Ten or 15 years ago, Friedrich Merz would have seemed a wildly unlikely candidate for the role of savior to Europe’s liberal democracy. Spoiler alert: He still does. 

But the internal decay of European politics has reached a critical stage, whose stakes were made abundantly clear by the ludicrous spectacle of Donald Trump and JD Vance berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for insufficiently groveling before the Orange Throne. This was not the historical moment Merz expected, and it definitely isn’t the one he wanted. But for better or worse, he looks to be Europe’s last man standing.

If we flash back to the bygone days of the late 2000s, Merz’s future looked to be in the past: He was Angela Merkel’s defeated right-wing rival in the Christian Democratic Union, the mainstream conservative party that has dominated German electoral politics since the fall of the Nazi regime, first in the former West Germany and then, less convincingly, in post-1990 reunified Germany. Merz left politics and racked up millions in the private sector as a corporate lawyer, including a five-year stint as board chairman at BlackRock Germany, a major branch of the world’s largest asset management firm. 

He returned to the CDU in 2018 as the anti-Merkel, vowing to spice up the party’s usual agenda of pro-business fiscal “austerity” and free trade with staunchly pro-American foreign policy and a dash of hard-right anti-immigration policy. Even amid the continent-wide political chaos caused by the Syrian migrant crisis and the rise of fascist-flavored parties in one country after another, it still took three tries for Merz to get himself elected party leader after Merkel’s retirement. 

After “winning” Germany’s recent federal elections, in what may be remembered as a textbook example of Pyrrhic victory — the CDU finished first with 28.5 percent of the vote, slightly better than its worst-ever result in 2021 — Merz will now be forced to preside over an awkward coalition of center-right and center-left parties, whose primary purpose (at least on the home front) will be to fend off further advances by the not-quite neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. If you want to find a silver lining to the German elections — and frankly, that isn’t easy — it would be this: While the AfD finished second with 20.8 percent of the vote, basically doubling its 2021 total, there’s no evidence that Elon Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement (or Vance’s slightly less overt endorsement) did them any good. 

On the international front, as last Friday’s contretemps in the White House threw into sharp relief, Merz will become the leader of the largest and most important member of the European Union at precisely the moment when it must “achieve independence from the U.S.,” to use his own words from a post-election press conference. On one hand, Merz is something of a black box, an untested leader who has never held a position in government and whose entire career seems mismatched to this perilous fork in history’s road. On the other, he appears to grasp the magnitude of the current crisis, and has so far given no indication that he will seek accommodation with either Germany’s far right or their MAGA pals in Washington. 

Merz has described the attempts by Musk and various other Yank interlopers to meddle in Germany’s elections as “no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” and suggested that under Trump the U.S. appeared “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” This marks a startling reversal for the man described by German journalist Jörg Lau as the most pro-American politician in Germany and “a lifelong believer in the transatlantic security alliance” (i.e., in NATO, which Trump seems determined to demolish). That may also reflect a sense of injured pride and betrayal: Clear back to Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s, the CDU has always presented itself as a staunch American ally, largely aligned with what we’d now have to call the vanished orthodoxy of the pre-Trump Republican Party.

At the same time, Merz has described the startling surge of the AfD as “the last warning to the political parties of the democratic center” to reach consensus on immigration policy, economic reforms, a shared European defense strategy and numerous other thorny issues. Germany found itself under “massive pressure from two sides,” he said — presumably meaning the U.S. and Russia — along with significant internal divisions: The AfD dominated in the economically struggling states of former East Germany, while Merz’s party won in the more prosperous west. (The rapidly fading Social Democrats won in Berlin, and almost nowhere else.) In historical terms, Merz concluded, it was “five minutes to midnight for Europe.”

So, damn! Will this acrid-tongued, 69-year-old multimillionaire, a child of the rural Catholic haute bourgeoisie — he was raised in the house his mother’s family built in 1752 — turn out, against all odds, to be the statesman the world needs now, ideology and partisan affiliation aside? Is he a latter-day Churchill standing astride the tides of history, ready to push back Vladimir Putin on one side and Trump on the other? 

Of course the real answer is that no one can see the future and it’s likely to surprise us: Maybe! It’s just about conceivable that Merz, now liberated from his previous pro-American views and in a forced marriage with his domestic political opponents, will reveal that kind of strength. But honestly, that scenario requires a world-historical level of wishful thinking. 

For one thing, as Lau observes in the Guardian essay quoted above, Merz was effectively for Donald Trump before he was against him. He ran as an overtly MAGA-curious candidate during his failed campaign for CDU leadership in 2018, and only weeks ago pushed a harsh non-binding resolution on migrant policy through the Bundestag with the AfD’s support. That Trump-style political maneuver, meant to shame outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz by capitalizing on a series of violent attacks committed by immigrants, did not technically violate the “firewall” that prohibits Germany’s mainstream parties from forming coalitions with the far right. But as Lau suggests, it may have led normie voters to wonder whether Merz could be trusted.

Merz isn’t the only mainstream European conservative to turn bearish on America; it’s starting to look like a trend. Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin is an old hand, having made world headlines back in 2003 by opposing the U.S. war in Iraq in an eloquent U.N. address. He’s now considering a 2027 presidential campaign, in hopes of fending off rising far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. In a recent interview with the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, de Villepin outdid Merz, proclaiming that “America can no longer be considered an ally of Europe” and that the world now finds itself divided between “three illiberal superpowers: Russia, China and the U.S.”

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Both Merz and de Villepin see the opportunity, in the latter’s words, for “a European awakening of democracy.” That’s an inspiring phrase, but one that avoids the larger historical question: Can the existing European order that elite political leaders like them are so eager to defend actually be saved, in anything like its current form? You don’t have to be a Trumper or an ultra-leftist to observe that the so-called Western alliance has been decaying for some time; one of Putin’s guiding principles, which has yet to be falsified, is that if he jabs it in the right spot it will collapse altogether. Rethinking the relationship between Europe, America and the rest of the world shouldn’t be left to JD Vance and his buddies in the nationalist new right. 

It’s difficult to imagine that Merz — by all accounts a person of highly conventional ideas, atop a fragile coalition with a narrow political mandate — is ready to seize that portfolio. Even a cursory reading of German history suggests darker parallels: Merz looks and sounds an awful lot like the pro-business upper-crust German conservatives of the early 1930s, who assumed they could dominate the radical upstart with the dopey mustache and his dimwit followers. Those guys were astride the tides of history too, but not in a good way.

Of course the past does not predict the future; it shapes it. That cautionary tale still has considerable resonance for Germans of Merz’s generation, even if many people in that country and elsewhere around the world have grown tired of hearing it. Those who fail to learn from history, as Salon contributor Mike Lofgren said to me recently, are doomed to repeat famous quotations. Whatever Friedrich Merz does with his improbable starring role on the world stage, let’s hope his lessons are in order.

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Donald Trump’s war against Iran is going so well that the U.S. is now yanking the USS George Washington from the western Pacific to relieve the beleaguered USS Abraham Lincoln, which is stationed off the Iranian coast in the Northern Arabian Sea. 

The move is significant on both fronts. While the switch will be a godsend to the weary sailors aboard the Lincoln, who have faced deteriorating living conditions and reported suicide attempts during their historic deployment of over 260 days and counting, the Washington was the Navy’s last aircraft carrier stationed in Asia. Its exit represents a remarkable abdication of American military power in the region.

At the same time, the president has ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea. Seoul seemed blindsided by the announcement, but judging from Trump’s social media post, which underscored his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” it appears that one reason for America’s diminishing military presence on the Korean Peninsula also has to do with Iran. The move reportedly came after the South Korean government refused to assist the U.S. in military actions in Iran. “I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, “and they said, ‘No thanks!’” 

This is all great news for China, which has already dispatched its top envoy to South Korea, seemingly to fill the void Trump is creating. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will meet with Korean President Lee Jae Myung to discuss North Korea and global issues, creating an “unusually favorable moment for Beijing,” according to Han Lin, China country director at the Asia Group, who spoke to Bloomberg. “Washington is signaling flexibility toward Pyongyang while simultaneously creating uncertainty in Seoul,” he said, adding that “China can use that gap to bolster diplomatic influence.”

Once again, China embodies the pseudo-Taoist “Does nothing. Wins.” meme, but that hasn’t entirely mollified fears that Beijing will invade Taiwan. Those worries have caught the attention of The National Interest, a magazine founded in 1985 by neoconservative Irving Kristol and attached to a think tank established by former President Richard Nixon, who saw the potential for Chinese dominance in world affairs. The magazine, which has more recently become a mouthpiece for Russian concerns, has published hand-wringing features on how munitions depletions are putting Taiwan at risk. Such depletions are a consequence of the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, of course, but it’s not clear that China wants or even needs to take advantage of this gap, at least not by dropping bombs.

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Beijing has watched closely as the U.S. and Russia, in its invasion of Ukraine, have damaged their economies, weakened their militaries and destroyed their global reputations while still losing the wars they started. No one wants to say that risk of a Taiwan invasion is completely gone, but China’s motivation to do so is likely pretty low. Why invade some place if you basically already control it? Just keep doing nothing and keep winning.

But more tangibly, it’s becoming clearer by the day that the bloated military machine the U.S. has run for decades is running out of steam. An exclusive report published Tuesday by the Washington Post details how the Pentagon is considering reducing its military footprint in the Middle East, notably because American military bases in the region have repeatedly gotten pummeled throughout the Iran war. If this happens, it would mark a substantial pivot from how American forces have operated in the region post-9/11.

 

All of this may be welcome news to anyone who opposes the world police stance of the U.S., but Trump kicking out the crutches of our ailing empire could also swing in a disastrous direction. As former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Joseph Yun detailed to CNN, the void the U.S. leaves is prompting more countries, including North Korea, to look more toward nuclear weapons as a deterrent against future aggressors. 

As anyone who has studied nuclear proliferation will tell you, this is a dangerous game: The more countries that rely on nukes for peace, the greater chance there is of a nuclear holocaust, whether it’s triggered accidentally or intentionally. The slow decay of American hegemony may be good news for many people in the world, but it could also create new existential risks as China reemerges as a global superpower.

In the meantime, it probably won’t hurt to start learning Mandarin on Duolingo.

The post Trump’s Asia pullback is a gift to China and North Korea appeared first on Salon.com.

MANCHESTER, England — On the day in June that Andy Burnham ended his nine-year term as mayor, Manchester’s authorities sent him off with a parting gift: a wingback chair whose shiny fabric was printed with the city’s trademark worker-bee symbol and its rallying cry “we do things differently here.”

One month later, Burnham moved to 10 Downing Street, the sprawling Georgian terrace in London replete with mice, net curtains, cranky heating and patchy phone signal from which six other prime ministers have struggled to run Britain in the last decade. But the worker-bee chair did not accompany him on the trip south. It moved just a half-mile, through a city that was once the engine of the industrial revolution but for more than a century has struggled for balance against the political, economic and military power consolidated in the capital.

The chair now sits beside a 10-seat conference table in what Burnham calls “No. 10 North,” a refurbished 1980s office block he has chosen as his auxiliary seat of power. What remains of the largest empire the world has known is now governed most Fridays from above a discount cocktail bar, where Burnham has replaced Downing Street’s concentric rooms of gatekeepers with clinically lit floors of open-plan desks. Staffed by several political allies from his time in Greater Manchester and decorated with a gold record of The Queen Is Dead, the 1986 album by Manchester band The Smiths, it is Burnham’s “comfort zone,” a person who has worked with him said — “an homage to his time” as mayor.

No. 10 North is more than Burnham’s own Manc-a-Lago, where he retreats ahead of weekends at his family home nearby. The prime minister, who succeeded Keir Starmer as the benefactor of a Labour Party putsch on July 20, has made it a central aim of his premiership to move power and money out from limestone buildings on Whitehall, the old heart of London’s civil service — by centralizing some of Whitehall’s power further in No. 10 North, and handing other parts of it to local leaders outside government. He is banking Labour’s political future, and that of the British center-left, on being able to reverse a decades-long decline of England’s former industrial heartlands, one that fueled a political polarization and drove the 2016 vote for Brexit.

“What we’re bringing is a different type of energy,” Caroline Simpson, the mayoral authority’s former chief executive whom Burnham has tasked with heading up his new northern outpost as deputy chief of staff, told POLITICO Magazine in her first interview since assuming the role. “That’s really the point about No. 10 North — to connect our places, connect devolution back into the heart of governing.”

Burnham’s political opponents — and, privately, some civil servants, who have seen past prime ministers try to move power out of London — have derided the Manchester office as a gimmick, a soundstage for a politician attuned more to optics than policy detail. (No. 10 North is “absolutely not” a gimmick, insists Simpson.) The office is already up and running, but some of the basic details of how it will geographically redistribute power — such as how funding or boundaries will be configured — have not been worked out. An early test of Burnham’s commitment to redistributing his government’s sparse finances will come on Oct. 28, the day of his first budget, and in a cross-government spending review in 2027.

POLITICO Magazine spoke to 28 current or former civil servants, political officials, regional officials, advisers and politicians to illuminate what life is like inside No. 10 North and the broader policy vision it reflects. Many were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the workings of Burnham’s government. Downing Street declined to comment on the specifics of this article, beyond making Simpson available for interview.

Burnham took office on a pledge to “rewire Britain.” He has to rewire the house first.

Moving to Heron House

The incoming prime minister discussed the idea of setting up No. 10 North with his closest aides ahead of the June special election that sent him back to Westminster, a person with knowledge of the conversations said.

But the idea was kept secret from all but his innermost team until Burnham announced it in late June. He did not even tell Simpson about it in advance. “It all happened very, very quickly,” she said.

After winning the June special election, Burnham scrambled to make No. 10 North a reality. He wanted to put it in Manchester — but where, exactly, wasn’t clear. He told an interviewer in early July that his preferred site was the planned Manchester Digital Campus in the Ancoats area of the city, but the site he named will only open fully in 2032. Burnham’s team looked at options for other government buildings in Manchester during a few frantic weeks of transition talks with the civil service.

A few days before he took power, Burnham and the civil service agreed on a temporary solution: Heron House, a red-brick office block that was renovated in 2019. No. 10 North occupies a floor that had been prepared for use by GCHQ, the U.K.’s intelligence and cyber-security agency. GCHQ was happy to vacate the floor; one senior government official said the agency was “bending over backwards to be helpful,” since it still has senior figures in other parts of the building who will find it useful to be near the PM. Less happy about the arrangement: Greater Manchester Police, which has been under more strain thanks to the burden of protecting the PM and building. It had an initial back-and-forth with London’s Metropolitan Police about when each force should be responsible for Burnham’s security, a person with knowledge of the talks said, and has raised concerns about who will pay the long-term bill. A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said the force was still working with government departments on security arrangements and “the cost of this is yet to be determined.”

There was a recent model for moving a core government function from Westminster to the north, and Burnham’s team is relying on some of that expertise. Former PM Boris Johnson opened government offices outside London including the Treasury, which launched a campus in the north-eastern railway town of Darlington, conveniently near then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s large family home in North Yorkshire.

Beth Russell, the senior official who leads the Darlington campus, has been advising on the setup of No. 10 North. But the projects are not the same; Darlington has around 350 Treasury civil servants across all ranks (plus more from eight other departments) while No. 10 North currently has only 50 or so, many of them necessarily senior. That means Darlington’s boasts to have recruited 80 percent of its staff locally, including from nearby schools, are unlikely to be repeated in No. 10 North.

Heather Scott, the veteran Conservative who was leader of Darlington Council at the time, argued local recruitment had made the project a success; some young people “never thought that they would have an opportunity to work for a government office.” Local staff may also think (and therefore make policy) differently, because they live outside London. “They’re not in £5 Gail’s coffee world,” said one Labour official, referring to a high-end chain bakery.

Burnham has, though, poached many members of his old mayoral team to No. 10 North — some of them based fully in Manchester and others splitting their time between there and London. Simpson will be a political special adviser while others will be non-partisan civil servants including John Wrathmell, who influenced thinking on “Manchesterism,” Burnham’s vision of putting the needs of a place above political ideology by combining private investment with state intervention. They were joined in recent weeks by Amy Davies, who ran Burnham’s calendar as mayor; she has been given the job of executive assistant to the PM, according to two people with knowledge of the appointment. (No. 10 does not routinely comment on staffing matters.) Other civil servants who join No. 10 North will already have been based outside London or want to return to where they grew up.

But in the meantime, civil servants have descended on Manchester from afar. No. 10 North’s Director General Sam Lister — its most senior civil servant — was only appointed on the Friday before Heron House opened to staff the following Monday, July 20 — the day Burnham took power, two people with knowledge of the process said. Lister declined to comment for this article (civil servants are ordinarily barred from speaking in public). Department heads were asked to suggest staff who might transfer to No. 10 North less than a week before it opened. One senior Whitehall official described the process as a “tap on the shoulder” and said the method for choosing people had been “unclear.”

Many of the 50 or so civil servants currently in No. 10 North are still based outside Manchester — which is 180 miles from London — and living in hotels for part of the week. That includes Lister, whose commute from his north London home was photographed covertly by the Mail on Sunday. After the story broke, officials were advised to stay across a variety of hotels to keep a lower profile, an official with knowledge of the process said.

Civil servants assigned to work at No. 10 North have been turning up before 8 a.m. on Fridays to secure desks that Burnham will walk past. Some ministers hot-desk. Simpson has her own office, there is a suite for ministerial use and officials are “buying the nicer furniture that comes with being the center of government,” the same official with knowledge of the process said.

Cheerleaders for the No. 10 North agenda argue this rush to action shows the team is trying to do something that British governments seldom manage — behave like a start-up. Lister wrote on LinkedIn that the unit “must maintain an agile, scale-up, non-hierarchical mindset” to work, “solving problems in real time rather than waiting for perfect answers.”

Therefore officials are anxious not to appoint too many civil servants; a person with knowledge of the planning said the total number of civil servants in No. 10 North is likely not to exceed 150, a tiny number compared to the thousands who already work in government offices outside London.

Those who do move permanently will each be able to claim up to £14,000 in relocation costs under existing rules, said the same official with knowledge of the process quoted above. They would not be expected to take a pay cut.

And then it may all churn again. Putting No. 10 North in Heron House is still only a medium-term arrangement and is unlikely to last until the nearby digital campus is open in 2032, said the same person with knowledge of the planning quoted earlier. That means Burnham’s team is looking at whether it can move somewhere else — neither Heron House nor the digital campus — in the coming years.

Burnham has pledged to work from the office every week, mostly on Fridays. (Burnham’s advisers say he will have visited five times in the month since becoming prime minister.) Despite his love of casual clothes, some of the trappings of his office follow him around. Downing Street sent its front-of-house staff up north with Burnham during his visits; aides suddenly found themselves being waited on with cups of tea.

In recent weeks the Manchester base has become such a focus of conversation that Burnham insiders have begun referring to London’s most famous street address as “No. 10 South.” Those who work there now find themselves on the receiving end of the north-south insecurity. One Labour official retorted: “No, we are No. 10!”

Downing Street and the surrounding streets still hoard the vast bulk of state power; the old Georgian building is the one with the famous black door and Larry the Cat, the feline who has lived at No. 10 longer than several prime ministers. No. 10 North has no real cat, said Simpson — but it does boast a cardboard cutout of Larry.

“Our building at the moment is tricky,” Simpson explained. Unlike Downing Street, where Larry can come and go as he pleases, Heron House has security keypads that cannot be operated by paws.

All roads lead from London

Burnham is far from the first British PM to try to break London’s hold on Britain — the result of a highly centralized government, based in a city of global finance and tourism that is more than three times the size of its nearest U.K. rival.

London was always the seat of Britain’s establishment, but northern cities — as the seat of the industrial revolution — once held a power of their own. The first steam train ran through Darlington; Manchester has a statue of Abraham Lincoln in honor of mill workers who refused to touch slave-picked cotton. (It is next to the back door of No. 10 North.)

“There was a time during which people in the north had a load of control, agency and power by virtue of being part of the industries that powered this country — by having powerful MPs, councils that were well-funded, community institutions and organizations that were coherent and well-embedded in their in their place,” said Oliver Coppard, the Labour mayor of South Yorkshire, a county west of Manchester that includes Sheffield. “Those things have all gone, or largely gone, and communities are fractured. So people don’t have agency; they don’t know who to reach out to get things to change.”

Thirty years ago the U.K. had ceremonial mayors instead of empowered municipal ones, and no true parliaments for the nations outside England. Since then there has been an endless ratchet of pledges to move power outside Westminster. Labour’s Tony Blair set up democratic bodies for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, but kept centrally-run agencies for England’s regional development (Simpson worked in one of them). Conservative David Cameron followed with his “northern powerhouse,” which gave some English cities mayors and funding deals. Boris Johnson, who built his profile as London’s mayor, extended the model to rural areas, seizing on the regional divides that drove the 2016 Brexit vote with his promise to “level up” Britain.

Yet England is still “very centralized” compared to the U.S. and its system of federalism, argues Simpson: “We are one of the most centralized countries in the Western Hemisphere. We have very little true devolution.” Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a business lobby group, added: “Our country is basically designed so we only have a federal government, we have no state government.”

And so Burnham, who decided in 2016 in a pub in Westminster that he would quit London, where he was serving in parliament and had previously been in cabinet, and run for mayoral office, now pledges to go further still. His plan is shaped by those nine years as mayor, when he was infuriated by how the system worked in practice — or didn’t.

He has vowed to extend devolution to more areas of England and go beyond the traditional focus on economic investment, looking also at public services such as bus networks. He is planning to tidy up the messy patchwork of boundaries for police, health and fire services that he confronted in the role. He says he will give mayors more true economic freedom; they will be allowed to spend an allotment of national income tax, and commit to more expensive projects without national approval, giving them a predictable income stream rather than forcing them to chase new grants each year. Regional officials will have less frenzied oversight from Whitehall. (One senior Labour figure in a mayoral authority joked that they had to tell the central government how many thumb tacks they had bought.)

“The conversation is completely different from what it was,” said Greg Clark, the Conservative minister for decentralization under Cameron in the early 2010s. In the early 2010s, he explained, “the direction was very much centralization. There was no real debate about devolution from the city deals onwards. These things have now become irreversible.”

Burnham’s policy vision is contained in a rare joint statement of his Cabinet on July 31, less than two weeks after he came to office. Thrashed out over pre-handover “access talks” between Burnham’s top aides and Antonia Romeo, Britain’s most senior civil servant, it said ministers had agreed to “the full shape” of how the government’s structure will shift power away from London before the next election. The seven-page PDF is “what people in No. 10 are excited about,” said Murison. Burnham deliberately imposed his end point without a detailed plan instead of letting Whitehall pore over drafts; one ally said it was to avoid his plans being “sanitized.” Romeo sees it as a foundational document too; she believes she could become the cabinet secretary who presided over the greatest change to the state in decades. Officials are now in what they privately call a 100-day sprint to produce a detailed policy paper in the fall that will set out more about how Burnham intends to actually implement the vision.

In their old jobs in the mayoral authority or elsewhere in Whitehall, No. 10 North aides had already looked to Germany and France for inspiration, including on the countries’ regional approaches to industrial strategy. Senior officials have also asked the BBC for advice after the national broadcaster relocated several operations to Salford — a district of Greater Manchester — in 2011. “The BBC didn’t just land as an island,” said Simpson. “The BBC created a whole creative sector around it.”

They may need the advice. The Cabinet document promises a “major transfer of powers, resources and functions” from central government to mayors and councils; that signals that Burnham intends to shrink Britain’s national civil service, which has billowed by 100,000 people in six years to around 550,000 after the Covid pandemic and Brexit. That will be “uncomfortable,” admitted the person with knowledge of the planning quoted earlier.

Burnham and his team have given no clue of how many civil servants they plan to cut. (“I don’t think they know,” said the official with knowledge of the process quoted earlier in this article.) Simpson said it will mean moving “significant resource from Whitehall” and into local areas, but added: “I am not going to put a figure on what that is going to look like.”

Nervous civil servants will be kept waiting. While Burnham’s October budget will set out much of the detail, the trade-offs may only appear in their starkest form in next year’s Treasury spending review. The small print of that will likely show that money is being held back from some Whitehall departments, especially outside the most politically contentious areas such as defense and health, to spend more on local and regional government. Burnham’s choices are even more difficult because Labour’s last spending review, under Starmer, frontloaded spending early on but tightened it after 2027.

One of the toughest decisions, on where to define the boundaries of police forces, could put Burnham in potential conflict with his home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. Mahmood had already been working on a plan to reduce the number of police forces and consolidate some of their functions. One person with knowledge of her thinking said she is generally skeptical of how well devolution can work in practice, though another said she is not ideologically against it. (The Home Office declined to comment on these specifics.)

There could be tension too with the Treasury, whose responsibility for local economic growth has already been handed to No. 10 North. Clark — who negotiated early city deals alongside Miatta Fahnbulleh, a former civil servant who is now a key Burnham ally in his Cabinet — recalled the finance ministry being “hostile” to his “subversive” push for devolution. “There’s a Whitehall preference for tidiness and for everything to be identical,” he added.

Another tricky and expensive decision will be around what to do with England’s private water firms, which have provoked public outcry by paying dividends while presiding over a creaking Victorian infrastructure. Burnham has promised greater “public control” of utilities but stopped short of promising full nationalization, and aides are still working through multiple options, including a mutual form of ownership and whether debt-ridden Thames Water could be split into two entities, one for London and the other for the surrounding region. On many issues, Burnham has identified problems without yet knowing the solutions.

Thus far there are many quiet skeptics of Burnham’s approach but few vocal critics. The skeptics tend to focus on two separate dilemmas: how do you meaningfully move money out of Whitehall and meet demands to raise spending on healthcare and defense? And after all the devolution promises that came before it, will No. 10 North prompt meaningful change?

One senior trade union figure said devolution in itself — which ties up the government in machinery changes and takes years to have an impact — does not “float the boat” of voters who are more concerned about the cost of living now. They voiced concern that the varying quality of leadership in each area could reinforce inequality, which would be ironic for a PM promising “good growth in every postcode.” Some MPs are already nervous that Burnham is running his devolution agenda from Manchester — a prospering city that has little in common with left-behind towns, or communities in England’s rural south west.

Then there is the existential question hanging over Burnham’s Labour — can empowering left-behind communities persuade voters to desert opposition parties, including Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK or the hard-right Restore Britain?

“This is the last bulwark against a fucking Farage-led government,” said one former Conservative government official. “I suspect it will be somewhat of a gimmick. But if it’s a gimmick that people respond to and vote for, is it all that bad?”

Some believe Burnham’s relentless focus on England’s individual regions misses the wider picture. “England as a constitutional and political entity does not figure,” said Jonathan Rutherford, who co-founded the socially conservative Blue Labour movement in the party. “And yet England is the place where the populist revolt is strongest. It’s where it originated. It was the strength behind the Brexit vote. It’s the source of the strongest form of nationalism — English, which is expressed through Reform and Restore.”

Others in Burnham’s own party worry that his plan could be too effective. After a series of strong electoral performances nationwide, Reform now controls many local councils, using its limited powers to scrap climate schemes, take down Pride flags and declare war on financial waste. A Labour government in London returning more authority to those councils would end up just empowering the opposition.

“I do worry about it,” said the senior Labour figure in a mayoral body quoted earlier in this story. They pointed out that mayors will soon have more say over police budgets and priorities. “You are putting quite a lot of power in the hands of people who could be quite malign in their intentions,” the senior Labour figure said.

Opposition parties sense an opportunity from Burnham’s extra funding; Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley in the north east, wants to hand money back to voters as a rebate. Burnham shut down the idea but Houchen told POLITICO Magazine he has spoken to Treasury officials and believes it will be possible, unless the government specifically blocks it. Simpson did not completely rule out such rebates, saying: “There’s going to be no ability to sit outside of the tax framework at a local level. That’s not what fiscal devolution is about. But flexibility about how that money is spent in a local area is going to be there.”

None of those concerns are deterring Burnham, whose allies say he can succeed because he will drive the devolution agenda personally from No. 10 North in a way no prime minister has done — and that he genuinely trusts the councils and mayors he’s empowering to serve their areas. “It is already changing things,” said Simpson.

Burnham’s team has met chief executives of mayoral authorities and hosted mayors for a meeting of a revived national economic council, set up by Gordon Brown in response to the 2008 financial crisis. There was potent symbolism in the way Burnham ran the meeting, forcing Cabinet ministers to listen and take note of the mayors rather than the other way round. Those at the table included the prime minister’s business adviser Varun Chandra, who is more used to talking to U.S. trade negotiators than regional leaders.

The prime minister told mayors he wanted to meet every two weeks.

‘It’s like Fort Knox in there’

Burnham has spent the last two weeks on a tour of the country he now leads, focusing on areas where Labour has fallen behind — a trial run for a general election the PM must call no later than 2029 to earn his own mandate for governing. It stands to be a five-way contest for power, pitting Labour against Reform and the Conservatives, Greens and Liberal Democrats, alongside Restore.

Almost no one in the Labour Party believes Burnham will be able to repeat the 172-seat majority that Starmer won at the last general election in 2024, leaving him a narrow window to do something radical while he commands the sway of parliament.

Burnham is already trying to connect his technical reforms to real change on the ground. The PM crisscrossed England this week with stops at the Wolverhampton Bus Terminal, where he announced the local mayoral authority would take control of the bus network, and to a homelessness charity in Newcastle where he asked local leaders to help his pledge to end rough sleeping. Newspaper front pages this summer have splashed repeatedly on a long-running plan to release some prisoners early because England’s Victorian jails don’t have enough room; one interview this week was dominated by questions about messages that Burnham traded with a person impersonating White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

All those issues are already crowding out his focus on reengineering the machinery of government. “I wish people might just engage with the seriousness of the proposition,” Burnham told The Times this week.

The vibes in Burnham’s inner circle remain good. “I’m not saying there aren’t going to be difficulties, but sometimes you’ve just got to get up and do it,” said one current government minister. “That was part of the problem under [Starmer’s] administration. There were always roadblocks; there was always a reason not to do something.”

And if Burnham is seeking to show he is among his people, the building itself does some of the work for him. Unlike Downing Street, imposing and behind iron security gates since 1989, Heron House sits on top of ordinary life in the city.

It faces a busy public square above a Slug & Lettuce chain cocktail bar, a branch of the ubiquitous pie store Greggs and trendy cafes serving Vietnamese drip coffee and matcha from Kyoto. Shoppers sit on a bench next opposite the low metal barriers and police guards on the door. The Ferris wheel at the square’s Christmas market is so tall that last year riders could see down onto the six-storey building’s roof. The local marriage registration office is on the ground floor. “You don’t really notice it,” shrugged a groom, Max Harris-Green, while his bride posed for photos a few meters from the new heart of government.

Put simply, it looks boring. The entrance goes unnoticed by many of those walking past, save for the occasional passer-by taking a selfie by the door.

Getting into the building itself is harder than Downing Street, whose custodians swing open the black front door for guests who have cleared the perimeter. Visitors to No. 10 North go through one of several discreet entrances — one of them next to a Chinese restaurant favored by the former Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney — and successive doors. A Labour official said: “It’s like Fort Knox in there.” (No. 10 declined to give POLITICO Magazine a tour.)

Recent visitors speak of elevators with unmarked buttons, a bombproof room and special doors for agents who still work on other floors. Nearby during the lunch rush, one man in a shirt was overheard joking to three others: “Is this going on the MI6 credit card?”

But the success or failure of Burnham’s power shift will rest not on the building but the prime minister himself. Ironically for a man preparing to give up authority, Burnham will have to wield it firmly from the center to make his plan work. That even extends to where he sits.

No. 10 North will mean nothing without Burnham being there in person, said the official with knowledge of the process quoted earlier: “In the civil service, power always gravitates to the most senior people. You need the senior decision-making people there in person.” Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves was criticized for spending only five days working from the Treasury’s Darlington campus in almost two years after Labour took power. (Treasury officials insist she visited other places nearby.)

Burnham’s pledge to work from Manchester each week “can’t slip,” said one senior Labour aide, even as he faces more demands to travel abroad. “The whole center of power has to move there at the end of the week.”

Esther Webber contributed reporting from London.

When TIME Magazine released their “100 Most Influential People” list in 2017, it stood to reason that Jared Kushner would be listed. After all, Donald Trump had brought his son-in-law into the White House and given him a broad portfolio which, as the husband of the president’s favorite daughter, made him very powerful. Kushner couldn’t be fired. But the question of whether he was up to the job was pretty well answered by the man TIME chose to write the required encomium: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It’s hard to read the late secretary’s words as anything but damning with faint praise. 

Kissinger opened his short two-paragraph tribute by essentially saying that the presidential transition process is difficult and that a president who doesn’t know anything must depend on his advisers to help him through it. Then he wrote:

This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given. We have sporadically ­exchanged views since. As part of the Trump family, Jared is familiar with the intangibles of the President. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU, he has a broad education; as a businessman, a knowledge of administration. All this should help him make a success of his daunting role flying close to the sun.

That was it. In Kissinger’s accounting, Kushner’s only qualifications were that he went to college, was a businessman and knew the president. And we all know what happened to the guy who flew too close to the sun. 

As it happened, Kissinger had actually been quite involved with the Trump transition and knew exactly how ill-prepared they were. Shortly after the 2016 election, the 93-year-old had met with Trump, Kushner and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn at Trump Tower and traveled at their behest to China to meet with Premier Xi Jinping and set up an early bilateral meeting between the two leaders. (Trump, ever the bull in a China shop, immediately fumbled the agreement by taking a call from Taiwan’s president. Apparently, no one in the president-elect’s circle knew about the One China policy, or that no president had spoken with a Taiwanese leader since 1979.) 

Kissinger helped set up a so-called “Kushner channel” to certain powerful Chinese leaders — even as the young staffer was privately pursuing private Chinese business deals on the side. But by the time the secretary was asked to write that plaudit for TIME, it was pretty clear that he didn’t have much use for the new administration. 

That apparently didn’t matter to Kushner. Trump’s son-in-law appears to see himself as the Kissinger of this era, consciously modeling himself on the notorious diplomat, perhaps not realizing that the secretary’s foreign policy achievements were tempered by his reputation as a ruthless, immoral purveyor of realpolitik who left millions of dead bodies in his wake. Then again, it’s also possible Kushner knows that very well and is fine with the comparison.

While Kushner’s approach to world affairs is remarkably similar to Kissinger’s, the older man’s worldview was shaped by his ideology and academic understanding of world power dynamics. Kushner’s, on the other hand, is primarily influenced by his alleged business savvy; like his father-in-law, he sees everything through the lens of a win-win real estate deal. 

Kushner’s portfolio during the first Trump administration was wide-ranging. But his heart was in international relations, particularly the Middle East, where he had an intense interest in resolving the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By the end, he managed to orchestrate the Abraham Accords, an agreement normalizing diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Israel. The accords were controversial, with some calling it a useful first step, while others viewing it as a sop to commercial interests that ignored the Palestinians altogether. 

Although Kushner chose not to officially rejoin his father-in-law’s second administration, he is serving, along with Trump’s real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, as its special diplomatic envoy. So far, the duplicitous duo have tried and failed to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine and failed to stop the war with Iran. The Gaza Peace Plan that had everyone strutting around declaring victory just a few months ago is stuck. 

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The exchange of prisoners took place as required by the agreement, and some aid has been allowed to flow, but the violence has continued. The current impasse hinges on Hamas disarming and Israel withdrawing, and neither side will make the first move. There appeared to be some movement a couple of weeks ago when Trump announced that his so-called Board of Peace had secured an agreement from Hamas to disarm and Israel to suspend all military strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s immediate rejection of the idea brought Kushner back into the mix to see if he could resurrect a little of that old Kissinger magic. 

After Syria and Egypt’s surprise attack on Israel in October 1973, Kissinger spent nearly two years on “shuttle diplomacy,” flying back and forth between Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem in search of a lasting peace deal. If managing a fragile ceasefire counts as a win, he was successful. But it took Jimmy Carter to broker the Camp David Accords six years later, which brought a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel.

Over the past few days, in an attempt to salvage the obviously empty Board of Peace agreement, Kushner traveled to Egypt, along with his fellow board member and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, to meet with leaders of Hamas. The trip raised the ire of Israel’s supporters in the U.S., including former ambassador Eliot Abrams, who accused Kushner of legitimizing a terrorist organization. The leader of Hamas said they will not disarm unless Israel withdraws from Gaza, so Kushner shuttled to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu, who basically told him to pound sand; Israel will not withdraw until Hamas disarms. They decided to establish some working groups to talk further, and the next day Israel struck a seaside cafe in Gaza City, killing seven people. 

Kushner gave the game away in an interview with Fox News, putting the full onus on Hamas to end the impasse. “If they don’t follow through now on their commitment,” he said, “everyone will see that they’re not genuine about peace, and then Israel will have a lot more support from the U.S. and others to go and finish the job.” 

Trump’s special envoy for peace didn’t explain what he meant by “finish the job,” but considering what Israel has already done, it’s pretty clearly a terrifying threat. Even Henry Kissinger was more subtle than that.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the events of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

The post Jared Kushner’s Henry Kissinger cosplay should worry us all appeared first on Salon.com.

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday that Seoul received no warning of Donald Trump’s plan to slash joint military exercises, a move the U.S. president announced publicly and linked to South Korea’s refusal to help with his war in Iran.

“Neither our government nor U.S. officials knew what President Trump wrote on his Truth Social,” Cho told the National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee. “We were not notified in advance.”

Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday to “substantially reduce” the annual exercises, calling them costly and “totally inappropriate and hostile” toward North Korea. He tied the move to Seoul’s refusal to assist his effort to strip Iran of its nuclear capabilities and highlighted his “very good relationship” with Pyongyang’s ruler Kim Jong Un.

Cho said Trump’s announcement caught Seoul by surprise, but added the eventual changes to the drills were being worked out jointly. Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back was in “close consultations” with Washington, he said. “Since our defense minister was involved in the discussions, I do not think it amounts to a unilateral notification.”

He also warned that the smaller drills should not delay the transfer of wartime operational control, or OPCON, to Seoul — a longtime plan that would put a South Korean general in command of the combined U.S.-South Korean forces during a conflict.

The drills have anchored the U.S.-South Korean alliance for more than 70 years, born from the aftermath of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement but no peace treaty. North Korea, which routinely condemns the drills as rehearsals for an invasion, launched another round of ballistic missile tests last week after this year’s exercises were announced.

The rollback is already taking effect. South Korea said Wednesday that this year’s exercise will end on Aug. 21 rather than Aug. 27 after a U.S. request, cutting six days from the schedule.

Der Raketenterror gegen Kiew und andere Teile der Ukraine bringt Wladimir Putin militärisch keine Geländegewinne, zielt aber auf die Zermürbung der Zivilbevölkerung. Rixa Fürsen bespricht mit dem Sicherheits- und Verteidigungsexperten Nico Lange die Lage nach der russischen Frühjahrsoffensive 2026.

Lange kritisiert die zögerliche europäische Militärhilfe und das Fehlen strategischer Luftverteidigung scharf. Um Angriffe nachhaltig zu stoppen, müsse die Ukraine russische Rüstungsfabriken und Lieferketten mit Waffen wie dem Taurus gezielt ausschalten können.

Auch bei Rufen nach Diplomatie warnt er vor Naivität: Erfolgreiche Verhandlungen seien nur durch harten wirtschaftlichen und militärischen Druck möglich. Wirksame Hebel wären etwa ein umfassender Stopp für Schengen-Visa für Russen oder das konsequente Blockieren der Schattenflotte.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

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BERLIN —Senior conservative and social-democrat lawmakers in Germany’s governing coalition are urging the EU to sanction Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir after he called for nightly targeted killings in Gaza.

“I think targeted killings should be carried out in Gaza, remove 30, 40 [people] every night,” said Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, in a podcast episode released last Saturday. “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. No, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

The comments drew an unusually sharp response from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives.

“Ben-Gvir’s inhumane remarks can only be condemned,” Jürgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesperson for the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union parliamentary group, told POLITICO. “The EU should sanction him as a sign of the universal validity of human dignity and human rights.”

Hardt went further, saying he was convinced an Israeli government without Ben-Gvir or fellow far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich would bring Europe and Israel closer together.

Germany’s Social Democrats struck a similar tone. Adis Ahmetović, the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, said the two ministers had shocked international opinion well before their latest statements, and urged the German government to support sanctions against both.

The criticism extended across the political spectrum.

The Left’s Dietmar Bartsch called Ben-Gvir’s remarks “deeply inhumane,” and urged Berlin and Brussels to consider sanctions, including an entry ban. Markus Frohnmaier, the far-right Alternative for Germany party’s foreign policy spokesperson, said calling for the indiscriminate killing of people who posed no immediate threat crossed “a clear line.” Green Member of Parliament Marlene Schönberger branded Ben-Gvir a “far-right extremist” and said his comments were “deeply inhumane,” adding that they had “nothing whatsoever” to do with Israel’s right to defend itself and its citizens.

The statements mark a significant shift in Berlin. Germany has repeatedly pushed back against EU measures targeting Israel, including proposed sanctions on Ben-Gvir in June and, as recently as last month, restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

EU sanctions require unanimity, giving Berlin considerable sway over whether the bloc can move.

Merz’s government has not yet followed the lawmakers’ lead. The Foreign Ministry declined to take a position Monday, while some in government fear sanctioning Ben-Gvir just weeks before Israel’s Oct. 27 election could play into his hands.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul will meet his EU counterparts in Ireland on Sept. 1 and 2, where Ben-Gvir’s remarks and the war in Gaza are likely to loom over discussions.

Maximilian Heimerzheim contributed to reporting.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

Wer regiert die Welt – und was treibt sie an? In unserem regelmäßigen Machthaber-Spezial geht es um die mächtigsten und umstrittensten Politikerinnen und Politiker unserer Zeit. Wir zeigen, wie sie denken, entscheiden – und was das für uns bedeutet. Eine Politikerin oder Politiker, ein Blick hinter die Kulissen der Macht.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
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Pauline von Pezold und Frederik Schindler widmen sich in dieser Folge gemeinsam mit Jacob Ross, Research Fellow bei der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik , der Außenpolitik der AfD. Sie analysieren gemeinsam mit ihm, wie sich die Partei von einer reinen Protestbewegung zu einer gestaltenden Kraft mit einem eigenen Gegenentwurf zur Außenpolitik der Bundesregierung entwickeln will.

Im Zentrum steht das Konzept der „Multipolarität“. Einer Weltordnung, die in regionale Einflusssphären unterteilt ist, wie sie von Russland und China propagiert und von Teilen der AfD angestrebt wird. Schindler, Ross und von Pezold diskutieren, ob der Versuch der AfD, gleichzeitig die Nähe zu Putins Russland und zum Amerika unter Donald Trump zu suchen, ein Widerspruch ist oder vielmehr Teil einer kohärenten Strategie ist, um sich als neue Kraft in einer veränderten Welt zu positionieren.

Außerdem gehen sie der Frage nach, wie realistisch ein solcher außenpolitischer Kurswechsel für Deutschland wäre.

„Inside AfD“ ist der POLITICO-Podcast über die umstrittenste Partei des Landes. Trotz Radikalisierung und Beobachtung durch den Verfassungsschutz wächst die AfD weiter. Wie ist das möglich? Was treibt ihre Anhänger, Strategen und Gegner an? Wie funktioniert das Innenleben der Partei? Und was bedeutet ihr Aufstieg für das politische System Deutschlands?

Antworten liefern immer mittwochs Pauline von Pezold von POLITICO und Frederik Schindler von WELT — unaufgeregt, aber kritisch.

Fragen und Feedback gern an insideafd@politico.eu.

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PISA, Italy — Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to be beaten at her own game.

With an election approaching next year and a new far-right rival emerging, the Italian prime minister — whose political origins lie in Italy’s post-fascist right — is putting aside the moderate image she has built over her four years in office and hardening her tone on migration and security.

Meloni’s government was the first in the EU to attack the Spanish government over a sudden influx of migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week. 

While France and other countries tightened border checks, Italy went further and announced it had suspended the EU’s free-movement Schengen agreement with Madrid. Now, in Italian airports, passengers from Spain are asked to join a different line. 

Meloni’s office has made clear it has no intention of lifting the controls until at least Aug. 15, escalating the clash with Spain, which retaliated by imposing checks on travelers from Italy.

“We will not back down one millimeter on illegal immigration,” Meloni posted on X while her allies attacked the socialist Spanish government, accusing it of failing to manage migration flows. “Defending our borders, stopping human traffickers, and ensuring effective repatriation will continue to be this government’s policy,” she added.

The clash with Spain is just the latest sign that the Italian leader is doing all she can to secure her core, hard-right electorate in the face of a challenge from the right by Roberto Vannacci, a former general and member of the European Parliament.

With an election expected as early as next spring, Vannacci’s far-right National Future party has been advancing in the polls, overtaking one of Meloni’s coalition partners, the far-right League party, and gaining on another, Forza Italia, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. 

For Meloni, who began her political career in the youth wing of Italy’s post-fascist movement, the challenge strikes particularly close to home.

“There is no doubt that there is concern about containing the competition from National Future,” said Marco Tarchi, a leading right-wing political scientist. “It all boils down to a sharpening of tone. The issues — security, immigration, identity — remain the same as before.” 

During the electoral campaign that brought her to power in 2022, Meloni promised to crack down on illegal migration by putting in place a naval blockade off Italy’s coast. Though that project never ultimately happened, Meloni’s government did open detention hubs in Albania to house migrants while their asylum applications are processed. 

Vannacci, who is campaigning on security and a hard line on immigration, is calling for a more radical solution: “remigration” — a yet-to-be-detailed plan to encourage migrants to return to their countries of origin.

The crisis in Ceuta, during which tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave and nearly 100 died, provided Meloni with an opportunity to show that fighting irregular migration remains an absolute priority for her government.

Meloni’s reaction was “purely the result of domestic political calculations,” said Giorgio Gori, a member of the European Parliament from the left-wing Democratic Party. The Italian prime minister is trying to secure her electorate “by showing that she is loyal to the right-wing slogan and propaganda on migration and beyond.”

For Giovanni Orsina, director of the political science department at Rome’s Luiss Guido Carli University, Meloni’s priority at this stage is “that the Brothers of Italy [Meloni’s party] doesn’t start losing votes too” — in preparation for a potential alliance with Vannacci before or after next year’s election.

“Vannacci has been growing a lot in polls, especially over the past two months,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco from the YouTrend polling firm, noting that National Future is polling at over 7 percent. 

“Without Vannacci, the center-right could lose the upcoming election,” he said. “These seven points matter a lot.”

The Vannacci effect

Nicola Procaccini, Meloni’s lieutenant and co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, denies that Meloni is shifting on policy to protect herself from Vannacci.

“She stands where she has always stood,” he told POLITICO. “She simply isn’t the racist, xenophobic fascist she was made out to be when she first took office. And she isn’t one now, either.” 

Meloni is also facing a challenge to her support for Ukraine, with both the League and Vannacci advocating a softer line on Moscow, opposing military aid to Kyiv and arguing against an increase in defense spending. 

Though Meloni has portrayed herself as a strong backer of Ukraine, her reliance on the League for support has meant Italy has contributed just €3 billion in four years, roughly the equivalent of €1 a month for every Italian citizen, less than the cost of an espresso.

Italy has also declined to join NATO’s PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), an arms-buying scheme set up last summer after U.S. President Donald Trump ended new military aid commitments to Kyiv.

Ukraine is where Meloni’s real difference with Vannacci lies, argued Tarchi, who teaches at the University of Florence and is considered the key figure of a movement called the New Right.

“Otherwise, the gap is artificially exaggerated in rhetoric and posturing for tactical reasons,” he said.

Meloni’s allies haven’t ruled out an alliance with Vannacci but they stress that the possibility will depend on where he stands on key values such as foreign policy.

If he seeks “to position Italy, alongside Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, clearly, it is not possible to stand together,” said Procaccini. “If, instead, he chooses the West — the democracies, Western nations, Western liberal democracies — then we can certainly stand together.”

Most of Donald Trump’s success in politics has stemmed from his reputation as a savvy dealmaker. But in his 11 years on the national political scene, that has been exposed as a fiction — a persona invented by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for the president’s bestselling book “The Art of The Deal,” who followed him around for 18 months and realized in the process that no one would want to read a book about the real Trump. 

After Trump announced his run for president in 2015, Schwartz told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer he felt deep remorse for creating this erroneous image of Trump, saying if he wrote the book today, he would call it “The Sociopath.” He said, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

His words were startling, to say the least, but Schwartz’s description of the president’s true personality was revelatory. The man who touted himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker was a pathologically dishonest hype artist with the attention span of a four-year-old, described by Schwartz as having “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” who seemed “driven entirely by a need for public attention.” His alleged negotiation prowess was actually nonexistent, as the multiple failures of his businesses should have made clear. 

In Trump’s first administration, it became obvious that his idea of dealmaking consisted of willingly succumbing to flattery by malevolent actors and ineffectually bellowing at allies. Professional diplomatic and national security advisers managed to steer him away from most disasters, although he commonly embarrassed the nation on the world stage by displaying his ignorance and fondness for sucking up to adversaries. 

Trump’s second term is a whole other story. 

The president has confused his “Art of the Deal” with the art of diplomacy, and they are most definitely not the same thing. Even if he were actually talented at the former, which he is not, it would have no bearing on the latter, and the consequences of that are turning out to be substantial and damaging. By this point, it’s a cliché that Trump is “transactional,” which many (if not most) people understand to mean he is negotiating on behalf of the American people, bringing riches and security to the nation. In reality, Trump’s often self-serving deals are gravely harming the national interest. 

Diplomacy isn’t just signing a particular agreement between two countries. That may be the culmination of negotiations or just the beginning, but it isn’t actually the goal, especially for a superpower. The aim is to manage relations between countries over the long term to maintain stability and predictability; it’s not a “winner take all” proposition. Credibility is everything for a country like the United States, and now, without it, we are unleashing powerful forces that will be very hard to control.

Trump is a pathological liar. Schwartz discovered that from the very beginning. He was attached to Trump at the hip for many months, listening in on every phone call, observing his conversations and racking his brain to figure out how to present the man as a lovable rogue rather than the damaged personality he really is. The whole world has seen this up close for the past decade. 

At first, allies depended upon the professional diplomatic and national security apparatus to continue to run things in spite of Trump’s erratic behavior and belligerence. They understood early on he loved pomp and circumstance, and that he was easily flattered by obsequious compliments, so they played along, giving him the pageantry of over-the-top state visits and paying homage to him at his properties and the White House. But for the most part, they were just trying to wait out the term, expecting that the American people would realize the error of their ways and revert to being a serious nation. 

This time around is different. A recent report in the Washington Post by Steve Hendrix and Anthony Faiola revealed that the world is no longer taking the U.S. seriously, leaving the government with no credibility. As a result, international relations are unstable and dangerous. 

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When Trump regained office the second time, the world quaked at his swagger, backed up by a bizarre tariff regime that seemed to be put together by Mad Libs. The markets dropped, recriminations flowed, and it looked as if Trump had finally been completely unleashed. To some extent, he had been. He and his close circle had decided to do whatever they wanted and see what they could get away with. But it soon became evident there wasn’t really any strategy or even any particular goals, despite the apparent participation of people like Elon Musk and the authors of Project 2025. In the end, it was all about Trump’s whims, which changed from minute to minute. 

The short attention span Schwartz described is now even more pronounced. The president’s obsession with building monuments to himself notwithstanding, he flits from subject to subject, bellowing threats to all who oppose him and rewarding his cronies with ever more obvious modes of corruption. 

The world has decided to stop paying attention. “[M]ost consequently,” Hendrix and Faiola wrote, “Iran refuses to bend under American bombs and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Russian President Vladimir Putin persists in his war in Ukraine. Europe met Trump’s recently renewed demands for Greenland with a collective sigh, and trading partners have shrugged off the latest tariffs.” 

Over the years, world leaders have had varying reactions to American presidents of both parties. But the country’s leaders have never been disregarded. 

Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Post he was surprised at how long Trump’s bluffs and bellicosity had worked, crediting it to the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

The president’s threats are now seen as empty, and his so-called deals aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. This was most recently on display in mid-July when he made a big, splashy announcement of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Within a day, Trump added a poison-pill requirement by way of a Truth Social post that left the Saudis reeling. His threats to annihilate Iran are now falling on deaf ears because he’s all over the place, usually lying about the progress of diplomatic talks, showing that he’s full of bluster and bombast but lacks a strategy to win and ideas about how to get out. 

America’s political dynamics have us all just trying to hold on until he’s out of office so we can try to rebuild from the rubble. But the loss of credibility, the exposure of the nation’s weaknesses and the people’s willingness to put such a man in charge will not be easily repaired. The long-term damage to our international reputation, coupled with the weakness we are demonstrating in any number of areas, will leave us vulnerable for a long time to come.

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Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.

It’s tough to find any semblance of a silver lining in the humiliating implosion of Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last year, especially after a week that has brought us another escalation of the war no one supports, a recycled trade war with Canada, an out-of-nowhere nuclear deal with a country that should never have access to nuclear weapons, and yet more threats against a small nation that poses no threat to the United States. 

But here’s the upside, just maybe: The tiny and perverse cadre of “anti-anti-Trump leftists” has been decisively silenced. If you find that phrase baffling, consider yourself fortunate. You evidently haven’t wasted any of your one wild and precious life arguing with renegade Marxists about whether the Trump-Putin alliance, in world-historical terms, was “objectively” superior to neoliberal internationalism on the Clinton-Obama model. 

If this is a safe space, I will admit here that at one time I was around one-third vulnerable to such arguments. I don’t mean the part about Trump being a force for progressive change in any sense, even if entirely by accident, since that was obviously and hilariously wrong, not to mention based on the same “enemy of my enemy” pretzel logic that produced the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. But on the level of a sophomore-seminar intellectual exercise, I could understand why self-appointed contrarians like Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald saw Trump as a disruptive force who might upend the softcore imperialism of the previous three or four decades, which had led to the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hegemony of corporate capital. 

You didn’t have to be an unregenerate Leninist or an online troll or a Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservative (or all three at once!) to be momentarily seduced by Trump’s “America First” nonsense. Disgruntled Americans of all varieties voted for Trump by the millions, based in large part on his populist, isolationist rhetoric. Maureen Dowd’s notorious “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk” column from 2016 should be inscribed above the gates of one of the lower circles of hell as a permanent warning to know-it-all media commentators. 

It was, of course, immensely helpful to Trump’s agenda of fabrications, exaggerations and outright lies that we experienced the failings of mainstream U.S. foreign policy all over again during the strange interregnum of Joe Biden’s presidency, with its pious invocation of a “rules-based order” — where the rules are set by America, of course — and its theological commitment to a now-entirely-imaginary “two-state solution” in the Middle East. Several things can be said in retrospect about Biden’s fateful embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu on the Tel Aviv tarmac after the Oct. 7 attacks: It was an authentic and heartfelt gesture, it was a grievous political error and it paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe now widely perceived as genocidal. 

Trump’s return to power has, at the very least, finally confounded all the doofuses who ever took anything he said at face value, and has also dispensed with the contradictory or two-faced rhetoric of the Biden years. There’s no more talk of universal human rights or the spread of democracy. The fundamental logic of Trumpian policy is cynicism all the way down: We don’t care about any of those things and we never did. To paraphrase Stephen Miller, surely the most instrumental figure in the Trump White House, the only thing that matters is power. 

Maybe we should be grateful for the epic and reckless corruption of this administration, since Miller’s ambitious schemes to reshape America and the world as a white-supremacist wonderland are consistently undercut by the enormous levels of graft surrounding him. (Miller strikes me as a true believer whose corruption is moral rather than financial, one of many traits he appears to share with Joseph Goebbels.)

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As the Trump administration veers unsteadily into its lame-duck phase and a likely midterm wipeout, its quest for a legacy achievement becomes increasingly pathetic, not to mention increasingly dangerous. Trump’s dance of death with the Iranian regime might have a comical aspect if the lives of many thousands of people and the future of the global order were not at stake. By goading the president into restarting the war for the third time (by my count), the new roster of hardline leaders in Tehran, at least for now, have strengthened both their domestic control and their international reputation. It’s difficult to imagine, in fact, how Trump and his ludicrous cast of advisers could possibly have screwed this up worse than they did. (D.C. rumors suggest that high-testosterone “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth will ultimately be compelled to walk the plank over this fiasco.)

Meanwhile, the search for something that can be pitched to last-ditch MAGA loyalists as a victory, no matter how petty and insignificant, continues. Trump has never given up on his dream of seizing or annexing Greenland, but it was always more like an extortion scheme or a real estate scam than a military threat. Roughly the same applies to his improvised plan to rebuild Gaza as a Trumpified new Riviera, which took even Netanyahu by surprise and was never likely to escape the uncanny valley of AI fantasy. 

I’m inclined to feel similar about this week’s reports that Seb Gorka, an unhinged far-right free radical with some sort of roving-ninja role in the Trump White House, is urging a military assault against Islamist militia groups in Mali, a West African nation with complicated internal dynamics and no relationship whatever to U.S. national security. Again, this might be amusing if real human lives weren’t at stake, and if billions in taxpayer dollars appropriated by Congress for aid to impoverished countries like Mali weren’t being diverted to right-wing nationalists, white supremacists and anti-LGBTQ groups instead of humanitarian and healthcare NGOs. (Read this ProPublica report for more on that.)

Things have truly gotten dark if we’re looking to JD Vance and Marco Rubio as the proverbial adults in the room, managing the worst impulses of their increasingly disinhibited and incapacitated boss. I don’t know which of those two geniuses signed off on the reported nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which may fall apart, goddess willing, under the weight of its impromptu idiocy and the fact that literally no one thinks it’s a good idea. Mohammed bin Salman, that kingdom’s journalist-murdering leader, is roughly the last person in the world who should have access to nuclear materials. If this deal goes through, it could rank among the very worst of Trump’s foreign policy blunders. Of course there’s still time for more. 

The post Trump’s foreign policy enters its decadent, desperate end stage appeared first on Salon.com.

For a man who considers himself the greatest builder the world has ever known — move over, Pharaoh Khufu! — Donald Trump has managed vanishingly little of it in either of his presidential terms. What his administrations have done is show an impressive talent for tearing things down. 

From the East Wing of the White House to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and public health, Trump has demonstrated a clear aptitude for demolition. Among his most successful accomplishments has been his assault on the international institutions that were created in response to the worst catastrophes of the 20th century. 

During his first campaign and administration, Trump constantly attacked NATO, the military and political alliance formed in 1949 in response to Soviet aggression that operates on the principle of collective security. He also withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and ripped up the Iran nuclear agreement, cornerstones of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. But Trump didn’t stop there. He withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Since he returned to office in January 2025, he has continued to attacks on NATO and signed an executive order withdrawing from 66 additional international organizations. 

To be fair, Republicans have never really trusted international institutions. This tendency stretches back at least a century to the League of Nations. While the GOP has tended to back alliances like NATO, which they felt they could control, the party has been deeply suspicious of organizations like the United Nations, which they believe threaten national sovereignty — and impede America’s ability to act with impunity anywhere in the world. Since 1998, this has especially included the International Criminal Court, which is now coming under assault by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on behalf of the Trump administration.

Since its creation, the I.C.C. has been the bête noire of the American right. At first glance, one might have thought such an organization would have been championed by the U.S. After all, the country pioneered the idea of such a tribunal after World War II when it ran the Nuremberg trials to hold Nazi leaders accountable for crimes against humanity, while also pointedly declaring that waging a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime,” containing within itself “the accumulated evil of the whole.” The idea of holding individuals responsible for such violations was forged in that process and became the basis of international criminal law. 

In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted and established four crimes over which it could take jurisdiction if the party state refused use its own legal system: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The statute was immediately decried by Republicans (and some conservative Democrats) as a threat to U.S. sovereignty on the basis that Americans could be subject to political prosecutions. But that wasn’t all of the story. It’s clear they also wanted to maintain the impunity conferred by America’s superpower status. 

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One hundred twenty-five countries are parties to the agreement. The U.S., under Bill Clinton, was a signatory to the treaty, but it was never ratified, and in 2002 it was officially withdrawn by George W. Bush. Israel, Sudan, Burundi, the Philippines and Russia have also withdrawn. 29 countries have signed but not ratified the agreement, while 41 others, including China and India, have neither signed nor acceded to it. 

Since then, the I.C.C. has tried war criminals and has a number of active cases, although few leaders have faced charges while in office. In November 2024, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became an exception for his conduct in Israel’s war against Gaza following the attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, joining the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. 

Even after Bush withdrew from the treaty, it was assumed the I.C.C. could grow its legitimacy among the holdouts — including the U.S., which has used the body itself when it was advantageous. But that is not to be. 

Project 2025, the plan for a MAGA overhaul of the entire federal government produced by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, explicitly demanded that the U.S. to “must end blind support for international organizations,” only using them to the extent that they help the country achieve its own goals regardless of the effect on other nations.

Now, in his quest to be the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, Rubio has launched a full-blown assault on the I.C.C. with the support of Trump. The move is part of a variety of crusades the secretary is leading to establish his MAGA bona fides, and comes in addition to his international “far left terrorist crusade,” which I recently chronicled. Not content just to refuse to participate in the process and pledge to rely on our own justice system, as Republicans have done in the past, Rubio wants the I.C.C. destroyed completely. 

The administration has already sanctioned eight of the court’s judges, including its chief prosecutor, banning their travel to the U.S. On July 13, Rubio took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to declare that the I.C.C. “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system.” Using the usual sophomoric language of the MAGA movement, such as referring to “smug globalists,” he declared that the U.S. will now lead a “diplomatic campaign” against the Court, which will include penalties on countries that continue to cooperate with it, including by withdrawing foreign assistance. This is a tried and true Trump tactic that the president has even deployed on the home front against blue states that disagree with him. Now, it looks like the GOP establishment, of which Rubio has long been a representative, has signed on to the president’s mob-like coercion tactics against all rivals foreign and domestic.

According to Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the administration’s goal is to destroy multilateralism altogether using what he called “four basic behaviors: defection, rebellion, substitution, and conditional cooperation.” Trump has quit some institutions, attempted to sabotage others and even tried to establish his own, such as the “Board of Peace” and the “Shield of the Americas,” both of which the administration believes it can dominate — and no doubt profit from. It has reengaged with others, such as the World Bank and the G20, but on a conditional basis: They are expected to do as they are told. But, as Patrick observed, “the administration’s campaign to dismantle the ICC is a campaign of pure destruction, a coercive attempt to impose the United States’s will on the rest of the world.”

The world has reacted in horror to Rubio’s moves, as we might expect. Patrick wrote, “Given the voluble reaction from America’s closest allies, the full-bore attempt by the administration to destroy the ICC would seem to be both imprudent and futile, an effort in symbolic politics that will further cement the reputation of the United States as an unhinged, domineering hegemon, rather than a benevolent and farsighted global leader.”

I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

This policy is Marco Rubio’s baby. He owns it. The secretary has established himself as the would-be statesman who took Donald Trump’s wrecking ball and made it his own. In doing so, his remake of himself in the Dear Leader’s image is complete.

The post Marco Rubio’s quest to destroy the International Criminal Court appeared first on Salon.com.