John Feffer's Blog

Most Israelis are too focused on the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7 to acknowledge, much less denounce, the atrocities their government is committing on an ongoing basis in Gaza. The Israeli public is desperate to save the 20 or so remaining Israeli hostages that are being hidden somewhere in that besieged strip. Israelis seem less concerned that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza is being held hostage by the Israeli military.

In a recent dispatch from Israel for The New Yorker, David Remnick describes this Israeli response as “zones of denial.” This echo of The Zone of Interest, the novel by Martin Amis about the indifference of Nazi families living next to the genocide in Auschwitz, is unmistakable.

This indifference to the suffering of Palestinians is not universal inside Israel. Amid all the starvation, the killings, and the displacement in Gaza, Israelis are finally beginning to utter the “g” word. This week, two Israeli human rights organizations—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—concluded that the Israeli government is indeed engaged in an attempt to systematically wipe out the Palestinian population in Gaza by killing, starving, or forced removal.

“The systematic destruction of the health care system, the denial of access to food, the blocking of medical evacuations and using humanitarian aid to advance military objectives—all indicate a clear pattern of conduct, a pattern that reveals intent,” says Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

This is also the conclusion of Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, who specializes in Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has identified

a pattern of operations that conformed to the statements that were made in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, which was to systematically destroy Gaza. That is to destroy schools, universities, museums, everything – hospitals, of course, water plants, energy plants. In that way to make it uninhabitable for the population and to make it impossible, if ever this is over, for that group to reconstitute its identity as a group by completely erasing everything that is there.

A group of 31 prominent Israeli figures have also published a letter urging the international community to impose “crippling sanctions” on Israel in response to the government’s policies facilitating starvation in Gaza. The group, which includes an Academy award winner, a former Israeli attorney general, and a former speaker of the Israeli parliament, is also calling for an immediate ceasefire. Asking the world to sanction their own country is almost as incendiary in Israel as using the “g” word.

Don’t hold your breath for the U.S. government to describe Israeli policy as genocidal. However, Donald Trump did point out this week that Palestinians are starving to death in Gaza. The photographic evidence is clear enough that even the U.S. president, who is quick to dismiss plenty of facts as fake news, said that “some of those kids are — that’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that.” It takes a lot for Trump to break with his pal Bibi, so the genocide in Gaza must be starting to cause reputational damage to Trump and his self-described role as peacemaker. But Trump is only talking about supplying money for food deliveries; he won’t take the next step of pressuring Israel to end the crisis.

The Israeli government, not surprisingly, denies the allegations that it is deliberately starving people in Gaza. It pins the blame, however improbably, on Hamas, which has been reduced to a force that can barely remain viable much less control access to food for two million people.

The Netanyahu government has recently responded to international pressure by allowing in more aid. But it’s grotesquely insufficient. The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in Gaza, according to a recent UN report.

There is no more glaring example of the political nature of famine than Gaza. Starvation is happening not because of crop failures or market dysfunction. The Israeli military has levelled the area and destroyed the means for growing and selling food. It has imposed a blockade on the delivery of aid. Plenty of food is waiting just outside Gaza.

The United Nations refused to participate in what little food distribution takes place in Gaza. Instead, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has set up distribution centers in four evacuation zones—Tal al-Sultan, the Saudi neighborhood, Khan Younis, and Wadi Gaza—and precipitated a dystopian, Darwinian struggle to access that food. Hungry people must travel, in some cases, considerable distances, to get to these centers. And then, if they get there, they face more obstacles.

According to GHF’s Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, has said “the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”

Israeli soldiers have so far killed more than 1,500 Palestinians trying to access aid.

Civilians must also contend with armed groups that loot the food convoys. Contrary to Israeli government assertions, these armed groups are not affiliated with Hamas. In fact, an internal U.S. government analysis found that Hamas has not engaged in any significant diversion of food aid.

Rather, the armed groups are specifically anti-Hamas, and they have been supported by the Israeli government. In fact, the Netanyahu government has openly embraced this divide-and-rule strategy.

Even as the material basis for a state is slipping through the fingers of Palestinians like so much sand through an hourglass, countries around the world are responding to the current crisis by recognizing what so far doesn’t exist. The most recent country to recognize a Palestinian state is France. The Labor Government in the UK has vowed to follow suit in September if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire. Australia and Canada are currently on the fence. Even before France made its move, 10 European Union countries recognized Palestine, and they are part of the 147 out of 193 UN members to have done so.

France also teamed up with Saudi Arabia to organize a three-day conference at the UN this week to discuss Palestinian statehood. Neither Israel nor the United States participated in the proceedings.

Forget about a two-state or a one-state solution. Netanyahu is all about a no-state solution. The Israeli government seems determined to make Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians (though perhaps not for Israeli settlers or rich people interested in buying waterfront villas). Meanwhile, at the end of May, the government announced a major increase in settlements in the West Bank, approving 22 new settlements. Defense Minister Israel Katz was blunt in his rationale for the move: it “prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”

It all has the feel of the dispossession and expulsion of Native Americans during the Andrew Jackson presidency and the land grabs that white settlers were quick to execute. Jackson, of course, is Donald Trump’s favorite president.

In the bad old days, states resulted from genocide. The United States, for instance, was built on the genocide committed against Native Americans. Australia and New Zealand similarly grew out of the ashes of the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples. Dig around enough and you’ll find similar skeletons in the closets of many states: in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa.

In the modern era, the equation has often been reversed. Stateless minorities have gone through genocides and only then been awarded a state. That was certainly the case for Jews and Israel (1948). But it’s also what happened for Bangladesh (1971), East Timor (2002), and, after a considerable lag time, Namibia (1990) and Armenia (1992). Kurds are still waiting for their state—they have part of a state in Iraqi Kurdistan—and they are not the only stateless minority longing for an internationally recognized homeland.

Palestinians have been waiting since the nakba of 1948 for their state. It’s not only Israel that has stood in their way. Other Arab states have displayed varying degrees of indifference, with the Abraham Accords the latest proof of how easy it is to bribe countries like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco to take Palestinian statehood off the table. Hamas sent its expeditionary force into Israel on October 7 in part to forestall Saudi Arabia jumping on the Abraham Accords bandwagon.

Now, with Palestinian suffering at levels unseen for several generations, it is impossible for many countries to avert their gaze. France is planning to push the issue of statehood at the UN General Assembly meeting in September. The minimum conditions for such a state would, of course, be a credible ceasefire, an end to Israeli occupation of Gaza, Palestinian governance of the territory, and an end to new settlements in the West Bank.

The current government in Israel would not likely support these conditions. But international pressure, along the lines of the crippling sanctions recommended in the letter of the prominent Israeli critics and long recommended by the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, might oust Netanyahu as surely as the global anti-apartheid movement managed to force a political transition in South Africa.

Voices around the world are saying: it’s now or never for a Palestinian state. It’s beyond horrible that Palestinians must suffer a genocide for the world to take seriously their demands for a state. But it would be incomparably worse if, once again, they get nothing for their pains.

FPIF, July 30, 2025

Sometimes, when the electricity goes out in a city, everyone works together to maintain order, help the most vulnerable residents, and find ways of coping with the temporary disruption. Every so often, however, a blackout leads to anarchy: looting, violence, and all against all.

To many observers, the world is currently experiencing a blackout with little in the way of cooperation. Strong countries like Russia and Israel are invading their weaker neighbors. The United States under Donald Trump has initiated a trade war that is paralyzing the global economy. The climate emergency is only getting more severe, and international institutions like the UN seem incapable of addressing it.

The global rules of the road governing human rights, the protection of natural resources, and even sovereignty are eroding. Has the world passed a tipping point where violations have become so numerous that compliance has become a thing of the past?

Is anarchy the world’s future?

The current crisis affecting the world order comes down to a matter of perception. International affairs seem considerably less predictable today than, for instance, during the Cold War period. The bipolar order offered a semblance of stability, of a time when the European Community was able to coalesce, East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan could rapidly develop, and Third World countries could play the two superpowers off each other.

But the Cold War order was only superficially stable. It featured two separate rules of the road for the capitalist and the communist worlds, and these worlds clashed on a regular basis. War in Korea and Vietnam, genocide in Cambodia, famine in Biafra and Bangladesh, military coups throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia: only the Global North enjoyed unprecedented stability and prosperity during this period.

The decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 featured the consolidation of an international community built on the rule of law and the protection of human rights. But this new global order was very fragile, and its rules were often honored only in the breach.

This post-Cold War order, in which the United States acted more unilaterally, was even more unpredictable than what came before. Although the European Union expanded, U.S.-Russian relations experienced a brief détente, and China began its rapid economic growth, horrific violations continued: the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, the first Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the killing fields in Sudan, and devastating economic crises in Asia in 1997 and globally in 2008.

When today’s events are put into this larger context, the current trajectory does not seem substantially more anarchic. Most countries continue to adhere to global rules. They are still submitting cases for arbitration at the World Trade Organization and the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court continues to issue arrest warrants and, in the recent case of Rodrigo Duterte, to take well-known figures into custody. There is some cautious optimism that Brazil can reenergize climate talks this year, even without the participation of the United States.

Despite the continuing atrocities committed by Russia and Israel, other countries are not rushing to seize neighboring territory. India and Pakistan stepped away from the brink after a clash over Kashmir. China has not invaded Taiwan. Venezuela continues to advance claims against Guyana but hasn’t intervened militarily. Trump hasn’t followed through on his threats against Greenland, Panama, and Canada.

The fear of global anarchy focuses more on the future than the present. What if a large part of the world shifts to the far right, as in the years leading up to World War II? It’s certainly true that right-wing nationalists rule in the United States, Russia, Hungary, India, and El Salvador. Extremists threaten to take over in Germany and France, thereby moving the European Union away from liberal internationalism. The pink wave in Latin America—which has produced left-wing governments in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico—looks like it might, in the wake of victories by Javier Milei in Argentina and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, turn a nasty shade of brown.

But the evidence so far is that Trump is doing no favors to his right-wing counterparts in other countries. Thanks to fears of a home-grown Trump taking over, elections in Canada and Australia returned the center left to power. Trump’s attacks on Lula in Brazil have only boosted the leftist leader’s popularity. The left is now in charge in South Korea, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Sri Lanka.

There is some speculation that Trump is nudging the world toward one classic form of world order, namely the kind of spheres of influence that prevailed during much of the imperial era of the nineteenth century. In this updated version, the United States focuses on the Americas, China retains primary influence over East and Southeast Asia, and Russia controls the post-Soviet space, while European influence is restricted to its own limited chunk of Eurasia plus parts of Africa.

Such theories look plausible on paper, but the reality is considerably messier. The United States, under Trump, is still acting all over the world—bombing Iran, supplying a new weapons package to Ukraine, and spending huge sums of money on the military to confront China. China, meanwhile, remains committed to its Belt and Road initiative, which involves investing in infrastructure development and mining projects all over the world. The European Union is still pushing for an expansion of its membership into the post-Soviet space, including both Ukraine and Moldova.

Then there’s the notion that the BRICS represent a new kind of global force that is pushing back against Western imperialism. Although Russia is a primary mover of the BRICS coalition, it has not succeeded in turning the organization into an anti-Western entity. The other members, especially China and India, want an open economic order. The organization as a whole is comfortable working within the IMF and World Bank system.

To sum up, the current period is no more chaotic than earlier periods. The United States, under Trump, has exited a number of international agreements and institutions, like the Paris climate accord and the UN Human Rights Council, but there hasn’t been a rush to the exits to follow Trump. A future of Trump acolytes ruling all over the world is not inevitable or even likely. Rival global orders in the form of spheres of influence or the rise of anti-Western bloc have not materialized. For the most part, the global rules of the road still hold, and “mere anarchy” has not been “loosed upon the world,” as Yeats described the period immediately after World War I.

Does that mean that the world order will continue as is, with occasional disruptions and non-compliance?

It is always a mistake to assume that the present will not change, for change is a constant in world history. The climate crisis is the biggest variable. It’s an opportunity for some leaders to promote the politics of fear, of a war of all against all. That’s certainly one of the choices that a looming blackout offers.

But as writer Rebecca Solnit has persuasively argued, the more likely public response to disasters both current and impending—Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the COVID pandemic, rising ocean waters—has been to cooperate and find novel, even liberating, solutions. Soon her theory will be put to a test on a global level. Let’s hope that the Trumps of this world are wrong, and she is right.

Hankyoreh, July 23, 2025

He promised to end the war in 24 hours. He made nice with Russian President Vladimir Putin and parroted Kremlin talking points. He humiliated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the cameras in the Oval Office. He refused to send more weapons to Ukraine.

But that was the old Donald Trump.

The new Donald Trump is pissed off that Russia hasn’t taken his generous offer of peace. The new Donald Trump admits that Putin pulled a fast one. “I believed he was someone who meant what he said,” Trump confesses, echoing the earlier gullibility of George W. Bush who’d gushed that he could get a sense of Putin’s soul. “He can speak beautifully, but then he bombs people at night. We don’t like that.” When the new Donald Trump shifts to the royal “we,” it’s a sign of profound disappointment.

So, now, the United States is readying a new package of military support for Ukraine that includes both defensive and offensive weaponry. Meanwhile, Congress is considering bipartisan legislation that would authorize the president to levy a 500 percent tariff on any country still buying fossil fuels or uranium from Russia. Trump has scaled back that threat to 100 percent while imposing a 50-day deadline for Russia and Ukraine to sign a deal.

Is this all a theatrical ploy to push Russia to the negotiating table and compromise? Or is this a decisive break between Trump and Putin, comparable to the recent split between the president and Elon Musk?

The one constant, of course, is this: don’t trust the U.S. president. He doesn’t think with his brain or even with his gut. He is moved by his gallbladder, and right now Putin is the object of his bile. Here’s the problem: Putin feels the same way toward Ukraine.

Back in April, when I last wrote about the war, Putin was looking at a pretty good deal. The Ukrainian government was willing to consider territorial compromise. Trump was eager to reestablish economic relations with Russia. NATO membership for Ukraine was off the table, and the U.S. government wasn’t supplying Kyiv with any new weapons (much less any security guarantees).

But when the opportunity arose in May to meet with Zelensky in Istanbul, Putin didn’t show up. More troubling, he didn’t pivot from his maximalist demands. Ukraine would have to give up territory it still controlled in the four provinces Russia had formally annexed. To achieve a “comprehensive peace,” Ukraine would also have to reduce its military, ban any third-party forces on its soil, and dissolve “nationalist groups.” To add insult to injury, Ukraine would have to give up any claims for compensation for the damage that Russia has caused.

The easy explanation for Putin’s intransigence is his belief that he can win on the battlefield. Russian forces have moved slowly but surely westward. The Ukrainian forces that seized a slice of Russian territory have been expelled. The Kremlin seems to have an unlimited number of drones and missiles with which to pummel Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Not long ago, Russia launched a record 477 drones, which it then quickly surpassed with 550 drones. Last week, 728 drones entered Ukrainian airspace. By September, Russia will likely be able to launch a thousand drones at a time, and civilian casualties in Ukraine are rising.

But any optimism in the Kremlin runs up against some challenging realities, even before Trump’s about-face is factored in and those heavy tariffs start biting.

Let’s start with the math.

If Russian troops keep up their modest pace of land seizure—and that’s a big if—they will complete their occupation of the four Ukrainian provinces that the Kremlin has already claimed…in February 2028. To occupy all of Ukraine would take 89 years. The Russian public is getting antsy, with only a minority supporting a war to dislodge Zelensky. Their grandchildren are going to be even unhappier if they are still sacrificing on behalf of a forever war in Ukraine.

Those sacrifices include over a million Russian casualties since the full-scale invasion in 2022. The daily casualty rate has nearly doubled from 2023 (693) to the first half of 2025 (1,286). That’s nearly half a million casualties a year. At this rate, Russia will sustain another 1.5 million casualties just to take the rest of those four provinces.

The Russian economy, meanwhile, is hurting, has been hurting, will probably continue to hurt after hostilities cease. As Georgi Kantchev writes in the Wall Street Journal,

Manufacturing activity is declining, consumers are tightening their belts, inflation remains high and the budget is strained. Russian officials are now openly warning of the risks of a recession, and companies from tractor producers to furniture makers are reducing output. The central bank said Thursday that it would debate cutting its benchmark interest rate later this month after lowering it in June.

When the war eventually ends, even if a compensation package is not on the table, Russians will have to pay the bill for the war. And the opportunity costs of spending money on drones and bullets, instead of modernizing factories and diversifying away from fossil fuel exports, will ensure that the Russian economy remains stuck in the twentieth century.

Then there are the military setbacks Ukraine is inflicting. Most recently, an attack on a Russian ammunition depot in occupied Donetsk yielded spectacular results by removing much of the firepower that Russia was relying on for its summer offensive. After an earlier strike killed the commander of the Eighth Army, Russian forces in Donetsk “now face a grim reality: no shells, no missiles, and no one to lead them,” writes Chuck Pfarrer in the Kiev Post. “Among the destroyed munitions was Russia’s principal storage point for Surface-to-Air Missiles in Ukraine.

Earlier, with Operation Spiderweb, Ukrainian drones ranged far across Russia, even to the Olenya airbase in the Arctic more than 1,200 miles away, to destroy one-third of the country’s strategic bombers. The psychological impact of the operation must have been devastating for Kremlin planners.

But nothing compares with the latest news that Trump is now encouraging Ukraine to launch long-range strikes in Russia if the United States provides the necessary missiles. In a conversation with Zelensky, Trump wanted to know if the Ukrainians could hit Moscow and St. Petersburg to “make them feel the pain.”

Anything short of total victory makes Putin look bad. As Lawrence Freedman writes in Foreign Affairs:

For Putin, ending the war without meeting his core political objectives would be tantamount to a defeat and would leave the patriotic, ultranationalist bloc that he has cultivated and nurtured during the war deeply angered. The more moderate Russian elite might be relieved by such an outcome, but with so little to show for such a costly effort, there would still be a dangerous reckoning. Many would begin to ask, “Was it worth it?” and to wonder about the fallibility of Russia’s leadership.

What Putin has achieved so far is hard to spin as a victory. Crimea is a favorite vacation destination for Russians, but the peninsula today is like a very expensive summer house with huge cracks in the foundation wall and multiple nests in the attic that send hornets down to harass the owners on a continual basis. The Ukrainian military has destroyed enough Russian vessels to ensure that the Black Sea is not the Russian lake Putin wants it to be. The Donbas is a ruined landscape full of Ukrainian resistance fighters who will probably continue to operate even after a ceasefire. Sure, there’s some valuable resources beneath the ground, but good luck trying to access them with saboteurs all around.

These are the reasons for Putin’s intransigence. It’s not that he wants a stronger negotiating position in future peace talks. He has effectively linked his political fate to a decisive win in Ukraine because compromise will mean an uprising from forces to his right (sound familiar, Netanyahu?). Meanwhile, anyone of political importance who might cheer an end to the war is in jail, in exile, or in the ground.

Given that Trump thinks with his gallbladder, it’s a fool’s errand to try to figure out his strategy. In his usual vulgar way, he is trying to have it all.

The U.S. president wants to send weapons to Ukraine but have the Europeans pay for it (so far, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands are ready to buy Patriot systems for Kyiv). He wants to punish Putin for his refusal to kowtow to the Oval Office, but he is also giving him 50 days before applying any secondary sanctions. He wants Ukraine to launch attacks that the Biden administration was reluctant to countenance, but he also wants a peace deal that ends the fighting.

Hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned. Trump doesn’t really care about the war in Ukraine. All he really wants is for Putin to acknowledge his alpha-male status, return to the negotiating table, take Trump’s generous offer, and accept a deal that can last until the next U.S. presidential election. That will be enough for Trump, at least in his own mind, to earn a Nobel Peace Prize, which he grumbles that he won’t get because the naysayers have always been against him.

Trump thinks of himself as an unstoppable force. But Putin is an unmovable object who won’t be bullied because he is the ultimate bully. Trump rants about taking over Greenland, Canada, Panama; Putin launches actual invasions. Trump is scared to send any soldiers into battle; Putin sends wave after wave into the meat grinder. Trump threatens to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship; Putin orders his enemies killed.

Trump’s about-face on Ukraine is all about face. Trump wants a face-saving solution so that he doesn’t look an idiot for promising to end the war in 24 hours. Putin, meanwhile, wants to wipe Ukraine off the face of the map. It’s really no contest.

But Putin, too, must face facts. Trump might be a pushover, a chicken hawk, a TACO. But in Ukraine, Putin has found his own unmovable object.

FPIF, July 16, 2025

There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.

In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank as the worst president in U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)?

Elon Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test that proposition.

It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a new political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out with Donald Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the recent passage of Trump’s legislative package and the several trillion dollars that the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding with Trump over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover that the president, in the end, turned out to be a more conventional tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.

Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new America Party. The details of the party platform are scant, as you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has naturally emphasized “responsible spending,” debt reduction, and deregulation. He has also added pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his expanding platform along with “free speech” and “pro-natalist” positions.

These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical libertarian project—if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany, and his fantastical accusations of “genocide” against the South African government for its treatment of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on race, genetics, and demography. As The Washington Post reports:

He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.

In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls from the artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The newly unshackled Grok—named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land that means a deep, intuitive understanding—began to rant anti-Semitically. As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.

You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says or does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent during his tenure as DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans has dropped from 78 percent in March to 62 percent after his break with Trump in June.

But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the insults traded with Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory hole once Trump’s economic program starts to hurt the blue-collar constituents that supported his 2024 candidacy. That’s when Musk will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the “big and beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.

Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his assets and his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could buy the presidency. Now along comes Elon Musk with even more money, a bigger ego, and a comparable lack of shame.

Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other respects as well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both Democrats and Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump presidency to be an “embarrassment,” and believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but there was little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off into extremes.

If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just returning to his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa where his racist views were more the norm. She writes that Haldeman, in the 1930s,

joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

Like his grandfather, Musk escaped from his country of birth, in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon Valley, Musk found a like-minded community. He palled around with Peter Thiel—and created PayPal together—before eventually falling out over artificial intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian beliefs, as do other Silicon Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who have shifted rightward. They all have a fondness for the latest avatar of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin, himself a refugee from saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic over replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.

And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for himself. So what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.

Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik before he donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orban was an ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as an illiberal autocrat. Elon Musk’s political evolution could be compared to the trajectory of these two opportunists.

Elon Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship with Putin over the last two years—after initially supporting Kyiv following Russia’s 2022 invasion—and has floated pro-Russian peace plans to end the conflict in Ukraine. Musk met with Orban at Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and has tweeted support in the Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the illiberalism of Putin and Orban is not really a model for Musk.

Instead, he has gravitated toward something even less palatable: the Alternative fur Deutschland. The AfD, founded in 2013, built its base on anti-immigrant sentiment, attracted extremists with its anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and capitalized on anti-elite anger by railing against heat pumps. Musk has framed his support of the AfD as a defense of “free speech,” a familiar tactic of those who routinely engage in hate speech. In an op-ed in the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper that was calculated to influence the German elections, Musk wrote that only the AfD could save Germany by “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” This was a particularly rich observation from one of the most powerful promoters (and beneficiaries) of globalization.

Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to become today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.

The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization. More recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process of banning the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two criteria: it must threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be sufficiently popular to pose such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal process, the party is deemed unconstitutional, it is dissolved.

Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for the party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent, behind the Christian Democrats (28 percent) but ahead of all other parties. For the time being, these other parties are refusing to collaborate with the AfD at a federal level, though there have been some cases of collaboration at the subnational level. A ban—of a party or of collaboration with that party—may be satisfying, but it doesn’t address the reasons that the party is flourishing.

In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Elon Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.

As NBC reports:

Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.

As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often end up hating each other as well.

Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly. “I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political analyst told The New York Times. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”

But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.

Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.

It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.

FPIF, July 9, 2025

A spate of break-ins has been taking place in your neighborhood. Armed thugs associated with a crime syndicate have been knocking down doors and grabbing what they can. The police show up only after the assaults, which have led to injuries and even a few deaths. Under-resourced and overstretched, they haven’t been able to thwart the robbers.

Someone in your neighborhood puts up a sign: This Homeowner Is Armed and Dangerous. The next night, the thugs break into the houses on either side, not even bothering to test whether the homeowner in the middle has a gun or knows how to use it. They just leave that house alone.

Question for you: do you buy a gun?

Maybe you don’t believe in guns. So, do you consider putting up a similar sign even though the most dangerous item in your house is a nail clipper? The evidence seems clear. Even just the threat of retaliation is enough to dissuade the would-be attackers. Your life and the lives of your family are on the line.

This is the dilemma facing many countries around the world, except that the gun in this analogy is a nuclear weapon. Countries without nuclear weapons—Libya, Yugoslavia—experienced attacks that eventually led to regime change. Countries that possess even just a few warheads—North Korea, China—have managed to deter states with malign intent.

Iran, a country that has put up a warning sign in its window without fully committing to acquiring the ultimate deterrent, was recently bombed by both Israel and the United States. A tenuous ceasefire now holds in this conflict. The Trump administration imagines that it has destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. It also believes that it can now put more pressure on Iran to give away its nuclear weapons program at the negotiating table.

But the obvious takeaway for Iran after the recent attacks is that it’s certainly dangerous to semi-covertly pursue nuclear weapons but it’s perhaps even more dangerous not to have them. If nuclear powers don’t suffer devastating bombing campaigns, insecure nations conclude that they best acquire a nuke as quickly as possible.

It’s not just Iran. Other countries are drawing similar conclusions about how to survive in an international environment where collective security—the global equivalent of the police—is falling apart as quickly as a fence in a hurricane.

Guns can be used for different things—to hunt, to hit clay targets, to massacre children at a school.

Likewise, nuclear complexes can serve very different purposes. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear facilities are for the production of energy, medical isotopes, and so on. But a country doesn’t need to enrich its uranium to 60 percent, as Iran reportedly has done, to achieve these peaceful goals. Nuclear power requires an enrichment level of 3-5 percent. Weapons-grade uranium, meanwhile, is 90 percent.

The Obama administration, with a number of international partners, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that capped the level of enrichment at 20 percent and began diluting Iran’s uranium stockpiles to 3.5 percent. The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the agreement. The enrichment level of Iran’s uranium not surprisingly began to creep upwards.

Iran has maintained two underground enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. These were two of the targets of U.S. bunker-busters. The 14 bombs the United States dropped on these targets might be expected to have returned Iran to the pre-nuclear stone age. And that’s certainly what the Trump administration has claimed.

But Donald Trump is quick to claim victory even in the throes of obvious defeat (remember COVID, Afghanistan, and the 2020 election?). According to an anonymous source in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the recent U.S. attack set Iran back “maybe a few months, tops.” The Trump administration dismissed this assessment as a leak from “an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”

But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, echoed the DIA report: “The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that.” Even Iranian officials, caught speaking privately about the attack, were surprised that the damage was not as great as they’d anticipated.

Even if the capacity to enrich uranium had been destroyed, the U.S. and Israeli attacks couldn’t root out the knowledge of these processes from the minds of the Iranian scientists—or the desire to acquire nuclear weapons from the Iranian population as a whole. According to a poll from June of last year, nearly 70 percent of Iranian respondents favored the country going nuclear—this after nearly two decades of public opinion opposing the weaponization of the program.

Memo to both the United States and Israel: it’s not just Iran’s political leadership that wants nukes. In other words, regime change is not going to resolve this nuclear question. Iran’s complex.

Considering Trump’s cancellation of the Iranian nuclear accord back in 2017, diplomacy wouldn’t seem to be top on the administration’s agenda. But it wasn’t diplomacy per se that Trump rejected, only diplomacy associated with the Obama administration.

As late as the Friday before the U.S. attack, even as Israel was continuing its own bombing runs, the Trump administration was conducting secret talks with Iran. According to CNN:

Among the terms being discussed, which have not been previously reported, is an estimated $20-30 billion investment in a new Iranian non-enrichment nuclear program that would be used for civilian energy purposes, Trump administration officials and sources familiar with the proposal told CNN. One official insisted that money would not come directly from the US, which prefers its Arab partners foot the bill. Investment in Iran’s nuclear energy facilities has been discussed in previous rounds of nuclear talks in recent months.

That sounds a lot like the Agreed Framework that the Clinton administration pursued with Pyongyang, with South Korea largely footing the bill for the construction of reactors that could power North Korea’s civilian sector. Those reactors were never built, and North Korea went on to assemble its own mini-arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Iran has said that it would consider returning to the negotiating table at some point after it receives guarantees that there will be no future attacks. Without much trust among the various sides, it would be hard to imagine Iran forever renouncing a nuclear option or Israel forever forswearing attacks on Iran, even if they both make rhetorical commitments for the purpose of restarting talks.

There is much loose speculation that Donald Trump is an isolationist, an anti-militarist, a believer in spheres of influence. The U.S. attack on Iran should dispense with such nonsense.

Donald Trump is a political opportunist. He takes positions—anti-abortion, pro-crypto—based not on principles but on how much they will boost his political (and economic) fortunes.

On foreign policy, Trump has raised opportunism to the level of a geopolitical doctrine. He has talked of steering clear of military conflicts in the Middle East, but then the opportunity presented itself to strike against Iranian targets effectively risk-free (because Israel had already secured the airspace). He has railed against corruption in Ukraine and declared President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” but then the opportunity presented itself to sign a minerals agreement with the government in Kyiv.

Trump has no problems negotiating with religious fundamentalists. He gets along just fine with Sunni absolutists in the Middle East, and he would probably be hard-pressed to explain the religious differences between the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the Shia of Iran. If an opportunity presents itself to negotiate a deal with Iran, Trump may well take it—mostly because he can then call himself the person who really vanquished that country’s nuclear “threat” (take that, Obama!).

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make it more likely that countries around the world will invest in their own nuclear weapons programs.

At home, despite some rhetoric about the lack of any need for new nuclear weapons, Trump is adding nearly $13 billion to the budget for nuclear weapons. And his plan for a “golden dome” will only encourage other nuclear powers to spend more to evade such heightened defenses Such dangerous one-upmanship was, after all, the rationale for the dearly departed Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Trump’s reluctance to provide assurances to allies that the United States will come to their defense in case of attack has poked huge holes in the nuclear umbrella that hitherto covered much of Europe and Asia. Now European politicians are talking about building out their own nuclear capabilities—with the French arsenal at its center—and conservatives in South Korea have also begun talking about establishing a nuclear deterrent.

And the rest of the world? The Iranian parliament has begun drafting the country’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Only one other country has exited the treaty—North Korea—and only a handful of countries are not parties to it (Israel, India, Pakistan, South Sudan) If Iran goes, there may well be a rush to the exits, beginning with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have made noises about the nuclear option.

Nothing speaks louder than Trump’s actions. He exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (nukes), is a big fan of Vladimir Putin (nukes), and has indicated that he has more respect for China (nukes) than Taiwan (no nukes). On the other side of the nuclear fence, he has bombed Iran, threatened Venezuela and Cuba, and discussed the possibility of taking over Greenland and Canada.

I’m no advocate of nuclear armaments. But if I were Canadian, I might start thinking that a reputation for niceness just doesn’t cut it in TrumpWorld. A couple of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, however, would send a message that this White House more readily understands.

FPIF, July 2, 2025

“We’re back,” I tell the room. It’s January 21, 2029, and I can barely contain my excitement. “America is back!”

I expect applause, but there is none.

I try again, louder this time. “After four long years, America is finally back! We’re ready to resume our international obligations!”

The members of the U.N. Human Rights Council are looking in every direction — except at me. I feel a tug on the sleeve of my suit jacket. I glance down and note that the representative from Morocco is passing me a slip of paper.

All I see are numbers. “This is… a bill?”

She nods. “Your international obligations.”

“Fifty-two billion dollars?”

“Four years of non-payment of U.N. contributions.  We rounded it up.”

“That’s a lot of — “

She interrupts. “It doesn’t begin to cover the costs of the damage you did. We’re still preparing that bill.”

Read the room is what they tell you in Diplomacy 101. This room at U.N. headquarters, however, needs no reading. It’s an open book — a mix of indifference, amusement, and outright hostility.

The chair of the committee, a gentleman from South Korea, clears his throat and motions for me to sit down. Then the meeting continues. And so does my humiliation.

Oh, in case you didn’t realize, I’m the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. I was initially thrilled to take the job. For a former career foreign service officer, an appointment like this is the top of the ladder. Before the second set of Trump years began, I quietly worked my way up from the consular service and the ambassadorship in Malawi to deputy undersecretary of state for Latin American affairs. Even after Trump arrived back in the White House, I remained a firm believer in the “international community,” though I’d be hard-pressed to tell you anymore exactly what that is.

Long ago, I pledged my allegiance to liberal internationalism, which, in my country nowadays, is like admitting to being a Shaker or an alchemist. Call me quaint, but I’ve always believed that the world needs to abide by certain rules and regulations. We all accept traffic laws, right? We assert our individuality by choosing the cars we want, but we also agree to stop at red lights, stay in our lanes, and maintain certain speeds. Violators are penalized.

The international community has a similar set of guidelines. Countries can assert their sovereignty by flying a particular flag, issuing colorful stamps, and singing boastful national anthems. But we also agree — most of us, at least — to certain rules of the road: don’t invade other countries, don’t force children into your army, don’t kill off or, for that matter, deport a significant percentage of your own population. And yet, despite the international penalties, all too many countries still insist on being scofflaws.

To be ambassador to the U.N. is like being appointed to the rule-making committee. Who wouldn’t be excited?

Well, me, to be exact, after my first day on the job.

Look, I knew it was going to be tough. The last four years, during which Trump 2.0 dumped on anything with the word “international” attached to it, were an affront to me and so many others. Thanks to Elon Musk’s infamous DOGE, I didn’t have to participate in that charade of diplomacy. Like many of my colleagues, I was purged in those days of “government efficiency” and forced into early retirement. From my perch at a DC think tank, I then watched Trump’s grim assaults and the backlash that ensued with a mixture of horror and schadenfreude.

Over the last four years, we liberal internationalists planned and plotted how we would make things right when we finally returned to power.

How naïve we were!

At first, Trump was merely predictable. Returning to the Oval Office in January 2025, he sang from a familiar hymnal by withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO. He stopped paying U.N. dues, which pushed many agencies to the edge and put a virtual stop to peacekeeping globally. He cozied up to strong men like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. He made bold promises — end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours — that (no surprise!) he didn’t keep.

Then he started to innovate.

He imposed tariffs on everyone and anyone — allies like Canada, adversaries like China, incredibly impoverished countries like Lesotho, and uninhabited places like the Heard and McDonald Islands. He threatened to tear apart the global economy so that he could protect a few industries in the United States. Without an industrial policy to boost promising sectors of the U.S. economy, however, his tariff war ended up badly hurting American consumers and producers alike.

Of course, our new administration has just removed almost all of those tariffs, but it was way too late. “Honey,” the Canadian ambassador told me, “we diversified. We found new trading partners. And why would we want to go back to crazy now?”

The attacks on foreign aid, meanwhile, were unprecedented. (Boy, was that word overused during the Trump era!) In the administration’s first four months alone, more than 97,000 adults and 200,000 children died because of the funding freeze on foreign assistance and the dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Over the course of the next four years, more than 100 people died every hour, thanks to Trump’s and Musk’s disastrous cuts to USAID and other places. By the end of the Trump administration, that amounted to the deaths of three to four million people globally.

Those numbers are, of course, in the genocidal range. In effect, it was no different than the Nazi policy of culling the German population of the sick, the old, and the disabled — but this time it was applied to the global population. I don’t know what bill the U.N. will present to me for the loss of all that life, not to mention all the environmental damage to the planet, but however large, it will end up being of only symbolic value. We just don’t have the money — or, frankly, the desire — to pay such reparations.

What can’t be assessed monetarily is the demonstration effect of Trump’s flouting of the international rules of the road. Other strong-armed leaders — in Turkey, India, Argentina — followed Trump’s playbook, of course, just as he had taken cues from Hungary and Russia. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine surely inspired Trump to grab Greenland in 2027. And that illegal seizure of the world’s largest island — which our administration is determined to reverse — no doubt encouraged Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza, Russia to grab Moldova, and China to attempt its takeover of Taiwan.

Trump’s attacks on international institutions effectively unraveled the norms of global cooperation. Everyone is now scrambling to mine the seabed for its minerals. Almost everyone ignores arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. The big powers do what they want and the smaller powers do what they can.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that “there’s no such thing as ‘society.’” Trump one-upped her by denying that there even was an “international community.” Through his actions, and in collaboration with autocrats the world over, he nearly denied it out of existence.

What the Trump administration did at home was, of course, no better than what it did abroad — especially if you weren’t a rich White man. For instance, what started out as a campaign against undocumented immigrants turned into a full-blown attack on foreigners. Everyone without full citizenship was presumed guilty, rounded up indiscriminately and deported to conflict zones or Salvadoran prisons, stopped at the border for “smuggling” or similar nonsense, or even penalized for speaking out against the murder of Palestinians. Then the administration began blocking foreign students from coming here to study, starting with the Chinese.

“Harvard, Yale, Stanford: these institutions used to be our Mecca,” the South Korean ambassador told me recently. “Now we’re telling our students to go anywhere but the United States.”

“But we’re back,” I repeated weakly.

“For how long?” he asked. “How can we know that the next administration won’t pick up where Trump left off and go on a fresh rampage?”

And in truth, many Americans are asking the same question after the cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits. They now look at the federal government warily, like a victim of three-card monte who’s allowed to win the first couple times only to be taken to the cleaners.

Of course, we’ve resurrected the Biden-era industrial policies that favored green tech. But MAGA lives on. Campaigns to block those policies are still being waged in courts that are now all too keen to punish federal “overreach.” In incorrigibly red states, even ones where the 2028 presidential election was unexpectedly close, governors are determined to flip off the feds. As I write this, “stop the steal” rallies over election 2028 are edging ever closer to violence, survivalists are grabbing their go bags, and there’s increasing talk in some communities of massive noncompliance with the federal government.

Red-blue animosity certainly preceded Donald Trump. These days, however, we seem to be on the brink of an all-out color war in this country. According to the MAGA crew, you’re either with them or against them (and the other side pretty much believes the same thing). The color purple? It’s been purged from our vocabulary.

We’ve just inherited a government that resembles a city destroyed by a retreating army. It’s not just the ruined institutions — the gutted State Department, the defunct Education Department, or the eviscerated system of federal funding for scientific research and development. It’s the nationwide cynicism regarding government. Even before Trump, “politics” was increasingly becoming a dirty word. Now, it’s a toxic waste dump.

Our new administration has, of course, promised to build back better. But thanks to Trump, the American public no longer seems to believe that government should have a place in their lives or in the life of the country. Voters no longer have an appetite for foreign aid. They don’t support democracy struggles overseas, peacekeeping missions, or cooperation to address climate change. At home, the United States desperately needs immigrants to pick crops, construct buildings, and staff restaurants, among so many other things, but attitudes toward the undocumented have hardened.

Americans have become dangerously accustomed to the privatization of government. NGOs and wealthy foundations have taken over the work of USAID. Corporations are running the Postal Service and Amtrak. Financial services institutions have turned Social Security into a casino. The federal government, once dismissed as a fussy nanny, is now viewed as guilty of breaking and entering.

Sure, voters are fed up with corruption. That’s the main reason they ejected Trump and his party from office. But having come to associate government with corruption for so many years, many Americans now want as little of it as possible.

Honey vs. Vinegar

The precipitous decline in trust can be seen at the international level as well.

“We’ve decided to put you in the time-out corner,” the Malaysian ambassador tells me. “Until America can prove that it can behave itself.”

“But look at what we did eight years ago,” I protest, “when the Biden administration made nice with the U.N.!”

“And then came Trump 2.0, which was a lot worse than the first version.”

“We can’t afford to sit in a corner for four years. The world can’t afford it.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Some countries want to treat you like North Korea. Sanction you, blockade you, quarantine you to contain the virus of MAGA.”

“But you can’t do that to a…a… “

“A superpower? In all your talk about returning to the international stage, you still haven’t apologized.”

“Trump wasn’t one of us,” I point out. “We’re the good guys.”

“The Germans apologized for what the Nazis did.”

She had a point, though I couldn’t concede it. Another lesson from Diplomacy 101: America means never having to say you’re sorry.

We’ve now rejoined all the U.N. institutions. We’ll pay our arrears (well, a solid portion of them anyway). We’re prepared to take Putin into custody for the International Criminal Court if he ever foolishly sets foot on U.S. soil. But no, we don’t have the political will to actually join the ICC. There are limits to what the American people are willing to do.

“You have to help me here,” I tell the Malaysian diplomat. “If you and your middle-income countries don’t let us out of the corner and show us some respect, the MAGA crowd will capitalize on your public shaming. They’ll win the next election and you’ll get what you most fear. The return of MAGA for a third time will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“We’ll take our chances.”

I smile bewitchingly. “We could lower the price of our oil and gas exports.”

“Solar and wind are cheaper,” she points out.

Time to switch tactics. “Aren’t you the smallest bit worried about China? Might you not need a little help defending your territorial claims in the South China Sea?”

“You’re smiling,” she says. “But this is really a threat.”

“I’m offering to help.”

“No, you’re threatening not to help. Just as the last administration didn’t help Taiwan.”

My smile widens to show my teeth. A final take-away from Diplomacy 101: what you can’t achieve with honey, you can usually accomplish with an aircraft carrier.

“What did I tell you?” I remind her, this time with more grim determination than enthusiasm. “America is back.”

TomDispatch, June 25, 2025

The Trump administration has sidelined Congress, violated the U.S. Constitution, and taken an axe to both the U.S. and the global economies. Trump has issued executive orders that give him unprecedented presidential powers. The courts have blocked many of his policies, but in the budget bill pending in the Senate, there is a clause buried in the thousand-page document that would make it far more difficult for courts to enforce their judgements against the administration. In front of the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers have successfully argued that he has immunity from prosecution for pretty much anything he does when he’s in office.

In this way, Trump has dismantled the structures of U.S. democracy. You might think that all of these actions taken together amount to a declaration of martial law. But they don’t. The United States remains, at least formally, a civil democracy, and the president must still answer to other institutions (Congress, the courts).

However, Trump continues to test the limits of his power, and now he is doing so with respect to the military. He is doing so either to govern just short of a martial law declaration—or in preparation to make that declaration at some future date.

Although formally the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president is constrained by tradition and by law from deploying the military however he pleases. In his first term, Trump nevertheless attempted to use the military as a tool of presidential power. He tried to arrange a military parade in Washington, DC. He proposed to use the military against Black Lives Matter demonstrators around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The military said no. His defense secretaries—Jim Mattis and then Mark Esper—opposed these proposals.

In his second term, Trump has replaced career military with loyalists. For the head of the Pentagon, he appointed Pete Hegseth, an incompetent ideologue and former Fox News host. And now it seems that the military is willing to do Trump’s bidding. On June 14, the president will get the military parade he has so desperately wanted—to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Army and his own seventy-ninth birthday. Kim Jong Un would be envious.

More consequentially, using the Insurrection Act of 1792, Trump dispatched National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to suppress demonstrations against the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). What Trump is doing is technically unconstitutional for the president can’t send the army to participate in policing.

But the constitutionality of Trump’s actions is secondary to the scale of his ambition. On the face of it, Trump wants to ramp up deportations. He knows that he will have to confront the political leadership of Democrat-controlled cities and states. He will have to overcome public resistance to ICE raids on workplaces, churches, and schools. He will also have to confront some of his own allies in business—in construction, agriculture, and the service sector—who will be deprived of their workforce.

But in many ways, Trump’s use of the military is far more ambitious. He is using the immigration issue as a pretext to expand his control over public institutions and legitimate the unconstitutional suppression of the freedoms of speech and assembly. He has promised to send the National Guard to cities across the United States to suppress protest, and he hasn’t made much of a distinction between violent and non-violent demonstrations.

In other words, this is a form of slow-motion martial law. It is less a declaration than an evolving action.

Trump’s expanding control of the military extends to the foreign policy realm. Despite his promises to learn the lessons of the Iraq War, Trump is now thinking about joining Israel’s war against Iran. He has called on Iran to surrender unconditionally and is considering the use of U.S. bunker-busters to destroy the country’s underground nuclear facilities. Iran has threatened to retaliate against U.S. bases in the Middle East.

Americans are not meekly accepting Trump’s autocratic moves. His military parade coincided with thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations across the country that turned out millions of protestors. These are not partisan events. Many independents and even a few Republicans are appalled at Trump’s flirtation with martial law. And Trump’s threats against Iran have split his own MAGA camp.

Congressional Democrats by and large oppose Trump, but they don’t control enough votes to make much difference. If Trump’s budget bill fails to pass the Senate—it already passed the House by a single vote—it will be because it doesn’t cut enough government services for deficit hawks in the Republican Party.

In California, however, Governor Gavin Newsom has emerged as perhaps the most prominent critic of the president. He has correctly diagnosed the presidential dispatch of the National Guard—without his approval—not just as a powerful violation of the constitution but as the moment when Trump is attempting to seize absolute power. “The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don,” the governor said in a recent speech.

In South Korea, when Yoon Suk-yeol infamously declared martial law in December 2024, parliamentarians and ordinary people immediately fought back. They managed to reverse martial law in a matter of hours, and Yoon was subsequently impeached. The Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment, and new elections were called. One of the parliamentarians who courageously pushed back against martial law, Lee Jae Myung, was elected president this month by a comfortable margin.

Trump knows that a declaration of martial law in the United States would trigger similar—through perhaps not similarly effective—protests. He doesn’t feel the need to make a formal declaration if he can achieve what he wants under the current system. He has already invoked a number of emergencies to assume extraordinary powers.

In South Korea, martial law was undone by public protest. In the United States, Trump will reverse the equation and use martial law to overcome public protest. He anticipates that his current actions—to deport a million people, to cut government services—will unleash massive protests. If he can’t suppress those protests through “ordinary” means, he will use martial law as his trump card.

It might seem an impossible dilemma for the resistance movement in the United States. Don’t protest now for fear that the president will declare martial law or protest now and increase the chances of such a declaration.

Trump projects strength. But an autocrat secure in his power doesn’t organize a military parade on his own birthday. Deep down, Trump knows that a majority of Americans don’t support him, that the courts consistently rule against him, that major institutions in society like universities, the press, and Hollywood hold him contempt. Trump is, in fact, a weak man who doesn’t even have the courage of his (few) convictions. His latest nickname is TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

So, protest is the only answer to Trump’s actions even if it risks a declaration of martial law. It is important to force Trump’s hand and make him say in public what everyone already knows: that he is an autocrat who wants to destroy American democracy.

Hankyoreh, June 18, 2025

The falling out between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would make a grand opera. Two titans of business who entered a political marriage of convenience have had a predictable clash of egos and, instead of parting company privately, have flung mud at each other in public. Coming to the Met in 2026: Philip Glass’ monumental Musk v. Trump.

Don’t mistake this affair for mere entertainment. The deeper issue here is corruption and what happens when collusion goes awry, as it so often does.

The ostensible reason for the rift was Musk’s criticism of Trump’s budget bill, which the industrialist rightly pointed out would add trillions to the national debt. With the bill in danger of foundering in the Senate, Trump can’t afford to have a high-profile critic like Musk standing in the way of what might be his only serious legislative initiative.

This disagreement could have remained at the level of policy debate but instead quickly devolved into something closer to a schoolyard squabble. Musk claimed credit for Trump’s election. Trump pointed to Musk’s consumption of drugs during his DOGE rampage. The South Africa-born tycoon asserted a connection between Trump and infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and went so far as to champion Trump’s impeachment. The president threatened to sever all relations between the federal government and Musk’s enterprises. Musk countered with a proposal to stop running flights for NASA, which would effectively end the transportation of U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.

Both men have since stepped back from the brink (for the time being). Musk removed his Epstein and impeachment tweets from X and even acknowledged that they “went too far.” Trump stopped threatening massive retaliation (except in the case of Musk financially supporting Democrats). And Musk has approved of Trump’s dispatch of the National Guard to California to quash anti-ICE demonstrations.

Trump is famous for forgiving the worst examples of disloyalty—such as J.D. Vance’s comments that Trump was “America’s Hitler” and a “moral disaster”—as long as that person has political/financial clout and is willing to grovel at his feet. Though he certainly meets the first condition, Musk is no groveler. So, don’t expect a reconciliation any time soon.

In fact, if contemporary parallels hold true, Musk should be either hiring more security guards, taking on more accountants to thwart an IRS audit, or preparing to relocate overseas.

If you fall afoul of Viktor Orban in Hungary, you might get frozen out of business deals, but you generally don’t have to fear for your life. Hungary is a member of the European Union and a popular tourist destination. However corrupt and autocratic Orban might be, he’s not a contract killer.

The same can’t be said of Vladimir Putin, who uses murder as a principal mode of dissuasion. The Russian leader arranges the assassination of political rivals (like Boris Nemtsov) to discourage serious electoral challenges. He facilitates the elimination of journalists (like Anna Politkovskaya) to ensure that the media doesn’t poke holes in Kremlin narratives. He oversees the removal of human rights activists (Stanislav Markelov) to send a message to civil society that Russia no longer tolerates “independent” spaces.

The business community initially thought itself safe. Most Russian oligarchs were on board with Putin because of the obvious benefits of doing business with the Kremlin. Of course, if you changed your mind about the Russian leader, as did oligarch Boris Berezovsky, you could expect retribution. He survived two apparent attempts to kill him with car bombs before fleeing to the UK where, in 2013, his death was ruled a suicide.

Even if Berezovsky did in fact kill himself—he was involved in an expensive divorce at the time—the Kremlin still managed to communicate its message: bad things happen to those who cross Vladimir Putin. Putin even created the new category of “death by association.” Several of Berezovsky’s associates—Georgian businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili (heart attack), former deputy director of Aeroflot Nikolai Glushkov (strangled with a dog leash)—were also found dead in London.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, oligarchs started dropping dead left and right. John O’Neill and Sarah Wynne write in The Hill:

Vladislav Avayev, an immensely wealthy banker and government official, was found dead in his Moscow apartment, gun in hand, alongside the bodies of his wife and young daughter, all shot to death. He was described by neighbors as a “happy nerd.” Within 24 hours, Sergey Protosenya, a Russian natural gas oligarch, was found hanged in a Spanish villa. Nearby, his wife and young daughter were hacked and stabbed to death with an axe and a knife, both wiped of fingerprints. Much evidence suggests these were murders at the direction of Putin.

The list goes on: an aviation industry exec died after falling off his yacht in Vladivostok, a sausage magnate died after falling out of a hotel window in India, an oil company CEO died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow. Even non-Russian oligarchs who criticized Putin ended up dying in mysterious circumstances, like Latvian-American financier Dan Rapoport, who perished after falling out of a building in Washington, DC.

If you’re an oligarch and you criticize Putin, you should probably move into a ranch house.

Authoritarian regimes routinely dispatch their enemies. Kim Jong Un famously eliminated his uncle, who’d been possibly plotting to take over. Mohammed bin Salman’’s henchmen took a bone saw to prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the Philippines, under Rodrigo Duterte, more than a dozen outspoken journalists were killed.

Corrupt, semi-democratic states, meanwhile, go after their critics in other ways: squeezing their assets, taking them to court, forcing them out of the country. At the moment, Donald Trump is going down this road. As his dispatch of National Guard troops to Los Angeles demonstrates, he is certainly interested in quashing dissent. But he is generally doing so in more bureaucratic ways—firing federal workers, eliminating funding for NPR and PBS, leaning on universities.

When it comes to the corporate world, Trump has demanded fealty and, in return, has distributed administration positions like expensive party favors. Billionaires Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, and Scott Bessent serve in his cabinet. Several billionaires were given plum ambassadorial positions (Warren Stephens to the UK, Charles Kushner to France). Through the power of his office, he has made lapdogs of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. In the wake of the feud between Trump and Musk, Bill Gates visited the White House, hat in hand, to plead for the resumption of USAID funding.

Musk is perhaps the first high-profile, high-assets apostate. Given the resources at his disposal and his desire to influence elections, an anti-Trump Musk could pose a risk to MAGA Republicans. Ro Khanna (D-CA) even reached out to Musk’s people to see if he could help the Dems in the mid-terms. But bringing the most hated man in America into a party that has its own problems coddling the rich is not going to win any elections.

The Musk Affair is useful in other respects. It is the most prominent example of the corrupt practices of the Trump administration. Trump rewards his loyalists with power and money. He has fired the federal workforce not only to decimate the “deep state” but also to have thousands of new opportunities to distribute favors. The flip side of this patronage system is the punishment of defectors. Putin communicated the price of disloyalty very clearly to the oligarchs who dared to protest the war in Ukraine or the business practices of the Russian government. He has been careful, however, to maintain plausible deniability. Other leaders similarly punish their powerful opponents behind the scenes.

Trump prefers to make his threats in public no matter how unethical the actions might be. The cancelation of federal contracts with Musk’s companies would be as corrupt as the awarding of them in return for his political favors. Because he is an autocrat, Putin can act with impunity when he kills his challengers. Trump also aspires to act with impunity—indeed, his lawyers have argued before the Supreme Court that he has immunity for practically anything he does as president.

Corruption, however, has taken down many a ruler—Ferdinand Marcos, Viktor Yanukovych, Jacob Zuma. This could be Trump’s Achilles’ heel. Citizens tolerate a certain amount of corruption if they themselves are doing okay economically. But once the cuts in government services begin to bite, they will be newly appalled at the politically motivated contracts, the naked grab for money through pyramid scams like meme coins, and all the other pay-to-play games of access in Washington.

Trump can do a lot of damage to Musk and will do so in order to send a message to anyone contemplating disloyalty. But Musk can also do a lot of damage to Trump by amplifying an anti-corruption message through his social media platform. Musk himself is no Alexei Navalny. But if the Musk-Trump war goes hot again after the current ceasefire—and if Musk decides to go public with an insider’s account of the administration’s corrupt practices—it might cause some real damage to the administration.

FPIF, June 11, 2025

Beginning in the late 1980s, Eastern Europe shifted from being a political backwater to a political bellwether. By shrugging off the Soviet yoke and exiting communism, the region pointed toward the future collapse of the Soviet Union and the cresting of a third wave of democratization. The fast-track liberalizations of Eastern Europe in the 1990s encouraged similar bouts of deregulation and marketization elsewhere in the world. The disintegration of Yugoslavia presaged centrifugal conflicts that would engulf Libya, Sudan, and Ukraine.

And if you want to understand the popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the global backlash against liberalism first acquired its distinctive right-wing populist flavor in Eastern Europe, beginning with hapless presidential hopeful Stanislaw Tyminski in 1990. The failure of liberal parties in the region to usher in broad prosperity—and the creation of distinct post-communist classes of haves and have-nots—led directly to the rise of right-wing populist parties and politicians. Even the egalitarian effect of European Union transfers was not enough to prevent the success of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and the Law and Justice Party in Poland.

Today, the region is torn between broadly liberal, pro-EU politicians and their broadly illiberal, nationalist, and xenophobic rivals. What separates the two is often just a percentage or two at the polls. In Romania, a representative of that first group, pro-EU presidential candidate Nicusor Dan, won last week’s election but only after a pair of far-right opponents nearly pulled off an upset victory.

In Poland, meanwhile, the political winds blew in the other direction, as Karol Nawrocki nosed past the pro-EU candidate. It was a very close election, with Nawrocki garnering 50.89 percent of the vote and his opponent getting 49.11 percent. Nawrocki is linked to the right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS), and he has now become a major obstacle in the path of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s plan to bring Poland back into the European mainstream.

Over the last decade, the world has suffered bouts of political whiplash as right-wing populists and their opponents have battled it out at the ballot box. In the United States, Trump has come back for a second term after besting liberal Kamala Harris while the progressive standard-bearer Lula has returned to office in Brazil after the defeat of “Trump of the Tropics” Jair Bolsonaro. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, after leaving government in disgrace in 2019, won the general elections last year (only to be squeezed out of power by three other parties joining together to form a coalition government). After elections this week, South Korean progressives will return to government after losing by a tiny margin last time around.

To be sure, some autocrats— like Orban, Narendra Modi in India, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador—have proven almost election-proof. And some progressive parties, like Morena in Mexico, have also remained in power across terms.

But the polarization of politics in Eastern Europe, which has already produced wild swings at the polls, points to a new era of instability when election results are hard to predict because the electorate is so evenly divided and the society so starkly polarized. Is governance even possible in such a see-saw world?

Let’s take a closer look at Poland to see what the future of democracy looks like.

The Law and Justice Party (PiS) patterned its remaking of Poland on the example of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Socially conservative, it promised a more aggressively Christian Poland that would be less tolerant of homosexuality and immigrants. Since taking power in 2005, it followed Orban’s model by exerting more control over the judicial sector, systematically restricting media freedoms, and pushing back against perceived interference by European institutions.

Unlike its libertarian counterparts elsewhere in the world, PiS actually favored more government involvement in the economy—to direct resources to an underfunded health sector, encourage pro-family policies, institute a minimum wage, and provide tax exemptions for young workers. These economic policies were a thank-you to Poland B, the folks who didn’t benefit from the liberalization of the 1990s and who exacted their revenge by putting PiS in office.

The other element that distinguished PiS from its regional counterparts was its intense animosity toward Russia. Part of this was general Russophobia that dates back to the tsar’s enthusiastic participation in the dismemberment of Poland in the eighteenth century, the Soviet attempt to reoccupy parts of the country in 1919, and Stalin’s later grip over the government in Warsaw. But part of the animosity is of more recent vintage. In 2010, one of the founders of PiS, Lech Kaczynski, died in a plane crash in Smolensk, in western Russia, which was the result of human error but which some Poles are convinced was a Russian plot.

So, while Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico align themselves with the illiberalism of Vladimir Putin, Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw, who continues to pull PiS strings in the background, will have nothing to do with the Kremlin.

In 2023, PiS came out on top for a third straight parliamentary election. But it didn’t win enough seats to form a government. Donald Tusk, who returned to Poland after a stint as the president of the European Council, led his Civic Platform party into a coalition government with the Left and the Christian Democratic Third Way party.

Tusk has subsequently steered Poland away from illiberalism and back into the good graces of Brussels. The EU has once again opened the spigot of funding for Poland. But other promised reforms have been hard to push through because the government doesn’t have a parliamentary majority sufficient to overcome a presidential veto. And the Polish president, the PiS-aligned Andrzej Duda, loved to use his veto power.

That’s why this week’s presidential election was so important. If a liberal had won the presidency, the Tusk-led government could have finally passed many of its promised reforms. Instead, to the dismay of Tusk and others, Karol Nawrocki continued the PiS winning streak, which means that the party will control the presidency from 2015 to at least 2030.

A conservative historian and former boxer, Nawrocki has little power outside of his ability to wield a veto. But that’s a veritable superpower. He will likely use it to block abortion access and LGBTQ rights. During his campaign, he shredded a copy of Gender Queer: A Memoir to demonstrate his commitment to “family values.”

Unlike Orban, he supports Poland’s actions on behalf of Ukraine. Like Orban, he is anti-immigrant, including the million or so Ukrainian refugees who fled to Poland after the Russian invasion in 2022.

Nawrocki represents a beachhead for the MAGA movement in Poland. Trump endorsed him. And the Conservative Political Action Conference held its first meeting in Poland in the week leading up to the election—to give Nawrocki a last-minute boost. Homeland Security head Kristi Noem appeared at the gathering to announce that Nawrocki and other European politicians in attendance “will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values.”

Nawrocki has made his outsider status an advantage. He’s a first-time politician and, at his campaign’s outset, half of Polish voters had never heard of him. Like Trump, he somehow managed to survive several scandals—including allegations of procuring prostitutes for clients—that would have killed the careers of other politicians.

Perhaps his greatest asset, however, was that he wasn’t associated with the current Tusk government. In February 2025, nearly 60 percent of Poles were dissatisfied with Tusk and his coalition partners.

The far right, when it attains power, doesn’t observe the niceties of the law. In Poland, PiS went straight for the judicial jugular to stack the courts in its favor. Trump issues unconstitutional executive decrees. Daniel Noboa handed out money to essentially buy the recent election in Ecuador.

Liberals, on the other hand, are generously more scrupulous about obeying the law (at least in comparison). They play by the rules, which means that they must somehow restore some semblance of democracy within the legal constraints of democracy. It’s as if one side digs a giant hole with a backhoe without bothering to file an environmental impact statement or inform the owners of the land. The other side scrambles to meet all the legal requirements of filling in the hole, and then is given only a trowel to do the job.

That’s certainly been the case in Poland. PiS attacked independent judges and tried to silence critical journalists. Tusk, meanwhile, has been bound by democratic rules (the presidential veto) and democratic procedures (the presidential election).

The far right generally doesn’t give a fig about democracy. Right-wing ideologue Curtis Yarvin once called for “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” which put him on the margins of discourse in 2008 when he published his manifesto under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug. Today, his proposal to cede all power to a CEO-in-chief has become a near-reality, and Yarvin has become a veritable MAGA whisperer with close links to J.D. Vance, among others.

Unfortunately, however, defending democracy isn’t necessary a winning strategy for progressives. Satisfaction with U.S. democracy actually increased after Donald Trump’s election last November. To win, progressives have to focus not just on the plutocrats or Trump’s violations of civil rights but on the intersection of the two: corruption.

Anti-corruption campaigns are populist, cut across ideological categories, and capitalize on the desire of people to “throw the bums out.” Trump and his allies around the world are corrupt, above all. Voters should be more exercised about the breaking of political rules but in practice they’re angrier about the breaking of economic rules and the outright theft of government resources.

The other takeaway from Poland is the continued popularity of an economic agenda that truly benefits the have-nots. One of Duda’s vetoes, just last month, was to shoot down a Tusk effort to reduce health care revenue. When will liberals learn? Nawrocki’s insistence during his campaign on an agenda of economic populism provided him with just enough of amargin of victory.

An anti-corruption platform married to a social democratic agenda would be a killer combo for progressive candidates. Many countries are teetering politically, capable of being nudged one way or another by a small percentage of voters. Can left and liberals find a way to work together to fashion broadly popular campaigns—as in France in 2024 and South Korea in 2025—to prevent MAGA forces from taking over the world?

FPIF, June 4, 2025

The clean energy transition that the Biden administration touted as the focus of its industrial policy required large amounts of mineral inputs. Batteries for electric vehicles depend on lithium, solar panels contain gallium and molybdenum, and powerful magnets in wind turbines can’t be built without rare earth elements. Biden’s landmark legislation, such as the 2022 Inflation Adjustment Act, effectively resurrected industrial policy in the United States but this time on the basis of a shift away from fossil fuels.

Donald Trump, since taking office in early 2025, has swung U.S. policy back again toward oil, gas, and coal. But the Trump administration is no less interested in securing access to minerals. After all, the same “critical minerals” necessary for the Green transition are coveted by the Pentagon for use in nearly all high-tech weapon systems. The United States depends on foreign sourcing for nearly all of these mineral inputs. And the country that controls the lion’s share of these resources—as well as the processing of them—is China. The Pentagon is particularly uncomfortable with China’s potential to hold major U.S. weapons systems hostage.

Two regions that have figured prominently in Donald Trump’s mineral ambitions are Ukraine and Greenland. These two areas, one a country at war and the other a semi-autonomous possession of Denmark, couldn’t be more different. Greenland is the world’s largest island. Covered mostly with ice, it has a population of fewer than 60,000 people. Ukraine has a smaller land mass but is a major industrialized country and a top agricultural producer, with a current population of about 37 million people.

From Donald Trump’s point of view, the two regions share a key attribute: they are, in the lexicon of Wall Street, assets ripe for a takeover. Ukraine has been weakened by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and has come to rely heavily on U.S. military assistance and intelligence. Greenland, without a military of its own, has been angling for independence from Denmark.

During his first 100 days in office, Trump spoke of acquiring Greenland and didn’t rule out a military intervention. With Ukraine, the U.S. president complained that the country was taking U.S. weapons without giving back anything in return. In one of his classic transactional moves, Trump proposed that Ukraine pay its “debt” with the mineral resources beneath its soil.

Trump’s interest in both regions is not purely mineral.

“When President Trump has said several times now that the United States is going to get Greenland one way or another, it’s not always clear what the primary driver is,” explains Klaus Dodds, “At times, for example, we’ve been told it’s on the basis of international security. On other occasions, minerals and energy security have been explicitly cited. Actually, what perhaps was underpinning all of this was a desire to make sure that China never established any kind of economic, political, infrastructural foothold in Greenland.”

As for Ukraine, the agreement over minerals that was finally reached at the end of April didn’t ultimately contain a provision requiring Ukraine to pay down its “debt” with minerals. Rather, it spelled out in vague detail how the sale of the country’s minerals—and other natural resources like fossil fuels—would go toward economic development under the joint supervision of the United States and Ukraine. The Trump administration also hoped the deal would be a preliminary step in reaching a ceasefire in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

From Ukraine’s point of view, however, the agreement has some problematic elements. “There is nothing in this agreement regarding the contribution of the United States in the form of investment in a fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine,” explains Volodymyr Vlasiuk. “Also, there is nothing in this agreement about Ukraine capturing the maximum value of the minerals extracted in the territory of Ukraine.”

As both president and businessman, Donald Trump is using the power of his company (the United States) to strong-arm weaker partners into lopsided agreements. In Greenland’s case, he is even considering a hostile takeover. As Dodds and Vlasiuk explained at a Global Just Transition webinar in early May, U.S. policy has as much to do with the acquisition of valuable minerals as it does with the U.S. effort to achieve a geopolitical edge, primarily over China.

The United States has a longstanding military relationship with Greenland that dates to 1941 when, after Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, Washington sent troops to the island to construct air bases and weather stations. A decade late, a 1951 treaty gave Washington the formal right to build military bases there and move around freely as long as it gave notice to both Greenland and Denmark. The United States currently maintains the Pituffik airbase—previously Thule—that serves as an early-warning system for missile attacks. After a jet bomber carrying four nuclear bombs crashed onto the ice in the northern part of Greenland in 1968, it was revealed that the United States was also using the Thule base as part of its nuclear strategy, with tacit Danish consent.

Geopolitics and minerals were a dual priority from the beginning. “During the Second World War and in the early years of the Cold War, the United States was well aware of the strategic resource potential of Greenland,” Klaus Dodds points out. “And that partly explains why Harry Truman offered to purchase the island in 1946. At that time, the interest was largely in cryolite, which was essential to the manufacture of aluminum.”

A mining operation in Ivituut, the largest source of naturally occurring cryolite, sent 86,000 tons of the mineral to the United States and Canada in 1942. The mine closed in the mid-1980s. Much of the wealth from the sale of cryolite ended up in Denmark, which remains a point of tension between the island and the Danish government.

But that conflict pales in comparison to the disruption that Donald Trump has caused, first with his stated desire during his first term to buy the island, and then with his continued threats to acquire Greenland when he returned to power in 2025. In both cases, he has been rebuffed by both Denmark and Greenland.

Again, minerals seem to be of great interest to Trump, in this case the promise of critical minerals, including rare earth elements. According to a Danish study, the island has 31 of the 34 minerals identified by the EU as critical.

But accessing those minerals will not be easy. “There’s a long history of mining and extraction in Greenland,” Dodds explains. “If President Trump thinks that critical minerals or rare earths are going to be exploited at some point during his second administration, he’s likely to be disappointed. Mining, particularly in remote, challenging areas, is a long-term project. And Greenland is a textbook example of why these things are challenging, why they’re often expensive, and why also politics can complicate things.”

Greenland offers a number of physical challenges. It is very cold, and sites might be accessible only part of the year, depending on location. The mines are likely to be remote, and there isn’t much in the way of infrastructure to access those mines. There is a skills shortage as well on the island.

Then there’s the bureaucracy. “If you look at the experience of licensing, which the government of Greenland is very much in control of, the vast majority of companies and entities that have taken up some kind of license have ended up being disappointed,” Dodds adds. “That’s true of oil and gas. That’s also true of other minerals.”

Greenland currently only has two operational mines. Companies have invested in other mines, and some have spectacularly failed, like the effort of the Australian outfit Energy Transition Minerals that, with Chinese investors, plowed $100 million into a rare earth element mine. Because these minerals are often intermingled with uranium, community opposition to the environmental consequences of this particular enterprise led the government to pull the plug. The company is now suing either to get approval to resume operations or to get compensation to the tune of four times Greenland’s annual GDP.

Many Greenlanders want independence from Denmark, a trend that Trump seems to want to exploit. “If Greenland were to become independent, many Europeans will worry that the United States will try to shape that independence or make sure that it becomes an independent island state under very, very close U.S. supervision,” Dodds points out. Meanwhile, Greenland retains a lot of autonomy short of independence, “and government ministers there have continued to stress that Greenland is open for business and that openness does not necessarily preclude Beijing. So, I predict that American pressure on Greenland and Denmark will continue.”

Donald Trump spent a lot of time on his presidential campaign complaining about all the weapons the Biden administration was supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. As president, Trump became fixated on getting Ukraine to pay off the “debt” it had supposedly accumulated from these deliveries of arms. When apprised of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, he began to push Ukraine to sign a deal that would deliver to the United States at least some of the profits from those extracted minerals.

Ukraine holds as much as 5 percent of the world’s supply of critical raw materials, though what is known about Ukraine’s mineral wealth comes largely from Soviet-era geological exploration.  It’s one of the top five countries in terms of its graphite deposits, and it contains one-third of Europe’s lithium. It also has significant amounts of titanium and rare earth elements. According to Forbes Ukraine, the total value of this mineral wealth is nearly $15 trillion.

“We have to be very careful about such a figure,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk pointed out. “This is the whole value of all the deposits of all the minerals in Ukraine. The value of critical minerals is much less than this.”

Vlasiuk divides these critical minerals into three categories: for batteries (lithium, graphite, manganese), for semiconductors (gallium, germanium, metallic silicon), and for strategic construction (titanium, zirconium, hafnium, vanadium). Ukraine has a significant portion of these materials: in the case of both lithium and graphite, for instance, Ukraine has roughly 4-5 percent of the world reserves.

All these minerals add up to a lot of potential money. The first group, Vlasiuk estimates, is worth about $200 billion, the second about $44 billion, and the last about $12 billion. Together, that adds up to about $250 billion—a considerable figure, but considerably less than $15 trillion. Also, some of the deposits are in the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.

Three factors make Ukraine’s deposits appealing, not just to the United States but to the European Union and to China. The resources are available in good quantities and of sufficient quality for industrial processing. Because of Ukraine’s infrastructure—transportation, energy—the deposits are relatively easy to access (at least, those not in the occupied territories). “We can get easy access to these deposits, maybe by constructing 5-10 kilometers of road or adding a few kilometers to the electricity grid,” Vlasiuk added. “This is in contrast, for instance, to Siberia or Greenland.”

Finally, Ukraine offers minerals at a competitive cost and the mining projects will be economically efficient.

But processed materials are worth a great deal more than raw materials. If Ukraine produces semi-finished products with these minerals, it could boost the total value to $678 billion, Vlasiuk estimates. Meanwhile, finished products would yield nearly $1.4 trillion. Ukraine is already involved in the production of electrolytes, separators, and graphite rods for electric smelting furnaces, and could supply the nearby European Union. “So, it’s very important to capture the value added through this downstream process,” he concludes.

But much depends on the recent agreement signed with Washington and the resulting United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The Ukrainian parliament approved the deal unanimously—but only after the objectionable sections of earlier proposals were removed. In this final version, the United States has committed to investing capital in Ukraine to build up the extractive sector—including gas and oil—and all revenues for the first decade will be reinvested in Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, gets preferential access to what’s produced.

Behind all of this maneuvering lies China. The United States has two primary concerns: the control that China exerts over the critical minerals supply chain and the spread of its geopolitical influence in places like Ukraine and Greenland.

“President Trump has been very clear that he thinks the United States faces an existential threat in the form of China,” Klaus Dodds notes. “Trump absolutely wants to keep China out of Greenland. Remember, Greenland did flirt with Chinese investment. There was talk at one stage about China investing in airports there and maybe even purchasing an abandoned naval station.”

Shift the focus away from minerals and toward seafood and China suddenly becomes a lot more significant. “China has next to no physical presence In Greenland, full stop,” he continues. “But the most important export of Greenland is seafood, and China is the key market. If Greenland wants to become an independent country at some point, and I believe it does, then it’s got to do two things. One is to find a replacement for the block grant, which is an annual transfer of about 500 million euros from Denmark. Second, you don’t want to alienate unnecessarily your biggest consumer of seafood.”

China is also a key partner for Ukraine. “China is the second biggest external trade partner after the European Union,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk reports. “After Russia disappeared from our radar, China became a major consumer of Ukrainian foodstuffs—wheat, corn, sunflower oil.” China has in the past offered loans to Ukraine, such as a $3 billion “loan for corn” deal in 2012 and a $15 billion loan for construction in 2015. During the current war, however, China has focused on partnering with Russia, though it also remains poised to be part of Ukrainian reconstruction once the war ends.

“China’s a powerful country, and this creation of trade barriers by Mr. Trump is not a very good step,” Vlasiuk continues. “From the economic point of view, nobody benefits from this, including the United States. Such barriers make it difficult for countries to benefit from world trade, to achieve an economic impact from globalization.”

He adds that “it’s quite obvious that the United States and the European Union have lost time while China has made a very impressive step forward to reach these deposits and to take the control of global supply chains. China continues to look around the world for more deposits. It is very active in the Africa and the Middle East. And, of course, there is closer cooperation between China and Russia. There are a lot of Chinese workers in Russia. China is profiting a lot from buying Russian natural resources at a cheap price. Putin wants China to invest in the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, but so far China has refused. But I am sure that China will use this war to reach deposits in Russia, which will make China even more powerful in controlling the value chain of these critical minerals.”

China is not the only geopolitical consideration. For Donald Trump, the acquisition of territory is an obsession. Trump considers Greenland to be integral to the U.S. sphere of influence.

“It’s worth recalling that this is a president who likes maps, globes, charts,” Klaus Dodds points out. “As everybody knows, the Mercator projection makes Greenland look even bigger than it is. It’s three times the size of Texas, but it’s probably not quite as big as Donald Trump thinks it is. Trump wants to be immortalized in U.S. history as the president who made America bigger: the Trump Purchase, if you will.”

The Cold War pitted two superpowers in a race for resources around the world, particularly in the Global South. Today, this tension is being replayed by the United States and China. “To a certain extent, there’s a certain sort of deja vu to all of this,” Dodds continues. “The names change, but the impulse remains the same: to create ‘supply chain resilience,’ which is the term we use nowadays. With the Kennedy administration, for instance, when it came to places like Ghana, bauxite loomed large, for aluminum smelting, which was also linked to dam construction because of the enormous amount of power and cooling required. Today, it’s the Democratic Republic of Congo where there is a scramble for influence that involves China, the European Union, the United States, and also regional actors such as Rwanda.”

On the Ukrainian side, geopolitics boils down to defeating Russia and moving closer to the European Union. The mineral agreement “gives Trump the instrument to continue to support Ukraine with military equipment,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk points out. “Without this cooperation, the risk would increase of a cessation of U.S. military aid.”

But the agreement could contain some potential pitfalls for Ukraine. The United States could still try to condition future military assistance on the delivery of an equal amount of mineral wealth as a quid pro quo. Or Washington could focus on the extraction of primary materials and discourage Ukraine from processing the ore or producing finished products, thus depriving the country of considerable value. “In terms of the operation of this fund, Ukraine and the Ukrainian people should benefit as the owners of these deposits and derive the maximum value added in Ukraine,” Vlasiuk maintains.

Also, he continues, “it’s very important that this agreement should not create any barriers for Ukrainian access to European Union. Our European Union colleagues would also like to make a win-win project in the exploration and processing of these deposits. But with this agreement, the Americans would like to take a dominant position in order to choose the most attractable deposits for future processing. So, we have a very difficult job ahead of us. We need to be careful. We would like the West and East to cooperate and for there not to be a split between democratic and not-so-democratic countries, especially in such an explosive form as on our territory. But it’s not our choice.”

Although most pictures of Greenland feature sparkling ice, polar bears, and imposing mountain range, the Arctic is not pristine.

“When you look at ice cores taken from the Greenlandic ice sheet, what you discover is a record of traces of lead and other pollutants going back to the Roman era,” Klaus Dodds reports. “Greenland has borne the brunt in one form or another of past centuries of extraction and use of various minerals, which are trapped in Greenlandic ice. Because of melting, these pollutants are making their way through the island and into the neighboring sea.”

Then there’s the more recent history of mining. “There were lead and zinc mines in Greenland going back 50 or 60 years,” he continues. “And they are still causing pollution-like consequences, particularly in certain parts of southern Greenland. There is a legacy of toxic mining. People haven’t forgotten this, and they’re living with those consequences because in some cases those mines were not that far away from communities. So, there was a very public shift, a visceral reaction against uranium extraction in the aftermath of a longer history of unhappiness over the toxic consequences of mining.”

On the labor question, Greenland has a small population. Any significant mining operation will require foreign laborers. “This is not unique to Greenland, but it does create anxieties about importing the labor force,” Dodds notes. “Where are these people going to be staying? How are they going to be supported?”

The European Union’s environmental standards apply to Greenland (through Denmark). But they also exert influence on Ukraine, which hopes to accede to the EU as quickly as possible.

“The development of mining and processing of critical minerals is not friendly to the environment,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk points out. “Especially, for example, the processing of lithium ore in the form of spodumene concentrate. In our business plan, we mention that pollution is the costlier part of the project. But now, after seven years, we have discovered that there are much more effective technologies that ensure that this processing is less dangerous for the environment. We want to cooperate with more technologically developed countries so that they will invest as much as possible in the technology that reduces this pollution in Ukraine.”

Vlasiuk adds that Ukrainians are often well aware of environmental consequences and have mounted protests accordingly. “So, it’s very important to have political support and local support and to explain the benefits and that the pollution will not be dangerous for either health or social stability.” Ukraine, he notes, also has a skilled labor force and specialists who can do the work.

With the exception of mining corporations owned by the state—in China, Vietnam, Tanzania, Chile—private corporations are responsible for the bulk of mineral extraction around the world: BHP Group (Australia), Rio Tinto (Australia-UK), Glencore (UK), Vale (Brazil), Freeport-McMoRan (U.S.).

“Greenland in the recent past has had no shortage of companies interested in both minerals and oil and gas,” Klaus Dodds says. “Exploration licensing over the last 20-odd years has been genuinely a multinational affair: North American companies, Australian, European.” Some of those companies have included Green Rock, Amaroq, and Critical Minerals Corporation. Most recently, the government inked a deal with a Danish-French consortium to mine anorthosite, a substitute for bauxite.

“In 2021,” Dodds continues, “when the elected government of Greenland moved away from uranium mining, it left some companies rather exposed and, in at least one case, profoundly irritated by the loss of millions of dollars spent on drilling and investment.”

Corporations are also not the most reliable sources on the value of their enterprises. “This is not an island that has been lacking when it comes to mapping, surveying, and resource valuation,” he adds. “In many parts of the world, and Greenland is absolutely typical, there is a tendency on the part of commercial enterprises to engage in boosterism. When you read various estimates about what the rare earth value might be of Greenland, you might alight upon figures of $30 billion, $70 billion. I would treat this with a degree of healthy skepticism. It wouldn’t be the first time that companies have tried to talk up the value of their licenses and their investment.”

Outside corporations are also lining up to have the opportunity to access Ukraine’s mineral wealth—particularly because of the accessibility of these deposits. “Maybe I’ll not give you the concrete names of the companies,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk says, “but I can say that companies from the United States, Germany, and Japan are interested a lot in investing in Ukraine deposits. In 2013-4, both Shell and Chevron entered Ukraine to explore and extract shale gas.” The Chinese, meanwhile, have been interested in Ukrainian coal.

What hasn’t happened yet, according to Vlasiuk, is Russian exploitation of mineral resources in the occupied territories. However, in January, Russian forces occupied Shevchenko in the Donbas, home to one of Ukraine’s largest lithium deposits.

In terms of the new U.S.-Ukraine mineral agreement, it will be the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) that will serve as the U.S. partner along with Ukraine’s State Organization Agency on Support of Public-Private Partnership. “As I understand, this financial corporation as a state entity can also invest and will have very close contact to other U.S. investors,” Vlasiuk concludes.

FPIF, May 28, 2025