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    Trump allies attack Biden for allowing Ukraine to use US missiles inside Russia

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    Allies of the president-elect, Donald Trump, have lashed out angrily at Joe Biden for his decision to permit Ukraine to use long-range US missiles to launch attacks inside Russia for the first time, in what the Kremlin has termed an “escalation” in the war.Key Trump surrogates, including his son Donald Trump Jr, hardline congressional Republicans, and other backers have accused Biden of seeking to spark “world war three” before Trump’s presidential inauguration in January.“The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives,” wrote Donald Trump Jr on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, who was seen as a potential candidate for secretary of state, wrote: “No one anticipated that Joe Biden would ESCALATE the war in Ukraine during the transition period. This is as if he is launching a whole new war. Everything has changed now – all previous calculations are null and void.”Other Republicans to sound off included the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Utah senator Mike Lee, who said: “Joe Biden has just set the stage for World War III. Let’s all pray that it doesn’t come to this.”A state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, defended the decision during a press briefing on Monday, saying: “[The] American people elected Joe Biden to a four-year term, not to a term of three years and 10 months, and we will use every day of our term to pursue the foreign policy interests that we believe are in the interests of the American people.”Discussions had been ongoing for months between the White House, the state department and European allies on whether to allow strikes into Ukraine. Currently, the decision to allow limited strikes using the US-supplied Atacms missiles would permit the Ukrainian army to target Russian military infrastructure in the Kursk region where the US has said that more than 10,000 North Korean troops have joined Russian forces preparing a counter-offensive to force Ukrainian troops out of the region.The decision by the White House will set up a dilemma for the incoming administration on whether to immediately roll back the authorisation after Trump’s inauguration or retain it as a potential bargaining chip in the negotiations the president-elect has said he wants to hold in order to end the fighting.While Trump and his allies have broadly denounced increasing military support and financial aid for the Ukrainian government, analysts said it was unclear whether Trump would move immediately to repeal the decision regarding long-range missiles.“On the first day they could announce, ‘We are suspending this authorization pending a review of Ukraine policy,’” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank based in Washington. “But that would engender a lot of criticism and revive all these stories about some deals with Putin.”He said it was not a foregone conclusion that Trump would immediately repeal the decision. “One is just the political cost isn’t worth the gain, but Trump’s also a deal-maker, and that would be to give away something without getting anything for it … to start off with a concession is just bad negotiating tactics.”The White House decision may also prompt European allies with similar restrictions on the use of their long-range missiles in Ukraine to follow suit. The UK is expected to supply Storm Shadow missiles for use by Ukraine on targets inside Russia following the Biden decision with Keir Starmer, the prime minister, saying at the G20 summit that the UK needed to “double down” on its support for Ukraine.Germany has maintained its position not to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles, while the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had already said Paris was open to consider greenlighting the use of its missiles to strike on Russian soil.Theresa Fallon, the director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels, said that there were mixed reactions among European military officials, with some worried about the potential for an escalation, while others were “happy … that Ukraine could now use the equipment without one hand tied behind their back any more. But this decision came late, very late, [Ukraine] needs to be able to defend itself, and use this equipment for what it was designed to do. But we should keep in mind it is not going to be a game changer and more equipment is needed.”“I can’t predict what Trump will do,” she said. “But … once these things are in place, there is a momentum to continue to use them. It may be hard to put it back into the box. But on the other hand, if there is not a resupply of missiles then the use of them for targets in Russia will have run its course.” More

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      Here’s how to mitigate some of Trump’s most dangerous foreign policy instincts | Kenneth Roth

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      The nightmare has arrived. Trump’s “America First” norm-flouting was bad enough the last time around, when a collection of traditional Republicans in senior positions moderated his worst impulses. No such grown-ups are expected to return.Our only hope may be that Trump no longer must worry about re-election. Instead of pandering to – and promoting – the worst instincts of his base, Trump, long preoccupied by his image, may begin to contemplate his legacy. Will history mock or admire him? The greater his concern with his lasting reputation, the better our chances of averting disaster.Ukraine illustrates the choices ahead. Does Trump really want to be known as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, appeasing a brutal tyrant in the naive hope that he will be sated with a single gulp of ill-gotten territory?For reasons that are not wholly understood, Trump has long harbored an unseemly admiration for Vladimir Putin. Trump is likely to stop sending arms to Ukraine and to insist that Kyiv settle for at best a frozen conflict, in effect ceding its occupied eastern territory to Russia. But with Trump in the White House, Putin is likely to want more.Behind Putin’s self-serving rhetoric about denazifying Ukraine is a desire to de-democratize it. A democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border is a constant reminder to the Russian people of the freedoms that Putin’s dictatorship denies them. He wants another Belarus.No amount of strongman-admiration on Trump’s part will overcome the Ukrainian people’s refusal to become another Kremlin vassal state. Nor will it avoid Ukraine’s understandable distrust of Putin and insistence on western security guarantees if there is to be any formal accord. Trump as Chamberlain would be indifferent to Kyiv’s pleas. A Trump sensitive to his place in history might be more accommodating.Moreover, a humiliating surrender for Ukraine would hardly go unnoticed in Beijing. Trump might try to spin it as enabling greater focus on China, which he rightly sees as a threat, but Xi Jinping is likely to read it as a lack of resolve. If Trump will not defend an aspiring democracy on the threshold of the European Union, why would he prevent Beijing from incorporating Taiwan by threatened or actual force? Even close American allies such as Japan and South Korea would quickly recalibrate their need to accommodate Beijing. Is that what Trump wants to be remembered for?Trump mainly sees China as a commercial threat. Having hiked tariffs during his last presidency (Joe Biden maintained them), Trump now threatens to substantially increase them. He laughably claims that China would pay for the tariffs, ignoring the near-universal view of economists that the cost would be passed on to American consumers.Trump contends that tariffs would force more manufacturing to US soil, but a battle of tit-for-tat tariffs would more immediately fuel inflation. During the campaign, Trump played on many Americans’ mistaken tendency to equate higher prices from past inflation with ongoing inflation, but they would soon appreciate the difference as prices again soared.Biden showed the way toward a smarter trade policy – one built on common values rather than mere competition – that Trump would be wise to continue and expand. Beyond subsidies, many Chinese producers exploit Beijing’s use of Uyghur forced labor, especially in China’s north-west province of Xinjiang. That forced labor infects exports of cotton, tomatoes, aluminum and, significantly, polysilicon, the building block of China’s corner-the-market solar panels.Both the US government and the European Union claim to oppose importing the product of forced labor, but only the United States has created a legislative presumption against any imports from Xinjiang without proof that forced labor was not involved – proof that is impossible to obtain given China’s opaque supply chains. The EU never adopted that presumption, so imports from Xinjiang have surged, while US imports have diminished.A smart policy on trade with China would push the EU to adopt a similar presumption. Trump should also have US customs officials pay more attention to Beijing’s subterfuges, such as shipping from Xinjiang via other parts of China or even third countries to avoid the presumption.Israel’s war in Gaza will demand a rethink from Trump. During his first term, he gave Benjamin Netanyahu whatever he wanted, from recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to greenlighting rapid expansion of Israel’s illegal (war-crime) settlements and refusing to call Palestinian land “occupied”. Now, Trump says that Biden has imposed too many restraints on the Israeli prime minister – by pushing him to stop bombing and starving Palestinian civilians – even though Biden refused to use the leverage of conditioning US arms sales and military aid to enforce those demands. Trump wants to let Israel “finish the job”, ideally quickly, and told Netanyahu to “do what you have to do”.But an unrestrained Netanyahu might heed the calls of his rightwing ministers to force the mass deportation of the Palestinians of Gaza to Egypt – a trip that, like the Nakba of 1948, is likely to be one-way. That would outrage the world and almost surely yield additional war-crime charges from the international criminal court (ICC).During Trump’s last term, he disgracefully imposed sanctions on the prior ICC prosecutor for opening investigations that could implicate Israeli officials in Palestinian territory as well as US torturers under George W Bush in Afghanistan. Biden lifted those sanctions, and even mainstream Republicans warmed to the court after its prosecutor charged Putin with war crimes in Ukraine. If Trump were to revive sanctions, he would virtually invite the prosecutor to abandon political restraints that keep him from charging senior US officials (soon, including Trump) for aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes in Gaza.Trump’s desire to expand the Abraham Accords, perhaps the most visible foreign policy achievement of his first term, will also founder without a tougher approach to Israel. Although the Saudi crown prince is notoriously indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, Saudi public opinion has forced him to announce that, however much he wants the carrot of US security guarantees against Iran, he will not normalize relations with Israel without a firm path to a Palestinian state. That is anathema to the Israeli government. Trump must decide whether to abandon his reflexive support for Israel in favor of a deal that would indeed be historic.A similar dilemma faces Trump on Iran. His ripping up of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal has put the clerics just a few short steps from a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu is itching for Trump to join him in a military attack on Iran’s nuclear program, but that would risk involving American forces in a regional war that Trump wants to avoid. It would also endanger the Gulf states’ oil supplies, fueling inflation. And it would only encourage Iran to obtain a ready-made nuclear weapon from, say, North Korea. Is that what Trump wants?More broadly, Trump needs to decide whether to continue his professed admiration for the world’s autocrats. He seems to relish their ability to act without the impediments of democratic checks and balances that so frustrated him during his first term.But the autocrats have learned to play him. Trump can hardly trumpet his artful dealmaking when word is out that a round of calculated fawning is all it takes to manipulate his fragile ego. Will Trump be known for dispensing with the national interest in his quest for the sugar high of flattery? Despite his transactional, go-it-alone tendencies, even Trump might come to appreciate how few friends he has if he stands for little beyond a quest for praise.Trump might even reconsider his instinctive opposition to multilateral endeavors. Biden, sadly, has already done him the favor of abandoning the US seat on the UN human rights council. But does Trump really want to defund the World Health Organization again when it is the frontline for our defense against the next pandemic, whether bird flu, mpox, antimicrobial resistance or something as yet unidentified? Does he really want to continue treating climate change as a “hoax” as severe weather decimates the homes of his supporters?On migration, Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants would cost billions, create labor shortages that fuel inflation and separate millions of US-citizen children from one or both parents. Yet with the need for an election issue behind him, he could negotiate long-awaited comprehensive legislation that would bolster border enforcement, fund the asylum system to reduce backlogs and introduce a statute of limitations that exempts longtime residents (who, despite his racist claims, typically have families, jobs and constructive lives in America) from the threat of deportation.I recognize this may all be wishful thinking. Trump may be too self-absorbed to think beyond the self-gratification of the moment. But if he has a shred of mental space left to worry about his legacy, that may be our best bet to salvage a potentially disastrous presidency – for America and the world.

      Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs More

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      Biden now has his best opening to end Israel’s war on Gaza – and won’t use it | Mohamad Bazzi

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      When the histories of his administration are written, it will be clear that Joe Biden held on to his callous disregard for Palestinians until the end of his presidency. How else to explain why Biden would refuse a final chance to stop Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and save Palestinian lives, when he has nothing to lose?On Tuesday, the Biden administration quietly ignored its own deadline for Israel to increase the minuscule amount of humanitarian aid it allows to enter Gaza. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, imposed the 30-day deadline in a letter sent to Israeli officials on 13 October, which warned that they must take “concrete measures” to ensure that Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza have access to food, medicine and other necessities. The administration said it could suspend US military support to Israel if conditions did not improve. Despite the US ultimatum, the amount of aid reaching the besieged territory in October had dropped to its lowest level in 11 months.As the deadline passed, the Biden administration did what it has done for more than a year: it caved and continued sending weapons to the government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the devastation and famine Israel has inflicted on Gaza. And Washington sheepishly told the world that it would not impose any consequences on Israel, even though the US is legally bound to stop arming an ally that blocks humanitarian aid in a conflict zone.It’s the latest in a long series of decisions by Biden over the past 13 months that show his disdain for Palestinian lives. But his lack of action this week is especially egregious because Biden is politically unrestrained: the presidential election is over, and Donald Trump won. Biden can do whatever he wants without incurring a political cost. He doesn’t even have to worry about a transition to his fellow Democrat and vice-president, Kamala Harris. If there was ever a time for Biden to use his considerable power to save Palestinians, this was it. Yet he squandered this final opportunity to make the right and moral choice – and help end the Gaza war before leaving office.Biden’s decision to keep supplying weapons to Israel reinforces his legacy as the primary enabler of the slaughter in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s campaign to expand the war into Lebanon. While Biden and his allies have done a lot of hand-wringing about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law, the Biden administration failed to uphold US law and its own policies – and it has undermined US credibility around the world even before Trump takes office once again.Biden has been fully complicit in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, in which more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, although the true figure is probably much higher. One estimate published by researchers in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that the death toll could eventually reach 186,000. That accounts for “indirect casualties” of war, such as widespread hunger, a cholera epidemic, unsanitary conditions and the destruction of Gaza’s health system.Following a relentless Israeli military assault that started after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced at least once, and are now living in makeshift tents or in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. Last week, a UN-affiliated group of experts warned that famine is imminent, or may already be unfolding, in northern Gaza – and that the enclave’s entire population faces acute food insecurity, which is one step below a full-blown famine.Days after Biden decided to continue arming Israel into the twilight of his presidency, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a devastating 154-page report that contradicted most US and Israeli assurances that Israel is not violating international law. The report, issued on Thursday, concluded: “Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” HRW urged western governments to impose sanctions and suspend their arms shipments to Israel.The US has provided Israel with nearly $18bn in weapons and other military assistance since October 2023, according to a report released last month by Brown University. Washington spent another $4.8bn on its own military activities in the Middle East due to the conflict. Overall, the Biden administration spent at least $22.7bn in US taxpayer funds to enable Netanyahu and his government to prolong the Gaza war.But the US administration did not have to become so deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Biden and his aides had the leverage, policy tools and legal mechanisms to restrain Israel, end the conflict, and save thousands of Palestinian lives. For months, Biden, along with his secretary of state, squandered any influence they could have exerted over Netanyahu by refusing to enforce US law and their own administration’s policies on weapons transfers.In February, as Biden faced pressure from a handful of Democrats in Congress critical of his unwavering support for Israel, he issued a new national security memo which required the state department to certify that recipients of US weapons would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid during active conflicts and abide by international law. Biden’s memo did not set new policies for arms transfers to foreign countries, but instead used provisions of existing US laws, especially under the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWashington can suspend shipments if it suspects that a foreign military will use US weapons to carry out violations of international law, or to countries that block the delivery of humanitarian aid – as Israel has done throughout its war in Gaza. By May, the state department sent a 46-page report to Congress full of bureaucratic double-speak to justify Biden’s decision to flout US and international laws to protect Netanyahu.Long before the administration’s report, the UN and human rights groups had amply documented that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war – a violation of international law – and deliberately blocking food and other supplies from entering Gaza.Yet the report avoided concluding that the Israeli military had obstructed humanitarian aid, or violated international law while using US weapons. Such findings would have forced Biden to suspend most weapons shipments to Israel under the policies outlined in his own national security memo. But instead of upholding US law and using the suspension of military support to force Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire, Biden sat by and enabled Israel to kill thousands of Palestinians since May.Back then, Biden was still running for re-election and could have feared political repercussions for breaking with Netanyahu. But this week, the US president was as free from politics as he’s ever been in his entire career. He simply decided that Palestinians don’t matter – and sealed his legacy as the enabler of Israel’s war crimes.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      Elizabeth Warren denounces Biden administration over Gaza humanitarian situation

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      Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive voice in the US Senate, has denounced the Biden administration’s failure to punish Israel over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and endorsed a joint resolution of disapproval in Congress.The amount of aid reaching the territory has dropped to the lowest level in 11 months, official Israeli figures show. The White House last month gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to improve conditions or risk losing military support. As the deadline expired on Tuesday, international aid groups said Israel had fallen far short.But the US state department announced it would not take any punitive action, insisting that Israel was making limited progress and was not blocking aid and therefore not violating US law. Warren condemned the Biden administration’s decision to continue supplying arms to its ally.“On October 13, the Biden administration told Prime Minister Netanyahu that his government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza or face the consequences under US law, which would include cutting off military assistance,” the Massachusetts senator said in a statement shared with the Guardian.“Thirty days later, the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel’s actions had not significantly expanded food, water and basic necessities for desperate Palestinian civilians. Despite Netanyahu’s failure to meet the United States’ demands, the Biden administration has taken no action to restrict the flow of offensive weapons.”For the first time on the issue, Warren threw her weight behind a joint resolution of disapproval, a legislative tool that enables Congress to overturn actions taken by the executive branch. Such a resolution must pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate.She added: “The failure by the Biden administration to follow US law and to suspend arms shipments is a grave mistake that undermines American credibility worldwide. If this administration will not act, Congress must step up to enforce US law and hold the Netanyahu government accountable through a joint resolution of disapproval.”Eight international aid groups have said that Israel failed to meet the US demands to improve access for assistance, while food security experts have said it is likely that famine is imminent in parts of Gaza.Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, told reporters on Wednesday that Israel had taken some steps to improve aid but they needed to be sustained to take effect. He called on Israel to rescind evacuation orders to allow those displaced by its operations to return home and to resume commercial trucking deliveries into Gaza.Biden has backed Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked the country in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. Since then, more than 43,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza, with 2 million displaced people and much of the strip reduced to rubble.The president, whose term ends in January and who will be replaced by his predecessor Donald Trump, is facing growing dissent from Democrats over his handling of the war. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Zeteo this week: “President Biden’s inaction, given the suffering in Gaza, is shameful. I mean, there’s no other word for it.”Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont, announced that next week he will bring joint resolutions of disapproval that would block the sale of certain weapons to Israel. “There is no longer any doubt that Netanyahu’s extremist government is in clear violation of US and international law as it wages a barbaric war against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he said.And on Thursday, 15 members of the Senate and 69 members of the House announced efforts to press the Biden administration to hold members of the Netanyahu government – specifically, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir – and others accountable for the rise in settler violence, settlement expansion and destabilising activity in the West Bank. More

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      Is Donald Trump a foreign policy dove? If only | Mehdi Hasan

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      “If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars,” declaimed Donald Trump at a rally in Michigan, on the Friday before the election. “I am the candidate of peace.” In a typically ridiculous rhetorical flourish, Trump added: “I am peace.”Nevertheless, despite the ridiculousness, the president-elect in recent weeks succeeded in connecting with plenty of of anti-war voters tired of the United States’ “forever wars”. He went to Dearborn, the “capital” of Arab America, attacked Kamala Harris for campaigning with the pro-war Cheneys, and came away with an endorsement from a local imam who called him the “peace” candidate.In fact, I have lost count of the number of leftists who have told me in recent months: “Trump didn’t start any new wars.” Sorry, what? Trump spent his four years in the White House escalating every single conflict that he inherited from Barack Obama. Many have forgotten that Trump bombed the Assad government in Syria twice; dropped the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan; illegally assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil; armed Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen; and made John Bolton his national security adviser. Few are even aware that Trump launched more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Obama, dubbed “the drone president”, did across eight years in office.But this time, we were told, it would be different. This time Trump meant it. No more war! No more neocons! Some took heart from Trump’s very public rejection of arch-hawks Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. Others signal-boosted efforts by RFK Jr, Don Jr and Tucker Carlson to block neoconservative figures from joining the new Trump-Vance administration. “I’m on it,” bragged Trump’s eldest failson.It was all for naught. “I am peace”? Really? Consider who Trump now plans to nominate as his secretary of state: Marco Rubio. The Florida senator was once an outspoken critic of the president-elect, calling him a “con man”, “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency”, and questioning the size of his manhood. Fast forward almost a decade and Rubio has happily bent the knee to Trump in order to become fourth in line for the presidency and to take charge of US diplomacy.The slight problem is that Rubio isn’t a fan of diplomacy; he’s a fan of war. An ardent hawk, Rubio defended the invasion of Iraq during his first Senate run in 2010. He has since backed regime change everywhere from Cuba to Venezuela to Iran to Syria. In 2019 he voted to oppose withdrawing US forces from both Syria and Afghanistan. Over the past year, he has been one of the strongest supporters in Congress of Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, dismissing widespread Palestinian civilian casualties as the fault only of Hamas, and saying that Israel cannot coexist “with these savages … They have to be eradicated.”“I am peace”? At Rubio’s side, running the Trump transition team at the state department, is Brian Hook, a long-standing Iran hawk and co-founder of the John Hay Initiative, an anti-isolationist Republican group. He was the architect of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran during Trump’s first term. And, as I revealed for the Intercept in 2018, Hook was in charge of the the state department’s policy planning staff when one of its internal memos called for an “Islamic reformation”.“I am peace”? Trump wants Elise Stefanik to be the new US ambassador to the United Nations. The New York congresswoman is perhaps best known for being a Trump sycophant par excellence but she is also a long-standing Republican hawk whose first job out of college was working in the Bush White House. She later went on to be employed by two of the most hawkish thinktanks in Washington DC, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). The FDD is obsessed (obsessed!) with regime change in Iran, while the FPI, which was co-founded by neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and closed down in 2017, loudly pushed for an expansion of the war in Afghanistan.Stefanik is also a blind supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza, backs an uninterrupted supply of US weapons to the Netanyahu government, and has slammed Joe Biden for being too tough on the Jewish state. In May, she gave an address to the Knesset in which she called for a “total victory” against Hamas.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I am peace”? Trump is appointing Florida congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser. Waltz, a former Green Beret, is perhaps the leading China hawk in Congress. Like Stefanik, Waltz is also an alumnus of the Bush administration and an enthusiast for the “war on terror”. As late as 2017, he was still calling for a “multi-generational war” against terrorism and suggesting the US should be ready for “a lot more fighting” in Afghanistan. That sound dovish to you? In fact, here’s the best (worst?) part: he served as counterterrorism adviser to the most hawkish vice-president in US history, the prince of darkness himself: Richard B Cheney. Got that? Trump spent the last few weeks of his presidential campaign attacking Dick and Liz Cheney, suggesting the latter should be forced to face “nine barrels” on the battlefield, and then just days after winning the election tapped the elder Cheney’s former counterterrorism adviser to be his own national security adviser. File it under: You. Cannot. Make. This. Stuff. Up.“I am peace”? Trump is sending former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to Israel as his ambassador. Huckabee is a Christian evangelical so extreme that he believes there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and “no such thing as an occupation”. He compared Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal to the Nazi Holocaust and was such a proud supporter of the Iraq war that he even criticized George W Bush for setting a timetable for withdrawal!“I am peace”? Trump’s pick for defense secretary is Fox host Peter Hegseth, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dubbed “Trump’s war whisperer”, Hegseth called for the US to disregard the “rigged” rules of war in order to attack Iranian religious and cultural sites in 2020, and also helped persuade Trump to pardon three soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes in 2019. How do you get more hawkish than a supporter of a literal war criminal?In Washington DC, as the saying goes, personnel is policy. Trump is surrounding himself with hawks so you can be assured that his will be a very hawkish administration. Again.But this is the Trump playbook: run as a dove, govern as a hawk. It’s what he did in 2016 and again this year. Attack neocons; get elected; hire neocons.So “Donald the dove”, as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times once put it? If only. Whether it is on domestic policy or foreign policy, Trump remains a conman. Don’t take my word for it. Take his new secretary of state’s.

      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More

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      Trump builds hawkish team with Rubio and Waltz tipped for top jobs

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      Donald Trump has chosen a pair of establishment Republicans from Florida for senior roles in his administration as he builds a national security team that looks more hawkish than the isolationist America First brand of foreign policy that he has championed in public.Trump was expected to select the senator Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, the US’s top diplomat, and has asked the congressman Mike Waltz, a retired Green Beret known as a China hawk, to become his national security adviser, a powerful role that would help shape his policies on the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as around the world.Rubio is a noted foreign policy hawk with hardline policies on China, Iran, and on Venezuela, where he has led US efforts to unseat the president, Nicolás Maduro. He was one of the earliest China hawks in Washington, where Beijing is now viewed with extreme scepticism by both parties, and has served as a co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China.On Ukraine he is likely to tailor his views to Trump’s and those around him, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr, who have voiced sharp criticism of continued funding for Ukraine’s defence against the Russian invasion. Rubio was one of 15 Republican lawmakers to vote against a $61bn supplemental aid bill in the Senate earlier this year that led to a months-long delay of crucial funding for the Ukrainian military.Rubio said earlier this month on national television: “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion, or that country is going to be set back 100 years.”Rubio, whom Trump nicknamed “Little Marco” during his first presidential run, has gone from a regular target of Trump’s insults to a loyal surrogate to the Republican president-elect.Trump had regularly denigrated him in the past as a member of the Republican establishment, calling him a “puppet” and saying he was a “nervous basket case”. But he has been in lockstep with Trump during the campaign and has worked with Democrats and fellow Republicans in the Senate foreign relations committee and intelligence committee, making it likely he will have an easy confirmation process in that body.That stands in sharp relief to a reported rival for the role of secretary of state, Ric Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany, who has proven himself as a loyalist but was known in Washington and Europe as combative and would have faced a tough confirmation process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWaltz, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, has argued that Trump should move quickly to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine in order to transfer US focus and military assets back to the Indo-Pacific region and counter China.Those policies dovetail with Trump’s isolationist tendencies in terms of seeking a speedy resolution to the war in Ukraine, even if it is achieved by forcing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia.“Supporting Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ in a war of attrition against a larger power is a recipe for failure,” Waltz and a co-author, Matthew Kroenig, wrote in an op-ed for the Economist this year. “The next administration should aim, as Donald Trump has argued, to ‘end the war and stop the killing’.” They said the US should use economic leverage on energy sales to “bring Mr Putin to the table”.“If he refuses to talk, Washington can, as Mr Trump argued, provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions on their use,” they continued. “Faced with this pressure, Mr Putin will probably take the opportunity to wind the conflict down.”With regards to Israel’s war in Gaza, the pair appeared ready to give Benjamin Netanyahu carte blanche to “let Israel finish the job”, as Trump has said. They also suggested launching a “diplomatic and economic pressure campaign to stop [Iran] and to constrain their support for terror proxies”.“Washington should maintain a military presence in the region, but with the war in Gaza and Lebanon concluded, it can transfer critical capabilities back to the Indo-Pacific,” they wrote. More

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      Trump speaks with Putin and advises him not to escalate Ukraine war – report

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      Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.The US president-elect advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, the Post reported.It added that Trump expressed interest in follow-up conversations on “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon”.During the election campaign, Trump said he would find a solution to end the war “within a day”, but did not explain how he would do so.According to one former US official who was familiar with the call and spoke to the Washington Post, Trump likely does not want to begin his second presidential term with an escalation in the Ukraine war, “giving him incentive to want to keep the war from worsening”.In a statement to the outlet, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “President Trump won a historic election decisively and leaders from around the world know America will return to prominence on the world stage. That is why leaders have begun the process of developing stronger relationships with the 45th and 47th president because he represents global peace and stability.”Trump had also spoken to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, according to media reports.Biden has invited Trump to come to the Oval Office on Wednesday, and on Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden’s top message will be his commitment to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. He will also talk to Trump about what’s happening in Europe, in Asia and the Middle East.“President Biden will have the opportunity over the next 70 days to make the case to the Congress and to the incoming administration that the United States should not walk away from Ukraine, that walking away from Ukraine means more instability in Europe,” Sullivan told CBS.Washington has provided tens of billions of dollars worth of US military and economic aid to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022, funding that Trump has repeatedly criticised and rallied against with other Republican lawmakers.Ukraine’s foreign ministry disputed a claim in the Washington Post article that Kyiv was informed of the call and did not object to the conversation taking place. “Reports that the Ukrainian side was informed in advance of the alleged call are false. Subsequently, Ukraine could not have endorsed or opposed the call,” foreign ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi told Reuters.On Friday, the Kremlin said Putin was ready to discuss Ukraine with Trump but that it did not mean that he was willing to alter Moscow’s demands.On 14 June, Putin set out his terms for an end to the war: Ukraine would have to drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw all its troops from all the territory of four regions claimed by Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUkraine rejected that, saying it would be tantamount to capitulation, and that Zelenskyy has put forward a “victory plan” that includes requests for additional military support from the west.Also on Sunday, Trump spoke to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “The chancellor emphasised the German government’s willingness to continue the decades of successful cooperation between the two countries’ governments. They also agreed to work together towards a return to peace in Europe,” a German government spokesperson said.In a call last week with South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, Trump said the US was interested in working with Seoul in the shipbuilding industry, particularly in naval shipbuilding, as well as “promoting genuine peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region,”, the South Korean leader said.Trump’s call with Putin comes just a day after Bryan Lanza, a senior political adviser to Trump, told the BBC that Ukraine should focus on achieving peace instead of “a vision for winning”.“When Zelenskyy says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace, once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelenskyy: Crimea is gone,” Lanza told the BBC.After his comments, a Trump spokesperson said Lanza “was a contractor for the campaign” and that he “does not work for President Trump and does not speak for him”. More

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      Ukraine’s MPs hopeful Donald Trump’s victory ‘not a catastrophe’ for war effort

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      Ukrainian politicians are expressing tentative hopes that the return of Donald Trump to the White House will not necessarily lead to a rapid and humiliating forced peace.An initial 25-minute post-election call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, during which the president-elect handed the phone to Elon Musk, is said to have been positive in tone and no specifics of any peace proposals were discussed.Zelenskyy also thanked Musk for making the Starlink satellite internet service available for use by his country’s military, for whom it is a vital communications tool on the front line.Though Trump promised to “stop wars” in his first speech after his victory over Kamala Harris became apparent last week, there are no settled outlines of a peace plan yet, giving Kyiv breathing space to press its own case.Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian opposition MP, said: “I don’t think that Trump’s victory is a catastrophe. Ukraine is now his business and if negotiations lead to a disaster it will be his, like Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This is a person who loves to win.”Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin on the phone on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post has reported. The US president-elect advised Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, according to the Post.Ukrainians emphasise the complexity of negotiating with the Russian president, who they hope may overplay his hand with maximalist demands or irritate the notoriously prickly American leader.“At some point, Trump has to present a plan to Putin and we will see if Putin wants to stick to it. From that moment there is a new reality,” Goncharenko said. “In the meantime, we have to work with the US and with US public opinion.”Putin has already praised Trump’s courage for his defiant behaviour after surviving an assassination attempt in July, describing him as “a real man”, though Moscow has said its goals in invading Ukraine – once described as “demilitarisation and denazification” – remain unchanged.The Russian president congratulated Trump on his victory and said: “He turned out to be a courageous person. People show who they are in extraordinary circumstances. This is where a person reveals himself. And he showed himself, in my opinion, in a very correct manner, courageously. Like a man.”He said he was ready for dialogue with Trump. “What was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to bring about the end of the Ukrainian crisis, in my opinion this deserves attention at least.”On Sunday, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, was upbeat but non-specific. “Trump during his election talked about how he perceives everything through deals, that he can make a deal that can lead to peace,” he said, though he added campaign trail statements were not always borne out.A day after his phone call with Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, acknowledged that the president-elect thought he could move fast. “I believe that President Trump really wants a quick decision,” he said at a meeting of the European Political Community in Budapest. “He wants that. It doesn’t mean that it will happen this way.”Specific proposals for a peace deal in Ukraine from senior Republicans are competing and to some extent contradictory. A critical factor will be Trump’s appointments to the state department and Pentagon as well as his choice of national security adviser.In June, the retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who previously both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s national security council, presented a proposal to Trump that would force Ukraine to negotiate by threatening to cut off military aid, freezing the conflict along the current frontlines.In September, JD Vance, now the vice-president-elect, proposed something similar, a plan that would allow Russia to take control of the 20% of Ukraine it currently occupies, and stipulating that Ukraine would never be allowed to join Nato.Another plan partly proposed by Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state under Trump now considered to be a candidate for defence secretary, involves a de facto partition based on the current frontlines while lifting “all restrictions on the type of weapons Ukraine can obtain and use” – including British Storm Shadow missiles. This would be paid for with money obtained from Russian foreign exchange reserves; $50bn in loans from G7 members was announced last month.Over the weekend, the Trump campaign distanced themselves from a comment made by another campaign adviser, Bryan Lanza, who said “Crimea is gone,” arguing the occupied territories were lost for good. Lanza “does not speak for” Trump, a spokesperson for the Republican said.All such proposals are diametrically opposed to Zelenskyy’s own “victory plan” presented publicly last month, which called for Nato membership plus unrestricted use of western weapons to force a restoration of its internationally recognised territory.Across Ukraine there is a certain fatalism. Maria Avdeeva, a Kyiv-based fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute thinktank, said: “I think Ukrainians have already learned the lesson that we have to count on ourselves” – a refrain that crops up repeatedly in conversation.Ukraine is already struggling on the battlefield to a degree not seen since the spring of 2022, particularly on the southern part of the eastern from, where Ukraine has lost 9km in a week in some areas as Russia presses forward aggressively, incurring, according to UK estimates, numbers of troops killed and wounded of as high as 1,354 a day.The numbers of cases of Ukrainian desertion (18,196) and soldiers going absent without leave (35,307) between January and September are double those of the whole of 2023, according to leaked figures from the prosecutor general’s office, suggesting a growing weariness in parts of the armed forces.Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s most senior military commander, said on Saturday: “The situation remains challenging and shows signs of escalation. The enemy, leveraging its numerical advantage, is continuing offensive actions and is focusing its main efforts on the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions.” More