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    Trump accused of caving to big business after deal to cut Swiss tariffs to 15%

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    Donald Trump agreed to cut US tariffs on Switzerland from 39% to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters.The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms.Critics seized on the announcement as evidence that the White House had put corporate interests ahead of those of struggling Americans, as inflation continues to increase the cost of living nationwide.“While prices for American families are going way up because of Trump’s chaotic tariffs, it’s the billionaires and giant corporations cozying up to Trump that get relief,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said.Leading Swiss executives met Trump at the White House earlier this month. Rolex, the luxury Swiss watchmaker, also invited the president and a string of his officials to the US Open tennis final in September.Upon arrival, Trump “did ask in jest whether he would have been invited had it not been for the tariffs”, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, the Rolex CEO, later disclosed. This was “a moment that brought a round of laughter all around”, he added.Dufour denied that Rolex had engaged in “any negotiation” with the US over tariffs. The White House dismissed Warren’s criticism as “asinine conspiracy theories”.Trump was gifted a golden table clock by Rolex, which was later spotted on his desk in the Oval Office. Another firm is said to have donated an engraved gold bar.The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, also confirmed the breakthrough on Friday, telling CNBC, the financial news network, that both sides had “essentially reached a deal”.The Trump administration agreed to limit US tariffs on Switzerland and Liechtenstein “to a maximum of 15%” under the deal, according to a statement from the Swiss government.This brings US tariffs on Switzerland in line with those on the European Union – allowing Swiss exporters the same treatment as rivals in neighboring countries.In return, Switzerland will reduce tariffs “on a range of US products”, the statement said. “In addition to all industrial products, fish and seafood, this includes agricultural products from the US that Switzerland considers non-sensitive.”Swiss officials also committed to granting a series of quotas for US goods that can be exported to Switzerland on a duty-free basis, including 500 tonnes of beef, 1,000 tonnes of bison meat and 1,500 tonnes of poultry.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The date for implementing these market access concessions will be coordinated with the US to ensure that customs duties are reduced at the same time,” the statement said.This is the latest “framework” trade deal to be struck by Trump and his administration. Unlike formal free trade agreements, which are substantial and can take years to negotiate, these pacts have typically been narrow in focus and light on detail.The precise timing of the implementation, and when the new tariffs and quotas will be enforced, has yet to be finalized.“They’re going to send a lot of manufacturing here to the United States – pharmaceuticals, gold smelting, railway equipment,” Greer claimed on CNBC, “so we’re really excited about that deal and what it means for American manufacturing.”The Swiss government said companies in the country were “planning to make direct investments” in the US worth $200bn “by the end of 2028”. More

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      AfD hails US ban on European leftwing groups as historians fear crackdown on anti-fascists

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      Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has welcomed the US government’s decision to classify a prominent German anti-fascist group and three other European networks as terrorist organisations, calling on Berlin and other European governments to follow the example.But historians of anti-fascism warned that at a time when far-right groups were making electoral gains across the continent, the move set a dangerous precedent that could prepare the ground for a broader crackdown on leftwing activism.The US state department announced on Thursday that the ban would apply to Germany’s Antifa Ost, an anti-fascist group whose members have been prosecuted by German authorities for attacks on far-right figures; Italy’s International Revolutionary Front, which sent explosive packages to the then president of the European Commission in 2003; and two organisations accused of planting bombs in Greece: Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense.The AfD has long called for German authorities to make a similar ruling against anti-fascist groups, even before it became the largest opposition in the German parliament earlier this year.“Antifa is a terrorist organisation, and it would be easy for the German state to take action against it, only those in power don’t want to,” said Stephan Brandner, the deputy federal spokesperson for the AfD, accusing the German state of tolerating far-left violence.The designation could result in the freezing of any assets belonging to the groups held in the US and a ban on their members entering the country.Mark Bray, a Rutgers University professor who teaches a course on the history of anti-fascism, said that of the four proscribed groups, only Antifa Ost was an explicitly anti-fascist organisation.“The others are revolutionary groups,” he said. “This shows how the Trump administration is trying to lump all revolutionary and radical groups together under the label ‘antifa’. By establishing the (alleged) existence of foreign antifa groups, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for declaring American antifa groups (and all that they deem to be ‘antifa’) to be affiliated with these supposed foreign terrorist groups.”View image in fullscreenThe antifa movement emerged in Germany in the 1920s. But the term is extremely loose and is frequently applied to a variety of leftwing activist groups, whose common denominator is their opposition to fascism.Members of Antifa Ost are accused of attacking a neo-Nazi in Dresden as well as other acts of violence against people perceived as belonging to the far-right scene, including in Hungary, between 2018 and 2023.Six alleged members were charged in Germany in July, and its most prominent member, Maja T, who is non-binary, is being held in custody in Hungary in conditions they have described as inhumane. They face trial in January and have been told they could face up to 23 years in prison.Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service, which has designated the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force, has previously concluded that the antifa “movement” has neither a fixed organisational structure nor any clearly defined hierarchies.The historian Richard Rohrmoser said the name was such a broadbrush term it could be applied not just to “black-clad groups ready for violence” but also to peaceful activist groups from the Anne Frank Center to the White Rose student movement, the Christian-inspired student group that opposed the Nazis in the 1930s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump is pursuing a perfidious tactic,” he told Der Spiegel. “By labelling groups as ‘antifa’, he can ban leftwing groups and demonstrations and crack down on opposition figures as soon as someone is seen wearing an antifa sweatshirt or carrying an antifa flag.” By doing so, he said, he can legitimise any action he takes against “anyone who is, in a broader sense, to his left, or opposed to him”.Italy’s Fai/Fri, or Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, is a collection of anarchist-insurrectionist cells considered to be the most structured and well established of the European groups designated by the Trump administration. The group, which unlike other Italian anarchist movements expresses itself through violence, was founded in December 2003, when it distributed leaflets claiming responsibility for the explosion of two bins close to the home in Bologna of Romano Prodi, who at the time was president of the European Commission. A few weeks later, a parcel bomb exploded in Prodi’s hands. He was uninjured.Italy’s security services describe Fai/Fri as a “horizontal” movement made up of autonomous cells united by an insurrectionist-anarchist ideology and which uses armed direct action. Other actions include letter bomb attacks in 2010 on the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome and the 2021 kneecapping of Roberto Adinolfi, then the chief executive of the nuclear engineering company Ansaldo Nucleare.Mary Bossis, an emiritus professor of international security at the University of Piraeus in Athens, said violence was common on the edges of broad-based social movements. “But that does not mean, as in the case of antifa, that the whole movement is either violent or supportive of terrorism. In fact it is very much not the case … Standing against fascism does not make someone a terrorist.”Greek media reports described the US move as “a dangerous development” at a time when the threat from the right on both sides of the Atlantic was so visibly on the ascendant.After the dismantlement of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which rose to be Greece’s third biggest party during its near decade-long debt crisis, ultra-nationalist, far-right parties have emerged and been voted into parliament. More

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      Resilience of Europe’s populist right carries warning for US Democrats

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      In the afterglow of electoral triumph, hope springs renewed for Democrats confined to the frustrating impotence of political opposition.Boosted by last week’s electoral wins in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere, as well as California’s affirmation of Proposition 50 allowing for congressional redistricting, party members suddenly feel able to dream that future elections may herald an escape route from the Donald Trump era.Yet the experiences of other countries that have grappled with the rise of rightwing authoritarian or populist movements provide a cautionary antidote to such optimism.It suggests that even the rosiest Democratic scenario – one that would see the party retake control of (at least) the House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, and win the White House in 2028 – might not be enough to permanently break the feverish intensity of Trump’s Maga movement.Defeated rightwing populists are capable of mounting electoral comebacks after suffering setbacks at the polls – as Trump himself proved by winning the 2024 presidential election after his defeat by Joe Biden four years had lulled many commentators into writing him off.Three recent elections in east-central Europe attest to the electoral resilience of populist forces, with politicians or parties that had previously been voted out following mass protests returning to office.In the Czech Republic, the populist ANO party, led by the wealthy oligarch Andrej Babiš, is on the verge of a return to government in a coalition with a far-right anti-immigrant party and a previously fringe anti-environmental grouping after it finished as the biggest bloc in last month’s parliamentary election.It will mean Babiš returning as prime minister four years after an electoral defeat propelled by conflict of interest scandals, and mass protests against his government that resembled the recent No Kings demonstrations in the US.His comeback matches that in neighboring Slovakia of Robert Fico, a former socialist who was a guest speaker at this year’s CPAC gathering in Maryland. Fico, an anti-immigration hardliner who has abandoned his country’s support for Ukraine in favour of ties with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, returned as prime minister in 2023 when his Smer party won an election five years after he resigned following popular street protests sparked by the murder of an investigative journalist.View image in fullscreenIn another striking resurgence, the candidate of Poland’s rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS), Karol Nawrocki, narrowly won last June’s presidential election against a liberal centrist candidate of the governing Civic Platform, Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw.Nawrocki’s victory came less than two years after the nationalist and socially conservative PiS was ousted from power in parliamentary elections by a coalition headed by the Civic Platform.The PiS revival prompted Anne Applebaum to write in the Atlantic that “all elections are now existential”.“Small numbers of voters swinging one way or the next will decide the nature of the state, the future of democracy, the independence of the courts,” she added.Albin Sybera, a Czech commentator, said that although local conditions in all three countries differed, all demonstrated “the resilience of populism”.“The resilience feeds on similar ingredients and polarization is one common theme,” he said.“Another is the failure of liberal or centrist parties to find a lasting solution to economic discontent resulting from a rapidly changing economic landscape that has seen traditional manufacturing jobs disappear – a scenario familiar to many parts of the US, as well as former communist states in eastern Europe.“There is definitely something in common [with the US] in the Czech case and in the Slovak case, to some extent, in the dissatisfaction of the vulnerable parts of the society, in combination with the failure of the liberal political parties to address this,” said Sybera.Such parties are further energized by standing for an animating vision – usually a strident view of nationhood harking back to a supposed golden bygone, as exemplified by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, and often (though not always) bolstered by religious faith and socially conservative values.“If you look at all the major political forces in western democracies, the only one with any real ideology, any real passion, any real project, is the far right,” said Steven Levitsky, professor of politics at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die.“The far-left, center-left, liberal-center, Christian Democrats – none of them have a real project. They will unite in their opposition to the far right. But I can’t think of a social democratic party in the world that has people getting up out of bed early Saturday morning to work for the party.”The erosion of the traditional left versus right political axis in most western democracies provides a further boost to populists. Politics revolves less around traditional arguments about government spending and taxation – although these arguments still take place – than between urban cosmopolitan secularism and more rural traditional nationalism.“Politics in most western democracies is now primarily cleaved along what you can call cosmopolitan versus populist lines,” said Levitsky. “We call it left-right, but it’s urban-liberal, secular on the one hand, and more rural religious, ethno-nationalist on the other.”The tendency of centrist and leftist parties to prioritize defending democracy – a core theme of Biden’s presidency and adopted as a campaign issue by Kamala Harris – may also play into the hands of the far right.Populations the world over may be less motivated by democratic ideals and freedom than previously thought, believes Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador and ex-president of the American Foreign Service Association.“One of the things I’ve learned from 40 years as an American diplomat is that some of the basic assumptions we grew up with are not necessarily true. Some of them were ideological,” he said.View image in fullscreen“The assumption, that people, given a choice, will prefer democracy, they want to elect their own leaders, they want freedom of speech and all the other freedoms – as a default, that’s probably true but there are trade-offs.“If you ask most people in the world, would you give away some freedom for economic security or prosperity or national security, I think in most countries the answer is yes. But I think we convinced ourselves, à la Barack Obama, that the arc of history bends toward progress.”Such pragmatism fits with another factor explaining the populist bounce-back facility – the growth of anti-incumbency sentiment, particularly prevalent following the Covid pandemic.“The generalized unpopularity of incumbents hits everybody, not just the liberals,” said Levitsky. “It hits the far right. It affected Trump in 2020. It’s going to affect the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.”But that assumes that the continuation of an even electoral playing field in the next two election cycles that Democrats suspect Trump is scheming to tilt in Republicans’ favor.An exception to the trend has been Hungary’s strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán – who visited Trump at the White House on Friday – and who has won four consecutive elections aided, critics say, by ruthless gerrymandering. But he faces a tough re-election fight next spring as polls show his Fidesz party trailing the main opposition.Trump has repeatedly hailed Orbán’s illiberal philosophy – characterized by, according to opponents, a takeover of institutions such as the courts and universities, buying up independent media by the prime minister’s cronies, and unfair elections – as a model for his own governing style.Rubin believes the US’s current trajectory has close parallels to Hungary and warned that the combination of a 1929-style crash and a determined ideological project could pose a dire threat to democracy.“Don’t assume that this is about winning majorities over to whatever the cause or the plan is,” he said. “It’s about finding a way to keep and seize power regardless of what the majority wants.” More

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      Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’

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      After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal childcare and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said the Dutch environmentalist and former government adviser Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. “Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. “Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”More than a decade ago, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, became the largest city in the world to introduce fare-free public transport. Financed by the city’s resident tax, the scheme faced heavy opposition before its rollout, with some describing it as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.Nearly a year later, researchers found that public transport use had increased by 14% and that the mobility of low-income residents had improved. Similar schemes have since sprung up across the continent, in France’s Montpellier and Dunkirk, for example, and expanded across countries in the case of Luxembourg and Malta.When Mamdani promised to launch one city-owned grocery story in each of New York’s five boroughs, with a view to expanding if the pilot was successful, it reminded Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, of the city-run grocery store she had visited in Istanbul in 2014.Back then, she had been surprised to see the heaving shelves, laden with products that ranged from bread to lentils to basic household appliances, much of it provided by small, little-known manufacturers. Access to these stores was limited to low-income households, with families receiving a preloaded monthly loyalty card to use at these shops, she said. “These city-run grocery stores in Istanbul were successful and replicated by other cities.”More than a decade on, the experience convinced her of the viability of Mamdani’s promise. “I was struck by the fact that New York elite and Republicans wanted to paint these proposals as sort of coming from the moon,” she said. “Things like non-profit stores or free buses, these are not outrageous ideas, nor are they socialist. They’ve been tried in different parts of the world.”For New Yorkers, precedents for city-run grocery stores can also be found closer to home. Chicago is mulling similar plans, while Atlanta and St Paul, Kansas have launched their own takes on municipal-run grocery stores.Mamdani’s campaign also promised to make childcare free for all children in the city, ages six weeks to five years. Days before the election, the state of New Mexico provided the city with a precedent-setting example, becoming the first US state to offer free childcare to all of its residents, in an effort to boost its economy and raise education and child welfare levels.Across the Atlantic, Portugal’s government began introducing free childcare in 2022, starting with children ages one and under with promises to gradually expand the program to children up to the age of three. While the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access, with priority given to low-income and single-parent families.In Berlin, childcare has been free for children from their first birthday until they start school since 2018, though centres are allowed to levy additional charges for provisions such as lunches and extracurricular activities. Across the Nordic countries, free childcare is not universal, but is heavily subsidised by the state for most families.Mamdani’s platform also included a promise to provide new parents with a free baby basket that includes items such as diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, swaddles and books. In Finland, the baby box has been a universal benefit since 1949 and has since been emulated by nearly 100 programs in 60 countries around the world.The sharp contrast in how Mamdani’s policies were seen within the US and abroad probably has much to do with the scant existence of a welfare state in the US, writer Mary Holland noted this week. “To anyone living in a western European state, the self-professed democratic socialist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable,” she wrote in Monocle. “But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even.”Perhaps the most widely panned of Mamdani’s ideas is his vow to freeze rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilised tenants in the city. The former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was among those who slammed the idea, writing on social media that rent control was the “second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing”.In 2020, Berlin passed a law that resulted in a five-year rent freeze, at June 2019 levels, for 90% of the flats in the city. While the law offered relief to about 1.5 million households who had seen rents rise by an estimated third in the six years prior, it was ruled as unconstitutional in 2021 after Germany’s highest court sided with landlords and property investment lobbyists who had argued it was inappropriate and illegal for the state to meddle with the private market.A 2022 paper, however, marked out an interesting impact of the short-lived measure, in that it found that while rent control was in place, residents were seemingly more receptive to new housing developments in their area. The finding suggests that if Mamdani is able to carry out the rent freezes as promised, it could help to pave the way for his promise to also triple the city’s production of affordable homes.Perhaps the strongest precedent, however, for rent freezes comes from New York’s own recent history. In the past 10 years, during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, members of the city’s rent guidelines board voted to freeze the rent four times, one former member of the New York City rent guidelines board, Leah Goodridge, noted recently in the Guardian. “This is why criticisms of Mamdani’s rent freeze ring hollow for me – it’s painted as out of touch, yet there’s already a precedent, backed by government reports and data.” More

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      Trump says Maduro’s days are numbered but ‘doubts’ US will go to war with Venezuela

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      Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about potential US intervention in Venezuela, playing down concerns of imminent war against the South American nation but saying its leader Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered.The president’s remarks, made during a CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in the Caribbean and has conducted multiple strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens.Asked during the 60 Minutes program if the US was going to war against Venezuela, Trump said: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” However, when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he replied: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”Maduro, who faces indictment on drug charges in the US, has accused Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for “imposing regime change” in Caracas to seize Venezuelan oil.More than 15 US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed at least 65 people in recent weeks, with the latest taking place on Saturday, prompting criticism from governments in the region.Washington has yet to make public any evidence that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the US.In the same interview, Trump alleged countries including Russia and China had conducted underground nuclear tests unknown to the public, and that the US would test “like other countries do”.“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it,” he told 60 Minutes.“I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” he said, adding North Korea and Pakistan to the list of nations allegedly testing their arsenals.Confusion has surrounded Trump’s order that the US begin testing, particularly if he meant conducting the country’s first nuclear explosion since 1992.Trump first made his surprise announcement in a social media post on Thursday, minutes before entering a summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea, saying he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis”.The announcement came after Russia said it had tested a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, and a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone.Asked directly if he planned for the US to detonate a nuclear weapon for the first time in more than three decades, Trump told CBS: “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.”No country other than North Korea is known to have conducted a nuclear detonation for decades. Russia and China have not carried out such tests since 1990 and 1996, respectively.Pressed on the topic, Trump said: “They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test. You feel a little bit of a vibration.”However, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Sunday downplayed any possible tests by the US, telling Fox News on Sunday: “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions.”The US has been a signatory since 1996 to the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes.Other topics addressed in the interview included:

      Trump said he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats to reopen the government, making clear that he has no plans to negotiate as the government shutdown will soon enter its sixth week.

      Asked to clarify whether he would try to run for a third term, which is barred by the constitution, Trump said: “I don’t even think about it,”

      Trump said immigration enforcement officials hadn’t gone far enough in deporting people who were in the country without legal authorisation.
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      Trump directs Pentagon to match Russia and China in nuclear weapons testing

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      Donald Trump has instructed the Pentagon to immediately start matching other nuclear powers in their testing of nuclear weapons, specifically citing Russia and China.In a post to Truth Social, Trump said “because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”The post came less than an hour before Trump met the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in South Korea on Thursday morning in an effort to come to a trade war truce. The meeting was the first between the two since 2019.The United States last held a full nuclear weapons test in 1992, and China and Russia are not known to have held any such tests since the same era. Trump’s reference to “on an equal basis” left it unclear what weapons testing could take place, or whether he was referring to displays of power similar to those recently conducted by Russia.Since 1998, no country other than North Korea is confirmed to have conducted a full explosive nuclear test. But nuclear-armed countries such as the US have subsequently carried out simulated nuclear explosions using high-powered computers, as well as related nuclear physics experiments, tests of nuclear-capable missiles, warhead mechanisms and “subcritical” tests of nuclear materials to ensure their arsenals remain viable.Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to questions about the announcement from Trump.Speaking on Air Force One after his meeting with Xi, Trump said he would “like to see” denuclearisation, adding that the US was “talking to Russia about that”.“And China would be added to that if we do something,” he said, without elaborating.On Thursday China’s foreign ministry told a regular press conference that Beijing hoped the US would honour the non-proliferation treaty “and take actions that contribute to regional peace, rather than the opposite”.“We would like to emphasise that China remains committed to the path of peaceful development, pursuing defensive national security policies and friendly diplomatic policies,” said spokesperson Guo Jiakun. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that Russia had successfully tested its “unique” nuclear-propelled Burevestnik cruise missile, which can carry a nuclear warhead. The Kremlin described it as part of efforts to “ensure the country’s national security”. Trump later described Putin’s announcement as “not appropriate”. Sergei Ryabkov, a close aide to Putin, told Russian media that Moscow had notified the US in advance about the test.The timing of Russia’s Burevestnik testing is notable, coming amid the Kremlin’s intensified nuclear posturing and a break in US-Russia talks over the war in Ukraine.On Wednesday, Putin said Russia also carried out a test of a Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo that military analysts say is capable of devastating coastal regions by exploding a nuclear warhead and triggering vast radioactive ocean swells that would swamp and contaminate cities.Trump also falsely noted in his Truth Social post that the US had more nuclear weapons than any other country, a claim he repeated during his Air Force One press conference. Russia currently has the most confirmed nuclear weapons, with more than 5,500 nuclear warheads, while the US has 5,044 nuclear weapons, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.The last full nuclear test by the US, codenamed “Divider,” was carried out on 23 September 1992 at what is now called the Nevada National Security Site. The then president, George HW Bush, announced a moratorium on underground nuclear testing that same year. The US still, however, has the ability to resume tests at the Nevada National Security Site.In response to Trump’s post, Nevada congresswoman Dina Titus posted on X: “Absolutely not. I’ll be introducing legislation to put a stop to this.”Despite repeated statements from both Moscow and Washington about wanting to halt the arms race, little progress has been made. The Kremlin has recently criticised Trump’s push to develop a missile shield – known as the Golden Dome – which he claims would make the US impervious to attack.During his first term, Trump reportedly sought to increase the US nuclear arsenal “tenfold”.In December 2016, he tweeted: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”Additional reporting by Helen Davidson in Taipei and Jason Tzu Kuan Lu More

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      Forget diplomatic niceties: it’s beyond time Europe denounced Trump’s trashing of democracy in the US | Paul Taylor

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      What do you do when you discover your best friend is abusive to their partner at home? That question, or something similar, should be addressed to European leaders – and indeed to all of us in the European public space, who are watching, often speechless, as Donald Trump takes a cudgel to the institutions of American democracy.For the last nine months, European leaders have bitten their tongues, looked the other way and engaged in flattery, appeasement and wild promises to keep the US president sweet and engaged in European security. The overwhelming imperative for Trump to stand with Europe against Russia over its war on Ukraine – or at least not against us and alongside Vladimir Putin – has led them to swallow unrealistic defence spending targets and unbalanced trade terms. For what gain?No European leader has publicly contradicted Trump’s inflated claims to have ended eight wars in eight months, nor criticised his demolition of the multilateral rules-based free trade order, his assault on the United Nations, or his selective use of tariffs to pursue political vendettas around the world.The only time European leaders briefly found their voices was when JD Vance used the stage of the Munich security conference to launch a fierce attack on European democracy. Vance accused US allies of suppressing free speech and said he was more worried by “the threat from within … the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” than by any threat from Russia or China to the continent’s freedom. To underline his support for freedom of anti-immigrant hate speech, he chose to meet the leader of the far-right German AfD Alice Weidel in Munich in the midst of an election campaign, and to snub Berlin’s then-chancellor, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats.With millions of Americans now taking to the streets to protest against Trump’s authoritarian drift at home, isn’t it time for European leaders to speak up and assert their moral autonomy by signalling Europe’s support for democracy in the US, and for those who are trying to defend it?This is not to suggest that an expression of European dismay would have any practical effect on the dismantling of checks and balances in the US political system, the abolition of the USAID foreign aid agency, the crackdowns on universities, law firms and science, the abuse of the justice system against political enemies, or the purging of the armed forces and, most alarmingly, the deployment of the military in American cities to combat the “enemy from within”.While the US can protect security in Europe and deserves our undying gratitude for having done so for the last 80 years, Europeans cannot protect democracy in the US. They can and must, however, protect liberal democracy in Europe, which risks becoming a collateral victim of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agenda.What happens in America doesn’t stay in America. It is often a precursor for trends in Europe. Just as the #MeToo and “woke” movements spilled over from Hollywood studios and US campuses to European film sets and universities, so the tide of illiberalism and repression rising in Washington is already washing up on European shores in countries such as Hungary and Serbia. By speaking up about Trump’s assaults on the independence of the US civil service, judiciary, legal profession, media and armed forces, and his moves to criminalise dissent, European leaders would be asserting the values of the rule of law, the separation of powers and liberal democracy that they have a duty to preserve at home.If Elon Musk can use his social media platform and the world’s biggest fortune to intervene in German elections in favour of Weidel’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – or in British politics in support of convicted anti-Islam extremist Tommy Robinson – then surely we, too, can make our voices heard in US politics. We can offer support and practical cooperation to states, cities and courts that share our values, and moral support to US freedom campaigners. Our governments and regions can build partnerships on climate action, civil rights and development assistance with like-minded US states and local authorities. We can offer jobs, visas and scholarships to US scientists and academics hit by Trump’s cuts to research funding. Europe stands only to gain from a self-inflicted American brain drain.The massive No Kings protests in towns and cities across the US were fortunately peaceful, despite Trump’s deployment of armed forces in Washington DC, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland and other cities, and the attempted mobilisation of the National Guard across 19 states. But having branded his leftwing opponents “domestic terrorists”, the risk is growing that Trump will make good on his threat to invokethe 1807 Insurrection Act and claim sweeping powers to use the military against American protesters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe last time the US military was used for domestic policing against demonstrations was under Richard Nixon in 1970, when the National Guard shot dead four students protesting, at Kent State University in Ohio, against the draft and the US military intervention in Cambodia. An earlier precedent for the deadly use of force against peaceful protesters was in Selma, Alabama in 1965, when state and local police violently broke up civil rights marches by black Americans demanding the unhindered right to vote. On both those historic occasions, European media criticised the use of force against peaceful demonstrators, but governments on this side of the Atlantic kept their mouths shut, motivated by the principle of non-interference in the affairs of an allied state.With the administration and its billionaire buddies intervening at will in support of hate speech and its proponents in Europe and against EU digital regulation, there is no longer any justification for staying silent. On the contrary, the defence of European liberal democracy starts by recognising when it is under threat in our closest ally.

      Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre More

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      The Guardian view on Ukraine peace talks: Europe must ensure Zelenskyy can resist Trump’s bullying | Editorial

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      It wasn’t quite the calamity of February, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was publicly humiliated in the Oval Office by Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance. But the Ukrainian president’s latest visit to the White House on Friday was, by all accounts, a disquieting experience. Mr Trump’s public musings before the meeting suggested that his stance had hardened towards Vladimir Putin, to the strategically significant extent of being willing to sell long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv. But by the time Mr Zelenskyy arrived in Washington, the US president had changed his mind, instead lecturing his guest on the need to make territorial concessions to Russia.So far, so familiar. Since being re-elected, Mr Trump has repeatedly resiled from following up tough talk on Russia with meaningful action. Faux deadlines for Mr Putin to make substantive steps towards peace have come and gone, treated with indifference by the Kremlin. Last week, the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, stated that Washington was ready to “impose costs” if Russia continued the conflict. But a two-hour phone call at Mr Putin’s request was enough to defuse that threat, and for Mr Trump to once again position himself as a neutral arbitrator between two warring parties.The return of that insidious and amoral framing signifies a moment of diplomatic peril for Mr Zelenskyy. In language that is more suitable for describing a contested real-estate deal than an illegal invasion costing hundreds of thousands of lives, Mr Trump told Fox News that Mr Putin was “going to take something … he’s won certain property”. Should a planned meeting in Budapest take place between the US and Russian presidents – to be hosted by Hungary’s Putin-friendly leader, Viktor Orbán – discussion of a potential carve-up will dominate the agenda, as it did in the failed Alaska head-to-head.That prospect should concentrate minds ahead of a EU leaders’ summit later this week in Brussels. In the wake of the signing of the Gaza peace agreement – in relation to which Mr Putin was careful to offer fulsome congratulations – Mr Trump has taken to describing himself as “the mediator president”. In grimly paradoxical fashion, there is every possibility that he will try to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unacceptable deal that rewards Russia’s aggression, in order to burnish his supposed credentials as a supreme peacemaker.It is critical that Europe provides Ukraine with the resources and staying power which allow it to resist such pressure. Progress is reportedly being made on proposals backed by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, which would use frozen Russian assets to secure an interest-free £122bn loan to Kyiv. Such money, however it is sourced, will be fundamental to supporting Ukraine’s defence effort into next year. At a more symbolic level, there are also signs of a new determination to find ways to circumvent Mr Orbán’s opposition to advancing Ukraine’s bid for EU membership.As Mr Trump pursues his mercurial path, guided only by vanity, mercantilism and admiration for the exercise of brute force, EU leaders will need to be creative and determined in ensuring that Ukraine’s interests are adequately defended in the weeks and months to come. Mr Putin is playing the US president again, exploiting the absence of a moral compass in Washington. More than ever, a robust counterweight is required on the other side of the Atlantic. More

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      American democracy might not survive another year – is Europe ready for that? | Alexander Hurst

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      Fascism is supposed to look a certain way: black-clad, uniformed, synchronised and menacing. It is not supposed to look like an overweight president who can’t pronounce acetaminophen and who bumbles, for a full minute, about how he would have renovated the UN’s New York headquarters with marble floors, rather than a terrazzo. But as Umberto Eco remarked in his timeless essay on identifying the eternal nature of fascism: “Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”Historians, scholars and even some insiders from the first Trump administration have seen through the comedic quality of the disguise. They appear to have seen in Donald Trump himself and those around him, Eco’s core criteria: the call to tradition and the rejection of reason, the fear of difference, the hostility towards disagreement, the ressentiment, the machismo, the degradation of language into newspeak, the cult of a “strong” leader. Almost a year ago, the historian Robert Paxton, in explaining why he had changed his mind about employing the word to describe Trumpism, remarked: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”Since then, the Trump administration has deployed the US military and National Guard to cities against the will of their state governors. It has put pressure on state legislatures to disenfranchise opposition voters in extraordinary ways, and floated the idea of disenfranchising all voters residing outside the US by ending mail-in voting. It has used the power of the state to censor books, bully the media and “cancel” comedians who regularly make fun of Trump. It has seized executive power in alarming and potentially illegal ways, including the use of tariffs, immigration policy and targeted exemptions to generate subservience among powerful corporate actors.An over-fixation on whether actions are legal or not misses the forest for the trees: constitutionality is, practically speaking, whatever the supreme court decides. If the supreme court acquiesces to fundamental changes in the nature of what the US is, that is merely one more sign of how deep the rot goes. And from concrete policy to the decision to publicly venerate the Confederacy, the intended direction of travel is clear.The disguise dropped a little bit more, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder – one more tragic datapoint in the merging of the US’s epidemic of gun violence and its growing political violence. At his strange funeral-rally-spectacle, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, gave a speech dripping with everything Eco sought to warn us against, raging against a diffuse “they” who “cannot conceive of the army they have arisen in all of us”. “You are nothing,” Miller continued. “You have nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing.”In the past year, as Trump and those behind him have dismantled the institutions of US democracy with incredible speed, the European conversation finally moved from denial to attempts at bargaining, with some acceptance of US disengagement and disinterest going forward. But there has been almost no space for a high-level, public conversation about what to do when the US government is, for the foreseeable future, in the hands of actors hostile to the EU’s basic raison d’être and its values.I understand why European leaders don’t want to have this conversation openly with voters. They fear that alienating Trump, even slightly, will lead him to drop US support for Ukraine. The cleverest think they can buy time by flattering Trump, manipulating him just long enough to find a better footing, while the blindly optimistic look to the 2026 midterms as an inflection point, and some sort of “return to normal”. But the midterms will not save us. As the Democrats’ elections attorney Marc Elias laid out in detail for The New Yorker, the 2026 elections will probably not be wholly free and fair, and even where they are, Trump’s prior history of insurrection indicates that the results very well might not be honoured. And Trump is already laying the groundwork to drop Ukraine fully into Europe’s lap.During the first Trump administration, we heard, ad nauseam, that he should be taken seriously, but not literally. It was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. When Trump says, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them”, we in Europe (“a foe,” remember?) should take him literally. The radical authoritarian agenda the Trump administration is pursuing domestically matters to Europe. A US with a new, masked, secret immigration police with nearly unlimited funds, whose “red” government deploys its military to “blue” cities, and uses the criminal justice system to exact retribution on political opponents at the president’s behest – in short, the end of the rule of law – necessarily affects European democracy. Not least, because the Trump administration is engaged in a culture war against Europe, promoting forces that seek to destroy it as it currently exists.European voters are out in front of the politicians on this one. The spring Eurobarometer survey showed that large majorities of citizens want the EU to protect them from crises and security risks, think the EU needs more financial means to do so, and support that new funding coming from the EU as a whole, rather than member states alone. A survey of the EU’s five biggest states, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, found that 52% think the EU was humiliated in the recent trade deal with the US. They blame the commission for not “defending” Europe more ardently, with a strong minority of 39% wanting the bloc to become more “oppositional” to Trump.Timothy Garton Ash recently gave Americans 400 days to save their democracy. As an American, I don’t think the country has that long. As Europeans, we should assume that it does not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEuropeans are ready for an honest conversation about the challenge Europe faces from Trump – the same way they’ve solidified in the face of aggression from Vladimir Putin. The danger lies in Europe’s leaders fudging, hesitating and avoiding this conversation. If they cannot lead with candour, voters will conclude that European democracy and its institutions are too weak to withstand the pincer move that is building against it.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist More