The Social World

Tag: American foreign policy

  • Why Trump’s Muslim Brotherhood crackdown is long overdue

    Why Trump’s Muslim Brotherhood crackdown is long overdue

    Donald Trump has begun the process of banning the Muslim Brotherhood. The President asked his officials last week to investigate whether certain chapters of the group should be classed as foreign terrorist organizations, which would result in economic and travel sanctions.

    Some are portraying this as a reckless lurch into Islamophobia. In fact, it is overdue by at least a decade. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a benign religious association. It is a disciplined ideological movement with a century-long record of exploiting political systems. Its explicit objective is to work towards the establishment of a global caliphate – only by gradualist means, rather than the reckless confrontation and brutality favored by its distant offshoot, ISIS.

    Its approach varies by setting, not by moral principle. Where the environment is permissive – in fractured states, or in countries with weak institutions or sympathetic governments – it behaves like a revolutionary vanguard. Where the environment is rules-bound and resistant, it burrows into student groups, charities, interfaith organizations, academic centers and even government institutions, steadily strengthening its influence. But wherever it operates it has the same ultimate aim.

    The Brotherhood’s modus operandi has been understood by intelligence services for years. Trump’s move is less a policy innovation than an admission of reality.

    There are several reasons why Trump is acting now. One is legislative: the “Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025” was introduced in Congress in July, championed in the House by Representative Mario Díaz-Balart and in the Senate by Ted Cruz. The Act’s progress created a political incentive for Trump to get ahead of Congress and demonstrate leadership on the issue. The MuslimBrotherhood has piqued Republican anxieties about national security for two years now, ever since Hamas’s attack on Israel unleashed near-constant Islamist-flavored protests on American streets and campuses. 

    The battle against progressive academia, where such protests have often turned outright anti-Semitic, has become a mainstay of Trump’s political platforms. Pro-Hamas encampments, faculty statements whitewashing Hamas’s atrocities, and the open collaboration between progressive student groups and Islamist-aligned organizations shocked even those who thought they had become accustomed to the intellectual decay of American academia.

    For Republicans, the protests confirmed what they have long suspected: that American universities have been significantly penetrated by an unholy alliance of the progressive left and Islamist networks, each using the other’s grievances for its own ends.

    For decades, university administrators, civil-rights bureaucracies and even parts of the intelligence community have tiptoed around clear signs of Islamist organizing on campus. They have convinced themselves that confronting Islamist activism would lend credence to the narrative of a persecuted minority and so make radicalization worse. 

    In fact, the opposite happened: the vacuum left by institutions gave ample room for Brotherhood-affiliated groups to pose as authentic voices of Muslim America, even when their aims bore little resemblance to the concerns of ordinary Muslims. This appeasement occurred in many other civic spaces besides academia.

    Targeting the Brotherhood abroad allows Republicans to confront it where it is vulnerable. The Executive Order sensibly says that three foreign branches of the Brotherhood – in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon – should be investigated, with reports due on them in mid-December and decisions to be made on their fate by the end of January.

    This approach gives the new policy a good chance of success. Investigators can now follow financial and organizational trails they previously might have considered too politically sensitive to pursue. Brotherhood-linked institutions will be subjected to a level of scrutiny they have long avoided. Intelligence agencies have long claimed they are too busy to address “non-violent Islamism,” even when states like Egypt and the UAE have provided information about the Brotherhood’s malign activity. Trump’s Executive Order puts a stop to that “not my department” approach. It will be fascinating to see what kind of terrorist activity this sudden beam of light will reveal.

    The one point Trump appears not to have fully considered is the contradiction between this ban and his warm relations with Qatar and Turkey, the two most prominent state sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood. The two countries were left off the proscription list. Doha bankrolls Brotherhood-aligned groups across the region and hosts the Hamas leadership; Ankara sees the Brotherhood as a natural extension of its regional ambitions.

    It may be Trump’s view that some contradictions are simply the cost of doing business in the Middle East. If the ban is to have lasting credibility, however, Washington will have to square its antipathy to the Brotherhood with a foreign policy that still treats key Brotherhood sponsors as indispensable partners. Laura Loomer, the influential but controversial right-wing commentator, has already complained loudly about Qatar and Turkey being left out of the scope of the Executive Order. 

    Loomer is impatient for these countries to be held to account. But of course intelligence about the activities of Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese Islamists will rapidly implicate Qatar and Turkey as the Brotherhood’s key international sponsors. Likewise, accumulating information about foreign infiltration of the US education sector will yield damning information about hostile Qatari activity that Trump will find it difficult to ignore.

    The significance of this goes beyond American borders. Other Western democracies have also spent years tying themselves in knots over how to approach the Brotherhood.

    European governments, in particular, have long worried that their cautious approach to Islamist activism has created precisely the conditions that the Brotherhood exploits best: permissive legal frameworks, weak enforcement, and a political class anxious to avoid accusations of prejudice. Trump’s designation should embolden them to follow the example of Austria, the one European country that has proscribed the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The Austrian ban has not caused community relations to collapse. Many Muslims hate the Brotherhood as false representatives of their views and interests, and bullies bent on suppressing their freedom.

    For all the unanswered questions around Trump’s decision, its core logic is sound. The Muslim Brotherhood has thrived on western hesitation, on the belief that ambiguity is safer than clarity. The Brotherhood’s furious online response to last week’s policy shift shows how much it values that hesitation and wants to encourage it. The Executive Order is a belated correction. Whether it is the beginning of a sustained shift, or simply another false dawn of resolution in the face of Islamist infiltration, subversion and intimidation, will depend on what Washington and its allies choose to do next.

  • It feels as if Michael McFaul’s audience has long since left

    Since the end of the Cold War, politicians and commentators have been searching for a new paradigm through which to understand international relations. Notwithstanding Francis Fukuyama’s oft-misunderstood The End of History, we have tried various patterns to classify the world order, of which George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” first used in 2002, was among the more enduring.

    In Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Michael McFaul acknowledges the widespread if nebulous consensus that the challenge presented by Russia and China is a kind of second Cold War – historian Niall Ferguson has labeled America’s relations with China “Cold War II.” But McFaul rejects the easy creation of a model which is reminiscent of past conflicts, arguing that it fails “accurately [to] describe the complex, unique dynamics of our current era of great power competition.”

    While McFaul’s analysis draws on his experience as a social scientist and a historian, he also dons his “policymaker hat” to provide a solution as well as commentary. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not – of which more anon – for that, at least, we should be grateful. It is easy enough to lament, to use Seán O’Casey’s phrase, that “th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis,” but considerably more demanding to say what can and should be done about it.

    There is a touch of the straw man around the edges of McFaul’s arguments. When he explains that “China is not an existential threat to the United States or the free world,” for example, he is suggesting a position which few serious foreign policy observers hold. Indeed, it is hard to say what a truly existential threat to the US would look like – at least a foreign one. As a young Abraham Lincoln told his audience in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge… if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

    One current difficulty lies in characterizing the foreign policies of the Trump administration. McFaul notes, correctly, that the President, on returning to the White House, “immediately withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council.” It is hard to think of a multilateral institution that Donald Trump likes or trusts, from the UN to NATO to the World Trade Organization. McFaul sums this up as “an even stronger commitment to an isolationist agenda.”

    But that will not quite do. President Trump authorized major air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June; he is escalating military action against drug cartels in the Caribbean Sea, declaring that the US is at war with the drug cartels and creating a Joint Task Force within US Southern Command to coordinate strikes; he has interposed himself as a “peacemaker” between India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan and, most recently, in the Middle East. This is hardly shutting out the rest of the world and focusing on domestic concerns.

    What, then, would the former ambassador and director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies advise the nation’s chief executive to do? McFaul advocates selective but not complete economic decoupling from China, lifting most of the tariff barriers Trump has imposed and encouraging American investment abroad, attracting Russian and Chinese scientific, technological and entrepreneurial talent to the US. He also argues that “defense is only part of a successful strategy. America needs more offense,” though it is hard to see him and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth agreeing on the implementation of that statement.

    Fundamentally, McFaul believes in international cooperation and in multilateralism, not only for America’s prosperity and security but also as a way of prying apart the ad hoc and transactional alliance which currently holds sway between Moscow and Beijing. I freely confess to being an enthusiast for informed debate and vigorous but respectful exchange of ideas, and someone with McFaul’s background should be listened to as America decides how to approach international relations.

    However, Autocrats vs. Democrats founders on two obstacles. The first is the highly personal and utterly unpredictable nature of Trump’s foreign policy. The President has few guiding principles save his own instincts and his attitudes can turn on a dime, making it very difficult to formulate any coherent kind of framework which can direct American policy. As we have seen with his wildly varying views on Ukraine and Russia, it sometimes feels as if he himself does not know what he will think tomorrow – making it a sheer impossibility for anyone else.

    More broadly, there is a feeling that American politics is not currently amenable to debate, discussion and exchanges of information. While the extent to which the electorate is polarized may be exaggerated, politicians certainly seem to have retreated to entrenched positions and debate can seem like a concession to a sworn enemy. In that respect, there is something slightly old-fashioned about McFaul’s book. He may have prepared an intellectual case and a list of detailed propositions, but it feels as if his audience has long since left, taken up arms and rushed to the ideological barricades.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Are J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio heading for a clash?

    Thanksgiving weekend ends on Sunday, and still there’s no peace in Ukraine. Donald Trump’s latest attempt to end the war – his 28-point plan – began to fall apart from the moment it mysteriously leaked to various international news outfits last week.

    As that story landed, Reuters broke some other news: Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, would stand down in January. Kellogg, who represents the more ardently pro-Ukrainian faction of the administration, had clashed repeatedly with Trump’s peace envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been engaging in friendly dialogue with Moscow for most of the year. His departure seemed linked to the fact that Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the US Army and an ally of J.D. Vance, had been despatched to Geneva to tell the Ukrainians to accept the latest deal or forget about America’s continued support.

    All that triggered an all-too-predictable chorus of Trump denunciation. In his desperation to strike a deal and declare peace, countless pundits said, the President was selling Ukraine out and blindsiding his European allies. Trump was, once again, accused of being a Kremlin stooge. The Independent claimed that the his plan had been “entirely dictated by [Vladimir] Putin.”

    Witkoff, for his part, was roundly criticized for “coaching” Russian officials in emails which leaked (again) to Bloomberg. “It would probably be surprising if he cursed us with obscenities in his conversations with Ushakov,” came the caustic response from Putin.

    Trump’s plan was gravely flawed, of course. The idea that he could be anointed as a “peace czar” who would ensure that America shared the “profits” of any postwar reconstruction seems classic MAGA unrealpolitik. Even if such an arrangement could be struck, neither Volodymyr Zelensky nor Putin were ever likely to accept the proposed land partitions or the compromise of a “buffer” zone. And Britain and the European Union dismissed the plan out of hand. “We have not heard of any concessions from Russia,” said the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas. “If Russia really wanted peace, it could have agreed to an unconditional ceasefire a long time ago.’’ And so the tragedy goes on.

    But the latest imbroglio did reveal some interesting tensions with the Trump administration’s approach. Vance, representing the anti-war paleoconservative faction, appears to be angry with his fellow Republicans for, as he sees it, scuppering the White House’s ceasefire efforts. On Monday, the Vice President posted a furious message on social media. It’s worth quoting in full:

    After four years of house prices doubling (and in some areas, tripling) many young people feel priced out of the American Dream of homeownership. A welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota reveals that large numbers of new arrivals aren’t assimilating and are funneling our tax dollars to literal terrorist groups. An innocent woman was set on fire in Chicago as the mayor resists federal law enforcement resources to bring peace to one of our great cities. The Obamacare insurance system is buckling under its own weight. And the country is $38 trillion in debt. Our administration is working hard on addressing all of these problems. But you know what really fires up the beltway GOP? Not any of the above. Instead, the political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four-year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close. I’m not even talking about the substance of their views. Much of what these people have said about the Ukraine war has been proven wrong, but whatever. We can agree to disagree. But the level of passion over this one issue when your own country has serious problems is bonkers. It disgusts me. Show some passion for your own country.

    In attacking “the beltway GOP,” Vance aimed his ire chiefly at Senator Mitch McConnell, who had said that Putin was playing Trump for a fool. Vance branded his comments “a ridiculous attack on the President’s team, which has worked tirelessly to clean up the mess.”

    But some of Vance’s allies, if not necessarily the Vice President himself, also feel some bitterness towards Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Despite his apparent conversion to the America First agenda, Rubio remains on the more hawkish end of the Trump foreign-policy spectrum. It was Rubio who flew to Geneva last week and appeared to soften up Trump’s hard deadline with the Europeans and Ukrainians. “We believe that Marco Rubio’s engagement in the continuation of talks is important,” an official from a Nato country told Politico. Rubio’s changed the pace of negotiations, he added: “After yesterday, it has slowed down, and that’s good.”

    The White House insists, of course, that the entire cabinet is “working in lockstep” towards the shared goal of ending the war: Witkoff, Rubio, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, put on at least the appearance of a united front in Switzerland. Rubio remains on friendly terms with Vance, despite their seemingly inevitable rivalry for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.

    But it is also evident that Rubio and Vance have very different approaches when it comes to dealing with Europe and Ukraine. That could set them on course towards a more public clash in the coming months, as Team Trump becomes increasingly frustrated with its failure to end the most difficult war of our time.

  • 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 bromances MbS as Epstein Files loom

    Trump bromances MbS as Epstein Files loom

    The contrast could hardly have been starker. As Donald Trump palled around with Mohammed bin Salman in the newly gilded Oval Office, Congress was voting on a transparency act that would further expose Jeffrey Epstein’s grave misdeeds. Trump, who had worked overtime to try and quash the vote, was in his element with the Saudi crown prince. Transparency? Not a bit of it. Trump proclaimed that the crown prince “knew nothing” about the death of Jamal Khashoggi who was, after all, “extremely controversial,” the term that he often deploys to describe anyone he dislikes or finds nettlesome. 

    The hero, or, to put it more precisely, heroine, of the day was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is a profile in courage. She stood up for Epstein’s victims in an honorable and upright fashion that underscored the sordid nature of Trump’s attempt to suppress the release of the files in possession of the Justice Department. What those files will reveal is an open question. The likelihood that they will divulge anything incriminating about Trump seems slender – other than the fact that he has battled so ardently to prevent them from seeing the light of day.  

    In seeking to bury the files, Trump has been defending the very establishment that he professes to despise. Greene, in battling to ensure the release of the files, has revealed the rampant corruption in elite America, including the escapades of former Harvard president Larry Summers. Trump has referred to Greene as Marjorie “Traitor” Greene. She hit back today outside the US Capitol in the presence of Epstein’s victims, one of whom eloquently demanded that Trump stop seeking to politicize the brouhaha over the files.  

    According to Greene, “I fought for him for the policies and for America First. And he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition. Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of Americans and Americans like the women standing behind me.” Strong words. 

    If Greene has been on something of a tear lately, she’s not the only one that has administered a shellacking to Trump. He has been suffering a number of defeats in other arenas. The latest arrived this afternoon when a Texas federal court struck down the state’s redistricting map that was designed to ensure an additional five Republican seats in Congress. The worst blow is that Trump originally appointed the judge who wrote the decision, Jeffrey V. Brown.  

    Trump’s remedy has been to retreat to foreign policy, where he effectively enjoys a form of suzerainty, at least for now. He’s been making noises about attacking Nigeria and Venezuela. For the next day or so, he will enjoy his bromance with the crown prince, escorting him to a grand dinner tonight. Meanwhile, he’s planning to sell him F-35 fighter jets, a move that Congress may seek to block, particularly since Israel is opposed to the deal. A lucrative real-estate deal also appears to be in the offing, no matter the public outcry. 

    Trump himself could not appear to be more blasé. MAGA, as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, is being “ripped apart.” Trump, though, is enjoying hanging out with his new pal from Riyadh. “We talk at night. We can talk, I can call him almost any time,” Trump said. “He goes, ‘Hi, how are you doing.’ It’s like, the craziest times.” It is indeed. 

  • Why Trump is freezing out Five Eyes allies

    Why Trump is freezing out Five Eyes allies

    The most powerful intelligence alliance in the world is breaking up. In January, Donald Trump restricted intelligence-sharing on Russia and Ukraine, cutting allies out of negotiations and freezing certain channels entirely. Then in March came the so-called “Ukraine intel blackout,” an unprecedented freeze that shut Britain and Australia out of updates on Russian troop movements. And last month, the Dutch said they were scaling back intelligence-sharing with America over fears of “politicization.”

    Trump tends to treat intelligence as leverage, a tool to reward countries that fall in line with Washington and punish those that don’t. In his hands, intelligence and secrets have become bargaining chips. But by holding information back, he’s weaponizing the very trust that built the western alliance and sustained the power of the Anglosphere. The “Five Eyes” – the spying network that comprises the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – is not a commercial arrangement. It can’t survive if its members start haggling over access.

    There are good reasons for Trump to be wary of the Five Eyes. British and Australian agents, after all, were at the heart of the Russiagate saga which did so much to derail his first administration. More broadly, the alliance allows governments to spy on their own citizens through one another’s networks, sharing the results without technically breaking their own laws.

    We like to believe our governments need warrants, oversight and law to reach into our private lives. In truth, the invasion of privacy in the West takes place on an industrial scale. Almost every phone call, search and message passes through a web of monitoring that’s rarely acknowledged and almost never constrained by law. Its defenders insist this cooperation keeps the West safe. Its critics call it institutionalized hypocrisy. Both are right to a degree.

    American law forbids the National Security Agency from targeting US citizens without a warrant. British law requires GCHQ to obtain one under the Investigatory Powers Act. So the NSA collects on Britons. GCHQ collects on Americans. Data is exchanged. It’s a system built on plausible deniability. Each agency claims it is merely receiving “foreign intelligence.” The scale of the intelligence-gathering and analysis is staggering.

    The US’s NSA alone intercepts hundreds of millions of text messages, emails and call records every day. Under its “Upstream” and “Prism” programs, the agency taps the world’s main fiber-optic cables and demands user data directly from US tech giants. Britain’s matching operation, GCHQ’s “Tempora,” stores three days of transatlantic internet traffic at any one time, with metadata retained for a month. Australia’s Signals Directorate monitors entire oceanic cable systems linking Asia to the Pacific. Canada’s Communications Security Establishment sits astride the Atlantic routes into North America, feeding bulk intercepts into shared databases that analysts in all five countries and beyond can query.

    The alliance’s reach extends into almost every form of modern communication – mobile networks, satellite relays and social media platforms. Few of its targets are terrorists or spies. The agreement that started this system, known as UKUSA, was signed in 1946. It has never been ratified by any legislative body and remains classified in full. What we know comes from leaks, court rulings and declassified scraps. Over the years, the network has quietly expanded beyond its original five members to include associate and “third-party” partners in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These extensions, often referred to as “Nine Eyes” or “Fourteen Eyes,” have turned the alliance into a sprawling global surveillance web, linking western intelligence agencies through shared databases, cables and monitoring systems that cover the planet.

    The Five Eyes were born of Churchill’s idea of “the English-speaking people,” bound by language, law and a shared sense of moral purpose. Yet the values that once made Five Eyes a moral community have fractured. Today, the alliance binds countries that no longer see liberty, privacy or speech in the same way. In Britain, police arrest citizens for online “hate incidents.” In Canada, the government froze protesters’ bank accounts. Australia’s diplomats helped ignite an FBI investigation into a US presidential candidate.

    The secrecy and the overreach are real, but Trump’s crusade against Five Eyes is not about curbing surveillance. It’s about dominance over the system. At the start of the year, the President began starving Washington’s allies of intelligence they’d once taken for granted. Then screenshots from a White House Signal chat appeared online, revealing private exchanges between senior aides discussing US military options in Yemen, shared by allies. The breach exposed not only sensitive operations but also the chaotic way Trump’s team handled classified material. British and Australian intelligence officers were said to be furious, prompting allies to scale back contributions. Former GCHQ staff described a collapse of confidence among the Five Eyes intelligence services.

    London and Canberra have since formed smaller, closed sub-groups to coordinate without US participation. Canada, meanwhile, has scaled back its contributions after Trump publicly threatened to expel it from the alliance altogether, following months of tariff disputes. Inside Washington, intelligence veterans describe an atmosphere of suspicion not seen since the Cold War.

    For Trump and his allies, the intelligence alliance is not a bond of friendship, but a nest of unelected bureaucrats, the “deep state abroad.” To him, distrust is not paranoia but prudence. He views the exchange of intelligence as a transaction and intelligence itself as a commodity. That’s not altogether wrong. The Five Eyes alliance has always been transactional, a system of barter between intelligence services, trading data for access, reach or favor. Trump’s battle is not against the surveillance itself. He is targeting the independence of allies who refuse to submit. Intelligence does not obey the laws of supply and demand. It depends on the unspoken belief that what is shared will not be politicized. Once that trust collapses, the value of the intelligence collapses with it. Trump is destroying Five Eyes by destroying the trust that underpins it. Whether that’s deliberate or not is hard to say.

    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. 

  • 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.

  • Will Trump meet ‘Little Rocket Man?’

    Will Trump meet ‘Little Rocket Man?’

    As President Trump sets off on his East Asian tour, all eyes will be on the bilateral summits that the US president will hold. After all, Trump has made no secret of his preference for tête-à-têtes over multilateralism. With a meeting with Xi Jinping scheduled in South Korea, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, the question of whether Trump will meet Little Rocket Man is unsurprisingly pervading, not least given how few details have been revealed as to Trump’s agenda.

    Although such a meeting, whether at the Demilitarized Zone or otherwise, seems unlikely at a time when US-North Korea relations are poor, nothing can be ruled out. Nevertheless, whilst the first Trump administration taught the world to expect the unexpected, Trump 2.0 is hardly the same beast.

    Back in 2017, Trump and Kim Jong-un were engaged in an escalatory war of words, threatening “fire and fury” if “Little Rocket Man” continued his “suicide mission” of developing and testing nuclear and missile technology. In response, North Korea insulted Trump as a “dotard”, referring to Trump’s “impaired intellect or understanding in old age.”

    The next two years, however, would see Trump and Kim pose for photographers in Singapore, Hanoi and at the Demilitarized Zone. The latter, held on June 30, 2019, even caught North Korea off guard. A day before he planned to visit Seoul to discuss how to revive denuclearization talks, following the failed Hanoi Summit in February, Trump tweeted that he wanted an impromptu meeting with Kim at the inter-Korean border “to say hello”. The North Koreans deemed the proposal to be “interesting,” but much like the rest of the world, were confused. An hour-long meeting happened, and Trump became the first incumbent US president to enter North Korean territory.

    By the end of 2019, however, Washington’s relations with Pyongyang had made little concrete progress despite three presidential summits in two years. North Korea only continued to accelerate its treasured nuclear development, and Pyongyang’s willingness to negotiate with Washington plummeted during the four years of neglect by Biden, for whom Pyongyang was hardly a priority. When Trump entered the Oval Office for the second time in January 2025, North Korea had bonded with what Kim Jong-un called its invincible ally, namely, Russia.

    Could we see a repetition of the 2019 DMZ summit this week? The answer is perhaps. The second Trump administration faces global challenges that are hardly the same as those into which Trump was thrown in 2017. The North Korea problem is now not limited to a rogue state seeking to bolster its own nuclear capabilities but doing so in close security cooperation with Russia during a global war, all the while China knowingly turns a blind eye. What is more, whilst the first Trump administration saw core teams of senior officials responsible for preparing and negotiating with Pyongyang, in Trump 2.0, any talks with Kim look to be much more the product of Trump’s own desires.

    Pyongyang’s supply of artillery, missiles and manpower to Moscow to assist Putin’s war, in exchange for financial and technological assistance, could see Kim Jong-un rebuff any overtures by Trump. Nevertheless, Kim craves status and legitimacy, whilst having no intention of denuclearizing. In September, he stressed how North Korea would “never ever” abandon its nuclear weapons, and only earlier this week, Pyongyang tested several hypersonic missiles of what it deemed to be a new system able to engulf South Korean defenses. A spontaneous Kim-Trump summit wherein the North Korean leader refuses to offer any nuclear concessions and is not expected to do so by the United States would be a victory for Kim.

    Whilst Trump’s East Asian sojourn will conclude with the APEC Summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, the multilateral forum risks being overshadowed by his bilateral meeting with Xi, the day before. At the same time, other East Asian leaders cannot rest on their laurels as they prepare to meet the US president. For the newly elected Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi – a staunch conservative – and her South Korean counterpart, the left-wing Lee Jae-myung, the next week will prove a key test of their abilities to work with their ironclad ally. They will need to manage Trump’s penchant for personalistic politics deftly and adapt to his unconventional style. At the same time, they must ensure that the interests of Washington’s Northeast Asian allies are not sidelined amidst difficult discussions on tariffs. Strengthening deterrence is more important than ever.

    At a time when East Asia faces an ever-increasing range of isolated and connected security threats, not least from North Korea, China and Russia, the West has a difficult challenge ahead. Nevertheless, even in the unlikely event that Trump and Kim do meet, we must be realistic in our expectations. North Korea will do anything but denuclearize.