Tag: foreign policy

What Dirty Tricks Does the Grandson of Former CIA Director William Colby—a Key Man Running U.S. Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration—Have in Store for Us?

Elbridge Colby, President Donald Trump’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the man running the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, is the grandson of Nixon’s CIA Director William Colby, son of Jonathan Colby, a manager of the Carlyle Group, and nephew of Carl Colby, alleged to have participated in a covert operation targeting Bob Marley, and Christine Colby Giraudo, who worked for Hill & Knowlton.

Continuing the family tradition, Elbridge Colby’s Wikipedia page says that his “early career included over five years of service with the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and in the Intelligence Community.”

From 2018 to 2021, Elbridge Colby was at the firm chosen by so many CIA alumni, WestExec Advisors.

Short for West Executive Avenue, the street that runs between the White House and Eisenhower Executive Office Building, WestExec’s client list includes Blackrock, Bank of America, Facebook, Palantir, and Boeing.

It is campaign headquarters for the plan to get Ukraine into NATO and install a nuclear-armed fighting force there that is big enough to invade and conquer Russia.[1]

The woman who literally wrote the book on that plan, Celeste Wallander, was at WestExec before running the war in Ukraine as former President Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and now she is back at WestExec.

WestExec co-founder Antony Blinken served as Biden’s Secretary of State, while WestExec shamelessly advised Ukraine on how to spend U.S. aid (to benefit its Pentagon contracting clients, of course).

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Endless Wars and Misguided Intelligence: Rethinking US Foreign Policy

For decades, the United States has been drawn into military interventions far from its borders, consuming trillions of dollars in taxpayer money and putting thousands of American service members in harm’s way. These conflicts – from Afghanistan to Iraq, and now the specter of confrontation with Iran – illustrate a recurring failure of U.S. foreign policy: the tendency to act on incomplete, misleading, or politically convenient intelligence.

One of the clearest patterns is how external actors can manipulate American decision-making. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, figures like Ahmed Chalabi provided information that exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Those claims, as we now know, proved to be baseless – there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Yet the narrative took root, steering Washington into a war that cost thousands of American lives, destabilized an entire region, and drained U.S. resources that could have been devoted to pressing domestic needs.

Similarly, in the case of Iran, opposition groups such as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) offered claims regarding Iran’s nuclear program that were later amplified in U.S. political and media circles. While these groups presented themselves as allies against hostile regimes, their primary objective was to advance their own agendas, not American national interests. Policymakers who rely on such sources risk committing the country to conflicts that serve others while imposing heavy costs on U.S. citizens.

The consequences of these interventions are measurable and enduring. Beyond the immediate loss of life, wars divert critical resources from domestic priorities, undermine public trust in government, and entrench cycles of instability abroad. Relying on partisan or ideologically motivated intelligence prevents an accurate assessment of threats and alternatives, leading to decisions that are reactive, costly, and often counterproductive.

It is imperative that the United States reassess the criteria for military engagement. Intelligence must be rigorously verified, independent of actors with self-serving motives, and embedded within a broader strategic framework that prioritizes diplomacy, regional stability, and the protection of American citizens and service members. Blindly following narratives designed to provoke intervention undermines both national security and moral responsibility.

Ultimately, true national strength is demonstrated not by the number of conflicts waged overseas, but by the ability to pursue peace, restraint, and reasoned foreign policy. U.S. leadership should emphasize negotiation, conflict prevention, and multilateral engagement, ensuring that resources are invested in building stability rather than perpetuating endless wars.

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A National Asset in Troubled Times

When he was running for president in 2024, Donald Trump promised that he would shut down the Ukraine war shortly after taking office, if not before he moved into the White House. He also promised that he would not start any more wars and would markedly improve U.S. relations with Russia. Very importantly, he engineered a ceasefire in Gaza on January 19, 2025, the day before he was sworn in again as president, which provided hope that the Gaza genocide might come to an end.

But after that auspicious start, President Trump has failed to deliver on his promises. The Ukraine war and the Gaza genocide rage on. Trump, like President Biden before him, is fully complicit in a genocide. On top of that, the United States directly attacked Iran on June 22, 2025, a move Biden had the good sense to avoid. Most observers think it is only a matter of time before Trump and Israel attack Iran again. Relations between Moscow and Washington have improved a bit, but remain antagonistic at their core, while U.S.-India relations, which had improved greatly over the past twenty-five years, have recently turned poisonous. Finally, there is an ever-present possibility in East Asia that China and the United States could get into a shooting match.

All of this is to say we live in not just troubled times, but dangerous times. Remember that we live in a nuclear world. Sadly, there is no easy way to fix the many problems facing us. But we can minimize the chances of making bad situations worse, and maybe even make major inroads in solving some of the key problems we face. Additionally, we can maximize our chances of creating further disasters.

The best way to make progress of this sort is to openly debate foreign policy issues, so that critics of the conventional wisdom or government policy can have their say. Media institutions are hugely important in fostering this kind of debate, which is why freedom of the press is so important in the United States. It allows critics to make their views known to large numbers of people and it provides legitimacy. Critics of existing policy are not always right, but sometimes they speak truth to power and help us avoid or correct big mistakes.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States have become much less effective since the Cold War ended. It has become increasingly difficult for dissenters to get a platform in prominent media outlets, and mainstream media outlets often seem to speak with one voice on the big foreign policy issues of the day. This situation is not healthy, and it helps explains why America’s standing in the world has declined over the past three decades.

Thankfully, alternative media outlets have proliferated in recent years, making it possible for critics of US foreign policy to make their voices heard. Indeed, growing numbers of concerned citizens and policy analysts pay as much attention, if not more, to alternative media sites than the mainstream media.

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US Terminating All Trade Talks With Canada Over New Tax on US Tech Firms

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the United States is halting all trade negotiations with Canada due to Ottawa’s decision to implement a new tax on American tech companies.

“We have just been informed that Canada… has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies, which is a direct and blatant attack on our Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” the US president added.

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‘One-sided game’ in relations with West has ended – Putin

Russia will no longer play “one-sided” games with the West, President Vladimir Putin has told journalists on the sidelines of the summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in Minsk. Western nations have repeatedly betrayed Russia by not fulfilling their promises related to NATO expansion and resolving the Ukraine conflict, he stated at a press conference on Friday.

NATO is currently justifying its planned defense spending hike to 5% of its members’ GDP and military buildup in Europe by pointing to Russia’s “aggressiveness,” Putin said, adding that the bloc’s members are “turning everything upside down” when they make statements such as these.

“No one is saying a word about how we’ve come up to the Russian special military operation,” the president said, adding that the roots of the Ukraine conflict go back decades when Moscow was “blatantly lied to” about NATO expansion. “What followed was one expansion wave after another,” he stated.

Russia’s security concerns about the bloc’s activities have been consistently ignored and met with silence, according to Putin. “Isn’t it aggressive behavior? That is precisely aggressive behavior, which the West does not want to pay attention to.”

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US to Begin European Troop Withdrawal Talks, NATO Ambassador Says

In a move signaling a long-overdue shift in American foreign policy, the United States, under President Donald J. Trump, is preparing to open discussions with European allies on reducing its military footprint across the continent.

US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker confirmed the Trump administration’s plans during a security forum in Estonia, stating that the conversations will formally begin after June’s NATO summit in The Hague, Reuters reported.

“Nothing has been determined,” Whitaker said, “but as soon as we do, we are going to have these conversations in the structure of NATO.” He made it clear this isn’t just another round of diplomatic foot-dragging. “It’s more than 30 years of the US desire to reduce troops in Europe. President Trump just said, enough—this is going to happen, and it’s going to happen now.”

The remarks starkly contrast with previous administrations’ foreign policy, which treated NATO like a sacred cow regardless of how little European members contributed in return. Trump-era officials have increasingly called out what they see as chronic European underfunding and dependency.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth minced no words earlier this year, declaring that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

In private discussions over the allegedly encrypted messaging app Signal, Hegseth reportedly expressed his “loathing of European free-loading,” a sentiment echoed by Vice President J.D. Vance. The two have become key voices pushing to restore a foreign policy rooted in American interests, not global entanglements.

Despite the uproar in some NATO capitals, Whitaker reassured allies that the US isn’t abandoning the alliance altogether—just recalibrating its role. “We’re going to remain in this alliance,” he said. “But we’re not going to have any more patience for foot-dragging.”

The numbers behind the move are substantial. America currently maintains an estimated 128,000 troops across Europe, with Germany hosting the lion’s share. Poland, Italy, and the UK also house significant contingents.

But the political winds are shifting, and rightly so. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently tried to tamp down fears after the US quietly redeployed forces away from a major Ukrainian support hub. Still, the writing’s on the wall.

For decades, Washington has carried the bulk of the military burden in Europe, funding and defending nations that often lecture Americans while failing to meet even basic NATO spending obligations. With ballooning domestic priorities and a border crisis back home, many Americans—especially those aligned with the nationalist, Trump-aligned right—are asking why their sons and daughters are still stationed abroad to defend countries that won’t defend themselves.

Critics of the withdrawal, unsurprisingly, warn of a “security gap” that Russia could exploit.

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How War Propaganda Has Fueled American Foreign Policy For A Century

The New York Times this week reports that the Trump administration has canceled many grants that were to fund “research” on “misinformation.” This is being presented by the media as a dastardly deed that will supposedly allow the spread of misleading or false information through various media channels.

Of course, if there were any genuine interest in studying the most egregious efforts to spread misinformation, media outlets like the Times would study themselves and their friends in the regime. After all, few organizations have been more complicit than the national American media and the US foreign policy establishment when it comes to spreading much of the worst propaganda in American history. I say “worst” because this propaganda has often been used in service to the worst ends: to gin up support for a variety of wars resulting in the deaths of thousands—sometimes even hundreds of thousands—of innocents.

Relatively recent media-regime partnerships in propagandistic misinformation include the “Russiagate” hoax, various efforts to obscure US meddling in Ukraine, and the nearly nonstop drumbeat of “news” stories over the past twenty years designed to push for regime change in various countries from Venezuela to Russia to Libya and to Syria—where the Assad regime, according to US design, was recently replaced by Islamist terrorists. And then, of course, there is the nonstop stream of misinformation designed to prop up the State of Israel and obscure its many war crimes. And let’s not forget the fictional “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq which the US presented to the United Nations as established fact.

Throughout all this, the interventionist “foreign policy blob” in Washington received near universal support from its friends at publications like the Times and the Washington Post.

The United States did not invent these tactics. Over the past 100-plus years, however, perhaps no regime was more innovative than the British when it came to inventing “facts” designed to manufacture popular consent for wars and more foreign intervention. The United States has done its best to adopt similar methods, however, and creating invented narratives in service to the regime’s foreign policy goals is now standard operating procedure for the American state as well.

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The National Endowment for Democracy goes dark

The National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S.-government backed nonprofit designed to influence the domestic politics of countries across the globe, says its efforts are part of a campaign to promote “open and transparent government.”

The group, funded by Congress and working in tandem with the State Department, has backed activists and civil society groups across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to push for greater disclosure among government entities. For instance, a recent NED report argues that “enhancing transparency” is vital for building trust in institutions and democratic governance, and urges the adoption of new disclosure laws for countries in the Balkans.

Despite the altruistic goals of disclosure for the developing world, NED is now going dark. In a new “duty of care” policy published this week, NED quietly announced a new rule to conceal the names of recipients of its programs from the public. Its 2024 grant list, attached to the policy, features dollar figures and one sentence summaries for over 1,700 grants. All of the external recipient names and identities have been wiped.

The move amounts to a fundamental shift in NED programming. For decades, the group, in accordance with its public demands for transparency, has published annual lists disclosing its grant recipients.

Formed in the early years of the Reagan administration in response to increasing controversy surrounding the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, NED set out to engage in pro-American foreign influence initiatives that were once the domain of covert operations. “This program will not be hidden in the shadows. It will stand proudly in the spotlight, and that’s where it belongs,” stated Reagan in 1983.

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” stated former acting NED president Allen Weinstein in a widely quoted 1991 interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection,” he continued.

The primary U.S. funder of overt operations has been the NED, the quasi-private group originally headed by Carl Gershman that is controlled by the U.S. Congress, Ignatius explained. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been covert — such as dispensing money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain and funding dissident media known as ‘samizdat’.

The endowment was initially active inside the Soviet Union. It gave money to Soviet trade unions; to a foundation headed by Russian activist Ilya Zaslavsky; to an oral history project headed by Soviet historian Yuri Afanasyev; to the Ukrainian independence movement known as Rukh, and to many other projects. Avoiding the scandal of journalists and governments uncovering covert political action funding has been the raison d’être.

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Making Sense of Trump’s Tariffs

Trump’s entire political history is a cautionary tale against confusing elite and media fury for heartland sentiment. A certain strategic coherence and a common tactic unite Trump’s domestic and foreign policies in pursuit of the overarching goal of making America great again. The bigger concern is not that there’s no method to his apparent madness, but that the implementation of his ambitious national and international agenda could be imperilled by incompetence and bumbling, as with the amateurish use of Signal chat groups for highly sensitive discussions.

There are three components to each of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies that he is pursuing with a sense of urgency with wounds still raw from how the DC swamp-dwellers derailed his first term. Domestically, he is dismantling Net Zero, DEI and gender self-ID policies that have imposed exorbitant tax, regulatory and compliance costs on American consumers, producers and institutions. They have also deepened identitarian divisions and conflicts that threaten to destroy social cohesion and unleash an orgy of national self-abasement. Internationally, he wants to step back from forever wars that have taken a heavy toll on American blood and treasure, distribute the burden of defending Western interests and values more equitably among allies – J.D. Vance is surely right to say that being a ‘permanent security vassal’ of the US is neither in its nor their interest – and reverse the decades-long drift into globalisation and globalism that have deindustrialised America and ‘Gulliverised’ its freedom of action in world affairs with normative restraints. Mass immigration is a seventh on-border pathology that straddles domestic and foreign policy. Between them, the suite of domestic and international policies will, he believes, restore national pride and identity, stop America being ripped off by security and trade partners, re-shore manufacturing capacity and re-establish America as the word’s most powerful industrial and military power.

This is where the paradigm-shifting tariffs come in. Benjamin Brewster is credited with having written in the Yale Literary Magazine way back in February 1882 that “in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is”. In orthodox economic theory, free trade and globalisation create winners all round. In practice, they’ve created winners and losers, widening inequality both within and among nations. ‘Free’ trade has rewarded ‘everywhere’ elites even while its prescriptions have immiserated the ‘nowhere’ folks and denuded America’s manufacturing strengths. The inequitable distribution of the burdens of globalisation has shredded the social contracts between governments and citizens. People are citizens of nations, not of economies. Nationalism requires the prioritisation of citizens over business. Policies that enrich Chinese while impoverishing Americans, that make China stronger while hollowing out America’s industrial-cum-military might, are the antithesis of this foundational social compact.

Trump’s instinct may well be right that globalisation had shifted the trading balance to America’s net disadvantage and the new equilibrium that eventually settles after his rupture of the existing world trading order will reposition the US to recover lost ground. The WTO, for example, has proven to be not fit for purpose in enforcing fair-trade rules on a predatory non-market economy of China’s size and a mercantilist bloc like the EU. Time will tell if the punitive tariffs are a ‘shock and awe’ negotiating tactic to recalibrate the trading order or an attempt to compel trading partners to capitulate to arbitrary US demands. Trump is taking an audacious gamble that efforts by others to threaten American financial primacy as they de-risk from the US by diversifying to other markets and suppliers will quickly run into hard limits. Besides, how many countries will, if pushed to the choice, opt for long-term strategic dependence on China rather than the US? Will we? The scramble for bilateral deals with Washington, by countries that hold weaker trade cards than the US and are rushing to placate Trump, may prove a harbinger. For example, hit with 18% tariffs, Zimbabwe has suspended tariffs on US goods in order to build a ‘positive relationship’ with the Trump Administration. And the administration has worked the miracle of converting British PM Keir Starmer into a champion of free speech and increased defence spending while cutting health and foreign aid spending.

Michael Pettis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in Foreign Affairs on April 21st, notes that the world trading order became increasingly cumbersome as countries externalised domestic economic imbalances into trading imbalances through a complex maze of tariffs, non-tariff barriers and subsidies. Trump’s policies aim at the transformation of this global trade and capital regime that subordinated the needs of individual economies to the demands of the global system. A new equilibrium of individual and global needs could result in better-balanced economic growth, higher wages and trade parity.

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The Case For Tariffs – How Tariffs Can Help Bring Back The Golden Age Of American Economy

About once a decade, the question of Protective Tariffs finds its way into the national debate. Whether a political candidate dares to raise the issue or a clever collection of activists and analysts work together to inject it into the national discussion, the reaction is always the same from the halls of entrenched power – hysteria and panic over the mere discussion of tariffs. 

Both the establishment Right and the establishment Left in the United States argue that tariffs represent an end to industry and trade, that they deny opportunity to the third world, will only raise prices for American consumers, and that they are the first shot in a tragic trade war. In the halls of corporations and academia, everyone seems to agree – tariffs are bad for the economy and the country as a whole. Predictably, corporate property in Congress parrot the same line and it appears that opposing tariffs is one of the few areas where Democrats and Republicans can agree.

Thus, when anti-tariff politicians, CEOs, and academics speak, their warnings that tariffs represent an end to their globalist vision where international corporations continue to abandon Western workers with their pesky wages, rights, and protections while exploiting third world workers for lower wages, easy replacement, and lack of concern for basic human needs are thinly veiled. This latter, more honest, concern is, in fact, correct. tariffs do threaten globalism and corporate exploitation of workers and societies. Particularly older working class citizens remember the days of American Tariffs and the undeniably better economic distribution of wealth and opportunity they afforded. Younger (middle aged) Americans remember at least the removal of those Tariffs and the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs leaving for Mexico, South and Central America, Asia, and China that decimated their communities and the American economy before their eyes. Indeed, it seems that the working class inherently understand the benefit of Tariffs and Protectionism, at least when they are properly explained. This is why such a massive and sustained media, academic, and governmental propaganda campaign has been invoked to convince them otherwise and why, whenever Tariffs are mentioned in the public discourse, they are immediately attacked as fringe, crazy, xenophobic, racist, populist, and dangerous. 

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