From Ukraine to Venezuela, people are fleeing their homes and becoming weaponized refugees

Refugees are daily streaming over borders to neighboring countries and adding to what is already the world’s largest refugee crisis. The country they are fleeing is embattled, violent and experiencing extreme shortages of medicine and food.

This is not Ukraine. It is Venezuela.

While Ukraine is undergoing invasion, Venezuela continues to suffer erosion. In both cases, people seeking survival are fleeing these two countries. In Europe, they are escaping armed invaders and rocket attacks; in Latin America, they are rushing from societal collapse. READ MORE

Merkel, and the rest of Europe, are through with Trump

Munich.

The very name conjures vastly different images and emotions depending on your age and where you live.

For the Greatest Generation, Munich immediately evokes memories of a spineless Western “appeasement” that sold out Czechoslovakia and fed Hitler’s insatiable appetite for power leading to World War II. Baby Boomers recall Munich as a terrorism turning point when cold-blooded Black September members murdered 11 Israeli athletes in the city’s 1972 Summer Olympic Games.

This past week, Munich may likely be remembered as the place where American allies finally gave up on President Trump, America’s leadership of the alliance of Western democracies and any U.S. security guarantees as credible.

Appeasement, murder, betrayal. Munich has had its pivotal historic moments, and this looks like one of them. READ MORE

Brexit aside, Poland and Italy are Europe’s latest troublemakers

Poland is free because of a pope, the Vatican and a European dream. Not that long ago, Soviet-dominated Warsaw created a spiritual alliance and common cause with a church-dominated Rome and its dream of an expansive pan-European political union.

That dream is now a nightmare that aligns the two Catholic-dominated nations of Poland and Italy, bound together in an anti-immigrant stance, an unholy alliance ready to take on Europe and cut it down to size.

This latest assault on the European Union comes on top of an uncertain and undefined Brexit brought on by a banger-eating British populace tired of Polish plumbers unclogging their water closets. Europe seems especially brittle right now with the political chaos surrounding Britain’s political schizophrenia and the unanswered Irish border wall question. Despite Brexit’s severe disruption, however, Poland and Italy are the European Union’s newest challenge for survival. READ MORE