World

For the most part, President Trump hasn’t had to worry too much about the loyalty of his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. Sure, he needed to make a trip to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue to pressure a few Republican holdouts to support his “big, beautiful” package of tax cuts and spending cuts, but the rank-and-file has tended to blindly follow whatever the White House wants.  Yet over the last several days, a slight divide has emerged between Trump and Republicans – or more specifically, Trump and Senate Republicans – on Ukraine and Russia policy.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s incendiary speech last month calling on Democrats to organize massive civil unrest against the Trump Administration caught me off guard. “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” he urged an assemblage of New Hampshire Democrats, “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. The reckoning is finally here!”Let those words sink in. Mass protests. Like the 2020 George Floyd riots with at least 25 deaths and $2 billion in property damage? Mobilization. It’s a military term, like the Army convoys I saw on highways and heavy equipment on trains when I drove cross-country in 2002 as Bush prepared to invade Iraq.

If Donald Trump and Elon Musk really want to know if there is a “white genocide” happening in South Africa, as they claim, I’d suggest they start in a beer hall. Such speakeasies are common in the black townships around Jo’burg and in rural areas. Size varies from a shed to a small aircraft hangar, some are licensed, others not, and as a journalist, it’s where I read the pulse of the nation. The townships are where millions scrape by on next to nothing, crowded in shacks with few street lights and open sewers, while the political elite enjoy their mansions in the city.I am always the only white face in a sea of black. I don’t own a gun and move about engaging with drinkers who are mostly under the age of 30, the majority unemployed.

Elon Musk stood silently in the Oval Office, eyeballing the South African President while Donald Trump tore into the ANC leader for permitting “white genocide.” The exiting Department for Government Efficiency (DoGE) chief said nothing as the President dimmed the lights and required an unsuspecting Cyril Ramaphosa to watch a short film about white farmers being targeted and South African politicians chanting “kill the farmer.”As Donald Trump berated Ramaphosa, Trump didn’t call on Musk, standing just a few feet away. He didn’t need to intervene: according to Elon’s father, Errol Musk, his son – an outspoken critic of Ramaphosa's government – had already briefed the President about what he agrees is “white genocide”.

The triumph of Mark Carney in the Canadian election has turned what seemed like a series of local flukes into a global trend. The political mainstream has begun to despair of its own leaders, and now feels compelled to parachute in stately ex-mandarins of a slick, personalist style – figures who seem to stand above the factions. Call them "liberal Caesars." Carney is only the latest example.

The worst victims of South Africa's African National Congress are not white Afrikaners, even if they are a vulnerable group. The worst victims are poor black people, the majority of South Africans, who have been deliberately impoverished by the super-wealthy ANC elite. These blacks live in stinking squalor with 42 percent unemployment, with water and sanitation failing, terrorized by violent crime and stricken by malnutrition. If any South Africans should be welcomed into the US as refugees, it is they. So it was a sorry farce when 49 Afrikaner “refugees” were greeted as heroes by senior US officials at Dulles Airport in Washington Monday. Trump is talking nonsense about “white genocide” in South Africa.

It was an emollient J.D. Vance who showed up at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington, DC. Gone was the Vance who dissed the Europeans in Munich on February 15 by complaining that they were practicing censorship of political views and who met with a representative of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Gone was the Cerberus who barked at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the Oval Office on February 24 that he had exhibited a dismaying lack of gratitude toward America for its assistance to his beleaguered nation. Gone was the Ohio senator who declared in July 2024 that he didn’t give a fig about Ukraine’s fate and was more interested in pursuing an Asia First policy.

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to NATO headquarters in Brussels couldn’t have been easy for either Rubio or the Europeans.  The normally copacetic relationship between the United States and Europe isn’t in shambles as the more overly sensitive lawmakers and pundits would have you believe. But it’s not exactly rosy either. European policy elites for the most part like to downplay their differences with Trump’s Washington and emphasize the positive, but it’s hard to be a European politician these days and not be terrified of the future.