The Weekly Forum - 7 February

Faced with Trump, Europe is doubling down. This is true not just of geopolitics – France announced the delivery of Mirage fighters to Ukraine, just as Trump opened his peace initiatives with Russia – but also on social issues like abortion. The new US Vice-President’s first public speech after his inauguration was to the annual anti-abortion ‘March for Life’, which Trump also addressed again this year.

By contrast, in the Dutch Parliament, at the same time, Gideon van Meijeren was prevented from making a speech about second trimester abortion, which is widely practised in the Netherlands (the legal term is 24 weeks) after he showed a plastic model of a 22-week-old foetus to the Committee. The livestream was shut down and the Chairman forbade him from continuing his speech. Gideon left the room and made a video of his speech instead. In it, he shows how late-term abortions are performed using a sopher clamp, a long grasping instrument with sharp teeth which is used to tear the foetus apart, limb by limb, and then to crush its skull. This is what Dutch parliamentarians refused to see or allow to be seen. Only FVD tries to show reality.

Watch Gideon’s video here

The Trump revolution is ripping the ground from underneath the feet of European leaders.  For decades they have been in hock to the Americans: now they are being hung out to dry by a US administration which holds them in contempt.  But they have already burned their bridges with their biggest neighbour, Russia and have made Europe too weak to stand up to anyone anyway: EU policies have bled the continent white.  Worse, the obsession of European leaders with EU integration means that they can no longer think out of the box, for instance to pursue policies of national (not ‘European’) independence. FVD MP Ralf Dekker explained all this with great clarity in a recent speech to the Lower House of the Dutch Parliament.

Read Ralf Dekker’s speech here

Meanwhile the biggest economy in the world is China. While Western commentators scrutinize mathematical - or supposedly mathematical - criteria like GDP and growth, the power – including economic power – of a nation can also depend on other factors, such as strategy. In an exclusive article for FVD International, Professor Hei Sing Tso from Hong Kong explains that China’s famous (but little understood) strategic thinking will give it strengths, even in hard times – thinking which Western countries neither have nor understand.

Read Professor Hei Sing Tso’s article here

We were delighted to have Dr Aleksandar Mitic from the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade as our guest on The Forum this week. Dr Mitic is an eyewitness to many of the lies told about Serbia going back to the 1990s: he explained how these were used to construct the US-dominated world system for the next three decades.

Listen to the Forum & Friends here