Three Women Who Want to Reshape Europe


Politics today would transpose onto the canvas the ever-changing faces of Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel to show the evolution of Europe’s populist right. The first came to power against the odds in Italy.

The second wants to be French president by 2027, though a court last month banned her from standing office. The third has her eyes set on the German chancellery in 2029.

By the end of Donald Trump’s second term, the world could be staring at an entirely reconfigured European Union, its three biggest economies ideologically shaped by these Three Graces, each with a complicated origin story and the historical baggage of their countries’ far-right past.

Together, they embody a movement that has emerged from the fringes and shed its postwar guilt to take once-taboo nationalist pride into the mainstream.

On the surface, there are similarities: three ambitious female leaders of right-wing parties in Europe, embracing anti-immigrant views and a distaste for broader European integration. But look deeper and they couldn’t be more different.

Meloni is a God-and-country conservative; Le Pen a nationalist who believes in state intervention; Weidel a radical libertarian who idealizes Margaret Thatcher. Their differences mirror the uneven shades of the populist right.

The future of Europe, berated and belittled by Trump’s MAGA movement, will to some extent be determined by which of their competing visions prevails.

#Women #Europe #reshape

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Hegseth, Reshaping the Pentagon’s Present and Future

The Department of Defense’s new business-minded leaders under Secretary of Defense Hegseth are channeling a venture capitalist’s mindset with a flurry of broad and deep reviews: cut the fat, scale what works, kill what doesn’t.

These methods, foreign to the bureaucracy, will ensure the overhauls are substantial and enduring.

The Pentagon’s tech modernization is being reoriented around mission outcome metrics rather than compliance or procurement throughput.

Leaders are taking a hard look at internal inefficiencies, from paper-based processes to bloated and redundant office functions to faster acquisition timelines, especially for software and dual-use systems.

Then there was the major defense weapons program review to identify waste and realign government spending with more shared risk with industry. Now the team is plotting to map the mammoth civilian workforce to warfighter priorities exclusively.

The deep dive into the almost-800,000-strong federal defense civilian workforce is especially welcome. This vast group of employees generally only ever gets larger, no matter the push from various administrations to streamline.

In new guidance to senior leadership across the enterprise, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, launched a sweeping organizational review to rightsize the workforce consistent with the Secretary of Defense’s interim National Defense Strategy guidance.

The directive calls for a fundamental rethinking of the massive federal defense civilian staff in order to simplify operations, eliminate redundancy, and refocus resources.

Feinberg’s instruction aims to put the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy on wartime footing by treating urgency not as a contingency but as the standard for how decisions are made and billets are justified.

#Hegseth #Pentagon #Reshape

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Trump Is Reshaping the State Department


Trump administration executive order circulating among US diplomats proposes a radical reduction to and restructuring of the State Department.

The changes, if implemented, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the Department since its founding in 1789.

The 16-page draft has been spread among diplomats around the world, according to officials familiar with the document.

The order would eliminate dozens of positions and departments, including those dealing with climate, refugees, democracy and Africa, as well as the Bureau of International Organizations, which liaises with the United Nations.

Under the changes, the sprawling State Department would be reorganized into four regional bureaus covering Indo-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Eurasia.

An unspecified number of “non-essential” embassies and consulates in Sub-Saharan Africa would be shuttered.

The changes should be made by Oct. 1, according to the draft.
The draft order was first reported by the New York Times. A spokesperson for the US embassy in Nairobi declined to comment.

It remains unclear if the entire contents of the draft order will be signed by Trump.

One senior official in Africa said information circulating within the State Department about reforms that are set to be announced to the foreign service — potentially as soon as Tuesday — would be less sweeping than those described in the document.

Some employees writing on a foreign service-dedicated Reddit page also expressed doubt about how such an order could be implemented.

“I suspect this is being leaked as a red herring designed to make us grateful for a more modest but still unpopular reorganization,” wrote one user.

“It will be basically immediately challenged and enjoined, and then ‘implementation’ will be dragged out until Trump is voted out.”

#StateDepartment #reshape #draft

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