The Weekly Forum - 14 March
17 maart 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
How should Europe and the world take advantage of the Trump era? This is the question former Czech president Vaclav Klaus addressed in a speech in Slovakia last week, which we are honoured to publish. Klaus sees the Trump era as an opportunity because the US president has returned the world to a pre-Wilsonian era of transactionalism. In other words, he is breaking with practices which are more than 100 years old – what Klaus calls the ‘we are all friends’ way of doing politics. Unfortunately Klaus is not optimistic that Europe will take advantage of this. Instead, European politicians, intellectually unwilling and institutionally unable to pursue national interests, are hunkering down and hoping for the Trump era to pass. It is the policy of the ostrich, the bird which can run but cannot fly.
Read Vaclav Klaus’ article here
Instead of taking advantage of the Trump era to return to a policy of national interests, Europe is taking advantage of the Trump era to accelerate a policy of serving the personal and institutional interests of the European Union. The plan to spend an extra 800 billion euros on ‘defence’ is intended to create a European federal state with its own army. But this will not make Europe stronger. It will simply launder ever more tax money into the Brussels institutions. Accountancy tricks do not win wars. Instead, the new debt will lead to further inflation and impoverishment. FVD International’s director, John Laughland, spoke to RT shortly after the London mini-summit to explain the boring truth behind the unconvincing myth of a newly independent Europe.
Watch John Laughland's interview here
‘No guts, no glory’ is an old saying among bankers and investors, as Ralf Dekker MP pointed out in a recent speech to the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament. Pleasure and a full life involve risk. Yet for too long Europe has become ever-more risk-averse. The obsession with health, especially tobacco, is now so deep that we have got used to being told by the state how to live our lives. A dreary nannying protectionism hangs over everything like a damp fog. Unless Europe can rediscover the pleasure which comes from pleasure, it will remain forever in a smokeless, loveless and joyless miasma of goody-goody protectionism – a sort of living death.
Watch Ralf Dekker’s speech here
According to Jobst Landgrebe, an extremely intelligent German mathematician and philosopher, the scare over artificial intelligence is a myth. Machines cannot take over the world, as he demonstrates experimentally and mathematically. Instead, the AI scare is designed to implement ever more sinister levels of social control. If you missed The Forum this week, where he was our guest, please listen back to it. It was a superb discussion.