Tag: perpetual war

Trump ambassador vows NATO-like reforms to UN after terror scandal: ‘Clean this place up’

President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations is vowing to force a massive reform at the global agency, pledging to slim it down through privatization and create more accountability in the wake of revelations that one of its relief agencies in Gaza funded employees who participated in the 2023 terrorist attack in Israel.

“The charge from the president is to clean this place up and get it working for the American people,” U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz said Thursday night in a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show that focused on ending abuses and fraud in American foreign aid.

“What President Trump has done with NATO, we’re looking to do to the United Nations,” he added.

Waltz sharply criticized the Biden administration for turning a blind eye to fraud across America’s multibillion foreign aid system and specifically for re-funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) despite evidence of close ties to the terror group Hamas.

Trump ended funding for UNRWA after taking office in 2025, and the USAID inspector general revealed last month that more than 100 workers funded by UNRWA have been identified as having participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel.

Waltz said those revelations are a wakeup call for the world that the U.N. is not serving its charter, and the Trump administration has already forced significant changes in recent months.

“We forced them to take their first budget cut ever in their 80-year history. They are going to fire 3,000 U.N. bureaucrats out of the headquarters building in New York. We’re going to get more of our aid dollars,” he said. “…And then there’s 90,000 U.N. peacekeepers around the world. We’ve cut 25% of them. So we put the U.N. on a diet.”

Waltz said the next round of reforms that the U.S. will force as the largest contributor to the U.N. will be modeled after Trump’s effort to make European allies pick up a greater share of the NATO burden.

“The American people are generous people when it comes to tsunamis or earthquakes, like we just had in Venezuela, or other types of famine. But we need to know that it’s not filtering through a bloated bureaucracy; that it’s actually getting to people in need,” he said. “We’re making it leaner and more focused.”

“I think people rightly ask why we’re even involved at all. I say two things. Number one, you need one place in the world where everyone can talk, and if we just walk out, I don’t want to see the U.N. in Beijing or Brussels or somewhere else, we need to get in there and fight and win for American interests,” Waltz added. “And then number two, there’s a burden sharing component to it. I don’t want to see U.S. troops in places like Gaza or, you know, dealing with the gangs in Haiti when the U.N. is willing to go in there and we can push that agenda. I think that’s something that’s in line with the president’s America First foreign policy.”

Waltz succinctly summarized Trump’s policy toward the U.N.

“So, diplomacy first, words before bullets, and burden sharing are two of the reasons we’re still trying to keep this place up. But ultimately, that’s the charge from President Trump: Help it realize its potential, and the U.N. should be helping him craft these peace deals around the world,” he said.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer agreed during the show on Thursday that the U.S. should continue to cut funding for the U.N., particularly as it relates to USAID funding, which has already seen cuts under the Trump administration.

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Global Empire as Domestic Policy

While many mainstream commentators blanch at the characterization of the United States as an empire, the hard data show that it is today impossible to seriously dispute. The U.S. military operates between 750 and 800 bases around the world, located in around 80 foreign countries and territories. Because there is no fixed or standard definition of “base” for these purposes, there is no accepted number, and some estimates place the figure at closer to 900. The U.S. is also known to operate dozens of secret military bases and black sites, further complicating attempts to settle upon an exact and definitive number.

Just as the number of military bases is disputed, experts have continued longstanding disagreements about how best to tally up total military spending. As the Peter G. Peterson Foundation observed earlier this year, “The United States continues to lead the world in defense spending by a wide margin. In 2025, defense spending by the United States accounted for 33 percent of all military expenditures by countries around the world,” with its nearly trillion-dollar outlay that year exceeding the combined spending of the other six biggest military spenders. This number is down from 2025’s value of nine to six largely because several other countries dramatically increased their military spending (Germany, for example, upped its spending by 24 percent). Breaking Defense reports, “The Pentagon is betting big on a $1.15 trillion discretionary budget request with a further $350 billion coming from the reconciliation process — together adding up to a historic $1.5 trillion defense budget.” The Trump administration’s discretionary funding request of $1.15 trillion marks the first time in history that a discretionary defense request has exceeded $1 trillion on its own. In the previous budget, for FY 2026, the total number hit the $1 trillion mark with a combination of  $848 billion in discretionary spending and $113.3 billion in mandatory reconciliation spending.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes that many “obvious examples of programs many would consider ‘military spending’” under commonsense definitions are not a part of the Pentagon budget, including spending for veteran benefits, the Coast Guard, and even nuclear weapons. Looking at five different methodologies, a POGO report published in June points out that all five share at least one conclusion: “Military spending in the United States has long been radically underestimated.” (Not unrelated to this slippery accounting is that fact that the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in years, failing its eighth in a row at the end of last year.) This recent POGO report finds that “the true total military budget for the last fiscal year (FY 2025) was significantly higher than $1 trillion: It was likely between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion.” If we count interest payments associated with debts for military spending, then “the range is between $1.7 trillion and $2.3 trillion.”

We rarely consider the domestic political implications of Washington’s globe-spanning empire, yet government spending on war and empire functions as the de facto national industrial policy of the United States, largely determining which cutting-edge technologies receive the most investment, which companies will enjoy massive state-guaranteed markets, and which physical objects will be the focus of the country’s industrial production capacity. Through the military empire, the state becomes both the architect of and primary consumer for a huge industrial sector. And while it has grabbed more headlines this year due to the parlous speculative bubble surrounding AI, the political consequences of the connection between the global military empire and the private sector tech industry remain woefully under-discussed in the mainstream discourse. The federal government is funneling billions to AI companies willing to work directly with the military, overpowering objections from employees and the investor market.

Just this week it was reported that “Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence-powered military platform, is now an official program of record for the Pentagon.” The executive and strategic leadership of major technology companies also increasingly connects and overlaps with the military and national security establishment, often through the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and liaisons dedicated to recruiting talent and procuring products from the tech sector. As we have already witnessed for decades, cutting-edge technologies developed for the war and empire inevitably end up being deployed domestically against Americans inside the country. Now more than 50 years ago, the Senator Frank Church Committee showed that the intelligence agencies used programs originally designed for foreign surveillance to monitor Americans here at home without warrants. We still have not seriously reckoned with this connection between the policies and technologies of the empire and the ways our own government sees us and governs us.

Since classical antiquity, astute observers have understood that this kind of worldwide military empire is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law, constitutional government, and even the thinnest definitions of democracy. The administration of such an empire demands secret and centralized forms of decision-making and thus necessarily precludes transparency, accountability, and popular sovereignty. Contemporary political language has managed to disguise what is patently a system of permanent war and empire in the terminology of a liberal and rules-based order of international law and free trade. We have consigned terms like imperialism and colonialism to the history books even as we continue these systems in different forms today. Even the liberal side of our mainstream discourse no longer seriously questions the political system of war and empire that actually governs the country. We will not understand the form of domestic politics we have in the U.S. today until we stop trying to separate it from the imperatives of empire.

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Trump Will Demand Repayment From the EU Over Biden’s Massive Military Aid to Ukraine

Rather belatedly, but it will be demanded.

In the context of a social media burn against ‘SCUM’ journalists who are suggesting that the missile and ammo stockpiles would be dangerously low, President Donald J. Trump suggested that the European Union should repay the US for the untold billions that creepy Joe Biden’s administration sent to Ukraine.

Le Monde reported (translated from the French):

“Donald Trump on Thursday criticized his predecessor, Joe Biden, for providing Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars in aid and ammunition for free, believing that the Europeans should have borne the cost and announcing his intention to ask them for the money.

‘Hundreds of billions of dollars have been given for free to Ukraine and NATO, money that Europe would have paid if it had just been asked, but we will claim this money, even if it’s a little late!’ the US president wrote on Truth Social.”

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We Are Sleepwalking Into World War III: Why I’m Preparing for the Worst

We Are Sleepwalking Into World War III

The rhetoric emanating from Western leaders has crossed a threshold from political posturing to an open declaration of war against Russia. We are not on the brink of a conflict; we are being marched into one by leaders who have abandoned diplomacy for a suicidal path of confrontation.

The American public, fed a constant diet of propaganda from a complicit corporate media, is suffering from a mass “reality avoidance disorder,” as my recent interview guest Steve Quayle explained, as they are unwilling or unable to see the calamity that is being prepared in our name. This is not a hypothetical future; the groundwork for a global conflagration is being laid in real-time.

The conflict in Ukraine, for starters, was never about territorial integrity; it was a cynical proxy war designed to weaken Russia, and it has failed spectacularly. As I’ve noted, Western leaders have already been defeated because they refuse to recognize their own weakness and the strength of a multi-polar world that is rising to replace their dominance [1]. The sleepwalk must end; we need to wake up and see that we are being led to the slaughter by a globalist elite that views our lives as expendable.

The Paper Tiger: Why America’s Military Can’t Win This Fight

The narrative of American military omnipotence is a carefully maintained illusion. I have described the U.S. military as a “paper tiger,” a hollowed-out force that relies more on perception than sustainable power [2]. The endless wars in the Middle East have shown that the strategy of “pillage and plunder” has been stopped cold by determined nations like Russia and Iran, exposing our empire as a facade [3]. While we have been bogged down in asymmetrical conflicts, our adversaries have been developing and fielding decisively advanced, combat-proven systems that render our multi-trillion-dollar military obsolete.

Russia possesses hypersonic missiles that our defense systems cannot defeat. Russia also has the Poseidon torpedo, a nuclear-powered doomsday weapon that can lay waste to our coastal cities. When I interviewed Steve Quayle, we discussed the unveiling of Russia’s nuclear-powered cruise missile as another sign of their technological superiority over our own aging arsenal [4].

An analysis of the U.S. military posture suggests a “Hollow Goliath” facing catastrophic defeat if it engages in a direct conflict [5]. We are a colossus with feet of clay, and I believe that when the facade finally crumbles, the desperation in Washington will lead them to irrational and catastrophic acts, potentially including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, because they will have no other option to avoid total defeat.

The Real Enemy: It’s Not Russia, It’s the Globalist Playbook

We are being sold a lie that Russia and China are the enemies. But the real enemy is the globalist agenda of total control (and human depopulation). The endless wars and manufactured crises are not about national security; they are about consolidating power into the hands of a Luciferian elite who despise freedom and view humanity as a resource to be managed, or worse, eliminated [6].

The push for AI, for example, is not about progress; it is about creating a surveillance state and replacing human workers with obedient machines, all as part of a depopulation scheme that is playing out before our eyes [7]. Books like “Countdown to Annihilation” detail the blueprint for this engineered conflict, a plot to ignite World War III to reshape civilization [8].

This playbook is being executed with chilling precision. Those who worship at the altar of technology and central control are digging their own graves, aligning themselves with a system that will eventually discard them as obsolete. The globalists seek to replace human consciousness with artificial intelligence, seeing our species as a flawed experiment that needs to be rebooted [7].

This is not a conspiracy theory; it is the logical conclusion of the policies we see enacted every day, from the push for digital IDs and CBDCs to the censorship of independent voices who oppose the official narrative. We must recognize this war for what it is: a spiritual war against humanity itself, and the only way to win is to refuse to play by their rules.

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Defense firms soar on ample military spending, testing manufacturing schemes

The year 2025 was another record setter for global defense companies, so much so that production bottlenecks in Western nations — not the usual industry lamentations about lacking government spending — began creeping up as the key problem many NATO countries are facing today.

Companies in the United States and Europe rode a wave of significant defense-spending increases on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, individual national budget increases, as well as the European Union’s increasing involvement in brokering and financing joint procurement, continued to increase the revenue of defense industry players large and small.

In the United States, the 2025 Reconciliation Act is set to pump most of the legislation’s total $156 billion into acquisition — on top of the regular defense budget of roughly $900 billion for that year.

“Now, it’ll take years for that enacted money to actually flow to the companies and to their financial statements,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser in the defense analysis program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But it will be a big boost for many companies.”

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Norway Seizes Russian Cruise Ship in the Arctic

Norway seized the Professor Molchanov at the request of Ukrainian authorities.

We have been reporting here on TGP on how Western powers have been intercepting and seizing cargo vessels suspected of being part of Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’.

The official justification is that these are sanctioned ships transporting Russian oil under false flags but, in fact, these ships provide the perfect soft targets for the European warmongers to show some semblance of ‘victory’ over bogeyman Vladimir Putin.

These ‘shadow fleet’ tankers are invariably released to continue their voyages after a few days, after the Globalist ‘leaders’ have postured enough.

But yesterday, the stakes were raised considerably as Norwegian forces seized Russia’s Professor Molchanov, a much more benign ship.

The Professor Molchanov is a Russian Arctic oceanographic research vessel that has been repurposed as a cruise ship.

The Norwegians seized the ship in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard at the request of Ukraine’s energy firm Naftogaz, enforcing a $4.22 billion arbitration award.

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The Zionist Attention Corral

For valid reasons, Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the corruption of their government by Zionists and the Zionist lobby.

The concern that their government does not represent them, but rather the Zionist element within both the US and the Israeli governments, is squarely based upon evidence and, for the overwhelming part, is not born of antisemitism.

Zionism is a racist nationalist political movement, not a religious movement. It is purely for political reasons that the World Jewish Congress (WJC) declares Zionism to be synonymous with Judaism. It is this baseless claim that supposedly justifies accusing anyone who opposes Zionism of being antisemitic.

The idea that Zionism is a core feature of Jewish identity is nonsense. Many Jews resoundingly reject Zionism. Anti-Zionism is not, by any definition, a form of antisemitism. Regardless of the WJC’s groundless assertions.

Illustrating the absurdity of maintaining that Zionism and Jewish identity are synonymous, the WJC openly concedes that Zionism’s primary objective was defined at the First Zionist Congress, or Basel Congress, in 1869.

That objective is:

To secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally assured homeland in Palestine.

The creation and expansion of a Jewish nation state “in Palestine” is an overtly ethno-nationalist political ambition.

Underlining the separation between the Zionist state project, Judaism, and the Jewish people, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) working definition of antisemitism clearly determines that “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” is antisemitic. Reciprocally, therefore, claiming that the state of Israel embodies the will of Jews is equally antisemitic, according to the IHRA definition.

In the UK—from the legal perspective—anti-Zionism is definitely not antisemitism. Professor David Miller has won his employment tribunal and defeated the subsequent appeal by his employer. Miller’s tribunal finding has established in UK law that anti-Zionism is a protected philisophical belief for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act.

There are, of course, antisemitic anti-Zionists, but anti-Zionism is not antisemitic. Opposition to the political ideology of Zionism and revulsion at the horrors inflicted by the Israeli state and its international partners in pursuit of the political ideology of Zionism is not to blame all Jews.

For example, the Israeli state, heavily influenced by Zionism, has committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. This observation does not imply that Jews, as a whole people, are collectively responsible for this abhorrent war crime.

From a rational perspective, genocide is obviously incomprehensible. To perpetrate a genocide, even if ordered, requires a deeply unfathomable, heinous malevolence. Burning children alive in their beds, blowing infants’ brains out, sniping pregnant women (and their unborn children), beating the elderly to death with rifle butts, and using anal rape as part of your torture regimen—then writing songs about your exploits and celebrating your depravity as if it were a virtue—are not the actions of morally defensible human beings: Jewish or otherwise.

As discussed in my recent piece for Unlimited Hangout, aside from the obscene brutality—recorded, filmed, and shown around the world—just from a statistical or even an official report perspective, the Israeli government’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza is blatantly obvious.

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Trump’s Saudi Nuclear Agreement May Prolong the Iran War

A final deal between the United States and Iran is slipping further out of reach. Since the Memorandum of Understanding collapsed in July, the prospects for reviving it have deteriorated by the day. While Tehran publicly demands a return to the MOU, Trump’s current position is that even if Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz, he would neither return to the agreement nor lift the blockade on Iran. And even in the unlikely event that he did, the MOU could not come back into force as long as Israel continues to bombard Lebanon. Iran is unlikely to accept an MOU minus Lebanon: its demand for a regional ceasefire is non-negotiable.

But even if these obstacles were resolved, profound differences over the nuclear issue would remain. And those differences have now grown dramatically more severe because of Trump’s nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. The details of the deal were just made public, and Kelsey Davenport at the Arms Control Association has published an excellent FAQ addressing its most important aspects.

The bottom line is: Trump is granting Saudi Arabia access to the same uranium-enrichment technology the United States has sought to deny Iran for more than three decades, while imposing a far weaker inspection regime on Saudi nuclear activities. In effect, Washington is providing Riyadh a pathway to the bomb while insisting that Iran have no enrichment capability whatsoever – the infamous zero-enrichment objective.

As ACA writes,

“the Trump administration rejected key nonproliferation conditions for U.S. nuclear cooperation that have long-standing bipartisan support and are internationally recognized best practices.

Most critically, the deal does not require Saudi Arabia to adhere to the more intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement, known as the Additional Protocol.”

As a point of comparison, Iran began voluntarily implementing the Additional Protocol (AP) under Obama’s nuclear deal in 2016 and was expected to ratify it once the United States formally lifted sanctions through Congress. That never happened, however, because Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018.

Moreover, Trump’s agreement with Saudi Arabia gives the kingdom a pathway to develop a uranium-enrichment program reaching 20 percent. Again, the comparison with Iran is revealing. When Iran expanded its enrichment to 20 percent in 2010 to produce fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor – which, ironically, the United States had given Iran in the late 1960s as part of the Atoms for Peace program – Washington pointed to the move as further evidence of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions.

State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley said on February 11, 2010, that Iran’s decision to begin enriching to 20 percent “further solidifies… our impression and that of the international community that Iran’s nuclear intentions are anything but peaceful.” At the UN Security Council, then-Ambassador Susan Rice argued that Iran’s decision moved it “closer to weapons-grade material,” as she made the case for new UN sanctions against Tehran.

Now, Trump wants Congress to approve a deal with Saudi Arabia that gives the kingdom access to precisely that technology – but with far fewer inspections – while bombing Iran to prevent it from having any enrichment at all.

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DOJ Seizes Over $560,000 in Cryptocurrency Donations for Hamas

The FBI has seized more than $560,000 in cryptocurrency donations intended for Hamas, the Justice Department said Tuesday in announcing a disruption of financing for the militant group.

In addition to seizing cryptocurrency meant to support Hamas’ military wing, the department said that it had taken control of website domains and communication platforms used for fundraising and recruitment, and had obtained information about thousands of people who had contacted Hamas with a goal of giving money to the group.

“My message to Hamas is clear: your networks are not secure, your crypto is vulnerable, and we will not stop until your ability to wage war is defeated,” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a video statement announcing the operation.

According to FBI affidavits filed in connection with the seizures, Hamas began testing virtual currency fundraising in or around early 2019 through its Qassam Brigades, or military wing, and solicited donations on its Telegram channel and also used direct online fundraising. Hamas officials bragged that the currency would be untraceable and their websites offered instructions for how to make anonymous donations, the affidavits say.

A major investigative break arrived last year when FBI officials identified a financing network soliciting donations to the Qassam Brigades via virtual currency and a confidential source located in the United States alerted law enforcement to a Telegram post asking for contributions to an email address associated with Hamas.

Brett Leatherman, an FBI assistant director in charge of its cyber division, said the bureau would “continue to use its authorities to intercept illicit funds and prevent terrorist organizations from exploiting digital networks to finance their operations.”

Hamas officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Trump floats renaming Strait of Hormuz to ‘Trump Strait’

resident Donald Trump on Wednesday floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz to the “Trump Strait” amid the ongoing war with Iran.

“Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before!” he posted on Truth Social.

The Strait of Hormuz is the critical waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. Its name likely derives from the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda, which was once widely worshiped in the region before the rise of Islam.

Trump has increasingly been willing to rename geographic landmarks in symbolic rebuke of his diplomatic or military adversaries. Earlier in his term, he renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and last month renamed Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

Few nations have embraced the changes, which he enacted via executive order.

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