Nov. 11: On Foreign Policy, Trump Should Stick With Success

Qatar boots Hamas; Trump to crush enemies (terrorist NGOs); A "Jew hunt" in Amsterdam

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The Big Story

With the election over and done with, the struggle for influence—and appointments—in Donald Trump’s second term has begun. 

Last week, we noted a few early personnel moves. Trump designated Susie Wiles, the co-manager of his campaign, as his White House chief of staff. Wiles is generally considered to be highly organized and competent, and to the extent that Trump’s 2024 campaign was more disciplined than his previous two, much of the credit for that goes to her. Trump also selected Brian Hook, who worked closely with Jared Kushner on the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term, as the chief of the transition team for Trump’s State Department. Hook is no Metternich, but still, his role signals at least some continuity with Trump’s first-term foreign policy. Trump has named former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief and border hawk Tom Homan as “border czar” and is “expected” to appoint immigration adviser Stephen Miller as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, indicating that he fully intends to follow through on his campaign promises about securing the border and deporting criminal migrants. 

Elsewhere, the appointments remain a bit of a mystery, and there is a very public (and no doubt private) arm-wrestling match among the various factions of the Trump coalition and Trump’s inner circle. Trump announced over the weekend that neither Mike Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would have a role in his administration, allegedly due to lobbying from Tucker Carlson and Don Trump Jr., according to Politico. We have no special affection for either of them, and Pompeo had endorsed Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified-documents case against Trump, which may have led the president-elect to decide he was untrustworthy. Whatever the case, the Carlson faction has been taking a victory lap:

The above tweet, in particular, raised some eyebrows since it suggested that Don Jr. is taking cues from Dave Smith, a room-temperature-IQ “libertarian” comedian who reliably regurgitates Obama-faction talking points on Gaza and Yemen and believes that Trump’s big problem in his first term was being “awful” on Israel, by which he means that Trump squeezed Iran and its terror proxies rather than embracing the “pro-peace” Obama position of funding Iran. That “pro-peace” position, of course, led to near-constant war and instability during the three Obama-Biden terms in which it was tried, unlike the first-term Trump policy, which produced peace in the Middle East and Europe without entangling the United States in any new wars. Why the self-proclaimed MAGA types want the failed policy instead of the successful one is beyond us, but our humble suggestion would be for the president-elect to throw Smith, Carlson, and their ilk a bone by, we don’t know (and this is just a hypothetical), deputizing Rudy Giuliani to cook up a RICO investigation of Bill Kristol, following the precedent set by Fani Willis. Kristol deserves it, it would be funny, and it’ll keep the boobs entertained. Hypothetically, of course.

But we’d also encourage our readers not to overreact either to the Don Jr. tweet or the sidelining of Pompeo. The other names floating around for top cabinet positions are all, for the most part, quite good. Former Ambassador to Germany and Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who has been mentioned as a candidate for either secretary of state or national security advisor, would be an excellent choice for either post. Other top names include Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Ambassador to Japan and current Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty, and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, all of whom would be either good or perfectly serviceable. The only real wild card we’ve seen comes from a report in The American Conservative—which we’re not sure we should even take seriously—that Trump is mulling over Vivek Ramaswamy for secretary of state. We like Vivek, but he’s a foreign policy neophyte whose views change every six weeks, and he would likely get rolled by the bureaucracy. The Carlson faction’s preferred candidate, for what it’s worth, is Elbridge Colby, who has also appeared on a few lists for top administration jobs. But even if Trump gives Colby the nod, we’d caution everyone not to conclude that the sky is falling. 

That’s because the concrete news so far has all been encouraging. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Congresswoman Elise Stefanik—a militant critic of the United Nations who has also claimed the scalps of several Ivy League presidents—has accepted Trump’s offer to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a Sunday article, the paper quoted several named and unnamed Trump aides who suggested that Trump’s second term is likely to continue the “Peace through strength” policy of his first term, including by reviving “maximum pressure” against Iran. As the Journal wrote, referencing the multiple foiled Iranian assassination attempts against the president-elect during the campaign:

Trump remains willing to talk with Iran, one of the former Trump administration officials said, but Tehran is going to pay a very heavy price at the negotiating table. “Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to kill him,” the former official said.

Trump, the Journal notes, has also repeatedly told the Israelis to “do what you have to do” against Iran. Which is a good reminder that Trump’s successful first-term policy was mostly the product of Trump’s instincts—back your allies and kick your enemies in the nuts—and not, as a loud faction of MAGA social media has it, a result of sinister “neocons” and “warmongers” whispering in his ear. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Maggie Phillips on a Lutheran congregation and a Christian radio station trying to hold on in Nome, Alaska

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The Rest

→Last week, after the final results of the U.S. election were announced, reports emerged that Qatar had informed Hamas’ leadership that they were no longer welcome in the country. Biden administration officials leapt to claim credit, telling U.S. media that the Qatari decision had come in response to a U.S. ultimatum issued prior to the election. On Saturday, however, Fox News Digital reported that it was the Qataris themselves—apparently frustrated with the deadlocked negotiations—who informed Hamas that “the Hamas political office [in Doha] no longer serves its purpose.” Fox added that Qatar had previously asked Hamas to leave in April but that “the Biden administration and Israeli government asked Qatar to request Hamas’ return, because they were keen to continue the talks.” And, as The Scroll reported in May, the Qatari government offered to expel Hamas during a closed-door meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Oct. 13, 2023. Blinken told the Qataris not to bother. 

→Don’t threaten us with a good time!

The bill in question is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, aka H.R. 9495, which would grant the Treasury Department “unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a ‘terrorist-supporting organization.’” An obvious first target would be the Alliance for Global Justice, which fiscally sponsors Samidoun, which the Treasury designated in October as a “sham charity” and a front for the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. However, we hope that the incoming Trump administration will set its sights higher and look at the Tides Center, part of the dark-money behemoth the Tides Nexus, which fiscally sponsors groups such as the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, the Adalah Justice Project, Palestine Legal, and the Community Justice Exchange, all of which are terrorist-supporting organizations. 

→Members of a pro-Palestinian WhatsApp group chat called for a “Jew hunt” prior to last Thursday’s assault on supporters of the Israeli soccer club Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam, The Wall Street Journal reports, further confirming that the anti-Jewish violence was organized and premeditated. While the Journal notes that some isolated scuffles might have been in reaction to aggressive Maccabi fans (some were filmed chanting anti-Arab slogans), Dutch police say there was also a much wider campaign of organized violence on the part of local Arabs and Muslims outraged at the presence of a Jewish soccer club in the city. An “online appeal,” according to the Journal, “went out for taxi drivers to mobilize at Holland Casino to confront the roughly 400 Maccabi supporters who had gathered there,” and the casino fired a security guard after it learned he had “sent messages to a group chat that were linked to the confrontation there.” One Maccabi fan told the Journal, “They knew everything. They knew exactly where we stayed. They knew exactly which hotels, which street we were going to take. It was all well-organized, well-prepared.” As of Monday evening, scattered bands of Arabs were still rioting in downtown Amsterdam, lighting fires, destroying property, and screaming about the Jews. 

→A Florida official for the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FEMA) ordered employees to “bypass the homes of Trump supporters” while canvassing to find residents who qualified for federal disaster-relief aid, according to internal messages that a whistleblower shared with The Daily Wire. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, told members of her Department of Homeland Security Surge Capacity Force team, both verbally and in writing, to “avoid homes advertising Trump,” ostensibly for their own safety. According to government employees who spoke to The Daily Wire, at least 20 homes in Lake Placid, Florida, were skipped due to the guidance, meaning their owners “were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance.” As The Daily Wire reports:

Photos from the system used by federal relief workers to track what homes they visit showed that relief workers followed Washington’s guidance. Several addresses were marked “not able to access property” with listed explanations such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership,” “Per leadership no stop Trump flag,” “Trump sign,” and “Trump sign, no contact per leadership.”

On Saturday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell announced that Washington had been fired and that her actions were “reprehensible.” Indeed. 

→On Saturday, a man was caught on video attempting to abduct a Hasidic child who was walking on the street with his father in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The perpetrator, 28-year-old Stephan Stowe, has been arrested and charged with several crimes, including kidnapping in the second degree and harassment. CrownHeights.info reported on Sunday that, according to Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, the perpetrator has more than 30 prior arrests, including one arrest for being a criminal in possession of a weapon. You can watch the security camera footage here: 

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‘The Church Hasn’t Changed. But People Have Changed.’

A Lutheran congregation and a Christian radio station have a long history in Nome, Alaska. But can they hold on to the next generation?

By Maggie Phillips

The Iditarod arch has greeted Iditarod Trail race finishers for the past quarter-century. It collapsed the week before my arrival in Nome, Alaska. Wood rot, according to the local paper. Surveying the town center, it is tempting to see the collapse as a metaphor for an isolated northwestern Alaska town facing the cumulative impacts of outmigration, declining birth rates, and climate change. Dilapidated, single-story wooden homes with cluttered lawns scatter the snow-covered landscape (it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit when I visited in early May). Some wooden facades still resemble Old West saloons, suggesting Nome’s origins as a 19th century Gold Rush town, as if Tombstone had been transposed just 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Its face set toward the frozen Bering Sea, Nome felt unwelcoming when I arrived, out of season from the hustle and bustle of the famous Iditarod race.

Appearances can be deceiving, though.

If Nome seemed forbidding to me as an outsider from the Lower 48, its denizens and regular visitors were extremely welcoming. The next day, I met with Amanda Van Vliet-Snyder outside of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, where she is the pastor. Originally from California, she moved there six years ago with her husband, an Alaska Native from a small village 200 miles away, north of the Arctic Circle. Exchanging texts with Van Vliet-Snyder before my flight from Anchorage, I learned that her husband, Jordan Snyder, was also on my small commuter plane. When I found him in the waiting area, he told me he was headed home from a family member’s graduation. As we were speaking, the graduate in question passed behind us on a moving walkway, and the cousins exchanged friendly, casual greetings. He told me this kind of encounter is common, since in Alaska flying is a fact of life. Nome is only reachable from other parts of Alaska via plane, which cultivates a friendly atmosphere between staff and regulars at Nome’s tiny airport, and makes you realize the TV show Northern Exposure was probably closer to life than many viewers may have appreciated. Jordan drove me to my hotel, giving me an informal tour of Nome’s landscape and local characters on the short drive. Despite its unique history and atmospheric surroundings, in many ways, Nome is any other small town.

But the remoteness is still an issue for many. “A lot of congregations are just feeling, I think, kind of frustrated that there’s no pastors that want to stick around,” said Van Vliet-Snyder, “because it’s not really an easy place to live.” She pastors a small congregation, and a big part of her job consists of traveling to the remote places, like the fishing island of Shishmaref, that lack pastors of their own. It’s challenging work, complicated by a larger dwindling of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) nationwide. The situation is a far cry from the denomination’s heyday in Nome, although a Lutheran legacy remains in two visible Nome institutions: the Lutheran Church and Christian radio station KICY.

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When the United States purchased the Alaska Territory from Russia in 1867, the Department of the Interior made Sheldon Jackson the general agent for education for the new acquisition. Although a Presbyterian minister, Jackson became responsible for Nome’s historically Lutheran character, since his portfolio was to establish schools in Alaska via contracts with missionary organizations.

The Lutherans were one of several Christian denominations tapped by Jackson to bring Christianity and traditional American values to Alaska Natives. “Carved up” is an often-used phrase to describe Jackson’s attempted cultural overhaul of the territory, but it’s hard to think of anything more apt. A map from Jackson’s tenure, included in a congressional report from Alaska on his reindeer scheme (of which, more to come), illustrated how different denominations had different areas of responsibility. The Swedish Lutherans had Nome, with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Swedish Evangelicals operating in the territory right next door. The Episcopalians were even farther north, and the Moravians a few hundred miles to the south in the Yukon Delta.

Since the relationship between religious indoctrination and public education was more porous back then than it is today, it is perhaps unsurprising that a general agent for education would concern himself with this sort of thing. What may be less intelligible is why this information was included in a congressional reindeer report, or what a congressional reindeer report was supposed to be.

Evidently operating under a capacious interpretation of the modifier “general” in the title “general agent for education,” Jackson became concerned in the 1890s about what he perceived as a looming starvation crisis among the Native Inupiat people of northwestern Alaska. He laid the blame at the feet of capitalism, saying that 50 years of American whaling and caribou hunting had greatly diminished traditional Indigenous whale and caribou hunting. Jackson contrasted this with the “robust” Indigenous Siberians, who subsisted on reindeer, and set about developing reindeer as a substitute herd for the Indigenous Alaskans to hunt. Although he was right that the whale population was moribund after half a century, some historians are skeptical that it constituted a crisis for the Indigenous peoples, who had begun trading with the whalers to augment their traditional diets.

Through a combination of private philanthropy and congressional appropriations, Jackson was able to bring in reindeer from Siberia and Scandinavia over the course of the decade. Jackson established Teller Reindeer Station first, less than 80 miles from Nome today. An initial attempt to recruit Siberian Chukchi people to teach Alaskan Inupiaq the ropes of reindeer herding was abandoned, due to the Chukchi practice of using their own urine to guide the reindeer.

Reasoning that the climate was probably pretty similar in Scandinavia, Jackson inaugurated an 1893 ad blitz in U.S. Scandinavian newspapers in the Lower 48. It resulted in 16 Sami reindeer herders traveling from Norway, across the Atlantic and the continental United States, to serve as reindeer herding consultants at the Teller Reindeer Station. The Sami are a nomadic, Indigenous Scandinavian ethnic group. True to form, Jackson was sure to include in their three-year contracts a stipulation that they must be Christians in good standing.

Although the Christianization of the Sami began as early as the 11th century, 18th-century Lutheran missionaries represented the first effort targeted specifically at converting Sami populations, who retained both Indigenous and pre-Reformation Catholic traditions well past the 16th century. When Jackson’s initiative reached the Sami who were to go to Alaska, their community was under the influence of a movement called Laestadianism. This Lutheran revivalist movement, named for Lars Levi Laestadius, the Swedish Sami clergyman who inspired it, took hold among northern Norwegian Sami during the second half of the 19th century.

In a parallel development, an offshoot of the Lutheran national Church of Sweden, the Evangelical Covent Church (ECC), also took root in Nome around the same time. In 1889, a missionary for what was then called the Mission Covenant Church named Alex Karlsson arrived in Unalakleet, Alaska, around 150 miles southeast of Nome. The Mission Covenant Church was a popular trans-Atlantic denomination both among Swedish emigrees to the U.S. and back in Sweden in the 19th century. The church took root in Sweden throughout the 18th century as a reaction to what members saw as an excessively legalistic and cerebral approach to religion. By contrast, the Mission Covenant Church was Pietistic. As a movement, Pietism saw itself as a contrast to cold, logical religion, and was more evangelical, focusing on personal experience, self-improvement, and charitable outreach.

When he arrived in Unalakleet, Karlsson had already done a stint in Central Moscow Prison after a failed attempt to convert Russia. His presence in the Native Alaskan village on the Bering Sea was the consequence, a second foray into bringing Pietism to Russia, this time working westward beginning with Indigenous Siberians. But Karlsson soon switched his focus to Indigenous Alaskans after hearing there was a need for missionaries there.

He had a rocky start, but Karlsson soon managed to establish a school for Native children (“the children all got new names and clean clothes and promised to wash their faces each morning,” Karlsson wrote in his journal on the first day of class). He was joined by more missionaries two years later, who helped establish a children’s home, and Karlsson started to garner financial support from Mission Covenant Church leaders in the United States.

Karlsson’s missionary still faced challenges: financial challenges in the form of a depression in the Lower 48, theological challenges from the long-present Russian Orthodox Church, and moral challenges from the Gold Rush boom in Nome. Since the discovery of gold in the late 1890s, the population of 200 had ballooned by a factor of 100 by 1901. No less a personage than Wyatt Earp soon established a saloon in Nome to accompany the various other bars and brothels that had sprung up there to serve the new clientele.

All the same, Karlsson’s efforts bore fruit. “In 1890, there probably was not a single Christian Inupiaq Eskimo,” according to a 1994 essay by anthropologist Ernest S. Burch Jr. “Twenty years later, there was scarcely an Inupiaq who was not a Christian.”

Karlsson’s missionary work continued and expanded after his death in 1910, as his successors preached to the villages surrounding Unalakleet. A few such missionary successors established KICY’s prototype during WWII. Two ECC missionary couples were taking a holiday break in Nome, resting from their work of flying a Fairchild Model 24 monoplane around to minister to remote Alaskan villages. While in Nome, they had an idea: a live Christmas Eve carol broadcast. They pitched their show to the town’s Armed Forces 400-watt radio station, which the military established there during the war to facilitate wartime communication in Alaska. The missionaries received an enthusiastic yes.

The station received thank-you letters from the surrounding villages, and a Christmas tradition began. An ECC missionary later put together the Nome Ministerial Association in 1945, giving other Nome ministers a chance at the mic for what were now weekly half-hour Sunday devotional broadcasts. Momentum for an independent radio station built throughout the postwar years, an initiative led by ECC clergy and laity. The equipment, expertise, and FCC license slowly fell into place. In 1960, the year after Alaska attained statehood, Nome Covenant Church held a dedication service for its new studio. KICY was officially in business.

While KICY reached the original Covenant missions that Karlsson and his successors had established, their signal also reached hundred miles away. Indeed, the U.S. government received a letter from the Soviet government complaining about KICY, which indicated to the ECC missionaries that they had finally attained Karlsson’s dream of evangelizing Russia.

But devotional programming was only one part of KICY’s mission. At the time it was founded, many villages still lacked private home phones; it was not uncommon for a village to have one public phone for everyone. A nightly program called the Ptarmigan Telegraph became a vital communication link. According to the book on KICY’s history of the same name, “The Ptarmigan Telegraph (pronounced ‘tarmigan’) invited listeners to call or write in messages for family members, work colleagues, or distant relatives. These brief comments would then be read on the air so that the intended recipient would hear and respond in an appropriate manner.” The news and weather updates meant that, according to author Greg Asimakoupoulos, “[f]or the first time, listeners had up-to-the-minute forecasts and warnings of approaching storms, severe temperature drops, and low-pressure fronts moving in from the Bering Sea.” In a place scattered with remote villages where transportation was a challenge, such information could mean the difference between life and death.

Read the rest here.