Trip the Beltway Fantastic With Kelley Vlahos and Friends

On Monday President Trump signed an agreement with Arab leaders that has been called a “miracle” and “historic.” It has largely (so far) paused the Israeli onslaught in the Gaza strip and served to release the remaining live Israeli hostages held by Hamas and upwards of 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Before attending the signing ceremony in Egypt, Trump was feted in triumph by Israeli officials at the Knesset. Aside from bestowing on him the moniker “President of Peace” they said he would be remembered “as a giant of Jewish history, one for whom we must look back two and a half millennia into the mists of time to find a parallel. Cyrus the Great. Donald J Trump, you are a colossus who will join the pantheon of history,” said Amir Ohana, Speaker of the Knesset. He referred to the 6th century BC Persian King who liberated the Jews from Babylonia to create their own self-governing province in the Persian Empire, also known as the Second Temple period.

Benjamin Netanyahu was also met with thunderous applause and a long standing ovation, as was Steve Witkoff, whose name was even chanted. In his own remarks Trump went on for nearly an hour, charting the litany of things he had done for Israel since his first presidency, including recognizing the Israeli capital in Jerusalem, and acknowledging right there that it was due to the aggressive lobbying of the billionaires Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. They were strange speeches overall, in that the word “Palestinians” only came up once, even though the deal was to eventually afford the Palestinian people the same self-rule the Jewish people had enjoyed thanks to Cyrus in 540 BC.

The speeches, too, mentioned very little about the United States, other than Washington had given everything it could — including $21.7 billion in taxpayer dollars — to the Israeli cause over the last two years. Trump even boasted that he had approved every weapon Netanyahu had asked for, even ones he never knew existed.

This week I brought in my friend Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor to the show, because after the dust settles, one wonders what any of this has to do with America and the vaunted America First foreign policy that Trump had been promising since 2016. For the last two years, Americans have been told this was “our fight too” but it was never properly explained. It’s been clear in polling that Americans haven’t been convinced either, even Republicans are waning more visibly in their support for giving Israel everything it wants in order to wage a war that has resulted in the collective punishment and deaths of more than 67,000 Gazans, most of them civilians. 

Today, Gaza is in ruins and we are being told it was worth it. Was it?

This week Secretary of State Pete Hegseth called every single admiral and general to Virginia where the Pentagon is located for a meeting. It turned out to be a pair of speeches from Hegseth and President Donald Trump about what they are declaring to be the new American military era.

In his own words, Hegseth described it as “no more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for war fighters.” 

“We are warriors. We are purpose built, not for fair weather, blue skies or calm seas. We're built to load up in the back of helicopters, five tons of zodiacs in the dead of night, in fair weather or foul, to go to dangerous places to find to find those who would do our nation harm and deliver justice on behalf of the American people, in close and brutal combat, if necessary. You are different. We fight not because we hate what's in front of us. We fight because we love what's behind us.”

OUT are rules of engagement that restrict the necessary force, DEI, and “fat generals” walking the halls of the Pentagon. IN is a warrior ethos that only focuses on the “M” (military) and builds pride in that ethos. OUT is the word “defense.” IN is “killing and breaking things.”

Trump followed with a much less cogent speech, at one point saying he wanted to make American cities National Guard training grounds and talked about the “enemy within.” Given that he has or is threatening to send troops to a number of U.S. cities over crime and anti-ICE “rioting” this immediately sparked another wave of panic in the press and among American Constitutionalists. 

This also comes as the president and his administration appears to be leaning into a renewed Drug War, particularly military action against Venezuela, and proposals for a new Authorization for Military Force targeting “narco-terrorists” that could, in practice, see U.S. military force used in upwards of 60 countries if not the homeland itself. 

And, according to the New York Times this week, not only are there Marco Rubio-efforts within the administration to engage in a regime change operation in Venezuela, but on Thursday the paper reported that the administration has decided that the U.S. is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels that his team has labeled terrorist organizations, and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants.” This was conveyed by the administration in a confidential notice to Congress this week. 

There have been plenty of calls for military reform, even shaving the top officer ranks and instituting radical reforms to the culture of the institution, which has become sclerotic in its thinking, detached from American life and people, and unaccountable for its failures and corruptions.

But is what Trump is doing the right way to go? I put this question to two veterans I most respect. Brandan Buck is a scholar and fellow at the CATO institute and an Afghanistan veteran. Dan McKnight is the founder and director of “Bring Our Troops Home” and also a veteran of the Afghanistan War.

The Trump Administration reportedly has a plan to reconstruct Gaza into a Riviera on the Mediterranean. What does that mean? According to reports, President Trump, with the help of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, have laid out details for the total real estate redevelopment of the war torn Gaza Strip. This of course would require the relocation of the two million people, or what is left of the Palestinians after two years of war, who live there.

According to the Washington Post this week, it is euphemistically called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust.

The proposal “was developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)” which is operating the Hunger Games-like food distribution centers at which more than 2000 Gazans have been killed, mostly from getting shot or shelled from Israeli military tanks. The financial planning and prospectus was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group, which has now distanced itself from the project. 

The plans, according to Washington Post, call for “a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls ‘voluntary’ departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.”

“Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new ‘AI-powered, smart cities’ to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food.”

The plan estimates that every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000, compared with the cost of housing them somewhere in the Strip while the reconstruction takes place — so a financial incentive to push as many Palestinians out of Gaza as possible.

Gaza’s western waterfront would be reserved for the “Gaza Trump Riviera,” boasting “world-class resorts” with the possibility of artificial islands similar to the palm-shaped ones built off the UAE city of Dubai.

For many who have been watching this nightmare in Gaza unfold, the details of the plan do not come as a surprise. Not only did Trump announce something like this was coming shortly after his inauguration, Kushner was interviewed at Harvard in March 2024 before Trump was elected saying there was “very valuable” potential in Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip. 

Since then of course, tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli forces and they are being deliberately starved as the Netanyahu Government makes it untenable to live there. Families are being forced completely from the North of the Strip and from Gaza City as a military incursion began in earnest this week. There are no serious signs of the war abating or a ceasefire agreement coming into fruition.

The prospects of Kushner leading a real estate bonanza in this hellscape is, even beyond what we’ve seen over the last 22 months, a little hard to swallow. Here to talk about it with me are Jon Hoffman, a Middle East research fellow at the CATO Institute, and Rawan Abhari, who serves as an advocacy associate at the Quincy Institute.

The big Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, followed by the extraordinary convocation of European leaders, along with Ukrainian President Zelensky and Trump’s team on Monday at the White House, signaled that something is finally happening. The War in Ukraine may be finally coming to an end.

Of course the fighting on the battlefield hasn’t stopped and all parties appear to acknowledge that an immediate ceasefire is not in the cards, at least not until some sort of framework with terms can be sealed. There is also a broad recognition that there will have to be some territorial concessions by Ukraine, which is losing on the battlefield, and some sort of security guarantees for Ukraine after the war short of NATO membership.

But as they say the devil is in the details. The mainstream press was as always skeptical of Trump’s approach but assessed that in a “master class in diplomacy” (I’ll call it butt kissing) Europe had largely gotten what it had wanted — that Trump was listening, and the so-called adults in the room had been heard. 

Others saw things a bit differently. They surmised that Putin would never go for the “Article 5” like guarantees that Trump and the Europeans had been banging on about in front of the press, and certainly Western peacekeepers in Ukraine was a no go. They guessed that Trump was being deliberately vague. Moreover, word on Wednesday was that Putin may never accept a “bilateral” meeting with Zelensky, despite Trump’s assurances that it would happen.

In short there was little substance to come out of the meeting, just a lot of solid if not good vibes. While there is nothing wrong with a positive momentum, the lack of detail could cause a whole lot of crossed wires and given the mistrust and hostilities built up over the years, it wouldn’t be too difficult to see this going south if given certain triggers. 

Two of the best analysts on the Ukraine war joined us this week to sort this all out. James Carden is a writer and publisher of the Realist Review. Mike Vlahos is a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and a weekly contributor on the John Batchelor Show. 

More from Carden: 

Sixty-Three Years, Nothing Has Changed

Presidents Trump and Putin Must Seize the Moment in Alaska

More from Vlahos:

Accepting the Truth About Ukrainian Casualties is the Only Real Path to Peace

America's Military Is in Big Trouble

Hello and welcome to Trip the Beltway Fantastic. On July 17, the only Catholic church in Gaza - the Holy Family Catholic Church – was hit by Israeli fire, killing three, wounding scores of others including the parish priest. Israel says it was a mistake,  a stray tank shelling, igniting a firestorm particularly among American Catholics and Christians, many who had already been shifting support away from Israel on the issue of Gaza.

Catholics including Sohrab Ahmari, who joins us here today, jumped on comments by people like Luke Moon of the Catholic Philos Project, who  lashed out against critics of Israel in the wake of the Holy Family church attack. In comments called “unacceptable” and a “bridge too far,” Moon said ““Church leaders are quick to blame Israel (and Israel has apologized),” he added. “They never speak so clearly about Islamists. They’re afraid to. It’s not courageous to attack the Jews. It’s easy. It’s been easy for almost 2000 years. One would think that the leaders of a billion member Church might not be so afraid, and yet they are.”

Meanwhile Evangelical Christian Joe Berry,  managing editor of the conservative Onion, the Babylon Bee, is probably regretting comments he made about the outcry after the church shelling. He went on a rant saying “this won’t be easy for people to hear, but there are only 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas.” 

“I don’t know about anyone else, but as a Catholic who supports and prays for my persecuted Christian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the Holy Land, I won’t be sharing or boosting anything produced by the Babylon Bee or its anti-Catholic, dispensationalist editors ever again,” wrote author and Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson.

Berry doubled down suggesting this was all an effort to turn Christians against Israel, calling it “​​evil forces trying to break up MAGA along racial and religious sectarian lines and it’s encouraging to know some people of wisdom and discernment see right through it.”

While polling still shows strong Republican support for Israel overall, there is a discernible drop overall of Americans’ tolerance for its war in Gaza after more than 22 months of civilian death, destruction and starvation. There is a notable shift in attitudes, even among Republicans, of Americans under 30. MAGA, which includes a strong faith based element, has been divided over the issue, as Berry said, but the blame, my guests here today are likely to say, are Israel actions and the Trump administration’s inability to stop them, more than “evil forces” trying to systematically divide the coalition.

The disillusionment of course goes far beyond the Catholics. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an Evangelical Christian, has come out to call what is going on in Gaza a genocide and has specifically invoked her faith to explain why she is speaking out so vociferously against the Israeli government on this front. “Yesterday I spoke to a Christian pastor from Gaza. There are children starving. And Christians have been killed and injured, as well as many innocent people. If you are an American Christian, this should be absolutely unacceptable to you,” he posted on X this week. 

Online outrage included Erik Prince, no pacifist or even critic of Israel, who actually accused Israel of taking “pot shots” at the cross on the top of the Holy Family Church. He too said he was finished supporting American funding for Israel’s war on Gaza. He said Hamas “need to die” but "But the real losers are the normal people in Gaza just trying to live.” 

So what is going on here? I wanted to drill down on how Christians and particularly Catholics on the conservative end of the spectrum are part of the backlash against Israel and may play a bigger role in potential policy change where the war is concerned — and what that might look like.

Joining me are the aforementioned Sohrab Ahmari, who is the US bureau chief of Unherd magazine, and author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty – and What to Do About It (2023).

Dave DeCamp, new editor of Antiwar.com and host of Antiwar News

And Andrew Day, writer and editor at the American Conservative magazine

According to the UN this week, some 1054 civilians have been killed trying to get food in Gaza since May. Some 766 of them were killed at food distribution points operated by the Global Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is backed by the U.S. and Israel and uses private military contractors for security. 

These contractors are beginning to come forward with horror stories about their colleagues using live ammunition, stun grenades, and pepper spray in crowd control and may be responsible for shooting civilians. This is vehemently denied by the GHF and the American contracting companies — Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions — but the the reality is that armed American mercenaries are working alongside Israeli military in a combat zone and in a situation in which scores of civilians, desperate for food, are being shot at with guns, tanks, pepper spray and tear gas.

So whatever gave the U.S. government the idea that sending U.S. contractors to do this would be a good thing? While hired guns had been an integral part of U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror, and have worked with governments across the globe on humanitarian and rescue missions, even humanitarian work, this feels different. Biden and now Trump have vowed to keep U.S. military boots off the ground in Israel-Gaza, so is this a way to keep that pledge while assisting Israel directly in its military aims? Does that still make us co-beligerents? What happens if these contractors get hurt or killed while they are there, what if they kill Palestinians? What happens then?

Here to talk about all of this and more this week is Morgan Lerette, a former Blackwater contractor who worked for the company during its infamous time in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and later went back to Iraq as a commissioned Army intelligence officer. Lerette has since written a critical memoir called “Guns, Girls, and Greed: I Was a Blackwater Mercenary in Iraq”

#USmilitary #USmilitarycontractors #Gaza #Israel #GHF #foodaidGaza #MiddleEast #foreignpolicy #nationalsecurity #Blackwater #IDF

The Trump administration is reeling from a potential disaster but one of its own making. 

After months of roiling criticism over DOGE cuts and deportations, Trump has found himself in a situation in which his loyal base is revolting over his refusal to release the Epstein files. Not only that, his administration — including Attorney General Pam Bondi — has gone from saying an infamous Epstein client list does not exist, to asserting the files themselves were “created” by President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and that there is essentially “nothing to see here” but more left-wing attacks whipping up against him.

It would seem that this time, the spin job is not working with MAGA. This follows what is becoming a long hot summer in which the president has seemingly taken a number of foreign policy turns against what many in his base had been expecting: he is now threatening Russian President Putin with tariffs and even bombing him, while pledging more weapons to Ukrainian president Zelensky and in June, decided to bomb Iran and boasted he destroyed its nuclear program when there is no evidence to support that claim. Essentially, no ending the war in Ukraine as promised, and no diplomacy over war in the Middle East as promised. In particular, the base sees deference to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel as the curious common denominator here, given his insistence on an ‘America First’ foreign policy. For many, it just doesn’t feel like it.

Here to talk with me about this are two of the most persistent and capable investigative reporters I know — Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil of the Grayzone. Max, the editor of the Grayzone, has had a long career in journalism publishing widely in the The Nation, Daily Beast, New York Times, Salon, and more, he has also written several books, including the latest The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump 

Anya is a journalist  for Greyzone and a documentary filmmaker whose reporting has taken her to a number of international hot spots and conflict zones including Honduras, the Palestinian territories, the Korean Peninsula and Venezuela. Her  book, Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire was published in 2024.

As the West focuses on and indulges Israel’s wars in the Middle East, U.S. security policy toward China, supposedly the ‘pacing threat’ , seems neglected. Is that such a bad thing?

One of the most interesting threads to come out of the last six months of new Trump foreign policy is that China has not been the focus, other than a tariff war which as of this writing, does not appear to have blown up in the catastrophic ways predicted in the press, at least not yet. While Trump has been perceived as “bullying” other countries into not doing business with Beijing, the U.S. and China last week came to an important trade agreement aimed at deescalating the tensions.

What has been missing is the escalation on the security front. Aside from boilerplate pronouncements by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that China may be an imminent threat to Taiwan and ongoing efforts to rally allies and partners in the region like the Philippines and Pacific Islands to the cause of playing hedge against Beijing, there seems to be a lagging interest in picking a fight with China on that level today.

One could say the administration has its hands full with Ukraine and the Middle East. The first Trump administration identified China as the “pacing threat” and began to shift all of the resources and energy of the military industrial complex in that direction. Realists now in the administration, like Elbridge Colby, now Undersecretary for Policy Planning at the DoD, have charged that the U.S. must extricate from the Ukraine War to focus on maintaining our interests in the Indo Pacific. 

So what happened? And more importantly, have the events of the last several months, including the decision to bomb Iran, changed the dynamics of the U.S. posture in other parts of the world, and, just as importantly, how China views the Trump administration strategically? Much has been written on trying to assess the impact of the Ukraine War on China’s calculations vis–a-vis the U.S. — so what is Xi Jinping thinking today?

We talk to two informed analysts on this topic: Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser, U.S.-China, at the International Crisis Group, also author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity, and Dan Grazier, director of the  National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center.

More from Wyne:

Three Potential Pitfalls of Trump’s Approach to China

Debating Whether China Is Getting Stronger or Weaker Won’t Make U.S. Policy More Sound

More from Grazier: 

Taiwan Up Close: Why Geography Complicates Invasion

Why US shipbuilding is the worst and more money won't save it

News is moving so rapidly in the Middle East right now. Israel launched strikes against Iran on June 13, the Iranians have been retaliating in kind, and then the U.S. jumps in with its own strikes against Iran’s nuclear program on June 21. On Monday the Iranians engaged in limited retaliatory strikes on the U.S. military base in Qatar and by the end of the day Trump announced a ceasefire which was barely holding Tuesday morning.

Wow, my head is spinning. I am lucky to have Retired Col. Douglas Magregor here to sort this all out for us and give us his always astute, always realist and common sense perspective. For some context, Col. Macgregor was the "squadron operations officer who essentially directed the Battle of 73 Easting" during the first Gulf War. He was also a military planner during the NATO intervention in the Bosnian war in 1999 and one of the most important critics of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad in 2003. He has been a solid voice for military reform and restraint for the last 25 years and is invaluable in his military and geopolitical analysis today.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russia bases and aircraft on June 1 has sent the media and Ukraine’s supporters in Congress and Europe into a flurry of triumphal metaphors and hyperbole, from “David and Goliath” to “daring”, “stunning”, “audacious” and one “bad-ass” operation. 

Ukrainian military officials said 41 Russian aircraft were hit, including strategic bombers and surveillance planes, with some destroyed and others damaged. This unfortunately has unleashed a week of attacks on both sides, but the most fierce from Russia, which over the course of Monday and Tuesday, launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Kviv, Karkhiv, and Odessa, hitting civilian areas including one administrative building of a maternity ward. If the gloves weren’t off, they are coming off now with a seeming vengeance.

In a matter of days, the peace process, already struggling for oxygen, seems as if on life support. President Trump has threatened to walk away and has expressed his share of frustration with both Presidents Putin and Zelensky. The second round of talks in Istanbul seemed to have bore no fruit, with both sides issuing demands that the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven called “completely mutually incompatible” suggesting “that at present neither side is in fact interested in an early peace.”

So where does this renewed fighting leave efforts to end this war? Will the Russians choose to just keep fighting and taking territory through the summer? How much can Ukraine take? Will the US at some point cut off aid? Will Europe be able to step in and fill the gap?

Here to talk about this on the show are two good friends and experts, George Beebe, the director of the Grand Strategy program at the Quincy Institute, and Mark Episkopos, Eurasia Research Fellow.

More from George:

What the giddy reaction to Ukraine's surprise attacks says about us

Trump’s strategy of peace

More from Mark:

Despite war, Moscow is booming

For US in Georgia, political meddling is a hard habit to break