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David Sanger: No End in Sight to Trump’s War in Iran

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2026 //
5

David Sanger of the New York Times comments on the mess that Trump created by making war on Iran.

Before the war, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned Trump of the risks, including the likelihood of Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Wall Street Journal. Trump ignored his warnings, because he thinks he’s the smartest person in every room. He had the experience of a swift victory in Venezuela, so he decided Iran would be a piece of cake. He thought Iran would capitulate in two or three days.

Make no mistake: the Iranian theocratic regime is led by cruel fanatics who tolerate no dissent. Only days ago, three men were executed on charges of murdering policemen during the January protests. One of those publicly hung was a teenage wrestling champion, who said his “confession” was coerced by torture.

Trump started the war ostensibly to free the Iranian people from their tyrannical leaders but quickly dropped that goal and said his purpose was to destroy Iran’s capacity to wage war , especially on Israel.

When Iran attacked shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump called on our NATO allies to open the choke point for 20% of the world’s oil. They refused. He began blasting our allies for failing to help us; they did not want to get involved in a war that Trump and Netanyahu started. Trump forgot that he had been belittling our allies since he returned to office (as well as during his first term in office), even threatening to attack and seize Greenland, which is part of Denmark.

He has painted himself into a corner, even threatening to crash the world economy, because of his ignorance and stupidity.

Now, thousands of Marines are en route to the Middle East. The 82nd Airborne is on alert. The world waits to see how much more damage he will inflict before he declares victory and stops his war.

David Sanger, veteran national security reporter, wrote:

Ever since President Trump began what he now delicately calls his “excursion” into Iran, Washington has been consumed by the question of when he would call it a day — even if many of his war goals remain unaccomplished.

On Friday evening, as he headed to Florida, Mr. Trump seemed to be designing that much-discussed exit. But he clearly has not yet decided whether to take it.

And there is mounting evidence — average gas price approaching $4 a gallon, infrastructure in ruins across the Persian Gulf, a decimated Iranian theocracy digging in and American allies at first rebuffing and now struggling with demands to patrol hostile waters — that the repercussions of Mr. Trump’s excursion may outlast his interest in it.

As always, Mr. Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, which his critics cite as evidence that he entered this conflict with no strategy and his followers cheer as strategic ambiguity. With thousands of additional Marines headed to the region and the pace of American and Israeli attacks quickening, Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday he had no interest in a cease-fire because the United States was “obliterating” Iran’s missile stocks, navy, air force and defense industrial base.

Hours later, perhaps sensitive to a Republican base understandably nervous about the political effects, he posted on his social media site that “we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East.”

But his latest list of those objectives left out a few of his previous goals and watered down others. He made no mention of defeating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which appears to remain in power, along with Mojtaba Khamenei, who has succeeded his father as supreme leader, though he has yet to be seen or heard in public. Mr. Trump also omitted any message to the Iranian people, whom he told only three weeks ago: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

And after insisting in the failed negotiations that led up to the war that Iran had to ship all of its nuclear material out of the country — starting with the 970 pounds of enriched uranium that are closest to bomb-grade — he suggested a new goal. “Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability,” he wrote, “and always being in a position where the U.S.A. can quickly and powerfully react to such a situation.”

That is, essentially, where the United States was after it buried Iran’s nuclear program in rubble last June. The sites have remained under the watchful eye of U.S. spy satellites.

Mr. Trump ended the posting with a new demand for American allies, whom he had frozen out of his deliberations before starting the war, and gave no warning to prepare for its consequences. “The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — the United States does not!” American forces would help, he said.

“Think of it as the new Trump Doctrine for the Middle East,” Richard N. Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served on the National Security Council and at the State Department during the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq war, wrote on social media.

“We broke it, but you own it.”

Mr. Trump’s shifting goals continued into Saturday evening. Just a few days ago, he was calling on Israel to avoid targeting Iranian energy sites, for fear it would lead to an escalating round of retaliatory counter-strikes across the Gulf. But on Saturday, he threatened to hit Iran’s power plants if it did not “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz” within 48 hours.

He said that U.S. strikes on Iranian plants would start “WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST.” Iran’s biggest plant appears to be its only operating nuclear power plant, at Bushehr. For decades, nuclear power plants have been considered completely off limits for strikes because of the obvious risk of environmental calamity.

This is not where Mr. Trump expected to be after three weeks of war.

Foreign leaders, diplomats and U.S. officials who have spoken with the president said that in the first week he voiced expectations that Iran would capitulate. That was clear in Mr. Trump’s demand on March 6 for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”

The demand was mystifying, said one European diplomat with long experience dealing with Iran, given the country’s competing power centers, its national pride and a Persian state that has existed within the rough boundaries of modern-day Iran, enduring many rises and falls, since the days of Cyrus the Great around 550 B.C.

(That demand was also missing from his latest set of objectives. The White House has since said that the president does not expect a surrender announcement from Iran, but that Mr. Trump will determine when Iran has “effectively surrendered.”)

Iran’s refusal to “cry uncle,’’ as Mr. Trump termed it to reporters on Air Force One, has been only one of the surprises to the president in recent weeks.

The first was the crisis in the energy markets, which the International Energy Agency has called “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” It has sent Mr. Trump and his aides scrambling. They have promised releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was only 60 percent full, reflecting a lack of planning. Over the past week the Treasury Department has issued licenses for the delivery of Russian and Iranian oil already at sea. In other words, to calm the markets, the president has approved enriching an adversary that is at war with Ukraine, an American ally, and another that is at war with the United States.

So far, the effects are minimal. Brent crude closed at around $112 a barrel on Friday after the Treasury announcements, and Goldman Sachs warned on Thursday that if ships were reluctant to make their way through the Strait of Hormuz, prices could remain high into 2027.

The Iranians clearly understand that market chaos is their one remaining superweapon. On Saturday, Tehran warned it could set fire to other facilities in the Middle East. The United States believes the country entered the war with 3,000 or so sea mines — some of which are believed to have been destroyed — and the United States has focused on destroying small boats in the Iranian fleet that are targeting tankers associated with American allies.

“All it takes is for one of those things to get through to shut down traffic,” said John F. Kirby, who served as both Pentagon and State Department spokesman after retiring as a naval officer. “The fear alone can be paralyzing to the shipping industry, as we have already seen.”

Mr. Trump’s second surprise was his sudden need for allies. He didn’t imagine it at the beginning of the conflict, the defense minister of one Gulf nation said recently, because he thought the war would be short. But patrolling the strait, and other checkpoints, appears to be a task that could last months or years.

His third surprise was the absence of any uprising among either the Revolutionary Guards or ordinary Iranians. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the Oval Office this past week “we are seeing defections at all levels as they’re starting to sense what’s going on with the regime.” But American and European intelligence officials say they have no evidence of such defections — even after Israel targeted, and eliminated, Iran’s supreme leader, its top security and intelligence chiefs and many top military officials.

All that could yet come. Wars are not won or lost in three weeks. But Mr. Trump entered the Iran war after enjoying the fruits of quick victories. A bombing run over Iran’s three major nuclear sites in June was a one-evening expedition, essentially burying the country’s nuclear stockpiles and wiping out thousands of its centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium.

The commando raid to seize Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from his bed in Caracas was similarly swift. And so far, the government Mr. Trump left in place — essentially Mr. Maduro’s government — has been compliant. That operation has helped Mr. Trump destabilize Cuba, which has lost the Venezuelan fuel supplies that it has long depended on. The other day the electric grid in Cuba collapsed, and administration officials have been openly suggesting that the government will, too.

Perhaps those quick results encouraged Mr. Trump to believe the U.S. military was all-powerful, and that the mullahs and generals and militias that run Iran, a country of 92 million people, would crumble. Perhaps he rushed.

Military historians will be dissecting this conflict for a long time. But for now it is clear that Iran is a different kind of challenge. Mr. Trump started using the word “excursion” to suggest this is just a short trip, a brief diversion. But there is no real end in sight.

Categories Ignorance, International, Trump

Russia: Putin Defender Turns Against Him

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2026 //
30

Former KGB agent Vladimir Putin was hand-picked by Boris Yeltsin as his successor. Yeltsin was a drunk, and he miscalculated badly in picking Putin. Instead of building democratic norms and institutions, Putin embarked on a long-term plan to restore the USSR. After serving as president of Russia from 2000-2008, he was succeeded by a puppet (Dimitri Medvedev), then resumed the presidency in 2012. The national legislature extended his term to 2036. Anyone who seriously threatens him ends up in prison or dead.

In a startling development, one of Putin’s most strident sycophants abruptly turned against him. Ilya Remeslo, a lawyer, was known as a reliable lapdog for Putin. He regularly testified in trials against Alexei Navalny.

Pjotr Sauer wrote in The Guardian:

For years, Ilya Remeslo was a reliable pro-Kremlin operator, going after critics of the regime and smearing independent journalists, bloggers and opposition politicians.

Then the 42-year-old lawyer abruptly turned on the country’s most powerful man. Late on Tuesday, Remeslo posted a manifesto to his 90,000 Telegram followers titled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”

In it, he accused the “illegitimate” Russian president of waging a “failing war” in Ukraine that had caused millions of casualties and wrecked the economy, and argued that Putin’s more than two decades in power illustrated how “absolute power corrupts”, calling on him to step aside….

Doubling down on his earlier remarks, he told the Guardian on Wednesday from his flat in St Petersburg: “Vladimir Putin should resign and be put on trial as a war criminal. His personalised, corrupt system is doomed to collapse, as we’re seeing now with the war in Ukraine and elsewhere.

“The army isn’t advancing in Ukraine, and the war is going nowhere. There are massive losses. We are fighting over tiny territories that will ultimately give Russia nothing.”

He went on to criticise Putin’s authoritarian rule, the state of the economy and Moscow’s recent push to shut down internet access. “This man [Putin] has destroyed everything he could lay his hands on. The country is literally falling apart,” Remeslo said.

Please open the link and finish reading this fascinating article.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Evil, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, International

The Media Is Struggling to Cover Tehran

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2026 //
13

A very interesting blog called Status covers the media. It usually has the inside scoop on what’s going on behind the scenes, which journalists are seeing or leaving, what’s happening inside the major corporations.

In this post, Status explains how difficult it is to cover the war in Iran. The regime does not admit journalists. CNN is trying to provide coverage, as is The New York Times, but its reporters are not in Iran. The Washington Post is suffering from self/-influcted wounds because just a few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos eliminated his foreign correspondents in a cost-cutting move. Really smart for a guy with a net worth of $250 billion.

Natalie Korach wrote for Status:

As U.S. and Israeli forces launch deadly strikes on Iran, the inherent challenges of covering the country are exacerbated by recent newsroom cuts, social media distortion, and a White House prone to telling lies. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Americans watched the war unfold through footage captured by journalists embedded with troops across the region. Two decades later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, foreign correspondents from U.S.-based networks raced to Kyiv and other areas of conflict, broadcasting live as missiles struck Ukrainian territory. But when the United States and Israellaunched strikes on Iran over the weekend, there were few, if any, Western journalists in the country to document the damage firsthand. 

In a nation largely closed to Western media and with broadly limited internet access, the conflict is unfolding as something of an information black box, forcing news organizations to cover one of the most consequential military escalations in years largely from the outside. Adding to the challenge: Whether they can trust pronouncements coming from a Trump administration that has exhibited few compunctions about lying, from the president on down; and the degradation of social media, especially X, which is no longer a reliable source of information in breaking news situations. 

Major television news networks and newspapers tasked with covering the war are having to piece together events from government statements, grainy videos circulating online, and reports from Iranian state media. In an era where many news organizations have been forced to scale back foreign bureaus and reporting resources—most notably the recent and devastating cuts at The Washington Post—the conflict is quickly becoming a test for media, exacerbated by the fact that Iran remains one of the most difficult places on earth for journalists to operate safely. 

The geographic spread of the reporting team at CNN, the U.S. network with arguably the most foreign reporting resources, illustrates the challenge. The network has reporters fanned out across the region—Erin Burnett, Nick Paton Walsh, and Jeremy Diamond in Tel Aviv, Nic Robertson in Riyadh, Becky Anderson in Abu Dhabi, Paula Hancocks in Dubai, and Clarissa Ward reporting from Erbil in northern Iraq. Elsewhere across cable news, Fox News had Trey Yingst reporting live from Tel Aviv, Nate Foy on the ground in Cyprus, and Lucas Tomlinson in Istanbul. But none appeared to be inside Iran as of Sunday afternoon. 

The New York Times is similarly mobilizing its global newsroom to cover the unfolding conflict. A spokesperson for the paper told Status that “hundreds of journalists from across The Times’ global newsroom–in New York, Washington, London, Seoul and a large and growing reporting team on the ground in the region–have been coming together to produce comprehensive coverage of every aspect of this military action.” 

But few news organizations still possess the global infrastructure to support half a dozen or more reporters monitoring the situation on the ground in neighboring countries. Years of budget cuts have thinned the ranks of foreign correspondents in the region across the industry. At The Post, recent layoffs hit international coverage particularly hard, with the paper’s entire Middle East desk laid off. In January, Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati, who had been covering Iran, publicly appealed to owner Jeff Bezos on social media alongside colleagues, noting that she had spent months covering developments inside the country and wanted to continue the work. The appeals to Bezos to save the foreign reporting staff went unheeded. 

“If I were The Washington Post right now, I’d still want international journalists,” Ian Bremmer wrote on social media, where many experts called attention to the terrible timing of The Post’s retrenchment during this moment of crisis abroad. Spokespersons for The Post did not respond to requests for comment, but the paper’s rolling coverage of the conflict dominated its homepage all weekend.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, International, Media

Paul Krugman: Day 1461 of Putin’s Three-Day War

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2026 //
37

On this day in 2022, Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine. He expected to encounter token resistance, but the Ukrainians fought back fiercely. For four years, the brave Ukrainians have held back the Russian onslaught.

Russia aimed its barrage of missiles and drones at apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, train stations, shopping centers, power plants–all civilian targets. The Russian onslaught conquered territory but at a high price in Russian men (about one million) and vast amounts of tanks, airplanes, weapons, and supplies.

Writing on Substack, Marius Didziokas disparaged the view that Russia is winning:

Imagine that, four years after invading Poland, Hitler’s troops were bogged down fighting over unnamed villages 80 kilometres from the border. The Bismarck and half of the German navy would be lying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Polish drones and missiles would be raining down on Berlin’s refineries and weapons factories throughout the Reich. This is Russia today.

Some victory!

Paul Krugman is also skeptical about Russia’s “success.” As he notes, Biden made a terrible miscalculation in limiting Ukraine only to defensive measures, not permitting them to strike back at Russian targets. Putin’s threats of nuclear retaliation were a bluff.

Krugman writes:

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2002. Putin expected a quick Russian triumph — reports are that he expected the Ukrainians to fold in days. He never said “three days,” but this meme has become shorthand for his belief that it would be a walkover. Western military analysts who had bought into propaganda about Russia’s military strength shared his assessment.

U.S. right-wingers were especially enthralled with what they perceived as the toughness, masculinity, and anti-wokeness of Russian soldiers.

But Putin’s dream of a short, victorious war has turned — as such dreams usually do — into a long nightmare of blood, destruction and humiliation. Ukrainian courage and Russian incompetence — combined with the effectiveness of British and American man-portable weapons — ensured that the attempt to seize Kyiv became an epic debacle. The three-day war is about to enter its fifth year.

I am not a military expert. But I pay attention to those who are — especially Phillips O’Brien, who has been far more right about this war than anyone else I know. Furthermore, the future of the war will depend greatly on an issue I do know something about, Europe’s ability to provide Ukraine with the support it needs. So I thought I would use the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war to talk about where we are right now.

First, about the military situation. The maps at the top of this post show how the area of Ukraine under Russian control — shaded pink — has changed over the past year. You may ask, whatchange? Exactly. The Ukraine war isn’t like World War II, in which breakthroughs could be exploited by armored columns sweeping into the enemy’s rear. It’s a war in which the battlefield is swarming with drones, where there isn’t even a well-defined front line, and the “kill zone” within which even armored vehicles are basically death traps is many kilometers wide.

Some observers still don’t understand how the reality of war has changed. Thus there have been breathless reports about the danger Ukraine would face after Russia seized the “strategic city” of Pokrovsk since July 2024. Russian forces finally entered Pokrovsk late last year and may now occupy most of the rubble. But it made no difference.

This reality shows how idiotic it is for the U.S. Department of Defense — sorry, Department of War — to decide that its mission is to embrace a “warrior ethos.” Bulging biceps and macho posturing won’t help you prevail in modern war, while bombastic stupidity is a good way to get many soldiers killed.

So if modern technology has turned war on the ground into a bloody stalemate — much bloodier for Russia than for Ukraine, but still indecisive — what will determine victory and defeat? The answer, which has been true in most wars, is that it will come down to resources and logistics.

If this were purely a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the Ukrainians, for all their heroism, would be doomed. Russia, after all, has four times Ukraine’s population and ten times its GDP.

But Ukraine has powerful friends.

For the first three years of the war, the United States was the most important of these friends. Indeed, Ukraine wouldn’t have been able to resist Russia without U.S. aid.

Unfortunately, top Biden officials were too cautious. They didn’t want Putin to win, but they clearly lost their nerve at the prospect of outright Russian defeat. So they slow-walked aid and kept putting restrictions on the use of U.S. weapons. Without those restrictions, Ukraine would have been able to hammer Russian rear areas, and this war might well have ended in its first year.

As it was, Ukraine was able to hang on but not triumph. And now we have a U.S. president who clearly wants to see a Russian victory. He’s unwilling or unable to openly throw America’s weight behind Putin, but he has effectively cut off all U.S. aid to Ukraine. That’s not hyperbole. Here are the numbers:

A graph of different colored bars AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: Kiel Institute

This is a betrayal of everything America used to stand for. We’re witnessing a war between freedom and tyranny, between an imperfect but decent government and a monstrous mass murderer — and the U.S. government is de facto backing the tyrannical monster.

Yet despite Trump’s pro-Putin policy, Ukraine is still standing, while Russia’s year-long offensive has been a bloody failure. While Trump may have thought that he could discreetly hand Ukraine over to Putin, it turns out that he didn’t have the cards.

Crucially, as you can see from the chart above, Europe has for the most part stepped up to the plate, replacing most of the lost aid from the United States. True, some of the military aid takes the form of U.S. weapons purchased by European nations and transferred to Ukraine. In particular, there is still no good alternative to Patriot air defense systems. And the Trump administration has been stalling some military deliveries even though Europe is paying.

But European — and, increasingly, Ukrainian — arms production has been ramping up. One indicator of European potential for arms manufacturing is that U.S. officials have gone ballistic over proposed buy-European provisions in Europe’s ongoing military buildup and threatened retaliation. This is quite rich: America in effect reserves the right to use its control over weapon systems to hobble other countries’ military efforts — on behalf of dictators the president likes — but is furious at any attempt to reduce dependence on those systems.

But does Europe have the resources to ensure Ukrainian victory without the United States? Mark Rutte, a Dutch politician who is currently secretary-general of NATO, made waves last month when he told people who believe that Europe can defend itself against Russia without the United States to “keep on dreaming.” One sees similar declarations of helplessness from some other Europeans. But it’s really difficult to see where this defeatism is coming from. Combined, the economies of the European nations that have strongly supported Ukraine are vastly larger than Russia’s:

A graph of a bar chart AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: International Monetary Fund

It’s true that Europe has in the past had great difficulty acting like the superpower it is. But that may be changing.

So, how will this war end? Russia’s strategy now appears to be to terror-bomb Ukraine into submission, but as far as I know that has never worked. The more likely outcome is that European aid and Ukraine’s own growing prowess in arms production will gradually shift the military balance in Ukraine’s favor, and that Russia’s war effort will eventually collapse.

I hope that’s how it turns out. But even if it does, shame on America, for betraying a valiant ally.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, International, Resistance, Trump

Zelensky Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize! But What About Trump?

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2026 //
16

If Zelensky wins, the ceremony should be held in a bunker in Norway!

Categories International, Trump

Mark Carney’s Speech at Davos

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2026 //
3

Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, gave a speech at Davos that was widely hailed as a realistic response to the disintegration of the old world order.

Carney’s speech received a standing ovation from the audience of global leaders, diplomats, and corporate executives. This is a rare occurrence at Davos, where most speeches are received with polite applause.

Richard Haas, former chief executive at the Council on Foreign Relations, said this about Carney’s speech:

The most important speech delivered at the Davos enclave was not that of Trump but rather Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Reportedly written by Carney himself, the speech was steeped in realism, both as to the state of world order and how small and medium powers, such as Canada, must adapt. Early on he made his basic point, one that provides the title for this week’s newsletter: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition…Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security – that assumption is no longer valid…Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Carney was no less direct as to what Canada needed to do: “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength…To help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

There is much talk of regime change within countries such as Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, but the most fundamental form of regime change taking place is at the international level. A post-American world is fast emerging, one brought about in large part by the United States taking the lead in dismantling the international order that this country built and underwrote and that served this country and the world well for eight decades. It is being carried out in a manner reminiscent of two characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” All of which, I am sad to say, applies to this president and his administration—and to their many enablers in the Republican-controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and throughout American society.

Categories Economy, International

At Davos: President of Finland Says Putin Is Losing in Ukraine

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2026 //
23

Alexander Stubb, President of Finland, says Russia is losing the war in Ukraine.

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has suffered the deaths of one million soldiers. Its economy is a shambles. If it meant to project its power, it failed.

He speaks plainly and bluntly. It’s a fascinating interview.

Putin made a bad gamble. He is losing.

Ukraine will join the EU and probably NATO.

Categories International

Thom Hartmann: The ICE Raids are Not About Immigration Enforcement. They Are About Racial Control.

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2026 //
9

When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. Yesterday, he said:

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?”

At the end of this month, funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out. Congress is going to have to act and that makes this a very important moment, politically.

The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on October 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on September 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nurnberg Rally.

I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”

Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:

“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)

This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:

“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)

As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.

Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:

— Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
— Abraham Lincoln said that our Founders had created: “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”
— Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
— FDR simply used the name of our nation on December 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Across 220+ years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.

Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.

George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction. 

And here we are.

ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:

“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.

“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’

Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.

Thanks to Dean Blundell for compiling these images

— Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” Malcolm Nance noted: 

“This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMAN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”

— The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).

— Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.

Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base: 

As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cycle newsletter:

“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. … 

“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”

From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.

One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:

“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”

It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.

The police officers who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, for example, were all Klansmen, and that’s where Don Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.

Yesterday, Congressman Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?

“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out. 

We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.

Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.

If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out. 

It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.

Categories Immigration, International, Racism, Trump

The Idiocy of Seizing Greenland

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2026 //
6

Foreign Policy, a distinguished publication for leading scholars of foreign affairs, published an article by staff writers Keith Johnson and Christina Lu asserting that Trump’s lust to control Greenland is just plain nuts.

They wrote;

Seeking additional barrels of oil in Venezuela or digging for rare earths in ice-covered Greenland makes no sense from an economic or security point of view. And yet U.S. President Donald Trump persists, even though the costs massively outweigh the benefits.

In reality, naked resource grabs explain a lot about Trump’s dizzying foreign policy, perhaps even more so than other explanations that have been proposed. It seems Trump may have reached back even further in time for his guiding light than tariff-happy William McKinley and big-stick imperialist Theodore Roosevelt to the British and Dutch quasi-state mercantilist corporations that introduced much of the world to rapacious capitalism starting in the 17th century. The British and Dutch East India Companies did grab much of the world, usually at gunpoint. At least they got pepper, spices, and tea. All we have here is sulfurous oil and neodymium.

Gunboat diplomacy is back, only this time without the diplomacy.

Trump’s obsession with natural resources that the companies paid to extract them refuse to touch does raise several questions. Are these even the right resources to be grabbing? Is any of this legal? And most importantly, is any of this a remotely good way to promote the security of the United States?

WHEN IT COMES TO OIL, which has been a Trump obsession for decades, the answer is clearly no.

Oil demand is a tricky thing to project into the future. Some forecasters expect global demand for oil to peak within five years, while others reckon fast-growing developing economies will still be thirsty into the next decade, requiring more wells and more production. Either way, oil from Venezuela and Greenland is not the answer.

Venezuela’s oil woes have been amply demonstrated. It’s an expensive thing to produce in a place with little security and less rule of law, especially with oil languishing in the mid-$50s a barrel. The chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, told Trump at a White House meeting last week that Venezuela was “uninvestible.” Trump then said he would ensure that Exxon was kept out of any U.S.-led Venezuela ventures—and Exxon’s stock rose on the news.

Greenland, too, is rumored to have oil: billions of barrels of it. It’s not clear if that is actually the case, because decades of exploration have hit only dry wells, but on paper, Greenland could have 8 billion barrels of oil hidden under the tundra and the whitecaps, or nearly 3 percent of Venezuela’s unattractive reserves.

But there are some daunting challenges. Most of those estimated oil resources are north of the Arctic Circle, and mostly offshore. That is not easy to access, even with climate change stretching summer on both ends. Even the oil on land is not easy to tap. There are fewer than 100 miles of paved road on an island the size of Mexico. Deep water ports, airports, pipelines, oil-export terminals, housing, clinics—all are on somebody’s to-do list to build, but not that of oil majors.

Also relevant: Since 2021, Greenland has banned further oil exploration due to environmental concerns. The only current play, a land-based oil-exploration operation on the island’s east coast with U.S. backing, relies on a grandfathered lease from years ago. That legal stricture, in the absence of a complete annexation, could complicate further U.S. efforts to tap Greenland’s possible oil.

BUT WHAT ABOUT GREENLAND’S rare earths, which Trump officials have suggested are one of the primary reasons the U.S. president is so interested in the island?

While those who focus on rare earths mining simply say the plan is “bonkers,” the real issue is that rare earths are not rare—processing facilities and magnet factories are. Which makes a race for ice-bound dodgy mining prospects in somebody else’s territory all the harder to understand.

“It certainly doesn’t make any sense as a rare-earth story,” Ian Lange, a professor in the mineral economics program at the Colorado School of Mines, recently told Foreign Policy.

Rare earths, or a set of 17 metallic elements with obscure names like neodymium and samarium, have catapulted in geopolitical importance because they power everything from F-35 fighter jets to Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. China overwhelmingly commands their global supply chains, giving it powerful leverage in its ongoing trade spat with the United States.

Sure, Greenland may have some sizable rare earth reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey—but so do many other countries. And a big economic question hangs over potential operations in Greenland, where no rare earth mining has ever taken place and mining itself remains a fraught and divisive issue.

The biggest problem with Trump’s resource grabs is not their lack of economic foundation, which is nil, or their legality, which is none, but with what they do for U.S. security, which is little or worse.

Also, the bulk of Greenland’s land—a whopping 80 percent—is estimated to be covered in ice. All of those factors are certain to make establishing crucial mining and processing infrastructure, already a difficult and hefty financial endeavor, even more costly and challenging.

In his pursuit of rare earths, industry experts say, Trump will likely have an easier time looking elsewhere.

AND THEN THERE’S THE QUESTION of the legality of how Trump is going about his resource grabs. Abducting heads of government to seize resources is not anywhere sanctioned in the U.N. Charter, nor is threatening to invade a NATO alliance partner to forcibly annex their territory. But rogue states are hard to red team.

Trump has waved aside centuries of international law, telling the New York Times “I don’t need international law,” because his own “morality” was the only check or balance required.

It’s not an abstruse debate. For centuries, the West has sought to paint a patina of law over the anarchy of the international system, and even today, tomes are written about revisionist powers seeking to pervert international law for their own ends. Until very recently, the United States was not among the revisionist powers.

But there’s little to be done on that front. Trump’s installed successor in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro’s former vice president and now also acting president Delcy Rodriguez, who has been under U.S. sanctions since 2017 for human rights abuses, is according to Trump “a terrific person.” Also not entirely legal is storing the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales the United States has carried out in an offshore account in Qatar.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with Trump’s resource grabs is not their lack of economic foundation, which is nil, or their legality, which is none, but with what they do for U.S. security, which is little or worse….

The great advantage the United States had, until recently, was its network of alliances: NATO, Japan, South Korea, and a multitude of others. That’s all gone now, or nearly. It is surely a sign of bungled foreign policy when Sweden dispatches troops against you.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, History, Hypocrisy, Inequity, International, Stupid, Trump

James Fallows: A Primer on Greenland

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2026 //
3

James Fallows is a veteran journalist who has published widely and was a regular columnist for The Atlantic. Early on in his career, he was chief speechwriter for President Carter.

He visited Greenland in the past year and has some sage thoughts about the idiocy of trying to seize it.

He wrote on his Substack blog:

This morning on Fox, two well-matched intellects: Maria Bartiromo and Ted Cruz. Next to them is a Fox-produced map making Greenland look bigger than China, which in reality is more than four times its size. And on a par with the whole of Africa, which in fact is nearly 15 times as large. Fox is famous as the main source of real-time intel for the person who has assumed one-man control of US military, economic, and diplomatic relations with the world. What could go wrong?

This post includes a reprise of some previous items on Greenland, especially from this post one week ago. But as news has evolved, and as the insane idea of taking over Greenland has moved closer to alliance-destroying “reality,” and as a handy one-place guide to the main issues, I offer this update:

I’m not expert on Greenland. But at least I’ve been there, last spring for nearly a week. Which is a week more than the current US President, his Secretary of State (who is also his National Security Advisor), or his Secretary of Defense can claim, among them. And I’ve been reading about the place, and asking people about it, before that and ever since. Which I doubt any of them have done.

Here are my main suggestions if you find yourself in a “Wow, this Greenland situation, what do you think??” conversation any time soon.

1) This crisis is all coming from someone’s gut. Not from anyone’s brain.

Maybe you want to keep this to yourself, rather than leading with it in the conversation. But it’s worth knowing: Does the Trump-era obsession with Greenland seem completely irrational? That’s because it is—as no less an authority than Trump himself has told us.

The most self-aware part of Trump’s recent hours-long gabfest with NY Times reporters, and among the most self-damaging, was the “why Greenland?” exchange.

The Times team didn’t put it exactly this way, but the implied setup for their question was: With brutal war ongoing in Ukraine, with carnage in Gaza, with regime change in Venezuela, with upheaval in Iran, with federal troops occupying major cities, with tariffs upending world economies, and so on, why on Earth are you even talking about Greenland?

Here’s how the Q-and-A played out, with emphasis by me.

David Sanger [NYT]: Why is ownership [of Greenland] important here?

Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success…. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document…

Katie Rogers [NYT]: Psychologically important to you, or to the United States?

Trump: Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.

Give Trump credit, this one time, for honesty. Give him demerits on every other count. What he’s doing to all the rest of us is crazy. But, in a moment like Tony Soprano on the psychiatrist’s couch with Dr. Melfi, he’s looking into himself and seeing a deeper truth.

Because the feeling of ownership is “psychologically important” for this one damaged man, the US is throwing alliances and interests built over centuries into a bonfire. Great. But not what Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson had in mind.

2) The US has nothing to gain by ‘owning’ Greenland. Zero.

Actually less than zero, into the negative range.
The military bases the US might want, to patrol activity over the Arctic? Especially as melting ice opens more sea lanes? We already have treaty rights to operate as many bases as we could want.

The Chinese and Russian boats allegedly crowding the waters around Greenland? Bullshit. Check out MarineTraffic.com, VesselFinder.com, ShipFinder.co, etc (the rough maritime counterparts of FlightAware and ADSB-Exchange in aviation) to see for yourself.

The “rare earths” that are so prized? As mentioned before, the “mining” terrain in Greenland is about as challenging as any in the world. Even as glaciers melt at a quickening pace, the average thickness of the ice cap over Greenland is more than one mile. There are simply no roads in the country—none, at all—to connect potential mining sites with ports.
What you see in Greenland, apart from tiny settlements on the coast, is ice. Melting ice, yes.

But still a stupendous amount of it. Rare earth miners may eventually go to work there. But it will be a very long time. And the US doesn’t need to “own” this territory to buy their output. If and when there is any.

And this is not even to get into all the burden of maintaining Greenland, if the US took it over. Health care. Education. Food. Transport to remote locations. Adjudicating indigenous rights versus those of the central government.

People in the US grumble about the challenges of remote rural locations. This is on an entirely different scale.

Denmark already has agreed to open Greenland to every security and economic ambition the US might have. And meanwhile, Denmark is juggling all the challenges of this semi-autonomous state.
One man’s sense of what is “psychologically important, to me” might matter to him. It should matter less to us, than Tony Soprano’s did to his mob.

3) No one wants us there. Zero.

Greenlanders have complex feelings about their “mother” country, Denmark. The ties are deep. So are the desires for independence. Greenland is self-governing, and has its own flag, its own culture, its own ambitions—as we heard from everyone we met. But nearly everyone we met had studied in Denmark, and spoke Danish, and had relatives there.

That’s complicated. By contrast, the view of US takeover is simple. No!

There is more but you half to open the post and subscribe to finish it.

Categories International, Stupid, Trump
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