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Foreign Affairs Can MAGA ‘Conquer’ France? French civil society is getting in position to exploit the White House’s “civilizational” turn. Transatlantic diplomacy has reached a low ebb of late. The American ambassador in Belgium, Bill White, just received a summons from Brussels and a public rebuke from the country’s foreign minister for accusing his hosts of antisemitism in a poorly-spelled X tirade. Charles Kushner, the American representative in France, has now gotten his second démarche from the Quai d’Orsay (both of them linked to his social media activity). These incidents are the latest crashes in our clown-car diplomacy, which in the past 14 months has done grave damage to the West’s alliance structure.  Recent media coverage, however, would have us believe that the White House’s foreign policy amounts to something more than saber-rattling and rants. According to a vague report in POLITICO Europe, the U.S. State Department is now attempting to cultivate a network of right populist organizations in various European countries. In Paris, this endeavor appears to have taken the form of a brand-new outfit: Western Arc, headed up by Nicolas Conquer, the former spokesman for Republicans Overseas. The piece claimed Western Arc was on a roster of possible organizations that could be funded to advance the administration’s worldview in France. The article’s author did not confirm that the State Department was planning activities with Western Arc. The brief contained a Brussels dateline, carried a file photo of Conquer, and appears to have relied mostly on Conquer’s assertions to this effect.  Conquer’s incursion into the policy space appears to have come about recently. According to filings with the French government, his organization was created on December 22, 2025. The required statement of purpose contains numerous departures from grammar and punctuation conventions, omitting accent marks, apostrophes, and commas. The organization’s website names as its address the statue of the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris’ tony Eighth Arrondissement. The place of business registered with the French government is, in fact, a nondescript office building in a mid-market Paris suburb. The contact information for the organization is Conquer’s Gmail address and cell phone number. The operation seems largely centered on Conquer himself. Conquer lists two collaborators on Western Arc’s website, but most of the content is directly sourced from him. The news (actualités) tab directs to a compendium of his columns published in the French popular press over the last year. The site features three position papers on the European Union’s Digital Services Act, Greenland, and Euro-American discord over the meaning of free speech. He is the author of two of three of these documents, the longest of which runs to twenty pages, each with large fonts and graphics.  Conquer provides this bio line in his position papers: “Expert in transatlantic geopolitics and digital governance, he has worked on questions of sovereignty and innovation at the intersection of Paris and Washington.” He markets himself on LinkedIn, however, as an “expert in SEO [search-engine optimization] and insights.” Indeed, through late 2024, his full-time job was at a cosmetics firm as a digital marketer. He worked prior to that in operations and financial planning for a hospitality conglomerate and a cookie company.  Conquer’s pursuit of political office has so far failed, perhaps due to being dispatched to a terre de mission. Running for a seat in parliament during the 2024 snap elections, he was routed by a nearly two-to-one margin by his Socialist opponent. He boasted in that race the nomination of Eric Ciotti’s Union of Rights for the Republic, a subsidiary faction of the Rassemblement National.  Conquer made a splash with a book in January 2026 titled Vers un Trump français (Toward A French Trump). The volume, coming from the major French imprint Fayard, has been depicted in the right-wing media here as more a travelogue and memoir than a policy manifesto. The postliberal Causeur opines that Conquer is more “a raconteur” than “an ideologue.” The magazine’s reviewer also engages in a bit of persiflage, observing the author’s “very American taste for clashes, theatrics, storytelling, and media buzz.”  Conquer might not be a policy wonk, but he certainly ranks as a habitué of television studios and column inches. He regularly appears on the premier cable channels, such as BFM-TV, and garners mentions in Le Figaro and Le Journal de Dimanche.  Conquer’s foray into the policy space is his affair. But French conservatives already have a vast infrastructure of policy shops and intellectual publications. Pierre-Édouard Stérin, a billionaire tech mogul, has poured millions into building a complex of think tanks, policy initiatives, and magazines that are laying the intellectual seedbed of the populist right in France. These include Hexagone, an outfit explicitly inspired by the Heritage Foundation, and Les Fonds du Bien Commun, a source of backing for right-coded civil society projects. This White House is not exactly worldly. Conquer cuts a handsome figure with his brown mustache and double-breasted suit. He has become French cableviewers’ token Republican, and now he is punching his ticket in the other direction as conservative Washington’s token Frenchman. The post Can MAGA ‘Conquer’ France? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs On the Iran War, They Think You’re Stupid This president and members of this Congress are openly and brazenly insulting Americansintelligence’ . Does Donald Trump think Americans are stupid? After he announced in a video that “a short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran” to “defend the American people” by eliminating “imminent threats” to Americans at home and abroad, the president then listed some of his reasons for taking the U.S. to war. Presumably, he would tell us about this threat and just how imminent it was. Trump said, “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries.” Okay, but 47 years? Pro-Palestinian protesters in America chant things that are perceived as meaning death to Israel, but no one in either country considers that rhetoric an act of war by the U.S.  What was the president talking about, exactly? Trump went to the 1979 hostage crisis under President Jimmy Carter. He talked about the 1983 bombing by Iranian proxies of a U.S. marine barrack that killed 241 American servicemen. That was a tragedy dealt with by President Ronald Reagan, who chose to bring American soldiers home. Trump said Iran “knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole” that happened 26 years ago in 2000, when Bill Clinton was president. Trump went on to other events including Iranian support for the October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel by Hamas that took over 1,000 lives and many hostages, including Americans. That happened under President Joe Biden. But through all his attempted rationalizations at no point did Trump provide a solid, pinpoint—and perhaps most importantly, new—reason for why it was necessary for the U.S. to begin a regime change war at this very moment, something other American presidents did not do when dealing with the Iranian attacks he cited. Trump’s many “reasons” amounted to really no reason at all. Any intellectually honest observer was left fairly clueless. Enter Congress. More specifically the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which shared a post on X congratulating the president on “ending” Iran’s “forever war” with the U.S. I swear I’m not making this up. “President Trump is ending the forever war that Iran has waged against America for the last 47 years,” the committee’s X account shared, adding “Thank You POTUS.” So according to this bipartisan committee, a war has been going on between Iran and the U.S. for nearly half a century and Trump’s actions over the weekend were merely a decisive and strong president finally putting an end to it. The balls on these people! Almost every major poll showed that Americans overwhelmingly did not want the U.S. to go to war with Iran prior to the attacks. Americans were not asked, hypothetically, “Do you want Trump to end the current U.S.–Iran war?” because few to no Americans perceived their country as being in a war with that country. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Saturday after the U.S. strikes and published Sunday found that, “Only one in four Americans approves of the U.S. strikes that killed Iran’s leader on Saturday, while about half — including one in four Republicans — believe President Donald Trump is too willing to use military force…” The survey added, “Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure.” These are not favorable numbers for this administration. Furthermore, if their narrative is that Team Trump and the U.S. didn’t start a war, and in fact are simply ending an ongoing 47-year-long one, that’s classic adding insult to injury. By this metric, realists and restrainers can argue that the U.S. began this supposed ongoing war by pursuing Iranian regime change way back in 1953. No, Trump just started a war with Iran in which there will be life-and-death and political consequences to which little thought seems to have been given. But make no mistake: This is a new regime-change war of choice, which most Americans didn’t want, was started by Donald Trump, and will end only God knows how. Americans aren’t as stupid as Washington apparently hopes, and no amount of spin is going to save them from whatever fallout may come. The post On the Iran War, They Think You’re Stupid appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Supreme Court Clarified Tariff Authority, but Did Not Change Economic Reality The imperatives remain the same, even if the application of the tools must be adjusted. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) I recently spoke to steelworkers and auto parts makers in Michigan. These are people who have spent their lives inside America’s industrial economy. Their concerns are not abstract. They want to know one thing: Does America still plan to make the things it needs to be a powerful country? This is the question that trumps all others. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling regarding the use of emergency powers to impose tariffs is significant, but only in the sense that it is now clearer how such a policy would be carried out. It does not, however, change the fundamental reality of the situation. Tariffs have long been one of the tools that America uses to build and maintain its industrial strength. From the early days of the Republic until the start of the 20th century, tariffs were at the heart of America’s economic policy. America’s founders knew that political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom. A nation that is dependent upon foreign industry to produce the things that it needs is a nation that is in a state of permanent subservience. This is precisely the point that Alexander Hamilton made in his “Report on Manufactures” in 1791. Hamilton knew that a nation that did not develop its own industry would forever be in a subservient position to the more advanced industrial nations of Europe. Domestic industry is not something that occurs naturally. It must be developed, and one of the ways in which that development was made possible was through the use of tariffs. The results speak for themselves. In the 19th century, the United States had a set of tariffs that would be considered politically unrealistic in the modern age. Yet it was also a time in which the United States had the fastest industrial development in its entire history. American industry surpassed Great Britain’s and became the largest industrial base in the world in the early years of the 20th century. This was not accomplished by accident. It was accomplished in a framework in which it was understood that the development of productive capacity was a necessary thing. In recent decades, the role of tariffs has been viewed as a distortion in the economy. The conventional wisdom has been that the economy should be focused on efficiency and the lowest possible prices. This conventional wisdom ignores the reality in which industrial capacity is developed. Industrial capacity is developed over time through experience and repetition. Each generation of industrial capacity makes the next generation stronger. The next generation of workers is trained by the first generation. The next generation of engineers makes the next generation of industry more efficient. This capacity is difficult to rebuild once it is destroyed. In the United States, the role of tariffs was never to protect industry from competition. It was to protect industry so that it had the opportunity to exist in the first place. This reality is more important now than it was in the past. In recent decades, the United States has pursued a model in which globalization is the dominant economic reality. The conventional wisdom was that it did not really matter where anything was produced as long as it was produced efficiently. This conventional wisdom ignores the reality that production is a function of the people and the skills that are associated with it. Production is a function of the capacity and the ability that is associated with it. When production moves from the United States to another country, the capacity and the ability go with it. The effects are evident in several sectors. Supply chains have become more tenuous. Some sectors have developed a high degree of dependence on foreign manufacturing. Some regions have struggled to replace what was lost in the past. The Coalition for a Prosperous America and other such organizations have extensively documented these changes. Their work indicates a growing awareness of the fact that industrial capacity is not just an economic issue. It is also a matter of national resilience. The Supreme Court’s decision does not remove tariffs. It clarifies the fact that tariffs must be enforced in accordance with established statutory procedures rather than emergency procedures. Congress’s constitutional powers are still intact. Existing legal procedures are still in place to deal with unfair trade practices. While the procedures have changed, the economics have not. The question remains: Does America plan to continue using tariffs as part of its overall policy to preserve and build its industrial capacity? The answer can be clearly found in history. Every nation that has developed into a significant industrial power has made efforts to protect its domestic industry at some point in its history. America did it. Other countries have done it too. Industrial capacity does not develop on its own. Nor does it grow because of “free trade” or “free markets.” It develops because of choices made over time and a coherent, comprehensive policy that supports it. Tariffs alone do not guarantee success, but, without tariffs, it becomes more difficult to preserve or build industrial capacity. While the Supreme Court’s decision has made the parameters clearer, it has not changed the economics. Nations are strong when they have the capacity to produce what they need and weak when they lose it. This was true at the beginning of America’s industrial revolution. It remains true today. The issue of tariffs is not just about protecting America’s manufacturing. It’s about preserving America’s capacity to be a nation. The post The Supreme Court Clarified Tariff Authority, but Did Not Change Economic Reality appeared first on The American Conservative.

Not cut out for his voice. The post The one song Paul Simon said he should have never sang first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review: So now the die is cast and the United States has joined Israel in an unprovoked attack on a non-threatening Iran to destroy its military capabilities and to bring about regime change. This is a major mis-step that could easily turn out very badly as it is a pointless […]

Hezbollah fired missiles from Lebanon towards Israel following Operation Epic Fury conducted by the United States and Israel, which resulted in the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran Confirms Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei Dead After Strikes According to The Times of Israel, it's the first time the Tehran-backed militant group has fired rockets at northern Israel since the November 2024 Israel-Lebanon ceasefire. ⚡HISTORIC: For the first time ever, Israel used the Iron Beam to intercept rockets fired by Hezbollah. pic.twitter.com/DU63REU22k — Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) March 2, 2026 More from The Times of Israel: The rocket attack is “revenge for the blood of the Supreme Leader of the Muslims, Ali Khamenei,” the Iranian proxy group says, referring to Iran’s supreme leader, who was killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli bombing campaign on the Islamic Republic on Saturday. Hezbollah claims it targeted a missile defense site south of Haifa in the attack. The IDF said it intercepted one rocket fired at northern Israel from Lebanon and let several other fall in open spaces. There were no reports of injuries or damage. Hezbollah suggests that the rocket attack constitutes a “warning” to Israel to “withdraw from occupied Lebanese territory,” referring to the five border posts Israel has held on to in Lebanon, citing security concerns, despite being required to withdraw under the 2024 ceasefire. Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said in January that the group would not be “neutral” if the US struck Iran, and vowed to confront US threats to Khamenei, but stopped short of committing to intervene in a regional war. After the US and Israel struck Iran on Saturday, the government in Beirut, which seeks to disarm Hezbollah, said it would not let anyone drag Lebanon into war. "In response to projectile fire toward northern Israel, the IDF is striking Hezbollah targets across Lebanon. Hezbollah is operating on behalf of the Iranian regime, opening fire against the Israeli civilians, and bringing ruin to Lebanon," the Israel Defense Forces said. "IDF troops have prepared for such a scenario as part of Operation ‘Roaring Lion’, and are prepared for an all-fronts scenario," it added. In response to projectile fire toward northern Israel, the IDF is striking Hezbollah targets across Lebanon. Hezbollah is operating on behalf of the Iranian regime, opening fire against the Israeli civilians, and bringing ruin to Lebanon. IDF troops have prepared for such a… — Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) March 2, 2026 Al Jazeera shared further: Hezbollah, which operates independently from the Lebanese government, has been weakened by the 2024 war, which saw Israel kill most of the group’s military and political leaders. It is not clear how much damage it can inflict on Israel or whether its intervention can meaningfully alter the balance of power for Iran. Israel was quick to respond with air strikes in southern Beirut. Local news outlets also reported Israeli attacks in several villages in south Lebanon, as well as the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country. The Israeli military said it was “vigorously attacking Hezbollah” throughout Lebanon. “The [Israeli military] will act against Hezbollah’s decision to join the campaign, and will not allow the organisation to pose a threat to [Israel] and harm the residents of the north,” it said. “The Hezbollah terror organisation is destroying the state of Lebanon. Responsibility for the escalation lies with it, and the [Israeli military] will respond forcefully to this harm.” The Israeli military later said that it targeted “senior” Hezbollah members in the Beirut area and a “key” figure in south Lebanon, without providing details. Israel also called on people in more than 50 villages in south Lebanon and Bekaa the Valley, including the town of Bint Jbeil, to evacuate their homes and stay at least 1km (0.6 mile) from the buildings.

Complex, ambitious, experimental, conceptual, long-form, fantastical, pretentious — just a handful of adjectives often used to describe progressive rock. While the genre often defies categorization and can’t be easily contained, the aforementioned descriptors couldn’t be more on-the-nose when it comes to the Yes opus from 1974, Tales From Topographic Oceans. Over the years, the double album has earned a bit more praise and appreciation. Upon its release, however, it was met with derision and confusion. Keyboardist Rick Wakeman was so disenchanted, he quit Yes after they toured the record. Nevertheless, it topped the U.K. album chart and snuck inside the Top 10 in the U.S., earning a Gold record. Now, 53 years later, a Super Deluxe Edition of Tales From Topographic Oceans offers a complete picture with new mixes, previously unreleased material from the sessions, and live music from the subsequent tour. Available as a 12-CD, double LP, single Blu-ray box set, the new mixes, including an incredible Dolby Atmos version, were done by Steven Wilson with extensive liner notes by Syd Schwartz. Sprawling across four side‑long tracks, Tales From Topographic Oceans grew out of a conversation singer Jon Anderson had with King Crimson percussionist Jamie Muir about Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. Anderson was particularly taken with the book’s stated four shastras, that outline different aspects of spiritual knowledge. This resulted in the four movements comprising the album: “The Revealing Science Of God (Dance Of The Dawn),” “The Remembering (High The Memory),” “The Ancient (Giants Under The Sun),” and “Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil).” Developed while on the road with Steve Howe, the album came together in the studio as the other band members — Wakeman, bassist Chris Squire, and drummer Alan While, making his first appearance on a Yes studio album — struggled to bring it to fruition. Despite their reservations, the playing and performances are nothing short of superb. Squire’s bass lines are articulate and prominent, weaving around Howe’s fluid guitar work. Wakeman’s keys add color and atmosphere, while White not only anchors the shifting rhythms, but contributed a little bit of piano. The textures are rich, the vocals layered, and the guitar-keyboard mix creates integral ambient soundscapes. The overall production, led by Eddie Offord, is dense yet vivid, allowing the ensemble’s interplay to shine. The Super Deluxe Edition shares previously unreleased in-progress versions of all four album tracks, while the set’s live material, sourced from shows in Zürich,  Manchester, and Cardiff, finds the band in their element, spreading their wings at every turn. For audiophiles, the Atmos mix, alongside the 2016 5.1 surround mix, is immersive and encapsulating enough to give any doubters cause for reexamination. As Schwartz says in his liner notes: “Without Tales, there’s no Relayer. No pivot to leaner, sharper structures in the later 70s. No map gets drawn without first pushing the edges of the known world — and Tales is where Yes did exactly that.” Wakeman returned to the band in 1977 when they recorded the much leaner, song- oriented Going For The One and stayed on until 1980 when both he and Anderson left (though not for good). From there on out, Yes in its many forms conformed to a more strict, linear path. Still, the complexity, ambition, experimentation, and pretentiousness of Tales Of Topographic Oceans remains a highwater mark in the annals of progressive rock. ~ Shawn Perry Purchase Tales Of Topographic Oceans (Super Deluxe Edition)