The Social World

Category: International

  • Inside Trump’s war on the cartels

    Inside Trump’s war on the cartels

    To deal with big problems, the second presidency of Donald Trump adopts a three-step approach. First, the declaration of authority: in this case, the designation announced in February of multiple Mexican and South American cartels as international terror organizations, opening up new avenues for legal, intelligence and potential military responses.

    Next, eye-popping kinetic action: this came with SOUTHCOM’s deployment in August of eight warships to the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, including three Aegis guided-missile destroyers parked off the coast of Venezuela along with a landing dock, amphibious assault ships and a fast-attack nuclear submarine. These vessels can carry 4,500 Navy and Marines along with helicopters, advanced surveillance equipment and cruise missiles that can strike anywhere at will.

    Earlier this month, we saw a missile kill 11 “narco-terrorists” on a boat coming out of Venezuela. “Instead of interdicting it, on the President’s orders, we blew it up,” confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “And it’ll happen again.”

    The third step involves a very public forging of Trumpian symbolism: look to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement last month of the restoration of the Mexican Border Defense Medal, an award given originally to the armed forces that supported the expedition of General “Black Jack” Pershing (a personal favorite of Trump’s) in Mexico more than a century ago. The bronze Roman sword and crossed sabers on a medal emblazoned “For Service on the Mexican Border” could hardly send a louder message. Watch out, Mexico: MAGA has found the one war it wants.

    If this second administration has a motto, it’s “again this time, but for real.” Tweets fired off from the hip, now in the form of Truth Social posts, could once be dismissed even by the President’s supporters as something to be taken seriously, but not literally. Now, the Donald’s outbursts are gospel. In his first term, Trump and the likes of then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo publicly entertained the idea of escalating the mission against Mexico’s cartels to a military priority, but never formally did so. This time, the primary Mexico brief landed not at State, Homeland Security or Justice – but with gung-ho Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

    On his first call in January with Mexican officials, the newly confirmed Hegseth delivered an unequivocal message: that unilateral US military action was on the table if Mexico didn’t step up action against the cartels – a statement that left the Mexican brass “shocked and angered” according to the Wall Street Journal, but directly preceded the unprecedented handover of 29 top cartel officials for extradition.

    If that was supposed to satisfy Hegseth, it hasn’t – in the months since, he has publicly stated that “we’re taking nothing off the table – nothing,” when it comes to potential strikes and that “we’re watching [the cartels], and we know a little bit more than they think we know about them.”

    A network of drones and spyplanes provide an eye-in-the-skyview of cartel assets and activity

    What the US knows is largely thanks to a network of drones and spy planes which provide an eye-in-the-sky view of cartel assets and activity. They are technologically capable of transforming from watchers to weapons as they have to great effect in Africa and the Middle East. Razing targets from the sky is not something the Mexican military is built to defend against: their assignment is the control of the Mexican people. One analyst told me: “There is no part of Mexico we cannot reach.” But this White House and the key players in Trump’s cabinet also recognize that declaring war on the cartels – by wiping out fentanyl labs, demolishing training camps in Jalisco, or killing drug kingpins – is pointless if, Hydra-like, the monster’s heads simply grow back.

    That’s why for this White House, success is defined as forcing the Mexican government to do what it doesn’t want to. As Hegseth indicated on that first call, Mexico must handle the cartel problem itself, lest the Americans handle it instead.

    One reason war on the cartels has become a MAGA priority is due to the forward-looking politics of the top men surrounding the President. Vice President J.D. Vance, Rubio and even Hegseth himself could conceivably run in 2028, and Trump’s close advisors, such as Stephen Miller, have warned that a temporarily quiet border isn’t enough. Mexico is a problem to be solved now, not when the cartel’s spigot of drugs and trafficking presumably turns back on in three years’ time.

    It’s telling that Rubio is aligned with this stepped-up mission, potentially breaking with the prevailing views among long-serving diplomatic experts such as Spanish-born former ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau, currently Deputy Secretary of State, who prefer the public-facing perception of cooperation and fear potential blowback over military action. While officials who prioritize the status quo are loath to openly criticize Mexican leadership, within the administration there is a sizable faction, possibly including the President himself, who no longer believe Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum when she says she’s cooperating. “The Mexicans are just trying to buy time until the White House changes hands again,” one analyst told me.

    For Mexican nationalists and anti-war critics on right and left, Trump’s burgeoning cartel war is framed as an act of imperial authoritarianism: simply the next step for a President who talked of buying Greenland and making Canada the 51st state. The less radical criticism raised in the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal has focused more on the lack of effectiveness: that Hydra problem again. But the truth is that Trump and his team of warriors have no designs to conquer Mexico, or even to eliminate the cartels completely – instead, they view the aim of kinetic military action as a threat designed to force Mexico to end the dominance of the cartels itself.

    Left to its own devices, Mexico would have little appetite for this. The protection of these powerful entities has become the number one priority of the state. The cartels raked in billions from trafficking millions of people and poisoning tens of thousands during the Joe Biden years, and they paid a pretty penny to the Mexican government to do so. This effectively turned our neighbor into a quasi-failed narco state.

    In Mexico, politicians work for criminals – or else they are the criminals. And the politicians have hardly been quiet about it – see former president (and still the most influential politician in Mexico) Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who declared any assault on the cartels as tantamount to war on all Mexicans. He called it “demonization,” saying that the cartels were “respectful people” who “respect the citizenry.”

    The former ruler now presides from the security of his ranch, La Chingada (translated, it means “the fucking thing” or “the one who’s fucked”), where he exercises control of the ruling party via his son and a vast network of cronies. On the rare occasions where Sheinbaum has opposed an AMLO decision, such as nominations for various offices, the former president’s loyalists in the Mexican Congress have reminded her who’s actually boss. They remain loyal to the leader who enriched them so well with decades of bribes and kickbacks. But there is a crack in the facade: AMLO is well aware he enjoys his quasi-retirement (he is ostensibly writing a history of Mexico) only so long as his successor succeeds in keeping the US out.

    As AMLO’s chosen heir, Sheinbaum is a true believer following a more pragmatic leftist nationalist – imagine a Bernie superfan inheriting the mantle from the man himself. Berkeley-educated Sheinbaum has managed her relationship with Trump relatively well, praising him in English and saving her criticisms for Mexican audiences. Yet part of the reason AMLO chose her in the first place is her weakness – she has no organic base within the Morena party apart from him. And her naive ideological commitment to AMLO’s utopian program has earned her disdain and even naked contempt from the former president’s cronies, who were spotted earlier this year declining to shake her hand after a major public speech. 

    There’s a distinct lack of on-the-ground human intelligence about the cartels’ activity, but a series of recent court deals could play an important role. Information from Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel who faces a life sentence after pleading guilty in New York, and from Ovidio Guzmán López, son of El Chapo, who pleaded guilty in Chicago, could change that. Both have the ability to inform on key figures within the cartels and the Mexican government itself.

    Mexico hawks believe recent improvement on the border is not due to Sheinbaum, but to a change of mindset by the cartels and their government cronies who have perhaps calculated that a few lean years under Trump are tolerable, especially if Gavin Newsom takes over next. But a temporarily quiet border isn’t enough for this version of Trump, and Mexico is one area where the MAGA base and its brain trust seem open to the idea of more aggressive action.

    “There’s a 1,950-mile border that changes the calculus for MAGA, with a much more present awareness of the danger because of that proximity,” says Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. He emphasizes that the institutional right would be “categorically supportive” and dismisses the idea of backfire from the President’s base. “There are a lot of us outside the White House who are working with the folks on the inside on raising up Monroe Doctrine 2.0, including key players in the administration. If you do what needs to be done to wreck the cartels, who would complain on the right?”

    Roberts also believes that a motivating factor for some is Mexico’s Chinese connection – comparing it to Germany’s Zimmermann Telegram of 1917 – both through investment and as a source for the basic elements of drug production. “[MAGA] people who want us to be less active in the Middle East and Europe are aware of this,” Roberts says. “The threat of increased presence of China in our hemisphere makes this a problem people are willing to confront, even if they are more uncertain about how to deal with challenges like Taiwan.”

    Ryan P. Williams, president of the California-based Claremont Institute, echoes this view. “This is about reflexive Jacksonian values. Our hemisphere has been the central focus of American foreign policy going back to a more responsible era when our statesmen were better educated by eighth grade than our leaders today,” he says, comparing the moment to John Quincy Adams’s defense of Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Florida. “If you have sovereign control over territory and you lose it, and violence comes from that which hurts our citizens, it’s our right to fix a situation if you can’t or won’t, including with force.”

    This is the one war MAGA believes is worth starting. “The bureaucratic institutional culture in Washington at places like the State Department thinks of problems as something to be managed and under no condition ever disrupted,” Williams says. “But a big course correction when it comes to Mexico has been long overdue, and the threat of a quasi-failed state run by cartels, with regular incursions over our southern border by drones and other forces, with drugs flowing into our streets fueled by Chinese materials – we should not put up with this any longer.”

    The drones are silent for now. Trump’s current approach is an encirclement strategy led by SOUTHCOM – going after the Venezuelans, the Cubans and the Nicaraguans, partnering with friendly governments such as Ecuador to eliminate Mexican criminals in their own state, and operating in a concentric fashion in an attempt to accomplish America’s aims without pulling the trigger. But the government stands ready, should that approach fail, in all likelihood followed by a solemn statement sincerely thanking our willing partners in the Mexican government for their cooperation and help – whether or not they gave it.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15 2025 World edition.

  • America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

    America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

    As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in mid-June 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mom. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices for you to exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking.

    On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammoni. No one wants to be that guy. And to get away from this menace, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings.

    So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. Whereas the US had many midwives, its mother was unquestionably Britain. It was Britain that seeded the first colonies in Virginia. Britain that gave America her mighty language. It was largely Britons who drafted the US Constitution – indeed the Founding Fathers saw themselves, quite overtly, as more British than the British: more honorably in love with their freedoms.

    As a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t

    It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Americans have an Oedipally schizoid relationship to Britain, even today. On the one hand you have that entire Downton Abbey strand of American desires. Our accents are adored, poshness is weirdly revered, an idealized concept of echt Britishness – from manners to furniture to clothes (Ralph Lauren built a billion-buck business on this) – is admired and aped, or created ex nihilo. Donald Trump’s White House is probably the most pro-UK administration in several generations. Trump celebrates his Scottish roots; J.D. Vance holidays in the Cotswolds. Winston is back in the Oval Office.

    At the same time, America has often scorned Britain, mocked her, bossed her around and generally treated Mum something terrible. And right now, and from the same Trumpite wing of US politics, the UK is facing a lot of this pitiless scorn. Across conservative social media we Brits are seen as decrepit, weak, cucked, lame, broke, snaggletoothed losers who are utterly doomed to extinction.

    You’ll find this discourse everywhere. From Tucker Carlson lamenting that Britons are “slaves,” to Elon Musk calling us a “tyrannical police state” to internet pundit Charlie Kirk describing us as “a husk” and “a conquered country.” Earlier this month, after comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for his views at Heathrow Airport, the British politician Nigel Farage went to Washington to tell members of Congress that Britain had turned into North Korea. Americans listened avidly.

    Whatever the provenance of these critiques – and plenty come from a place of grief, or regret, not mere contempt – they hit home. They can make Brits wince. And one of the times I’ve winced the most came via a much less well-known voice: a Substack called Starstack, created by – as far as I can see – a firmly right-wing but not crazy Republican, known on X as @youngtroon.

    The particular essay about the impending doom of the YooKay (and he uses this demeaning nickname quite deliberately) is entitled “Mind the Gap,” but the subhead gives us the gist: “A powerful set of systemic factors are threatening to bring chaos unseen in centuries to the shores of the United Kingdom.”

    I advise you to read the entire essay yourself. It is articulate, considered, perceptive and, if you are British, quite harrowing. He has given us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. And, my God, it is a dismal portrait. And it therefore deserves a close analysis, as a shining example of the genre.

    The author attacks us from all sides. Not with pointless venom, but with outright astonishment at our grotesque and self-harming stupidity.

    Here are a few choice descriptions: to him, Britain is “a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if it were run by your neurotic mother-in-law.” Parts of the North resemble “a collapsing civilization.” The National Health Service is “a black-hole money pit with some of the worst dollar-per-dollar outcomes.”

    We also have “some of the nuttiest benefits handouts in the entire world.” He notes that our Chancellor recently broke down weeping in parliament. He says the economy is “effectively stagnant, and there is little or no plan to resolve underlying systemic factors.” He adds that Britain is a country “where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of white girls were systematically sexually exploited by gangs of Mirpuri Pakistanis” – a fact which was then covered up. Meanwhile, we are also a nation that “received well in excess of 1 percent of its population for several years straight during the ‘Boriswave.’” Mr. Troon does not see this as a good thing.

    Then he really gets going. I’ll spare you the gory fiscal details, but it’s when the essay turns to our growing debt crisis – those gilt yields soaring over 5 percent – that the apocalypse promised by the subtitle begins to loom. It is not pretty.

    Naturally, as a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t. I have been through the essay, insult by insult, and I’ve found only two arguable errors. Firstly, the UK does not – thank God – suffer weekly or daily terror attacks. Secondly, Britain does not have a “uniquely violent street gang culture.”

    Apart from that, I cannot find major flaws. Which makes it all the more depressing, and makes me wonder whether the author’s prognosis is correct and Britain is, actually, “rapidly heading toward a grand and brutal reckoning” and that “the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely.”

    To make it worse, the author does not see a savior anywhere, not in Reform, Labour, the Conservatives, because we have “one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet.” Ouch.

    However, he does offer the motherland one brief filial hug at the end. The author states that, despite all the above, the native Britons have somehow managed to keep a functional country together, so far. And on that basis he predicts that, after the inevitable revolution, our innate virtues should prevail and we will rebound.

    Nonetheless, as things stand, let’s just say, from a certain American perspective, Mom has drenched herself in gasoline. And is about to light a cigarette.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • What is Charles Kushner doing in Paris?

    What is Charles Kushner doing in Paris?

    When Charles Kushner took up his appointment as American ambassador to France this summer, his first official visit was to the Shoah Memorial in Paris. As a child of Holocaust survivors, he tweeted, “fighting anti-Semitism will be at the heart of my mission.” So it has proved. Last month, Kushner published a letter in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused Emmanuel Macron of insufficient action in the face of soaring anti-Semitism in the Republic.

    The ambassador was summoned for a dressing down. He didn’t attend as he was on vacation

    Kushner also castigated the French President for his imminent recognition of Palestinian statehood. “Public statements haranguing Israel and gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state embolden extremists, fuel violence and endanger Jewish life in France,” wrote Kushner. “In today’s world, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism – plain and simple.”

    The American criticism of Macron mirrors that of Benjamin Netanyahu. Last month, the Israeli Prime Minister claimed the decision to recognize Palestine “pours fuel on this anti-Semitism fire.” Macron described Netanyahu’s remarks as “abject.”

    Macron didn’t respond personally to Kushner’s criticism, but the ambassador was summoned to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a dressing down. Kushner didn’t attend, as he was on vacation. In his place he sent his chargé d’affaires. The magazine Paris Match described the move as “a deliberate diplomatic affront.”

    Paris said it regarded Kushner’s remarks as not only inaccurate but also undiplomatic, not being “commensurate with the quality of the transatlantic link between France and the United States and the trust that must result from it, between allies.” The ambassador’s criticism, it said, also contravened the 1961 Vienna Convention, which stipulates that diplomats are duty bound “not to interfere in the internal affairs of the state.”

    This convention was ignored in 2016 by France’s ambassador in Washington. In responding to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, Gérard Araud tweeted: “After Brexit and this election, anything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness.” He later deleted the post.

    Araud returned to the attack in 2019 when he left Washington, declaring that Trump was a “whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed” President. The passage of time has not mellowed Araud. On learning last November that a re-elected Trump had nominated Kushner as ambassador to France, Araud tweeted: “I recommend reading his CV. ‘Juicy,’ as the Americans would say… Needless to say, he doesn’t know the first thing about our country… we console ourselves as best we can.”

    Araud was not alone in objecting to the appointment of Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. The French media expressed surprise that a man who had spent a year in a federal prison for tax fraud (and was pardoned by Trump during his first term as President) was considered suitable for the post.

    The left-wing newspaper Le Monde wondered what exactly qualified Kushner to the post of ambassador, noting his response to the Senate when asked a similar question: “I don’t know much about French art or wine, but I understand business.”

    Democrats in America were also unimpressed by Kushner’s appointment. Severin Beliveau, a stalwart of the party in Maine and an honorary consul of France, penned a furious op-ed earlier this year explaining why Kushner should not be Uncle Sam’s man in Paris. “It is hard to find anything that qualifies Mr. Kushner for the appointment,” wrote Beliveau. “He is a convicted felon, has no diplomatic experience and can be expected to personalize the existing tensions between President Trump and the President of France.”

    Kushner, 71, does indeed have little to recommend him for the role. But the same applied to some of his predecessors in Paris. George W. Bush appointed Howard H. Leach as ambassador to France in 2001, a man whose area of expertise was food-processing. And in 2009, Barack Obama gave the job to Charles Rivkin, who had made his name as a producer of The Muppet Show. The appointment raised eyebrows in France, although it was noted that he had been one of Obama’s principal financial supporters during his presidential campaign.

    Despite his lack of diplomatic experience, Rivkin’s appointment was welcomed by the Paris elite, as mesmerized by Obama as the rest of Europe’s movers and shakers. “We couldn’t have dreamed of a better choice,” simpered Jean-David Levitte, the diplomatic advisor of president Nicolas Sarkozy. “Charlie Rivkin is the epitome of American professional success.”

    In attacking Charles Kushner, France is shooting the messenger. His criticism is not unfounded

    Once in Paris it became evident that Rivkin had one particular mission, which was to spread American-style identity politics into the suburbs. This soon came to the attention of the French press. Le Monde published an article in the summer of 2010 entitled “Washington conquers the 93” (93 is the administrative designation of the turbulent Seine-Saint-Denis département north of Paris).The paper described how Rivkin liked to visit these suburbs, sometimes with a famous face in tow, such as actor Samuel L. Jackson. According to Le Monde, “these symbolic and media junkets conceal the extent of the networking that has taken place in France in recent years to identify the elites of the neighborhoods and ethnic minorities.” Once they’d been identified, the American embassy invited these “elites” to Washington in order to “deepen their reflections on their subjects of interest.”

    The extent to which Rivkin was importing identity politics into France was exposed by WikiLeaks in 2010. On January 19 of that year, Rivkin sent a confidential report to Washington entitled “Minority Engagement Strategy.” “French institutions have not proven themselves flexible enough to adjust to an increasingly heterodox demography,” wrote Rivkin. One initiative was to work “with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools, so that it takes into account the role and perspectives of minorities in French history.”

    This was clear interference, yet it raised barely a murmur in Paris. Not so the intervention of Kushner, which has caused outrage among the French elite. Jean-Noël Barrot, the minister of foreign affairs, described his criticism as “unjustifiable and unjustified… because it is not the place of a foreign representative to come and lecture France on how to govern its own country.”

    Someone has to, because Kushner is right: France is taking insufficient action to protect its 500,000 Jews. Macron’s political adversaries accuse him of abandoning the country’s Jewish population in order to pacify the violent minority within France’s large “Algerian diaspora.”

    In November 2023, Macron declined an invitation to attend a rally in solidarity with France’s Jews, who were already experiencing a surge in anti-Semitism. Allegedly he made his decision after he was warned from a Muslim advisor that his attendance might “give the neighborhoods cause to catch fire.”

    The following year, Macron vowed that France would be relentless in combating anti-Semitism, which he admitted had increased “in an absolutely inexplicable, inexcusable, and unacceptable manner.”

    In reality, the rise is eminently explicable. Once the preserve of the far right, French anti-Semitism is today most commonly found among the far left and their Islamist allies. Among the many recent anti-Semitic acts in France are the assault of a teenage boy as he left a synagogue in Lyon and the refusal of an adventure park to admit a party of Israeli children. There was also the chainsaw attack on an olive tree planted in memory of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was tortured to death in 2006 by an inner-city gang. Two Tunisian brothers have been charged with the desecration.

    Halimi’s sister says “no lessons have been learned” from her brother’s death. Increasingly she fears for her children’s safety in France and says she is thinking of emigrating to Israel. Macron, she says, is “doing nothing” to protect France’s Jews.

    In attacking Kushner, France is shooting the messenger. His criticism – supported by Washington – is not unfounded.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Is it all over for Milei?

    Is it all over for Milei?

    A landslide election defeat for Argentine President Javier Milei’s Libertad Avanza party has made money markets doubt whether he will be able to push through his radical economic reforms.

    The Argentine peso lost 5.6 percent to the dollar and the Merval stock index plunged by 13 points on Monday after the flamboyant President’s party trailed the leftist opposition Peronist party of former President Cristina Kirchner by 13 points (47 percent to 34 percent) in local elections in Buenos Aires province – which, with 40 percent of the country’s voters, is the country’s biggest and most populous area.

    Bond markets also reacted negatively to the shock result, posting their biggest daily falls since they recommenced trading in 2021 after a debt reconstruction deal. The markets are worried that the heavy defeat for Milei means that he is also heading for a beating next month in midterm Senate and congressional elections that he needs to win decisively in order to override constitutional bars on his ambitious libertarian plans to reform Argentina’s antiquated statist economy.

    Milei, a political outsider who revels in the label “anarcho-capitalist,” came from nowhere in November 2023 to win the Presidency in a shock result on a platform of radical right-wing economic transformation to rescue the country from decades of stagnation and decline. He took to waving a chainsaw at public rallies to symbolise his plans to slash jobs in the government’s bureaucracy.

    Milei appeared on stage with Donald Trump and Elon Musk after the U.S. President won his second term in the White House a year after Milei’s victory on a similar promise to cut government jobs and save huge amounts in state spending. But this surprise electoral defeat raises the possibility that Argentina’s voters are experiencing buyers’ remorse when faced with the harsh reality of Milei’s job cuts.

    Milei reacted to what he admitted was a “clear defeat” with defiance. While acknowledging that he would need to “process” the setback he said he would not retreat from his policy by “even a millimetre”. On the contrary, he pledged to accelerate and even deepen the cutbacks.

    Public worries about an economic slowdown have been compounded recently by rumors of a corruption scandal involving Milei’s sister. Audio clips were released of an official in a disability charity claiming that Karina Milei – who is secretary in the presidency – was accepting half a million dollars in bribes in exchange for awarding government pharmaceutical contracts. Milei and his sister have denied the claims, but since Milei won the Presidency partly by denouncing Peronist corruption, the allegations are to say the least, embarrassing.

    In his first year in office, Milei certainly made a determined start in fulfilling his campaign promises to curb inflation and begin his drive to reduce government spending. He devalued the peso by 50 percent, cut the number of ministries by half, and dramatically slashed state subsidies on fuel and transport. He also fired tens of thousands of civil servants who he deemed surplus to requirements.

    Despite initial jitters about the wild-haired President’s freewheeling style, the markets liked what they saw and inflation did start to fall, while Argentina’s bank reserves reached record levels. But as Sunday’s electoral setback proved, the Argentine people – especially those in and around the capital, a long time Peronist stronghold have grown increasingly frustrated that their economic situation has not improved more rapidly.

    Argentines have grown comfortable after decades of relying on handouts from a bloated state sector, so Milei’s ruthless austerity has come as an unwelcome dose of reality.

    The reliance on support and subsidies from a state that couldn’t really afford the handouts fuelled hyperinflation and bred unhealthy habits of dependence, as well as stifling free enterprise and initiatives.

    If Milei is now unable to force through his libertarian reforms in the teeth of opposition from the powerful Argentine establishment, and second thoughts by the voters, the clear danger must be that the country will revert to the bad old ways under which it was misruled for so long.

  • Is Jacinda Ardern trying to avoid Covid scrutiny?

    Is Jacinda Ardern trying to avoid Covid scrutiny?

    During the five years Jacinda Ardern led New Zealand, much was made of her “transparent” style of touchy-feely leadership and willingness to deal with thorny questions. Yet on the biggest issue of her record – her zero Covid policies – the former prime minister has gone missing.

    A planned week-long public hearing at an inquiry in New Zealand into the nation’s Covid response was abandoned last month, after Jacinda Ardern and other senior figures from her government unexpectedly refused to testify.

    Ardern’s no-show came as a surprise to many, including the country’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, who said his predecessor’s decision was “not right.”

    Summarizing her decision not to speak publicly about her handling of the pandemic, the commission said Ardern and her former allies – her health minister, Ayesha Verrall, the minister in charge of the Covid response, Chris Hipkins, and her high-spending finance minister Grant Robertson – believed that the exercise would merely be “performative” rather than “informative.”

    The erstwhile ministers had also been concerned that the livestreaming or publication of their evidence could become fodder for epic online trolling.

    A spokesman for Ardern said she had already provided “extensive evidence, including a recent interview that lasted three hours” for the commission, which is currently in its second phase of evaluating the country’s response to Covid – homing in on the later period when much of the gloss came off the Ardern juggernaut.

    A touch wearily, Hipkins, who has led Labour since Ardern stepped down in early 2023, said he had already spent years talking about the subject.

    As Ardern’s minister in charge of the Covid response, Hipkins oversaw the implementation of a raft of policies that saw cities locked down for months at a time, all but the luckiest expatriate Kiwis denied entry back into their country and, most controversially, Ardern’s “no jab, no job” policy for public servants in education and health who refused the vaccines.

    The last measure led to a month-long occupation outside parliament that ended with running street battles between police and hundreds of protesters.

    In the wake of the chaos, the telegenic leader’s hitherto unassailable poll numbers began to crash, and within a year she decided to call it a political day – even as her reputation abroad remained as high as ever in social democratic circles.

    Her latest decision to stay mum about the central event of her life seems awkwardly timed. With political life now behind her, Ardern has been promoting a bestselling new book about the “different” kind of leadership she brought to world politics.

    Billed as an “inspiring story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt changed our assumptions of what a leader can be,” Ardern’s new work has also been criticized in Britain as a 350-page transcript of a less-than-enthralling therapy session.

    Surprisingly little space is devoted in the book to lingering questions over her handling of the pandemic. The period is mainly recounted in the context of a factual retelling of landmark moments without much reflection on the kinds of pratfalls that almost certainly would have been raised at any public hearing in New Zealand.

    It could be that she has simply moved on to brighter things. Since leaving politics, Ardern has nabbed a number of plum stateside academic roles, including dual fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School – the university’s school of public policy and government – and a recent commencement speech at Yale.

    This year she became a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, where she offers what the school describes as her insights into “leadership in times of crisis, commitment to public service, and deep understanding of governance.” Presumably not to be repeated beyond closed doors.

  • Macron must go

    This evening Emmanuel Macron will almost certainly be searching for his fifth prime minister since January last year. François Bayrou’s decision to call a vote of confidence in his government looks like a calamitous misjudgment, one that will plunge France into another period of grave instability. Comparisons are being drawn with the tumult of the Fourth Republic when, between 1946 and 1958, France went through more than 20 governments.

    Bayrou’s coalition government has limped along this year, achieving little other than creating more disenchantment and contempt among the long-suffering electorate. The French are fed up with their political class.

    Above all, they’re sick to the back teeth of their president. It was Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election in June 2024 that kickstarted the chaos. And to think he did it for “clarification.”

    An opinion poll last week reported that Macron’s approval rating has hit a record low: just 15 percent of the country think he is doing a good job. Who are these 15 percenters? How can any voter cast an eye over their crumbling country and conclude that France is in a better state economically and socially than it was in 2017?

    Across the political spectrum calls are growing for Macron to resign. From Marine Le Pen on the right to Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left, and including veteran centrists such as Jean-François Copé, a minister in the government of Jacques Chirac. They believe the only way France can begin to rebuild is with a new president.  So do the majority of the people; a weekend opinion poll reported that 58 percent believe Macron should resign in the event Bayrou loses his vote.

    Were Macron a man of his word he would step down. In an exchange in 2019 with a group of intellectuals, he criticised previous presidents who stayed in their posts despite losing the confidence of voters in legislative elections. 

    The French are fed up with their political class

    “The president of the Republic should not be able to stay (in office) if he had a real disavowal in terms of a majority,” said Macron.

    The president’s parliamentary majority was slashed in the 2022 election when his party lost 105 seats. In last year’s snap election, they hemorrhaged a further 95.

    The president still struts around the international stage, exchanging hugs and handshakes with other equally inept European leaders. But outside Western Europe no one takes Macron seriously. Not Trump, not Xi, not Putin, not even Tunisia.

    Last week a Tunisian with a history of drug abuse and violence rampaged through Marseille, stabbing several people with a knife as he screamed “Allahu Akbar.” Police shot him dead. The Tunisian government is outraged, calling it “an unjustified killing” and demanding an investigation into the actions of the policemen.

    Authoritarian regimes issue such provocative statements because they know Macron won’t respond. Tunisia, like Algeria – which in the last 12 months have thrown a French journalist and a Franco-Algerian writer in jail – have no respect for the president of the Republic.

    With every day that Macron stays in office, France’s international standing drops another notch. But he insists that he won’t resign.

    In that case, what are the alternatives to France’s political impasse, assuming Bayrou does lose his vote of confidence this evening? Macron could dissolve parliament and call fresh elections, which is what Marine Le Pen wants. But then she would, knowing that the opinion polls put her National Rally party way in front of its rivals.

    Last week, former president Nicolas Sarkozy said that legislative elections were the “only solution.” He also legitimatized Le Pen, declaring that the “National Rally is a party that has the right to stand in elections… in my view, they belong to the Republican spectrum.”

    It’s going to be a week of extreme turbulence in France

    Last month Macron declared that fresh elections aren’t the answer. His preference is to cobble together a third coalition government. Having tried a center-right Premier (Michel Barnier) and a centrist in Bayrou, he’s said to be considering a prime minister from the left.

    The name on commentators lips is Olivier Faure, the leader of the Socialist Party. He and Macron know each other well, to the point of using the informal “tu” when addressing each other.

    You might consider it odd that Macron would turn to a Socialist. This is the party whose representation in parliament has nosedived from 331 seats in 2012 to 66 last year. Their presidential candidate in the 2022 election, Anne Hidalgo, polled 616,478 votes (1.7 percent), 200,000 fewer than the Communist candidate.

    Then again perhaps it isn’t surprising. Macron may have sold himself to the public as a centrist when he launched his En Marche! party a decade ago, but he is at heart a Socialist. He admitted it to a summit of business leaders in 2014, when as the Economy Minister in Francois Hollande’s government, he told his audience: “I am a Socialist… I stand by that.”

    In effect, France has been governed by a Socialist since 2012. Between them Hollande and Macron have led the Republic to rack and ruin. Now there is the prospect of a Socialist prime minister.

    Among the measures Faure has announced in the event he becomes PM are a reduction of the retirement age from 64 to 62 and the creation of a 2 percent tax on assets worth more than €100 million ($117 million).

    It’s going to be a week of extreme turbulence in France. There is the vote today in parliament and then on Wednesday the people will take to the streets in a protest movement called “Block Everything.”

    Do they really need to bother? France is already blocked, thanks to Emmanuel Macron.

  • The case for MAGA imperialism

    Empire has always been part of the American tradition. We are a sequel state to the greatest empire in world history. Our period of colonial tutelage under that empire taught the lessons of legitimate territorial expansion against French and Spanish rivals. Our continental aggrandizement after independence was necessary. Later overseas expansion, including periods of imperial apprenticeship in places such as Liberia, the Philippines and Panama, was further evidence of our colonial métier. Like it or not, imperialism and colonialism are congenital to the American experiment. This has been the case since 1779, when the Continental Congress branded a proposal to limit westward expansion an “intolerable despotism.” Since then, our imperial project has experienced constant cycles of confidence and self-doubt. Fair-weather friends – such as Niall Ferguson and Max Boot – scamper for the exit when times are tough. But history shows the need to stay the course. Making America great again will require the United States to take up its old vocation.

    The Trump administration inherits two of the most critical imperial roles that we currently undertake: the defense of Taiwan and the defense of Israel, two countries that are, properly speaking, imperial dependents: without American support they would not exist. So far, the US has borne those responsibilities admirably. But the past six months have shown that a more avowedly imperial policy represents the best means of advancing the national interest. Donald Trump’s highlighting of the misgovernance of Greenland and the Panama Canal region has been energizing through its cold-blooded pragmatism. The US has had interests in these jurisdictions for decades, but it was only the credible threat of imperial annexation that could extract the concessions made by Panama and the Danish Crown.

    Similarly, the revival of the very old idea of a North American union with Canada has been a jolt in the arm to our listless northern neighbor. It has elected a conservative in all but name as prime minister, is boosting defense spending to bear its fair share of the NATO burden, and is reinforcing the porous border that it long ignored. Mass immigration is being checked and fiscal balance taken seriously. We could not suffer our northern border becoming some semi-failed European welfare state with colorful socks, and it was only our threat to revise the verdict of 1812 that has forestalled this.

    Still outstanding on the overseas front is how to reconstruct Gaza into a stable and humane enclave which has been fumigated of terrorists. Trump (and Israel) recognize that there is no going back to Palestinian self-governance. Much as 60,000 Lebanese demanded a restoration of French rule after a port explosion leveled Beirut in 2020, there is a case for a restored western mandate in Gaza led by the US. Making America great again requires the US to take up these new loads of the “enlightened man’s burden” (which is apparently what Rudyard Kipling meant when he spoke of “the white man’s burden”) lest we fail in our historic mission as provider of ordered rule to places of strategic significance. The US military has been quietly building up its ranks and training civil affairs officers since being caught with its domestic governance pants down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sooner the Trump administration initiates the project, the better. Lessons learned from the successful colonial occupation of Iraq and the failed one in Afghanistan can be applied. In time, a self-governing enclave could emerge.

    The other outstanding overseas imperial calling is in Yemen. The country has been a failed state since the British fled from their shrinking perimeter in Aden in 1967. The United Arab Emirates set up a de facto colonial regime in Aden in 2017, the Southern Transitional Council. It is now part of a larger, Saudi-orchestrated governing body for the non-Houthi areas of Yemen, the Presidential Leadership Council. Both are supported by the UN as well as the EU. Now that Iran’s ability to support the chaos in the rest of the country has been weakened, there is an opportunity for the US to form a governing coalition for the country as a whole with Abraham Accords partners. This would secure the maritime route through the Suez Canal and bring further security to both Saudi Arabia and Israel. That would be an imperial mission to applaud.

    Finally, there is the pressing question of restoring American rule in the US itself. The US-Mexico border that was delineated in 1848 never acted as a barrier to illegal immigration. Since then, tens of millions of people from around the world have used the southern border to colonize themselves as US subjects. But colonialism must be in the gift of the colonizer, not the colonized. Aside from a stronger border and an end to birthright citizenship, our growing imperial capacities must play a role here. The imperial waystation in South Sudan that the Supreme Court declared legal in early July, as well as our use of El Salvador for the same purpose, are examples of how our imperial network abroad can be used to protect our imperial gains at home.

    A more robust defense of our imperial story is also the best way to fight the “decolonizing” impulse at home. The great decolonizer Barack Obama represented a break with the long tradition of black patriotism since the American founding. The “return to Africa” neo-segregation of black communities that this encouraged could only be a farce since black people have no actual interest in decolonizing themselves from white communities.

    More serious was Obama’s encouragement of Native American separation and its entailed obliteration of American imperial history on the continent. Under the Obama and then Biden administrations, the entire Department of the Interior gave itself over to “decolonizing” American land management in favor of “Native American” groups. What is required now is to develop a robust legal strategy to combat this steady erosion of the republic.

    The US became an empire because most actual Indians, as with most California and Texas Mexicans, most Spanish Floridians and, later, most Filipinos and South Vietnamese and South Koreans, preferred American rule to the available “indigenous” alternatives. The Taiwanese prefer US suzerainty to rule by China and Israel certainly prefers it to erasure. The American experiment has been an imperial one from the very first; the sooner we affirm this – at home as well as abroad – the better.

  • Why Venezuelan F-16s buzzing US warships prove Trump right

    Why Venezuelan F-16s buzzing US warships prove Trump right

    First the boat, then the buzz. On Tuesday, an American strike in the Caribbean shredded a vessel ferrying narcotics out of Venezuela, killing eleven alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang – which Caracas, strategically, dismissed as an AI hallucination. Two days later, Nicolás Maduro tried his own spectacle, dispatching a pair of F-16s to roar over the USS Jason Dunham, one of the U.S. destroyers recently sent on a counter-narcotics patrol off Venezuela’s coast.

    The maneuvers – and the steady drumbeat of pressure that preceded them – have regime-changers daydreaming about intervention and restrainers losing sleep. But before mistaking the noise for reality, it’s worth asking: what is Washington trying to achieve?

    Those who prefer tidy binaries – many of the journalists covering this beat – often misread what President Donald Trump’s administration is doing. One week, the president is cast as Liz Cheney’s hawk; the next, he is said to have sent Special Envoy Richard Grenell on a mission to befriend Marxists. The trick is not taking the headlines at face value, but tracing the pattern of moves rather than the noise of actions.

    Though often caricatured as a schizophrenic strategy, the picture – despite all the buzz – is more coherent than it seems.

    The seeming contradictions – Chevron licenses briefly extended, then revoked; Americans released from Venezuelan jails, then a record $50 million placed on Maduro’s head; terrorism designations stacked on top – are not slips in discipline. They form a sequence. Like a chess master sacrificing pawns to open the board, Trump knows how to trade small, reversible concessions to capture the strategic initiative.

    Unlike former President Joe Biden, who offered billions in relief tied to a doomed-to-fail democratization plan, Trump has operated on a different level. Rather than pursuing democracy as a single, fixed goal, he has layered multiple vectors – immigration, terrorism and drug trafficking – into his approach. At its core, the dynamic is simple: as Trump has suggested elsewhere, he has the cards – and he intends to hold them.

    Biden’s team took Maduro’s crumbs – and even absorbed a few punches. Trump, by contrast, followed the release of all remaining American prisoners in Venezuelan jails – a Trump accomplishment that changed the strategic landscape – not with mere celebration, but with increased pressure.

    Reductionist thinking, which treats sanctions or military gestures as blunt instruments, misses the point. To frame the overall effort as “regime change,” “drugs,” or “migration” is to misunderstand the logic at play. Washington’s pressure is designed to put Maduro on the defensive, forcing him into concessions on terms we define. The goal is not to provoke reckless intervention, or to simply asphyxiate the regime because we don’t like them, but to widen the cracks in his system and ensure Maduro bargains from weakness.

    Seen this way, the ambiguity is the strategy. Optionality is not confusion, it’s leverage. If Maduro grows anxious enough to cut deals, open channels, or less plausibly, contemplate an exit, that outcome is preferable to the frozen status quo. Those who demand a singular goal misread the nature of power: here, several possible futures count as success.

    Biden’s approach yielded neither democracy, market access, nor migration compliance. Trump’s approach acknowledges that something is better than nothing – and wields power with that reality in mind.

    If anything stands out this week, it’s that after the U.S. strike – which did, in fact, occur – Caracas’ response looks less like strength and more like a busted gambler rattling coins after a loss. By denying the strike and then sending two jets on a showy flyover, Maduro hopes the media inflates the drama – military strategists, however, aren’t losing any sleep. Fear, not retaliation, is what’s worth noticing here.

    Maduro’s touting of 4.5 million “militiamen” is yet another absurd claim that underscores his fear – one that CNN reported without any further explanation. Many of these so-called militiamen are just boys and girls sent into parades because, as a viral video making its rounds in Venezuelan social media show, “Maduro me obligó” (“Maduro forced me”). For context, Ukraine’s active military personnel is at around 1 million, reading that Maduro is parading 4.5 million understandably freaks folks out. Calling it misleading doesn’t do it justice – it’s laughable.

    The flyovers and grandiose claims are performative; they mask weakness. Maduro wants to signal that he can act, especially to his citizenry, but the truth is he doesn’t hold the cards – and that’s exactly the point.

    Maduro can posture, he can bluff, but he cannot rewrite the balance of power. Washington doesn’t need a singular, dramatic victory; it needs to exploit the fissures and make attainable demands. Every concession, every crack exposed, every gesture coerced is a win – quiet, methodical and unmistakably real. In this game, the noise is an illusion. The leverage, the cards, and the power are what matters.

    Don’t confuse the moves for the endgame. With prudence, the US can use both carrot and stick to advance America’s concrete interests. The signal is clear: you don’t want a conflict – and neither do we. Act against us, and consequences could get worse.

  • By taking on the cartels, Trump is reasserting American authority

    By taking on the cartels, Trump is reasserting American authority

    The reporting process on Donald Trump’s war on the cartels for my latest cover story for The Spectator, published here today, mostly focused on the administration’s theory of the case: what they intend to do about the challenge of the drug running, human trafficking and terrorist activity by the narco syndicates to America’s south and why they believe a major escalation is necessary. In the intervening time between filing a piece and going to press, the theoretical became very real with the fiery destruction of a boat carrying drugs in international waters, allegedly steered by 11 now-dead members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua cartel. 

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked about the shocking (to those who haven’t been paying attention) military strike, made clear that the rules of engagement have changed, and they are not going back to the old pattern of interdiction and trial. 

    “The President has been very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America and the full might of the United States to take on and eradicate these drug cartels, no matter where they’re operating from and no matter how long they’ve been able to act with impunity,” Rubio told journalists after traveling back from meetings in Mexico City. “Those days are over.” He added:

    I think as long as those vessels are in the region and as long as the President’s in the White House, he’s made very clear he’s not going to allow the United States to continue to be flooded with cocaine and fentanyl and other drugs coming from different places – this one is from Venezuela, which is a common route. But by the way, some of it ends up in Europe. A lot of it ends up in Puerto Rico and then on into the United States mainland. So no one should be surprised.  That’s why they’re there on a counter-drug mission, and they’re going to continue to operate. As far as specifics and future operations, I have to refer you to the Pentagon on that. This is a DoD operation…

    The President was very clear, and that is we destroyed a drug boat that left Venezuela operated by a designated narcoterrorist organization, which is what these are, and he’s been clear that the days of acting with impunity and having an engine shot down or a couple drugs grabbed off a boat, the – those days are over.  Now it is we are going to wage combat against drug cartels that are flooding American streets and killing Americans.

    The election-year depictions of Trump as a dovish isolationist who adopts a Lindberghian attitude toward America’s role in the world has never been accurate, and it has consistently been proven wrong not just in his first term but even more so in his second. The President’s attitude toward Canada, Greenland and the like have been dismissed as foolish talk, but the truth is that he is presiding over a reassertion of American authority over the Western Hemisphere that is long overdue. The war footing this administration is adopting now toward the cartels is still in its early days, but the die is cast – and there is no going back.

  • Poland’s Nawrocki heralds a more mature populism

    Yesterday, September 3, President Trump welcomed Karol Nawrocki, the newly inaugurated president of Poland to the White House. It was a stirring occasion, replete with a surprise military fly-over of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets flying in “missing man” formation to honor  Major Maciej “Slab” Krakowian, the Polish pilot who died in a crash in Radom, Poland, last Thursday. 

    Nawrocki, who narrowly won the presidency in June, is often described as “the Polish Trump.” It’s an accurate epithet. Nawrocki is as much a “Poland First” president as Trump is an “America First” president. The 42-year-old historian (Nawrocki holds a PhD in history) supports a list of policy initiatives that could have come right out of the MAGA playbook. In his inaugural address on August 6, he touched on several of these themes. Unlike his brethren in the EU, Nawrocki, a staunch Roman Catholic, emphasized Poland’s abiding “attachment to Christian values and identity.” Among those values, he noted, were “love and mercy towards other people,” including, he said with a perhaps a touch of irony, those who had vilified and lied about him during his campaign. 

    On more overtly political matters, Nawrocki affirmed that at the center of his “Plan 21” platform were two negative imperatives: “no” to illegal migration “no” to adopting the euro. Poland would maintain its own currency, and thus its independence from the encroachments of the EU not only on matters of illegal immigration but also on such subjects as energy (Nawrocki is pro-nuclear energy) and the florid sexual exoticism of LGBTQ+ and transsexual activists.  

    During his meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, Nawrocki stressed his commitment to bolster Poland’s contribution to NATO. It already stands at 4.7 percent of GDP, he noted, one of the highest in the EU, and his goal is 5 percent. 

    Trump endorsed Nawrocki last spring and it was clear that the two men have a lot in common. Both are pro-growth, pro-law and order (Nawrocki is an independent but is supported by the conservative Law and Justice party), and pro-national sovereignty. And just as Donald Trump has been wildly castigated (and indicted) by agents of the globalist, deep-state establishment, so Nawrocki has been the object of a campaign of vilification by the usual suspects. The Polish American, anti-Trump writer Anne Applebaum, for example, has dismissed Nawrocki as an “authoritarian populist candidate” and advocate of “blood-and-soil nationalism.” The side-long allusion to the diminutive Austrian house painter with the funny mustache was not adventitious.  

    In fact, Karol Nawrocki is one of a new breed of politically mature populist leaders in Europe, among whose number I would include Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. These are leaders who have rejected the malicious hot-house utopianism of open borders and fantasy politics in which a nurturing past is exchanged for a congeries of militantly superficial and enervating liberal clichés. If leaders like Karol Nawrocki represent the future of Europe, Europe’s future will be bright. Donald Trump saw that instantly, which is why the two men exhibited such obvious rapport and camaraderie in the Oval Office. I predict that meeting marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship.