Nato at yet another crossroads

Nato has had a pretty disastrous period in recent years and now, with its next summit due this coming week, there will no doubt be a call for resurgence and more spending and closer ties and a united front against Russia. But will it mean anything? Alliance members are still struggling to find the money for all the new equipment and expertise required to fight the next war, or, hopefully, deter the next war, and it could be years before the whole organisation is, as it were, fighting fit for the future. Donald Trump has been scathing about Nato for so long, one wonders whether he will ever become a fan again. He will be at the Nato summit and will no doubt barge his way through the various leaders and chat up the only people he still seems to like, such as President Erdogan of Turkey and, for some odd reason, President Macron of France. I say odd, because the two are as unalike as you could imagine but Trump likes Macron. I think he's also fascinated by his much older wife. I doubt he will bother with poor Keir Starmer who is on his way out and whatever he says at the summit won't count, especially after the very modest amount of extra money he has agreed to spend on defence, as outlined by the Defence Investment Plan. Andy Burnham will be prime minister a week or so after Starmer returns from the summit, so no one will be interested in what Starmer says, apart from goodbye. Cruel, but true. Whether Nato will survive will depend on whether Trump has had a rethink and feels the alliance isn't such a bad thing after all. That just may happen, especially if everyone flatters him like he's some sort of Hollywood icon or whatever.

The political disasters looming for Trump over Iran

The confrontation with Iran has gone quiet. The bombing has stopped, oil tankers are once again going through the Strait of Hormuz. Is it peace at last? There is still a huge amount to negotiate during the 60-day phase of the peace discussions in Switzerland. But can President Trump now feel he has done enough to appease his critics who still claim the war with Iran achieved very little. Trump says he can always revert to bombing Iran if the peace negotiations fail. But it’s not in anyone’s interests, least of all the president’s, for the war to be restarted. If the Republicans are to retain their majority in the Senate and House of Representatives in the midterm elections in November, the president will need to demonstrate that the war is over and the benefits for the United States and for the whole world are tangible and longlasting. Oil prices have gone down substantially since the Strait of Hormuz was reopened but every time there is a spate of attacks and retaliatory strikes between the US and Iran, the price goes up. What Trump needs is a period of stability to allow the negotiations with Iran to continue without angry clashes between the US and Iranian military. However, even if the war is finally over, there are still potential politically negative repercussions for the Republicans and for the president. If Trump loses this argument about the Strait of Hormuz and his negotiators concede to Tehran’s demands to charge a service fee, it will be viewed as a major failure, not just by Republicans in general but by his MAGA supporters. If Trump were to give in to Tehran on this issue, it could have a disastrous impact politically for the Republican party in November.

Will the funeral of Ali Khamenei finally end the war or revive it?

Seeing the thousands of people gathering in Tehran to follow the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one wonders whether the tears being shed for him will provoke demands for revenge or whether there will be an acceptance of peace. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was one of the first victims of the US/Israel bombing that began at the end of February. He was deliberately targeted and was, therefore, assassinated as part of Donald Trump's and Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to bring down the regime he led. If there is to be peace it won't be out of love for Trump and Netanyahu. They will remain the enemy in the minds of Iranians. Indeed, when Iranian negotiators talk about developments in the peace talks, they always refer to negotiating with the enemy. The killing of their former supreme leader, and the severe injuries suffered by his successor, his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, will always remain the yardstick for Tehran's demands for a settlement. They will want revenge for their loss. This is a dangerous ingredient for Washington. If Trump wants a deal which makes it look like he has won the war, he will still have to make concessions as a quid pro quo for the death of the leader now being mourned in the streets of Iran's cities.

Putin is surely getting more and more desperate

Vladimir Putin is a wounded lion, growling and in pain but refusing to admit that his world is collapsing around him. He is ruining his country, destroying his people, wrecking the economy, sending more and more young men to their deaths in Ukraine, and yet still he hangs on in the belief that if he keeps launching drones and ballistic missiles at Kyiv, his hated enemy Zelensky, will cave in. But there is absolutely no sign of that happening. Zelensky is increasing the number of attacks on Russia itself and bringing the war to the Russian people. It is now a common event for Ukrainian drones to fly over Russian territory. It wasn't that long ago, a year or so back, when Putin hinted that if Russia faced an existential threat, he would have to resort to other sorts of weapons of weapons. Thank God, he hasn't done so. But at what point does he decide Ukraine is going too far? Hopefully this will never happen. But it is extraordinary that Russia is facing almost daily attacks. Why is there not an outcry in Russia, why is no one turning to their president and accusing him of putting the country at such risk? Putin survives however bad it is getting. Can this go on for ever? PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS, AMAZON.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will never give up the Strait of Hormuz

It is perfectly obvious that the regime in Tehran, and in psrticular the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, is going to hang onto some sort of control of the Strait of Hormuz whatever Donald Trump says. Tehran has been helped by Oman which sits on the southern side of the strait, which is also keen on having management (money-making) control of shipping going through the narrow channel. I don't see how Trump is going to stop it happening. Returning to war is not going to change Tehran's determination to maintain the leverage it now has, with or without Oman. This is a disaster for Trump, a disaster for the world's shipping industry, and probably a disaster for keeping oil prices down. If every ship going through the strait has to pay, say $1,000 or maybe $1 million, when using the strait, it's going to have a huge impact on oil prices and shipping insurance. It will deal a massive blow to Trump who has said publicly on numerous occasions that the Strait of Hormuz is an international channel and that fees can therefore never be charged. As the talks continue in Switzerland on this issue and the Iranian nuclear programme, I can envisage a settlement in which Iran is granted the right to charge some sort of fee for ensuring safety for all shipping in exchange for a deal over Iran's uranium-enrichment programme. I reckon Iran will go for that, and Trump will be forced to accept it so that he can boast he has stopped Iran from building a nuclear bomb. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER PAPERBACK. ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES, AMAZON.

Starmer boosts defence spending but is it enough?

Keir Starmer has only got another 20 days or so as British prime minister before he "voluntarily" steps down and hands over to Andy Burnham. But he has managed to find the time to publish, at last, the defence investment plan to fund the armed forces and modernise their equipment for future wars. It has taken a long time and he has persuaded the Treasury to hand over an extra £15 billion to help build a new class of warship which will be a mother ship for drones, plus some additional vessels for the Royal Marines and a fancy new combat aircraft that will fly alongside unmanned air veihcles. Yes, more drones. The Ukraine war has taught the whole world that warfare is now different. Forget tanks and traditional warships, the requirement is for drones, drones, drones, whether in the air, on land or on the water or under the water. Thousands of them are needed to fight off Russia in the future. The problem is that drones are not the answer to everything. When it comes to big military powers like Russia, they have hypersonic ballistic and cruise missiles and if the UK doesn't have the most advanced air-defence systems, we would be crushed in a war. The UK should be buying US Patriot missiles and parking them around the country if we want to be safe from Russian missile attack. Drones are great, they are more potent than in the past, they have longer ranges and can be guided to hit targets spot on. But we need so much more than drones to stay ahead of our enemies. And this is where the extra money is going to seem paltry by the time it has been spent on new fancy drones. With the UK economy drifting like a slow-moving barge, it's difficult to see where all the money for defence is going to come from. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS, AMAZON.

The challenges at America's top spy agency

The al-Qaeda terrorist attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, was one of the biggest intelligence failures of all time, which might have been avoided if America’s spy agencies had worked more cohesively. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to learn that painful lesson, and ensure that every one of America’s 18 intelligence agencies coordinates and cooperates with each other. But now this overseer of spooks - from FBI agents to military intelligence - is under attack by the Trump administration, senior Congress politicians and long-serving intelligence officers have warned. They are alarmed over the appointment of a new acting director for the ODNI who, before he took over the reins on June 19, had never had any experience of the secret spying world. The relatively-unknown Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist, is head of the government’s federal housing finance regulator. He will be keeping that job, too, while joining the cabinet in his new senior intelligence role. Pulte, 38, arrived at the ODNI office at 1500 Tysons McLean Drive, Virginia, just outside the Washington DC border, with a list of names to be chopped, and his role appears to be to cut, cut, cut. The apparently arbitrary nature of the job losses has raised questions over whether the ODNI will be so undermined as to be ineffective, or whether it survives at all. The ODNI was set up by President George W Bush in April 2005, after the excoriatingly thorough inquiries that followed the 9/11 attacks. The investigations found that vital clues to Osama bin Laden’s plot to train terrorists in Florida to fly Boeing airliners and launch them like cruise missiles into the Twin Towers and Pentagon had been picked up by the FBI. Likewise, the CIA obtained covertly-acquired information - but the two threads were not connected in time. The ODNI has gone through many variations. It expanded to about 1,660 personnel, became too bureaucratic and has continued to rival the CIA for winning the ear of the president. But after the 9/11 catastrophe, most members of the US intelligence community would concede that a DNI remains an important post. But not if it’s filled by a man with no clue about intelligence matters. A former long-serving CIA officer told The Times: “I do think this an effort to, at the very least, significantly scale down the size of ODNI. Frankly, that’s not entirely a bad thing. It has ballooned in ways that was never intended since 2005. “The question is how they do it — will they go about it strategically or with a sledgehammer? There’s no question that we need a DNI, but a more tailored and rightsized ODNI wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.” A more alarmist interpretation of Pulte’s appointment as intelligence chief was delivered by Senator Mark Warner, Democratic vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Representative Jim Himes, Democratic ranking member of the House intelligence committee. “We are concerned that your record as director of the federal housing finance agency demonstrates a willingness to misuse your position, including your access to sensitive information, to pursue President Trump’s perceived political enemies and further his retributive political agenda,” they wrote in a letter to Pulte. They also warned that further job cuts (in addition to the 500 losses announced under Tulsi Gabbard who resigned from the DNI post last month) would “risk jeopardising the mission of an organisation explicitly created after 9/11 to prevent any future such terrorist attack”. The shake-up at the ODNI comes as Trump has repeatedly shown that, rather than listen to the advice of his own intelligence agencies, he prefers to operate on gut instinct and on occasions to seek the views of non-US spy chiefs who have their own particular furrow to plough. The classic example of this was in February, before the war with Iran. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, appeared with David Barnea, the head of the Mossad spy agency, a video screen during a national security meeting in the White House’s basement “situation room” and predicted that airstrikes would bring down the regime in Tehran and lead to a popular uprising. A day later, American intelligence analysts had interrogated the claims. John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, described the Israelis’ regime change scenarios as “farcical” while Marco Rubio, secretary of state and national security adviser, agreed they were “bullshit”, according to the New York Times. But Trump appeared to trust Netanyahu and Mossad more than the CIA’s own assessments, and the Israelis were proved wrong: Operation Epic Fury, the war started on February 28, did not create a revolution. Similarly, the White House was furious after leaked intelligence reports suggested that last year’s US-Israeli strikes on Iran had only set back Iran’s nuclear programme by a few months, rather than completely “obliterating” it, as the President had boasted. Former senior officials with long experience of working with the US intelligence community fear that Pulte’s appointment is part of Trump’s long-running battle with the alleged “deep state”. They shared the concerns expressed by Senator Warner and his House colleague over the the acting director’s qualifications and motivations. “I would say that there are arguments that the DNI experiment led to some bureaucratic bloating and the DNI was never given control over IC [intelligence community] budgets that would have allowed the occupants of the office to really oversee the entire IC as many hoped would be the case,” one former senior official said. “But whatever the arguments may be for reform, putting someone like Pulte in charge who has no knowledge of or experience with intelligence, not only violates the spirit but the letter of the law. “Even more troubling is the fact that Pulte is there to execute Trump’s retribution agenda against the alleged ‘deep state’ who drew attention to the extraordinarily unusual array of contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and envoys of Russia’s government. It is a gross politicisation of the intelligence structures and endangers US national security.” Trump has also tasked Pulte with investigating “rigged elections” as part of his intelligence agency role. Last week the acting director was reported to have installed a woman who worked on election monitoring for the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, raising further criticism. Senator Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, remarked that Pulte’s office was supposed to be countering foreign threats, not importing “election denialism into the intelligence community.” Pulte’s tenure is expected to be temporary. Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor in New York, to be Gabbard’s permanent replacement. Clayton, 59, a former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and veteran Trump Administration official, is at least a more conventional choice for the role. “Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay,” Trump said earlier this month in a Truth Social post announcing his pick. “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible.” However an attempt by Democrats to speed up Clayton’s appointment before Pulte could begin work was also derailed by the president. As part of a political tug of war with his critics, Trump demanded that the Senate hold hearings to confirm Clayton’s replacement as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York before they interviewed him for the post of Director of National Intelligence. The question being raised on Capitol Hill is: how much damage can Pulte do as acting director before Clayton’s appointment comes up for confirmation by the Senate? 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