements that sit in the highest-end systems. One major estimate put China’s share of global heavy rare-earth processing at more than 90%. That’s a massive national security hole.

Greenland matters because it offers a way out — not a magic wand, but an exit. Greenland holds serious mineral potential. That potential shifts the long-term strategic balance only if development happens.

Greenland’s own politics have made development tricky. In 2021, Greenland reinstated a uranium ban that effectively froze the Kvanefjeld project, one of the world’s most significant rare-earth deposits, because uranium appears alongside rare-earth ore and triggers the political and regulatory trip wires that make major mining projects difficult to sustain.

Greenland’s voters have every right to weigh environmental costs. Strategy still counts consequences. But the practical result of the ban didn’t restrain Beijing. It protected Beijing’s advantage.

The Europeans, of course, love a green virtue-signal that imposes no serious cost on Europe. Through it all, however, the continent remains dependent on America’s military might, dependent on Chinese processing, and increasingly dependent on slogans to conceal both.

So yes — Trump’s aggressive posture creates complications. Acquisition talk puts Denmark in a public box and turns what should be an alliance negotiation into a freak show. It hands European leaders a stage they don’t deserve and an excuse to treat American interests as a moral problem.

RELATED: Trump announces ‘framework’ of ‘great’ deal with NATO on Greenland

Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images

But Europe’s leaders made fools of themselves by trying to address a strategic reality through choreography. A reconnaissance team, a few liaison officers, and a weekend of headlines don’t secure Greenland against anyone. Their “show of force” invited contempt, not respect.

Codevilla’s 2019 essay mocked the way our establishment inflates foreign threats to discipline the home front. The Greenland episode shows a mirror image: European elites inflating a U.S. negotiating push into a crisis because they can’t handle an America that talks like a serious country.

Greenland touches our national defense. Greenland touches Arctic geography. Greenland touches the supply chain for advanced systems. Those facts don’t bend around Davos etiquette.

So use Codevilla’s test. Strip away the moral fog. Rank interests and act like the answers matter.

What’s Greenland to us?

A hell of a lot.

Buckle up: We are headed for an AI collision with China



President Trump spoke by phone to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on November 24 and later posted on Truth Social, “Our relationship with China is extremely strong!” The warm feelings from Washington came on the heels of the two leaders holding a productive meeting in Korea recently and scheduling several more confabs for the year ahead.

But bubbling beneath the surface is a rivalry between the two countries over the most vital technology of the 21st century: artificial intelligence.

China is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy.

To understand the rivalry, consider a recent announcement by the U.S. Justice Department: On November 20, it charged two Americans and two Chinese nationals with a conspiracy to illegally export about 400 high-performance graphics processing units to China. Federal law requires a license for export of these technologies, which can be used to develop and strengthen AI.

The co-conspirators didn’t have a license — and never even applied for one. In fact, they lied about the destination of the GPUs when shipping them. And for their services, they received a cool $3.89 million in wire transfers from China.

The backdrop to this smuggling scheme is Beijing having set a goal for China to be the world’s leader in AI by 2030. And it’s made considerable headway. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, “China is the global leader in AI research publications and is neck and neck with the United States on generative AI.” Additionally China is “advancing rapidly in AI research and application, challenging the United States’ dominance in this critical field.”

This progress stems from massive investments by the Chinese government. From 2000 to 2023, venture capital funds connected to the Chinese government made $184 billion in investments in China-based companies in the AI sector, according to a study published last year and conducted by professors at Harvard, MIT, and Oxford.

In an amusing coincidence, one day after the smuggling indictment, Huawei — a leading Chinese technology company — announced a tool called Flex:ai that it said “improves the utilization of artificial intelligence-based chipsets.” The announcement also made the obligatory nod to corporate citizenship, saying that the technology will “speed up the democratization of AI.” But the company buried the lede, saving the most important detail — which is curiously attributed to “sources” — for the final sentence: “The new software tool will help China create an analogue AI chip 1,000 times faster than Nvidia’s chips.”

Huawei is not just any company. It is the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. And it’s also been engaged in the kind of skullduggery that resulted in the recent indictment. In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department indicted the company and four of its subsidiaries. The charges mostly revolved around attempts to steal trade secrets from U.S. companies.

The company used an array of tactics, but perhaps most brazen of all, it paid its employees bonuses if they procured confidential information from rival companies. And when U.S. law enforcement was investigating Huawei, the company told its employees not to comply.

RELATED: China’s AI strategy could turn Americans into data mines

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Suffice to say, there’s good reason not to trust the Chinese government and its proxy companies like Huawei.

The Trump administration recognizes the threat. In late June, it approved a merger among two American companies that compete with Huawei: Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks. A senior U.S. national security official told Axios: “In light of significant national security concerns, a settlement ... serves the interests of the United States by strengthening domestic capabilities and is critical to countering Huawei and China.” The official said blocking the deal would have "hindered American companies and empowered" Chinese competitors.

Given the economic importance of AI to countries throughout the world, the competition between the United States and China is regrettable. But it’s probably also inevitable. China is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy. And it’s using AI, says the Justice Department, to bolster its military, to test weapons of mass destruction, and to heighten surveillance.

Sometime next year, President Trump is scheduled to make a state visit to Beijing and Xi is scheduled to come to Washington. They’re destined to focus on the cooperative parts of the relationship, but you don’t need to ask ChatGPT to see that the two countries are on a collision course over AI. Buckle up.

Editor's note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Trump forced allies to pay up — and it worked



In the fifth century B.C., a group of Greek city-states formed a defensive alliance known as the Delian League to protect them against the Persian Empire.

Athens, the most powerful member, gradually increased its power. Its rulers moved the league’s common treasury from the island of Delos to Athens (to keep it safe, of course), attacked allies that attempted to secede, and started casually referring to the alliance as “our empire.”

If you want good allies, you need to be a good ally.

The most brazen assertion came when the Athenian leader Pericles raided the league treasury to fund building projects in Athens (including the Parthenon).

When the other league members objected, Pericles insisted that the treasury was less like a common military budget and more like protection money: As long as the Persians aren’t breaking down your doors, we can spend league funds however we want.

Obviously, this is no way to treat one’s allies. It is not just exploitative; it is counterproductive. During the ensuing Peloponnesian War, Athens spent as much time fighting its own rebellious allies as it did fighting Sparta.

The United States, however, has spent the last several decades conducting its foreign relations on the opposite principle. We have the same hegemonic role Athens held, but instead of robbing our allies, we let them rob and betray us.

A few months ago, the government of Kuwait — a country hundreds of Americans died to defend just a few decades ago and that continues to rely on us for protection against Iran — launched a “Kuwait-China Friendship Club” to strengthen military ties with Beijing.

And if cozying up to our biggest geopolitical rival weren’t enough, Kuwait is also ripping us off.

The United States played a huge role in building Kuwait’s massive Al Zour oil refinery, and the country’s government still owes us hundreds of millions of dollars.

Closer to home, Mexico — which Bill Clinton bailed out to the tune of $20 billion — takes in more than $60 billion a year in remittance money from the United States, all while its socialist oil company refuses to pay the $1.2 billion it owes to American contractors.

RELATED: Trump makes America dangerous again — to our enemies

Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

The NATO countries are even worse. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, just six of the alliance’s 32 members spent the required 2% of GDP on defense.

Meanwhile, these countries used the money they weren’t spending on guns to build massive welfare states (their equivalent of Pericles’ Parthenon). They also eviscerated their domestic energy production and became increasingly reliant on oil from Russia, the country the alliance is supposed to keep in check.

Thankfully, a combination of Vladimir Putin’s aggression and Donald Trump’s bullying has increased the number of countries meeting the 2% threshold from six to 23.

If you want good allies, you need to be a good ally.

That means no more meddling in the name of “international development” or “advancing democracy.” Just mutual clarifications of national interest and frank discussions about how to advance those interests.

Athens’ focus on its own self-interest was its undoing. America’s neglect of it might have been ours. Under President Trump, however, it looks like that is starting to change.

Trump’s Caribbean ‘drug wars’ are forging a new Monroe Doctrine



For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.

The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

RELATED: A war on Venezuela would be a war on reality

Photo by PEDRO MATTEY/AFP via Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

Want more from Glenn Beck? Get Glenn's FREE email newsletter with his latest insights, top stories, show prep, and more delivered to your inbox.

The Gaza ceasefire is a death trap, not a deal



At a time when conservatives are calling to divest from the Middle East and confront crises at home, Gaza is the last place America should pour time, treasure, or troops. What national interest do we have in defending a territory run by the most violent Islamists on earth?

Thanks to a coordinated online propaganda campaign — part cyber-jihad, part influencer echo chamber — some on the right have begun parroting communist and Islamist talking points about a “Gaza genocide.” Voices like Tucker Carlson now argue that Israel’s defense partnerships no longer justify U.S. involvement. From an America First perspective, that sounds reasonable: fewer entangling alliances, less foreign aid. But if Israel supposedly offers us nothing, what on earth does Gaza offer?

If we’re serious about an America First foreign policy, we should begin disentangling from the Middle East altogether.

On October 13, the entire communist world — and its pseudo-right allies — got what it wanted. Israel withdrew from Gaza’s populated areas and exchanged 2,000 terrorists for 20 hostages, trusting Hamas to disarm.

Peace in our time, right? More like no Jews, no news.

Hamas immediately reneged, of course, refusing to return most hostage remains and launching a campaign of public executions. The largest slaughter of Muslims in the Arab world wasn’t committed by Jews, but by other Muslims. Remove the Jews, and Gaza doesn’t grow peaceful — it turns on itself. Yet without Jews in the headlines, global media suddenly loses interest in reporting on “genocide.”

Once the internal purges were done, Hamas returned to its favorite target: infidels. On Sunday, terrorists emerged from tunnels in Rafah and attacked Israeli forces, killing two IDF soldiers. Snipers fired on Israeli positions near Jabalia. At the same time, Hamas used Gaza’s hospitals — Al-Shifa, Al-Ahli, Al-Aqsa, and Nasser — as makeshift detention and interrogation centers, confirming what Israel long claimed: Those “civilian” sites serve as terror bases.

Israeli troops now sit exposed, ordered to hold positions but forbidden to act pre-emptively. They’re surrounded by tunnels and terrorists, trapped in another international “ceasefire” that only empowers killers.

Gaza’s terminal disease

The “Free Palestine” lie has collapsed under its own weight. Rebuilding Gaza under Arab control isn’t just naïve — it’s suicidal. No society so steeped in religious violence can sustain peace or self-government. Hamas is not an aberration; it’s a symptom of a deeper rot in Islamic political culture.

So why is President Trump involving America in this mess through the so-called 20-point plan? For a movement that claims to oppose endless wars and foreign aid, the right’s silence on this scheme is baffling. The Pentagon has already confirmed plans to send 200 U.S. soldiers to the Gaza border. If Israel defending itself against Iran supposedly meant “Americans dying for Israel,” what exactly do we call Americans dying to protect Hamas from Israel?

RELATED: Trump receives roaring applause for historic peace deal after all remaining hostages are freed

Photo by Evelyn Hockstein - Pool/Getty Images

The British blueprint

This entire plan was crafted by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — the same man who recently declared Britain must become “a nation of global citizens.” No wonder it leads to deeper entanglement, not withdrawal. Once again, globalist bureaucrats are trying to pull America into Middle Eastern “peacekeeping,” which always means nation-building with American blood and money.

If we’re serious about an America First foreign policy, we should begin disentangling from the region altogether — starting by weaning Israel off U.S. weapons systems so it can act freely without American political interference. But under no circumstances should we send troops or tax dollars to Gaza. Peacekeeping there isn’t in our interest. In that part of the world, “peace” means paralysis, and paralysis means death.

The wolf and the lamb

President Trump’s desire to see the “wolf dwell with the lamb” is noble, even biblical. But Isaiah’s prophecy won’t be fulfilled through U.N. peacekeepers or Pentagon deployments. It won’t come through Islam, whose theology demands submission, not reconciliation.

Let Gaza be the Arab world’s problem. Let Israel defend itself without our restraint. And let America finally wake up to the rising threat of political Islam — in our own communities, not 6,000 miles away.

Xi, Putin, and Modi join forces to reject West’s fading world order



What do a Hindu nationalist prime minister, a former KGB autocrat, and communist China’s imperial strongman have in common?

Apparently, enough to walk arm in arm at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China — smiling for the cameras, toasting regional “cooperation,” and calling for a new global order that doesn’t revolve around Washington, Brussels, or the International Monetary Fund.

Each of these leaders — Xi, Putin, Modi — believes his country has been talked down to by a West that still sees itself as the default setting of human civilization.

Watching Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping embrace in Tianjin earlier this month may strike Western observers as a diplomatic absurdity — a Lovecraftian alliance of contradictions. But it’s only absurd if you’re still trapped in the fog of 1990s end-of-history delusions.

In reality, what we’re seeing is a convergence of deeply rooted civilizations — ancient empires with long memories — asserting that they won’t be subordinated to a West that still believes it owns the future.

To understand this moment, you need to understand history — not just the last 80 years, but the last 800.

Reclaiming ancient identities

China was the “middle kingdom” long before it became the world’s factory. It ruled as a centralized, Confucian empire for millennia — containing its own tributary states, cultures, and contradictions. The current Chinese Communist Party regime doesn’t just govern China; it is consciously rebuilding it as a totalitarian civilizational state aimed at restoring its former glory and avenging its “century of humiliation.” Xi Jinping’s “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is a project explicitly rooted in a return to imperial pre-eminence, not democratic inclusion.

Russia, for its part, never really stopped being an empire. Whether it flew the tsarist eagle, the Soviet hammer and sickle, or today’s revanchist flag of Russian Orthodoxy and gas pipelines, it has always been a civilizational project stretching across 11 time zones. Putin’s Russia isn’t looking to export an ideology — he trades in memory, borders, and ensuring it’s never again humiliated by NATO expansion or IMF diktats.

And India — too often misunderstood as just the world’s largest democracy — is in the midst of rediscovering its own cultural core. While India has never sustained a single continuous empire, Modi’s India is assertive, spiritual, and unapologetically Hindu in its civilizational narrative. While he plays nice on global stages, he is keen to shed India’s post-colonial skin and assert its role not as a subordinate in the West’s rules-based order, but as a peer.

Of course, these aren’t natural allies. India and China have come to blows in the Himalayas. Russia and China eye each other warily in Central Asia. Modi can’t forget the border clashes or China's tech intrusion. Putin sells weapons and hydrocarbons to both. But what unites them now is something the West continues to ignore: a shared rejection of subordination.

Each of these leaders — Xi, Putin, Modi — believes his country has been talked down to by a West that still sees itself as the default setting of human civilization.

A unified front against the West

The SCO summit wasn’t about solving their differences. It was about presenting a united front against a common narrative: the unyielding insistence by Washington and Brussels that there is one set of rules for everyone else and another for the liberal West.

And it’s not lost on anyone in the East that Western Europe has all but collapsed economically — not because of war or invasion, but because of its own self-inflicted obsession with net-zero fantasies. Energy costs have skyrocketed, industries are fleeing, and the once-mighty militaries of Germany, France, and the U.K. are now barely functional. Their foreign policies rest on rhetoric, not strength. They outsourced their energy to Russia and their deterrence to America — and now have neither.

Meanwhile, China, India, and Russia burn coal, build steel, and mobilize armies.

The world is not “deglobalizing”; rather, the world’s center of economic gravity has shifted.

If trade gets blocked in one place, whether by sanctions or tariffs, it reappears in other ones. As Louis Gave explains:

The Western world attempted to trigger a collapse in the Russian economy by blocking access to the U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, and Swiss franc. Unsurprisingly, Russia immediately shifted to selling its commodities for renminbi, Indian rupees, Brazilian real, or Thai baht, and trade between Russia and the world’s major emerging markets went parabolic.

China’s trade surplus has surged by opening new markets for its products. In 2017, the value of Chinese exports to ASEAN economies amounted to 60% of China’s exports to the U.S. Today, China’s exports to Southeast Asia stand at roughly 120% of China’s exports to the U.S.

A multipolar world

The American foreign policy class loves binaries: democracy vs. autocracy, order vs. chaos, good guys vs. bad guys. But history doesn't care about binaries. It cares about power, memory, geography, and pride.

That’s what brings these “strange bedfellows” together. They don’t need to love each other. They just need to agree that the current world order is not designed with their civilizations in mind.

And as America potentially turns back to America First — which is long overdue — it’s worth recognizing that this time, the rest of the world isn’t standing still. Unipolar globalization is no longer the key organizing principle. The East now speaks with a louder voice, and it contains over half the world’s population and represents almost 40% of global GDP. A second Trump term can’t simply reassert American dominance by fiat.

RELATED: From Silicon Valley to Moscow, a supply chain of death

Photo by ewg3D via Getty Images

America First with guile

The SCO summit was more than a photo op. It was a signal. That signal is this: The old rules-based order isn’t binding any more. The future isn’t unipolar; it’s multipolar and won’t be built only on Western terms.

This is not a call for appeasement. It’s a call to engage with these ancient empires by leveraging our strengths with strategic humility and guile.

America First must deal from strength and with awareness that it no longer holds all the cards. President Trump knows how to read a room. He now needs to read a world where the emperors are back. And this time, together, they’re working on a plan.

Qatar sheltered Hamas — now let it shelter Gazans



Hamas’ barbaric October 7 massacre of Israelis — including children and the elderly — was driven by hatred, yes, but it was also enabled. Governments, organizations, and media outlets all played a role. Israel, Arab states, the United States, the United Nations, and especially Qatar share responsibility. Now, as Israel nears victory and “day after” debates begin, the international community needs to rethink its approach to both Gaza and Doha.

Qatar has long styled itself as a mediator. In reality, it has become a saboteur.

Qatar must face consequences. Gaza must be freed from Hamas. And America must stop funding its own adversaries.

Qatar has provided safe haven to Hamas leadership for years and continues to do so, depending on how many survived Israel’s decapitation strike in Doha on Monday. Despite reports suggesting the United States asked Qatar to host Hamas leaders for negotiation purposes, the relationship long predates October 7 and any such arrangement.

Qatar also hosted Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, until his death in 2022. Its most powerful media arm, Al Jazeera, has functioned as a Hamas mouthpiece, even providing journalistic cover to operatives like Anas al-Sharif.

The emirate’s interference doesn’t stop there. It funds radical movements across the region, destabilizing neighbors and prompting a Gulf Cooperation Council blockade in 2017. That blockade responded to Qatar’s ties with Iran, support for terrorist groups, and meddling in other nations’ internal affairs.

Closer to home, Qatar has poured billions into American universities. Between 2021 and 2024 alone, it gave more than $2 billion, fueling a surge of “illiberal, anti-democratic sentiment” on campuses. At the same time, the United States maintains its largest Middle East air base, Al Udeid, in a country that bankrolls terror.

That’s a strategic liability. Iran’s 2021 missile strike on Al Udeid — and later attacks during Operation Midnight Hammer — showed the base’s vulnerability. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. troops and families stationed there effectively subsidize Qatar’s radicalism.

President Trump’s February 4 proposal to relocate Gazans out of Gaza broke the stalemate. Critics howled, but the plan remains the only one that secures Israel, dismantles Hamas, and opens a path to reconstruction under new governance.

Temporary relocation of Gazans to Qatar is the most viable option. This is not forced displacement. It recognizes that civilians cannot live in a war zone and that years of Qatari-backed Hamas indoctrination require deliberate de-radicalization. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have refused refugees for exactly that reason. Qatar — the principal sponsor — should shoulder the burden.

RELATED:The genocide that isn’t: How Hamas turned lies into global outrage

Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

At the same time, the United States should withdraw from Al Udeid and construct a state-of-the-art base in a rebuilt Gaza.

That move would be more than symbolic — it would be strategic. A U.S. base in Gaza would guarantee security during reconstruction, prevent Hamas 2.0 from rising, and inject jobs, contracts, and services into the local economy. Gaza’s Mediterranean location also offers direct access to Africa, where China is expanding at America’s expense.

This isn’t fantasy. It’s a workable blueprint: Arrest remaining Hamas leaders in Doha; relocate civilians to safety; rebuild Gaza free of terror-backed regimes; and establish a permanent U.S. presence that stabilizes rather than inflames.

Protests will erupt. Denunciations will come. But serious problems demand serious solutions. Qatar must face consequences. Gaza must be freed from Hamas. And America must stop funding its own adversaries.

Democracy promotion is dead: Good riddance



What passes for intellectual heft at the Atlantic is any criticism of President Donald Trump. In the Atlantic’s pages and its digital fare, you can read the now-discredited musings of David Frum, who helped bring us the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the inane foreign policy arguments of Max Boot; the interventionist prescriptions of Anne Applebaum; and now, the democracy promotion of political science professor Brian Klaas, who, in a recent article, blames President Trump for killing “American democracy promotion.”

If Klaas is correct, that is one more reason that Americans need to thank President Trump.

Klaas’ first priority is using American treasure and blood to promote his chimerical notions of global democracy and universal human rights.

One would have thought that the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq would have humbled our nation’s democracy promoters — but they haven’t. One would have thought that the failed foreign policy of Jimmy Carter would have humbled those who wish to make “human rights” the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy — but it didn’t. One would have thought that the chaos facilitated by the so-called “Arab Spring” would engender prudence and introspection among the democracy promoters — but it is not so.

Professor Klaas wants the world to become democratic and for U.S. foreign policy to lead the effort in bringing the globe to the promised land.

Rewriting history

The Trump administration, Klaas writes, has “turn[ed] against a long-standing tradition of Western democracy promotion.”

Perhaps Klaas has never read George Washington’s Farewell Address, in which he counseled his countrymen to conduct foreign policy based solely on the nation’s interests. Or perhaps he missed John Quincy Adams’ July 4, 1821, address, in which he cautioned against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy and reminded his listeners that America is the well-wisher of freedom to all but the champion only of her own.

Perhaps Klaas believes that Wilsonianism is a “long-standing” American tradition, but in reality, it is mostly limited to starry-eyed liberal internationalists and neoconservatives.

Klaas mentions the “democracy boom” under President Bill Clinton, which was nothing more than a temporary consequence of America’s victory in the Cold War. Yet Klaas thinks it was the beginning of “shifting international norms” where freedom and democracy triumphed in “the ideological battle against rival models of governance” and “had become an inexorable force.”

Here, Klaas is likely referring to Francis Fukuyama’s discredited theory of the “end of history.” We have since discovered, however, that history didn’t die and that democracy is fragile, especially in places and among civilizations that have little democratic experience.

Fukuyama was wrong, but Samuel Huntington was right when he wrote about the coming “clash of civilizations.” One wonders if Klaas has read Huntington or Toynbee — or Spengler for that matter. Or, even more recently, Robert Kaplan’s “The Tragic Mind.”

Authoritarianism disguised as ‘democratic’

Klaas criticizes Trump for praising dictators, but President Woodrow Wilson praised Lenin and President Franklin Roosevelt praised Stalin. Klaas says that Trump is indifferent to democracy and human rights. No, Trump simply refuses to make them the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy, which is a “long-standing” tradition that stretches back long before Wilson to our founding fathers.

However, neither Wilson nor FDR wanted America to right every wrong in the world, as Klaas does. Klaas wants his “human rights” and democracy agenda “backed by weapons.” He laments that authoritarian regimes no longer need to fear the “condemnation” and the “bombs” of the American president.

Klaas’ leftism is revealed when he condemns the United States for helping to replace Mossaddegh with the pro-American shah of Iran, overthrowing the Marxist regime of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, helping to overthrow Allende in Chile, and cozying up to other authoritarian regimes.

RELATED: Vance makes one thing abundantly clear ahead of Trump's big ceasefire meeting with Putin

Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The professor also might want to read Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” to learn that sometimes doing these things is in America’s national interests. Klaas’ leftism jumps off the page when he refers to the illegal aliens removed by the Trump administration — many with criminal records — as “foreign pilgrims.”

Some of those “foreign pilgrims” raped and killed Americans. But Klaas’ first priority is not America or its citizens; it is using American treasure and blood to promote his chimerical notions of global democracy and universal human rights. He is anti-Trump precisely because Trump’s foreign policy is America First. Let’s hope Klaas’ style of democracy promotion is dead.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.