GERMANY - The era of ‘Pax Americana’ is over for Europe, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said, adding that the global economy and political order are undergoing a “tectonic shift” in centers of power worldwide. The term ‘Pax Americana’ (American Peace) describes the transatlantic order that emerged after 1945 and was institutionalized through NATO, with the US as Europe’s primary security guarantor and leading military power. Speaking at the Christian Social Union (CSU) party convention in Munich on Saturday, Merz urged Europeans to prepare for a “fundamental change in the transatlantic relationship.” “The decades of the Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe and for us in Germany as well. It no longer exists in the way we knew it,” he said. “Americans are now very, very firmly pursuing their own interests.” The chancellor pointed to changes in tariff policy under US President Donald Trump, which led to a trade deal between Brussels and Washington that many criticized as disadvantageous for the EU.

USA - Recently, the White House issued the annual National Security Strategy. The document is mandated by law and describes in very broad terms the administration’s vision of the world. Rarely does the document go into details of how the challenges must be addressed – it does not prescribe “how,” but tells “what” and “why.” This latest attempt at defining the foreign policy of the United States is historical in three aspects. It paints the world without friends or enemies. It declares the former and current interests outside of the Western Hemisphere of less importance. It finally puts an end to the status and the ambitions of the country as the superpower. The document officially declares the end of American world power. It concludes almost two decades of declining power coupled with unwillingness and inability to wisely exercise it.

AUSTRALIA - As the civilised world united in horror at Sunday’s terrorist atrocity on Australia’s Bondi Beach, one man far away in the Middle East may well have felt somewhat pleased with himself. Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Qurashi is the current global head of Islamic State – the terror group in whose name at least one of the gunmen apparently acted. Sunday’s slaughter on Bondi Beach – in which father-and-son duo, Sajid and Naveed Akram, shot dead 15 people – was a stark reminder, though, that even when at an ebb, the threat from Islamic State remains a real one. Sydney’s beach-goers were not the only Western lives claimed by the terror group over the weekend – Islamic State fighters also killed two US soldiers and their interpreter in Syria. But were these just one-offs – a bloody last-blast from a dwindling cohort of diehard followers? Or might they be part of a wider resurgence in the group’s fortunes, one which, in part, is capitalising on Muslim anger over the post-October 7 war in Gaza?

UK - Jihadists like the evil pair who carried out the Bondi Beach massacre are laughing at the West and its craven leadership. There must be a cast-iron understanding, inculcated in every single child at school, that anyone who moves here must do as the Jews did. Adopt British values, become patriotic and show respect for our country. The UK must stop importing ideologies which are not only hostile to Jews and women, but which will eventually destroy us all. If it can happen at Hanukkah, don’t think Christmas is safe. How can we fight the growing threat when most Western leaders are too frightened to even name the problem they help create? Kemi Badenoch also took no prisoners when she addressed the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) Hanukkah reception. "We know the evil that we face – we know how it operates, how it abuses our democracy, subverts our institutions… Let us be plain: it is radical Islamism that is a threat to Western civilisation and the rest of the world.” A courageous and much-needed statement.

UKRAINE - Nato nations need to arm themselves with “as many drones as bullets” to win a war with Russia or China, a senior Ukrainian military adviser to the alliance has said. “Millions” of cheap kamikaze drones must be manufactured if European states are to stand a chance at defending their borders, Oleksandr Voitko said. During a Nato weapons and technology demonstration in southern Finland this week, the senior lieutenant said it can now take “dozens” of drones to destroy one Russian battle tank. Many more are needed to intercept waves of dive-bombing devices in the air, he added.

UK - Blaise Metreweli, in her first public speech as head of the intelligence agency, says the world is being remade by technology that was once the stuff of fiction. In a speech that focused largely on Russia, she also said that President Putin was “dragging out negotiations” to end the war in Ukraine, and Britain was now operating in a “space between peace and war”. “Our world is being actively remade with profound implications for national and international security,” she said, as Sir Keir Starmer headed to Berlin for talks on a Ukraine peace deal. She said technologies could create “peril” as weapons, drones and robots inflicted devastation on the battlefield, and some algorithms could “become as powerful as states”.

USA - Donald Trump has filed a $10billion lawsuit against the BBC after the embattled corporation was found to have doctored his speech in a Panorama episode. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of Florida, includes one count of defamation and one count of violating a Florida trade practices law. Trump's legal team are demanding $5 billion in damages for each count. In a 33-page complaint document, attorneys for the president accused the BBC of publishing a 'false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction' of him 'that was fabricated' in the Panorama episode Trump: A Second Chance? The documentary, which was aired just a week before the US election, spliced together two parts of a speech in a way which appeared to show him inciting his followers to storm the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.

UK - Crimes by illegal immigrants no longer shock us. Their very frequency has a numbing effect. Just as we became dulled to the horror of IRA terrorism in the 1970s, so we no longer react as we should to sexual assaults by people who ought not to be in our country. A failed asylum seeker was convicted of rape in Bournemouth last week – a story that would once have dominated the front pages, but which now seems almost routine. It was a harrowing case, in which the victim recorded what was happening on her phone. Her recording was played in court, where she was heard crying and begging her attacker to stop.

AUSTRALIA - This was not an isolated act of violence — it was the culmination of ‘globalise the intifada’ rhetoric that has been building around the world since October 7. Now, they’re all shocked. The progressive activists. The influencers. The Greens. The podcasters. All those impeccably right-on people who’ve spent two years making “Zionist”, or “Zio”, the dirtiest word in the Australian vocabulary — who marched down Oxford Street in Sydney during Mardi Gras holding a sign that said “Globalise the Intifada”. Well, congratulations. The intifada’s here. Globalised. Mission accomplished.

GERMANY - After the October 7 massacre, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz now rejects the idea of a two-state solution. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Yad Vashem, he not only bowed his head in memory of 6 million murdered Jews, he delivered a message to millions of living Jews — in Israel and across the Jewish Diaspora. Under Merz’s leadership, Germany is reiterating its commitment to confront antisemitism, support Israel’s right to self-defense, and reject policies that weaken Israel’s security. Germany’s unofficial arms embargo against the Jewish state during the height of the Israel-Hamas war has ended, and in a remarkable twist of history, Berlin has turned to Jerusalem with a multibillion-dollar purchase of the Iron Dome system. In the 21st century, the Jewish state’s cutting-edge technology will be safeguarding tens of millions of German lives.