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Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu is ‘ready to do a deal’ to secure the release of hostages still held in Gaza, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Thursday. 

‘I got the sense from the prime minister he is ready to do a deal,’ Sullivan told reporters during a Tel Aviv press conference, according to multiple reports. ‘The prime minister indicated he wants to get it done.’

Biden’s national security adviser, who met with the Israeli prime minister on Thursday, was pressed on whether Netanyahu was stalling cease-fire negotiations with Hamas in a move to wait for the incoming Trump administration, to which Sullivan said, ‘No, I do not get that sense.’

‘We want to close this deal this month. I wouldn’t be here today if I thought this is waiting until after Jan. 20,’ he said. 

Sullivan’s comments came just two days after he met with the family members of American hostages who have been held captive by Hamas for more than 430 days following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. 

Hope that a hostage deal could finally be on the horizon after more than a year since the last hostage release was agreed to in November 2023, resurfaced late last month after Jerusalem and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire under a 13-point deal. 

A report this week by the Wall Street Journal further suggested that Hamas has conceded on two key Israeli demands and reportedly told mediators the terrorist network would allow Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers to remain in Gaza during a pause in the fighting.

The group also apparently agreed to drop its demands for a permanent end to Israel’s campaign and handed over a list of hostages, including Americans, who would be exchanged under a ‘cease-fire pact.’

It remains unclear how many hostages Hamas would hand over or which of the seven Americans still in Gaza – three of whom are still believed to be alive – were on this list.

Families of the hostages, both in the U.S. and in Israel, have been calling on Netanyahu for months to seek a truce and secure the release of the hostages. This plea became increasingly urgent after a cease-fire deal collapsed in late summer, and ultimately failed to secure the release of American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who, along with two other Israelis shortlisted for release, were killed alongside three other hostages by Hamas in August. 

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday issued a sweeping demand that Israel and Hamas reach a cease-fire agreement and that all hostages be freed from captivity. 

The resolution, which was adopted with 158 votes in favor of the 193-member body, called for an ‘immediate, unconditional and permanent cease-fire, to be respected by all parties, and further reiterates its demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.’

Though U.N. General Assembly resolutions are not binding, they are significant as they portray the international position regarding an issue. 

Nine countries voted against the resolution, including the U.S. and Israel, while 13 other nations abstained.

In an address to the assembly following the vote, Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood said, ‘The draft resolution on a cease-fire in Gaza risks sending a dangerous message to Hamas that there’s no need to negotiate or release the hostages.’

‘Even as the Gaza resolution before us today does nothing to advance a realistic diplomatic solution, the United States will continue to pursue a diplomatic solution that brings peace, security, and freedom to Palestinian civilians in Gaza,’ he added, saying now is the time to put more pressure on Hamas.

Sullivan on Thursday reportedly said Hamas’ ‘posture at the negotiation table’ had shifted since the cease-fire in Lebanon was agreed to last month, effectively showing the terrorist network it could no longer rely on assistance from Hezbollah. 

The White House national security adviser is expected to travel from Israel this week to Qatar and then to Egypt, where he will meet with top officials to secure a cease-fire and the release of hostages. 


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A top conservative grassroots group is launching a six-figure ad campaign to support the swift confirmation of President-elect Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

The $150,000 static digital ad campaign will target nine states with a ‘soft appeal’ to voters who might, in turn, contact their senators and express how Trump ‘has a mandate from the American people,’ Heritage Action for America Vice President Ryan Walker said Thursday.

Walker said the $150,000 is the first tranche of $1 million the group has allocated through Inauguration Day to push for Americans to ask their senators to support the nominees.

The first ad of the campaign sought to bolster Defense Secretary-nominee Pete Hegseth, and the overall initial ad buy will last through Dec. 31.

Other ads have or will highlight former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, Kash Patel and former Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi – all of whom are Trump Cabinet nominees.

This initial buy, Walker said, focuses on Alaska, Maine, Louisiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Utah, South Dakota and Washington, D.C.

While most similar advertising campaigns may seek to appeal to voters in ‘swing states’ or in a particular region of the country, the states included here have a unique link, Walker said.

Some of the states included in the first ad buy are home to senators who either appear on the fence or have not stated a solid commitment for or against nominees like Hegseth, Gabbard and Patel.

Alaska and Maine are represented by two high-profile moderate Republicans – Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, respectively. 

Both women voted to impeach Trump, but both also were supportive of some of the president-elect’s policies as well. 

‘[Trump has] really about 18 months to get a substantial amount of his agenda through before the midterms. And time is of the essence in getting these folks, these Cabinet nominees, in a timely manner,’ Walker said.

‘Uniting the Republican conference around them is what we’re trying to accomplish here.’

Walker said Heritage Action is focusing on public commentary from senators in the target states, and also is very much in tune with which nominees are in the news or spending time on Capitol Hill on certain days.

Last week and this week, Hegseth made the rounds seeking support for his confirmation, so the campaign began with the former Fox News host, Walker suggested.

Next week, Health and Human Services Secretary-nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to visit Washington for the same purpose, and the advertising campaign is ready to pivot to focus on the Democratic Party scion if necessary.

‘We want to remain flexible in this campaign to be able to highlight in different states… or different nominees, depending on what the conversation is in the Senate,’ Walker said, adding a direct-text-message campaign will also follow this initial advertising endeavor.

‘Then we’re likely to do a television ad,’ he said, adding he hopes to air it on national media on Inauguration Day.

Heritage Action also employs grassroots activists nationwide to forward conservative principles at the state-government level.


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President Biden slammed Republicans for not understanding how advancing women’s health not only improves the lives of women but also the prosperity of the entire nation. He made the remark during a first-of-its-kind conference on women’s health research at the White House Wednesday afternoon.   

‘The fact is, the health of our moms, and grandmothers, sisters and daughters, friends and colleagues, affects not just women’s well-being but the prosperity of the entire nation,’ Biden said at the conference. ‘That’s a fact – we haven’t gotten that through to the other team yet. I mean it – across the board.’

Republicans, meanwhile, questioned whether Democrats understand the need to protect women, citing, in particular, Biden administration policies that sought to allow transgender women to use biological women’s spaces and play on women’s sports teams.

‘Is any Democrat willing to stand up and defend girls and protect girls in private, in their private spaces, and protect girls in sports – not to force girls to participate in sports against men?’ asked Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of the conservative nonprofit Moms for Liberty. ‘The idea that Democrats protect women or respect women is just absolutely nonsense.’ 

Justice pointed to Biden’s appointment of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, ‘who was unwilling to define what a woman was’ when pressed on the matter during her confirmation hearings.

The Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Perry, a civil rights attorney who has extensive experience litigating Title IX issues, noted that Biden’s remarks had an underlying tone of ‘abortion is health care,’ which was a hot-button issue for Republicans during this year’s election.

‘This is an administration that has made a name for itself in advancing the most radical ideologue policies,’ Perry said. ‘I mean, he’s got a man in a dress at HHS telling us what health care is. That is the specious nature of those kinds of representations.’

Colin Reed, a GOP strategist, added that the electoral success seen last month by Republicans was an indication that the American people reject these sorts of arguments from Democrats.

‘The Democratic Party has become a one-trick pony trying to speak to voters facing across-the-board challenges,’ he said. ‘Until Democrats start meeting voters where they are at, they will continue losing elections.’

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Karoline Leavitt, Trump-Vance Transition spokeswoman, noted that Trump campaigned on ‘making ALL Americans’ healthy again, including women, adding that Trump ‘will deliver on that promise.’

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a response.


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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday declared himself a ‘proud feminist’ as he lamented Vice President Harris’ loss to President-elect Trump in the 2024 presidential election as just one recent example of a setback for women’s progress.

Trudeau delivered remarks in Ottawa at a gala for Equal Voice, an organization that works to improve gender representation in Canada’s politics. 

‘We were supposed to be on a steady, if difficult, march towards progress,’ Trudeau said. ‘And yet, just a few weeks ago, the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman president.’

‘Everywhere, women’s rights and women’s progress is under attack, overtly and subtly,’ Trudeau continued. ‘I want you to know that I am, and always will be, a proud feminist. You will always have an ally in me and in my government.’

Trudeau’s remarks come as relations between the U.S. and Canada grow tense over immigration and the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S.

Trudeau jetted into Mar-a-Lago unannounced on Nov. 29, just days after Trump threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products. Trump is threatening to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico over failures by both nations to curb the flow of illegal immigrants and illicit drugs from those countries into the U.S. 

Both Trump and Trudeau called the meeting ‘very productive.’

Sources later told Fox News that Trudeau had told Trump he cannot levy the tariff because it would kill the Canadian economy completely. Trump retorted by asking, so your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion? 

Trump then suggested to Trudeau that Canada become the 51st state, which caused the prime minister and others to laugh nervously, sources told Fox News.

Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan and Greg Wehner contributed to this report.


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Former FBI source Alexander Smirnov has struck a plea agreement with the office of special counsel David Weiss, agreeing to plead guilty on several counts.

The document notes that Smirnov is agreeing to plead guilty to ‘Count Two of the indictment in United States v. Alexander Smirnov … which charges defendant with causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation … ‘ and agreeing to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion.

Smirnov is accused of providing false information to the FBI.

He signed off on a statement of facts in support of the plea agreement, which echoes allegations that had been made against him in an indictment.

Smirnov allegedly ‘provided false derogatory information to the FBI about Public Official 1, an elected official in the Obama-Biden Administration who left office in January 2017, and Businessperson 1, the son of Public Official 1, in 2020, after Public Official 1 became a candidate for President of the United States of America.’ 

The allegation apparently refers to President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, though the two are not specifically identified by name.

Smirnov had served as a ‘confidential human source’ with the FBI.

The material also alleges that Smirnov ‘claimed executives associated with Burisma, including Burisma Official 1, admitted to him that they hired Businessperson 1 to ‘protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,’ and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each to Public Official 1 and Businessperson 1, when Public Official 1 was still in office, so that ‘[Businessperson 1] will take care of all those issues through his dad,’ referring to a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma and to ‘deal with [the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General].”

‘The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact, Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office,’ the statement of facts asserts. 

‘Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.’


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The GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed its annual defense spending bill Wednesday, including a key culture-war caveat: a ban on transgender medical treatments for minor children of U.S. service members.

The provision in the 1,800-page bill states that ‘medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization may not be provided to a child under the age of 18,’ referring to the transgender children of military personnel. 

Republicans argued that taxpayer dollars should not fund potentially experimental and harmful procedures for minors.

House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., praised the passage of the defense measure, though it now heads to the Senate for approval in the Democrat-run chamber.

‘Our men and women in uniform should know their first obligation is protecting our nation, not woke ideology,’ Johnson said in a statement after the measure passed.

While the provision was a win for Republicans that could further push President-Elect Donald Trump’s policy agenda, the measure did not incorporate several other Republican-backed provisions related to social issues. Notably absent were efforts to ban TRICARE, the military’s health program, from covering transgender treatments for adults and a proposal to overturn the Pentagon’s hotly-debated policy of reimbursing travel expenses for service members seeking abortions stationed in states where the procedure is restricted.

Democrats were largely outraged by the provision to strip TRICARE from service members’ transgender children, with the House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith, vowing to vote against the bill on Tuesday despite helping on other portions of the package. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., did not advise his party members to vote for or against it.

The measure also drew the ire of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC), which called it an ‘attack’ on military families.

‘This cruel and hateful bill suddenly strips away access to medical care for families that members of our armed forces are counting on, and it could force service members to choose between staying in the military or providing health care for their children,’ HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.

The Senate’s response to the transgender treatment provision will be pivotal in determining the final content of the defense policy for the upcoming fiscal year. If it passes, it would align with Trump’s criticisms of the military’s ‘woke’ policies. 

The Supreme Court also heard oral arguments last week for a first-of-its-kind case involving Tennessee’s ban on transgender medical procedures for minors, which could place further restrictions on the procedures.

The $884 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policies for the Defense Department, was passed in a 281-140 vote, with 124 Democrats and 16 Republicans voting against it. 

Other provisions also place limits on diversity, equity and inclusion-based recruitment and the teaching of critical race theory in military-run schools. Other policies include a 14.5% pay boost for junior enlisted troops, expanded child care access and enhanced job assistance for military spouses, reflecting a year of bipartisan focus on addressing record recruitment struggles.

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.


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China is denying a new report linking it to four bases in Cuba that a think tank says allows the CCP to spy on the U.S. 

The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a report last week detailing facilities in Cuba that it claims China may be using to gather signal intelligence (SIGINT) on the U.S. 

‘The cooperation between China and Cuba is aboveboard, not targeting any third party, and does not allow any malicious slander from third parties,’ Chinese foreign minister Mao Ning told reporters on Wednesday. 

Cuban foreign minister Carlos de Cossio claimed reports of Chinese spying hubs in Cuba originate from ‘Cuba’s enemies’ in the U.S. ‘as a way of justifying the criminal policy of economic aggression. It is absolutely false.’

CSIS analyzed over a dozen ‘sites of interest’ in Cuba and four stuck out as most likely to be supporting China and its spying ambitions. 

‘These sites have undergone observable upgrades in recent years, even as Cuba has faced increasingly dire economic prospects that have drawn it closer to China,’ the report’s authors said. 

Each of the four sites had ‘observable SIGINT instrumentation,’ clear physical security infrastructure and other signs of intelligence collection. 

One such station located on a hill overlooking Havana, Bejucal, has been suspected of ties to Chinese intelligence for years. The complex gained notoriety for housing Soviet missiles during the Cuban missile crisis. 

During the 2016 presidential debates, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called on Cuba to ‘[kick] out this Chinese listening station in Bejucal.’

According to CSIS findings, satellite imagery shows that the site was active as of March 2024 and had been for some time. There are at least five entrances to underground facilities at the base, but what the facilities contain could not be discerned by satellite imagery. Antennas dot the ground, including satellite antennas used for intercepting satellite communications. 

With Havana situated just 100 miles off the coast of Florida, the site could potentially be used to collect data on U.S. rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. 

The U.S. and China are locked in a space race and rocket launches that deliver U.S. satellites to space will likely garner a high level of interest within the CCP. 

On another site on the opposite side of the island, east of the city of Santiago de Cuba, a large radio signal finding technology project is under construction, one capable of detecting signals between 3,000 and 8,000 nautical miles away. 

Cuba has a history of allowing U.S. adversaries to use its soil to snoop on U.S. communications. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union operated a SIGINT facility at the Lourdes Signals Intelligence Complex near Havana. That site monitored U.S. satellites and intercepted sensitive military and commercial telecommunications. 

In recent decades, the alliance between China and Cuba has grown – and China has provided around $7.8 billion in development financing to the island nation. 


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The House passed a once-bipartisan bill on Thursday that authorizes 63 new permanent district judgeships over the next 10 years, 22 of which President-elect Trump can fill during his next term. 

The White House released a statement earlier this week that President Biden would veto the bill if it came to his desk. 

The Senate in August passed the ‘Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved Act’ or the ‘JUDGES Act of 2024,’ which staggers the 63 new permanent judgeships the president may choose over the next 10 years. Citing how courts are burdened by heavy caseloads, the bill says the president shall appoint 11 of those permanent judgeships in 2025 and 11 more in 2027. The president would tap another 10 judges in 2029, 11 in 2031, 10 in 2033 and 10 more in 2035, the bill says. 

But now key Democrats are backing away from the bill after Trump won the presidency, decrying how it wasn’t voted on until after Election Day. 

‘Today, the House passed the JUDGES Act to authorize additional federal judges to ensure the American people receive timely and fair justice,’ House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a statement. ‘This important legislation garnered broad, bipartisan support when it unanimously passed the Senate in August because it directly addresses the pressing need to reduce case backlogs in our federal courts and strengthen the efficiency of our judicial system.’ 

‘At that time, Democrats supported the bill – they thought Kamala Harris would win the Presidency,’ he added. ‘Now, however, the Biden-Harris Administration has chosen to issue a veto threat and Democrats have whipped against this bill, standing in the way of progress, simply because of partisan politics. This should not be a political issue—it should be about prioritizing the needs of the American people and ensuring the courts are able to deliver fair, impartial, and timely justice.’

The proposal passed the House on Thursday by a 236 to 173 vote, with 29 Democrats voting in favor of it. 

The bill’s Democratic co-sponsor in the House, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said in a floor speech Thursday before the vote that he now opposes the measure. 

‘You don’t get to pick the horse, after that horse has already won the race. But that’s exactly what my Republican colleagues are seeking to do today,’ he said. 

On Tuesday, the White House said while ‘judicial staffing is important to the rule of law,’ the JUDGES Act is ‘unnecessary to the efficient and effective administration of justice.’ 

‘The bill would create new judgeships in states where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies,’ the statement said. ‘Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now. In addition, neither the House nor the Senate fully explored how the work of senior status judges and magistrate judges affects the need for new judgeships.’

‘Further, the Senate passed this bill in August, but the House refused to take it up until after the election. Hastily adding judges with just a few weeks left in the 118th Congress would fail to resolve key questions in the legislation, especially regarding how the judges are allocated,’ the White House added. 

Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Todd Young, R-Ind., co-sponsored the bill in the Senate. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates. 


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On Sunday, commenting on the downfall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, President-elect Donald Trump took a dig at Russian President Vladimir Putin, a staunch supporter of Assad whom Putin gave political asylum in Russia. 

‘There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. Trump pointed to the fact that ‘600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever.’ Trump said Russia is in a ‘weakened state right now,’ because of ‘Ukraine and a bad economy.’

This swipe at Putin is likely to be a prelude to Trump’s Russia policy during his second term. If you thought Trump and Putin were buddies, don’t be fooled. There almost certainly will be no rapprochement between Moscow and Washington on Trump’s watch. Here’s why.

Whether President-elect Trump succeeds in settling the almost three-year-old devastating conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as promised, his negotiating talents, not withstanding, the incoming commander in chief is highly unlikely to erase the fundamental irreconcilable differences between Moscow and Washington. Ukraine, where Russia and the United States are currently head locked in a proxy war, is just one example of Russia’s national interests colliding directly with U.S. long-term bi-partisan foreign policy.

Moscow and Washington each want Ukraine within their sphere of influence. Russia considers Ukraine as part of its strategic security perimeter and, therefore, off limits to U.S. geopolitical control. To enforce Russia’s version of the Monroe Doctrine, Putin has been waging a brutal war on Ukraine. His goal is to keep Ukraine out of NATO, an adversarial military alliance, in Moscow’s view. Similarly, Russia considers other former Soviet states, such as Georgia and Moldova, as part of its vital interests.

The U.S. policy in Eurasia is almost a century old and is highly unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. This policy has been guided by the so-called ‘defend forward’ logic, conceptualized by the Dutch American geostrategist John Spykman in the 1930s. A balance-of-power realist, Spykman convinced the U.S. national security establishment that to improve its chances of survival, America should get involved in Eurasian affairs. This strategy called for the creation of U.S. strategic alliances and military bases in Eurasia, in order to prevent an emerging rival power that could threaten America. 

Spykman’s doctrine was rooted in the British geographer Halford Mackinder’s thesis, put forth in 1904, that whoever controls Eurasia—which he called the World Island—commands the world. Mackinder believed that Eurasia is predetermined to play a dominant role in global politics because of its vast natural resources and central location on the globe. 

Former President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski summarized this policy in his 1997 book, ‘The Grand Chess Board: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.’ Echoing Mackinder and Spykman, Brzezinski wrote that the U.S. must ‘make certain that no state…gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitrating role.’

The Russians took Brzezinski’s strategic guidance -‘who controls Eurasia controls the world’ – seriously. They concluded that what Washington was after was Russia’s containment and territorial fragmentation. A major Russian think tank summed up its perception of U.S.-Russia policy as follows. ‘The United States will strive to weaken and dismember the rest of the world, and first of all the big Eurasia. This strategy is pursued by the White House regardless of whether it is occupied by the conservative or liberal administration or whether or not there is consensus among the elites.’

The deeply seeded distrust between Russia and the U.S. dates back to Soviet times. Trump is highly unlikely to overcome it. At the center of this distrust is the expansion of NATO. 

Moscow and Washington have entirely different interpretations of what was promised to Russia when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Feb. 9, 1990, as part of the negotiations on the peaceful re-unification of Germany. The Russians took Baker’s famous assurance ‘not one inch eastward’ as a promise not to admit former Soviet states into the Alliance, a claim that U.S. and NATO leaders deny, some calling it a ‘myth.’ 

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, NATO admitted the Baltic States — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — which used to be part of the USSR and added several former Soviet bloc countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, to the alliance. In total, 13 Eastern European states have become NATO members since 1997. This resulted in the reduction of Russia’s buffer zone from 1,000 miles during Soviet times to 100 miles. Feeling duped, Moscow accused the U.S. and NATO of violating their promises. Putin made it his life-long mission to restore the lost buffer against NATO.

Thirty declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents, consisting of written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels, reveal that Gorbachev indeed received what he perceived as NATO’s promises not to erode Russia’s security. For example, the U.S. Embassy in Bonn informed Washington that German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made clear ‘that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process’ would not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ 

The same cable included language indicating that NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the East, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’ However, the phrase ‘led to believe’ appears to be the key verbiage used across these documents, which contributed to the difference of interpretations. The phrase reflects the informal nature of assurances rather than legal guarantees.

That is why Putin will almost certainly not accept, as part of the peace settlement Trump seeks to broker between Russia and Ukraine, anything less than formal legal guarantees from NATO, precluding Ukraine’s membership.

Putin does not trust Trump, despite the seemingly positive rapport between the two. Nor does Trump trust Putin. During his first term, Trump took several actions that aimed at undermining Russia’s military strategy and economy. Trump sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, founded the U.S. Space Force, ordered the development of a low-yield, nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile and authorized an operation that killed 300 of Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries in Syria. In 2017, Putin summed up his realpolitik relationship with Trump. He ‘is not my bride. And I am not his bride, nor his groom. We are running our governments,’ Putin told a reporter at an economic summit.

President Biden’s recent drastic policy change, green-lighting Ukraine to attack Russia properly with U.S.-supplied long-range missiles, served as confirmation for Putin that Washington cannot be trusted. It’s why, in response to Trump’s recent request to Putin, that reportedly took place during a phone conversation, not to escalate in Ukraine, Putin did the opposite. The Russian made two highly escalatory moves. Putin approved changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for nuclear weapons’ use, and he authorized a strike on Ukraine with a new class of experimental hypersonic missile, the Oreshnik. The Oreshnik has sufficient range to target all of Europe and the U.S. West Coast. Neither the U.S. nor NATO have any defenses against it. 

A product of the Russian strategic culture, Putin has a worst-case scenario mindset. Presupposition of inevitable conflict, deeply rooted in the Russian thinking will always drive Moscow’s foreign policies. A talented businessman, Trump may be able to transition U.S.-Russia relations from hostile onto a transactional basis. But Trump or not, Russia and America will never become friends.


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While a majority of American voters questioned in a new Fox News poll say they are hopeful about the re-election of President-elect Donald Trump, they are divided when it comes to the president-elect’s top nominees who will likely serve in his upcoming second administration.

Fifty-four percent of respondents in the survey, which was conducted Dec. 6-9 and released on Wednesday, said Trump’s election victory last month in the White House race over Vice President Kamala Harris made them hopeful.

However, when asked about the president-elect’s cabinet selections, which include some unconventional nominees, 47% of those polled said they approved, with 50% disapproving.

It was the same response when asked about billionaire Elon Musk serving as a close adviser to the president-elect during the transition from President Biden’s administration to the Trump administration, with 47% approving and 50% disapproving.

Two other polls also conducted in recent days and released on Wednesday shed additional light on how Americans feel about the incoming administration and how Trump’s handling the process of building out his government.

According to a CNN poll, 54% of Americans say they expect Trump to do a good job as president once he takes over the White House. 

Additionally, 55% said they largely approve of how the president-elect is handling the transition.

That is a higher percentage compared to eight years ago, when Trump first won the White House, but it is still well behind other recent presidents, according to CNN polling.

Meanwhile, 47% of people questioned in a Marist Poll gave the former and future president a thumbs up when it comes to how he is handling the transition, with 39% disapproving and 14% unsure.

Not surprisingly, the polls point to a massive partisan divide on the question. In the Marist survey, 86% of Republicans approved of how the GOP president-elect is handling the transition. However, 72% of Democrats disapproved. Among independents, 43% disapproved and 38% approved.

‘Although more people support Trump’s transition than oppose it, more independents are taking a wait-and-see position than more partisan voters,’ Marist Institute for Public Opinion Director Lee Miringoff said.

Miringoff added that ‘a note of caution for President-elect Trump is that fewer voters approve of the transition than gave a thumbs up to either Biden or Obama at this point.’

The release of the polls came as Trump’s cabinet picks continued to meet with senators on Capitol Hill ahead of confirmation hearings starting next month.

Trump named his nominees for his cabinet and his choices for other top administration officials at a faster pace than he did eight years ago after his first White House victory.

However, his transition has already faced some setbacks, including his first attorney general nominee, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, ending his bid for confirmation amid controversy over allegations he paid for sex with underage girls.

Trump last weekend made his first international trip since winning last month’s election, and he was courted by world leaders during a stop in Paris.

Trump will be inaugurated Jan. 20.

Fox News’ Victoria Balara contributed to this report.


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