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      ‘A human rights disaster’: immigrants sent into Guantánamo black hole despite no proof of crime

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      Handcuffed and shackled, the men appear in government propaganda photos being herded towards military cargo planes that will carry them to an uncertain future in an infamous land.“These individuals are the worst of the worst that we have pulled off of our streets,” Donald Trump’s homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, thundered against the supposedly “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” being packed off to Guantánamo Bay.In interviews and on social media, Noem alleged those being sent to the notorious US naval base in Cuba included South American “child pedophiles”, drug traffickers and “vicious gang members” guilty of “heinous crimes”.But 10 days after the Trump administration began sending immigrants to Guantánamo, authorities have yet to provide proof of those claims as mystery continues to surround their identities and doubts grow over whether many have committed any crime at all.“It sounds like this picture the government is painting of them being people who are dangerous and violent is patently false,” said Jessica Vosburgh, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of a coalition of rights groups that this week sued the Trump administration for access to the Guantánamo detainees. “It’s clear the folks who we suspect have been sent to Guantánamo are not, on the whole, dangerous people,” Vosburgh added, even if people in immigration detention “may have a mix of criminal backgrounds”.View image in fullscreenJ Wells Dixon, a lawyer with nearly two decades’ experience working with prisoners in a place critics call “America’s gulag”, said: “It is almost impossible to know exactly what is happening at Guantánamo at this moment. I’m not sure the Trump administration really understands what is happening.”The pictures US authorities have released of people they call “highly dangerous criminal aliens” have inadvertently shed some light on the identity of Trump’s Guantánamo internees.According to the website Migrant Insider, relatives identified one member of the first 10-member group flown to Guantánamo on 4 February as Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera. The 23-year-old Venezuelan was detained seeking asylum on the southern border on 19 January, one day before Trump took power vowing to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came”. “He’s innocent,” Castillo’s sister, Yajaira Castillo, told the Spanish news agency EFE, denying her brother was part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.A second man spotted in the photos is Tilso Ramón Gómez Lugo, 37, a car mechanic from north-west Venezuela who had been sent to an immigration detention facility in Texas after being picked up on the border in April 2024. “I’ve known him since he was a child. He’s an educated boy who has no problems with anyone. He is someone with good parents, a hard worker and a good family – and very well-liked in the town we are from,” a friend, who asked not to be named, told the Guardian.“Trump had and has my support – but I do not agree with these extreme measures, especially against our compatriots,” added the friend, who like many fellow Venezuelans backed Trump believing he would take a hard-line stance on their home country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.A third detainee is reportedly 25-year-old Yoiker David Sequera, a Venezuelan barber who was reportedly picked up by border agents last September after making the perilous journey through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama to reach the US. “My son is no criminal,” one relative, who suspected Sequera had been targeted because of his tattoos, told Migrant Insider.For the most part, however, the life stories of the immigrants remain an enigma.View image in fullscreen“The US government has shared close to nothing … they’re being completely evasive with sharing names,” said Vosburgh, whose conversations with other detainees and relatives of those suspected to be in Guantánamo led her to believe that Noem’s descriptions of the detainees as “vicious” criminals were “bald-faced lies”.A senior Department of Homeland Security official said all of those sent to Guantánamo had “committed a crime by entering the United States illegally”. “In addition to holding violent gang members and other high-threat illegal aliens, Guantánamo Bay is also holding other illegal aliens with final deportation orders. Every single alien at Guantánamo Bay has a final deportation order,” the official added, without offering evidence that any of the detainees had links to gangs or crime.The official declined to disclose precisely how many detainees were being held at Guantánamo but said it was “less than 100”. “In total, there have been eight flights in eight days,” the official added on Wednesday. On Thursday the New York Times said 98 men had been sent to the island base by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) between 4 and 11 February.“We don’t know who these individuals are yet. In that sense, it is reminiscent of Guantánamo’s past,” said Dixon, recalling the base’s post-9/11 conversion into a prison for “enemy combatants” captured in the “war on terror”.“People may forget [that] after Guantánamo opened in early 2002, it took quite a long time to learn who was detained [there], why they were there and what had happened to them. That information only started to become public when lawyers like me started traveling to Guantánamo to meet these individuals.”Back then, US authorities also called those held at Guantánamo “the worst of the worst”, recalled Dixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The reality was something very different. The reality was that you had people like the Uyghurs [Turkic Muslims] who had fled persecution in China and were rounded up in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan … and ended up in Guantánamo … The reality was something very different from the propaganda – and I think that’s undoubtedly what you’re going to see here.”Lee Gelernt, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, said all of the detainees were thought to be Venezuelan men. “But until we’re down there, we can’t be sure. And the government’s … threatening to send thousands [of people, so] I suspect at some point it’ll move beyond Venezuelans,” he added.If the identities of the Guantánamo detainees remain cloaked in secrecy, activists say there is little doubt over the conditions that await them at an isolated island base that has become synonymous with human rights abuses and torture.Fifty-three of the 98 detainees have reportedly been sent to a medium- to high-security military prison called Camp 6. It has previously been used to house “war on terror” prisoners, in some cases for years. The other 45 people are being held in “a lower-security building” on the other side of the base and being guarded by members of the US Coast Guard, according to the New York Times.A 2007 Amnesty International report painted a dire picture of life inside Camp 6, which was originally built to house 178 detainees. The US government claimed the facility combined “humane treatment with security needs” but activists called conditions there “unacceptably harsh”.The cells had no access to natural light or air and were lit by fluorescent lighting 24 hours a day, Amnesty said. Detainees “consistently complained of being too cold in the steel cells” as a result of air conditioning controlled by guards.Five Uyghur prisoners cited in the report told lawyers Camp 6’s strict regime left them feeling “despair, crushing loneliness, and abandonment by the world”. One previously smiley, “gentle and pleasant” man now “appeared to be in despair” and said he was “beginning to hear voices”.Dixon said it was possible detainees could be held in isolation for 22 hours each day.Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, said the Guantánamo detainees had fallen into “a legal black hole”.“You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse … and the inability to contact the outside world is intense,” she said, calling for an end to Trump’s transfers.Schacher believes the Guantánamo transfers were designed to please Trump’s base. “It’s political theater … cruelty theater … harsh-on-immigrants theater,” she added.“All we really know is that the Trump administration is trying to evoke the terrible images of Guantánamo in order to appear tough on illegal immigration in the United States. That’s what this is about,” said Dixon. “This is not about law or policy … It’s a catastrophic human rights disaster.”Additional reporting by Clavel Rangel More

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      Vance to meet Zelenskyy as European leaders call for unity over Ukraine

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      The US vice-president, JD Vance, will face calls for greater consultation and coherence when he meets European leaders, including the president of Ukraine, at a security conference in Munich.The timing of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s meeting with US officials, initially scheduled for Friday morning, remained unclear because the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had to change his flight from Washington when the plane experienced a mechanical fault.The expected showdown came after 48 hours in which senior members of the Trump administration, including the president, unleashed a volley of contradictory positions on how and when negotiations with Russia about Ukraine’s future would be conducted.In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Vance tried to quell criticism that Donald Trump had made a series of premature and unilateral concessions in a phone call with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.He said the US would still be prepared to impose sanctions on Russia if Moscow did not accept a satisfactory deal. “There are any number of formulations, of configurations, but we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” he said.Vance added the option of sending US troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained “on the table”. He said there were “economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage” the US could use against Putin.Before being nominated as vice-president, Vance said he did “not really care about Ukraine’s future, one way or the other”.Rubio added that the US had an interest in the long-term independence of Ukraine, remarks intended to imply some form of security guarantee for Ukraine.Trump has also insisted that any deal would be in consultation with Ukraine, but he has been less emphatic about the involvement of Europeans – an omission that has infuriated leaders of the continent, who believe any Ukrainian settlement will have profound consequences for European security.Trump reiterated that it would not be possible for Ukraine to ever join Nato since Putin would not accept it. In his view, Ukraine is aware of this. “I think that’s how it will have to be,” Trump said.Instead, he foresaw Russia rejoining the G7 group of wealthy countries as part of its reintegration into western economies.The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was due to meet his Polish counterpart in Warsaw on Friday, said the US was not making premature concessions.European leaders have long expected Trump would slash US support for Ukraine, but have been shocked by the lack of planning by the administration and the absence of consultation with allies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe French president joined the chorus of politicians demanding the US adopt a more careful and coordinated approach. “A peace that is a capitulation is bad news for everyone,” Emmanuel Macron said.“The only question at this point is whether President Putin is sincerely, sustainably … prepared for a ceasefire on that basis,” he said, adding that Europe would have a “role to play” in regional security discussions.The most angry response from a senior European politician came from Kaja Kallas, the new EU foreign policy chief and former Estonian president.“Why are we giving them [Russia] everything they want even before the negotiations have started? It’s appeasement. It has never worked,” she said, adding that Nato membership for Ukraine was the “strongest” and “cheapest” security guarantee available.She suggested the war would continue with European support if Zelenskyy was cut out of the talks. “If there is agreement made behind our backs, it simply will not work,” Kallas said. “The Ukrainians will resist and we will support them.”Hegseth also downplayed the relevance of European values to security policy: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can’t shoot values. You can’t shoot flags and you can’t shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power.” More

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      Oh, Canada! Can Trump just take it? – podcast

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      Archive: 10 News First, BBC News, CBC News, CTV News, Fox News, NBC News, CNN, CBS News
      Listen to The Audio Long Read on Trump’s tariff plan with China
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/politcspodus More

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      US park service erases references to trans people from Stonewall Inn website

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      The National Park Service eliminated all references to transgender people from its website for the Stonewall national monument on Thursday. The monument commemorates a 1969 riot outside New York City’s historic Stonewall Inn, led by trans women of color, that ignited the contemporary gay rights movement.The move comes as federal agencies across the country seek to comply with an executive order Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, calling for the US government to define sex as only male or female.“This blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals – especially transgender women of color – who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights,” organizers at the Stonewall Inn and the non-profit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative said in a statement.Since Trump returned to office last month, he has signed a series of executive orders targeting trans Americans, including by banning trans athletes from women’s sports, restricting healthcare for trans youth and transferring incarcerated trans women to men’s facilities; a US judge, however, temporarily blocked federal prisons from implementing the order to move trans people. Many of the orders have been framed as “defending women”.The Stonewall national monument, located in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, has become a symbol of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. One June night in 1969, LGBTQ+ patrons of the historic gay bar resisted a police raid. Although recollections of the night vary, by many accounts a Black trans woman named Marsha P Johnson “threw the first brick”.During the George Floyd uprisings in June of 2020, a march for Black trans lives began at the Stonewall Inn. It was followed by the largest-ever march for Black trans lives in Brooklyn later that month.Barack Obama designated the site as a national monument in 2016.Earlier this week, the homepage for the monument said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”On Thursday, it said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is just cruel and petty,” Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, posted on social media. “Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights – and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased.” More

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      ‘Melt Ice’: protesters in New York rally against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies

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      Crowds of demonstrators including undocumented people took to the streets of downtown Manhattan on Thursday in a fierce show of resistance against Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.The rally, which started at Foley Square and in front of the field office of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), came amid the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdowns.Speaking to the Guardian, Sergio Uzurin, a spokesperson for the grassroots movement NYC Ice Watch, said: “We’re helping to … escort undocumented folks so that they are not afraid.”“As much as the administration is trying to spread an atmosphere of fear, today is proving that some people are undocumented and unafraid to speak out about the social catastrophe that these deportations are causing,” Uzurin added.A 31-year-old undocumented man from Nicaragua who identified himself as Begea said: “We just need an opportunity to show what we could do … We are not criminals. We are just people coming to this country, looking for an opportunity, the opportunity we [lost] in our countries.”View image in fullscreen“It’s negative and really hard, what’s happening to us right now … We need the space to try to be better, to help our families, to support [and do] something good for this country,” Begea added.Echoing similar sentiments, an undocumented man from Oaxaca, Mexico, who identified himself as Alfredo Gayta said through a translator: “I am here to raise our voices against what is happening in New York. We have been treated as criminals and we are not criminals.”Wearing a white T-shirt with the Spanish words “Mis organ y mi sangre no tienen frontera” or “My organs and my blood have no borders”, Gayta said: “When we go out on the streets and are just walking, people would shout for us to leave the country, for us to go back to where we came from. We don’t really take it personally, it doesn’t really bother us. We just leave it in the hand of God.”Gayta went on to add: “The message that I want to give Trump is to give us an opportunity. We are here to work. He can see that we are not bad people. If he just gives us an opportunity, we can showcase that.”Throughout Foley Square, protesters, with some donning green bandanas around their faces, held handwritten signs that read “Melt Ice” as well as: “To get our neighbors, you have to get through us!”View image in fullscreenDave Schmauch, a member of the Freedom Socialist party, held a sign with a message to New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, who has in recent months taken a hardened stance against immigration. “Immigrants are not your get out of jail card!” the sign read, in reference to Adams’s own federal corruption charges, which the newest Trump-appointed justice department has ordered prosecutors to drop.“Today’s protest is just the beginning of what is starting to coalesce into a large, spirited, New York City immigrant solidarity movement,” said Shmauch, adding: “I want everybody to know that we say immigrants are welcome here. New York is an immigrant town and we are going to support and defend our neighbors.”Following several chants including: “Deny, defend, depose, all Nazis got to go!” and: “Every gender, every race, punch a Nazi in the face,” at least 100 protesters, with some beating drums, marched from downtown through the city’s upscale SoHo district, flanked by a heavy police presence that appeared to be twice their numbers.At least six arrests were made, with at least a dozen police appearing to surround one of the protesters as he was pinned to the ground. Around him, other protesters yelled: “Let him go!”Thursday’s rally came as Adams, a moderate Democrat, announced he would reopen an Ice office at the city’s Rikers Island jail. In 2015, an Ice office closed at the jail under the city’s sanctuary laws that impose limitations on the city’s ability to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.Also on Thursday, the newly appointed attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that the federal government was suing New York over its immigration policies, accusing state officials of having “chosen to prioritize illegal aliens over American citizens”.At one point during the march, Begea stopped in front of the Jacob K Javits federal office building with a crowd of protesters, journalists and police looking on.Accompanied by a fellow protester who repeated after Begea in a call-and-response chant, Begea introduced himself to the crowd, at first quietly before his voice grew louder upon hearing the echoes of the protesters.“My name is Begea. I am a Nicaraguan citizen and I came to this country looking for an opportunity and freedom that I didn’t have in my country,” he said as he became visibly emotional.“We are only asking for the opportunity to be able to express our talent, our ability, to contribute to this country a grain of our help. We do not want to be treated like criminals. We want them to treat us like human beings,” he added.At the end of his chant, Begea raised his fist in the air.“La libertad,” he yelled.“La libertad,” the protesters yelled back. More

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      Trump administration lays off most probationary staff and warns big cuts to come

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      The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the country’s largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection – potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.In addition, workers at some agencies were warned that large workplace cuts would be coming.The Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides healthcare for veterans, reported on Thursday evening that it had laid off more than 1,000 probationary workers. The US Forest Service was set to fire more than 3,000.The decision on probationary workers, who generally have less than a year on the job, came from the office of personnel management (OPM), which serves as a human resources department for the federal government. The notification was confirmed by a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.It’s expected to be the first step in sweeping layoffs. Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that told agency leaders to plan for “large-scale reductions in force”.Elon Musk, whom the president has given wide leeway to slash government spending with his so-called “department of government efficiency”, called on Thursday for the elimination of whole agencies.“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said via a video call to the world governments summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”Paul Light, an expert on the federal government and professor emeritus of public service at New York University, said it seemed like the administration was “inventing new methods for destroying government capacity”.“You’re basically harassing your own workforce at the end of the day,” he said. “You’re undermining the engine that you want to run.”Layoffs are unlikely to yield significant deficit savings. When the congressional budget office looked at the issue, it found the government spent $271bn annually compensating civilian federal workers, with about 60% of that total going to workers employed by the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.The government could, in theory, have cut all those workers and still run a deficit of more than $1tn that would continue to grow as tax revenues are needed to keep up with the growing costs of social security and Medicare.Thursday’s order was an expansion of previous directions from OPM, which told agencies earlier this week that probationary employees should be fired if they weren’t meeting high standards. It’s not clear how many workers are currently in a probationary period. According to government data maintained by OPM, as of March 2024, 220,000 workers had less than a year on the job – the most recent data available.The firing of probationary employees began earlier this week and has included Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education workers.At least 39 were fired from the education department on Wednesday, according to a union that represents agency workers, including civil rights workers, special education specialists and student aid officials.The layoffs also hit Department of Veterans Affairs researchers working on cancer treatment, opioid addiction, prosthetics and burn pit exposure, US senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, said on Thursday.“I’m hearing from longtime VA researchers in my home state of Washington who are right now being told to immediately stop their research and pack their bags,” Murray said in a statement, “not because their work isn’t desperately needed, but because Trump and Elon have decided to fire these researchers on a whim.”Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), a group that defends government workers, said the agriculture department’s food safety and inspection service would be hit especially hard by the laying off of probationary employees because it has trouble recruiting inspectors required to be present at all times at most slaughterhouses.“Firing any probationary employees would be a big kick in the gut to those that do very grueling and difficult work,” Peer’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said. “It would make our food system less safe and cause consumer confidence in the safety of our food supply to dip.”The civilian federal workforce, not including military personnel and postal workers, is made up of about 2.4 million people. While about 20% of the workers are in Washington DC and the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, more than 80% live outside the Capitol region.Trump’s initial attempt to downsize the workforce was the deferred resignation program, commonly described as a buyout, which offered to pay people until 30 September if they agreed to quit. The White House said 75,000 people signed up, and a federal judge cleared a legal roadblock for the program on Wednesday.However, the number of workers who took the offer was less than the administration’s target, and Trump has made it clear he would take further steps.Employees at the National Science Foundation and the housing and urban development department were told this week that large reductions – in some cases a halving of the workforce – would be coming, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.The National Science Foundation was told to expect a 25% to 50% reduction in force within two months, while the housing and urban development department was told to plan for a 50% reduction, the person said.Employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were also bracing on Thursday for reductions in their workforce.The order Trump signed on Tuesday stipulated that government functions not required by law would be prioritized for cuts and hiring would be restricted. With exceptions for functions such as public safety, only one employee can be added for every four that leave. In addition, new hires would generally need the approval from a representative of Doge, expanding the influence of Musk’s team.Trump, speaking to reporters later at the White House, praised Musk’s work to slash federal spending.“We’re looking for waste, fraud and abuse,” he said. “That’s what Elon is working so hard on.”Trump has also been sharply critical of federal workers, especially those who want to keep working remotely, though his administration is simultaneously working to cut federal office space and ordering the termination of worksite leases throughout the government.“Nobody is gonna work from home,” Trump said on Monday. “They are gonna be going out, they’re gonna play tennis, they’re gonna play golf, they’re gonna do a lot of things. They’re not working.” More

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      The heartlessness of the deal: how Trump’s ‘America first’ stance sold out Ukraine

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      In Donald Trump’s world, everything has its price.There is no place for sentiment in his politics. Common values cannot secure loans for military aid. And the US president does not care who controls the blood-soaked soils of east Ukraine, so long as he can access the rare earth minerals that lie beneath.The peace Trump will negotiate is not about justice. There is no deeper moral or morality here except for who “got it done”, and Trump has signaled that he is ready to pressure Ukraine and Europe to provide concessions to entice Russia to sign on the dotted line.All that’s left for him is to hash out a price.“I’m just here to try and get peace,” Trump said in the Oval Office, where he riffs out policy daily. “I don’t care so much about anything other than I want to stop having millions of people killed.”It is difficult to put into words what an about-face this is for US support for Ukraine, which for years was built on helping the country defend itself, though not win the war.The Biden administration helped manage the symptoms of Russian aggression. Now, Trump says he’s going to provide the cure. But it is an unwelcome one: stop resisting.Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the adage in the Oval Office had been “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”. Biden officials regularly said in public that Ukraine itself would decide when it was ready to negotiate.But that was before the US election. It wasn’t the issue of Ukrainian manpower or the supply of weapons that ultimately brought us to this point; it was the price of eggs in Pennsylvania. The Biden administration’s biggest betrayal of Ukraine may have been to lose the US elections, effectively surrendering Ukraine’s second front to “America first”.“We’re the thing that’s holding it back, and frankly, we’ll go as long as we have to go, because we’re not going to let the other happen,” said Trump, in what may be the only silver lining of his remarks on Monday, indicating he wouldn’t allow Ukraine to collapse completely. “But President Putin wants that peace now, and that’s good, and he didn’t want to have peace with Biden.”Some Ukrainian and Russian observers may believe the US president has a deeper plan here, perhaps to consolidate Europe and then pressure Russia as a united front while sinking the oil price. But judging by his actions in Gaza, or in the United States, there is likely to be no deeper plan.Assigning Steve Witkoff, his go-to dealmaker who negotiated the Gaza ceasefire-for-hostages deal, rather than the hawkish Gen Keith Kellogg, indicates that the process will be maximally unsentimental. Just another real estate deal.Now, much of Europe is wondering whether Trump is about to deliver them a fait accompli on their eastern flank, seeking to commit European troops with no Nato protection to Ukraine in a security agreement negotiated exclusively between Moscow and Washington.“What’s left to negotiate?” read one text message from a European official, who called it a “surrender”.In fact, that was just Trump’s opening offer.Russia has indicated it wants him to go further. In a communique, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said he wanted the deal to address the “origins of the conflict”, which he has previously said include Ukraine’s pro-western stance and the Nato expansions of the 2000s and 1990s.He may seek to turn back the clock, said another European official, and demand that US forces stationed in the Baltics, Poland and other former communist countries return, raising concerns about further Russian land grabs without American troops there to guarantee their defense.Such an outcome seemed even more possible on Thursday, when Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, told his Nato counterparts that a reduction of US troop levels in Europe could be part of any deal.In effect, Trump is negotiating with Europe, not Russia. Europe has issued its counteroffer: treat us as a partner and give us a seat at the table.“We shouldn’t take anything off the table before the negotiations have even started,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, before the Nato meeting on Thursday. “It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work. You need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”That depends what Trump plans to do next, as Hegseth made clear. “Everything is on the table,” he said. “In his conversations with Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy, what he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world: President Trump.”The question is who is in that free world now, and what is the price of entry. More