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      The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? | George Monbiot

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      All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him. We know that Trump can brook no challenge to his hegemony. Russia is no threat to US dominance, but Europe, with a combined economy similar to that of the US, and a powerful diplomatic and global political presence, could be.Putin has long sought to break up the EU, using the European far right as his proxies: this is why he invested so heavily in Brexit. Now Trump, in turn, could use Putin as his proxy, to attack a rival centre of power. If Trump helps Russia sweep through Ukraine, Putin could then issue an ultimatum to other frontline and eastern European states: leave the EU, leave Nato and become a client state like Belarus, or you’re next. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán might agree to this. If Călin Georgescu wins in Romania in May, he might too.What form could US support for Putin in Ukraine take? It could involve intelligence sharing. It could involve permanently withdrawing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service from Ukraine, which is strategically crucial there, while making it available to the Russian armed forces. Already, the US government has threatened to nix the service if Ukraine doesn’t hand over its minerals, as reparations for being invaded. This is how Trump operates: blackmailing desperate people who are seeking to defend themselves against an imperial war, regardless of past alliances. In the extreme case, Trump’s support for Russia might involve military equipment and financial backing, or even joint US-Russian operations, in the Arctic or elsewhere.Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.All this is now overseen by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, in charge of the CIA, NSA and 16 other agencies. After she recited conspiracy fictions seeded by the Syrian and Russian governments, she was widely accused of being a “Russian asset” or a “Russian puppet”. At what point do we conclude that by sharing intelligence with the US, the UK might as well be sharing it with Russia?View image in fullscreenDepending on whose definitions you accept, the US has either 11 or 13 military bases and listening stations in the UK. They include the misnamed RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, actually a US air force base, from which it deploys F-35 jets; RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, in reality a US NSA base conducting military espionage and operational support; RAF Croughton, part-operated by the CIA, which allegedly used the base to spy on Angela Merkel among many others; and RAF Fylingdales, part of the US Space Surveillance Network. If the US now sides with Russia against the UK and Europe, these could just as well be Russian bases and listening stations.Then we come to our weapon systems. Like everyone without security clearance, I can make no well-informed statement on the extent to which any of them, nuclear or conventional, are operationally independent of the US. But I know, to give just one example, that among the crucial components of our defence are F-35 stealth jets, designed and patented in the US. How stealthy they will turn out to be, when the US has the specs, the serial numbers and the software, is a question that needs an urgent answer.Nor can I make any confident statement about the extent to which weapons designed here might be dependent on US central processing units and other digital technologies, or on US systems such as Starlink, owned by Musk, or GPS, owned by the US Space Force. Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military? At the very least, the US will know better than any other power how to combat them, because our weapons are more or less the same as theirs. In other words, if the US is now our enemy, the enemy is inside the gate.Much as I hate to admit it, the UK needs to rearm (though cutting the aid budget to find the money, as Keir Starmer intends, is astonishingly shortsighted). I reluctantly came to this conclusion as Trump’s numbers began to stack up last July. But, if they are fatally compromised by US penetration, rearmament might have to begin with the complete abandonment of our existing weapons and communications systems.This may need to start very soon. On 24 February, the UN general assembly voted on a Ukrainian resolution, co-sponsored by the UK and other European nations, condemning Russia’s invasion. Unsurprisingly, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary and several small and easily cowed states voted against it. But so did the US andIsrael. This, more clearly than any other shift, exposes the new alignment. An axis of autocracy, facilitating an imperial war of aggression, confronts nations committed (albeit to varying degrees) to democracy and international law.For many years, we have been urged to trust the UK’s oppressive “security state”. Yes, this security state is yanked around like a fish on a line by the US government, with such catastrophic outcomes as the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Yes, it is engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens. But, its defenders have long argued, we should suck all this up because the security state is essential to our defence from hostile foreign actors. In reality, our entanglement, as many of us have long warned, presents a major threat to national security. By tying our defence so closely to the US, our governments have created an insecurity state.I hope you can now see what a terrible mistake the UK has made, and how we should have followed France in creating more independent military and security systems. Disentangling from the US will be difficult and expensive. Failing to do so could carry a far higher price.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Transgender US military personnel must be identified and stood down, says Pentagon memo

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      Transgender service members will be separated from the US military unless they receive an exemption, according to a Pentagon memo filed in court on Wednesday – essentially banning them from joining or serving in the armed forces.Donald Trump signed an executive order in January that took aim at transgender troops in a personal way – at one point saying that a man identifying as a woman was “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member”.This month, the Pentagon had said that the US military would no longer allow transgender individuals to join and would stop performing or facilitating procedures associated with gender transition for service members.Wednesday’s late-evening memo went further. It said that the Pentagon must create a procedure to identify troops who are transgender within 30 days and then within 30 days of that, must start to separate them from the military.“It is the policy of the United States government to establish high standards for service member readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” said the memo, dated 26 February.“This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria or who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria.”There is no requirement for transgender troops to self identify and the Pentagon doesn’t have a precise number.The Pentagon said waivers would be granted only “provided there is a compelling government interest in retaining the service member that directly supports warfighting capabilities”.It added that for a waiver, troops must also be able to meet a number of criteria, including that the service member “demonstrates 36 consecutive months of stability in the service member’s sex without clinically significant distress”.The military has about 1.3 million active duty personnel, according to Department of Defense data. Transgender rights advocates say there are as many as 15,000 transgender service members. Officials say the number is in the low thousands.The move, which goes further than restrictions Trump placed on transgender service members during his first administration, was described as unprecedented by advocates. “The scope and severity of this ban is unprecedented. It is a complete purge of all transgender individuals from military service,” said Shannon Minter of the National Center For Lesbian Rights (NCLR).The memo was filed in court as part of a lawsuit brought by NCLR and GLAD Law. The suit challenges the constitutionality of the January executive order and argues that it violates the equal protection component of the fifth amendment.This month, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said people with gender dysphoria already in the military would be “treated with dignity and respect”. 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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      Trump plans to cut more than 90% of USAid foreign aid contracts

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      The Trump administration said it is eliminating more than 90% of the US Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60bn in overall US assistance around the world.The cuts detailed by the administration would leave few surviving USAid projects for advocates to try to save in what are current court battles with the administration.The Trump administration outlined its plans in an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press and in filings in one of those federal lawsuits.The supreme court intervened in that case late Wednesday and temporarily blocked a court order requiring the administration to release billions of dollars in foreign aid by midnight.Wednesday’s disclosures also give an idea of the scale of the administration’s retreat from US aid and development assistance overseas, and from decades of US policy that foreign aid helps US interests by stabilizing other countries and economies and building alliances.Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government. Both men say USAid projects advance a liberal agenda and are a waste of money.Trump on 20 January ordered what he said would be a 90-day program-by-program review of which foreign assistance programs deserved to continue, and cut off all foreign assistance funds almost overnight. The funding freeze has stopped thousands of US-funded programs abroad, as the administration and Musk’s “department of government efficiency” teams have pulled the majority of USAid staff off the job through forced leave and firings.In the federal court filings on Wednesday, nonprofits owed money on contracts with USAid describe Trump political appointees and members of Musk’s teams terminating USAid’s contracts around the world at breakneck speed, without time for any meaningful review, they say.“’There are MANY more terminations coming, so please gear up!”’ lawyers for the nonprofits wrote, quoting an email sent by a USAid official to staff on Monday.The state department said Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, had reviewed the terminations.In all, the Trump administration said it will eliminate 5,800 of 6,200 multi-year USAid contract awards, for a cut of $54bn. Another 4,100 of 9,100 state department grants were being eliminated, for a cut of $4.4bn.The Washington Free Beacon was the first to report on the memo.The memo described the administration as spurred by a federal court order that gave officials until the end of the day Wednesday to lift the Trump administration’s monthlong block on foreign aid funding.“In response, State and USAid moved rapidly,” targeting USAid and state department foreign aid programs in vast numbers for contract terminations, the memo said.The nonprofits, among thousands of contractors, owed billions of dollars in payment since the freeze began, call the en masse contract terminations a maneuver to get around complying with the order to lift the funding freeze temporarily.Trump administration officials – after repeated warnings from the federal judge in the case – also said on Wednesday they had finally begun paying USAid bills again after the month-long halt on payments, freeing for delivery a few million of billions of dollars owed. More

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      Trump cabinet flunkies hail wannabe Caesar and Elon, his oligarch pal

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      On Tuesday, just over a mile from the White House, the classicist Mary Beard spoke to an audience about Roman emperors. “An autocrat is somebody who kills you when he’s being his most generous,” she remarked. “You go to dinner, you think, wow, this is wonderful! But the generosity of the autocrat is always potentially lethal.”On Wednesday, Donald Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. The mood was warm and convivial and, some might say, generous. Housing secretary Scott Turner offered a prayer that included: “Thank you, God, for President Trump.”Was it just an accident that the TV camera framed the scene as the antithesis of DEI? Viewers could see seven men in suits with Trump in the middle, then another row of seven men in suits sitting behind. Nearly all of them were white. (Yes, there were women and people of colour at the meeting – but not many.)The Vice-president, JD Vance, was in attendance but there was no doubt whom this emperor had appointed as consul. Trump invited Elon Musk, the tech billionaire running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to speak before any of his cabinet secretaries after claiming that everyone present was supportive.Wearing a black “Make America great again” cap, Musk jokingly referred to himself as “humble tech support” – people laughed dutifully – and claimed that his haphazard efforts to take a chainsaw to the federal government can save a trillion dollars and dig the country out of debt. “It’s not an optional thing, it’s an essential thing,” he said. “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”It sounds fine in theory. But Doge, mostly consisting of young male software engineers fuelled by pizza and Red Bull, has been a disaster. It fired the people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile then hastily tried to rehire them, only to find they were hard to contact because they could not access their work email accounts. It claimed to have saved $8bn on a terminated contract that was actually worth only $8m. Musk falsely stated that the US spent $50m on condoms for Gazans. And it emerged this week Doge quietly deleted the top five items from its public ledger of alleged savings after they turned out to be nothing of the sort.Musk – who brought similar unholy chaos to Twitter when he bought it – admitted to the cabinet that Doge will make mistakes, but said it will fix them quickly. “So, for example, with USAid, one of the things we accidentally canceled briefly was Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”Not reassuring.Then came the most autocratic episode of the meeting. Trump, both generous and lethal, asked his cabinet: “Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw him out of here.”To the crocodiles? Or as his pal Vladimir Putin favours, from a high window? From this assembly of fawners, flatterers and flunkies, there was nervous laughter and applause.Triumphant, the president assured reporters: “They have a lot of respect for Elon, that he’s doing this, and some disagree a little bit but I will tell you for the most part I think everyone’s not only happy – they’re thrilled.”Game respects game. Musk, a fan boy of far-right movements all over Europe, showed an impressively instinctive feel for totalitarianism.He said: “President Trump has put together I think the best cabinet ever, literally, and I do not give false praise. This is an incredible group of people. I don’t think such a talented team has ever been assembled. I think it’s literally the best cabinet the country’s ever had … ”Then came a telling slip from the world’s richest man: “I think the company [sic] should be incredibly appreciative of the people in this room.”The cabinet on which Musk lavished such praise includes Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine conspiracy theorist who once dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park. Less Marvel’s Avengers than Star Wars cantina.Kennedy was asked by reporters about a measles outbreak in Texas in which a child reportedly died, the first measles fatality in the US for a decade. His lackluster response: “It’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”The whole meeting was yet another sorry exercise in worshipping an authoritarian and normalising a bully. Musk tried to defend the emails he sent to government employees, asking what they did last week, as not a “performance review” but a “pulse check review” because some people on the government payroll are dead.Trump rounded off the meeting by observing: “The country’s got bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.”Yet as Jon Stewart noted this week on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Doge will not touch the $3bn in subsidies given to oil and gas companies, a hedge fund loophole worth $1.3bn a year, or the $2tn given to defence contractors to build a fighter jet that will soon be obsolete. “This is where the real money is,” Stewart said.Not even a functioning democracy ever did much about those. So hopes for a country run by a wannabe Caesar and his oligarch pal are not high. More

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      Friedrich Merz was the most pro-US politician in Germany – his shift could be historic for Europe | Jörg Lau for Europe |

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      It is hard to overstate the importance of Friedrich Merz’s urgent message to the nation after his win in the German elections. This, after all, is the beginning of a new, dangerous era in European security. It would be his “absolute priority”, Merz said, immediately after victory for the CDU/CSU was confirmed, to create unity in Europe as quickly as possible, “so that, step by step, we can achieve independence from the US”. He added: “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television programme.”Indeed. For the leader of the conservative CDU, a lifelong believer in the transatlantic security alliance, this is a significant reversal. And it is highly personal for Merz: there is hardly a more pro-American politician in Germany than the man who worked for the investment company BlackRock and was the long-serving chairman of the influential lobbying group Atlantik-Brücke (Atlantic Bridge).That makes the unfavourable things the chancellor-elect had to say about the US government all the more remarkable. The interference from Washington in the German election campaign had been “no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow”, Merz said, referring to Elon Musk’s ever more frenzied support for the far-right AfD, and to the polemics of the US vice-president, JD Vance, against the CDU’s “firewall” policy, which excludes cooperating with the Putin-friendly party.Germany was under “massive pressure from two sides”, and Donald Trump’s government was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”, Merz said, warning that it was unclear whether, by the Nato summit in June, “we will still be talking about Nato in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defence capability much more quickly”.The unusual frankness of his remarks reflects a deep frustration that has built up in traditionally pro-US conservative circles in Germany, particularly over interference led by Musk and Vance. Their coordinated campaign sought to undercut the centre-right Christian Democrats in favour of the far right in the run-up to the vote. Musk posted a barrage of tweets on his X platform, including some on election day. He has also tweeted his support for one of the most extreme proponents of the AfD, Björn Höcke – a man twice convicted for using Nazi slogans.Even more intrusive were Vance’s repeated statements linking the CDU’s firewall policy, which keeps the AfD out of power, with the US security guarantee for Europe. The vice-president’s menacing message to Germany was: if you continue to exclude the far right from power, the US cannot do much for you.It was heartening to hear the chancellor-elect refute this unprecedented meddling in Germany’s affairs. He must know that the vindictive Trump administration will most likely want to make him regret his choice of words.There is an irony here in that Merz had tried his own brand of Trumpism just weeks ago, when he reacted to a string of violent attacks in Germany with the announcement of a tough migration policy that he would enact “on day one” of his chancellorship. He put pressure on the centre-left parties, the Social Democrats and the Greens. If they refused to support him, he would have no choice but to accept the votes of the far right for his proposals. To the shock of many, Merz’s non-binding motion (which included controversial measures such as pushing back all asylum seekers at the border) was passed with the votes of the AfD.That left Merz with a mixed message for the rest of the campaign: he promised radical change but continued to vow non-cooperation with his far-right competition. Mainstream voters who wanted a more restrictive migration policy, but not with the help of the extreme right, were left with doubts: how trustworthy was Merz? Would he do it again? The conservatives’ underwhelming result in the election is testimony to his miscalculation.To make matters worse, Merz had opened himself to AfD goading that he lacked the stamina to follow through and form a rightwing majority coalition. Our hand remains outstretched, the AfD co-leader, Alice Weidel, has repeated maliciously since election day, but if you keep shutting us out, we will crush you next time.Expect to hear this tune a lot in the coming weeks. Merz’s gambit backfired. His only option now is coalition talks with the diminished Social Democrats. If both parties manage to form a government, it can hardly be called a “grand coalition” any more. The two “people’s parties” barely add up to a majority in parliament.Yet there is an opportunity that arises from these pressures. The Social Democrats may find it easier to compromise on migration policy when in coalition with the conservatives. The next government urgently needs to exert more control on the border to counter the far-right narrative.Merz’s blunt assessment of an emerging post-transatlantic order opens a long overdue debate in Germany. It is, indeed, a head-spinning moment for the country’s strategic defence community, a reversal of core beliefs that have guided Germany for the past 80 years.It was the CDU that tied Germany irreversibly to the western alliance. This was a major historical achievement, because it was not at all popular at the time, especially among German conservatives who had habitually been anti-US. Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar chancellor, risked all the political capital he had when he steered a fiercely anti-western and pacifist Germany towards rearmament and Nato membership in 1955. What’s more, he rejected the alternative path suggested by the French president, Charles de Gaulle, to opt for a European defence community.Trump has now turned Germany’s conviction on its head. All German governments from Adenauer onwards, irrespective of left or right leanings, had argued against the French project of “European strategic autonomy” for fear that it would weaken Nato. A security partnership with the US was the indispensable guarantee of peace on the continent, the thinking went. But now the US government is calling Nato into question, thereby making a more independent Europe a necessity.The consequences are not confined to the continent. Merz wants to explore closer security cooperation with London, and he already has his eye on the UK’s nuclear arsenal, as well as France’s. What a turnaround: Germany, once proud of phasing out nuclear energy, is shopping for a new nuclear umbrella.Ironically, these worrying turns might help Merz succeed in forming a coalition with the Social Democrats. Reforming the strict fiscal regime known as the Schuldenbremse, or “debt brake”, has always been a source of friction between them. No more. The rigid limit on borrowing, enshrined in the German constitution, must go. Everybody knows this: there is no way to replace US security protection while upholding a balanced budget.Changing the constitutional debt brake requires a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, which leads to the final irony: Merz will have to make a deal with the parties on the left to win their support for loosening spending. More borrowing for defence, but also for infrastructure investments. Only a conservative could do this, like only Richard Nixon could go to China.There is quite a measure of poetic justice in this development. Merz has gone from flirting with Trumpism to easing Germany’s austerity policies in just a matter of weeks.

      Jörg Lau is an international correspondent for the German weekly Die Zeit More

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      Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ debacle is no joke – this is how authoritarians get started

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      Last week, the Associated Press sued White House officials for violating its free press rights by punishing the organization for defying Donald Trump’s executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Unfortunately, on Monday, a federal judge refused to immediately strike down the White House’s retaliatory treatment of the AP. But the case is far from over.Granting access to the White House on the suppressive conditions set by the Trump administration is a blow to the first amendment and the free press. If the retaliation against the AP is allowed to stand, more restrictions on the press are certain to follow, creating Kremlin-like conditions that will affect all Americans who might question, or be suspected of questioning, the Trump party line.This is why a seemingly trivial issue – what to call the Gulf – is freighted with importance. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf unmistakably delivers his “America first” message. He has every right to his message. But he doesn’t have the right to turn the press into his messenger.The controversy began on Trump’s first day back in office, when he issued a unilateral order that an international sea, known for centuries as the Gulf of Mexico, henceforth be named the Gulf of America. Certain organizations, such as Google, immediately complied by changing the Gulf’s name on Google Maps and redirecting searches for “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America”.However, the AP, along with several other news organizations, resisted. Noting that the Trump order had no effect outside the US, the AP made an editorial judgment that its status as an international reporting agency was best served by continuing to refer to the Gulf by the name known to global readers.The Trump administration retaliated by barring AP reporters from the press pool that covers media events at the White House or on Air Force One, and on Tuesday it went further, announcing it would determine which organizations had access to the pool – traditionally the job of the White House Correspondents’ Association. While limited seating capacity may give the White House some discretion about who gets to be in the press pool, the first amendment does not permit that discretion to be used to punish the press or to limit access to outlets favorable to Trump. As the AP stated in its complaint: “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government. The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech” by controlling access.As tempting as it is to follow Shakespeare in shrugging the shoulders at “what’s in a name,” we should turn to history to learn what follows when authoritarian leaders start out with seemingly harmless verbal imperialisms. One of the first actions Hitler took after seizing power in 1933 was to scrub streets and public spaces of names that reflected Jewish influence or Weimar republicanism in favor of tributes to National Socialism. Stalin celebrated his own greatness by changing Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd, to “Stalingrad”. Before Stalingrad, there was the switch from Petrograd to Leningrad. In today’s China, the name “Tibet” has disappeared from Chinese maps in favor of the Mandarin name, “Xizang”.It is hard to know how seriously to take Trump’s flagging of territorial, as well as verbal, imperialism. He has suggested the US reclaim the Panama Canal Zone, buy Greenland from Denmark, incorporate Canada as a 51st state, and take over the Gaza Strip for resort real estate development. Even if these are mere paper ambitions, the disdain Trump shows for international law is already doing irreparable harm.Appealing to his Maga base with the “America first” rhetoric in the Gulf, he is selling out Ukraine to Putin’s Russia in ways reminiscent of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938 by ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Ignoring this lesson of history – in Munich of all places – this month, JD Vance stopped short of endorsing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party by name, but made clear that the Trump administration would be happy if Europe adopted the same anti-immigrant policies that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf signaled.The ripple effect of Trump commandeering global waters reaches beyond the sea to all Americans. His actions must be considered alongside his other executive orders on his first day back in office, declaring the arrival of immigrants at the southern border an “invasion” and suspending grants of asylum, no matter how dire the situation of refugees. When we let Trump scapegoat vulnerable immigrants for this country’s – and the world’s – problems, we are in fascist territory. That is why Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America is no laughing matter. It expresses a level of disrespect for Mexico that could well be a precursor for how strongmen treat peoples whom they first strip of dignity. Substitute Jew, Catholic, Turk, Armenian, Arab, gay or transgender for Trump’s talk of an invasion of aliens across the Gulf, and you get the point.What the Gulf needs is not more nationalistic power grabs but international cooperation to tackle its most pressing problems – worsening pollution, rising sea levels from the climate crisis, intensifying hurricanes, crumbling infrastructure, and loss of shoreline and habitat. Far from squabbling over what to call the Gulf, the US and Mexico should recognize that no one owns the Gulf; it belongs to nature.In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet made her “what’s in a name” speech to declare love for Romeo even though he bore the family name of her family’s blood enemy. It didn’t turn out well for Juliet, and it won’t turn out well for us if we let Trump intimidate the AP because its editors had the courage to stand up to his bullying.

      Jeffrey Abramson is author of Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought. Jack E Davis is the author of The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018. More

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      The Guardian view on Starmer’s aid cuts: they won’t buy security, but they will undermine it | Editorial

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      Politics is about choices. Some are forced on governments by circumstance. Others are self‑imposed. Labour’s decision to cut the aid budget to “pay” for increased defence spending is firmly in the latter category. It is also wrong – forcing the world’s poor to pay for Britain’s safety. This is a false economy. Cutting aid will make the world more unstable, not less. The very crises that fuel conflict – poverty, failed states, climate disasters and mass displacement – will only worsen with less development funding. Labour’s logic is self‑defeating: diverting money from aid to defence does not buy security; it undermines it.The numbers tell the story. Despite government attempts to inflate the amounts involved, the extra £5bn‑£6bn for defence is tiny relative to Britain’s GDP. The UK could easily absorb this through borrowing – especially in a global financial system where sterling is heavily traded – or, if the government prefers, through a modest wealth tax. Yet Sir Keir Starmer has chosen to frame this as a zero-sum game, where aid must give way to security. Why? Because this is not about economic necessity – it’s about political positioning. Labour wants to prove that it can be fiscally disciplined even when the numbers don’t demand it. It wants to neutralise Tory attacks, even when the real battle is over priorities, not affordability.It is also a move that aligns with Donald Trump’s worldview. The US president wants to close down the US government’s main overseas aid agency, treating it as an expensive indulgence rather than a pillar of foreign policy. Sir Keir is set to go to Washington this week. A UK prime minister that echoes Mr Trump’s “America first” instincts on defence and aid may find the meeting more congenial. If so, Sir Keir may be taking the idea that “the meek shall inherit the earth” a little too literally.Labour doesn’t just believe in fiscal discipline, it believes that it must believe in fiscal discipline and it constructs a justification for that belief. The problem is this: by accepting Conservative trade‑offs, Labour locks itself into an orthodoxy that it may later need to break. In a volatile world, Britain – outside the EU – must boost high-value exports and cut reliance on fragile supply chains. Even under Joe Biden, the UK was kept out of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, which strengthened transatlantic industrial policy. Yet when does Downing Street admit Britain’s real limit is productive capacity – not budget deficits?Britain’s fiscal constraint is artificial, but its resource constraints are real. Energy, food and manufacturing are matters of national security, not just market functions. Without investment, dependence on key imports makes Britain vulnerable to supply-chain shocks and price inflation. That should make the announcements by Labour’s Ed Miliband and Steve Reed matter. If every pound spent requires a cut elsewhere, neither would have had much to say.Sir Keir often presents himself as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue – claiming to be adapting to circumstances rather than adhering to dogma. But such pragmatism is itself a belief system, one that treats capitalism’s rules as unchangeable, markets as beyond politics, and history as a one‑way street where past mistakes justify permanent, crippling caution. In doing so, he isn’t just rejecting alternatives – he’s rewriting history to suggest they were never an option to begin with.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More