The Social World

Category: International

  • Trump was right to snub Johannesburg’s G20 summit

    Trump was right to snub Johannesburg’s G20 summit

    The rule of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa since 1994 has been marked by a widening chasm between poor black people, the majority and a tiny black elite, who get richer and richer. A quarter of our children are so badly malnourished that their brains are stunted for life. Amid this terrible hunger, President Cyril Ramaphosa lives in fabulous splendor. He is said to be worth 6 billion rand (around $350 million). He has mansions in the rich parts of South Africa. He has a fleet of luxury cars. He owns a game farm of 11,120 acres. Yet before the G20 meeting of international leaders in Johannesburg, he wrote in his newsletter, “Inequality is one of the most pressing global issues of our time.” 

    This G20, purported to promote international cooperation and economic growth, was rescued from being the usual instantly forgettable fest of posture and pontification by President Trump, who by snubbing it turned it into a resounding success. This gave Ramaphosa a huge boost within the mainstream media, who made it seem as if he had told Trump to go to hell – when all he actually said was that Trump’s absence was “regrettable.”

    Trump has done good, bad and mad things; he acts on impulse, without thinking. He is profoundly ignorant about South Africa. He boycotted G20 because he says “bad things” are happening here, which is true but they are not the things he cites. There is no “white genocide” in South Africa. White farmers are murdered at a higher rate than the population at large, often horribly, and Ramaphosa did lie outright in 2018 when he told Bloomberg media, “There are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa” – at the time, the South African police had reported 1,700 such murders. But this is not genocide. 

    No doubt Joseph Stiglitz, who attended G20, nodded his head in agreement with Ramaphosa’s condemnation of inequality. But Ramaphosa’s record and the state of South Africa under his presidency reveal that he is not as concerned with inequality as he proclaims, and has in fact expanded the gulf between the rich and the poor.

    Ramaphosa has passed laws that have stifled the economy and caused massive inequality. Like the rest of the ANC, he hates the West and cheers its enemies but still expects its favors. Posing as a moderate, he has promoted the “National Democratic Revolution”: the foundation of ANC ideology, which wants to turn South Africa into a communist state. He passed the Expropriation Act, which allows the state to confiscate without compensation any property provided that it “is in the public interest.” He has presided over the country’s highest unemployment and lowest economic growth. But he is admired by many world leaders. He is charming and personable; he has a beaming smile, and speaks with soft reasonableness.

    A central plank of ANC policy is BEE, which in name is “Black Economic Empowerment” but in practice is “Black Elite Enrichment.” BEE has done great harm to poor black people. Ramaphosa, himself enormously enriched by BEE, states, “BEE is here to stay!” The Rooiwal Wastewater Treatment plant, north of Pretoria, was failing, sending contaminated water to black residents. In the past, a competent contractor would have repaired the plant at the lowest cost. Instead, in 2019, a BEE contractor, Edwin Sodi, was appointed for 295 million rand. Sodi had no competence for this but was an “ANC benefactor.” He didn’t try to repair the plant. He donated some of the money to the ANC and spent the rest on luxuries for himself, Ferraris, mansion improvements, gifts for girlfriends and so on. Contamination worsened. Over 20 black people died of cholera.  

    The record of all ANC presidents except Mandela on international human rights is deplorable. They applaud African tyrants such as Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe who slaughter black people. Ramaphosa is the worst. After the atrocity in Israel on October 7, 2023, many in the ANC cheered loudly for Hamas. When Israel finally retaliated, the ANC charged her with “genocide” at the International Court of Justice, with Ramaphosa posing as a brave hero. Whatever you think of Israel’s action in Gaza, it is not genocide – no more than what Trump calls South Africa’s “white genocide.” But real genocide against black Africans is happening right now, in Sudan, with the full approval of Ramaphosa and the ANC. 

    In 2015, Omar al-Bashir, then Sudanese leader, visited South Africa. He had presided over the genocide of about 300,000 black Africans by Jihadist Arabs. It was the world’s worse humanitarian crisis – and still is. Bashir was warmly welcomed by the ANC. The International Criminal Court asked the ANC to arrest him. They declined. Bashir was later overthrown by other Jihadist Arabs, who broke out in civil war against each other, laying waste to the country, starving millions, continuing the genocide. The worst killer was Mohamed Dagalo, leader of the Rapid Support Forces. In January 2024, he visited President Ramaphosa at his official residence in Pretoria. Ramaphosa greeted him warmly, gave him his big smile, practically groveled before him and called him “Your Excellency,” even though he had not taken power. He posed for a happy picture with him, holding his hand. 

    The once great city of Johannesburg is disintegrating under ANC misrule. Water, sanitation, electricity and roads are crumbling away. Those parts that the G20 leaders would see were hastily spruced up. Now the leaders have departed, celebrating a marvelous G20 and saluting Cyril Ramaphosa as a great African hero who defied Donald Trump.

  • The downfall of Thomas King, Canada’s most influential ‘indigenous’ man

    The downfall of Thomas King, Canada’s most influential ‘indigenous’ man

    It’s an awkward time in the upper echelons of the Canadian cultural establishment. It’s come to light that influential indigenous author and former broadcaster Thomas King, isn’t actually indigenous at all.

    It matters, because King has spent much of his 82 years claiming to speak on behalf of the indigenous peoples of North America, and his role in shaping Canadian perception of their First Nations has been enormous. His books have served as standard texts in Canadian schools and universities for over 20 years.

    Born in the US, King came to Canada in 1980 to teach native studies at the University of Lethbridge. His claim to be indigenous was made in all good faith, he says, believing on his mother’s say-so (but little other evidence, it seems) that his father, who abandoned the family early on, was part Cherokee.

    Whether it was in good faith or not, when King came to Canada, he was able not only to dine out on his purported indigeneity, but to make it the central facet of a lucrative career. He taught indigenous studies, but also wrote books about being indigenous. They were acclaimed and assigned to curriculums across the country, partly, perhaps, for their quality of writing, but chiefly for their subject matter and authorship. Shakespeare was crowded out of the classroom, but there was still room for Thomas King.

    Awards and literary prizes were heaped upon him, including some earmarked for First Nations writers; this is Canada after all, where every government form invites you to check the First Nations box for preferential treatment. His work made it to radio and screen, and he became a darling of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, hosting The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour and appearing as the first indigenous speaker at the prestigious Massey Lecture series. His promotion to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2020 recognized him for “enduring contributions to the preservation and recognition of Indigenous culture, as one of North America’s most acclaimed literary figures.”

    King was about to break into the world of opera with an adaptation of his Indians on Vacation novel when news broke that he was, after all, just an ordinary writer like everyone else – and the Edmonton Opera decided to cancel.

    It seems there had been rumors for years that King wasn’t really indigenous. In the end, it was the genealogists at the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds who got to him, an indigenous organization dedicated to outing “Pretendians,” though King says he doesn’t deserve to be classed with that group, because his was an honest mistake. He accepts the Tribal Alliance findings, he announced in an op-ed published in Canada’s Globe and Mail – a masterpiece of damage control that seemed to leave most readers feeling not outraged but sorry for him, if the comment section is any indication.

    When you look at the cultural impact of his work, however, it’s hard to be sorry that he has now been discredited. The work of Thomas King is not calculated to spread peace among the nations.

    Take this bit from The Inconvenient Indian, which was for a time one of the most widely read books in Canada: “Whites want Indians to disappear, and they want Indians to assimilate, and they want Indians to understand that everything that Whites have done was for their own good because Native people, left to their own devices, couldn’t make good decisions for themselves.” Er, all white people want this? How does he know?

    Or this tendentious passage, about the attitude of Europeans to natives: “By the late 19th century, the Indian Problem was still a problem… Yes, most of the tribes had been safely locked up on reservations and reserves. Yes, Indians were dying off in satisfying numbers from disease and starvation. Yes, all of this was encouraging…”

    Far more egregious is King’s treatment of residential schools. He alleges, without a source, that “up to 50 percent” of the estimated 150,000 children who attended residential schools in Canada “died from disease, malnutrition, neglect and abuse.” But this now appears to be wildly inaccurate. According to subsequent research presented by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of which King would certainly have since seen, the proportion of children who died of any cause while attending residential schools was between 2 and 4 percent. That’s an enormous difference. A journalist in 2017 called him out – but this writer was unable to find any acknowledgement of the error.

    This is propaganda, not history. Yet The Inconvenient Indian was read and reviewed favorably everywhere. And consider the consequences: how quickly Canadians believed the unsubstantiated mass grave narrative that swept through the media in 2021, and how easily the Canadian government shrugged off anti-Christian attacks and said the anger which led to the burning of over 100 churches was “understandable.” Even today, a Canadian MP wants to make “downplaying” the residential schools deaths a criminal offense.

    King says he’s not going to apologize for sincerely presenting himself as indigenous. All right, but what about an apology for saturating Canada with ahistorical propaganda? That would be far more to the point.

  • Fact-checking the Venezuela war hawks 

    Fact-checking the Venezuela war hawks 

    As the US Navy remains primed for action in the Southern Caribbean, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro prepares for what could be an American attempt to remove him. And as President Trump alternates between calling Maduro on the phone and authorizing air strikes, a bevy of misinformation is being peddled by public figures with an agenda. There are so many claims and counter-claims on the air waves right now that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.

    A sizable chunk of this disinformation is of course being sold by Maduro himself, a man who has learned from his predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chávez, that it’s easier to blame the United States for all of your problems than own up to your own catastrophic policy errors. Maduro’s biggest fraud occurred in the summer of 2024, when he lost the Venezuelan presidential election to former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia in astounding fashion but claimed victory anyway.

    Maduro, however, is hardly the only one throwing falsehoods into the air. The Venezuelan opposition movement led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado and a vocal group of far-right Venezuelan exiles in Miami are just as guilty. Machado, whose entire career has been devoted to ending the Chavismo politics that have ruled Venezuela for a quarter-century, has given countless interviews in the American press about how Maduro rigged the 2020 US presidential election, unleashed the Tren de Aragua gang and directed a massive criminal organization dubbed the Cartel de los Soles, with the express purpose of weakening America by turning its citizens into drug addicts. “Everybody knows that Venezuela is today the main channel of cocaine,” Machado told CNN last month, “and that this is a business that has been run by Maduro.”

    Machado is hardly the only one making claims designed to push the Trump administration into military action. Emmanuel Rincón, a writer and activist, alleged on Fox News this week that Maduro declared war on the United States long ago and is “one of the main architects” of the drug epidemic in the US Ryan Berg of the Center for Strategic and International Studies went on the same network and called Maduro a dire threat who was turning Venezuela into a Russian and Chinese colony only 600 miles from the US mainland.

    It also sounds quite scary until you turn off the noise and start dealing with the facts. The truth is that proponents of regime change are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Their aim is to inflate the threat, not educate the public.

    Take Maduro’s involvement in the drug trade and his supposed control of Cartel de los Soles as a prime example. Yes, Maduro’s regime is implicated in drug smuggling. We know this because several high-profile regime figures, including Maduro himself, have been indicted by the US Justice Department on various drug-related charges. Maduro is currently wanted by the FBI and has a $50 million bounty for information leading to his capture. Some senior Venezuelan officials and Maduro family members have been implicated in cocaine trafficking as well; two of Maduro’s nephews were prosecuted for cocaine distribution in 2017 and sentenced to 18 years in prison (they were later released in a prisoner exchange).

    But the notion that Maduro is giving orders to the region’s drug trafficking networks gives the former bus driver and union leader far too much credit. Indeed, the so-called Cartel of the Sons that Maduro supposedly leads isn’t even a cartel in the traditional sense of the word; it has no top-down structure or hierarchy of any kind. Command-and-control is lacking. Those who have studied drug trafficking for decades essentially refer to it as a loose, relatively laissez-faire connection between Colombian cocaine traffickers and Venezuelan army officers, who look the other way and take a cut of the drug shipments transiting Venezuelan territory for export to Europe and the United States. While this morally disturbing and certainly criminal, it’s not exactly a shocking development: corrupt politicians and officers in Latin America have participated in similar arrangements for decades. And the phenomenon is not exclusive to Venezuela – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was feted by the first Trump administration as a major partner in Central America, ran a narco-state himself. For Maduro, dabbling in the drug business is likely less about attacking the United States as the Trump administration claims and more about giving his support base the opportunity to access criminal rents to get rich, thereby binding their economic fortunes to his political longevity. In other words, it’s a survival strategy, not a grand conspiracy.

    Another key question should be put into perspective: is Venezuela the central node in the drug trade? Listen to Machado and her supporters and you could easily think that cutting Maduro down to size would magically win the war on drugs. But this is laughable. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own statistics, only 8 percent of the cocaine heading to the United States transits the so-called Caribbean Corridor, where Venezuela is located. The vast majority, 74 percent, is shipped from Ecuador and Colombia’s Pacific coast. The 2025 DEA drug threat assessment report didn’t even bother to mention Venezuela in the context of drug trafficking, which is a curious omission for an administration that frequently describes Maduro’s Venezuela as the epicenter of the narco world.

    Moreover, one of Machado’s biggest selling points is her contention that Venezuela will inevitably turn into a democracy once Maduro’s regime is deposed. She insists there is a 100-day plan to take over the reins of government and guide Venezuela through a political transition. Freedom of speech, free-markets, elections, justice and accountability will apparently replace repression and criminality. It all sounds pretty good.

    There’s just one problem: Machado’s camp hasn’t bothered to provide any details whatsoever about how they intend to accomplish this utopian objective. There are far more questions than answers. How will they re-build the institutions that Maduro has gutted over the last 12 years? How will they convince the Venezuelan army leadership that its interests are best served switching their support to a new government? What incentives are they willing to offer? Why are they so confident that the Venezuelan generals who made a killing under Maduro will choose cooperation over resistance, particularly when Machado continues to declare that anyone who perpetrated crimes will be prosecuted to the fullest extent? And what about the armed criminal groups and paramilitary pro-Maduro forces whose number are even greater than the regular Venezuelan military?

    The Venezuela policy debate won’t be going away anytime soon. Unfortunately, as the days go by, emotion, ideology and political agendas are displacing reality. And that’s a recipe for terrible policy.

  • Trump team warned over London’s Chinese super-embassy

    Trump team warned over London’s Chinese super-embassy

    So much for simple Chinese takeout. In his never-ending search for economic growth, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has finally alighted on the obvious answer: cozying up to the liberal-minded democrats of Tiananmen Square. The Prime Minister is expected to fly to Beijing in the new year, once the long-awaited Chinese super-embassy in the London neighborhood of Tower Hamlets secures planning approval next month. No wonder 2025 is the year of the snake, eh? 

    But there now seems to be a wrench in the works, ahead of the mooted approval on December 10. For a group of American politicians are up in arms about the possible threat to global financial security. Cockburn has been shown a letter by a quartet of Nebraskan state politicians addressed to Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. It warns that the Royal Mint Court site in London poses potential risks to “Nebraska-based insurers and financial-services firms and, by extension, the broader US financial system,” arguing that:

    Because the site may provide a vantage point for physical access to fiber-optic lines, the risk extends beyond accidental outages and could include intentional metadata capture or traffic interception… Many US insurers and financial-services firms rely, directly or indirectly, on systems routed through London. Should an incident occur, the underwriting, operational-resilience, and reputational capacities of firms far removed from London could be strained.

    State Senator Eliot Bostar went further, telling Cockburn:

    It is one thing for the UK to take decisions that imperil its own national security, but quite another for risks to be taken which impact United States financial services. As a close ally of the UK and Five Eyes partner, we expect credible assurances, not denials or obfuscation. Such assurances have yet to be provided.

    So much for the “Special Relationship,” eh?

  • China has quietly taken over America’s food supply

    China has quietly taken over America’s food supply

    For all the talk about artificial intelligence and quantum supremacy, the fate of civilizations still depends on breakfast. ChatGPT can’t grow corn. Empires rise on stomachs as much as on silicon. And America’s food system – long dismissed as safe and self-sufficient – has quietly become a front line in the US-China rivalry. We act as if lunch is inevitable, but Beijing knows that food is power.

    A new report from the America First Policy Institute should wake us up. Washington long treated agriculture as a post-political space where globalization could do no harm, and was therefore happy to let much of the nation ship its growth to China. As Ambassador Kip Tom and Royce Hood argue, China has thus taken over critical pieces of the US agricultural system and food supply. That’s created an obvious strategic vulnerability.

    Through state-owned giants such as WH Group and SinoChem, the CCP has spent the last decade spreading its tentacles through America’s food production. Its means of doing so have been so patient and banal that it’s gone mostly unnoticed.

    Consider Smithfield Foods. Once a model of American agribusiness, it was bought in 2013 by WH Group, then called Shuanghui – a Chinese conglomerate financed by state banks and guided by Beijing’s Five-Year Plan directive to “go abroad.” At the time, as Tom and Hood indicate, it was the largest-ever acquisition of an American company by a Chinese firm. 

    The Obama administration approved the deal despite some bipartisan objections. In one stroke, China gained control over roughly a quarter of US pork processing. At the time, the story barely registered beyond the business pages. Now it reads like an opening chapter in a longer, scary story. Say what you will about the CCP, but dumb they are not. 

    Smithfield’s market power lets it shape prices and standards across the industry, and the profits flow neatly back to China. During the pandemic, as American grocery shelves emptied, the company still managed to ship thousands of tons of pork to Chinese ports each month.

    Then there is Syngenta. The seed and agrochemical titan was acquired in 2017 by ChemChina, a state-owned enterprise that later merged into SinoChem. Despite being headquartered in Switzerland, Syngenta is now an organ of Chinese industrial policy. Its Chinese subsidiaries are linked – through a thicket of shell companies – to Xinjiang entities accused of using forced labor.

    One of them, the report notes, sells seeds directly to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the paramilitary conglomerate that anchors Beijing’s campaign of “re-education” aimed at the region’s Uyghur population. So while American farmers buy Syngenta products to improve yields, the profits feed into a system of repression half a world away. That is globalization at its bleakest.

    Then there’s the question of data – which matters more now than ever, considering that data-access is the CCP’s greatest advantage in the AI race. Modern farms are sensor-laden, drone-mapped, and algorithm-advised. Syngenta and its partners, including Chinese drone manufacturers DJI and XAG, sell “smart agriculture” platforms that collect torrents of data on American soil composition, crop patterns, and yields. Under China’s National Intelligence Law, all that information can be requisitioned by the state. Imagine handing a rival superpower a continuously updated MRI of your own food system – and calling it efficiency. 

    China views American openness as weakness – and its own opacity as strength. We’d do well to understand that mindset without arrogance. While we assumed moral superiority would carry the day, China stayed focused on the simpler, harder truths of power.

    It would be funny if it weren’t true. While our media spent years fixating on TikTok tracking teenagers – a real concern, to be sure – China nonchalantly secured access to the datasets that actually keep people alive.

    None of this is accidental. The CCP’s economic blueprints explicitly instruct its companies to secure global agricultural assets to achieve self-sufficiency through overseas acquisition. What Beijing calls “food security,” Washington calls “foreign direct investment.” One phrase belongs to a civilization that thinks in centuries; the other, to one that thinks – if it does at all – in dollar signs.

    Our policymakers should compel divestiture of strategic assets and restrict our fiercest geopolitical competitor from owning American land. If “dominance” sounds too impolite, we can at least strive for symmetry. The alternative is to tolerate theft and give up the defense of our own farmland.

  • The unbearable wokeness of the Canadian military

    The unbearable wokeness of the Canadian military

    “I think the question that needs to be asked is: what kind of military does Canada even want?” Dallas Alexander has been all country-star cool until I ask about his former employer. Now his voice takes on a more earnest tone.

    We’ve talked about the song the veteran-turned-singer considers his best – “Child of this Land,” a ballad about growing up in the remote Fishing Lake Métis Settlement in northern Alberta – and we’ve discussed which is the fan favorite: same, he says, or maybe the more upbeat “Can’t Blame My Bloodline.” To my mild surprise he doesn’t mention “Adios Amigo.” The song, with its catchy (and ominous) refrain, references the record-breaking sniper shot taken by Alexander’s team in 2017. Fired during the Battle of Mosul, the bullet traveled 2.2 miles before taking out an ISIS combatant who had just scrambled out of a window with an AK-47.

    Back then, Alexander was a sniper with the elite Joint Task Force 2, a Canadian special ops unit on a par with America’s Delta Force and Britain’s SAS. But the Canadian Armed Forces were already beginning to lose their way, pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion at the expense of effectiveness – and only a few years later, Alexander would be hounded out.

    Today, Alexander is unimpressed by General Jennie Carignan, the head of Canadian defense, who appeared on TV earlier this month with a tearful public apology for systemic racism. Alexander, who is Métis and served for 17 years, doesn’t think the military is systemically racist, as he understands the word “systemic.” He’s nuanced about it: racism, he says, can appear in any large group, especially in an aggressive workplace like a military unit or sports team, with “very get-after-it types of people.” But, “I don’t think the answer to any of it is a general – supposed to be in charge of a fighting force – crying on TV.”

    It began when Alexander was still fighting with Joint Task Force 2. “It was starting to trickle in, you needed to do an Indigenous awareness course. And I was like, what the hell does this have to do with a special operations unit? And I’m Indigenous.” Gender awareness courses were next, then other sensitivity training, all eating into time previously spent on combat training.

    The Canadian military has been struggling with recruitment and retention, and I remark that leadership seems to think that going down the sensitivity route will attract more people. “They’re going to get the people that they ask for, that’s all… recruiting might go through the ceiling,” but it’ll be “just a bunch of people that want to go in and be sensitive and get free money.”

    When Covid hit, with its protocols and mandates, the troops felt they were being used as a testing ground; the government wanted to “be able to go to the world, or to the rest of Canada, and say: look, this group of people were 100 percent compliant.”

    Alexander thinks that if every person in JTF2 at the time who didn’t want to be vaccinated had stuck to it, their unit might have gotten away with it. The government would have had to cancel the whole Tier 1 special operations program – and Alexander thinks that wouldn’t have happened. But there was a lot of pressure. “People got scared for their mortgages and their next positions.” Many caved; those who, like Alexander, held their ground were eventually forced out. He thinks the elite units took a gigantic hit at this point. “A lot of people that were very experienced in tons of operations, leaders, aggressive, what you need in a force like that,” left. “And like the cliché of an action movie, if I had to pick a team to go do some crazy mission, every single person I would add to that team is out of the military right now.”

    How good was the Canadian military, before all this? “Second to none,” Alexander says of his unit. They trained and competed a lot with Delta in the US and though the Canadian special forces have nowhere near the same money and equipment, Joint Task Force 2 “kicked ass.”

    If Canada wanted to turn things around, what could be done? “If I was in charge of the military in Canada tomorrow,” Alexander says, “I mean, this is gonna sound terrible, but I’m gonna say it anyway – I would cancel almost every part of the military and build a robust special operations unit and intelligence-gathering unit. And that is all that we would have. The rest would be volunteers to help within Canada. And that’s it.”

    I ask him about PTSD. Alexander says he thinks a lot of veterans go through a similar cycle, becoming disillusioned when they “realize that the government… is corrupt and immoral.” He firmly believes soldiers need to know what their own morals are before heading out on deployment and “if someone tells you to do something against that, you tell them to go to hell.”

    “Everyone says that’s not how the military works,” he says. But Alexander believes in morals. For him, they always came before orders. “Call me a bad soldier. I don’t really care. But I don’t have debilitating PTSD because I stuck to my morals.” He says a lot of young guys who go into the military early are put into situations for which they are unprepared. Then once they grow up, they have a lot of regrets that they have to work through. Moral preparation “isn’t popular because it makes soldiers harder to deal with. Instead of just taking some stupid order, you’re like, wait a minute… but I think it’s needed if you want to get out the other side and be able to sit peacefully at the dinner table with your family.”

    What does Alexander think of the Canadian government offering euthanasia to vets asking for help with PTSD? “To me, that’s insane,” Alexander says. “It’s insane that that is a place where the government thinks it should be stepping in, offering to kill people who are its own citizens. I think it’s very weird. And especially people in vulnerable positions… it’s sickening.” Why pick on veterans in particular? “I mean, you look at it, it saves them a lot of money, that’s for sure. But I don’t know. It’s not a good enough reason, in my opinion.” Mine neither.

    Alexander is pursuing his music career in Nashville now, where he’s making tour plans for 2026 and has founded Music City Gun Club for artists and musicians to go shooting with special operations instructors. He likes Tennessee. “I’m super happy and grateful for all that happened, because I’m way better off now,” he says. That said, speaking with Alexander, it seems to me that you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Of his own songs, his favorite is “Child of This Land.” And that, in a way, says it all.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Is South Korea bracing for a third Trump-Kim summit?

    Is South Korea bracing for a third Trump-Kim summit?

    Donald Trump’s meeting with President Xi was the standout moment of this month’s Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit in South Korea. Yet almost as much attention focused on the rumors that Trump’s gaze had turned once again to North Korea. Addressing suggestions he would meet Kim, the President told reporters, “I’d be open 100 percent. I get along very well with Kim Jong-un.” A meeting never materialized, but speculation – and tension – has only grown since. 

    Days after Trump’s departure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived as part of his own tour of Asia. In Seoul, he became the first defence secretary in nearly eight years to visit Panmunjeom, the border village within the Joint Security Area (JSA) of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). There, North and South Korean soldiers stand face to face, separated by a single line that cuts through a small blue hut – the same building where the 1953 armistice was signed and where Korean leaders last met in 2018, ahead of Trump’s first summit with Kim. 

    The visit’s symbolism was unmistakable. Panmunjeom had been closed for years after a rogue US serviceman fled across the border and only recently reopened to limited tourist groups in the weeks before Trump’s arrival. Hegseth’s trip was the first by a defense secretary since James Mattis in 2017 – a prelude, then, to Trump’s historic summits with Kim in Singapore and Hanoi. The timing has inevitably prompted speculation: could a third meeting be on the horizon?

    South Korea, too, has grown more receptive to another Trump-Kim summit – driven by two factors: a shift in domestic politics and a pragmatic reading of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

    South Korean politics has steadied after the turmoil of December 2024, when President Yoon Suk-yeol was impeached following his attempt to declare martial law. Yoon has claimed “pro-North Korean” forces were threatening democracy – a move that plunged the country into months of interim leadership. After fresh elections, President Lee Jae-myung took office in June and quickly set a new tone. Conservative governments such as those of Yoon’s People Power party (PPP) typically take a hard line on the North, boosting defense spending and rejecting inter-state cooperation. Progressive administrations, like that of Lee’s Democratic party of Korea (DPK), pursue dialogue and restraint instead. Although plans to reopen the JSA predated Lee’s victory, he made the same pledge during his failed 2022 presidential campaign.

    Lee’s presidency coincides with Trump’s second term – and with it, a US foreign policy team hawkish only really towards China. Officials such as Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, have urged allies from Europe to East Asia to shoulder more of their own defense burdens. South Korea is no exception. During his visit, Hegseth praised Lee’s commitment to boost defense spending – a pledge credited with securing US support for nuclear-powered submarines by 2030. With 25,000 American troops stationed in South Korea, Washington’s strategic priority is clear: focus those forces on the Taiwan threat, not the Korean peninsula. 

    Events moved quickly after Trump’s departure. Days later, artillery fire landed in the waters west of South Korea; soon after Hegseth’s visit, North Korea launched a short-range ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan. This drew international condemnation – though Russia defended Pyongyang’s “legitimate right” to act. Such displays are routine from the North, yet the South under Lee has taken quieter steps in the opposite direction: ordering propaganda loudspeakers that were in place across the border to be silenced, urging activists to halt leaflet drops, and reinstating a ministry for inter-Korean dialogue. The North, in turn, removed its own speakers. 

    These gestures may seem minor, but they allow Seoul to showcase goodwill while letting Pyongyang remind Washington of its potential menace. For centuries, Korea viewed itself as a ‘shrimp among whales’ – a posture that shifted only with its mid-20th century alliance with the United States. That legacy shapes today’s mixed reception for Trump: protests greeted his visit, but so did crowds waving US and South Korean flags, chanting, “we stand together.”

    Throughout 2025, nations have marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. In South Korea, those commemorations carry added meaning: the liberation from more than three decades of Japanese occupation. Yet another milestone – the 75th anniversary of the Korean War’s outbreak – passes with quieter reflection. Trump has renewed his attention on a peninsula where memories are long, but whether he meets Kim or not, Seoul seems satisfied that, for now, he still stands with them. 

  • Lord Young goes to Washington

    Lord Young goes to Washington

    I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and think-tankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old.

    Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist, but by viral videos on X. The impression these give is of a country rapidly descending into lawlessness in which the police are too busy arresting people for hurty words to protect them from violent criminals. “What the hell’s going on over there?” is the constant refrain.

    When I tell them the footage they’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg and the police are detaining more than 30 people a day for speech offenses – outdoing Russia – they’re anxious to help.

    But what can they do? I had hoped that the US-UK trade deal might provide Donald Trump’s administration with some leverage. Could a preamble be included in which both sides affirm their shared commitment to the long-standing guarantees of freedom of expression and association as set out in the First Amendment? That wouldn’t be legally enforceable, but would be politically significant and might make Keir Starmer think twice before further eroding free speech, lest he be accused of jeopardizing the deal.

    However, the people I met in the State Department said the President is anxious to get the trade agreement over the line and unlikely to countenance anything that would delay it. The sense I got from meetings with members of the administration, which probably won’t come as a surprise, is that Trump is very much in charge and no one wants to do anything to irritate him. Indeed, they were careful to refer to the “Department of War” and the “Secretary of War,” even to me, although occasionally they stumbled and said: “The Department of Defense… I mean War.” A Washington Post editor I had lunch with confirmed this was an important loyalty test, with WaPo journalists getting into bad odor with the President because the newspaper insists on continuing to use “Defense Department.”

    Trump’s iron grip was often contrasted with the chaos of the previous administration, with Joe Biden portrayed as a drooling idiot. I met with staffers at the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, which has just published a report accusing a group of senior Democrats in the last administration – the “Politburo” – of covering up the President’s cognitive decline and effectively ruling in his place, signing off executive orders – and pardons – using an autopen. The Committee’s view is that all the clemency actions taken by the Biden administration were illegitimate.

    Does this mean Anthony Fauci, pardoned by Biden in one of his final acts before leaving the White House, can now be prosecuted? I asked an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services over dinner and he laughed but declined to answer. Incidentally, I was reliably informed that Health Secretary RFK Jr is the second most popular member of the administration after Trump. The reception he gets from the MAGA faithful is rapturous, apparently.

    Another possibility I discussed with officials was withholding visas from UK citizens who work for censorship bodies such as Ofcom, which is currently trying to take enforcement action against US tech companies that refuse to comply with Britain’s new “Online Safety Act.” But after kicking around that idea we concluded it would probably be politically unhelpful. If Dame Melanie Dawes, the CEO of Ofcom, was refused a travel visa, she’d spin it as Trump doing the bidding of his buddy Elon Musk when all she’s trying to do is keep children “safe.” A better alternative, we thought, would be for the White House to offer political asylum on human rights grounds to British thought criminals. That would be a piece of epic trolling, given that our PM is Mr Human Rights. If any Christian street preachers are facing prosecution for misgendering some pro-abortion activists, do get in touch.

    Even that might not fly. The overall impression I got is that, for reasons no one was quite able to explain, the President still thinks of Sir Keir as a useful ally. So our best hope of harnessing the might of the US to protect free speech in the UK is if Starmer is replaced by someone more antagonistic to Trump. It surely won’t be long.

  • Trump is being misled on Venezuela

    Trump is being misled on Venezuela

    President Trump is being misled into a regime-change war close to home. Few Americans nowadays find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention that overthrew Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Regimes were successfully changed both times, but what came after the dictators’ downfall was civil war, regional instability and mass-migration flows that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbors.

    Now the Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolás Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. That will predictably do to the Americas – including the US – what the War on Terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

    Why would Donald Trump make such a mistake? Bush and Obama’s foreign-policy blunders gave the President one of his strongest campaign themes in 2016, and his first term was distinguished by his success at keeping America out of new wars. His use of force abroad has typically been selective – why depart from what’s worked?

    If the examples of Bush II and Obama aren’t enough, the Trump administration should consider what happened when Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter intervened in places such as El Salvador. The US-backed civil war in El Salvador sent waves of refugees and immigrants northward, including to the US, where some of the new Salvadoran communities formed gangs – notably MS-13.

    The tension in the Trump coalition isn’t just between foreign-policy hawks and doves – it’s between hawks and immigration restrictionists. Refugees and mass migration are inevitable consequences of today’s wars. And the Trump administration’s policy does not make sense as a tactic to stop illegal drugs, especially fentanyl, from reaching our border: the chaos and population flows that regime change triggers are a boon to drug networks and human traffickers.

    It’s true that Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez have also caused some migration by remaining in power, but the people fleeing because of socialism are often middle-class and freedom-loving; war uproots everyone, especially the poor.

    Despite claiming in 2016 that George W. Bush should simply have taken Iraq’s oil, Trump is probably not contemplating an invasion to seize Venezuela’s petroleum resources. He’s conducting a “maximum pressure” campaign to make an example out of Maduro, regardless of whether or not the socialist dictator can be forced out of power.

    Trump wants to show that there are rewards for America’s friends and painful punishments for her enemies, and he takes the Western Hemisphere particularly seriously. Maduro’s agony will be a lesson to anyone else in Latin America who thinks of making a foe out of Washington. At least, that’s the theory – but the US has a long history of throwing its weight around in Latin America and only making enemies in the process.

    The model Trump should adopt isn’t Reagan’s strategy in Latin America but rather the one that won the Cold War in Europe: stabilizing America’s friends and helping them prosper, thereby heightening the contrast between life under freedom and life under socialism.

    Seeing that contrast inspired Europeans to liberate themselves, tearing down the Berlin Wall and replacing communist governments with democratic ones. If Latin Americans want freedom – and they do, as Argentina’s election of Javier Milei indicates – they can achieve it just as Eastern Europeans did.

    The examples of those places where the US relied most on force during the Cold War are overwhelmingly negative. Even the great triumph of Reagan-era political warfare in Afghanistan defeated a Soviet puppet only to create conditions that brought the Taliban to power and provided al-Qaeda a haven from which to attack the US. That’s a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.

    The Trump administration’s interest in toppling Maduro preceded Marco Rubio’s tenure as secretary of state, and sources with ties to the administration say it’s unfair to blame Rubio for the neocon tilt of Venezuela policy. But if there’s a war, it will be Rubio’s at least as much as Trump’s, and if it goes badly, Rubio will get the blame – not least from the President himself.

    Rubio has earned a great deal of respect from many in the MAGA movement who once thought of him as a Bush Republican – weak on immigration, neocon in foreign policy. He risks proving his detractors right if he embraces a regime-change program left over from the days of Mike Pompeo.

    As for Trump himself, he sees force as another form of leverage in negotiations. He won’t bomb allies in trade talks, but he will use America’s military might to change the way adversaries think. And if he’s not about to start a war with China, he’s fully prepared to demonstrate what he can do on Maduro.

    Making an educational point, rather than actually changing the regime in Caracas, may be his objective. But there’s a constituency in the Republican party that wants more than that, and Trump likes to give everyone in his coalition something they have their hearts set on.

    In this case, however, he can’t please neocons or hawks without harming immigration restrictionists as well as doves. Obama, Bush II, Reagan and Carter have shown that when America tries to change other regimes, the result is mass migration that changes Europe and the US. Regime change abroad leads to regime change at home, and right now Trump is the regime.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • The return of Erik Prince

    The return of Erik Prince

    Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince.

    Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14. Trump eventually pardoned the four men, but by then Blackwater had been renamed and merged out of existence. Prince moved on. He traded under a series of bland corporate identities: Xe Services, Vectus, Presidential Airways. His latest proposal is for a mercenary force to protect Christians in Nigeria.

    Prince talks to me about this on a video call from what looks like a pickup truck as he drives around his estate in Virginia. He was once a Navy SEAL and is still absurdly clean cut: short blond hair, blue eyes, square jaw. “Tens of thousands” of Christians are being killed by jihadi gangs, he tells me; the Nigerian army won’t stop it because “corrupt” generals are skimming a bloated defense budget and $28 billion of oil is being stolen every year – the world’s “largest case of industrialized crime.” But, he says, “the private sector can actually help put that fire out.”

    Prince offered his services to the Pope on X. Under a video of Pope Leo blessing a block of ice – a Papal gesture toward climate change – Prince posted: “@Pontifex Sir, I have a better idea. Why don’t you fund my colleagues to protect Nigerian Christians from the marauding Muslims who are slaughtering them.” He hasn’t heard back from the Pope and doesn’t really expect to. It’s all part of the Prince publicity machine.

    Professor Sean McFate, who wrote The Modern Mercenary, thinks Prince might be the best-known mercenary in the world. But, he told me, one of the most important things a mercenary sells is plausible deniability – they can be deployed without any public link to whoever is paying their wages. “It is supposed to be the silent profession. [Prince] is anything but.” He calls Prince a “pitchman.” If so, he’s perfectly suited to doing business under Donald Trump, the ultimate pitchman.

    Prince has long had an interest in Africa, land of opportunity for the private soldier. During his Off Leash podcast last year he said that in “pretty much all of Africa, they’re incapable of governing themselves… it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say: ‘We’re going to govern those countries.’” He is working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo now, helping its government to fight smuggling, corruption and general lawlessness. If his men pacify the vast terrain they’ve been given, more taxes are collected – and Prince gets a cut.

    Is this an American version of Russia’s Africa Corps, the Wagner Group as it used to be known? Wagner is half mafia, half mercenaries, a tool of Kremlin foreign policy, licensed to fill its boots with as much gold or oil or diamonds as it can. Prince rejects the comparison. Wagner just “muscles in” on mines and other lucrative assets, he says; his enterprises are more like the British East India Company, which had to perform the functions of government where they wanted to trade. “And, yeah, they definitely kicked ass when they had to. The French were removed from India, not by the British Crown, but by the East India Company.”

    The East India Company was Prince’s proposed model for ending the Afghan war. This was not well-received in Afghanistan, where stories are handed down of Britain’s bloody 19th-century campaigns: “butcher and bolt.” But Prince tells me he could have held the country with only 6,000 private soldiers – “everybody else could leave.” He claims he could have done it for 5 percent of what the US government was spending.

    The regular army is like the postal service, he tells me, whereas he’s FedEx – a line he’s used many times before. He says that conventional armies don’t understand unconventional warfare. The US military has a “CT [counterterrorism] fetish” of “just killing the leaders” of whichever group they are fighting. “It ignores the history of warfare. You have to crush the manpower, finances, logistics – at the bottom of the pyramid, the broadest number, not just a select few at the top.” If you need to kill a lot of bad guys, Prince will get the job done.

    He has a contract in Haiti, where a desperate government is losing a war with street gangs. The gangs opened the prisons and tens of thousands of Haiti’s most dangerous criminals are now on the loose, armed with “increasingly heavy weaponry,” killing, organ-harvesting, practicing Voodoo, “some really, really bad stuff.” Some 90 percent of the capital is controlled by gang members, he says. His mercenaries use drones to kill them – more than 200 in the first three months of their deployment, according to a human rights group.

    Prince doesn’t like the term mercenary. “The idea of compensating professionals that can bring specialty skills to local governments is as old as warfare.” The UN said that in 2019 he’d brought his “specialty skills” to the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, including a “high-value target termination unit” – a death squad. A UN investigation found he’d broken the Libyan arms embargo by sending spy planes, attack helicopters and drones to help Haftar overthrow the government. Prince tells me he has an alibi: he was on a road trip from Wyoming to Alaska with his son. “So, I was not involved in that.”

    The exhaustive UN investigation did not accuse Prince of going to Libya in person. Instead, it found he’d met Haftar in a hotel in Cairo to plot the coup. It ended in ignominious failure, with Haftar furious at the quality of the weapons he’d been sent. The mercenaries had to flee Libya in rubber dinghies. They blamed Prince, according to someone who spoke to them at the time. “They wanted to kill him. They wanted to hunt him down and execute him.”

    In 2020, the Intercept reported that Prince tried to get back into Libya by proposing a partnership with the Wagner Group, by then already under American sanctions for its role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Prince sued the website for libel, though the case was thrown out.

    A source who helped with the UN investigation told me Prince was questioned in Egypt and in the UAE, which had supposedly paid for the Haftar operation and wasn’t pleased. Prince is having none of it. “You can quote me on this,” he says. “Tell your sources: go get fucked, because it speaks to how utterly idiotic they are… those motherfuckers are full of shit… Let them come out. Name themselves… I’m going to sue the motherfucking pants off them.”Prince has a tangled history with Russia. He visited Moscow in 2012 because, he says, the Russians wanted to ask him to recreate Blackwater there. Nothing came of it, and he’s had “no contact with them in any way, shape or form since.”

    There was a curious meeting in the Seychelles in 2017 between Prince, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, and a fixer for the UAE. The Mueller report – remember that? – cast the meeting as a Russian attempt to open a back channel to the new Trump administration, with Prince a willing participant. Prince said he’d bumped into the Russian at the bar and they’d had a beer.

    Is there anyone whose money he wouldn’t take? The Chinese Communist party was a big investor in Prince’s Hong Kong company, Frontier Resources Group. But he says: “We didn’t do any guns… we didn’t do any training of the security people.” All he did was to tell “airline or bank employees” how to avoid being kidnapped. He says he left when he came under pressure to have a CCP committee in the company. “Hard no.”

    A former Blackwater mercenary, Morgan Lerette, told me Prince was “a hell of a businessman.” He went on: “The guy’s looking to make a buck. He can do patriotism and Christianity and all the other stuff. At the end of the day, he worships the almighty dollar.” As Lerette said, Americans are tired of war and don’t want boots on the ground anywhere. Demand for privatized warfare will only grow.

    Controversy follows Prince around as he tries to cash in on this. He tells me that there’s “no shortage of assholes in the world” trying to tear down people who prefer to “do, not pontificate.”

    He admires figures from military history such as John Smith, the British mercenary who led the settlers in Jamestown, Virginia; and Myles Standish, another British soldier who was hired by the Pilgrims to defend Plymouth Colony. America was civilized by mercenaries, “by bold people who wanted to create a new opportunity.”

    Prince wants to do the same for Africa. “It pains me when I go to these struggling countries… the murder, rape and mayhem that is endemic in these places.” A “steady hand on the wheel” would be “infinitely better” for hundreds of millions of Africans suffering in this way.

    “I am an unabashed defender and lover of western civilization.” In this new imperial mission, ideology meets profit, and every crisis is an opportunity.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.