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      Wednesday briefing: Inside the US president’s chaos machine

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      Good morning.Few words can fully capture the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency. Dizzying? Unrelenting? Disorienting?Trump’s team has described its strategy as “flooding the zone” – in essence, overwhelming the opposition, the media and the public with a torrent of executive orders, mass dismissals of federal staff and the suspension of trillions in national funding. The logic is simple: create too much chaos for the media to cover, and make your critics struggle to keep up.How long the White House can sustain this approach remains uncertain – as does the question of how soon the systematic purge of government employees will translate into real consequences for the public.Dismantling the systems of government with brute force will inevitably yield blunt consequences. Take US foreign aid, which was, in Elon Musk’s words, put through the “wood chipper”: a 90-day funding freeze abruptly halted medical trials for cholera, malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. The department of education recently got this treatment, after Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) terminated nearly $1bn worth of its contracts.If the newsletter catalogued everything Trump has done so far, the scroll bar on your screen would all but disappear. Instead, today’s newsletter focuses on four recent developments. That’s right after the headlines.Five big stories

      Middle East | Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel will resume fighting in Gaza if Hamas does not release more hostages by noon on Saturday, endorsing a threat by Donald Trump that could shatter the three-week-old ceasefire between the two sides.

      Economy | Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society, has waded into a row over whether the government should cut tax breaks on cash Isas, arguing such a move would reduce the availability of mortgages for first-time buyers.

      AI | The US and the UK have refused to sign the Paris AI summit’s declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology.

      Assisted dying | The Labour MP Kim Leadbeater has said her assisted dying bill for England and Wales will still have the strongest safeguards in the world despite the removal of a requirement for scrutiny from a high court judge. Opponents derided the change as “rushed and badly thought out”.

      Housing | Rogue landlords in England will face curbs on how much housing benefit income they can receive if their properties are substandard, Angela Rayner has said as she announced an extra £350m for affordable housing.
      In depth: Four fronts of Trump chaos, and where they go nextView image in fullscreen‘Geopolitical blackmail’ in the Middle EastLate on Monday, Hamas announced a delay in the further release of Israeli hostages, citing violations of last month’s ceasefire agreement. Among the grievances listed are delays in allowing displaced persons to return to northern Gaza and continued shelling and gunfire.However, as this Guardian report highlights, the warning comes amid increasingly hardline stances from the US and Israel regarding Gaza’s long-term future. Last week, Trump’s incendiary remarks suggesting the US could “take over” the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian population should be relocated were widely condemned as an endorsement of forced displacement amounting to ethnic cleansing. His response to Hamas has only heightened tensions in the region, with the president declaring that “all hell is going to break out” if all remaining Israeli hostages are not returned on Saturday.Earlier this week, Trump (pictured above with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in 2018) reinforced his stance on depopulating Gaza, suggesting he could cut aid to Jordan and Egypt if they refused to permanently absorb most of Gaza’s Palestinian population. Both nations, though reliant on US aid and trade, have flatly rejected the proposal, calling it a red line. Experts say, however, that their economic dependence leaves them vulnerable to “geopolitical blackmail”. Jordanian officials, in particular, fear that postwar plans for Gaza could increase the likelihood of West Bank annexation. Jason Burke’s piece delves deeper into these concerns.Jordan’s King Abdullah met yesterday with Trump, becoming the first Arab leader to do so since his comments about forcibly displacing Palestinians from Gaza. The president continued to double down on his position, saying that the US had the authority to “take” Gaza, despite the king making clear his country was firmly opposed. Trump did seem to slightly walk back his position on withholding aid from countries like Jordan to get his way on Gaza, insisting that he was not using it as a threat: “I think we’re above that.”Bethan McKernan has a helpful explainer on what all of this means for the state of the ceasefire.Ukraine’s futureView image in fullscreenSpeaking to reporters last week about the three-year war in Ukraine, Trump said: “I want to end this damn thing.” He is eager to be seen as the peacemaker, not least because it would mean there is no reason to continue to spend so much on aid for Ukraine. There is also the not-so-small matter of his longstanding ambition to win the Nobel peace prize.In an interview with the New York Post, Trump said he had spoken with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over a negotiated settlement and suggested that Russian negotiators are keen to meet with US counterparts.A bit of insight came, perhaps, when Trump cast doubt over Ukraine’s future sovereignty, suggesting the country “may be Russian someday”, a few days before his vice-president, JD Vance, meets with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy (above). However, Trump has not ruled out continued US support for Ukraine’s war effort – provided there is a financial return. His price: $500bn in rare minerals. Ukraine is rich in resources such as lithium and titanium, crucial for electronics manufacturing. Zelenskyy has been leveraging the country’s vast natural reserves in diplomatic talks with Trump, though the idea of tying military aid to resource extraction has already drawn sharp criticism.For more on this, read Shaun Walker’s excellent interview with Zelenskyy from Kyiv.Musk, Altman and the AI arms raceOpenAI’s Sam Altman has not only caught the president’s attention but has outmanoeuvred Elon Musk by positioning OpenAI at the heart of the government’s emerging artificial intelligence strategy.Musk, the world’s richest man, responded as he often does: by attempting to buy control. Leading a consortium of investors, he made an unsolicited $97.4bn offer for OpenAI, which was recently valued at $157bn. Altman swiftly rejected the offer, posting on X: “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”The move comes just weeks after Altman and Musk clashed publicly, following Musk’s criticism of Trump’s Stargate initiative – a $500bn project involving OpenAI and Altman.‘Diplomatic love bombing’ in the UKView image in fullscreenIn the UK, Trump’s tendency to hold grudges and wield power ruthlessly against those he perceives as enemies has not gone unnoticed. Over the past few months, the Labour government has taken a conciliatory approach towards his administration, hoping that Trump’s transactional nature will either yield diplomatic and economic benefits – or at the very least, keep Britain out of his crosshairs.Several Labour ministers have softened their stance on the president, as has the prime minister. Peter Mandelson, the UK’s ambassador to the US (above), has publicly walked back his previous criticism of Trump, admitting that his remarks describing the president as “a danger to the world” were “ill-judged and wrong”. In a Fox News interview, Mandelson instead praised Trump’s “dynamism and energy”, adding, in an interview with the BBC, that Britain must respect Trump’s “strong and clear mandate for change”.Political correspondent Eleni Courea has written that the UK’s “diplomatic love bombing” appears to be paying off – Trump recently remarked that Keir Starmer “has been very nice” and that the two leaders are “getting along very well”. (Courea’s full piece is well worth a read.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet the UK prime minister’s reluctance to antagonise Trump has led to a muted response on even the most controversial policies, such as the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. Ultimately, none of these efforts change the fundamental reality that Trump is “fickle and reactive”, as his decisions are seemingly driven primarily by what serves his interests at any given moment.For the latest on Donald Trump – and there will be more – keep an eye on the Guardian’s homepage.What else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      First Edition’s own Archie Bland and his partner, Ruth Spencer, write damningly about a new Netflix feelgood film that offers astounding but ultimately false hope to families of those with severe cerebral palsy. “Lucca’s World perpetuates the idea that children like our son are broken and must be repaired, rather than whole people who deserve every chance to live full and happy lives,” the pair write. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters

      Mehdi Hasan is blistering on the Republicans and their dog whistling about DEI and the liberal media’s enabling on the issue. The right do not have good faith critiques of diversity policies, Hasan writes: “This is the weaponisation of a three-letter term to denigrate Black people and pretend the political and economic advancement of minority communities over the past 60 years was a mistake”. Nimo

      Jeff Ingold has a unique playlist. Standing (as of now) at 75 songs, the roughly six-hour set list comprises one song for every man with whom Ingold has slept. The result is a meaningful musical extravaganza that transports Ingold through the deep relationships and fleeting romances of his life. “When most people hear Candle in the Wind, they think of Diana. Me? A threesome I had with a couple in south London.” Charlie

      After Kendrick Lamar’s stellar Super Bowl performance, what is left for Drake (besides his millions), many of us wonder. Ben Beaumont Thomas explains that though the rapper has endured a public evisceration, he can still regain his relevance – and perhaps even his cool. Nimo

      “Not so much drifting slowly downwards as nose-diving at a frightening rate.” After last weekend’s galling defeat to Italy in the Six Nations, Robert Kitson is frank about the worrying state of Welsh rugby in this week’s edition of the Breakdown newsletter (sign up here!). Charlie
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | Jude Bellingham put Real Madrid 3-2 ahead with the last kick of the game to give his side an advantage in the Champions League playoff against Manchester City. More Champions League resultsRugby | Wales have appointed Cardiff’s Matt Sherratt as interim head coach after Warren Gatland’s second spell as head coach abruptly ended on Tuesday. Gatland has paid the price for Wales’s dismal recent record, having presided over the worst losing run in the country’s 144-year international rugby history.Football | Sam Kerr has been found not guilty of racially aggravated harassment after calling a police officer “fucking stupid and white” when he doubted her claims of being “held hostage” in a taxi. The captain of the Australian women’s football team and Chelsea’s star striker faced up to a maximum sentence of two years in prison.The front pagesView image in fullscreen“Zelenskyy: Europe cannot protect Ukraine without Trump’s support” – an exclusive interview is the Guardian’s lead story. “Court gives Gazans right to settle in UK” reports the Telegraph while the Mirror says “Left to rot” as it investigates NHS dental care or the lack of it. “Judge tweak hits support for assisted dying bill” reports the Times while the Express insists “MPs must back ‘crucial’ right to die law”. “Absurd we cannot sack rogue cops” is the Metro’s splash while the i has “UK savings rates cut by 30 banks – and first mortgage deals under 4%”. Top story in the Financial Times is “‘Trump trades’ backfire as greenback weakens and bond yields come down” while the Mail splashes on “Labour’s new borders watchdog will WFH … in Finland!”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenWhy giving up the Chagos Islands could cost Britain £9bnEleni Courea discusses the UK’s historic deal to sign sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and why some inside the Labour party are now regretting it. Campaigner Olivier Bancoult outlines why he hopes the deal will go aheadCartoon of the day | Martin RowsonView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenEstablished in 1942, the Women’s Timber Corps saw upwards of 15,000 young women work during the second world war as “lumberjills”. Aged between 17 and 24, they assumed roles traditionally filled by men in Britain’s forests, felling trees to aid the war effort. Joanna Foat’s new book, The Lumberjills, tells their story through stunning archive photography – and this gallery gives an enthralling taste.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

      Quick crossword

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      US schoolteacher held in Russia since 2021 released, White House says

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      A US teacher who has been held in Russia since 2021 was released on Tuesday following an unannounced visit to Moscow by Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.The White House said in a statement that Marc Fogel, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher sentenced in Russia to 14 years on drug-trafficking charges, had left the country aboard Witkoff’s plane.“Today, President Donald J. Trump and his Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are able to announce that Mr. Witkoff is leaving Russian airspace with Marc Fogel, an American who was detained by Russia,” Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, said in a statement.Fogel had worked as a teacher at the Anglo-American School of Moscow since 2012 and taught overseas in countries like Oman and Malaysia. He was arrested in 2021 at a Moscow airport after Russian officials found less than an ounce of marijuana in his luggage.In his statement, Waltz said that the US and Russia “negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine”.He did not say what the US side of the bargain entailed. Previous negotiations have occasionally involved reciprocal releases of detainees and prisoners.Trump later said he hoped the release could mark the start of fresh ties with Moscow.“We were treated very nicely by Russia,” Trump told reporters. “Actually, I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war.”The deal was negotiated in secret, but rumors began circulating about Witkoff’s presence in Russia when his private jet was spotted landing in Moscow.The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier in the day that he had “no information” about the reported arrival of Witkoff’s plane.View image in fullscreenThe surprise release of Fogel highlights the ongoing backchannel negotiations between the US and Russia and signals Putin’s intent to cultivate ties with the Trump administration ahead of expected peace talks over the war in Ukraine.Putin has showered Trump with compliments since his inauguration, repeatedly praising him as “brave” for surviving an assassination attempt while also signaling his readiness to meet with the US leader.Trump has said that he has spoken with Putin but has been vague on the details other than to say he was making “progress” to secure a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Monday, Trump suggested that Ukraine “may be Russian some day”, as his vice-president JD Vance gears up to meet the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy later this week at the Munich security council.Russia’s latest engagement with the US will set off alarm bells in Kyiv, where Zelenskyy must navigate the new reality of a US administration that has opened dialogue with Moscow while at times displaying open hostility toward Ukraine.Fogel and his family had hoped he would be included in the historic prisoner exchange in August that freed the Wall Street journalist Evan Gershkovich and the US marine Paul Whelan. At the time, Fogel was not yet designated as “wrongfully detained” by the US government, a label he only received late last year.In a statement, Fogel’s family said they were “beyond grateful, relieved and overwhelmed” that he was coming home. “This has been the darkest and most painful period of our lives, but today, we begin to heal,” they said. “For the first time in years, our family can look forward to the future with hope.”Fogel is expected to arrive in the US later on Tuesday. More

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      Trump says he has spoken with Putin about ending Ukraine war

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      Donald Trump has said he held talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over a negotiated end of the three year Russia-Ukraine war, indicated that Russian negotiators want to meet with US counterparts.Trump told the New York Post that he had spoken to Putin, remarking that “I better not say” just how many times.In comments to the outlet on Friday aboard Air Force One, Trump said he believed Putin “does care” about the killing on the battlefield but did not say if the Russian leader had presented any concrete commitments to end the nearly three-year conflict.Trump revealed that he has a plan to end the war but declined to go into details. “I hope it’s fast. Every day people are dying. This war is so bad in Ukraine. I want to end this damn thing.”Last month, Trump estimated that approximately 1 million Russian soldiers and 700,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since the invasion began – an estimate far in excess of numbers that Ukrainian officials or independent analysts have presented.The Post said the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, joined the president during for the interview.“Let’s get these meetings going,” Trump said. “They want to meet. Every day people are dying. Young handsome soldiers are being killed. Young men, like my sons. On both sides. All over the battlefield”.Waltz would not confirm that Trump had spoken with Putin, telling NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that “there are certainly a lot of sensitive conversations going on” and that senior US diplomats would be in Europe this week “talking through the details of how to end this war and that will mean getting both sides to the table”.Ending the war, Waltz added, had come up in conversations with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, China’s president Xi Jinping and leaders across the Middle East. “Everybody is ready to help President Trump end in this war,” Waltz said, and repeated Trump’s comments that he is prepared to tax, tariff and sanction Russia.“The president is prepared to put all of those issues on the table this week, including the future of US aid to Ukraine. We need to recoup those costs, and that is going to be a partnership with the Ukrainians in terms of their rare earth (materials), their natural resources, their oil and gas, and also buying ours.”But Waltz reiterated what he said was the Trump administration’s “underlying principle” that the Europeans “have to own this conflict going forward. President Trump is going to end it, and then in terms of security guarantees that is squarely going to be with the Europeans.”During his presidential campaign, Trump made repeated vows to end the war quickly if he was re-elected, often pointing to the loss of life on the battlefield.Last month, Trump said “Most people thought this war would last about a week, and now it’s been going on for three years,” and said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had expressed interest in a negotiated peace deal.During the interview on Friday, Trump again expressed sorrow for the loss of life in the war and compared the young men dying to his own sons.“All those dead people. Young, young, beautiful people. They’re like your kids, two million of them – and for no reason,” Trump told the Post, adding that Putin also “wants to see people stop dying”.The Kremlin on Sunday declined to confirm or deny the report of the phone call. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS state news agency he was unaware of any such call.“What can be said about this news: as the administration in Washington unfolds its work, many different communications arise. These communications are conducted through different channels. And of course, amid the multiplicity of these communications, I personally may not know something, be unaware of something. Therefore, in this case, I can neither confirm nor deny it.”The Kremlin has previously said it is awaiting “signals” on a possible meeting between Trump and Putin. The head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Leonid Slutsky, has said that work on preparing contacts between Moscow and Washington “is at an advanced stage”.The US president also ventured into the current stand-off between Israel and Iran, saying he “would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear” and would prefer a negotiated deal to “bombing the hell out of it… They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.”If there was a deal with Iran, he said, “Israel wouldn’t bomb them”. But he declined to go further on any approach to Iran: “In a way, I don’t like telling you what I’m going to tell them. You know, it’s not nice.”“I could tell what I have to tell them, and I hope they decide that they’re not going to do what they’re currently thinking of doing. And I think they’ll really be happy,” Trump added. More

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      To Obey Trump or Not to Obey

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      In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out.I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration disbands task force targeting Russian oligarchs

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      The US justice department under Donald Trump is disbanding an effort started after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to enforce sanctions and target oligarchs close to the Kremlin.A memo from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued during a wave of orders on her first day in office but not previously reported, said the effort, known as Task Force KleptoCapture, will end as part of a shift in focus and funding to combating drug cartels and international gangs.“This policy requires a fundamental change in mindset and approach,” Bondi wrote in the directive on Wednesday, adding that resources now devoted to enforcing sanctions and seizing the assets of oligarchs would be redirected to countering cartels.The effort, launched during Joe Biden’s administration, was designed to strain the finances of wealthy associates of Vladimir Putin and punish those facilitating sanctions and export control violations.It was part of a broader push to freeze Russia out of global markets and enforce wide-ranging sanctions imposed on Moscow amid international condemnation of its war on Ukraine.The taskforce brought indictments against the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and TV tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev for alleged sanctions busting, and seized yachts belonging to the sanctioned oligarchs Suleiman Kerimov and Viktor Vekselberg.It also secured a guilty plea against a US lawyer who made $3.8m in payments to maintain properties owned by Vekselberg.Prosecutors assigned to the taskforce will return to their previous posts. The changes will be in effect for at least 90 days and could be renewed or made permanent, according to the directive.Trump has spoken about improving relations with Moscow. He has previously vowed to end the war in Ukraine, though he has not released a detailed plan.The emphasis on drug cartels comes after Trump designated many such groups as terrorist organizations, part of a crackdown on illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking.The shift also implicates enforcement of a US foreign bribery law that has led to some of the justice department’s largest corporate cases over the last decade. The unit enforcing that law, known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), will now prioritize bribery investigations related to cartels, according to the memo.A wide range of multinational firms has come under justice department scrutiny over the law, including Goldman Sachs, Glencore and Walmart. Those large corporate resolutions do not typically involve cartels.“It is a radical move away from traditional FCPA cases and toward a narrow subset of drug and violent crime-related cases that have never been the focus of FCPA enforcement,” said Stephen Frank, a lawyer at law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who worked on FCPA cases as a federal prosecutor. More

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      in US Politics

      What will Trump 2.0 mean for the global world order? | Stephen Wertheim

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      Many assumed that Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States would turn out like his first. But this time looks to be different. In his opening weeks, the US president has taken a flurry of actions he never attempted before, wielding sweeping tariffs against the US’s neighbors, upending portions of the federal workforce, and attempting to change constitutionally enshrined citizenship laws through executive order.The early signs on foreign policy are no exception. In his inaugural address, Trump said next to nothing about the issues that have dominated US foreign policy for decades – matters of war and peace in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Instead, he spoke of expanding US territory in the western hemisphere (and going to Mars), harking back explicitly to the 19th-century tradition of manifest destiny. Astoundingly, Trump mentioned China solely for the purpose of accusing it, inaccurately, of operating the Panama canal. When he turned beyond the Americas, Trump’s most telling line signaled restraint: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”Then Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, made even more pointed and intriguing remarks. Rubio ran for president in 2016 vowing to usher in a “new American century”, the mantra of post-cold war neoconservatives. But days ago, sitting for his first lengthy interview as America’s chief diplomat, he emphasized the need for a foreign policy grounded in the US national interest and said:“So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the cold war, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”For a US secretary of state to announce that the world is now “multipolar”, or is inevitably heading in that direction, is historically significant. Hillary Clinton also used the m-word in 2009 at the start of her tenure in the same role, but she invoked it less than affirmatively: Clinton professed a desire to move “away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world”. Rubio, by contrast, meant that a world of multiple poles or powers is to be accepted, not resisted. He also implied that US foreign policy had long been off course, having taken unrivaled American dominance to be a normal or necessary condition when in fact it was destined to disappear. At the end of the cold war, Rubio explained: “We were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.”The message: no longer.Still, no longer could lead down any number of roads. Read against the Trump administration’s Americas-centric start, Rubio’s comments have provoked dread – or excitement, depending on the perspective – that the United States will radically reduce its political-military role beyond the western hemisphere even as it asserts its power within the Americas.For traditional figures in Washington, the fear is that Trump 2.0 will give China and Russia a free hand to command “spheres of influence” in their regions, so long as they permit the United States to police its own sphere. For advocates of US restraint overseas, the hope is that Trump will deliver on his promises to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, shift more responsibility for defending Europe on to the shoulders of European allies, and seek to find a stable if competitive mode of coexistence with China. If Rubio thinks the world is now multipolar, presumably it follows that the United States should abandon the approach it pursued in the bygone age of unipolarity – a grand strategy of “primacy” or “hegemony”, as scholars call it.Perhaps. Rubio, though, was not nearly so conclusive. Throughout the interview, he referred to the governments in Moscow and Beijing in adversarial terms, which hardly suggest a willingness to grant them spheres of influence. Nor is there a straight line from acknowledging the loss of unipolarity to abandoning primacy. Even in a crowded, competitive landscape, the United States could try to remain militarily stronger than every rival, retain all its globe-spanning defense commitments, and maintain a large troop presence in Asia, Europe and the Middle East simultaneously. Those are the elements of primacy. Rubio did not renounce any of them. The United States, in short, could still pursue primacy without enjoying unipolarity.Indeed, in associating multipolarity with the existence of “multi-great powers”, Rubio may have meant to affirm the outlook of the first Trump administration, which adopted “great power competition” as a watchword. For Trump 1.0, as for the Biden administration that followed, the rise of China and the assertion of Russia did not compel Washington to pare back its military commitments and presence. Quite the contrary. Over the two presidencies, Nato enlarged to four new countries, the US military presence in the Middle East (excluding Afghanistan) remained stable, and the United States deepened security cooperation with Ukraine, Taiwan and others.So far, the appearance of formidable rivals has done less to discipline US ambitions than to furnish US global primacy with a new rationale – to stand up to the aggressive and revisionist activities of America’s adversaries. As Rubio put it: “China wants to be the most powerful country in the world and they want to do so at our expense, and that’s not in our national interest, and we’re going to address it.”But Rubio did signal more restraint than a continuation of business as usual. Just after his remarks on multipolarity, he noted that the second world war ended 80 years ago and that “if you look at the scale and scope of destruction and loss of life that occurred, it would be far worse if we had a global conflict now.” Since the end of the cold war, US leaders have invoked the second world war almost exclusively to exhort the country to lead the world. Rubio, by contrast, did so to caution against the dangers of overreach. He continued:“You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest. So that’s the tricky balance.”Quite so. In recent years, the risk of conflict between major powers has grown acute. The war in Ukraine – in which one major power is fighting directly on its borders and the other heavily arming its opponent – had no parallel during the cold war. A US-China military conflict over Taiwan would be ruinous. In a country unused to paying noticeable costs for foreign policy choices, and a world that no longer remembers the last general war, Rubio delivered a salutary message.The policy test, however, is still to come. If the new administration is serious about avoiding catastrophic wars, without exposing core US interests to great power predation, it will make a determined, sustained diplomatic effort to end the war in Ukraine and minimize the risks of escalation if initial talks do not succeed. It will explore politically difficult ways to reach a modus vivendi with China, including by offering assurances that the United States does not seek to keep Taiwan permanently separate from the mainland, a red line for Beijing.The new administration’s opening moves suggest some intention to find a more sustainable and less confrontational approach toward the world’s major powers. But if unipolarity is dead, the lure of primacy remains very much alive.

      Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University More

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      in Elections

      Syria’s New Leadership Takes Early Steps Toward Legitimacy

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      A little more than a week after overthrowing the longtime Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, the rebel alliance that took power in Syria was making rapid progress toward international legitimacy as its officials began to receive diplomats from the United Nations, the Middle East and Europe.The leader of the rebel coalition, Ahmed al-Shara, met on Sunday with the United Nations special envoy to Syria, Geir O. Pedersen, and they discussed the unfolding political transition, according to a message on Telegram posted by the coalition. Mr. al-Shara, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, “stressed the importance of rapid and effective cooperation” to rebuild Syria, develop its economy and maintain Syria as a unified territory, the Telegram post said.Speaking to reporters on his arrival in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Mr. Pedersen said many challenges lay ahead for Syria and called for increased aid to assist with the country’s humanitarian crisis.Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters on Monday that she had sent the “European top diplomat in Syria” to meet with the new government in Damascus. The European Union is the biggest donor of humanitarian aid to Syria through U.N. agencies, making the relationship with Brussels a crucial one.France’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that a team of diplomats would travel to Syria on Tuesday. And Turkey and Qatar, which were in contact with the rebels well before the surprise offensive that rocketed them from obscurity in Syria’s northwest to control of nearly the entire country, were both reopening their embassies in Damascus.Since Mr. al-Assad fled the advancing rebels on Dec. 8, the rest of the world has had to reckon with a sudden new reality in Syria: A country where nearly 14 years of civil war had left Mr. al-Assad in seemingly firm control was now in the hands of a conservative Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, that the United Nations, the United States, Turkey and many other countries had long designated as a terrorist organization for its early ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Ex-FBI informant agrees to plead guilty to lying about Bidens’ Ukraine ties

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      A former FBI informant accused of falsely claiming that Joe Biden and the president’s son Hunter had accepted bribes has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges, according to court papers.As part of the plea deal with the justice department special counsel, David Weiss, Alexander Smirnov will admit he fabricated the story that became central to a Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.The plea agreement comes just weeks after prosecutors filed new tax-evasion charges against Smirnov. The two sides will recommend a sentence of at least two years behind bars and no more than six years, according to the agreement.David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, attorneys for Smirnov, said they will make their case for a fair sentence in court and declined to comment further.Smirnov was arrested in February on allegations that he falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5m each in 2015 or 2016. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems”, according to court documents.Prosecutors said Smirnov had had contact with Burisma executives, but it had been routine and actually took place in 2017, after Barack Obama’s presidency and Biden, his vice-president, had left office – when Biden would have had no ability to influence US policy. Prosecutors said Smirnov made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Biden while the latter was a presidential candidate in 2020.Smirnov repeated some of the false claims when he was interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023, changed his story about others and “promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials”, prosecutors said.Smirnov has agreed to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion and causing a false FBI record, according to court papers.Smirnov is being prosecuted by the same special counsel who brought federal gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was supposed to have been sentenced this month on his convictions in those cases, until he was pardoned by his father. More