Gustavo de Arístegui: Geopolitical Analysis 25 November

Global positioning - Depositphotos

Gustavo de Arístegui

26 de noviembre de 2025 (11:05 h.)

Demographic winter in the United States: structural weakness at the heart of the West

Facts:

New demographic data confirm that the United States is approaching the point where, every winter, deaths will outnumber births, as is already the case in several regions and racial groups. Among whites, that shift occurred in 2016, and the gap is widening year by year.

The problem is not just ageing: adjusting for age, deaths have barely fallen since 2008, while the birth rate is structurally declining. Ken Johnson and other demographers point to a fundamental cultural change, not simply a ‘postponement’ of having children: precariousness, unaffordable housing, delayed marriage and an increasingly individualistic view of adult life.

Implications:

This demographic winter has clear strategic consequences:

Fewer young people and taxpayers mean less fiscal leeway for defence, innovation and sustaining a hegemonic position.
Without a birth rate policy + orderly immigration, the alternative is the lethal combination of an ageing economy and wide-open borders, precisely the model that has exploded in Europe.

Here, Trump's logic is heading in the right direction: if demographics is power, immigration and asylum cannot continue to be managed as if they were unlimited rights, disconnected from security and internal cohesion. The Biden administration's review of refugees, controversial as it may be, is based on a non-negotiable fact: the state has the right – and the obligation – to know who is entering, why they are entering and whether they continue to meet the conditions.

Workers prepare printed newspapers for circulation featuring an image of the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States, at the Nation Media Group printing press on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, on 8 May 2025 - REUTERS/THOMAS MUKOYA

Sedition in the Armed Forces: the ‘Six’ cross a very serious red line

Facts:

According to Reuters, the Pentagon has warned Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy captain, that he may be called back to active duty to face military justice for ‘serious allegations of misconduct’ following a video in which he and five other Democratic lawmakers encourage military and intelligence personnel to ‘refuse illegal orders.’

Trump has publicly described their conduct as ‘seditious.’ The legal basis is not fabricated: the Uniform Code of Military Justice allows for the prosecution of retired officers who return to active duty if serious misconduct is proven.

Implications:

Here, it is important to be very clear:

In a serious democracy, Congress does not play games with politicising the Armed Forces. Encouraging the troops—no matter how wrapped up in a discourse on ‘illegal orders’—is monumentally irresponsible. That is the line that Kelly and his colleagues are crossing.
The Pentagon's consideration of disciplinary measures is not ‘Trumpist authoritarianism’; it is defence of the chain of command against the temptation to turn the Army into a partisan actor.

Must we ensure that this precedent does not become a mechanism for silencing any criticism of political power by former military personnel? Yes. But the priority, in the face of a Democratic opposition that flirts with the idea of internal ‘resistance’ to the president, is to shield the neutrality of the uniform.

The one breaking the rules here is not Trump: it is a sector of the Democratic Party that has decided that anything goes against the president, even playing with the fire of military discipline.

Aerial view of the Pentagon in Washington, USA - REUTERS/JOSHUA ROBERTS

Trump-Xi summit: negotiate with China, yes, but from a position of strength and reason

Facts:

Trump has accepted Xi's invitation to visit Beijing in April, following a call described by the White House as ‘very good’ that focused on Ukraine, fentanyl and agricultural trade. The trip will come a few months after the meeting in South Korea, where an annual tariff truce was agreed.

According to the Chinese narrative, Xi insisted that Taiwan is an essential part of the post-war international order. In the American version, Trump highlights progress on soybeans, other agricultural products and Beijing's commitment to stemming the flow of fentanyl.

Implications:

At this point, there are more positives than risks:

Trump understands that a permanent trade war with China cannot be sustained while a real war is being fought in Ukraine and another is brewing in the Caribbean. Some kind of truce was inevitable.
The key is that this tariff relaxation does not translate into a strategic concession on Taiwan or critical technology.

There is rightly concern among Japan and other Indo-Pacific allies about a grand bargain of ‘trade in exchange for silence on Taiwan’. But it is also true that no previous administration had put so much pressure on Beijing on fentanyl, intellectual property theft and trade rebalancing.

Criticism, yes, but well directed: the danger is not that Trump is talking to Xi; the danger would be if that conversation translates into a soft deal on Ukraine or a lack of protection for Taiwan. That is the point to watch, not the mere existence of the summit.

US President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the start of their bilateral meeting at the G20 leaders' summit in Osaka, Japan, on 29 June 2019 - REUTERS/KEVIN LAMARQUE

Peace plan for Ukraine: ending the war cannot be synonymous with rewarding Putin

Facts:

The 28-point draft — now reduced to 19 — of the US plan for Ukraine assumes, according to Reuters and other sources, massive territorial concessions: complete cession of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk; freezing of the current lines in Kherson and Zaporizhia; reduction of the Ukrainian army; a constitutional and NATO veto on Kiev's future accession; and a general amnesty.

Russia has described the plan as ‘mostly acceptable’, while dismissing as ‘unconstructive’ the European counter-proposal that sought to safeguard stronger security guarantees and not enshrine the annexations.

Implications:

Here we must be very clear: as it stands, the plan is unacceptable to any serious Atlanticist.
It rewards aggression: it legitimises annexations by force.
It effectively disarms Ukraine: it cuts its army without demanding anything equivalent from Russia.
It undermines deterrence: it sends Moscow and Beijing the message that, if you are brutal enough, the West will eventually accept you.

This criticism is not “anti-Trump”; it is anti-surrender. The weariness of American public opinion is understandable, as is Trump's need to show “results”; but there is no worse result than a peace that sows the seeds of the next war in Poland or the Baltics.

Europe, for its part, is once again appearing as what it is: an economic power incapable of sustaining a war without Washington and divided between those who want to stand their ground and those who are willing to accept an expanded Finlandisation of the East rather than pay the price of rearmament.

If the White House insists on this plan, Europe's duty is not to applaud out of Atlanticist reflex, but to defend the basic logic of Western deterrence: the aggressor is not rewarded, nor is the victim disarmed.

House destroyed by Russian bombing during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Chernihiv, Ukraine - REUTERS/ ZOHRA BENSAMRA

Muslim Brotherhood: the matrix of radical Islamism and jihadism is finally called terrorism

Facts:

Trump has signed an executive order instructing the State Department and the Treasury to prepare the designation of several branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organisations.

At the same time, legislative initiatives that have been calling for the same thing since 2015 are moving forward in Congress. What is relevant today is that some Democrats have decided to break party discipline and support these measures, a shift that recognises what we have been saying for years: conservative Islam cannot be treated in the same way as the revolutionary Islamism of the Brotherhood, the ideological origin of modern jihadism.

Implications:

The Muslim Brotherhood is not ‘moderate Islam’. It is an organisation that, at its core, seeks to use Islam as a political ideology to establish monstrous and oppressive regimes. It is true that there are different degrees of radicalism in radical Islamism. Let us say that, ideologically, every jihadist is a radical Islamist and a Salafist. Not all Islamists are radicals, Salafists, or jihadist terrorists. The Muslim Brotherhood was the first religious organisation with a dictatorial and violent political vocation and is the ideological mother of Salafism, the ideology of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. In this sense, they have served as a doctrinal breeding ground for Hamas, Al Qaeda, Daesh and global jihadism as a whole.

Conservative Muslims who live, work and obey the law in Western societies are another matter: there, the enemy is not faith, but the totalitarian political project.

The United States is doing what Europe has been avoiding for decades out of cowardice: drawing a clear line between Islam and Islamism. The next step should be European: auditing funding networks, presence in mosques, associations and front NGOs that act as transmission belts for the Brotherhood on European soil.

Will there be collateral effects, tensions with allies such as Jordan or Turkey, legal difficulties? Of course. But we are already paying the price for doing nothing — ceding neighbourhoods, public spaces and cultural debate to Islamist structures.

On this point, Trump's line is correct and coincides with Europe's security interests: the Brotherhood belongs to the ecosystem of radical Islamism, not that of religious moderation.

Hassan al-Banna, Muslim Brotherhood

Venezuela: narco-state, narco-dictatorship, the Cartel of the Suns, and US military deployment

Facts:

The State Department has formally designated the Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organisation, stating that it is headed by Nicolás Maduro and linked to drug trafficking networks operating with Mexican cartels and regional criminal groups.

At the same time, the United States has deployed some 15,000 troops and more than a dozen ships to the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and a nuclear submarine, as part of operations against vessels linked to drug trafficking that have already left dozens dead.

Left-wing governments and media in Europe and Latin America speak of ‘preparations for an intervention’. Some G7 ministers, sectors of the EU and part of the British intelligence community have been quick to criticise these operations almost more harshly than the Chavista narco-regime itself.

Implications:

There can be no middle ground here: Venezuela is today a narco-state with an institutional facade, and the Cartel of the Suns is not a journalistic metaphor, but a criminal structure embedded in the armed forces and Maduro's political apparatus. Designating it as a terrorist organisation is the right decision... and a belated one. It should have been taken during Trump's first term.

Operations against drug trafficking — including those carried out in international waters or on the territory of states with which diplomatic relations are maintained — are perfectly legal and legitimate when directed against armed actors operating as de facto enemies. It is worth reminding amnesiac Europeans that the Obama administration executed terrorist leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq with drones without the G7 tearing its hair out.

The difference now is uncomfortable for certain leftists: the enemy is no longer just an Islamist terrorist group, but a ‘Bolivarian’ regime that for years was presented as a heroic social experiment.

Is there a risk of classic military escalation? Yes. Could a poorly planned intervention further destabilise the region? Also yes. But that does not invalidate the underlying premise: Chavismo, now a narco-mafia, is not going to relinquish power willingly and poses a direct threat to hemispheric security.

What is reprehensible is not that Maduro is being pressured; what is reprehensible is that the world looked the other way while the narco-state consolidated its power.

The Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group Ford Carrier Strike Group, which includes the flagship USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS Winston S. Churchill, the USS Mahan, and the USS Bainbridge, sails toward the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean on 13 November 2025 - PHOTO/US Navy/Petty Officer Third Class Gladjimi Balisage via REUTERS

Asylum: from automatic right to conditional privilege

Facts:

The Trump administration has ordered the review and interview of some 200,000–230,000 refugees admitted during the Biden era, also suspending the automatic process towards permanent residence until further notice.

The number of future admissions is reduced to historic lows, with selection criteria that prioritise cultural and security profiles over symbolic quotas.

Implications:

Here the break is conceptual and welcome: asylum is no longer treated as an abstract ‘human right’ and is now seen as what it always should have been: a sovereign prerogative.

The state has a moral obligation to offer refuge to those fleeing real persecution, but it does not have a duty to unquestioningly accept the ideological, cultural or security filter that others want to impose on us.

The European experience after 2015 shows what happens when generosity is confused with naivety: Islamist networks taking advantage of legal loopholes, overburdened public services, populist reaction and internal fracture. That the United States is now correcting the excesses of the Biden era — when the southern border became a sieve — is a move consistent with demographic and security realities.

Will there be individual cases of injustice? Certainly. That is why review mechanisms are needed. But the general logic is correct: asylum cannot be a parallel channel for poorly filtered mass immigration; it must be a privilege conditional on security and compatibility with the host society.

US President Joe Biden, with Vice-President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, announcing the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas - REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Amazon, AI and the new military-digital complex

Facts:

Amazon Web Services has announced a commitment of up to £40 billion to expand artificial intelligence and supercomputing infrastructure for US government customers, adding approximately 1.3 GW of computing capacity in classified regions.

More than 11,000 federal agencies and organisations will be able to use services such as SageMaker, Bedrock and foundational models (Nova, Claude) for tasks ranging from cybersecurity to mass intelligence analysis.

Implications:

The decision is correct and necessary from a geopolitical point of view:

The United States cannot afford to lose the AI race to China.
That race is not won with speeches in Davos, but with gigawatts of computing power, advanced models and a state-business ecosystem capable of deploying military and intelligence capabilities in real time.

Are there risks of technological power concentration? Of course. Controls, audits and guarantees will have to be discussed to ensure that AI does not become an unbridled surveillance monster. But the real risk would be an analogue Pentagon facing a digitised People's Liberation Army.

The fact that private muscle (Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) is being put at the service of national security is, at this historic moment, good news for the West. What should concern us in Europe is not so much the ‘danger’ of Amazon as our absolute inability to build anything comparable.

Full view of Apple Park, in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, United States - Depositphotos

G20 in Johannesburg: rhetorical multilateralism, South African government far from exemplary

Facts:

The G20 in Johannesburg has approved a consensus statement without the United States present, following Washington's boycott denouncing discrimination against the Afrikaner minority, an accusation dismissed by the South African government and most observers.

The South African presidency is selling the result as a ‘victory for multilateralism’, with an emphasis on debt, climate and inequality. The absence of the US is real, as is the absence of Russia and China at the highest level.

Implications:

It is true that Trump is overreacting with some of his accusations against Pretoria; the rhetoric about the ‘systematic persecution’ of whites in South Africa does not hold up as it is formulated.

But neither should the South African government be idealised: systemic corruption, proximity to Russia and China, complacency with anti-Zionist narratives and a highly questionable domestic record do not exactly make it a model.

The ‘multilateralism’ celebrated in Johannesburg is, to a large extent, a multilateralism of discourse, where many leaders take the opportunity to settle scores with the West... while asking for more funding, access to technology and debt forgiveness.

Criticism of Trump should be tempered: his boycott weakens the Western position in a key forum, but it is also legitimate to point out the inconsistencies of a South African presidency that presents itself as a moral arbiter with its track record.

Group photo at the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 22 November 2025 - LEON NEAL via REUTERS

Blow to Hezbollah in Beirut: a necessary, albeit dangerous, surgical operation

Facts:

Israel has killed Haytham Ali Tabtabai, Hezbollah's chief of staff, designated a global terrorist by the United States since 2016, in an air strike on a suburb of Beirut. According to Reuters and other media outlets, the attack has caused several deaths and more than twenty injuries, and is the most significant elimination of a Hezbollah leader since the 2024 ceasefire came into effect.

Hezbollah has promised to respond ‘at the right time’, while the Lebanese president has denounced a serious violation of the truce and called on the international community to take action.

Implications:

From a Western and Israeli perspective, the operation is legitimate and necessary:

Tabtabai was not a politician, he was a military leader of an Iranian-backed terrorist organisation involved in wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq and dedicated to preparing the next offensive against Israel.
The ceasefire cannot become a licence for Hezbollah to rearm with impunity.

Risk of escalation? Obviously. But the alternative is to allow Hezbollah to regain its offensive capability and use northern Israel as a permanent hostage, something that Europe seems willing to tolerate while selectively expressing outrage every time Israel acts.

The hypocrisy is glaring: the same people who tolerate the presence of pro-Iranian armed militias in Lebanon without batting an eyelid are scandalised because Israel eliminates a designated terrorist leader. A reasonable balance lies somewhere in between: support for Israel's right to defend itself; pressure to avoid all-out war; zero leniency towards Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons.

People gather to attend the funeral of Hezbollah's top military commander, Haytham Ali Tabtabai, and others killed in an Israeli air strike on Sunday, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, on 24 November 2025 - REUTERS/ MOHAMED AZAKI

Media rack

United States (NYT, WaPo, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Politico, The Hill, USA Today, AP, Reuters)

NYT, Washington Post, CNN, NPR: alarmed tone with Trump (refugees, Kelly, Venezuela), clear emphasis on the president's ‘overreaction’. They do take demographic winter seriously, but they find it difficult to draw conclusions about family, birth rates and asylum.

WSJ, Fox News, Washington Times, National Interest: much closer to the line we defend here: support for the designation of the Cartel of the Suns, the Brotherhood and the review of asylum; criticism of Democratic blindness on security.

United Kingdom (The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, The Economist, BBC)

The Times, Telegraph: firm against Russia and Maduro, relatively sympathetic to Trump's hard line on security, critical of the Ukrainian peace plan when it is seen to concede too much to Moscow.

The Guardian, BBC: very critical of the refugee review, the operations in the Caribbean and the designation of the Cartel de los Soles; they see in all this the shadow of ‘Iraq 2.0’. Less forceful on Hezbollah.

FT, The Economist: in-depth analysis of demographics, AI and global order. They welcome Amazon's investment and are very concerned about the plan for Ukraine and the absence of the US at the G20.

Continental Europe (Le Monde, Le Figaro, FAZ, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Corriere, El País, etc.)

France and Germany: obsessed with the Ukrainian plan and the crisis of strategic autonomy. Good reflection of the danger of accepting the draft as it stands, but little clarity on how to finance and sustain a credible alternative without Washington.

Southern Europe (Italy, Spain): correct analysis of Venezuela and Ukraine, but little willingness to take a clear side.

Arab and Muslim world (Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Arab News, Asharq al Awsat, Lebanese and Jordanian press)

Qatar/Turkey axis (Al Jazeera, Al-Quds al Arabi): very critical of the designation of the Brotherhood, hostile to Israel and sympathetic to Hezbollah.

Saudi/Emirati axis (Al Arabiya, Arab News, Asharq al Awsat): applaud the hard line against the Brotherhood and view the escalation with Hezbollah with concern; support, with nuances, pressure on Iran and its proxies.

Israel (Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel Hayom, Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel)

Broad support for the elimination of Tabtabai as an intelligence success; internal debate on the risk of completely opening up the Lebanese front while attempting to stabilise Gaza.

Russia and Ukraine (TASS, RT, Ukrainska Pravda, Ukrinform, Kyiv Independent)

TASS and RT sell the US plan for Ukraine as confirmation that the ‘special military operation’ has achieved its strategic objectives.

The Ukrainian press is torn between the need to explore any path to peace and the awareness that accepting these conditions would mean giving up real sovereignty.

Latin America (Clarín, El Mercurio, Reforma, El País, Latin News, MercoPress)

There is a very real fear of military intervention in Venezuela, especially in Colombia and Brazil, but also a widespread perception that the Chavista regime is unsustainable and dangerously connected to drug trafficking.

Think tanks and strategic journals (Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Interest, Chatham House, CFR)

They agree on the structural seriousness of Western demographic decline, the importance of AI as the battlefield of the 21st century, and the risk of rewarding Russia with a poorly designed peace. They diverge more in their assessment of Trump's hard line on refugees and Venezuela, where the ideological bias of each outlet is very much on display.

Editorial conclusion

The day leaves a clear message: the West will only survive as such if it has the courage to name its enemies and correct its own weaknesses.

In the last 24 hours, we have seen both:

A White House that is right to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and the Cartel of the Suns as terrorists, to tighten asylum rules and to invest heavily in AI to maintain technological superiority. There is a line of continuity here that is heading in the right direction.
A peace plan for Ukraine that, if not corrected, would betray the most basic logic of European security, rewarding Putin and weakening Kiev.
A US political system where a sector of the Democratic Party has decided that anything goes, even calling on the troops to ‘resist’ the president, forcing the Pentagon to do something as unusual as reminding a senator that he is still subject — legally — to the military code.
Europe appears, once again, as the silent guest: it is scandalised by operations in the Caribbean, looks suspiciously at Israel when it defends itself against Hezbollah, celebrates the African G20 as a moral victory... but continues to depend on Washington for its security and on foreign demographics to sustain its economy.

The task—also for Spain and the Hispanic world—is very simple to formulate and very difficult to execute:

To recover a strategic culture that understands that force is not a sin in itself, but an instrument that, when used well, protects freedoms.
To distinguish precisely between Islam and Islamism, between genuine refugees and disorderly migration, between a temporary ally autocracy and a narco-state that must be dismantled.
Demand consistency from Washington on Ukraine, not out of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but out of mature Atlanticism that knows that a misguided peace in Kiev will be paid for in Warsaw, Tallinn and perhaps in the Mediterranean.

This editorial note — critical of the democratic drift, firm against jihadism and narco-Chavism, demanding but not hysterical with Trump — serves as a guide for future reports.

From here on, the compass is clear: defence of the West, without complexes; uncompromising criticism of those who erode it from outside and from within; and zero indulgence for the moral fantasies that have brought us to this edge of the abyss.