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One of the oldest and most sacred Christian monasteries in the world was set ablaze overnight Monday when Russia launched a massive <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/14/europe/kyiv-pechersk-lavra-monastery-fire-russian-attack-intl-">missile and drone assault</a> on Kyiv, damaging the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra — a site that has stood as the spiritual heart of Eastern Orthodox Christianity for nearly a thousand years.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Russia hit Kiev Pechersk Lavra tonight—intentionally or not doesn’t matter.
Lavra is one of the most important monasteries in Russian Orthodoxy. It was founded in a cave in the 11th century and important historical personalities are buried there, including Nicholas II Prime… <a href="https://t.co/7lI9XPmFj8">pic.twitter.com/7lI9XPmFj8</a>
&mdash; Katya Sedgwick (@KatyaSedgwick) <a href="https://x.com/KatyaSedgwick/status/2066396581751075237?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 15, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The Lavra, founded in 1051 by a monk named Anthony who had trained on Mount Athos, is not merely a Ukrainian landmark. It is among the founding institutions of Christian civilization in the Slavic world, the monastery where the region&#8217;s earliest written histories were composed, where saints are entombed in underground caves, and where pilgrims have traveled for centuries from across the Orthodox world. UNESCO had already placed it on its World Heritage in Danger list since Russia&#8217;s full-scale invasion began.
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Ukraine&#8217;s emergency services reported that 800 square meters of the Dormition Cathedral&#8217;s roof were destroyed in the blaze, with a separate fire consuming 1,000 square meters of an adjacent national cultural complex. Firefighters battled through the night beneath the monastery&#8217;s iconic towers and domes. At least nine people were killed across Ukraine in the overnight assault — four in Kyiv, and five rescue workers in Kharkiv responding to an earlier strike — after Russia launched 611 drones and 70 missiles.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the smoldering site Monday, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/russia-attacks-fire-kyiv-pechersk-lavra-ukraine-monastery-rcna350077">calling</a> the attack &#8220;one of Russia&#8217;s most serious crimes against Christian culture to date.&#8221; Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv called it &#8220;a crime against humanity, against history, against Christianity.&#8221; Ukraine&#8217;s foreign minister called Russian dictator Vladimir Putin &#8220;the 21st century&#8217;s worst barbarian.&#8221;
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Russia denied responsibility, claiming a stray Ukrainian Patriot missile caused the damage. Ukraine&#8217;s security service rejected that, citing drone wreckage recovered at the scene.
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The attack carries a grim historical echo. This is not the first time the Dormition Cathedral has been destroyed on Moscow&#8217;s orders. In 1941, retreating Soviet NKVD operatives mined much of central Kyiv before abandoning it, demolishing the cathedral and killing thousands of civilians in the process. The Soviet Union blamed the Nazis for the Katyn massacre — and that lie held for decades. The cathedral was only fully rebuilt after Ukrainian independence, consecrated in the year 2000.
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The monastery has endured Mongol sackings, Golden Horde raids, Soviet secularization, and World War II destruction. Each time, it was rebuilt. Its underground caves still hold the naturally mummified remains of medieval saints, including Nestor the Chronicler, author of the region&#8217;s earliest histories. Its bell towers and baroque churches have defined the Kyiv skyline for centuries.
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Whether this latest assault represents another wound from which the Lavra will recover — or something more final — will depend on how the war ends. What is not in question is what was attacked: not just a Ukrainian building, but one of the living roots of Christian civilization.
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Russia Strikes Kyiv in Large Scale Drone and Missile Attack

Russia Sets One Of Christianity’s Holiest Sites Ablaze In Bombing

Christianity

Kyiv

Russia

Ukraine

Something is going on, and it&#8217;s been going on for a while: ideological subversion.
And it&#8217;s a dangerous threat to the United States of America.
We all know that Candace Owens hates a lot of things: the truth, basic scientific knowledge, proper pronunciation of words, Charlie Kirk&#8217;s widow, and, naturally, the Jews.
But undergirding all of that is a conspiratorial, anti-American worldview. She does not like America, and neither do her ideological allies. That’s why she is headed to Russia: to visit her friends, ideological handlers, and sponsors.
The reason I&#8217;m saying that she has ideological solidarity with those governments is that our current status with Russia is not great. The United States government has a problem with the Russian government. The State Department currently advises Americans not to travel to Russia for any reason. They stated, “U.S. citizens are at risk due to terrorism, unrest, wrongful detention and other threats. U.S. citizens in Russia should leave immediately.”
They warn that the American embassy in Russia will not be able to help you if you travel there and get in trouble with the Russian government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed out that the United States has severe sanctions on Russia right now for a reason.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2434?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can go there because they are useful idiots for the Russian regime. They agree with the Russian regime that America is terrible and morally deficient. They agree that American power in the world is evil.
A lot of people have speculated about what happened to Candace and Tucker; were they paid off?
I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s the case. I will grant them their sincerity. I think they honestly believe all the terrible things they&#8217;re saying.
So do the Russians.
So what is Candace doing in Russia? She&#8217;s not going there for the fashion. It has been reported that she is attending and speaking at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum alongside Vladimir Putin as well as Alexander Dugin, known as “Putin&#8217;s brain,” the great theorist of Russian supremacism, as well as other members of the Russian government and Intel community.
According to Ryan Mauro, “SPIEF, where Candace will speak on a panel, is a known hub for Russian intel. Leaked docs show that its panels serve as ‘recruitment pipelines’ for foreign collaborators. Top goals are ‘media partnerships’ with ‘foreign influencers’ as part of ‘state-directed soft power.’”
None of this should be a shock. You&#8217;ll recall that recently, Candace Owens interviewed Hunter Biden. It was a warm interview; very, very strange. After her interview, Laura Loomer correctly reported that Russia Today, which is the Russian state media, posted 17 separate clips of Candace&#8217;s interview with Hunter Biden, which is not a shock because she is their ideological ally.
They do the same thing with Tucker Carlson, another one of these Russian allies. He has spent years parroting Russia&#8217;s perspective on the world over and over again.
When people say what happened to Tucker, the answer is: nothing. He always believed those things; he just had people in seats above him at Fox preventing him from going fully off the rails. The Tucker you&#8217;re seeing today is the real Tucker.
Russia loves the real Tucker because he agrees with them, obviously. In 2024, Tucker traveled to Russia and praised the magic of their Russian-operated shopping cart because the man had never been to an Aldi.
He is one of the most silver-spoon people in America, and he was astonished by the workings of basic grocery stores.
So what is actually happening here? Candace, Tucker, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Thomas Massie; why all this warmth toward Russia? The answer is ideological kinship.
But the really big question here is: Why is this important?
Over the past decade, it has felt like everything in America is falling apart; the polarization is extraordinary. We&#8217;ve seen institutional distrust, economic unrest, and civil unrest.
A lot of that is not a coincidence; it is part of an actual plan. That doesn&#8217;t mean everything that we&#8217;re seeing in America is dictated by the Russian government. They don&#8217;t have that kind of power. They didn’t rig the 2016 election or some nonsense like that.
A lot of the institutional distrust that Americans have right now is earned: Russiagate or the government&#8217;s response to Covid, or the Black Lives Matter scam, or the cover-up of Joe Biden&#8217;s mental incompetence. There’s a lot of blame to go around for institutional distrust.
But here&#8217;s the thing: Our enemies in Russia, China, and Iran wait for vulnerability in the United States, and then they exacerbate divides and exploit them.
Here&#8217;s how the world works through the lens of actual legitimate influence operations. These are real things that have been going on for decades.
Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet informant and KGB operative. He defected to the United States in the early 1970s. In a 1984 interview that&#8217;s become famous online, titled “Deception was my job,” he laid out the four stages of what he called ideological subversion that were created by radical Soviet Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within and then destroy them.
Listen to how he lays out the operation here:
<blockquote>To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite their abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It&#8217;s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow, and is divided into four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy.
In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.
The result you can see: Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, dropouts, or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern.
You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.</blockquote>
Demoralization, as Bezmenov spells it out, is followed by stage two: destabilization. Destabilization is where you create the preconditions for stage three, which is a crisis, a breakdown. And then stage four is normalization of the new set of values.
Right now we are still in the late stages of stage one demoralization, where we have had several generations of indoctrination at the highest levels in America into anti-Americanism. And that destabilization requires friends; it requires ideological allies.
We could have destabilization at any moment. All it takes is a little push, and we&#8217;re in crisis. Maybe there&#8217;s an economic downturn, maybe there&#8217;s foreign chaos.
But right now, our enemies are laser-focused on demoralizing us. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, all the people that Russia has been openly using and allying with, are demoralization agents.
They are doing the work. Russia needs them and is using them, and they&#8217;re not shy about this.
Alexander Dugin has appeared on a wide variety of Woke Right shows, ranging from Tucker to Alex Jones. In 1997, he wrote a book called “Foundations of Geopolitics.” That book was then apparently used as a textbook at the General Staff Academy in Russia and became part of their actual policy.
Here&#8217;s a quote from that book. See if you can spot what&#8217;s going on.
<blockquote>It is especially important to bring geopolitical turmoil into the US domestic reality by encouraging all kinds of separatism. There is ethnic, social, and racial conflict, actively supporting all dissident movements of extremist, racist,and sectarian groups that destabilize internal political processes in the United States. At the same time, it makes sense to support isolationist tendencies in US politics. The theses of those often right-wing Republican circles that believe the US should confine itself to its domestic problems. This state of affairs is highly advantageous to Russia, even if isolationism is carried out within the original Monroe Doctrine warning i.e., if the U.S. limits its influence to America. This does not mean Eurasia — (meaning Russia) — should give up on destabilizing the Latin American world by seeking to remove certain regions from U.S. control. All levels of geopolitical pressure on the United States must be engaged simultaneously.</blockquote>
He&#8217;s talking about demoralization. Find allies who are stumping for America to be weaker in the world, actively generate tension, actively generate sectarianism in American politics, actively pit Americans against one another, and find friends on the Right-wing side of the aisle to help foment all of that.
The good news for Russia is that in the era of the internet — when there are no reliable fact checkers, when the wave of information that Bezmenov talks about is unstoppable because there&#8217;s just so much conflicting stuff out there — it&#8217;s very difficult for anyone who&#8217;s not deeply in this stuff to find the truth.
It&#8217;s a perfect environment for the spreading of this kind of demoralization and chaos.
You can see who the friends are. Alex Jones spoke with Dugin (!) about rediscovering what it meant to be American.
Tucker Carlson did an interview with Alexander Dugin and painted him as a victim of censorship and a non-regime-aligned philosopher, a true Platonic figure, protesting that “his ideas are deeply offensive to some people.”
Dugin said that actually the reason the West hates Vladimir Putin is not because he&#8217;s an aggressive dictator, a former KGB agent who has fostered chaos and evil all over the world, and is currently involved in the invasion of a sovereign country that has resulted in the deaths of at least half a million people and threatening other Eastern European countries as well, spreading chaos down into Africa, spreading chaos into the Middle East. No, the reason — according to Tucker and Dugin — that the West has a problem with Vladimir Putin is because Vladimir Putin is a true “traditionalist.”
When he&#8217;s not poisoning his enemies.
I&#8217;m not saying that Tucker and Candace are working for Russia. I&#8217;m saying they agree with them. They agree with America&#8217;s enemies.
The demoralization ideology has infected the entire Democratic Party. Whether it’s Hasan Piker or Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a terror supporter, or Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner attacking a Purple Heart recipient or James Talarico saying that the American flag, Jesus, and the cross had been co-opted, it’s all the same.
The demoralization operation is operating.
Once you see what&#8217;s going on, it&#8217;s hard to unsee it.

tucker and candace water

Who Keeps Carrying Water For America’s Enemies?

Ben Shapiro

Opinion

(Reuters) — NATO accused Moscow on Friday of reckless behavior and pledged to &#8220;defend every inch of Allied territory&#8221; after Romania said a Russian drone had crashed into a civilian apartment block in the alliance member state during an attack on neighboring Ukraine.
Romania&#8217;s defense ministry said a woman and a child suffered minor injuries in Galati near the border with Ukraine overnight after radar tracked a Russian drone entering Romanian airspace.
Photos from the scene showed charred and damaged brickwork on the roof of the 10-story apartment block which Romanian authorities said was hit by a drone that exploded on impact, tearing through a top-floor flat.
Russia&#8217;s TASS news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said President Vladimir Putin had been informed about the incident.
<div id="attachment_1104439" style="width: 857px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1104439" class="size-large wp-image-1104439" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T065911Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0DZ_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-1-847x576.jpg" alt="" width="847" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T065911Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0DZ_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-1-847x576.jpg 847w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T065911Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0DZ_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-1-300x204.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T065911Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0DZ_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-1-768x522.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T065911Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0DZ_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-1.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 847px) 100vw, 847px" />A Romanian law enforcement officer works on the site of an explosion at a residential block of flats following a drone hit close to the border with Ukraine, in Galati, Romania, May 29, 2026. Inquam Photos/George Calin via REUTERS</div>
Separately, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia&#8217;s powerful Security Council, warned European leaders that drones would continue to stray into their countries and prevent their populations from sleeping peacefully.
It was the first time a densely populated area in a NATO country had been hit causing injuries during Russia&#8217;s war in Ukraine, and the incident is likely to increase tensions on the alliance&#8217;s eastern flank as member states worry about the war spilling over their borders.
&#8220;Russia’s reckless behavior is a danger to us all,&#8221; NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on X after speaking by phone to Romanian President Nicusor Dan, whose country is in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.
&#8220;I affirmed that NATO stands ready to defend every inch of Allied territory,&#8221; he said, without making any mention of triggering NATO&#8216;s mutual defense clause. &#8220;We will continue to enhance our readiness to deter and defend against any threat, including from drones.&#8221;
Dan said the Russian consulate in the southeastern city of Constanta would be closed and the consul expelled.
TASS quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying Moscow would respond swiftly to Bucharest&#8217;s decision to close the consulate.
Romania, which shares a 400-mile land border with Ukraine, said Russian drones had breached its airspace 28 times since Moscow began attacking Ukrainian ports across the Danube River following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Stephen Evelyn, a 44-year-old American citizen who lives in Galati, called it &#8220;another provocation by the Russians&#8221;.
&#8220;I don&#8217;t believe this was an accident, this has happened too many times for the Russians to be doing this by accident,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Either that or they&#8217;re highly incompetent at waging war, but NATO needs to do something about this.&#8221;
There have been multiple airspace incursions into NATO airspace since Moscow invaded Ukraine, most notably when more than 20 Russian drones entered Poland&#8217;s airspace on the night of September 9-10.
In recent weeks Ukrainian drones have strayed into Baltic countries&#8217; airspace, sowing confusion and raising tensions with Russia.
Romania has asked NATO allies to deploy additional anti-drone capabilities to Romania, with official sources saying Bucharest needs low-altitude radars and interceptor drones. A NATO spokesperson said on Friday &#8220;potential additional defensive measures are considered.&#8221;
Local authorities in southern Ukraine said Izmail port in the Odesa region, across the border from Galati, had come under attack from drones early on Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv was ready to support Romania &#8220;in whatever way is necessary&#8221;.
<div id="attachment_1104441" style="width: 659px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1104441" class="size-large wp-image-1104441" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T054159Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0AI_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-649x576.jpg" alt="" width="649" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T054159Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0AI_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-649x576.jpg 649w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T054159Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0AI_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-300x266.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T054159Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0AI_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES-768x682.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/2026-05-29T054159Z_1_LYNXMPEM4S0AI_RTROPTP_4_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ROMANIA-DRONES.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" />A fire burns on the roof of a 10-story block of flats after a drone crashed into the building, causing an explosion and injuring two people, near the border with Ukraine, in Galati, Romania, in this handout image released on May 29, 2026. Romanian Department for Emergency Situations (DSU)/Handout via REUTERS</div>
The Romanian defense ministry said two F-16 fighter jets had been scrambled and a military helicopter was sent to monitor the attack, with the pilots authorized to shoot down any drones without endangering inhabited areas. The residents of border counties Braila, Galati and Tulcea were warned to take cover.
The drone was in Romania&#8217;s airspace for four minutes and flew at a low altitude for 6.2 miles, making it difficult for radar to detect, Romanian Brigadier General Gheorghe Maxim said.
He told a press conference that although the U.S. anti-drone system Merops is operational in Romania it is not yet fully integrated with national air defenses and it would have been too risky to use in a city.
In addition to the woman and her child who were taken to hospital with minor injuries, two people were treated on the scene for panic attacks and 70 were evacuated from the apartment block, local authorities said.
Deputy Interior Minister Raed Arafat, who is in charge of the emergency response agency, told private broadcaster Digi24 that the drone affected two building stairwells, an elevator shaft and damaged five cars.
A drone also damaged an electricity pole and a household annex in Galati in April.
In a separate incident, a drone without an explosive charge was found in northwestern Romania, state TVR broadcaster said late on Thursday, citing local authorities.
(Reporting by George Calin in Galati, Luiza Ilie in Bucharest, Jekaterina Golubkova in Tokyo, Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk in Warsaw, Jason Hovet in Prague and Lily Bayer in Brussels; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Kate Mayberry and Timothy Heritage)

ROMANIA-NATO-DEFENCE-EXERCISE

NATO Sends Clear Message To Russia After Attack On Member Nation

Foreign Policy

NATO

Ukraine-Russia War

The kind of third-worldist brainrot that has long been an undercurrent of America&#8217;s far-Left is having a moment.
The &#8220;Blame America First&#8221; crowd used to be confined to the fringes — coffee shop discussions of a million dead Iraqis, Jane Fonda manning a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun, DSA conference speakers deriding Barack Obama as a war criminal for taking out Based Pan-Africanist Socialist Revolutionary Gaddafi — but now it dominates the Discourse. Podcasters and newsletter writers from Left, Right, and the schizo middle draw millions of clicks by asserting that American projection of force and pursual of interest is the root cause of all the world&#8217;s ills, from Russia-Ukraine to &#8220;genocide in Gaza&#8221; to the Islamic takeover of Europe.
Sadio Camara would likely agree with some version of that anti-Western assessment if you asked him about it. You can&#8217;t, though, because he got blown up by a car bomb last month.
Camara was the Minister of Defense in the West African country of Mali until his untimely yet instructive death on April 25. It was only a few years earlier that he played a key role in overthrowing his own country&#8217;s government, kicking out the United States (and even more so the French), and entering a security partnership with Russia and its mercenaries.
Mali is part of the Sahel region of Africa, alongside Niger and Burkina Faso. The average American could be forgiven for not caring much about this part of the world, but they should at least a little: it&#8217;s rich in rare earth minerals, resources like gold and uranium, and Islamic terrorists. They also sit along key migration routes from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, which is to say that they have some bearing on how non-European Europe will continue to become in the future.
All three of those countries previously had democratic-ish governments that worked with the United States and France on counter-terrorism. You might recall the <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/dods-report-investigation-2017-ambush-niger">tragic ambush</a> in Niger that killed four Green Berets (and 4 Nigeriens) in 2017. Africa has really become a hotspot for Islamic terrorist groups in recent years, and the United States had a major presence in Niger to fight them (and smaller special forces operations in Mali and Burkina Faso).
Then, in the early 2020s, they fell one-by-one to Russian-backed coups that installed military juntas and severed ties with the United States.
&#8220;Move on from the colonial past and hear the anger, the frustration, the rejection that is coming up from the African cities and countryside, and understand that this movement is inexorable,&#8221; Malian government spokesman Abdoulaye Maïga told the UN in 2022. &#8220;Your intimidations and subversive actions have only swelled the ranks of Africans concerned with preserving their dignity.&#8221;
There is a little bit of blame to be attributed to Washington, D.C., at this point in the story. Under President Joe Biden, a delegation of officials visited Niger and more or less gave the junta an ultimatum: stop cozying up to Russia and Iran and work with us instead, or else. At the time, Niger was nearing a uranium agreement with Iran. (Surely that won&#8217;t be relevant down the road!)
They promptly told the Biden administration to kick rocks and booted what remained of America&#8217;s presence from the country, including one of our most critical drone bases in the region which we used to kill terrorists.
&#8220;For Niger it was just very abrupt and very aggressive. They felt that it was the same attitude that the French had,&#8221; Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute&#8217;s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, told me. &#8220;The military junta asked them to leave.&#8221;
&#8220;Instead of presenting it as an ultimatum, they could have presented an alternative. Instead of doing a uranium deal with Iran, why don&#8217;t you do one with the United States, and you get a school program or something in Niger, something they don&#8217;t have,&#8221; Riboua said. &#8220;A lot of these countries have unemployment issues, and they&#8217;re landlocked countries, so it&#8217;s very hard for them to do trade and be integrated in the region.&#8221;
Alas, with the Western colonial powers gone, things should have been on the upswing for the Sahel. We&#8217;ve got Russia (primarily via its mercenary forces, the Wagner Group) doing security and fighting the terrorists. We&#8217;re trading with Iran and China. All is well.
Then they got mugged by reality. The Russians were killing untold numbers of civilians and still somehow managing to cede ground to the jihadists. In fact, in Burkina Faso and Mali, the Russians and government forces actually killed more civilians last year than the jihadists. The security situation was deteriorating rapidly. Then, things really came to a head in April, with the offensive that killed Camara and countless others.
The April attack even resulted in Russia&#8217;s own mini-Kabul moment, with Russian troops fleeing the region, forced to leave large amounts of weapons behind.
The Sahel juntas, just a few years after declaring themselves strong, independent, anti-Western governments that don&#8217;t need no protecting from Europe and America, found themselves being overrun by Jama&#8217;at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and ISIS.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
🚨Urgent – 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
Une dissidence d’un groupe entier du JNIM a été signalée dans le nord du Burkina Faso, avec son ralliement à la branche de l’État islamique dans la province du Sahel ( ISSP)
Le nombre de combattants concernés serait important. <a href="https://t.co/AXpAFcMsnS">pic.twitter.com/AXpAFcMsnS</a>
— Sahel Alerte (@SahelAlerte) <a href="https://twitter.com/SahelAlerte/status/2044491770755453039?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 15, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
JNIM are a group of Salafi-jihadist groups, descended in part from al-Qaeda, which now operates in territory larger than every U.S. state besides Alaska, primarily in Mali and Burkina Faso. They&#8217;re the ones who rolled up to Camara&#8217;s house and detonated a car bomb. They&#8217;re probably the closest entity we&#8217;ve seen to peak ISIS since its downfall, seeing as their specific goals are to expel foreign forces and establish a caliphate under sharia law.
Of course, there is still ISIS itself, which is also active here. ISSP (Islamic State-Sahel Province) has taken over large swathes of Niger, and even launched an attack on the capital&#8217;s airport in January (which also housed some Russian mercenaries).
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The JNIM/FLA coalition attacked and took control of the Malian military base in Hombori, Mopti region in central Mali this morning. <a href="https://t.co/r0k9NrbSHl">pic.twitter.com/r0k9NrbSHl</a>
— Brant (@BrantPhilip_) <a href="https://twitter.com/BrantPhilip_/status/2049780359336763836?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 30, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The Trump administration has signaled some willingness to get involved and try to rectify the situation, potentially with a mineral deal of some kind, but who knows if it will come too late. The Islamists are taking all three countries by storm now, and have killed nearly 80,000 people since 2019.
&#8220;We are victims of our wealth — the wealth that imperialists want to seize at all costs, aiming to keep us in slavery. We will secure it,&#8221; said Burkina Faso&#8217;s &#8220;Interim&#8221; President Ibrahim Traoré in 2024.
They probably wish they had stayed under the boot of Western imperialism after all.

TOPSHOT-MALI-UNREST

They Kicked America Out. Now They’re Being Hunted By Jihadists

Africa

Al Qaeda

Burkina Faso

DW Opinion

ISIS

Mali

Niger

Radical Islamic Terror

President Donald Trump announced a three-day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine beginning Saturday, hinting at the possibility of the “beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought War.”
&#8220;I am pleased to announce that there will be a THREE DAY CEASEFIRE (May 9th, 10th, and 11th) in the War between Russia and Ukraine,&#8221; Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116540259118606629">posted</a> Friday on Truth Social, adding that the ceasefire would mark the anniversary of Victory Day in World War II — one of Russia&#8217;s most important national holidays.
President Trump said the ceasefire will mean the &#8220;suspension of all kinetic activity&#8221; in a conflict that began in February 2022 and has resulted in more than 2 million casualties.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the details of the ceasefire, adding that &#8220;a prisoner exchange in the format of 1,000 for 1,000&#8221; would also take place between Russia and Ukraine.
&#8220;Within the framework of the negotiating process mediated by the American side, we received Russia’s agreement to conduct a prisoner exchange in the format of 1,000 for 1,000,&#8221; Zelensky wrote on X. &#8220;A ceasefire regime must also be established on May 9, 10, and 11. Ukraine is consistently working to bring its people home from Russian captivity. I have instructed our team to promptly prepare everything necessary for the exchange.&#8221;
Russia had spent weeks lobbying Ukraine for a Victory Day ceasefire, threatening to strike Kyiv if the planned Victory Day parade was disrupted. Ukraine dismissed the ceasefire proposal as &#8220;unserious&#8221; until Trump intervened and brokered a prisoner exchange.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told Russian media that Moscow agreed to the arrangement following a phone call between Putin and Trump.
The three-day truce will mark the first mutual ceasefire between the two nations since Russia&#8217;s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago. Russia has previously declared unilateral pauses around Orthodox church holidays and Victory Day in past years, and the two nations briefly observed a one-month halt to strikes on energy infrastructure earlier this year. A deep mutual distrust between the two sides has prevented any comprehensive cessation of hostilities from being reached until now.
&#8220;Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought War. Talks are continuing on ending this Major Conflict, the biggest since World War II, and we are getting closer and closer every day,&#8221; Trump said.

Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin

Trump Announces Ceasefire In Russia-Ukraine War

Ceasefire

Trump Administration

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, has now decided that the time has come: At long last, he&#8217;s going to put into action his Soviet plan for a government-run grocery store.
Are you excited about government-run grocery stores?
It&#8217;s going to be just great, because if there&#8217;s one thing that we have to fight off in America, it is starvation.
I know you&#8217;re thinking right now that we actually have a massive obesity problem in the United States. You&#8217;d be right.
But according to Mamdani, the biggest problem in America is that people cannot afford food, and the best way to make food affordable is for the government to open grocery stores.
This has never been tried anywhere.
Except for Cuba, the USSR, and most communist countries.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></div>
That led, of course, to the very famous photos of Soviet leadership walking into American supermarkets and being astonished by the selection of products. Capitalism makes things better, cheaper, and more plentiful, which is how they become better and cheaper.
Mamdani explained: “This store will be open in 2029. The reason that we&#8217;re announcing it first is because unlike other stores, this will be built from the ground up. We are talking about a vacant lot that is about one or two blocks over there that is currently lying vacant. It is city-owned. We&#8217;re going to build it from the ground up.”
Just wow.
By the way, how much is it going to cost to build this grocery store from the ground up? According to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/nyregion/mamdani-city-owned-grocery-store-la-marqueta.html">New York Times</a>, $30 million.
$30 million.
I have a question. Do you think that when Publix builds a new store, it costs them $30 million?
Nope.
If the city subsidizes particular food products at a cheaper rate, either people will want to buy those food products or they will not. If they like eggs, for example, there will be a run on eggs, and then a shortage.
That&#8217;s what will happen, because when you subsidize the price of a product, it spurs more demand, and you will end up with a shortage — and longer lines.
Duh.
It is amazing how no one has ever read a book or even watched an old documentary.
Mamdani says he wants the new grocery store to offer discounts on basic groceries and to provide quality jobs. The city will waive rent and real estate taxes for the store.
If you really wanted to lower food prices, you could do that for all the grocery stores in New York. That would lower some prices.
But you know what else you could do? You could get rid of all of the regulations surrounding the grocery stores in New York, which make it very difficult to run and operate a business.
It&#8217;s hilarious that the minute the Democrats want to lower prices, they give a specific cut-out that gets rid of all of the government red tape, but just for their friends, like the government-run grocery store.
Meanwhile, Congressman Ro Khanna, the West Coast version of Zohran Mamdani, wants free everything. He called for free health care and free college.
There&#8217;s no such thing as free. There&#8217;s just stuff paid for by someone else.
“The moment has finally come for national health insurance,” Khanna declared. “Why? Because people now realize you cannot have health care linked to your job. Not at a time where your job may change or where you may lose your job. We need Medicare for all. That&#8217;s a better system with better outcomes, where health care is guaranteed to every single person from the day they are born. For our young people, where a short career opportunity is not limited by your family&#8217;s wealth, we need free college and free trade schools.” 
Free everything. How could that go wrong?
Maybe we can heavily subsidize everybody going to college. That won&#8217;t raise the price of — oh, it turns out that that radically raised the price of college.
Perhaps we could have more government subsidization of health care. That won&#8217;t raise the price of health care.
Whoops. That raises the price because it increases the base that people are willing to pay and are able to pay.
It doesn&#8217;t matter what the effect is.
The only thing that matters to the Democrats is that it feels good when they say the word “free” over and over and over again.

Mamdani Soviet

Mamdani’s Supermarket Sweep: Soviet Edition

Communism

Democratic Socialism

groceries

New York City

Soviet Union

Zohran Mamdani

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called an emergency defence council meeting on Sunday after powerful explosives were found near a pipeline in Serbia that carries Russian gas to the country.
The incident prompted political scrutiny in Hungary at a sensitive time days before a national election, with Orban&#8217;s party trailing in opinion polls.
Orban said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, a close ally, had informed him by phone about the discovery outside the town of Kanjiza, near Hungary&#8217;s border with Serbia.
&#8220;Our units found an explosive of devastating power,&#8221; Vucic said in a post on Instagram. &#8220;I told PM Orban that we would keep him updated on the investigation.&#8221;
Officials in Budapest and Belgrade did not respond to requests for comment about the incident, which comes before pivotal elections on April 12 in Hungary where nationalist Orban is fighting to hold onto his more than 16-year grip on power.
A former Hungarian intelligence official told Reuters there had been discussions in Hungarian security circles over the past days about a precise plan for a &#8220;false-flag&#8221; operation impacting the pipeline in Serbia as part of an effort to influence the Hungarian vote.
Peter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party also raised doubts about the incident, saying it appeared aimed at boosting Orban&#8217;s electoral prospects.
&#8220;Several people have publicly indicated that something will &#8216;accidentally&#8217; happen at the gas pipeline in Serbia at Easter, a week before the Hungarian elections. And so it happened,&#8221; Magyar said in a statement.
PIVOTAL ELECTIONS
In a Facebook post after the defence council meeting, Orban suggested the incident related to an attempt to blow up the pipeline, which transports Russian gas through the Balkans to Central and Eastern Europe.
&#8220;According to information that we have&#8230;.there was an act of sabotage prepared,&#8221; Orban said after the meeting, adding that both countries have strengthened the protection of the pipeline.
Without directly blaming Ukraine for the incident in Serbia, Orban said &#8220;Ukraine has been for years trying to cut off Europe from Russian energy.&#8221;
&#8220;The Russian section of TurkStream is also under continuous military attack. Ukraine&#8217;s efforts pose a life-threatening danger to Hungary,&#8221; he added.
The head of Serbia&#8217;s Military Intelligence Agency, Djuro Jusic, said the explosives found on a section of pipeline linked to the Turkstream system, which carries Russian gas to Turkey and then to Central Europe, were produced in the United States.
&#8220;We had information that a person from a migrant community, with military training, will carry out a diversion on the gas infrastructure,&#8221; he told reporters in Belgrade. He did not give further details, but said authorities in Serbia were searching for that person.
Orban in February scaled up security around energy infrastructure in the country by dispatching troops after what he said were plans by Ukraine to disrupt the Hungarian energy system &#8211; charges Kyiv denied.
Ukraine&#8217;s foreign ministry strongly rejected what it said were attempts to link Kyiv to the explosives.
&#8220;Ukraine has nothing to do with this,&#8221; foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said on X. &#8220;Most probably, a Russian false-flag operation as part of Moscow&#8217;s heavy interference in Hungarian elections.&#8221;
Budapest has also been in a dispute with Ukraine over a halt in oil supplies via the Druzhba pipeline. Orban&#8217;s Fidesz party has sought to associate opposition leader Peter Magyar with Brussels and Ukraine, suggesting that voting for his Tisza party means voting for tanks and war.
Hungary is an outlier in the European Union for maintaining ties with Moscow, which voiced support for Hungary over Sunday&#8217;s incident and suggested that Ukraine was responsible.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto also blamed Ukraine, writing on Facebook that &#8220;in the past few days and weeks, the Ukrainians organised an oil blockade against us, and then tried to put us under a total energy blockade &#8230; And now we have today&#8217;s incident.&#8221;
(Reporting by Krisztina Than; Additional reporting by Lili Bayer in Brussels and Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade Writing by Edward McAllister; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Helen Popper, William Maclean, Christina Fincher)

GettyImages-2267436846

Hungary Rattled By Russia Pipeline Scare As One Claim Gains Traction

Global Politics

Hungary

World

A historic Catholic church and monastery complex in western Ukraine, part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, was damaged in a Russian strike this week, underscoring the continued toll of the war on religious and cultural landmarks.
Russian forces launched <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/24/russia-strikes-civilian-areas-ukraine">a large-scale aerial assault</a> on Tuesday, striking the 16th-century Bernardine monastery complex in the city of Lviv, including St. Andrew’s Church, a cornerstone of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic community. The site, located in what has been described as the heart of Ukraine’s Catholic region, dates back roughly 400 years.
The attack comes just days before Holy Week, the most sacred period in the Christian calendar. Local officials confirmed that nearby residential buildings were also hit, with fires breaking out and parts of the monastery, including its tower, sustaining damage. 
The nearby Church of Saint Mary Magdalene was also impacted, with shattered windows and debris strewn across its interior. “Thank God it happened in the afternoon,” <a href="https://catholicreview.org/russian-drone-strikes-damage-historic-church-monastery-in-lviv-ahead-of-holy-week/">said</a> Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki of Lviv, noting that the timing likely prevented fatalities. “People were still at work, children had not yet returned from school.”
Even so, the broader assault was deadly. Ukrainian officials reported that Russia launched nearly 400 drones in a single night, one of the largest aerial attacks since the war began in 2022, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more. In another strike, a maternity hospital in the Ivano-Frankivsk region was also hit.
UNESCO <a href="https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-alarmed-strikes-lviv-world-heritage-site">said</a> it was “deeply alarmed” by the damage to protected cultural sites, emphasizing that such landmarks are safeguarded under international law. For those on the ground, however, the destruction of churches is nothing new.
“This happens a lot,” said Steven Moore, executive producer of the documentary A Faith Under Siege, speaking from Kyiv to <a href="https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/europe/ukraine-monastery-hit-in-russian-missile-strike-most-historic-church-targeted-so-far">EWTN</a>. He noted that Russia has repeatedly targeted religious buildings throughout the conflict, including Orthodox churches, despite claiming to defend traditional Christian values. 
St. Andrew’s Church, he said, may be “the most historic church they have targeted so far.” The strike also comes at a moment of renewed intensity across the front lines, as both sides escalate operations ahead of the spring campaign season.
In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces have <a href="https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-offensive-civilian-attacks-48a46d2503513c903bc3e4de31b96e00">continued grinding advances</a> in the Donetsk region, particularly around the heavily contested areas near Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar, where months of attritional fighting have yielded incremental gains at high cost. Ukrainian defenses, while still holding key lines, have been strained by manpower shortages and the constant pressure of artillery and drone assaults.
At the same time, Ukraine has expanded its use of long-range drone strikes deep into Russian territory, targeting oil depots, airfields, and logistical hubs in an effort to disrupt Moscow’s war machine beyond the front. These strikes, often carried out hundreds of miles from the battlefield, represent a strategic shift toward asymmetric pressure as Ukraine seeks to offset Russia’s numerical advantages.
Drone warfare, in particular, has become the defining feature of this phase of the conflict. Both sides are deploying thousands of unmanned systems monthly, from inexpensive first-person-view (FPV) <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/drones">drones</a> used in trench warfare to long-range Iranian-designed Shahed drones that can strike cities far from the front. The scale and speed of this technological adaptation have transformed the battlefield into a constant, low-altitude threat environment where traditional lines of safety once assumed in Western cities such as Lviv no longer hold.
The war’s international dimensions are also becoming more pronounced. Iran continues to supply drone technology to Russia, while intelligence assessments have pointed to growing cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. Reports of North Korean personnel supporting Russian operations have further underscored concerns that the conflict is increasingly drawing in actors beyond Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, <a href="https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/masshtab-ciyeyi-ataki-svidchit-duzhe-chitko-sho-nemaye-v-ros-103497">addressing</a> the latest strikes, said their scale demonstrates that “Russia has no intention of really ending this war.” Now in its fifth year, the conflict continues to reshape daily life across Ukraine. Air raid sirens, damaged infrastructure, and the constant threat of attack have become routine, even in cities like Lviv, once considered relatively safe.
For Ukraine’s religious communities, the war has taken on an added layer of meaning. Churches that once stood for centuries as symbols of faith and continuity are now being drawn into the front lines, damaged, shattered, and, in some cases, destroyed. As Holy Week approaches, the strike on one of Ukraine’s most historic Catholic sites stands as a stark reminder: the war is not only being fought on battlefields, but in the cultural and spiritual heart of the nation itself.

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Russia Bombs Iconic Centuries-Old Christian Landmark

Christians

Church

Holy Week

The Justice Department has reportedly agreed to pay President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, roughly $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit over his prosecution during the Russia collusion investigation. 
The settlement, <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.411523/gov.uscourts.flmd.411523.72.0.pdf">announced</a> Wednesday, resolves a malicious prosecution case Flynn filed in Florida against the DOJ. Flynn argued that FBI agents entrapped him during the investigation, which found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. 
“Today, after ten years of fighting, I have reached a settlement agreement with the United States Government in my case regarding the Russian Hoax FBI lawfare against me,” Flynn said in a statement. “Nothing can fully compensate for the hell that my family and I have endured over these many years — the relentless attacks, the destruction of reputations, the financial ruin, and the profound personal toll inflicted upon us all. No amount of money or formal resolution can erase the pain caused by a prosecution that should never have been brought.”
A Justice Department spokesman called the settlement an &#8220;important step in redressing&#8221; the &#8220;historic injustice.&#8221; 
&#8220;This Department of Justice will continue to pursue accountability at all levels for this wrongdoing. Such weaponization of the federal government must never be allowed to happen again,” the spokesman said. 
The DOJ did not disclose the exact settlement amount. The New York Times reported it at $1.25 million, while the Associated Press reported it as $1.2 million.
Flynn was charged during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents about a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He later sought to withdraw his plea, arguing he had been misled by federal agents. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020.
Flynn&#8217;s attorney, Jesse Binnall, said the agreement reflects acknowledgment that his client &#8220;was seriously wronged.&#8221;
“General Flynn is an American hero and he and his family should have never been put through this hell,” said Binnall. “That they had the courage to stand firm and fight back against the extremists in the Mueller investigation should be a testament to the strength of American character.”

ReAwaken America Tour

Michael Flynn Gets Payout As Justice Department Addresses ‘Historic Injustice’

Department of Justice

Donald Trump

Michael Flynn

Robert Mueller

Russia Collusion Hoax

In current foreign-policy debates on the Right, some have pushed for dividing the world into “spheres of influence.” The United States would get the Americas, the People’s Republic of China would be granted sway over Asia, and Vladimir Putin would have carte blanche to intervene in European affairs. Far from being steely-eyed “realism,” splitting up the world in that way might actually not take the national interest seriously enough.
The “spheres of influence” gambit has a superficial logic. By some measures, the United States is a smaller portion of the global economy than it was fifty years ago. It faces growing fiscal burdens. Its industrial infrastructure has withered. Some of its longstanding allies have hit economic and demographic slumps. The growth of other regional powers means that the geopolitical landscape has become more multipolar. Yet withdrawing from much of the globe would hamper the ability of the United States to respond to those changed circumstances and would also undermine the policy aims of American populists. International networks will be critical for renewing American industry and reinforcing national sovereignty.
While some European partners need urgent reforms (from cutting red tape to hiking defense budgets), the continent remains a major global economic hub. The White House’s recent <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf">National Security Strategy</a> observed that Europe “is home to cutting-edge scientific research and world-leading cultural institutions” and that it retains robust manufacturing and technology sectors. A full-scale American withdrawal from Europe could close down a crucial market for American industry (including defense sales) and could also threaten regional stability. Ending NATO and shuttering American military bases would create a power vacuum in that continent and also hurt the ability of the United States to project power abroad.
Nor can the United States afford to ignore Asia. Responsible for about half of <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/media-center/cusp-of-new-era-in-asia">global manufacturing output</a>, Asia has become the workshop for the world. The People’s Republic of China is already a manufacturing powerhouse, and it could consolidate industrial dominance if the United States severs its commitments to allies in the Pacific. That is especially the case for the advanced technologies that are the building blocks of the digital economy. A link in countless international supply chains, Taiwan produces about <a href="https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/taiwan-semiconductors-including-chip-design-ai">90%</a> of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. If the People’s Republic of China conquered that island, it would have a chokehold on the American and global economies. It could cut off the chips that are needed for cars, computers, missiles, and phones. Beijing is already trying to use its control of key market sectors to influence policymaking in the United States. Responding to American tariffs and industrial policy, China has floated restrictions on some critical minerals, including those that are essential for <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-new-rare-earth-and-magnet-restrictions-threaten-us-defense-supply-chains">defense technologies</a>.
Populists have rallied around the claims of national sovereignty, but allowing the Chinese Communist Party to cut off the American economy at a whim is the antithesis of national independence. While building out American domestic semiconductor production is a national-security imperative, that’s also a very long process. The United States cannot afford to surrender economic self-governance for the indefinite future while it waits for some eschaton of economic autarky.
Conversely, coordinating with allies in Europe and Asia can bolster economic agency. For example, the PRC is responsible for over <a href="https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-tungsten.pdf">80%</a> of the global annual production of tungsten, which is used for drills, computer chips, aerospace, x-rays, and more. The United States has not even mined tungsten commercially in over a decade. In addition to bringing back domestic tungsten production, American allies could help de-risk the tungsten market. Australia has massive tungsten reserves, and South Korea’s <a href="https://www.mining.com/sangdong-tungsten-mine-in-south-korea-returns-to-production-after-30-years/">Sangdong Mine</a> has returned to production for the first time in decades. Accessing those resources will require keeping Pacific alliances strong — and not surrendering that region to Beijing.
Likewise, allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East will continue to be important for American national-security aims. Even as it has stressed the need to reform certain geopolitical arrangements, the Trump administration’s foreign-policy strategy is premised on the United States being a global great-power. Losing the hard power that backs the dollar’s reserve-currency status would cause an immediate economic crisis at home, but a global defense infrastructure also helps target American foes abroad. The Jacksonian tradition of foreign policy — which prioritizes the targeted use of military force to defend the national interest — has achieved a renewed prominence in the Trump presidencies. Jacksonianism could be a way of rebalancing global commitments by keeping America’s rivals off-balance without tying down the United States. International alliances can help optimize such Jacksonian exertions of force.
From its very founding, the United States has prioritized having access to global markets. When the Barbary pirates threatened American ships, Thomas Jefferson sent frigates to Tripoli. To open up Japan, Commodore Matthew Perry brought the United States Navy to Edo Bay. The network of alliances in the aftermath of World War II could be seen as an extension of a long-term strategic imperative: that the Stars and Stripes should be able to move freely throughout the world and that those who live under that banner should be safe from both foreign and domestic threats.
We now face a very different political landscape from 1946 or 1999. Implementing “liberal democracy” in a country is a lot harder than getting an Amazon package there. If policymakers had sought to integrate the world into some post-historical bazaar, their dreams have been sorely disappointed. Great-power competition is back, and populist movements have roiled political establishments on both sides of the Atlantic. Those changes indicate the need to rethink international alliances without abandoning them entirely.
Yes, the United States needs to recognize the limits of power and to try to defer existential conflict with its competitors. It also needs to understand the interests of those competitors. At the same time, the United States needs to understand its own interests. Cutting itself off from allies in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere would squander a major geopolitical advantage and undercut efforts to build a stronger nation at home.
* * *
Fred Bauer is a writer from New England. Find his work at National Review, City Journal, The Atlantic, UnHerd, and The Washington Post. @fredbauerblog

Strategic world map with shipping infographics, flags and dice

The Plan To Split The World Into Spheres And What It Means For America

The Plan To Split The World Into Spheres And What It Could Means For America

China

Economics

Europe

National Security

U.S. Military

U.S. Navy

Do you agree with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin about the world? 
Are you convinced that America ought to surrender its global power to a multipolar order?
If so, you might be a Quisling, a fifth columnist, an America Laster.
There are plenty of them. They&#8217;ve spent years lying about America, about our history, about our foreign policy, about our enemies, about our allies.
In the end, the only unifying feature of their bizarre amalgam of conspiracism and untruth is an agenda; an agenda to reduce America&#8217;s role in the world.
Let’s talk about the America Lasters, the people who play defense for Iran, Russia, and China, but who go on offense against the allies who fight alongside the United States. What do these people want? What is their actual agenda and why? Why do they so despise America&#8217;s dominant role in the world?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2393-sub?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
To understand the America Lasters, first we have to understand a basic reality: They are liars. They are lying about the nature of reality, and they have to lie because their lies are the only path toward American defeat, particularly in the current conflict with Iran.
I&#8217;ve been saying for weeks that those who most ardently oppose President Trump&#8217;s action are at best misinformed, and at worst, lying on behalf of the Iranian regime.
Since the beginning, they have argued that Iran was not a true threat to America or her interests; that President Trump was bamboozled into the war by lying, nefarious Israelis and domestic American voices, that all of this with regard to Iran is overblown, or even that Israel is the bad guy with regard to Iran.
Over the weekend, Iran blew that entire narrative up. Iran demonstrated full-scale that all of their defenders were useful idiots or America Lasters. The fools who claim that Iran posed no threat beyond the immediate region? They were parroting Iranian lies.
Just a few weeks ago, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arachi — who is likely not long for this non-72-virgin world — announced that Iran had limited its own missile range to 2,000 km, roughly 1,200 miles. That would make Iran a threat to the Middle East, but not to the heart of Europe.
Top American officials at the time warned it was not true. Senator Tom Cotton said to CIA director John Ratcliffe last week:
<blockquote>Iran has always had a space launch program, which is flimsy cover for the first part of that intercontinental missile program. I haven&#8217;t seen any Iranian astronauts in space lately. And second, they have medium-range ballistic missiles, which already have a reentry vehicle. So if you crudely married those two technologies together, I&#8217;ve heard some analysts say that Iran could have had a functioning intercontinental missile to threaten the United States in as few as six months. Would you agree with that assessment?</blockquote>
Ratcliffe replied: 
<blockquote>You&#8217;re right to be concerned about Iran&#8217;s development of longer range ballistic missiles, Senator. If Iran were allowed to develop IRBM ranges, which is 3,000 km, it would threaten most of Europe.</blockquote>
Over the weekend, American officials announced that Iran had launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, a joint U.S. airbase in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is 4,000 miles away from Iran.
What does that mean? Virtually all of Europe is in Iranian ballistic missile range, based on the attempt to hit the Diego Garcia airbase.
The Iranians appear to have been lying, which is not a shock because they lie all the time, whether it is ballistic missiles, their nuclear program, or their support of terrorists.
What would a world with a burgeoning Iranian nuclear program with intercontinental ballistic missile capacity look like? That is precisely the threat laid out by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu over the course of the last several years, that Iran had already developed missiles that could threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they&#8217;re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.
We were told by the America Lasters that all of this was untrue. But their lie was invalidated by the fact that there was a long-range missile that was aimed at Diego Garcia, which is thousands of miles from Iranian territory.
The America Lasters, people who actually really do despise America&#8217;s history and her present, are openly siding with China and Russia, just as they have with Iran in the current conflict.
Tucker Carlson recently told The Economist, “We can no longer be the sole author in terms of commerce of anything. We have to share power with China &#8230; because of their scale.” Tucker&#8217;s guests make this argument all the time, and just as often they are Chinese propagandists.
Take, for example, Jeffrey Sachs, a true globalist shill, basically an unofficial spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party. He said: 
<blockquote>In many ways, the United States cannot compete with China, certainly on manufacturing production across a wide range of industries; can&#8217;t compete with China in a wide range of diplomatic areas; and this is very disruptive. It probably would be intrinsically disruptive, because this is a change of power and a change of the international order. And I think we all feel that it&#8217;s not the temporary phenomenon, but really the end of the U.S.-led geopolitics and even more fundamentally, the end of the Western-led geopolitics.</blockquote>
Carlson consistently repeats Sachs&#8217;s messaging, and he did so over the weekend while interviewing a man he called a prophet. This Chinese propagandist said:
<blockquote>What I would do is basically sit down, everyone, including Russia, China, Iran, and say it&#8217;s time for a new world order where we are partners in this relationship. &#8230; Now what we want to do is open a dialog where everyone is respected, where America is no longer the bully, but a winning partner in creating a new economic order that benefits everyone and not just a few.</blockquote>
“I think that&#8217;s the wisest possible advice and probably the only path that preserves civilization,” Carlson responded. “The one country standing in the way of that is Israel.”
So Israel — that tiny country in the Middle East, not the United States — is the one that&#8217;s blackmailing America into not giving up its global power?
Right.
It’s important to recognize what he is talking about when he calls for what you might call a “new world order”: a partnership between the United States, China, and Russia to restructure global economics to “not benefit a few.”
If you don&#8217;t find that alarming, it&#8217;s because you are full-scale ignoring what Tucker Carlson is saying.
To understand why the America Lasters seem to have power in the online space, we have to understand that the America Last philosophy is rooted in a deep conspiracism about the United States.
Here’s the point: To the untrained eye — the eye of a normal American who grew up in America, who loves America, who was born in America — a world with more American power is a better world, a freer world, a more prosperous world.
When I say “untrained,” I mean a non-conspiratorial eye. I might look at the increase of power of America since World War II and see overall, unprecedented economic prosperity, the defeat of the Nazi empire and the Soviet Union, the spread of democratic values, and the spread of economic freedom.
America Lasters — on the Left and the Right —see something else: a worse world since World War II, a world of evil American capitalism destroying local communities, of “racist military might” overwhelming people of color everywhere.
The story of the world since World War II in the left-wing America Last perspective is a world of unending tragedy: The failure of the Marxist dream of the Soviet Union, the collapse of a “fairer” vision to the reality of free markets, the emptying out of left-wing thought in favor of neoliberalism, while on the Right, the American Lasters see a worse world since World War II as well: a world of evil American capitalism emptying out the communitarian world of real America, a world of American imperialism spreading vile secularism abroad, a world of false meritocracy providing cover for an emptying out of so-called “heritage Americanism” decided by bloodline rather than American ideals. Those are ideals that they consider a sham and a ruse.
This would be why America Lasters are fully in favor of the destruction of American power abroad.
But to destroy American power, first, you have to change American minds. To do that, you have to explain that a world of increased American power is actually terrible, darker, and more evil. And to make that claim, you have to believe a bunch of conspiracies. You have to believe that American meritocracy is actually a lie, that the Declaration of Independence is a lie, that in reality, America is run by a secret coterie of evildoers who manipulate systems and events for their own specific, insular benefit. 
The America Last Movement relies on unchecked conspiracy theorizing, conspiracism run amok. And that conspiracy is not just on the rise, it&#8217;s on an exponential rise.
It&#8217;s no shock that all these figures on all sides of the American Last movement are radically anti-Israel, because Israel actually is a powerful ally acting in concert with the United States. Israel has spent decades building its military power, sharing intelligence and tech with the United States, destroying incipient threats to the West from the Iraqi nuclear reactor back in the 80s to the Syrian nuclear reactor in the mid-2000s to Iranian proxies, and now the Iranian government.
And all these people despise Israel for it. Hassan Piker, Tucker Carlson, and the propagandist for the Chinese government are all on precisely the same page.
How little must you think of America to believe that China and Russia ought to have more influence in the world and that this would somehow be better for the world and America?
American hegemony is the best thing for the world. It is we who keep the trade routes open, ensuring freedom of the seas and the trade that provides the lifeblood of the global economy. It is we who stand down the world&#8217;s most evil regimes, achieving the world&#8217;s most dangerous weapons. It is we who support the rise of allies who share our values. It is we who prevent the spread of perverse cancerous power emanating from imperialist tyrants of communist and fascist persuasion.
The alternative world, the one the American Lasters want, is dominated by the same people who ran the One-Child program, and who currently throw dissidents in prison to linger and die, like Jimmy Lai. A world run by people who currently chuck their political opponents from the roofs of buildings, or poison them with nuclear materials, as the Russians have done, while allying with regimes that murder people who oppose radical Islam and support radical Islamic terror all over the world.
America First has nothing to do with America Last.
And it shouldn’t.

America Last

America Last: Conspiratorial Collaborationists Root For Our Enemies

Iran

Middle East

American adversary Russia is reportedly providing intelligence to Iran on the location of U.S. forces, including warships and aircraft.
The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/">cited</a> three officials Friday morning who spoke on the condition of anonymity and said that Moscow has indirectly joined the conflict between the United States and Iran. One of the Post&#8217;s sources said that Russia&#8217;s involvement &#8220;does seem like it’s a pretty comprehensive effort.&#8221;
The Trump administration has not yet confirmed publicly whether Russia has stepped into the conflict to help Iran. The War Department declined to comment on the issue when asked by The Daily Wire. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not address the Washington Post report but said, &#8220;The Iranian regime is being absolutely crushed.&#8221;
&#8220;Their ballistic missile retaliation is decreasing every day, their navy is being wiped out, their production capacity is being demolished, and proxies are hardly putting up a fight. Operation Epic Fury is meeting or surpassing all of its goals, and the United States will continue to dominate,&#8221; Kelly added.
After President Donald Trump launched &#8220;Operation Epic Fury&#8221; last weekend, Russia condemned the joint U.S.-Israeli military action targeting Iranian leadership, military assets, and nuclear infrastructure. Russia and Iran have long partnered on military efforts. Their ties were further strengthened last year when they signed a 20-year political and economic treaty partially focused on helping each nation fend off outside threats.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin condemned the United States and Israel after they took out Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Putin <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/putin-says-killing-khamenei-is-cynical-murder-2026-03-01/">called</a> the strike that killed Khamenei and members of his family and inner circle a &#8220;cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.&#8221; The Russian dictator, however, stopped short of committing to defend his ally as the United States continues to pummel Iranian forces and defense systems.
Even if Putin committed to back Iran against the United States and Israel, Russia&#8217;s ability to come to Iran&#8217;s aid would be severely limited as Moscow remains in the middle of a war with Ukraine that has entered its fifth year, with no sign of the conflict ending anytime soon. Iran also has close ties with China, but it appears that the communist regime in Beijing has yet to intervene.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth was recently asked about any potential role Russia and China could play in the conflict, and he replied by saying the countries are &#8220;not really a factor here.&#8221;
Iran has launched precision strikes this week that have hit their targets, including U.S. military bases and embassies. Six American troops were killed in one Iranian strike in Kuwait.
The United States, meanwhile, has decimated Iran&#8217;s navy and continues to hunt down the regime&#8217;s ballistic missile launchers. In an update at Central Command headquarters in Florida on Thursday, Admiral Brad Cooper said that U.S. forces have sunk more than 30 Iranian ships and recently struck an Iranian drone carrier roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier. The Israeli Air Force also hit a military bunker on Thursday night that has been used by senior Iranian political and military leaders.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/live-updates-iranian-protests-intensify-as-citizens-demand-end-to-ayatollah-rule?author=Daily+Wire&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=8&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=LIVE+UPDATES%3A+Overnight+Win+Blows+Apart+Iran+Regime%E2%80%99s+Secret+War+Bunker">LIVE UPDATES: Overnight Win Blows Apart Iran Regime’s Secret War Bunker</a>

Russia/Iran

A U.S. Adversary Quietly Helping Iran In War With America? Here’s What We Know

Israel

U.S.

Vladimir Putin

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