Foreign Affairs Polish MP: ‘Maybe Europe Needs a Shock’ From Trump Krzysztof Bosak sat down with The American Conservative to discuss Europe’s civilizational decline and President Donald Trump’s aim to reverse it. (Photo by Marek Antoni Iwaczuk/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) Last week, the Trump administration released a new National Security Strategy that warned of Europe’s “civilizational erasure” and lambasted its policies on migration, free speech, and environmental regulation, among other issues. The document shocked liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, and European elites worried that President Donald Trump seeks to betray their nations and align with Russia. But some European politicians take a very different view of Trump’s approach to the old continent. I spoke to one such politician, Krzysztof Bosak, a Polish leader in the nationalist “Euroskeptic” movement, which is wary of the European Union. Bosak is the deputy speaker of the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, and a rising star in right-wing European politics. He offered insights on Trump’s provocative strategy document, Europe’s civilizational crisis, and the EU’s war with Elon Musk. President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy warns that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.” It says some European countries are becoming “majority non-European” in the coming decades and that this will be bad for the United States. America’s mainstream media is presenting this document as the latest example of Trump’s hostility to Europe, and many European elites feel the same way. How do you see the concerns expressed in this document about Europe’s economic, military, and civilizational decline? My perspective won’t be the typical European perspective, because I grew up in the Euroskeptic movement. So, the remarks from the strategy document have been typical talking points of my movement for 20 years or more. This criticism towards the European mainstream is also our criticism. I can’t say that I disagree with anything there.  Of course, the question is whether this criticism should be put in a strategic document. Are we still allies in one organization? This is a big question. And I think it sets a new precedent in international life to be so provocative. Although, of course, it’s also a continuation of Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich [Security Conference] speech, which I agreed with completely. So first, I agree with these opinions. I think they are true, unfortunately. I would like it to be otherwise, but they are true. Of course, there are also good things to say about Europe. And if the American administration had been in a better mood, maybe some good sentences about Europe also could have a place in this document. But this is a choice for your administration, what to put in your strategic document. I can imagine a European strategic document with some criticisms of America. It is also possible. But the question is, What kind of result do we look for? And this is, I think, the most interesting question in this situation, because we have been trying to change the direction of the European Union for decades, since the 1990s. We have had criticisms of the centralization of the European Union and the overregulation of the European economy for more than two decades. We have had criticisms of climate policies for more than 10 years probably. And nothing is changing. Or the changes are only in a bad direction.  So, maybe Europe needs a shock from our good old friend America to start a true debate, because there was no debate in the European mainstream. In America, you have both sides of the political spectrum. In Western Europe, there’s only one side. If you have politically incorrect views, you can find yourself in prison, because you said too much, for example, in England or sometimes in Germany.  In Poland, we still have a big space for free speech, for politically incorrect views, in parliament and in media debates. But Poland is an exception. Maybe the whole Central and Eastern European bloc is an exception. So, if the goal was to shake Europe and to help Europe find some solution for its disease, maybe it will work. But we’ll see. For now, it’s a huge shock. In my opinion, in most European capital cities, it was unimaginable to publish something like that. It’s completely against the logic of the mainstream attitude to transatlantic relations, which is just patting each other on the shoulders, taking photographs, repeating slogans. In Europe today, right-wing nationalist parties are Euroskeptic. And liberals are pro–European Union and cosmopolitan. And I was wondering if there’s room for a synthesis here, such that the European Union remains cosmopolitan, but only for Europeans. Why do Euroskeptic parties want to abolish the EU or withdraw their countries from it, rather than take over the EU and turn it into a right-wing organization?  It’s not true that Euroskeptic parties or more alternative right parties or nationalist parties would like to withdraw from the EU. They are not against the presence in the EU. Why? Because European societies don’t want to leave. Britain was an exception.  So this, as you said, “synthesis” works in almost every European country. Even the more conservative and EU-critical parts of the society in every country would like to be a part of the bloc, and they would like it to work in a better way.  But the EU is constructed in such a way that it’s almost impossible to reform it in a more conservative and sovereignist direction. It was developed for many decades, and it was designed to change only in one direction: more European integration, more centralism, more federalism. In fact, not really federalism, because federalism gives you some level of autonomy…. And you have many political institutions and mechanisms that are preventing change. It’s not only mainstream media; it’s also institutions with hard power, for example, the European Court of Justice. To appoint a judge there you need an acceptance of the body based on European treaties. And this body excludes everybody who’s more sovereignist. They have mechanisms of putting sanctions on countries if they elect a government that is too conservative. They call it a “defense of the rule of law.” But it’s not about the rule of law. It’s about liberal values, a liberal agenda.  So, to change the situation, you need a majority in the European Parliament, and we are very far from that…. And you need also a majority in the European Council, which is the group of European prime ministers. So you have to win with the alternative right in more than half of European countries. It’s impossible. So, in the current situation, you can’t change the European Union…. And of course, you need power in at least one big European country to change the situation, France or Germany. If you don’t have a big country on board, it’s almost impossible. And in Germany, they used the internal security agency to investigate AfD [Alternative for Germany party]. And in France, they used the courts to take away [National Rally leader] Marine Le Pen’s right to be a candidate in the next presidential elections. So, on every level you are blocked if you are too conservative or too sovereignist. What, then, is the strategy of Europe’s right-wing parties? If you don’t want to withdraw from the EU because doing so is unpopular, and if you don’t think that the EU can be reformed in the near term, do you just remain in the EU but resist it in the meantime? Yes. We are in a trap. As one leader of the identitarian movement said, this is an open-air prison for European nations. But it’s not so bad. A big majority of society experiences economic freedom and individual freedom. But on the political level, it does not look good. So I think every political party should try to be pragmatic in this situation. They should oppose the centralization of the EU. And they should try to raise consciousness in society, to increase our ability to oppose the progressive agenda and also to organize ourselves.  It may not be so obvious from an American perspective, but Europe is very divided, and even the European conservative movement is very divided. For one, because of language barriers. If you have more than 20 different languages, it’s not easy to build one movement. But we are working, and I think that every European right-wing party, truly right-wing party, is rising…. The European Union recently fined Elon Musk’s X $140 million and is investigating X’s content moderation practices. Here in the United States, we’ve seen Elon Musk and J.D. Vance push back against this ruling by the EU. And I’m wondering how you as a nationalist in Europe think about that. Do you resent having these American billionaires and politicians telling the EU how to govern tech and social media, or are you glad to see this pushback from America when it comes to the EU’s regulation of social media? We have two problems in one question. The first is our relation with big American corporations. And the second is the particular case of Elon Musk, X, and freedom of speech. I believe that Elon Musk secured freedom of speech by buying Twitter and changing it to get rid of politically correct censorship, and giving this tool to us to communicate with each other. I use it a lot and I think it’s now much better than ever.  I do think that some people should be fined: first, [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg, because he was censoring us hard. And he was censoring other right-wing movements without any legal basis. We are trying to take Facebook to court. We have been working on it for more than three years, because they interfered in our elections. They stole our profiles, our pages on Facebook. They blocked us for some years. They censored us, not only my party, but the whole right. They did that to us too! And you know what? They don’t want to go to court in Poland. They say that we should go to court in Ireland or in the United States. Our lawyers filed a lawsuit, and Facebook tried to not take correspondence from the post office for years. They use such dirty tricks to avoid accountability. It’s so stupid and disappointing.  So if the European Union truly cares about freedom of speech, they should go after Facebook first. Now they’ve introduced some policies against misinformation or something. And if they want to fine somebody, they always will find some reasons to do it. It’s completely arbitrary. So we do not, of course, support such a policy…. In Poland, there was always big pro-American sentiment. So, I am sad to say to the American press that yes, unfortunately, now American corporations are a symbol for us of censorship, not a symbol of freedom. I hope that will change. It has already changed a little; now it’s much better. But we know it’s not because they are changing on their own. They’re only changing now because of the Trump administration. Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and conciseness. The post Polish MP: ‘Maybe Europe Needs a Shock’ From Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Double Significance of the Fall of Pokrovsk The Russians call Pokrovsk Krasnoarmeysk. Perhaps we should get used to calling it that, too. (Photo by Alexey NIKOLSKY / POOL / AFP via Getty Images) On December 1, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin travelled to a battlefield command post to receive a briefing from his chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov. It was good news for Putin. Gerasimov told Putin that Pokrovsk had been liberated: it had fallen to the Russian armed forces. As part of a desperate push to justify the continued flow of billions of dollars of arms from Europe by selling the hope that the war is not yet lost, Ukraine has denied the claim, claiming instead that it is just “propaganda” to influence negotiations that does “not correspond to reality.” But the reality is that, if Pokrovsk has not fallen, it has 95 percent fallen and will be completely in Russian hands any day. Prior to the fall of Pokrovsk, all sides agreed that it was a key logistical hub; subsequent to its fall, Ukraine and its European partners have downplayed its significance, claiming the victory to be more of a Russian morale and propaganda victory than a strategic one. The consistently quoted talking point is that at Russia’s rate of advance over the last nearly four years, it would take “at least another year” to capture the rest of Donetsk. But the calculation is sophistry that deliberately ignores the nature of Russia’s attritional strategy. The nearly four years of war has not been a war to advance rapidly across territory. It has been a war to attrit Ukraine’s weapons and troops until they are stretched so thin that they collapse under the force of the still-growing Russian force. To claim that, at the current rate, it will take another year for the Ukrainian front to collapse is like claiming that, if it took 100 years for a brick wall to disintegrate by 80 percent, it will, at the current rate, take 25 more years for it to fall. In reality it might crumble at any minute. The fall of Pokrovsk is important for two reasons: on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. On the battlefield, the loss of the key logistical hub would threaten the Ukrainian armed forces’ ability to supply their troops in the Donbas with weapons and food. It would also leave other key Ukrainian cities facing encirclement and Russia with miles of undefended field as they continue their advance west. The day after being briefed that Pokrovsk had fallen, Putin was asked by the media why this achievement was so important. He answered that Pokrovsk “has indeed been given special importance both by the Ukrainian side and by the Russian Armed Forces” because it is “a major infrastructure site that is part of the network of regional transport links.”  “Most importantly,” he said, “it is a good bridgehead for accomplishing all the objectives set at the beginning of the special military operation. That is, from here, from this bridgehead, this sector, the Russian army is well positioned to advance in any direction the General Staff deems most appropriate.” On December 4, Putin said of the parts of Donbas that Russia does not yet control, “Either we will liberate those territories though military force, or Ukrainian forces will withdraw and stop fighting there.” Putin insisted that the dire situation in Donbas never had to come to this point. “We told Ukraine from the start: ‘The people don’t want to stay with you, they took part in referendums [in 2022], voted for their independence; pull back your troops, and there will be no fighting’. But they chose to fight.” But it has come to this. And the shift on the battlefield has led to a crucial shift at the negotiating table.  Much of the fate of the current peace negotiations has come down to a single point. Point 21 of the 28-point peace plan states that “Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk Oblast that they currently control” and “Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognised as de facto Russian, including by the United States.” Russia insists on this point, and Ukraine has refused to agree. Point 7 is, perhaps, equally divisive. It states that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.” This is the key point for Russia, and Ukraine has again refused to agree. But half of the decision regarding point 7 is not really in Ukraine’s power. Ukraine can choose to reject the demand to enshrine neutrality in its constitution. But it is up to NATO what is included in its statutes. Despite the constant insistence by Western officials and media that it is Ukraine’s right to choose to join NATO, it is not true that any country has the right to join NATO; nor is NATO obliged to accept anyone who wishes to join. Membership has to be at the invitation of NATO, and NATO members have to agree unanimously. And NATO is under no obligation to extend an invitation to a solicitous country. NATO only says that it “may then be invited to participate,” and that there is no guarantee. Even Ukraine’s European “partners” have cynically suggested that, perhaps, Ukraine could keep the pursuit of NATO membership in their constitution while NATO agrees never to grant it. So peace may hang on the seemingly intractable demand that Ukraine cede the approximately 14 percent of Donetsk that it still controls.  At the end of November, U.S. President Donald Trump pointed out the obvious: “Look, the way it’s going, if you look, it’s just moving in one direction. So eventually, that’s land that over the next couple of months might be gotten by Russia anyway. So do you want to fight and lose another 50,000–60,000 people, or do you want to do something now?” The strategically crucial fall of Pokrovsk has forced this crucial shift at the negotiating table. With the failure of the Minsk Agreements and the military and cultural threat to the ethnic Russian citizens of Donbas, Russia was determined to protect those citizens, if not by the autonomy promised by the Minsk Agreement, then by annexation. Along with legal guarantees that Ukraine would never be a NATO member, this was one of the key root causes of the war that Russia insisted would be addressed either at the negotiating table or on the battlefield. The fall of Pokrovsk will bring the military accomplishment of this Russian goal to reality, whether it takes weeks or months or a year. During that time, thousands more Ukrainians will die. To ask them to die for the very same outcome that can be achieved at the negotiating table now with no more death is morally horrible.  The significance of the fall of Pokrovsk is that the shift on the battlefield has forced a shift at the negotiating table. Europe must provide a way for Ukraine and its president to accept the terms that reality has dictated—and stop pushing for a war that it knows will change nothing but the body count. The post The Double Significance of the Fall of Pokrovsk appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Trump’s Clemency Machine Deserves More Right-Wing Scrutiny Conservatives who criticized Biden’s autopen pardons now ignore an emerging scandal. Last week, President Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was serving a 45-year sentence for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.  As the administration targets foreigners suspected of narcoterrorism in an extrajudicial killing program in Latin America, Trump has freed one of the region’s most notorious offenders—someone not merely suspected of narcoterrorism like the victims of U.S. boat strikes but convicted in federal court for it.  The pardon of narcoterrorist Juan Orlando Hernández was nonetheless celebrated by some of the same conservative activists who applaud the Trump administration’s campaign in the Caribbean.  Roger Stone, who argues that “Maduro should be removed in Venezuela because he is a Marxist narcotrafficker” was among them.  Reported to have played a key lobbying role in securing Hernández’s pardon, Stone’s involvement likely explains why an administration otherwise willing to push its drug-war tactics outside the law to project an image of toughness against drug trafficking would carve out such an obvious exception for the former Honduran president. In a January 2025 article co-authored by Roger Stone titled “How President Trump Can Crush Socialism and Save a Freedom City in Honduras,” Stone argued that Trump should pardon Hernández in order to save “the Próspera experiment” a foreign Zone for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE), referred to as “a haven for Bitcoin entrepreneurs who are sick of being taxed to death in first-world countries.” Prospera’s governing arrangement was overseen by Hernández, who Stone called “a staunch supporter of the ZEDEs.” When Hernández left office, the Supreme Court of Honduras declared those “havens for Bitcoin entrepreneurs,” to be unconstitutional. Stone took credit for the release of the former president of Honduras, telling his radio show audience that he sent Trump a letter—dated October 28—hours before Hernández’s pardon was announced.  Hernández’s release is the latest in a series of pardons now attracting serious scrutiny from liberal and Democratic Party-aligned outlets like the Guardian and The New York Times. Calling it, “a classic authoritarian tactic,” the Guardian cited various legal experts to denounce the January 6 pardons as well as “commutations or pardons that seem increasingly aimed at boosting political allies and some Trump family business interests.” Discounting the editorial decision to fold in the January 6 pardons, the core critique—when applied to some of Trump’s other clemency actions—is accurate, and remains conspicuously absent from conservative commentary. Just a year ago, a series of pardons signed by President Joe Biden, apparently executed through the “autopen” and seemingly without his direct involvement, rightly became the subject of intense scrutiny from conservative media. Right-wing stars Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon among others bashed the autopen pardon of a convicted killer from Connecticut, Adrian Peeler, even proposing legal theories for how Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department might be able to undo Biden era pardons.  Yet one month ago, Trump unwittingly mimicked Biden’s inattentiveness when, after pardoning Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he did not even know who the crypto exchange founder was. Zhao is one of various white collar criminals for whom Trump has demonstrated leniency. His pardon is only the latest in a pattern, dating back to Trump’s first term, in which clemency has been shaped by opaque lobbying networks and personal access—much like under Biden, though without attracting comparable scrutiny from conservative media. For example, the pardon of Philip Esformes, a nursing-home operator convicted in what prosecutors called one of the largest Medicare-fraud schemes in U.S. history, while largely overlooked by the right at the time, provided an early indication for how open the Trump administration’s clemency process could be to private influence.  Esformes’ 20-year sentence was abruptly commuted after an effort routed through the Aleph Institute, a Chabad-affiliated criminal justice nonprofit that had cultivated a direct line into the White House through Jared Kushner and outside advocates such as the lawyer Alan Dershowitz. To secure his release after his indictment, Esformes’s family increased its donations to Aleph in what The New York Times later described as a “study in special access,” noting that petitioners connected to Aleph were allowed to bypass the Justice Department’s formal review process altogether.  Esformes was one of various Chabad-connected criminals whose sentences were commuted on the last day of Trump’s first term thanks to the efforts of what the New York Times labeled “a loose collection of well-connected groups and individuals led by a pair of Orthodox Jewish organizations.” Another beneficiary of that pardon network was the convicted fraudster Sholam Weiss, who had been serving a 835-year sentence for a $400 million insurance fraud scheme.  Also pardoned was Eliyahu Weinstein, who—thanks to lobbying by Dershowitz and the Chabad-affiliated criminal justice network—was released after serving only eight years of a 24-year sentence for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of roughly $224 million, and for committing additional wire fraud offenses while already under indictment. Just last month, Weinstein was sentenced to 37 years in prison over his role in running yet another Ponzi scheme, this time valued at $44 million. Of the 238 total pardons and commutations granted by President Trump during his first term, 27 went to people supported by Aleph Institute, its peer organization the Tzedek Association, and/or the lobbyists who worked with them. Those groups first demonstrated their pull with the commutation of Sholom Rubashkin in 2017, an Iowa meat-packing executive convicted of bank fraud and immigration-related offenses, also secured through the help of Dershowitz, as well as Jared Kushner’s father Charles. As CNN reported at the time: According to a source with knowledge, Charles Kushner also started to lobby the New York legal community the moment Trump won the 2016 election. In January 2017, Reade denied Rubashkin’s motion to be resentenced. Soon after, Jared Kushner took up Rubashkin’s cause inside the White House. Charles Kushner’s attorney said he understood Dershowitz’s lobbying is what deserves credit. Dershowitz, who successfully lobbied for multiple pardons during the first administration, now says that Ghislaine Maxwell, the confidante of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, should also receive one. President Bill Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon, long held up as the gold standard for politically connected abuses of presidential mercy, now looks like a modest abuse beside the networks that have shaped clemency under both the Biden and Trump administrations. And while conservatives had no trouble denouncing Biden’s autopen pardons, the same standard of scrutiny is overdue for the clemency system now operating inside this administration. The post Trump’s Clemency Machine Deserves More Right-Wing Scrutiny appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Washington Post's Sunday Slobber Over Rosie O'Donnell

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