Monday, February 17, 2025

Part I

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Far Right? Hard Right? Radical Right? Media Confusion After Vice President Vance Delivers Message in Munich

Last Friday, US Vice President JD Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference. He did so creating no small amount of controversy as he addressed the military, foreign policy and intelligence establishments gathered there for this meeting which goes back to 1963. At one of the hottest moments in the Cold War, the conference was put together. It was known as the Munich Conference on Security Policy before simply becoming known as the Munich Security Conference. Now, the Vice President of the United States offered what amounts to the most complete programmatic statement he has made since his inauguration to that office, and he represented not only the United States in a general sense, but quite specifically he represented the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

Now, President Trump has sent his own warning signals. He has been a disruptor on his own in terms of the foreign policy establishment, particularly when looking at the European consensus. But now the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, has created his own ripples. He has made his own statement. Addressing the security conference, the Vice President said this, “We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security, and normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today,” said the VP. “But while the Trump Administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about,” said the Vice President, “Vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.”

He went on to say, “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.” Now, before going further, we just need to set the stage a bit. The Munich Conference does go back to 1963, and the point is that at the height of the Cold War, it was established as a way of developing European consensus given the international security threats at that time, most importantly, the Cold War represented that threat. But now, of course, Munich is no longer a part of West Germany, it’s a part of a united Germany. That means the East and the West came together after the fall of the Berlin Wall as we entered the last years of the 20th Century, and, of course, the Cold War, as we know it was declared to be over. The basic ideological warfare, the clash of civilizations between the Soviet Union, representing communism, and the United States and our allies representing and democracy, democratic order.

But as you look at the situation today, you recognize it’s not just the name of the organization has changed, its function has largely changed too. But even as the Vice President addressed this group, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was creating exactly the kind of disruption that he intended, and in all likelihood, he got the response he probably intended to receive. The United States was sending a signal through the Vice President. The White House was sending a very clear signal that this is not business as usual in terms of international diplomacy. But even as we considered the disruption that was caused by the Vice President’s remarks, we need to take a little closer look at those remarks. We also need to understand what JD Vance was seeking to disrupt because I want to be clear, he wasn’t seeking to disrupt a meeting, he’s seeking to disrupt a way of looking at the world, and a European way of looking at the world and its own responsibility, furthermore the internal politics of those nations as well.

The Vice President basically addressed all of those issues and probably caused a good deal of consternation on all of those fronts. The news reports about the European consternation over the Vice President’s comments came almost immediately, and when you look at the comments themselves, it’s a wonder the consternation was not even more intense. The Vice President spoke, for instance, of the fact that in his view, “When I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.” That’s quite a slam. The Vice President of the United States was saying that many of the countries in Europe that pride themselves the most on their democratic systems of government, their constitutional orderly representative systems of government, their absolute commitment and their own view to western values such as free speech and all the list of the freedoms that would be included in terms of the modern European experiment, the vice president came back and said, “The greatest threat is not from without, the greatest threat is from within, and that includes the silencing of voices in these nations and in some cases intervention in the democratic process itself.”

Now, when you look at the international press reports on the speech, it’s really interesting to see that there’s a terminology that just jumps out at us. The terminology has to do with right, far right and hard right. So for example, the American media referred to the fact that a part of the European frustration with the Vice President’s comments is that he appeared to be calling for an openness in the political process to candidates policies and platforms coming from parties of what’s identified as the right, identified in other reports as the far-right, and still other reports as the hard-right. Well, what in the world is the distinction here? What’s the difference between right and far-right and hard-right?

Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, for example, ran an article of the headline “German Leader Rebukes Vance Over Far-Right.” Then you have other reports in which the term is not far-right, but hard-right. Now, the terms left and right in terms of a leftist politics lending itself towards the radical and certainly the liberal, the progressive, that’s on the left, the right being conservative, and that means in many ways what’s been defined as reactionary, in least in a historical sense. True conservatives recognize themselves to be far more than reactionaries, but it is true that conservatism is often articulated over against a leftist danger, and that means sometimes things have to be articulated politically in one generation that no one thought would be necessary in a previous generation. But on the right, you have conservatives and then you have people who are more generally on the right who may be so far on the right that they really aren’t rightly described as conservative.

So you’re looking at two trajectories, and to be honest, there are extremists in both directions, but it is really interesting that you don’t see the terms hard-left or far-left very often in the mainstream media, and that’s because when you look at conservatism, quite honestly, the mainstream media sees just about all legitimate conservatism, just about every legitimate position on the right as potentially far-right or hard-right. From the perspective of the left, everything on the right looks far. But just thinking generously, maybe we could come up with some distinction that makes some sense that might be behind at least some of the usages of these terms. And at least one distinction does come to mind, and that is that in the period after the second World War, the term far-right or hard-right, sometimes even radical-right, was applied to conservative or right-wing groups that questioned the validity of democratic forms of government, representative forms of government, constitutional forms of government.

And so looking at that, you could say, “Well, that can happen on the right,” and that would indeed be a hard-right or a far-right. But in the case of the news coverage we’re talking about right now, the point is that the mainstream media use these terms without any particular discipline to explain why. You just talk about the Left, you talk about progressives, no word put in front of those terms, but when it comes to the term conservative, you can just see the warning signal that the mainstream media are trying to send to their readers when they precede the word right with far or hard. In other words, “Look out.”

Well, let’s take that a step further and recognize that the history of the 20th Century reminds us that in many places of the world, and in particular in Europe, there were radical right regimes, and so even as you had communism in the Soviet Union, you had fascism not only most infamously in Nazi Germany but also in Italy, remember, and furthermore in Spain and you had neo-fascist movements and places as far removed from Europe as Argentina. And looking at this, well, it’s just a sober reminder of the fact that these things do happen.

So when you’re looking at hard right or far right in the mainstream media, or even in terms of political analysis or even potentially coming from some of the mainstream European leaders who were speaking at the Munich Security Conference, some of the people who were upset at the Vice President of the United States for saying they were wrong in excluding some of these conservative positions from the electoral process and from the public square, when you look at it that way, you come to see it’s very reckless to use those terms without any context. Are they implying fascism? Are they implying Peronism or some other form of far-right ideology? Well, when it comes to Germany, the Vice President did directly address the fact that in Germany there has been an effort to marginalize what is known as AFD, in the German language that stands for Alliance for Germany, and it is a very conservative party, it holds to very conservative principles.

But we also need to recognize that AFD and other European conservative parties, even as in the European context, they’re often dismissed as far-right or hard-right, the reality is that many of the ideas, many of the concepts, many of the principles to which they hold would fit in a conservative context somewhere else, perhaps even in the United States of America.

Now, when it comes to party by party, policy by policy, movement by movement, these things would have to be evaluated. But the point is the Vice President of the United States castigated European leaders for holding to a consensus of attempting politically to hold conservatism back. And here’s where we do need to step away and look back at Europe and recognize that in the post-war consensus that developed after the Second World War, there was a basic commitment to a social contract liberalism, a basic commitment to what in Germany and elsewhere was described as a Christian democratic tradition.

Now, in this case, Christian is not entirely out of place because this was a continuation of some openly Christian identified parties in the past of these nations. But in the main in a secularized era, what this means is a certain kind of left, but at least officially not too far left consensus, and you had the development of efforts to try to even make many parties on the right, many conservative parties, not only silenced, but in some cases illegal, marginal, keep them away from the political action. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany castigated the Vice President, saying that his call for the inclusion of participation by groups such as AFD was incompatible, he said, with the pledge, “never again.” Now, never again what? That was a very common and, of course, absolutely necessary statement made after the fall of the Third Reich, after the fall of Nazi Germany. This must never be repeated.

But we do need to recognize that the left or center-left, as it is often described, consensus, the social democratic consensus in so many of these European nations, it basically uses that never again as a way of seeking to marginalize all conservative opposition or to redefine conservative opposition that would hold to certain principles even with long European heritage as being outside the pale.

Now, let’s be clear, there are ideas, there are policies that are outside the pale, but when you’re looking at many of the political issues that now confront Europeans, it’s clear that there has been an effort to marginalize an awful lot of conservative argument, and furthermore even to sequester a lot of conservatives from the political process at all costs. You see that in France right now with Emmanuel Macron. You see it in other nations. You see it right now in the language that’s being used by the German Government and even the German Chancellor when speaking of a party of the right.

It’s also very interesting to note that the American Vice President addressed the group there in Munich over the issue of immigration, speaking very openly of an immigration crisis, and he acknowledged that it’s a crisis in the United States of America as well as in Europe. When he pointed out that in the European context, many governments have acted on this issue with absolutely no democratic accountability whatsoever. As the Vice President said, the voters of these nations never had a voice in this immigration policy and in many decisions that have basically reshaped immigration with a vast influx of immigrants, all without any democratic accountability. Germany, by the way, is at the front of the line of countries that have taken those kinds of policies. Vice President Vance also called for a lighter touch when it comes to regulation of information technology even related to the emerging technology of AI or artificial intelligence.

This was something of a shot over the bow when it comes to the American Vice President warning Europeans about trying to constrict these technologies too much. He went on to say that would be to the ultimate benefit not of any nation in the West, but rather of China and other malign influences on the world stage. He went on to say this, and I quote, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.” He said, “The people have a voice. European leaders have a choice, and my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.”

Bringing this section to a close, it is interesting to note that Europeans and Americans share so much of a common worldview as well as a common culture, a common civilizational inheritance, but it’s also true and has been true for a long time that Americans and Europeans as a whole often do not see reality in the present in exactly the same way. If anything, that is an understatement. Europeans tend towards a worldview of cosmopolitanism. The United States stands far more to a worldview of American responsibility and American action on the world stage along with allies, yes, but America is seen as a civilizational power unto itself, of course, of European inheritance, but nonetheless, what you have in Europe is a cosmopolitanism, given the fact that it’s not so many states together in a federal union, it is so many nations speaking different languages with some shared history, but a lot of different history in a very long history of centuries of conflict, and often that conflict is broken out into war.

The European reflex is thus to try to do just about anything to avoid war. And the Vice President and now the President of the United States are warning Europe that they live in a world in which that can become a very dangerous dream.

One final footnote on this story. It’s interesting to note that when you look at the situation in Ukraine, big questions loom, when you look at the Vice President’s address, a lot of headlines, one of the bigger issues behind all of this is that the United States is particularly determined under President Trump that Europe should take a far larger slice of the responsibility for its own defense and deciding issues for its own future rather than relying upon the security umbrella largely paid for by the United States of America. But we need to remember that at this point when Vice President JD Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and spoke to a largely European group, a largely European audience, he assumed that there are common ties between the United States and Europe over against the larger challengers on the world scene, most particularly Russia and China, but also North Korea, Iran, and a host of other nations.

As has been the case throughout so much of human history, we’re about to find out long-term what the civilizational patterns really are. We’ll be talking in future editions of the briefing why those civilizational patterns tend to come up again and again and again for good reason.

Part II

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A Huge Moral Imbalance Exchange Between Israel and Hamas: Israel Receives Back 3 Hostages in Exchange for 369 Palestinian Prisoners

Next, we need to recognize that so often on Mondays we need to go to hot spots around the world, and that’s because over the weekend, the headlines keep coming, the events keep coming. Most importantly on the world scene is what took place in the Middle East on Saturday, there was another exchange of hostages and prisoners. Hamas released three Israeli hostages it had held since the horrifying October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Israel in response released 369 Palestinian prisoners. In moral terms, we have to point to the imbalance of this exchange. It’s a radical imbalance.

Let’s consider three dimensions of this imbalance. We’ve talked about the first dimension before, and that is we’re talking about Israel, a legitimate state and Hamas an Islamic terrorist organization, that’s an imbalance. But in the media, you’ll see there’s an exchange between Israel and Hamas that implies some kind of equal standing that we just have to remind ourselves with moral sanity, it doesn’t exist, that equality is unreal.

The second dimension of this imbalance is the fact that you’re talking about numbers, three Israeli hostages in order to obtain on the Palestinian side 369 prisoners out of Israel.

The third imbalance is the morality of the holding of these human beings. When it comes to Hamas, they were holding innocent Israelis taken in a terror attack upon Israel, they are hostages. When it comes to the Palestinian prisoners, they were people being held on criminal charges in Israel, usually based upon terrorist actions against Israel itself.

So those three dimensions of imbalance, you don’t see much of that treated straightforwardly in the mainstream media, but we need to keep it before ourselves constantly lest we lose moral grip on this situation.

But you’ll remember that towards the middle of last week, there’s a question as to whether this exchange would take place at all, it did. But Hamas is showing its stripes all over again. It always will. It’s because it’s going to show who it is because as a terror organization, it only has power insofar as it reminds the world of its terrorist ambitions. So President Trump spoke, for instance, of the possibility that Palestinians will be relocated and the United States would develop Gaza, but without even looking at that argument, the most important thing is that when the leadership of Hamas responded to that, they said, if there is any land swap, it will be Palestinian control of Jerusalem.

So just keep that in mind, understand what’s being threatened there, understand that Hamas is absolutely committed, and has been from the beginning, to the non-existence of Israel as a state, presumably the non-existence of the Jewish people in the region as well. That’s been made pretty clear. But we also need to recognize that Hamas being Hamas has taken political advantage as this kind of terrorist organization will do basically humiliating and parading the Israeli hostages even in the process of the release. There were giant banners with Hamas heroes painted on them just so that it had to be within the camera frame of the media covering the event. Hamas knows what it’s doing. It’s exacting a price. It is achieving some of its aims even in these exchanges, and of course the exchanges are a part of a very temporary, or at least a very fragile ceasefire agreement.

Many people in the world want Israel to refrain from entering into any military activity, once again, there in Gaza, but Israel is also determined, it says, to remove the living threat of Hamas. It’s increasingly difficult to see how that might happen. We think Israel’s aim in this case is exactly right, but we come to understand that a terror organization in its asymmetry with a legitimate state is able to operate in ways that a state cannot, and it is also living on this extremist ideology. All of that becomes very, very clear. The cruelty, the intentional cruelty of the Hamas worldview was also made clear in an article that ran in the New York Times on Sunday where we are told, “Hamas has mostly refused to give up control of Gaza and to send its leaders into exile. The group also worries that handing over the hostages, its most valuable bargaining chips, would remove its best insurance against a renewed Israeli invasion.” The final statement in the article, “To sustain the ceasefire either Israel or Hamas would most likely have to blink. For now, neither is done so, leaving the future of the truce up in the air.”

Part III

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Terrorism is the Official Policy of Hamas: The Deadly Determination of Hamas Highlights Its Danger and the Difficulty of Eliminating Deadly Ideas

Now, before that final sentence, I want us to note what was acknowledged by the New York Times in this case, and that is that the taking of hostages is a part of the official policy of Hamas as a terror organization. It’s afraid to give up the hostages because it then gives up its leverage and effectively gives up its business model. It will get back to taking hostages as quickly as possible. Israel’s determination, stated in public by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to eliminate the threat of Hamas. But this is where, as Christians think about this, we just need to remind ourselves not only of the rightness of that approach looking at a terrorist organization bent on the extinction of Israel, but we also understand as Christians how difficult it is to confront, to battle and to eliminate ideas, and that includes perhaps especially the most toxic and deadly of ideas.

Terrorism as an ideology and as a strategy has undoubtedly existed throughout most of human history, but there is a specific history to terrorism we need to note. In the 20th Century, terrorism became an instrument of widespread global attention, influence, and concern in the aftermath of the Second World War, even during the Cold War and in its aftermath, particularly in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, right down to the present time. And so terrorism has been directed as a basic market plan on the part of many extremist ideologies, and one of the things we note is that terrorism is like a contagion. It spreads and it spreads in a very dangerous and deadly way, and so you have Islamic terrorism, which is one of the most long-standing forms of terrorism, going all the way back into the conquest by the Muslims of so many non-Muslim territories throughout the history, for example, of Muslim regimes and in particular of the Ottoman Empire.

But terrorism was also undertaken by many other groups that styled themselves as liberationist groups in the 20th Century now into the 21st Century. This creates another asymmetry. It’s not only Hamas and Israel. For instance, when you have a terrorist organization and an organized state, the terrorist organization can conduct operations that would not be politically possible in a democratic state, in a form of government, when there’s some kind of democratic consent. Democratic governments will not put up with the same kind of activity. The nations to be received among the community of nations, at least with full recognition and respect, have to operate by certain rules. Terrorist organizations seek, by definition, to upset the equilibrium and they excuse or perhaps even just celebrate and justify their terrorist acts because of their political ends.

Now, this is not to say that nations do not take actions that are not aggressive and invasive that also break the rules of nations, and what’s often described fairly abstractly and inaccurately is international law, as someone pointed out years ago, that’s probably something of an oxymoron. But nonetheless, we do recognize the asymmetry issue because it plays out in so much of what we discussed today, that asymmetry explains why we use Hamas and Israel in the same sentence even though we certainly want to do no such thing, and why when we look elsewhere in the world, we come to understand it’s the same problem.

By the way, the Wall Street Journal asked the question over the weekend, “Who owns the Gaza Strip?” That’s a very interesting question. It turns out there’s no clear answer to that question, which points again to the fact that we are talking about one of the most intractable problems on the world stage. It’s not recently intractable, it’s been intractable for a very, very long time. And we in the United States often think that if something’s a hundred years old, it’s ancient history, but when we’re looking at other parts of the world, we need clearly to see that there’s an inheritance of not only centuries, but even millennia in some cases of human history, and human beings, let’s remember, have a very long memory. In that sense as the great southern novelist William Faulkner pointed out, there are places and there are times when the past isn’t forgotten. As he quipped, it’s not even past.