• Donald Trump’s Tripwire for WWIII  By Richard C. Young
• Money for Nothing  By Debbie Young
• Republican Leadership Addicted to Perpetual War?  By Richard C. Young
• 12 Years in Darkness and Hell  By Debbie Young
• The First RAGE Gauge Reading Signals High Risk  By E.J. Smith
• Powerful Repudiation Against U.K. Elites  By Richard C. Young
• Mafia Impresario Meyer Lansky: The Riviera Story  By E.J. Smith
• Costs of EU Membership Outweigh Benefits  By Richard C. Young
• A New Nationalist Era? Part One  By Justin Logan

Pat Buchanan asks, “Does anyone think these things through. Looking for a four year face of with nuclear-armed Russia? Hillary’s the one.”

If U.S. bombs and missiles rain down on Damascus, to the cheers of the C-Street Pattons, what do we do if Bashar Assad’s allies Iran and Hezbollah retaliate with Benghazi-type attacks on U.S. diplomats across the Middle East? What do we do if Syrian missiles and Russian planes starting shooting down U.S. planes?”

Go to war with Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia?

Assume U.S. strikes break Syria’s regime and Assad falls and flees. Who fills the power vacuum in Damascus, if not the most ruthless of the terrorist forces in that country, al-Nusra and ISIS?

Does anyone think these things through?

Donald Trump calls the NATO alliance a rip-off, a tripwire for World War III and “obsolete.” Hillary Clinton compares Putin’s actions in Ukraine to Hitler’s actions in Germany in the early 1930s.

Looking for a four-year faceoff with a nuclear-armed Russia?

Hillary’s the one!

From the WSJ’s Notable & Quotable: Sportscaster Vin Scully comments on socialism while Herman Perez is up to bat:

Perez, 25 years old, originally drafted by the Tigers. Lives in Venezuela. Boy, can you imagine, you’re a young kid playing in the United States, you’re from Venezuela, and every time you look at the news it’s a nightmare. A bunt attempt is missed—runners are holding, 0-and-2. Socialism failing to work, as it always does, this time in Venezuela. You talk about giving everybody something free and all of a sudden, there’s no food to eat. And who do you think is the richest person in Venezuela? The daughter of Hugo Chavez. Hello! Anyway, 0-and-2.

My friend Jon Basil Utley, publisher of The American Conservative, lists six positive policies that Donald Trump could, in fact, create against perpetual war. Jon explains:

For all one’s doubts about Trump, his main appeal is that of restraining Washington’s war machine. As my friend Ron Maxwell, producer of two great war movies, writes, “Trump may be the only off ramp from non-stop wars of choice we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.”

The establishment Republican leadership that Trump is challenging is virtually addicted to perpetual war, while Democrats are so afraid of being called wimpy that they too end up supporting more wars.

Perhaps only Trump has the strength of will to cut the Gordian Knot in Washington. He may yet crash as a result of his chaotic management style, his penchant for promoting rivalries among his staff, and his vindictiveness. But today there is no doubt that he threatens the Beltway establishment—and that challenge is what most Americans want. Should he shock everyone by winning in November, we must trust our system of checks and balances to constrain his worst impulses.

More about Jon Basil Utley here:

Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet, regarded by many as Cuba’s foremost democracy activist, is a symbol of the general resistance to the Castro dictatorship. For this, Dr. Biscet was imprisoned essentially for 12 years for “dangerousness,” a common charge that means the individual in question will not submit meekly to dictatorial rule, writes Jay Nordlinger in National Review in April 2011.

In 1997, Biscet established the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights (“Lawton” being the name of the Havana neighborhood in which he lived). The organization, of course, is banned. In 1998, he spoke out strongly against abortion, particularly late-term abortion: In his work as a doctor, he saw ghastly things. The authorities responded harshly to his protest.

After being detained repeatedly — 26 times — Biscet was arrested in 1999 and thrown in prison for three years. He was released on October 31, 2002, and had 36 days outside of prison. During this time, he worked on his “Democratic Principles for Cuba” and a civic project called “Club for Friends of Human Rights.” He was again arrested on December 6, 2002, and underwent his ordeal until last March (2011).

He says that his immediate task is to “recover psychologically and physically” from his twelve years in darkness and hell. “I hope to be in the best possible condition,” to do the work he finds it unavoidable to do. Does he expect to be rearrested? “Anything is possible,” but he will work without fear. He believes that the island’s democrats are basically united, although “we do live under a totalitarian dictatorship that uses all of its resources to attempt to destroy us, which makes it difficult to progress as quickly as we would like.”

Dr. Biscet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday at the George W. Bush Institute. Here are a few comments from Dr. Biscet:

For more than 57 years, we Cubans have lived in a Cuba under the oppression of a communist dictatorship. The most basic rights, such as freedom of speech, of assembly and association, of religion and a free press, are intensely limited by the Castro regime.

Cruel and inhuman punishments, torture, the imprisonments and shootings for dissenters are the instruments of state terror that are used to keep the Cuban people subjugated. This is a Cold War state where my people still live and that we do not accept.

For June 2016, my RAGE Gauge signals: High Risk

Tension is high on the social and economic fronts. FBI Background checks continue to trend higher, dissatisfaction with the direction of the country is trending high, and the underemployment rate (U6) isn’t real encouraging in this sluggish economy. But it’s a sluggish economy with inflation. You need only look at your checkbook and credit card bills, not the government’s worthless CPI, to find it: Education, Condo’s in Boston/NYC/Miami, food (the type you buy) and taxes to name a few are sky-high. Gold is up 20% YTD. Your dollars are getting smaller by the day. And the pathetic dividend yield of just over 2% on stocks is well below the norm.

What should you make of this? Well, retirees that are reaching for yield—when they should be protecting what they’ve earned over a lifetime of working and saving—will feel the pain. When? No one knows. I don’t spend much time trying to predict the when. But when it does happen, you should be prepared. This is not a market that favors the needy. And like always, it is the needy investor that tends to get crushed by the market for hurling Hail Mary passes in the fourth quarter. With the RAGE Gauge signaling high risk today, you should avoid adding risk where possible and continue to focus on the long- term.

The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher comments on the U.K.’s vote to exit the EU:

The Leave campaign has won. The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. Good.

I had generally hoped that the Leave side would win. This, simply because a Leave victory would be a strong repudiation of the elites, and in particular the unaccountable internationalists in Brussels. As I type this, I’m watching a British political analyst on CNN describe this as a stunning discrediting of the experts, all of whom thought Remain would win.

My friend Jack Colhoun wrote the book on Cuba. It’s called Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and The Mafia, 1933 to 1966. In his Op-ed, recently published on the History News Network, he writes, “The heirs of Meyer Lansky, the impresario of the North American Mafia gambling colony in Cuba (1933-1958) are betting on a big payback from the negotiations between the United States and Cuba to normalize relations between the two countries.” And concludes, “To portray Lansky as an aggrieved victim of Cuba is to stand history on its head. There should be no compensation for the heirs of the former Mafia gamblers in Cuba.”

The heirs of Meyer Lansky, the impresario of the North American Mafia gambling colony in Cuba (1933-1958) are betting on a big payback from the negotiations between the United States and Cuba to normalize relations between the two countries. Compensation claims by U.S. citizens or businesses for properties nationalized by the Cuban revolution are among the issues under discussion.

Lansky’s daughter Sandi, her son Gary Rapoport, and her brother Paul have filed a compensation claim against Cuba for the Riviera Hotel and Casino with the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. The Cuban revolution confiscated the Riviera and other Mafia-owned properties after it toppled the gangster-linked regime of General Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

“It was through my grandfather’s hard work that the hotel was built,” Rapoport told the U. K. Daily Mail Online on December 23, 2015. “We are his natural relations . . . . By right, it should be our property.” He says the Riviera is valued at $70 million. The Tampa Bay Tribune, Reuters, and Haaretz have also covered the story.

The Riviera, which overlooks the Straits of Florida, was the crown jewel of Lansky’s casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in Havana. When the Riviera opened in December 1957, it was the largest Mafia-owned hotel-casino outside Las Vegas. The hotel’s 440 double rooms were booked solid for the winter season of 1957-1958.

However, the narrative that the success of the Riviera was the product of Meyer Lansky’s “hard work” is undercut by Lansky’s own assessment of his arrangement with Batista. Lansky talked candidly about his years in Cuba with Israeli national security writers Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau for their admiring biography Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (Paddington Press, 1979). (Lansky lived in Israel in 1970-1971 to avoid tax evasion charges in the United States.)

Read the rest of the story here.

About Gangsterismo:

Gangsterismo is an extraordinary accomplishment, the most comprehensive history yet of the clash of epic forces over several decades in Cuba. It is a chronicle that touches upon deep and ongoing themes in the history of the Americas, and more specifically of the United States government, Cuba before and after the revolution, and the criminal networks known as the Mafia.

The result of 18 years’ research at national archives and presidential libraries in Kansas, Maryland, Texas, and Massachusetts, here is the story of the making and unmaking of a gangster state in Cuba. In the early 1930s, mobster Meyer Lansky sowed the seeds of gangsterismo when he won Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista’s support for a mutually beneficial arrangement: the North American Mafia were to share the profits from a future colony of casinos, hotels, and nightclubs with Batista, his inner circle, and senior Cuban Army and police officers. In return, Cuban authorities allowed the Mafia to operate its establishments without interference. Over the next twenty-five years, a gangster state took root in Cuba as Batista, other corrupt Cuban politicians, and senior Cuban army and police officers got rich. All was going swimmingly until a handful of revolutionaries upended the neat arrangement: and the CIA, Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and the Mafia joined forces to attempt the overthrow of Castro.

Gangsterismo is unique in the literature on Cuba, and establishes for the first time the integral, extensive role of mobsters in the Cuban exile movement. The narrative unfolds against a broader historical backdrop of which it was a part: the confrontation between the United States and the Cuban revolution, which turned Cuba into one of the most perilous battlegrounds of the Cold War.

About Jack Colhoun:

Jack Colhoun is an independent historian of the Cold War (University of Wisconsin, Madison, BA, 1968; York University , PhD, 1976), an investigative reporter and professional archival researcher. Colhoun has written widely on U.S. foreign policy and covert intelligence operations. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Toronto Star, The Nation, The Progressive, National Catholic Reporter, and Covert Action Quarterly. Colhoun was a longtime Washington bureau chief of the storied radical newsweekly The Guardian until it closed in 1992. During the Vietnam War, Colhoun, an anti-war Army lieutenant, was a leader of draft and military resisters exiled in Canada and an editor of the American exile magazine AMEX-Canada.

The Cato Institute’s Marian L. Tupy offers unique and compelling perspective on the European Union:

I started my career as a believer in the European integration process. Central Europe, where I was born, was impoverished by communism, and membership of the EU seemed like a solution to many economic and political problems in ex-communist countries. Over time, I started to see the costs as well as the benefits of the EU. It was only much later that I came to believe that the costs of EU membership far outweigh its benefits. While this was a gradual process, one event greatly helped to convince me that the EU has become pernicious and must be stopped. That event was the EU’s handling of the French and Dutch referenda on the EU Constitution in 2005.

After the people of France and Holland rejected the EU Constitution in their respective referenda, the EU establishment relabeled it as the Lisbon Treaty and adopted it nonetheless. This act of supreme arrogance convinced me that the EU establishment held the people of Europe in utter contempt and that it would stop at nothing in order to pursue its agenda of an “ever closer union.” It showed me that the EU bureaucrats see themselves as a class of wise experts who know how society ought to be organized. The memories of my childhood behind the Iron Curtain flooded back. And that brings me to my final point: does an “enlightened” class of technocrats have a right to make people free or happy or, simply, better off?

As I have explained, the EU is not only failing to address Europe’s problems, it exacerbates them. Moreover, it seems to be unable and unwilling to reform. With every electoral cycle, “establishment” parties committed to further European integration are growing weaker and anti-EU parties are getting closer to power. The EU has been very successful in plodding along, but its rearguard action cannot succeed indefinitely. At some point, one of the EU’s 28 member states will elect an anti-EU government. I fear that the longer the EU establishment ignores its opponents, the more belligerent the latter will become.

As such, a negotiated parting of ways between the EU and countries that feel they can do better on their own makes more sense. Of course, there is no guarantee that all of the former EU members will make the right choices. I can imagine Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Great Britain becoming a global free-trade superpower. But, I can also imagine President Marine Le Pen’s France hunkering down behind a wall of protective tariffs. That said, I would rather see individual nation states make wrong choices than to force them to remain in the EU, thus increasing resentment and risking greater disruption down the line.

The EU has become a large pressure cooker with no safety valve. Large parts of Europe suffer from low growth, high unemployment, rising deficits, and stratospheric debts. To make matters worse, tensions between the people of Europe are increasing. Some feel that they are being forced to adopt policies they do not like, while others feel that they have to unfairly subsidize people with whom they have nothing in common. The EU could turn down the heat by repatriating many of its competences back to the nation states. That, alas, is not in its nature. The EU risks imploding in an uncontrolled way and if that happens, everyone will lose.

Between the Brexit vote, Donald Trump’s under-predicted emergence, squirming about refugee flows and assimilation in rich countries, and a growing ambivalence about globalization, it’s hard to think we’re not entering a new nationalist era.

Lots of people are overstating things, of course. For some in England, the European Union was actually the Third Reich. For others, British Leave voters and the American Trumpenproletariat are the closet Nazis. During the Greek crisis, Angela Merkel appeared in the Greek press and in effigy in Greece as a Nazi officer.

But a flurry of Nazi comparisons, especially in a negative connotation, don’t prove a nationalist era. After all, borderless liberals loathe the Nazis as intensely as anyone.

So what’s happening here? Is there just a combination of over-hot rhetoric and resentment at an oversold case for globalization from the 1990s?

That seems to be part of it, but another way of looking at it is that there was no non-nationalist era, rather a combination of economic growth and a lull in political conflict in Western countries that people mistook for the End of History.

After all, even the 1990s saw brutal civil wars across eastern and central Europe over questions of identity, a dangerous crisis in Taiwan over the question whether Taiwan was part of China, and a number of other nationalist flare-ups.

Every era in the modern age is a nationalist era, we just notice it sometimes more than others.

In the United States, questions of national identity and, yes, white identity politics are at the forefront of the presidential campaign, but nationalism had never gone away. Just look at the way in which American “exceptionalism” came up in our politics, and the way in which the first black U.S. president’s identity was constantly probed, and from every angle. There was a concerted effort to “other” Obama, totally apart from policy differences. Whether this was because elites believed that policy was too abstruse to inspire voters or whether something about Obama tickled their own identity politics button is unclear.

And since I’ve brought the subject up, a word on American exceptionalism. Obama got himself into trouble by starting an answer to a question about American exceptionalism with the sentence, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” He went on to puff out his chest and tick off some of America’s accomplishments, but this didn’t satisfy his critics.

Obama was at an international summit in Strasbourg, France, with the president of France and the German chancellor. This was not the place for a Fox News late night soliloquy about how we’re so great and the rest of the world just doesn’t get it. As I wrote previously,

Imagine your coworker, or neighbor, or spouse, constantly parading about, preening and pronouncing that he is the greatest person ever to have been made and marveling at how lucky are those subject to his ministrations. Any impartial observer would forgive you for nudging him off a pier, and all the more so if he were, in fact, great.

Next week, we’ll push a bit more on this concept of exceptionalism, on how nationalism influences our policies, and on whether the coming months and years are likely to see an increase in nationalism and identity politics in the United States and the West.

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