Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

“Europeans at the Doha Forum in Qatar were quite clear in their disdain for President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy and his peace plan for Ukraine, but his ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker came out swinging in favor of both, unabashedly telling an audience Saturday that U.S. partners need to step up if they want continued support from Washington and not to criticize the sausage (peace deal) while it’s being made.” (12/06/25)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-nato-trump/

Source: The Bulwark
by Will Saletan

“Donald Trump’s latest assault on immigrants — threatening to ‘denaturalize’ U.S. citizens who were born in other countries — is an affront to human rights and American values. It’s also a betrayal of the six million naturalized Americans who voted for him last year. Without their ballots, he wouldn’t be president. And if they turn against him, his party will be out of power. … if Trump thinks he can strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, he’d better move fast. The backlash from nonwhite voters has already cost his party two governorships.” (12/05/25)

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-bites-the-hand-that-voted-for-him-naturalized-immigrants-citizens

Source: Law & Liberty
by Jason Gehrke

“About two weeks after America’s final withdrawal from Kabul, Al-Qaeda issued an open letter praising ‘the Almighty, the Omnipotent,’ the one who ‘broke America’s back’ in Afghanistan ‘the graveyard of empires.’ Al-Qaeda’s boast transformed a self-fulfilling prophecy into the Taliban’s triumphant honorific, according to Choosing Defeat, a new book by Paul D. Miller, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University. … In his telling, the phrase ‘graveyard of empires’ haunted U.S. policymaking for twenty years. Every wartime president invoked it, as did American generals, senior civilians, defense intellectuals, and journalists. There’s only one problem: Afghanistan never was known as the graveyard of empires — not until Milt Bearden penned an article in 2001. When asked, Bearden said he ‘just came up with the name for [his] piece for Foreign Affairs.'” (12/05/25)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/strategy-and-culture-in-the-graveyard-of-empires/

Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson

“[T]he Trump administration has its agents arresting green card applicants as they show up for their final meeting. These are not ‘the worst of the worst’ as Donald Trump likes to put it: One was a British mother with her 4-month-old baby in her arms. (The New York Times has the whole ugly story.) These people were not accused of having entered the country illegally or of violating U.S. immigration law in some way other than following a legal process that takes a long time and creates ambiguities. Some of them were shipped off to detention centers. Why are federal agents arresting these people? Because they are the easiest people to arrest …. Some strategy: Abuse the weak, the vulnerable, and the law-abiding — chasing down the actual malefactors is too much work.” (12/05/25)

https://thedispatch.com/article/immigration-criminals-green-card-arrests-trump/