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The whole world is watching as negotiations begin today in Islamabad, Pakistan between Iran and the United States following an agreement to cease military action for two weeks. The negotiations are based on a ten-point plan outlined by Iran and approved by the United States as a basis for the talks.

Israel has not been invited to the negotiations, which are being conducted indirectly and with a great deal of skepticism by the Iranian team. The outcome of these talks will impact the entire global economy and the fate of millions of people in West Asia, six million of whom have already been forcibly displaced by US and Israeli aggression in recent years.

The 2025 Free Trade and Labour Mobility Act and Building Canada Act, also known as Bill C-5, One Canadian Economy Act is the federal government’s economic response to the US Trump Administration’s trade war by “breaking inter-provincial trade barriers, accelerating infrastructure, and unlocking 200 billion dollars in growth.”  In these uncertain times, the government’s attractive pitch to voters is an orientation towards economic efficiency now, prosperity later.

Bill C-5 does target real and persistent economic barriers. Restrictions on labour mobility have prevented qualified workers from moving freely across provinces for work, while overlapping federal and provincial environmental reviews extend project approvals up to five years.

When Donald Trump accepted the GOP’s nomination for president in 2024, he boldly stated that “the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of the country.” It was music to the ears of tens of millions of Americans who lived through the Biden border invasion and experienced decades of sustained illegal immigration with little interior enforcement. Finally, a political leader had the gumption to say, “Enough is enough,” and proclaim that it is time for millions of illegal aliens to go home. The American people rewarded Trump’s courage when they decisively re-elected him.

Unfortunately, the second Trump Administration has not lived up to the promises made in that July 2024 speech in Milwaukee. It has instead prioritized removing the worst criminal illegal aliens. With that population estimated at between 500,000 and 800,000 individuals, the administration has focused enforcement resources on a small subset of illegals, prioritizing quality over quantity. But this is a misguided attempt to assuage the concerns of a radical—but sizable—segment of Americans who do not believe in borders or in sovereignty.

In 2011, when U.S. Navy Seals blew open the front door of Osama bin Laden’s fortified compound in Pakistan, stormed up the stairs, and shot him dead, they found more than a loaded AK-47 in his room. Bin Laden had been reading the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), which told the story of military conflict since the 15th century. Kennedy’s argument was as dismaying to his fellow countrymen as it must have been heartening to bin Laden: the American empire, too, was mortal, and “imperial overstretch” was bringing inevitable decline. Kennedy wrote with such brio that his book climbed The New York Times bestseller list, peaking in March 1988 at number two, topped only by a real-estate mogul’s ghost-written memoir called Trump: The Art of the Deal.

This year, just days after President Trump committed the United States to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel in bombing Iran into regime change, another Yale historian, Odd Arne Westad, published a book that also warns of relative decline and imperial overstretch. Westad, a Norwegian-born expert on Asia and the author of the highly regarded The Cold War: A World History (2017), focuses on the turn of the 20th century, when Europe’s Great Powers—prosperous, complacent, and at peace—lurched into civilizational catastrophe.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Genocide or Hyperbole? | The Roundtable Ep. 312

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

Martin Empson is a climate activist from the UK and the editor and a contributor to System Change not Climate Change, a book of essays from socialists around the world on the nature of capitalism’s ecological crisis and the radical response that is needed.

Many years ago, when I was first teaching about demagoguery, a high school friend

Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, flanked by a multi-hued cast of New Yorkers (though with no whites visible), announced the results of NYC’s long-awaited “racial equity” audit that attempts to assess the allegedly dire plight of “people of color” across the five boroughs.

The report itself, running 375 pages, makes it clear that the state of racial disparities in NYC is rooted in “settler colonialism,” noting that “New York City’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.” The report asserts, for example, that the Lenape Native American tribe are the “rightful stewards” of New York.

It also has numerous calls to action, including mandating anti-racism training for government staff and a fresh look at “fine and fee based programs” for transportation to seek out “racial and ethnic disparities”—that is, doing even less to enforce against subway fare evaders, who are predominantly black and Hispanic and who disproportionately commit other crimes on the subway. It decries the “punitive policing policies” that further marginalized “Black and Latine communities”—the very policing measures that drove the city’s historic drop in crime under Giuliani and Bloomberg.

And it goes on in this vein for chapter after chapter. But you get the idea.

New York City is racist, and it’s your fault, whitey, so you must pay even more taxes.

From the department of foreign affairs own website the “G20 brings together the world’s major and systemically important economies.

“Its members represent 85 per cent of global GDP, 75 pr cent of international trade and around 80 per cent of the world’s population”.

Australia has the 15th largest economy in the world. We are “the 12th largest contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets, held the first presidency of the Security Council and sent the first UN peacekeepers to Indonesia in 1947.

All this to say that in the post war period, Australia isn’t – and hasn’t – been powerless.

We are not a small nation with no agency. We’ve proven that time and time again.

So you have to wonder why our government goes to such extraordinary lengths to present Australia as being powerless against the United States, a passive player at the mercy of Donald Trump’s tempests.

Even if you believe, as former DFAT, Defence and ASIO boss Dennis Richardson told the Sydney Morning Herald late last week that – “the Australian government is not paid by the taxpayer to let fly and give them five seconds of warm inner glow by saying things that wreck the relationship with the US … The idea they should be calling Trump out is just rubbish”– the idea that Australia has no power is a very strange development in modern times.

It was the right that derailed Australia’s energy transition, that prioritised fossil fuels above the nation, that fought reality and convinced a slew of Australians it was common sense to put their faith in a finite resource that was not only contributing to killing the planet, but causing harm to millions in the fights over who controlled it.

It is a fantasy to think that any nation that does not control its energy supply has security. Australia could have been well on its way to securing its energy, if John Howard and his ilk hadn’t had a tantrum over a changing world, and succumbed to their desires to keep everything the same.

The Morrison government gave instant tax write-offs to encourage the take-up of big dumb utes, while fighting against vehicle emission standards and delaying the take-up of EVs.

The agriculture industry was not encouraged to move away from its reliance on diesel. A general ennui swept middle Australia, lulled by the right into fighting for its own interests.

Nor is Labor blameless. Instead of fighting for science and for the future, it took defeats over the carbon price and emissions trading scheme and assumed the only way to beat them was to join them.

Neither party has seen fit to unhook Australia from US foreign policy, and Anthony Albanese was one of the first leaders in the world to throw his support behind the American and Israeli decision to bomb Iran, despite not knowing of it in advance, its justification, its legality or even its objectives.

After the Australian government shamelessly abandoned morality and international law to back Israel and the United States’ illegal war on Iran, Australia is now experiencing the inevitable consequences, and successive federal governments have failed to plan for those too.

Cowardly abandoning the international rules-based order when our so-called allies wage illegal wars makes all Australians less safe and less secure. But higher petrol prices and higher gas prices will mean a lower standard of living for most Australians, and that is where the federal government is really in trouble.

“This is the biggest threat to energy security in history,” International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol told ABC’s 7.30 this week. It’s no exaggeration. In response to being attacked by Israel and the United States, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in an estimated 20 per cent of the world’s gas and oil exports grinding to a halt, sending petrol prices skyrocketing here and around the world.

Iran also retaliated against US-aligned Gulf states like Qatar, bombing its LNG facilities and wiping out almost 20 per cent of global LNG supply. These twin energy crises have major implications for Australia; let’s start with petrol and Australia’s liquid fuel security.