The Weekly Forum - 20 June
24 juni 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
If you want a short masterclass in why NATO is a bad thing, you need look no further than Thierry Baudet’s recent speech to the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament. The key issue, as Thierry explains, is not so much NATO enlargement as NATO aggression – in Yugoslavia in 1999 and in Libya in 2011. The Iraq war of 2003 was not a NATO operation but was waged by NATO’s leading states. These naked acts of aggression had nothing to do with self-defence, as even pro-NATO figures know and admit. Instead, they demonstrate that the notion of a ‘rules based international order’, which NATO now claims to be defending in Ukraine, is gross hypocrisy. The debate also gives us a masterclass in the inanity of the opposition: Jan Paternotte of the socialist D66 party intervened to say something about MH-17, the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine in 2014. It was a classic example of how warmongering wokery uses cheap emotion in response to a carefully crafted argument about geopolitics.
And if you want a short masterclass in why the EU is a bad thing, you need look no further than Pepijn van Houwelingen’s recent speech to the same Second Chamber. In a few short, structured moments, Pepijn explains what is wrong with Brussels and why the Netherlands (and everyone else) should leave it. It is undemocratic, bureaucratic, over-regulatory and now warmongering. It is a threat to prosperity, sovereignty and peace. It should never be forgotten that the Netherlands is, with Ireland, the only country in the EU where not one but two national referenda have been overruled by Brussels – on the European constitution in 2005 and on the Ukraine association agreement in 2016. All this is bad enough but the EU has even now abandoned its claim to be a peace project and is instead sabotaging US attempts to put an end to the war with Russia which Brussels, it seems, is determined to inflame.
One of Thierry Baudet’s most consistent claims is that Western governments are in office but not in power. The ability of politics to change anything is extremely limited, even if you win an election. Instead, political change comes from metapolitics – cultural change, intellectual change, economic change, the sorts of things FVD is trying to bring about. Perhaps the most striking example of this truth has been the dismal record of the Dutch government which recently collapsed. Its principal component, the Freedom Party which had been led by Geert Wilders for over 25 years with a single-issue anti-immigration message, failed to prevent over 300,000 immigrants arriving in the Netherlands in one year alone, the equivalent of the city of Utrecht. How is this possible when the Immigration Minister came from Wilders’ party?
We were delighted to have as our guest on The Forum Pascal Lottaz, assistant professor of neutrality studies at Kyoto University. Naturally the talk was about Iran and Trump’s apparent capitulation to the deep state. If you missed it, listen back.