Tag Archive for: foreign policy

U.S. State Department Mulls Closing 27 Embassies and Consulates

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The U.S. State Department is formulating plans to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates, reported The New York Times, based upon an internal memo. The plan, which expands on one circulated in an earlier March memo, is part of an internal budget-cutting campaign, which aims to reduce the State Department operations budget by as much as 20%.

The memo proposed shuttering six embassies in Africa (Central African Republic [C.A.R.], Eritrea, Gambia, Lesotho, the Republic of Congo and South Sudan), two in Europe (Luxembourg and Malta), one in the Caribbean (Grenada), and one in the Indian Ocean (the Maldives), according to the Times. However, the official State Department list of embassies does not list a U.S. embassy in Grenada.

The memo also proposed closing all five U.S. consulates in France, two out of five U.S. consulates in Germany, and both branch offices of the embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Times said. It also proposed closing the consulates in Thessaloniki, Greece; Florence, Italy; Ponta Delgada, Portugal; and Edinburgh, Scotland, plus four outside of Europe: Douala, Cameroon; Medan, Indonesia; Durban, South Africa; and Busan, South Korea.

The U.S. operated 271 diplomatic missions overseas (embassies and consulates) in 2023, according to the Lowy Institute’s Global Diplomacy Index. These proposals therefore represent a 10% cut to the number of U.S. missions.

The Times complained that closing embassies “would hinder the work of large parts of the federal government,” especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which usually posts its officers at embassies under a diplomatic cover. “Embassies house officers from the military, intelligence, law enforcement, health, commerce, trade, treasury and other agencies,” they explained. They especially fretted over “ceding vital diplomatic space to China,” which according to the Lowy Institute operates 274 overseas missions.

But diplomatic influence cannot be measured simply by counting the number of foreign missions a nation operates. There are many important factors, including how a nation uses the diplomatic missions it has. (In that respect, the U.S. is never going to leverage its overseas missions as far as China, which has operated secret police stations even inside the U.S. to keep tabs on its own citizens.)

The point is, if some U.S. missions see little to no use, or are more of a liability than an asset, then they should be shut down. And suggesting “then we’ll have less than China” is not a good argument for keeping them open.

There are already at least 25 nations without an official U.S. embassy in-country, TWS found. The U.S. embassies in six nations (Afghanistan, 2021; Belarus, 2022; Sudan, 2023; Syria, 2012; Venezuela, 2019; and Yemen, 2015) have suspended operations entirely due to dangerous conditions persisting there. Meanwhile, the American embassy to Guinea-Bissau is located in neighboring Senegal, the embassy to Libya operates out of Tunisia, and the embassy listed for Iran is really the Swiss embassy.

For 16 other nations, the U.S. has no embassy listed at all. This includes six Caribbean island nations (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines), which all use the U.S. embassy in Barbados. It also includes four Pacific island nations (Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu) and one African island nation (Sao Tome and Principe). Rounding out the list are three tiny European nations (Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Monaco), and two nations with whom the U.S. has no formal relations (Bhutan and North Korea).

The clever reader will likely notice a theme to nations lacking U.S. embassies: most are tiny nations with small populations, small economies, and therefore little business to transact with the U.S. What little business there is can more easily be conducted through an embassy in a neighboring country than by establishing a whole new embassy, requiring infrastructure, staff, vetting procedures, etc.

The embassy closures proposed by the State Department largely continue this theme: Lesotho and Gambia are entirely surrounded by another country, while Luxembourg, Malta, and the Maldives are small (and, for two out of three, also islands). It’s less obvious why the State Department chose certain consulates to shutter, but it could be for the same reason: little work to do that could not be handled more easily somewhere else.

The most notable embassies to be closed are those in the relatively larger nations of C.A.R., South Sudan, and Republic of Congo. The first two are landlocked, impoverished nations that have little intercourse with the U.S.; C.A.R. ranks among the world’s most repressive countries, while South Sudan has little infrastructure or civic stability. The Republic of Congo is better off, but perhaps the State Department noticed that the U.S. operated another embassy only four miles away (as the crow flies), across the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It is also notable that so many proposed consulate closures are in Europe. This could reflect a downturn in European tourism, likely due to lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in fewer Americans requiring consular services.

This could also reflect the Trump administration’s wariness about European countries that have retreated from certain fundamental freedoms. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vice President J.D. Vance said in February. “What I worry about is the threat from within: the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

This raises another factor the State Department must consider: the potential threats to U.S. diplomatic missions. The 2012 attack on America’s consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in four American deaths, dramatically underscores the real risk associated with operating far-flung diplomatic missions in hostile corners of the globe, with only a handful of staff.

So far this year, the State Department has seen an unusually high number of resignations (about 700), including 450 career diplomats. For the safety of America’s own diplomats, it makes sense to consolidate our diplomatic missions, so that America operates no more than it can fully staff.

With staffing cuts and budget cuts, it makes sense for the State Department to trim away the least important overseas missions, too. And, once those reductions are made, a slimmer State Department — and the U.S. taxpayers who fund it — will benefit for years to come.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Newsham: “The Elites, Wall Street, The Business Class, They Have Funded The Build Up Of The CCP.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

China: America’s Aggressive, Escalating Adversary

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“If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” declared the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in a statement reposted Tuesday by the Chinese Embassy. President Donald Trump has engaged the CCP in a punishing spiral of escalating tariffs, which have now exceeded 100% in both directions. But the conflict is not limited to trade, as tensions grow between the U.S. and China on numerous diplomatic and military fault lines.

Trade War

Front and center has been the trade war, with Trump hiking tariffs on Chinese goods to an effective tariff rate of 145%, while the CCP has raised tariffs on American goods to 125%. “The U.S. escalation of tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which seriously infringes on China’s legitimate rights and interests and seriously undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system,” complained China’s Finance Ministry.

That grievance might carry more weight if China did not routinely violate the legitimate rights and interests of other nations, particularly the U.S., through currency manipulation, slave labor, intellectual property theft, and intense censorship.

Travel Advisory

In an apparent attempt to extend the trade war horizontally, China’s Tourism Ministry on Wednesday issued a travel warning for the U.S., stating, “Recently, due to the deterioration of China-U.S. economic and trade relations and the domestic security situation in the United States, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reminds Chinese tourists to fully assess the risks of traveling to the United States and be cautious.”

The U.S. State Department issues travel advisories to discourage Americans from visiting parts of the world rendered dangerous through civil unrest, rampant crime, or oppressive or uncooperative governments. China’s travel advisory, especially the allusion to an imaginary “domestic security situation” is calculated to deter Chinese tourism to America, and thus hit the U.S. economy on another pressure point.

Cyber Attacks

The CCP has accompanied its longstanding economic belligerence with accelerating aggression in cyberspace. Last year, in a breach called Salt Typhoon, Chinese hackers broke into U.S. telecommunications networks, including those belonging to AT&T and Verizon, and they used the data to spy on the unencrypted calls and texts of government and political figures, including people working on the Trump and Harris presidential campaigns.

A separate breach called Volt Typhoon attempted to gain a foothold in computer networks managing critical U.S. infrastructure, while a third attack in December broke into the U.S. Treasury Department and accessed employee workstations.

The CCP has always denied responsibility for these powerful cyberattacks in public, but they came close to acknowledging a role in them during a secret December meeting in Geneva, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Thursday. At the meeting, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Wang Lei told the American delegation that the infrastructure hacks resulted from the U.S. military’s backing of Taiwan. The language was oblique enough to avoid a direct admission of guilt, but nevertheless clear enough to convey the threat.

In response to this reporting, China’s embassy in Washington dismissed “so-called hacking threats,” choosing instead to attack the U.S. for “using cybersecurity to smear and slander China.” The U.S. State Department responded that “Chinese cyber threats are some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security,” and that “the United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to safeguard U.S. critical infrastructure from irresponsible and reckless cyberattacks from Beijing.”

Military Tensions

Regardless of the details of the secret December meeting — a last hurrah for former President Biden’s diplomatic team — American officials assess that China escalated its aggressive actions around Taiwan by 300% in 2024, in what the U.S. military calls not just exercises by rehearsals for an invasion.

“Foremost” of the challenges the U.S. faces in the Indo-Pacific is “China’s increasingly aggressive and assertive behavior,” said Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. “Their unprecedented military modernization encompassing advancements in artificial intelligence, [hypersonic missiles], space-based capabilities, among others, poses a real and serious threat to our homeland, to our allies, and to our partners.”

Unfortunately, China not only threatens the U.S. homeland from their own hemisphere but from ours. “China’s military has too large of a presence in the Western Hemisphere,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Wednesday at the Central American Security Conference in Panama. “Make no mistake, Beijing is investing and operating in this region for military advantage and unfair economic gain.”

After pressure from the Trump administration, a Chinese company agreed to sell ports it operated at either end of the Panama Canal, but Hegseth noted the further threat of Chinese military inroads into Latin America.

This brings us full circle, to the CCP declaration that opened this article: “If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.” Perhaps someone should tell them that cribbing lines from manipulative movie villains (“If it’s war Guilder wants, it’s war they shall get,” Prince Humperdinck, “The Princess Bride”; “If it’s a war Aslan wants, it’s a war he shall get,” Queen Jadis, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”) makes them sound a little too sinister — not to mention eager.

“The era of capitulating to coercion by the communist Chinese is over,” declared Hegseth on Tuesday. China’s “growing and adversarial control of strategic land and critical infrastructure in this hemisphere cannot and will not stand.” Those aren’t quite fighting words, but I don’t think Xi will invite Hegseth to tea anytime soon.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Animals’: Hamas Hands Over Wrong Body, Parades Bodies of Murdered Children

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In the latest incident involving the Israeli hostages held by Hamas that has drawn widespread outrage, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced Thursday that a body that Hamas returned as part of the hostage deal was “an anonymous, unidentified body” rather than that of Shiri Bibas, the mother of two children that were also killed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to avenge the hostage deal breach, describing the incident as a “cruel and malicious violation” of the ceasefire agreement.

This development followed a morbid display put on by the terrorist group on Thursday, when they handed over the bodies of Bibas’s sons, 4-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir, as well the body of 84-year-old Oded Lifschitz, among a massive, celebratory throng of terrorists. While Hamas claimed that Bibas and her children were killed as a result of an Israeli airstrike, the IDF announced Friday that a forensic examination determined that the children were murdered by Hamas “with their bare hands” a number of weeks after they were kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

“This is, without exaggeration, the conduct we expect from animals,” wrote the National Review’s Noah Rothman.

The incident calls into question how long the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will last. Adam Boehler, who serves as the U.S. envoy for hostages, called the handover of the wrong body “horrific” and a “clear violation” of the ceasefire deal. Referring to Hamas, Boehler remarked, “If I were them, I’d release everybody or they are going to face total annihilation.” Currently, six more Israeli hostages are set to be released on Saturday.

The incidents come amid further terrorist attacks targeting civilians in the Jewish state, when three parked commuter buses exploded in Bat Yam, outside of Tel Aviv on Thursday with nobody on board. The buses had recently finished their routes, and Mayor Tzvika Brot remarked that it was a “miracle” that nobody was killed or injured.

During Friday’s edition of “This Week on Capitol Hill,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) observed that Hamas’s conduct paints a stark picture of the ongoing threat the terrorist group is to Israel.

“Hamas is an evil regime, and that was on literal parade this week for everyone in the world to see it … with the parading [of] the little coffins of children that they murdered,” he commented. “I mean, this is good versus evil, light versus darkness, civilization versus barbarism, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th massacre. The world is recognizing this, and even leaders in other Arab countries are having to disclaim this because it’s so brutal and in-your-face.”

“We have to eradicate this threat,” Johnson insisted. “President Trump said very clearly, if all the hostages were not released by Saturday last week, that there would be hell to pay. And now we’re all awaiting the next developments and to see what happens there. It’s a terrible situation for Israel and for freedom-loving people around the world, but it shows you exactly what we’re up against.”

Simcha Rothman, a member of the Israeli Knesset, also joined the show and emphasized the inhumanity displayed by Hamas.

“What does it take to murder with your bare hands a 10-month baby just because he’s Jewish?” he asked. “What does it take? What does it take for such a group to go and chant and cheer when they see a coffin of two children murdered just because they’re Jews? That is the evil that we are dealing with. That is the evil that the world must deal with. … President Trump understands that we cannot have those people near our borders planning the next attack. Like what? We could have woken up to a morning with five or 10 buses in the rush hour explod[ing] in the streets of Israel — only a miracle saved us from this. So we were almost having this talk with thousands more Israelis dead and injured today. So this is what we are dealing with. This is why we must win for us and for the entire world.”

Meanwhile, 64 hostages still remain in the clutches of Hamas, and it remains unclear if a second phase of the ceasefire agreement will go forward.

“I really hope that Israel will not retreat from any place in Gaza,” Rothman contended. “The deal is bad enough. To have a deal with the devil, to have a deal with [these] modern-day Nazis. … We are all happy to see the hostages back, but to have this deal is bad enough to give away the place that they will sit and plan the next attack and kidnap the next group of people. That’s something we cannot have, we must not have. We have to go the way President Trump says. Give back all the hostages at once, or we will break the gates of hell over you. This is the only way we will be able to get more hostages.”

Rothman concluded by arguing that in order to secure the peace of Israel, all of the Hamas terrorists that were released during the first phase of the hostage agreement will have to be dealt with.

“We have to make sure that we can either eliminate those terrorists from being a threat or get them back in prison or kill them,” he maintained. “We cannot live with this kind of threat. No freedom-loving and life-loving nation will live with this evil presiding just meters away from the families of citizens and from the heartland of the Jewish people.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is repubished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Lack of Moral Clarity,’ ‘Weakness of Political Will’ Explain the Left’s Issue with Free Speech: Expert

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After Vice President J.D. Vance made his commitment to free speech clear during an address in Munich, CBS News’s Margaret Brennan did not take to it well.

During an interview with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Brennan compared Vance to Nazis. “[H]e was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” she said. “He met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that.” Rubio promptly disagreed with the news anchor, emphasizing how “free speech was not used to conduct a genocide.”

He was also quick to explain that, “there was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none.” The tussle with free speech at CBS did not end with Brennan.

In a “60 Minutes” episode, a production of CBS, a German lawyer argued that “free speech needs boundaries.” In another episode, three German prosecutors touted similar claims. “They say, ‘No, that’s my free speech,’” remarked Dr. Matthäus Fink. “And we say, ‘No, you have free speech as well, but it also has its limits.’” The episode also featured a police raid on an individual for something they posted online. With the full support of CBS, they characterized the fact that it’s a criminal offense to insult someone in Germany as an effort “to bring some civility to the world wide web” through “policing speech online.”

On Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins addressed this issue head on. “So,” he asked, “why does the Left have such a significant issue with free speech?” Mary Hasson, the Kate O’Beirne senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, replied that part of the Left’s problem with free speech is that “they’ve lost their sense of moral clarity.” Ultimately, “if you don’t have a sense of what’s good … right … [and] true,” then “you don’t understand speech as being part of that search for the truth.”

As Hasson explained, speech that stops seeking after truth is “all about power. And that’s what we see here. … [W]hen you lose your moral clarity, when you no longer appreciate the truth, or even the sense that there is a truth, then it’s all about maintaining your power. And that’s where censorship comes in.”

Perkins agreed, stating that this kind of perspective makes it so that “up is down, down is up. Good is evil, evil is good.” The fact that Brennan asserted “that Nazi Germany was the product of free speech” is a clear example, he said, especially when Adolf Hitler’s Germany “suppressed any type of voice that was counter” to the regime.

In addition to the “lack of moral clarity,” Hasson suggested another factor is “a weakness of political will.” For instance, she pointed out that Germany has had “a terrible problem with criminal migrants,” which has caused their crime to spike. “[A]nd yet,” she added, “here they are spending all this energy trying to police what people are saying [online as] they’re doing a very poor job of policing criminality and actually protecting their own people.” As she put it, Germany is “no longer willing to call some things wrong and some things right.” And this, Perkins emphasized, is largely because, like with many leftist ideologies, “their ideas are indefensible.” “[T]hey don’t want to be challenged by free speech.”

Perkins noted that Hasson has experienced this “firsthand.” Hasson has been at the center of what it looks like to be called “hateful” just for disagreeing with someone. “For example, I was recently speaking at ASU and there was a segment of people among the faculty and students who protested my mere presence, even though I wasn’t there to talk about gender ideology per se. … [B]ecause I disagreed with them,” Hasson said, they felt “they were in danger and … not safe because of my ideas.” It all points to this “sense of trying to protect themselves from hurt feelings or from having their ideas challenged,” which is “not how you arrive at the truth.”

“That’s not how we have a free society,” she continued. A society “where we know what’s good and what’s true.” In fact, “we want to have this open conversation to be able to persuade others. But when you’re simply trying to avoid feeling bad, you don’t want to hear what other people have to say,” so conversation gets shut down. As Perkins stressed, “the freedom of speech, which is a part of our First Amendment freedoms, is critical.” It’s like “a pressure valve [that] allows people to vent … [and] express themselves. And when that is short circuited or suppressed, that’s when we have real problems.”

“I completely agree with you,” Hasson emphasized. “And in fact, if you look back at the … political regimes that have suppressed free speech, they don’t … stop people from thinking or seeking the truth or trying to share that truth with others. It all goes underground.” Instead of controlling society, the more authorities try to suppress these pursuits of free speech, the more likely “you’re going to have a rebellion, a revolt.”

Perkins said, “[W]e need more speech, not less, in my view. So, … how can those of us who cherish this First Amendment freedom work together, growing America’s respect for this freedom?” Especially when considering “some of the younger generation … don’t [seem to] have a healthy understanding of the importance of the First Amendment.”

“[A]gain,” Hasson stated, “part of it goes back to this idea that they’ve come to believe that they are too fragile to hear ideas that they disagree with, or that make them uncomfortable.” As such, “we need to be bold and … speak the truth, and to encourage our children to be resilient, to understand that they can and should engage with ideas that they disagree with.” If anything, she concluded, the skill of “self-censorship” often comes into play when talking to “people who are very different from [us.]”

In any conversation, Hasson concluded, we need “to listen, to engage, but then … be confident in speaking the truth.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Proposed Gaza Ceasefire Is a ‘Terrible Deal for Israel’

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1/17/2025 9:16 a.m. This story has been updated to reflect that the Israeli Cabinet has voted to approve the ceasefire deal.

A prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was reached Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced. But, after “many months of intensive diplomacy” between the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar, the deal they devised would require Israel to give away the farm, leaving them no leverage to ensure that all their hostages are safely returned. “It’s a terrible deal for Israel,” complained Frank Gaffney, president of the Institute for the American Future. “I fear that it amounts to a victory for Hamas.”

The details of the deal have not been published, but according to reports, the ceasefire agreement would occur in three phases.

In the first phase, Israel would release 100 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences (a.k.a. “pedigreed jihadists,” Gaffney stated) and 1,000 other prisoners not involved with the October 7 attacks, and Hamas would release 33 hostages in return. “I’m getting some signals out of Israel that this is not the best deal for Israel,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “I’m told the ratio is 50-to-1 for every hostage.”

These lopsided prisoner exchanges would be spaced out over a six-week ceasefire — an unexplained delay that left Perkins “a little puzzled” — during which time Israel would pull its military out of all the populated areas of Gaza and allow hundreds of aid trucks to enter the Gaza Strip, bringing humanitarian aid and tens of thousands of temporary homes.

In the second phase, the two sides would declare a permanent end to the war, and Israel would withdraw the rest of its forces from Gaza. Hamas would also release more hostages in exchange for more prisoners.

In the third phase, Hamas would return the rest of the hostages, including the remains of those it killed. In return, it would get “a major reconstruction plan for Gaza,” in President Biden’s words.

To review, Israel would have to pack up and go home before getting the hostages it came for, and Hamas would not only have its pre-October 7 autonomy restored, but it would get its own personal Marshall Plan, and spring 50 terrorists per hostage.

What an odd way to punish its terrorist atrocities! What an odd way to deter future iterations.

Unfazed by these particulars, Biden declared he was “deeply satisfied” that a deal had been reached — likely so he can claim credit. “We got the world to endorse it,” he boasted. Given how the world feels about Israel, that should be a warning sign.

“I think it’s, in some ways, worse than the plan … that Joe Biden put together” last year, said Gaffney. By agreeing to this deal, Israel would be “effectively surrendering the entirety of Gaza to the people who perpetrated this horrific attack on October 7th,” and who have “been at war with Israel … from the inception of this terrorist organization and will be until it is put out of business.”

“All of the progress that Israel has made to root out Hamas, to deprive it of resources, to close its infrastructure … will essentially be undone because they will be allowed to have the run of Gaza again,” warned Gaffney.

And all of this assumes that Hamas will keep up its end of the agreement through all three phases. But that might be the least likely outcome, based on its past behavior and genocidal hatred of Israel. “Hamas broke ceasefires with Israel in 2003, 2007, 2008, and nine times in 2014,” listed National Review’s Jim Geraghty, not to mention a terrorist shooting during a ceasefire in 2024.

Over the past year, Geraghty continued, “Hamas either rejected ceasefire proposals or hostages-for-prisoners trades, walked away from the table, or refused to restart negotiations in the months of December, January, February, March, April, May, June, and July 2024. … Hamas has proven a bad-faith, bloodthirsty, irrational, and self-destructive negotiator at every step in this process.”

The deal is so bad for Israel that it could put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in trouble domestically. “The Left has, of course, wanted his head on a pike for a long time,” said Gaffney, but “there are a lot of people now on the right who feel that all of this is for naught — all of the war efforts — if this [deal] is allowed to go forward.” Throughout the war, Israel has maintained its sovereign right to self-defense, which involves the right to react to the ongoing threat posed by Hamas, a terrorist group operating from within its borders.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have come out against the deal; while aligned with Netanyahu, they control enough votes to destabilize his coalition. “This could cause his governing coalition to implode,” Perkins exclaimed.

If fact, it seems that Netanyahu himself was reluctant to agree to the deal, until he met with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s incoming special envoy to the Middle East. The Biden administration’s State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed that input from Trump’s team was “absolutely critical in getting this deal over the line.”

“Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] basically had his knees broken” by Witkoff, said Gaffney. “He took what Donald Trump meant as leverage on the Hamas terrorists, putting them on notice that if the hostages were not released … by the time he came to office … all hell would break loose. Now, that was intended to be pressuring Hamas. Instead, Witkoff — and the Biden team, of course — turned this into leverage on Bibi Netanyahu.”

In fact, Gaffney suspected Witkoff of showing more loyalty to Qatar than to Trump. Witkoff said “that ‘Qatar is doing God’s work in these negotiations.’ I think he might have meant Allah’s work, because what has been done, I think, is not in the service of Israel,” he alleged. “This is a man who may work for Qatar, but I don’t honestly think he’s worked effectively for Donald Trump or the interests of the United States, to say nothing of Israel.”

Trump initially celebrated the “EPIC” ceasefire agreement that “could only have happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signaled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies.”

But Gaffney cautioned that Trump might not have the full picture. “I hope that the president, Donald Trump, will think better of this as he learns more about what’s been done,” he said. “I’d be a little surprised if President Trump knew when he put [Witkoff] in this position that he had actually done a $600 million hotel deal with the nation of Qatar.”

The Israeli cabinet approved the deal “after examining all political, security, and humanitarian aspects, and understanding that the proposed deal supports the achievement of the war’s objectives, the Ministerial Committee for National Security Affairs (the Political-Security Cabinet) has recommended that the government approve the proposed framework..”

Netanyahu accused Hamas of creating a “last-minute crisis” by making additional demands over the identity of the prisoners Israel will release. Netanyahu explained the deal Israel agreed to “gives Israel veto power over the release of mass murderers who are symbols of terror,” but Hamas now “demands to dictate the identity of these terrorists.”

Instead of approving the lopsided ceasefire right away, Israel launched overnight airstrikes against 50 terrorist targets in Gaza. Hamas-aligned sources claimed that the airstrikes killed at least 75 people — most of whom were probably terrorists. In a statement, the IDF confirmed the death of Muhammad Hasham Zahedi Abu Al-Rus, a terrorist who participated in the October 7, 2023 massacre at the Nova Music Festival.

The world may be ready to move on from Hamas’s atrocities, but Israel will not — cannot — rest secure until the Hamas threat within their own borders has been eliminated.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

From Tariffs to Territory: Trump’s Expansionist American Vision

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Over the past month, President-elect Donald Trump has proposed annexing Greenland, admitting Canada to the American union, and reassuming control of the Panama Canal. To some, these proposals are jarring or confusing, and the left-wing media is only too happy to frame Trump — per usual — as a power-hungry, wannabe dictator. To find the truth, we must dig deeper.

Threats

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office on January 20, he will inherit a more dangerous world than he did in 2017. Not only are America’s adversaries more aggressive, but President Joe Biden has retreated from many of Trump’s foreign policy successes, leaving America weaker on the world stage.

Eight years ago, the only pressing threat was ISIS, which the Trump administration dismantled in 18 months. Today, Russia is in a hot war with a European democracy, China and North Korea are stronger and more belligerent than ever, and Iran is likely to develop a nuclear weapon at any time.

Meanwhile, America has fumbled its dominance in Afghanistan and the Red Sea, seen its military dwindle due to stupid social crusades, renounced the energy independence of 2019, and — from Trump’s perspective, at least — failed to benefit from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada [trade] Agreement (USMCA) that replaced NAFTA in 2020.

Now, as Trump thinks seriously about overcoming these challenges, he is proposing bold and creative solutions. But not every utterance of Trump’s public brainstorming session is wise, likely, or final. “What the president is doing is thinking long-term about our safety and security here in the United States,” explained Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) on “Washington Watch” Wednesday.

Some of the criticism directed at Trump’s suggestions is due to a failure by the mainstream media and others to see how different policy issues are interconnected. Progressivism tends to rely too heavily on narrowly defined siloes of expertise. The Biden administration, in particular, often erred by failing to recognize how its decision in one area would have negative consequences somewhere else.

Canada

At least chronologically, Trump’s current train of thought seems to begin with ruminations on how to achieve his objectives on immigration and trade policy (his favorites). Trump was looking for a way to cajole Canada and Mexico into taking more responsibility for border security, as well as address what he perceives as a trade deficit with America’s northern and southern neighbors.

In November, Trump threatened to impose a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico unless they stopped the cross-border traffic of drugs and migrants. Although dwarfed by southern border crossings, America’s porous northern border has still seen an unprecedented number of crossings under the Biden administration. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol recorded nearly 190,000 migrant encounters at the northern border in fiscal year (FY) 2023 and nearly 200,000 migrant encounters in FY2024.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded by warning that Canada would retaliate against the proposed tariffs by cutting off energy exports to the northern U.S. “We will go to the extent of cutting off their energy going down to Michigan, going down to New York State and over to Wisconsin,” he declared in December.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has more experience dealing with Trump, chose to avoid a confrontational standoff. Instead, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago to placate Trump and find out what Trump really wanted from the negotiations.

The visit was disastrous. At first, Trump described it as “a very productive meeting,” but he soon raised the temperature, publicly trolling Trudeau and openly contemplating the possibility of turning Canada into America’s “51st state.” Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned from Trudeau’s cabinet on December 16 over disagreements about how to handle Trump’s threatened tariffs, disagreements which continued to simmer within Canada’s governing Liberal Party. On Monday, January 6, Trudeau himself resigned as leader of the Liberal Party “due to internal battles.” Trudeau likely never suspected that his visit to Mar-a-Lago would end his political career.

As for making Canada the 51st state, both Canada and Congress would have to agree. Canadians may object to losing their public benefits, exchanging their parliamentary system for the American division of power, or combining their 10 separate provinces into one state.

For their part, U.S. representatives would likely balk at admitting a state with a population slightly larger than California, which would take approximately 50 seats from other states through reapportionment (the U.S. House is capped at 435 members). Democrats would be reluctant to follow Trump’s lead, while Republicans would be nervous that Canada’s progressive tendencies would swing the balance of power to the Left.

It’s difficult to see how Trump’s threat to use “economic force” (a.k.a. tariffs) against Canada would overcome these systemic obstacles. Although he will have no personal role in preventing it, Trudeau said there is “not a snowball’s chance in hell” Canada will join the U.S.A., and he’s probably right.

However, it is possible that the U.S. and Canada — who already share defensive and economic treaties — can reach new agreements to bring the two nations closer together, and this may be Trump’s real goal. “Trump is a negotiator, and he’s a disrupter. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that his negotiating style is very disruptive,” Ricketts pointed out. “Trump is certainly not going to give up anything in his hand before the negotiations have even begun.”

One possible Trump objective is to make Canada meet its defense spending obligation as part of NATO. “The president knows that Russia and increasingly China have been involved in the Arctic, and that we need to secure that northern flank,” said Ricketts. “Also, he knows that Canada has not been pulling its weight with regard to its defense spending. I think last year it spent 1.3% of its GDP on its defense, when it’s supposed to be spending 2%.”

Greenland

Trump’s interest in Greenland also flows from his concern about U.S. national security to attacks from the north. Earlier this week, Trump expressed an interest in the U.S. acquiring Greenland as well. “I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA,’” Trump said Monday on Truth Social. “Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our nation. … Make Greenland Great Again!” Donald Trump, Jr. flew to Greenland Tuesday to emphasize this point.

Greenland enjoys a strategic location on the Arctic Ocean and has large deposits of minerals such as cobalt, copper, and nickel. “It would be a way for us to help secure the northeast United States by making sure we would be able to put up our military bases there,” Ricketts explained.

The U.S. currently operates one airbase in northwest Greenland, but that may not be enough to counter a growing Chinese presence.

“We should be very concerned about what the Chinese are doing in the Arctic,” Ricketts added. There are “Chinese ships that are there that are dual purpose. They’re supposed to be doing research, but we know that there’s nothing in the Chinese Navy that … is just purely civilian. … They’ve all got [a] dual purpose. They all report to the same dictator who tells them what to do.”

After Trump’s comments, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (Denmark owns Greenland) responded that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders” and that “Greenland is not for sale.” But Ricketts noted that “the negotiations for Greenland … haven’t even started yet.”

The proposal to furnish Greenland is probably the Trump proposal that seems furthest afield for many Americans. This proposal neither featured in his campaign nor expresses a deep-seated desire of ordinary citizens. In fairness to Trump, however, it is not unprecedented; the U.S. occupied the island during World War II to preempt a Nazi invasion after the Danish government capitulated, and President Truman made a secret offer to buy the island in 1947.

It seems that America’s interest in Greenland is primarily related to security, and leasing more military bases may be satisfactory alternative to outright purchasing the land.

Panama

Going from north to south, on December 22, Trump set his sights on the Panama Canal, complaining that “The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, highly unfair.”

Trump’s concern about Panama is also related to security. “In the event of a conflict with Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China, we’re going to have problems because … one Chinese company owns a port on both ends of that canal,” Ricketts explained. “And you bet that they will try to shut that down if there’s a conflict and harm us from being able to respond to anything going on in the Pacific.”

The U.S. finished construction of the Panama Canal in 1914 to more quickly move naval assets from the East Coast to the West Coast. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty to surrender control of the canal to Panama, a process which was completed in 1999. “On the Panama Canal, we should have never given that back to Panama,” declared Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “We should have retained control of that.”

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino responded that “every square metre” of the canal belongs to Panama, and that the country’s sovereignty and independence were not negotiable.

Trump has tussled with Panama before. In 2018, during his first term in office, a legal dispute resulted in Panamanian authorities forcibly seizing a 70-story Trump hotel in Panama City. How Panama and Trump might resolve this most recent dispute is not clear.

Doubling Down

During a Tuesday press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made comments that his critics will distort to monger fear. When asked whether he would rule out the use of military force in relation to Greenland and Panama, Trump responded, “I’m not going to commit to that. It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country. We need Greenland for national security purposes.”

It’s not difficult to imagine how a skeptical media will use this statement as evidence that Trump is about to embark upon wars of conquest. But there is a far more reasonable interpretation.

Trump stated that controlling Greenland and Panama is vital to U.S. national security. This remark surely anticipates a possible confrontation with China or Russia that spans the globe, not an isolated squabble with either country. In the event of a war with, say, China, neither Panama nor Denmark could defend themselves against a Chinese invasion, which would then use their territory as a forward base for launching attacks against the U.S. homeland.

In such a situation, a U.S. president would be forced to choose between allowing China to set up shop in Panama and Greenland to attack our homeland, or preemptively occupying these strategic chokepoints ourselves — as the U.S. did with Greenland during World War II.

This wartime scenario is the likeliest interpretation for Trump’s statement, “It might be that you’ll have to do something.” Trump is prudently keeping his options open. The breaking news here is not that Trump is about to embark upon a crusade against smaller nations who share our hemisphere, but that America is about to once again have a president who recognizes the dangerous world we find ourselves in and is willing to do whatever is necessary to keep Americans safe.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: NBC ANALYST STEPHEN HAYES: “Trump is at his absolute strongest right at this moment.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Is Bipartisanship Dead?

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If there’s one thing we all learned from the election, it’s that the American people agree on a whole lot more than their representatives do. Despite the breadth of our differences, this country still wants a lot of the same things. What most voters can’t understand is why 334 million of us can find some scrap of common ground and the 535 men and women on Capitol Hill can’t. Is compromise in politics even possible in a city where the two sides view each other as mortal enemies? Or is unity just the casualty of these ferociously divided times?

Of course, as a lot of historians would point out, hyper-partisanship is nothing new. The Founders had to wrestle with competing ideas every day just to get this remarkable experiment off the ground. Ratifying the Constitution took compromise. The Bill of Rights took compromise. The dozen-plus amendments that followed took compromise. But as Senator Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) pointed out in a poignant farewell speech on the floor Tuesday, these men “understood what was at stake, and they were willing to put their differences aside to build something extraordinary.”

A lot of our struggles, Manchin emphasized, are pale in comparison to the disagreements they had 235 years ago. But unlike today’s leaders, they also understood the value of a raucous debate. Two centuries and a half later, Congress has lost the will to even have a conversation.

That’s one of Manchin’s greatest regrets. The moderate, one of the handful left in either chamber, mourned the loss of collaboration on the Hill, “of good people coming together to solve tough problems.” Thinking back on his 14 years in the Senate, he said emotionally, “[T]oo many opportunities to fix what’s broken in America [have] slipped right through our fingers.” They were missed, he insisted, because “politics got in the way of doing our job.”

There’s a power, the former governor wanted his colleagues to know, “of sitting down and listening and getting to know each other. And we don’t do that much here.” Everyone should be arguing over ideas, he admonished, “not personalities.” “George Washington warned us about the dangers of political parties dividing our country over 200 years ago, and we’re living in the world he feared today.”

That’ll have to change if the 119th Congress has hope of getting any legislation over the finish line. At last count, the GOP majority was dancing on a knife’s edge in the House, with just a single-vote margin for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — at least for the time being. With Donald Trump poaching three Republicans for his new administration, the special elections could take months to resolve. In the meantime, the chamber will have to decide: will gridlock or cooperation rule?

FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter is optimistic. “As contentious and consequential as the November 5th election was,” he told The Washington Stand, “I do think there are opportunities for bipartisanship. There’s already evidence that the results have kicked off an internecine squabble among Democrats on many of their social priorities, which were wildly out of step with the average American voter.” This may be the one thing that turns the tide, he believes. “I think this has opened up the possibility of some Democrats in Congress who may want their party to move back toward the middle in order to be competitive again in 2026. That may mean rethinking their party’s position on transitioning minors into the opposite gender, so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, open borders, and soft-on-crime policies, for example.” Carpenter points out that “there has been bipartisan support for other things like enforcing insider trading rules and term limits for members in the past. I’m hopeful the new Congress can find common ground on a range of issues.”

In the not-so-distant-past, the parties were also unified on political hot potatoes like taxpayer-funded abortion, natural marriage, Israel, national defense, and a host of other issues that have become sticks of ideological dynamite in recent days. The area with the most agreement, 38% of Americans believe, is foreign policy — but Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack and the ensuing war have certainly challenged that notion.

“It used to be said, in the area of foreign policy, that politics stopped at the water’s edge,” observed Chuck Donovan, a longtime leader in the conservative movement and senior writer for the Reagan White House. “That ideal was never actually realized, as the Reagan years showed with their bitter conflict over intermediate-range nuclear forces and the Iran-Contra controversy,” he told TWS. “But there was some effort at least not to highlight division and embarrass our nation in foreign settings when it counted in the 1990s and after. Some of that spirit might return as the thorny issues regarding Ukraine and Israel ask us to act with character and foresight under a new administration.”

On the domestic front, he said, “One can always hope because the problems are so severe. We had bipartisan agreement for decades on preserving social security, eliminating government waste, equal opportunity for women in economics and politics, tax relief for families with children, and incentives for transitions from welfare to work. Some of this can be revived,” Donovan observed, “but there is tension over reducing deficits and the size of government while leaving entitlement programs untouched and offering absurd policies as we did with COVID relief grants and waiving student loans.”

As someone who spent four decades in Washington politics, he believes America “desperately needs a rejection of the selfishness of the Sexual Revolution and a revival of the institution of marriage. The Left has an opportunity to back away from the ‘gender’ madness. The Right has the opportunity to join forces with a true feminism that is appalled by the suppression of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban and presses for freedom for women in nations where it is sliding backward at an accelerating rate.” But, most importantly, Donovan added, “If we relearn how Creation is the work of a loving God who is the source of our rights and our only hope, we might yet again do things our forebears could scarcely imagine. We might seek our future among the stars and abandon not a single one of our young.”

Interestingly enough, there are areas in government where the two sides seem to peacefully co-exist. The philosophically-diverse Supreme Court is famously congenial, and the close friendship of the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg became the stuff of D.C. legend. While the two almost never agreed on the application of the law, Scalia would say of the unlikely duo, “Some things are more important than votes.”

Obviously, those justices don’t have to enter the mud-slinging campaign world and run for reelection, but if Congress thinks bitter gamesmanship is what the American people want every two years, they’re wrong. The country wants the unity that’s spoken about so often but rarely practiced. At the height of Biden’s failure of a presidency, Americans were asked if the parties should try to work together, and 74% said yes. Only 9% had a lot of confidence they would.

“It speaks to the frustration that people are feeling,” Lee Miringoff, director of Marist College Institute for Public Opinion told NPR. “Because they really would like things to get done. … They would like the system to run smoother.” In fact, he pointed out, 74% is the “highest we have had in a decade in terms of people wanting bipartisan compromise. So people are frustrated. That’s not news. But it sure shows in these numbers. … They would like more in the direction of working together. But they’re totally not convinced that that’s likely to occur. And who can blame them, given the … back-and-forth every day that we’re seeing in our politics coming out of the Capitol?”

In the frigid tensions of Washington, however, there are signs of a coming thaw. Just this week, three Democrats made the bold move of publicly supporting Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (Fla.) declared, asking to join the House caucus on the effort. Agencies like Homeland Security, he argued, have “gotten too big.” “It’s not practical to have 22 agencies under this one department.”

Jaws dropped when radical leftist and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) agreed with this new tact. “Elon Musk is right,” Sanders tweeted. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.” California Democrat Ro Khanna chimed in, “There needs to be more open competition, not the monopolization in defense contractors.”

Then, there’s the great awakening some Democrats are starting to have about the nightmare of gender ideology in this country. After November 5, where the transgender issue almost certainly fueled Trump’s swing-state sweep, more congressional dads are opening up about the party’s intolerance for common sense on things like girls’ sports.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who’s taken the brunt of the abuse for saying he doesn’t want his little girls competing against biological boys, is slowly being joined by other members of the party whose eyes are opened to the dangerous (and politically suicidal) strong-arming Democrats are doing on the issue. “We seem to have a set of liberal litmus tests, and if you don’t meet those litmus tests, then you’re not even allowed to share your opinion. I mean, this is the attitude that a lot of Americans feel the Democratic Party takes to the entire country. ‘If you don’t agree with us, then not only are you wrong, but you’re a bad person, and these things are not up for debate,’” he explained on CNN Tuesday.

“So, I gave this example of transgender women in sports. It’s just one of many issues where we’re not even allowed to have a debate. And many Americans are turned off by that. They say, ‘Why would I want to be a part of a party where my views aren’t valid, they’re not even up for discussion?’ The definition of a majority party is you actually encompass the majority views of Americans. And a lot of people feel the Democratic Party is out of touch right now. So if we want to start winning again, we’ve got to start embracing more ideas.”

Since then, more Democrats have come out from hiding, including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — who barely won reelection. In an interview with The New York Times, he argued that his party needs to “stop pandering to the far-Left.” “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports. … Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”

Maybe in the new year, with a fresh start, both sides will find their way back to Christopher Buckley’s wise words, “Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship.” And as Manchin stressed in his long look around the chamber, “What the country needs right now [is] more of us together. Listening to each other, respecting each other, working together.” Because, as he said — and so many of us feel — “I still believe in this system. I believe in the purpose of what we have … and the need to cherish it.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Trump Vs. Sleeper Cells in America.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

5 Ways the Biden Administration Is Working to ‘Trump-Proof’ Washington

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The Biden administration has gone into overdrive securing progressive policy goals from the impending Trump administration 2.0. From confirming progressive judges, to constraining American energy with environmental red tape, to simply spending every last unjustified dollar, the Biden administration is committed to ensuring their policies carry on into the Trump administration for as long as possible.

“It comes [down to] setting land mines and making it more difficult for the incoming administration to reverse those changes,” said Cato Institute policy analyst Tad DeHaven. “It matters or else they wouldn’t be doing it.” The American people have decisively rejected the Biden agenda. So, naturally, the Biden administration has responded by forcing their agenda upon Americans even harder, right down to January 20.

Employees

Across the bureaucracy, career government employees are lining up lawyers and setting up to lobby against mass firings, reports The Washington Times. At the end of Trump’s first term, by executive order he created a new class of federal workers (Schedule F) which would be easier to hire and fire. The Biden administration undid Trump’s change, and now the bureaucracy is afraid Trump might reinstitute it.

Employees in two divisions of the Justice Department are also rushing to unionize, according to the Times. This would make it more difficult to fire them. It also provokes the question, why? Shouldn’t their unimpeachable integrity and relentless pursuit of nonpartisan justice be enough to protect their positions?

Rulemaking

While executive branch employees rush to protect their jobs, executive branch agencies rushed to protect their progressive policies. For instance, the U.S. Department of Education is rushing to finalize a proposed rule canceling student loans for people with “financial hardships,” which it previously expected to finish in 2025.

Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency have been particularly busy. They announced $3 billion in grants to facilitate a rule that requires local municipalities to replace lead pipes within 10 years. They finalized a rule on November 12 to fine oil and gas companies for “wasteful methane emissions.” They are also rushing to impose penalties and reach settlements with companies accused of violating their environmental regulations. The EPA also plans to grant California a waiver to enforce its rule banning the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles in the state by 2035.

Meanwhile, bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Energy are hurrying to complete a study on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, which is expected to conclude that they are not “consistent with the public interest” because of their climate impact. This won’t directly stop the Trump administration from restoring America’s energy exports, but it could help anti-fossil fuel activists challenge the Trump administration in court. “Biden’s decision on LNG is the most consequential thing he can do on climate and fossil fuels before Trump takes office,” declared Fossil Free Media spokeswoman Cassidy DiPaola.

Other environmental rules the Biden administration is rushing to finalize include “narrowing the scope of an oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” “restricting drilling, mining and livestock grazing across nearly 65 million acres … to save an imperiled bird,” and “finaliz[ing] three rules restricting the release of toxic chemicals.”

“From what we can tell, they’ve done a very good job lining this stuff up, so there’s not a whole lot at risk of getting punted into the next administration,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities. “I think everyone learned that lesson in 2016.”

The flurry of administrative rulemaking aimed to meet a late-November deadline, marking 60 days from the inauguration. Rules passed within 60 days of Trump taking office are subject to the Congressional Review Act, which means that the incoming Republican majority could block them, along with Trump’s approval.

Judges

Another area requiring cooperation between the administration and Congress is judicial appointments. Senate Democrats are hurrying to confirm Biden-nominated judges to the federal bench, leaving few slots open for Trump to fill.

Positions in the federal judiciary, which are tenured for life, are officially not partisan, but it is generally acknowledged that judges appointed by Democratic presidents tend to lean more progressive, while appointees by Republican presidents tend to lean more conservative. This means that the federal judges President Biden can get through a lame-duck Democrat-controlled Senate in the final days of his administration will likely look favorably on his progressive policies.

Before the Senate left for Thanksgiving break last week, Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise deal to vote on as many as 14 nominees for district court appointments, but not to vote on four appellate court nominations.

Spending

The Biden administration is also hurrying to spend the remaining money allocated by Congress’s stimulus spending in 2021-2022, so that it won’t be available to the Trump administration. The Washington Times cites unnamed officials who plan to spend the remaining $46 billion available in fiscal year 2025.

Foreign Policy

The Biden administration is also spending its lame-duck session making major foreign policy moves — which it declined or refused to make earlier — in hopes of constraining President-elect Trump’s diplomatic options. Biden is trying to spend $6.4 billion in aid for Ukraine — funds Congress allocated in April but have not been spent — and cancel $4.65 billion in debt owed by Ukraine to the U.S. Biden also permitted Ukraine to fire longer-range missiles into Russia, provoking further Russian escalation. The Biden administration is also working hard to finalize another major loan to Ukraine through NATO, before Inauguration Day.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the Biden administration pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hezbollah before Trump took office.

Why It Matters

The Biden administration is hoping to outfox the incoming Trump administration in a high-stakes, bureaucratic game of hot potato. Every time the White House changes hands, the incoming administration seeks to undo the rules adopted by their predecessors. Thus, in 2021, the Biden administration reversed administrative actions taken by the outgoing Trump administration, just as the Trump administration, in 2017, had reversed policy moves made by the Obama administration.

This back-and-forth has gone on at least since President Bill Clinton reversed President Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, but it has recently expanded to cover an ever-growing number of issues. “It’s unfortunate but expected that [Biden officials] will try to throw as many roadblocks at what President-elect Trump has pledged to do,” said Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance.

The reason why competing administrations play increasingly critical games of bureaucratic football is that they realize the legislative branch lacks either the ability or the will to stop them. And the sad truth of the matter is that progressives — with greater buy-in from employees of the executive branch and greater faith in the government’s problem-solving capabilities — are usually better at playing the game than conservatives. To the extent that there is a “Deep State” in “The Swamp,” this is it.

Ordinary Americans don’t spend their lives obsessing over politics, except for occasionally wondering why voting for good people never seems to produce the desired results. In my conservative opinion, the answer resides not in electoral results but in the long-term executive and judicial strategies that round out our system of checks and balances (and which is currently tilted in favor of the executive branch).

This is why bureaucratic maneuvering like these by the Biden administration matter. When President Trump takes the keys and slides behind the wheel on January 20, the success of his whole administration will depend on how quickly he can take America from zero to 60. This question — and particularly Trump’s first 100 days — will set the momentum for the next four years. And this question depends on how adroitly his deputies can remove these roadblocks thrown in their path by the Biden administration.

If Trump wants to return America to the prosperous, cruising state of 2019, he must undo four years of rulemaking by the Biden administration, and he only has four years to do so. Can his bureaucracy work faster than Biden’s? We’ll soon find out.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘A New Policy of Peace through Strength’: Johnson Renews Conservative Foreign Policy Vision

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On the eve of the 2024 NATO Summit in the nation’s capital, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) delivered a sweeping foreign policy speech that illustrated how the Biden administration’s “weakness” on the world stage has fueled global unrest, highlighted China as the “greatest threat to global peace,” and presented a conservative approach to once again attain “peace through strength.”

The speech, delivered on Monday at the Washington, D.C.-based Hudson Institute, marked the first major foreign policy-focused address of Johnson’s ninth month tenure as speaker. It concentrated broadly on the threats facing the U.S.-led world order and cast a vision for what a Republican-based foreign policy looks like, which he described as a strategy centered on both “realism” and “strength.”

“[T]he Republican Party is not one of nation builders or careless interventionists,” the speaker underscored. “We don’t believe we should be the world’s policeman. Nor are we idealists who think we can placate tyrants. We are realists. We don’t seek out a fight, but we know … we have to be prepared to fight. And if we must fight, we fight with the gloves off. And today, when our adversaries don’t need to cross oceans to harm our people, we need a new policy of peace through strength for the 21st century.”

Johnson starkly laid out the breadth of global threats facing the U.S., led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “It’s an interconnected web of threats … a China-led axis composed of partner regimes in Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and even Cuba. Now, they each have their own cultures and their own specific, sinister aims, but they all wake up every morning thinking how they can take down America, and they are increasingly using their collective military, technological, and financial resources to empower one another in their various efforts to cut off our trade routes and steal our technology and harm our troops and upend our economy. Iran works with Russia to produce Shahed drones to hunt down … Ukrainians every day, while Russia launches North Korean missiles at Ukraine’s electrical grids using technology provided by the Chinese.”

The speaker further detailed how interconnected China and other countries are in fueling the crisis along the U.S. southern border. “China, our single greatest threat, is engaging in malign influence operations around the world and is even working with cartels now, backed by Cuba and Venezuela, to poison Americans with fentanyl. China, Russia, and Iran all work with Cuban intelligence outposts to target Americans and provide safe harbor for terrorists in transit. And all these enemies operate in our hemisphere … and they’re trading oil with Venezuela, which is pushing illegal aliens and violent criminals towards our borders.”

Johnson went on to lambast the Democratic foreign policy that laid the groundwork for where the world currently stands. “During the Obama administration, we saw eight years of international apology tours,” he lamented. “We saw the sequestration of our military, the buildup of ISIS, Russia’s invasion into Crimea, the spread of malign Chinese influence around the globe, and in a nuclear deal that gave Iran everything they wanted. And what are we facing today? The same failures we saw under Obama have happened under Joe Biden, because he’s empowered an out of touch foreign policy establishment who has an agenda very different than the one that we need right now.”

He continued, “Their agenda is about once again appeasing and apologizing and accommodating. Joe Biden doesn’t treat China like an enemy. He’s stopped supporting Israel and has cozied up to Iran to revive the failed nuclear deal. And in the most inexplicable policy imaginable, he’s opened our borders wide to spies and terrorists while reducing sanctions on Latin dictators who wreak havoc in our backyard. And the results of this were completely foreseeable, and we’re all living through it. Obama’s weakness invited aggression, and Biden’s weakness has fueled that aggression like nothing we’ve seen since World War II.”

The speaker proceeded to set forth the priorities that Republicans will aim for in order to stabilize national and global security.

“First, we have to strengthen our domestic position because national security begins at home,” Johnson emphasized. “[O]ur biggest national security challenge is our national debt. … I can promise you that come 2025, spending reform will be a top priority for our new Republican majority. … Congress has to prioritize the truly essential needs of our nation, and our national security has to be at the top of that list.”

First on the list is making sure the U.S. military is “a credible deterrent to our adversaries,” the speaker argued. “That’s why we invested $23 billion to restock essential weapons and rebuild our defense capacities in the April National Security Supplemental bill.” In addition, Johnson noted, “House Republicans pushed back on the Biden administration’s policy of Iran appeasement and secured the toughest Iran sanctions package in nearly a decade. We leveraged our economic influence against CCP-controlled TikTok. We passed the REPO Act that allows us to seize Russian oligarchs’ bank assets to pay for assistance in Ukraine, and in the Ukraine supplemental, we mandated cost matching for European allies.”

The Louisiana lawmaker further outlined legislation that House Republicans are putting forward to counter China.

“China poses the greatest threat to global peace,” he reiterated. “The House will be voting on a series of bills to empower the next administration to hit our enemy’s economies. On day one, we will build our sanctions package to punish the Chinese military firms that provide material support to Russia and Iran, and we’ll consider options to restrict outbound investments in China. We’re working on a piece of legislation to move this fall to do that very thing. We will vote on the Bio Secure Act, which will halt federal contracts with biotech companies that are beholden to adversaries and endanger Americans’ health care data. We’ll end the de minimis privilege for any good subject to Section 301 trade enforcement tariffs, and that will help stymie China’s attempts to exploit American trade. Our goal is to have a significant package of China-related legislation signed into law by the end of this year in this Congress featuring these priorities and many more, and we’ll work aggressively toward that package.”

Johnson also challenged NATO member countries to put a higher priority on military spending. “Every NATO member needs to be spending at least 2% of their GDP on defense,” he stipulated. “That’s the agreement. … There’s 10 or 12 of them that aren’t doing that yet. It’s no longer acceptable that not all NATO members have reached their current commitment. It may even need to be closer to levels during the Cold War. But if we’re all going to enjoy a future of peace and prosperity, we all need to have skin in the game.”

Additionally, the speaker reiterated the GOP’s support for Israel and the importance of standing with America’s allies in protecting trade routes. “Come November, we will be clear about our steadfast support for Israel, and we’ll build upon the Abraham Accords so the Jewish people can enjoy safety and freedom in their homeland. Likewise, in the Indo-Pacific, America must continue to build upon our military and economic relationships with India, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom. We all have strategic interests in the region, and with a strong united front, we can protect our trade routes, our shipping lanes, and all of our shared interests.”

Invoking the Greatest Generation, Johnson urged a renewed commitment to peace through strength. “We can rearm, rebuild, reinvigorate, restore, and reinstate fear in our enemies. We can retake the summit of respect and thus look out on a landscape of peace and prosperity and security. We can show courage, we can show valor, and we can give our grandchildren the chance to grow up not in the shadow of tyranny, but atop our own shining city on a hill. Decline is always a choice, but that is not a choice that Republicans will be making any time soon.”

The speaker closed by quoting a former pope and president in stressing how the U.S. remains the free world’s greatest champion. “Pope Pius XII said it this way, ‘The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America, God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.’ Reagan said, ‘We are indeed, and we are today the last, best hope of men on earth.’ By God’s grace, we will always be.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

President Donald J. Trump ‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’

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We thought it would be important to look at what President Donald J. Trump did during his 4-years in office.

As people go to the polls on November 5th, 2024 it is important to compare and contrast what Trump did in his time in office and what Biden has done while in office.

This information comes from the White House archives:

Foreign Policy

President Trump restored American sovereignty at home and American leadership abroad, partnering with strong and responsible nations to promote security, prosperity, and peace. Instead of sending American troops to fight in endless wars or giving cash to terrorists in countries like Iran, the United States under President Trump used bold, creative diplomacy to secure peace deals with our allies across the world.

With the same “peace through strength” foreign policy that President Reagan once used to win the Cold War, President Trump rebuilt American deterrence power to hold our adversaries accountable. Perhaps most important, the Trump Administration reversed Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan refusal to confront China over its unfair trade practices, intellectual property theft, and more.

Immigration

President Trump kept his promise to build a wall on our southern border between the United States and Mexico. With 450 miles complete—and many more in progress—illegal crossings plummeted over 87 percent in areas where the wall went up.

By enforcing America’s immigration laws, President Trump made major gains toward ending the humanitarian crisis at our border; keeping criminals, terrorists, and drugs out of our country; and protecting American workers and taxpayers against job loss and misuse of the welfare system.

National Security & Defense

President Trump rebuilt the United States military after eight years of decline and neglect under the previous Administration. He revitalized our defense industrial base, secured the largest pay raise for our troops in a decade, and created the sixth branch of our Armed Forces: the United States Space Force. President Trump also became the first American leader since Ronald Reagan not to start a war.

On President Trump’s watch, the world’s most notorious terrorists were brought to justice; the ISIS territorial caliphate was completely destroyed; and violent, corrupt regimes were held accountable through a mix of sanctions and targeted military action.

Economy & Jobs

Before the Coronavirus spread from China across the globe, President Trump helped America build its strongest economy in history. Median household incomes rose to their highest level ever in 2019, while the poverty rate hit an all-time low. Under the Trump Administration, more Americans were employed than ever before—160 million—and the unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low. The unemployment rates for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Americans without a high-school diploma all hit record lows, while the Trump “Blue-Collar Boom” saw wages grow faster for workers than for managers or supervisors.

After COVID-19 forced a temporary economic shutdown, President Trump signed the largest relief package in American history to protect workers and families from economic devastation. Under President Trump’s leadership, the American economy surged back to life within months, seeing record growth and job gains.

UNPRECEDENTED ECONOMIC BOOM

Before the Coronavirus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy

  • America gained 7 million new jobs—more than three times government experts’ projections
  • Middle-class family income increased nearly $6,000—more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration
  • The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century
  • Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job hirings
  • More Americans reported being employed than ever before—nearly 160 million
  • Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low
  • The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest level on record
  • Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly three decades

Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds

  • Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows
  • Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years
  • Nearly 7 million people were lifted off of food stamps
  • Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows
  • Income inequality fell for two straight years—and by the largest amount in over a decade
  • The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth
  • Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue-collar workers—a 16 percent pay increase
  • African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent

Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA

  • Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs
  • Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas
  • Small business optimism broke a 35-year-old record in 2018

Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks

  • The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020
  • The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs

Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns

  • An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off now than four years ago, even in the midst of a global pandemic
  • During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent—the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded
  • Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost
  • Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery
  • Unemployment fell to 6.7 percent in November, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April—beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the end of 2020
  • The 8 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate from April to November is the largest seven-month reduction ever recorded
  • Under the previous administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from 10 percent to under 7 percent, compared to just 3 months for the Trump Administration
  • Since April, the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen by 10.5 percent, Asian-American unemployment by 7.8 percent, and Black-American unemployment by 6.4 percent
  • 80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April
  • Small business confidence hit a new high
  • Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006
  • Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled
  • Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high
  • Home prices hit an all-time record high
  • The United States rejected crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public health harms and instead safely reopened its economy
  • Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country
  • Stabilized America’s financial markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department supported facilities at the Federal Reserve

Biden has undone everything that President Donald J. Trump did and has hurt the American people more than any other president in history.

Please feel free to comment below on this column.

©2024. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

‘They Don’t Understand War’: Experts Slam Biden’s Denial of Arms to Israel

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As stunned outrage escalated in reaction to President Joe Biden’s decision to halt arms shipments to Israel in the midst of its battle against the Hamas terrorist group, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that the Jewish state would “stand alone” and “fight with our fingernails” in the face of a lack of military aid.

“I hope that’s a senior moment,” remarked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in reaction to Biden’s announcement. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) stated that they were “appalled that the administration paused crucial arms shipments to Israel,” adding that “this disastrous policy decision was undertaken in secret and deliberately hidden from Congress and the American people.”

Democrats also expressed frustration with the decision. “As the leader of the free world, America cannot claim that its commitment to Israel is ‘iron-clad’ and then proceed to withhold aid from Israel,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) wrote. “The mixed messaging makes a mockery of our credibility as an ally. No one will take our word seriously.”

Meanwhile, ceasefire talks in Cairo between Israel and Hamas that were pushed by the U.S. stalled on Thursday, as Hamas continued its refusal to release 132 hostages, 38 of whom are believed to no longer be alive. As experts on the ground in Israel are pointing out, despite Hamas’s unprovoked October 7 attack that killed the most Jews since World War II and despite the unreleased hostages, the Biden administration has been undermining Israel’s military response for at least four months.

“Beginning in January, we started getting first reports that the Biden administration was slow walking munitions to Israel, including specifically ordnance for our aircraft and 155 millimeter artillery shells and tank shells,” explained Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate, on Thursday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “So these are the basic tools of war that the Biden administration and the Obama administration convinced Israel we didn’t have to produce at home [because] the United States would be the steady supplier of all of these things.”

Glick went on to detail how the Biden administration went back on its word to give military aid to Israel.

“[T]hey double-crossed us, Speaker Johnson, and the House and Senate Republicans,” she underscored. “They … made aid for Israel contingent on aid for Ukraine, knowing full well that the Republicans opposed the aid for Ukraine. … [T]hat’s just the way the Democrats fly. They didn’t want to allow Israel to be a standalone legislation. They forced the Republicans’ hand. Speaker Johnson wanted to get the aid to Israel [and] he risked his position in his party in order to push it through with the aid for Ukraine. And then as soon as Biden got what he wanted from the Republicans specifically for Ukraine, he turned around and he double-crossed them and said, ‘Nope, we’re not giving Israel what they want.’”

Glick further described how the administration is setting expectations for how Israel should conduct its war against terrorists.

“[N]ow what he said is, ‘We’re willing to give Israel the means to intercept incoming projectiles from Iran or from Lebanon or from Gaza, but they may not cause Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, any of them, to pay any price for their aggression. All you can do is intercept incoming, but you can’t downgrade their power in any way. You cannot take the war to your enemies. They are allowed to attack you, and they will be completely immune from any sort of counter assault by Israel.’ That’s what the United States wants, and their long-term game is to transform Israel into a weak, totally dependent protectorate of the Democratic Party. … [I]t’s inviting the expansion of the war to other theaters in a major way.”

In addition, Glick enumerated how President Biden has personally inserted himself between Israel and other nations who have indicated their desire to provide military aid to the Jewish state. “[E]arly on [after October 7], the German chancellor came to Israel and met with Prime Minister Netanyahu,” she recounted. “And then after a series of conversations between the two leaders, the Germans agreed to sell us tank shells. … [T]wo hours after the announcement was made, President Biden was on the phone with Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and essentially push[ed] him to cancel the arms sale.”

The response within Israel has been to increase domestic production of munitions, Glick relayed. “[We’re] massively ramping up our domestic production. … [It’s] not productive enough to suit all of our needs, but we’re moving very quickly towards that goal. It will take a number of months, but we’re doing it. … They’ve opened up new lines of the Israel military industries in various cities around the country, and they’re hiring more and more employees to work the lines. … So we’re just going to have to build it ourselves as quickly as possible. We have to be the arsenal for our own democracy.”

Glick concluded by contending that the Biden administration is in over its head in its dealings with Israel’s war against terrorism. “U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration is … extremely shallow,” she argued. “[T]hey think that war is a game or some sort of graduate seminar that you can somehow or another resolve through all kinds of fancy ideas about deterrence and balance of power. They don’t understand war.”

“They don’t know what they’re dealing with,” Glick continued. “They attribute monstrous intentions through good people — the good people of Israel. And they project the goodness of the people of Israel on the monstrous enemies that are fighting us, whether it’s the Iranian regime that seeks our genocide through nuclear weapons and its terror proxy war, … or whether it’s Hamas. And we saw what they did on October 7th, and we understand what it means when they say that they want to kill [us]. [W]e see it with Hezbollah. … [W]e found dozens of subterranean tunnels over the years that they’ve dug into Israel from Lebanon with the goal of infiltrating our villages and capturing and slaughtering our people. So this is not a game.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

NHS Formally Declares Sex a ‘Biological’ Reality

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Britain’s top health authority is officially rejecting transgender ideology and declaring that biological sex is a reality, while “gender identity” isn’t. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) is revising its constitution to state, “We are defining sex as biological sex.” The proposed constitutional revisions stress a need for “respecting the biological differences between men and women,” further warning, “If these biological differences are not considered or respected, there is the potential for unintended adverse health consequences.”

Among other things, the constitutional revision will bar biological men who identify as women from accessing female-only wards, allow female patients to request other biological females for “intimate care,” and do away with terms such as “chestfeeding” and “birthing people.”

“We need to be making this robust case to refuse to wipe women out of the conversation,” Health Secretary Victoria Atkins stated, according to The Telegraph. “We have always been clear that sex matters and our services should respect that. By putting this in the NHS constitution we’re highlighting the importance of balancing the rights and needs of all patients to make a healthcare system that is faster, simpler and fairer for all.”

“The confusion between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in official policies like the NHS constitution is what has enabled women’s rights to be trampled over in the name of transgender identities,” explained Maya Forstater, co-founder and chief executive of the advocacy group Sex Matters. “Sex, of course, is a matter of biology, not identity, and it is welcome that the NHS is now spelling this out in relation to single-sex accommodation and intimate care.”

Last year, then-Health Secretary Steve Barclay announced similar plans to eliminate “wokery” in the NHS, including barring biological who identify as women from accessing female-only wards, doing away with terminology like “chestfeeding,” and restoring the word “woman” to NHS guidance on subjects like menopause and ovarian cancer. “We need a common-sense approach to sex and equality issues in the NHS,” Barclay said at the time. “It is vital that women’s voices are heard in the NHS and the privacy, dignity and safety of all patients are protected.”

The constitutional revisions are hardly the only changes the NHS is making in its approach to transgenderism. In March, NHS England formally banned the prescription of puberty blockers and hormone drugs to minors, announcing instead a focus on family therapy, individual child psychotherapy, parental support or counseling, and other forms of counseling and therapy. “Puberty blockers … are not available to children and young people for gender incongruence or gender dysphoria because there is not enough evidence of safety and clinical effectiveness,” NHS England announced. Last month, Scotland’s NHS offices followed suit, “pausing” the prescription of puberty blockers and hormone drugs to minors while health officials examine “evidence of safety and long-term impact for therapies.”

Many of the changes in how British healthcare practitioners approach transgenderism center around the publication of the Cass Review, an extensive four-year investigation led by renowned pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass into gender transition procedures for minors. The report found that there was “remarkably weak evidence” to recommend the use of puberty blockers and hormone drugs, there was “no evidence” that gender transition procedures prevented or reduced the risk of suicide, the majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria suffer from a host of often-neglected psychological co-morbidities, and serious research into the harms of gender transition procedures was impeded by “toxic” debate surrounding the topic. Additionally, the groundbreaking 400-page report found that gender transition procedures for children are largely based on biased and even low-quality research.

For example, the infamous Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic at Tavistock worked in close conjunction with transgender activist group Mermaids. In 2022, two years before her final report was due, Cass urgently recommended that the U.K. government shut down Tavistock’s GIDS clinic, based on concerns over an absence of child safeguarding and an excess of gender ideology guiding staff members’ decisions. Cass reported that staff and clinicians often rushed children as young as 10 years old onto puberty blocker and hormone drug regimens, sometimes after as few as three consultations. Ninety-six percent of child patients at Tavistock’s GIDS clinic were placed on puberty blockers and numerous whistleblowers reported that staff often diagnosed children with gender dysphoria while ignoring or neglecting other psychological conditions such as autism, anxiety, or depression.

In the wake of the Cass Review’s publication, a cohort of 16 unnamed clinical psychologists penned an open letter saying that they were “ashamed of the role psychology played in gender care” and of how psychologists “failed young people at Gender Identity Development Service clinics.” The clinicians called for “accountability for the managers and clinicians who pursued such unethical practice and caused avoidable harm to young people,” adding that “the role of our own profession should be fully examined.”

Numerous European countries have halted or placed stringent safeguards around gender transition procedures for minors. France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland have joined the U.K. in largely or entirely halting the prescription of puberty blockers and hormone drugs to children, warning that there is a lack of thorough research and study surrounding the safety and efficacy of gender transition procedures. Yet the U.S. still allows for gender transition procedures to be practiced on minors, earning the label of “outlier.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Hold Obama-Biden Foreign Policy Responsible for Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel

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The terrorist Iranian regime’s unprecedented recent attack on Israel, which included 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles, is an unambiguous casus belli — an act of war — under international law.

Of course, Iranian proxies spread across the Middle East, such as Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Yemen-based Houthis, have committed countless previous acts of war against Israel. But last weekend was something different entirely: For the very first time since fanatical Islamists overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and took power in 1979, Iran launched such attacks directly from its own soil.

The regime’s attack against the Jewish state, a tactical failure in which 99% of Iran’s varying projectiles were successfully intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces and a U.S.-led multinational coalition, is highly revealing. No longer can anyone deny the Iranian regime’s role as “head of the snake” of Middle East chaos; nor can anyone now deny the regime’s genocidal intentions. It turns out that when they chant “Death to Israel” in the streets of Tehran, they really mean it. (They also chant “Death to America,” incidentally.)

The obvious question: How? How did we reach the point where Iran feels so emboldened, and so unafraid of any repercussions, that it lobs hundreds of offensive weapons from its own territory toward another sovereign nation — especially one so closely allied with the U.S. and interconnected with the broader Western order?

The answer is just as clear as it is troubling: The Middle East “realignment” so doggedly pursued by President Joe Biden, and by former President Barack Obama before him, got us here. Under the Obama-Biden foreign policy doctrine, an Iran so emboldened that it feels free to wage offensive war against Israel in such brazen fashion is not a bug; it’s a feature.

Steeped in pseudo-academic theories, such as postcolonialism and surrounded by left-wing ideologues who held America and Western civilization responsible for collective global sin, Obama sought to remake the Middle East map. On the one hand, he sought to hamstring the region’s sole outpost of Western civilization, Israel, as well as America’s traditional Sunni Arab allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. On the other hand, he bolstered those countries’ natural foes: Iran, Qatar, and the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The apotheosis of the Obama-Biden Middle East “realignment” was the terrible Iran nuclear deal of 2015, laundered to a skeptical American people by failed novelist-turned-Obama White House apparatchik Ben Rhodes via a cynical, astroturfed “echo chamber” of a PR campaign.

In 2016, Obama secretly delivered $400 million in wooden pallets of cash to the mullahs — on the same day the nuke deal went into effect. More recently, the Biden administration agreed to cough up a whopping $6 billion in return for five illegally detained U.S. citizens — just weeks before the Iran-sponsored Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7. And just last month, Biden approved a fresh $10 billion sanctions waiver for Iran.

There are too many other examples to count. But it is all in service of the Obama-Biden doctrine: Punish America’s allies in the Middle East and reward its enemies.

Just as bad, the Iranian regime has also shown itself capable of infiltrating and co-opting America’s corridors of power: Last September, Semafor scooped emails revealing an Iranian regime-supported intelligence operation seeking to influence high-ranking government offices, think tanks and academic institutions in the U.S. The man at the center of it all? Robert Malley, Obama’s lead negotiator for the 2015 nuke deal and Biden’s now-suspended special envoy for Iran.

Most recently, Iranian reporter Vahid Beheshti revealed a stunning internal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps document this week that inculpates the Iranian regime in helping to orchestrate America’s day of anarchic, crippling, pro-Hamas “demonstrations” on Monday.

The Trump administration, something of an interregnum between the two “realignment” presidencies, pursued the precise opposite policies: Punish America’s enemies and reward its friends. That is what basic logic would dictate, and the results were historic: new peace deals forged between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords.

It turns out that the obvious thing is often also the best thing.

The Hamas pogrom and the ensuing war in Gaza was the first real test for the accords — and the Iran-containment coalition they represent. Crucially, none of the Arab signees have severed relations with Israel. Even more remarkably, Saudi Arabia — not part of the accords — acknowledged on Monday that it assisted the U.S.-led coalition that foiled Iran’s weekend attack.

All of this is a tribute to the statesmanship of former President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who shepherded the accords across the finish line. And it is a glimmer of hope that more peace — and less Iran-emboldening Obama-Biden foolishness —might be just around the corner.

Josh Hammer is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek.

This article appeared in The Daily Signal.

AUTHOR

Josh Hammer

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Iran’s Attack on Israel Was a Direct Result of American Weakness

JOSH HAMMER: The Obama-Biden Doctrine: Punish America’s Allies In The Middle East And Reward Its Enemies

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Blank Checks and Slush Funds’: House Passes $95 Billion Foreign Aid Package for Ukraine, Israel

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Members of Congress chanted “Ukraine!” and waved a sea of rippling, blue-and-gold flags across the House floor, as the House of Representatives approved a massive $95 billion foreign aid package that benefits Ukraine, Taiwan, and both sides of the Israel-Hamas war.

The aid package contained approximately $61 billion in additional funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia, which supporters say will pay for the military’s next year of efforts. The bill also contains $26 billion for Israel, $9 billion of which is constituted as “humanitarian aid” for the Gaza Strip. The Awdah Palestinian TV, owned by the Fatah Party, accused Gaza’s Hamas-controlled government of stealing and absconding with food and other vital supplies intended for its citizens “to their own homes.” The package also contains $8 billion for the “Indo-Pacific” region, primarily Taiwan.

The bill passed the House on Saturday by a 311-112 vote. While Democrats voted unanimously in favor of the bill, a majority of Republicans opposed additional aid (112-101). One congressman, Rep. Daniel Meuser (R-Pa.), voted present. The Democrat-controlled Senate is expected to pass the bill on Tuesday.

Raucous congressmen began chanting, “Ukraine! Ukraine!” and waving foreign flags in the lower chamber of the U.S. people’s House immediately upon the bill’s passage, putting off critics of continued aid. “Too much Ukraine. Not enough USA,” remarked Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah).

The only member of the House born in Ukraine, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), voted against sending more aid to her homeland, saying she would only vote to forward additional aid if it came with tighter oversight and provisions to secure the U.S. border. This aid package continues the Biden administration’s policy of “blank checks and slush funds,” Spartz declared on the House floor. “Unfortunately, this strategy has failed the American people. Biden has failed the American people.”

“If we don’t have proper oversight, we are not going to achieve our goals,” said Spartz earlier this month. “We cannot have these never-ending wars.”

House Republicans hoped to at least secure additional border enforcement from the aid package, but the measure failed to get the necessary two-thirds supermajority to be included in this bill.

House Democrats deemed the measure unnecessary. “Some say, ‘Well, we have to deal with our border first.’ The Ukrainian-Russian border is our border,” declared Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.).

Ultimately, insiders familiar with the process say, the Ukrainian aid package “would not have passed without Donald Trump.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told “Fox News Sunday” that “President Trump has created a loan component to this package that gives us leverage down the road.”

The legislation allows the U.S. to ask Ukraine to repay $10 billion in aid. But Ukraine is not expected to pay back U.S. taxpayers.

Controversially, the bill gives the president the ability to absolve Ukraine of half of that remaining $10 billion debt after the next presidential election but before the next president takes office.

“The ‘loan’ for Ukraine is all smoke and mirrors,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) posted on the social media platform X. “It allows the president to cancel up to 50% of funds owed after November 15, 2024, and all remaining funds owed after January 1, 2026. No bank would allow this.” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) dismissed the loan as “a joke.”

The deepening fissure within Republican ranks had been signaled during a procedural, rules vote on Friday. “What was significant about it is that the Democrats actually joined Republicans in voting in favor of the bill,” reporter Victoria Marshall told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm shortly after that tally.

That bipartisan support may have cost Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) vital support among his own House caucus, as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) doubled down on their threat to vacate the chair, terminating Speaker Johnson’s short and embattled tenure in office. Observers say that could result in a unified Democratic caucus overpowering a fractured Republican bloc to hand far-Left Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) the speaker’s gavel — and its attendant powers to move, or block, legislation.

“One of the things that’ll be interesting to track is how this plays in the Republican caucus that Speaker Johnson continues to try to hold together,” said Backholm on Friday. This weekend’s vote holds “lots of political ramifications for him personally and certainly for the caucus, as they head into November.”

Alongside the aid package, Congress passed the REPO Act, which allows the Biden administration to freeze, seize, and redistribute an estimated $6 billion in Russian assets, sending the proceeds to Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has already promised “retaliatory actions and legal proceedings” if Washington follows through with its threat.

An ebullient Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told “Meet the Press” the fresh injection of U.S. taxpayer funds gives his nation “a chance for victory” over Russia. Likewise, CIA Director William Burns insisted the additional resources were aimed at “puncturing Putin’s arrogant view that time is on his side” during a speech at the Bush Center Forum on Leadership in Dallas on Thursday.

But military experts say Ukraine’s defeat is inevitable.

“This aid does not enable Ukraine to win the battle,” Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst now with the America First Policy Institute, told Newsmax TV on Monday morning. “It simply keeps Ukraine in the fight.”

“The best option, which Zelensky and Biden won’t talk about, is to end the war — to start a ceasefire and a process to end the killing,” said Fleitz. “Because Ukraine will eventually lose this war of attrition.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Scolds Dems Waving Ukrainian Flags After Vote – ‘Put Those Damn Flags Away!’ 

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Most Populous Muslim-Majority Country to Normalize Diplomatic Relations with Israel

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The most populous Muslim-majority has agreed to normalize relations with Israel, according to Israeli news outlet Ynet. The news comes “after three months of secret talks” regarding a bid by Indonesia to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Israel normalized relations with four Muslim-majority countries (Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and U.A.E.) as part of the Abraham Accords promoted by the Trump administration, but further talks have not borne fruit since 2021.

The OECD Council decided on February 20, 2024 to open discussions with Indonesia regarding that nation joining the international trade and development organization, which is a “multi-year process.” At the same time, it reaffirmed that Indonesia could join without “unanimous” support from the organization’s 38 member states.

One of the OECD member states is Israel. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz initially objected to Indonesia’s membership, per Ynet, and refused to remove his objection unless Indonesia made a gesture toward Israel. Indonesia and the OECD eventually agreed to include the stipulation that, before Indonesia joins the organization, it must establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Earlier negotiations to normalize relations stalled after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, according to the Times of Israel, and Indonesia chose to back South Africa’s charge at the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The Times also said that anti-Semitic protests are common in Indonesia, as they have been around the world since Hamas’s terror attack.

However, Israel allowed Indonesian planes into its airspace as part of an airdrop of humanitarian supplies to Gaza, which may be a first step towards establishing relations.

Indonesia is the fourth-most populous nation in the world, behind only India, China, and the U.S., with more than 277 million people in 2023. Its population is 82% of that of America and twice that of Russia. The archipelago nation is overwhelmingly Muslim (87%), though not Arab, and it has a significant Christian minority (10.5%). Its annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) totals $1.5 trillion, making it the world’s 16th largest economy.

The OECD is a Western-dominated economic organization whose members must maintain a commitment to democratic government and free markets. The organization includes the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and most nations in northern, western, and southern Europe, as well as a smattering of nations in Latin America and elsewhere. Current members in the far east include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Israel and Turkey are the only Middle Eastern members of the OECD.

Russia and China are not members of the OECD. Russia was never a full member, but its partial participation was suspended over its invasion of Ukraine.

The news that Indonesia is pursing normalized relations comes at a critical time for Israel as the country continues to face international pressure to abandon its goal of eradicating the Hamas terrorist network in Gaza. Even once solid supporters of Israel, like the U.S. government, are now wavering in their support. That a large, influential, Muslim-majority would seek to improve relations with Israel now indicates that their international standing is not as bleak as might otherwise appear.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

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