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Korea Herald
3 hours ago
- Business
- Korea Herald
[Hal Brands] A new chapter in US foreign policy
Nearly six months into Donald Trump's presidency, a Trump Doctrine is coming into view. Contrary to the fears of his critics, and the hopes of some admirers, Trump is no isolationist. And contrary to those who claim Trump is simply a marvel of ac hoc-ery and inconsistency, there is a distinctive pattern to the policies he has pursued. This Trump Doctrine emphasizes using American power aggressively — more aggressively than Trump's immediate predecessors — to reshape key relationships and accrue US advantage in a rivalrous world. The isolationist label has long followed Trump, but it's never accurately described an idiosyncratic man. Yes, Trump disdains core elements of US globalism, from the international trade system America established to its promotion of democratic values and its defense commitments around the world. Yet Trump has also argued that America should assert itself more forcefully in a cutthroat world. And today, as Trump pursues a capacious view of presidential power at home, he is offering an equally ambitious conception of American power abroad. Trump rails against long, costly nation-building efforts. But he has nonetheless waged two short, sharp Middle Eastern conflicts: one to deter Yemen's Houthis from attacking US forces and Red Sea shipping, the other to roll back the Iranian nuclear program. Several US presidents pledged to use force to keep Tehran from crossing the nuclear threshold; Trump really did it. Meanwhile, Trump started trade wars against dozens of countries, in hopes of reshaping the international economy. He deployed diplomatic leverage, and explicit threats of abandonment, to remake the transatlantic bargain by getting European allies to spend much more on defense. Trump also wielded America's innovation power — its role in designing high-end semiconductors — to bring Saudi Arabia and the UAE into Washington's tech bloc and make them partners in his push for 'AI dominance.' Closer to home, Trump used veiled threats to pry Panama out of China's Belt and Road Initiative. He has demanded territorial concessions from Panama, Denmark and Canada. At the same time, Trump touts his Golden Dome missile shield, meant to protect the homeland and give America greater freedom of action against its foes. This isn't standard-issue, post-1945 American internationalism: It's hard to imagine prior presidents telling allies to yield their land. But neither is it a retreat into Fortress America. And by applying American power in such energetic, omnidirectional fashion, Trump has revealed much about the true state of world affairs. Policy journals brim with articles about American decline and the advent of multipolarity. But Trump, in his inimitable way, has reminded so many countries where power really lies. For example: The strike on Iran demonstrated America's unique global military reach and its ability, together with Israel, to reshape the Middle East while relegating Russia and China — nominally Iran's allies — to the sidelines. Trump's key insight is that the world's sole superpower has more muscle than commonly understood. Yet the Trump Doctrine nonetheless suffers from three big problems. First, its exercise of power is weakened by its dearth of strategy. Trump's trade war got off to a farcical start because he failed to consider how sky-high tariffs might wreck the US economy — a real-time discovery that forced a rapid, humiliating climb-down. A president who privileges the art of the deal over intellectual consistency sometimes pursues contradictory policies: Trump's tariffs against Indo-Pacific allies erode their prosperity and make it harder for them to spend more on defense. Second, a president who sometimes struggles to distinguish friends from enemies sometimes fails to point US power in the right direction. Trump delights in taking aim at US allies. He has been more reluctant to confront Russia, even as Vladimir Putin makes a mockery of Trump's desire for peace in Ukraine — and even though Putin's war economy is increasingly vulnerable to the commercial and financial coercion that Trump so often threatens to employ. Third, the best presidents build US power for the future, but Trump risks depleting it instead. Maybe the One Big Beautiful Bill will juice the economy — or maybe it will lock in structural deficits that constrain defense spending and growth. Slashing foreign aid saves little money but squanders US global influence; the war on universities threatens the research ecosystem that underpins America's economic and military might. Moreover, a policy of tough love toward allies could turn into mutually destructive hostility, and a superpower that regularly coerces its friends could wreck the soft power that lubricates key relationships. Trump revels in using US power, but he doesn't quite understand where it comes from. That's the central irony, and fundamental weakness, of the doctrine guiding his administration today. Hal Brands Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.
Shafaq News
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Shafaq News
Houthis launch dual drone strikes on Israel
Shafaq News - Sanaa Yemen's Houthis (Ansarallah) carried out a dual military operation against Israel, using three drones, the group announced on Tuesday. In a statement, Yahya Saree, the group's military spokesperson, said two drones struck what he described as an 'important' military site in the Negev region, while a third targeted the Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) port in southern Israel, confirming that the attacks 'successfully' achieved their objectives. #معركة_الفتح_الموعود_والجهاد_المقدس — العميد يحيى سريع (@army21yemen) July 15, 2025 Saree described the assault as part of the group's response to the Israeli 'genocide' in Gaza, where Israeli hostilities have killed over 58,000 people, mostly women and children, vowing that 'our operations will continue until the aggression against Gaza stops and the siege is lifted.' The Israeli military has yet to comment on the incident. The latest strike comes days after a similar attack on Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, which the Houthis have repeatedly targeted. The group has also intensified maritime operations in the Red Sea, attacking ships it considers connected to Israel.
New York Post
4 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Mike Waltz grapples with ‘Signalgate' during UN confirmation hearing
US ambassador to the UN nominee Mike Waltz was forced to confront 'Signalgate' during his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday — and insist he wasn't technically fired as national security adviser over it. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee grilled Waltz over the Signal group-chat scandal involving him and a slew of Trump administration officials — accusing him of outright lying about how Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to the chat, which involved planning the mid-March airstrikes on the Houthis. 'I was hoping to hear from you that you had some sense of regret over sharing what was very sensitive, timely information about a military strike on a commercially available app,' Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) grumbled to Waltz, who was national security adviser at the time. 'Signalgate' wasn't a top focus for lawmakers on the panel, but after about an hour into the hearing, Democrats made sure to dredge it up and pummel Waltz over it as they weigh his UN confirmation. 'There was no classified information on that chat,' Waltz countered, a point he reiterated multiple times during the hearing. 4 Mike Waltz tangles with several Democratic senators on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as he seeks to be confirmed as the next US ambassador to the UN. Getty Images 4 Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) scolds Waltz for not expressing more remorse over the Signal chat debacle. Getty Images Waltz has been accused of accidentally adding Goldberg to the discussion. While the Trump administration has maintained that there was technically no information on the leaked chat deemed classified, published versions of it show that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth messaged times and targets for the US' military strikes against the Houthis. Perhaps the most forceful Democrat who Waltz faced Tuesday was Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who accused him of being untruthful about how Goldberg was added to the Signal chat. Initially, Waltz claimed he never met the Atlantic's top editor and implied Goldberg's number had been inadvertently added to his phone. 'I've seen you not only fail to stand up, but lie,' Booker fumed, accusing the UN nominee of exhibiting 'profound cowardice.' 'That's not leadership when you blame people that tell the truth,' Booker said. 'That's not leadership when you can't say the words, 'I made a mistake. I could have done better.' ' 4 Waltz tries to downplay the Signalgate fiasco during his hearing. Getty Images Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) also underscored that 'Signal has not been approved for use by U.S. government officials for the sharing of classified information.' Waltz stressed that Signal's use was encouraged by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during the Biden administration, though he later admitted that it was not designated for sharing classified information — although he still insisted wasn't shared in the leaked chat. About a month after the Signalgate scandal, Trump announced that he would nominate Waltz as his US ambassador to the UN and make Secretary of State Marco Rubio his acting national security adviser. In the time since, Waltz has maintained a paycheck from the White House over his role as an adviser, he said. 4 Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) presses Waltz about the information that had been shared in the Signal chat. Getty Images 'I was not fired. The president never said that, nor did the vice president,' Waltz told Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) Should Waltz get confirmed, he will fill the UN role that has been held by Dorothy Shea in an acting capacity since January. Trump had initially nominated Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) for the post but later withdrew her nomination in March amid fears about winnowing the razor-thin House GOP majority if she gave up her seat for it.
Russia Today
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
Humanitarian aid from hell: The extermination of Palestinians is being disguised as help
The Gaza genocide is special. And not in one but two regards. As has often been observed, this is the first genocide in history that is, in essence, livestreamed. No genocide before has been committed under the eyes of the world like this one. And second, the Gaza genocide is undermining and, in effect, devastating whole moral and legal orders – or at least longstanding claims to them – in an equally unprecedented way. These two peculiarities are related: The only way the world as a whole could have tolerated the Gaza genocide for almost three years now is by stubbornly disregarding fundamental norms, both written and unwritten. For instance, almost no state – with the exception of Yemen (under de facto control of the Ansar Allah movement or Houthis) – has even tried to comply with its binding and clear obligations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, namely to 'prevent and punish' the crime of genocide. No one with the power – alone or with others – to do so, not in the Middle East, not beyond it, has come to save the Palestinian victims of the Gaza genocide in the only manner that would work: By stopping their Israeli murderers by massive force. Yet the small but still disproportionately influential part of the world that calls itself the West has gone beyond merely failing to act. That's because, whether the West is a civilization once shaped by Christianity or not, for a long time now, its true inner core has been hypocrisy. And during the Gaza Genocide, the West's compulsive need to rationalize even its most vicious actions into acts of virtue covered by 'values', has led to a new peak of absolute moral and intellectual perversion: Precisely because the West has not only abandoned the Palestinian victims but is actively co-perpetrating this genocide together with Israel, its elites – in politics, culture, the media, the police, and judiciary – have made a sustained, obstinate effort to radically alter our sense of right and wrong, from specific legal norms down to our intuitive and widely shared understanding of limits never to be crossed. Waging, for example, a so-called 'war' by killing or injuring – often maiming for life – over 50,000 children (as of May 2025)? A 'war' in which we receive one reliable testimony after another that many of these children are targeted deliberately, including by drone operators and snipers? A 'war' in which starvation, medical deprivation, and the promotion of epidemics have all been deployed equally deliberately? In the West, we are told to call this 'self-defense'. Indeed, we are asked – with great insistence, to say the least – to believe that this form of mass-murderous, infanticiding 'self-defense' is something to be proud of, even vicariously: The mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, for instance – notorious for his suppression of any signs of resistance to Israeli genocide – has just declared that city hall will keep flying the Israeli flag. In the same depraved spirit, the establishments of the West hand out punishment – from vicious police beatings to crippling lawfare to international sanctions – not to the perpetrators and accomplices of the Gaza genocide, in Israel and elsewhere, but to those who resist it in solidarity with its Palestinian victims. Protesters, journalists worth their salt, and even a UN special rapporteur are treated like criminals, even terrorists for actually standing up against the crime of genocide, as – just yesterday, it seems – we were all officially supposed to do. But 'never again' has been turned into 'definitely again, and as long as the murderers want, since they are Israelis and our friends'. It is in this context of a reversal of morality, law, and meaning so complete the overused term 'Orwellian' for once really applies that we can understand what is now happening to the concept of 'humanitarian' action. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica's back-to-basics definition, a humanitarian is a 'person who works to make other people's lives better,' for instance, by trying to end world hunger. Since modern humanitarianism already has a history of two centuries, historians, such as Michael Barnett in his 'Empire of Humanity', have delivered more complex accounts. Critics have long denounced humanitarianism's limits and even flaws. For French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, it is what's left when a more optimistic humanism decays: A sort of bleak emergency response, a sign that the world has gotten worse, again. In particular, during the post-Cold War decades of American hubris – misnamed the 'unipolar moment' – humanitarianism often allied with Western imperialism. In the war of aggression against Iraq that started in 2003, for instance, humanitarian organizations became servants to the aggressors, invaders, and occupiers. Yet, whatever view of humanitarianism you may endorse, there are things the concept can only accommodate for the completely deranged and limitlessly evil, such as massacring starving civilians and concentration camps. And yet, in Gaza, both have been labeled humanitarian. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a shady US-Israeli concoction, has promoted a scheme in which pittances of food are effectively used as bait for lethal traps: Palestinians deliberately blockaded by Israel have been lured to four kill zones masquerading as aid distribution points. Over the past one and a half months, Israeli forces and Western mercenaries have killed at least 789 victims – and injured thousands – at or near these satanic traps. Obviously, killing the unarmed on such a scale is not collateral damage but deliberate. By now, the murderous intent behind the scheme has been confirmed by various sources, including Israeli. No wonder that 170 real humanitarian and human rights group have signed a protest against this fake relief and genuine mass murder scheme. And then there is the concentration camp plan: Israeli leaders have already driven the surviving inhabitants of Gaza – one of the most densely settled places on Earth even before the genocide – into an area comprising only 20% of Gaza's devastated surface. Yet that is not evil enough for them: On the way to what seems to be their idea of a final solution of the Gaza question, they have now pitched a new plan to their US allies, namely, to herd the survivors into an even smaller area. This de facto concentration camp they advertise as a 'humanitarian city'. From there, Palestinians would have only two ways out: By death or by leaving Gaza. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz wants to sell us this as 'voluntary'. It is an irony of history that Israeli genociders now compete not only with the crimes of the Nazis but also with the Germans' horrendous abuse of language. The location of this deadly ethnic-cleansing transit station? The ruins of Rafah. You may remember Rafah, once a bustling city in southern Gaza, as the place Israel's Western allies pretended to try to protect, sort of, for a while. Those warnings were worth nothing, of course. Rafah was flattened, and now the area is earmarked for the concentration camp to end it all. The scheme is so outrageous – but then, that is Israel's ordinary modus operandi – that even its critics can hardly keep up with just how depraved it is. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA – the effective aid distribution organization that Israel has shut down in pursuit of its starvation strategy, killing almost 400 of its local staff – has posted on X that the 'humanitarian city' would amount to a second Nakba and 'create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians.' The Nakba was the Zionist ethnic cleansing, interspersed with massacres, of around 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. But Lazzarini is wrong if he believes that the first Nakba ever ended: For the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence, it only initiated an ongoing process of theft, apartheid, and often murder. A process that has now culminated in genocide, as multiple international experts acknowledge, including the eminent Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. This is not a second Nakba, but the Israeli attempt to complete the first one. Lazzarini's comment that the humanitarian city plan would create concentration camps on the border with Egypt is, of course, also true as far as it goes. Yet all of Gaza has long been what (even by 2003) the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called 'the world's largest concentration camp ever.' The point is not to be pedantic. What Lazzerini's protest – welcome as it is – still misses is that what Israel is now doing to the Palestinians is creating a fresh hell within a much older one. But not Israel alone. The West is, as always, deeply involved. Let's set aside that the interwar Zionists learned about how to use concentration camps against Palestinians from the British Mandate authorities, as with other methods of vicious suppression, too. Now as well, various Western figures and agencies have become involved in the Israeli schemes of resettlement that drive the humanitarian city plan. Tony Blair's foundation – really a commercial consulting and influence-peddling company systematically working for the dark side wherever it pays well – and the prestigious and powerful Boston Consulting Group have both been caught contributing to Israeli ethnic cleansing planning. And behind that stands the declared will of no one less than Donald Trump, the president of the US, who has long been explicit that he would like to see Gaza rebuilt as a vast, glitzy Trumpistan and without Palestinians. From the beginning of the Gaza genocide, it has been both a brutal crime and a constant attempt to redefine what is right and what is wrong so that this crime would appear necessary, justifiable, and even as a legitimate opportunity to profit. And the West's elites – with far too few exceptions – have joined Israel in this absolute perversion of fundamental ethics and reason no less than in the mass murdering. If both Israel and the West are not stopped at long last, they will use the Gaza genocide to change much of the world into a hellscape where everything we have learned to despise about the Nazis will become the new normal.
Roya News
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Roya News
Houthis claims drone strike on 'Israeli' military target in Negev
The military spokesperson for Yemen's Ansar Allah (Houthis) announced Tuesday that the group's drone forces had targeted a military installation belonging to the 'Zionist enemy' in the Negev region. In a brief statement carried by the group's media channels, the spokesperson said, 'The Air Force carried out a drone operation targeting a military site of the Zionist enemy in the Negev.' No further details were provided regarding the nature or results of the strike.
