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Posted
24 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Lithuania’s former foreign minister has similar thoughts.  There will be a lot of lurching and spasmodic outbursts because that’s just the way this administration is. But there’s also a growing acceptance that the rest of the world can’t be cowed and browbeaten into submission when a primary isn’t at stake. 
 

The bad news, of course, is that cracking down at home to offset concessions you have to make abroad is the well-trodden autocrat path. 

image.thumb.jpeg.629770965027a031ba05060c8c0f221d.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.db216e089e5055c14d4846743e6ca4ac.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.2fe896e84bff38b211aa2e5b6849ea51.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.10a3cbf08d0a682a4dc441c2b2d98646.jpeg

 

Interesting, but when the lurching and spasmodic outbursts come in the form of global economic crises, backstabbing our allies, and allowing our enemies to attack other sovereign nations, I think this may be a little bit of an optimistic take.  

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Posted
1 minute ago, Biff Tannen said:

Interesting, but when the lurching and spasmodic outbursts come in the form of global economic crises, backstabbing our allies, and allowing our enemies to attack other sovereign nations, I think this may be a little bit of an optimistic take.  

True and they also use spouse batterer psychology all the time. “At least he didn’t hit me today.”  

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Posted
30 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

True and they also use spouse batterer psychology all the time. “At least he didn’t hit me today.”  

Exactly. Words are wind. Fuck JD Vance. 

 

 

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Posted
3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Easy peasy.  Stop maintaining the street in front of the embassy, stop delivering water, stop taking sewage...because all of those municipal entities follow local DEI-type rules, and we KNOW the embassy doesn't want to receive any DEI services.  Malicious compliance and all that.

 

3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  You win by playing your opponent, not by strutting around the chess board.  Sacrifice a pawn, rope him into giving you the checkmate you're aiming for as he's gloating over the pawn he "totally destroyed, the likes of which no one has ever seen before!" -- that's a win.

 

 

Which is it young feller? 

 

 

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Posted
3 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

 

 

Which is it young feller? 

 

 

Oh, Sweden has the pieces to tell Trump to fuck off.  So they should.

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Posted
16 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Vance gave some unusually measured and in some places even conciliatory remarks in an interview for the Munich Security Conference leaders’. Really a contrast in tone to basically everything coming from his office.

- Acknowledged that Russia is asking too much in negotiations and taking fewer swipes at Ukrainians

- Almost statesman-esque in the comments on NATO spending, framing it as a goal we all agree to and that the real question is how to get there quickly 

- Even some soft-pedaling of his hostile and antagonistic February speech where he raged out over alleged censorship; instead talking about the need to balance security and values with rights.

My sense is that someone told him that this administration is racking up Ls and they need to get positive movement from Europeans on trade and at the NATO summit since there’s basically no domestic appetite to have pointless food fights with Europe. 
 

 

Don't worry, he balanced it out by displaying his complete lack of knowledge of nuclear energy and how it relates to nuclear weapons.

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Posted
16 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Lithuania’s former foreign minister has similar thoughts.  There will be a lot of lurching and spasmodic outbursts because that’s just the way this administration is. But there’s also a growing acceptance that the rest of the world can’t be cowed and browbeaten into submission when a primary isn’t at stake. 
 

The bad news, of course, is that cracking down at home to offset concessions you have to make abroad is the well-trodden autocrat path. 

image.thumb.jpeg.629770965027a031ba05060c8c0f221d.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.db216e089e5055c14d4846743e6ca4ac.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.2fe896e84bff38b211aa2e5b6849ea51.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.10a3cbf08d0a682a4dc441c2b2d98646.jpeg

 

There are some really good and key observations in there, though.  Not praise for the situation, or Vance, just observations of the current reality.

- We thought we could shove the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break lots of things" down literally everyone else's throat.  And that is "simply not acceptable to them."  

- We have utterly fucked ourselves on defense sales.  We are not a reliable partner, in any respect.  Would you entrust an unreliable, even backstabbing, partner with things essential to your security and survival?  You'd be an idiot if you did any more than you absolutely had to.  We can't really unfuck ourselves here.

- you can broligarch (perfect word for our current government) your way to the highest echelons of power in the US, but apparently that doesn't help you change things in Europe.  Not that the system in Europe is perfect - far from it - but it IS at least still somewhat designed to reflect some will of the people and an interest in a common good.  That is utterly incompatible with the US approach.

- but really, most of the above comes down to this: "the first victim of Trump's disruption was trust.  It was a very expensive commodity that was built up through decades of hard work and it will be very tough to regain."  That's really it.

Every choice is "what do I lose, and what will I gain."  Strategic entities make trade-offs.  Truly, I don't see much of anything of value that we will gain by Trump's approach.  But let's imagine that we marginally improve our trade deficit in the immediate term, and we call that a gain.  What will we have lost?  We will have lost the currency that allowed us to make favorable deals - trade, military, strategic, intelligence, everything - for 80 years: TRUST.  We are erratic, untrustworthy, and frankly, openly hostile (walking back the tone by JD doesn't change what everyone already knows because of the many words they've already said: this admin is openly hostile to and dripping with contempt for Europe).  We are not trusted.  We will not be trusted again in my lifetime.  And that's the absolutely correct decision by Europe.  We have lost so much.....for fucking what?

To keep with the chess metaphor, we aggressively brought out capital pieces to knock over a couple of pawns, and now we're strutting around the room bragging about the brutality we wrought, we captured two pieces, they captured none!  When long-term, we just set up the board in a way that our capital pieces are now fucked in future moves.  They are going to spend the next decades either neutered because they will be on the defensive, or they're going to get outright taken out because we stupidly put them in a vulnerable, indefensible position.  We just traded our get of two pawns today for our loss of our bishops, knights, and queen in the next 15 moves.  Stupid.

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Posted

Seems that this could be a big deal, but I honestly don't know enough beyond: peace = good; Erdogan benefiting = bad.

Kurdish Insurgent Group Says It Is Ending Conflict With Turkish State
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., said that it would lay down its arms and disband, a decision that could reverberate in neighboring countries.

A Kurdish militia group that has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state for four decades said on Monday that it would lay down its arms and disband, a decision that could reshape Turkish politics and reverberate in neighboring countries.

The announcement by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish acronym, P.K.K., came a few months after its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, urged the group to disarm and disband. In his February message, he said the group’s armed struggle had outlived its initial purpose and that further progress in the struggle for Kurdish rights could be achieved through politics.

The P.K.K. began as a secessionist group that sought to create an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority. More recently, it has said that it sought greater rights for Kurds inside Turkey. It is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and other countries.

In a statement on Monday, the group echoed Mr. Ocalan’s call, saying that it had “carried the Kurdish issue to a level where it can be solved by democratic politics, and the P.K.K. has completed its mission in that sense.”

A recent congress by the group’s leaders in northern Iraq had decided to end “the work under the name of P.K.K.’’

The group said Mr. Ocalan should lead the process of disarming, and it called on Turkey’s Parliament to take part. The move could end a conflict that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

It was unclear what would happen next. Mr. Ocalan has been held in near isolation in a prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara after his capture by Turkish intelligence in 1999. The P.K.K. and pro-Kurdish politicians have called for his release, or at least for a loosening of the restrictions on him to allow him to oversee the disarmament process.

Many Kurds in Turkey have also expressed hopes that the end of the conflict would lead the government to formally expand Kurdish cultural and educational rights, but no new legislation on such issues appears imminent.

The long conflict, in which P.K.K. militants bombed civilian areas and the Turkish military responded with great force, has led to pitched battles in Kurdish-majority cities.

Monday’s announcement is a boon for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He can claim to have done what his predecessors failed to do, and the P.K.K.’s dissolution could expand his support among Kurds, which many analysts suspect that he covets to change the Constitution and seek a third presidential term.

In a social media post, Omar Celik, a spokesman for Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party, said the P.K.K.’s announcement was an important step in Mr. Erdogan’s work to ensure a “terror-free Turkey.”

The P.K.K.’s declaration could also influence other Kurdish militias, particularly in Syria, and shift regional dynamics beyond Turkey’s borders.

The Kurds — an ethnic group of roughly 40 million people — are spread across Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. They were promised but never granted their own nation by world powers after World War I and have since launched various rebellions against governments that have sought to suppress their cultural identity.

In nearly every country where they live, Kurds have faced state-sponsored suppression of their language and culture.

It was not immediately clear how the decision would affect the P.K.K. bases hidden in the mountainous areas of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. Turkey has repeatedly bombarded P.K.K. strongholds in northern Iraq, as well as the group’s offshoot controlling the northeastern regions of Syria, branding them a terrorist threat near its borders.

Turkish officials have said publicly that the government offered no concessions to the P.K.K. to persuade it to disarm. But officials from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party have expressed hope that the government would expand cultural and educational rights for Kurds.

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Posted

They are canceling Nobel-prize winning economists because woke.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/opinion/stiglitz-trump-dei.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G08.On8J.4hSuhXSYq--k&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=g
 

Quote

The email arrived in early February from the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, carrying a blunt message. It informed the organizers of a Danish lecture series — one I was soon scheduled to speak at — that the final portion of American funding would be released only after they signed a statement essentially saying they were in compliance with a U.S. executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion.

It was a head-spinning turn of events; under President Biden, attention to D.E.I. issues had been a requirement for receiving the grant. Unwittingly, Denmark seemed to have been swept into America’s culture wars.

Before the organizers at the University of Southern Denmark could respond, the U.S. State Department sent an even blunter message: The grant was “being terminated for the convenience of the U.S. Government.” It concluded by thanking the Danes “for your partnering with the Department of State and God Bless America.”

Some partnership!

The stakes here were relatively small. The lecture series was respected, but not overly prominent, and the savings amounted to a minuscule $10,000. Sometimes, though, a small story reveals a great deal — in this case about the priorities and obsessions of the Trump administration.


 

 

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Posted

Saudi's arranged for a mobile Mickey D's to follow that fat turd around.  How he hasn't stroked out yet amazes me.

 

Posted

Here’s something of value given in exchange for all the crypto and development deals - and we’ve only just started the official bribery tour. We haven’t even gotten to the new weapons deals for Qatar, yet.
 

Surely Republicans who spent 30 years decrying improper foreign influence of the Clintons will be furious, but no more so than the anti-terrorist hawks who can’t abide favorable treatment for state sponsors of terrorist organizations or Hamas. I’m sure the media will also be following up with relentless reporting and multiple days of front page coverage that was devoted to just as serious national security concerns about email servers for the Secretary of State 

*bangs head into desk*

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Posted
32 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Here’s something of value given in exchange for all the crypto and development deals - and we’ve only just started the official bribery tour. We haven’t even gotten to the new weapons deals for Qatar, yet.
 

Surely Republicans who spent 30 years decrying improper foreign influence of the Clintons will be furious, but no more so than the anti-terrorist hawks who can’t abide favorable treatment for state sponsors of terrorist organizations or Hamas. I’m sure the media will also be following up with relentless reporting and multiple days of front page coverage that was devoted to just as serious national security concerns about email servers for the Secretary of State 

*bangs head into desk*

Actually.....broken clock can be right twice a day.  There are some very good arguments for dropping sanctions against Syria once the Assad regime fell.  If the world wants to give the new regime a chance to succeed, and to offer it a carrot and incentive to be a good actor, dropping sanctions is a good way to do it.  In fact, keeping sanctions on Syria now that they've shaken off the shitty regime that was the reason Syria was sanctioned, would be unfair and arguably counter-productive.

Now, did Trump reach that conclusion for that reason?  Fucking OF COURSE NOT.  But it's still what plenty of decent, objective international strategists would have advised and proposed.

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Posted

As a follow up....last year, the US did $12.7 million in trade with Syria.  That is functionally.....zero.

Any increase in trade with the US would help stabilize Syria. I mean, we won't DO that, because in idiot world, trade is only good if they are buying things from us, not vice-versa.

Posted
1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

As a follow up....last year, the US did $12.7 million in trade with Syria.  That is functionally.....zero.

Any increase in trade with the US would help stabilize Syria. I mean, we won't DO that, because in idiot world, trade is only good if they are buying things from us, not vice-versa.

In case you were wondering, Syrian goods are subject to a 41% tariff.

Posted
2 minutes ago, royiv said:

In case you were wondering, Syrian goods are subject to a 41% tariff.

I mean....a full 1/3 of what the US imported from Syria was antiquities...likely looted.  So, fuck it.

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Posted
51 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Actually.....broken clock can be right twice a day.  There are some very good arguments for dropping sanctions against Syria once the Assad regime fell.  If the world wants to give the new regime a chance to succeed, and to offer it a carrot and incentive to be a good actor, dropping sanctions is a good way to do it.  In fact, keeping sanctions on Syria now that they've shaken off the shitty regime that was the reason Syria was sanctioned, would be unfair and arguably counter-productive.

Now, did Trump reach that conclusion for that reason?  Fucking OF COURSE NOT.  But it's still what plenty of decent, objective international strategists would have advised and proposed.

Let me be clear: I don’t give a fuck. They paid the President and obtained a change in US foreign policy. This is even more direct than backing an embargo and reversing course once certain people bought Kushner’s family’s building in NYC at an above-market price that rescued their bad loans. It’s out and open bribery and no one should tolerate that Trump can put the presidency - and US policy- for sale

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Posted (edited)

I’m not super excised about removing the designation for Syria, although of course the business deal is gross. But, I think even a Harris admin would have been moving this way: 

1. There really is a window here to roll back Iranian and Russian influence in the region and with it a lot of the cover for terrorism.

2. You have to give a path off of a designation if behavior really changes.  Otherwise there’s no incentive to change. A chance here to show the region that there is a way to reform and rejoin the world.

3.  It will cause Anastasis to melt down. 
 

Announcing that you think the Syrian guy is really hot is super weird though. 

Edited by 956 Worldwide
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Posted
On 5/13/2025 at 3:10 PM, Pig Bellmont said:

Here’s something of value given in exchange for all the crypto and development deals - and we’ve only just started the official bribery tour. We haven’t even gotten to the new weapons deals for Qatar, yet.
 

Surely Republicans who spent 30 years decrying improper foreign influence of the Clintons will be furious, but no more so than the anti-terrorist hawks who can’t abide favorable treatment for state sponsors of terrorist organizations or Hamas. I’m sure the media will also be following up with relentless reporting and multiple days of front page coverage that was devoted to just as serious national security concerns about email servers for the Secretary of State 

*bangs head into desk*

 

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Posted
18 hours ago, Bullneck said:

 

I’m really looking forward to my upcoming vacations at Trump Damascus and Trump Gaza.

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Posted
21 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Announcing that you think the Syrian guy is really hot is super weird though. 

It's not when you remember that a couple decades ago Trump was a New York lib that loved theatre. He's always been zesty. Ain't no straight man wearing that much face bronzer.

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Posted

Two elections right now with high-level Trump regime interest: Romania and Poland presidential elections. 
 

In Romania the hard-right candidate (Simion) is likely to win the second round. This comes after Trump had a temper tantrum when Romania re-ran elections and disqualified a more blatant pro-Russia candidate following a clearly illegal, Kremlin tied influence campaign. Trump later yanked Romania’s Visa Waiver status in what was widely seen as a political move designed to up pressure and spark anger to get Simion over the line. 

In Poland big-tent centrist movement Civic Platform candidate, Warsaw’s liberal mayor Trzaskowski is the front runner in the first round. The Trump regime has openly tried to boost populist Law and Justice candidate Nawrocki, giving him an Oval visit shortly before the elections.  They will likely face off in a second round.

There is already a conspiracy theory bubbling in Polish right wing spaces about how Soros and Obama tied NGOs are boosting Trzaskowski. I expect it to get boosted further in MAGA-world after the first round.  The regime is very invested in building a populist Europe and intervening into elections in a way we have not seen before. 

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Posted
On 5/15/2025 at 4:59 PM, Brian Fantana said:

It's not when you remember that a couple decades ago Trump was a New York lib that loved theatre. He's always been zesty. Ain't no straight man wearing that much face bronzer.

Trump going to the Kennedy center and demanding more “Cats” from the new board will never not be hilarious. 

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Posted

Portuguese elections are also tomorrow, although unlike in Romania and possibly Poland, there is no chance that the far right Chega (Enough) party will take power. This is a reprise of last year's election where the center-right coalition led by the PSD - Partido Social Democrata - is likely to retain power, perhaps with a gain of a seat or two at the expense of the center-left PS (Partido Socialista)* . This will likely result, again, in a minority government as the PSD will not go into coalition with Chega, who is expected to garner about 20% of the vote.

Until recently, Portugal has resisted the authoritarian movements seen here and in much of Europe, but Chega has grown in strength and now can keep either major party from an outright majority, forcing minority coalition governments that are inherently less stable than what the country has seen in the 50 years since the fall of the clerico-fascist Salazar dictatorship. Even more alarming is the fact that amongst young voters, Chega leads. This trend is certainly not seen only in the US; it's becoming rampant in Europe as well.

* - Despite the names, the PSD (Social Democrats) is center-right and the Socialists are center-left, and between the two have run the country since the Estado Novo dictatorship fell. The PSD is the only European party to still use the anti-fascist 3 Arrows symbol common among social democrats in the 1920s and 30s, despite now not being a social democratic party.

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Posted
On 5/17/2025 at 7:12 PM, Ghost of NMAS said:

Because there is a statute that makes it an exception

Oh, I really think you're wrong here, we shouldn't have accepted it because of the statue of limitations.

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Posted
37 minutes ago, gernblansten said:

Oh, I really think you're wrong here, we shouldn't have accepted it because of the statue of limitations.

c42644bd-a6f2-4767-94b6-2272f2f1bd03_scr

Yes, it's a sculpture of limitations.

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Posted

Surly's been ahead of the curve on calling this.

Trump’s Vision: One World, Three Powers?
President Trump’s recent actions and statements suggest he might want an arrangement where the United States, China and Russia each dominate their sphere of influence.

For President Trump, anytime is a good time for deal-making, but never more so than now with the leaders of China and Russia.

Last week, Mr. Trump said he wanted to normalize commerce with Russia, appearing to lessen the pressure on Moscow to settle its war with Ukraine. And he is trying to limit the fallout from his own global trade war by urging China’s leader to call him.

“We all want to make deals,” Mr. Trump said in a recent interview with Time magazine. “But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there.”

Mr. Trump may have something even bigger in mind involving Russia and China, and it would be the ultimate deal.

His actions and statements suggest he might be envisioning a world in which each of the three so-called great powers — the United States, China and Russia — dominates its part of the globe, some foreign policy analysts say.

It would be a throwback to a 19th-century style of imperial rule.

Quote

 

Mr. Trump has said he wants to take Greenland from Denmark, annex Canada and re-establish American control of the Panama Canal. Those bids to extend U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere are the clearest signs yet of his desire to create a sphere of influence in the nation’s backyard.

He has criticized allies and talked about withdrawing U.S. troops from around the globe. That could benefit Russia and China, which seek to diminish the American security presence in Europe and Asia. Mr. Trump often praises President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, as strong and smart men who are his close friends.

To that end, Mr. Trump has been trying to formalize Russian control of some Ukrainian territory — and American access to Ukraine’s minerals — as part of a potential peace deal that critics say would effectively carve up Ukraine, similar to what great powers did in the age of empires. Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin spoke about Ukraine in a two-hour phone call on last week.

“The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, said that the leaders of the United States, Russia and China are all striving for “an imaginary past that was freer and more glorious.”

“Commanding and extending spheres of influence appears to restore a fading sense of grandeur,” she wrote in a new essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. The term “spheres of influence” originated at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, in which European powers adopted a formal plan to carve up Africa.

Some close observers of Mr. Trump, including officials from his first administration, caution against thinking his actions and statements are strategic. While Mr. Trump might have strong, long-held attitudes about a handful of issues, notably immigration and trade, he does not have a vision of a world order, they argue.

Yet there are signs that Mr. Trump and perhaps some of his aides are thinking in the manner that emperors once did when they conceived of spheres of influence.

“The best evidence is Trump’s desire to expand America’s overt sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But setting up a sphere of influence in the post-imperial age is not easy, even for a superpower.

Last month, Canadians elected an anti-Trump prime minister, Mark Carney, whose Liberal Party appeared destined to lose the election until Mr. Trump talked aggressively about Canada. Leaders of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, have rejected the idea of U.S. control. Chinese officials are threatening to stop a Hong Kong company from selling its business running two ports in the Panama Canal to American investors.

“China will not give up its stakes in the Western Hemisphere so easily without a fight,” said Yun Sun, a China analyst at the Stimson Center in Washington.

Even so, Mr. Trump and his aides persist in trying to exert greater American influence from the Arctic Circle to South America’s Patagonia region. When Mr. Carney told Mr. Trump this month in the Oval Office that Canada was “not for sale,” Mr. Trump replied: “Never say never.”

In March, Vice President JD Vance visited a U.S. military base in Greenland to reiterate Mr. Trump’s desire to take the territory.

And it is no coincidence that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s two most substantial trips since taking office have been to Latin America and the Caribbean.

In El Salvador, Mr. Rubio negotiated with Nayib Bukele, the strongman leader, to have the nation imprison immigrants deported by the U.S. government, setting up what is effectively an American penal colony. Mr. Rubio also pressed Panama on its ports.

As a senator representing Florida, Mr. Rubio said at a hearing in July 2022 that focusing more closely on the Western Hemisphere was “critical to our national security and our national economic interests.”

“Geography matters,” he said, because “proximity matters.”

On a late March visit to Suriname, Mr. Rubio was asked by a reporter whether administration officials had discussed setting up spheres of influence, which would entail negotiating limits on each superpower’s footprint, including in Asia.

Mr. Rubio, who has more conventional foreign policy views than Mr. Trump, asserted that the United States would maintain its military alliances in Asia. Those alliances allow it to base troops across the region.

“We don’t talk about spheres of influence,” he said. “The United States is an Indo-Pacific nation. We have relationships with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines. We’re going to continue those relationships.”

Some analysts say Mr. Trump’s approach to the war in Ukraine is consistent with the concept of spheres of influence. The United States is talking to another large power — Russia — about how to define the borders of a smaller country and is itself trying to control natural resources.

Mr. Trump has proposed terms of a settlement that would mostly benefit Russia, including U.S. recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea and acknowledgment of Russian occupation of large swaths of eastern Ukraine. This past week, Mr. Trump even seemed to back off his demand that Russia agree to an immediate cease-fire with Ukraine. Earlier, he got Ukraine to sign an agreement to give American companies access to the country’s minerals.

Supporters of Mr. Trump’s settlement proposal say it reflects the reality on the ground, as Ukraine struggles to oust the Russian occupiers.

But Mr. Trump’s praise of Mr. Putin and of Russia, and his persistent skepticism of America’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has inflamed anxieties among European nations over a potentially waning U.S. presence in their geographic sphere.

The same is true of Taiwan and Asian security. Mr. Trump has voiced enough criticism of the island over the years, and showered enough accolades on Mr. Xi, China’s leader, that Taiwanese and U.S. officials wonder whether he would waver on U.S. arms support for Taiwan, which is mandated by a congressional act.

Mr. Trump says he wants to reach a deal with China. Whether that would go beyond tariffs to address issues such as Taiwan and the U.S. military presence in Asia is an open question.

“Beijing would love to have a grand bargain with the U.S. on spheres of influence,” Ms. Sun said, and “its first and foremost focus will be on Taiwan.”

Trump administration officials have not detailed how far the United States would go to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. At his confirmation hearing, Elbridge A. Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, was asked by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, why Mr. Colby’s stance on defending Taiwan appeared to have “softened” recently.

Mr. Colby said Taiwan was “not an existential interest” for the United States, and affirmed a vague commitment to Asia: “It’s very important the core American interest is in denying China regional hegemony.”

 

 

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Posted
3 hours ago, cabowabo said:

In other news. Macron gets assaulted by his wife on camera. Ouch. 

 

Maybe he’ll find some solace

image.jpeg.f1d67df913e6fecc9f8dfac9f4e30189.jpeg

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Posted

Embassy Baghdad is drawing down all non-critical staff, others are evacuating families, and others called emergency action committee meetings.  Lots of indicators that Iran-Israel is about to pop off in a big way. 
 

 



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