President Trump has the world playing taps for the New World Order, and that’s a

President Trump has the world playing taps for the New World Order, and that’s a good thing. In the process he dealt the UK’s Keir Starmer what appears to be a fatal blow. And in Minneapolis, a combination of communists and NGO-paid rioters are trying to replay the George Floyd Summer of Love and is instead showing why ICE’s work is essential to good order. The media is trying to help the rioters by concocting a “bait boy” fable.

Davos

Niall Ferguson sums up, ”The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.”

He did it by forcing a realistic assessment of the state of the world, which the Davosinian caviar munchers seem to have ignored for too long. He made clear that globalization was dead, that it failed the U.S., failed Europe, diminished prosperity and made them subservient to their enemies. In a prelude to the meeting, Trump and his administration whipped up the prospect of annexing Greenland. This prompted French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to gasp that such a move would rupture longstanding multinational geopolitics. Once the Davos crowd was all atwitter about the monster U.S. grabbing Greenland, Trump called the whole thing off. It was a deliberate distraction in which he ended up getting exactly what he wanted in Greenland without it costing us a cent.

The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one. [snip] Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. [snip] The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug — and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain.[snip]. 

The reason Trump forced Greenland to be the No. 1 topic at Davos, I suspect, was to keep European leaders from meddling in America’s Middle Eastern and Eastern European policy. It was notable on Wednesday how little the president said about Iran and Ukraine. That is because his administration has plans afoot for both countries.

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its strike group are currently in the Indian Ocean en route to the Persian Gulf and are preparing strike package options on Iran for the president’s approval. KEEP SCROLLING, MY TABLET IS MESSED UP.

President Trump has the world playing taps for the New World Order, and that’s a good thing. In the process he dealt the UK’s Keir Starmer what appears to be a fatal blow. And in Minneapolis, a combination of communists and NGO-paid rioters are trying to replay the George Floyd Summer of Love and is instead showing why ICE’s work is essential to good order. The media is trying to help the rioters by concocting a “bait boy” fable.

Davos

Niall Ferguson sums up, ”The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.”

He did it by forcing a realistic assessment of the state of the world, which the Davosinian caviar munchers seem to have ignored for too long. He made clear that globalization was dead, that it failed the U.S., failed Europe, diminished prosperity and made them subservient to their enemies. In a prelude to the meeting, Trump and his administration whipped up the prospect of annexing Greenland. This prompted French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to gasp that such a move would rupture longstanding multinational geopolitics. Once the Davos crowd was all atwitter about the monster U.S. grabbing Greenland, Trump called the whole thing off. It was a deliberate distraction in which he ended up getting exactly what he wanted in Greenland without it costing us a cent.

The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one. [snip] Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. [snip] The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug — and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain.[snip]. 

The reason Trump forced Greenland to be the No. 1 topic at Davos, I suspect, was to keep European leaders from meddling in America’s Middle Eastern and Eastern European policy. It was notable on Wednesday how little the president said about Iran and Ukraine. That is because his administration has plans afoot for both countries.

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its strike group are currently in the Indian Ocean en route to the Persian Gulf and are preparing strike package options on Iran for the president’s approval.

If the Greenland gambit was insufficiently obvious a signal of the U.S. having run out of patience with and regard for the globalists, the president formally withdrew us from the World Health Organization, adhering to the agreement that we had to give a year’s notice (which we did) before leaving. The WHO deserves this for its mishandling of the COVID-19 virus, its very close ties with China, and its mismanagement. Over a year ago, HHS head Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. criticized WHO for becoming “mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest and international power politics” along with the fact that we contribute far more than other members.

I think that critique is a fair estimate of all the existing major multinational organizations.

Melanie Phillips says the old world order is dead because Western universalists destroyed it. And as online posters say, she brought the “receipts.”

Carney and other liberal leaders lamenting the end of the globalist game are merely acknowledging that Washington will no longer tolerate it. They fail to admit, however, that they have been propping up an international order that promised liberal ideals but delivered the opposite.

These are the leaders who continue to develop economic ties with China, one of the principal threats to freedom and security in the world.

These are the leaders who, for more than four decades, appeased the fanatical Islamic regime in Iran as it exported terrorism and mass murder around the world, pursued the development of nuclear weapons, waged proxy war against Israel and oppressed its own people. Over the past few weeks, as at least 16,500 Iranians were murdered in their attempt to bring the regime down, these world leaders said virtually nothing and did even less.

Even now, France, Spain and Italy are actually blocking the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the main instrument of the regime’s global aggression — as a terrorist organisation.

The leaders in Davos have continued to allow Russia to launder its ill-gotten money through their capitals and have done little more than wring their hands over Ukraine.

They say they don’t like bullying leaders like Trump. But these countries have themselves relentlessly bullied Israel at its time of maximum need.

They have punished it for defending itself against genocide, promoted Hamas lies as truths, and incentivised the Palestinian Arabs in their aim of exterminating Israel by continuing to fund the Palestinian Authority’s rewards for terrorist attacks and the indoctrination of its children in murderous hatred of Jews.

So their hypocrisy in throwing up their hands in horror at what America has become is epic. 

In place of the lumbering, corrupt UN, Trump seems to be putting together a Board of Peace. Phillips expresses very rational concerns about some of the invitees, particularly Qatar and Turkey, and of some of his personal characteristics, but on balance approves:

Trump is motivated by love of America, Western civilisation and the Jewish people. His political opponents, on the other hand, are motivated by hatred of America, Western civilisation and the Jewish people — or are chillingly indifferent to those who are.

There’s surely no contest.

Trump’s new world order has emerged because the old one has so catastrophically failed. International law and transnational institutions were created to destroy the power of imperial overreach in the interests of peace, freedom and justice. But that international order has betrayed and abandoned peace, freedom and justice. The outcome is a Caesar in the White House.

The biggest loser of the week was Keir Starmer, who embarrassingly had to abandon his public and widely bruited plan to hand the very strategically important Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which never owned them, and to pay Mauritius, which is now more closely aligned with China, thirty-five billion euros to top off the gift.

Lord Daniel Hannan provides a detailed summary of the importance of the islands and the history of British, U.S., and Mauritius’ connections to them. Trump was entitled, under a decades-long agreement that allowed the joint Anglo-American base on one of the islands, Diego Garcia, to veto any transfer, and he did.

The blow to Starmer’s already weak credibility would appear to be fatal, and I doubt he will survive past May.

For months, Starmer insisted there was no alternative. He spoke of inevitability, of international law, of security imperatives that demanded speed. Yet the International Court of Justice opinion he relied upon was non-binding. No court order compelled action. No hostile force threatened Diego Garcia. No deadline loomed. The urgency was political, not strategic. And that fiction has now been exposed.

The fatal flaw was never Mauritius. It was the treaty Starmer treated as an afterthought. The 1966 UK-US Exchange of Letters is clear. The Chagos Islands are to remain under British sovereignty to ensure the operation of the joint base. That agreement was not obscure. It was foundational. Any competent government would have resolved its status before drafting legislation to hand the territory away. Starmer pressed ahead regardless, confident that the United States would fall into line later.

That confidence was misplaced. Trump’s earlier acceptance was casual and conditional. But when the legal consequences sharpened, and the treaty could no longer be waved away as a technicality, the White House pulled the plug. Trump called the plan an act of great stupidity, and suddenly the bill vanished from the Lords’ schedule. The same government that spoke of urgency now cannot proceed.

This exposes the lie at the heart of the deal. If national security were the driver, the treaty would have been the starting point. If legality mattered, Parliament would have been told the full cost and the unresolved risks. Instead, Starmer claimed the handover would cost just £3.4 billion, a figure he falsely linked to the OBR, while his own officials estimated the real bill at more than £35 billion. Parliament was expected to nod it through after the fact, armed with a number that was never true. He hid behind an authority that had not endorsed the figures and rushed a handover that would have placed British sovereignty in legal limbo while tens of billions flowed out of the defence budget.

What we are watching is not diplomacy gone wrong. It is statecraft conducted by assumption. Assumption that international courts must be obeyed. Assumption that allies will acquiesce. Assumption that Parliament will rubber-stamp. Assumption that Britain should give first and argue later. That mindset is managerial, legalistic, and deeply hostile to the idea of national power.

The bill was pulled because the bluff was called. Once the treaty surfaced, the security argument inverted itself. Once Washington objected, Starmer had nowhere to go. A Prime Minister who claimed there was no choice has now discovered that his choice could not stand.

This episode will endure as a warning. Not about Trump’s temperament or transatlantic spats, but about a governing class that treats sovereignty as an inconvenience and treaties as paperwork to be tidied up after the fact. Britain was inches away from giving away territory in breach of a live defence agreement, on the back of a non-binding opinion, financed by a fiscal fiction, all to satisfy an international audience that does not vote here and does not pay the bill.

Starmer did not stumble into this. He built it on sand. And when the tide came in, it washed away the pretence. 

“The moment Washington raised the 1966 treaty, the whole structure gave way. A deal sold as urgent, lawful, and essential to security could not survive contact with reality.”

Wretchardthecat posts that the deal was never popular. Of course it wasn’t. The deal was moronic, and as Lord Hannan shows, without any legal justification. So how did Starmer’s scheme, which had progressed so far, finally lose support? Wretchard attributes that to a “preference cascade,” A fancy way of describing how, like the crowd in the Emperor’s New Clothes, people are too polite to say the deal was nuts. “But once some impolite, crude and tactless person [Trump] started to complain, the rest chimed in.” 

As the corruption and graft in Minneapolis are now undeniable, Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey are furiously fanning the anti-ICE communists and leftists paid by what are still referred to as “NGOS,” although largely financed by the government. Public sentiment seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of ICE (the last poll I saw said that 72% supported ICE. And even seven New York Democrats in Congress voted with Republicans to fund ICE this week.)

In desperation, the Minnesota leftists are working to tar the agency and its officers as barbaric thugs. The shtick this week is the legacy press’s pimping a phony story that ICE arrested a cute five-year-old in a darling knitted cap and then used him as “bait” to capture other members of his family. An example of the perfervid, dishonest reporting is this one in the Washington Post’s Style section. (This is the ever-thinner paper’s section aimed at women with such critical news reports as “Boob jobs are shrinking.”)

The mawkish account by Philip Kennicott could not be more fact free or obviously designed to prejudice readers by tugging at heartstrings.

The truth is his father ran off and abandoned the kid in freezing temperatures and the ICE officer had no choice but to keep him close until a proper guardian had been found. The boy’s mother’s home was nearby so they went there. She refused to take custody. The twisted media tale is that having the kid go to his mother was using him as “bait.” He awaits a custodial determination in a clean, warm, well-run facility where his father is being held. It makes much of the child’s cap, “a blue knit with white bunny ears and pompoms” and instead of acknowledging that his family refused to take custody of him, states the boy “was a pawn… The photograph stirs empathy and compassion, the same emotions the ICE agents apparently used to entice adults into make themselves vulnerable to capture.”

The author goes on to compare the photo with a painting by Mary Cassatt. Much more apt would be a comparison between a little boy standing without apparent fear alongside an ICE officer in freezing weather to little Elian Gonzales’ capture by an armed agents of the U.S. Border Patrol under President Clinton, where Elian is obviously terrified and clutched in his aunt’s arms.

The author, an arts writer, slathers on the schmaltz: 

”It is evidence, forensic data, snatched from the slipstream of human barbarity, probably by a cellphone camera. But its accidental composition accentuates the boy’s helplessness, and by extension, our own compassion for children standing in the bitter cold, torn from the protection of their parents, subject to the brutal treatment of adults. The boy stares at the truck, as we might stare at a wall if brought to the point of complete moral despair, complete loss of faith in too many of our fellow citizens.

This is an image of universal moral urgency.

John Carter, by contrast, shows how the media twists truth to create the “bait boy” to drum up requisite outrage.

According to reports, the father was spotted in public and fled, abandoning the boy. Like [Kamala] Harris, Craig reminded citizens that “this is a time where we should all be outraged. If this doesn’t pierce through your humanity, as a Republican member of Congress, if you can’t speak out about this, then you’ve got no humanity left.”

The key, again, is the requisite outrage. If you are not outraged, you are not human.

It is often said that we are living in a “post-truth” political environment. The term rose to favor due to the 2016 election of President Trump. Oxford Dictionaries specifically cited Trump when it selected the term as word of the year. The irony is that the proof of post-truth politics is often found among those who use it the most on the left, in the media and academia.

The bait boy hoax is particularly disgraceful. It is common to have minor children present during arrests of all kinds. Officers will often try to get family members to take a child rather than put him into child services.

In this case, ICE officers were trying to detain Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an undocumented Ecuadorian national, when he bolted and left behind his five-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos.

Rather than leave the child in the freezing cold on the street, the officers took the child to his home to get his mother to take him in. She refused to open the door despite agents reportedly saying that she would not be detained. They proceeded to take the boy to McDonald’s, play his favorite music, and take care of him. He was never arrested. They also did not send him into detention. According to ICE, his father asked for the boy to be allowed to stay with him at a detention facility, and ICE agreed.

Maybe news accounts ought not to be written by art critics in Style sections or media hacks.

Clarice Feldman, American Thinker