Thomas Karat | The Libertarian Institute

How Unelected EU Officials Built a Transnational Speech Police

by Thomas Karat | Feb 24, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On December 5, 2025, the European Commission imposed a €120 million fine on X, formerly Twitter—its first enforcement action under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The stated violations had nothing to do with incitement, fraud, or child exploitation. The Commission objected to the design of X's blue checkmark, the layout of its advertising repository, and its data-sharing arrangements with academic researchers (read the Commission's decision here). In the bureaucratic vocabulary of Brussels, these constituted breaches of "transparency obligations." In plainer language, the world's most...

Coordinated Media Messaging Is Prepping for Iran War

by Thomas Karat | Feb 5, 2026 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Between January 27 and January 29, 2026, something carefully orchestrated unfolded across Western capitals. Within this forty-eight hour window, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group arrived in the Persian Gulf, President Donald Trump declared "time is running out," the European Union unanimously designated Iran's Revolutionary Guard as terrorists, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced "Iran's days are numbered," and oil surged 5%. This was not a spontaneous crisis but methodical preparation for military action. Analysis of 235 news headlines from eleven countriesAnalysis based on...

When Dollars Become Weapons: How mBridge Became the Alternative to American Financial Power

by Thomas Karat | Jan 27, 2026 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The next time you wire money internationally, consider this: someone in Washington or Brussels can decide you don't get to complete that transaction. Not because you broke any law. Not because a court found you guilty of anything. But because a U.S. Treasury Department or the European Council official added your name—or your bank's name, or your customer's name—to a list. That's the power the U.S. government has wielded over the global financial system for two decades, and it's the power that's now driving the construction of a parallel financial architecture designed specifically to operate...

How Europe Became a Battlefield for Someone Else’s War

by Thomas Karat | Jan 7, 2026 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Modern wars have a peculiar discipline: they are carefully organized to happen far from the capitals that authorize them. Decision-making remains insulated, prosperity remains intact, and political life continues uninterrupted—while destruction, instability, and escalation are exported to allied territory. The war in Ukraine follows this pattern with brutal clarity. Europe is not watching this war from a safe distance. It is hosting it. Economically, politically, strategically, Europe is the space where risk accumulates and consequences materialize. Critical energy infrastructure “rupture”...

Europe Is America’s Sacrifice

by Thomas Karat | Dec 17, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The bombs never fall on Washington, and that has always been Europe’s problem. Europe often claims it is finally awake and that the war in Ukraine has clarified the stakes of this century. The deeper lesson is older and harder: the continent is positioned, not protected. The logic that shaped NATO’s nuclear scripts—from early exercises that mapped firestorms onto German soil to the WINTEX-CIMEX drills of the 1980s—has returned, updated and layered beneath the language of values. Europe now faces a war it did not choose, under a doctrine it did not write, inside a strategic architecture that...