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[View Article at Source]Governments throughout East Asia and the rest of the international system are increasingly agitated about media reports alleging that an anonymous source in the office of Japanese…

[View Article at Source]The American Conservative sat down with the talk host after his turn at AmFest. The post Tucker Carlson Talks the West, Collective Punishment, and Antisemitism appeared first on…

A selection of articles our editorial team thought best represented both the news and reader interest in 2025.

Foreign Affairs Washington May Need to Deal With a Nuclear Japan Nonproliferation is becoming a less stable policy with every year. Governments throughout East Asia and the rest of the international system are increasingly agitated about media reports alleging that an anonymous source in the office of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stated that the country needs nuclear weapons, a position that deviates sharply from the country’s long-standing non-nuclear principles. Other Japanese government sources earlier stated that Takaichi also is considering reviewing Japan’s “Three Non-Nuclear Principles,” which prohibit the country possessing, producing, or permitting the introduction of nuclear arms. Those principles were first declared in the Diet by then–Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1967 and seemed to reflect a national consensus at that time But the domestic consensus against Japan having a nuclear deterrent has been fading for years. Several former high-level officials, (including prime ministers and defense ministers once they were out of office), have openly suggested that Japan embrace such weapons. A once nearly forbidden topic is now generating vigorous debate among both the political elite and the general public. Takaichi herself has quickly acquired a reputation for adopting hawkish positions, expressing complaints about the external behavior of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and indicating strong support for Taiwan’s security. During one parliamentary debate, she even crossed a longstanding policy line that Beijing had drawn. Asked repeatedly about a hypothetical Taiwan security contingency, Takaichi abandoned Tokyo’s usual diplomatic evasions and declared that a military crisis over the island would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, thereby potentially triggering collective self-defense and direct Japanese military involvement.  Since the end of the Second World War, Japan has relied on the United States for nuclear deterrence. Yet Washington issued its guarantee at a time when there was only one hostile nuclear power in Japan’s neighborhood: the Soviet Union. That situation has changed dramatically over the decades. Russia, as the Soviet Union’s principal successor, is still an important factor in Tokyo’s security equation, but there are other crucial players. The PRC began to build an arsenal in the mid-1960s and is now one of the world’s leading nuclear powers. Indeed, the gap between the overall military capabilities of the United States and the PRC has narrowed significantly over the past two decades. Tokyo became even more uneasy when volatile and unpredictable North Korea began to pursue a nuclear weapons program in the 1990s. Pyongyang has ignored Washington’s repeated demands to abandon that program. Concerns about the reliability of the U.S. deterrence commitment have been mounting in Japan as the overall regional and global security environments have changed. The anonymous source in Takaichi’s office expressed the growing domestic worries about continuing the current policy of total reliance on the United States for nuclear deterrence: “In the end, we can only rely on ourselves.” North Korea’s emerging capabilities are especially worrisome to Japanese leaders and the general public. Experts at the U.S. Arms Control Association estimate that Kim Jong-Un’s regime has now assembled approximately 50 nuclear weapons. Most possible Japanese targets, both military and civilian, are well within the range of Pyongyang’s missiles. But equally troubling is the potential impact of North Korea’s expanding capabilities in long-range ballistic missiles. The ability of a malignantly hostile power like North Korea to strike the American homeland changes the entire risk-benefit calculus regarding Washington’s extended deterrence commitment to Japan—or any other U.S. allies and security dependents in East Asia. Over the past several years, there is growing evidence that Pyongyang already has tested missiles that have sufficient range to reach the continental United States. How long will it be before North Korea has an entire operational fleet of such missiles? The Trump administration may have to decide in the relatively near future what policy to adopt if Japan opts to build and deploy an independent nuclear deterrent. U.S. leaders typically have displayed an allergic reaction to most manifestations of nuclear proliferation, although they were perfectly content when Great Britain quickly developed its own arsenal shortly after the Second World War. A succession of U.S. administrations also have remained tolerant of Israel’s undeclared and unacknowledged stock of atomic weapons. But Washington has been far less accommodating toward other uninvited nuclear powers. Even France under President Charles De Gaulle found Washington’s reception to its new status in the 1960s downright chilly. When India and Pakistan joined the ranks of nuclear powers in the late 1990s, the U.S. reaction was even less accommodating. U.S. leaders have even persisted in their absurd demand that North Korea return to nuclear virginity, even as Pyongyang has built an arsenal roughly the size of Pakistan’s.  U.S. administrations even have a long history of discouraging America’s technologically capable, firmly democratic allies from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold. Washington has not been shy about pressuring (if not outright bullying) Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to foreswear building independent nuclear weapons capabilities instead relying totally on the United States for deterrence. A similar hostility has been directed toward any manifestations of interest in a nuclear deterrent by Germany and Washington’s other European allies. At the very least, it is time for U.S. leaders to review that rigid policy and carefully reconsider its various implications. Japanese who want their country to reduce or eliminate its total dependence on the United States for nuclear deterrence are not being reckless or unreasonable, given the realities of today’s regional and global security environments. Worrying about a stable, democratic country such as Japan having nuclear weapons echoes the misplaced logic of gun-ban zealots in the United States. Their policies disarm peaceful citizens while producing guaranteed unarmed victim zones for violent predators. Focusing on preventing Japan and similar countries from possessing nuclear weapons creates a similar dynamic—leaving peaceful status-quo powers vulnerable to the threats of ruthless rogue states (like North Korea) or unstable semi-autocratic powers (like Pakistan). To the extent that nonproliferation is still a realistic objective at all, Washington needs to focus its concerns on trying to impede more states in those two categories from becoming members of the global nuclear weapons club. The Trump administration’s attitude toward the possible emergence of a nuclear Japan should at least be one of indulgent receptivity. The post Washington May Need to Deal With a Nuclear Japan appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Tucker Carlson Talks the West, Collective Punishment, and Antisemitism The American Conservative sat down with the talk host after his turn at AmFest. Harrison Berger: Lately a common theme of your speeches has been this MLK-style message. It came up in your Nick Fuentes interview where you explained how we should be judging people as individuals, as God would, not as groups. You rejected identity politics. You also discussed rising Islamophobia; you said, “It’s disgusting.” Why did you choose to talk about that at TPUSA, specifically to that audience? Tucker Carlson: Well, I didn’t really choose to talk about it. It just kind of emerged. I mean I don’t write notes or anything like that. I always just go with what I’ve been thinking about. I’m just so offended by it. And what I should have said—which I think all the time is: How is hating all Muslims better than hating all Jews? And the answer, obviously, is it’s not. And does that mean hating their children? Do we have to hate their children? I guess we do? Their ancestors, their grandchildren? The whole thing is disgusting. First of all, Christians aren’t supposed to hate anybody. But I certainly hated a lot of people, so, I mean I understand, I’m not judging. We may disapprove of people as individuals, but we can’t start holding their children responsible for their crimes or else we’re done.  I think what got me thinking about this topic in the first place were the constant references one hears to Western civilization, the defense of the West. You know, “I’m a defender of Western civilization.” And then you think like, what is Western civilization? What are we defending? What are you talking about? And it strikes me that having traveled an awful lot in my life, the main difference between East and West is the belief in the individual human soul, and that derives from Christianity. And because of that belief, you are literally not allowed to practice collective punishment. And it seems a standard worth upholding, not just as an American; like, that’s what distinguishes your society from the East and from non-Western societies.  I thought that was obvious, and I realized it wasn’t obvious when I made a remark about Hiroshima being disgusting and immoral, which it was. And I was immediately attacked by Ben Shapiro and a bunch of other self-described conservatives and I sort of wondered like, “What?” Why of all the lunatic things I’ve said—too many to count, since I’ve spent 30 years on camera—why is that the statement that makes Ben Shapiro mad? And you know my obvious conclusion was: because it implicates what’s happening in Gaza. If it’s bad to bomb children to death in Hiroshima, it’s equally bad, stupid, in Gaza… You know, he and his Israel First allies see their role, their mission as defending whatever Israel does, whatever the Bibi government does, no matter what. But then I started to think about it more and I realized, wait, the only reason they’re comfortable with what the government is doing with American backing in Gaza is because they don’t believe at the most basic level that humans are equal. You have to believe that your people, whoever you’re defending, are specially chosen by God and that others are sub-human. You have to think that or else you couldn’t live with yourself.  And there’s no more non-Western view than that yet it’s a very common view with our leaders. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, I just noticed that these are all very obvious conclusions which came to me over a period of weeks in my sauna, while thinking about this. And I think it’s the distinction that matters. I think it is the standard that’s worth upholding.  But what we’re seeing here is the importation of an ancient ethnic conflict into my country, and everyone involved can go home immediately, as far as I’m concerned. To restate: We are seeing the importation of an ancient ethnic conflict into our country, and everyone involved can go home immediately. Meaning: leave. None of us signed up for this. And it’s not just by the way, Muslims and Jews, it’s, you know, Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Muslims. It’s all these different conflicts. These are all long-standing, in some cases ancient grudges that we imported along with the people who carry them. And they’re distorting our society. And as a legacy American, I resent that. I have every right to resent that, and I think we can just call bullshit on that. Like, a lot of our foreign policy is that: It’s that my group has enough money to bribe policymakers into fighting some ancient tribal war. I mean, that is our foreign policy.  As someone who’s not a participant in any of these ancient conflicts, but I am a big funder of them as a big taxpayer and as a, whatever, 15th-generation American, I think I have a right to say this: like, no. I mean, this is what happens when people don’t assimilate or pretend to assimilate. I have to hate all Muslims because you do or something? No.  And then the third reason that I said that was I know a lot of Muslims who are deeply humane and good people. I’ve just traveled a lot and no, I’ve never taken a dollar from a Muslim, okay, just for the record. Not that I’m against it, but I never have. So it’s not like I’m being paid, but I just traveled, and only someone who’s never been anywhere could say something like that. Clean conscience, like thinking that every Muslim is Osama bin Laden, like you just don’t know anything, and why don’t you sit this one out?  Harrison Berger: TPUSA did a poll during AmFest in which they asked the audience what they considered to be the greatest threat to America. They put “radical Islam” at number one. I’m wondering where you think those sentiments are coming from. I mean, I’ve heard you say before that this is “an op” and that “we all know which foreign government it’s actually coming from.” Which government is it and can you explain how that operation works? How is it laundered into our discourse? Tucker Carlson: It comes from the Israeli government and its many defenders and informal employees in the United States, of course. I mean, I don’t know how they responded to the poll. I don’t know who answered it, but I believe in measuring reality a little more empirically. And I don’t know anyone in the United States in the last 24 years who’s been killed by radical Islam. I do know a lot of people who have killed themselves. I know people who’ve died of drug ODs, more than a few. I know people who can’t get jobs. None of the boys in my daughter’s class can get jobs, none of those white boys can get jobs. They’re being destroyed by Adderall and video games and porn.  I see millions of Americans being destroyed, and none of it is at the hands of radical Islam. Is radical Islam more dangerous than OnlyFans? It’s not even close. Turning some huge percentage of American women into prostitutes. That’s not radical Islam doing that, actually. So anyone who believes that lie, I feel sorry for. But it doesn’t reflect the lived reality of anyone I’ve ever met in the United States. And I observe this for a living. It doesn’t mean I’m right, but it means I’m not a casual observer. I’m a close observer because that’s my job. And I just think that that’s insane.  I mean, this is the whole game. This is how the United States has somehow tied itself to the anchor of Gaza. Like, why are we responsible for Bibi’s mass murder? Well, we are now. Partly because so many Americans have been told over and over and over: Your destiny is intertwined with Israel, Israel’s our most important ally, etc. There is no sense in which Israel is an important ally; it’s not even an ally. It’s a liability. But people have been told that again and again, just like they’ve been told I’m an antisemite. By the way, I got the award for “Antisemite of the Year” two days after I gave a speech saying antisemitism was immoral. So what does that tell you? It tells you that the people creating the propaganda and disseminating it have zero interest in the reality of any question.  If you’ve convinced a bunch of kids who literally can’t get jobs and buy houses or find wives or husbands, whose parents are divorced, who are posting on OnlyFans, who are playing video games all day, if you convince them that radical Islam was their number one problem then you are the most effective propagandist in history. I mean, that’s an unbelievable feat. I haven’t seen the poll, I’m taking your word for it. And again, I don’t know how many people responded to it. But that is deranged. And by the way, if you think radical Islam is the threat that you claim it is, I’m hardly endorsing it and I’m opposed to it; I’m against radical anything. I’m the most temperamentally moderate person. I’m a fucking 56-year-old WASP. Why isn’t Ben Shapiro asking the government to fully declassify the 9/11 files? You’re hiding basic facts about 9/11, and the answer is, of course, it’s not what they told us.  Harrison Berger: You just brought up another great point too and it reminds me of a clip I just saw a couple days ago. It was with Bill Maher and Anna Kasparian. Bill Maher is someone who made their career as an alleged atheist, yet now he’s going around citing the Bible and the Torah to justify why Jewish people deserve to live in Israel and why Palestinians do not. He was interviewing Anna and he challenged her exactly on this, on which Muslim country she’d feel comfortable living in while wearing some type of revealing dress, which for whatever reason, as you said, has become the standard of human freedom, deployed whenever we bomb a foreign country: whether or not women are allowed to be naked in public. Why is that the standard or civilizational litmus test that always gets deployed: whether or not women can wear bathing suits?  Tucker Carlson: Because it’s just the kind of shallow conversation they hope to lull you into to prevent you from thinking about what’s true. For me, none of that is relevant. What’s relevant is what I said. I want to live—I demand to live in a place that treats people as individuals not as groups. That’s why I voted against Kamala Harris. I will never vote for identity politics, I think it’s evil. Do I like white people? I am white, so are my kids, I’m very pro-white. And I think white people are the main victims of discrimination in the United States—not Jews—obviously, but I’m not exclusively pro-white at all. I don’t think whites are inherently better than any other group’ they’re not. So just to clear that up. I mean, you can be pro-white. Why wouldn’t I be pro-white? I am white. And not a white supremacist. I’m the opponent of white supremacists.  There’s so many things to say. It’s like, I don’t even know where to begin. Just the ignorance of it irks me. Bill Maher is 70 years old, or about 70. It’s, like, you’ve never actually been to the Gulf and seen women in bikinis? Like, where are you even talking about, what country exactly are you talking about? Yemen, I guess, Yemen? But in the rest of the Muslim world, in the six GCC countries, in the eight Islamic monarchies in the world, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, and Morocco, in all those countries: Women can drive, participate. They go out unaccompanied, they can drive, they wear bikinis. Like what are you even talking about? It’s like it’s just not real, okay? So there’s that.  But I don’t care whether it’s real or not. Countries have an absolute right to live according to their customs. I don’t care if women can vote or drive in a foreign country. Why would I? I just don’t. If you don’t think women should vote or drive, that’s up to you. I’m not a cultural imperialist. I actually like differences between the countries. But it’s also silly.  But the real question here, if you’re gonna keep throwing this stuff in my face, which they are, Jews have a right to their own country. Okay, what other groups have a right to own countries? That’s the first question. Do whites? I was told they didn’t. So how do Jews, how does any ethnic group have a “right to a country”? Where does that right emanate from? Does it emanate from holy scripture? Okay, which ones do you believe in? Which ones? And then we can ask real questions. And then in what sense are the current occupants of Israel related to the people that I read about in, say, Deuteronomy? Are they genetically the same? Well, we can test for that, actually. How about 23andMe? Oh, it’s banned in Israel, how weird.  Is it the same religion? I was told this was Talmudic Judaism, which was created after the destruction of the temple. So just explain, since you brought it up, why don’t you explain to me what the hell you’re talking about? Because I don’t understand. They’re not even equipped. They’re just like, “Oh, you couldn’t wear a thong in Saudi.” Well, of course you can, but whatever; they don’t even know anything. Look, once you start pushing this conversation on people, you’re going to lose. And that’s what’s happened. Harrison Berger: I want to ask you a couple of questions about antisemitism. You were recently named, as you said, the antisemite of the year by this pro-Israel censorship group called “Stop Antisemitism.” They just go around demanding that people be fired from their jobs for wearing Palestinian scarves, putting on Palestinian flags on their laptops, and they make them homeless. Megyn Kelly actually argued that rising antisemitism that we might be seeing, that it’s actually being generated by these pro-Israel censorship groups like Stop Antisemitism, along with Israel First figures like Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, the ADL, the people who keep demanding for censorship on behalf of their favorite foreign government. That provokes backlash. And groups like the ADL, of course, have claimed to be eradicating antisemitism for years. So, when they say now that antisemitism is rising—it seems kind of an indictment of themselves and their own efforts all these years. The Israel lobby too, they’ve been using the same tactics for years that you just talked about, like censorship, smear campaigns, smash-mouth politics, as John Mearsheimer calls it. Why do those groups keep behaving that way if antisemitism is increasing? Do they not understand that their efforts are increasing antisemitism?  Tucker Carlson: The purpose of the system is its result.  What’s the point of this? Well, the point is what it does, by definition. And so if you’re creating antisemitism generationally, you’re doing it for like 50 years, as they have been, then maybe your goal is to create antisemitism. Now, why are they doing that? I can’t even fathom. I mean, I personally suspect there are a couple of different reasons. But I don’t even want to speculate.  I guess the challenge for the rest of us is don’t fall for it: don’t become what they call you. And it’s actually been a painful experience for me to be slandered, especially as someone who’s philosophically opposed to lawsuits; I would never sue anybody, period. I never have, and I never will. And I knew that they would call me these names when I advocated against regime-change war in Iran in June. I knew this would happen to me, and it did. And I decided, you know, I’m old enough and I’m privileged enough that I can handle it and I’m just gonna get punched in the face and keep going, that’s my plan. But a lot of other people are, as you just said, destroyed by it. And why? Why? Because they clearly want to increase hatred.  And it’s been a kind of beautiful experience for me actually, because it’s forced me to reckon with the question, will I take the bait? Will I become what they call me? It’s destroyed a lot of my friendships, the ones that I cared about. And so you have to ask yourself, like, am I gonna allow myself to become hateful about this? And I’ve decided I’m not. I’m gonna allow that. I’m absolutely not gonna allow that, and I’ve actually become calmer, for whatever it’s worth, and less angry.  And I’m really trying to keep that posture because I don’t want to become what they say that I am. I don’t want to be a hater and I’m just not going to because it destroys you, by the way. But here, they’re trying to control the terms. I don’t want to talk about Israel. I’m not that interested in the topic. I’m not Jewish, so I’m not obsessed with Jewishness. I’m just not that interesting. I’m not against it at all. But it’s not the center of my life. It doesn’t have to be the center of my life, I’ll decide what’s the center in my life because I’m a free man.  The one thing that antisemites and the ethno-narcissists, the neocon-ethno-narcissists have in common is all they talk or think about is the Jews. They’re very sort of similar in that way. The post Tucker Carlson Talks the West, Collective Punishment, and Antisemitism appeared first on The American Conservative.

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