David Hearst – Middle East Eye Dec 24, 2025
It is tempting to distill all the chaos, hatred, and blood spilled in 2025 into the small frame of one man: Donald Trump.
It is true that Trump richly deserves the accolade of being the worst, but also the most consequential president in modern US history.
This president has bombed Iran, allowed Israel to invade Southern Syria, finished the decimation of Gaza and embarked on the annexation of the occupied West Bank. The Emirati-funded and armed ethnic cleansing of Sudan means little to him. A death toll of up to half a million Sudanese is of no consequence.
Three months after unveiling his “big beautiful peace plan“, a reality is established on the ground in Gaza that is its parametrical opposite – an ugly, petty recipe for war without end.
Israel is not even content to leave over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza shivering and Killing Palestinians has become an Israeli national obsession.
Israel Katz, the defence minister, has just announced plans to settle northern Gaza permanently: “We are deep inside Gaza and we will never leave all of Gaza; there will be no such thing. We are here to protect and prevent what happened,” Katz said.
So much for any hope of a full withdrawal envisaged by the Trump plan.
A ‘moral collapse’
Bounced like a pinball between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump has been unable to secure in Ukraine in a year what he promised as a candidate to achieve within days.
When Bob Reiner, a Hollywood director and long-time critic, was killed along with his wife by his son, in a family tragedy so deep it should elicit sympathy from any parent, Trump’s bile could not contain itself.
Reiner’s death was his own fault because he had driven others “crazy” with his obsession with Donald Trump, the president declared on Truth Social.
This is the mentality of the man to whom every rich Arab state in the Middle East has paid good money and now looks to for salvation.
Never has so much been expected of a mind that is truly so small.
This is the man whom Syria expects to force Israel to stop arming the Druze in Sweida, as a Washington Post investigation disclosed.
This is the man whom Turkey hopes will force the Kurds to join the as-yet non-existent national armed forces of Syria; the man whom Qatar hopes will install an international stabilisation force on the borders of Gaza, the man from whom Saudi Arabia wants a nuclear reactor, the man on whom the leader of Egypt – most likely the next Arab leader to fall – depends on for his very survival.
The only power that profits from this chaos is the power that is not involved: the meta story of 2025 is the confirmation of China as crown prince, as a world leader in waiting – a rise that has been handed to it on a silver plate.
More valuable to China than all its own strategic patience, planning and thinking added together has been the moral collapse of America. All China has had to do is weather Trump’s tariff tantrums and watch the US collapse unprompted under its own weight.
Turning victory into defeat
How did the US pluck defeat from the jaws of victory? Arrogance, hubris, the belief that as the last man standing, we were the only man standing, are all part of the story.
So the outgoing liberal elites of America and Europe, who have been in power for so long, are surely deluding themselves if they ascribe the chaos of 2025 to the rise of the extreme right at home and abroad.
We are not only seeing out one terrible year, but the first quarter of the century. It has been a terrible start.
If you compare how powerful America and the West were in Christmas 1991, when I watched the Soviet flag descend on the building of the Russian Supreme Soviet and chart a course to where they are now, you can only come to one conclusion: that when America had the chance to become the world’s uncontested leader, it blew it.
In 1991, America held the monopoly over the use of force abroad. Today, there are as many drone attacks as there are state actors or non-state actors who own them.
In 1991, Russia was on its knees. Today, its forces menace not just Ukraine but the whole of Western Europe.
In 1991, the streets of Russia were so pro-western that there was a debate in the media as to whether they should continue using the word West, as Russia was now part of it.
Today, they are prepared to sacrifice a whole generation of Russian youth in a war that is framed in Moscow as a war with America.
Losing wars is another part of the jigsaw.
The Pentagon and Nato headquarters in Brussels should really have asked themselves a long time ago, why western alliances “of the willing” have not won a war since Kosovo in 1998.
Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria have all been defeats. Whether those interventions were declared or undeclared, whether they were led from the front or from behind closed doors, the result was the same.
The quick thrill of toppling regimes was followed in each country by the sober reality of insurgency, civil war and ultimately military withdrawal.
Imagined foes
Ideology also played its part. I do not mean the ideology of “radical Islam”, but the ideology that made the US and its allies such an aggressive world force.
It goes far beyond 19th-century imperialism, which, by comparison, was fairly limited in its ambitions.
It is the belief that at any one time in history, western liberal democracy is faced by an implacable, transnational and existential foe.
During the Cold War, it was communism. After it, al-Qaeda became a world threat. Then came Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State.
Today, it is the Muslim Brotherhood; and soon, it will be Islam itself.
Even though these imagined foes have nothing in common with each other, they are given the same characteristics.
During the Vietnam War, it was the Domino theory, a theory that warned if the dominoes of Southeast Asia were allowed to fall to communism, Australia would be next.
In the days of al-Qaeda, this was replaced by “the crescent of crisis”, which stretched from Iraq to Somalia.
This ideology pre-existed major events like the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, and helped transform what should have been a limited anti-terrorist operation into an all-out “war on terror”.
It was critical to this project that the West did not define the enemy.
Hence, Vladimir Putin’s first bloody war as prime minister and later president of Russia, the war he launched on Chechnya, was merrily folded into George W Bush’s “war on terror”.
The then British Prime Minister Tony Blair was duly sent by Washington to invite Putin to meet Queen Elizabeth II, as the horrors of Russian counterinsurgency were tried out on the Chechens 22 years before the same techniques were applied to the Ukrainians.
But what did it matter, western intelligence calculated. They were only Muslims.
Now, 25 years on, America seems congenitally incapable of learning from its mistakes.
Terminal decline
When Dick Cheney, the former vice president and the architect of the war on terror, died recently, the tributes came in thick and fast.
Former President Bill Clinton extolled Cheney’s “unwavering sense of duty”, while former Vice President Kamala Harris called him a “devoted public servant” who gave “so much of his life to the country he loved”. CNN’s front-page story lauded him for helping “his daughter stand up to Trump”.
They praised a man who constructed an elaborate double lie as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq: that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had links with al-Qaeda.
In 2004, Cheney said: “I continue to believe, I think there’s overwhelming evidence [of a]… connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.”
There have been many attempts to assess the human cost of the Iraq war. The latest in 2023 by Brown University researchers, using United Nations data, concluded that the invasion of Iraq and related “war on terror” campaigns killed more than 4.5 million people.
This figure includes about 1 million direct deaths and 3.5 million indirect deaths. The wars also killed 7,000 US troops and 8,000 contractors, according to the study.
There is something in the psyche of an imperial power in terminal decline that blocks out the obvious truth: the wars fought in defence of democracy destroyed all belief in the system at home.
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Even before a new generation of ideologues assumed power in Washington, the old regime of liberal Zionists, like Joe Biden, had armed and allowed Israel to do most of the killing in Gaza, the West Bank, south Lebanon and Syria.
The vacuity of US foreign policy was on display at the MAGA edition of Doha Forum earlier this month. Donald Trump Jr, said the US could not be the “ big dumb guy with the chequebook” expected to “ cover all the world’s problems.”
And former secretary of state Hillary Clinton defended earlier remarks that people were consuming “ pure propaganda” and “ made up videos” about the war in Gaza on Tik Tok. She said that young people did not understand the full history of the conflict.
I wondered what missing context Clinton was referring to.
The 18 year siege of Gaza, which for four years as Secretary of State she herself fully supported ? The 277 Palestinians that were shot dead by Israeli soldiers when Palestinians marched unarmed towards Israel’s borders ? Or the organised rape of Palestinian detainees in Israeli detention centres?
So, the collapse of US governance over the Middle East is truly a bipartisan achievement. The year 2025 capped 25 years of failure.
A new leadership
What happens next? It is alas very far from being goodbye to all that, because all of the unfinished business in the Middle East and Ukraine will keep on coming back to haunt the retreating West.
Western governments can only keep on supporting a two state solution by blinding themselves to the reality of what Israel is doing day by day in the West Bank.
Even if there is a change of prime minister and the settlement scheme is slowed down, it has been evident for a long time that the Palestinian state recognised as a sovereign nation by 157 of the 193 UN member states is impossible to create.
Dangling the bauble of a Palestinian state coexisting with one designed for Jews only is a bigger deception today than it was at the time of the Oslo Accords.
It is to the West Bank, not Gaza, that all eyes should be turning in 2026.
Israel’s mission to annex the West Bank can be as clearly seen through Christian eyes as it is through Muslim ones, as Middle East Eye’s Lubna Masarwa and Peter Oborne report on how Christians in Bethlehem face an existential threat.
The pressure on governments by their people will grow. They will do their best to outlaw demands for Palestinian justice. But the more they seek to oppress, the more of a domestic civil rights issue Palestine will become.
The real sin of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has not so much been to keep as close to Washington as possible on Israel, but to establish the infrastructure of an authoritarian government that will be fully used by his potential successor, Nigel Farage.
The late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to grant “special category status” to the 1981 Irish hunger strikers is being replicated today, even though her response led to the death of 10 men, including the MP Bobby Sands, and a government capitulation on the core demand.
No matter.
Lord Timpson, the UK’s prisons minister, is intrepidly following in Thatcher’s footsteps in the way he is dealing with the hunger strike by youths on remand for taking part in direct action on behalf of Palestine Action.
Timpson said: “We are very experienced at dealing with hunger strikes. Unfortunately, over the last five years, we have averaged over 200 hunger strike incidents every year, and the processes that we have are well-established and they work very well – with prisons working alongside our NHS [National Health Service] partners every day, making sure our systems are robust and working – and they are.”
We will see in 2026 how long that confidence in the system lasts if one of those hunger strikers dies. We will also see the divide that has opened up between Israel and the Jewish diaspora getting wider.
If 2025 was the year when the fig leaf around Israel’s true genocidal character dropped away, the first years of the next quarter of this century will be dominated by more Jews in America demanding and creating an entirely different political leadership.
The ideologues of “Israel First” are fighting an ugly and vicious losing battle, and they know it.
This is supposed to be America’s century. If the first 25 years have proved anything, it is that America was emotionally, morally and intellectually incapable of acting as a global leader.
At the moment that failure is leading to the rise of the extreme right all over the West and potentially the rise of fascists. We only need a real financial collapse to recreate the conditions of the 1930s.
If that, in turn, spurns a new generation of leaders capable once again of governing with authority, morality and modesty, then it will have been a lesson worth waiting for. But at what price?
Rabbi’s car featuring ‘Happy Chanukah’ sign firebombed in anti jew attack
Story by Oliver Trapnell • 18h •
An Australian rabbi’s car adorned with a festive “Happy Chanukah” sign has been firebombed in a suspected anti jew attack just a week after the terror attack on Bondi Beach.
The vehicle was engulfed in flames during the early hours of Thursday morning in Melbourne’s St Kilda East suburb.
nice one thanks lads
we need to see more like this
Starmer behind HMRC plans to ‘confiscate’ more of your cash in latest tax grab
Story by Joe Sledge • 1d •
Tax changes that will be used to help the Government draw even more money from your pocket, experts have claimed.
The bill for migrants is now £40 billion, the secret agreement to take in millions expelled from the occupied territories
is bankrupting the UK and ireland
Details of the money grabbing were set out in Budget documents published by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, where ministers said the change would allow for “more timely payment for Self-Assessment”. Under the proposal, HMRC would gain the power to adjust PAYE tax codes to collect tax owed on self-employment and other self-assessment income directly from wages and pensions.
The policy is aimed at taxpayers who receive income through both PAYE and self-assessment.
A consultation on how the changes would be implemented is expected in early 2026.
Starmer has said as we welcome in more migrants the bills have to be paid
We do not require at all a GLOBAL LEADER. The countries have to be independent a decide
themself what is good for their people. Approximately 200 countries are member of the UNO.
Also something which is not necessary. To stop UNO and close it gives better life for all the
different countires of the world.
A World Global Leader plus helpers will never work and produces more problems than without
them !
An example is also the EU in Europe, since they are leading so many countries, the problems
are increasing since many years, every year.
It remains to be seen how the vain Donald Trump will be dressed for the 250th anniversary of the United States on the 4th July 2026. He may think a suit won’t quite cut it seeing how providence ensured he’d be the President for this one. He may think something ceremonial more appropriate, but I think a 5x draft dodger like Trump shouldn’t even be allowed to salute which he likes to do.
The US had no right to be in Vietnam but that doesn’t mean he has the right to strut around like he’s ex-services, when it was the last place he wanted to be and his family’s money enabled him to dodge it. Many people who didn’t want to be there but had no money died there, and though they’re entitled to salute they’re all dead, so him saluting now just takes the piss out of every one.
Whats Trump doing… impersonating Charlie?
Let’s not forget the complicity of the yapping Bwitish chihuahua.. and how a century of arrogance & hubris of The House Of Hanover / Saxe Coburg Gotha ( aka “Windsor” ) capped a century of Bwitish disasters.
The Very Planned Death of the West
Most influential and well-off people in US and in the rest of the West go along with the official narratives and cast a blind eye to the crimes their governments and major institutions commit on their behalf. As long as some foreign operation, such as the genocide and land clearances in places like Gaza, or the invasion of Venezuela for its oil, can be seen as serving their interests, and especially if you are an American, that is entirely acceptable.
The Americans, who for the most part, gladly spend more on the military than all other nations combined are central to this way of thinking. In the present moment they appear all powerful, and having that power they believe that if they do not use it they will lose it. With the thinnest and most fake pretexts they have in fact become a ruthless nation spreading crime abroad almost as fast as it has spread on their own shores.
As many well know, this way of behaving comes from the ingrained ideology of “might makes right” that has ruled all empires of the past, and has led each one of them to their doom, The reason is that the poison fangs of power corrupt and are totally dependent on its slithering body in which “the ends justify the means”. Those infected with the lust for power simply end up endorsing every single vice under the sun, to their own destruction. Not only are all the evil methods seen as good and justified to maintain power and control over others in a world they see as a jungle of snakes and predators, but also, the control and deployment of the various vices are seen as necessary to weaken all rivals and resistance, and, of course, to fuel own their lusts and addiction to more and more power. In the ruthless bombing and invasion operations against Iraq, it was not anomaly in US foreign policy that the first thing the Americans did in Baghdad was to open a porn theatre.
The problem is that power does corrupt, but we all say it is necessary to protect us from our adversaries, and unless we have and can exercise sufficient power over them, they will simply conquer and exploit us in the same way. So, we live behind the lie that our military prowess in some arms race is necessary for our “defence”, and each of our nations has a “Department of Defence”, or some such name, in order to assure the moralists in our midst that in the exercise of our military powers we are never really the aggressors. Then, and without even a hiccup, the man in gold who has been trotted out to be the captain of the USS Enterprise, the head of so-called “leader” nation of the West, boldly goes where no one has dared to go before (except in the time of a world war), and changes the name of the DoD to the “Department of War”. Yes, another blatant, brazen in-your-face decree and bold action signalling there are absolutely no limits to what the mainly Jewish-owned-and-controlled “money power” will do in its war against the rest of us to rule the world.
We are all to cast a blind eye to the wars, murders, mayhem and devastation the US and the rest of the West start and maintain in places such as Syria, the Ukraine, and Gaza. Venezuela and Iran are next on the chopping block. Apart from all of the election promises for peace, the Chabad has decreed that the war in the Ukraine must go on. Why? As long as equally-amoral Russia can be bought off with even larger hunks of the Ukraine going their way, together with promises of more open-trade with the EU in the future, the Kremlin can be counted on to follow the money-power commands and abandon its token support and resistance to those self-asserting and resource-laden nations.
Even if such workings on the globalist stage seem above our pay grade, the only underlying explanation suggested in the official narratives is that the people in those war-torn nations must be insane, and that we must all be content with that kind of facile pretext to avoid even glancing at our own evil doing and methods. However, if we do then we must look the other way and simply accept that our own leaders (or “owners” are really doing what is “necessary” to maintain and advance our interests. We must not bite the hand which feeds us, the very hand which is able to create both credit and debt out of nothing – always at our expense and enslavement.
So, they tell us to quit crying over spiled milk (and blood), and complaining about our leaders “going along in order to get along with” the ruthless deeds of the richest and most powerful bully on the block. Behind the scenes the governments of Denmark and Canada object both to the means and the ends of money-power-run, super-duper power US, and the next thing to hear is that unless they support the war efforts they will lose large hunks of their own possessions. The US has blatantly sent envoys, not to the capital of Denmark, but to the few inhabitants of Greenland in order to offer the people some deal to sell the place to the US. Meanwhile, the US deep-state, and money-power banksters, blatantly interfered in the 2024 Canadian federal election, ensuring their NYC-based corporate man, Mark Carney, and the sell-out Liberal Party is in control of the nation, while the nation continues to be bled by crippling US tariffs. The message everywhere is “Obey, or we will destroy you!”.
With our focus on these skirmishes between the various power superblock nations and usurpations of the stronger nations over the weaker, it is the West which is being systematically destroyed. It is mostly internal by being ruled by mass deceptions, fearmongering, and oppression, and the systematic institutionalization of every vice imaginable. As with Covid, and most other psyops and massive crimes against humanity, all of the bread crumbs lead to the house of the Rothschild’s, and to an ever-increasing power and control over virtually everything. It is that house which is behind the international banking cartel and the globalist control of credit (and debt). Their tentacles extend everywhere.
They took over the British Empire in the 19th century and used it to fuel and take over the USA by the end of that century. Even JP Morgan was one of their agents in helping to take over the banking industry, and serving as a most useful loyal subject to push through the Federal Reserve Act. The US, despite all efforts to maintain its powers domestically, became a prodigy nation of that international money cartel, to further debt-rig all Western nations in two world wars, leaving the British Empire enslaved to them and then virtually abandoned.
The very same thing is happening to the US. The people simply are under the delusion that the Zio money-power interests are centered in their own nation, in DC or in Wall Street, and that they are in control of their own prosperity. Many now appear perturbed to see that the loyalties of their own ruling establishment is subservient to Israeli interests, and to an exclusive ethnic tribe. They fully accept that Israel is a prodigy nation of the Rothschild synastry. but like the Brits before them, they cannot get their heads around the fact that the same tactics were used to take over their own nation and bleed the British Empire dry, shifting the “wealth of nations” more greatly to their international controls.
The Americans, despite all of the arrogance, hubris, and blatancy in our faces with the golden boldness of a Captain Kirk at the helm, cannot even look at the history of the PRC, to see all of the parallels from its inception. They cannot see that from the late 1940’s (and even decades before) China was destined to be the next major prodigy nation to develop for the Rothschild dynasty, to be used to bring down and replace their rivals in the West, advance their international holdings, and to further their own quest for global dominance. It was no accident that the PRC was created and used with a blueprint to industrialize and bleed the entire West through all of the planned outsourcing projects scheduled to begin when the people of that nation were completely subjugated, regimented, and the nation was ripe to bleed and take over the West.
The Chinese with their new-fund booty are buying up virtually everything in sight. Yesterday, RFK Jr. was on YouTube with a selfie saying how vast tracks of US farmland are being bought up by Chinese interests. First, bankrolled corporate interests come along, bankrupt, and take over dairy, egg, cattle and pig farms. They do that lowering the prices so they cannot compete, and then they sell their vast assets to the Chinese. Boldly, the Caucasian barbarians go to their own demise, while the main prodigy nation of the same international money power (which incidentally controls China) “inscrutably” takes over everything.
american failors are over 100 years old .
have not any grounds to mingle in our
europea quarrels lured by the Perfide Abilon .
every dead american soldier anywhere is a
good american !
No failures or defeat for U.S., only resounding success in forwarding ZOG agendas. All the blood and treasure expended was never about U.S. interests, so these policies, wars etc never failed because there never was an attempt to succeed in benefiting the U.S.
Of course, the author failed to give any credit to the great Don. He did close the border. He did institute tariffs. He did expel foreign criminals. He has rebuilt the military. As Prometheum.com recalls for us, he is destroying the old English-European conflict based economic model and has replaced it with a less warlike American model. And he has pointed the way to an advanced technological society which includes almost free energy with fusion power and robots which Musk says will be in operation at the end of 2026. And a lot of us really like him.
Sounds like you are praying for the antichrist.
Biggest load of HATE FILLED Bile I have ever read!! What would YOU have done Hearst you pathetic hate filled FAR LEFT NAZI????? Install Biden and Obarmy forever?? You pathetic hate filled spineless POS
No American had to die in Viet Nam, or even be there. All they had to do was refuse to raise their hand and take the oath. Fact. Mamy did just that. Those who didn’t were the victims of a government school system that implanted and reinforced a servility to “authority figures.”
That said, if Trumpy shows up in a costume, he must be ridiculed.