Free Republic

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration would “absolutely” continue to remove Venezuelan immigrants on deportation flights despite a ruling from a federal judge ordering them to pause their efforts. “These are foreign terrorists, that the president has identified them, and designated them as such, and we will continue to follow the Alien Enemies Act,” Bondi said Monday on Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime.” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday temporarily blocked President Trump from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which would grant him the authority to detain and deport individuals of countries deemed foreign adversaries with little...

The former secretary of state’s 1972 opening to China badly weakened the U.S. By dispensing with that conceit, Trump shows he intends for America to win the great-power competition. The undiplomatic words that Donald Trump had for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week left some Washington, D.C., observers wondering how the Europeans saw the situation. After all, they wondered, if that’s how Trump treats a war-torn country fighting for its independence against Russian despot Vladimir Putin, what do Paris, London, and Rome, etc. think about U.S. security commitments? Other foreign policy analysts recognize that Trump has many audiences outside the...

Ukraine doesn’t actually have any commercial deposits of the rare earths that both Washington and Kyiv have hyped up. The country does not currently produce rare earths, which are a type of critical mineral, nor has it produced rare earths in recent decades. Kyiv only has Soviet-era rare-earth geological mapping, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is certain to complicate any mining or processing efforts—all of which require years of hefty investments, even in countries that are not in war. “Mining is a long-term effort—so the United States may not yield benefits for another 20 years,” a report by the Center...

The president’s swift moves underscore the confidence of an administration with a much firmer grip on the levers of government than during his first term.The last time President Trump held office, he tried to make deep cuts to foreign aid, but was blocked by Congress. He is finding little resistance from fellow Republicans this time to his move to freeze such funding.During a special counsel’s inquiry in his first term, Mr. Trump expressed a desire to fire the investigator, but White House lawyers stopped him. This term, Mr. Trump has swiftly forced out a slew of federal officials who had...

NBC News’ chief foreign affairs Andrea Mitchell said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there was an international backlash developing against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Host Kristen Welker said, “We just talked to the Trump national security adviser amid questions about Gaza, whether he plans to try to make Canada the 51st state and of course, all of these cuts that we’re seeing. How do you see the Trump doctrine right now?” Mitchell said, “It appears to the world as might makes right in Panama, Canada. You can argue that this is an opening bid but we’ve seen in...

Mike Benz on how USAID spent tens of millions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to remove Jair Bolsonaro from power and end free speech in Brazil: “When populist waves swept the world within the U. S. in 2016 with Trump and with what happened all over Europe with Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage, USAID declared censorship holy war against every single populist group, including Bolsonaro. Steve, I’m telling you right now, if USAID did not exist, Bolsonaro would still be the president of Brazil and Brazil would still have a free and open internet. It...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is traveling through Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic as he represents President Trump and the new administration. He’s doing great. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered remarks to reporters in El Salvador discussing his role as Acting Director of USAID after President Trump and Elon Musk moved to incorporate USAID into the State Department. Secretary Rubio repeated that USAID must align with U.S. foreign policy and the national interests of the U.S. government. Citing the “uncooperative” nature of the USAID leadership acting as an independent entity, Secretary Rubio announced...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino on Sunday, making it clear that the U.S. won’t tolerate China’s growing influence over the Panama Canal. “Secretary Rubio informed President Mulino and Minister Martínez-Acha that President Trump has made a preliminary determination that the current position of influence and control of the Chinese Communist Party over the Panama Canal area is a threat to the canal and represents a violation of the Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal,” the State Department said in a statement. “Secretary Rubio made clear that this status...

In January, President Donald Trump returned to the White House, facing a world that is arguably more complicated than when he left the building four years earlier. The war in Ukraine, which will enter its fourth year in February, will take much of Trump’s time as he begins to craft and sell a detailed plan to cease the fighting and negotiate a peace settlement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin can live with. China, the aspiring hegemon that seeks to displace the United States as the world’s foremost power, will be a constant challenge for Trump’s...

Elon Musk and MAGA are already disrupting the status quo, and Europe seems ill-prepared.For the last decade or more, Europe’s governments have been trying to resist covert influence operations from adversaries like Russia and China. Now they have a very different challenge: Fending off overt efforts by Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement to seize territory, oust elected leaders and empower far-right causes and parties. Even before he retakes office, Mr. Trump is making threats — perhaps serious, perhaps not — to acquire the territory of NATO allies like Canada and Denmark. And Mr. Musk, the president-elect’s biggest financial...

In the recent frenzy of commentary seeking to interpret U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s increasingly adamant comments about territorial expansion to Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, too much of the discussion has focused on matters of secondary importance. These range from assessing whether Trump is merely engaging in a game of showmanship or distraction, to deciphering how those regions’ inhabitants feel about ceding territorial control to the United States, to determining how much it would cost to purchase their acquiescence. From a policy perspective, though, more fundamental matters have gone surprisingly unaddressed, beginning with the question of whether any of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Associated Press that he hopes the incoming Trump administration will press forward with key points in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, including on the Middle East and Ukraine. But in an wide-ranging interview Friday on his last workday as America’s top diplomat, he expressed concern that the Trump team might abandon all or some of those policies. Blinken said there is reason to be concerned that the new administration might not follow through on initiatives that Biden’s national security team put into place to end the war in Gaza,...

Biden’s farewell boasts ring hollow as his foreign policy missteps—from emboldening Iran and Hamas to the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal—undermine his claims of global achievement. Departing President Joe Biden offered a farewell brag this week to his State Department about how his tenure had improved America’s stature abroad. In his now accustomed weird mix of whispering and fiery shouting, Biden apparently felt he had to lie or mislead about almost every one of his “achievements.” Yet to the extent that anything improved abroad on his watch—the weakening of Iran or the near destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah—it was due despite, not...

President-elect Donald Trump has made clear his intent to supercharge his “America First” approach to foreign policy in his second term — and Mexico looks set to be at the tip of the spear.While many of Trump’s predecessors have also followed a “realist” strategy — that is, one in which relative power is at the forefront of international relations and diplomatic success is viewed through how it benefits one’s own nation — the incoming president has displayed an apparent unwillingness to consider the pain that his plans would inflict on targeted countries or the responses this will engender.Trump’s proposed policies...

New email records released by the National Archives show then-Vice President Joe Biden was briefed about sensitive foreign policy matters by then-advisor Antony Blinken on his private email account, including details about a failed North Korean missile launch. Joe Biden, now president, first faced scrutiny about potential private accounts after emails contained on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop showed the then-vice president in the Obama administration was using an email address with a pseudonym to communicate about business and official matters with his son, other family members, and senior staff. One new email, part of several batches released by the National...

One of the bleakest places on Earth today is the central processing facility for the remains of dead soldiers in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the logistical hub of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Designed to process hundreds of corpses at a time, this sprawling mega-morgue has been hopelessly overwhelmed for many months. Footage from the inside, posted by witnesses on social media, shows hundreds of bodies in various stages of decomposition and limbs strewn across the corridor floors. In wooden boxes lining the walls from floor to ceiling, row after row after row, are the lucky ones: those whose bodies...

Washington — President Biden told Americans he's "not going away" after leaving the Oval Office in January, saying he plans to continue his foreign and domestic policy work. The president made the comment during an appearance on ABC's "The View" on Wednesday morning in New York City. As he prepares to leave the White House following decades in public office, Mr. Biden said he will continue to work on domestic policy matters with the University of Delaware's Biden Institute and foreign policy matters with the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. Both programs were established...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Friday that the foreign policy vision that former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Trump’s running mate, espouse is “nonsense.” McConnell has long tried to eliminate the “isolationist” wing’s increasing influence over the Republican Party. Although he did not directly reference Trump or Vance, McConnell called the “America First” foreign policy doctrine “nonsense.” “I mean, even the slogans are what they were in the 30s — ‘America First,'” McConnell added. Despite McConnell’s strong support for Ukraine’s protracted war, he admitted in an interview in July that he is not sure...

Revisiting realism in 2018, I realized foreign interventions, meant to ensure American security by “spreading democracy” or “securing stability,” were flawed. The point hit home for me that year when my niece graduated high school, suddenly eligible to fight in a war that started when she was an infant. My idea of realism had turned into a restrained realism, one that I believe still fits my own conservatism. Restraint’s critics, interventionists and neoconservatives derogate “restraint” as “isolationism.” That is just not true. Pundits and the foreign policy establishment recently commemorated NATO’s 75th anniversary and are still considering what the future...

Vice President Kamala Harris may have made it more difficult to close a hostage deal, a startled senior Israeli official said after hearing the remarks she issued to the press late Thursday afternoon. “We hope that it won’t make it harder to achieve a hostage deal because it gives the appearance of day light between Israel and the United States,” the official said. Harris surprised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those close to him by issuing her statement, which she also placed on X shortly after her hour-long meeting with him.