The gold trade helped boost Turkey’s flagging export numbers at a moment when those numbers might have hurt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chances for reelection. Zarrab, who became fabulously wealthy by taking a percentage from every transaction (he later estimated his take at $150 million), even received a reward for his efforts from a Turkish trade association in 2015, with Erdogan applauding from the audience.

track record of identifying and exposing Iran’s malign activities.

In the end, the trial ran long. With the judge calling for the prosecution to wrap things up quickly, I managed to avoid taking the stand. Atilla testified in a last-ditch self-defense, and the jury began its deliberations on December 20.

All eyes are now on the United States government and whether it issues a fine against Halkbank, particularly now that it has proven in a court of law that the bank engaged in a massive, illegal financial scheme.

Fine or no fine, it’s hard to envision tranquil U.S.-Turkish relations going forward.

And now that Zarrab has finally clarified a few things about the Iranian role in his scheme, one troubling question lingers: Why did the U.S. government continue to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran in 2013 and 2014 while Treasury was warning Halkbank about enormous sanctions violations? We may never know. Then again, from the documents I viewed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see other sanctions busters come in the DOJ crosshairs—creating new and uncomfortable challenges for our existing alliances and diplomatic agreements. Perhaps other future indictments will tell us more.

first sign something could be wrong came in the May 2017 presidential election.

There are several reasons Iran’s economy hasn’t taken off in the way Rouhani had promised.

But perhaps more important than the uncertainty over the agreement are Iran’s own demographics. Half of all Iranians are under the age of 30. More people are entering the workforce each year than jobs exist or are being created. This all but ensures that a country with near universal literacy—with no gender disparity—will continue to have double-digit unemployment for the foreseeable future.

The protests were able to spread because of, among other things, the penetration of the smartphone—more than 40 percent of Iranian households have access to at least one—which enabled Iranians to use messaging apps to spread the word about the demonstrations.

Ultimately this might have been what prevented them from getting bigger.

This is ultimately what could imperil the Iranian regime. Rouhani’s economic promises have yet to materialize.

“The Islamic Republic,” Takeyh warned, “is entering a period of prolonged transition where it will no longer be able to proffer a theocracy with a human face.”

Trump’s administration has suggested that it sees nuclear weapons as useful against “non-nuclear strategic attacks” on U.S. infrastructure, perhaps including cyber or terrorist attacks.

It proposes two new nuclear-capable systems.

Neither weapon is needed to deter potential adversaries, and would instead raise the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon—whether because an adversary thinks it is being attacked or whether a U.S. president thinks he has to order an attack. As it stands, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the institutions that would handle the warhead changes, will struggle to find the funding or the manpower to meet existing modernization requirements. New programs would only compound this uncertainty and endanger core nuclear-modernization priorities. Moreover, developing new warheads creates an unpalatable choice: They will either be deployed without a test or with a test. Both options are bad. Lastly, the draft NPR asserts that its program proposals are affordable, but avoids making fiscal trade-offs between different military priorities. Yet Congress will have to ask whether new nuclear weapons programs are really worth the money, given that there is still no plan to pay the $1.2-trillion bill for nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.

Even as the Trump administration is proposing expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities, it is subverting traditional mechanisms for controlling them.

Today, an astonishing 58 percent of Americans lack confidence in the president’s judgment with the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to believe that Congress or the American public will quietly acquiesce to a major expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities and missions. Yet, without concerted pressure, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review will abandon U.S. leadership to reduce nuclear risks and instead follow our adversaries into a world where nuclear competition is commonplace.

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the FN’s identity crisis than the departure of Florian Philippot, the party’s former vice president and national spokesperson. He had embodied the FN’s “de-demonization” strategy—less racism and xenophobia, more education, healthcare and progressive economics.

“They’re returning [to] an identity-based rhetoric. It’s really a step backwards,” he said. Since Philippot’s break with the FN (he insisted he was pushed out), he has co-founded a political party called “the Patriots.”

The Front’s leaders, however, insist that they don’t want to revive the FN of the 1970s and 1980s, the days of the party’s Holocaust-denying president Jean-Marie Le Pen and his obsession with immigration.

This logic animates the push for the party to pick a new name, which is expected to be announced at the FN’s “re-foundation congress” in March.

It’s difficult to see anything changing until another FN politician rises to challenge Le Pen.

To some degree, the party still operates as something of a personality cult.

“If people from the National Front are really asking themselves questions about the basics and about strategy, and they want to bring them forward, they need to run against Marine Le Pen for the presidency of the National Front,”

Perhaps the most sensitive question for the FN is that of a potential electoral alliance with the Republicans, France’s mainstream conservative party, which has struggled to differentiate itself from Macron’s La République En Marche

While the Trump administration tried to undermine the book’s release, even seeking to block its publication, these efforts only appeared to draw more attention to it. It’s not often a publisher is called on to cease and desist publication of a book, and it’s even rarer for such a demand to come from one of the most powerful leaders in the world.

“Given how central the story of Trump’s administration has been to the political conversation—certainly in the West and definitely beyond that as well—I think it’s fair to say that this book is getting a wide hearing ,” Jacob Parakilas, the deputy head of the U.S. and Americas project at the London-based Chatham House, told me. “The commentary in American publications about it, the way it has sort of driven the media narrative, is apparent to audiences far beyond Washington.”

The book’s international popularity mirrored its U.S.-based reception. In Singapore, some bookstores ran out of copies less than 24 hours after it was released.

Bannon proposed quashing the two-state solution—once considered to be a cornerstone of American diplomacy in the Middle East—by splitting up the Palestinian territories between Jordan (which would retake control of the West Bank) and Egypt (which would assume control over Gaza).

While the book has earned Trump a fair bit of international bad press since its release

it probably won’t lower Trump’s standing in foreign countries by any significant margin.

“The effect of the book, rightly or wrongly, is to reinforce this narrative of the White House as this center of intrigue and competing fiefdoms and aggressive competition between different ideological and personality-based groupings surrounding the president and the sort of concomitant narrative of Trump’s own mental state, his fitness for office, his level of attention to the job,”

Whether his tweet was premeditated or another instance of erratic, spontaneous outburst, it is hard to imagine any of the men or women Trump ran against in the 2016 primaries or the general election handling this matter as poorly.

He’s projecting the image of a man canceling out of umbrage––a man who disagrees with a done deal and intends to make a show of it without trying to reverse it.

They told me that while democracy is “not dying” in the United States, certain “alarm bells” are ringing. They pointed out that the first year in office of a democratically elected, would-be authoritarian is an unreliable indicator of future democratic breakdown, and compared the United States with 1930s Spain, 1970s Chile, and contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.

There’s also a generational divide

The tunnel was filled in, abandoned and forgotten, only to be discovered recently when workers at the Mauerpark, a green area near the former buffer zone around the wall, found it during building work.

“It was a tunnel that had dramatic effect,” said Mr. Holzapfel, who helped to dig it. “Twenty-one people were arrested as a result of that tunnel, and one woman died while she was in prison.”

conscious policy to reintroduce language that was previously not acceptable in debate

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s choice of words drew condemnation from around the world.

But the political reality is that migration has become a salient issue — and not only for right-wing, populist and nativist politicians.

Several European heads of government were proudly xenophobic in their responses to a refugee crisis in 2015, when more than one million asylum seekers arrived by boat on European shores, prompting a surge in support for far-right parties and nativist rhetoric — particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

While still moderate in tone, some leaders are pursuing policies that are Trumpian in spirit

But that’s obviously not the point of what the 45th president of the United States was trying to do. Stirring up racial and religious hatred for political ends has become known as “populism” among the pundit class. It’s considered impolite to call it what it is: fascism. But we are long past the point of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, or respecting voters who exercise their democratic rights for racist causes. There’s something more going on here that demands an honest response. Trump is a particularly stupid neo-Nazi sympathizer.

By now, most rightwing politicians have figured out how to flirt with the neo-Nazis without getting burned by their torch-wielding mobs and burning crosses. They stir hatred for immigrants and preach about the sanctity of national culture and family values. But they generally stop short of circulating fascist propaganda. It’s just too offensively obvious.

Two Benitos.

Militarism.

Two Benitos.

Glorification of violence and readiness to use it in politics.

One Benito.

Fetishization of youth

Zero Benitos.

Fetishization of masculinity

One Benito.

Leader cult.

Hyper-nationalism.

Lost-golden-age syndrome.

Four Benitos.

Self-definition by opposition.

Three Benitos.

Mass mobilization and mass party.

Two Benitos.

Hierarchical party structure and tendency to purge the disloyal.

Four Benitos.

Theatricality

Three Benitos.

In the fascist derby, Trump is a loser.

26 out of a possible 44 Benitos

While there is a strong family resemblance, and with some features an uncanny likeness, Trump doesn’t fit the profile so well on those points where the use of violence is required. Projecting an air of menace at rallies, uttering ambiguous calls for assassinations, tacitly endorsing the roughing-up of protesters, urging the killing of terrorists’ families and whatever else Trump does — while shocking by the standards of American politics — fall far short of the genuinely murderous violence endorsed and unleashed by authentic fascists.

Italy’s prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), said the rise in industrial production “would have been unthinkable only two years ago”. But he might just as validly have chosen a much longer time span: the Italian economy has been wallowing in the shallows for almost two decades. It repeatedly grew more slowly than other European economies in the good times and shrank faster in the bad ones. The financial and euro crises of 2008-11 made things a lot worse. But the underlying problems, which include low productivity, too few big corporations, sky-high public debt, a fragmented banking system, limited competition, slow civil justice and underfunded, underperforming universities, were all handicaps before.

Arguably, the biggest potential snag is not economic, but political. Structural reforms usually anger vested interests. They need governments with agreed programmes and stable majorities, able to weather temporary unpopularity. Italy’s next election, which has to be held by May, is likely to produce anything but.

As with most on-the-record discussions with an elected official, I was recording our conversation to ensure accuracy.And after Mr. Corker got off the phone, his two aides made sure I had recorded the call. Like the senator, they wanted to ensure his extraordinary charges were precisely captured.As Mr. Corker noted in our interview, his comments were only the latest, and sharpest, critique he had made of Mr. Trump this year.

Trump continues his war of words and measuring of egos with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While I still find the threat of a nuclear strike remote, it grows less and less remote with every passing day and every insult. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Kim Jong-un is irrational and unhinged, but so is Trump.

Don’t say that we weren’t warned.

“Donald Trump is dangerous. But not in the way you think. Many people think he’s dangerous. They say, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want somebody like that with such a hot head with his fingers on the nuclear codes.’ And yeah, that’s certainly true. That’s not the real danger. The real danger is that ironically Donald Trump could destroy America’s chance to be great again.”

Something about all these warnings, while true, felt of another time, like they were happening during the Cold War, rather than tailored for an election about the culture wars. Still, a Fox News poll conducted a month before the election found that voters overwhelmingly trusted Clinton to do a better job making decisions about using nuclear weapons.But enough Americans looked past these warnings, just as they pushed past so many others, to hand Trump the election. After all, the nuclear question was theoretical and academic, right? No, it wasn’t.In fact, after the election, concern about Trump controlling our nuclear arsenal only congealed.

Plenty of people tried to warn us about this moment, but not enough Americans took heed. To them, this was sky-is-falling hyperbole. The use of nuclear weapons was a thing of history and Hollywood. Write A Comment But it is ever so clear that the threat is urgent and real and that the only thing standing between a nuclear strike and us is a set of short fingers that constantly type out Twitter insults.If all this makes you uneasy, good. It should. Also, welcome to the club.

Many have hoped, and still hope, that Mr. Trump’s aggressive posture is mostly theater, designed to slake his thirst for attention, keep adversaries off guard and force changes in their behavior by words alone. But there is no underlying strategy to his loose talk, and whatever he means by it, Congress has been sufficiently alarmed to consider legislation that would bar the president from launching a first nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress. It wouldn’t take away the president’s ability to defend the country.

That’s a sound idea, and could be made stronger with a requirement that the secretaries of defense and state also approve any such decision. As things stand now, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed when there was more concern about trigger-happy generals than elected civilian leaders, gives the president sole control. He could unleash the apocalyptic force of the American nuclear arsenal by his word alone, and within minutes.

“I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” he said. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”

“During the recent offensive, fighting, which is literally hot work, was hotter than usual, and the men on the firing line suffered great discomforts. Humorous as these pictures appear to be, it should be noted that they represent scenes right up at the front where the men were in danger of being killed while enjoying their baths. That is why they were still wearing their steel helmets, and not to produce a comic effect.”