In many Third-World countries, falling out of power means being declared an enemy of the people who needs to be done away. In some situations that means trumped-up charges and made-up evidence—lawfare—to…

Foreign Affairs Can Trump Achieve a Diplomatic Breakthrough With Iran? It will take more than a few campaign gestures, but progress is possible. Credit: Borna_Mirahmadian The Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump, recently made several statements suggesting his readiness to engage in a more constructive relationship with Iran than has been the case for the better part of the last 45 years, since anti-American revolutionaries toppled the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. In mid-August, Trump said he hoped for “friendly relations” with Iran. In early September, at the Economic Club of New York, he spoke about how Washington’s addiction to sanctions weakens the dollar’s hegemonic position in the world by forcing countries like Iran, Russia and China to ditch it in favor of alternative financial arrangements, undermining America’s global position. Trump’s narrative on this point is sensible. To get a sense of the perspective, one only needs to look at the expansion of BRICS, initially a grouping comprising China, Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa. Since 2024, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia have joined it. Turkey—a NATO ally—has applied to join. Reportedly, more countries have expressed interest in exploring the idea, including some of those with which the U.S. has close security relationships, such as Azerbaijan. While at first sight BRICS may not amount to more than summitry and earnest communiques about the advent of a multipolar world, one key incentive for countries to consider joining are the prospects—so far, mostly tentative—to find alternatives to dollar for their trade and investments, in order to shield themselves from the weaponization of dollar for geopolitical purposes by Washington. Considering that BRICS after its expansion now represents 45 percent of the world population, Trump’s concerns about the U.S. sanctions overreach are fully justified. The question: Can he pull off a genuine change in the U.S. approach? Iran, a country with which the U.S. has the most entrenched and seemingly intractable conflict, could be a good litmus test for Trump’s abilities. The precedents do not invite much optimism. During his first term, Trump wrecked the nuclear deal with Iran known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was delivering on its objective to keep Iran away from the nuclear bomb. He imposed new sanctions against Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign devised, in theory, to deliver a “better deal” with Tehran but in reality, thanks to ultra-hawkish advisers like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, amounting to no less than pursuit of a regime change in yet another Middle Eastern nation. Trump did try occasionally to reach out to Iran. As Trita Parsi, the executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute, reminds us, in 2017 and 2018 he sought meetings with Iran’s then-President Hassan Rouhani and, through the mediation of the Republican Senator Rand Paul, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.  Those meetings, however, never materialized, as Tehran did not respond to Trump’s entreaties. That happened, primarily, not because of some ideological animus towards the “Great Satan,” but because the policymakers in Tehran calculated that accepting a meeting would validate the “maximum pressure” strategy and allow Trump to brag about its success without removing any sanctions. There was no reason why Tehran was going to hand this diplomatic victory to Trump for free. The situation was further complicated by Trump’s order to assassinate General Qasem Soleimani, the influential commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s elite Al-Quds force. Given Soleimani’s status as a de-facto operational leader of the Tehran-led “Axis of Resistance” in the Middle East, dealing with Trump poses seemingly insurmountable political and ideological challenges for Tehran. Yet, despite this, Tehran may have incentives to test Trump’s intentions should he win the elections in November. For one thing, the lesson of the JCPOA—which Trump destroyed but his Democratic successor Joe Biden failed to restore—is that the deals concluded with the Republicans have a better chance of standing. Contrast the fate of the JCPOA with that of the Abraham Accords, signed under Trump’s watch and built upon by Biden. The lesson is that the Republicans are willing to renege on the deals made by the Democrats, but the Democrats are happy to live with the deals made by the Republicans. For Trump, however, to get a “yes” for an answer from Tehran would take more than occasional vows on the campaign trail and belief in his own transactional abilities. A skillful, patient diplomacy is needed. First, Trump needs to entrust his Iran policy to those few Republicans who, like Senator Paul and Colonel Douglas McGregor, seem open to dealing with Tehran. Exponents of the America First foreign policy, such as the vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance and prospective national security adviser Elbridge Colby do display some pro-restraint tendencies, but those are mostly focused on Russia and Ukraine. On Iran, they mostly stick to a conventionally hawkish Washington consensus. However, they are unlikely to push for Pompeo and Bolton-style regime change policies. Then, Trump needs to use the momentum from the reformist administration in Tehran showing signs of readiness of re-engaging with Washington. With the veterans of nuclear diplomacy, such as the foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, back in charge, lines of communication could be re-established. The current government in Tehran strives to diversify the nation’s foreign policy, and recent tensions with Russia over diverging interests in the South Caucasus show the limits of the one-sided “turn East” orientation pursued by the previous administration. Above all, Iran’s dire economic situation requires some form of sanction relief, from which the U.S. businesses could also benefit. That last point is surely not lost on Trump when he complained in 2016 that, as a result of the nuclear deal under President Barack Obama, it was the European and Chinese, not American, companies that benefited. Finally, Trump should take advantage of Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris’s unwise strategy of trying to out-hawk Trump on Iran by criticizing his “feckless policies” in office (meaning alleged failure to respond militarily to Iran’s strikes on the U.S. bases in Iraq, themselves undertaken as a retaliation for Soleimani’s assassination). He should leave the repetition of the hawkish Washington boilerplate platitudes to his opponent, and instead run as a pro-peace, pro-business candidate committed to extracting the U.S. from the pointless enmities and endless wars.  The post Can Trump Achieve a Diplomatic Breakthrough With Iran? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The U.S. Hurt Itself With Russia Sanctions A new book shows how the unprecedented financial punishments failed to stop Russia, while revealing the American worst-case playbook. Credit: image via Shutterstock A character in the fascinating new book Punishing Putin: Inside the Global Economic War to Bring Down Russia by the Bloomberg journalist Stephanie Baker is introduced as “the most powerful guy you’ve never heard of.” A lot of people in this book are like that.  The man in question is Björn Seibert, formerly a German defense ministry official and currently head of cabinet to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Daleep Singh, Wally Adeyemo—these are not household names, but together they have totally reshaped the use of global finance as a weapon of war.  The first thing to know about Western sanctions on Russia since February 2022 is that they are unprecedented. The second thing to know is that they haven’t worked. To start with the first: The sanctions imposed by President Joe Biden’s administration on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine were a massive escalation from the comparatively mild sanctions imposed by Barack Obama in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea. For example, cutting off Russia from the global payment system SWIFT, which Baker calls “the Gmail of the global banking system,” was without parallel. Singh, deputy national security advisor for international economics, and Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the Treasury, among others, had to work overtime to get the Europeans to agree to it. Even more extreme was the decision to freeze assets held in Western financial institutions by Russia’s central bank. “To do this to a fellow central bank involves breaking the assumption of sovereign equality and the common interest in upholding the rights to property,” wrote economic historian Adam Tooze at the time. The figures involved are staggering: more than $300 billion, compared to the $7 billion in Taliban assets that Biden froze after our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a holdout against the asset freeze. She refused to agree to the plan when it was first proposed because she worried about its effects on currency markets. Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister and former European Central Bank president, was dispatched to convince her, which he successfully did. “They spoke the same language, and I’m not talking about English,” an anonymous source tells Baker. The world turns on such conversations. Another took place in July 2023 at the Aspen Security Forum, where National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan listened to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’s pitch for confiscating Russia’s frozen assets and giving the money to Ukraine for reconstruction.  Summers’s wingmen in his pitch were Robert Zoellick and Philip Zelikow, two Republicans. The three tell Baker that they teamed up in order to make their idea “transcend party politics.” In fact, it just drives home that our Russia policy is currently being set by the uniparty. Zoellick and Zelikow are both Bush-era neoconservatives. As for Summers, he was pushing for harsher sanctions on Russia back in the Yeltsin years, when he was serving under Robert Rubin in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department.  Sanctioning Russia is not something these people had to be reluctantly brought around to. Many were raring to impose sanctions from the get go. Note that the first package of sanctions Biden imposed on Russia were in April 2021, before the invasion. According to Baker, that package was in response to “Moscow’s meddling in the U.S. elections, the poisoning of the late Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny, and the Russian-backed cyber hack on the U.S. tech company SolarWinds Corp.” Furthermore, “The Biden administration viewed the sanctions as an act of housekeeping, making up for Trump’s unwillingness to respond to Russia’s malign actions.” They imposed new sanctions because the last guy didn’t—a logic that only hardened attitudes in the Kremlin. Two and a half years after the invasion, it is clear that sanctions have not had the devastating effect on Russia’s economy that the Biden administration expected. The ruble has not crashed. Russia’s economic growth is strong, projected to be higher than France’s or Germany’s this year.  The disappearance of McDonald’s from the Russian market is a symbolic blow, a reversal of the hopeful symbolism of 1990 when the Cold War ended, but the domestic replacement, Vkusno i Tochka, has picked up the slack serving Russia’s fast-food diners. That is the story for most sectors of domestic production that have been affected by sanctions, in part because Putin made it his goal after 2014 to make his country sanction-proof. When de-SWIFTing was first floated in 2014, Russia moved to create its own alternative payment systems. The Mir card was launched domestically in 2016, which allowed Russian consumers to survive the withdrawal of Visa and Mastercard from the Russian market in 2022. Without that alternative in place, the Russian economy might indeed have crashed.  “Many Western leaders hoped that the sanctions would quickly kneecap Putin’s war machine,” Baker writes. She concedes, “That proved overly optimistic.” But that does not go far enough. These unprecedented sanctions have actually hurt America more than they have helped us, in at least three ways. First, they have pushed Russia’s oligarchs closer to Putin. “Putin always told us the West hates us,” one tells Baker. “Now it’s a fact.” Second, they have sacrificed the neutrality that previously upheld America’s position as the global financial powerhouse. If other countries doubt our commitment to property rights and fiduciary neutrality, they will be reluctant to entrust us with financial power over them. The downsides of this loss of trust will not be apparent right away. They may take years to manifest, but they may well be the most important consequence of the war.  Third, it has shown China our whole hand. By going after Russia so aggressively, we have essentially shown China exactly what we would do if they invaded Taiwan and we decided to retaliate. This information has no doubt been priceless to Chinese war planners—as has been the example Russia is setting in how to circumvent us. The post The U.S. Hurt Itself With Russia Sanctions appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Roots of the Trump Assassination Attempts It is only by luck that the former president is still alive. (Twitter) In many Third-World countries, falling out of power means being declared an enemy of the people who needs to be done away. In some situations that means trumped-up charges and made-up evidence—lawfare—to mislabel the fallen leader as evil and justify the life sentence he receives. In other situations, jail is not secure enough, such as when the fallen leader still has many supporters. That means he must be killed. The murder can be a well-planned assassination, an “accident” or true up-against-the-wall execution. It’s all necessary for the greater good, especially if the nation wants to claim higher goals at work—for example, saving itself from a worse fate, like loss of “democracy.” Dictators in power are democracy advocates, and dictators out of power are fascists, infidels, and enemies of the people. Donald Trump is an enemy of democracy itself, says the left in writing and from the debate stage. It is then not surprising when people, often mentally ill enough to accept the base argument that someone who served four years as president, who defeated multiple impeachment attempts without resorting to tanks on the Capitol lawn, and who has run via the electoral system for president three times, is not a believer in democracy. Would-be killers have seen lawfare fail. Of course it did; it was based on in one instance the manipulation of the justice system to transform a payoff to a porn star as part of a legal nondisclosure agreement from a simple misdemeanor (if that) into 34 separate felonies. In another instance, the lawfare was so weak an attempt on the candidate that a single woman’s vague testimony from decades earlier was enough to convict him and fine him enough to bring him near bankruptcy—all enabled by a Covid-era legal device revitalizing charges long past their statute of limitations. In other instances, the lawfare was too thin to even hurt. Trump once faced 91 charges in four jurisdictions. Now he faces 12. He’s been convicted on the 34 noted above and seen 45 charges dismissed. The remaining charges face their own challenges after the Supreme Court determined in July that Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for actions undertaken while in office. As in most Third-World countries, the lawfare was executed by clumsy but politically loyal amateurs, relying on home-turf advantage to overcome their weak cases. And speaking of democracy, lawfare to date has also been defeated (convictions alone don’t matter when the goal is political destruction) by some judges still willing to uphold the ideals of a fair system and dismiss unfair charges. With lawfare essentially failing off the table, it is time to demonize Trump to create a manifesto for the mentally ill American who will carry out the grim final round. The New Republic has duly warned us that “Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s last election”—if Trump wins, American democracy is over. “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have,” Trump himself said, and he would never joke or exaggerate, right? In another number from the New Republic, a writer concluded, The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia. Trump will… use every means available to achieve an America with no immigrants, no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style “Don’t Say Gay laws,” license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and “dual sovereignty” arguments, but it’s unlikely they will succeed due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like. If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection Act, civil war is on the table. “Putin does what [Trump] would like to do,” Hillary Clinton has said. “Kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists into exile, rule without any check or balance. That’s what Trump really wants.”  In short, says the Washington Post, “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” And what politics of fear round-up would be complete without Trump’s misquoted out-of-context “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country”? Somewhere after that comes a mention from the left of how our system of bypassing the popular vote in favor of the Electoral College is undemocratic even if it has resulted in a democracy each and every time it has been used since the Founders created it. There are a lot of grievances, triggers, and dog-whistles to hit. An element of “Trump is Hitler” has always been missing, Trump’s own version of Mein Kampf. Hitler was famous for writing (from prison) exactly what he planned to do once he gained power. Now there is Project 2025, a document disavowed numerous times by Trump that pundits from the left (and the Democratic candidate herself) nevertheless claim is Trump’s nefarious blueprint for a second term. Trump’s team did not write Project 2025, and he has not cited it in his speeches, but it is stuck to him by the Left like tar. And as a call to arms, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said that democracies, with their strong protections for civil liberties and the rule of law, don’t drop dead of a heart attack. Instead, they die slowly, incrementally, poisoned at the roots by the fear and anger instilled by demagogues—like Trump. Adam Kinzinger wrote on X, “MAGA pretending they didn’t light this fire is gaslighting to the 100th power.” For those who need more intellectual backup to calling for murder, welcome Jonathan Chait, who wrote, “Donald Trump Is a Threat to Democracy, and Saying So Is Not Incitement.” It’s OK, they seem to say, because Trump asked for it. “He’s worth killing” is the broader message. “I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful, to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents,” said Hillary Clinton. “We can’t go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.” Unlike in the Third World, there will be no hand-picked assassin here. There is also no conspiracy per se to assassinate Trump. Instead, the left bets that if they send out enough signals, someone mentally ill enough in armed America will do what they want in their hearts. It is the patriotic thing to do, like time-travelers smiting baby Hitler. A jihad. The left is too coordinated in its words and actions not to know what it is doing. Trump knows it; during his debate with Harris he remarked that he took a bullet to the head for some of her remarks that he is anti-democratic. Trump’s would-be assassin knows it, claiming that “democracy is on the ballot.”  What happens next sadly seems to revolve around luck. It was by hair’s breadth away in Butler, Pennsylvania, that the Trump rally did not end with a “back and to the left” blood- and brain-splattered scenario. It was luck that a lone Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel poking out of cover from the perimeter of the Mar-a-Lago golf course and fired to prevent the killer from getting off a round. Next time? In the face of so many sparks being thrown into so much tinder, how much more luck can Trump count on to see him through to Election Day? The post The Roots of the Trump Assassination Attempts appeared first on The American Conservative.

With fewer days between now and the election than between Trump assassination attempts, it’s more important than ever that freedom-loving Americans mobilize to motivate the electorate and protect the process. In Vindicating Trump, Dinesh D’souza attempts to paint a picture of the man divorced from the Hitlerian caricature portrayed by the propaganda arm of the DNC. Dinesh D’souza Dinesh D’Souza’s American journey has been nothing short of remarkable. Born in Mumbai to Catholic parents, D’Souza immigrated to the U.S. as a student in the late 1970s and eventually found himself advising on policy in the Reagan administration. In 2012, he entered the world of filmmaking with *2016: Obama’s America*, a documentary critical of then-President Obama that became the highest-grossing political film of all time. Since then, D’Souza has become a prolific political documentarian, producing films like *Hillary’s America* (2016), *Death of a Nation* (2018), and *2000 Mules* (2022). He is also a bestselling author, former president of The King’s College, and a well-known Republican pundit. In 2014, D’Souza was convicted of violating campaign finance laws after pleading guilty to using a straw donor to contribute $20,000 to Wendy Long’s Senate campaign. He was sentenced to eight months in the Grossmont Community Corrections Center in San Diego, five years probation, and a $30,000 fine. In 2018, President Trump pardoned D’Souza, yet another moment that marked a significant chapter in his life.   Full Disclosure When reviewing a politically charged documentary like this, I think it’s crucial to be transparent about where I stand. With the exception of my first presidential election (ah, to be 18 and naive), I’ve been a registered Republican my entire adult life. But it’s not because of the 99% of politicians who seem more focused on their careers—whether that’s living off taxpayer dollars or selling books on talk shows. I’m a Republican because I believe in fundamental principles: small government with limited federal control, capitalism as the best path to improving lives, a strong national defense, traditional values, the rule of law, and fiscal responsibility. Sadly, many elected officials with an “R” beside their name only pay lip service to these ideals. Another reason for my party affiliation is simple: where I live, party registration is tied to the primaries you vote in. Now for the big reveal: I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. His rhetoric often rubbed me the wrong way, and I never cared for his vague, unfocused style, especially during his presidential campaigns. Reluctantly, I cast my vote for a third party that year for the first time. But, like many others who felt the same, I quickly came around during his presidency. While I still have reservations about certain things, knowing what kind of leader he became has helped soften those concerns. In 2020, I proudly voted for him, and I plan to do so again. This is all to say that I neither believe Trump can do no wrong nor am I part of the mob eager for his downfall.   Vindicating Trump Review Whether it’s to show the human cost of war, the bizarre youth of the legacy elite, or reveal anti-racist grifters as the charlatans they are, all documentaries attempt to tell a story in the hopes that the audience comes away with a new understanding of the subject matter. Arguably, the very best documentaries can change hearts and minds and even spur people to positive action. Thanks to a lifetime of documenting and working within the Republican political sphere, D’souza’s documentaries almost always benefit from unparalleled behind-the-scenes access, and so it is in Vindicating Trump. In it, he spends significant time chatting with the head of the RNC and daughter-in-law to the once and would-be future president, Lara Trump, as well as The Don’s lead criminal attorney, Alina Habba. However, it is his time spent with the man himself, Donald Trump, in which the movie is most impactful. Filmed not long after the first of two assassination attempts just weeks apart, his ear still marked from the bullet that was mere millimeters from ending his life, Donald Trump presents a far softer side of himself than many in the public have seen before. It is in these unshielded moments, when juxtaposed with the fierce defiance that he showed on July 13, in what has become one of the most iconic images in modern history, that the man beneath the bluster shines through: his genuine desire to see America and Americans prosper in safety and peace. It’s rather touching and worth watching for this, if nothing else. In this same interview, D’souza touches on what is arguably the film’s most poignant observation: the considerable power that President Trump could wield via his ardent supporters if he were the kind of man to do so. Regrettably, the documentary falters in several key areas as it progresses. The first 60% of the film oscillates between efforts to humanize Trump through interviews with him and his inner circle and exposing the duplicity of bad actors in the mainstream media, DNC, and DOJ. The attempts to humanize Trump, however, come off as overly scripted, at times feeling more like slick infomercials. The questions are softball and lacking depth—the kind we often criticize the Left-leaning media for tossing to their preferred candidates (“Why is Trump so great, and why is the media so awful?”—not that blunt, but close). The responses feel too polished, leaving viewers uncertain whether they were rehearsed or if the two women being interviewed are just particularly poised and knowledgeable about the inner workings of the subject. It doesn’t help that D’Souza’s frequent, enthusiastic nodding evokes late-night infomercial vibes reminiscent of a “ShamWow” salesman. “It dices AND slices?” The credibility of the interviewees is another major concern. Lara Trump, though a trusted voice, isn’t exactly impartial—she’s not only family by marriage but also the spokesperson for the RNC, so it’s hard not to expect some spin. Alina Habba, on the other hand, is a paid legal representative whose job is to defend Trump. Her involvement might have felt more natural if her role had been more focused on breaking down the legal absurdity of some charges rather than being used as another character witness. The absence of Milania, Don Jr., Ivanka, or other close family members only highlights this imbalance further. Improving things somewhat, the rest of this section of the film is devoted to media bias. One of Vindicating Trump’s more effective tactics is to show montages and video collages of hordes of pundits and news outlets spouting identical anti-Trump talking points nearly word for word. While it’s not definitive proof of fraudulence, it certainly shows that they are all clearly working together and puts the question to their credibility. Another bright spot, Vindicating Trump features reenactments that speculatively depict key behind-the-scenes moments at the DNC and DOJ. They aren’t as impactful as actual receipts, but they are a lot of fun nevertheless. Ranging from their derision of the initial announcement of Trump’s candidacy to their possible collusion with one another to ensure his loss, each one is a funny and feel-good manifestation of many of our (the Right) assumptions. In a nice change from many other docs, the performances are fairly decent (as docudramas go) as well, with Nick Searcy (Reagan) and Jarret LeMaster (Woke Jesus – The Babylon Bee) standing out. Finally, the remaining 30% of the film takes a sudden turn as it becomes almost entirely about the ease with which nefarious parties could exploit weaknesses in our ballotting system. While it’s compelling, it’s also a jarring thematic departure that feels like it would be more at home in 2000 Mules, another D’souza film that focuses solely on voter fraud. All in all, Vindicating Trump is a bit of a head-scratcher with an unclear purpose or audience. It is neither a hard-hitting exposé revealing the dark truth behind a corrupt system, a fully fleshed-out character piece that gives unique and persuasive insights into a deeply misunderstood and misrepresented man, nor is it a focused unmasking of voter fraud. Instead, Vindicating Trump appears to be more of a sizzle reel for three separate documentaries for each of these. Some undecided voters may have their minds changed after watching it, but most viewers will likely come away with the same perspective with which they entered.   WOKE ELEMENTS Nada None The post Vindicating Trump first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

A countercultural icon. The post Inside Dennis Hopper’s personal record collection first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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