The Betrayal of Arab Leaders: Perpetuated Animosities and Wars by Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man’s nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in position of power the vulgar and base.” (C.E.M Joad. Guide to Modern Wickedness, 1936)

Leaders or Puppets of Western Powers

Divided and defeated they are even though European colonization ended more than a half of century ago. Islam civilized the Arabian tribalism and anarchy, professed and preached a message of universal brotherhood, peace and harmony but it was reversed and lost by the fake prosperity of oil discovery and its consequential economic wealth offering disdained comfort and expectations.

Former colonial cliches embedded in fraudulent schemes of things for modernity originate from European and American hegemony of the Arab Middle East. Most Arab states have no armies or formidable defense capacity to safeguard their national interests and live in an ill-informed reality of colonial assigned national identities. All mythological concepts unfold ego-driven authoritarianism glued to the shameful glory of distractions and dreadful cruelties experienced by the Arab masses. When Arab leaders were educated Muslim and visionary for the good of mankind, they acquired triumph and honor for their endeavors and universality of Islam. Israel and America dominate the Arab genetically modified culture of thinking and imagination as they consumed contaminated foods and made song and dance and sports a way of life. A century earlier, it was Islam imbued with Arab culture for guidance and glory, now the fervor spells into obscene dances, music, football matches and loss of originality of culture and sense of universality. Not triumph but annihilation of Arab identity awaits to collective consciousness. Futuristic Arab generations are degenerated and left to have nothing to inherit except the treacherous illusion of fame and fortune. The natural resources belong to the people not princes or kings. Israel and America continued to propel new animosities and bogus wars across the oil exporting Arab world. They imply psychological twists and turns to make peace but intend on prolonging the wars, occupation and crimes against humanity in Gaza- Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. Their ceasefires are a prelude to further conflicts and schemes of occupation. They view occupation of Arab lands as a way of life to enforce the ‘Greater Israel.’ A scenario being repeated since 1948.

John Perkins (Confession of an Economic Hitman, 2006), describes House of Saud ‘cows to be milked as long as necessary’ and portrayed Saudi Arabia in a US-led scheme of money laundering and fake security alliance of 12B annually for the protection of the House. of Saud.https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081A Saudi Prince with no accountability makes billions into trillion investments in split second to appease the US President.

Are Israel and America set for the conquest of the Arab world? The war on Gaza and West Bank, Palestine has crippling impacts on the Arab states. Please see more: https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/03/14/howarab-muslim-leaders-betrayed-the-people-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/ Editor Antonio Rosa (Transcend Media: 11/10/25), exposes the reality of the on-going genocide in Gaza and other parts of Palestine: “Genocide in Pictures: Worth a Trillion Words.” https://www.transcend.org/tms/2025/11/genocide-in-pictures-worth-a-trillion-words-74/

War Monsters Bomb the Spacious Earth – A Trust to Humanity

Israel has bombed Gaza - three times more insane than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the World War2. Do Israelis or Americans believe in God and accountability for their actions? The Torah and Bible fully reflect on this core human responsibility and punishment to those who violate the Divine Covenants. The Earth is a trust to mankind; those bombing and destroying it are mentally sick and defy the Divine Truth. The earth is a living entity and spins at 1670 km per hour and orbits the Sun at 107,000 km per hour. Imagine, if this spinning fails, what consequences could occur to the living beings on Earth. Think again, about the average distance of the earth from sun is 93 million miles - the distance of the Moon from Earth is currently 384,821 km equivalent to 0.002572 Astronomical Units. Earth is a “trust” to mankind for its existence, sustenance of life, survival, progress and future-making. The Earth exists and floats without any pillars in a capsule by the Will of God, so, “Fear God Who created life and death.” Is human intelligence still intact to understand this reality? Wherever there is trust, there is accountability. The Divine Revelations (the Quran: 40: 21) offer a stern warning to conscientious leaders and nations:

Do they not travel through the earth and see
What was the End of those before them. They were even superior to them in strength
And in the traces they have left on the earth. But God did call them to account for their sins
And none had they to defend them against God.

And killing of innocent people is prohibited in the Ten Commandments (Torah):

'Thou shalt not kill' (Exod. 20:13; also Deut. 5:17). Jewish law views the shedding of innocent blood very seriously, and lists murder as one of three sins (along with idolatry and sexual immorality), that fall under the category of yehareg ve'al ya'avor - meaning "One should let himself be killed rather than violate it.

War Racketeering and the Arab Leaders

“War is a racket Then and Now”, Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler (WAR IS A RACKET) of the US marines served 33 years and tells “the wars sustained capitalist governance and made millionaires into billionaires. WAR is a racket.  It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”https://www.amazon.ca/War-Racket-General-Smedley-Butler/dp/B09NRNV4DD/ref=sr_1_1Undoubtedly 2.4 million people of Gaza are innocent victims of Israeli War and Palestine is lost by Arab political conspirators. Please see:https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/the-fallacy-of-gaza-peace-plan-and-failure-of-arab-muslim-leadership-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/.War is a crime in civilization context. Militarization complements the characteristics of warmongering and it has been institutionalized in the superpowers democratic system of governance and its spill-over impact is spreading fast across the globe. What is the cure to raging indifference and cruelty to the interests of the whole of mankind?The 21^st century new-age complex political, economic, social and strategic challenges and the encompassing opportunities warrant new thinking, new leaders and new visions for change, conflict management and participatory peaceful future-making. The imperial networks export wars and conflict-making and conflict-keeping across the Middle East.

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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 and We, The People in Search of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Kindle Direct Publishing-Amazon, USA: 2025 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6V6CH5W

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Check Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. NEW eBOOK,
Wars on Humanity:
Ukraine, Palestine and the role of Global Leaders
HERE!

An inquiry that knows by Jemma Norman

There is something almost Shakespearean in the way Boris Johnson flinches whenever the UK Covid-19 Inquiry drifts near his name, as if the ghost of lockdowns past is rattling chains in the hallway of public memory. Officially, the Inquiry exists to examine Britain’s handling of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Unofficially as anyone paying the slightest attention has noticed, it has become a stage for a different drama: the collision of politics, corruption, and economics in a country that has never been very comfortable looking at its own reflection.

From the beginning, Covid was treated less like a public health crisis and more like an unplanned stress-test of Britain’s political machinery. It revealed the misalignments, the broken cogs, and the strange, squeaking priorities of a government that seemed to value optics over outcomes. And nowhere has that been more visible than in the Inquiry hearings, which have not so much illuminated what happened as exposed who was afraid of the illumination.

The deeper the Inquiry digs, the clearer it becomes that the real story of the pandemic is not the virus but the system it infiltrated. Pandemic response, after all, is not delivered by microbes or masks, it is delivered by people, often powerful people, whose decisions become invisible architecture for everyone else’s suffering. And so the country now finds itself revisiting the familiar scenes: the delayed lockdowns, the baffling communications, the science-by-WhatsApp, the contracts awarded over brandy and personal acquaintance. The virus spread fast, but political self-interest spread faster.

For Johnson, the Inquiry represents an intolerable inversion of his preferred narrative. He has always been most at ease when he can create his own myth: the raffish hero stumbling through chaos with charm as his compass. But a public inquiry is immune to charm. It deals in documents, not anecdotes; in testimony, not nostalgia. Its job is to sort through the rubble of decisions made at speed and in darkness, and identify whose fingerprints are on the structural failures. And Johnson knows perhaps better than anyone that the Inquiry has found prints.

One cannot help but appreciate the irony. Johnson, the man who once projected himself as the embodiment of British exceptionalism, now finds himself at the mercy of an Inquiry revealing a different kind of exceptionalism, Britain’s talent for turning national emergencies into political opportunities. Pandemic response became a theatre of insider economics, a showcase of how quickly the language of patriotism can be weaponized to justify lucrative shortcuts. A crisis that should have united the country instead magnified the fractures between public duty and private gain.

What unsettles Johnson most, one suspects, is that the Inquiry threatens the political alchemy on which his career has always relied: the transmutation of accountability into affability. In the court of public opinion, he has long survived by virtue of being entertaining. But an Inquiry is the one arena where entertainment offers no protection. There is no stagecraft to hide behind, no well-placed Latin quip to deflect a question. It is a process designed, however imperfectly, to extract truth from power.

And truth is rarely flattering to those who govern.

The deeper one reads into the transcripts, the more the pandemic resembles not a medical emergency but a vast, uncoordinated improvisation. Ministers struggled with basic technology. Advisors competed for influence like characters in an office satire. Vital decisions were delayed not because evidence was lacking but because political consequences were feared. And underpinning it all was the sense that Britain was being run less by strategy than by mood, particularly the moods of the man at the top.

The Inquiry is inconvenient for Johnson not because it misrepresents him, but because it represents him too faithfully. It captures the casual bravado, the disdain for detail, the reliance on instincts over information. It documents the machinery of government bending itself into shapes that suited his preferences rather than public needs. And it reveals a political ecosystem that enabled him, not because it believed in him, but because it benefited from him.

In many ways, the Inquiry has become the nation’s attempt at collective therapy: an effort to understand how a crisis spiralled into a catastrophe and why so many decisions seemed engineered to protect political careers rather than human lives. It asks the questions people muttered in real time but felt too exhausted to pursue. Why were warnings dismissed? Why were experts sidelined? Why were billions sprayed into the pockets of the well-connected while nurses wore garbage bags?

The answers, predictably, lie not in virology but in politics, a fact that explains Johnson’s hostility with clarity. The Inquiry does not threaten his pandemic legacy; it threatens his political mythology. If it concludes that mismanagement and misplaced priorities amplified the death toll, then Johnson cannot cast himself as the beleaguered leader battling an invisible enemy. Instead, he becomes something far less romantic: a prime minister outmatched by the moment, buoyed by opportunists, and betrayed by his own instincts.

And so he bristles. He complains. He deflects. Because he understands that once the Inquiry publishes its findings, the historical record will be harder to charm than the electorate ever was. The footnotes will not laugh at his jokes. Future scholars will not be swayed by his rumpled charisma. History, unlike politics, has no interest in his persona.

In the end, the Covid-19 Inquiry is not really about a virus at all. It is about the machinery of a nation and the leaders who claimed they could steer it. It is about how power responds under pressure, and how quickly political convenience can become national vulnerability. And it is about the uncomfortable truth that Britain’s greatest pandemic failure was not scientific, it was political.

That, more than anything, is why Boris Johnson hates it.

The carpet and the mountain of justice misconducts by Edoardo Moretti

There’s a certain theatrical quality to the way the American justice system has been forced, over the past decade, to perform for an audience that never bought tickets but keeps showing up anyway. We’ve grown used to indictments that read like political fan fiction, prosecutors who seem to have leapt fully formed from the fever swamps of cable news, and statements from public officials that fall somewhere between Greek tragedy and slapstick. But even in this crowded landscape of institutional oddities, the latest episode, District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s dismissal of the criminal cases brought against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, manages to achieve a kind of sublime absurdity.

The core of the ruling is almost elegant in its simplicity, Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor appointed to bring the case, was never legally appointed at all. It’s the sort of bureaucratic footnote that in a better-functioning moment in American governance would be just that a footnote. Yet here, it becomes the entire story. Judge Currie’s finding amounts to saying that the architect of this legal assault was essentially a squatter in the seat of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. And with that, everything built on that foundation collapses.

Enter, stage right, the attorney general, promising an appeal, vowing this isn’t over, insisting that the dismissal itself is a miscarriage of justice, even as the scaffolding of the case lies in splinters at his feet.

It would all be merely farcical if it weren’t also so predictable.

For years, the pattern has repeated: a handpicked loyalist elevated to a position of immense prosecutorial power; a case targeting one of the administration’s greatest political irritants; a rollout drenched in primetime bravado; and then, eventually, the unraveling, the judicial equivalent of turning on the kitchen lights and watching the whole enterprise scatter.

This time, the targets were especially symbolic: Comey, the ghost who never stops haunting the former president’s psyche, and Letitia James, the New York power attorney whose investigations have so consistently pierced the membrane of myth that surrounds Trump’s business empire. Bringing them down would have been a kind of operatic revenge, the stuff of presidential daydreams.

But even dream sequences require continuity and the casting here was all wrong. Halligan’s appointment was, in retrospect, a case study in arrogance disguised as administrative oversight. To call her “Trump-installed” is both accurate and insufficient; she was the kind of appointment that said the quiet part loud. Her presence telegraphed intent long before any indictment was unsealed. It’s no wonder Judge Currie’s ruling seemed to carry the faint aroma of judicial exasperation. Not for the first time, a court was being asked to treat political theater as legal architecture. And not for the first time, it refused.

What makes this fiasco especially revealing is not the legal failure itself but the narrative that will inevitably be woven around it. The attorney general has already begun stitching the first threads: the courts are biased, the system is rigged, the deep state strikes again. These refrains have been repeated so often that their cadence is practically patriotic. But repetition does not make them true; it only makes them familiar.

The truth is far less conspiratorial and far more mundane. The case collapsed not because of a vast institutional resistance but because the administration governing its prosecution cannot seem to manage the basic mechanics of governance. Incompetence is not as thrilling as sabotage, but it is far more common.

Still, one has to admire the rhetorical choreography. The promise to appeal even if such an appeal is little more than a procedural ghost ship, allows the administration to keep the story alive. It keeps the loyalists engaged, the critics enraged, and the legal press corps on a low simmer. It also delays the inevitable reckoning: that this was never a serious case, that it was never meant to be, and that its downfall was baked in from the start.

And yet, the most instructive image to emerge from all of this comes not from the courtroom but from the metaphor the public has now started repeating: there is only so much you can shove under the carpet.

The carpet, in this metaphor, is of course the administration’s preferred storage unit for political embarrassments. Over the past years, it has bulged with inspector general reports, contradictory executive memos, failed legal crusades, and a revolving cast of officials whose tenure could be measured in lunar cycles. And now, added to the pile, lies the crumpled remains of the Comey-James prosecutions, a case so poorly engineered it barely survived its own unveiling.

The attorney general may try to sweep this one under as well, but geometry has limits. Eventually the carpet rises to meet the furniture, and the furniture shifts, and someone, usually a judge, stumbles on the whole thing and pulls the corner back.

In the end, what remains is not some grand political victory or symbolic cleansing. What remains is a familiar tableau: institutions battered, norms ignored, professional standards contorted into partisan configuration, and a public asked again to suspend disbelief.

And yet, the courts, those stubborn guardians of process, those maddeningly patient custodians of procedure, continue to do the quiet work of pulling the carpet back down to the floor.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not headline-friendly. But it is how the republic endures.

Even when the room is a mess.

The tightrope of French democracy by Nadine Moreau

Emmanuel Macron, once hailed as the centrist reformer who bridged the chasm between left and right, now teeters on a precipice of his own making, a man so confident in his dominion that he may soon be forced to call elections, not because he wants to but because he must. The irony is grim: in a political landscape increasingly devoid of credible alternatives, Macron may be pushing France into a corner where democracy’s very essence is under threat.

From the presidential palace in the Élysée, Macron has long operated as an unchallenged maestro, orchestrating policy with technocratic efficiency. Yet, beneath the polished veneer lies a growing vulnerability. His popularity, while resilient, is not immune to fatigue. Economic stagnation, social discontent, and the specter of a divided Europe are all chipping away at his narrative of inevitable progress. With mounting frustration among the electorate, calls for a fresh mandate are growing louder and he may not be able to ignore them forever.

Consider his strategic calculus: by calling an early election, Macron can seize control of the political storyline. He can frame it as a reaffirmation of his vision rather than a retreat. He can rally his base, rebrand his legacy, and force his opponents many of them fragmented, ill-prepared, or lacking charismatic leadership, into a spotlight for which they may not be ready. It’s a high-stakes risktake, if the gamble pays off, he consolidates power; if it fails, he could emerge weakened, or worse yet, unseated.

Yet therein lies the paradox. Macron’s strength has always been his appeal to pragmatism, his ability to pitch himself as above the old partisan skirmishes. But what happens when no one truly opposes him? The opposition in France is fractured, ideologically adrift, and often more focused on infighting than on mounting a coherent challenge. The left is splintered between traditional socialists, greens, and radicals. The right teeters between nationalists and conservatives. No single force seems capable of consolidating a viable counterweight to Macron’s machine.

This lack of viable alternatives is not just a political problem; it’s a crisis of democracy. When the electorate is offered little more than a yes/no vote on the incumbent, the very act of choice begins to shrink. Voters may grumble, may protest, may turn to abstention but when forced to pick between a technocrat they distrust and a patchwork of underwhelming challengers, many will feel compelled to support the lesser of disappointing options. In doing so, France risks drifting into a politics of inevitability, where power is concentrated not because of ideological triumph, but because of default.

The implications are profound. A Macron-backed election, if successful, could entrench his reformist project for another term, reforms that may accelerate Europe-friendly markets and fiscal discipline, but also risk alienating large swaths of the population. The emerging chasm between a cosmopolitan elite and the disenfranchised masses could widen, and with it, resentment. Worse, the façade of choice could intensify cynicism: democracy as a staged performance rather than a true contest.

Moreover, in an era of rising populism, the stakes are not just national, they’re continental. Should Macron prevail, his re-election might soothe the markets and reassure Brussels, but it could also stoke fears among those who see his agenda as technocratic and remote. Alternatively, a bruising contest might energize nationalist or isolationist forces, giving them the momentum they need to galvanize around anti-elite sentiment. Either outcome could destabilize the fragile balance that has kept European politics from tipping into irrelevance or authoritarian drift.

There is also a generational dimension to this. Younger French voters, who yearn for change and care deeply about climate, inequality, and social justice, may interpret Macron’s potential re-election as a betrayal, not only of their ideals, but of their future. For them, the election isn’t just another democratic exercise; it’s a fork in the road. Will France double down on austerity and technocratic governance, or will it invest in a more inclusive, forward-looking polity?

Macron, for his part, must be acutely aware of these risks. He is no stranger to political manoeuvring. But the gamble he seems poised to take now is different in kind: it’s not simply about winning, but about legitimizing his dominance in a system where meaningful opposition has atrophied. It’s a move that could cement his legacy or accelerate his decline.

If the election goes awry, the damage could be irreparable. A weakened Macron may find it impossible to govern, trapped between a hostile parliament and a resentful population. The resulting paralysis would fuel disillusionment, deepen fragmentation, and perhaps open the door to more extreme voices. On the other hand, if he triumphs decisively, the consolidation of power could erode the democratic checks and balances that have long undergirded the French Republic.

Ultimately, Macron’s potential call for an election is more than a calculated political manoeuvre; it is a symptom of a broader malaise. It speaks to a dystopian democratic reality in which the absence of genuine alternatives undermines the very principle of choice. It forces us to ask: when democracy offers only one viable path, is it still democracy?

At its best, democracy thrives on competition, debate, and the clash of ideas. But in Macron’s France, the stage seems carefully curated, the opposition muted, the script pre-written. And when power becomes so centralized, when dissent is soft and divided, France risks drifting from the ideals that once defined her Republic.

So, as Macron toys with the notion of imposing another election, the French people may find themselves looking at ballot boxes that feel less like gateways to change and more like checkpoints in a journey they never asked to take. And for a republic that once prided itself on liberté, égalité, fraternité, that may be the gravest threat of all.

A fistful of cactus #109 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

When a cactus becomes the sheriff then a whole lot of spines shoot around!

For more A fistful of cactus, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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A continent left on hold by Gabriele Schmitt

The spectacle of Donald Trump once again striding onto the global stage with a self-fashioned “peace plan” for Ukraine has exposed something Europeans have quietly feared for years but rarely say aloud: that the European Union, led by a bureaucracy that prides itself on stability and procedure, has been caught flat-footed in one of the most pivotal geopolitical crises of our time. It is not simply that Trump can ignore Europe; it is that Europe has made itself easy to ignore.

Nowhere does this failure feel more embodied than in the figure of Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president who often speaks as if conviction alone were a substitute for strategy. Her solemn declarations of unity, her unshakable insistence that the EU stands firmly with Ukraine, all ring somewhat hollow when measured against the brute fact that Washington whether led by Biden, Trump or a committee of unruly ghosts still dictates the tempo and terms of war and peace on Europe’s own borders. The continent that imagined itself as a normative superpower has lately struggled to be even a competent regional one.

The Trump episode crystallizes the broader paralysis. Trump, in his signature bravado, claims he can “end the war in 24 hours,” a boast that would be laughable if it weren’t a reminder of Europe’s diminished role. The disturbing part is not the outlandishness of the promise but how casually it sidelines Brussels. He doesn’t need Europe. He doesn’t fear Europe. He doesn’t even calculate Europe. He simply disregards it, as one might disregard background noise while negotiating something serious. And Europe, for all its institutions and summits and declarations, appears content to clear its throat politely while events unfold without it.

This is not merely a matter of diplomatic ego; it is a matter of security. European citizens, those whose homes lie closer to Russian artillery than Washington’s, are stuck watching leaders who seem permanently surprised by geopolitical reality. While Putin rewrites borders by force and Trump rewrites alliances by impulse, Europe writes speeches. The continent’s vulnerability is not just military; it is conceptual. It has not yet accepted that soft power finds its limits in hard times.

One might have hoped that Russia’s invasion in 2022 would jolt Brussels into strategic adulthood. And yes, Europe acted with a speed that surprised even itself, sanctions, arms deliveries, refugee support. But the initial burst of clarity soon dissolved into familiar patterns, bureaucratic friction, intra-EU disputes, strategic ambiguity masquerading as sophistication. What began as a moment of unity hardened into complacency, as if the mere act of condemning aggression could contain it.

Meanwhile, Europe’s dependence on American military power, long acknowledged, long lamented, never resolved, has reached a level that borders on the absurd. The EU talks of “strategic autonomy” with the kind of earnestness that suggests it is reciting a phrase from a language textbook it has not yet learned how to use in real conversation. For all the conferences on the subject, the continent remains a security tenant living under America’s unpredictable landlord.

Enter Trump, whose plans, whatever their details or lack thereof, underscore Europe’s inability to shape its own fate. The tragedy is not that Trump is returning to the global spotlight; it is that Europe, facing its most dangerous moment since the end of the Cold War, still relies on the whims of an American politician whose worldview is built on unilateralism and transactionalism. Europe claims to champion multilateralism, yet its security rests on a single man’s mood at any given hour.

What, then, is the path forward? It certainly does not lie in the EU’s current posture of performative resolve and institutional inertia. Europe must do something radical: take responsibility. Not in the abstract, not in glossy strategy papers, but in the concrete terms of defence spending, unified command structures, and the political willingness to face the world as it is rather than as it wishes it to be. The continent needs leadership that can distinguish between optimism and illusion, between diplomacy and drift.

But this requires confronting uncomfortable truths. It requires admitting that Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission, however well-meaning, has governed with a technocratic complacency ill-suited to an era of power politics. It requires acknowledging that many European governments have treated security as a luxury item, something to debate in safe rooms rather than invest in before the storm hits. It requires accepting that Europe’s soft-spoken moral certainty, that favoured tool of post-war identity, cannot stop tanks, dissuade autocrats, or deter the ambitions of men who believe force is the ultimate currency.

Most of all, it requires Europe to stop outsourcing its survival to the United States. America may be a friend, an ally, even a lifeline but it is not Europe’s guarantee. It never was, and certainly not in the era of Trumpian unpredictability. The notion that Europe can continue to rely on Washington while offering little more than speeches in return is not just outdated; it is dangerous. The continent must either grow into the responsibilities of sovereignty or accept the consequences of its dependence.

If Trump’s unilateralism awakens Europe from its strategic slumber, then perhaps there is a silver lining to the insult of being dismissed. But if Europe continues believing that declarations of unity are a substitute for power, then the next crisis, whether sparked in Ukraine, the Balkans, the Caucasus, or within Europe’s own political fractures will leave the EU once again staring at events it cannot shape, waiting for someone else to decide its fate.

Europe does not lack the capacity to act; it lacks the will. Until that changes, the continent remains what it has become: a geopolitical observer with the vocabulary of a superpower and the influence of a bystander. And history, as it has warned repeatedly, is not kind to bystanders.

The absence at the most important table by Brea Willis

The conference halls in Belém were supposed to feel like the front line of humanity’s common struggle, humid air, anxious negotiators, the faint hope that yet another global climate summit might be the one that finally cracks through the shell of geopolitical self-interest. Instead, what hung in the air was something heavier, almost metallic, the knowledge that the world had shown up, but the United States had not.

This year’s United Nations climate conference, COP30, ended as so many of its predecessors have—thick with well-intentioned language and thin on the commitments that would actually bend the planet’s overheating trajectory. Delegates managed to agree on modest steps for adaptation financing and incremental progress on transparency measures. But the elephant that has been stomping around these conferences for years, the need to phase out fossil fuels remained untouched, undiscussed in any meaningful way, and certainly uncommitted to. It was as if the very words “phase-out” were too radioactive for the diplomatic lexicon.

And yet, the absence of the United States was the real ghost wandering the corridors. The Trump administration’s refusal to send even a symbolic delegation was more than a diplomatic snub; it was a message written in thick marker: We will not play. We will not help. We will not acknowledge our role. For a nation historically responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other, this was not just petulance it was a dereliction of planetary responsibility.

To many delegates, especially those from small island nations whose shorelines shrink year by year, the American no-show landed with the dull inevitability of a betrayal repeated too often. But this time, the disappointment carried an edge sharper than usual, because the stakes are no longer theoretical or futuristic. Brazil, the host, is living through the climate crisis in real time: record drought punctuated by catastrophic floods, the rainforest gasping under the dual assault of illegal burning and global warming. And yet, despite the immediacy of the threat, the conference’s conclusions read like a polite shrug.

There is a kind of global emotional fatigue at these summits, a sense that everyone is required to pretend we are inching forward while knowing we’re mostly running in place. But even the most hardened doubters, the sceptics who’ve grown allergic to climate optimism, had to admit something as COP30 concluded, without the United States participating fully and forcefully, the prospects of preventing destructive warming collapse dramatically. The world may no longer revolve around Washington, but the climate still does. America’s economic weight, its technical capacity, its political influence over global energy markets, these are irreplaceable. And it is precisely these levers that Donald Trump has allowed to rust.

There is no way to speak honestly about COP30’s failures without speaking plainly about Trump. His withdrawal, literal and ideological, from climate cooperation is not simply a policy difference. It is an allegiance. And it is not to the American people. It is to the industries that have long mastered the art of pretending the future is somebody else’s problem. Fossil fuel interests have found in Trump not just a reliable ally but a kind of champion who carries their talking points with the zeal of a convert. The result is not subtle, gutted regulations, theatrical disdain for environmental science, and the normalization of climate indifference.

The paradox is that Trump claims to fight for American strength even as he weakens the very global structures that have allowed the United States to lead. Climate diplomacy, at its best, is one of the few remaining arenas where American soft power still commands respect. When America walks into a climate summit, the room shifts. When America refuses to walk in at all, the room shrinks.

Brazil’s president, along with numerous other leaders, pushed hard for a more ambitious agreement this year, but without Washington’s political gravity, every proposal rose briefly then drifted away like loose paper in an open window. Europe cannot shoulder the burden alone. China, despite massive investments in renewables, continues to approve new coal plants at a dizzying pace. The Global South remains trapped between moral urgency and economic constraints. In this fragile geometry of global interests, the United States is the anchor even when it behaves badly, even when it demands more than it gives. But this time, the anchor was simply gone.

And so the summit’s final text reads like an exercise in restraint. Words like “encourages,” “recognizes,” and “invites” appears where words like “commits,” “requires,” and “phases out” should have stood. It is the diplomatic equivalent of clearing your throat for three days and deciding that the clearing itself counts as progress.

Critics often describe climate summits as talk shops, but talking is not the problem. Talking is the precursor to action. The problem is pretending that talk alone counts as action, especially when the world’s most powerful nation can’t even be bothered to show up and talk.

There is a tragicomic quality to the global climate effort now: nations drafting elaborate plans to avert disaster while one major player insists that the disaster itself is a hoax or worse, someone else’s responsibility. But climate physics is indifferent to American politics. The atmosphere does not pause to see who won which primary. It tallies emissions with cold accuracy.

What COP30 revealed, yet again, is that humanity has the technical tools to change course, the scientific wisdom to see the danger, and even the financial capacity to cushion the transition. What we lack is the political will of one country that holds an outsized share of the power. And until that country decides to act like the indispensable nation it claims to be, climate summits will continue to end the way this one did: with exhausted applause for agreements that no longer match the urgency of the crisis.

The planet does not need American heroism. But it does desperately need American participation. And until the United States reclaims its place at the table, no matter who sits in the Oval Office the world will keep gathering, keep talking, keep waiting. The climate clock will keep ticking. And the future will keep shrinking.

Cracks in the armour by Shanna Shepard

International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

There is a day each year, November 25th, when governments tweet slogans, NGOs publish earnest posters, and the world rehearses its condemnation of violence against women. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women has become a ritual of recognition, a solemn nod to a crisis so vast and so persistent that it almost resists comprehension. Yet this year, that ritual feels different. Heavier. Fraught. Because the backdrop against which it unfolds is not merely the familiar landscape of gender-based violence but a political era tilting unmistakably toward the far-right, where the very notion of women’s rights has become a battleground.

It is no coincidence that, as extremist politics surge globally, domestic murders, often minimized as "family tragedies" rather than what they are: preventable killings, are rising with grim consistency. The data and headlines do not whisper; they shout. Women killed by partners. Women killed by former partners. Women killed because someone decided their autonomy was an insult. Violence against women is the longest-running pandemic on record, and no vaccine has ever been developed because its root cause is not biological. It is ideological.

Far-right politics is not solely responsible for the phenomenon, but it has certainly become its accelerant. In many countries, political leaders who champion “traditional family values” also champion judicial reforms that quietly, efficiently, and lethally weaken women’s protections. They cast gender equality as an elitist provocation, feminism as a corrupting foreign import, and the concept of systemic violence as a myth designed to emasculate men. The courtroom becomes a theatre where women must perform their pain convincingly enough to be believed, but not so convincingly that they appear hysterical. And the judges, mostly men, often untrained in gender-sensitive approaches, sometimes carrying unexamined biases, retain the authority to decide whose suffering counts.

We are told, in this era of political polarization, that everything must be balanced. But balance is a luxury not afforded to the dead. In many jurisdictions, courts have begun entertaining “parental alienation” claims more readily than testimony of abuse, and such rulings disproportionately place women and their children back into the custody or proximity of their abusers. The message is unmistakable: the system doesn’t merely disbelieve women; it disciplines them for speaking.

If this sounds dramatic, it is because the situation is dramatic. What is happening is a rollback, subtle in its bureaucratic language, blatant in its consequences, of hard-earned rights and protections. And the far-right does not hide the blueprint. Its political vision hinges on the restoration of a patriarchal order: man as provider, woman as dependent. Man as authority, woman as subordinate. In such an ideological structure, domestic violence becomes not only invisible; it becomes predictable.

What makes this moment especially perilous is not just the rise of extremist leaders but the normalization of their rhetoric. Misogyny has rebranded itself as a form of cultural preservation. Online, it flourishes with unchecked ferocity. Influencers with millions of followers preach a gospel of male entitlement, repackaged as self-improvement philosophy. Young men, disillusioned and digitally isolated, find community in anger. And when anger becomes identity, violence becomes expression.

Meanwhile, women remain told by institutions, by politicians, by judges to report violence “through the proper channels.” But these channels are clogged, cracked, or designed to loop women back into harm. When a woman gathers the courage to report abuse, she often enters a labyrinth where her credibility is interrogated more thoroughly than the violence itself. She finds herself having to convince strangers that her fear is valid, that her bruises are not metaphors, that her partner’s volatility is not simply “a private matter.” She may be asked why she stayed, why she left, why she didn’t record the abuse, why she did. It is a procedural ritual that rewards silence far more than it rewards truth.

This is the hypocrisy at the heart of our current moment: we commemorate a day dedicated to eliminating violence against women while simultaneously inhabiting political landscapes that treat such violence as an inevitable by-product of social tradition. We cannot both celebrate women’s resilience and elect leaders who legislate their vulnerability. We cannot claim to protect women while permitting courts to interpret their trauma through prisms of suspicion. And we cannot praise “family values” while ignoring the fact that, for countless women, the family home is the most dangerous place they will ever enter.

The true purpose of this international day should not be to mourn yearly statistics. It should be to confront the ideologies that uphold them. To examine which political movements benefit from keeping women quiet, frightened, and dependent. To acknowledge that violence is not merely an individual act but a structural one: a consequence of narratives that devalue women, institutions that fail them and political movements that exploit them.

The far-right does not ascend because it promises safety; it ascends because it promises certainty. And in that promise lies a dangerous question: certainty for whom? Certainly not for the women whose names appear in grim annual tallies.

On this day, this symbolic day, we owe more than remembrance. We owe clarity. Violence against women does not exist in a vacuum; it flourishes where inequality is policy, where misogyny is political strategy, where the courts are more concerned with reputation than justice. Until we confront that, November 25th will remain not a day of elimination but a day of repetition.

Who are the terrorists and the bandits? By Tunde Akande

To ward off terrorism and banditry, Nigeria must take strong action against religious extremism. It must be defined and eliminated by our constitution.

When Nigeria fought the Civil War with the Biafra separatist movement, it ran for three fierce years and only providence gave the Nigerian side victory. But now Nigeria is in another war that the military tells the nation is asymmetric. It is now 16 years and still running. It is a war of Fulani bandits and terrorists against other Nigerians.

The Fulani employ the bandits who once were called Fulani herdsmen but now out of pressure from the Fulani elites who said they should not be profiled as Fulani herders have transformed into terrorists. It took years to brand them terrorists because the elite Fulani who use them would not allow even the label “terrorist.” A war expert told me labelling them terrorists will allow the military to deal with them with strong hands. Without that label, I’m told Nigeria will not be able to deploy the Tucano jets Nigeria purchased from the USA. Until these bandits began to abduct and rape the wives of elites in the cities, the very elites sponsors did not allow the nation to label terrorists by a law. The law to do it will not just be passed in the legislature; they blocked it. The administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan could not do it because he was the very reason the bandits were put together. Despite his kowtow to the Fulani elites, they still will not allow him rest. He must be removed from power because he is not one them. He is from the Niger Delta and even though the Niger Delta produces the oil which is the financial life line of the nation, yet Goodluck Jonathan does not deserve respect, he is not a Fulani who are the presumed owners of Nigeria. That is what their great grandfather told them. Every inch of Nigeria belongs to them.

Not until the bandits had gained the upper hand in Zamfara State killing their fellow Muslims because of control of gold reserve in that state and causing problems for the Fulani elites did former President Muhammadu Buhari remember he had to don his military uniform once again to drive some terror to the bandits who he helped nurture. Nurture the bandits? Yes, the story goes like this, there are allegations yet unchallenged, that Buhari, Nasir El Rufai, former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Dr. Usman Mohammed Bugaje, former PDP chieftain and others in APC, and possibly the current president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who nurtured an ambition to succeed Buhari as president, imported a group of armed Fulani from other parts of West Africa into the country to show former President Goodluck Jonathan the way out forcibly if he decided not to leave power. These foreign Fulani elements having seen the good of Nigeria and Jonathan having left power voluntarily because his ambition, according to him, is not worth the blood of any Nigerian, did not leave the country when their service was no longer needed. For this set of Fulani, Nigeria is too prosperous a nation not to enjoy her goodies. Together with their kith and kin in Nigeria who enjoyed great patronage from Buhari who was the patron of the Myetti Allah, the umbrella association for all Fulani cattle herders, they became a thorn in the flesh of Nigerians. They could not be touched, they were the apple of Buhari’s eyes. With these two sets Buhari hoped to fulfill his unexpressed desire to Islamize Nigeria. At a time Buhari was so pushed by that desire that he didn’t know when he said he would distribute one Quran to each secondary school student in Nigeria to improve their morality. I think somebody must have pinched him by his side to remind him that Nigeria is a federal state and a multi-religious society, and he did not have power to do that. He abandoned the idea subsequently.

But Islamisation still burns in his bones. Buhari surrounded himself in power by all manner of Fulani elites. So Nigeria has three categories of terrorists; the Boko Haram that was terrorising the North East, a section of local Fulani herdsmen who formed the bandits and are ravaging the North West and foreign Fulani who with their local collaborators filled the forest of Nigeria, and are kidnapping Nigerians and ferreting them to the bush from where they demand ransom to set their captives free. Many of their captives were killed. But who are these three categories of terrorists. Only one category of them brought to foment trouble should Goodluck Jonathan not want to leave power are foreigners. The Boko Haram, who are they? What produced them? What empowered them? There is talk generally that President Bola Tinubu must act fast to defeat Boko Haram and bandits. He can’t do it. This is the time the weakness of the president will manifest: the man who is strong in politics but is not a statesman. He thinks only of himself, his family and his friends, and not about Nigerians.

Defeating Boko Haram and banditry will come only when we know the source of those evils and call them what they are not minding whose ox is gored. Mohammed Yusuf was the first leader of Boko Haram. How did be become enemy of the state? He was born by a Muslim father. He dropped out of school, Gemini AI said. Gemini AI did not tell us why. But we can hazard some guesses. His father could have been poor and unable to send him to school. So if Mohammed Yusuf had the opportunity of a free education funded by the state, he could have had the opportunity of a good education and would have turned out differently. After he dropped out of school he stayed at home learning the Quran under the guidance of his father. Statistics say there are over ten million out-of-school children in Nigeria, most of them in the north. The north pays no attention to them, some southern governors are joining them too by neglecting education. These out-of-school children are potential recruits into Boko Haram and banditry. To defeat terrorism and banditry, Nigeria must provide education for children of school age. But President Tinubu cannot fund university education as he loudly said. Then the nation will have to continue to contend with banditry and terrorism.

Why was Yusuf’s father not able to provide education for Yusuf’? Perhaps he has too many children. Islam permits, it did not compel four wives, you can marry four wives if you can love them equally. Sultan of Sokoto Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar 111 has only one wife. We don’t know why but perhaps he knows he can’t love two women equally, let alone four women always brawling because of envy. Perhaps by his education he knows that a one-wife man buys peace for himself and unity among his children. Multiple wives gives multiple children and multiple children results in unmanageable population. Huge population has become a tool in the hands of political elites in the north with which they win elections. China’s Mao Zedong, was a Marxist theorist, revolutionary, the first chairman of the People’s Republic of China, was like the northern elders. He thought that huge population is instrument of international power until over four million Chinese died of famine and starvation. His successor, Deng Xiaoping saw the illogicality of that thinking and stopped it. He began the policy of one-child per family (Now relaxed to three) and also opened up China to market-driven economy away from the strictly communist production of Mao. The result is what we see today, a developed China that is striking fear into the heart of Octopus America. There must be someone who must compel a strict population control in Nigeria. God himself knows we don’t have enough resources to take care of the current population and we will never have. It must be a countrywide policy and no religion must be respected in that regard. Former president Muhammadu Buhari said he was consulting when he was asked to curtail population. Maybe we will see the result of his consultation in the near future. Until population is curtailed, especially in the north, there will be many more Mohammed Yusufs, and terrorism and banditry will not end. When Mohammed finished learning at his father’s feet, he also learnt under several prominent Islamic teachers. When he qualified he was said to be the equivalent of a graduate. First he joined the Shia group, the second largest branch of Islam. He became a Salafarist, a very radical group of Islamists. Not satisfied with the extent of their radicalism, he formed his own group. He preached against Western education, secularism, democracy, and the concept of evolution. He believed that Sharia must be imposed on society. His sect believes that Muslims must engage in politics, in fact taking power to impose Sharia.

To ward off terrorism and banditry, Nigeria must take strong action against religious extremism. It must be defined and eliminated by our constitution. Many people praise the effort of Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore but Lee himself told the story of what he did to eliminate religious extremism. He said: “In the beginning we locked up many religious extremists without trial.” Lee was an Oxford trained lawyer who knew everything about human rights and the rule of law. He knew also that nation building demands tough action against all factors that can hinder a nation at its formative years. Today Singapore is a good story to tell. Religious extremism is not restricted to Islam, it is also in Christianity and it could be in the traditional religion. Islam fractured immediately after the death of the Prophet when there was division about his successor. That broke Islam into Shia and Sunni and it remains like that till today. Division within the two major blocks have developed. Celestial Church of Christ splintered into divisions immediately after the death of its founder, Bilewu Oscoffa and the divisions are still multiplying. The same thing with the Cherubim and Seraphim. Some Pentecostal churches have also splintered. Nigeria must make the issue of religious extremism as a constitutional matter. Mohammed Yussuf died violently when he was killed in a scuffle with the police. His successor Abubakar Shekau was more hardened. His own life trajectory reflects who terrorists are. He was born by an Islamic teacher who taught him. An ethnic Kanuri, he was sent to Maiduguri to be almajiri. He reportedly begged for food on the street, a common practice among the almajiri.

Abubakar Shekau, the former leader of Boko Haram, attended the Government Secondary School in Konduga, Borno State, and later enrolled in the Borno College of Legal and Islamic Studies. He believed Sharia must be imposed on society. When he took over from Yusuf, he escalated the crisis. He aligned with Al Queda. He was known to be very brutal, slaughtering his victims like one will slaughter a ram. His group splintered when ISIL ( Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant) also known as the Islamic State, ISIS, appointed another leader for Boko Haram which he did not like. He was said to have a photographic memory that enabled him to have his own interpretation of the Quran, and also fluent in Hausa, Fulbe, Arabic and English. He reportedly committed suicide when the rival ISWAP cornered him. Shekau’s background as an almajiri formed in him a very crooked and wicked character turning him from someone who should have been a profound intellectual into an extremist, who aims to destabilize society, according to his narrow and unsophisticated interpretation of the Quran .

Alamajiri system must be cancelled by a legal instrument. Parents must have the responsibility to look after their wards. Parents who won’t must be sanctioned by jail terms. Nobody must commit the care of his children to others. This is why the issue of population control and control of marital pattern is very essential. Nobody must use his sexual indiscipline to wreck society. Secularism must be emphasized in our constitution and it must cover the entire country. We have seen the problem we have with democracy. While leaders from the north talk adoringly about democracy, in their heart they don’t want it. They, like Yusuf and Shekau want to impose Sharia. We have seen that in the smuggling of Sharia provision into the Constitution. A recent viral video showed a man in Abuja who had a commercial dispute with another person. The Sharia Court of Appeal ordered to lock up the shop of that man, who is a Christian and Igbo. They will sell off the goods in his shop. But the man is not a Muslim, so why did they bring him under that system. Those who want Sharia always tell the rest of us that it does not concern non-Muslims. Ilorin is called an Islamic city where the Yoruba Isese traditional worshippers cannot operate. The Emir of Ilorin gave an order to drive Isese worshippers out of the city.

The trajectory of Bello Turji, one of the most notorious bandits, who has done much damage to lives is another story that tells the source of that evil. He has no formal education, and over 30 years he has been roaming the forest tending his herd. He had conflict with some people in settled communities, possibly the Hausa. He alleged his cows were stolen and given to an emir. His efforts to sue the emir failed because of the usual corruption. Six of his siblings and an uncle were killed. He took to banditry and formed a group which he leads till date. The Nigerian military has not been able to arrest him and he has led many deadly ambushes against the security forces. He has killed over 200 people. He has had several peace negotiations with state governments which he has often reneged on. Like others, he also has no formal education. With welfarism declared by a constitutional mandate, potential bandits like Bello Turji will find their feet. Nobody would spend some years in school, secure a good training and a good job or business and want to put himself at a risk of being a bandit. Bandits are very brutal thieves. They will continue to be if they are not educated. A cow herder following cows in the thick forest, exposed to wild animals cannot but be wild like the animals that he encounters. Fulani herders must be settled in ranches and be given education.

Some are praying now so that Trump who has declared to help Nigeria to wipe off these terrorists and bandits will not come. One of those prayers I saw making the rounds on social media is from the palace of the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar 111. It was addressed to all Muslims. Good effort, but my little knowledge of God is that he does not answer the prayer of sinners. I’m sure some of the Muslims who will say that prayer have murdered persons in the past in the name of Islam. Perhaps those of them in Sokoto participated in the killing of Deborah Samuel, the Shehu Shagari College of Education student who was killed because she confessed Jesus as her helper in her exams which she passed. Even the Sultan himself is complicit. We are not aware whether he made any effort to get justice for Deborah Samuel who was killed not too far from his palace, according to reports. Let’s not deceive ourselves playing religion. Trump will come because government here will continue to lack the will to do anything. Tinubu does not have the muscle to move against the terrorists and bandits in the north. Trump is the man that will set Nigeria to rethink our wickedness and set this nation right. We are in the harvest season of our misdeeds. God must revenge. The emir who got Turji’s cows will have to pay for it somehow. I recommend that all our traditional rulers, because they have outlived their usefulness, should vacate their thrones while elected mayors take over the towns and cities.

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.

Fika bonding! #112 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Fika is a state of mind and an important part of Swedish culture. It means making time for friends and colleagues to share a cup of coffee and a little something to eat.

For more Fika bonding!, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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When bombast meets moral bankruptcy by Eze Ogbu

Working for Donald Trump is like riding a runaway carnival carousel: dizzying, precarious, and full of sound and fury. Imagine then, that just days after he unleashed a barrage of bluster at the Nigerian government, threatening war, speaking of “total devastation,” framing global conflict in transactional terms, the world watched as terrorists struck in tragic, decidedly un-cinematic fashion. Over 300 schoolchildren and a dozen teachers were abducted at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Niger State, Nigeria. This horrific event didn’t register as his greatest foreign-policy moment. Rather, it exposed something far more telling, moral bankruptcy dressed as bravado.

Trump’s verbal assault on Nigeria wasn’t rooted in careful diplomacy. It was performative, transactional, rant-fueled. He cast the country as a failing actor in a global marketplace of influence, threatening to withdraw recognition, threaten war, or destabilize things entirely, his words swinging like a machete in a political jungle, lopsided and aggressive. And here, nearly simultaneously, was a real crisis: children torn from classrooms, teachers forced into terror. The contrast should have caused a collective moral recoil, but instead, the spectacle of his bombast overshadowed the substance of suffering.

To work under that kind of man is to internalize a stark disjunction: public threats paired with private impotence. The administration’s grandstanding about Nigerian governance does nothing to redeem its failure to protect innocents or to condemn abductions with the kind of global moral clarity that might actually make a difference. If anything, Trump’s hawkish language gave the world a distorted metaphor: as if Nigeria were a toy to be broken or bartered, rather than a nation where children yearn to learn in peace.

We might wish that attention toward Nigeria’s plight sprang purely from altruism. But in this world of power, urgency often arrives on the back of self-interest and in Trump’s case, cornucopia of theatrics. His threats were not an outpouring of concern for Nigeria’s future; they were an overture in his transactional politics: “If you don’t do this, we’ll do that. If you don’t pay, we’ll pull back.” Yet when gunmen stormed into a Catholic school and snatched hundreds of young lives, the performative war cries turned eerily hollow.

Abductions in Nigeria are sadly not new, kidnappings of students have become almost routine, a grotesque testament to the failures of regional governance, extremist opportunism, and global indifference. But what should have made this abduction resonate was not just its scale but its timing: following the bluster from Trump’s lips, days after he had painted Nigeria as inept and dangerous. The world was primed to hear warnings, to watch fireworks; instead, it got a tragedy that blew past the rhetoric and laid bare a ruthlessness no amount of sabre-rattling could repair.

The irony is biting and brutal: in his bid to corner Nigeria into submission, Trump spoke in abstractions, state failure, instability, diplomatic leverage. But in real life, the failures are concrete. Weak infrastructure, failing security forces, deeply vulnerable communities. The children snatched from St. Mary’s weren’t pawns in geopolitical grandstanding. They were human beings, and their abduction punctures the farce of transactional diplomacy.

There is, of course, a temptation to frame this as a foreign policy failure and it is. But it’s more than that. It’s a moral failure of prioritization. What does it mean to threaten war when you can’t protect children? To chant economic leverage when you aren’t even ensuring basic security partnerships? To preach “America First” while ignoring that global responsibility sometimes requires more than a bombastic tweet.

It should boggle the mind that a showman’s voice could drown out the crying horror of real violence. But it does. In the cacophony of threats and counter-threats, the moral gravity of what happens in Nigerian backwaters, where Catholic schools can become deathtraps, becomes a footnote. And that’s no accident. That’s the architecture of neglect.

Those kidnapped children deserve more than a tweetstorm. They deserve an international system that refuses to treat their nation as a bargaining chip. They deserve real aid, serious diplomacy, relentless pressure on local and regional actors to guarantee their safe return. They deserve moral leadership that doesn’t require the next headline, the next deal, the next slice of leverage.

And what of working under Trump through all this? It likely feels like watching a pyrotechnic show while fires rage in the distance, spectacular from your seat, but destructive for everyone else. Yes, the stage dazzles. But the backdrop burns.

In the end, the tragedy of St. Mary’s isn’t just a commentary on Nigerian security; it’s a mirror held up to American posturing. Threatening war is easy. Sending real help, showing consistent solidarity, building trust, demanding accountability that’s hard. Bombast is cheap. Leadership, real leadership grounded in humanity, has a price.

If we continue to let the loudest, most incendiary voices dominate global discourse, we risk turning every foreign tragedy into background noise. And the voices that matter most, the terrified children in a Catholic school, the grieving teachers, the families waiting by the phone, will be drowned out by the next political spectacle.

Trump’s threats were loud. But his commitment was shallow. And as those young lives hang in peril, that dissonance echoes with devastating consequence. The world must do more than listen. It must act, with urgency, with humanity, and with a moral clarity that no amount of grandstanding can replace.