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Home Front: Politix

By Halting The Federal Judiciary's Left Turn, Trump Has Saved America

2025-07-10

[AMERICANTHINKER] What Donald Trump
...The Hero of Butler, Pennsylvania...
has achieved in the first six months of his non-sequential second term borders on the unprecedented. The most lasting and impactful accomplishment will be Trump's ongoing victories in permanently reining in a rogue and increasingly radicalized federal judiciary. His electoral victory in 2024 and uncompromising battles with the judiciary have rescued the United States from an irreversible decline and fall.

Over the past 70 years, the federal judiciary has increasingly assumed the extra-constitutional role of arbitrarily setting the boundaries of congressional and presidential authority. This has been an evolutionary process that reflected the American left's long-term strategy of appointing collectivist judges to the federal judiciary.

All Marxist-inspired despots of the twentieth century understood that party or state control over the judiciary is a key factor in successfully transforming a nation into a one-party socialist or communist state. This process was dramatically accelerated in the United States after Barack Obama
I am the change that you seek...
became president. During his two terms in office, he and the Democrat party, per the Marxist blueprint, were singularly focused on radicalizing the federal judiciary.

Image created using ChatGPT.

This single-minded determination culminated in Obama and his minion, Joe The Big Guy Biden
...46th president of the U.S. Sleazy Dem machine politician, paterfamilias of the Biden Crime Family...
, appointing vast numbers of radical left-wing judges during their combined twelve years in office. The unabashed and unconstitutional lawfare directed at Donald Trump and the January 6th protestors was a manifestation of their success.

Since the beginning of Trump's second term, dozens of Obama-Biden district court judges have unconstitutionally interjected themselves in Trump's lawful exercise of executive power, issuing an unheard 45-plus national injunctions in less than six months.

From the Constitution's ratification until the dawn of the Twentieth Century, courts did not issue any nationwide injunctions. Beginning in 1900 and spanning 21 presidencies, courts issued 170 nationwide injunctions. Of those, 112—or 65% of all national injunctions over 249 years—came during the four years of Trump's first term and six months of his second. By comparison, per the Harvard Law Review, the last Republican president, George W. Bush, experienced just six nationwide injunctions over eight years.

It is not a coincidence that this avalanche of injunctions began after the Obama presidency, during which he appointed hundreds of radical district judges. There are currently 631 serving District Court judges in 94 districts, and Obama and Biden appointed over 60% of them. This makes it easy to find a judge sympathetic to the Marxist-inspired Democrat party and willing to issue unconstitutional nationwide injunctions or conduct rigged trials against political adversaries.

After experiencing a record 64 nationwide injunctions during his first term, surviving the egregious travesty that was unconstitutional lawfare directed at him, and observing the appalling and blatant political persecution of the January 6th protestors, Trump came into office in 2025 single-mindedly determined to take on this Marxist monolith.

Trump knew that the Democrats

...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy, white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects...
' strategy was to derail his agenda. During the four years of his second term, they intended to file lawsuits continuously with their dependable sycophants in the judiciary. These judges would then issue an unending avalanche of judgments, restraining orders, and national injunctions that would freeze the Trump agenda.

They theorized that Trump would either openly defy lower court orders, thus alienating the Supreme Court and becoming susceptible to accusations that he was a fascist
...anybody you disagree with, damn them...
-inspired dictator, or he would not be able to aggressively marshal the legal team and strategy to fight continuous battles in innumerable district courts, the circuit courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court.

Trump, however, knew what was coming. Before his inauguration, he assembled an experienced and loyal legal team that was later installed in the Justice Department and the White House Counsel's office, expressly to contest the anticipated lawsuits.

Upon assuming office on January 20, 2025, Trump turned the tables on his feckless and fatuous adversaries by immediately issuing a massive number of executive orders. The Democrat party strategy was immediately exposed to the public as they and their fellow travelers predictably filed 328 lawsuits in the first 100 days of his presidency, stretching their credibility and resources to the limit.

Most importantly, Trump wisely allowed the processes to play out and did not traffic in unhinged accusations or hyperbole when reacting to the inane (and insane) lower court rulings and injunctions. However,
some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves...
he made clear he would never back off in contesting every judgment, restraining order, and injunction. Lastly, he never threatened to ignore any court order, regardless of its merits or constitutionality.

These overall tactics caught the Democrat machine by surprise as they assumed Trump was incapable of restraint. Trump's willingness to respect the separation of powers was not lost on the Supreme Court Justices, who would be the final arbiters of the validity of many rulings, especially the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions.

As a result, Trump has amassed an unexpected winning streak, not only before the Supreme Court but in many lower courts, too. This streak included the monumental win in Trump v. CASA, Inc., which saw the Supreme Court permanently and dramatically limit district courts' power to issue nationwide injunctions. This effectively eliminates a major tool Democrats use to thwart their political opposition and abet their transforming America.

Link

-Great Cultural Revolution

Explosive report: Obama was the sleeper cell, Mamdani is the detonator to collapse America

2025-07-07

[World Net Daily] A new, explosive report is alleging the same Deep State forces that brought Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency are responsible for the meteoric rise of Zohran Mamdani, the socialist who is now the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor.

The analysis Sunday by Ethan White at Gazetteller.com says: "Barack Obama was never just a president. He was a weapon — carefully installed, heavily protected, and strategically unleashed to dismantle the American Republic from within.

"Now, on July 6, 2025, the fruits of his deception are visible for anyone who dares to see through the smokescreen of media propaganda and elite manipulation.

"And the clearest product of his globalist-engineered legacy is Zohran Mamdani — a foreign-born, socialist radical openly advocating the destruction of capitalism, national identity, and constitutional law."

Link

Government Corruption

Miranda Devine: How the Biden admin ‘weaponized' the justice system against Trump aide Peter Navarro

2025-07-07

[NYPost] Former first lady Jill Biden’s factotum Anthony Bernal refused to testify before Congress last week for a scheduled interview about the President Joe Biden autopen scandal.

Now Bernal will be subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to compel his testimony about who was really running the White House during Biden’s term — or face potential criminal charges of contempt.

That’s a real possibility for Bernal and other former White House officials implicated in the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline, considering that the Biden administration broke all norms when it jailed President Trump’s White House adviser Peter Navarro and former adviser Steve Bannon last year for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas to testify before Nancy Pelosi’s star chamber investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

What goes around comes around.

Navarro, 75, was the first White House official in history to be imprisoned for a contempt of Congress conviction.

He served a four-month sentence in a federal prison in Miami last year.

DEM DOJ’S PRECEDENT
By contrast, the very Department of Justice that set a chilling precedent with its prosecutions of Navarro and Bannon (who also served four months in a federal prison in Connecticut last year) gave itself a pass when then-Attorney General Merrick Garland similarly was held in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena to hand over embarrassing audio recordings of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.

As a senior White House adviser on Jan. 6, 2021, Navarro’s conviction should have had a higher bar than Bernal’s or any other former adviser’s.

But the Biden DOJ and one of its pet DC judges, President Barack Obama-appointed District Judge Amit Mehta, ignored Navarro’s legitimate concerns about executive privilege and punished him for his loyalty to his boss, Trump.

Link

Government Corruption

John Brennan was my boss at the CIA. He belongs in prison

2025-07-06

[FOX40] Former CIA Director John Brennan was once my boss. Given what we just learned in a shocking new report about his role in the Trump Russia hysteria, he should be in prison.

Here’s why.

The CIA released fresh details yesterday about the creation nearly 10 years ago of the agency’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It found that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election. That assessment — ordered by then-President Barack Obama and executed by Brennan — ignited the Trump-Russia hoax that would haunt Trump’s presidency for four years.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan participates in a session at the third annual Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, U.S., September 8, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

We’re now learning five key details Brennan used to cook the books to ensure maximum damage to Trump.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Trump threatens to arrest New York City mayoral candidate Mamdani

2025-07-02

[IsraelTimes] US president suggests that the state assembly member is in the country illegally, throws support behind incumbent Eric Adams, whom he says he ‘helped out a little bit’ in the past

US President Donald Trump
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons...
threatened during a presser on Tuesday to arrest New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani should he win the mayoral elections in November, hours after his victory in the primaries was formally confirmed.

The president, who was speaking at an immigration roundtable at a new Florida detention facility, also repeated an unfounded claim that Mamdani entered the US illegally and voiced support for New York City Mayor Eric Adams

...Hizonner da Mare of Noo Yawk. As a Manchurian candidate, Hizonner was all in favor of law and order and that kind of stuff. Once in office, a bunch of his friends found cushy jobs with the city, the windows kept getting broken, and Soros-funded DA Alvin Bragg remained right where he was. Most people comfort themselves with the thought that he's not Bill di Blasio but that's pretty small comfort with kids who actually go to school getting bumped off while standing in front of them. But he's a Dem, so the rubes will vote for him next election too, so he's what they deserve...
, who is seeking reelection.

Asked about Mamdani’s plan to oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities in New York City, Trump said that if this happened, the US administration would "have to arrest him."

"We’ll have to arrest him," Trump said. "We don’t need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation."

Mamdani earlier said that the immigrant raids were "terrorizing people," and that agents who carry them out have no interest in following the law.

"We send him money, we send him all the things that he needs to run a government," Trump said, repeating his threat from earlier this week that Mamdani would have to "do the right thing" or forgo federal funds.

"A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally," Trump said. "We’re going to look at everything and ideally he’s going to turn out to be much less than a communist, but right now he’s a communist, that’s not a socialist," he said.

Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents and became a US citizen in 2018.

Trump has often used citizenship and immigration as a weapon with which to attack his political opponents, having claimed repeatedly that former US president Barack Obama
I am the change that you seek...
was born in Kenya, and that former vice president Kamala Harris
once a marijuana-busting Caliphornia DA
, whom he defeated at the polls last November, did not meet citizenship requirements to run for president.

Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist and state assembly member, is a member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America, which is not a communist organization.

The DSA has made anti-Israel activism one of its planks, and Mamdani has come under fire from some parts of New York City’s Jewish community for his refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state — saying instead that he believes it "has a right to exist as a state with equal rights" — and for refusing to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada," which is generally viewed as a call for violence.

Trump also used Tuesday’s roundtable event to offer support to one of Mamdani’s opponents, incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who is standing for reelection in November as an independent, following a since-dismissed federal bribery case.

"Mayor Adams is a very good person. I helped him out a little bit, he had a problem and he was unfairly hurt over this question," Trump said, calling corruption allegations against Adams a "phony indictment."

Adams has friendly ties with Trump, who is unpopular in New York City.

The federal corruption charges against Adams were dismissed in April, which the judge in the case said "smacks of a bargain" between Adams and the Trump administration.

President Trump on if Zohran Mamdani doesn't cooperate with ICE: "Well, then we'll have to arrest him. We don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation." pic.twitter.com/oqV7POiClL
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 1, 2025

Victory of Pro-Palestinian NYC mayoral candidate in Democratic primary confirmed

Link

Home Front: Politix

Obama and Bush Unite in Rare Move Against Trump

2025-07-02

How unstatesmanlike. President Bush, at least, was trained in good manners, and knows better. Poor President Obama was brought up by Communist spies, and so all he understands is power plays. Not that anyone cares what either of them think on the subject, as President Bush never mastered the Deep State and President Obama co-opted it, inasmuch as they were not his enthusiastic fellow travellers.

[Daily Beast] Former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush have joined forces to shoot down President Trump’s "colossal mistake" to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Trump administration cut around 90 percent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts during Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rampage back in February. Musk oversaw the depletion of the workforce from 10,000 to less than 300.

The agency will be absorbed by the state department, where it will be replaced by a new organization called America First.

In a farewell video message to staffers on Monday, USAID’s last day before it is folded into the state department, the two former presidents decried its treatment by Trump.

Link

Fifth Column

Asra Nomani: How Socialist Muslims pulled off a 20-year takeover of the Democratic Party

2025-06-30

Long, information dense, lots of names to remember and correlate. Here’s a taste:

[FoxNews] The rise of Zohran Mamdani is the product of a strategy partly funded by the House of Soros, uniting socialism (red), political Islam (green), and the Democratic Party (blue)

Many people are wondering how Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist Muslim who wants to defund the police, globalize the intifada, and destroy capitalism, has emerged as the Democratic Party's nominee for New York City mayor, with leaders like former President Bill Clinton fawning over him.

To understand Mamdani’s political ascent, you have to trace the red-green-blue spider’s web that brought him here. This isn’t a complete map — I've written a book, "Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Undermining America’s Freedom," to document that story — but it is a snapshot of key turning points over two decades of strategy, narrative manipulation, and activist training.

A critical moment traces back to a Friday night in 2008, according to investigative reporting I’ve done at the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative. It reveals how socialists (red) and Muslims (green) seized the Democratic Party (blue) over a long 20-year campaign. At 9:28 p.m. on Dec. 12, 2008, former ACLU civil rights lawyer Ann Beeson sent an email to former Clinton administration senior advisor John Podesta.

Beeson was executive director of U.S. Programs at George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, where she said she oversaw $150 million in annual grants to "promote human rights, social justice and accountability nationwide."

In her email, publicly discussed here for the first time, Beeson wrote, "I’m writing to follow up on one topic we discussed — what the incoming Administration could do to address domestic national security policies and practices that unfairly target Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities in America."

She attached a memo from Farhana Khera, then executive director of Muslim Advocates, a group based in San Francisco, and Aziz Huq, then the director of the "liberty and national security project" at the William J. Brennan Center for Justice, both Open Society "grantees."

As a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has investigated the convergence of radical leftist politics and Muslim political activism for decades, I have followed a paper trail of tax returns, grant lists and confidential memos, and this email represented the culmination of a decades-long ideological drive that began with Muslim international students arriving in the U.S. in the 1960s, not just to study, as my father did at Rutgers University, but to lay the institutional groundwork for political Islam, or Islamism, in the United States. By the 1980s, they had established a strategic base at 500 Grove Street in Herndon, Va., later investigated by the FBI for alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both groups seeking to destroy Israel and America and build a global caliphate.

The transformation accelerated after December 2005, when Muslim governments convened at an "Extraordinary Islamic Summit" of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. There, they launched a campaign to weaponize the term "Islamophobia" to silence critics of extremist Islam. American Muslim leaders seized the moment to re-engineer the national security narrative, using American philanthropic networks, like the House of Soros, as a Trojan horse to racialize Islam, frame Muslims as the "oppressed" and embed illiberal ideologies within America’s liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party.

By January 2008, with Soros pumping money into Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, his philanthropy staff launched a "National Security and Human Rights Campaign" with D.C.-based Atlantic Philanthropies, committing at least $20 million to "dismantle" Bush-era counterterrorism policies. One grantee, the Proteus Fund, based in Waltham, Mass., ballooned in revenue from $9.5 million in 2008 to $73 million in 2023. Soros dollars flowed to groups including Muslim Advocates, the Brennan Center, the ACLU and many others who set their sights on targets, including the New York Police Department. Today, Mamdani says he wants to "defund the police."

A Pearl Project analysis of 38 documents detailing the operations and funding of the National Security and Human Rights Campaign revealed the coordinated efforts of progressive and Islamist activists to reframe post-9/11 narratives. The aim: clear the path for red-green candidates like Mamdani.

Muslim Advocates grew nearly 10-fold, from $76,331.03 in annual revenues in 2005 to $992,892 in 2023. The Brennan Center’s revenue exploded from $6.6 million to $57.9 million during the same period.

Soros soon funded a new "Security and Rights Collaborative" at Proteus Fund to "restore civil liberties and human rights lost in the name of the ‘war on terror.’" Headquartered in a one‑story building off Research Drive in Amherst, Mass., the new "collaborative" was run by Shireen Zaman, a Muslim activist previously at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Washington, D.C., group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Their focus: America’s "Muslim, Arab and South Asian community," called "MASA." Zaman now works at the Ford Foundation.

Their strategy went beyond policy to narrative warfare.

Starting in late 2008, Soros pumped some $20 million into a "fieldwide communications hub" to arm Muslim groups and leftist media allies with messaging tools. The recipient: ReThink Media, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., co-founded by "progressive" political operatives Peter Ferenbach and Lynn Fahselt, then a consultant to Democratic donors, including Open Society, Proteus Fund, Ploughshares Fund, Carnegie Corporation, Piper Fund, Atlantic Philanthropies, and others "progressive" donors that have since pumped money into ReThink Media.

ReThink Media became the loudspeaker for the red and the green. Last year, Proteus Fund paid ReThink Media $643,000 as a "communications consultant." Soros also backed Media Matters, run by ex-conservative-turned-Democrat David Brock, to shape media narratives about Muslims attacked by Republicans.

Over the years, ReThink Media has hired and trained alumni of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, including staffers Zainab Chaudary and Corey Saylor, to promote an "echo chamber" for liberal groups. One narrative: Muslims were under attack in the West, and the Democratic Party would defend Muslims.

This storyline took hold in the post-Obama political landscape.

In late 2010, Open Society staffers in Beeson’s U.S. Programs division distributed an internal memo, "Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civic Discourse," announcing they were giving Podesta’s Center for American Progress $200,000 for a new "Examining Anti-Muslim Bigotry Project" that would "document structures underlying the Islamophobia movement."

The memo detailed plans to do "opposition research" on groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Middle East Forum, which track Islamic extremism.

The project description noted that "progressives were caught off guard" earlier that year when New York City residents opposed the building of a "Ground Zero mosque" near the site of the former World Trade Center.

"Progressives" were in "urgent need of high-quality opposition research so that they can switch from playing defense to develop a proactive strategic plan to counter anti-Muslim xenophobia and to promote tolerance," protecting "progressive counter-terrorism policies," they wrote.

Related by Daniel Greenfield:

Only 5% of New Yorkers Voted for Mamdani

Who are those 5%? They aren’t New Yorkers because polls showed us Mamdani performing poorly with anyone over 50, with African-American, Latino and working class white voters. What’s left? White hipsters and Muslim immigrants.

Link

-Land of the Free

Hegseth announces Navy oil tanker named after gay rights leader renamed after Medal of Honor recipient

2025-06-28

[FoxNews] Defense Secretary declares, 'We are taking the politics out of ship naming' as Pelosi condemns change

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a Navy oil tanker named after gay rights leader Harvey Milk will be renamed after Medal of Honor recipient Oscar V. Peterson.

"We are taking the politics out of ship naming," he wrote on X along with a video announcing the move.

Milk was California’s first openly gay politician, who was shot and killed inside San Francisco city hall by former San Francisco supervisor Dan White. The ship, a fleet replenishment oiler, was originally named after him in 2016 under President Barack Obama.

He served four years in the Navy in the Korean War but left due to his sexuality.

Peterson was awarded the Medal of Honor after his death, having died of his wounds during battle in World War II in an act of self-sacrifice that saved lives.

"People want to be proud of the ship they’re sailing in," Hegseth said of the change. "We're not renaming the ship to anything political. This is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration."

Peterson, who spent 20 years in the Navy, was in charge of running the steam engine in the U.S.S. Neosho when it came under Japanese fire in the Philippines in 1942.

On May 7, 1942, the Neosho was severely damaged during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Peterson and other members of his repair party were badly injured, but Peterson managed to close four bulkhead steam valves. He sustained third-degree burns in the process, but the move kept the ship afloat. On May 11, the U.S.S. Henley rescued 123 survivors from the Neosho, and Peterson died two days later from his wounds.

The renaming comes amid a push from Hegseth to remove DEI and "woke" policies from the Department of Defense.

When the move was first reported earlier this month, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the move a "shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream."

Of course she did.

"As the rest of us are celebrating the joy of Pride Month, it is my hope that the Navy will reconsider this egregious decision," Pelosi said in a statement.

Link

Syria-Lebanon-Iran

Iran's Flying Monkeys

2025-06-27

[Tablet Magazine] A few months before he was buried under the rubble of his Beirut bunker, the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, repeated to his followers, as he had done many times before, his famous line that Israel was "weaker than a spider’s web." That is, Israel was an artificial implant that structurally was bound to collapse. All it needed was sustained violence and patience. The end result was inevitable: Israel would vanish from the map with a wave of the hand.

The fantasy that Nasrallah peddled to his followers and "resistance" fans was not, on its face, entirely ungrounded. Iran, a much larger country than Israel, with 10 times the population, was a rising power. Its regional reach spanned from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. It had established missile bases on Israel’s borders and on a critical maritime passageway in the Red Sea. It controlled four Arab capitals and dominated the landmass across Iraq through Syria into Lebanon. In addition, Iran was allied with the United States’ two great rivals, Russia and China. In short, for Nasrallah and the resistance faithful, it appeared certain that Iran was inexorably ascendant.

In reality, Iran’s winning hand was a mirage. It took Israel 21 months to blow through it—15 of which were during a hostile American administration that actively tried to hobble the Israeli effort, to prevent the Iranian Wizard of Oz and his legions of flying monkeys from being scattered to the winds.

Gaza, Iran’s southern front, is now a wasteland, which, if President Donald Trump implements his stated plan, will be emptied of most if not all of its inhabitants—or at least those who choose not to live in rubble. Whether Trump’s Gaza plans rise or fall, it’s unlikely that Israel will ever cede control over the strip’s border with Egypt, which means that Gaza as an active front against Israel is gone for good.

Next to go was Hezbollah, the oldest and best equipped of Iran’s regional terror assets—indeed, the lynchpin of its regional network. Within three months in 2024, Israel eliminated the group’s entire command structure, decimated its infrastructure along the shared border, and blew up its weapons caches. Despite a U.S.-imposed cease-fire, Israel has maintained operational freedom and continues to take out cadres and arms caches inside Lebanon at will, with Hezbollah unable to mount any response.

Not long after Nasrallah’s demise, the other big piece on the Iranian board tumbled. In a matter of days in December 2024, the Assad regime, the Islamic Republic’s strategic ally since the 1979 revolution, was gone. Hollowed out by a decade and a half of war, and with Hezbollah eviscerated and Russia bogged down in Ukraine, the 53-year rule of the Assad family was suddenly history. In its place, a new Sunni regime in Damascus, Syria, is now intercepting weapons shipments to Hezbollah.

Iran’s multiple militias in Iraq, another card in the mullah’s winning fantasy poker hand, didn’t bother to deploy in Syria and have largely been irrelevant in the axis’ confrontation with Israel. While Iran maintains political clout in Baghdad, its militias there have proved worthless as a military instrument in its regional project, as Iraqi Shia turn out to look good only on paper while displaying little motivation to get slaughtered by a superior enemy on behalf of Iranian adventurism.

With its Levantine network in shambles, Tehran’s most relevant proxy over the past 20 months has been the Ansar Allah group (the Houthis) in Yemen. The Houthis have held global shipping in the Red Sea hostage while occasionally lobbing missiles and attack drones at Israel. As a result, they too have been hit hard, by both the IDF and the United States and Britain. In recent days, the Houthis have threatened to resume targeting U.S. ships in the Red Sea, which would likely invite a punishing response.

Finally, there was Iran itself: the home base of the mighty resistance axis. In recent years, Israel had already shown how thoroughly it had penetrated Iran. From the theft of the mullahs’ entire nuclear archive to multiple sabotage operations and high-value targeted assassinations, including taking out Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the heart of Tehran in July 2024, Israel showed the ability to operate with ease throughout Iran—including in the country’s most sensitive and well-guarded places. The country’s intelligence services and decision-making echelons were forced to assume that Israel was privy to the regime’s secrets and could kill its leadership at will.

After making short shrift of Iran’s air defense systems in October, Israel demonstrated its total military superiority this month, gaining full control of Iran’s airspace and going to work on its nuclear facilities, ballistic missiles and launchers, command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the nuclear program’s top scientists, clearing the way for the United States to demolish Iran’s three main nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. And with that, Iran’s nuclear dreams went up in smoke, much like its regional enterprise.

Since Israel thrashed Hezbollah a year ago, and the cascade of wins that followed, the global reaction to its achievement has been one of surprise—shock at the comprehensiveness of the Israeli domination and the complete Oz-like hollowness of the Iranians. But the Iranian regional position, much like its nuclear program, was a function not of Iranian strength but most crucially of U.S. support. If the Iranians were illusionists, the fuel for their tricks came from an America that repeatedly wrote monetary and diplomatic checks under the assumption that the magic act was real.

This applied across the board. In Iraq, the American nation-building project ensured the Iranians a sanctions-busting vehicle and protection. Whenever a Sunni revolt against the post-2003 order emerged in Iraq, the Iranians relied on the United States to put it down and prop up Tehran’s assets in the country.

But it was in Syria where Iranian dependence on U.S. protection was most evident. When Syria’s Sunnis rose against Iran’s vassal, Bashar al-Assad, Iran mobilized its Lebanese and Iraqi assets to prop him up. Soon it was sending Afghan and Pakistani Shia into the Syrian theater, too. Still, it wasn’t able to put down the uprising, despite Assad using chemical weapons against population centers.

Yet it turned out that Iran and Assad had little to fear from direct American involvement in Syria. When Tehran’s ally, then President Barack Obama, finally intervened in 2014, it was against the Islamic State group, which the United States and Iran’s Iraqi assets were partnering against in Iraq as well. Regardless, by 2015, Iran’s position in Syria was still wobbly. It required Obama facilitating the entry of Russia’s air force into Syria to help Iran’s militias gain the upper hand, though even that was not enough to take back the whole country.

Similar to Iraq, the American nation-building enterprise in Lebanon was also a condominium with Iran designed to protect Tehran’s holdings. Much as the Obama administration teamed up with Iranian assets in Iraq under the cover of the "anti-ISIS campaign," it did the same in Lebanon behind the veneer of supporting "state institutions," which allowed Hezbollah to protect its flank while prosecuting Iran’s war in Syria. Moreover, at various points before Oct. 7, Washington intervened to dissuade Israel from responding to Hezbollah provocations, locking it instead in diplomatic and even economic arrangements with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon. Even after the group opened the front against Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, the Biden administration deterred Israel from attacking in response. Even the cease-fire the administration announced in November 2024 was reportedly imposed under threat of a U.S.-backed U.N. Security Council resolution against Israel.

The IRGC and its regional proxies all benefited from American protection under the Obama team’s three terms in office. While Obama protected the IRGC from being designated as a foreign terrorist organization, and his deal with Iran removed international sanctions on regime terror chief Qassem Soleimani, the Biden administration likewise removed Yemen’s Houthis from the terror list. With Obama’s help, the IRGC consolidated its position across the region.

U.S. protection and funding—including, for example, the famous 2016 direct payment of $1.7 billion in cash—were at the heart of Obama’s deal with Iran. The JCPOA not only legitimized Iran’s nuclear weapons program but also protected Iran’s nuclear assets with an international, namely American, shield. That shield took the form, among other things, of leaks against potential Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. In fact, Obama administration officials bragged about blocking Israeli military action, declaring that it was now too late for Israel to do anything: The administration had successfully protected its new ally’s nukes.

For more than a decade, Israel has had to work around this American protective cover. Fear of leaks intended to sabotage Israeli operations was so pervasive under Biden that the Israelis did not give advance notification of the September strike that killed Nasrallah. The following month, ahead of Israeli retaliatory strikes against Iran, the administration made clear its objection to any Israeli targeting of Iranian nuclear or energy facilities. It took Israel as long as it did to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and regional project only because Washington hobbled it for all but six of the past 21 months, between diplomatic pressure and threats, slow-rolling arms deliveries, and micromanaging the Israeli war effort, especially in Gaza.

So what changed? As the past few weeks have demonstrated, the key variable—the difference between a U.S.-protected nuclear Iran that dominates the region, and the geopolitical picture we have today, with Iran cut down to size—is leadership. Any misalignment on either side, in the United States or Israel, could well have prevented the current outcome.

Had the Obama team’s campaign to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded at any point between 2021 and 2024, it seems unlikely that Netanyahu’s American-approved replacement would have been able to successfully navigate the post-Oct. 7 landscape and destroy Iran’s regional project. Likewise, had Trump lost the 2024 election or, worse still, had he not turned his head at that precise moment in Butler, Pennsylvania, the likelihood of American support for the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program drops to zero. Remove the great men of history, and everything defaults back to the Obama structural settings on the Democratic and also some of the Republican side of the aisle.

Even now, you can see it in some of the comms environment in Washington, after the U.S. strikes on Iran, where we’re hearing things from both Democrats and Republicans about the need for a "long-term settlement" with Iran, to be accompanied, no doubt, by endless new rounds of negotiations. Over what, exactly? A new and improved JCPOA, after having destroyed all their centrifuges and facilities? Why? Who cares?

President Trump put it best. When asked if he’s interested in restarting negotiations with Iran, the president was dismissive: "I’m not. ... The way I look at it, they fought. The war is done. I could get a statement that they’re not going to go nuclear ... but they’re not going to be doing it anyway. ... I’ve asked [Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio], ’You want to draw up a little agreement for them to sign?’ ... I don’t think it’s necessary."

The president is being praised for using military force while eschewing long-term commitments and entanglements. The corollary of that policy is, properly, for America to walk away after the strikes yet threaten to bomb again should the need arise. Everything else, whether it’s a new "deal" or the hope of "integration" for a "moderate" Iran, is static from the Obama signal.

Why the D.C. establishment, left and right, feels such an intense attachment to Iran defies any rational cost-benefit analysis related to the national interest. It therefore can only be explained by extrinsic factors that are probably best explained by a shrink who specializes in subjects like "white guilt" or "the burdens of empire"—which means I am obliged to take a pass. I can only observe that this attachment is a powerful one that must therefore signify something important to those who continue to feel its attraction, even when the United States and Iran are at war.

Fundamentally, D.C. is a pro-Iran town, where factions on the left and right have shown a core investment in ensuring that Iran has the means and the opportunity to go nuclear as part of their political programs at home. Why? Again, I can only speculate, as it so clearly defies basic calculations of the national interest. Perhaps they see Iran, as Obama did, as a useful tool in factional wars against domestic political rivals.

Luckily for the rest of us, the behavior of D.C. sewer dwellers matters far less now, thanks to President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The illusion that the D.C. establishment has maintained, hand in hand with Iran, for decades, has been shattered. The proxy armies that formed Iran’s "Axis of Resistance" are no more. We can even pinpoint the moment when Israel pulled the curtain aside: Sept. 27, 2024, the day it killed Nasrallah, whose Iranian masters turned out to be part of the same illusion that he was.

Now that the Ayatollah’s monkeys have scattered, whatever remains or does not remain of Iran’s nuclear program doesn’t much matter, even while anonymous sources in Washington do their best to put cards back into the regime’s hand by claiming that Fordow wasn’t "fully" destroyed and other such irrelevancies. The spell is broken, and the regime’s regional alignment, which was at the heart of both its threat to its neighbors and its strategy of deterrence, has been shattered beyond any hope of easy repair. Now it’s time for Washington and regional leaders alike to deal with reality.

Link

China-Japan-Koreas

Moment of Mutation: The US's Transformation into a Guarantor of Democracy Began with Korea'

2025-06-26

Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Kirill Novikov

[REGNUM] 75 years ago, on June 25, 1950, the administration of US President Harry Truman brought the "Korean question" to the UN Security Council for discussion. At the same time, more than 8,000 kilometers from Washington, units of the Korean People's Army crossed the demarcation line that the US and USSR had drawn along the 38th parallel.

The Korean War began, which lasted three years and is formally still ongoing.

The conflict, which cost the lives of 9 million Koreans (80% of them civilians), is often called a civil war. In form, it was, at least until the direct intervention of the "UN troops", that is, the US and its allies, and until the arrival of the million-strong corps of "Chinese People's Volunteers".

Moreover, the war developed according to the plot of the American Civil War: North versus South.

But in fact, less than five years after the end of World War II, the planet was closer than ever to the start of World War III.

The recent allies, the Soviet Union and the United States, were on the brink of direct conflict.

Thanks to the help of the USSR and the intervention of China, the war was "slowed down" and stopped. But the conflict could not have matured without the participation of another great power - the United States.

This is worth remembering now, when the will of the Americans determines whether a war in another corner of Asia will flare up to a global level or stop.

Translation: Our side can start all the trouble it wants, but it only becomes a war when America chooses to fight back.

BURIED DISCHARGE
In January 1951, when the war on the peninsula was at its height, Pablo Picasso unveiled his painting Massacre in Korea in Paris. This expressionist painting is not as well known as Guernica, but it is executed in the same manner and serves as a “continuation” of the famous 1937 painting.

The scene of the Americans shooting peaceful Korean women and children is depicted in the same way as the aftermath of the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica by the Luftwaffe Condor Legion. The artist equated the soldiers of the "UN peacekeeping corps" with the Nazis - and Picasso was not the only one who thought so.

I’m fairly ignorant about art history. Until just now I didn’t realize exactly how much of a posturing ass Mr. Picasso was.

But how did it happen that the recent liberators of Western Europe turned out to be punishers?

In the final stages of World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who died in April 1945) was determined to achieve a lasting peace with the USSR. The American leader believed that involving “Red Russia” in the establishment of a new post-war order would reduce the likelihood of confrontation with Western countries. Addressing Congress in March 1945, the already seriously ill president noted that after victory, the world order could not be based on the dominance of “one man, one party, or one nation”; all countries needed to move away from the policy of confrontation and unite for joint creation.

In essence, Roosevelt formulated the principles of “international détente” – this rhetoric would be used by both Republicans and Democrats – from John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But in 1944-45, it was not just about rhetoric. At this stage, Washington organized the Lend-Lease program for its Soviet ally. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt “removed” the Polish question by agreeing to recognize the Curzon Line as the border between the Soviet Union and Poland. In return, the USSR took part in the UN and even signed the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, which abolished the gold standard and recognized the dollar as the international currency of account.

Roosevelt's line still looks optimal: while conceding on points that were insignificant for American national interests, he sought to reach an agreement with Joseph Stalin on the USSR's participation in international settlement institutions. In our time, this policy of building bridges is consistently pursued by Moscow (demonstrating a readiness for dialogue with Washington) and is very inconsistently pursued by the Trump administration.

Oh dear. That poor writer sprained his wrist patting himself on the back…

But back then, in the late 1940s, "détente" was buried by Roosevelt's death.

Truman had already called on Congress in March 1947 to allocate funds to fight communist Russia. The formal pretext was the creation of a buffer zone in Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union.

CLAWS OF THE "HAWKS"
There was a strong isolationist sentiment among the ruling Republicans then, as now, but, as now, the tone is set by the "hawks" with a fixation on a power foreign policy.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg pushed through both houses of Congress, convincing them to approve the Truman Doctrine and vote on spending to counter the Red threat. And soon an opportunity arose to load the American military-industrial complex with military orders - although it "flared up" not in Central Europe (the first Berlin crisis of 1948-49 was the lightning bolt of which), but in the Far East.

In the autumn of 1945, the victorious powers, the USSR and the USA, divided Korea, liberated from Japanese colonial rule, into two occupation zones. This regime was supposed to last for 5 years, after which it was supposed to recreate a single state (as happened with Austria). But the plans were thwarted by the onset of the Cold War.

On September 7, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur issued Proclamation No. 1, which declared the introduction of a military dictatorship. Disobedience to the administration was punishable by death, and English was declared the official language of the occupation zone.

According to contemporaries, the pace and progress of reconstruction in the Soviet zone (and the way these successes were presented by propaganda) inspired greater optimism at the time, which provoked the growth of leftist sentiments in the South, including in the middle class. Understanding that reliance on big business and landlords alone was not enough to build a pro-Western democracy, Truman relied on a “strong hand.” Dr. Syngman Rhee, brought from exile on MacArthur’s personal plane and elected president of the Republic of Korea in 1948, became the first in a series of Seoul-based pro-American dictators.

The following year, 1949, when Mao Zedong emerged victorious from the Chinese Civil War, the Truman administration faced a barrage of criticism from the right, with hawks accusing the White House of weakness. In order not to lose the Korean Peninsula after mainland China, the United States stepped up support for its partners in Seoul.

INEVITABLE COLLISION
In June 1949 alone, the Americans transferred to their ally 50,000 carbines with ammunition, 2,000 rocket launchers, 40,000 vehicles, light guns and mortars, 70,000 shells for a total of $5.6 million. That's almost $76 million in today's dollars.

And this helped to increase the total number of personnel in the security forces of the South to 104 thousand people.

In January 1950, the United States signed an agreement with Seoul, according to which its army received 140 thousand rifles (40 thousand Japanese), 2 thousand anti-tank bazookas, a large number of artillery pieces, tanks and aircraft, and 4,900 vehicles.

The "Korean Military Advisory Group," made up of American officers, conducted training courses for South Korean soldiers and provided them with technical and material support.

In total, the US spent $190 million, or $2.5 billion in today's money, adjusted for inflation, on arming the South Koreans in 1949. And in March 1950, Congress appropriated another $100 million (or $1.33 billion in today's dollars) to "provide military and other assistance to the Republic of Korea."

After the start of the war and until 1953, the Americans invested 1.17 billion dollars at the time, or 15 billion today, in rearmament and other assistance to their South Korean wards.

To compare the scale, according to the Pentagon, from 2014 to 2022 the US allocated 2.7 billion in military aid to Ukraine. After the start of the Second World War, the pumping increased several times, by another 66.5 billion dollars, according to official data from the State Department.

The logic of the Cold War dictated the need for a mirror response from the USSR and North Korea.

Given that the USSR started it, mirror is not quite the right word.

Since 1949, the leader of the DPRK, Kim Il Sung, had been asking Stalin to support the Korean People's Army's (KPA) march to the South, insisting that once the war began, the South Koreans themselves would overthrow the puppet pro-American regime. Politically, Moscow held back its allies, but at the same time, Soviet military aid to the North Koreans was in full swing. A clash became inevitable.

INTERVENTION OF "PEACEKEEPERS"
Early in the morning of June 25, a 175,000-strong KPA force, supported by 172 combat aircraft and 150 T-34 tanks, crossed the border. South Korean historiography generally believes that the North attacked first. Pyongyang, however, points out that the start of the war was preceded by numerous (up to several thousand in recent months) armed provocations from the South.

Be that as it may, on June 26 the United States entered the war.

Truman, without seeking congressional approval, appealed to the UN, which gave the go-ahead for the so-called police action in Korea. The USSR boycotted the Security Council sessions, demanding that communist China be included instead of Taiwan. Thus, in September 1950, the only armed intervention of its kind by the "UN peacekeepers" began - the USA and its allies, including those in the newly formed NATO (Britain and Turkey played a real role), launched a frontal attack on Kim Il Sung's troops.

At that time, Democrat Truman, like Democrat Joe Biden now, was harshly criticized by some Republicans for interfering in a war on the other side of the world. In particular, by former President Herbert Hoover and influential Ohio Senator Robert Taft, son of President William Taft. The same Taft Jr., by the way, harshly criticized US participation in NATO, like today's isolationist Trumpists.

But the decisive “yes” to the war was said by the American military-industrial complex.

If, on the occasion of the end of World War II, Truman cut the defense budget to $13.5 billion, then in December 1950 the same president gave the Pentagon $50 billion. Translated into today's money, this is $667 billion - more than the military department had in the mid-2010s, but less than now (at the moment, the Pentagon has $886 billion).

During the Korean War, "civilian" business in America was going through hard times - the White House raised corporate and income taxes, and credit conditions were tightened. But defense contracts brought huge profits to companies such as Lockheed, Northrop, and Boeing, and they were able to increase the defense budget to 15% of GDP in 1952.

DANGEROUS LEGACY
During 1950, the US became increasingly involved in the war, to a degree not comparable to its current involvement in the Ukrainian or Middle Eastern conflicts. It seemed that the “UN troops” were winning – Pyongyang had been taken, the North’s army was pressed to the Chinese border.

After the arrival of the "Chinese volunteers" and the turning point in the war, Commander MacArthur advocated maximum escalation - bombing China, an invasion of the Kuomintang from Taiwan and, if necessary, atomic bombings. At that time, the PRC did not yet have a nuclear arsenal (as Iran does now), and by 1951 our country already had 15 RDS-1 bombs at its disposal.

Truman had the good sense to back down after the conflict had been brought to the brink of World War III. MacArthur's proposals were shelved, and in April 1951 he was removed from command altogether.

The US intervention in a conflict in another part of the world began under a Democratic president, and the US was withdrawn from the war and the conflict itself was ended by a Republican president.

Dwight Eisenhower did what Donald Trump would probably like to achieve: in 1953, the Korean War ended in a military draw on terms acceptable to the United States. The US-dependent South Korean regime was preserved, the front line slowed down at the same 38th parallel, turning into one of the most closed and guarded borders in the world.

The Cold War did not develop into a nuclear Armageddon, which can also be considered a happy ending.

But it was after the Korean conflict that US policy began to mutate in a dangerous direction.

America finally consolidated its role as the only superpower of the “free world” and “guarantor of democracy.” Since the mid-1950s, the role of the military-industrial complex (and this term itself appeared at that time) as one of the locomotives of the American economy has sharply increased, and the connections between the Pentagon, the defense industry, and lobbyists of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric in Congress that still exist today were formed. Since that moment, military spending has rarely fallen below 10-12% of GDP.

The Korean War was the first in a series of local wars that the United States fought in the Eastern Hemisphere. Vietnam, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were only logical continuations.

Now, when America is struggling to get rid of “aid” to Kiev and is balancing on the brink of yet another “export of democracy,” this time to Iran,

…no need for that. The Iranians know how to do democracy as they’ve been going through the motions for several generations, should they exert themselves to either drive out the Mullahcracy in bloody revolution or more slowly evolve in a less totalitarian direction…

it is more obvious than ever that the United States will be able to return to the Monroe Doctrine, limit itself to the affairs of the Western Hemisphere, or focus on domestic affairs, if it succeeds, only with great difficulty.

Link

Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

Medvedev completely rejected the possibility of transferring nuclear weapons to Iran

2025-06-24

Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.

This is the aftermath of being taken to the woodshed...
[Regnum] Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, in response to the concerns of US President Donald Trump, who suggested the possibility of transferring nuclear weapons to Iran, said that Russia does not intend to do so.

Good. That would have been really, really dumb. Because they consider you infidels in need of conquering, too, and there is no guarantee that feeding that particular alligator would get you eaten last.

Medvedev wrote about this in English on the X social network, commenting on criticism of him from the head of the White House.

"As for President Trump's concerns: I condemn the US strike on Iran - it did not achieve its goals.

Apparently it did… or at least pushed the deadline considerably further off.

However, Russia does not intend to supply nuclear weapons to Iran because, unlike Israel, we are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," Medvedev wrote.

*Snicker* Like you, Israel was not going to supply Iran with nukes. So nice to see you both in agreement on the subject.

He indicated that he was well aware of what such a move could lead to, since he also controlled Russia's nuclear forces when he was president. At the same time, Medvedev warned that other countries could make deliveries.

In addition, Medvedev recalled that the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which he signed with the 44th US President Barack Obama, is still in effect.

Link

Europe

Trump Effect: NATO Nations Agree to Increase Defence Spending to Five Per Cent of GDP

2025-06-23

[Breitbart] Members of the Western NATO military alliance reportedly agreed to increasing defence spending to five per cent of GDP within the next decade in a major victory for U.S. President Donald Trump, who has long demanded that America’s allies pay more for their defence.

Ahead of the NATO summit this week at The Hague in the Netherlands, members agreed in principle to increasing individual nation-state defence spending to five per cent of GDP by the year 2035 at the latest, German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported. The figure would be the first time NATO has set itself a formalised, increased spending floor since the two per cent agreed on at the Cardiff summit in 2014.

“Those damned Americans always demand we live up to our treaty commitments! We were so excited about Barack Obama finally being one of us, but he’s just a cowboy like the rest of them.”

Even over a decade later now a considerable number of NATO members still don’t hit that two per cent, though, including Portugal, Italy, Canada, Belgium, and Spain.

They never intended to, and so they didn’t.

Nevertheless the new deal, which came in the wake of pressure from the Trump administration, stipulates that at least 3.5 per cent of GDP must be spent directly on military needs, while the additional 1.5 per cent can be devoted to related defence costs.

With all the social spending promised to their illegals and Moslem colonists, can they afford so much as 2%, let alone the higher number?

While socialist-run Spain had initially threatened to block the agreement, Madrid is said to have dropped such plans after securing an exemption from the new spending target.

Nice to have formalized what they intended anyway…

Spain has frequently failed to meet the current NATO spending obligations of 2 per cent of GDP, including last year, when it ranked dead last among all NATO members having spent just 1.28 per cent of its GDP on defence.

Embattled Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez said that the scale of the expected military investment is “disproportionate and unnecessary,” while openly declaring that his nation would not abide by requirement.

In contrast, Poland, long one of the top contributors in Europe, committed earlier this year to reaching the five per cent threshold, after having already surpassed four per cent last year amid growing concern over Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

Guarding the gates of Europe since the Ottomans tried to come through.

The reported move by NATO to collectively agree to increasing defence spending to five per cent will represent a significant victory for U.S. President Donald Trump.

…only if they actually do it instead of just trying to placate him. Being played for a sucker is no victory.

Dating back to his first term in the White House, President Trump was openly critical of prosperous European nations leaning on American might and wealth to subsidise their defence.

A particular punching bag for the American leader was Germany, which he frequently lambasted for failing to meet their NATO defence spending commitments while being the richest country in Europe and while forking over billions to Moscow in exchange for Russian natural gas.

In 2018, then-President Trump accused Germany and others of being “captive” to Russia, paying Moscow billions in exchange for natural gas, as they demanded American protection from Putin.

While figures within the liberal political establishment and legacy media often attempted to cast Trump’s approach as alienating other Western allies, his novel tactics were later credited for increasing NATO power.

In 2019, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that President Trump’s hardline methods were critical in securing an additional $100 billion in spending from NATO allies.

Which certainly is something, if not enough to allow Europe to defend itself, should Russia actually surge over the border. Though why Russia would want to is beyond me.

Link

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