Foreign Affairs How Brazil’s Government Foiled Trump’s Effort to Save a Key Ally A corrupt Brazilian court has neutralized the former president Jair Bolsonaro. This summer, the Trump family ally and former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in the January 8 protests by a modified Brazilian Supreme Court panel, handpicked to ensure that outcome by the country’s chief justice and chief censor, Alexandre de Moraes. Then, in November, before an official sentence could even be read, Moraes ordered the Federal Police to prematurely arrest and imprison the former president. The imprisonment of Bolsonaro is merely one abuse in a series of authoritarian actions overseen by de Moraes, known in Brazil as Xandão (Big Alex), through which judicial, investigative, prosecutorial, and enforcement authority have each been consolidated within a single office to a degree not seen since Brazil’s rule under military dictatorship.  In his previous role as São Paulo’s secretary of public security, Moraes drew constant criticism from both human rights organizations and the Brazilian left, who labeled him a “fascist” and accused him of perpetrating “genocide” over the violent favela raids he oversaw. Now, many of those same political forces revere the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) judge for his relentless pursuit of right-wing protesters and for overseeing the jailing of the Brazilian left’s chief political adversary, effectively disqualifying him from future elections. Since initiating prosecutions in 2022, Moraes has expanded the scope of his enforcement beyond individuals accused of physically participating in the January 8 unrest to include Brazilians targeted merely for political speech, online posts, and memes. In a near mirror image of the authoritarian censorship regime that has captured Western Europe, Moraes has used unilateral STF orders to authorize numerous preventive detentions, social media account suspensions, asset freezes, and passport seizures against people accused of disseminating what the court arbitrarily classifies as “anti-democratic” content. Among those targeted was Filipe Martins, a former Bolsonaro adviser arrested in 2024 after Moraes alleged—based on a border-entry record supplied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Biden administration—that he had fled to the United States to evade prosecution, a document that was contradicted by CBP’s own internal data and airline records and later proven to be a forgery likely cooked up by the Biden government and Moraes himself. Despite the exposure of the record as fraudulent, Moraes has relied on it to justify Martins’s preventive detention and to impose continuing judicial restrictions after his release. The expansion of those prosecutions has coincided with Moraes’s transformation of the STF into an active censorship authority. He has personally compelled social media platforms to remove posts, suspend accounts, and disclose user data, often under secret orders, causing the exodus of free speech websites like Rumble from the country and, in 2023, temporarily banning X in Brazil over that website’s refusal to censor the accounts Moraes arbitrarily demanded be removed from the internet. This month, Moraes has once again drawn intense scrutiny following revelations involving Banco Master and its owner Daniel Vorcaro (now labeled online in Brazil as the “Brazilian Jeffrey Epstein”), which emerged as the top client of a law firm run by Moraes’s wife and children, signing contracts that earned the Moraes family as much as R$129 million (about $23.5 million in U.S. dollars) as he simultaneously consolidated his authority over the STF. Banco Master has been under investigation for allegedly falsifying accounting records, funneling money through affiliated companies, and masking heavy losses to create the appearance of financial stability.  When the criminal complaint against Banco Master reached the STF just a few weeks ago, Moraes’ ally on the court, Dias Toffoli, imposed sigilo máximo (maximum secrecy) over the proceedings, completely barring all public access to them, shielding his political ally and patron Daniel Vorcaro from further media scrutiny, behavior which has raised serious questions about corruption within the court.  When President Donald Trump this past summer, at the personal request of Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, levied sanctions against Moraes in response to that series of abuses, many on the Brazilian right believed that the U.S. government would be their saving grace. They were mistaken.  After the White House deployed Magnitsky Act sanctions on Moraes, the STF unilaterally barred Brazilian financial institutions from observing U.S. sanctions unless validated by the Brazilian government, and within weeks President Trump dropped them entirely. Capitulating to the Brazilian government even further, the administration removed a series of tariffs that were put in place earlier this year after Brazilian President Lula kindly asked him to do so on a phone call. The New York Times accurately describes what happened with the appropriate headline: “Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” interpreting the failure as a “stark example of the limits” to the U.S. president’s ability to influence the internal politics of foreign governments.  The Brazil-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has published an investigative series on Moraes agreed, writing that: At age 78, [Lula] just gained one of his most spectacular victories, handing a huge defeat to Trump, the US and its sanctions regime…Lula told the US to f— off with its sanctions. And Trump just did. Brazil created a new model to defeat US sanctions. As Greenwald notes, Brazil’s major media outlets have only now begun scrutinizing Moraes’s abuses and conflicts of interest after his central objective, “jailing Jair Bolsonaro and weakening his movement,”  has already been achieved. With Bolsonaro removed from electoral politics, the fractured right has turned to his eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, as a potential standard-bearer, although polling shows him trailing Lula by wide margins.  Trump’s retreat is perhaps best explained by a pattern long evident in his political instincts, most recently on display in his public embrace of New York City mayor-elect and supposed adversary Zohran Mamdani: “we love winners,” as Trump repeatedly puts it. By abandoning his own foreign policy and conceding to Lula despite obvious ideological differences, it is obvious that Trump views Lula as one of those winners. The post How Brazil’s Government Foiled Trump’s Effort to Save a Key Ally appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics American Militarism Is the Missing Element in the Creed–Nation Debate War is no longer the business of citizens. With his usual panache, Vivek Ramaswamy, erstwhile presidential candidate and DOGE co-czar, current candidate for governor of Ohio, kicked off one of his classic Christmas agonies with a speech at Turning Point USA’s annual AmFest confab. Ramaswamy, who last year took the opportunity of Our Lord’s birthday to defend the merits of H-1B workers relative to “mediocre” Americans, enunciated an aggressive version of the “propositional” theory of America—those are Americans who subscribe to the American creed (a phrase that makes the Menckenites among us smile). Ramaswamy’s many and articulate critics, including our own Andrew Day, have pointed out the problems a conservative might have with this very loose definition of America, not least that it tends to prioritize the interests of would-be Americans over the actually existing nation notionally served by our government. It is also historically suspect. Our traditions, liberal and expansive as they are in orientation, did come from a particular people in a particular place; regime construction does not occur in a vacuum, no matter how much the Straussians would like it to do.  But it must be granted to the propositionists (or credalists, or whatever you want to call them—all the available nouns are phonologically repellent) that America has in fact successfully absorbed a great number of primarily Western Europeans of different languages, traditions, and religions. Here, the more zealous champions of the “Heritage American” tend to get into difficulties—it is politically unactionable to assert that anglophone, tax-paying, law-abiding descendants of the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and so on who came in the second and third waves of immigration aren’t “real” Americans. Are you going to levy political penalties on them? Deport them? Good luck. (For one thing, your favorite magazine would be out of a managing editor.) So why did that assimilation work, and why is it difficult or impossible to replicate? Scale is one reason; the numbers even when Coolidge issued his immigration moratorium fell far short of the Biden wave. The difficulties of assimilating larger populations, and the unusual phenomena that a nation sees when approaching the 15 percent foreign-born mark, have been well catalogued and need little repetition.  Another aspect, however, that has gone all but unremarked is the decay of a very ancient feature of republics: the linkage between citizenship and military service. In antiquity, political rights were explicitly conditioned on an individual’s ability to take the field in time of war. Death for the polity was the highest consummation of a citizen’s life qua citizen; let’s take a look at Pericles’ Funeral Oration from Thucydides (Jowett translation), delivered in honor of the war dead: I believe that a death such as theirs has been the true measure of a man’s worth; it may be the first revelation of his virtues, but is at any rate their final seal. For even those who come short in other ways may justly plead the valor with which they have fought for their country; they have blotted out the evil with the good, and have benefited the state more by their public services than they have injured her by their private actions. Nor was this outlook an Athenian tic. The most common route to gaining Roman citizenship was service in the legions. Willingness to risk death for the state was the ultimate test of identification with it. It is in this sense that Carl Schmitt writes that war or the possibility of war affords the “high points” of politics: These are the instances in which the subjectivity of nationhood is made concrete and visible. You are with us, or you are with them. It is in this tradition that the American Founding documents must be read. The Second Amendment situates the citizen’s right to bear arms within his duty in “the militia,” which was synonymous in the Anglo-American tradition with the corps of able-bodied male citizens. The democratic identification of the state—that is, the monopoly on violence—and the people was why (among other reasons) the Founders had such a leery attitude toward professional militaries. High up in the Declaration’s list of grievances against good King George: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” The Constitution very carefully mandates Congress to raise armies, but to maintain navies (which are pragmatically difficult to secure in emergencies, but also pose less threat to political life, particularly in a continental nation like the United States). While there was some erosion of these principles over time, especially as political elites of the late Gilded Age and Progressive Era started to envision a more imperial American project, standing armies remained relatively small into the 20th century. In 1935, the army was in the ballpark of 130,000 out of a total population of 127 million. War depended on the bureaucratic descendant of the militia concept, the draft. So when the nation threw in against the Axis in 1941, the war was waged on the whole-of-society basis posited in republican government. It was in the Second World War that these newly arrived Italians and Greeks became, unambiguously, Americans—not because they subscribed to some list of abstractions, but because of blood shed for country. The Cold War brought about a change. The military was professionalized and, even in times of nominal peace, remained very large. In 1975, two years after the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War, the standing army was 784,000 out of a population of 216 million. War became something that those people who pursued a soldiering career did, not something that was intimately linked with national will and collective effort, let alone civic duty. Wars, Schmitt’s “high points” of the nation’s politics, became something that did not involve most nominal citizens. It is perhaps for this reason, among others, that war has become more and more prevalent as an activity; it no longer concerns most of the nation. The crucible for defining a national citizenry has been broken. No wonder immigrants in the postwar period have not assimilated so thoroughly. A return to the militia theory is ideal, but probably impractical; modern international relations posit standing armies, and it is difficult to imagine the United States taking the plunge to see what happens. (Not least among the many pragmatic problems is that the military as it exists is enormously popular with the voting public.) Given that the probably unconstitutional, probably illegal standing army looks to be here to stay, the statesmen among us who aren’t friends of militarism might consider returning to the roots of republican ideology by instituting a national service requirement. Not only would there be fewer frivolous wars if people’s own children were on the line rather than strangers’; those who came through it would have an irrevocable claim to being real Americans. The post American Militarism Is the Missing Element in the Creed–Nation Debate appeared first on The American Conservative.

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A silver pendant decorated with an image and attributes of Assyrian goddess Ishtar has been discovered ancient city of Amos near Turunç, southwestern Turkey. Decorated with repoussé figures and hammered dots, the round medallion has a hanging loop at the top indicating it was worn on a necklace. It is missing a part of the lower left quadrant, but the lion’s fierce roaring face, body, hind legs and tail are all preserved. A female figure  wearing a tall headdress stands on the lion’s back. The star is behind her headdress. Lions were Ishtar’s sacred animal. They were symbols of royalty, ferocity, and strength. Reliefs of lions adorns the Ishtar Gate built by Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon, and they feature prominently in depictions of Ishtar. She is often shown standing on or riding a lion, emphasizing her dominion over nature and monarchs. Amos was settled by colonists from Rhodes, likely from the city of Lindos, in the 5th century B.C. The worship of Ishtar far predates it, and the site being excavated is of Hellenistic date (ca. 2,200 years old), so the pendant is evidence that the Mesopotamian deity had a wide cultural reach. Assoc. Prof. Mehmet Gurbuzer, head of the excavation and a faculty member at Mugla Sitki Kocman University’s Department of Archaeology, explained in remarks conveyed to the media that the necklace points to Amos having had notable cultural, economic, and commercial strength. He noted that during the seventh century B.C., advanced cultural elements from the Near East began to spread into the Mediterranean through trade and military contacts. Within this context, Amos appears to have stood out as a port city that was well plugged into the political and economic currents of its time.

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