[View Article at Source]President Donald Trump should discuss the murder of Iryna Zarutska in blunt and honest terms. The post Say Her Name appeared first on The American Conservative.

[View Article at Source]Nixon’s Metternich is turning in his grave at the imbeciles undoing his main geopolitical legacy. The post The ‘Reverse Kissinger’ That No One foresaw appeared first on The…

[View Article at Source]The peace-loving Trump administration has found new ways to circumvent congressional war powers. The post Two Cheers for the AUMF appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Foreign Affairs The ‘Reverse Kissinger’ That No One foresaw Nixon’s Metternich is turning in his grave at the imbeciles undoing his main geopolitical legacy. A curious habit of any true-blue historian is considering who “lost” whom. Did we “lose” Eastern Europe to Stalin? Was China “lost” to Mao? Perhaps. President Donald Trump seems to think that “we” lost India and Russia to China. “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to the deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” Trump wrote in a social media post accompanying a photo of the three leaders together at President Xi Jinping’s SCO summit. Trump was keenly watching both those events, just as Xi wanted.  It seems unwise to judge this administration on a day-to-day basis, as no one actually knows who is in charge. Is the Pentagon in charge of us baiting Venezuela into a conflict? Is the administration in charge of its own forthcoming National Defense Strategy? Does the document even have any meaning, given the mercurial principals notionally overseeing it? At the time of writing, Trump appears to have moderated his tone regarding India, a sentiment instantly reciprocated by a canny Narendra Modi. Nevertheless, there has been forever a talk of a “reverse Kissinger,” this time splitting Russia from China rather than China from Russia. While that hasn’t happened, what has happened is a “reverse Kissinger” in the sense that we have ensured that three major powers of Eurasia are now aligned instead of divided. Nixon’s Metternich is probably turning in his grave at the undoing of his geopolitical masterstroke.  The photo in Trump’s post is incredible, an artifact of something never before achieved through either folly or farce, even at the height of the Cold War, and something that was actively avoided as core policy for the last 80 years: uniting Eurasia against the United States. For an administration that claims to be “not neoconservative,” this was a very “with us or against us” foreign policy, with results predictable by anyone with an over-room-temperature IQ.  The recently concluded National Conservatism summit in Washington, DC, ended on a triumphal note—it started in DC in 2019, and lo, it is at its zenith in 2025. After all, we are only trying to displace an entire population to turn its home into a riviera, trying to settle peace for errant clients and protectorates that are not interested in it, lecturing a continent on how to run its own affairs and domestic policies, and planning to bring the War on Terror home, this time against the cartels. Gone are the halcyon days of March, of burden-shifting and “commerce, not chaos.” Take that, neoconservatives!  But even amid many other moronic ideas, the notion that any attempted coercion that leads one-third of humanity—India, a pharma and manufacturing giant, Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power, and China, another manufacturing giant and America’s real Asian peer rival—into an alignment of necessity against what increasingly looks like a mindless Jacobin power will not affect the U.S. is genuinely strange to think. When the original American realists tried to divide Eurasia for over 80 years, the logic was simply Mackinderian: You cannot simply have a third of humanity actively hate you because they might entice another third towards them by simply being less arrogant than you. When that happens, more relevantly than a military threat, your trade power will go kaput. The sanction power and reserve currency that we are so confident about will be used against us. Hedging is important in international relations, something our new aspirational counterelites, the same ones who constantly harp on the glory days of prewar WASPdom, never somehow seem to grasp in their crusading spirit. This administration is not used to pushback, or worse, being ignored. India turned out not to be Armenia or South Sudan or Thailand or Europe or Japan. Tokyo and Brussels are both militarily dependent on Washington, DC. New Delhi isn’t. The most interesting thing about uber-democratic online commentary on foreign policy from the populist right is not how dumb it sounds. It’s the almost superhuman combination of a lack of intelligence and curiosity and an extreme overconfidence, a weird, toxic mix of Obama and Bush ’43. Consider the administration’s current attack dog of choice, Peter Navarro, in all matters related to the Indian purchase of oil from Russia; he recently claimed that it is the Indian Brahmins who are apparently profiting as their countrymen suffer. You don’t have to be a colonial imperialist to see how factually ignorant that is. The fact is that Navarro simply wanted to impose the American racial white–black or the Marxist capital–labor dichotomy on an ancient and complex society. But Brahmins traditionally were the priests and scholars in ancient India, and, while casteism is officially banned in modern India, in modern times one can still see the Brahmin prevalence in intellectual professions of law, medicine, and the professoriate—but not business. Whatever the Brahmins are, they are not the “capitalist class” in India.  The good thing, as in anything related to history, is that this state of affairs isn’t permanent. History is cyclical; this government won’t last forever. The “multiracial working class coalition” is already fraying at the seams, if for no other reason than the rampant social media abuse of parts of its constituents by other emboldened member groups of the coalition. India, Russia, China, and the U.S. are individual great powers, and sooner or later they’ll come to an equilibrium. But three-quarters of a century of American Asia policy now lies in tatters, partly due to the unhinged, incoherent policies of the administration and partly due to the Raw-Egg-Nationalization of grand strategy: foreign policy by social media clout. International relations is a domain of the elites because it needs prudence, propriety, realism, and restraint; that restraint is also behavioral. The fact that our previous elites were not good at foreign policy is no justification to make an uber-democratic statecraft that encourages the most functionally retarded elements to think they are wise and omniscient.  There is one core principle of realism, and it has everything to do with numbers: Don’t alienate too many people. All historical revolutionary powers—Jacobin France, Nazi Germany, or Bolshevik Russia—risked that. They were arrogant and crusading, and as a result, overstretched. No one likes a hectoring power, and a crusading foreign policy never won, even during the actual crusades. The relevant question is not moral, but numerical. Jacobins, Nazis, and Bolsheviks lost their biggest gambles because they alienated everyone, while the other side unified and made impartial use of its talents. The system manages to slap down the one who’s stupid or overbearing. It’s pretty Darwinian. If Trump truly believes that “we” lost Russia and India, he might want to relay that message to his administration and aides who are responsible for that loss. There might still be time to correct the course. The post The ‘Reverse Kissinger’ That No One foresaw appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Say Her Name President Donald Trump should discuss the murder of Iryna Zarutska in blunt and honest terms. The savage murder of Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina last month has laid bare the daily terror of American urban life, the hypocrisy of the American mainstream media, and the negligence of the American political elite.  On Monday, President Donald Trump briefly addressed the murder during a speech on religious liberty. “When you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions,” Trump said. “There are evil people. We have to be able to handle that. If we don’t handle that, we don’t have a country.” I agree with the sentiment. My basic philosophy of law and order is this: Someone’s head is getting bashed. The only question is which heads will be bashed and who will be doing the bashing. Personally, I think we’ll all fare better if the heads belong to bad guys and the bashers have police badges. But the president should do more to highlight the Zarutska murder, discussing it in blunt terms to seize the political advantage, kick off an honest conversation about violent crime in America, and restore public safety. A Truth Social post he published later on Monday was a great start, and the Trump administration needs to keep up the pressure on the Democrats and liberal media. A Ukrainian refugee who fled her war-torn homeland in 2022, the 23-year-old Zarutska was stabbed to death last month by Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old black man, on a light-rail car in Charlotte. Zarutska entered the car a little before 10 p.m. after finishing a shift at the pizzeria where she worked. She sat in front of Brown, looked at her phone, and made herself most unobtrusive, tiny arms and ankles crossed. That proved too much for Brown to handle. A career criminal whose numerous past convictions include armed robbery, felony larceny, assault, and breaking and entering, Brown rubbed his forehead and shifted in his seat before stabbing the young woman repeatedly with a pocketknife from behind. In a clip that went viral on X Monday evening, Brown stumbles through the car, blood dripping from his blade, and appears to mutter “I got that white girl.” The grisly murder had remained an obscure local story until surveillance footage hit social media this weekend, sparking outrage and forcing Charlotte’s Mayor Vi Lyles to respond. In a statement released Saturday morning, Lyles lamented the “heartbreaking attack that took Iryna Zarutska’s life” and thanked “media partners” for not reposting the footage. “I’ve been thinking hard about what safety really looks like in our city,” Lyles said. No evidence has emerged that Lyles is capable of thinking clearly about safety in the city she nominally governs. In late August, days after the Zarutska attack, Lyles said the episode highlighted the importance of creating support services for people like Brown, the murderer. “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” she said. “Mental health disease is just that—a disease like any other that needs to be treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease.”  Brown seems to suffer from a strange affliction that predisposes him to inflict astonishing violence on the small and the weak. This was the same malady suffered by Jordan Neely, the “Michael Jackson impersonator” who in May 2023 harassed and threatened passengers on a New York City subway until a courageous rider, Daniel Penny, subdued and accidentally killed him. Depicted in the mainstream media as a kind-hearted “dancer,” Neely in fact had a history of accosting children, women, and the elderly before encountering Penny, a former Marine. Penny was ultimately exonerated of negligent homicide after being released on $100,000 cash bail, facing up to 15 years in prison, and having his name sullied. Since Penny is white and Neely was black, the act of civic heroism was treated like a modern-day lynching. Brown, by contrast, was released without bond by a magistrate judge this January after he made a “written promise” to return for a court hearing. To be fair, Brown had been arrested for a crime that, by his standards, was rather minor: misusing the 911 emergency system. During a welfare check, Brown told police officers that a “man-made” substance had been implanted in his body to control its basic biological functions. After the officers explained they didn’t handle that sort of thing, he became frustrated and called 911.  But a sane criminal justice system would have seized the opportunity to keep Brown off the streets, considering the great lengths to which he had gone over many years to demonstrate the extreme danger he posed to others. Alas, the judge, Teresa Stokes, instead showed Brown the kind of “compassion” that Lyles has since called for, and she let him go.  Perhaps Stokes developed her deep reserves of empathy for human predators at the Second Chance Services “treatment facility,” where she serves as operations director. Brown, given yet another “second chance,” used it to steal an innocent person’s only life. The silver lining in this dreary affair is that concerned Americans are demanding better from their nation’s elites.  Over the weekend, several MAGA influencers not only lambasted the Charlotte city government, but also contrasted the mainstream media’s breathless coverage of the accidental killing of Neely with its despicable silence on the brutal stabbing death of Zarutska. Under rising pressure, mainstream outlets on Monday finally acknowledged the latter case—with apparent reluctance and even agitation. “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message,” blared an Axios headline. The reporter, Marc Caputo, wrote: Influential conservative social media accounts accused major national news outlets of not covering the racial dynamics of the Charlotte killing — a white victim and a Black suspect — with the same intensity as they did in the case of Daniel Penny. The whole report—down to the inconsistent capitalization of “black” and “white”—almost seems designed to vindicate those pesky conservatives it covers.  You might think the case would command sympathetic headlines, given the shocking nature of the murder and the human interest of a young, beautiful Ukrainian war refugee being brutally murdered in an unprovoked attack while simply going about her socially productive activities.  Yet Caputo all but apologized for even writing the story, and seemed, like Charlotte’s mayor, to resent the availability of surveillance footage. “The rising number of surveillance cameras in public spaces, including on Charlotte’s light rail, has become a big accelerant in these cases,” he wrote. “The video is easily shared or leaked, and can instantly pollinate across social media — a visual counterpoint to statistics showing crime decreases.” Clearly, conservatives are right to condemn racial bias among political and media elites. Incredibly, prominent Republican politicians lately have been more inclined than their Democratic counterparts to engage in explicit anti-white rhetoric. “All of these protesters are white,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sneered on X after a demonstration in DC against a federal crackdown on crime. Trump and his team should take a different approach and treat the Zarutska murder as an opportunity to do so. The case illustrates several themes the president has emphasized—urban violence, woke politics, fake news, and the worsening plight of working-class whites—and it has galvanized his most influential online supporters while backing the media into a corner.  Most importantly, it vividly demonstrates the delusional character of modern liberalism on matters of race and criminal justice, which Caputo might have understood had he more closely inspected those crime statistics he cited. The delusion must be ruthlessly exposed if we are to solve the problems that led to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a woman who escaped high-intensity war in Ukraine but could not survive public transportation in America. The post Say Her Name appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Two Cheers for the AUMF The peace-loving Trump administration has found new ways to circumvent congressional war powers. (CARLOS BARRIA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) It is month eight of the Golden Age of America, and President Peacemaker is preparing to let slip the dogs of war on Venezuela. The Navy has parked a variety of ships, including an amphibious landing group, outside Venezuelan territorial waters; the Americans blew up an apparent drug-running vessel as a prelude to whatever is coming next. The State Department has designated Nicolas Maduro, the unpleasant character who runs that fine South American shambles by the enlightened principles of the Bolivarian revolution and the late Hugo Chavez, the head of a vast narco-terrorist empire. I would advise Mr. Maduro to sit very still and postpone indefinitely any planned purchases of aluminum tubes. I hate to be seen carping, but this all has gotten rather silly, hasn’t it? I’m more or less a disappointed Madisonian; I understand that the system is designed so that each component tries to expand its own powers. Nevertheless, it is striking that the administration of Donald Trump, whose campaign rhetoric was built in large part around the criticism of irresponsible foreign interventions, has arrogated broader executive war powers than even the Bush administration in the heyday of the Global War on Terror. The GWOT authorizations for use of military force were expansive and subject to gross abuse, but at least they gave lip service to Congressional supremacy; likewise, the PATRIOT Act and FISA at least based the vast security state apparatus in statutory law. These were bad legislative instruments, by my lights, but at least they reflected aspects of how the republican system ought to work on paper.  Yet the Trump administration has not seen fit even to gesture in this direction. As of writing, the White House has yet to provide any legal reasoning for the June strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. Maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s the 2001 AUMF. We don’t know, and the government doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry to tell us.  Now the administration is playing semantic games with the word “terrorist,” a favorite pastime in the post-GWOT era. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is braying that Maduro is “NOT the president of Venezuela,” but a drug cartel boss. Fentanyl is the going cover story right now, although Venezuela is not a meaningful participant in the fentanyl trade (unlike, say, Mexico). Call me paranoid, but this looks an awful lot like an effort to justify a war on an actual sovereign nation—admittedly, not a very nice one, and one that does pose real policy difficulties for Washington—by resorting to the executive’s capacious powers to deal with the ill-defined category of “terrorism.” If successful, this would give the Article II branch an even vaster resource for unilaterally engaging in what any reasonable person off the street would call wars. This is fatuous; if successful, it also seems like the end of constitutional limits on presidential war powers. The Trump administration, for its occasional anti-interventionist rhetoric, does seem to enjoy some drive-by military action. The New York Times last week reported on a 2019 special forces operation in North Korea that apparently concluded with a bang—that is to say, by smoking a boatful of North Korean civilians. (Naturally, the operation also failed to achieve its aim, setting up a device for listening to North Korean government communications.) Perhaps needless to say, Congress was not looped in. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani has been discussed at length elsewhere; once again, Congress (except, perhaps, Lindsey Graham) was not notified. (Although, back then, there was at least a post-hoc appeal to the 2002 AUMF.) Mr. Peace has quite a track record here. I’m told that this is Jacksonianism; that doesn’t seem like much of a recommendation in itself, but I guess opinions vary. War is in fact serious business; there’s a reason the framers did not make it too easy. But there also seems to be a political liability in running the business this way. The Democrats may someday get their act together, in which case the impeachment circus could well come to town again. A cavalier attitude toward war powers is not unusual in the past 50 years of American politics; declining even to issue a boilerplate justification, however, is novel, and makes the action harder to defend. While it seems seriously unlikely that Trump would be removed (at the moment, even conservative projections suggest the GOP will keep the Senate at midterms), an impeachment would be a distraction and would siphon resources from the administration’s agenda.  A little more circumspection about stepping on congressional toes may not just be theoretically laudable; it may prove to be useful CYA in the near future, too. And if it resulted in fewer ill-considered military actions, well, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? The post Two Cheers for the AUMF appeared first on The American Conservative.

A close shave. The post The metal legend Jarvis Cocker almost killed: “Like a fucking guillotine” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.