Palestinian Information Center – April 15, 2025
Gaza: 17 martyrs and 69 wounded people in 24 hours
Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in the Gaza Strip received the bodies of 17 martyrs and 69 people suffering from different injuries following Israeli attacks.
Since the Israeli occupation army resumed its brutal war on Gaza on March 18, 2025, a total of 1,630 people have been killed and 4,302 others have been injured, according to Gaza’s health ministry on Tuesday.
The new fatalities increased the death toll from the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, which started on October 7, 2023, to 51,000 martyrs. The number of the wounded also surged to 116,343 people.
Meanwhile, efforts are underway to recover the bodies of more martyrs who are still missing in different areas of the Gaza Strip.
https://english.palinfo.com/news/2025/04/15/337396/
Countercurrent – April 15, 2025
Palestine Holocaust
by Mir Adnan Aziz
The post 9/11 years saw a vitriolic anti-Islam campaign. Those maliciously demonizing Islam and its adherents were self-proclaimed champions of human rights and liberty; the leaders of the western world. When Osama bin Laden was killed, author and political commentator Debbie Schlussel exulted, “1 down, 1.8 billion more to go.” This was the mindset that led to the reprehensible murder of millions of innocent Muslims across the globe.
Christian Zionists profess that biblical prophecies should dictate the policies of the United States. They recognize Israel as God’s timepiece and the fulcrum of biblical prophecy. Greater Israel, an imperative of God’s divine plan, will trigger Christ’s second coming, his ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and Armageddon, the end-time battle on the hills of Megiddo in Palestine. Sarah Posner, known historian of the Christian right, writes: “In this scenario, war is not something to be avoided but something inevitable, desired by God and celebratory.”
These Christian Zionists hold sway over US policy. It has aided and abetted Netanyahu’s genocidal war crimes. Bitterly opposed to the Oslo Peace Process, they sabotaged it. They also opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and prevailed towards its annulment by President Trump, his moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and Israel’s West Bank expansion. It has also aided the Palestine Holocaust and the horrific murder of over 51000 Palestinians in Gaza, 17000 of them children.
At the forefront of the Christian Zionist movement is Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI). The largest pro-Israel organization, CUFI boasts over 10 million members. In his bestselling 2005 book “Jerusalem Countdown”, Hagee extolls Jews to hasten the End Times and bring about the second coming of Christ. These views are shared by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey, evangelists who dictate Washington’s Israel policy.
Ardent Trump supporters, 80% Christain Zionists believe that the conception of Israel has been ordained by biblical prophecy. A 2017 Pew Survey found them holding the most negative views of Islam. Their leaders propagate that the God of Judaism and Christianity opposes the “false deity worshipped by Muslims” and that the divide between Islam and Christianity is an unbridgeable one.
Michael Coogan at the Harvard Divinity School is also Director of publications at Harvard’s Museum of the Near East and editor-in-chief of Oxford Biblical Studies. He writes in his recent work “God’s Favorites: Judaism, Christianity and the Myth of Divine Chosenness,” that the Jewish myth of being the chosen ones, along with that of the Christian Zionist mindset, is for political and personal gain. He argues that it has resulted in incalculable bloodshed and the division of mankind. He describes it as a stain on the West’s collective morality.
Christian Zionists are vehemently ant-immigration, something central to the Trump policy. Coogan dubs it as “American apartheid.” He argues that beneath the myths and self-deluding fairy tales about human rights, freedom and morality, xenophobia is the lens through which America views the (Muslim) world. Among other known intellectuals, Karen Armstrong, one of contemporary religions’ most prolific authors, identifies Christian Zionism with the Crusades. She asserts that these “fundamentalists have returned to a classical and extreme religious crusading.”
Trump’s first term Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon were self-declared Christian Zionists. This time around, Mike Waltz is National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth, who called for building a Jewish temple at Al-Aqsa, is Secretary of Defense, Elise Stefanik UN Ambassador and Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel.
After Huckabee’s appointment, Jerry Nadler, a senior Jewish Democrat, said “Huckabee’s (anti-Palestine) positions are not the words of a thoughtful diplomat. They are the words of a provocateur whose views are far outside international consensus and contrary to the core bipartisan principles of American diplomacy.”
In February this year, in an Oval Office meeting with Netanyahu, Trump compared the released Israeli hostages to Holocaust survivors. Earlier this week, sitting again with Netanyahu, Trump bizarrely tried to rewrite Nazi history. He declared that Nazis treated Jewish prisoners with love as compared to Hamas’s treatment of the Israeli hostages.
It is not the Trump administration alone that fosters this dangerous mindset. In 1974, Ronald Reagan addressed a Conservative Political Action Conference. Invoking religion repeatedly, he described like-minded people as “prophets of our philosophy” and referred to America as “a part of a divine plan in whose hands God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.”
George Bush boasted divine guidance for invoking horrors. Calling himself “a messenger of God doing the Lord’s will”, he told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and foreign minister Nabil Shaath: “I am driven with a mission from God. He would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan and I did. Then God would tell me, go end the tyranny in Iraq and I did.” The destruction of Iraq was brought about by lies.
An excerpt from the report “Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy – Working Group of the Church of England’s House of Bishops” reads: “The sense of (America’s) moral righteousness is fed by the major influence of the Christian Right on US policy. A very worrying aspect, Christian millennialism has been taken up with apocalyptic overtones and a very clear political agenda in relation to the Middle East. Not only is political reading in the light of apocalyptic texts illegitimate but these texts need to be read as a critique of imperialism, rather than justification of a particular form of it.”
America was found as the mythical land of the chosen ones. Its exceptionalism mimicked the belief that as Israelites were chosen by God to receive the promised land, so were they ordained to get theirs by evicting the extant “heathen” population. Attributed to biblical roots, this narration was adopted to give legitimacy to the genocide of Native Americans. Weaponizing of theology by Armageddon seekers, irrespective of religion, can never ever justify the Palestine Holocaust or removal of Palestinians from their homeland.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance columnist. He can be reached at miradnanaziz@gmail.com
https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/palestine-holocaust/
Israel’s escalating West Bank assault is part of a larger plan to split the territory in two
Israel is expanding its “Iron Wall” offensive in the West Bank as it approves plans to separate the northern West Bank from the south. The plan is an accelerated prelude to Israel's expected annexation of the West Bank.
BY QASSAM MUADDI
Israeli forces escalated their offensive in the occupied West Bank last week across Palestinian cities and refugee camps, killing three Palestinians. The escalation came amid renewed Israeli plans to expedite annexation plans to solidify the expansion of key new settlement projects in the central West Bank, including connecting one of the largest Israeli settlements, Maale Adumim, to Jerusalem.
Last Monday, April 7, Israeli forces opened fire at three children in the town of Turmusayya, northeast of Ramallah, killing 14-year-old Palestinian-American citizen Omar Saadeh. On Tuesday, April 8, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian woman, Aminah Yaaqoub, 30, at an Israeli checkpoint near Salfit in the northern West Bank.
These killings raised the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers since October 2023 to more than 800, as the Israeli army increased its use of lethal force as part of an ongoing military crackdown on the West Bank’s cities and refugee camps.
Earlier this month, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man, Hamza Khamash, 33, and arrested his brother during a raid into the city of Nablus. On the same day, Israeli forces raided the refugee camp of Dheisheh in southern Bethlehem and injured two 15-year-old Palestinian boys and two Palestinian men aged 50 and 46. The raid on Dheisheh lasted for more than seven hours, including house searches and multiple arrests. Israeli forces also threw leaflets in Dheisheh threatening residents of “the same fate of Tulkarem and Jenin” refugee camps if they harbor militant elements in the camp. Leaflets portrayed a picture of a destroyed street in one of the northern West Bank’s refugee camps, where Israeli forces have forced tens of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes.
Israeli forces also intensified their attack on Jenin with airstrikes on the already-depopulated refugee camp, detaining Palestinians in the surroundings of the camp and searching their phones.
This military campaign first began after the signing of the now-broken ceasefire deal in Gaza. The military offensive, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” started in Jenin and expanded to other parts of the northern West Bank following the start of the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in mid-January. However, the operation is also an accelerated prelude to Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank, as pledged by Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
The plan to bifurcate the West Bank
The launching of the “Iron Wall” offensive has been described by the families of Israeli captives held in Gaza as compensation offered to Smotrich in exchange for accepting the signing of the ceasefire and refraining from quitting Netanyahu’s right-wing governing coalition.
In reality, Smotrich’s agenda of crushing Palestinian refugee camps is part of the Israeli government’s broader stated agenda for annexing the West Bank. The escalation of Israel’s military campaign against Palestinian cities came as an echo to developments in Gaza, as Israel announced the expansion of its ground invasion in the strip last week, especially in Rafah. This West Bank escalation was also coupled with the expansion of new settlement projects.
On March 30, the Israeli cabinet approved a new settlement roads project east of Jerusalem. The project includes a road that circumvents the center of the West Bank between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, allegedly allowing Palestinians to drive directly from Bethlehem to Jericho and isolating both areas definitively from Jerusalem. The current highway, one of the few Israeli highways on parts of which Palestinians are allowed to drive, will be exclusively reserved for Israelis, connecting Jerusalem with Israeli settlements that expand from the east of Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley. Most central to this annexation project is the second-largest Israeli settlement, Maaale Adumim, which houses 40,000 Israelis.
Linking Jerusalem with settlements to the east would separate the south and the north of the West Bank and create a geographical continuity between Israel’s 1948 boundaries, Jerusalem, and Israeli settlements. Most crucially, the West Bank would be bifurcated. It’s a plan that Israel has had in the works for years but has now gained official approval.
The Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar, located in the center of the soon-to-be isolated area, would become inaccessible for Palestinian vehicles and would be reached only on foot.
The project would cost $91 million and be covered by money in a special budget reserved for services to Palestinians separate from the Israeli government’s budget. The Israeli organization Peace Now said in a statement that the project “serves no purpose in improving Palestinian transportation. Instead, it is solely aimed at facilitating the annexation of a vast area, approximately 3% of the West Bank, into Israel.”
Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, stated that the project “will enhance security by separating Israeli and Palestinian circulation,” while the mayor of the Maale Adumim settlement called the project’s approval “a historical moment.” Peace Now warned that the project would “eliminate the possibility of ending the conflict and a two-state solution.”
Earlier this month, while standing alongside Bezalel Smotrich, Katz said in a video that Israel “will not allow the Palestinian Authority and Abu Mazen [the PA President, Mahmoud Abbas] to impose their control on the West Bank’s lands through illegal building that threatens the settlements’ security.”
Katz added that “just as we crush terrorism in the camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams, we will also prevent the Palestinian Authority from controlling lands in Judea and Samaria” — the Israeli term for the West Bank — by preventing the PA’s so-called “illegal building” projects that “threaten settlements.”
Katz made his statements during a tour of several West Bank settlements accompanied by Smotrich. In the video, Smotrich said that “there hasn’t been such a revolution [in settlement building] in Judea and Samaria since 1967.”
“Israel’s government works on developing settlements and combats Arab illegal building, which has become a scourge to us in recent years,” the Finance Minister added.
Both Katz and Smotrich belong to the Israeli far right, whose voting base comes largely from the settler movement. Smotrich has been leading calls to annex the West Bank since 2015 and has labeled his plan “the definitive solution.” This plan, according to Smotrich, would “end the conflict” by imposing Israeli control over the West Bank and annexing it to Israel’s 1948 boundaries, killing any chances for establishing a Palestinian state. This vision aligns with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s longtime effort to undermine a two-state solution and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Israeli far right has dominated Israeli politics in recent years, winning a majority of seats in the Knesset in five consecutive elections in two years. After October 7, 2023, Smotrich stated that his “definitive solution” of annexing the West Bank is “Israel’s response to Hamas.” Since then, Israel has been periodically escalating settlement expansion and violent crackdown on the West Bank, echoing developments in Gaza — with little to no international opposition.
Settler violence in the West Bank has displaced no less than 20 Bedouin communities in the West Bank since October 2023, while the Israeli army and settler attacks have killed more than 800 Palestinians in the same time period. According to UNRWA, Israel’s “Iron Wall” offensive has so far displaced well over 40,000 Palestinians and completely depopulated the Jenin and Tulkarem refugee camps, with Israel’s Defense Minister saying that its residents would not be allowed to return for at least a year.
Palestinian Information Center – April 15, 2025
Over 1,700 settlers defile Aqsa Mosque on 3rd day of Passover
Hundreds of extremist Jewish settlers desecrated the Aqsa Mosque in Occupied Jerusalem on Tuesday morning and later in the afternoon on the third day of the Passover holiday, amid tight restrictions on the entry of Muslim worshipers to the holy site.
According to al-Qastal news agency, 1,732 settlers entered the Mosque through its Maghariba Gate and provocatively toured its courtyards under police escort.
During their tours at the Islamic holy site, the settlers received lectures from rabbis about the alleged temple mount and a number of them provocatively performed Talmudic prayers.
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation police imposed movement and entry restrictions on Muslim worshipers at the Aqsa Mosque’s entrances and gates and prevented many of them from entering the holy site.
One settler was seen wearing Jewish prayer attire in the Mosque’s courtyards, while others danced and sang provocatively near the Old City’s Asbat Gate or performed prayers in front of some gates of the Aqsa Mosque.
The Israeli occupation police already transformed Jerusalem and its Old City into a military zone, deploying thousands of officers and special forces on their streets and roads to secure settlers’ movement on the week-long Passover holiday, which started last Sunday.
https://english.palinfo.com/news/2025/04/15/337402/
World Socialist Web Site– April 15, 2025
China hits back at Trump by tightening exports of rare earths
Nick Beams
China has taken a significant step in the intensifying economic war with the US by moving to tighten controls on the export of rare earth minerals and magnets critical for many advanced technologies in auto production, electronics and military equipment. Restrictions had already been imposed on the exports of some rare earths as the Trump tariff war has escalated, but the latest moves appear to be the most significant retaliatory measure so far.
According to a report in the New York Times by its Beijing bureau chief Keith Bradsher published yesterday, shipments of magnets “essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors.”
On April 4, two days after Trump’s announcement of his “reciprocal tariff” war—since suspended for all countries for 90 days except China for which tariffs have been raised in 145 percent—Beijing ordered restrictions on the export of six heavy rare earth metals refined in China and rare earth magnets.
The magnets are crucial for the production of electric motors for cars and other products. China produces around 90 percent of the 200,000 tonnes of rare earth magnets each year. Japan produces a large portion of the rest while a small quantity, dependent on China for raw material supplies, comes from Germany.
The Times article cited comments by Daniel Pickard, an adviser to the US trade representative and the Commerce Department on critical minerals. “Does the export control or ban potentially have severe effects in the US? Yes,” he said.
James Litinsky, the chief executive of MP Materials which supplies rare earths, said supplies to military contractors were of particular concern. “Drones and robotics are widely considered the future of warfare, and based on everything we are seeing, the critical inputs for our future supply chain are shut down.”
MP Materials owns the only sole rare earths mine in the US, Mountain Pass in California.
The key issue is not so much obtaining supplies of rare earths and critical minerals but in processing them. The US has considerable supplies of rare earths. Getting them out of the ground is one thing, processing and refining them is another.
Rare earths can be found all over the world but often not in sufficient concentrations to make mining them economically viable. And the refinement process itself is complex and expensive because the rare earths are found in combination with minerals having similar chemical properties, which makes it difficult to extract them.
An article in the Financial Times in early March cited remarks by Pierre Josso, deputy director of the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre, who pointed to this issue. “Refining is where things become difficult. Managing to separate them into individual elements takes a lot of time and energy. You can mine anywhere in the world, but if you don’t build the smelting and refining capacity, you’ll send your ore to China to be refined,” he said.
The US at present mines about 12 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths, putting it second only to China, according to the United States Geological Survey. But refining is capital intensive and not particularly profitable and so China is the main center for processing.
An article in the Wall Street Journal in March noted that the “US exports about two-thirds of its rare earths to China. It has little choice: China is responsible for around 85 percent of the world’s rare earth refining. Chinese companies then turn the ore into the final product—rare-earth magnets—and export the magnets back to the US.”
According to Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado Institute of Mines, whose remarks were cited in the article, the so-called “midstream piece of processing and refining ores into chemicals and metals is really important and dominated by China. I don’t see it becoming undominated.”
His remarks are borne out by the data. According to industry estimates, the cost of building a refinery plant in China is one-third of the cost in the US.
Industrial dominance goes beyond rare earths and extends to cobalt and copper. The top six refiners of cobalt—vital for military industries and batteries—are Chinese. China’s share of the production of refined cobalt is estimated to have grown from 65 percent in 2018 to 83 percent in 2024.
In copper, crucial for all areas of electronics, US refining capacity lags behind China and the Trump administration has initiated an investigation into how dependence on imports of the metal is a threat to US “national security.”
The issue of rare earths and its importance for US military capacity has concerned Trump for some time. In 2017 he signed an executive order to secure supplies of critical minerals and issued another in 2020 regarding Chinese dominance.
In his address to the joint session of Congress in March, Trump said he planned “historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare earths.” These minerals are part of his drive to annex Greenland and were at the center of his proposed agreement with Ukraine.
For its part, the actions of the Chinese government to tighten its grip on their supply and the magnets it produces is another indication that President Xi Jinping considers that whatever the short-term problems caused by the Trump tariffs—and they will be significant—over the longer haul China is in a stronger position than the US.
Such views will have been buttressed by the turbulence in financial markets, centered on the $29 trillion bond market, and the growing international sentiment that the US is no longer a safe haven for investment.
Significantly, while Trump has boasted of a line of countries “kissing my ass” in order to enter negotiations and make trade deals, China is not among them and Xi has not sought a phone call. The view in Beijing appears to be that despite being virtually shut out of the US market, any blow on that score will be able to be countered by boosting its domestic market with government stimulus measures.
The latest response by China is not likely, however, to produce any lasting US economic concessions, despite urging by financial oligarchs, such as billionaire founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund Ray Dalio, for a “win-win” US-China trade deal.
Given its lag on the production front, sharply expressed in the refining of critical minerals but present in many other areas of manufacturing as well, the response of the Trump regime will be to step up preparations in the one area where it considers it has superiority, that is, through war.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/15/ecbk-a15.html?pk_kwd=wsws-daily-newsletter
Trump’s “1984”-Like Vision for a New World Order
ALFRED W. MCCOY
(ﾠTomdispatch.comﾠ) – Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all — and I first read the book in high school — was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens.
Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” As those moments of hate continued, what appeared was “the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched out of their seats.”
Finally, as “row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces… swam up to the screen” and brought those two minutes of Hate to their terrifying climax, the face of Big Brother appeared “full of power and mysterious calm,” prompting spectators to shout, “My Saviour!,” and to break into “a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!… B-B!’ — over and over.”
For, as Orwell explained, those people of Oceania were “at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.” Officially, “Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia,” which “represented absolute evil.” Yet through some quirk of memory, the novel’s hero Winston “well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.”
That was, in some fashion, Orwell’s ultimate horror: a world divided into three great continental blocs, with humanity held in thrall to omnipotent leaders like Big Brother through endless wars against an ever-changing enemy. Even though he published1984 nearly 80 years ago in 1948, just two years before he died, more than three quarters of a century later, in the age of President Donald Trump, his fictional fantasy is fast becoming an unsettling simulacrum of our current geopolitical reality and that couldn’t be eerier (at least to me).
A Tricontinental Strategy
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring forth almost daily from the Trump White House, the overall design of his de facto geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising speed. Instead of maintaining mutual-security alliances like NATO, President Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself — with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling, in a version of fortress America, all of North America (including, of course, the Panama Canal). Reflecting what his defense secretary called a “loathing of European freeloading” and his administration’s visceral disdain for the European Union, Trump is pursuing that tricontinental strategy at the expense of the traditional trans-Atlantic alliance, embodied by NATO, that has been the foundation for American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.
Trump’s desire for ultimate continental hegemony lends a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise seemingly off-the-wall, quixotic overtures to claim Greenland as part of the United States, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada “the 51st state.” On his sixth day in office, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it.” He then added, “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world.” After Vice President J.D. Vance made a flying visit to a remote U.S. military base in Greenland and claimed its people “ultimately will partner with the United States,” Trump insisted that he would never take military force “off the table” when it came to claiming the largest island on this planet.
Turning to his northern neighbor, Trump has repeatedly insisted that U.S. statehood would mean “the people of Canada would pay a much lower tax…They would have no military problems.” During his first weeks in office, he imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico, which was quickly followed by a blizzard of similar tariffs that instantly sparked multiple trade wars with once-close allies. In response, Justin Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister, whom Trump was already referring to as “governor” (as in the head of that 51st state), charged in an emotional speech that the American president wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
In his inaugural address last January, President Trump also complained that “the Panama Canal… has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.” He added that “we have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China.” To a burst of applause, he insisted, “We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” No surprise then that, on his very first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio stormed into Panama City where he pressured its president, José Raúl Mulino, to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative.
In its totality, Trump’s vision is of a continental Fortress America, formed by annexing the northern lands of Canada and Greenland, while sealing off Mexico for ethnic reasons as a separate but subordinate state. Then, sweeping aside what had long been a U.S. reliance on global multilateral defense pacts and, with the country’s Arctic approaches under its control, the administration would draw a defensive frontier around Greenland and through the North Atlantic Ocean, secure the Panama Canal as a southern bastion, and maintain military control over the entire Pacific Ocean. Every major component of such a strategy would, of course, be laden with the potential for conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, where the U.S. faces a continuing challenge from China.
Demolishing a World Order
Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump has pursued this distinctive tricontinental strategy by working with remarkable speed to demolish the institutional pillars of the “rules-based international order” the U.S. had supported and tried to advance since the end of World War II. Standing in the Rose Garden on his April 2nd “liberation day,” Trump proclaimed a roster of tariffs reaching as high as 49% that, said Foreign Policy magazine, “will shatter the world economy” the U.S. has built since 1945, while the respected Economist observed that it “heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order.” After calling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “corrupt” and falsely claiming that he had “stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” Trump abolished just about all the global humanitarian initiatives of that agency. He cut 5,800 programs that provided food rations for a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, malaria prevention for 53 million people globally, and polio immunization for millions of children worldwide, among all too many other things. In a further flurry of executive orders, he also shut down the global broadcaster Voice of America, spuriously claiming that it was “radical” (though a judge has, for now, stopped that shutdown process), withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), and quit the Paris climate accords for a second time. Apart from the harm inflicted on poor communities across three continents, the closure of most USAID programs has crippled the key instrument of America’s “soft power,” ceding China the role as prime development partner in at least 40 countries worldwide.
In junking that Paris climate agreement, Trump has ensured that the U.S. would abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community, climate change and the potential devastation of the planet. In the process, he has left a void that China may readily fill by offering stable world climate leadership in contrast to the “aggressive unilateralism” of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” second term.
Reflecting his aversion to multilateral alliances, Trump’s first major foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. On February 12th, he launched peace talks through what he called a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” By month’s end, tensions from that tilt toward Moscow had culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”
That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also disregarded and even degraded NATO, which had, for the past three years, expanded its membership and military capacity by supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to begin reinforcing their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada (not eager to become the 51st state) and Ukraine, thereby aiming in the future to reduce their dependence on American weaponry. If his administration does not formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s ongoing hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken if not eviscerate the alliance — even as, recently, Trump has also gotten ﾓvery angryﾔ and ﾓpissed offﾔ at Russian President Vladimir Putin for not responding effusively enough to his gestures. Consider that an indication that American relations across much of Eurasia could soon prove all too unpredictably chaotic.
Fighting for the Pacific Penumbra
In the Asia-Pacific region, Trump’s new global strategy is already straining longstanding U.S. alliances. At the start of his second term, the American presence there rested on three sets of mutual-defense pacts: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense agreements stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines. However, Trump’s disdain for military alliances, his penchant for abusing allies, and his imposition of ever more punitive tariffs on the exports of all too many of those allies will undoubtedly only weaken such ties and so American power in the region.
Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan has been ambiguous. “I think Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June during the presidential campaign, adding, “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.” Once in office, however, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, issued an interim strategic guidance stating that “denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan… is the Department’s sole pacing scenario,” requiring that the U.S. shift some of its forces from Europe to Asia. In similar signs of a commitment to that island, the administration has noisily raised tariffs and technology controls on China, while quietly releasing $870 million in military aid for Taiwan. Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more probable in the future, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump could find himself faced with a difficult choice between a strategic retreat or a devastating war with China.
However it might happen, the loss of that island would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, possibly pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam, a major blow to America’s geopolitical position in the region. In short, even within Trump’s tricontinental strategy, the Western Pacific will remain at best a contested terrain between Beijing and Washington, fraught with the possibility of armed conflict in that continuing great-power rivalry, and war will remain a grim possibility.
A Residue of Ruin
With little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a grand Fortress America strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin — corroding American global power, compromising the current world order, and harming countless millions worldwide who once benefitted from this country’s humanitarian aid. His attempt at consolidating control over North America has already encountered determined resistance in Ottawa, which responded to him with a strong bid to join Europe’s accelerated development of its own defense industries.
While the Trump administration’s aversion to formal alliances and its imposition of protective tariffs will likely weaken diplomatic ties to traditional allies in Asia and Europe, both China and Russia are likely to gain greater influence in their respective regions. From a strategic perspective, this start of a staged U.S. retreat from its military bastions at the antipodes of Eurasia in Western Europe and eastern Asia will weaken its longstanding influence over that vast landmass, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power globally. With its military alliances compromised and its trade relations roiled by tariff wars, Washington’s international influence will, in all probability, be significantly reduced (or worse) by the end of Trump’s second term in 2029.
In the meantime, as he takes Americans on his own version of a succession of Two Minute Hates — of freeloading Europeans, prevaricating Panamanians, vile Venezuelans, Black South Africans, corrupt humanitarians, illegal immigrants, and lazy Federal workers — count on one thing: he’s leading us on a path eerily reminiscent of 1984. Unless, of course, like Orwell’s hero Winston, all too many of us somehow come to love Big Brother and so set aside our musty old Constitution and take Donald Trump’s often-repeated hints to elect him to a third term on a planet plunging headlong into a tempest of armed conflict, commercial chaos, and climate change.
