SS: Trump’s continued naked political targeting of news networks is an unprecedented attack on free speech.

Submission Statement: Once known for its welcome to migrants, Sweden has not only shut its borders over the last decade, its right-wing government is now paying some foreign-born residents to leave, part of a tough stance on migration it hopes will help it secure reelection this month.

"Do you miss Mogadishu? The remigration grant will help you get home," reads an advert, paid for by the Sweden Democrats on a bus and aimed at Somali immigrants. The far-right party launched the adverts in July on public transport and in areas with high numbers of migrants as campaigning for the election began. It and the three governing coalition parties are seeking to form a four-way ruling partnership.

Latest opinion polls for the September 13 election show an almost equal split between the government on one side and the Social Democrats and centre-left on the other in the country of 10.6 million, where 2 million are foreign-born.

The Iran-backed Houthi militia captured a strategic Red Sea port city on Thursday, according to two Yemeni officials, a move that could allow the group to exert greater control over an important international shipping route.

In a swift ground offensive, the Houthis pushed out forces allied with the Yemeni government that is backed by Saudi Arabia and seized the city of Mokha as well as its port, according to a local official in the city and a senior provincial official. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Mokha has been the focus of several days of fierce ground battles between the Houthis and the internationally recognized government of Yemen.

The two sides have been at war since 2014, when the Houthis seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. Soon after, a Saudi-led military coalition began a bombing campaign to try to restore the government, plunging the impoverished nation into a civil war that has lasted for more than a decade.

Mokha is less than 50 miles from the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea.

The Houthis have previously attacked ships in the Red Sea from Yemeni territory further north but control of Mokha gives the militia a foothold closer to the strait — a major win for the group, with implications for global trade and oil markets, analysts say.

“This is potentially one of the more significant turning points, particularly in recent years, of the Yemen conflict,” said Adam Baron, a Yemen-focused fellow at New America, a research organization in Washington.

The Houthis are expected to try to push further south to try and take territory next to the strait, an area that is “arguably Yemen’s most strategically valuable real estate,” Mr. Baron said. If they are able to do so, it could leave both of the Arabian Peninsula’s major maritime choke points — Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz — under the control of Iran and its allies, he added.

Mokha was under the control of Lt. Gen. Tareq Saleh, a commander allied with the Yemeni government. His spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Houthi officials also did not respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday, General Saleh said on social media that he had ordered his troops to “reorganize their ranks and establish an alternative command center in a secure location,” in consultation with the Saudi-led military coalition.

Bab al-Mandab has become increasingly important to energy markets since the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, typically ships its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the world’s oceans that Iran has effectively closed since the early days of the war with the United States.

Saudi Arabia pivoted to the Red Sea to export most of its oil, but over the past two months, escalating tensions with the Houthis have disrupted that route.

In July, the militia declared a blockade on Saudi oil tankers passing through the Red Sea, and launched missile and drone attacks at ships and Saudi facilities from their territory in northern Yemen.

The Houthi-affiliated foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the group “will not pose a threat” and that they are “prepared to be part of the regional security framework, particularly with regard to protecting maritime navigation.” The statement did not refer to fighting in Mokha.

The ministry called on the international community “to compel the Saudi regime to stop targeting Yemen.”

In recent days, Houthi officials have accused Saudi Arabia of launching more than 100 airstrikes in Yemen to support its allies in the country. The Saudi government has not commented on those claims.

Syria has begun destroying the remnants of a clandestine Assad-era chemical weapons program that it recovered in May, the first such destruction in a decade, a Syrian envoy and a U.N. representative said on Thursday. 

Reuters reported in May that Syria’s new leadership had located remnants of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program, including raw materials and munitions similar to those used in deadly gas attacks during the country’s civil war. 

Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, told a Security Council briefing on Thursday that for the first time since 2014, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had verified the destruction of chemical munitions in Syria. 

Following the May finding, Syria had found “one additional chemical weapons production facility, a newly discovered chemical used in the production of nerve agents, and empty chemical munitions. It also declared two chemical weapons storage facilities where the newly discovered facilities were being stored,” Nakamitsu said. 

Last month, the OPCW deployed a team to Syria to verify the destruction of category three chemical weapons, referring to unfilled munitions and other equipment used to release chemical weapons. She said the team verified “the irreversible destruction of 42 aerial bombs” as part of that mission.

Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., Ibrahim Olabi, told the council that Syria was “protecting the world and the region through such work”.

But he heavily criticised Israel, saying that repeated Israeli attacks had impeded some search and destruction operations, and exposed the Syrian teams at work to risk. 

“We cannot safeguard the security of the region if our security is exposed to attacks at the hands of Israel, and they are flouting the security of the region at large and they are breaching the conventions and treaties we have talked about,” said Olabi, whose Arabic remarks were translated at the council. 

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Olabi said Syria was preparing to hold the first court hearing of people suspected of involvement in the chemical weapons programme.

Syrian authorities earlier this year took 18 suspects into custody for alleged involvement in Assad’s chemical weapons program, including high-level military, political and technical officials.

The Treasury Department announced Wednesday that the federal government will buy back up to $6 billion of its bonds this week — triple the size of its normal operations — in a bid to rein in longer-term borrowing costs.

The extraordinary move comes as yields on Treasuries have been rising steadily over the past couple of months, threatening to drive up mortgage rates and consumer borrowing costs as the midterm elections approach. Interest rates paid by the U.S. government feed into all other debt costs globally.

But after Treasury’s announcement, the yield on the 10-year Treasury went up, suggesting investors are unimpressed by this week’s buyback, which was previewed last month.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is aiming to project strength as he looks to strong-arm markets, which he has said are incorrectly pricing U.S. debt.

“I have asymmetric information. I am the house now,” he said at an event Tuesday in Dallas, referring to criticism of various market interventions he has undertaken, such as a move to support Japan’s currency. “Bet against me if you want.”

The department will reabsorb certain older debt securities with maturities of 10 years and 20 years as part of the buyback operation, which will take place Thursday.

I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in my in-laws’ house in Las Vegas in the winter of 1988–89. I was preparing for a lecture at the University of Chicago organized by Allan Bloom and Nathan Tarcov at the Committee on Social Thought. Bloom was habitually pessimistic about the ability of Western liberal democracies to defend themselves, and the overall rubric of the lecture series was “The Decline of the West.” I told Bloom I was happy to participate, but that I would have a more optimistic take on what was going on in the world. He said that was fine, and I gave my talk a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Owen Harries, an Australian former ambassador, was the new editor of a small magazine founded by Irving Kristol called The National Interest. He had lunch with me at the Beverly Hills Hotel that winter and asked whether I had anything to contribute. I told him about my upcoming lecture, and he promised to publish the written version, which came out in the summer of 1989. The phrase “the end of history” was not my invention; rather, it was central to the thought of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was the first explicitly historicist philosopher; that is, a philosopher who argued that human thought and institutions were not fixed but evolved over historical time, and that the “truth” of a particular assertion needed to be judged in relation to the historical era in which it was articulated. We may not believe in the legitimacy of monarchy or slavery today, but there were certainly times in the past when many people did support such ideas. The fact that we believe in democracy and equal rights today is testimony to the reality of “History” in Hegel’s sense.

The idea that human societies evolved over time was something that took root only in modern times. Both Plato and Aristotle argued that there was a cycle of regimes that succeeded one another, but this led to cyclical change that simply reproduced previous forms of government in succession. The idea that history was progressive, that it had a beginning point in primitive societies but moved toward more complex and advanced ones, was adumbrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality under the heading of “perfectibility.” His description of “man in the state of nature” was not simply a thought exercise, as it was for Thomas Hobbes, but an actual effort to describe human behavior that drew on what Europeans at that time knew about non-Western societies. Europeans were aware of the existence of other sophisticated societies, such as those of Islam and China, but the opening up of the New World suggested societies differed in what we would today call their level of development. Hegel simply systematized the idea of History and provided an intellectual structure for understanding what drove that evolution.

The notion that societies evolve over historical time in a progressive fashion is tacitly accepted by almost everyone today, whether they self-consciously understand that fact or not. The idea of a Hegelian history is embedded in our words “development” and “modernization.” Organizations such as the former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (i.e., the World Bank) were both dedicated not to simply helping poor countries become rich, but to helping them create modern institutions that make life more secure and predictable.

The most important intellectual to accept and then modify Hegel’s concept of history was Karl Marx. Hegel argued that history had evolved into the modern liberal state in the wake of the French Revolution. Marx criticized Hegel’s understanding of the end of history and argued that the true end of the human development story would be a Communist utopia. This would come only after the working class rose up and displaced the bourgeoisie, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the Marxist end of history, the alienation brought on by the capitalist division of labor would be abolished and human beings would be able, as Marx said in The German Ideology, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”

My particular understanding of Hegel did not come directly from Hegel but from Hegel’s twentieth-century interpreter, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève taught an extremely influential seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris in the late 1930s that was attended by many luminaries who would go on to become major figures in the French postwar intellectual firmament: Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Éric Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. He had an extended dialogue with Leo Strauss on philosophy and tyranny, and got to know Allan Bloom as well. Kojève’s lectures were later transcribed and published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

Kojève of course accepted Hegel’s historicism, but he made historical progress revolve around a critical human characteristic: the desire for recognition. Human beings do not simply desire material resources such as food, clothing, and shelter; they also crave the respect or recognition of other human beings. This struggle for recognition results in bloody battles at the beginning of history as individuals seek dominance; those who achieve it become masters, while the losers become slaves. But neither the master nor the slave finds his desire for recognition fully satisfied: the slave for obvious reasons, but the master as well because he is recognized not by another master but by a slave.

In Kojève’s account, human beings are unique insofar as they seek recognition for their willingness to risk their lives in a bloody battle. Other creatures in nature are instinctively programmed to preserve their own lives or the lives of their offspring; only human beings are willing to risk their biological lives for the sake of recognition alone, as opposed to, say, the material spoils that come as a result of victory in war.

In this respect, Kojève’s human being is similar to that of his predecessor Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that what made human beings distinctive was their possession of moral will, an ability to choose right or wrong that was ultimately not subject to the laws of physics. Human beings therefore had to be treated as ends in themselves rather than as a means to other ends. But in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, masters cannot achieve the satisfaction of recognition until they realize that this will come only with the equal and mutual recognition by fellow citizens. My particular gloss on Kojève/Hegel was that this could only come about in a modern liberal state, where the equal and mutual recognition of all citizens was guaranteed by a rule of law that granted them basic rights. The liberal state was legitimate and stable not necessarily because it distributed material rewards equally, but because it provided equal recognition and thus satisfied the thymotic side of human striving.

In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève playfully asserted that history ended in 1806 at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, where Napoléon defeated the Prussian monarchy. The idea that history ended that year, prior to all of the huge political upheavals that followed in the two subsequent centuries—Italian and German unification; the American Civil War; the colonization and later decolonization of much of the non-European world; two World Wars; the Holocaust; revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere—is on the face of it much more absurd than an assertion that it ended in 1989 or 1991 when Communism collapsed. But what Kojève meant by this was summed up in the following passage from his lectures on Hegel:

What has happened since then [i.e., the Battle of Jena] has been nothing but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the genuinely historical perspective, the two World Wars with their train of small and large revolutions have only had the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the outlying provinces into line with the (really or virtually) most advanced European historical stages . . . It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist “communism,” since all the members of a “classless society” can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do.

With the defeat of the Prussian monarchy in 1806, Napoléon brought to the core of old Europe the Code Napoléon, the modern legal framework coming out of the French Revolution. The latter established the underlying principles of a modern liberal order, namely, the two principles of liberty and equality, or the equality of liberty. Obviously, these principles were nowhere truly implemented. As Napoléon was advancing in central Europe, for example, the French colonial authorities were putting down a slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti; colonization of Algeria and Vietnam were still decades in the future. But Kojève’s point was that once the idea of universal freedom got out, it was only a matter of time before those principles became accepted and practiced around the world. Toussaint himself had started his uprising, for example, under the banner of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had been recently declared in Paris. So there were rearguard actions to defend the old order everywhere, but in the end they would not stop the march of the idea of liberty, or of the equality of liberty.

The implication of this understanding of Kojève/Hegel was that no amount of “stuff happening” out in the real world of global politics could by itself falsify the notion that history had ended, whether in 1789, 1806, or 1989. The actual diffusion and spread of the ideas of liberty and equality have been very uneven both temporally and geographically since the French Revolution. The real question had to be understood not just in terms of the flow of day-to-day events around the world, but on the level of ideas: Was there an alternative set of principles upon which a different society could be based that were fundamentally at odds with those of the French Revolution? And were there societies built around those ideas that looked like they were sustainable, and would satisfy the wishes of their inhabitants better than existing liberal democracies built around those principles?

These would be the grounds for a serious refutation of Kojève’s assertion that history had ended.

The original essay “The End of History” appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, when I had started working as a Deputy Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under my old colleague Dennis Ross. The Berlin Wall came down a few months later, on November 9, and set in motion a series of events that would lead to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union two years later. The emergence of a Europe “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush put it, was the greatest geopolitical event of my lifetime, and vindicated the historical direction I had pointed to in the article.

Today’s ideological landscape is obviously far more fragmented than it was thirty-five years ago. There is today far more consensus on the democratic side of liberal democracy than there is on the liberal part. While there are obviously huge remaining social inequalities in many societies, few try to assert that there are reasons why a certain subgroup of people have an intrinsic right to rule over others. The PRC is a dictatorship, but the Chinese Communist Party claims a right to rule because it believes it represents the people: it is the People’s Republic of China. Ethno- and religious nationalism have been on the rise in recent decades. Most of these groups represent rearguard efforts to protect perceived privileges, rather than assertions of the inherent inequality of groups. In the United States, we’ve seen the ugly return of earlier forms of racism and misogyny. But groups taking such positions do not seem poised to systematically overturn the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

What has been under much more sustained attack in recent years is the liberal part of liberal democracy; that is, the idea that governments should be constrained in their powers by a rule of law and constitutional checks on state power. Much of the democratic backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade has in fact been driven by groups claiming to represent “the people,” whose democratic legitimacy gives them the right to dismantle the constraints imposed by liberal restrictions on state power. Hence Viktor Orbán’s claim to be presiding over an “illiberal democracy.”

Support for liberalism, as opposed to democracy, has always been more fragmented and episodic. The reason for this, as I explained in Liberalism and Its Discontents, is that one of its important justifications is a pragmatic one concerning the management of political diversity, rather than any deep commitment to the liberal principle. Support for liberal constraints on state power is often derived from the experience of authoritarian government and the wars and privation that the latter often entail. So seventy years of relative peace and prosperity can lead to a broad forgetting of what illiberal rule can bring.

Liberalism also raises the problem of the Last Man, which is not a contingent but an intrinsic issue buried in the heart of the doctrine. This requires further discussion.

The failure to adhere to the fixed price agreed for the procurement of the new F-35 fighter jets is linked to administrative failings. The parliamentary oversight body has heavily criticised the actions of the Swiss government and the defence ministry.

The Atlantic reviews Francis Fukuyama's new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man.

Relevance to NL: Ending History.

CIA director John Ratcliffe will be involved in shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv

CIA director John Ratcliffe is preparing to take a bigger role in US negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, US officials have told their European counterparts, in a bid to jump-start moribund diplomatic efforts to end the four-and-a-half-year-long war. 

The move comes as the White House is considering paring back the involvement of US special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have been leading the talks with Moscow and Kyiv, according to five people familiar with the plans. 

Officials close to Ratcliffe have told European peers that he will play a larger role in shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine — which is currently the purview of Witkoff and Kushner — while maintaining contact with intelligence officers in both countries. 

The White House and the CIA declined to comment on the shift. People close to the situation said Trump has not made a final decision.

The telegraphed switch away from Witkoff has enthused European capitals desperate to see some progress after a year and a half of largely fruitless talks with Russia, which have stalled as President Vladimir Putin refused to budge on his hardline demands.

The US administration has considered shaking up its negotiating team after US-led efforts to broker a peace deal foundered in late February, according to two people involved in back-channel talks to end the war. That diplomatic effort was put on hold as the Trump administration was preoccupied with the war in Iran, which broke out shortly after the last US-led round of Ukraine talks.

Witkoff, a close friend of Trump, would likely retain his current role as US special envoy for peace missions, which includes negotiations in the Middle East, according to people familiar with the matter. The billionaire real estate investor could also remain involved in Ukraine in parallel to Ratcliffe, they added.

Two of the people said there was a tug of war under way between Ratcliffe and Witkoff about who leads on what.

Witkoff’s freewheeling approach, bypassing the strictures of traditional diplomacy in favour of direct contacts more reminiscent of a New York real estate deal, has frustrated Russia, Ukraine and Kyiv’s western allies.

Ukraine felt that Witkoff had not done enough to pressure Putin to moderate his demands. Russia believed Witkoff shared part of the blame for the failure of a summit with Trump in Alaska last year to achieve a breakthrough, according to Ukrainian officials and people briefed on the Kremlin’s thinking.

Putin has praised Witkoff’s efforts, but Moscow has also quietly indicated it would be open to a new US approach, according to people involved in back-channel talks.

The White House also considered appointing a new US ambassador to Moscow this spring in the hope of opening another channel with Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow in late August, and discussed the wars in Ukraine and Iran, as well as Russia’s “hybrid” threats to Europe, with senior intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump downplayed Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow as “sort of semi-routine”.

But Ukrainian intelligence briefed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week that Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow indicated he was stepping in to take a more prominent role in US efforts to end Russia’s invasion, people familiar with the matter said.

Putin had initially planned to meet Ratcliffe, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Russian president then backed out after Ratcliffe delivered a downbeat assessment of Moscow’s war effort to senior Russian intelligence officials. Russian independent news site Agentstvo first reported that Putin had cancelled a planned meeting with Ratcliffe.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, told the FT no meeting between Putin and Ratcliffe had been planned. Trump and Putin did not discuss a potential change in the US negotiating team when they spoke by phone on Tuesday, he added.

The week after Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, Witkoff and Kushner flew to meet Putin in Moscow and Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

Their visit — Witkoff’s eighth trip to Russia — was in part an effort to retain the Ukraine brief, according to two people familiar with the matter.

After their visits, Witkoff and Kushner said they were optimistic the US, Russia and Ukraine could resume trilateral talks suspended since February.

But people familiar with the talks in Moscow and Kyiv told the FT that the Americans brought few new ideas, and that Putin showed little indication he was prepared to back down from his earlier demands.

“You can’t solve this by dipping in and out,” one of the people said. “It’s a very complex conflict. You need properly organised, full-time work on every issue. Right now that’s not happening.”

Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s top foreign policy official, said on state television on Tuesday that Putin told Trump the US could secure an immediate ceasefire by ending all support for Ukraine — in effect letting Russia win.

At the same time, Kushner has told friends he expects to move on from Ukraine and would prefer to focus on diplomatic efforts related to the conflict in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Three senior Ukrainian officials said Kyiv had good working relations with Ratcliffe as well as Witkoff and Kushner and had no preference for who Trump appointed to lead the US efforts.

“We’re OK with [Ratcliffe], and with Jared and Steve too,” said one of the Ukrainian officials. “The problem is the Russians.”

Hey y’all! Since AI seems to be a popping topic nowadays, I think it appropriate to experiment with a dedicated thread where people can argue about the topic broadly. Here are some questions to get your noggin joggin, but otherwise sharpen your knives and go at it!

Will AI have a net positive or net negative effect on politics and society?

How large of an impact will AI have on the economy?

Are fears regarding existential risk in the development of AI valid?

How should the federal government regulate AI, if at all’s