Feeling liberated yet?
I've never seen a country do something this stupid before.
10% on ALL imports...
20% ON EU...
24% ON JAPAN...
26% ON INDIA...
34% ON CHINA...
46% ON VIETNAM... MORE...
WHY WAS RUSSIA SPARED? (Why indeed? Such a mystery.)
Highest import taxes since 1800s...
How much will prices rise?
Cars Were Already Unaffordable...
Trillions vanish from 401(K)s in minutes...
BIG BITE OUT OF APPLE...
WSJ: Blowing up world system will have consequence...
Trump will “buckle under pressure” if Europe bands together, Germany says...
I received a newsletter from Noah Smith this morning, aptly titled, Tariffs: Another American act of intentional self-harm. He says something I’ve thought a million times in recent years:
… in the 21st century, it often seems like America does stupid things just because it can. Why did we go to war in Iraq? Why did so many of us refuse to take Covid vaccines? Why did we let West Coast cities slip into anarchy? Why did we fail to punish Trump’s attempt to overturn the election of 2020? And so on, and so forth. It seems like we got bored of all the smart, successful things we did in the 20th century, and started exploring all the possible ways we could be stupid instead.
This is an obviously significant observation.
I’ve written before of the broad breakdown in American competence:
But this goes beyond incompetence. This is just stupid. This trade war marks such a triumphant crescendo of pure stupidity that it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that RFK Jr might be onto something: There’s something in the water that’s turning the frogs gay and knocking 50 points off our collective IQ.
What an act of idiocy. What moronic vandalism. The combination of stupidity, incompetence, fecklessness, and childishness that have characterized our national life in this century seems as if it should be biologically impossible: How could the nation that defeated the Nazis, cured polio, and put a man on the moon have become a country that does this in no more than a generation?
Noah Smith has no global theory about why this might be. He instead offers a few ideas about why we’ve embraced this particular adventure in economic lunacy:
Why is America choosing this moment to embrace an insane, self-destructive economic ideology? One reason is that the many years in which Trump’s subordinates managed to restrain his worst impulses simply tricked much of the country into believing they could take Trump “seriously but not literally,” and that he would never actually smash the economy. Another reason is that America is just emerging from a period of popular unrest, in which crazy ideologies of all stripes got far more buy-in than they should have.
But there’s also a deeper, longer-term reason. Over the past two decades, Americans collectively convinced themselves that their economy—by many measures one of the top performers in the world, and indeed in all of human history—was fundamentally broken and needed major changes. This line of thinking, popular on both the right and the left, did succeed in identifying some problems with the existing American system. But it massively blew those problems out of proportion, and brought way too much ideology into the debate. Now we’re going to experience the consequences.
The United States is an unbelievably wealthy country, as he points out. Only Luxembourg has a higher median income. We consume more per capita than any other nation. No economy in human history has ever been as powerful as ours.
Nonetheless, Americans were dissatisfied. Why? He suggests it might be because people measure their success and relative terms, and growing income inequality drove Americans berserk. Or it might be because Americans confused other quality-of-life and policy issues—crime, obesity, lousy urban planning, the risk of medical bankruptcy—with the economy.
A deep sense that something was fundamentally wrong with the economy took hold during the Great Recession, he thinks. We began to see an endless series of editorials deploring “neoliberalization” and the persistent recitation of erroneous statistics indicating just how much of a mistaken it had all been. (For example, it’s just not true that the wages of American workers have been stagnant since 1973.)
It is true, he writes (and I agree) that a cohort of serious problems arose from trade liberalization, among them income inequality, the displacement of factory workers, and the hollowing of our defense industrial base. But the idea that “neoliberalization” had been a wholesale failure was absurd.
Nonetheless, he continues, the idea that the problems of our society devolved from “neoliberalization” migrated from a marginal collection of socialists—the sad sacks who rioted when the WTO gathered in Seattle—to two far more influential groups: Elizabeth-Warren progressives and the MAGA movement. The former, overrepresented in the Biden administration, brought with them “the general attitude that the ills of ‘neoliberalism’ could be solved by finding the right class of Americans to disempower.” Preoccupied by this idea, the Biden administration failed vigorously to attack the real problems, which in his view were the decline in our state capacity and the entrenchment of degrowth policies.
But if the Biden administration was distracted by the notion that neoliberalism had led to a crisis of excess billionaires, he writes, it was the MAGA movement that truly put anti-neoliberalism into practice. (The irony here is off the scales. MAGA die-hards insistently call Democrats “socialists” and “communists.” That their movement appropriated its economic philosophy from Seattle’s rioting socialists has completely escaped them.)
Smith notes that Trump and his advisors seem sincerely to believe that free trade has harmed the United States:
They believe it has weakened America by allowing other countries to rip the US off. Peter Navarro … believes that trade deficits reduce US GDP. Trump appears to think this as well, and thus assumes that any country with whom the US runs a trade deficit is making us poorer by doing so.
This is so phenomenally stupid. As he notes, administration officials perseverate on the phrase “trade deficit” without understanding what it represents—net exports. They’re so focused on these that they have somehow forgotten the importance of our gross exports:
There is no evidence—none—that a higher trade balance is correlated to higher economic growth, or to any economic desiderata, for that matter.
What Trump does not understand, and what no one seems to be able—or willing—to explain to him, is that the US runs a large trade deficit because the dollar is the global reserve currency. Other countries need access to dollars if they’re to trade in dollars and maintain liquidity. Trump does seem to understand that the dollar’s status results in what France’s finance minister once described, in 1960, as “exorbitant privilege,” though I doubt he understands why.
The benefits of having the world’s reserve currency are enormous—lower borrowing costs, no exchange rate risk on external liabilities, reduced costs of imports for consumers, power over the global financial system. Trump has told other countries that if they stop using the dollar for international trade, he’ll put tariffs on them. But he doesn’t seem to realize that if the US doesn’t run a trade deficit with those countries, they can’t use the dollar as a reserve currency.
By definition, the inverse of the current account deficit—of which the trade-deficit is by far the largest component—is the capital account surplus. (The current account tracks the flow of imports and exports; the capital account tracks the flow of assets and liabilities.) Other countries trade their goods to us for dollars, then they take those dollars and invest them in US stocks, bonds, treasuries, and real estate—and this makes our capital account go into surplus. Foreign finance capital constantly flows into the United States, and this is directly related to the trade deficit. If you want to end the current account deficit, you must end the capital account surplus. And vice-versa.
Trump is demanding that the rest of the world to do something that is by definition impossible. He wants to reduce the US current account deficit to zero and maintain the dollar as a reserve currency.
He understands none of this. He just operates with a deep-seated fear that others are taking advantage of him. And now, because no one will say “no” to him, he has transformed his private psychopathology into a global economic crisis. As Noah Smith puts it, he’s committed to replacing the economic system that made the world wealthy—and made Americans insanely wealthy—with an American version of North Korea’s juche. “And just like the hapless North Koreans,” he writes, “regular Americans are now going to suffer economically so Trump can pursue this mad ideological crusade.”
Even though he begins his essay with the observation that at every juncture, Americans in this century have chosen to do the stupidest thing possible, I suspect he wrote those words more as an expression of acidic sentiment than a serious sociological observation. But it’s the point that most interests me.
I’m not sure that he’s right to blame anti-neoliberalism for the predicament we’re now in. This policy issues entirely from one man’s diseased mind. It doesn’t seem likely that Trump developed his plan for this from his careful reading of Naomi Klein and the Guardian, does it? Trump just has a bee in his bonnet. He thinks people and nations are ripping him off, and he doesn’t disambiguate between the l’État and lui. The explanation for his behavior is psychological, not ideological.
It does require explanation that so many Americans willingly put an absolute idiot in the Oval Office—twice—and are now prepared to believe claims like these:
And it also requires explanation that the people around Trump are willing to go along with this. Do they understand what a disaster this is? Are they as stupid as he is? Or are they so committed to toadying that they’d jump right out of a window if he told them to?
How on earth did Americans get so detached from reality?
Adam Garfinkle thinks it’s our technology:
American politics have become deranged because of a shift of mentality in the culture, and that derangement has manifested itself in acute political dysfunction, in turn advancing the deeper mentality shift by seeming to validate its premises. The cultural change is where the real variance lies; the political manifestations are epiphenomenal.
Magnifying, integrating, and bringing to full scale the sources of cultural change is the digital tsunami now hard upon us. The avalanche of mediated two-dimensional screen-delivered images that we willingly bring down upon ourselves almost without respite is rewiring and confounding our Stone-Age brains, for most of us without our conscious awareness of it. The novel, unplanned man-made environment we now inhabit is overwhelming our evolutionary inheritance, making most of us easy prey for the power of algorithm-armed concentrations of essentially unaccountable corporate power.
The economist Richard Baldwin blames a “globotics shock” and failed social policy:
… US trade policy has gone rogue, puzzling traditional allies and foes alike. What happened to the architect of the rules-based trade system—the one-time champion of open markets and predictability in trade? Tariffs, hostility to multilateral institutions, and constant brinkmanship have become the norm. Like the parents of energetic teenagers, people around the world are asking themselves: Why are they acting this way? Is it something we did?
It’s hard to make sense of US trade policy in any case, but it is nigh on impossible unless you understand the discontent of the American middle class and how it has built up over decades under Democrats and Republicans alike. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the US systematically dismantled the New Deal-era safety nets to finance tax cuts, thus eroding the security of ordinary Americans. Then came the twin forces of globalisation and automation—the “globotics” shock—which dramatically deepened inequality. While skilled knowledge workers thrived, the livelihoods of manual and middle-skilled workers crumbled. Unlike other advanced economies, there was no social policy to smooth over the globotics upheaval in the US. Middle-class Americans faced displacement alone, fuelling anger and frustration with traditional Democrats and Republicans. Eventually, the anger led to a political backlash that brought to power a populist with protectionist instincts (twice).
… It is tempting to treat Trump’s tariffs and threats as the cause of a new era in US trade relations. But in truth, the sharp break masks a long accumulation of discontent. Policies that would actually help the middle class—the sharing and caring policies that workers enjoy in every other advanced economy—would make sense, but they are entirely off the American political radar screen. Since the real solutions cannot be rolled out, and something must be done, protectionism is the natural result.
Tom Nichols believes we’ve been prosperous and safe for so long that it has permitted us to become astonishingly self-indulgent:
… this growing illiberalism is not the product of bad times, but of a long trend of rising narcissism and a sense of entitlement that was enabled by peace, prosperity, and rapidly improving living standards. The United States and other democracies have real problems, but the rise of a sour and selfish abandonment of democracy is not happening because of social injustice or “economic anxiety.”
Worse, our democracy now practically must run on autopilot independently of a public that is happily and willfully ignorant of the issues and wants nothing to do with the dreary business of governing. And with increasing frequency, our form of government is under attack by bored working and middle-class citizens—led by clever political and television figures—who have no use for democracy other than as slogans and window-dressing around their need to be the constant center of their own reality show.
Others have been quietly suggesting that we’re suffering from dysgenic fertility.
I’m willing to consider all of these hypotheses.
In any event, if it is true that prosperity and security have permitted Americans to detach themselves from the reality principle, at least the problem is self-correcting. Conjoined with Trump’s war on our allies, Trump’s tenure in office will give Americans their first taste of a kind of poverty and insecurity few Americans alive have ever known. It will be interesting, I suppose, to see if this cures our stupidity problem.
More on the Trade War
It’s the end of the world's economic order as we know it:
“Investors will be shocked how much things are going to move away from the US in standards, networks, and infrastructure—as well as services—in coming years,” said Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Bank of England official. “The breach of trust and evident short-sighted self-dealing by the Trump Administration with regard to NATO and to trade reinforce each other,” Posen, who just returned from a trip to Ottawa and has been speaking with European officials, added. …
The value of the US dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies in the last 24 hours—in contrast to economic theory that predicts higher tariffs would drive a currency up. Analysts attribute the move to a sense that the U.S. may no longer serve its unique role in the global economy. Thierry Wizman, a foreign exchange strategist at Macquarie, writes that the role of the dollar as a safe haven “was already attenuating” in the first quarter, amid a “loss of American exceptionalism under the push for a more ‘autarkic’ trade regime. In the short term, economists anticipate higher global inflation and slower world economic growth from Trump's tariff suite.
Wall Street led a global markets bloodbath Thursday as countries around the world reeled from President Donald Trump's trade war, while the White House insisted the US economy would emerge victorious.
Goldman Sachs lifts US recession probability to 35 percent. The bank also lifted its year-end 2025 core PCE inflation forecast to 3.5 percent year-over-year while also lowering its 2025 GDP growth forecast to 1.0 percent.
First-quarter GDP growth will be just 0.3 percent as tariffs stoke stagflation conditions, says CNBC survey. Policy uncertainty and new sweeping tariffs from the Trump administration are combining to create a stagflationary outlook for the US economy in the latest CNBC Rapid Update. The Rapid Update, averaging forecasts from 14 economists for GDP and inflation, sees first quarter growth registering an anemic 0.3 percent compared with the 2.3 percent reported in the fourth quarter of 2024. It would be the weakest growth since 2022 as the economy emerged from the pandemic.
Trump takes the ultimate risk with the global economy. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff plan is one of the biggest, most abrupt economic gambles in presidential history. He acted against the advice of most business leaders, many economists and even some Republican officials. … Prices on imported goods are likely to surge, a recession is possible, and far-reaching ripples in international economics and diplomacy are a certainty. A regime of mostly open markets that was built over eight decades by leaders of both parties has been ripped apart in a relative instant, without so much as a congressional vote. Yesterday’s executive action was undertaken using an emergency national security authority.
“It’s a disaster.” Global markets slide after Trump unveils tariffs:
… “The numbers are shockingly high compared to what people were expecting and it is inexplicable in many ways,” said Peter Tchir, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities. “I think it’s a disaster.”
… The Trump administration had modified its estimates of the tariffs imposed on the United States to include adjustments for what it deemed currency manipulation or even other taxes, with analysts questioning the analytical basis for doing so. “Trump is going to war with countries on this,” said Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at National Alliance Securities. “It’s ridiculous. It shows no comprehension as to what he is doing to other countries. And it is going to hurt the US.”
Investors flocked to government debt as a haven. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond, which moves inversely to prices, fell to 4.08 percent, the lowest since October. The prospect of weaker global economic growth also weighed on commodities, with Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, dropping 4 percent to around US$71.90 a barrel. The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 1.7 percent on Thursday, with most sectors, including banks, technology and consumer goods, in the red.
Shares in consumer brands slumped as the Trump administration imposed steep tariffs on countries that are manufacturing hubs for shoes and clothing, for example a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam and 32 percent on Indonesia. Shares of Adidas and Puma each dropped about 9 percent in Frankfurt. The stock of Pandora, a Danish jewelry company that makes its products in Thailand, tumbled 12 percent. Nike’s shares dropped more than 8 percent in premarket trading in New York. Shares in Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, fell 7 percent on fears of a global trade slowdown. Big European banks including HSBC, Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank dropped more than 4 percent.
Stock markets globally have been choppy in recent weeks, as investors have been whipsawed by the administration’s mixed messages on tariffs. Mr. Trump has previously announced, delayed, changed and ultimately imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico, steel, aluminum, cars and auto parts.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell into a correction on Monday and was jolted again on Thursday, with analysts and trade experts in Tokyo caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s announcement of a 24 percent tariff on Japanese products. A number of business executives in Tokyo had earlier said they were optimistic that Japan’s low average tariff rate might help save it from high tariffs.
The uncertainty around the tariff levels, and how long they might last, has made it difficult for investors, economists and policymakers to assess the potential ramifications for consumers, businesses and the broader economy. … Through Wednesday, the S&P 500 had fallen 7.7 percent below its most recent peak in February. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is chock-full of the tech stocks, was down almost 13 percent since its peak in December. In premarket US trading, tech stocks were among the biggest losers. Shares in Apple were down more than 6 percent, Amazon was down nearly 5 percent and shares in Nvidia and Palantir dropped about 3 percent each. In Asia, the stocks tumbled for a wide range of companies including technology and semiconductor giants, as well as major auto exporters. Shares of Japanese automaker Toyota fell more than 5 percent on Thursday, while South Korea’s Samsung Electronics fell close to 3 percent.
… Although many investors worry about the inflationary effect of tariffs, falling bond yields and a declining US dollar suggest that most are more worried about waning economic growth. The dollar slid as Mr. Trump spoke from the White House Rose Garden. On Thursday, an index that tracks the dollar against other major currencies fell 1.1 percent, the worst day in more than a month.
Other countries vowed to respond:
… “This is a game changer, not only for the US economy but for the global economy,” he said. “Many countries will likely end up in a recession. You can throw most forecasts out the door, if this tariff rate stays on for an extended period of time.” Other countries vowed to respond.
Most governments held back on specific countermeasures, promising to respond with “cool and calm heads,” in the words of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But beneath the diplomatic restraint were anger and fears of spreading economic chaos.
“This decision, which is so unprincipled, so abrupt, so profound in its impact, calls into question what kind of partner the US will be,” said Susannah Patton, the director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. “It will play into China’s narrative that the U.S. is an unreliable, distant partner that can come and go.”
The size of the tariffs stunned US allies in particular. “The administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic, and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose country got off relatively lightly with a 10 percent blanket duty. “This is not the act of a friend.”
Global markets reel from shock of Trump tariffs:
… Markets in Asia and Europe dropped sharply in response to the tariffs, and US futures were down. China vowed to take countermeasures to “safeguard its own rights and interests.” Its state media described the tariffs as “self-defeating bullying.” In Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said in an early-morning news conference that the bloc would be united in its response to the tariffs. “If you take on one of us, you take on all of us,” she said. The duties posed a particular threat to attempts to revive the largest economy in Europe, Germany’s, which has been stagnant for years. …
Mr. Trump’s move, a significant escalation, is likely to drive up prices for American consumers and manufacturers. While he had said for weeks that he would impose “reciprocal tariffs,” the specifics went far beyond what many experts had expected. Business groups, trade experts, economists, Democratic lawmakers and even a few Republicans swiftly denounced the tariffs, while some industries scrambled to understand how they would be affected.
Mr. Trump could have tried to fix the rules governing global trade, which he says allies have abused to the detriment of the U.S. economy and American consumers, said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. Instead, he said, “Trump has chosen to blow up the system governing international trade.” …
US tariffs: What’s the impact on global trade and the economy?
President Trump has announced 25 percent tariffs on auto and auto parts entering the U.S., which will take effect on April 2. This updated trade policy will likely raise costs for consumers, according to Ryan Brinkman, head of U.S. Autos and Auto Parts at J.P. Morgan. U.S. light vehicle prices could potentially rise by as much as ~11.4 percent on average under one scenario, should automakers prove successful in passing tariff-related costs along to consumers.
… In response to the auto tariff announcements, J.P. Morgan Research has further revised its growth and inflation forecasts. It now sees a 0.2 percentage point hit to U.S. GDP, which moves its estimate for the year down to 1.3 percent. Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price inflation for 2025 is expected to climb to 2.7 percent, up 0.2 percentage points, while core PCE inflation is forecast to increase 0.3 percentage points to 3.1 percent
“The worsening growth and inflation outcomes leave the Fed with a challenging dilemma. Absent labor market deterioration, there is a strong case for rates to be on hold indefinitely. However, the more challenging business environment increases the chances of just such a labor market deterioration,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan. “We hold our call for cuts in June and September and will revisit after next week’s jobs report.”
The Budget Lab modeled the total effect of the planned 25 percent automobile tariffs:
Motor vehicle prices rise by 13.5 percent on average, the equivalent of an additional US$6,400 to the price of an average new 2024 car. The price level rises by 0.3-0.4 percent, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of US$500-600 in 2024$.
If other countries retaliate, US motor vehicle & parts production shrinks slightly, by -0.04 percent while auto production in China, the UK, and the EU rises. If other countries do not retaliate, real US motor vehicle & parts production is 13.7 percent larger in the long-run. Even under the no-retaliation scenario, however, overall real GDP growth is 0.1 lower in 2025. In the long-run, the US economy is persistently 0.05 percent smaller, the equivalent of US$12-16 billion annually in 2024$. The automobile tariffs raise US$600-650 billion over 2026-35 conventionally-scored, and US$85-115 billion less if dynamic revenue effects are taken into account.
Tariffs are regressive taxes. Annual losses for households at the bottom of the income distribution would range between US$450–550 in 2024$, averaged across families that both do and do not purchase an automobile.
Wedbush sees “pure chaos” in auto industry from tariffs:
After speaking to auto industry experts from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Wedbush concluded President Trump’s 25 percent tariff on all cars and parts made outside the U.S. “would send the auto industry into pure chaos.” The move will raise the average price of cars between US$5,000 on the low end and US$10,000-$15,000 on the high end, the analyst tells investors in a research note.
Wedbush believes every auto maker in the world will have to raise prices selling into the US while the supply chain logistics of the tariff announcement is “hard to even put our arms around at this moment.” A US car with all US parts made in the US “is a fictional tale not even possible today,” according to the firm. Wedbush thinks it would take three years to move 10 percent of the auto supply chain to the US and cost hundreds of billions “with much complexity and disruption.”
It adds, “The concept of this auto tariff in our view would be a back breaker and Armageddon for the auto industry globally and throws the supply chain into pure panic mode.” Wedbush believes the winner from these tariffs “is no one.” Even Tesla will be hit and will be forced to raise prices, the analyst predicts. The news will continue to put “major pressure” on General Motors and other auto makers and suppliers until more clarity is learned from the White House, Wedbush says.
There is no utopia waiting on the other side of Trump’s economy. It’s just pain now in exchange for more pain later:
… “Autarchy” under Francisco Franco kept Spain poor for 20 years after the end of its civil war. “Peronism”, which emphasizes “economic independence” and is sometimes compared to Trumpism, led to Argentina falling out of the ranks of rich countries and suffering macroeconomic instability for many decades. “Import substitution industrialization”, which many post-colonial African and Latin American countries tried after they won their independence, is widely considered a colossal failure. The Ming Dynasty and Soviet Russia both doomed themselves by sealing themselves behind iron curtains. And so on.
… There is simply no utopia waiting on the other side of the years of economic pain that Donald Trump wants to subject America to. It’s just more pain on the other side. And all the dysfunction that comes with pain — relentless blame and persecution of enemies, increasing repression, feelings of futility and helplessness. The Onion basically has it right.
Trump is moving very fast toward making this outcome inevitable—swinging his baseball bat at everything in the shop, determined to wreck as much of the US economy as he can in order to prepare the way for a utopia that he will never be able to build. And now he’s proven that he doesn’t care about the stock market, or recessions, or anything else that might suffer in the name of his ideology.
If he isn’t stopped, it’ll just keep getting worse.
Will Russia come out a winner in Trump’s trade wars? Trump’s sweeping global tariffs notably do not include Russia or its neighbor Belarus. (Surprise, surprise—C.)
In other news …
National security adviser Mike Waltz’s team regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe. “Waltz built the entire NSC communications process on Signal,” said another one of the people who participated in multiple group chats.
How Donald Trump is undermining the intelligence community. The recently published Annual Threat Assessment reflects the administration’s political priorities and biases and the intelligence community’s willingness to defer to them:
What is not addressed in this year’s threat assessment is especially revealing of political influence. …
There is not a word in this year’s assessment about climate change …
Nuclear proliferation is another transnational problem that gets no mention in this document, other than in a later section about Iran. There is at least as much reason now to focus on proliferation as there had been in the previous years in which the issue was highlighted in annual threat assessments. There is new talk in countries from Germany to South Korea about possibly developing their own nuclear weapons. However, the reason for that talk is Trump’s treatment of allies as adversaries and his calling of US security commitments into question, so this topic is evidently barred from unclassified intelligence products.
The danger of global pandemics is also missing from the transnational threat section of the assessment. …
No single sentence in the threat assessment appears to be an outright falsehood, which makes it unlike much of the Trump administration’s public output. Thus, working-level intelligence analysts can assure themselves that they did not sign off on a lie. …
The damage from the politicization of this threat assessment includes giving the American public a misleading sense of the actual threats to the nation. This document is simply not, as its introduction claims it to be, “nuanced, independent, and unvarnished intelligence” that is needed “to protect American lives and America’s interests anywhere in the world.”The document is also another discouraging sign of the rapid erosion of the independence of institutions that are supposed to serve the national interest rather than just the personal and political interests of whoever happens to be in the White House.
It’s time to imagine how China would act as regional hegemon:
… It’s time to think about this awful prospect because under President Donald Trump the US’s commitment to alliances is suddenly looking shaky. …
With the region cowered and everyone else anxiously looking on, it would make great sense for a triumphant and unchallenged China to project a strong but benign image of itself to the world. Such a phase could last years and even decades, but it would not last forever.
… The prospect of the use of overwhelming military force combined with the usual economic carrots and means of political and social control across the region would, they’d hope, ensure that a hegemonic China’s interests automatically featured in the decision making of all regional countries. That would be plan A. China’s problem and ours is that most regional countries and the people that live in them would eventually tire of that dynamic and start pushing back. That is problematic mainly because deference lies at the heart of Beijing’s conceptions of the virtues of a historically China-led regional order, making anything short of absolute submission difficult to tolerate. …
… The less China is challenged by a regional peer competitor, the more unacceptable even the smallest external acts of defiance will seem to a domestic Chinese audience. This means that for reasons of domestic political legitimacy alone, leaders of a hegemonic China will want to deal with any afront in a way that is seen to effectively deter others. With internal pressure to act like a proper hegemon and no credible external checks and balances on its behavior, it is not hard to imagine China’s leaders pursuing increasingly overt and punitive methods to compel obedience and engineer thought beyond its borders.
North Korea now has a nuclear submarine, and there’s only one place they could have gotten it from:
North Korea’s indigenous technological base is clearly insufficient to have developed the submarine on its own—almost certainly meaning that Pyongyang sought help from Russia. … If operational, such a submarine would ensure that North Korea has a second-strike capability, allowing it to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes from underwater—an ability that is notoriously difficult to detect and counter.
South Korea, a stable US ally, proved that even economically successful and democratic nations can implode at a moment’s notice. Such instability would only be exacerbated if South Korea were a nuclear weapons state:
For decades, the United States has opposed the spread of nuclear weapons to any country, and worked to strengthen the global regime based around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which legally prohibits all non-nuclear-armed states from getting nuclear weapons. But President Trump has expressed a different view, telling an interviewer in 2016 that we would be “better off” if South Korea and Japan had nuclear weapons of their own to defend themselves, and that “it’s only a question of time” before those countries get nuclear weapons.
… However, it is important to consider the vulnerabilities South Korea would face on the way to armament. First, a South Korean move toward nuclear weapons would likely provoke a crisis with North Korea, and probably with China as well. … In the years before South Korea got a survivable nuclear force, its effort would be deeply vulnerable to preventive attack, from either China or North Korea. That situation would likely require a buildup of US forces rather than permitting the reduction that some on the Trump team hope for.
Second, South Korea joining North Korea in abandoning its NPT obligations would increase incentives for other countries to follow suit. Japan, which already has large stocks of plutonium and advanced nuclear technology, may be next in line. Such moves would weaken the NPT system, already under challenge from the collapse of great-power cooperation on nonproliferation, Iran’s march to the edge of a nuclear weapon capability, and more.
Third, nuclear weapons in more places would mean more places where things could go disastrously wrong. Long ago, the United States was supplying the Shah of Iran’s civilian nuclear program, despite concerns about the Shah’s nuclear weapons ambitions, because he was a reliable American ally. When he was overthrown, Washington was struggling to find ways to stop his successors in Iran from getting the bomb. Imagine the security nightmare the world would now face if the United States had allowed the Shah nuclear weapons, which then would have been taken over by the Islamic Republic.
In short, “reliable” allies might not stay that way forever, and the global effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons was designed to be even-handed: the NPT bars all parties who don’t have nuclear weapons from acquiring them, and requires all of them to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (inspections, whether they are American friends or not. Any effort to help South Korea on the path to the bomb would be a clear violation of legal obligations the United States led the way in creating.
South Korea’s political upheaval ought to be a wake-up call, helping us all remember a basic fact: nuclear weapons pose desperate dangers wherever they may be. In today’s world, where nuclear risk is the highest it has been in decades, we do not need more fingers on the nuclear button, especially when those fingers might not be as steady as we once believed.
Indonesians take to streets against new military laws.
Uncertainty torments Afghan refugees facing deportation from Pakistan. Monday marks the deadline for Afghans sheltering in Pakistan to leave the country, with the prospect of a dangerous future in Taliban-led Afghanistan ahead:
… In 2023, Pakistan expelled hundreds of thousands of Afghans—both documented and undocumented. However, most refugees awaiting resettlement in Western countries were largely spared thanks to diplomatic interventions. Their fate, however, became increasingly uncertain in January when President Trump issued an executive order suspending all refugee admissions to the United States. This decision left thousands of Afghans stranded in Pakistan.
In February, Pakistan announced its plans to repatriate Afghan nationals awaiting resettlement by March 31, along with 800,000 Pakistan-issued Afghan Citizenship Card holders and an unknown number of undocumented Afghan migrants. “Many have told us they fear prison, torture, or even execution if Pakistan forcibly sends them back to Afghanistan,” said Moniza Kakar, a lawyer with the Joint Action Committee for Refugees, a Pakistani civil society network that advocates for international intervention and support to safeguard lives. …
Among those affected is Samia Hamza, a women’s rights activist and former law and international relations student under the US-funded Denton Program. After the Taliban seized power, she protested against the ban on girls’ education, further endangering herself. As conditions worsened in late 2021, she fled to Pakistan. However, she has since faced severe discrimination and economic hardship while awaiting US resettlement through the special immigration visas for Afghans program. Like many Afghans, she was devastated by the Trump administration’s decision to halt new immigrants. “We have heard nothing about our case since then,” said Hamza, who lives with her husband and four children in Islamabad. “With the threat of deportation, returning to Afghanistan means facing grave danger.”
The Pakistani government has ruled out extending the deportation deadline despite appeals from international organizations and the Taliban administration. Justifying its crackdown on Afghans, the government has drawn parallels to ongoing deportation efforts in the United States and various European countries.
As many of you know, the Cosmopolitan Globalist has been supporting a family of eight Afghan refugees, five of them girls and young women. After the fall of Kabul, they fled to Pakistan, with our readers’ help. Mrs. S. was as a lawyer and women’s rights activist. She put abusers of women and children behind bars. They were immediately released by the Taliban when they took power. This family would be at grave risk if they were deported back to Afghanistan. Some of her colleagues have already been murdered.
Canada still welcomes refugees. After an arduous search, we found sponsors for them in Toronto, and we’ve raised all of the funds necessary to bring them there. Now, we’re waiting for the Canadian bureaucracy to complete the process of reviewing their file and issuing their visas. We have no idea how much longer it will take.
They’re in Pakistan legally, but that doesn’t seem to matter. They’re beside themselves with anxiety. Once again, they’re so frightened that they’re not leaving their home. They’ve come so far. So many people here have contributed so much. But it could all be undone if they’re deported back to Afghanistan.
🇨🇦 So I’m putting out an appeal: If anyone reading this has a connection to someone in the Canadian government who might be able to help—or a connection to someone who might have a connection—please get in touch with me. It’s unbearable to think that owing to a bureaucratic delay, this family could be sent back to Afghanistan.
“Mission South Africa.” How Trump Is Offering White Afrikaners Refugee Status. The United States has banned most refugees, including 20,000 people who were already ready to travel to the United States before President Trump took office. But Mr. Trump is making one exception.
The Trump administration has thrown open the doors to white Afrikaners from South Africa, establishing a program called “Mission South Africa” to help them come to the United States as refugees, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
… The administration’s focus on white Afrikaners comes as it effectively bans the entry of other refugees—including about 20,000 people from countries like Afghanistan, Congo and Syria who were ready to travel to the United States before Mr. Trump took office. In court filings about those other refugees, the administration has argued that core functions of the refugee program had been “terminated” after the president’s ban, so it did not have the resources to take in any more people.
… In a statement, the State Department said it was focused on resettling Afrikaners who have been “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” The agency confirmed that it had begun interviewing applicants and said they would need to pass “stringent background and security checks.” The decision to unleash resources for Afrikaners just starting the refugee process, while stonewalling court demands to process those fleeing other countries who have already been cleared for travel, risks upending an American refugee program that has been the foundation of the United States’ role for the vulnerable, according to resettlement officials. “The government clearly has the ability to process applications when it wants to,” said Melissa Keaney, a senior supervising attorney for the International Refugee Assistance Project, the group representing plaintiffs trying to restart refugee processing.
… Lawyers for the Justice Department have argued both that the administration now lacks resources to help thousands of refugees and that in restarting the program the government reserves the right to “do so in a manner that reflects administration priorities.” Mr. Trump has made clear what those priorities were when he created a refugee carve-out for white Afrikaners. Mr. Trump at the time accused the South African government of confiscating the land of white Afrikaners, backing a long-held conspiracy theory about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.
Mr. Trump was referring to a recent policy signed into law by the South African government, known as the Expropriation Act. It repeals an apartheid-era law and allows the government in certain instances to acquire privately held land in the public interest, without paying compensation, only after a justification process subject to judicial review.
Mr. Trump and his allies have for years echoed the grievances of Afrikaners. During his first term, Mr. Trump directed the State Department to investigate land seizures and “the large-scale killing of farmers.” Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has also falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day. Despite the claims, white people own half of South Africa’s land while making up just 7 percent of the country’s population. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in the nation.
The announcement has cause puzzlement in South Africa:
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Le Pen banned from running for office
In France, Marine Le Pen has been sentenced to two years in prison and declared in eligible to run for office for five years. She, her party, and its senior figures were convicted of embezzling EU funds to cover her party’s political expenses. The conspirators, the court ruled, took funds meant to pay expenses for parliamentary staff and diverted it to employees of the Rassemblement National in France, creating a series of fake jobs in Brussels that no one actually occupied. By the European Parliament’s estimate, they siphoned off about €7 million. She was fined €100,000 and given a four year sentence, two suspended. She’ll serve her time at home, wearing an electronic ankle bracelet.
Everyone expected she would be convicted: The fake employees’ testimony on the stand was devastating, and the evidence was overwhelming. The drama lies in her being barred from running for office. (I’ll write more about this soon.)
John Litchfield, the best English-language correspondent in France, wrote this several days ago:
… Nothing in this convoluted case is certain; everything is complicated; interpretations of the law and of the constitution keep shifting. Of one thing, I am reasonably sure. Le Pen will be convicted of conspiring to steal money from the taxpayer to fund her Far Right party and reward her friends. The evidence given at the trial in November was overwhelming. The Front National, now Rassemblement National, employed fake European Parliament assistants who never or rarely went to Strasbourg or Brussels.
Le Pen and the other defendants will be given large fines and suspended jail sentences. At most, she may be ordered to serve a short jail sentence without going to jail, by wearing an ankle bracelet like ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy.
All the suspense on Monday comes from another part of the sentence demanded by the prosecutors. Le Pen, they said, should be banned from seeking public office for five years with “execution provisoire” or immediate effect during the process of appeal.
The Far Right leader had hoped to spin out appeals for two years or more. She had not counted on a change in French law which makes “provisional execution”—or a ban from electoral politics during an appeal—the default position.
The three judges do have a margin of discretion. They could, in theory, decide that Le Pen’s position amongst the front-runners for 2027 makes an electoral ban dangerous or undesirable. They are, in effect, being asked to make a political/constitutional decision and not just a legal/criminal one. Imagine the explosion of fake indignation and misleading commentary by hard and far right politicians and media in France and abroad if Le Pen is banned.
Looks like we don’t have to imagine it.
Meanwhile in the Middle East …
American airstrikes are decimating ISIS in Syria:
CENTCOM has dramatically expanded the scope of its counterterrorism operations since mid-February. In around 40 days, US forces have killed or enabled the capture of four high-ranking terrorists in Syria and Iraq. The target deck has included a senior leadership facilitator of a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, the senior military leader of the same terrorism organization, an ISIS cell leader, and the second-in-command of ISIS.
The US military has carried out its largest offensive deployment to West Asia since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon in October 2023, coinciding with threats by President Donald Trump to start a major bombing campaign against Iran. According to an analysis of open-source aviation data, the US military has sent additional squadrons of fighter jets, stealth bombers, and quantities of weaponry in recent weeks. The new build-up amounts to a roughly 50 percent increase over the previous monthly peak in US military flights to the region.
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that US against attacking Iran:
“The use of military force by Iran’s opponents in the context of the settlement is illegal and unacceptable. Threats from outside to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure facilities will inevitably lead to an irreversible global catastrophe. These threats are simply unacceptable,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also told Life magazine that the “consequences of this, especially if there are strikes on the nuclear infrastructure, could be catastrophic for the entire region.”
Russia and the US have recently held talks on ending the war in Ukraine. Ryabkov said these talks have not resulted in a breakthrough. Regarding tension between Tehran and Washington, Ryabkov said Russia “condemns US threats.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s warning comes after US President Donald Trump renewed his threat to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
“If they don't make a deal, there will be bombing. But there’s a chance that if they don’t make a deal, that I will do secondary tariffs on them like I did four years ago,” the president said on Sunday. Iran issued a formal complaint to the UN Security Council and said it would respond to any threat.
Trump had sent a letter to Iranian leadership in early March, threatening an attack if Tehran did not come to the negotiating table.
Iran will have “no choice” but to get nukes if attacked, says Khamenei adviser.
Iran complained to the United Nations Security Council on Monday about “reckless and belligerent” remarks by US President Donald Trump, who threatened Iran on Sunday with bombing and more tariffs if Tehran did not come to an agreement with Washington over its nuclear program. An adviser to the supreme leader warned that Iran would have to acquire a nuclear weapon if attacked by the US or its allies.
Ahmad Naderi, a representative for Tehran in Iran’s parliament, said the obvious:
Over the past year, as Israel’s ground offensive against Hezbollah ramped up along the Israel-Lebanon border, one disturbing pattern repeatedly emerged from the field: the overwhelming presence of Russian-made weaponry inside southern Lebanon:
Time and again, Israel Defense Forces troops operating in Hezbollah-controlled territory uncovered homes converted into makeshift arsenals, packed with advanced Russian arms. Crates filled with anti-tank missiles, mortars, and rockets—many marked with Russian export codes—provided evidence of a pipeline stretching from Moscow through Damascus, and directly into Hezbollah’s hands.
Among the most concerning finds were sophisticated Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, capable of penetrating even the most heavily armored Israeli vehicles. Some of these missiles were manufactured as recently as 2020, indicating a supply line that has remained active well into recent years. Alongside them were older but still lethal systems—Fagot, Konkurs, and even Soviet-era Sagger missiles. The IDF uncovered weapons stores in civilian homes, schools, and mosques, embedded in the very communities Hezbollah claims to defend.
These discoveries were not isolated incidents. They are part of a broader reality: Russia, while waging its own war in Ukraine, has continued to quietly arm Israel’s enemies. The alliance between Moscow and Tehran has grown considerably since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, deepening not only in diplomatic and economic terms, but in the defense arena as well. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of Shahed-136 suicide drones—used to devastating effect against Ukrainian infrastructure—and in return, the Kremlin has opened its arms depot to the Islamic Republic and its proxies.
Shock, collapse, poor communication: IDF probe shows how Nova was left alone against Hamas. The attack lasted uninterrupted for over two hours. The party wasn’t mentioned in any situation assessments during the night, despite the IDF and Shin Bet picking up suspicious signs of possible Hamas activity:
An internal IDF investigation into the October 7 massacre at the Nova music festival in southern Israel found severe security failures, a breakdown in coordination between the military and police, and no preparation for protecting the thousands of civilians gathered near the Gaza border. The report details how these failures contributed to the killing of 378 people and the abduction of 44 others—17 of whom remain in captivity. …
The investigation cites three main reasons for the IDF’s failure to defend the Nova party: the initial shock and overwhelming force of the Hamas assault, which left all units focused on their own survival; a collapse in command, control and intelligence systems that allowed Hamas to isolate the scene; and poor coordination with the police, including a mistaken early assessment that most of the partygoers had safely evacuated. That last report, issued by the brigade’s Home Front officer based on police information, was largely accurate—but it led senior officers to believe there was no longer a threat to civilians in the area.
In response, one of the Nova festival's producers said, “The investigation revealed and confirmed the magnitude of the neglect we felt on our own flesh, and the magnitude of the failure that emerges from it is multi-systemic, shocking, unfathomable.”
In Russia and Ukraine …
Putin calls up 160,000 men to Russian army in latest conscription drive.
US lifts sanctions on wife of Russian billionaire Rotenberg
Pete Hegseth will not attend a gathering of 50 countries to coordinate military support for Ukraine. It’s the first time the coalition will meet without the American secretary of defense. (What message is this meant to send other than one of solidarity with Russia and hostility to Ukraine and Europe?)
France is calling for a new European plan to ramp up ammunition production, including of complex ordnance such as missiles, and wants to move forward at a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Warsaw this week, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said.
The New Hitler-Stalin Pact
By Robert Zubrin, published in the Kyiv Post
In a hypothetical Multi-Polar World proposed by various Kremlin mouthpieces and some of their US sympathizers, Trump would get North America and Putin would get Europe.
In the two months since he has taken office, President Donald Trump has launched a program of massive territorial expansion, demanding the US acquisition of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. 1Meanwhile, he has made it clear that under his leadership, America not only intends to withdraw the protection its forces have provided to Europe since the end of the Second World War, but will use its power to coerce Ukraine into surrender to Russia, thereby moving the Kremlin into position to attack America’s former NATO allies.
To best understand the method to Trump’s madness, a bit of history is in order.
During the 1930s, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany appeared to be arch- enemies, espousing rival brands of totalitarian ideology, and engaging in armed combat with each other via a proxy war in Spain. Hitler openly and repeatedly stated his intentions to conquer all lands to his east, with a goal of not only exterminating its Jews, but enslaving and then doing away with its majority Slav population as well. The Soviets, alarmed at such a prospect, called for international alliance to stop the Nazis.
Then suddenly, in late August 1939, it was announced that the two dictatorships had signed a “non-aggression pact.” While publicized as a move towards peace, it immediately became clear that it was anything but that. Under the terms of the deal, the Soviets got half of Poland, the Baltic States, and a shot at Finland. The Nazis got the other half of Poland and a free hand to conquer Western Europe. Within weeks of the pact’s signing, World War II was underway.
In Washington, Moldova’s foreign minister praised Trump’s “peace through strength” approach to Ukraine, calls for lasting peace.
I submit that we are seeing exactly the same kind of deal now, only on a much larger scale.
In the 1990s, Russian ideologist Aleksandr Dugin concocted a synthetic “Alt-Right” ideology combining tribal nationalism with fealty to Russia to replace the defunct communist movement as the Kremlin’s international fifth column. A network of parties matching this format—including the French National Front (now National Rally), the German AfD, the Trumpist MAGA movement, and similar outfits in Hungary, Austria, the UK, the Netherlands, and most other European countries—have now been launched to support this goal.
Dugin promulgated a geopolitical doctrine, known as “the Multi-Polar World” for both the Kremlin and its puppets to espouse. According to this creed, the “Unipolar World” led by the United States and its democratic allies (sometimes called “the rules-based international order”), based on collective security and free trade, is unfair, and needs to be replaced by a “Multi-Polar World” in which the globe would be divided into spheres of control under the domination three great powers. Under this scheme, the United States would be awarded North America, China would get East and South Asia, and Russian would get Eurasia, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” The rest of the globe could provide ample ground for skirmishing to keep the diplomats and proxy warriors of the great powers suitably amused.
It is apparent that the Trump administration has embraced this concept. Not only do Trump’s moves correspond exactly to this game plan, but Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has explicitly referred to the “Multi-Polar World” as the baseline for understanding the putative realities of the strategic future.
This is not a formula for peace. In the first place, it means death in short order to Ukraine and the Baltic States. France, Germany, and Poland appear better able to resist, but their positions in the long run are doubtful. Certainly, Germany will rearm. We are seeing that already. But where does that leave Poland, if and when the Kremlin-aligned ultranationalist AfD takes power? Much of modern Poland is situated on what was once Prussia. Cutting deals to split Poland with Russia has been a constant trope over the course of German history, and it is a near certainty that a rearmed Germany under AfD leadership would seize the opportunity to do it again.
Then we are back to 1939.
This is where Trump is leading us. The Multi-Polar World is not a formula for world peace. It is a formula for world war.
There are only two groups of people who can stop this mad plan. One is the Republicans in Congress. Unfortunately, these appear to so terrorized by the threat of a primary opponent funded by one of Trump’s bagmen that they won’t oppose Trump on anything, even his crazed trade war that is looting and destroying the savings of their constituents at a record rate. The others are the leaders of Europe’s remaining democratic powers. These need to stop posturing about hypothetical peacekeeping forces to send to Ukraine after a non-existent peace deal is reached, and send Ukraine the arms it needs to repel the Russian invasion now.
If they don’t, their countries will be the next ones on the dinner table.
I’m still working on Mark Bloch. And Marine Le Pen. And a bunch of other things. Stay tuned.
And Gaza, too—Claire.
Brexit was pretty stupid, though.... a similar idea: a country imposing economic sanctions on itself.
Wait! We haven't seen everything yet. He never ceases to amaze me. Every time I say he can't do anything more stupid, he does!