Top photo credit: Iraqi-American, Samir, 34, pinning deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to the ground during his capture in Tikrit, on Saturday, December 13, 2003. (US Army photo)
If they are not human, we do not have to follow the law
December 12, 2025
“Kill everybody” was what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reportedly instructed the Special Operations commander as alleged drug smugglers were being tracked off the Trinidad coast.
A missile strike set their boat ablaze. Two survivors were seen clinging to what was left of their vessel. A second U.S. strike finished them off. These extra-judicial killings on Sept. 2 were the first in the Trump administration’s campaign to incinerate “narco-terrorists.” Over the past two months, at least 80 people have been killed in more than 20 attacks on the demonstrably false grounds that the Venezuelan government is a major source of drugs flowing into the United States.
Because the supposed drug runners are participating in an “armed conflict” against the U.S., they are not entitled to due process or other protections — such as those afforded to shipwrecked individuals — under the laws of war, the administration contends. “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth charged on X.
Language serves more than a strictly legal justification. The term “narco-terrorist” is meant to dehumanize and desensitize. Their conduct — murder, terrorism, and poisoning Americans’ bodies — morally disqualifies them and, therefore, justifies extraordinary punishment. The possibility that harmless fishermen are blown to pieces must not weaken our leaders’ resolve to defend the nation.
The boat strikes may be illegal and appalling, but the Trump administration’s conduct follows a long historical pattern, where America’s enemies operate outside the acceptable boundaries of civilization, and Washington's heavy-handed response can be justified by notions of national security, economic interests, racial superiority, or basic human decency — or all four simultaneously.
In his stimulating book, “Chasing Bandits: America’s Long War on Terror,” Nichols College historian Michael E. Neagle reveals the constancy of terms “connoting criminality, incivility, and illegitimacy of both causes and means,” such as bandits, savages, guerrillas, and terrorists. “I maintain that these pejorative descriptions have had two distinct utilities: one, to rally popular and political support in the United States by intimating cultural distinctions that suggested or reinforced a sense of American superiority, and two, to justify incursions abroad that provided the United States with more influence in places of strategic interest,” Neagle says.
The author’s framework compels us to question the necessity and costs of the Global War on Terrorism through an unfamiliar lens. Most readers probably have not considered comparisons between the hunt for Osama bin Laden (and “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq) and mostly forgotten manhunts and guerrilla fighting a century or more ago. In the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico during the First World War, and Nicaragua in the 1920s and ‘30s, U.S. invaders fought difficult campaigns against foes who were dismissed as savages or bandits motivated by greed or bloodlust rather than legitimate political aims, such as national independence.
For instance, the Filipino insurgency (1899-1902) under Emilio Aguinaldo used “sneak attacks, booby traps, and assassinations,” notes Neagle, tactics that “justified brutal acts of retaliation and intimidation otherwise considered uncivilized or unethical… soldiers often bent or broke recently established rules of engagement, creating a framework that would be used in future combat.”
Long before the George W. Bush administration authorized torture and the indefinite detention of “unlawful enemy combatants,” U.S. forces in the Philippines subjected insurrectos to the “water cure” and tossed thousands of Filipinos into concentration camps.
Aguinaldo, his insurgency crushed, eventually took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Neither Pancho Villa nor Augusto Cesar Sandino was ever caught by their U.S. pursuers. In these cases, Neagle argues, Washington still achieved its larger aims of ending the threat at the U.S.-Mexico border and quelling Sandino’s rebellion against American occupation in Nicaragua.
But the victories came at a lasting cost. Thousands died in scores of small battles stretched out over years. Villa may have intended to provoke a large reprisal when his private militia raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 Americans and sparking nationwide outrage. Both U.S. interventions fomented anti-American sentiment while turning Villa and Sandino into heroes, although the latter was more popular elsewhere in Latin America than within his own country.
“The paradoxical results of these missions,” Neagle concludes, “show the broader importance of recognizing limitations of military power.” Time and again, delegitimizing language blinded U.S. officials to the potential costs of war. The enemy’s behavior may have been beyond the pale, but trying to kill them produced a new set of unintended consequences. Or, as Neagle puts it, “One of the tragic ironies of the GWOT is that the longer the conflict continued, the more extremism multiplied.”
Ernesto “Che” Guevara makes an ironic appearance in “Chasing Bandits.” Ridiculed by U.S. critics as a “professional revolutionary” who lacked conviction but was nonetheless bent on exporting Marxism to the Third World, Guevara was susceptible to the same kind of magical thinking he derided among his imperialist adversaries. His missions in the Congo and Bolivia were disastrous. He and his ragtag fighters lacked popular support in both locales, thus ignoring his own “how-to” book for successful guerrilla warfare. Moreover, Guevara imagined a sort of domino theory where his heroics would “inspire similar rebellions in neighboring countries, including his homeland of Argentina, which was Guevara’s grandest dream,” Neagle says. The Bolivian military, supported by U.S. training and intelligence, caught and executed him, and then put his body on display.
His crusade failed, “but in death, Guevara’s reputation flourished… his devotion set a template for other like-minded revolutionaries in Latin America.”
A trenchant question that connects Michael Neagle’s disparate examples is whether capturing or killing an enemy leader makes any meaningful difference. The notorious narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar, who made billions on America’s cocaine addiction, was gunned down by Colombian authorities in 1993. Yet other cartels filled the void, and today Colombia still produces “about 90 percent of the cocaine powder reaching the United States,” according to the DEA.
In the white-hot rage following the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks a quarter-century ago, few Americans, from policy-makers to ordinary citizens, could foresee that the coming wars would exact staggering costs in blood, treasure, and national prestige. For many, all that mattered was that Osama bin Laden was an evil mass murderer who hated freedom. “We’ll smoke him out of his cave,” President Bush promised.
By the time bin Laden was tracked down in Pakistan a decade later, U.S. public opinion had soured on the global war on terrorism. Did killing al-Qaeda’s founder matter by then? And what of the millions of lives upended as “forever war” and refugees rippled across the Greater Middle East? Michael Neagle’s important book encourages us to confront these questions anew. As has long been obvious but too often ignored, Washington cannot escape the law of unintended consequences, no matter how evil — or savage, backward, criminal, or inhuman — its enemies.
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Top photo credit: Keir Starmer (Prime Minister, United Kingdom), Volodymyr Zelenskyy (President, Ukraine), Rutte, Donald Tusk (Prime Minister, Poland) and Friedrich Merz (Chancellor of Germany) in meeting with NATO Secretary, June 25, 2025. (NATO/Flickr)
Euro-elites melt down over NSS, missing — or ignoring — the point
December 11, 2025
The release of the latest U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) has triggered a revealing meltdown within Europe’s political and think-tank class. From Berlin to Brussels to Warsaw, the refrain is consistent: a bewildered lament that America seems to be putting its own interests first, no longer willing to play its assigned role as Europe’s uncomplaining security guarantor.
Examine the responses. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz finds the U.S. strategy “unacceptable” and its portrayal of Europe “misplaced.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, for his part, found it necessary to remind the U.S. that the two allies "face the same enemies." Coming from a Polish leader, this is an unambiguous allusion to Russia, which creates clear tension with the new NSS's emphasis on deescalating relations with Moscow.
EU Council President Antonio Costa, voicing a common EU stance, claims the Union is targeted due to its strength, citing its steadfast support for Ukraine. This assertion, however, ignores the decisive reality: without American arms and intelligence, Kyiv might not have endured against Moscow’s invasion as long as it has.
Next comes the crescendo of think-tank hysteria: the EU is portrayed as a “last bastion of sanity” besieged by a cabal of “Russian warmongers,” “American tech bros,” and “MAGA politicians.” In this narrative, Europe is uniquely virtuous, a pure-hearted victim in a world of predators.
This is not analysis. It is a continent-wide therapy session. It reveals a political establishment confronted with the expiration of its preferred modus operandi: what analyst Almut Rochowanski aptly terms “vicarious primacy.” This can also be defined as a “primacy by proxy” — an illusion of strength stemming from Europe’s role as America’s junior partner. Europeans acted as America’s vice-hegemon, sharing in the moral authority and diplomatic clout of the West while outsourcing the work of actual security, deterrence, and great-power politics to Washington.
For Europe's elites, Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was not a stark warning of the expiration of this bipartisan consensus in Washington, but a transient aberration. Consequently, the response was not a sprint toward strategic autonomy, but a peculiar mix of hoping the American "deep state" would control a wayward president and actively appeasing him. The failure of the E3 — Britain, France, and Germany — to uphold the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump foolishly abandoned in 2018 exemplifies this latter approach.
Biden's 2020 election seemed to validate their hope for a "business as usual" return. Even now, in 2025, mainstream European politicians cling to the idea that a President Rubio, Ted Cruz, or a new Democrat in 2028 will resurrect the neoconservative/liberal interventionist consensus that made their vicarious hegemony so comfortable.
This denial is actively fueled by spoilers within Trump's own party — figures, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who work to sabotage efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
European politicians, seeking validation, flock to Washington where establishment voices — from International Republican Institute types to anti-Russia pundits like Max Boot, who recently dismissed the European section of the NSS as looking "like it was written by a far-right troll" — tell them precisely what they want to hear: that restrainers like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie are merely marginal "isolationists." I heard such ideas firsthand during my time as a European Parliament staffer.
Consequently, Europe’s mainstream made no serious effort to engage with the diverse MAGA world, including its anti-war paleoconservatives and libertarians. They preferred the comfort of their old Atlanticist echo chamber.
Why? Because true strategic autonomy is terrifying to them. It would require what they have consistently failed to do: think seriously about defense, which is first and foremost about the sober assessment of threats, not just more funding for defense contractors. It is also the practice of complex, nuanced diplomacy with adversaries — something the Europeans seem to have unlearned.
Examples abound. European diplomatic initiatives to end the war in Ukraine seem more like attempts to purge Trump’s peace plan from the very provisions that might incentivize Moscow to make a deal. When they do this, a return to a protracted war as a default setting appears to be the preferred option.
Matters are not much better with China. When France’s President Emmanuel Macron attempted an independent overture to Beijing, he returned to Paris only to threaten to impose tariffs — a staggering display of diplomatic incoherence made all the more reckless by the fact that the default American diplomatic and security backstop can no longer be taken for granted.
The new NSS, with its blunt language and clear prioritization of the Western Hemisphere subject to an imperious “Trump Doctrine,” must serve as a brutal wake-up call. From a European perspective, its language — notably the overwrought rhetoric of “civilizational erasure” — feels condescending and alarmist.
Trump’s reference to this in the NSS:
Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP — down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today — partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness. But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.
The irony is profound because the EU has long instrumentalized a similar, patronizing rhetoric of a “civilizing mission” to justify its meddling in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia.
Furthermore, when figures like Merz crassly frame Israel’s bombing of Iran as “doing the dirty job for all of us,” or when Macron and Finnish President Alexander Stubb cast the conflict with Russia in existential civilizational terms, they traffic in the same logic of supremacy they now condemn. Europe is confronting an unwelcome echo of its own rhetoric.
Yet there is no evidence that Europe’s current leaders will face reality, stop whining about “American betrayal,” and build the real strength that requires credible defense and the diplomatic maturity to engage in real give-and-take with adversaries.
Instead, they keep feeding their delusions of “convergencies with the U.S.” in pushing for Ukraine’s military victory, a policy that defies both battlefield evidence and Trump’s clearly stated strategic priority of stabilizing relations with Moscow.
Should the U.S. proceed despite European objections, some have floated a financial "nuclear option” — dumping U.S. Treasury reserves in British, German and French central banks. This threat, however, is dangerously detached from reality as it appears to be massively underestimating the practical and legal risks for Europe itself.
The absurdity of this financial "nuclear option" mirrors the larger strategic delusion: a belief that Europe can threaten measures that would undermine its own financial stability, all while still clinging to the ghost of an American strategic cover. It is the last, desperate fantasy of a vice-hegemon — a role Europe must finally shed if it is to become a serious, sovereign actor.
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Top image credit: Palestinians receive their financial aid as part of $480 million in aid allocated by Qatar, at a post office in Gaza City on May 13, 2019. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib. Anas-Mohammed via shutterstock.com
Gaza's economy is collapsing. It needs liquidity now.
December 11, 2025
As the world recently marked the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and only days after the U.N. Security Council approved the U.S.-backed resolution outlining a new security and governance framework for Gaza, one central issue remains unresolved. Gaza’s economy is collapsing.
Political resolutions may redefine who administers territory or manages security, but they do not pay salaries, keep ATMs functioning, or control hyperinflation. Without Palestinian-led institutions independently allowed to manage money transparently and predictably, a Palestinian state risks becoming purely symbolic.
Indeed, in Gaza today, liquidity is not technical. It is a part of ensuring survival itself. However, in recent political negotiations, liquidity was scarcely mentioned. Recognition dominated the conversation. But what are politically couched multilateral promises going to do for you when flour is 5,000% more expensive? When you wake up in the morning holding a disintegrating 100-shekel note, taped together for the tenth time, praying a vendor will accept it so you can feed your family? When you’ve already traded your ID card — your only ticket to humanitarian aid — for access to an ATM, where another equally desperate person charges you a 50% commission rate on the withdrawal?
This is not a commentary on political symbolism. Nor is it about abstract “day after” reconstruction conversations. It is about the immediate humanitarian consequences of Palestine’s economic collapse. Already, as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development noted, two years of military siege have reverted Palestinian GDP to 2003 levels, erasing 22 years of progress. And if this collapse is allowed to deepen, any effort to rebuild will become nearly impossible.
The economy cannot be deferred. It is the difference between aid functioning as a temporary stopgap or fraying into a solitary lifeline. To understand just how difficult recovery becomes once protracted collapse sets in, one has only to look to Syria.
Lessons from Syria’s collapse
Syria is not invoked here as a mirror image of Palestine. The two crises differ in context, intensity, and geopolitics, and deserve to be treated as distinct. However, Syria is the most recent case of prolonged financial degradation followed by near-unanimous international support for rebuilding.
Since 2011, Syria’s economy has contracted by more than 60%. Sanctions from the U.S., EU, and Arab League targeted its central bank, oil revenues, financial networks, and key state entities. As the war dragged on, restrictions hardened. Informal markets flourished and civilian infrastructure eroded. Hyperinflation gutted purchasing power; by 2025, the “Syrian pound has lost more than 99% of its value since the war erupted in 2011,” leaving banknotes almost worthless and public trust in tatters.
It was only after Assad’s ouster in December 2024 that the global community moved swiftly to reverse course. Sanctions relief was implemented across major jurisdictions. The diaspora mobilized to reinvest, and donors pledged support. In August 2025, the Syrian Central Bank redenominated the pound, “removing two zeros from its currency in an attempt to restore public confidence.”
But, even with coordinated relief and reform, recovery is far from assured. Regulatory opacity, historic investor flight, and fractured financial controls mean that public confidence in financial institutions has not returned. That is what makes Syria instructive: it shows just how difficult recovery becomes, even when the economic restrictions are lifted and the world aligns behind it. In Palestine, where neither the infrastructure nor the unanimous international support we now see in Syria exists, the task may just be Sisyphean.
This contrast becomes even sharper when considering the basic monetary tools Syria still possessed throughout its collapse. Syria had a sovereign currency, a functioning, if seemingly opaque, central bank, reserves to restructure, and the institutional authority to redenominate the currency.
In contrast, due to Israel’s complete control over Palestine’s financial levers, the latter has no traditional central bank, no independent currency, and no unilateral control over fiscal inflows. The Palestinian Authority’s budget and ability to pay salaries depends on clearance revenues, or taxes, collected (and often withheld) by Israel. The economy can only operate under the four main circulating currencies — shekels, U.S. dollars, Jordanian dinars, and Euros. Palestine has no authority to issue a trusted domestic currency and no true fiscal pathways to manage reserves, foreign exchange risk, or bond markets.
Reconstruction plans estimated at $70 billion are being developed in Palestine; yet even with the anticipated increase in the presence of the four foreign currencies coming in to support these efforts, they alone cannot insulate the economy from collapse: Israel has deliberately restricted shekel-to-dollar conversions, creating a surplus that has turned banks into cash warehouses. Transactions between Palestinian and Israeli banks still hinge on a single Israeli waiver, shielding the Israeli banks from liability.
That waiver, which was set to expire at the end of November 2025, was recently granted only a two-week extension, which is far from a permanent solution.
A banking system cannot function when its survival depends on a discretionary political instrument. The economy and the humanitarian system cannot function either. The only solution is Palestinian independence and control over its financial system and currency.
Indeed, absent this, Palestine risks inheriting Syria’s fragility in a much harsher form. The minimal monetary scaffolding Syria had before recovery does not exist in Palestine. A system that cannot convert its main legal tender into usable foreign currency is not dollarized or diversified; it is trapped. A viable sovereign currency may be an important marker of long-term statehood, but it is not a near-term option, and the remaining pathways are constrained by Israel’s complete financial control over financial rails. Therefore, the most salient recommendation is to create sustained mechanisms and pathways that are not susceptible to Israeli interruption or political will.
The currency of Palestinian statehood
Ultimately, liquidity is not only the lifeblood of tomorrow’s statehood; it is what makes humanitarian assistance function today.
Some will argue that the answer is simply to make aid more comprehensive. However, aid was never designed to replace an economy. Trucks can deliver flour and medicine, but not the shoes in a child’s size, the bus fare to reach a hospital, or the fuel to keep it running. Liquidity is what allows families to turn partial aid into actual survival. It is what allows aid agencies to pay suppliers, hire staff, and keep operations afloat. More aid trucks, or lifting the humanitarian blockade alone will not change that. These steps must be taken in tandem with restoring financial channels as a priority.
The international community must act before collapse ossifies. Palestinian transactions cannot remain hostage to a single, two-week or short-term waiver. Alternative correspondent banking channels, developed with regional or multilateral actors, are essential. So, too, are safeguards for clearance revenues. Independent oversight mechanisms could both insulate these transfers from political interference and give donors confidence that budgets will be honored and compliance will be upheld.
These tools must be deployed not in reaction to complete collapse, but in anticipation, and prevention, of it. Syria’s experience shows how hard it is to regain economic footing once financial infrastructure and trust are lost. For Palestine, the scaffolding for this infrastructure is hard wrought and fledgling. If recovery is to be possible in the future, what is left of Palestinian liquidity must be protected in the present, and the current damage must be urgently addressed to halt the trajectory toward a complete, economy-wide financial and humanitarian spiral.
To ensure this, the New York Declaration, and the accompanying U.N. General Assembly Resolution affirming it, cannot be diplomatic theater. A flag and a seat at the United Nations are vital markers of recognition, but statehood cannot be sustained by these displays alone. It requires the basic institutions of financial governance.
Palestinians have too often been handed words without the means to act on them. Without real economic support, the world will not be building a state. It will be scripting its next collapse.
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