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Full Transcript After the Break

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
September 11, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Frank and I discuss:

• The 9/11 anniversary: 25 years later.

• What Bush got right when the unthinkable happened.

• Why you can’t defeat an enemy you refuse to name.

• How the State Department squandered our military victory in Iraq.

• Why Marxists and Islamists unite (and then turn on each other).

• Zohran Mamdani’s rise and the lessons New York still hasn’t learned.

It’s a half-hour on one of the most important anniversaries of our time. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

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Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Securing America with me, Frank Gaffney, the program that’s a kind of owner’s manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and His kingdom.

We have a very somber occasion to mark with today’s program, and that would be the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: acts of jihad against the United States of America aimed at devastating our financial sector, business sort of operational hub in New York City, of course, and also the Pentagon, and perhaps another seat of government, Capitol Hill or the White House. Not entirely clear.

Fortunately, that fourth plane was taken down by the action of American patriots who prevented it from taking place. But the devastation, the carnage, the costs in lives and treasure that flowed from the three that did attack their targets was simply incalculable.

To note this occasion, to comment on it in his usual insightful way, I’m thrilled that we have our friend and colleague Rod Martin. Rod is a serial entrepreneur, a former policy adviser to then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a man who cut his teeth in the business world with PayPal early on, and also a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention for many years, and now the proprietor of a remarkable online resource. He calls it The Rod Martin Report. You can find it, you can subscribe to it, and I encourage you to do so at RodMartin.org.

He is the author of a forthcoming book, and he will tell us about it because it’s relevant to what we are talking about right now: the reordering of the world order by Donald J. Trump. Rod Martin, welcome back. It’s good to have you with us, sir.

Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.

Frank Gaffney: I wanted to start with, I guess, the question that will be on everybody’s agenda for the day, and that is: Where were you on 9/11, and what were your thoughts on the occasion of this terrible attack?

Rod D. Martin: Well, I was actually in my apartment in Silicon Valley, and I got a phone call from a friend who said, “You’ve got to turn on the TV.” I turned it on just in time to see the plane hit the second tower, and that was not something any of us really expected. Of course, it was a searing moment for all.

We didn’t know what was coming next. The Bush administration certainly didn’t know what was coming next. They had to prepare for all possible eventualities. It’s all easy to look back now and say, “Well, that was kind of all they had.” Well, it was kind of all they had, but we didn’t know it. I mean, for all we knew, it was just going to unleash across the country.

In reality, of course, we know what they were going for. Certainly, they wanted to attack the United States. We are, after all, “the Great Satan.” But what they really wanted was a propaganda extravaganza in the Middle East. Bin Laden in particular, more than anything else, wanted to overthrow the Saudi government and establish a caliphate. And so that failed. But the visuals did not. It was really quite extraordinary

So in your intro, you said we’re not really sure if the fourth plane was going for the White House or the Capitol. I’m guessing probably the Capitol Dome, because it would have made the best television. I also think they thought they would get something as spectacular at the Pentagon as they got at the World Trade Center. But that didn’t work out for them because they actually flew the plane into the one section of the Pentagon that was already reinforced structurally: they were upgrading the entire building. So the terrorists kind of blew that.

But this was all aimed at a huge propaganda victory among the people of the Middle East: if they were powerful enough to destroy the great symbols of American power, they would surely be seen as powerful enough to unite the Islamic world. And I don’t believe Osama bin Laden imagined what Bush would unleash upon him in a billion years.

So as many criticisms as we can validly make of various aspects of the Bush policy over the next seven years, I think we must, must take our hats off to George W. Bush, who handled an incredibly difficult situation better than most would have, and certainly better than Al Gore would have.

Frank Gaffney: Turns out that 2000 was a fateful election in many respects. Some contend that it was decided by Muslim votes, in fact, that 200 non-hanging chads made the difference in Florida, notably, were the result of an effort by a fellow by the name of Sami al-Arian, who was at the time a computer science professor in, I think it’s the University of South Florida. His real job, though, it turned out, was actually running Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was a terrorist and a top figure in the sort of Muslim Brotherhood pantheon at the time.

And that’s quite a story, actually, including what went on, which I personally observed on 9/11. I was in my office in Washington, D.C., Rod, and was similarly made aware of what was happening en route into town by a friend who called and said, “Are you watching television?” I said, “No, I’m driving.” And he said, this was before the second strike, “Well, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center tower.”

You were mulling what that could possibly be other than terrorism. And as we were speaking, the second one came in. And as I drove into town, the one went into the Pentagon, and it was coming up in horrific smoke at the time as I was driving along the Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, D.C.

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It was a moment of profound upset, particularly, I think, to those of us who had been warning of such things for some time, and that it had come to pass in this form, as it became clear in short order, at the hands of Sharia supremacists spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood, I think it’s fair to say.

And all of this is what I fear we have not properly learned the lessons of, Rod. I wanted to talk with you a little bit about what those lessons should be. I would posit that one of them is that our decision to describe what happened as an act of terror, and almost immediately to whitewash the role that Sharia played in what they were doing, actually contributed materially to confusion that persists to this day.

A lack of both clarity, but also, well, constructive steps to prevent those who perpetrated it from taking down our country, which I fear, actually, in these 25 years is an operation that has continued apace and is now perilously close to reaching, at least in parts of our country, critical mass.

Rod D. Martin: It was a lack of clarity that made a lot of sense, I’m sure, to the people who made those decisions at the time. And to be fair to them — and we should be before we rip that all apart — I know that the Bush administration looked at this, wasn’t quite sure what they were dealing with at first — because no one could have been — and knew that they were going to need Arab allies on board.

They also knew that they had this incredible propaganda defeat that had potential to rally revolutionaries across the region that would destabilize governments we needed.

Frank Gaffney: Hold the thought, Rod. We have to take a break. We’ll be right back with more on the other side. Stay tuned.

Naming the Enemy and Assessing the Response

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and we are visiting with the great Rod Martin, the publisher of The Rod Martin Report and a new book.

Rod D. Martin: Trump’s New World Re-Order.

Frank Gaffney: There it is. Trump’s New World Re-Order. You can order it now, I believe, preorder it, and I hope you will do so. This promises to be, as usual, a very, very engaging, possibly quite contrarian assessment of where we are and where we will be going from here by Rod Martin.

Rod, I had to interrupt you. I apologize for the necessities of taking the breaks. You were talking about, rather sympathetically, the Bush team contending, among other things, with this immense propaganda defeat for us and the need to enlist the help of Arab allies in the fight against these jihadis. Finish your thought, if you would.

Rod D. Martin: Well, it was a huge propaganda defeat, and that was ultimately the aim. It absolutely had an enormous consequence for us economically, and certainly traumatized the nation for at least a while. No question about all that. But they were playing for the television.

There’s a reason no airplanes flew into the mall down the street. They wanted highly important, well-known landmarks in the United States to go down in flames: symbols of American power, financial, governmental, military. And they largely succeeded in that. Again, the Pentagon attack didn’t do anywhere near as much damage as they imagined it might, at least from a television perspective. And the fourth plane didn’t hit either the White House or the Capitol dome. So they didn’t get everything they wanted. But they got a lot.

And the Bush administration looked at that and said, we don’t know exactly what we’re facing here. We also don’t want to antagonize allies in the region, all of whom we know we can’t trust, but many of whom we need. And we certainly don’t want to add to the propaganda defeat we just suffered in a way that causes an uprising in those countries, and suddenly you’ve got bin Laden running Saudi Arabia. I guess that would have been “bin Laden Arabia” if the House of Saud were gone.

So that’s their take, and I don’t want to overly second-guess anything that they did or thought in that first 90 days, when things were still kind of unclear. But it was, in retrospect — and I contended at the time, and I know you did too — it was a mistake. Because there’s no such thing as a war on terror. What does that even mean? Is that like, there’s a hurricane, so we declare a war on wind? That’s just nonsense.

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Terror was not the enemy. There were very specific enemies who had actually attacked us, who actually killed roughly the same number of people on 9/11 as died at Pearl Harbor. This is a monstrous attack. It was obviously something that was going to have consequences for a long time after, and it did, and it has. And we needed to actually identify the enemy.

If you don’t actually identify the enemy, eventually the political coalition is just going to fray, and you’re not going to be able to sustain what you need to do. Now, we can argue about whether the way they handled Afghanistan and Iraq was the right thing to do, and whether they conducted it well. And I would certainly say that in Iraq, you had a brilliant military operation that the State Department proceeded to throw away mere weeks after the invasion. And we’ve lived with that debacle for years after.

But the point is, all of this would have been easier if you’d actually called the enemy the enemy. And their failure to do that still lives with us.

Frank Gaffney: I couldn’t agree more, Rod. And what compounded it was that we were sort of deflecting attention to not just terrorism, but to terrorists, or even more opaque, violent extremists. And the message was unmistakable and was exploited powerfully by the Brotherhood and its operatives: that this didn’t have anything to do with Islam.

And I honestly believe that, sort of from that time to this, we have been more or less clueless as a people about the true nature of the contribution made by Sharia to this entire extraordinary attack and what has, again, flowed from it.

So that brings me to this question, Rod. On 9/11, are we learning, even now, the right lessons? Are we even now addressing, as I think we have to, countries like Qatar and Pakistan and Turkey and arguably Saudi Arabia as part of the problem that we are confronting? Obviously, Iran is. But are we still, in the interest, as you suggested, of having those Arab allies, or Turkish aren’t Arabs, but those Muslim Arab allies, going to continue to sort of avert our gaze from the truth?

Rod D. Martin: Well, first of all, we have to be fair. Turkey did not sponsor 9/11. So as many criticisms as you and I have of Erdogan’s regime, we have to keep in mind that all of these things aren’t identical.

So looking at what Bush achieved, just briefly, because fair’s fair: We haven’t had another 9/11. And it’s not because they haven’t tried. Our government has actually gotten quite good at stopping terrorist incidents on this continent. And we should be very thankful, not just for the men and women in uniform, but for their leaders who have achieved that over the last 25 years. So no more 9/11s. That’s great. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t have one today, but so far, so good. A quarter century is a good while.

Second, I wouldn’t want to live in Iraq, but Iraq actually is a functioning democracy now. And that’s way better than when it was a dictatorship that gassed its own people and started wars with its neighbors. The Iran-Iraq War alone, I believe, killed about 2 million people, for no good reason whatsoever.

And we don’t have that problem in Iraq anymore. We don’t have them trying to build nuclear weapons or chemical weapons. And anybody who says there weren’t any such weapons in Iraq is either ignorant or lying, because it is a fact that we found over 500 chemical weapons in Iraq. This was introduced into the congressional record. This was in The New York Times. This is not hidden.

The problem is, it was hidden to a degree because when it ran in The New York Times, it ran on page like Z23 or something. They didn’t want you to be aware of it, but the facts were the facts and technically, they did report them. Those weapons were there.

Were they new weapons? Well, the Bush administration got some of that wrong, but there’s no question what Saddam’s intent was.

The bigger point was, those were exactly the chemical weapons Saddam was required to destroy after the first Gulf War. And instead he hid them. The decision to go to war was made as a matter of enforcement of the 1991 armistice, and that’s exactly what it achieved.

So these are the good things. Obviously, Afghanistan ended up a debacle, but that’s on Joe Biden.

So, yeah, you can critique every detail along the way, pretty much starting with the decision to invade Iraq, or better, with the decision to make Paul Bremer the viceroy of Iraq, which turned out to be a disaster.

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Nevertheless, what we have in the aftermath is a continuation of the propaganda loss here. And it comes directly from what you’ve identified in the administration failing to identify the true nature of the enemy. That’s how we have Zohran Mamdani. That’s how we have...

Frank Gaffney: Okay, hold that thought. That’s where we’re coming back to: Zohran Mamdani and where we are today, with Rod Martin, right after this. Stay tuned.

Political Islam, Marxism, and the Domestic Threat

Frank Gaffney: We’re back. And so is Rod Martin. We are visiting with him about the events that took place 25 years ago today, as this program airs. We are, of course, remembering what went down. And I think, Rod, you’ve made a number of important points, as usual, that help put into perspective some of the decisions, some of the choices, some of the actions that were taken.

But I think we fundamentally agree that in the interest of not alienating Muslim putative allies, we pulled punches. And that had both strategic implications as well as sort of tactical ones in a number of places. But you were just at the end of the last block going to where I think we need to go next, which is: So where are we now? And what do we do about the fact that in these 25 years, I don’t know how else to describe it, but the problem has metastasized enormously?

I’ve seen data that suggests that we had 500,000 Muslims in the entire United States in 2001. It’s up to about 5 million today. And it appears that most of those, not all, but most of those, are following the sort of Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia supremacist line, at least are attending their mosques. And you don’t see much evidence of pushback. I’m sure that some Muslims are not aligned with all this, but you just don’t see them, as I’m fond of saying, putting their head above the parapet because they would be deemed apostates. And that could result in them losing their head.

So Zohran Mamdani, as a Marxist jihadist elected in the city that was particularly hard hit by 9/11, is a stunning indication of something seriously wrong, is it not?

Rod D. Martin: Well, it absolutely is. We didn’t identify the enemy. And we have to understand that not all Muslims want to blow people up. But on the other hand, a higher percentage of Muslims want to blow people up than Baptist Sunday School ladies. So it’s not an insignificant thing. It’s something you’ve got to pay attention to.

And, of course, the Marxism is typical. We saw that all through the Middle East during the Cold War and even after. But it is also a mechanism of control of the population, and the Islamists are able to make that alliance with the increasingly socialist, if not communist, Democrats because they’re all of one mind on that. And then they figure once they win, they will do what they’ve done in every other country in which they’ve won: they will start killing each other, and the most ruthless group will come out on top.

Usually that’s the communists. Sometimes, as in Iran, it’s the Islamists. Either way, it ain’t good for you and me.

Frank Gaffney: That’s for sure. Or anybody else, really, at the end of the day.

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Rod, I do want to come back to something you touched on there a moment ago, because it’s not a minor point. The reason that we focus on Sharia in our BanSharia.com project, notably of the Institute for the American Future, of which you are, of course, our chairman, is because I think it is much more clear that what that is about, yes, there’s a veneer, if you will, of pietistic practice, but the vast preponderance of it is about power.

Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely.

Frank Gaffney: How do you get it? How do you use it to stay in power? What the object of the exercise ultimately is, is to, as you say, have it spread worldwide. And this idea that, well, there’s this political Islam and then there’s this religious Islam, I don’t personally buy. I think that to the extent that it is really defined by Sharia, it’s not a religion. But Sharia is a political, military, legal strategy for war.

And whatever one thinks of Islam, whatever you want to call Islam, that’s what we’re up against. Because the people that are the majority of that community in the United States, I think, as well as elsewhere, are dead set on emulating the perfect man and practicing Sharia in the most, well, demonic way imaginable.

And that’s something that I think this Islam versus Islam, and I made a movie with some colleagues of that name, ironically. So I’ve come a long way, baby. But I really believe this is a place where we have to, as you say, have clarity and have the facts properly marshaled.

Rod D. Martin: Well, I think it’s no different than what we see on the left. You’ve got the actual party members, and you’ve got the fellow travelers, and then you’ve got this vast horde of what Lenin called useful fools. They buy into superficial aspects of socialism/communism. They don’t actually adopt the idea that we should have gulags and kill everybody, like Stalin.

And they’ll go along later because it’ll be sold to them. And did we mention they’re idiots? So they get swept up in it. But by the time they get swept up in it, they don’t really have a choice anymore.

I think that general outline is true of virtually every movement involving humans.

You have a lot of people who are really true believers, and then you have a lot of people who are true believers who don’t let on who they really are. And then you have this vast majority that they’re all just lying to, telling them what they want to hear until they no longer have to. And that’s as true of Islam as it is of the Democratic Party.

The rank-and-file Democrat probably does not believe in communism. But on the other hand, if somebody riles up a crowd, as the leader of the DSA did the other week at the DSA National Convention, and says, “Our goal is communism!”, well, the room cheers. They know not what they do, in much in the same way that I saw a lot of conservatives who really didn’t know anything about Mises or Hayek suddenly became “libertarians” a few years ago because it sounded like a harder-core version of conservatism, without actually understanding that idea or ideology.

Those people are easy to manipulate. The Muslims manipulate them, the Marxists manipulate them. They tell them what they want to hear, they use them to gain the power they want, and then they toss them away. Or just kill them.

That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s what Bush was trying to parse. I think he was really thoughtful on these points. I think he just got the balance wrong.

Frank Gaffney: Well, it’s a topic for a longer conversation on another occasion. It’s important that we make clear what went wrong, but also what we better be doing about it in the present and future. And we’ll talk more about that in future with Rod Martin, among many other things.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 11, 2026

Last month, wheat and cement began arriving at a berth in Tartus that had served Russia’s military for decades. In sight of the pier, Russian personnel were packing up equipment to move out of their building.

Ahmed al-Sharaa is finishing what he started. Syria has been a stalwart Soviet and later Russian client since the mid-1950s. In more recent years, the country cozied up to Iran as well, joining the mullahs’ “Ring of Fire.” The sudden December 2024 defeat of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad and Sharaa’s victory in the Syrian Civil War ended all that, and broke Russian and Iranian power over Syria. Even worse for Putin, Sharaa announced Russia’s eviction from its most important overseas bases.

Russia wasn’t wrong (other than morally) to bet on Assad: they’d been betting on both him and his father since the elder Assad helped lead the 1963 coup and then seized power for himself in 1970. The Baathists (same party as Saddam Hussein’s) were gleeful participants in the spread of Soviet power and terror proxies, to a degree that even their pro-Soviet predecessors had not been.

But Russia’s power isn’t what it used to be, and wasn’t enough to prevent Assad’s collapse and subsequent flight into exile in Moscow. Seventy years of Russian investment have come to this: bargaining with the men Moscow bombed for permission to keep a foothold in a country it once dominated.

The August 9 agreement finalizes the return of facilities at Hmeimim Airport and the port of Tartus. The military installations are to become joint training centers, with a three-month transition. To allow Putin to save face, a small number of Russian personnel will be allowed to remain. But gone forever are the forward bases from which first the Communists and then Putin supported operations across the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Sahel.

The Kremlin described the August agreement as an improvement in bilateral cooperation. Which was a bit like Iran claiming it had sunk the USS Abraham Lincoln three times.

A Very Long Way From Home

Russia is by far the largest country on Earth, and by some measures one of its most powerful. It certainly was during the Cold War.

But good luck getting a Russian warship into the Mediterranean. From the Black Sea, it must pass through the Bosporus and Dardanelles, both controlled by NATO ally Turkey. From the Baltic, it must sail past Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and Denmark — NATO countries all — just to enter a North Sea also surrounded by NATO allies.

Murmansk is better, but it’s north of the Arctic Circle. Getting from there to Syria means sailing around Norway, past Britain and Iceland (or Greenland), through the British and U.S. controlled Strait of Gibraltar, and then past more NATO allies all the way across the Mediterranean. Few Russian ships have the range for that trip without a port call. Then once there, the Russians have to keep it supplied somehow, thousands of miles from home. Putin can’t intimidate anyone off the Syrian coast with a warship that has to go back to the Arctic for repairs.

Tartus (and Latakia before it) spared the Russians that trip, and in the process, greatly extended their reach. Syria provided naval and air bases sufficient to refuel and replenish their ships, make repairs, and threaten the Suez Canal and NATO’s southern flank. Without it, Russia’s ability to project power beyond its own “near abroad” dries up.

In Pat Frank’s legendary Alas, Babylon, published in 1959, the incident that sets off the nuclear war takes place off a Soviet submarine base at Latakia. The Russians have depended on these forward bases for a very, very long time.

Putin added Hmeimim when he intervened in the civil war in 2015, giving Russia a new forward air base to complement and protect his naval foothold. In 2017, he renewed Russia’s agreement for Tartus with a 49-year lease. Moscow expected to stay forever, long after all its other Soviet-era bases, from Lourdes, Cuba to Cam Ranh Bay, had been lost. And it built its strategy accordingly.

The African Empire Syria Enabled

Few in the United States have paid as close attention to the African situation as have the French.

For decades, France stealthily maintained its African empire by other means, through economic rights, a Paris-dominated common currency (the CFA Franc), basing privileges, a legal right to militarily intervene, and countless other ways. France didn’t leave Africa. It pretended to leave Africa. Colonies became de facto protectorates, but nothing real changed.

By the mid-2020s, though, the Russians were rolling up the old French Empire in West and Central Africa, mostly through coups spearheaded and then reinforced by its officially private Wagner Group. Syria made that possible.

Most Americans know Wagner as the mercenary army that fought in Ukraine and then briefly turned on Putin in 2023. But its African business was an important part of the operation, and it survived the mutiny. Russia’s Defense Ministry has since taken over much of that business through its Africa Corps.

The Wagner Group offered rulers a fairly straightforward deal: we’ll help keep you in power, and you’ll make it worth our while. Gold, uranium, lithium, diamonds, oil, and many other minerals supplied much of the payment. The Russians made money, expanded influence, and pushed out the French, all on the cheap compared to Ukraine.

But even mercenaries need ammunition. And replacements. And spare parts. And a way to get home. Hmeimim gave Russia a base from which to move men and cargo into Africa, with Libya serving as a further stop on the way south. Tartus supported the naval side. Assad’s dependence on Moscow allowed the Russians to operate this far-off system without much concern for what the Syrians thought of it.

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This arrangement also let Moscow attack European interests without attacking Europe directly, a pretty useful tactic while those same Europeans opposed them in Ukraine. Paris lost access and influence in countries it had dominated for generations. The people who like to describe Russia as a victim of Western imperialism might want to have a look at what their favorite victim was doing in Africa (ditto for China).

You may have wondered why the Russians got involved in the Syrian civil war in the first place. That’s an awful lot of why. It’s also why all that Russian blood and treasure is so ruefully lost now.

Without Syria, the Russians are scrambling to salvage what they can. They’ve expanded facilities at Libyan air bases, and flight tracking through July shows that they’ve been able to continue supplying their African deployments…barely.

But Libya doesn’t give Putin another Assad. No facility in Libya can replace Tartus, nor can Russia’s strained budget easily build a new one, especially in a country at least as unstable as Syria became. A Libyan airfield can help airlift cargo into the Sahel. It can’t repair a warship, much less support a fleet (if Russia still had one worthy of the name).

Moscow spent decades building the Syrian position because it needed the whole enchilada, including a government whose survival depended on Moscow. That’s gone. Putin will have to pay for losing Syria long after the last handover. Up to a point, he can pay with money, with concessions, and by accepting a smaller role in places where he once expected to dominate. But this is no new beginning: it’s the death rattle.

The Long Goodbye

Sharaa could overthrow Assad faster than he could get rid of Moscow. The Russians built much of the military he inherited. Their troops pulled back to the coast, but they still had equipment to remove and facilities from which to decamp. Sharaa also needed to keep a shattered country functioning while he found other sources of support.

Perhaps above all else, Syria needs money for reconstruction, and Sharaa needs his independence. Erdoğan doesn’t just want to replace Russian domination: he wants to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, of which Syria was always a key province. Multiple patrons seem to be Sharaa’s answer. This puts him in bed with the Saudis, perhaps the Israelis, but certainly the United States. For the former terrorist’s own private reasons, he is rapidly locking himself in as a Western ally, or at least in opposition to the status quo ante bellum.

Trump gave him the room he needed. By lifting U.S. sanctions, the President opened the way for Syria to attract investment from America and the Gulf, and to trade its way out of its wreckage. Already, U.S. companies are flowing in, even to the extent that Chevron is reconstructing the damaged oil pipeline from Iraq to Baniyas on the Syrian coast.

The Saudis pitched in: despite their “friends close, enemies closer” defense pact with Ankara, they have no desire to see Turkish power restored. And as he always does, Trump conditioned much of what’s to come on Syria joining the Abraham Accords, a prospect no doubt distasteful to a new strongman with origins in the Golan Heights, but likely necessary if he wants to end the Israeli security zone in his south.

All of this adds up to a new order.

Meanwhile, every ruler buying Russian protection can see what happened to Assad. Moscow had a longer relationship with Damascus, and a greater stake in keeping it, than it has with any of its new African “friends.” Those men hired Russian troops to guarantee their power vis-a-vis Paris. A dacha beside Assad’s near Moscow would be a poor substitute.

When Putin rescued Assad with direct Russian intervention in 2015, he meant to cement Russia’s return as a great power. Instead, Russia spent nine years defending a regime that collapsed anyway, and lost the bases it went to war to preserve.

For all his talk of restoring Russian greatness, Putin has managed to lose what even poor Boris Yeltsin was able to keep.

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NOTE: Jacob Shapiro is neither a populist nor a MAGA guy. But he is brilliant, and this is one of the best treatments of the situation in Germany I’ve seen in English. — RDM

by Jacob Shapiro
September 10, 2026

Over the weekend, a German political party called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a major victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote, improving on its 2021 result by 23 percentage points. Three other parties, all various shades of far left, took 22.3 percent between them. Germany’s governing and center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, saw its share decline from 37.1 percent in 2021 to 17.2 percent. Voter turnout was a record 77.8 percent.

AfD’s platform and ideology have dominated coverage, but don’t miss the forest for the trees. This election was not a vote for anything. It was a protest vote against an incumbent presiding over a status quo unacceptable to a large and growing swath of the electorate. Over-indexing on the notion that a far-right populist party doing well in a state election means it’s 1933 again misses the political earthquake that has already happened in Germany. AfD’s victory is important — just not for the reasons Western media and mainstream German parties are focused on.

The Professors’ Party

AfD was founded in 2013 by German economics professors and conservative journalists. Its nickname: “The Professors’ party.” The dominant issue in Europe then was the sovereign debt crisis. The so-called “PIGS” — Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain — needed bailouts; Germany insisted on austerity.

AfD arose from this debate as a single-issue party pursuing the dissolution of the euro. Most of its 2013 manifesto concerns a return to national currencies within the European common market; a small section—three bullet points—noted support for tighter immigration policies.

The AfD’s founders were reacting to European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s 2012 pledge to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. These were intellectual, relatively moderate Germans who thought the euro was not worth saving from Germany’s national perspective.

Storm Clouds

Germany’s geopolitical problems were only just becoming visible in 2013. The debt crisis had made Germany Europe’s de facto leader, but even as it forced austerity down the bloc’s throat, storm clouds were gathering.

At the end of 2012, a little-known compromise candidate was anointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party: Xi Jinping. In 2013, Germany still expected to sell cars to China’s burgeoning middle class for the foreseeable future. Now Chinese EVs are putting German car companies under tremendous pressure.

The end of 2013 saw the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, which by 2014 had led Russia to seizing Crimea and the beginning of the Donbas war. Even so, Germany expected to keep importing cheap Russian energy (Nord Streams 1 and 2 had just been completed in 2011 and 2012). Fast-forward to 2026: The Nord Stream pipelines are gone, and Germany is attempting to sever energy dependence on Russia.

In 2013, President Barack Obama urged European countries to spend more of their GDP on defense, but Germany expected the U.S. would still guarantee its security indefinitely. It took another decade, and President Trump’s threats, to get Germany to start surging defense spending in earnest.

The 2015 European migration crisis, which brought over 1 million people fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa, still lay ahead. When they arrived, German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted Germany — and every other European country — would do its part, with a rallying cry of Wir schaffen das: “We can do it.” That this would become the source of her downfall seemed to occur to her not at all.

More Than Its Extremes

AfD is no longer the Professors’ party. It is now a broad tent for populist grievances born of Germany’s geopolitical challenges and a decade of policy that failed to answer them. Some of the voices within the AfD are unsavory. This is the country that brought the world National Socialism, aka Nazis, in the first place. They haven’t gone extinct. Voices within the AfD calling for “new, patriotic, cultural policy,” or halting sanctions on Russia, have found a home within the AfD.

But as an Israeli cab driver once said to me, “In every house there is a trash can.” AfD is much more than its most extreme elements.

After 2015, immigration became the AfD’s raison d’être. In its 2025 manifesto, AfD calls for “remigration,” a combination of expelling illegal migrants with a significant tightening of German immigration laws and enough ambiguity to deport anyone deemed a “security threat.” Clearly, some see that as extreme, though AfD is hardly the only Western party with a similar position.

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But the rest of AfD’s platform is less extreme than one might think. The party is still broadly Euroskeptic and advocates a return to the Deutschemark, though without abrupt rupture, and still wants to retain a European common market, external border control, and defense.

But according to the latest Eurobarometer survey, 69 percent of Germans support membership within the EU. The more responsibility AfD garners, the more it will be forced to do what Euroskeptic parties in Italy, France, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe have done: accept that their electoral success is not a vote against the EU.

The Divide

It is instead a vote against German policy failures. The biggest is reunification. AfD draws most of its support from East Germany, where it now polls as the strongest party in every eastern state. East Germany’s GDP per capita, productivity, support for the EU (closer to 50 percent), and faith in democracy all lag West Germany. These are the hollowed-out industrial cores that lost most when cheap Russian energy evaporated and China turned from promising market into existential competitor.

The divide goes back centuries, far beyond the Cold War’s East/West line. The point is that the structural problems AfD speaks to are real, have nothing to do with Nazis, and have been made worse by a political class that meets them with neglect and derision.

Case in point: After a fiery speech from AfD’s admittedly controversial leader, Alice Weidel, Chancellor Friedrich Merz addressed the Bundestag and tried to downplay the party’s success in Saxony-Anhalt. Insisting that Germany must embrace “the opportunities offered by new technology to modernize industry,” an AfD member jeered, “How is that supposed to work without energy?” Merz replied not with an actual answer, but with derision, for the very good reason that he has no answer to give.

Ghosts

It would be flippant to dismiss the historical overtones. The National Socialist Party never won a majority; it entered power via coalition, then manufactured the emergency it used to end democracy.

But that was a different time, a different context, and a different party. If Germany is to lead Europe and rebuild its defense capacity — as Washington has demanded since well before Trump — it must face these ghosts and transcend them. Ignoring the voters those parties speak for is the surest way to make things worse.

A generation is coming of age that did not live through World War II, has no memory of the Berlin Wall, and sees only feckless, ineffective government. Rather than vote for the status quo, at least in Saxony-Anhalt, they voted for change. Right-wing, left-wing, it does not matter. Whatever party can deliver change, or at least the feeling of it, will win elections.

Do Not Underestimate Germany

In 1999, The Economist put Germany on its cover as “the sick man of Europe.” By 2013, the year AfD was born, Germany was the beating heart of the European economy, thanks to tough reforms commentators had thought impossible.

In democracies, things must get worse before they can get better because that is what creates the necessary electoral conditions to usher in politicians willing to change. And few countries have shown the ability to change as successfully and rapidly as Germany.

From a macro perspective, Germany has faced headwinds in recent years, and those will continue. But look at the performance of German companies like Siemens, Rheinmetall, and even SAP. Germany can no longer outsource its security, energy, and market access needs. The world is changing, and Germany must change with it.

History suggests when Germany changes, the world changes. An AfD victory in a state election in an Eastern German state is not the beginning of the Fourth Reich — but it may well be the return of Germany to history.

— This article is published in cooperation with Mauldin Economics.

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NOTE: I am happy to note that General Yoav Gallant, former Israeli Defense Minister, joins us to provide this analysis. It is but several pieces of Trump’s broader global strategy, but it is life-and-death for Israel. And it portends a more peaceful world. — RDM

by General Yoav Gallant
September 10, 2026

Last week, in Tel Aviv, Israel and Greece signed the largest defense export agreement in the history of the relationship between our two countries, and one of the largest Israel has ever signed.

Achilles Shield will give Greece an integrated national air defense network built on David’s Sling, SPYDER, and Barak MX, with radars and a national command-and-control system tying them together. Roughly €700 million of the value will go to Greek subcontractors.

As Minister of Defense, I had the privilege of carrying forward what my predecessors began with Greece. At Kalamata, Israeli industry trains the pilots of the Hellenic Air Force under a government-to-government program running twenty-two years, and during my tenure the first advanced trainers arrived, and the center reached full operation. We signed a defense cooperation program alongside it, covering joint exercises and joint training.

With this new deal, Greece chooses to build its national air defense on Israeli systems, with Greek industry inside the production chain, over a period that will outlast several governments in both countries. The substance of this deal is trust, and this kind of trust is a strategic fact rather than a commercial one.

Three Circles of Hostility, and a Fourth of Friendship

Israeli defense thinking has long been organized around three circles. The first is the internal circle: Judea and Samaria and Gaza. The second is the states on our borders, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, and it is worth saying that with the last two we have peace agreements that are important and that have proven stable. The third is hostile states with no shared border, historically Iraq and Libya, and in recent years, when we speak of the third circle, we are mainly speaking of Iran.

Each circle carried its own doctrine, its own force structure and its own assumptions. All three describe enemies. What the framework never included was a circle of partners.

In a war of alliances waged against adversaries who move flexibly between them, Israel should be building a fourth circle around itself: the friendly states nearest to us, with which real alliances can be built because our interests are close and in some cases genuinely shared.

There are five who currently fit the criteria: India, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Greece, and Cyprus, with the last two acting politically as a single entity.

The fourth circle works like a star rather than a bloc. Israel is the common point, and the circle holds because each relationship holds, not because the members are aligned with one another.

What each of them shares with us is a threat assessment. All of these states, and Israel with them, see serious danger in radical Islamism, the political doctrine that uses the religion of Islam as its instrument. India contends with radical Islamist terrorism originating in Pakistan, and we remember the Mumbai attacks among the clearest examples of it.

The Emirates chose a deliberate course against religious extremism, and by any measure that choice has succeeded. Azerbaijan is a Shiite state threatened by Iran, a far larger Shiite state, in part because it has prospered while maintaining a pluralistic and tolerant approach to religion, which Tehran finds harder to forgive than hostility. Greece and Cyprus have lived under Turkish pressure for decades.

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The second thing they share is that all of them regard the United States as their strategic anchor, not Beijing and not Moscow. At a moment when many states are hedging between the great powers, that alignment matters, and it means the fourth circle strengthens the American position in these regions rather than competing with it.

The third is that with each we already have a real and mutual foundation: energy, intelligence, technology, industry, and tourism. Defense systems move between us as well, and it is worth being precise about what that signifies. Countries do not build their national defense on another state’s systems as a commercial preference. They do it when they trust that state and intend to remain close to it.

Looking at the map, what we are describing is a circle of friendship drawn around the circle of hostility, which places us on both sides of our adversaries rather than only in front of them.

Azerbaijan sits on the far side of Iran, India extends beyond, and Greece and Cyprus sit opposite Türkiye in the eastern Mediterranean, while the Emirates serve as our central anchor in the Gulf. These states are neither military bases nor proxies.

However, by aligning with partners who neighbor our adversaries and directly endure their hostility, our strategic position is fundamentally transformed, expanding what we can observe, deepening operational coordination, and forcing our adversaries to recalculate their own backyard.

An Opportunity for Peace

Azerbaijan’s identity as a Turkic nation ties it more closely to Türkiye than to us. However, its strong commitment to both relationships creates a valuable strategic opportunity for Baku to act as a mediator between our two countries. Rather than a complication to be managed, it can be an opportunity to be used.

Baku is one of the few capitals trusted in Jerusalem and in Ankara alike, and a state in that position can carry messages, lower the temperature, and open channels that neither side can open directly. Israel and Türkiye have real differences and they are not going to disappear soon. But tension is easier to restrain when someone both sides trust is willing to stand between them, and we should be encouraging that rather than treating Baku’s other friendships as a problem.

The same applies more widely. Several of these states maintain relations with countries hostile to us. They are capable of separating one relationship from another, and so are we. That is also why the fourth circle cannot be built by a single agreement or a summit. It is a set of relationships, each requiring its own attention, its own reciprocity and its own patience.

The region is moving quickly, and Syria shows how quickly. Two years ago it was a country without an army, without an economy, and without a future. Today its government is rebuilding its military capability with determination, and Türkiye is training and equipping the new Syrian army. Hezbollah is engaged in the same effort in Lebanon, and Iran has not given up its nuclear ambition, and it still holds the enriched material on which it intends to build, even after the last round of fighting. Rebuilding is what defeated adversaries do, and it happens faster than most people expect.

The United States is weighing all of this against its own wider considerations, in this region and beyond. Our task is to make ourselves useful within that, and the fourth circle is one of the clearest ways to do it, because every one of these states looks to Washington as we do.

We can treat the region’s reorganization as a loss of position, or we can build the arrangement that reflects what Israel actually offers and who actually wants it. Achilles Shield should be the model rather than the exception.

— General Yoav Gallant is the former Minister of Defense of the State of Israel. You may follow him on his Substack, “The Defense Memo”.

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Don’t miss the original “Trump’s Top 25 Achievements” list. And share widely!

by Rod D. Martin
September 9, 2026

My original list of Trump’s Top 25 achievements was supposed to be a cheat sheet. Instead, it drew a million views on X, thousands of new followers, and coverage from Dan Bongino’s show to Roger Stone’s.

Why? Because millions know something extraordinary is happening, but almost no one gives them the receipts. The Enemedia buries every victory. Republicans announce today’s win and forget yesterday’s. Voters sense that Trump is transforming the country but can’t explain how.

So here is the sequel. These are achievements, not promises.

You don’t have to memorize all 25. Learn five. And when somebody says Trump “hasn’t done much,” show them how wrong they are.

Trump Restored Speech, Sovereignty, and Safety

1. He dismantled the federal censorship machine at home—and confronted government censorship abroad.

On his first day back in office, Trump prohibited federal employees and agencies from coercing or paying private companies to censor constitutionally protected speech. He ordered an investigation of the Biden Administration’s abuses, gutted CISA’s censorship apparatus, and made free speech a foreign-policy priority. He also imposed visa restrictions on foreign officials and NGO operatives who pressured American platforms to silence Americans.

2. He ended state-run “public” broadcasting.

Not only was government unconstitutionally censoring Americans’ free speech: it was subsidizing Democrats’ talking points. Republicans have talked for decades, but Trump delivered, cutting off funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now PBS and NPR must compete for audiences and donors like everyone else.

3. He ended catch-and-release.

Sealing the border was No. 1 in my first list. But what happened after illegal aliens were caught deserves its own place. Under Biden, arrest often meant a bus ticket, a court date years away, and easy disappearance into the country. Under Trump, it means detention and removal. The Border Patrol has now recorded 15 consecutive months without releasing a single apprehended illegal alien into America.

4. He helped drive fentanyl trafficking—and fentanyl deaths—sharply downward.

Under President Trump, fentanyl trafficking at the southern border fell 56 percent compared with the same period in 2024. CDC figures showed synthetic-opioid deaths falling from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025 — a 22 percent plunge.

5. He designated the cartels as terrorists—and took the counter-narcotics war to sea.

Trump designated eight cartels and transnational criminal organizations as terrorist groups, thus unlocking powerful sanctions, intelligence, and enforcement tools. He stopped treating them like ordinary criminals and started treating them as the government-sponsored paramilitary forces they actually are. The Coast Guard also set an all-time record, seizing nearly 510,000 pounds of cocaine across the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean in fiscal 2025, and blowing up even more.

6. He crushed Washington, D.C.’s violent-crime wave.

Trump refused to let America’s capital remain a cesspool of murders, rapes, carjackings, and municipal incompetence. He flooded Washington with federal law-enforcement resources and forced cooperation among police, prosecutors, and federal agencies. One year later, homicides are down 45 percent, carjackings 64 percent, and authorities have seized nearly 2,000 illegal guns.

Urban violence disproportionately victimizes the poor. Restoring order is not oppression: it’s liberation.

7. He restored Second Amendment rights.

Trump ordered the entire executive branch to identify and reverse policies that infringed the right to keep and bear arms. DOJ created a Second Amendment Enforcement Task Force. ATF repealed Biden’s punitive “Zero Tolerance” policy for gun dealers and other unreasonable restrictions on selling firearms.

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Then Trump’s DOJ filed the first affirmative civil-rights lawsuit in Department history, forcing Los Angeles County to end nine-month delays for concealed-carry permits. It also restored the congressionally authorized process through which deserving Americans may regain federal firearms rights — and zeroed out the $200 federal tax on suppressors.

Trump Encouraged Work, Savings, and Ownership

8. He ended federal income tax on tips and overtime pay.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill allows eligible workers to deduct up to $25,000 in qualified tips through 2028. It also created a deduction for the overtime premium — up to $12,500 for an individual or $25,000 for a married couple. It’s hard to think of a more pro-working-class reform than that.

9. He eliminated the tax on Social Security for nearly all seniors.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill, seniors may deduct an additional $6,000 apiece or $12,000 for a qualifying married couple. For most seniors, that eliminates federal income tax on retirement income, including Social Security.

The fact that Democrats taxed Social Security in the first place is obscene. Trump reversed it.

10. He made Opportunity Zones permanent.

Trump’s Opportunity Zones steer private capital toward distressed communities by rewarding long-term investment. The One Big Beautiful Bill made them permanent and established recurring qualifying rounds, giving investors and local leaders the certainty to build for decades.

The Left’s answer to poverty is always another federal program. Trump’s is capital, ownership, businesses, homes, and jobs.

11. He protected farms and family businesses from the death tax.

The death tax can force a grieving family to sell family farms, homes, and businesses just to pay Washington. But Trump made it easier to pass a lifetime’s work and dreams on to the next generation. He increased the federal estate-and-gift-tax exclusion to $15 million per person in 2026, with inflation adjustments and no scheduled expiration — potentially $30 million for a married couple.

Trump Put Families and Good Health First

12. He expanded Health Savings Accounts — and created a $50 billion rural-health fund.

Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, millions more Americans can use Health Savings Accounts. The result? More personal control and fewer gatekeepers between doctor and patient.

Trump also created a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, reversing years of rural hospital closures under Biden.

13. He used TrumpRx and most-favored-nation agreements to force down drug prices.

For decades, Americans paid the world’s highest drug prices while socialist governments imposed price controls and freeloaded on American innovation. Trump turned that arrangement on its head, securing most-favored-nation agreements with 26 drugmakers covering 89 percent of the branded-drug market. It’s not a price control: it’s the end of a free ride. Foreign governments must now pay more for American drugs so Americans can pay less.

Moreover, the President’s new TrumpRx program gives patients direct access to steep discounts. Patients have already saved more than $700 million, while the latest nine deals added $19.6 billion in American manufacturing commitments.

14. He turned MAHA from a slogan into reality.

Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and MAHA forced a reckoning. HHS and FDA began moving manufacturers away from petroleum-based dyes, approved natural alternatives, changed labeling rules, and created a public tracker of corporate promises.

For the first time in generations, Washington is asking why American children are fat and sick — and fixing the problem instead of prescribing another drug.

15. He prioritized adoption and family formation.

Trump made the adoption tax credit partly refundable, allowing eligible families to receive up to $5,000 per adopted child even when they owe less tax. He also raised tax-free dependent-care assistance from $5,000 to $7,500 in 2026. Trump is forcing government to stop making it harder to adopt, care for dependents, or build families.

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16. He stood up for victims of revenge porn and sexual deepfakes.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalized specified nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated sexual deepfakes. Covered platforms must now provide a reporting process and must remove all qualifying images within 48 hours. Perps go to prison.

17. He stopped federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research in sketchy foreign labs.

Wuhan should have ended this debate. Instead, the Fauci-led bureaucracy doubled down on reckless experimentation and dangerous gain-of-function research, not just in the United States but in sketchy foreign labs, even in China. Trump put a stop to it, terminating projects in countries of concern and suspending other high-risk programs.

Trump Built America’s Economic Future

18. He turned valuable access to the world’s largest consumer market into leverage and revenue.

Washington treated access to the richest consumer market on Earth into a global entitlement, while allowing them to maintain huge trade barriers against U.S. producers. Trump turned that on its head. By January 2026, the Administration reported $300 billion in gross tariff collections.

The President used those tariffs to negotiate new trade deals with countries representing two-thirds of the global economy. In the process, he opened their markets, increased their purchases of U.S. energy, farm produce, and goods, supported industries vital to national security, and made companies begin building factories here.

19. He began breaking China’s rare-earth chokehold.

China dominates the minerals and magnets inside everything from smartphones to submarines. It controls 92 percent of global rare-earths refining. That’s not free trade: It’s a strategic hostage situation.

Trump’s Pentagon partnered with MP Materials to expand American rare-earth separation and magnet production, backed by long-term purchases and a domestic price floor. He also made deals with allied nations to bring their own production and refining online.

20. He created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve — and made America the center of digital finance.

Trump created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve by ordering the government to keep, rather than auction off, Bitcoin forfeited in criminal and civil cases. He also championed and signed the GENIUS Act, America’s first national framework for dollar-backed stablecoins, replacing Biden’s war on crypto with rules establishing global leadership and dollar dominance.

A stablecoin is a digital dollar that anyone with a smartphone can hold and spend, anywhere on Earth, without all the expensive banking fees. Under Trump’s law, the companies issuing those coins must back them with safe dollar assets, especially short-term U.S. Treasuries. So as stablecoins spread, they expand the dollar’s reach and dominance, even in countries with strict currency controls.

In short: instead of depending on the goodwill of foreign central banks, America can distribute the dollar system directly to billions of people and businesses.

21. He launched the AI Action Plan and Genesis Mission.

Trump’s AI Action Plan attacks the energy, permitting, infrastructure, and regulatory bottlenecks that could hand this century’s most important technology to China. Genesis brings federal data, national labs, supercomputers, and private AI companies together to accelerate discovery. So far, the Energy Department has secured more than $800 million in partner commitments.

22. He restored the Moon to the center of American national strategy.

Trump ordered America back to the Moon by 2028, with initial elements of a permanent base at its strategically vital South Pole by 2030. He also directed development of space-based nuclear power and nuclear rockets, and greater use of America’s unmatched commercial-space industry.

The Moon is the high ground of twenty-first-century industry, science, logistics, and defense — the first great arena of Astropolitics. Trump gave America the means to beat China and make the future free.

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Trump Reasserted American Power Around the World

23. He brought American hostages home.

By March 2026, the Administration had secured the release of 105 detained Americans. Marc Fogel came home after years in a Russian prison. George Glezmann came home after two years in Taliban captivity. So did prisoners held by Hamas, Belarus, Venezuela, and others.

24. He replaced foreign aid with investment and trade.

For a century, Washington measured compassion by how many dollars it spent, regardless of the often abysmal results. Trump put a stop to that: his “Trade Over Aid” doctrine offers not a handout but investment, markets, infrastructure, and partnership.

The December 2025 agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a perfect example. It tied American investment to secure critical-mineral supply chains. This creates Congolese jobs and infrastructure while rewarding American investors and securing American supply chains. It also rescues impoverished Third World countries from Chinese Communist debt traps.

25. He launched a $76.6 billion American undersea buildup — and began rebuilding the shipyards to sustain it.

China is on track to outnumber the U.S. submarine fleet by 2030. Biden did nothing about it. But in July 2026, Trump’s Navy awarded contracts for five Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines and nine Block VI Virginia-class attack submarines. The package totals $76.6 billion — an historic contract allowing shipbuilders to expand production lines and train skilled workers.

The President also ordered plans for a fifth Navy shipyard — the first new one in more than 80 years — along with acquisition, workforce, and repair reforms.

Now Act Like It Matters

Trump produced all of these “25 more” accomplishments in just a year and a half, while also accumulating that earlier Top 25 achievements list, accomplishments so consequential that these didn’t make the original cut.

The Republican Party’s greatest political problem this fall is not a lack of victories. It’s that too many Republicans have no idea what — or how much — they’ve accomplished.

It’s up to each of us to tell our story. Donald Trump is delivering great things, whether or not heaven on earth has broken out quite yet. Do the work, send him the team he needs to finish the job, and then get ready for 2028.

Take the time to learn at least five of these victories. Share this list with someone who needs it. Take friends to the polls. And vote as though the most consequential Presidency in modern history depends on what you do.

Because it does.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
September 8, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Paul Greaney to discuss how Trump is resurrecting Venezuela’s oil industry, giving its people back their future, filling Gulf Coast refineries, and breaking China’s cut-rate oil racket.

Paul and I discuss:

• How socialism crushed Venezuela from four million barrels a day to just 392,000

• Why foreign aid doesn’t end poverty: investments and good jobs do

• How the Gulf Coast turns Venezuelan crude into American power

• Why secure American oil defeats Iran’s Hormuz strategy

• How ending China’s illicit oil discount levels the field for American workers

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It’s 11 minutes of the analysis you need: watch the interview, and pass it along!

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Our Full Discussion:

Paul Greaney: Joining us now to discuss this is Rod Martin, geopolitical analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital. Good afternoon, Rod. It’s great to see you again.

How significant is it that these oil giants are now willing to invest billions in Venezuela?

Rod D. Martin: Extremely so. There was some hesitation at first, but truly, you can understand why. The socialist dictatorship that has been running that kleptocracy down there since the ‘90s stole all of their concessions in the country.

You have to understand, it was American interests that went down there and developed these fields. The critics here in the United States who act like we’re somehow stealing somebody’s oil seem to think that oil fields just pump themselves. That isn’t true. It requires advanced technology. It requires skilled workers who actually know how to drill for oil. And it even requires people who know how to maintain it, which the Venezuelans didn’t.

They took over these fields, and they went in short order from about four million barrels a day in production to about 392,000 barrels a day. It’s just pathetic. And of course, the country goes broke in the process.

So these American majors going in are getting access back to things they developed in the first place. And they had great deals before. Not great for them: great for Venezuela.

If you were to go and drill for oil in Midland, Texas, the property owner would get 20 percent of the take. In Venezuela, our companies were sharing 50-50 with the Venezuelans.

And now they’re going to get to go back because we’ve created enough legal protection for them to make that realistic. The result is going to be a staggering number of new, high-paying jobs in a country that has been so impoverished, people have actually been eating out of garbage dumps. This is a huge boon to both countries.

Property Rights, Profit, and Prosperity

Paul Greaney: And as you say, Rod, even on top of what you’ve characterized as a bad deal for the American majors in the past, they were also badly burned when the socialist regime took over all of their equipment and forced them out.

What kind of guarantees do you think the Trump administration has given them long-term? As you said, some of them seemed reluctant to go back into Venezuela because of how badly they were burned.

Rod D. Martin: I think the Trump administration has demonstrated a willingness to defend American property around the world. And we actually care about things like American property around the world now.

For decades, I have watched presidents of both parties act just utterly embarrassed by the idea that an American business would make money anywhere.

Well, I’m sorry. You can’t actually have jobs in these countries if somebody doesn’t invest money in them. And they aren’t going to invest money if they can’t make a profit. This is actually really, really simple, and everybody understands it when it comes to their own money.

Here we actually have a President who realizes that poverty doesn’t end because you send foreign aid. Poverty ends because you get people a good job. And the more you develop this infrastructure, the better their country, their living standards, and their children’s futures get.

So this is a huge opportunity for Venezuela to get out from under the socialist death clutch that it has lived under, and also the predatory embrace of China and Russia.

The Russians weren’t paying for any oil down there. They were taking it in debt repayment for predatory loans that they gave Venezuela years ago. The Chinese were buying the oil at an incredibly steep discount to market, and Maduro was happy to take it because his oil was sanctioned and he couldn’t sell it other places.

Here, they’re going to get market price. They’re actually going to be able to sell their oil on the open market.

A Hemispheric Energy Market to Displace OPEC

Rod D. Martin: And there’s another angle to it that a lot of people are missing. Most of the refineries in the world that can actually process the heavy, sour crude that comes out of Venezuela are on the American Gulf Coast, because these same majors built those refineries decades ago for the Venezuelan and, by the way, Canadian crude oil that they were pumping.

So we have the ability to process that into refined product, which will help the American consumer. But it will also help Venezuela sell their stuff to the world. It’s an incredibly symbiotic relationship.

It absolutely bolsters American energy security. That’s incredibly important.

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Increasingly, we’re in a position to be able to think of a relatively unified, I’m going to call it North American, although I know technically Venezuela is in South America, but it’s in the Caribbean Basin, a unified North American energy market that increasingly dominates the world in a way not dissimilar to what OPEC had in the ‘70s.

Paul Greaney: Well, that’s an interesting point, as we see OPEC continually fracturing, it seems, at least on the surface. It’s an interesting time for the United States to step this up.

You touched on how Russia and China were actually running oil fields in Venezuela, which will now be taken over and overseen by the United States. It’s an incredible turn of events.

Rod, you touched on a symbiotic relationship and advantages to the American consumer and, you could say, the Western Hemisphere as a whole. How long before we start seeing these benefits?

Rod D. Martin: It starts immediately.

You’ve seen this in every crisis where oil is taken offline for some reason, or there’s a blockade, metaphorical or actual or whatever, and immediately the price of oil spikes.

Well, there’s a reason we don’t have the $250-a-barrel oil that all the naysayers were predicting back in March. Oil is not that much higher than it was before the war. And the reason is that we’re bringing on an awful lot of new supply, and by the way, more secure supply.

So when Europe buys $750 billion in American energy in Trump’s trade deal with them, that oil is worth more to them precisely because they don’t have to pay as much for it, precisely because it didn’t come from the Middle East or Russia.

Why? Because it’s riskier supply. It’s harder to get there, and it is absolutely at risk to any political wind. American oil is secure, and the U.S. Navy protects its transport.

So all of our allies are better off if they’re buying from the Gulf of America and now Venezuela, as we bring it back into the world community.

And the Chinese also lose something pretty big, because they have been buying this illegal, illicit, steeply discounted oil from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela for years.

It is a huge, huge subsidy to their manufacturing economy, nearly all of which is for export. And those exports get that subsidy and undercut the product of American and European workers.

So rectifying that, putting China in the same global market for oil as the rest of us, means that American workers get fairer competition and can compete more fairly in global markets as well as domestic. This is great for everybody.

Paul Greaney: Well, Rod, you’ve taken a very high-level geopolitical view of this. I’m going to follow up on that.

It seems like an interesting hedge for President Trump to secure and utilize the oil in Venezuela, considering Iran’s strategy, or apparent strategy, to counter what the United States is doing there and to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, disrupt the oil flow out of Iran, in order to force up prices and put pressure on President Trump in the middle of an election year.

The more the United States controls global oil supplies and becomes an even more major player in the supply of oil globally, the less of a card it is for other nations to play to actually raise prices. It only benefits the United States in the end through higher revenue.

Rod D. Martin: Yes. The President learned the lessons of the ‘70s. He was actually an adult in the ‘70s. I was a little kid.

In 1973, when we had the first oil shock and oil prices jumped fourfold in a matter of weeks, you just couldn’t get gas. You had to go buy gas on even- or odd-numbered days, depending on the last number of your license plate. All this crazy stuff, and everything was thrown into recession.

Donald Trump lived through that. He understands it in a way that prior American leaders don’t seem to have grasped, and he’s seeking to reverse it.

America should be in control of its energy future, and in the process, it can extend that to its allies. That is, again, a huge security measure.

We were really, really threatened by the energy shocks of the ‘70s, when a bunch of countries that control your oil just cut you off. I mean, what happens if the Soviets had invaded in the middle of that? What happens if some other terrible thing is going on?

Donald Trump doesn’t mean to ever allow that situation to rear its head again. And ditto for all the things we outsource to China.

This is why we’re bringing rare-earth refining back to the United States, because the Chinese refined 92 percent of the world’s rare-earth elements. Not just that, they dominated our pharmaceutical industry back during COVID. That was a disaster. We’re never going to let any of that happen again.

Paul Greaney: It’s just incredible to hear reports, or rumors, or comments from the President about perhaps taking over or utilizing Iran’s oil supply. It’s a fascinating game to watch play out.

That’s Rod Martin, CEO of Martin Capital. Rod, thank you.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 8, 2026

Last month, the Enemedia crowed. The “experts” announced 1.5 percent growth and pronounced judgment. Trump’s promised boom had failed to arrive.

Wrong.

This month, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model has third-quarter real growth running at a 4.7 percent annual rate.

As I told you then, the TDS crowd was looking at the wrong number. In the second quarter report, imports and inventories pulled the number down. But the import surge was led not by toys, trinkets, or flat-screen televisions, but by capital goods: telecommunications equipment, semiconductors, and industrial machinery.

The equipment American companies were importing to build the boom was temporarily concealing it. And right on schedule, those machines are now roaring to life.

Friday’s employment report did more than add 162,000 jobs. It showed the sequence I described last month moving into its next stage. Restaurants and local-government schools supplied much of the headline gain. But manufacturing payrolls rose by 16,000, nearly all of it in durable goods. Machinery and fabricated-metal producers accounted for 6,000 apiece, while construction gained another 22,000 jobs.

Even July’s reported loss of 23,000 jobs did not survive revision. It became a gain of 21,000. Manufacturing employment has now risen by 58,000 since December, while factory production workers are earning 4.4 percent more per hour than they were a year ago.

Indeed, the private sector has added 1.04 million jobs since Trump took office just a year and a half ago.

The industrial boom has begun to hire.

Investment Is Turning Into Production

The latest numbers tell the story. Real final sales to private domestic purchasers — the part of the economy powered by American consumers and private investment — grew at a 4.2 percent annual rate, up from the original 3.9 percent estimate. Equipment investment surged by 13.6 percent after rising 15.8 percent in the first quarter. Excluding the pandemic reopening, America has not seen back-to-back double-digit equipment-investment quarters in more than a decade.

Indeed, capital-goods imports jumped $14.4 billion, more than the entire $12 billion increase in goods imports. Computers, computer accessories, and semiconductors led the way. Yet through July, American exports were up 12 percent from the same period last year and the total trade deficit was down nearly 30 percent.

The private economy wasn’t standing still. It was buying productive capacity.

July’s trade figures show why the same buildout appears to depress GDP before it raises output. GDP subtracts an imported computer server from the trade component before the machine adds anything to American output. The same is true of a German machine tool or a Taiwanese chip-fabrication system. GDP counts where the machine was made when it arrives. Only later does it count what American workers make with it. A new plant necessarily increases construction spending and machinery orders well before the public sees its finished products or new paychecks.

But now that accounting lag is ending.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Jeff Schreve
September 6, 2026

My discussion on American Family Radio’s "Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve". Sign up NOW for the AFR YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Jeff and I discuss:

• Why excusing Lindsay Clancy means denying women moral agency

• How therapeutic culture turns wickedness into diagnosis and perpetrators into victims

• Why Protestant seminaries’ silence on demonology has left Christians unarmed

• How abortion’s “culture of death” brought us here.

It’s 14 minutes you won’t want to miss!

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Our Full Discussion:

Announcer: This is Real Truth for Today. Podcasts of the program are available on the podcast page at AFR.net. Now, back to Pastor Jeff Schreve.

Jeff Schreve: Welcome back to the program. Pastor Jeff here, talking to my friend Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, an anti-communist, and part of the team that started PayPal. His website is RodMartin.org.

Okay, Rod, at the break we were talking about Lindsay Clancy and just how horrific what she did was. It seemed like it was planned out. She got her husband out of the house and killed her kids in a gruesome way, strangling them to death. They were five and under, three kids. Then she threw herself out of the window to try to kill herself. But she slashed her wrists or slashed her throat or something like that.

I haven’t followed it closely, but what is her defense? That I was just nuts?

Rod D. Martin: Yes, pretty much. She pled that she did it, but she’s crazy. That’s probably the best defense available, because otherwise this is completely indefensible.

The evidence is absolutely clear that she did it. And the people online who say, “Oh, well, the husband really did it,” and so forth are shocking to watch.

No. Her defense lawyers actually had her plead not guilty by reason of insanity. That means she’s admitting in a sworn filing that she did it. The whole basis of her defense is that she did it, but she wasn’t mentally competent. So all this internet crazy is just really wild to watch.

It goes back to something we were fighting in the Southern Baptist Convention for several years. In the defense of women, and of course we want to defend women, critical theory takes you into this weird place where women should be given all power, and if only women existed, there would be no violence in the world. At the same time, women can kill their children randomly and can’t be held responsible for it because: hormones.

Well, wait. What?! That’s just insane.

It’s anti-biblical, because the Bible actually holds us all responsible for our actions. If she really is crazy, then of course you would modify that, but you wouldn’t let her go free. She’s a threat to society, and she murdered three children. That’s not how that works.

So what is the biblical view? The biblical view and the American legal view are that you are responsible for what you do. That’s a good thing, because that’s the basis of equality.

If women are just all ninnies buffeted about by their hormones to such a degree that you can’t leave your children with them safely, then the logical response to that would just be to lock all the women up. But that’s complete nonsense, and so is the infantilization of those same women by their so-called defenders.

Jeff Schreve: Right.

Rod D. Martin: So the defenses being made are absurd. They are a dodge of responsibility, which is endemic in this culture. Everything is made a therapeutic issue to avoid the reality of sinfulness and fallenness. Nobody is ever accountable for anything. If somebody steps beyond a certain norm, we just call it crazy so we don’t have to call it evil.

That’s unbiblical. That’s un-Christian.

Honestly, if this woman is crazy, she probably didn’t have the requisite intent to be held fully accountable for murder one in this case. But she’s still accountable. She still did what she did.

Jeff Schreve: Right.

Rod D. Martin: There’s just no avoiding that.

The other thing, in answer to your question, is this idea that somehow she was drug-addled and turned psychotic by pharmaceuticals. The evidence doesn’t seem to support it.

I saw one of the doctors give testimony on this. He was saying her real problem was that she was pill-resistant. Her defense lawyer cross-examined that, and he said, “No, we couldn’t get her to take her pills. That was the problem.” She had all these prescriptions because she wouldn’t use them.

And sure enough, the physical evidence matches that. They looked at her pill bottles very, very closely. She’d hardly taken any of them, ever.

So the defense that she was driven into psychosis by medical malpractice just doesn’t seem to hold water. I look at this evidence, and I think she meant to do it. I think she was competent, and she’s just wicked.

Mental Illness and the Reality of the Demonic

Jeff Schreve: It’s just horrific.

I’ve had this conversation with a number of people in ministry. In the Bible, you don’t read much about mental illness. They had crazy people. They said of Jesus that he’s out of his mind. But you hear and read a lot about demonic possession.

I think that in America today, we don’t ever want to say somebody is demon-possessed or anything. But if you do the things that a lot of these people are doing, you stab Iryna Zarutska on the train for no reason at all, stab her to death as that guy did in Charlotte, North Carolina, I mean, the demons are involved in that kind of behavior, just like with her behavior. I think she even said she was hearing voices.

We don’t like to talk about the demonic side of this, but I put more emphasis on the demonic side than on, “She’s got a mental illness.”

Rod D. Martin: Well, that certainly seems to be the case here. I don’t think you’re going to be able to prove that to a jury, of course. But as Christians, we know that demons are real. We know how they act. We actually are given a very clear picture of that in Scripture. Jesus certainly took it seriously, so why wouldn’t we?

The answer to that is part and parcel of what I was saying earlier. The entire culture wants to deny the idea of fallenness, and certainly of the supernatural, all of which is a bit ironic these days. We have gone way past the rationalist materialism of our youth into a culture where Wicca is prevalent and all kinds of pagan “spirituality” is everywhere. They may not all know it, but of course they’re playing with demons.

I’ve met more than a few of these people. We’ve got one young lady in our church who was a Wiccan and spent years in the occult before she was miraculously saved. She tells stories: “Of course we knew we were dealing with demons. We would make contracts with demons. Yes, we knew what we were doing.”

Crucially, she said, “We took the Bible more seriously than any Christians I know, because the demons know perfectly well who God is and that He’s real.”

So the whole aim is to twist and pervert whatever God wants into something that will give Him offense.

Well, if that’s going on even with people in my own church, I don’t think that this is hidden in a corner somewhere anymore.

It is a real shame that our Southern Baptist seminaries, and no other Protestant seminaries of which I’m aware, even have a single class on demonology. They just don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. That’s a mistake.

It is a real mistake to leave mental health issues to a professional field that is rooted in Freud’s dictum that having religious belief is itself a sign of insanity. And it’s equally stupid for us to leave demonology entirely to the Catholic Church. That’s an enormous mistake. Protestants have to start taking this more seriously.

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In any case, if it is true, and I don’t know that it’s true, but I think based on the evidence I’ve seen that it is true, that Lindsay Clancy really wasn’t taking her pills, really actually seemed to be able to form the intent, and certainly premeditated it to the degree of even getting her husband out of the house and arranging everything so that she could carry this out, she actually strangled her own three children in front of each other.

Imagine the horror in the two children who are watching the first one get strangled to death and just can’t believe that their mommy is doing this.

Jeff Schreve: Yes.

Rod D. Martin: And she did all this just completely heartlessly.

So, okay, that actually does sound a lot like demon possession in Scripture, and Christians need to take that seriously. We don’t know that for sure, but we know that it’s possible.

And it would be helpful to speak to a culture that thinks of itself as highly spiritual without being Christian: Here is the consequence of what you’re believing and doing.

When Abortion Is Called Mercy

Jeff Schreve: Rod, I’m going to play you a clip. That was from Anne Hathaway on The View. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it just shows you Isaiah 5:20 comes into view every single day: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”

Here is Anne Hathaway talking about the mercy of abortion.

Anne Hathaway, recorded clip: When you are a young woman starting out your career, your reproductive destiny matters a great deal. My own personal experience with abortion, and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy.

We don’t know. We don’t know. It’s not a world in which we know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike. That follows that no two conceptions are alike.

So how can we have a law? How can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?

And where I come at it from is, when you allow for choice, you allow for flexibility, which is what we need in order to be human.

Jeff Schreve: It’s just unbelievable. Abortion is another word for mercy. Brutally murdering your unborn baby is another word for mercy. That’s where we’ve come. And then all the ladies on The View are a bunch of seals: “Oh, that’s right.”

Rod D. Martin: Yes, you can hear them.

Jeff Schreve: “Mm-hmm. How insightful.”

Well, that fits in with the women who are now supporting Lindsay Clancy, saying, “Oh, she’s not guilty because she was in psychosis.”

I look at that, Rod, and you just think: Obviously, there’s hope for humanity in Jesus, but there’s not hope for humanity outside of Jesus. We’re taking a bullet train in the opposite direction that we need to go.

The Culture of Death

Rod D. Martin: Well, we had a number of Southern Baptist leaders for a while — fortunately, many of them have left our denomination — but a number of them preached for many recent years that the worst thing about America was its Christian culture, this horrible “cultural Christianity” that deceives people into thinking they’re believers when they aren’t.

Okay. First of all, I question that anybody’s really deceived about that. Romans certainly suggests they are not. They either know Jesus or they don’t.

But the point is that what “cultural Christianity” did for us for centuries was give all of us a common moral reference point such that we just didn’t do or even think of certain things. And if somebody did, even the unbelievers understood that they were horribly wrong.

So there was a consensus that meant you didn’t get a lot of Lindsay Clancys, or Iryna Zarutskas, or the woman who in Times Square yesterday just randomly pulled a knife on a bunch of people and started stabbing them. Again, that sounds like demon possession. Apart from that it’s just weird.

And we have this increasingly prevalent view that no one is ever responsible for anything. Of course, unless you’re a Christian white male, and then you’re responsible for literally everything, of course.

Again, it is an attack on Scripture. And yes, it started with Roe v. Wade. It started with the idea that you could murder your own child in the safest place it should ever experience in its life, your womb, and somehow that’s not only morally acceptable, but in many cases morally virtuous.

No, that’s horribly, horribly wrong.

And not only because the excuse is frequently, “But the woman might not be able to raise the child well.” Well, guess what? Lots of people have bad mothers. That doesn’t mean they want to die.

For that matter, there are about three times as many people in the United States who would like to adopt a child as are able to. There’s no lack of demand for happy homes where these children can be raised, if somebody can just manage not to murder them before they have a chance to be placed for adoption.

So all of this is just horrible. And of course it was always going to lead here. What is the difference between killing a preborn child and a post-born child? Increasingly, the answer of many Democrats in particular is: There isn’t any difference at all.

We saw that under the previous governor in Virginia, when he was actually enacting legislation to allow the mother and the doctor to decide, after the child was born, whether they would kill it in the hospital.

This is where this goes: it can go nowhere else. And you see it with the euthanasia campaign in Canada and other countries. It is a culture of death. And if anything in the world is satanic, that’s it.

Democratic Socialism’s Openly Communist Goal

Jeff Schreve: Well said, for sure.

Okay, you are an anti-communist. It’s in your bio. They don’t call it communism. It’s democratic socialism, which I think the Nazis were the democratic socialists of their day.

Rod D. Martin: Yes.

Jeff Schreve: It’s on the rise. Young people think it’s all the rage. Are we on a collision course with disaster here?

Rod D. Martin: Well, they used to deny the communist thing. But we just had the Democratic Socialists of America convention a few weeks ago, and one of the principal leaders of the DSA stood up at the podium and said, “Our goal is communism.” And the crowd cheered.

So no, they don’t think it’s bad. They want to use the power of the state to punish their enemies. And we know where that goes. We know where it’s gone in every country that’s tried it. It involves mass censorship, mass theft, mass deaths, and just unbelievable totalitarian oppression.

So yes, we’re in a horrifying place in this country, and the Democrats are lapping it up like water at a trough. So we have our work cut out for us.

Jeff Schreve: We’re talking to Rod Martin. When we come back from the break, we’ll be taking your calls: 888-589-8840. That’s 888-589-8840.

If you have a question or comment, you’re listening to Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve here on American Family Radio. We’ll be right back after the break.

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by Ben Marlow
September 5, 2026

“We’ve decided in the European Union that we do not want to re-import Russian energy,” said Dan Jørgensen, the EU’s energy chief, on the sidelines of a summit of energy ministers in Brussels in March.

Jørgensen was responding to growing pressure from some European leaders to re-engage with Russia as the bloc scrambled to offset surging energy prices triggered by the war in Iran.

Yet the Dane was unequivocal that there would be no going back. “We’ve been far too dependent on energy from Russia, making it possible for Putin to blackmail us,” he declared. “In the future, we will not import as much as one molecule from Russia.” Jorgensen added that Europe would not “help indirectly finance Russia’s brutal, illegal war”.

What to make, then, of figures showing that Europe hasn’t just continued to import Russian energy, but seemingly can’t have enough of it?

In the first half of 2026, Europe bought nearly 10 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Yamal LNG, the largest project of its kind in Russia. That’s not only a 16 percent jump on the same period last year, but a record amount.

In fact, the shipments were so large that they accounted for nearly all of the Siberian facility’s output during that time. In May alone, 23 of the 25 cargoes exported from Yamal were delivered to the EU, according to sanctions campaign group Urgewald.

This doesn’t just make a mockery of Jørgensen’s bold promises, it reflects badly on the entire EU, exposing all the endless talk of solidarity with Kyiv as a disgraceful sham.

That Russian LNG was pouring into Europe at a time when Moscow was stepping up its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and civilian sites makes it a double slap in the face.

For more than four years now, European leaders have repeatedly boasted that they are doing everything in their power to ensure Ukraine can defend itself from Vladimir Putin. The EU stands shoulder to shoulder with the people of Ukraine, we’ve been told ad infinitum.

Only a fortnight ago, as NATO countries prepared to meet in Ankara, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said European leaders wanted to send “a strong signal of support for Ukraine”.

“The message to Russia is: Ukraine remains strong,” Merz said as he hosted the leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Poland at a summit for the European Group of Five (E5) in Berlin.

How unfortunate, then, that the EU is also doing its bit to ensure Russia remains strong.

Urgewald estimates that Europe may have paid as much as €6 billion for these shipments, and while Putin apologists may be quick to point out that Russia’s flagship LNG facility is owned and run by Novatek, a private company, that is a giant red herring. Around half of Novatek is owned by Leonid Mikhelson and Gennady Timchenko, two of Putin’s closest allies. Another 10 percent is held by the state-backed gas giant Gazprom, which gives it two seats on the board.

This means Novatek funnels money directly to the Kremlin not merely in corporate taxes but in dividend payments as well.

France’s TotalEnergies is also a significant shareholder in Novatek, as well as in Yamal — an arrangement that proved to be mightily lucrative both in the run-up to Russia’s invasion and afterward.

Between 2017 and 2022, Total banked nearly $1.8 billion in dividends from its investments with Novatek and the Yamal joint venture.

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This included $750 million during the first nine months of 2022, meaning Total was still profiting from the arrangement even while Russian bombs were terrorizing Ukrainian civilians in their homes.

Volodymyr Zelensky has made it abundantly clear what he thinks about this arrangement. Advisers to the Ukrainian president quite rightly called the dividends “blood money”.

Total began to distance itself from Novatek by writing down its stake and removing its representatives from the company’s board in late 2022, but not before pocketing a €440 million half-yearly payout despite a personal request from Zelensky to either reject or redirect the funds to victims of the war.

Months earlier, Patrick Pouyanné, the chief executive and chairman of Total, had said the dividends were becoming harder to receive. Clearly not hard enough, though.

It’s not just that the Continent has had more than four years to wean itself off Russian imports, or that it’s purchasing more LNG from Yamal than ever. It’s that the increase coincides with a looming ban on such trade.

Under EU rules that came into force in April, Russian LNG bought under short-term contracts — those lasting less than a year — are prohibited. Imports under long-term contracts remain legal but only until Jan. 1, 2027, when a full ban on Russian LNG comes into effect.

Put plainly, Europe is engaged in one final last-ditch scramble to stock up on as much Russian gas as it can get its hands on before new laws come into play.

There has long been a “say one thing and do another” approach to the continent’s post-Ukraine energy policy, whereby expectations and promises repeatedly collide with reality. But this is about as cynical as it gets.

Still, Europe’s appetite for posturing and hollow sound-bites appears to know no bounds. On Monday, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, played host to yet another meeting of the so-called coalition of the willing.

In the build-up, Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, said France would be summoning the ⁠Russian ambassador ⁠to Paris in the coming ⁠days because of an alleged cyberhacking ⁠campaign against at least 10 European countries.

“We ‌are going to publicly condemn a widespread cyber campaign carried ⁠out by Russia,” ‌Barrot said. Putin will be quaking in his boots.

At the same time, EU foreign ministers are meeting in Brussels to discuss the bloc’s next — and 21st — package of sanctions against Russia.

Kęstutis Budrys, the Lithuanian foreign minister, said: “I’m looking to see whether we are serious enough. ‌We cannot put economic interests above security interests ... That is a very dangerous trend.”

Yet Budrys shouldn’t have to fly all the way to Brussels for an answer. It’s staring him in the face. If the EU was serious about standing up to Putin, the Kremlin’s oil and gas windfall would have ended a long time ago.

Instead, record European gas imports continue to fund Russian terrorism against Ukrainian women and children, all while European leaders mouth platitudes and hector the United States to “do more.”

Indeed, the U.S. would be happy to do more. It would gladly start by selling Europe its own LNG in place of Russia’s. Perhaps someone should consider that.

— This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Jeff Schreve
September 4, 2026

My discussion on American Family Radio’s "Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve". Sign up NOW for the AFR YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Jeff and I discuss:

• How China is weaponizing (and funding) America’s data-center panic

• Why we could build ten times more compute and still fall short

• The Texas answer: Bring your own power. Bring your own coolant.

• Why Elon plans to put the cloud in orbit

• PLUS the Fourth Amendment answer to Flock cameras and mass surveillance

It’s 14 minutes you won’t want to miss!

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Our Full Discussion:

Jeff Schreve: Well, it is a privilege for me to welcome to the program a familiar guest, Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, anti-communist, part of the team that started PayPal. And he has his website, RodMartin.org. We want to talk about a host of things that you’ve been reading about in the news.

Rod, welcome to the program this morning.

Rod D. Martin: It’s great to be here, as always.

Jeff Schreve: Well, I appreciate you coming on, my friend. Right off the bat, I want to talk to you about something that’s big news in Texarkana, Texas, and that is data centers.

When I was a kid growing up, my dad worked for the Shell Data Center in Menlo Park, California. Nobody thought much about it. I think that thing was probably built in the ‘60s or something like that. This was in the late ‘60s, where he worked when he worked there in the early ‘70s.

Data centers have been around for a long time, but they’ve become a hot-button topic in the last couple of years. So I’ll just ask you a very open question, Rod, because I know you’ve touched on this before and written articles about it: What’s the big deal about the data center? Is it a noise pollutant, a water guzzler, an energy consumer? Is it something that we need to shun, or we need to embrace?

Rod D. Martin: Mostly, it’s a threat to China. And China is spending a ton of money to spread propaganda in the United States to stir people up and scare them.

It’s exactly as you said. We’ve had data centers since before I was born. It is true we’re building more now, because we’re using more compute now.

You used to have movies on VCR tapes or on DVDs. Now we stream all of them. You used to watch broadcast TV. I can’t remember when I last watched broadcast TV. If I watch broadcast TV, I stream it through YouTube or something. All of that requires data centers. This interview this morning is using Zoom, which utilizes data centers. There is just nothing we do now that doesn’t require them.

So if you think, “Oh, there’s all this explosive growth in data centers,” yes, it’s exactly the same as the explosive growth in the need for oil once somebody invented the car.

For decades, they were producing oil mostly for kerosene lamps. Who the heck has a kerosene lamp now? And they took the gasoline that came out of the refining process and just threw it on the ground. Nobody wanted it. Nobody could buy it. Now it’s the most important issue for most people all the time: “Got to get that price of gas down.” Well, that means you’ve got to refine a lot more oil.

If people want to do all the things they obviously want to do, they absolutely have to have more data centers, because basically a data center is just a great big server farm. When you say that you’re keeping your files in the cloud, what do you think the cloud is? An actual cloud up in the sky? No, it’s a data center. “Cloud” is just marketing terminology, and we’ve been using it for 20 years. But as you point out, we were using data centers for decades before that: we just hadn’t come up with the term “cloud” yet.

This is something we all use. We all need. And as AI becomes much, much more important to, for example, shooting down incoming missiles that have been fired at a school, preventing some kind of terrorist incident, or whatever it is that you need from a defense perspective, AI is essential.

The enemy has it. The enemy is shooting forward really fast on it, and they want to use our political system to disrupt our ability to keep up with them. That’s something we need to combat.

Building Compute Without Burdening Communities

Rod D. Martin: I’ll just say, in Texarkana, you guys should be happier than anybody, because Governor Greg Abbott just announced rules that require these things to bring their own coolant, bring their own power, and do everything right, where it is entirely beneficial to and not at all burdensome on the local communities. We’ve done a lot of that here in Florida too.

You’re absolutely right to want these things to be within reasonable constraints. The President’s talked about that too. He’s got an executive order to make sure that happens.

But the truth is, when people talk about water, we’ve been building data centers for 40 years that doesn’t use any water, or that use a limited supply of water that it takes in basically once and just reuses over and over again. You can air-cool these things. You don’t have to use water at all. You do that by air-conditioning the place and really pumping up the chillers. That takes more electricity, so sometimes water-cooled makes more sense, but it’s a choice.

The President wants to make them build their own power stations. And a lot of them are already doing exactly that.

There are things we want to do to make this better for everybody, but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is a really, really important civilizational advance.

A Market Starved for Compute

Jeff Schreve: Okay, Rod, this might be a dumb question, but I’m thinking in my mind: You’re Company X and you build a data center. How do you sell what you just built? How do you market that? We talk about the cloud. It’s kind of nebulous in terms of, “I build a data center. Who’s buying from me?”

Rod D. Martin: Oh my gosh, we don’t have enough. That’s the thing. And it’s right that you should mention X. Although you meant it as a variable, I’m going to mean it as a company.

SpaceX built the biggest data center in the world, and they couldn’t use all the capacity immediately, so they just rented it out to one of the other AI companies. They’re going to make about two billion dollars a month just off of that. I mean, it’s an insane amount of money, and it’s only going to grow. It’s so much so that, in five years, a rather large portion of SpaceX’s entire monthly earnings is going to be coming from renting out compute in these data centers as the demand just skyrockets.

This is actually a really good point. I’m so glad you brought it up. People seem to think that these things are disconnected from the rest of reality. No. Nobody is building a data center if it isn’t needed. Nobody is going to invest that kind of money if it isn’t profitable. And the truth is, we could build ten times as many as we are and not meet the demand that’s going to exist just five years away.

Data Centers in Space?

Rod D. Martin: This is exactly why Elon, by the way, is planning to build data centers in orbit, which ought to make everybody happy. But I’m sure they’ll find a reason why that’s a bad idea too.

In orbit, you’ve got unlimited solar power. Solar isn’t that smart on Earth a lot of the time, because we have this crazy new thing called nighttime, and we have rainstorms, and we have all these things that obscure the sun. In space, you can make it line-of-sight to the sun, where you just convert power all day long for the cost of the equipment to generate it. That’s way cheaper than building a nuclear plant in Memphis or something.

So that’s the future. I know a lot of people thought Elon was just talking out of his hat on that. Well, first, you should never, ever do that, because his timeline is sometimes wrong, but his predictions are almost always right.

Second, Morgan Stanley came in and did a big analysis of this data-centers-in-orbit idea, and they confirmed it 100 percent. They’re like, “The technology exists or is currently being developed to do this en masse at an economical price, and it’s going to solve everybody’s problem.”

The data centers we’re building right now? Of course we need them. Of course we will continue to need them. But that massive spike in demand is going to increasingly be absorbed and served from space, where nobody currently lives and nobody has to worry about what it does to their community.

Build the Future or Become a Colony

Jeff Schreve: Okay, so if we say as Americans, “Hey, we don’t want that. We don’t want these data centers,” and the activists get going and vote it down and that kind of thing, what is the result? America just gets left in the dust?

Rod D. Martin: Yes, exactly that. I mean, it’s like if we just decided not to industrialize during the Industrial Revolution. It’s the exact equivalent of saying, “Well, we don’t want steel mills. We don’t want cars. We don’t want phones. We want to live just like Little House on the Prairie.”

Well, guess what? The rest of the world isn’t going to make that decision. So the world races past us, and eventually we’re their colony. It’s just dumb. It’s needless. It’s pointless.

Privacy Is a Constitutional Question

Rod D. Martin: The one thing that I think people are really worked up about that really has a lot of validity is the use of Flock cameras and other surveillance systems, all of which are data-center-reliant, to do mass surveillance on the American people.

But that’s not a technology issue. If you have an issue with Flock cameras, that’s a Fourth Amendment question. That’s a Fifth Amendment question. Litigate it.

The Supreme Court on which Donald Trump appointed a majority came down with a fantastic ruling just this year limiting the use of technology for exactly that sort of thing because of Fourth Amendment protections, which prior courts hadn’t been willing to apply.

So the solution to Flock cameras isn’t getting rid of data centers. That’s like trying to get rid of murderers by eliminating oxygen. That’s just silly.

The solution here is stronger privacy protections in the law. And we have them in our Constitution. We just haven’t sufficiently applied them to modern technology, and the Supreme Court is starting to catch up.

Jeff Schreve: Well, we're talking to Rod Martin. When we come back from the break, we'll be taking your calls at 888-589-8840. If you have a question or comment, you're listening to Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve here on American Family Radio. We'll be right back after the break.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 4, 2026

On Wednesday, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle publicly described one of the most important changes in naval history, one I’ve been telling you about for some time now: “a ship’s electrical power will increasingly become a measure of its combat power.”

Sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it? Combat power is measured in guns, torpedoes, aircraft, missiles, VLS cells, right? Every shot consumes something physical. Every magazine runs dry.

But that world is ending. Fast.

High-energy lasers and high-power microwave weapons are beginning to turn a warship’s electrical generation into defensive firepower. Instead of answering every incoming drone, rocket, or missile with another, more expensive, physical projectile, the Navy is increasingly taking a page out of Israel’s Iron Beam playbook — using electrons and photons to fire again and again as long as the ship can generate the power and dump the heat.

That’s not just some marginal improvement. Indeed, it’s straight out of Star Trek. It’s the beginning of an entirely new kind of magazine, and thereby a new era.

Cheap drones helped force the issue. Shooting down a $30,000 drone with a multimillion-dollar missile is a terrible nightmare for the defender, even when the interceptor works flawlessly. The attacker is highly incentivized to throw whole drone swarms at the target, and at some point, the defense can’t help but be overwhelmed, not by better tech but by simple economics.

Insoluble, right? It’s one of the reasons certain commentators keep telling us the age of the aircraft carrier is over, that the greatest warships of our time are vastly expensive sitting ducks. But that prognosis has consistently ignored the characteristically American innovation that always solves such problems. Why accept the enemy’s cost curve when you can change it?

A single SM-6 interceptor costs about $6 million; the SM-3 anywhere from $11-$35 million. But Israel’s newly operational Iron Beam laser, jointly developed with the United States, costs just $2 per shot. Epirus’s Leonidas can kill entire drone swarms with high-power microwaves. Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet says his company is already using a 300-kilowatt laser in live-fire testing against drones and actual cruise missiles, and moving toward 500 kilowatts. The Navy has already put lasers to sea.

Under President Trump, this is moving fast into deployment, production, and a broad-based defense architecture — alongside expanded missile production, AI-enabled battle management, and a national nuclear-power renaissance. Golden Dome and the Golden Fleet are already being designed around directed energy systems, making the fleet — and ultimately the American people — increasingly invulnerable to attack from above.

The drone age was supposed to make the surface fleet obsolete. Instead, it provoked a revolution.

Reports of the Carriers’ Death Were Greatly Exaggerated

No platform benefits more from this revolution than the one the “experts” have been burying for most of the last century: the aircraft carrier.

The technology changes; the obituary stays the same. First carriers were supposedly too vulnerable to submarines. Then Soviet bombers and long-range cruise missiles. Then satellites and precision-guided weapons. China developed the DF-21D and DF-26 “carrier killer” ballistic missiles. Hypersonics were going to finish the job. Now it’s drone swarms.

Yet somehow the carrier keeps getting harder to kill. There’s a reason.

The entire “carriers are obsolete” argument makes the same dumb mistake over and over again: it extrapolates the attacker’s technology while freezing the defender’s technology in place.

That is not how anything works. Ever.

China did not spend decades developing anti-carrier missiles because carriers don’t matter. It built them because carriers matter enormously. As I’ve written previously, a carrier isn’t just a runway. It’s sovereign American territory that moves: a floating airbase, command node, intelligence center, and overwhelming concentration of air power that requires no foreign government’s permission to appear off an enemy coast.

Moreover, an aircraft carrier doesn’t sail around by itself, just waiting for somebody to shoot it. It‘s the center of an enormous moving defensive system extending hundreds of miles beyond the hull. A carrier strike group can detect threats, confuse them, destroy the incoming weapon — or send an air wing more powerful than most countries’ entire air forces to destroy the launch sites before a shot can be fired.

All of that costs a lot. The world’s dominant economy can afford it. But what if it didn’t have to?

Last October, AeroVironment demonstrated its LOCUST laser aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, CVN-77. It effortlessly destroyed its targets, with a kill rate of 100 percent. But even more impressive was how easily the capability was added. LOCUST was not designed into the carrier during construction, or installed during a years-long overhaul.

No. The palletized LOCUST system was forklifted onto Bush’s flight deck, plugged into the ship’s nuclear-generated power, and put straight to work. Navy Decoded reports that Bush subsequently carried LOCUST into combat operations against Iran.

Iran thought it could blow up a carrier. It couldn’t lay a glove on it.

Carriers possess an abundance of everything directed-energy weapons need: tremendous electrical generation, enormous physical volume, sophisticated sensors, powerful cooling systems, advanced command-and-control, and a crew capable of maintaining complex machinery at sea for months at a time.

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And suddenly, their nuclear reactors matter in an entirely new way.

For seventy years, the great operational advantage of nuclear propulsion was endurance: a carrier did not need to stop every few days for fuel. In the laser age, the reactors increasingly become part of the weapons system. They don’t just push the ship through the water. They generate the ammunition on demand and at the speed of light.

The Ford class already produces vastly greater electrical power than the Nimitz class specifically to support electromagnetic catapults, advanced sensors, and assorted “future systems.” The ships that follow can be designed with even more. The new nuclear-powered Trump class battleships can take the idea further still, with the electrical and thermal margins needed for larger lasers, railguns, ever more powerful sensors, and weapons we have not yet invented.

Those BBGNs can make a carrier strike group nearly invulnerable from above. They can also be nearly invulnerable by themselves.

Clearly, non-nuclear surface combatants — which make up most of today’s Navy — will have less power to spare. This just makes the carriers even more essential to fleet air defense until the Trump class comes online. And if the carriers are bristling with high-powered lasers, they’re even less vulnerable still.

Indeed, all of this turns the standard argument on its head. The bigger the ship, the more room it has for power generation, cooling, sensors, redundant systems, weapons, and defensive layers. The enormous nuclear-powered warship that looked like an inviting target in an age of finite missile magazines may become the ideal host for the weapons that make saturation attacks futile.

The carrier isn’t dying. It’s becoming a fortress.

The Revolution Doesn’t Have to Wait

Nor is there any need to wait for newly designed ships to deploy this technology.

Caudle is explicitly calling for modular, containerized laser systems like the one tested on the Bush that can be put quickly aboard ships already in service. It’s the right call: the Navy mustn’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Field the system, iterate it, scale it: a process of continuous improvement. It’s this philosophy that allowed a startup, SpaceX, to eclipse every long-established launch provider. It’s a lesson Caudle wants the Navy to learn.

And the revolution is already bigger than lasers.

Epirus’s Leonidas system has demonstrated something no missile battery can imitate: one electromagnetic pulse defeating a 49-drone swarm (and that number will grow). Lockheed’s MORFIUS takes high-power microwave energy airborne, flying into a swarm, frying electronics, and returning to recharge. Lasers offer precision; microwaves offer mass effects. Both draw from the same underlying advantage: the ship can keep generating power indefinitely, long after any number of missiles are gone.

That’s where AI-enabled battle management matters too. These systems don’t fight separately. Just as they share the same reactor, they increasingly share the same picture of the battle, allowing the ship to decide in milliseconds which weapon should kill which target.

The beam alone is not the weapon. The integrated kill chain is the weapon.

And because that kill chain is modular, the Navy can keep making it better without waiting years or even decades for new ships. Every improvement can be folded into the fleet already at sea.

Better still, every defensive job electricity takes over frees up something far scarcer: the missiles.

Defend With Lasers, Attack With Missiles

That may be the biggest payoff of all.

Former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief Jim Fanell points to a change that began after the Cold War. Under Reagan, the Maritime Strategy had a brutally straightforward purpose: if war came, take the fight to the Soviet Navy and destroy it.

But as the Soviet threat disappeared, the Navy’s finite missile magazine was increasingly devoted to other missions — first striking targets ashore, then increasingly defending the fleet itself. Ballistic missile defense accelerated the trend. The drone revolution threatened to take it to an absurd extreme, with some of the most sophisticated weapons ever built consumed merely keeping cheap flying bombs from exhausting the fleet.

Directed energy reverses that trend.

Every defensive engagement transferred from a missile to electricity leaves another missile in its cell. That is more than a savings. It restores offensive power. The physical magazine can increasingly return to what it ought to be: the arsenal with which the Navy destroys the enemy.

In a period in which far more VLS cells are being retired than can be replaced, this matters a lot. Every remaining cell needs to be on mission: killing enemy bases and ships, not messing around with incoming drones.

A Navy does not exist merely to survive the enemy’s attack. It exists to take command of the sea. So defend with electricity. Save the missiles for the attack.

And if Beijing starts the war, use those missiles to sink its fleet.

It turns out Star Trek gets a little more real every day.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
September 3, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss how Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal gives Washington new leverage over Ottawa, offers a free Iran a way to restore its energy wealth, and gives Venezuelans their futures back.

Cary and I discuss:

• How Trump’s oil deal hits China, Russia, and Cuba

• Why socialism turned an oil superpower into a basket case

• How Venezuelan prosperity could become Iran’s future

• How Venezuelan crude gives America new leverage over Canada

• PLUS how Trump’s deal refills our Strategic Petroleum Reserve for free

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It’s a quick 8 minutes: watch the interview, and pass it along!

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Our Full Discussion:

Cary Dunst: Joining us now to talk about the significance of the U.S.-Venezuela oil deal is Rod D. Martin. He’s founder and CEO of Martin Capital. Thanks for joining so early, Rod. Good to see you.

I’d love your reaction to how the Venezuelan oil deal actually ripples and affects Russia and China.

Rod D. Martin: Well, it really does, doesn’t it? It turns out that the fields in question were producing oil that was largely owned by the Chinese and the Russians. From the Chinese perspective, they’re obviously the world’s largest importer.

From the Russian perspective, Venezuela owes them a lot of money. Russia was taking that oil in payment of debt and then exporting it to other countries to try to pay for its war.

Likewise, Venezuela was shipping a lot of oil to Cuba, and we’ve cut that off. The Cubans were using it partly for energy, but partly for re-export so that they would have cash, because they have a socialist economy that produces almost no cash and certainly no quality of life for their people.

That’s exactly true in Venezuela. Venezuela was almost a First World country before the socialists won an election in the 1990s. It has been under increasing dictatorial darkness ever since. The Venezuelan economy has collapsed. The Venezuelan people have been supplementing, if you can call it that, their foodstuffs by raiding garbage dumps. Countless Venezuelans have had to flee the country, to the United States and even to Colombia, all because socialism doesn’t work.

Cary Dunst: Well, another way in which it didn’t work in Venezuela is that it took one of the biggest oil producers in the world and made it into one of the smallest.

They were producing millions of barrels a day. They got down into the low hundreds of thousands of barrels a day. That’s a staggering decline for a country that actually has the largest proved oil reserves of any country on Earth.

Rod D. Martin: Well, these fields represent 65 billion barrels of that oil. It’s an extraordinary amount. These are fields that have to be maintained. The Chinese didn’t have the technology to do it. We do.

The Chinese aren’t going to be allowed to invest the capital, because we don’t want Venezuela to be a Chinese puppet state.

But now American companies are going to go in and develop those fields. The result will be an enormous amount of investment in the Venezuelan people and in skilled jobs for them, giving Venezuela its future back.

Cary Dunst: I want to get to the benefits to the U.S. and Venezuela. But first, I want to get your view: certainly not overnight, but does this have any implications for the Iran war?

Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely, mostly because it harms China, and you alluded to that at the outset. China was getting about a $21-a-barrel discount off Brent for years and years. That’s basically a third off their oil.

As we’ve discussed many times, China has been getting 40 percent of its oil from these illicit, illegal, sanctioned sources: Venezuela, Iran, and Russia. That is an enormous prop to their economy. It gives them a huge external subsidy to goods that they’re already subsidizing, for the purpose of putting unfair trade practices in place that allow them to sell products much, much cheaper than anybody else can produce them.

Not through better innovation. Not through better efficiency. Through cheating.

And what that does is destroy American and European industries and American and European jobs. That goes away. And the Iran blockade doubles down on that. Nothing is getting in or out of an Iranian port right now.

So the Chinese are scrambling. They’re having to go out and purchase on the open market. That’s a disaster for them. It’s also a demonstration of a possible future for Iran.

If we were able to go into a free Iran and help the Iranian people redevelop their oil fields, which are in terrible disrepair and terrible disarray now, we could help Iran become a first-world country in the next generation. It would be an extraordinary boon to them and to the entire world.

Canada’s Strategic Folly

Cary Dunst: It’s interesting how that could be a model. What happens in Venezuela could be templatized for Iran.

Now, Rod, I want to get your view on President Trump’s comments that this is essentially the biggest oil deal ever. How does that directly help the Venezuelan people, and how does that advance U.S. interests?

Rod D. Martin: Well, we normally think a lot of what the President says is hyperbole, but this really isn’t. This probably is the biggest oil deal ever. And it’s really quite extraordinary for the United States in multiple dimensions.

One is that we are in a stupid, needless trade war with Canada, which has just lost its mind. Mark Carney is basically telling Donald Trump that he’s going to stand there and hold his breath until he turns blue.

Seventy percent of Canada’s exports come to the United States. They can’t really shift that. And nowhere is that more true than in oil, where they’ve basically boxed themselves in by refusing to build pipelines. Their oil has to ship to the United States. It has to be refined in the United States. If it’s sold to an export market, it has to be sold from the Gulf Coast of the United States. It’s an entirely self-inflicted wound.

They could have built another pipeline to the Pacific, and the government keeps blocking it because of this Green New Scam nonsense. But it’s worse than that. They wouldn’t even allow the building of a pipeline from Alberta to eastern Canada. So most of eastern Canada’s oil comes through pipelines that travel through the United States.

Why on Earth would somebody pick a trade war with a power they’re that dependent on?

Alberta’s oil is a heavy, sour crude that is not dissimilar from what we get out of Venezuela. Many American refineries are optimized for that exact grade of crude because we invested heavily in Venezuela before the socialist takeover, and of course we’ve invested heavily in Alberta as well. So we’re optimized for what they produce.

We can accommodate Canada’s oil and Venezuela’s. But if Canada wants to mess with us, we’re going to have an alternate supply now.

We’re also going to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with this oil for free. That’s part of the deal. So it’s an extraordinary boon to the American taxpayer.

Giving Venezuelans Their Futures Back

Cary Dunst: And just briefly, with about 20 seconds, what does it mean for the Venezuelan people?

Rod D. Martin: This is going to be the first shot in the arm they’ve had since Chávez won his election in the ’90s. They’re going to have a shot at actually having a great future now, because they’re going to make a fortune on this.

If we go down the same road, electing the socialists here, there won’t be anyone to similarly bail us out. We would do well to take note.

Cary Dunst: Well, a deal that potentially will send ripples for decades to come. Rod D. Martin, thanks so much for joining.

Rod D. Martin: Good to be here.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 3, 2026

You know I use and strongly support artificial intelligence. It is a boon to mankind and has increased my own productivity fivefold at least. It is an enormous blessing.

So is nuclear power, which is also the best way to power AI. What is not so great is a nuclear bomb, especially if you’re beside it when it goes off.

So understand that distinction when I sound this alarm. AI just crossed a line that can’t readily be uncrossed. It can now design complete, viable viruses that have never existed in nature, and for which no one has immunity.

Researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute trained an AI model called Evo on vast libraries of genetic material. They then taught it the genomes of Phi X-174 — a tiny virus that infects E. coli — and roughly 15,000 of its relatives. The model generated 700,000 candidate viral genomes. The scientists selected 285, manufactured their DNA, and inserted it into bacteria.

Sixteen worked. They reproduced. They burst out of their hosts. They infected other bacteria. Some multiplied faster than the natural virus on which the experiment was based.

To their credit, the researchers deliberately excluded viruses that infect humans and other animals, and even those that infect plants and fungi. The sixteen successful creations are bacteriophages. They are not going to turn into airborne smallpox and wipe out Chicago, or decimate humanity and create the Planet of the Apes.

But all that misses the point. Because while they won’t, something like them might.

Until now, the great promise of biological AI was that it could read the language of life: find patterns, predict protein structures, identify dangerous mutations, discover drugs, and help doctors repair what disease had broken. And indeed, the promise of that research is vast, and can and will revolutionize healthcare and longevity for everyone.

But now that same AI has gone beyond such benign research and created something entirely new — not merely a protein or a DNA fragment, but complete, viable viruses.

The experiment was safe. The capability is not.

AI’s peculiar strength is cheap failure at immense scale. Evo generated 700,000 possibilities; the researchers could rank them, manufacture the most promising, learn from the results, and try again. A pandemic pathogen does not require every design to work. It just needs one. And every failed round teaches the next model how to improve.

Bill Gates has now sounded the alarm. Last week, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper and The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin that today’s AI models are already “crossing the danger thresholds” in bioterrorism, that systems capable of helping create dangerous molecules are not adequately monitored, and that the next generation of models will be dramatically better.

He’s right. He’s also late.

The First One May Be an Accident

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Our Full Transcript After the Break:

by Rod D. Martin and Ryan Helfenbein
September 2, 2026

In this Sunday interview on Real America’s Voice, Ryan Helfenbein and I discuss:

• Why the Senate map still favors Republicans

• Why the House is nowhere near a Democrat wave

• How Trump wins either way

• How Lincoln’s blockade of the Confederacy became Trump’s Iran strategy

• Why Hormuz is open while Tehran starves

It’s 10 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

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Our Full Discussion:

Ryan Helfenbein: Joining us now is Rod Martin. Rod is the founder and CEO of Martin Capital and The Rod Martin Report. He is an investor, tech entrepreneur, and futurist. You can find his daily analysis on geopolitics, economics, and advanced technology, all from a Christian worldview, at rodmartin.org.

Rod, thank you for joining Sunday: The Road Forward. It is great to see you.

Rod D. Martin: It’s great to be here.

Ryan Helfenbein: Well, I want to talk about this, because all eyes are on these midterms. I wouldn’t say “kind of,” but we’re about 80 days out. Many conservatives are wondering, and they’re quaking in their boots, Rod.

They’re looking at Texas and Talarico. They’re looking up at Michigan and wondering, are we going to have another Muslim senator, or rather, the first Muslim senator? They’re looking all around the country, and there’s a lot of doom and gloom.

And yet, there’s an instinct out there among the most stalwart conservatives, and you’re one of them: Don’t trust the polling. So tell us about this.

Rod D. Martin: Well, don’t trust the polling you’re hearing on MS NOW or CNN. But there is polling that’s actually quite encouraging. So let’s take this one piece at a time.

On the Senate side, I don’t know about you, but I think Susan Collins pulls it out. I think Mike Rogers has a great chance against Abdul El-Sayed, especially after he went off on a tear with Jesse Watters about how circumcising a child is equivalent to castration, and parents and doctors ought to be able to castrate their very young children.

I don’t think that sells to a lot of people in upstate Michigan, and I think Mike Rogers has a real shot there.

Whether we have a shot at Ossoff in Georgia, who knows? Michael Whatley’s running a terrible race in North Carolina, but if he can get his act together, he can win that. But if not, if we pick up Michigan, it balances out.

Likewise, no one is paying that much attention to New Hampshire, but I think Sununu wins that. His family name is strong there, his positions are far better suited to the state, and that would be another pickup for Republicans.

And as to Talarico, he’s as crazy as El-Sayed and frankly more offensive. So I really can’t see Ken Paxton losing that race. Everybody wants to dump on Ken Paxton. But I remember just months ago how he was supposedly going to get annihilated by John Cornyn, and oops, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.

So I don’t think we’re in any trouble in the Senate. We might lose a seat or two on net. We might pick up a seat or two on net, depending on how a couple of things shake out, primarily the Whatley race. I think we’re good there.

Okay, so the House. Look at Charlie Cook’s latest numbers. Don’t trust the polling you’re seeing on TV, but if you’ve got the stuff that a lot of us have access to that normies don’t ever look at, Charlie Cook’s numbers are pretty clear.

The Democrats would have to win two-thirds of the seriously competitive races to be able to eke out a 218-seat majority. That’s a one-seat majority after winning two-thirds of the races. So, okay, maybe they can do that. But it doesn’t really feel like a wave year to me. I’m not saying they couldn’t win more seats than 218: I’m just saying that the math on the ground is worse for the Democrats than everyone’s claiming.

But I think redistricting went heavily in our favor. I think you end up cutting their maximum upside from about 236 House seats to about 223 or 224. And so, even if they win the majority, they really can’t do business in any meaningful way, and the Senate’s going to block them. And Trump still has his veto.

So the people who are counting on Trump to lose the midterms, first of all, they’re likely to be wrong. I’m not predicting with certainty that they’re wrong. I’m just making the case. I actually think we’ve got a really good shot. If we really get to work we can win, which would be an historic upset for the President’s party in the midterms.

But beyond that, Mark Carney, Doug Ford, the Ayatollah (if he’s alive), all these guys are counting on Trump losing the midterms as if America had a parliamentary system and somehow that would change what Donald Trump can do. Sorry, guys, that ain’t happening.

Trump will double down. And he has plenty of executive power with which to do that, not least because the Supreme Court has restored Article II, Section 1 for the first time since the 1930s. He’s actually able to function as the chief executive and the commander-in-chief, and that’s just a watershed.

More to the point, he’s not stupid. He knows how hard it is for the President’s party to win the midterms historically — it almost never happens — and he’s been planning for that from the beginning. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t serious.

So I think we win. I think we’ve got a really good shot of winning in both houses. And I think Donald Trump is unstoppable either way.

Iran’s 47-Year Forever War

Ryan Helfenbein: Rod, there’s a lot of tepid conservatives out there, some probably not actually conservative. But they’re looking at Iran, and they’re thinking, “Gosh, I just wish that we didn’t have this war going on right now, because, my goodness, it looks like we’re going to lose that. And we’re going to lose public opinion, we’re going to lose affordability, and we’re going to lose these midterms.”

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What’s really happening in Iran? What’s the strategy going on there? Break it down simply for us, because I think there’s just a lot of miscommunication, especially when you have the two halves of the conservative side, the older generation and the younger generation. The younger generation wants to have nothing to do with Iran. What are your thoughts?

Rod D. Martin: Well, they’re just mistaken. They haven’t lived with this as long as some of us have.

I was 10 years old when the Iranians stormed our embassy in Tehran and took all of its staff hostage for 444 days. I have been here for Iran’s forever war on the United States: 47 years of low-level warfare that has been unrelenting and has had absolutely no ceasefires.

Forty-seven years. Donald Trump is not starting a forever war. Donald Trump is ending one.

And all of the people who claim, “Oh, he promised no wars.” Did you just sleep through the last decade? That’s not what he said. He said we’re not going to be stupid and invade countries and have troops there for 20 years anymore like Bush and Obama. We’re not doing that anymore.

But look at his first term. Everybody forgets, and I’ll just pick one example because I know you want to get to the blockade. Does anybody remember that in his first term, Donald Trump spent seven months destroying ISIS? Seven months!

Don’t tell me he’s unwilling to use force when it serves American interests. He’s just not willing to use force when it doesn’t, unlike his predecessors. That’s the difference.

These are people who were building 20,000 ballistic missiles. These are people who were building nuclear weapons. These are people who would terrorize the world if they could. And they have, for half a century. And Donald Trump is ending it.

A Blockade Straight Out of Abraham Lincoln

Rod D. Martin: So the strategy, actually, right this minute, is brilliant. And it’s a page straight out of Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln and General Winfield Scott devised the strategy at the outset of the Civil War. Lincoln announced it within weeks of taking office. So this is long before Grant and Sherman were anybody.

Lincoln announced a blockade of the South, and the South just laughed because, “Oh, that’ll never work. The Union Navy isn’t big. They can’t do that. And Europe will come to our defense because they need our cotton.”

Literally, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, England was buying five-sixths of its cotton from the South. They were utterly dependent on the South. And the South was just certain that they would come into the war to help them out, or at least would use the world’s foremost navy to make the North’s blockade irrelevant.

Well, guess what? They were wrong.

Britain just diversified production to Egypt and India. And that production never came back to the South, which is one of the reasons the South stayed poor for decades after the war.

But for Iran, this gets a thousand times worse. Lincoln didn’t have GPS. Lincoln didn’t have satellite reconnaissance. Lincoln didn’t have carrier strike groups. Lincoln didn’t have B-2 bombers that can fly a 14,000-mile mission. And Trump does.

The blockade of the South, with 19th-century technology, reduced Southern cotton exports to just 5 percent of the prewar total.

In Iran, we’ve completely shut down their ports. They’re getting nothing in and nothing out. And in the meantime, we’re actually moving a dramatically increased number of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. It’s up 400 percent just in the last 14 days.

So we’re keeping oil prices stabilized. The whole world is functioning. We were told it would be $250-a-barrel oil. It’s actually $83, which isn’t much more than it was before the war. And the war is still going on.

What does the blockade do? It’s starving them to death. Don’t ask me. Ask the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who went on TV two days ago and said, “We’re starving to death. We can’t sustain this.”

And this is ultimately the strategy. If they can’t pay their troops, eventually their troops either melt away or turn on them. And that’s where you get the revolution that Trump is really angling for. He’s not going to say that, but I promise you that’s the endgame.

Ryan Helfenbein: Well said. Folks, listen, that was brilliant. And if you want to hear more analysis like that, you need to go to rodmartin.org.

Rod, thank you always for your insight, your wisdom into all of this. And I think a lot of us are feeling a little bit more encouraged on this Sunday morning.

Rod D. Martin: I appreciate your comments. Thank you.

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by Rod D. Martin
September 2, 2026

Amarok Petersen was 13 years old when Danish doctors implanted an IUD in her body. No one told her. She discovered it only when she was 27, after years of severe uterine problems, when another doctor finally found the device. By then, the choice to have children had been stolen from her. Years later, she learned that doctors had also removed her fallopian tubes without telling her.

“The Danes don’t see us as humans,” she said.

Last week, two expert investigations put the weight of an official record behind what Petersen and thousands of other Greenlandic women — out of a total population of just 57,000 — had tried to tell for years. Denmark’s treatment of Greenlanders was not “benevolent stewardship” marred by “a handful of mistakes.” It was colonial abuse inflicted on their bodies, their children, their families and their sovereignty.

It also conveniently produced exactly the result Copenhagen wanted: Greenlanders’ birthrate collapsed, the growth of the native population slowed sharply, the percentage of the population that’s Danish thus increased, and Denmark’s annual costs to maintain the colony were controlled.

The new data demolishes Copenhagen’s claim to be Greenland’s benevolent guardian. Denmark has forfeited the moral authority — and the moral right — to rule the island. Greenland’s future rightfully belongs to the Greenlanders. The problem is, they can’t afford the independence most of them want.

There’s a solution.

Their Bodies, But Not Their Choice

Denmark’s forced contraception campaign was staggering in scale. By the end of 1970 alone, nearly half of all women of childbearing age or younger had been fitted with IUDs, mostly without their knowledge or consent. In addition to IUDs, the program included contraceptive injections and other interventions, largely disguised as other procedures. This crime against humanity continued through 1991, when Greenland finally wrested its health system from its colonial overlord’s control.

The new human-rights investigation heard from 354 women describing 488 separate incidents. Of 410 reported IUD insertions, 300 women said they had never consented. In another 63 cases, investigators had no consent information at all. Nearly one-third of the women were 14 or younger at the time; more than half were minors. Some were just 12 years old.

These were not adults making informed medical decisions. They were schoolgirls summoned to clinics, fitted with devices they did not understand, and sent home in pain. Some bled. Some developed infections. Some suffered lasting physical and psychological damage. Some, like Petersen, lost the ability to bear children even after discovering what had been done.

One team of investigators found reasonable grounds to believe that Denmark’s conduct in imposing measures to prevent births met the definition contained in the Genocide Convention. The investigators stopped short of finding genocide because they could not establish specific intent for that exact crime. The distinction will matter in court, reducing possible claims against the Danish government. It does not rescue Denmark’s reputation.

Nor does Copenhagen seriously dispute the charge. In September 2025, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen acknowledged that thousands of women and girls had received IUDs, many against their will. She admitted that Greenlanders had been subjected to systematic discrimination precisely because they were Greenlandic. To her credit, she apologized on behalf of Denmark. But it’s far too little, far too late.

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Denmark treated Greenlandic women not as patients or citizens, but as a herd to be culled. Petersen put it more plainly: “They took our resources. They took our bodies. And then they told us to thank them.”

Then Denmark Took The Children They Had

A state that believed it could decide which, if any, Greenlandic women would be allowed to become mothers also presumed to decide which Greenlandic mothers were allowed to keep their children.

The United Nations has reported that Inuit children from Greenland living in Denmark were seven times more likely than Danish-born children to be taken and placed outside the home. Danish authorities relied on standardized psychological and “parenting competency” tests developed for Danish parents, in the Danish language and within Danish cultural assumptions. They then used those tests to judge Greenlanders whose language, emotional expression, extended-family structure and child-rearing traditions were profoundly different.

The result was both predictable and monstrous. Danish institutions defined Danish behavior as normal, interpreted Greenlandic standards as inferior, and took Greenlandic children from their families on that basis. Mothers described being assessed without adequate interpreters. One says she was forbidden to speak Greenlandic to her twin sons during visits. The boys eventually lost their mother tongue as well as their mother.

It was a systematic effort to erase the Greenlandic population and culture for the benefit of an imperial master.

Denmark only abandoned the standardized tests for Greenlandic families in 2025, replacing them with assessments by a specialized unit with Greenlandic language and cultural competence. Yet mere months later, authorities removed Ivana Nikoline Brønlund’s newborn daughter approximately one hour after birth without applying the new procedure. Denmark’s Social Minister called the failure a serious error. Yet only after widespread political outrage was the decision reversed, allowing mother and child to reunite.

This is not ancient history: this is yesterday.

Greenland Wants Independence. But It Can’t Afford It.

Greenlanders have been voting their way toward independence for nearly half a century. Understandably, more than 70 percent approved Home Rule in 1979. In 2008, 75.5 percent approved Self-Government — an arrangement that formally recognized Greenlanders as a people with the right to self-determination, and that established a legal path to full sovereignty. By January 2025, a Verian poll found that 84 percent wanted independence, and 56 percent would vote for it even if the referendum were held immediately.

The hesitation is not the destination: it’s the price. Independence is expensive, and as badly as Denmark underfunds its colony, its colony doesn’t have the money to replace what it does spend. Independence means more than raising a flag. A sovereign country must finance its government, build infrastructure, create and maintain embassies around the world, provide social services and defend an enormous, resource-rich island sitting astride the Arctic and Atlantic approaches to North America. Greenland cannot do all of that alone. Denmark adds very little, but it’s far more than Greenland can do for itself.

So Greenland is not debating whether it should be free. It’s debating how to survive afterward.

The answer, of course, is a Compact of Free Association with the United States. It’s a model the U.S. has used successfully for and with Pacific nations such as Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. Each is a sovereign, independent nation. But each also receives many of the benefits of being part of the United States, defense included.

Citizens of these three COFA nations may live and work indefinitely in the United States, as nonimmigrants without a visa. They can qualify for American benefits ranging from Pell Grants and work-study programs to Medicare and Social Security. They may join the U.S. military. If disaster strikes, FEMA shows up. America invests and creates jobs in their countries. A COFA provides all the benefits of inclusion in the world’s most powerful economy but without giving up independence. It also provides all the benefits of independence without the costs.

It’s genuinely “have your cake and eat it too.”

For Greenlanders, a COFA means independence without strategic helplessness. American capital and technology, far greater than anything Denmark can provide, would flow in to build the ports, airports, power systems, telecommunications, housing and processing facilities, all employing Greenland’s citizens and providing futures for its children.

Greenland’s vast deposits of rare earth elements, hydrocarbons and other minerals could create high-paying jobs and a booming local economy rather than leave the island dependent on a stingy annual subsidy. Its fisheries could be processed at home rather than shipped away so others capture the value. Its tourism — currently a fraction of Alaska’s — could make the country a fortune: just ask Iceland.

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Greenland could even become the Arctic answer to Bermuda or the Caymans: a sovereign financial center inside the American economic system, with easy access to both New York and London. The nation could attract offshore wealth beyond anything it has ever imagined. Its young people would no longer have to choose between dependence and emigration. Greenlanders could build a rich, modern country all their own.

So What Would America Get Out of This?

For America, the advantages are every bit as substantial. A free and friendly Greenland would secure the northern approaches to the United States, anchor the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, protect emerging Arctic sea lanes and enhance early warning, missile defense, space surveillance and North Atlantic monitoring.

A COFA would give American companies access to critical minerals outside China’s control while denying Beijing or Moscow the chance to turn Greenlandic poverty into a strategic foothold threatening the approaches to North America.

America does not need to actually own Greenland. It needs Greenland to be free, prosperous and able to choose a durable partnership with America. That is partnership, not colonialism: indeed, it would replace the current colonialism with a true partnership. Greenlanders would own Greenland, while both nations become richer and safer.

This solves Greenlanders’ long-term problem even more than America’s. But it also solves a problem that almost no one in today’s ahistorical political class grasps. Despite its shameful behavior, Denmark is America’s friend today. But no one can guarantee the future.

The peaceful North Atlantic order is a constructed alignment, not a law of nature. The structure of power and interests may change. The map does not. And leaders should not base the security of those entrusted to them on utopian dreams or “permanent” alliances and institutions.

America chose Diego Garcia, its most vital Indian Ocean base, in part because of Britain’s “unquestioned sovereignty” over the island. Britain remains one of America’s closest allies. Yet its socialist government has signed a treaty to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Chinese-aligned Mauritius. It assures the United States and its own people that all may rely on “ironclad” treaty protections for continued American and British access to the base. Yet that’s obviously nonsense.

Britain did not have to become America’s enemy to alter the strategic arrangement on which our security relies. Governments change. Treaties change. Interests change. Alliances change. Geography does not.

Greenland will remain astride North America’s Arctic and Atlantic approaches no matter who governs in Copenhagen or Nuuk five, 50, or 100 years from now. Nations do not have the luxury of assuming every future government will play nice forever. American statesmen must plan for the geography their grandchildren will inherit, not merely for the diplomatic comfort of the present.

Denmark’s abuses answer the moral question. Greenlandic independence answers the colonial question. Free association with America answers the economic and strategic questions. It also enables what last week’s reports make clearly necessary, but which would be impossible without American help.

Denmark’s rule must end. Greenlanders must be free. But for that to happen, America alone can offer them a future in which independence means sovereignty, prosperity and security — not poverty, vulnerability or a new Chinese master.

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by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
August 31, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Frank and I discuss:

• Scott Bessent: greatest Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton

• Can Bessent’s “Economic D-Day” break the regime and free Iran?

• China’s collusion with Tehran, and how China’s rare-earth weapon collides with the Malacca Dilemma

• How to make a Taiwan invasion more expensive than it’s worth

• Why Canada cannot survive a break with America

• PLUS why Greenland is key to countering China’s Polar Silk Road

It’s a full 27 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

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Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and I get to say those favorite words of mine: So is Rod Martin, the poobah uber alles of our Institute for the American Future. He serves as its chairman of the board and founder.

He is also a man of considerable experience in the business world. He started back in the PayPal days, when there was a Mafia there, in the best sense of the word. He was part of it, and he has gone on to entrepreneurial activities of many kinds.

But one of the most important of his ventures is the Rod Martin Report, a newsletter that he is producing online at RodMartin.org. It is a wealth of valuable information, his own and some select guest authors as well. I strongly commend it to you all.

Rod Martin, we’re delighted to have you with us. You have been busy on issues related to Topic A, which is the economic warfare that the Trump Administration has now very explicitly announced in the person of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

We talked a bit about this with our colleague, Major Elliot Chodoff, from a foreign perspective, but we’re very anxious to get yours, especially given your expertise in these matters.

I do want to say, you and I talked a little bit about a related aspect to this that you called the Anaconda Strategy. I think we’ll probably come to that in a moment. But let’s start with the Economic D-Day that has been declared with the intention of, well, basically preventing Iran from having access to outside funds from any source. Your thoughts, sir?

Rod D. Martin: Well, first and foremost, let us now praise Scott Bessent, who is truly a remarkable, remarkable man, possibly one of the smartest people we’ve ever had in the U.S. government, and definitely the best Treasury Secretary since at least Alexander Hamilton. The guy is just a machine. He is amazing.

Trump didn’t pick him randomly. Some of your viewers won’t remember, but Scott Bessent led George Soros’s hedge fund when they broke the pound. This guy knows what he’s doing.

Of course, he was never part of Soros’s political operation, his so-called charitable operation. Bessent wasn’t on that side of the store at all. Compared with Soros, he’s to the right of Attila the Hun. But he is one of the guys who broke a major central bank. If I were China, his mere existence would make me lose sleep at night.

That’s what’s happening to Iran. Bessent’s strategy here is above and beyond anything that’s ever been attempted with Iran. But, to be fair, the foundation of it is the blockade. We are preventing pretty much anything from getting in and out of Iran.

You can say, “Well, but there are roads. There are railroads. There’s the Caspian.” Okay, there is a railroad, for instance, from China to Iran. At most, it could handle 6 percent of Iran’s exports. There’s no way to expand it in time to help enough to matter.

The roadways are bombable. The bridges are bombable. And on the Caspian Sea, there simply aren’t enough ships to be able to handle more than a tiny fraction of Iran’s needs, either imports or exports.

Even if this is porous, it doesn’t really matter. The total percentage loss to this blockade is extraordinary.

When you hear on Fox or various places that they’re losing $500 million a day, you have to understand that over just 270 days, not even a full year, just 270 days of losing $500 million a day exceeds the total value of the Iranian economy. Not the government budget, the entire economy. So this is shockingly effective.

We saw the head of the Iranian parliament say on camera the other day that, “We’re being starved to death. We can’t sustain this.” When even regime figures are saying that, and he’s a former IRGC commander, he’s not one of these guys who’s sidelined, there’s no question that this is proving effective.

What Bessent just rolled out doubles down on that by blatantly telling anyone, Qatar, the UAE, China, Russia: We will hit you with similar sanctions if you let these guys up off the mat. I don’t think there’s any question they mean it.

China’s Rare-Earth Leverage Meets the Malacca Dilemma

Frank Gaffney: Let’s explore that, because there’s, shall we say, certain skepticism in our circles, Rod, that the Bessent strategy will be fully implemented.

People are pointing, for example, to the fact that he’s given a seemingly unspecified amount of time for a grace period, if you will, for people to disassociate themselves from Iran and the business that they’ve been doing with them.

A particular disbelief is that they’re going to actually pull the trigger on these secondary sanctions on China, especially on the eve of a state visit by the Chinese emperor, Xi Jinping, to Washington. What are your thoughts about those concerns?

Rod D. Martin: China has only one thing we really need, and that’s rare earths. As your audience ought to know better than anybody, China controls 92 percent of global rare-earth refining.

It’s not so much that they supply all the raw materials, although they supply a lot of them. It’s that they refine nearly all of them. Until we wean off of that, we can’t just go cold turkey on China.

But you see what’s happening. Treasury has already been sanctioning individual Chinese refineries, some of the so-called teapot refineries. They’ve been doing that now for several months, and purely on the basis of this Iran problem. Those refineries were processing Shadow Fleet-delivered oil, and Treasury has taken a tough stand on that. I think that’s just a warm-up act.

Is Trump just going to cut off the Chinese tomorrow? No. But he can really make their life hard, and they are very aware of it.

They’re the ones who coined the term “Malacca Dilemma.” They know that 80 percent of their oil is flowing through chokepoints that we control. They know that if they really ramp up pressure on rare earths, we’re just really going to cut off their food and oil supplies. The Iran situation is an object lesson in that.

We have constantly had this discussion through the years about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Were the atomic bombings necessary? The people who want to say no typically say, well, the United States would have had to blockade Japan, and that would have caused mass starvation. That would have been horrifying.

Of course, in the Japanese case, it actually would have been horrifying because they served their god-emperor and would have all gladly died. I don’t think the Iranian people are in that boat at all.

I think you hit a certain level of pressure where this regime is really in danger, and they’re already making noises in that direction.

So is there a high likelihood that the President just completely clamps off China? No. Can he do enough there to cause them to say, “Ouch”? Absolutely.

Remember, prewar, China was getting 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, and they were getting it at a steep discount. They’re having trouble replacing that, and they’re never going to get it at those prices again, which is a disaster for their economy. So the President has real levers on China. But these other countries, UAE, Qatar, he can really hurt them.

Frank Gaffney: Well, the UAE has already punched out, actually, before Bessent did his thing. I think we were talking about this last week as a major development, because they had been essentially helping to finance the Iranian regime.

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But just to stay with China, Rod: To the extent that the Chinese are in a position to hurt us with these rare-earth minerals, as you point out, we’re in a position to hurt them with respect to oil and food, and perhaps other things they want from us. Probably not least, investment, which continues.

Rod D. Martin: But nowhere near as high a level as it did five years ago.

Frank Gaffney: No, that’s true.

Rod D. Martin: Because the place is a mess, as you know.

Frank Gaffney: Not so investable.

Rod D. Martin: And all the companies that are pulling out! Ford just announced they’re not going to produce any more cars in China. That’s amazing.

And if I were Mark Carney, I’d take note, because if Ford (Motor, not Doug) pulls out of Ontario, they’re in a recession ten minutes later.

Frank Gaffney: We’re going to come to Canada in just a second. But just to stay again with China, are we in a sort of mutual assured destruction arrangement, would you say, Rod?

Is the net effect of that likely to have China sucking it up and saying, “Well, we’re not going to come to the aid of the Iranians”? They haven’t done so much to date, other than some weapons sales, I guess, and shipments of that kind, and buying oil where they can.

But I have to ask you to hold the thought, because we’re going to come back after a very short break. Rod Martin, I’m very keen to get your soothsaying, as it were, about how China responds to all of this, and frankly, how Donald Trump responds to all of this, because he clearly is very intent on having this summit with Xi Jinping in September.

That old September song, “Will I See You in September,” is the question of the day. We’ll be right back with Rod Martin, the proprietor of the Rod Martin Report. Find it at RodMartin.org. We’ll be right back.

Cheap Iranian Oil Is a Chinese Subsidy

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. We’re visiting with Rod Martin, which we have the privilege of doing each week, praise the Lord. We are deeply grateful for his faithful contributions to this program, especially at a time such as this.

Rod, we’ve been talking about this situation of a kind of, well, I called it mutual assured destruction between the United States and China, and where this leads in the run-up to a summit meeting here in Washington, expected to take place, as things stand now at least, with Xi Jinping.

President Trump has been, to date, especially with this threat of the cutoff of processed rare-earth minerals from China, as you’ve indicated, rather more accommodating of the Chinese than those of us on the Committee on the Present Danger: China, of which you are an important member, would otherwise prefer.

But where does this likely go from here? Scott Bessent was making some statements that made it quite clear that there were going to be no exceptions to this new order, that anybody who is helping prop up the Iranian government was going to meet the wrath of the United States through secondary sanctions and the like. So make book for us on this, if you would.

Rod D. Martin: I think the summit happens. I think it’s positive. I think it ends well.

We’re not going to get everything we want, nor are they going to get everything they want. You and I will never be happy with anything that comes out of a summit like that.

But at the end of the day, we need to keep rare earths flowing. They need to keep energy and food flowing. We’re dependent on each other for now.

Now, the problem for China that gives Trump meaningful leverage here, aside from the fact that they need the energy and the food more than we need the rare earths, is that Iran being offline and not being able to ship oil meaningfully impacts the Chinese economy.

It’s not just the oil itself. We’re actually getting a lot of oil out of the Strait. In fact, the latest numbers as of last night, we have now multiplied the amount of oil getting through the Strait of Hormuz by 400 percent in just two weeks.

In the 30 days preceding that, we had already gotten out millions and millions and millions of barrels of oil, none of it from Iran.

There are two aspects of the problem for China. The first one is the raw supply. But the second one is — remember — these things are normally done with 20-year contracts. So a lot of the people who are getting oil out have somewhere specific they have to ship it. China isn’t necessarily the recipient.

They have a supply issue. But they have an even bigger issue in that the Iranians were selling it to them on the cheap, as were the Venezuelans and the Russians.

So if you take a lot of that cheap oil offline, and remember, this was 40 percent of China’s total imports, and they’re getting it significantly below the then-lower market price, that’s a huge prop to the Chinese export-based economy.

That allows them to dump in Europe. It previously allowed them to dump here. It allows them to drive Western competitors out of business on unfair bases.

That starts going away, and it starts actually eating into China’s ability to stay out of recession territory, assuming they aren’t already there. I would argue that they are.

I know that’s in some dispute. It just depends on how much you trust the numbers coming out of Beijing, which I do not.

But the point is, China has a bigger problem here than the United States. China already said in the May summit, yeah, we want this oil online, we don’t want to arm them, we want to cooperate with you, President Trump, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, you don’t trust them. But actually, you do trust people when it works for their interest, and that has been true.

You’ll notice they haven’t sent any fighter jets to Iran. They haven’t sent huge arms shipments to Iran. There was a rumor about MANPADS a few weeks ago. The Chinese were the first ones to deny it. Maybe they shipped them, maybe they didn’t.

But if they did, I think Donald Trump would instantly double down on a new arms deal for Taiwan.

It’s a complex game from the Chinese point of view. This is not even chess. This is a game of Go. They’re always looking out for their own bottom line, not the ayatollahs.

Taiwan’s Porcupine Defense

Frank Gaffney: Interesting. Speaking of Taiwan and arms sales, the President did approve, on a pretty accelerated basis as I understand it, the movement of F-16s that have been held up interminably to Taiwan.

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Some cast that as evidence that the Administration is concerned that the Chinese are, no kidding, getting ready to exercise one of the myriad options they have to try to take Taiwan.

Perhaps it’s a blockade or a quarantine. Perhaps it’s some kind of fifth-column operation. Perhaps it’s actually an invasion.

What are your thoughts about how that’s shaping up, Rod, and how that might fit into this larger story, sir?

Rod D. Martin: Well, it notably fits into the porcupine defense and not into anything offensive. That’s important. That’s essential for the general dance we’re involved in with Beijing.

Think about an F-16. That’s not a long-range jet. It has a cannon very similar to an A-10’s.

Compound that with PrSM missiles in place of ATACMS in HIMARS. Couple that with the howitzers we just shipped them. Couple that with the other things that we’re doing to help them.

What you see is a strategy to blow up landing craft in the water before they can hit the beach, and then whatever gets through, blow them up on the beach. That’s essential to the whole thing.

All we can really try to do here with China, short of invading them and conquering them — and that isn’t going to happen: I’m pretty sure Donald Trump is not Genghis Khan. So short of that, what you have to do is, as our friend Morton Blackwell would say, make the steal more expensive than it’s worth.

Everything that increases the probability that an invasion fails reduces the chance that it ever gets tried.

Frank Gaffney: Key point. We have to take a pause. We’ll be right back with much more with Rod Martin. Stay tuned.

Canada’s Anti-American Pride Meets Economic Reality

Frank Gaffney: We’re back for a final installment of this weekly conversation with our great friend Rod Martin of, among other things, the Institute for the American Future.

Did I mention that he is its chairman and that we need your support? Please make a contribution to usfuture.org, if you would, if only to make this partnership even more viable.

Rod, in addition to that work, of course, you are working on the terrific product of your Rod Martin Report. In the course of what you do, I know Canada has on occasion been a focus of conversation, notably the possibility that Alberta may decide to punch out of Canada.

But there’s a lot of chatter about how nationalistic the Canadians are now feeling because they’ve been so badly handled by Donald Trump, and the tariff thrash and the various knock-on effects of tariffs for both countries, I think it’s probably fair to say, but particularly for the Canadians.

It’s causing some to speculate that we may be driving them, oh, I don’t know, into the arms of the Chinese Communist Party. But, as I recall, that’s actually been the policy of successive Canadian governments, including, I think, this one under Mark Carney.

Give us your sense of where things stand with Canada.

Rod D. Martin: O Canada, as they say.

Canada is that really nice country to the north of us that we love to go vacation in and otherwise almost never think about. That really hacks them off.

Basically, Canada exists for the purpose of anti-Americanism. Americans have lost track of that. But remember why there’s a Canada: They didn’t want to join the Revolution.

The Continental Congress expressly included them, and they didn’t want to come. Then, of course, we kind of messed with them and invaded Quebec. But the idea was not to conquer Quebec. It was to assist and enable a rising of people who had just been conquered by the English and clearly didn’t want to stay English, at least so we thought.

No, they wanted to be Americans even less.

Canada has always been this anti-American exercise. But they’re super nice all the time and call you “buddy,” so nobody notices.

They have gone to war alongside us. Mostly they just come down here to Florida and use our health care because socialized medicine is so terrible at home. Medicare for All, right?

This is the lay of the land. The average American doesn’t think about Canada normally, and they are forcing us to do so.

Here’s the thought that they need to have: Canada is one-tenth the population of America. Ninety percent of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Much of the industry in Canada is aimed at exporting to the United States. Seventy percent of Canada’s exports come here. Seventy percent.

The Chinese aren’t going to absorb that. The Europeans can’t absorb that. That can’t move. They can cut away at it at the margin, but they can’t replace the United States.

What we’re really seeing here comes into better focus if you look at Mark Carney’s speech about why he rejected the deal. Bear in mind, this is a deal that the two sides agreed to early last week. Then at the very last minute, Carney pulls out and gives this meandering speech about it.

You can look at it on YouTube. The prime minister of Canada, who, by the way, was also the governor of the Bank of England when Brexit was going on, was working against Brexit. He’s always working against the independence of whatever country he’s helping lead.

His response was, well, everything the Americans were demanding was reasonable, and we don’t even really disagree with it. We just don’t like how they said it.

Okay. Pure hubris. Pure pride. And pride goeth before a fall.

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Do we get to a deal? We’re going to have to, or they’re going to go into not just a recession. They could go into a lot worse.

As I said in the earlier segment, if Ford’s pulling plants out of China, which is a huge, huge consumer market for their product, most of what they’re building in Canada is for the American market.

What if they pull out of Ontario? What if other companies pull out of Ontario? Ontario lives to a great degree off the subsidy it’s extracting from Alberta. It depends for its oil on pipelines that run through America. Where do they go for help?

They get reduced to the same status as the Maritimes, and they’re all a basket case together.

This has to resolve. It just has to. They need us, a lot more than they’re willing to admit. But from the American perspective, honestly, we could do without them.

Greenland and the Polar Silk Road

Frank Gaffney: Fantastically interesting point. Rod, let me ask you about one other piece of this.

You mentioned the demographic distribution of the Canadian population. In those far northern reaches, which are largely unoccupied, there’s a lot of activity going on at the moment, including the Chinese opening what they’re calling the Polar Silk Road.

What do you make of that? And how does this tie into our strategic interests, notably in Greenland, sir?

Rod D. Martin: Well, this is all about Greenland, isn’t it?

The Polar Silk Road is very deliberately taking the route around Russia to Europe, not the route around Canada to Europe. That is a worthy thing to note.

But in the long run, America just doesn’t have any icebreakers to speak of. We’ve completely ignored the Arctic.

The Chinese aren’t even in the Arctic, and they’re taking the Arctic far more seriously than anybody in the United States except Donald Trump.

Frank Gaffney: They claim to be, I think, an Arctic-adjacent country, if I’m not mistaken.

Rod D. Martin: Well, that’s their spin on it. But if you just look at a map, they’re not actually anywhere near the Arctic. And yet they are now making it a central concern, and we aren’t, aside from the President.

So, yes, this just really underlines the necessity of some deal with Greenland. I keep saying, I think you get to a Compact of Free Association like you have with Palau and the Marshall Islands.

It doesn’t make sense to annex them. But a COFA would solve the long-term problem, for Greenland even more than for the U.S.

Frank Gaffney: Good point, Rod, and right on cue. We have to wrap it there. Thank you so much for joining us, as always. Keep up the great work you do in support, among other things, of the great work we do. God bless you.

And thank you to all of you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time, and that until then you will go forth and multiply.

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by Darlene McCormick Sanchez
August 31, 2026

In a pre-dawn raid in January, Delta Force soldiers burst in on a sleeping Nicolás Maduro, capturing the Venezuelan leader wanted on U.S. narco-terrorism charges.

​The dramatic end of Maduro’s control over a country emblematic of left-wing politics, and one which long supported and funded communist movements and regimes throughout the region, underscored Latin America’s shift to the political right.

​The leadership of five countries in the region has flipped from left to right just in the 20 months since President Donald Trump was re-elected: Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Peru, and Colombia. Uruguay, wedged between socialist Brazil and libertarian-led Argentina, did the opposite, shifting from right to left in November 2024.

​The conservative realignment under Trump comes as his administration has refocused on America’s southern neighbors in what has been dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine” — a play on the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted U.S. dominance over the region.

Gone is the “pink tide,” a wave of “soft” communism that emerged in Latin America in the late 1990s and extended into the 2000s before reemerging in the early 2020s.

The era gave rise to prominent left-wing leaders such as Maduro’s predecessor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Nicaragua’s Chavez-funded dictator Daniel Ortega, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, whose takeover of oil and gas production tanked his country’s economy.

Experts believe a combination of Trump’s influence, along with economic and security concerns — two areas of strength for conservative candidates — has triggered a reversal of fortunes for leftist governments in the region.

​Trump endorsed a number of right‑wing candidates in Latin America, an unusual step for an American president. In December 2025, he endorsed Chile’s José Antonio Kast, who won a landslide election against the communist candidate Jeannette Jara in December 2025. That same month, ​Nasry Asfura, a Trump-backed conservative, snatched victory away from Honduras’s socialist government.

The president also supported Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella, who this year edged out Iván Cepeda, a left-wing opponent aligned with outgoing leader Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla.

In four of the five countries, conservatives also made gains in their respective legislatures. Only Colombia saw the left actually gain legislative seats, but neither side holds a majority in its two chambers.

In Bolivia, no party won an outright majority, but the conservative government became the largest force in both chambers of its legislature, while conservative factions together make up a supermajority in both chambers of Bolivia’s government. The former leftist government retained only two seats.

Honduras’s single legislative chamber gained conservative seats on the coattails of Asfura’s victory. In Chile’s legislature, a conservative coalition controls the lower chamber, while the upper chamber is evenly split. Likewise, Peru’s conservative bloc holds a plurality but not a majority in the lower chamber, while the upper chamber is evenly divided.

Crime and Economics

Latin America’s conservative trend was sparked by the abject failure of leftist governments, which led to increased organized crime, reduced opportunity, inflation, and in some cases, near-starvation. ​Of 16 democracies with populations greater than 1 million people, 10 have changed political direction since 2022, mostly from left to right, according to the report and recent updates.

Of those examined, only Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and Uruguay currently have left-wing governments.

Venezuela, which isn’t counted as a democracy, remains in political limbo after Maduro’s removal, leaving his Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as interim president. Opposition leaders have stated that new elections could take place within nine months, and though past elections have been blatantly stolen, regularly scheduled elections were nevertheless held consistently during the socialist dictatorship, and the U.S. presence should ensure election integrity.

Elsewhere, Cuba remains under communist control that took root in the 1950s, though the regime is hanging by a thread. Another country not included in the survey was Nicaragua, ruled by 1980s communist dictator Daniel Ortega, then a puppet of Cuba and the Soviets, whose return to power was funded by Chavez in 2007. He recently announced the nation would cease to hold elections entirely.

Guyana, which has about 1 million residents, holds democratic elections but remains firmly in the grasp of socialists, despite increasing reliance on the United States.

​Just as Maduro’s demise signaled the end of the old communist guard, figures such as Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding leader Javier Milei symbolize the rise of conservative populist leaders.

​“Figures such as Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador embody the new political mood with their populist strategies, while moderate conservatives such as Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic prioritize stability and pragmatism,” according to a report from Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

U.S. policy has reinforced the region’s conservative vibe, the report said, leading to positive relationships with right-wing leaders.

​“This is hardly surprising given that Washington recently announced its intent to actively support like-minded political forces in the Western Hemisphere, to expand trade relations, and to stabilize Latin American countries in line with its own interests,” the report states.

‘Trump Effect’

Joshua Trevino, senior director for the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said ​having a conservative in the White House has driven change in Latin America.

Trump’s influence and policies have contributed to Latin America turning away from socialism and communism, he said.

“So what we see is a Trump administration effect to a lot of it,” he said. “We can have a lot more open optimism in Latin America than we previously did.”

Trump’s foreign policy goals, which refocused on America’s backyard, began almost immediately after he took office in 2025, as he threatened to take back the Panama Canal over the administration’s stance that China had gained control of the critical waterway.

The Trump administration said China’s operation of two critical ports on the canal potentially violated the U.S.–Panama Neutrality Treaty, which was part of the agreement turning over control of the American-built waterway to Panama in 1999.

​Earlier this year, the Panamanian Supreme Court ruled China’s control of the ports unconstitutional, requiring Panama to seize control of the ports.

Andrés Martínez-Fernández, Latin America Senior Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security, said the leaders and people of Latin America are responding to Trump’s willingness to engage with the region.

​“I think it is really being noted, by not just leaders in the region, but also voters who see an opportunity to align with the United States,” Martínez-Fernández told The Epoch Times.

Historically and culturally, Latin America has stronger ties to the United States than to communist countries like China, which stepped into the void left by a lack of American engagement in the region over the years.

The Right Security

Domestic and international factors are reshaping current Latin American politics.

Failed left-wing leadership had significant consequences on their respective domestic populations, Martínez-Fernández said.

​Former Colombian leader Petro, for example, negotiated conditional ceasefires directly with various guerrilla and criminal factions rather than relying solely on military force. The result was increased insecurity, violence, and organized crime activity, Martínez-Fernández said.

Security failures under socialist governments helped usher in conservatives who were tough on crime.

​“It’s one reason that [Peruvian President] Keiko Fujimori, almost from the moment she took office, imposed the state of emergency and announced that there’s going to be a crime crackdown,” Trevino said.

Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori said in her inaugural speech on July 28 that the military would temporarily lead security operations in crime-ridden areas. During her campaign, she vowed to take a hardline approach to violent crime, similar to that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

Likewise, citizens are seeking law and order, particularly those in cartel-infiltrated nations such as Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, he added.

Trump’s efforts to engage Latin American countries on shared security challenges surrounding narco-terrorists will likely retain American influence in the region.

One tool for that is the Shield of the Americas, a security and intelligence coalition designed to stop narco-terrorist gangs. The Trump administration launched the coalition in March.

Also in March, the Paraguayans approved a status-of-forces agreement allowing American forces to deploy in Paraguay for the first time.

“I would keep an eye on all that because there is an evolving U.S. military infrastructure in Latin America in particular, that I think is going to be with us for a very long time, and that too is going to have a political effect,” Trevino said.

​​Inflation and Politics

Amid inflation and a cash crunch that crippled flour imports, bread became a symbol of Bolivia’s economic crisis prior to the country’s elections in 2025. Bolivians were paying the same government-fixed price, but a loaf of bread had dwindled to about half its former size, as bakers cut size and quality.

Bolivia isn’t a country known for a high cost of living to begin with, yet people were struggling to survive under socialism.

As with crime, Latin Americans trusted conservatives at the polls more than liberals to help them economically.

“There’s a cost of living crisis around the world right now,” Trevino said. “It’s affected Latin America just as much as anywhere else. It is 100 percent made worse by socialist policies.”

Likewise, Argentina’s economic crisis under socialism was the catalyst for political change. The country’s “social welfare” government was in such shambles, with inflation soaring to 100 percent, that voters were open to trying someone new and elected Milei in 2023.

As a free-market capitalist, his election proved especially important for Argentina.

In 2025, the Trump administration announced a $20 billion currency swap with Argentina’s central bank. Under the deal, the U.S. Treasury agreed to purchase $20 billion in pesos in exchange for U.S. dollars to help Argentina stabilize its currency.

​The Buenos Aires stock market surged 15 percent on news of the deal, potentially averting currency devaluation ahead of that country’s midterms, which Milei’s party won. His government promptly repaid the draw on the fund in full.

​Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised Trump’s strategy of peace through economic strength, posting on X in January that his boss was “transforming Latin America in ways that are America First, surrounding the United States with stability and prosperity.”

Gaining Ground

Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung noted in its report that young people on social media were accelerating the region’s conservative shift.

Martinez-Fernandez agreed, saying Latin American youth have lived their entire lives under left-wing policies, have seen them go awry, and are driving change. However, the conservative shift in Latin America remains tenuous.

Older citizens are more leery of the right-wing dictators of the 1980. If the razor-thin victories in Peru and Colombia are any indication, then the pendulum might well swing back to the left.

Yet renewed U.S. engagement in the Western Hemisphere will likely put a thumb on the scale in the future.

“That is going to be a shift in the kind of underlying environment for regional politics, which is going to favor a more consistent pro-U.S. posturing than we have seen in the past,” Martínez-Fernández said.

— This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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by Michael Clary
August 30, 2026

“My daughter was murdered by gender ideology.”

Those are the words of Abigail Martinez, a devout Christian widow in California, who watched the state take her daughter away when she refused to affirm her daughter’s transgender identity. Her daughter, Yaeli, was struggling with depression and her sexuality, so a school psychologist recommended she join the school’s LGBT club (without Abigail’s knowledge or consent). When Abigail discovered what was happening, she refused to affirm her daughter’s transition, so the state removed her from her home.

Activists told Martinez to hold a funeral for her daughter and celebrate the adoption of a “son.” They told her she’d never see Yaeli again if she kept talking about God.

Not long after this, Yaeli killed herself.

When Martinez later testified before Congress, she said her daughter’s death was a murder. Gender ideology killed her.

Now, ask yourself a question. How many Christian leaders and churches have been outspoken about the dangers of gender ideology? How many pastors will boldly and unflinchingly denounce homosexuality, gay “marriage,” transgenderism, and the whole array of LGBT sins? Even though there is a growing movement of courageous pastors speaking out, the reality is, over the last 20 years or so, many of them have been silent.

I’m a pastor. Over more than 20 years in ministry, I’ve watched a theology take root in American evangelicalism that trains Christians to be silent in the face of all kinds of cultural tyranny. It’s a theology that says the church is at her best when she’s losing. It says we should not seek cultural influence because that would only corrupt us. Further, it says we should not seek political power because that’s beneath us. Our only public duty is to do evangelism, because eternal destinies are all that really matters. The culture war is just a distraction.

I call this loser theology, and it has done great damage to the modern church. Further, it harms society by causing Christians to disengage as the greatest conscience-shaping force in our culture.

Loser theology is promoted by prominent advocates, though that’s not what they call it. Russell Moore, one of the most influential evangelical voices of the last decade and former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, wrote in his 2015 book that “the Bible Belt is teetering toward collapse, and I say let it fall.” He argued the church is most faithful when she exists as a “persecuted minority,” never a “moral majority.” He says Christians are better witnesses as cultural losers rather than winners.

That may sound humble, but it isn’t. It’s simply waving the white flag of surrender to cultural powers who will eagerly destroy us if given the chance. This theology is custom-built to explain away defeat after defeat, training a generation of Christians to lose and feel good about it. Loser theology regards retreat as a virtue.

When loser theology is a dominant motif of modern evangelicalism, what do you think will happen? We don’t have to guess. The same year Moore’s book came out (2015), the Supreme Court invented a right to “gay marriage” in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In the six years that followed, public support for gay marriage skyrocketed to 70 percent. During that same period, LGBTQ identification among Gen Z nearly doubled.

Let that sink in. Roughly one-fifth of an entire generation of children who were seduced into sexual perversion in the immediate aftermath of Obergefell. The culture didn’t just suddenly change its mind. Rather, people changed their minds because powerful people signaled this was the new morality.

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And where was the church? She was largely silent because many Christians believed we should just focus on soul-winning rather than culture-warring. Thus, LGBT activism marched on, unopposed.

None of this happened because the culture simply changed its mind. Rather, it happened because the church had abandoned its post as the most powerful conscience-shaping institution in the world.

Obergefell has already done its damage, and it will be very difficult to get that toothpaste back in the tube. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian parents are now losing custody battles over their kids’ gender identities because their churches never gave them a theological framework for resistance, only permission to suffer and lose. And when the church loses her spine, the sheep are left without protection.

Other battles are ongoing and have yet to be settled where Christians need to assert a strong, prophetic voice. As Islam is already taking Europe hostage, its footprint in America continues to expand. Is it too late? Will we lose this battle also? We certainly will if the church is convinced that our only job is to ignore the culture and just do evangelism. And if we lose the culture, we will be ruled by a jihadist religious system that has no scruples against wielding power to crush its enemies.

That’s what Islam is. It’s a system of domination with a religious veneer. They will not simply coexist with us if we let them win.

So, should we let them win so we can be losers for Jesus? If so, how else might we choose to lose? How about family courts, school boards, and city councils? The pattern repeats across every civic institution because the best people to hold the line have been taught for two generations that line-holding is somebody else’s job.

Here’s the part that should bother you most, whether you’re a churchgoer or not. This isn’t happening because Christians are cowards. They’re not. It’s happening because many of them have been discipled to regard passivity as a form of holiness. They’ve been trained to think losing is “the way of the cross” because “Jesus calls us to be weak.”

These statements sound pious, but they profoundly misunderstand scripture. Yes, when we are weak, he is strong, but scripture never commands us to pursue weakness as an end in itself.

I’ve sat across from men and women in my office who suppress every instinct toward leadership and strength because they’ve absorbed the idea that ambition is sin and confidence is pride. I’ve watched churches refuse to speak plainly about cultural evil because plain speech might be regarded as unkind. This is no accident. It was discipled into people, one sermon at a time.

In short, some Christians are afraid of winning because we’ve been conditioned to believe power can only be used for evil purposes, never as a force for good. That’s not true. To be sure, scripture is full of warnings about the corrupting potential of power, but Jesus also promises to give his people power, and he expects us to wield it righteously (Acts 1:8).

Further, there’s a difference between refusing to worship power and refusing to use it at all. The same Christ who died on a cross now reigns at the right hand of the Father, and scripture says every knee will bow to Him — kings and nations included. That’s not a losing vision. The men and women who built the church that shaped Western civilization understood this. They didn’t do it by convincing themselves that losing was the point.

If you’ve ever sat in a pew wondering why your church seems allergic to contesting anything, or why every act of Christian courage gets treated with more suspicion than every act of Christian retreat, that’s not your imagination, nor is it biblical faithfulness. It’s loser theology. It’s a theology of defeat that’s presented as humility. And it’s long past time we reject it and step into the arena where we belong.

— Michael Clary is the Lead Pastor of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. His latest book, Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth is now available.

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by Rod D. Martin
August 29, 2026

Canada is furious about “Lake America.”

President Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario has been received north of the border as one more intolerable act of American arrogance: an insult to Canadian sovereignty, an affront to Canadian dignity, perhaps even proof that the United States has become a threat.

Trump is trolling, of course. But as always, the trolling isn’t random. Negotiation, like poker, is a contest in emotional control: the player who keeps his head can manipulate the one who loses his. Trump is deliberately provoking Canada because anger clouds judgment, wounded pride invites mistakes, and an emotional opponent is easier to maneuver. Canada keeps responding with outrage and claims of betrayal. Trump keeps provoking it because the provocation keeps working.

So before Canada climbs too high onto its familiar moral pedestal, a position of condescending “sophistication” all too familiar to Canadian governments, this might be a good time to remember that, within the lifetimes of my grandparents, Canadian military officers drew up a serious plan to invade the United States.

Not a joke. Not an American accusation. Fact.

It was called Defence Scheme No. 1.

Canada’s Plan to Invade America

Prepared in 1920–21 under Lt. Col. James “Buster” Sutherland Brown, Canada’s Director of Military Operations and Intelligence, Defence Scheme No. 1 contemplated a Canadian offensive against the United States. The document remained part of Canadian military planning for years; copies were ordered destroyed in October 1933.

Canada was not then a geopolitically detached neighbor. It was a Dominion of the British Empire, the world’s foremost military power, allied to Japan, and still a potential wartime enemy.

Canada’s ports, railways, industry and armed forces were therefore not merely Canadian assets; they were part of an imperial system that could be turned against the United States. In any Anglo-American war, American planners had to treat Canada as Britain’s (and Japan’s) continental bridgehead.

Brown was planning from the other side of the same strategic fact: Canada was the Empire’s forward position in North America — and, with barely one-twelfth America’s population and its own industrial heartland pressed against the border, also its most exposed.

Brown summarized the problem with brutal clarity:

“The first thing apparent then in the defence of Canada is that we lack depth.”

And then came the answer:

“Depth can only be gained by Offensive Action.”

That is the heart of the plan — and of this story.

Canada could not manufacture strategic depth inside Canada, so Brown proposed taking it, violently, from the United States. Canadian forces would strike first, cross the border in fast-moving columns, seize or raid key territory, disrupt American mobilization, and wreck railways and infrastructure that might be used in an American counterattack.

The Pacific force would drive toward Spokane and Seattle. Troops from the Prairie provinces would move toward Fargo and Minneapolis–St. Paul, seizing key U.S. rail junctions and protecting Canada’s vulnerable east-west communications. Other forces would raid across the Great Lakes frontier, push toward Albany and New York City, and press into Maine.

The plan was audacious, in much the same way as Manstein’s and Guderian’s plans for the invasion of France. It’s easy to write it off as comical or hopeless, but it wasn’t: it was conceived as part of a struggle between a much weaker America and one or more of the world’s then-greatest powers. It was also recognizably serious military planning by officers confronting a real geographic predicament.

The object was not to plant the Maple Leaf permanently over American cities. It was to help win a wider war — one Canada had to plan for because it belonged to an alliance system radically different from today’s.

At the opening of the 1920s, Britain was still bound to Japan by the Anglo-Japanese alliance. American officials worried that, even if conflict with the British seemed unlikely after World War I, a war between the United States and Japan might obligate Britain to take Japan’s side (and in case you missed it, worrying about Japan was probably a good idea).

Canada could not vote itself out of geography. Decisions made in London or Tokyo could place it in a war Ottawa did not initiate. Defence Scheme No. 1 was the answer. It looks fantastic now only because the world that made it plausible has disappeared.

If Japan attacked America, and Britain fought beside Japan, Canada would become the nearest and most exposed British front. The peaceful North American order and alliance structure we now take for granted did not yet exist. With Canada’s socialists cozying up to China in recent years, that new order might not be permanent now either: very little in life is.

The United States understood this too. American planners developed War Plan Red in 1930, for the same hypothetical conflict with the British Empire. In its color-coded vocabulary Britain was “Red” and Canada was “Crimson.” The plan called for American operations into Canada, including attacks designed to sever Canadian communications, capture Halifax before Britain could use it, and deprive the Empire of Canada as a base against the United States.

Together these plans establish something modern statesmen forget at their peril: today’s alignments are not laws of nature. Serious countries plan for circumstances that current diplomats find unthinkable. These were staff plans, not declarations of national hatred. That makes them more instructive, not less. Strategic circumstances can change profoundly while people remain friendly and diplomats continue exchanging pleasantries. Within a decade of War Plan Red, Americans and Canadians would be fighting side by side against Hitler, and in point of fact, Japan.

But this seeming historical footnote reminds us of the crucial point: Alliances shift. Geography does not. Or as Lord Palmerston famously put it, nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

That may not sound “nice”. It doesn’t make it any less true.

How America Solved Canada’s Problem

What made war between America and Canada effectively inconceivable was not some “enlightened” Canadian discovery of pacifism. What changed was the strategic structure.

The United States became the supreme power in the Western Hemisphere and then the leader of the free world. American military predominance secured the continent. Japan was flattened, occupied, and remade as an American ally. Canada and a greatly weakened Britain joined an American-led alliance. American and Canadian defense became deeply integrated. NORAD joined the defense of North American airspace. The American nuclear umbrella, Navy, Air Force and industrial base made an attack on Canada almost indistinguishable from an attack on the United States.

That transformation was built through wartime cooperation, permanent defense institutions, shared warning systems, integrated supply chains, and decades of American willingness to make Canadian security and prosperity part of its own strategic order. At the height of its postwar power, America did not exploit Canada’s weakness. It chose instead to make Canada’s defense one of its own national interests.

The economic bargain followed the same logic. After World War II, the United States deliberately tolerated asymmetric trade arrangements and carried a disproportionate share of the defense burden. Rebuilding allied economies and keeping them inside the American-led order were strategic necessities in the struggle against Communism.

Canada’s free ride was not originally theft. It was an American strategic subsidy with a purpose.

The Cold War ended. Much of the subsidy did not. And the free ride turned into freeloading.

How Charity Became an Entitlement

Unfortunately, success and the passage of time produced amnesia. Canada became accustomed to extraordinary access to the American market, extraordinary protection from American military power, and extraordinary latitude to criticize the country supplying both. A persistent strand of Canadian nationalism came to define Canada not by what it was, but by what it imagined America to be: cruder, greedier, more militaristic, less humane. The condescension reeks.

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Now you mustn’t misunderstand. Friends disagree, and the entire Trump Doctrine is about standing up partners strong enough to do so. America wants allies who open their markets as much as we’ve opened ours, who can defend themselves in a fight, and who are sovereign rather than subject to the sort of unelected globalist elites Mark Carney prefers. No one minds Canadians speaking their minds, or differing at times. But hectoring like a teenager in our basement is quite another thing, especially when its room is a mess and it’s demanding the car keys.

Today, Canada treats the benefits of the relationship as permanent entitlements, while treating reciprocity as American aggression. That’s just not okay.

Consider the current trade dispute. The United States offered Canada the most preferential trade deal it has ever offered any country, including major concessions in steel, aluminum, autos, lumber and other sectors. Even Carney acknowledged that negotiations had been moving Canada toward what he called the “best deal in the world with the U.S.” Canada agreed to that deal — and then reneged, denouncing Washington and turning defiance of Trump into a politically useful display for his socialist base.

This was not an innocent Canada minding its own business. This was not Trump attacking it without cause. It was Mark Carney threatening to hold his breath until he turns blue.

Dairy alone makes the point. Canada sells freely into the American market while its supply-management system walls off favored sectors at home. Above-quota tariffs have reached 245 percent on cheese and 298 percent on butter. That’s not a tax: it’s an embargo. But Canada won’t say that, because embargoes are an act of war, and Canadians are supposed to be “nice”.

It gets worse. Under USMCA, Canada promised new access for American dairy and fair administration of the quotas through which that access was supposed to occur. It lied. The dispute persisted, and American farmers continued to face barriers Ottawa would never tolerate in reverse.

Milk is not a pretext. Defending American farmers is precisely the President’s job. Reciprocity is simple fairness. And the postwar logic that allowed wide-ranging access to the world’s largest consumer market without that reciprocity has long ceased to exist.

Ditto for defense. NATO’s own figures show Canada spending just 1.01 percent of GDP on defense in 2014 and 1.47 percent in 2024. Canada finally reached an estimated 2.01 percent in 2025, and that increase is welcome. But Ottawa’s new $63 billion total includes more than $14 billion spread across other departments and whole-of-government security functions, little of which meaningfully contributes to North American defense.

A last-minute sprint to yesterday’s target does not erase a generation of freeloading on American taxpayers’ defense budgets. That’s not partnership in any sense of the word.

All of this gets much more galling when you compare who needs whom.

In 2025, 71.7 percent of Canada’s exports went to the United States. There’s a reason, and it’s structural: there’s very little Carney can do to change it, and even less that he’s willing to change. Take, for example, oil. Alberta would dearly love to expand pipeline access and thus exports, and rightly so. Yet the socialists continually block pipeline expansion toward the Pacific, or even to Eastern Canada. Trump knows what Carney has forgotten: if Ottawa wants a real trade war, cutting off access to American pipelines leaves Ontario shivering in the dark.

Ninety percent of Canada’s population and industry is concentrated within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Its automotive, energy, transportation and manufacturing systems were built around deep integration with the American economy. China can’t replace that market. Europe can’t replace it. Twenty new trade agreements can’t move Toronto, Montreal, Windsor or Calgary away from the United States. And Canada’s domestic politics only compound the problem.

Canada has no Plan B because geography has not provided one.

Friendship is not sentimentality, and even if it were, the American government’s sentiment belongs first with its own farmers and businesses, not with any foreign country’s. Likewise, an alliance is not something nations sign, frame and hang in a museum. It’s a relationship in which partners are supposed to contribute equally, or at least proportionately. Without true burden-sharing, what’s the point?

A century ago, Canadian officers mapped routes into American cities because the international order of their time made war entirely conceivable. American officers later mapped routes north for the same reason. Just one generation later, the two countries were intimate allies. The map didn’t change. The alignment of power and interest did. What exists today cannot be counted on to exist forever: it must be maintained, to the benefit of both. And if not, it sometimes must be reassessed.

Alliances shift.

Geography does not.

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by Rod D. Martin
August 28, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Don Ma to discuss why Mark Carney and Doug Ford cannot replace the American market or escape Ottawa’s self-inflicted energy trap. Trump knows exactly how much leverage he has.

We discuss:

• How Chinese EV dumping threatens America’s auto industry…and how Canada uses the current trade regime to enable that

• Why Canada’s China pivot is mostly a bluff

• How Ottawa made Canada oil dependent on America

• The end of American compartmentalization: how Trump links trade, borders, and defense

• PLUS, Scott Bessent’s “economic D-Day” against Iran, and how it targets China, the Gulf States, and Western Europe

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Our full discussion:

Iran’s Oman Gambit and Midterm Elections Strategy

Don Ma: Joining us now to discuss whether the U.S.-Canada trade dispute could be related to national security and China is Rod Martin, geopolitical analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital.

Rod, as always, thank you for being here with us.

How big of an element could China be in this Canada-U.S. trade dispute? Canada is opening up its auto industry to China and potential Chinese investment, allowing close to 50,000 Chinese EVs per year into the country. How are you reading this dispute between Canada and the United States with this element of China?

Rod D. Martin: Needless to say, there are several levels to it. But addressing the EV issue is actually quite important, and it is something Ottawa acknowledged in the talks up until the point where Mark Carney decided to hold his breath until he turned blue.

If you listen to his speech the other day explaining his withdrawal from the agreement, Carney was very clear: The American concerns are legitimate. They are understandable. We do not even necessarily disagree with them. We just do not like how Donald Trump says it.

That is a really stupid reason to mess up your own economy. It is just dumb.

Donald Trump is incredibly focused on things like the Chinese EV issue, which is just another case of dumping. It is another unfair trade practice by the communist Chinese: using steeply subsidized products manufactured in China. These cars may not be manufactured by slave labor, but a lot of what they manufacture is.

They take those things that are cheap because of their cheating and sell them radically below what an American or European company can possibly compete with. In that way, they drive American and European companies out of business through unfair trade practices and unfair competition that would send you to prison if you tried it here.

So yes, the President is laser-focused on that. He absolutely intends to protect our auto industry. And the truth is, Mark Carney and Doug Ford should be too.

There are a bunch of U.S. car plants in Ontario in particular. If those moved to Tennessee, Ontario would lose tens of thousands of jobs. That may sound like crazy talk, but Ford just announced it is pulling out of China and moving all its manufacturing out of there. There is no reason it could not move out of Canada too.

Canada’s China Bluff

Don Ma: Why does it seem like China is potentially moving closer, or Canada is seemingly moving closer to China? Look at China’s record. It does not have a reliable one when it comes to being a trade partner. I would imagine Canada is not completely naive to it. What is the motivation behind this new relationship?

Rod D. Martin: Honestly, most of this is the equivalent of Donald Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Of course, I say that sitting here where, if you look out my window, you can see the Gulf of America, which he also renamed.

I think a lot of the Canadian cozying up to the communist Chinese is in that vein. It is jockeying for position.

Canada is in a vastly weaker position in this negotiation. Make no mistake, this negotiation is not over. We are going to get to a deal, or I am reasonably certain we will. But Carney wants to give the impression that he has options. China is a scary, scary option, or at least it should be, except that we know better.

The truth is that 70 percent of Canada’s exports go to the United States. By contrast, just 14 percent of U.S. exports go to Canada. We could sell that stuff somewhere else if we wanted to. It would not be that hard. It would not make a dent in our economy.

If Canada loses 70 percent of its exports, it is in a depression.

So it is jockeying. It is a little bit of playing chicken, but I think there is a logical end to it.

Ottawa’s Self-Imposed Pipeline Trap

Rod D. Martin: The other piece is that you cannot just shift those exports around. A lot of what Canada exports cannot go to France, cannot go to China, and honestly cannot even go to Eastern Canada.

More than anything else, I am talking about oil. Canada’s oil goes to the United States. We sell it for them on the Gulf Coast, and we use a lot of it here at home.

But the same socialist government in Canada that honestly has an affinity for Beijing, because they are socialists too, has done everything in its power to block pipelines that could give relief to the economy of Alberta.

Carney makes a big show of saying, “We are going to expand the pipeline capacity going to British Columbia so we can sell to Asia.” Then he allows the First Nations to completely block it.

It is the same thing in the East. There was a pipeline on order to link Alberta directly to Eastern Canada through Canada. The government blocked it.

So guess what? All of the oil that has to be shipped from Western Canada to Eastern Canada flows through the United States. If they really want to have a trade war, we just close the pipeline. Ontario is shivering in the dark.

Trade, Borders, and an Unequal Relationship

Don Ma: Earlier, we played a package of one of our reporters asking people on the street whether they think Canada is trying to gain short-term benefits that could lead to long-term security issues with this deal with China.

From what I heard you describe, it seems like Canada would not even get short-term benefits. It would just get long-term security concerns.

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Rod D. Martin: As long as Canada remains a NATO ally — and considering Mark Carney’s greatest desire is to get Canada to join the European Union, it is certainly not leaving NATO — as long as that is true, Canada is not going to allow Chinese bases in Canada.

What it is going to do is give the Chinese economic advantages to tweak Trump. That hurts us through the mechanism I described earlier. It is the dumping more than anything else.

But Canada also has crazy, loose immigration laws. Any terrorist, intelligence agent, jihadi, or anybody else in the world who wants to come to America can get here through Canada. That is one of the things under discussion: You guys actually have to get control of your borders, or we are going to have to get control of ours.

This is a serious national-security issue, and it directly impinges on China.

In the long run, the Canadians really do need us. I am not saying we do not need them. We just do not need them anywhere near as much. There is a significant power imbalance.

In addition to the relative export percentages I just gave you, think about it this way: The United States economy is more than ten times the size of Canada’s. We can absorb an awful lot of goods that might otherwise have gone somewhere else without finding another export partner. The truth is that we have.

Donald Trump has concluded deals with countries representing two-thirds of the gross domestic product of the entire planet, and we are 26 percent of the entire world economy ourselves.

Where does Canada go? It can absolutely make our life annoying and difficult. What it cannot do is affect the American economy in any lasting way.

Canadian Freeloading in Trade and Defense

Don Ma: You are essentially saying that Canada’s dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs, around $20 billion, simply cannot be sustained long-term. This is just a way to gain negotiating leverage.

Rod D. Martin: Yes. It is a catastrophe for Canada. You would not want to own a business in Canada that is trying to deal with this.

I actually had an investor call this morning with a Canadian firm. They are doing wonderful things with cutting-edge technology, and they are having to restructure things around Mark Carney’s crazy pullout from this trade deal. It is causing enormous disruption.

In the short term, it helps Mark Carney’s poll numbers, because the socialists up there just love tweaking Trump, and so do no small number of conservatives. Doug Ford is just nuts. I do not know what he is thinking.

Those guys want to play this game, and they are hoping beyond hope that they do not actually have to accept a fair trade deal.

The truth is, they have been nuking our dairy farmers for decades with 280 percent tariffs on dairy. I am sorry, but you are just blocking us out of your market. It is the same thing on a bunch of other products, including softwoods. It is just grossly unfair.

Throw into that the fact that Canada’s military has atrophied so much. This is a country that was a major combatant in World War II. Canada performed heroically in the most important war in world history, and today, honestly, it couldn’t fight off a Boy Scout troop.

It is a joke. Canada is freeloading on the American taxpayer and the American defense budget.

Trump sees all of this holistically. Past administrations wanted to compartmentalize all these different aspects and deal with them one by one. Trump sees it as one big thing.

Canada is going to have to get serious about its defense-spending commitment. It is going to have to get serious about actually putting hulls in the water, planes in the sky, and doing the things it needs to do with its own money, not ours.

We will help Canada get richer if it will just accept a fair deal in which we have the same market access in Canada that it has in the United States.

Scott Bessent’s Economic D-Day

Don Ma: President Trump has said for decades that Canada has been ripping off the United States when it comes to trade.

I want to ask you one last thing about what our White House correspondent reported earlier: President Trump may be considering actions to punish China through economic pressure. The United States might sanction Chinese banks for assisting Iran.

If the United States does that, will it jeopardize Trump’s relationship with Xi Jinping? Should the United States punish China for helping Iran?

Rod D. Martin: Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, what Scott Bessent announced the other day is toothless, and nobody will ever take us seriously again.

I have to say, Scott Bessent is the best Treasury Secretary this country has had since Alexander Hamilton. This guy is a brainiac, and he knows how all the pieces fit together.

When he gets up there and says, “We have designed a package that adds up to an Economic D-Day for Iran,” he is not fooling around. This is a guy who helped execute the breaking of the British pound, for heaven’s sake. He knows what he is doing.

At this point, we have closed Iran’s ports. They cannot get anything in or out. We have discussed on your show several times that there just are not enough ships on the Caspian Sea. There just are not enough railways from Iran to China, or anywhere else for that matter. There is no way to close that gap.

They have to have their sea lanes, and we have closed them.

So what is left to do? We are starving them out. The speaker of the Iranian parliament literally said the other day, “We are starving here. We cannot sustain this.”

What is left that you can take from them? You can take their allies. You can take the people who are still surreptitiously supporting them.

That is not just China. It includes several Middle Eastern and even European allied countries, such as Britain and France, that have facilitated Iranian shadow banking for decades despite the sanctions. They have violated those sanctions again and again and again.

The United States Treasury is about to smack them all.

Don Ma: Rod, we always appreciate your comments. Thank you for your time today.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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