There is a peculiar comfort in permanence. For decades, Europeans have treated NATO not merely as an alliance but as a kind of geopolitical law of nature like gravity or the North Sea wind. It is simply there. Until, perhaps, it isn’t.
The idea of the United States stepping away from NATO, once unthinkable, now flickers at the edge of plausible debate. And like all unsettling hypotheticals, it reveals more about Europe than about America.
At first glance, some might argue that such a rupture could be a blessing in disguise. Europe, long accused, not always unfairly, of strategic complacency, might finally be forced to grow up. Defense budgets would rise not out of polite commitments but out of necessity. Military coordination, currently filtered through Washington, would have to become genuinely European. In this telling, autonomy replaces dependency; hesitation gives way to urgency. A continent that prides itself on unity would finally have to prove it under pressure.
There is a certain appeal to this vision. It flatters European self-perception. It suggests that beneath the bureaucracy and the slow summits lies a dormant strength waiting to be awakened. But it is also, perhaps, dangerously optimistic.
Because what disappears with an American exit is not just funding or firepower. It is the psychological architecture of deterrence. NATO has never been only about tanks and aircraft; it is about credibility, the quiet, unspoken assumption that any aggression would trigger a response too large to contemplate. Remove the United States, and that certainty fractures. What replaces it is ambiguity, and ambiguity is the breeding ground of miscalculation.
And then there is the more unsettling dimension: unpredictability. A United States unconstrained by alliance obligations does not simply become absent; it becomes untethered. Freed from the mutual expectations that have shaped transatlantic policy for generations, American decision-making could become more transactional, more impulsive, more narrowly defined by immediate national interest.
In such a world, even far-fetched scenarios begin to feel less absurd. The notion of pressure economic, political, even territorial, applied in unexpected places no longer belongs purely to fiction. Greenland, often treated as a geopolitical curiosity, suddenly re-enters the conversation not as a joke but as a symbol of how quickly norms can erode when guardrails are removed.
Would such outcomes actually occur? Perhaps not. But the mere fact that they can be seriously imagined is itself a warning.
For Europe, the real question is not whether American withdrawal would be good or bad. It is whether Europe is prepared for the kind of world in which that question matters. Strategic independence is not a slogan; it is a burden. It requires not only investment, but political will, the willingness to make hard decisions quickly, and to accept the consequences.
For decades, Europe has benefited from a system in which the hardest edges of power were softened by partnership. If that partnership dissolves, the softness goes with it.
And so the comforting illusion of permanence gives way to something colder, but perhaps more honest, alliances endure not because they must, but because they are continually chosen.
The unsettling possibility now facing Europe is that one day, that choice might not be mutual.
Give me Marina Tsetaeva Give me Karin Boyes Give me Petya Dubarova I sent you a poem You did not respond I told you I would always carry your heart with me But it meant absolutely nothing to you Europe has carried you away but all it has given me is quiet despair The kind of desperation of no longer having you in my life You never read any of my books You turn to Jhumpa Lahiri instead Mohsin Hamid while I have Fatima Sydow for courage a fridge tart on the table that doesn't quite make up for your absence Dear Sister, I'm sorry I'm sorry for what I said or did not say or what I did in childhood in youth Just know this I will always carry your heart with me and the scars you have given me for an eternity.
Nasir El Rufai, may his talent not be wasted, recently wrote an article just as he had just finished burying his mother who died while Nasir was in Tinubu’s gulag, that was widely circulated on social media. He argued with figures that the problem of underdevelopment in Nigeria is not the absence of talent but about the inappropriate reward structure. Talents go where the good money is, but in Nigeria the money is in what a friend called “man know man” or connection. That big money is not going to talents is not the major reason for Nigeria’s poverty and underdevelopment. Lack of appropriate orientation, especially among the youths, is also a major reason.
Alex Barbir and President Bola Tinubu
Nigerians have the opportunity to watch a young man, just 27, from the United States of America, Alex Barbir who has gained national and international attention as he brought succour and justice to the displaced people of Benue and Plateau states.
Alex Barbir has made a lie of the propaganda of President Bola Tinubu in his use of lobbyists to cover up the real cause and motive of insecurity in Nigeria. Alex Barbir is an American citizen and humanitarian who left the comfort of his great country to come to rural Benue and Plateau states to help poor Nigerians rebuild their homes which were destroyed by Fulani terrorists who aim to take over their lands and Islamize them. Barbir has been using his phones constructively and fearlessly to bring to the attention of the international community the real issues behind the insecurity in Nigeria.
The latest killing in Angwa Rukuba in Jos happened on Sunday March 29, 2025, during Easter worship. Barbir got to the scene immediately as he heard gunshots from his house. He provided footage to inform the whole world of what was happening. The governor of Plateau State, Caleb Mutfwang, drove there in an Armoured tank. President Bola Tinubu did not get to Jos until April 2, about five clear days later, and that attracted opprobrium from Nigerians. The President’s attitude was seen as another example of his disregard for Nigerian lives. For Alex Barbir, the killing illustrates once again that while Nigeria has enough security men on ground, there was a police station at a junction about five yards from the scene of the killing, yet no security showed up until the assailants had gone. Alex Barbir’s NGO, Building Zion, has been reconstructing houses that were burnt by Fulani terrorists in Benue and Plateau states so that those people displaced and relocated to ADP camps can return to their homes to show to the terrorists that their aim is in vain and unattainable. Alex has also been speaking truth to the government and other authorities in Nigeria. He is one voice that has made a lie of various efforts to play down the fact that the attacks are not a Christian genocide.
Alex Barbir has consistently maintained that Nigerians should not allow the terrorists to silence them as they have now. Alex has been targeted by Sheik Ahmad Gumi, an Islamist who asked the DSS to arrest him for his audacity. Gumi has become untouchable for the government of President Bola Tinubu as he was to the government of late President Muhammadu Buhari. Sheik Ahmad Gumi represents the untouchable Fulani oligarchy who have ruled Nigeria since independence and have held it down. But Alex maintains that God wants justice here on earth now and that the people must be a voice for justice. He told his audience that he was not afraid to die for his advocacy.
Alex Barbir teaches Nigerian youths many lessons in how a nation becomes great. Nigerian youths adore the US and would give anything to be there. They call America God’s own country but they don’t think about how America became great. America became great because there were many Alex Barbirs among the youths who were prepared to use their lives to serve their nation and humanity at large.
Alex Barbir is an outstanding footballer (Americans call it soccer) who won laurels. After his high school at Forsyth, he moved to Pennsylvania State University where he shone in soccer. He transferred to Liberty University in Florida, where he earned a degree in interdisciplinary studies. He could have remained in sports making money, he could have remained in corporate America making money but he decided to provide leadership in far away Benue and Plateau states when he saw how the people were being killed to take their land and Islamize them. He abandoned his cozy lifestyle and opportunities in America and came to Nigeria where he saw government failure in providing security not because government does not have the means but because government was not ready being that the President is a man pleaser who fears the Fulani oligarchy and is only interested in winning elections and retaining power to help himself and his cronies.
Alex Barbir is not like youths who see university certificates as meal tickets. He is not like Nigerian youths who don’t think they have a role in the greatness of their own country. He is not like Nigerian youths who only think of their tribe shouting very hard on social media that their country be divided not knowing that a well built nation is an instrument that backs them up anywhere in the world.
Gumi wants Alex Barbir silenced but Alex is aware of the tremendous power that backs him up. He knows the greatness of America is enough power that Gumi Islamism cannot withstand. He keeps saying, “Trump knows I’m here.” And that is true. Gumi, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa'aad Abubakar 111, Professor Usman Yusuf and other Islamists know the easiest way to get the North invaded by America is to touch Alex Barbir.
Be aware youths, that you are as big as your country is. If you want to remain a slave in your country and a slave in others that you may visit, continue to play ethnic and religious politics. If the early leaders of Nigeria were shortsighted and therefore played religious and ethnic politics which have caused great division in the country, should you let that continue? Now is the time to say no to this old thinking and to say no to the current leadership, all of them should emulate Alex Barbir who can speak anywhere in the world, who can get anywhere and build justice.
Alex is using crowdfunding to get his “Building Zion” going, and he is using his skills in social media to bring attention to the problem of the oppressed and to provide succour to them. A new Nigeria is not just a talk in your mouth, it is action that you take just as Alex Barbir told his youth audience in Angwa Rukuba, Jos. It is not your violent killings based on ethnic or religious emotions, it is the unity, fairness, meritocracy and equity you demand. That is why America is great and Nigeria crawling.
First Published in METRO
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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
There is a particular strain of political rhetoric that thrives on contradiction but rarely has it been distilled into something so stark, so unsettlingly blunt, as the promise to “liberate” a nation while simultaneously threatening to bomb it into oblivion. It is the kind of statement that does not merely stretch logic, it snaps it clean in half and dares the audience to accept both pieces as a coherent whole.
The idea of liberation has always carried with it a moral weight. It suggests dignity restored, autonomy regained, a people rising from the grip of oppression into something freer, fuller, more self-determined. But when paired with the imagery of relentless bombardment, of infrastructure reduced to rubble, of cities plunged into darkness, of civilians caught in the indiscriminate sweep of modern warfare, the word begins to hollow out. It becomes less a promise and more a pretext.
What makes this rhetoric particularly jarring is not just its aggression but its casual certainty. The assurance that such devastation could unfold within “a couple of weeks” speaks to a worldview in which war is not a last resort, but a tool readily available, almost procedural. It is the language of someone who treats complex human societies as abstract chessboards, where moves can be calculated without fully reckoning with the lives that would be irrevocably altered or ended by each decision.
There is, too, an unsettling paternalism embedded in the notion of externally imposed liberation. It assumes that freedom can be delivered like a package, dropped from above, regardless of the cost borne by those on the ground. History, of course, has repeatedly challenged this assumption. Nations do not emerge stable and democratic from the ashes of destruction simply because someone powerful declared it so. More often, they inherit new forms of chaos, their social fabric torn in ways that take generations to mend—if they mend at all.
And yet, such declarations are not made in a vacuum. They are performed, crafted for an audience, calibrated to project strength, decisiveness and moral clarity. The contradiction itself may even be part of the appeal. To some, it signals toughness, the willingness to do whatever it takes, unconstrained by the hesitations or ambiguities that typically accompany discussions of war. But this performance comes at a cost. It normalizes a language in which human suffering is abstracted, reduced to a strategic variable rather than recognized as an inevitable consequence.
What is perhaps most troubling is how easily this rhetoric can shift the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse. When the prospect of widespread devastation is framed not as a tragedy to be avoided, but as a viable path to a supposedly noble end, it alters the moral landscape. It invites a kind of numbness, a quiet recalibration in which the unthinkable becomes merely controversial, and the controversial becomes, over time, routine.
In the end, the contradiction at the heart of such statements is not just a rhetorical misstep; it is a reflection of a deeper dissonance. It reveals a vision of power unmoored from empathy, one that conflates dominance with deliverance. And in doing so, it raises a question that lingers long after the speech has ended, what, exactly does liberation mean when it arrives hand in hand with ruin?
Every April 8, flags ripple in shades of blue and green, marked by the red chakra that symbolizes a long, unbroken journey. International Romani Day is meant to be a celebration of culture, resilience, survival. But in recent years, it has begun to feel less like a festival and more like a quiet act of defiance.
Because beyond the music, the poetry, and the rightful pride, there is a harder truth pressing in: Romani communities across the democratic West are facing a renewed surge of hostility, one that feels both eerily familiar and disturbingly normalized.
It is tempting, in liberal societies, to assume that certain prejudices belong to the past that they were buried alongside the worst chapters of European history. Yet Romani people have never been granted that luxury of closure. Anti-Romani sentiment has proven to be one of the most durable and socially acceptable forms of racism, often slipping under the radar precisely because it is so deeply ingrained.
Unlike other forms of bigotry that provoke swift condemnation, Romani discrimination frequently arrives cloaked in euphemism. It is framed as concern about “integration,” or “public order,” or “cultural incompatibility.” It is joked about in ways that would be unthinkable if directed at other minorities. And increasingly, it is acted upon with violence.
Reports of hate crimes targeting Romani individuals and settlements have been rising, not only in Eastern Europe, where such tensions are often stereotypically located, but in Western democracies that pride themselves on tolerance. Arson attacks, forced evictions, police profiling, these are not relics. They are current events.
What makes this moment particularly unsettling is not just the increase in incidents, but the atmosphere that surrounds them. We are living through an era in which nationalist rhetoric has regained political legitimacy, where the language of exclusion is no longer whispered at the margins but spoken from podiums. In such a climate, the Romani, long cast as Europe’s perennial outsiders, become easy targets once again.
And yet, the public response remains muted. Part of the problem lies in visibility. The Romani are often described as “Europe’s largest minority,” but they are rarely treated as a visible one. Their stories are underreported, their voices underrepresented, their contributions overlooked. When harm comes, it does not always register in the broader cultural consciousness.
Another part lies in discomfort. Acknowledging anti-Romani racism forces Western societies to confront an inconvenient contradiction: that even within systems built on democratic ideals, hierarchies of belonging persist. It is easier, perhaps, to look away.
But International Romani Day demands that we do the opposite. It insists on attention. It asks us to celebrate not just the endurance of Romani culture, but to reckon with the conditions that have made such endurance necessary. It asks uncomfortable questions about who is allowed to feel at home in Europe and who is still treated as transient, suspect or disposable.
Most of all, it challenges the complacency that allows prejudice to flourish in plain sight. If the day is to mean anything beyond symbolism, it must serve as a reminder that recognition is not enough. Visibility without protection is fragile. Celebration without solidarity is hollow.
The Romani flag may still rise each April, carried by those who refuse to be erased. But the measure of progress will not be found in ceremonies. It will be found in whether, in the months that follow, that same dignity is defended when it is most under threat.
Until then, the day remains both a tribute and a warning.
There is something almost darkly comic about a machine deciding which books are too upsetting for children, like a thermometer diagnosing grief or a lock choosing which doors deserve to exist. And yet, in a secondary school in Greater Manchester, this is not metaphor but policy, an AI system, fed a library catalogue, quietly disqualified nearly two hundred titles. Among the exiled were a former First Lady’s memoir, a wildly popular vampire romance and a graphic adaptation of a novel famous for warning us about systems that erase inconvenient truths. The irony, one suspects, was not flagged by the algorithm.
At first glance, the decision might appear practical. Schools are busy places; educators are overburdened; technology promises efficiency. Why not outsource the tedious work of cataloguing appropriateness to a system that can scan thousands of titles in seconds? But this is precisely the problem: appropriateness is not a measurable property like page count or publication date. It is a conversation, messy, contextual and deeply human.
When a machine rejects a book for containing “upsetting themes,” what it is really doing is flattening the entire purpose of literature. Stories are, by their nature, unsettling. They are meant to disturb complacency, to introduce discomfort, to complicate certainty. A young reader encountering difficult ideas, loss, injustice, moral ambiguity, is not being harmed; they are being initiated into the complexities of the world they already inhabit. To deny them that encounter is not protection. It is deprivation.
There is also a quieter danger in allowing AI to curate cultural spaces: the illusion of neutrality. Machines do not invent values; they inherit them. Somewhere, in the opaque layers of code or training data, a set of assumptions about what children should or should not see has been encoded. Those assumptions may be conservative, risk-averse or simply ill-informed. But because they emerge from a machine, they carry a veneer of objectivity that human judgment does not. A librarian can be questioned. An algorithm, too often, is obeyed.
This shift matters because libraries are not merely storage rooms for books; they are declarations of what a community believes is worth knowing. To quietly remove titles based on automated decisions is to abdicate that responsibility. It replaces a public, accountable process with a private, inscrutable one. The result is not just a thinner bookshelf but a thinner intellectual life.
There is, too, a pedagogical contradiction at play. Schools aim to teach critical thinking, yet here they model uncritical delegation. Students are told, implicitly, that difficult decisions, about what to read, what to question, what to engage with, can be outsourced to a machine. It is a lesson in passivity disguised as innovation.
None of this is to suggest that AI has no place in education. It can assist, augment, and even inspire. But it should not decide. The act of choosing books, especially for young minds, is an ethical exercise, not a technical one. It requires empathy, judgment, and an awareness of nuance that no system, however advanced, can replicate.
In the end, the image lingers, a silent program scanning titles, issuing verdicts, thinning a library without ever turning a page. It is efficient. It is scalable. And it is profoundly illiterate.
The underground bunker hummed with the dull sound of machinery, the air thick with the heavy stench of oil and rust.
A faint smell of sweat lingered, as though the very walls were soaked in the tension of war. Werner Bauer, senior engineer of the V-2 rocket program, crouched beside the central control panel, his fingers tracing the exposed wiring with a steady hand.
Yet, beneath the calm, something gnawed at him. Something was wrong. His eyes flicked between the intricate system before him and the schematic on the table, his brow furrowed in concentration. The faint scratches on the wire weren’t a mistake, they were deliberate, methodical.
A subtle tampering, too well hidden to be an accident, too precise to be anyone but someone who knew what they were doing. It could be the difference between success and disaster.
Historical Novel
Lucas Durand is a history enthusiast whose passion for the past fuels his work as a columnist and author. He delves into the rich tapestry of human events, exploring the triumphs and tragedies that have shaped our world. Lucas concentrates in the WWI era and loves bringing history and events vividly to life.
Ovi eBook Publishing 2026
Valkyrie might not fly
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The trajectory of war against Iran unleashed authoritarianism of dark ages propelling insanity and dystopian supremacy using democracy to shield their crimes against humanity. A hybrid culture, part human and part vulture. Humanity and its future appears disdained and unpredictable. The American-Israel war claims peace, democracy for the Iranian people but exhibits continuous bombardments of civilian populations, pains, deaths, horrors and devastation of essential life infrastructures. Trump and Netanyahu do not appear to be normal beings but despotic kings to undermine their own national interest and security. Trump lied about “America First”, it is Israel First and a Plan for “Greater Israel” is already operational. What is at stake?
Global humanity is being marginalized and threatened by just two political figures lacking effective leadership and accountability for the consequences of their sadistic thinking. President Trump and PM Netanyahu would deny the emerging plan for “Greater Israel” but coordinate and solidify its top priority for the conquest of the whole Arab Middle East. Their actions make no distinction between vice and virtue. The UN Secretary General condemns the US-Israel war against Iran and Iran’s retaliatory attack on the Gulf States. Conscientious citizens of Israel feel being hostages as their normal lives are ruined by daily Iranian bombardment, destruction, and the political agenda of an extremist leader and a group of people. Across Western Europe, millions march in solidarity with Palestinians, peace and demand an end to hostilities. Absurd propositions of wars deny the truth but truth is one and has its own language and that this is a war on humanity impacting all segments of social, economic and human affairs. America and Israel are not the friends but foes of the Arab world. They continued to exploit the sectarian divides and dehumanize the socio-economic culture of the Arab societies. To stop insanity, the Arab people should wake-up and realize the factual challenges to defend themselves.
The war has its hidden objectives, to annihilate the whole of the Arab oil producing region, massacre anyone opposing the war and asking for peace, freedom and justice and to make Israel the new superpower of the Middle East. Israel under PM Netanyahu and extremists face no hurdle to evolve “Greater Israel”, no law and no civilized challenge to stop the march for putting finished answers to Palestine. The West European and the US leaders used to propel an imaginary Utopian world of human rights, peace without war and to foresee the “succeeding generations free of the scourge of war” as a legal and political responsibility. Not so, they have all failed miserably to protect the entrenched mankind. The imagination of a promising glorious future simply turned by the few against many as an inferno of horrors, killings and utter devastation throughout Palestine and Persian Gulf.
How Global Leaders Betrayed the Arab Masses?
How strange! The sanctity of human life carries no importance and value but flow of oil assumes top priority to go via Strait of Hurmuz. Trump issues another 48 hrs ultimatum to Iran for the opening of Hurmuz which is already functional and open to all except enemies of Iran and Islam. Trump and Netanyahu detached from reality and desperate to finding out a way for the end of hostilities, disguise their failure as a triumph of insanity. They bombed hospitals, schools, innocent civilians and destroyed what was built over centuries, cruelty knows no cure. Truth is One, indivisible and irreversible, both Trump and Netanyahu are a liability on global conscience - crime riddled politicians always looking for more sadistic opportunities. The oil enriched Arab leaders lost the Islamic history of moral obligations, compassion and intellect and wanted to buy wisdom with wealth. The Western nations fed the Arabian societies with contaminated foods for a long time to change their thinking and behaviors and make them robotic machines to enjoy sports, pleasures and palaces. The Arab masses live in discontent and despair not knowing the reality of upcoming future – crimes and genocide by Israel enlarged to cover the Arabian Peninsula.“The World Wonders! Where are the Arab Leaders”,https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/07/20/the-world-wonders-where-are-the-arab-leaders-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/
America and Israel cannot defend themselves, how could they defend others? The American-Israeli collaborative war on Iran and Palestine and its immediate consequences made the Western world shamefully redundant and void in the 21st century global norms of civility, human rights, freedom, justice and safety of civilians.
Human Life is a Test of Good and Evil and Accountability
All material powers are exhaustible and the notion of being the most powerful nation is absurd and a political distraction. Sinisterism and unacknowledged motives make Trump and Netanyahu pathological liars unaware of their own ending. They do not seem to have faith in God, humanity and accountability for their actions. God created you as human beings – the most intelligent creation on this planet with moral and intellectual capacity, obligations and accountability. Earth is a “trust”to mankind for its existence, sustenance of life, survival, progress and future-making. Wherever there is trust, there is accountability. Those bombing the earth and killing innocent people are not normal people but a curse to mankind. The Divine warning (The Quran: 7:56), warns:Do no mischief on the Earth after it hath been set in order, but call on God with fear and longing in hearts; For the Mercy of God is always near to those who do good.), the reminder is explicit: We created not the Heavens and the Earth; And all between them merely in idle sport. We created them not, Except for just ends. But most of them do not understand. (44:38-39).You cannot pretend to think and behave like animals. Animals live and do not reflect on the imperatives of life whereas, we, the human beings cannot act like animals as we are supposed to be intelligent and responsible species on this Earth. At the edge of reason, the notion of evil leads to realization of evil and tyranny of genocide must be stopped by all means to restore the manifestation of equal rights, peace, justice and security for all. Intelligent people, leaders and nations always readily accept advice: The followers of Moses – the generations of Israelite are reminded by God (The Quran 2: 84-85 ):And remember, We took a Covenant from the Children of Israel (progeny of Jacob), Worship none but God; ….shed no blood amongst you, Nor displace people from homes: and Ye solemnly ratified, And to this ye can bear witness…. It was not lawful for you to banish another party, then it is only a part of the Book that ye believe in…. And on the Day of Judgment they shall be consigned to the most grievous penalty, For God is not unmindful what ye do.
Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: Global Humanity and Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution for the 21st Century and Beyond, Barnes and Noble Press, USA, 2025. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/global-humanity-and-remaking-of-peace-security-and-conflict-resolution-for-the-21st-century-and-beyond-mahboob-a-khawaja/1147150197?ean=9798317619374 and We, The People in Search of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. 05/2025 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6V6CH5W
Check Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. eBOOK, Wars on Humanity: Ukraine, Palestine and the role of Global Leaders HERE!
