Biden's Middle East trip: Following in Trump's footsteps
WATCH: Biden looks poised to betray his campaign promise to sideline Saudi Arabia. Does this really serve America's interests?
Responsible Statecraft
Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
Top image credit: EUS-Nachrichten via shutterstock.com
Germany's grandstanding on Iran: The best Europe can muster?
January 15, 2026
In a striking display of recklessness, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the Islamic Republic of Iran to be in its “last days and weeks,” a regime he asserted had “no legitimacy.”
While other Western leaders condemned the bloody clampdown on the protests in Iran — with, according to conservative estimates, around 2,500 a in few days — none of them went so far as to boldly prognosticate an imminent demise of the regime in Tehran.
The response from Tehran was swift and trenchant. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shot back that Germany had “obliterated any shred of credibility” through its blatant double standards, asking what Merz had to say about his support for the “mass murder” in Gaza while lecturing others on human rights.
The Merz-Araghchi dialogue of the deaf is not an isolated diplomatic spat, it’s the logical culmination of a European Union trajectory toward Iran over the last few years that has devolved into performative posturing, strategic shortsightedness, and a loss of leverage.
To understand Araghchi’s retort, one need only look back to the summer of 2025. Following Israeli-U.S. airstrikes on Iran, Chancellor Merz offered not caution or calls for de-escalation — a standard staple of diplomatic discourse — but enthusiastic praise for the strikes. He notoriously hailed the attacks as Israel doing Europe’s “dirty work.”
While no other European leader went to such lengths to endorse Israel’s actions, none has condemned it either. This comment, delivered by the continent’s most powerful country, signaled to Tehran that Europe had abandoned any pretense of being a constructive actor or guardian of international law. Instead, it revealed an entity fully aligning itself with a maximalist U.S.-Israeli pressure campaign. In that moment, Germany and the EU voluntarily incinerated whatever diplomatic capital they still had in Iran.
With Merz setting the tone, the European Parliament’s president Roberta Metsola, seeking re-election in 2027, seized on an opportunity to bolster her own visibility. She sent a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas demanding more, and tougher, sanctions against Iran. Kallas has promised swift action.
The question is what kind of action? As Brussels has grown addicted to sanctions as a default instrument of statecraft, it has essentially run out of options on Iran, already one of the EU’s most sanctioned countries. Blacklisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as terrorist organization in its entirety has become some sort of a magic wand for those who demand more action — this is the only substantive demand in Metsola’s letter.
Such attempts were already undertaken in the past. However, a unanimity of member states has to approve. Some of them, like Spain, Italy and France, object to the measure as the IRGC is not just a security body, but also a prominent economic and political actor. With the looming succession in Iran, it is plausible that the IRGC will play a substantial role in the transition and in whatever new order will emerge, short of a sudden and wholesale dismantling of the regime, however unlikely.
The IRGC is not monolithic. There are extremist elements within it for sure, but also pragmatists who could work with the West. It would therefore be unwise for the EU to rule itself out of any contact with the organization as a whole, as opposed to individual sanctions on those who committed gross human rights violations.
Given that backdrop, the focus on designating the IRGC reveals more of an urge to “do something” than a strategically sound move.
While it is up to the EU Council (member states) to decide on the IRGC, Metsola banned Iranian diplomats from the European Parliament premises. This, however, is a hollow, performative gesture — any MEP or official wishing to meet can simply do so elsewhere.
More revealing still is who remains welcome. Operatives of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) — a cult-like exile group only removed from the EU terror list on a technicality — roam freely in the assembly’s halls in Brussels and Strasbourg. So do advocates for various ethnic separatist causes — they are granted platforms to lay out visions for Iran’s disintegration along ethnic lines.
For hardliners in Tehran, these facts confirm their narrative that the West seeks not reform and human rights but a violent regime change or dismemberment of Iran. By hosting these factions, the EU undermines the very Iranian civil society it claims to support, reinforcing the regime’s talking points that reduce dissent to a foreign-backed conspiracy.
This shift from engaged diplomacy to performance has exacted a heavy price. Europe’s leverage, once rooted in its role in forging the nuclear deal (JCPOA) and Tehran’s primary trading partner, has evaporated. The profound irony is that the Gulf Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that once dismissed the EU’s engagement with Iran as “appeasement,” are now actively pursuing détente with Tehran. Europe, by contrast, having absorbed the hardline narratives it once resisted, now finds itself isolated, its condemnations ignored by the regime it targets.
Furthermore, Merz’s public endorsement of the regime’s imminent collapse is strategically short-sighted. The actual violent disintegration of the Iranian state — a scenario his rhetoric encourages — could trigger a multi-sided civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, and fresh threats to Israel as Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and nuclear knowledge won’t disappear. With the removal of the current leadership and fragmentation of the state, armed groups would emerge unbound by any constraints. Most perilously to Europe, Iran’s collapse could ignite a massive new refugee crisis directly on Europe’s doorstep.
Incidentally, Germany and Merz are most vulnerable to such developments. His own political position is precarious with the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging in polls and overtaking his own center-right Christian Democratic Union’s lead. More refugees from the Middle East will most certainly boost the AfD’s popularity further. Merz is blindly betting on chaos he is utterly unprepared to manage.
Counterfactuals are fraught, but a credible argument can be made that had Europe maintained its strategic autonomy ensuring the JCPOA survived — rather than becoming a junior partner to a U.S.-Israel regime change agenda — the trajectory inside Iran could be different. It almost certainly would have boosted moderate, pragmatic forces within Iran. In turn, sustained economic engagement, dialogue on regional security and human rights could have created more space for incremental change in the interests of the majority of the Iranian population.
The path Europe is on today — marked by virtue signaling, performative hawkishness, and strategic incoherence — serves no one. For the EU to regain relevance and protect its own interests, the first step is to recognize that when you applaud someone else doing your “dirty work,” you inevitably get your own hands dirty and lose all control over the “job” being done.
keep readingShow less
Top photo credit: U.S. President Donald Trump, with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route from Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., January 4, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Does MAGA want Trump to ‘make regime change great again’?
January 14, 2026
“We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
This wasn’t the first time he eschewed the foreign policies of his predecessors: “We’re not looking for regime change,” he said of Iran and North Korea during a press conference in 2019. “We’ve learned that lesson a long time ago.”
There were numerous such signals to the America First movement that the days of the U.S. neoconservative-led regime change wars were over. But it’s less than half a month into the new year and the president is already boasting about a U.S.-led coup in which the president of Venezuela and his wife were captured by gun point and brought to the U.S. on criminal charges. Trump might have left Nicolas Maduro’s “regime” in place but he insists that its vice president is a mere placeholder while Washington is “in charge” and “running” the country now.
Meanwhile, by Day 14 of 2026, Trump has already threatened to attack cartels in Mexico, collapse the regime in Cuba, and is using the protests in Iran to warn the Islamic Republic of U.S. intervention too. He is even saying things like “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”
What happened?
Or as former Republican congresswoman and MAGA lodestar Marjorie Taylor Greene asked on Monday: “Call me old fashioned but I’m still against regime change and fighting and funding foreign wars.”
“How did that go out of style in only one year?” Greene pondered.
Good question. America First antiwar populism was a feature and not merely a bug for many in MAGA early on, even if Trump did not stick to it, in word or actions.
Congressional restrainers like Greene, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. Thomas Massie have all vocally opposed these interventions and threats. So has influential pundit Tucker Carlson, and at times podcasters Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz.
But Vice President JD Vance, on whom restrainers pinned a lot of hopes when he was brought onto Trump’s ticket, now seems eager to justify attacking Venezuela for its oil and because the Maduro regime is “communist.” Longtime opponent of Venezuela regime change, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, has been silent and sidelined.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been gunning for regime change in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua for his entire political career, appears to be having the most influence on the president today. Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been enthusiastic about putting U.S. bombs and bodies in various war zones, is Trump’s golf buddy these days. Sen. Paul has accused Trump of being “under the thrall of Lindsey Graham” (though it is not entirely clear who is in the thrall of whom).
Trump’s hawkish former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, seems happy all around, especially when he is giving interviews like this to Israeli think tanks.
While much of American foreign policy today reads like a militarist’s or a neoconservative’s wish list, Trump and some in his administration are trying hard to redefine regime change and intervention to be more palatable to the base, scrambling to make their own actions different from the Iraq and Libya regime change wars of the past.
“We’ve got this phobia built up” around regime changes and that “people need to stop ascribing apples and oranges here — the apples of the Middle East, or the oranges of the Western Hemisphere,” Secretary Rubio said on Meet the Press January 4.
“Venezuela looks nothing like Libya. It looks nothing like Iraq. It looks nothing like Afghanistan. It looks nothing like the Middle East,” he added.
Meanwhile, Vice President Vance — an Iraq War veteran who has in the past used his service to promote the idea of no new regime change wars — added on X, “We also have to remember, this is in our neighborhood. This is not Iraq. This is not 7,000 miles away. This is in our neighborhood.”
Is this switcheroo working with MAGA supporters who claim they are normally non-interventionist and against regime change? Maybe.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said after the Venezuelan ousting that he is “reflexively non-interventionist” but also that “Venezuela appears to be a resounding victory and one of the most brilliant military operations in American history. As an unapologetic American Chauvinist, I want America to rule over this hemisphere and exert its power for the good of our people.”
On its face that sentiment appears closer to Bush alumni and neoconservative David Frum, for whom there seems to be no U.S. intervention he doesn’t reflexively support.
Walsh isn’t alone. Former Trump adviser Steven Bannon, who has been a war skeptic more recently, sees a difference in Trump’s interventions too. “People are down for it as long as you don’t make the mistakes in Venezuela that the neocons made in Iraq — and every indication is that the president and his core team have studied this deeply and are implementing those lessons,” Bannon said in his own social media posting.
So should restrainer holdouts reconsider their positions too?
Senior Rand Paul adviser Doug Stafford doesn’t think so, telling RS, “Opposing endless wars, foreign aid and regime change was the bedrock of our founders foreign policy, and a lesson we would do well to keep trying to emulate today.”
“Just because the administration seems to have lost their focus, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep fighting,” he insisted.
“There are some hostile governments that look like they are hanging by a thread. I think Trump has been sold on the idea that he can topple them, or at least pull on the loose threads, without getting in too deep,” Jim Antle, executive editor of The Washington Examiner told RS in an email.
Antle added, “The lessons Trump and those who appear to be winning the internal fights in the administration took from Iraq are more limited than those learned by the restrainers in his orbit.”
On Greene’s concern that being anti-regime change has gone out of style, Curt Mills, Executive Director of the American Conservative, told RS that “opposition to regime change war didn't go out of style with the American people, however. Take a look at the polling on the Venezuela operation, which from a tactical perspective couldn't have gone more sterling for the administration.”
“It's still unpopular,” Mills said. “Neocon-lite foreign policy might be having a winter in the sun among some of the president's courtiers, but this nonsense remains hated in the broader public, and is likely poison for any politicians who embrace it or run firmly on its legacy.”
While Mills is right — in this YouGov poll, 51% of American adults opposed the Venezuela invasion while only 39% supported it — Republicans are largely still hawkish. In fact, 74% of self-identifying Republicans in that poll approved of the attack.
None of this bodes very well for foreign policy in 2026. The friends Trump keeps, and keeps closest, do seem to matter.
This week, reliable restraint advocate Tucker Carlson was present at a White House Venezuela oil executives meeting, where the president reportedly introduced him as “a very conservative guy, a very good guy.”
But Carlson once called Sen. Graham a “f***ing lunatic” for wanting the U.S. to strike Iran.
These personal relationships shouldn’t mean so much for American foreign policy. But they have, and likely will continue to in the future. Whether Trump is truly making “regime change great again,” therefore, is an open question.keep readingShow less
Military Base Toxic Exposure Map (Courtesy of Hill & Ponton)
Mapping toxic exposure on US military bases. Hint: There's a lot.
January 14, 2026
Toxic exposure during military service rarely behaves like a battlefield injury.
It does not arrive with a single moment of trauma or a clear line between cause and effect. Instead, it accumulates quietly over years. By the time symptoms appear, many veterans have already changed duty stations, left the military, moved across state lines, or lost access to the documents that might have made those connections easier to prove.
For decades, this gap between exposure and recognition has defined the experience of many veterans. Illness emerges long after service, while the places where that exposure occurred fade into memory or paperwork archived beyond reach. In the absence of clear acknowledgment, veterans are often left to reconstruct their own histories, searching for evidence that what happened to them was not coincidence.
Today, many veterans rely on public environmental data to fill those gaps. State water testing results, federal cleanup records, Environmental Protection Agency databases, and installation level assessments have become critical sources for understanding what was present in the air, soil, and groundwater at military bases. These records help bridge the distance between lived experience and the official record. Yet for most veterans, the information remains scattered across agencies, buried in technical documents, and difficult to interpret without specialized knowledge.
That fragmentation has long been a barrier to accountability.
This is why our firm, Hill & Ponton, developed the Military Base Toxic Exposure Map. The tool aggregates publicly available environmental data tied to hundreds of military installations across the United States and abroad, placing it into a single, searchable platform. Veterans can look up bases by name or state and see whether documented contamination has been recorded at locations where they served.
The map draws on existing public sources, including base cleanup histories, PFAS detection reports, groundwater monitoring data, and environmental assessments. It does not speculate or create new findings. Instead, it organizes what is already known and makes it accessible to people who have the most at stake in understanding it.
In that sense, the toxic exposure map follows a familiar model. Hill & Ponton previously developed a Blue Water Navy ship position map used by veterans seeking recognition for Agent Orange exposure. That earlier tool allowed sailors to verify whether their ships entered waters known to be contaminated, using declassified ship logs and official records. The new mapping effort applies the same principle to land based service, allowing veterans to locate installations where they served and see whether those sites have documented environmental hazards.
What these maps provide is not a diagnosis or a legal conclusion. They provide transparency. For many veterans, transparency is what has been missing for years.
Environmental exposure on military bases has often been treated as an administrative problem rather than a policy failure. Contaminated water systems, industrial solvents used in maintenance operations, fuel spills, and open burn practices were frequently normalized as part of military life. Oversight lagged. Monitoring was inconsistent. Records were incomplete. When contamination later came to light, responsibility was diffused across agencies and decades.
The consequences of that approach did not disappear when service members left the military.
Although the PACT Act expanded benefits and presumptive coverage for some toxic exposed veterans, many cases involving base contamination still fall outside those categories. Veterans who served decades ago, rotated through multiple installations, or developed conditions not yet formally recognized must still prove where they served and how those exposures relate to their current health. Without accessible documentation, that burden can feel insurmountable.
Mapping does not solve that problem on its own. But it changes the starting point.
By consolidating environmental data tied to specific locations and timeframes, the toxic exposure map allows veterans to bring concrete information into conversations with healthcare providers and the Department of Veterans Affairs. It helps establish exposure timelines and grounds claims in documented environmental conditions rather than memory alone.
This is not a question of expanding benefits indiscriminately. It is a question of aligning policy with reality.
The United States maintains one of the largest military infrastructures in the world. That footprint includes environmental consequences that do not end when a base closes or a service member discharges. Ignoring those consequences shifts long term costs onto veterans and their families, while eroding trust in the institutions responsible for their care.
Mapping toxic exposure is a modest step, but an essential one. It acknowledges that environmental harm leaves records, even when recognition lags behind. It gives veterans a way to see whether the places they served have documented histories of contamination and to ask informed questions about their health.
Most importantly, it reframes toxic exposure not as an unfortunate anomaly, but as a governance issue with lasting human consequences. Veterans upheld their obligations in service. Transparency and accountability after service should not be optional
keep readingShow less
Want more of our stories on Google?
Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
Click here to make us a Preferred Source.
Newsletter
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.