While National Newswatch does not keep an archive of external articles for longer than 6 months, we do keep all articles written by contributors who post directly to our site. Here you will find all of the contributed and linked external articles from Jeremy Kinsman.
The question “Cui bono – who gains?” was a Roman judicial construct popularized by Cicero. Lenin made it famous in his 1913 article in Pravda on Russian society, “Who Stands to Gain?” The question has served for centuries as a starting point for evaluating strategic options. The prediction of unintended consequences has often served as a check point on the...
For 80 years, the main anchor and principal architect of the “rules-based” cooperative order has been the United States. Now, in a reversal begun in Donald Trump’s first term and accelerated in his second, the US is abandoning that role. This is not just episodic isolationism. This is aggressive unilateralism, directed also toward America’s closest allies. Former Secretary of State...
As the world reels from another chaotic year, humanity hopes for a less frenetic, less dangerous 2026 while, as ever, bracing for God’s laughter. The negative change agent responsible for our insecurity is Donald Trump. Our hope lies in the fact that Americans now seem tired of the roller-coaster of shock driven by Trump, his tone of derision and vindictiveness...
On December 4th, the Trump Administration released its U.S. National Security Strategy. As with so many institutions, norms, and pillars of American democracy, the first NSS of the second Trump presidency represents a significant departure from all the presidential NSSes that have preceded it. Its foreword by Donald Trump describes the document as a “road map to ensure that America...
Since the dawn of this century, the “international community” of developed countries, now democracies, that have dominated world affairs for centuries have seen that economic and political domination challenged by the rise of new rivals. Countries like China, Brazil, South Africa, and India do not support the democracy-led international community’s values on a whole range of files, disputes, conflicts and...
In the garden of the United Nations headquarters in New York stands a sculpture depicting a man hammering a sword into a plowshare. It is the work of Soviet-era monumentalist Evgeny Vuchetich, creator of The Motherland Calls, the war memorial in Stalingrad (now Volgograd), site of the single deadliest battle in the history of war, and grave of more than...
As a Canadian going about his business in London and Paris these days, it’s been impossible not to notice a change in the reflexive greeting from foreigners. The usual friendly thaw at the news that you’re from “the unobjectionable nation” has been replaced by immediate expressions of sympathy and indignation at our new status as Donald Trump’s favourite trolling target...
Prime Minister Mark Carney is headed to Washington Tuesday to meet President Donald Trump and set the scene for a major negotiation to follow, which Mr. Carney has imagined will be a comprehensive economic/security discussion. Obviously, the top objective now for Carney is to get the immediate tariffs between the two countries off the table, pending a more definitive settlement...
It is difficult to capture this moment in Europe’s reaction to the extraordinary storm Donald Trump has launched across multiple fronts. The winds, swells, and tides change almost from hour to hour. Writing from the UK, there is little else preoccupying policy and political minds, to say nothing of the talk in the Waitrose checkout line. In Canada, voters are...
On April 2, or what Donald Trump declared “Liberation Day” (The Economist called it “Ruination Day”), leaders and citizens across the interconnected world paused for an hour to watch an American president launch a global trade war. Abusing yet again the power of the captive audience that comes with the office, Trump unleashed the most destructive set of measures of...
Canada has now entered an election campaign amid what Prime Minister Mark Carney terms “the most significant threat of our lifetimes,” based on a previously unthinkable menace from the White House to end Canada’s existence as a sovereign country. Both Carney, the current prime minister and Liberal leader, and Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, swear with certainty that existential threat...
In the late 1990s, in response to a request from the Ukrainian foreign minister, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy asked me, as someone with deep experience in both Washington and Moscow, to go (from my post in Rome) to Kyiv to mentor the Ukrainian government on how Canada, as a smaller neighbour of a superpower, manages its principal bilateral...
The term “Iron Diplomacy” was coined by former Ukrainian Railways CEO Oleksandr Kamyshin to describe the “Rail Force One” shuttle system he established to transport foreign dignitaries from Przemyśl Główny, in Southeast Poland, to Kyiv after Ukraine airspace became too risky in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion in 2022. On Monday, the third anniversary of that invasion, Prime...
The United States Office of Personnel Management recently sent on behalf of downsizing overlord Elon Musk a message to two million federal employees, with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” It invited them to resign from government service with eights months’ pay, and is almost certainly illegal. But wreaking havoc for US public servants is part of Donald...
President Donald Trump delivered two inaugural addresses on Monday; the formal one in the Capitol Rotunda, and the compensatory “real” one to loyalists afterward in Emancipation Hall — laced with falsehoods, boasts, and nationalist bravado. Both set out his second-term intentions. That Trump’s inauguration unfolded in the crime scene where, on January 6, 2021, a violent insurrection he was impeached...
To the extent that foresight is possible in today’s world of interconnected crises, it seems a fair bet that post-inauguration Donald Trump will continue to stir chaos and destabilization, especially for Canada. It’s in his nature as a power player, and in his technique as a negotiator. Trump’s is not a “win-win” negotiating approach, it’s winner-take-all. It makes the advent...
At last, an event the world’s humanists might celebrate. Finally, one of the world’s entrenched authoritarians has been defeated by a suppressed people. In 2011, when Bashar al-Assad crushed the peaceful democratic protests inspired by the Arab Spring, he did so ruthlessly, with extreme force. Dictators across the world, the military junta in Myanmar, Lukashenko in Belarus, the Chinese state...
Polls got it wrong. Pundits got it wrong. Donald Trump, who won a second presidential election Tuesday with 51% of the popular vote and 277 Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris’s 224, got it right. Anthony Scaramucci, once Trump’s White House Communications Director (for 11 days), who is today a fierce critic of the ex-President, credits him with an extraordinary...
Americans have seemed in the digital age to live in the moment; driven by memes, tropes and “likes”. But America anchors its identity and sense of purpose in its history as a nation, sometimes romantically misremembered. Still, it rightly holds itself high as probably the only major country whose organizing principle is dedicated to a proposition that all humans are...
“Navalny n’est plus?” In France, the newspaper headline over the report of a significant death is often, poignantly, that the defunct person “n’est plus.” He/she is “no more.” Alexei Navalny’s death signals the opposite. This is his biggest news day ever. He is not just in the news. He has become an enduring martyr to the grotesque regime that rules...