Enjoying the view from Limbo
Donald Trump, fresh off his great victory-that-will-end-in-quagmire in Venezuela, has instantly returned to his repeated threats to attack Greenland if Denmark does not cede that territory voluntarily. To state the obvious, it is long past the time when anyone can rationally try to explain away such threats as “trolling” or “joking.” He is saying explicitly that the United States “needs Greenland,” and that...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 6, 2026 · Last modified January 7, 2026
For decades, the world has been stabilized, in the sense that the democratic or nascently democratic nations’ greatest external threats and adversaries have been relatively constrained, by a tacit acceptance of, and acquiescence to, U.S. military and diplomatic preeminence. That is to say, Europe, most of the Americas, and much of East Asia had welcomed, or at least submitted relatively comfortably to, America’s...
Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Cowardly Murder and Russian Capitulation, has said that Americans are too fat and too dumb to serve in the military. He is surely right about this. Fortunately, Hegseth himself is not fat. There is no such thing as a “narco-terrorist,” just as there is no such thing as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” These terms of art have been manufactured...
The European Union appears to be on the verge of doing the bravest thing anyone could do in this moment of escalating and ever-more blatant pro-Kremlin machinations by the White House, namely taking their collective security into their own hands the way one must do when one finally comes to terms with the fact that one has been abandoned by one’s strongest ally....
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 2, 2025 · Last modified December 3, 2025
In a brilliant response to the infamous meeting in Miami in which Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner attempted to sell their country and all their allies to the Kremlin in exchange for some financial kickbacks for themselves and their immediate supervisor, i.e., Vladimir Putin’s American branch plant manager, Donald Trump, Ukraine has sent its own team of negotiators to the same city to...
The following is an account of a new interview of Donald Trump’s chief “negotiator” with Vladimir Putin, Steve Witkoff, conducted by the perfect interviewer for putting Witkoff at his ease in expressing his true thoughts about his assignment, namely Tucker Carlson, who has been the American media’s number one apologist for the Kremlin since the weeks before Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine. “What...
Is there a level of cowardice lower than Donald Trump? After a few weeks of off-and-on posturing about “getting tough with Russia,” Trump has boldly reasserted what was never really in doubt, namely that Vladimir Putin owns him and always has, and that Trump will happily go down in history as the man who served as Putin’s battering ram into the gates of...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 18, 2025 · Last modified October 28, 2025
In Trump Fantasy Land, America’s aspirational (thus far) dictator and Nobel Peace Prize earner has just brokered perpetual peace in the Middle East. In reality, of course, which never looks very much like Trump’s imagination, a hostage exchange has taken place, though at the point when there were very few Israeli hostages who had not already been killed; and a temporary ceasefire agreement...
What men will believe if it supports the rhetorical interests of their tribe. What they will overlook if it undercuts their self-identifying faith in their tribe. And how often the tribesmen will employ the former with the greatest force of absurdity as a psychological bulwark against having to confront themselves with the most disturbing evidence of the latter. Glenn Beck recently hosted a...
Every few weeks, the news media on all sides of the issue try to find evidence of a substantial change of perspective in Donald Trump’s actions regarding the war in Ukraine. Being a quintessential pitchman and obfuscator for profit, Trump is excellent at offering superficial alterations to his rhetoric in order to string his customers along with false promises of appreciating their wishes....
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