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      ‘He loves to divide and conquer’: Canada and Mexico brace for second Trump term

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      Stone-faced as he stared into a gaggle of cameras on Tuesday, the leader of Canada’s largest province laid bare how it feels to be America’s northern neighbour and closest ally this week.“It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart,” said Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford. A day before, president-elect Donald Trump had pledged hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the US’s two largest trading partners. “It’s the biggest threat we’ve ever seen … It’s unfortunate. It’s very, very hurtful.”For both Mexico and Canada, whose economic successes are enmeshed in their multibillion-dollar trade relationships with the United States, the forecasted chaos and disruption of a second Trump term has arrived. And the first salvo from Trump has already forced leaders from Mexico and Canada to revisit their relationship with the US – and with each other.Both have maxims to describe living in the shadow of the world’s largest economic and military superpower, which sees nearly $2tn worth of goods and services pass through its two land borders.“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau told then US president Richard Nixon. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”For Mexicans, it is the words of the 19th-century dictator Porfirio Díaz: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.”The vagaries of the relationship were tested again this week when Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both countries, and to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”Although in 2018 the US, Canada and Mexico renegotiated the Nafta trade pact that Trump had long blamed for gutting US manufacturing, the three countries still have deeply intertwined supply chains – especially an automotive industry that spans the continent – making a levy of that magnitude potentially devastating to all.In Canada, Trump’s demands have left the government scrambling to make sense of the threat – and how seriously to take it.“‘Good-faith negotiator’ is not usually a descriptor of Donald Trump. He loves to disrupt it. He loves to divide and conquer,” said Colin Robertson, a former senior Canadian diplomat who has had numerous postings in the US. “Trump is determined to truly make his mark. Last time he was disorganized. This time, he’s certainly started off demonstrating a high degree of organization.”Even before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and a handful of provincial premiers had mused openly about cutting Mexico out of future trade talks, instead pivoting towards a Canada-US trade pact – a move that Mexico’s lead negotiator called a “betrayal”.On Wednesday, Trudeau held an emergency meeting with all 10 premiers to push a “Team Canada” approach to the confrontation, pledging hours later to invest more in border security – a nod to Trump’s criticism of Canada’s patrolling of its border.A challenge for Canada is a need to approach Trump with skepticism, but also to take the threats seriously, says Robertson, adding that Canada’s trade relationship with the US is immensely lopsided. “The reality is, we need them. They’re big, we’re small.”Still, Trump’s demands “are perverse, but unfortunately predictable”, says Roland Paris, director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and former foreign affairs adviser to Trudeau.He notes that only a sliver of the fentanyl entering the US comes from Canada, a figure so small the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) does not even mention Canada in a report from 2020. As for migrants entering the US, Canada’s federal minister says yearly interceptions are similar to a “significant weekend” at the Mexico border.“This is [Trump’s] modus operandi,” said Paris. “He’s not wasting any time throwing America’s principal trading partners off balance, before he even enters office.”Ottawa’s efforts to smooth things over with Trump are also hampered by domestic politics. Trudeau remains immensely unpopular in polls, and the rival Conservatives have cast the prime minister as weak and ill-equipped to both preserve what Nixon called Canada’s “special relationship” with the US and to face off against a mercurial president.Paris imagines the prime minister’s cabinet, especially veterans of bruising negotiations with Trump during his first term, as “determined” to manage relations with a country that for decades has remained a staunch ally. He says years of close work has produced a significant overlap in policy goals for the two nations, including skepticism of China and a need to secure critical mineral and energy supply chains.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Canada is going to need resolve, patience and the most far-reaching advocacy campaign this country has ever conducted in the United States,” he said. “But everybody knows that Trump is so unpredictable that there’s no saying what he might do this time.”For Mexico, which has long borne the brunt of Trump’s ire, Monday’s tariff threat comes amid already tense relations, including a reform to elect almost all judges by popular vote that has drawn sharp criticism from the US. At the same time, the arrest in July of two top Sinaloa cartel bosses in Texas, a move that surprised Mexican officials, has triggered a bloody gang war that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, blames on the US.On Wednesday, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump, a conversation which the US president-elect characterised as “wonderful” after he claimed the Mexican president pledged to “stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”. Sheinbaum later gently clarified that she wouldn’t close the border, but that the call was “very kind” and had convinced her that no tariffs would happen.Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US, said Trump’s tariff suggestion has kicked off “panic” in the Mexican community living in the US. “How can you hit your partners in a free trade agreement with tariffs 25% higher than what you put on the rest of the world? It’s crazy,” she said.“What was his ceiling is now his floor,” she said of his previous negotiating position on trade. “The lesson? Never yield to a bully.”Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, a Mexican diplomat who oversaw migration when Trump first came to power, says the bombast of the next US president can be easier to work with than more traditional allies.“The Biden administration is a little more diplomatic, but this can actually make the discussion more complicated, because you don’t know what the terms of negotiation are,” he said. “Maybe it’s just my style of negotiation. It’s simpler when it’s more open. They put the cards on the table: ‘This is what we want.’ Then you can respond.”Both Mexico and Canada have scores of diplomats already experienced with Trump, but both sides also expressed concern that many of the key figures in Trump’s first term, who acted as a “check” on the president’s whim-based policy decisions, will be absent from the second administration, replaced by loyalists and idealogues who will do whatever he says.Still, for Mexican officials, there is a glimmer of hope that those in positions of power are more reasonable when they’re not in the media spotlight. Alcántara noted that “border czar” Tom Homan, who recently pledged to carry out a “mass deportation’, is known for his controversial positions, “but if you take the facts to him and explain them, he understands. He has a certain discourse in the media that’s very aggressive, but when you sit down together, you can talk.”For Mexico and Canada, a recognition that their fates remain tied to the US has forced them to redouble their efforts, not to reconsider their relationship.“In the end, we need to bet on a strong North America,” said Alcántara. It’s simple: make North America great again. As a region, not just the United States.” More

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      Abandoning Ukraine means ‘infinitely higher’ long-term security costs, MI6 chief says

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      Abandoning Ukraine would jeopardise British, European and American security and lead to “infinitely higher” costs in the long term, the head of MI6 has warned in a speech that amounted to a plea to Donald Trump to continue supporting Kyiv.Richard Moore, giving a rare speech, said he believed Vladimir Putin “would not stop” at Ukraine if he was allowed to subjugate it in any peace talks involving the incoming US Republican administration.“If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there. Our security – British, French, European and transatlantic – will be jeopardised,” Moore said during an address given in Paris alongside his French counterpart.The spy chief was touted earlier this week as a possible surprise appointment as the UK’s ambassador to the US, though he is not thought to be pressing for the job. The former Labour minister Peter Mandelson is considered the frontrunner for a critical role at a delicate time in transatlantic relations.Moore has served as the head of MI6 for four years in what is normally considered a five-year job. At the start of his tenure he overlapped with the Trump adviser Richard Grenell, who was the acting director of national intelligence.Trump has complained about the expense of supporting Kyiv and said repeatedly that he wants to end the war, claiming he could do so “within 24 hours”. JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has suggested freezing the conflict on the current frontlines, and denying Ukraine Nato membership for an extended period.“The cost of supporting Ukraine is well known,” said Moore. “But the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher. If Putin succeeds, China would weigh the implications, North Korea would be emboldened and Iran would become still more dangerous.”A key British argument to the incoming Trump administration is to try to link the war in Ukraine with US concerns about the rising military might of China, emphasising that the arrival of North Korean troops is bringing authoritarianism from Asia into what was previously a European conflict.Moore emphasised the UK’s history of intelligence cooperation with France in a speech to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, but he was also careful to emphasise that he expected UK-US intelligence cooperation to be unchanged regardless of any political tensions.“For decades the US-UK intelligence alliance has made our societies safer; I worked successfully with the first Trump administration to advance our shared security and look forward to doing so again,” Moore told his audience at the UK embassy, a short walk from the Élysée Palace, the official home of the French president.The spy chief’s public presence in the French capital reflects a wider political rapprochement between the British prime minister and the French president. After Trump’s victory, Keir Starmer met Emmanuel Macron in France where the two discussed Ukraine amid reports that the Republicans would like European soldiers to act as peacekeepers if a ceasefire was agreed.Moore said Putin’s goal was to “challenge western resolve” and that western spy agencies had “recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe” – a reference to a mixture of arson, assassination and kidnap plots, which included a fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham caused by an incendiary device hidden in a package sent at the behest of Russia.Moscow has said its demands regarding Ukraine remain unchanged. Earlier this month, the Kremlin said its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the “direct result” of a Nato policy that aimed at “creating a staging ground against Russia on Ukrainian soil”.Russia continues to demand “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, and in previous peace negotiations said Kyiv’s military should be reduced to 50,000. It also claims the territory of four eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, of which only the fourth is fully occupied. More

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      Mexican president claims ‘no potential tariff war’ with US after call with Trump

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      Claudia Sheinbaum has said her “very kind” phone conversation with Donald Trump, in which they discussed immigration and fentanyl, means “there will not be a potential tariff war” between the US and Mexico.The president of Mexico spoke to reporters on Thursday following Trump’s threat earlier in the week to apply a 25% tariff against Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10% tariff against China, when he takes office in January if the countries did not stop all illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling into the US.Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, claimed that during the phone call with Sheinbaum she had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”.During her Thursday address Sheinbaum clarified she did not agree to shut down the border.“Each person has their own way of communicating,” Sheinbaum said. “But I can assure you, I guarantee you, that we never – additionally, we would be incapable of doing so – proposed that we would close the border in the north [of Mexico], or in the south of the United States. It has never been our idea and, of course, we are not in agreement with that.”She added that the two did not discuss tariffs, but that the conversation with Trump had reassured her that no tit-for-tat tariff battle would be needed in future.On Monday this week, Trump threatened to impose a 25% percent tariff on Mexico until drugs, including fentanyl, and undocumented immigrants “stop this Invasion of our Country”. He declared that Mexico and Canada should use their power to address drug trafficking and migration and, until they do, “it is time for them to pay a very big price!”The following day, Sheinbaum suggested Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own.On Wednesday, however, the conversation between Sheinbaum and Trump was “very kind”, the Mexican president said. She said she told Trump of the various migration initiatives her government has undertaken, including providing resources and support to central American countries and to migrants arriving in Mexico. Potential immigrants “will not reach the northern border, because Mexico has a strategy”, Sheinbaum said.Trump “recognized this effort” by the Mexican government, Sheinbaum added.She also said Trump expressed interest in the government-driven programs to address fentanyl addiction and overdoses in Mexico. And she raised the problem of American-made weapons entering Mexico from the US to be used by drug cartels.Sheinbaum further added that she encouraged Trump to stop the blockades against Cuba and Venezuela, since “people suffer and it leads to the phenomenon of migration”.Asked by a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that quoted anonymous Trump-aligned sources discussing a “soft invasion” of Mexico by deploying the US military inside the country against drug trafficking groups, Sheinbaum dismissed the idea, calling it “entirely a movie”.“What I base myself on is the conversation – the two conversations – that I had with President Trump, and then, at the moment, the communication we will have with his work team and when he takes office,” Sheinbaum said. “We will always defend our sovereignty. Mexico is a free, independent, sovereign country – and that is above everything else.” More

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      Trump’s Ukraine envoy pick proposed forcing peace talks by withdrawing US weapons

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      Donald Trump’s plan to tap the retired US lieutenant general Keith Kellogg as US envoy to Ukraine and Russia has triggered renewed interest in a policy document he co-authored that proposes ending the war by withdrawing weapons from Ukraine if it doesn’t enter peace talks – and giving even more weapons to Ukraine if Russia doesn’t do the same.Trump is said to have responded favorably to the plan – America First, Russia & Ukraine – which was presented to him in April and was written by Kellogg and the former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s national security council from 2017 to 2021.The document proposes halting further US weapons deliveries to Kyiv if it does not enter peace talks with Moscow, while simultaneously warning Moscow that, should it refuse to negotiate, US support for Ukraine would increase.It blames “unserious and incoherent” US foreign policy under Joe Biden for the three-year conflict, including what it describes as a “precipitous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the supposed antagonization of US allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and a policy to China described as “weak and confusing”.The paper further accuses the Biden administration of putting “the idealistic agendas of the global elite ahead of a working relationship with Russia” – a “hostile policy” that it claims “made it an enemy of the US, drove Russia into the arms of China and led to the development of a new Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis”.Kellogg and Fleitz criticize what they said was a decision to scold Vladimir Putin and threaten “unprecedented” sanctions as it prepared to invade Ukraine, “instead of using negotiations to de-escalate tensions”.“An America First approach could have prevented the invasion,” they write.Trump’s vice-president-elect, the Ohio senator JD Vance, has aired comparable views, arguing in effect that US support for Ukraine is a drain on resources necessary to counter Washington’s principal security threat with China.The selection of Kellogg comes as the Biden administration pushes to complete more weapons transfers to Ukraine before the president’s term ends. A decision to approve the use of US-made Atacms missiles on targets inside Russia was met by Russia’s use of a powerful intermediate range missile, Oreshnik, on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.In an interview with Fox News, Kellogg said Biden’s decision to approve Ukrainian strikes inside Russia has given Trump “more leverage”.“It gives president Trump more ability to pivot from that,” he said.On Tuesday, Moscow responded to a New York Times report that unidentified western officials had suggested Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons before he steps down. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said discussions in the West about arming Ukraine with nuclear weapons was “absolutely irresponsible”.But the Kellogg-Fleitz plan, though lacking in details, appears to mirror the counsel of Gen Mark A Milley, Biden’s former chief military adviser who argued that since neither Russia nor Ukraine could win the conflict, a negotiated settlement was the sole route to peace.Under the plan, Moscow would also be coaxed to the table with the promise of Nato membership for Ukraine being delayed or abandoned.“We tell the Ukrainians, ‘You’ve got to come to the table, and if you don’t come to the table, support from the United States will dry up,’” Kellogg told Reuters in June. “And you tell Putin, ‘He’s got to come to the table and if you don’t come to the table, then we’ll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn that interview, Fleitz said Ukraine would not need to formally cede territory to Russia, but would come to recognize that it would not be able to regain effective control of all its territory.“Our concern is that this has become a war of attrition that’s going to kill a whole generation of young men,” Fleitz said, adding that a lasting peace in Ukraine would require additional security guarantees, including “arming Ukraine to the teeth”.But in the policy paper the pair acknowledged that it would be hard for Ukraine to accept a peace deal “that does not give them back all of their territory or, at least for now, hold Russia responsible for the carnage it inflicted on Ukraine”.Asking whether he endorses Kellogg’s position paper, the president-elect told NBC News: “I’m the only one who can get the war stopped. It should have never started in the first place.”Trump said that European nations should contribute more aid, a position echoed by Vance at the Republican national convention in July. “We will make sure our allies share in the burden of securing world peace,” he said. “No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer.”Trump chose Kellogg, an 80-year-old retired army lieutenant general, to be his top adviser on defense issues. He served as national security adviser to Vice-president Mike Pence, was chief of staff of the national security council, and then stepped in as an acting security adviser for Trump after Michael Flynn resigned.During the Vietnam war he served in the 101st airborne division, also known as the Screaming Eagles, and after the first Iraq war he was named commander of special operations command Europe (SOCEUR). He retired in 2003 as a lieutenant general.During the January 6 Capitol riot, Kellogg demanded that the Secret Service not evacuate Pence from the building, which would have prevented the vice-president from certifying Biden’s electoral victory. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it,” he reportedly said.After naming Kellogg as envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Trump said Kellogg “was with me right from the beginning”! More

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      The Democrats must radically rethink foreign policy | Anatol Lieven

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      In domestic political terms, the foreign policy of the Biden administration has proved almost unimaginably successful – for Donald Trump, whom it enabled to run for president as the representative, however mendaciously so, of foreign policy restraint. A deep and searching debate on the Democratic party’s approach to foreign affairs is now essential.Since the second world war there has only rarely been a significant difference between the Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy. The most significant divergence around the time of the backlash against the Vietnam war (initiated by a Democratic administration) and Watergate. This, however, lasted barely a decade.After the end of the cold war, Democrats wholeheartedly adopted the “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, whereby the US should aim to be a hegemon not just in the world as a whole, but in every region of the world: in effect, an extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet. Barack Obama tried, to a limited extent, to push back against this, but was largely frustrated by the US foreign and security establishment – the so-called “Blob”.Can the Democrats break free from the hold of the Blob? If they were guided by US public opinion, it should be easy for them to do so. According to a recent poll, only 56% of Americans think that the US should play an active role in world affairs – among the lowest level recorded since the end of the Vietnam war. Only a third of Americans overall, and only a minority of Democrats, believe that spreading human rights and defending other nations are important goals. Large majorities in both parties prioritise domestic spending over foreign commitments.And indeed, responding to this public mood, Biden ran in 2020 on the slogan “A foreign policy for the middle class”. Very soon, this joined George Bush’s promise in 2000 to pursue a more modest and restrained foreign policy in the dustbin of history, and Biden was quoting Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, about America being “the indispensable nation”.Three overarching principles need to shape a new Democratic party approach. First, US policy needs to prioritise common threats to humanity, climate change first among them and international cooperation to address these threats. Second, to achieve such cooperation, the US needs to abandon its messianic strategy of spreading “democracy” through US power, which has become in practice little more than a means of trying to undermine rival states.Instead, it should return to relying on the force of US democratic example – if that example can in fact be renewed. There is after all a certain contradiction in Democrats calling the new US president a fascistic would-be dictator elected by a majority of illiterate bigots, and telling the rest of the world to adopt the US system.Third, the US needs to pull back from the pursuit of domination in every region of the world and instead adopt a limited and realistic strategy of defending America’s position on the world stage as a whole. In Europe, this means accepting a peace deal with Russia (if Trump can achieve one), abandoning Nato expansion and shifting the chief responsibility for European security on to the Europeans, with the US military functioning only as an ultimate backstop.In the far east, this involves drawing a lesson from the defeat of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by land-based missiles and drones and recognizing that the US navy will soon be incapable of defeating China close to China’s shores – though on the other hand it remains entirely capable of maintaining US dominance of the world’s oceans. This means that the US will need to share power with China and commit itself to the reunion of China and Taiwan, albeit only at some distant point in future.Finally, there is Israel and the Middle East. A progressive party seeking votes from the young cannot succeed without at least some measure of idealism. The sight of a Democratic administration supporting mass murder and ethnic cleansing abroad, while clubbing, arresting and expelling US students protesting against these crimes, will not persuade idealistic young Americans to vote Democratic. What it will do and has done is to persuade even more of them to do what many were doing already: to stay at home, in a mood of nauseated contempt for the entire US political system. The very least the Democratic party should do is to return to the policies of previous US administrations in setting limits to Israeli aggression.Such changes in their approach to the world would be extremely painful and difficult for the Democrats, but the deepening crisis of the western democracies demands radical new thinking. And if an electoral defeat this shattering does not lead Democrats to rethink some of their basic policies, then nothing will.

      Anatol Lieven is director of the Eurasia programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case More

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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