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      China promises ‘countermeasures’ after Trump threatens additional 10% tariff

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      Donald Trump has threatened China with an additional 10% tariff on its exports to the US, prompting a promise of “countermeasures” from Beijing and setting the stage for another significant escalation in the two governments’ trade war.The US president also claimed he planned to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting next Tuesday, having delayed their imposition last month after talks with his counterparts.Posting on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said illicit drugs such as fentanyl were being smuggled into the US at “unacceptable levels” and that import taxes would force other countries to crack down on the trafficking.“We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled,” the Republican president wrote. “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”If Trump makes good on this latest threat, the move would further strain relations between the US and its largest trading partners.In response, China’s commerce and foreign ministries on Friday vowed to retaliate if Chinese companies were affected by the tariffs, accusing the US of using fentanyl as a “pretext” to threaten China.“Such behaviour is purely ‘shifting blame and shirking responsibility,’ which is not conducive to solving its own problems,” a commerce ministry spokesperson said. “If the US insists on proceeding with this course of action, China will take all necessary countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”Canada and Mexico have promised to retaliate if the US imposes tariffs on their exports. China hit back swiftly when Trump imposed a 10% tariff on its exports earlier this month.The Trump administration has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs, vowing to rebalance the global economic order in the US’s favor. A string of announced measures have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and businesses urge officials to reconsider.The duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum will not be enforced until next month, and a wave of “reciprocal” tariffs, trailed earlier this month, will not kick in before April.This week, the US president vowed to slap 25% tariffs on the EU, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States”, although details remain sparse. Duties will be applied “generally”, Trump said, “on cars and all other things”.The prospect of escalating tariffs has already thrown the global economy into turmoil – with consumers expressing fears about inflation worsening and the auto sector possibly suffering if the US’s two largest trading partners in Canada and Mexico are slapped with taxes.The prospect of higher prices and slower growth could create political blowback for Trump.Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Top Democrat says Trump may seek mineral deal with both Russia and Ukraine

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      Donald Trump may be pursuing a mineral rights deal with Vladimir Putin and Russia as well as with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, a top Senate Democrat has warned, discussing the US president’s demand that Kyiv grant US firms access to 50% of its rare-earth reserves, as a price for helping end the war three years after Russia invaded.“I think anything that helps position Ukraine for any peace negotiations is a positive move,” said Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate foreign relations and armed services committee, who recently visited Ukraine.“Now, what we heard when we were in Ukraine is that 40-50% of those mineral deposits are actually in territory controlled by the Russians. Maybe part of the deal is President Trump is going to get a deal with Vladimir Putin on the mineral rights too. So … that could be a little tricky.”Shaheen was speaking to the One Decision podcast, hosted by the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, the former CIA director Leon Panetta and the reporter Christina Ruffini.Saying Ukraine cannot expect to regain all territory taken by Russia, and rejecting Kyiv’s aim of joining Nato, Trump has demanded a deal with Ukraine as repayment for military support. On Wednesday, Trump said Zelenskyy would visit Washington on Friday to sign a “very big agreement that will be on rare earth and other things”.Trump did not offer details of a deal but said he was “not going to make security guarantees beyond very much,” adding: “We’re going to have Europe do that.”Trump is due to meet Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, on Thursday. Starmer has said the UK is willing to contribute peacekeeping troops.Shaheen said: “I do think there is support to do everything we can to help get a peace in Ukraine. And from my perspective, one of the most important aspects of that is ensuring that the Ukrainians are positioned in the most positive, favorable way for them. If this deal helps with that, and President Zelenskyy is comfortable signing it, then I support that.”Shaheen said her visit to Ukraine, with fellow Democrat Michael Bennet, of Colorado, and Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, proved “compelling, disturbing”.The senators visited Bucha, where Russian troops carried out a massacre in 2022. The town “showed the resilience of the Ukrainian people,” Shaheen said, adding: “They’re willing to resist. And it showed just what a murderous thug Vladimir Putin is.”Shaheen said the senators “met with the mayor of Bucha, we met with the priest. There had been a mass grave of a couple of hundred of the civilians who were killed. There were over 500 killed in Bucha in that 33-day siege [the final toll is unclear]. It was horrific. It was absolutely brutal. Finding the graves, taking the corpses out of the graves.“We met with the investigators who were investigating each murder individually, and they showed us the picture of the Russian commander who had given the order. And it was very clear that the order was to frighten the civilians, to do everything you can to try and reduce any resistance from the civilians. And for me … I thought this was a small village someplace in the hinterlands of Ukraine, but it’s not, it’s a suburb of Kyiv, and the tanks were stopped right there at the suburb.“So it really pointed out the stark contrast between the Russians and the Ukrainians and what’s at stake in this war.”Trump has stirred huge controversy by seeming to favor Putin and Russia in regards to the war in Ukraine, not least by beginning talks for a settlement without including Ukraine or European powers.Asked about Trump’s lie that Zelenskyy was a dictator who started the war, Shaheen said: “It’s very distressing. And the president’s wrong. He’s just wrong … Vladimir Putin is the dictator. President Zelenskiy was duly elected by the people of Ukraine, and he has a higher favorability rating than Donald Trump.” More

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      USAid workers to be ‘escorted’ back to collect belongings amid Trump shutdown bid

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      Workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAid) have been invited back to its office “to retrieve their personal belongings” as the Trump administration continues its bid to shut down the foreign aid agency.An email seen by the Guardian described how staff in Washington would be allowed to briefly return on Thursday or Friday of this week. They would be “escorted to their workspace” and granted “approximately 15 minutes” to gather their items, it said.All of the nearly 10,000 employees at USAid, aside from personnel deemed essential, have been placed on administrative leave. The Trump administration has signaled it plans to cut 2,000 positions.The move comes after a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to put thousands of USAid workers on leave, in a setback for unions that are suing over what they have called an effort to dismantle the agency.Staff who spoke to the Guardian sounded the alarm over the impact of these moves on global security, warning that closing USAid and withdrawing foreign aid is “only leaving war on the table”.The agency is “the canary in the coal mine” as Trump seeks to test the limits of his executive powers, said one USAid official, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation and harassment. “We see us as the most acute and boldest example of overreach, that checks and balances ought to restrain the powers of the president and the president should abide by the powers of Congress and the courts.“Can the president act like a king? We’re a glaring flare for all of those things.”The agency has been subjected to attacks and conspiracy theories about its work, with Elon Musk and his supporters making false claims about funding, including a baseless claim about the agency sending $50m to Gaza for condoms, and false claims about grants such as the suggestion by the so-called “department of government efficiency” that $21m had been sent to India to influence elections.Musk has called the agency “a criminal organization” and argued that it was “time for it to die”. Pushed on his false condoms claim earlier this month, he responded: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect.”Health clinics reliant on USAid grants in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Iraq and other countries around the world have been forced to shut down and international aid groups have already cut thousands of jobs due to the funding freeze.The Trump administration is fighting challenges in court to freeze all USAid funding, place nearly all employees on leave.“USAid was established by act of Congress. It needs to be un-established by act of Congress. They are ignoring that rule,” the USAid official said. “I would guess around 500 workers, no one has provided specifics, senior leaders, HR and IT people, are left behind to participate in the dismantling of the agency.”Contracts and grants are still being cut and terminated, with only a small fraction of the agency’s work abroad still continuing, they said. “We’re a lifesaving agency. They certainly have done damage that will take years to undo, but even though they’ve closed the building and banned us from it, we’re not done. We still exist,” they said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother USAid employee, who received a reduction-in-force notice, said: “They are not being above board. Nothing is following the law. The level of impunity that is occurring has our own domestic lawyers confused about what’s happening with the courts.”They criticized misinformation and allegations made against USAid, noting their funding is approved and constantly assessed by Congress, with no discretion for employees on how those funds are used. They argued the agency’s dismantling will result in a debt of diplomacy and hurt America’s standing around the world, and said other countries or bad actors will fill the void.“USAid will save you exponentially more money in bullets and blood. We are only leaving war on the table,” the worker said. “We don’t exist as an isolationist country. Our partners clearly don’t appreciate what is happening and are reconsidering how dependable we are, which has been to our benefit for 60 years. How does that make us safe, more secure, or more prosperous?”People “think this is about efficiency”, they added. “It’s a fundamental aspect of democratic governance for people to understand what is happening, and the current administration is taking great lengths to divorce the public from that and let people do whatever they want.”USAid deferred comment to the state department, who were contacted for comment. The White House was also contacted for comment. More

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      Can the ‘special relationship’ survive Donald Trump? – podcast

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      It’s the most important international relationship the UK has, and for decades has been referred to as “special”. Since the second world war, the UK and the US have considered themselves the closest allies, working together for shared values, with any resentments, differences of opinion or cross words kept to private channels.But now Donald Trump is back and he seems keen to throw the usual world order of alliances and enmities into chaos. Keir Starmer’s first meeting with the US president comes at a crucial juncture for Europe, with the future of Ukraine in the balance. “The stakes at the moment could not be higher,” says the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour.He tells Michael Safi what advice Starmer should be receiving from his advisers, including to keep things simple and not to be boring. And what Starmer will be trying to achieve, especially in terms of clarifying Trump’s recent outpourings around Ukraine. “I think the key thing to find out is where does this man lie ideologically,” Patrick says. But if Trump has no allies, only transactional relationships, how much can Starmer hope to achieve during this meeting? More

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      The ugly truth of American violence has never been plainer

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      View image in fullscreenAmong my hazier memories of early adolescence in Qatar is a screening, at a friend’s home, of an obviously pirated Betamax copy of Red Dawn. My friend’s father – most everyone’s father or mother or uncle, whoever – would, while on business trips overseas, visit the occasional video store or flea market and return with whatever films or books or albums they happened to find. It’s a haphazard, incomplete thing to consume the culture of a faraway place in this manner, like trying to divine the contours of a mouth from the texture of spittle.Red Dawn is a bad movie. Bad in a special, sincere kind of way. It’s about a bunch of teenagers who fight back against a Soviet invasion of the United States. Released in the early 80s, it belongs to a large fraternity of films in which scrappy underdog Americans fight back against the seemingly insurmountable but of course ultimately very surmountable power of the Soviet empire. In a couple of decades, the Russians would pass the baton of villainy to people who look like me, though in our case there was no real empire to speak of, and so we were mostly small-batch insidious, our specialty less tank-and-jet and more suicide-bomb-level violence. It didn’t much matter; Red Dawn with Arabs instead of Soviets for villains would have still been shit.In 2012, almost 30 years after I first watched the original, someone decided to remake Red Dawn. This time, there was no Soviet empire to invade the mainland, and so instead the Chinese would have to do. Again, it didn’t much matter – the point isn’t geopolitical fidelity, the point is 90 minutes of rah-rahing American tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. Never back down, never surrender, that sort of thing.Problem is, China is a big market for movies. And so, at the last minute, for fear of missing out on millions in potential box office returns, the producers decided to change the villain. In the final cut of the Red Dawn remake, it’s North Korea that invades the United States. It’s always the sign of a well-crafted movie when you can change a central narrative beam in post-production and it doesn’t make any difference at all. I’m reminded of a guy in one of my old writing groups who, fearing his story didn’t have enough female representation, did a find-and-replace and changed every instance of “Sam” to “Samantha”, then went through and changed the pronouns accordingly, leaving everything else the same.View image in fullscreenAgain, it didn’t much matter. Except that it does, over time – this glaring disconnect between cultural self-image and pragmatic reality. In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire.A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one’s nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else.I’ve seen this person many times – they occupy a hallowed place in American culture, catered to by so many of the nation’s dominant cultural forces, from Monday Night Football to the Country Music Awards to the entirety of AM radio. It’s the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wild – and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity – it’s self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them. The man in the action movie looks one way, the man the cops just shot in a traffic stop another.View image in fullscreenToward the end of December 2023, the South African government brings charges of genocide against Israel at the international court of justice. The case rests on Israel’s wholesale destruction of health facilities and the blocking of aid as evidence that what is being destroyed here isn’t a single terror organization, but a whole people. Much of the initial South African brief relies on the words of Israeli officials themselves, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s referencing of the complete destruction of Amalek in the Bible.Among those who have been calling for an end to the relentless killing, the development inspires a set of conflicting emotions. First, there is the basic relief of watching some official entity – any entity – do something. Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the wellbeing of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.Second, there is the realization that of course it would be a country like South Africa that would take this step – a country deeply versed in the ugly mechanics of apartheid, for whose citizens checkpoints and forcefully sealed-off towns are not abstractions, but the very recent past that, from the safety of the present, everyone now claims they always opposed.Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing – an understanding that the machinery of the west has never had much of a capacity for self-diagnosis. Who does? Who that achieves power of this scale ever does?Waiting on a western judicial institution to cast judgment on a killing spree financed and endorsed by the west means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling. The narrative – as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other – demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the west is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.View image in fullscreenAnd so we must watch the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the international court of justice, it doesn’t support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean. We must watch the German government – whose police forces, in the name of fighting antisemitism, arrested Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire – come to Israel’s defense at the court.In time there will be findings of genocide. There will be warrants issued, even. The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly allotted thing. As though criminality remains criminal even when the powerful support, bankroll, or commit the crime.It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.In the summer of 2014, I began writing the first draft of my debut novel, American War. It’s a piece of speculative fiction set in the 2070s and covers the aftermath of a second civil war. I never thought of it as a particularly American book, but rather an attempt to superimpose stories from the other side of the planet onto the heart of the empire. It didn’t seem like a particularly clever narrative trick on my part.Three weeks or so after I finished the first draft, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. The novel would end up being published in April 2017 and come to be almost universally read as an exclusively American story, a literal prediction of where this country might be headed. A bidding war breaks out for the film rights. Time and again, various production company executives tell me how perfectly the novel has managed to capture this moment in American life, and I can’t help but think that the exact opposite is true. Something of American life has captured the novel. The word “dangerous” is used quite often, always as a compliment.Then, in January 2024, I receive an email from the director who was set to work on the American War adaptation, letting me know he and the production company are stepping away from the project. “Prudence suggests this is not the time for making movies about freedom fighters or terrorists (no matter which side of that argument one is on),” he writes.A few weeks earlier, a novelist I know tells me her appearance at a small book club has been canceled – the organizer tells her it’s because they “stand with Israel”. My friend is an American of half-Egyptian, half-Scottish descent. A Palestinian artist’s retrospective at the University of Indiana is shuttered. People who call for a ceasefire are demoted, fired, called antisemites and terrorist-supporters.View image in fullscreenIt all feels so petty, the stakes so low. On the other side of the planet entire bloodlines are being wiped out and here in the sheltered world we are subject to relatively pathetic indignities – loss of income, disinvitations, cold shoulders from people who in a different time might have been quite proud of themselves for having a Brown friend. Every now and then we hear about those instances when the stakes turned out not to be so low, when this passive punishment transformed into something much more active, sometimes deadly. But for the most part it’s just a constant trickle of reminders of one’s place in the hierarchy – and it is precisely because of this that it becomes so tempting to just shut up, let what’s going to happen happen to those people over there and then, when it’s done, ease into whatever opinion the people whose approval matters deem acceptable.I start to see this more often, as the body count climbs – this malleability of opinion. At a residency on the coast of Oregon, I read the prologue to this book; a couple of days later, one of the other writers decides to strike up a conversation.“I’m not a Zionist,” she says. “But you know, I’m not anti-Zionist either. It’s all just so complicated.”I have no idea what to say. I feel like an audience at a dress rehearsal.There’s a convenience to having modular opinions; it’s why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner tables you lengthen to accommodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing, so that one might always be able to say, “Well, we could never have known it would get this bad, but now, now everything has changed.”It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.How long can the fabric of a pleasing story hold? Presented the facts of the situation without label, without real-world anchor, like actors asked to read the screenplay and pick a role, how many Americans would instinctively choose that of the Palestinian calling for an end to occupation? The South African calling for an end to apartheid? The Haitian calling for self-rule? How many would want to believe, as so much of the culture here has always strained to believe, that they side with the underdog, the downtrodden who refuses to give up, the rebel in the face of empire? And then, should the scenes be transposed back to the unforgiving reality of the world as it is, how many, knowing the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves, would just as instinctively retreat into the comforting fold of empire?One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is out now in the UK published by Canongate. It will be released tomorrow, 25 February, in the United States by Knopf, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart.

      Spot illustrations by Ben Hickey More

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      Trump ‘surrendering to the Russians’ on Ukraine, top Democrat says

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      A senior Democratic lawmaker accused Donald Trump of “surrendering to the Russians” on Sunday, as Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff said talks between the US and Russia over Ukraine was “the only way to end the carnage”.In an interview on ABC News’ This Week, Democratic senator Jack Reed, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, hit out at Trump’s recent verbal attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and increased alignment with Russia.“Essentially, this is President Trump surrendering to the Russians,” Reed said. “This is not a statesman or a diplomat. This is just someone who admires Putin, does not believe in the struggle of the Ukrainians and is committed to cozying up to an autocrat.”But senior administration officials sought to side-step accusations that Trump’s re-positioning of US policies on Ukraine, including a possible deal for Ukraine to repay US military and financial support with rare-earth materials, amounted to a capitulation to the Russian position on the war.Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the mideast who revealed this week that he had “spent a lot of time with President Putin”, during a recent trip to Moscow, “talking, developing a friendship, a relationship with him”, declined to blame Russia for starting war in Ukraine, calling Ukraine’s ambitions to join Nato “a threat to the Russians”.“The war didn’t need to happen – it was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians,” Witkoff said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.“There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining Nato”, he said. “That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians and so we have to deal with that fact.”Witkoff’s remarks come days after he, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Russian officials over re-establishing diplomatic relations and a Russia-Ukraine peace deal.Ukrainian officials said they were not invited to the meeting, and later said they would not accept a peace deal imposed on them. But Ukraine’s position later appeared to shift after Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”.On Sunday, Zelenskyy said he wanted Trump to be a close partner to Ukraine, not just a mediator between two superpowers, the US and Russia, and would be willing to step down, if it would secure lasting peace for his country.“If, to achieve peace, you really need me to give up my post, I’m ready. I can exchange it for Nato [membership]”, he said. “I don’t plan to stay in power for decades” he added. “But we won’t let Putin stay in power over Ukrainian territories either.”That came as President Putin appointed the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, as a special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation with western nations “including the United States of America”. Dmitriev, considered the most US-savvy member of Russia’s elite, was part of the Russian delegation that met with US counterparts in Riyadh.Nato membership for Ukraine has all-but been ruled out by the US negotiators. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, confirmed to Fox News Sunday that no US troops would be part of any future peace-keeping force in Ukraine and dodged the question over responsibility for starting the bloody three-year conflict.“Does all the finger-pointing and pearl clutching make peace more likely? That’s the enduring question the president is asking. He wants peace, and if that’s the case, you’ve got to stare down the Russians, and Vladimir Putin, and who they’ve chosen to negotiate and have earnest conversations about difficult things,” Hegseth told his former colleague Shannon Bream.“Standing here and saying, ‘You’re good, you’re bad; you’re a dictator, you’re not a dictator; you invaded, you didn’t’, it’s not useful, it’s not productive. So President Trump isn’t getting drawn into that in unnecessary ways and as a result, we’re closer to peace than ever before,” Hegseth added.The White House continued its pushback against claims that it has pivoted to Russia’s position on the war. “President Trump’s peace through strength America First diplomacy effectively deterred Russia in his first term, and this war would have never started if he had never left office,” said the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in an email to the Wall Street Journal.Leavitt said Trump was “actively pressing both sides to end this brutal conflict once and for all”. More

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      Mexico’s Sheinbaum wins plaudits for cool head in dealings with Trump

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      As Donald Trump swings his sights from one region to the next, upturning diplomatic relations and confounding allies, leaders of former US partners have clashed with him and come off much the worse.But so far, one – Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum – has emerged relatively unscathed.With the US-Mexico border and the trade, drugs and migrants that cross it a focus of the Trump administration, Mexico is under intense pressure. Yet while Sheinbaum has made some concessions, she has also charmed Trump and won plaudits at home, with approval ratings that touch 80%.“Sheinbaum has kept a cool head, and the capacity to hold firm and react to Trump,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political scientist. “But Mexico is in a situation of emergency with the US. And it will have to play this game for four years straight.”Sheinbaum led Morena, a leftwing populist party, to a landslide victory in June last year, and had barely taken power when Trump won re-election in November.Many wondered how Sheinbaum, a climate scientist before she became a politician, would handle the US president. But the two have struck up a relationship, with Trump describing Sheinbaum as a “marvellous woman” even as he claims Mexico is “essentially run by cartels”.Since Trump announced a plan to hit all goods imported from Mexico with a 25% tariff, citing its alleged failure to stop migrants and fentanyl entering the US, Sheinbaum has offered to negotiate, while avoiding gestures of obeisance – such as Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s trip to Mar-a-Lago – or defiance – like Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s tirade against Trump on X.Sheinbaum has also shown a willingness to do more on fentanyl, with Mexican security forces notching a record seizure just days after Trump’s announcement, and underlined that Mexico was already doing a great deal to keep migrants away from the US-Mexico border.View image in fullscreenAt the same time, she picked battles that allowed her to show strength to a domestic audience while avoiding direct confrontation with Trump himself – for example, threatening Google with a lawsuit after it bowed to Trump and renamed international waters in the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on Google Maps.She has pledged to expand legal action against US gun manufacturers who produce the majority of weapons used in Mexico, and implicitly turned Trump’s rhetoric on its head by warning that her country would not tolerate an “invasion” of its national sovereignty by US forces.“Sheinbaum found the sweet spot between the submission of Trudeau and the bravado of Petro,” said Pérez Ricart.The first real crunch came earlier this month, as the deadline for Trump’s tariff threat loomed.Sheinbaum was poised to announce retaliatory measures when last-minute talks defused the situation, with Trump agreeing to delay the tariffs for a month in exchange for Mexico sending 10,000 more soldiers to the border.It is unclear how those extra soldiers will reduce the flow of fentanyl, a substance so potent that only relatively small volumes are moved, and the great majority of which is trafficked through ports of entry by US citizens.“What I see is a show for the Mexican and American publics,” said Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US. “It’s clear that Trump is talking to his base and Sheinbaum to hers. But we don’t know what is happening in the conversations between them.”“The president bought time – but the negotiation is not over,” Bárcena added.The next deadline, on 4 March, for Trump’s tariffs will likely bring another round of feverish talks, as Mexico tries to convince the US of results made on fentanyl and migration.“But if we don’t know what they want or how they want to measure it, then Trump can keep threatening us from here to the end of his government,” said Bárcena.The US has also ratcheted up the pressure by adding six Mexican organised crime groups – including the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels, two of the world’s biggest drug trafficking organisations – to its list of foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs).While the designation of cartels as FTOs itself does not authorise US military action in Mexico, some fear it is a first step towards it.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth recently said “all options will be on the table” when it comes to dealing with the cartels. “Ultimately, we will hold nothing back to secure the American people,” he added.Meanwhile, Mexico’s economy edges towards recession. The mere threat of tariffs has already helped dragged growth projections down, with Mexico’s central bank predicting 0.6% GDP growth for 2025.That makes staving off tariffs and holding the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement together only more important for Sheinbaum.“For 30 years, Mexico anchored itself to a policy of trade and development in North America. It bet its growth, its identity, on integration into North America,” said Pérez Ricart. “And now this idea is being challenged. Trump doesn’t believe in it. This is a very delicate situation for Sheinbaum, and for the country.” More

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      No matter how distasteful we find Trump and Vance over Europe, they speak a blunt truth | Simon Jenkins

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      It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard. He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.Yes, these men are mendacious and hypocritical. Trump claims that Zelenskyy “refuses to have elections” and that he is “very low in the polls” despite recent polling showing that he still has a majority of Ukrainian support. As for the threat to free speech “from within”, the Associated Press is banned from White House briefings for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, and Trump’s friend Elon Musk thinks CBS’s “lying” journalists “deserve a long prison sentence”.Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?If the rest of the world has screwed up – while the US has stayed free and rich for two and a half centuries – that is the world’s problem. Americans have spent a fortune these past 50 years trying to improve life on Earth and, frankly, it has failed. To hell with diplomatic etiquette.As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone.Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing. It was just another device to make the US pay for Europe’s defence. Not any more. The US, says the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, “is no longer the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. Bang goes plausible nuclear deterrence.In reality, these talking points are not new, though they have not previously been expressed so brutally by an administration. In various guises, they have lurked beneath the surface of US isolationism for more than a century. To win an election, Woodrow Wilson swore that the first world war was “one with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us”. Franklin Roosevelt promised the same of the second. He promised American mothers “again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”. Neither kept his word.US public opinion can be patriotic when a war is on, as during Vietnam. But otherwise it has been persistently anti-interventionist. Kennedy might have pleaded global sacrifice and to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”. But that was largely fine words for foreign consumption.What Trump/Vance are now saying to western Europe is get serious. The cold war is over. You know Russia has no desire to occupy western Europe. This proclaimed threat is a fantasy got up by what a wise president, Dwight Eisenhower, called the US’s military-industrial complex, long practised at extracting profit from fear. If Keir Starmer really wants “to give priority to defence”, he can slash his own health and welfare budgets to pay for it. But is he really that threatened, or does it merely sound good?Joe Biden was meticulous in the degree of help he extended to Kyiv. Now is the inevitable moment of extrication, but it will require a very difficult ceasefire to precede it. Without a substantial guarantee from Washington, it is hard to see anything other than eventual defeat for Kyiv. Ukraine could yet prove a rerun of the US in South Vietnam.With a minimum of delicacy, Trump/Vance have decided to expose the mix of platitude, bluff and profiteering that underpinned much of the cold war. Nato’s victory in 1989 suggested the need for a shift to a more nuanced multipolar world, one that was never properly defined.Trump/Vance are right that a realignment is badly needed. They have chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it. We can be as rude to them as we like, but they will have US democracy on their side.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More