What is Putin going to do next?

It looks as if Putin is preparing to throw everything - bar nuclear - at Kyiv's energy plants to make sure the winter is a terrible dark experience for the Ukrainian people. There is probably very little Zelensky and the military can do about it. Putin is more desperate than ever because after nearly five years of war against Ukraine, he hasn't got much to show for it. Western experts are warning that in his frustration he might take on a Nato country and launch some form of incursion or mini-offensive to punish the West for backing Ukraine. But if he were to do that, Putin would be in even more trouble. He can't really believe that taking on Nato will improve his situation. So, I think Putin's next move will be to step up attacks on Ukraine by a magnitude, and maybe even send in more troops to restart the ground campaign which has stalemated. What Putin won't do is think about doing a deal with Ukraine. So, any efforts by the US or Europe to fashion some sort of negotiating stance is going to fail. Putin is not interested in peace with Ukraine. He is still determined to see Ukraine, or at least the Zelensky government, collapse. Zelensky has had huge problems, with the continuing evidence of corruption and the dramatic upheavals at the top of his government, after the dismissal of the popular defence minister. He will need to reunite his government and prepare for a tough few months before winter arrives. All the threats from Moscow about attacking Britain for backing Ukraine are just that - threats. Putin is right now in a very weak position and can't afford any more aggressive moves, especially against the Nato alliance.

Will the Venezuelan people benefit from this huge oil deal with the US?

The US is going to have its hands on 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil in a huge deal between Caracas and Washington that will bring private American investment into the earthquake-hit country. Ostensibly, this will be good news for the poor country which has been ravaged by corruption and super-corrupt leadership for so long. Ex-President Nicolas Maduro may be in a US jail awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges. But he left behind the remnants of his power base in charge. The deal has been done with the interim president, Delcy Rodriguez. But will this really be a massive optimism boost for the whole country which is going to suffer from the earthquake damage for years to come? And will all the money be invested in improving the lives of the people or will it get salted away into private bank accounts? It is difficult to predict because the leadership during the Maduro era was awash with corruption. Is Delcy Rodriguez who was Maduro's vice president and therefore must have known what was going on all those years, now going to be the country's saviour? Trump decided that she was a woman he could do business with and this is why we now have this massive oil deal which will provide the US with all the oil reserves it feels it needs for the future. Is there any small print in the deal which offers guarantees that the quid pro quo for the oil will be a much-improved economy in Venezuela and a better standard of living for its people? The people who negotiated the deal were Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary. A very odd combination unless there is some sort of security guarantee included which we don't know about. The Venezuela story still has an unknown end.

Trump will never be able to declare victory in Iran

The first six months of the war with Iran have been a sombre lesson for the United States and for its commander-in-chief. President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury has failed to bring down the regime in Tehran because the White House and military planners underestimated their enemy. After months of bombing destruction, a naval blockade and unprecedented economic sanctions, the mullahs and generals in Iran have adapted their warfare response to undermine and eventually thwart America’s vast superiority in firepower. “Iran’s strongest strategy was not to win a conventional military contest against the United States or Israel. It was to make the war harder to contain,” Neda Bolourchi, a national security analyst, concluded in an assessment of the conflict for the prestigious Modern War Institute at West Point in New York state. “Persian Gulf capitals, shipping insurers, energy markets, fertiliser markets, data centres, US allies and domestic political audiences all became part of the battlefield,” she wrote. The US military planners knew there was a risk Iran would try to close the Strait of Hormuz as one of its main leverages against the armada of warships and missiles assembled by Central Command in the region. However, the aim of Operation Epic Fury was to cause such damage to Iran’s military infrastructure that one of two consequences would follow: the collapse of the regime or a peace deal weighted heavily in favour of Trump’s demands for an end to the nuclear programme, a huge reduction in Iran’s ballistic missile inventory, and a pledge by Tehran to stop funding its proxy militia, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen. “As in Vietnam, we simply did not understand our enemy in Iran. The assumption that the leadership that succeeded Ayatollah Ali Khomeini would fold like an old tent proved fundamentally wrong,” a former senior Pentagon official said. “Strategy matters. We apparently had no Plan B if the initial air campaign failed to produce the desired results,” the former official said. “There are numerous options we could have put in place before going to war, such as a blockade [imposed more than a month after Operation Epic Fury began], support for resistance groups, or ground-force operations.,” he said. “We are also at the wrong end of the cost equation. We are defending ourselves with weapons costing an order-of-magnitude or more than those they intercept [a Patriot interceptor missile costs $3.9 million as opposed to an Iranian Shahed-136 drone at between $20,000 and $50,000} . Nor can we produce them at scale. And our national deficit just hit $40 trillion. We are pricing ourselves out of the market,” he said. The ground-troops option was never realistically on the cards because of America’s aversion to battlefield casualties. The decision to go for air and naval power, rather than boots on the ground, was to avoid American fatalities, although 18 US personnel have been killed in Iranian retaliatory strikes. Central Command still sent 2,200 marines and later more than 2,000 paratroopers from 82nd Airborne Division to the Gulf, in addition to the 50,000 troops already in the region.. All of them have been kicking their heels ever since. Trump’s threats to invade Kharg Island, which manages up to 90 per cent of Iran’s crude oil exports, never materialised into action by the marines or paratroopers, whose numbers were insufficient for even a short-term ground operation. The biggest lesson for the US is one that should have been learned a long time ago: that air power alone, even on the scale the American military can provide, rarely leads to a long-lasting and satisfactory political outcome. If the confrontation with Iran escalates into a new round of US military strikes, that basic lesson will still be valid which means Trump will never be able to declare victory. ends

Looking back at the Iran war with frustration

Donald Trump had every expectation that a mighty show of American firepower from the air and from the sea would make Iran tremble and plead for mercy. He was wrong. The one thing learned is that the regime in Tehran has an infinite capacity to absorb pain and survive in power. There seems to be no likelihood that this situation will change now or ever. The first six months of the confrontation have proved that the Tehran regime is so intent on staying in power, never mind the consequences for the 90 million Iranian people, that it doesn't seem to matter what Trump throws at them, whether it be bombs and missiles or economic sanctions. Iran also knows that it has China's back, and Russia's. So with these two big beasts on their side, the Iranian generals who are largely in charge, will battle on. This is seriously bad news for Trump who has tried everything and ultimately has failed to get the regime in Tehran to bow down to his demands. There would seem to be no prospects for any kind of peace settlement. So the confrontation, whether military or not, will just keep going. Perhaps for years. In other words, beyond Trump's presidency into the next one, whoever succeeds him.

China won't help Trump's economic war against Iran

Donald Trump needs China to play ball if his economic D-Day operation against Iran is going to work and drive the Tehran regime to the negotiating table. China is Iran's biggest trading partner, buying a huge proportion of Iranian oil. But China is not going to play ball. China never plays ball unless it's in its interest. I assume Trump was warned about this before he got his Treasury Secretary to announce the new sanctions against Iran and ordered all of Iran's trading partners to obey the new economic measures. China, I'm sure, will continue to trade with Iran. Other countries, too, will also risk Trump's sanctions and back Iran. So, like the military campaign, the economic campaign is not going to make such a difference if China and others just carry on as usual. Trade wars and tit-for-tat trade wars invariably make things worse, not better. Trump is due to see the Chinese leader, Xi Zinping, next month, and he won't want to screw that up before he even gets to Beijing. So D-Day might be a flop, although Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, seems pretty confident it will bring the mullahs and generals to their knees. But after years of international sanctions, Iran has learned how to get round them, just as North Korea has done all these years.

Why tell the world the UK is giving missile blueprints to Ukraine?

Why on earth has Andy Burnham, newish UK prime minister, announced to the world that he has approved giving missile blueprints to Ukraine so that Kyiv can make its own version of the weapon? Sure, it's good to remind Vladimir Putin that the West is on Ukraine's side. But something which should have been kept secret has been blurted out like it's intended as a slap in the face for the Kremlin. Good on yer, some might say. But the most important responsibility for Burnham is to keep this country safe, not Ukraine's, and telling Putin that the UK is handing classified blueprints to Kyiv seems to me to be foolish at the very least. Putin is already targeting Britain with cyber warfare, close-in submarines and warships. Why invite mnore aggression from Moscow? The blueprints are for components of the UK's Storm Shadow cruise missile which was jointly developed with the French who call it Scalp Mrk 2. It's a pretty fancy piece of kit which has been used by Ukraine since 2023 anbd is now regularly fired at targets inside Russia. The plan is for Kyiv to have its own factory churning out Storm Shadow/Scalps. But why the huge publicity? The first thing Russia will do is start hitting the factory. There are occasions when secrecy is justified. This is one of them.

US and Iran should do a deal

It's time for Washington and Tehran to stop threatening each other with military and economic action. Everyone in the world is fed up with the bickering and warnings and blackmail. It's all about ego and power abd status and money. Enough! Negotiators should get together and talk talk talk until a deal is done. The way things are going, the military bit of the war is going to start all over again and will make a deal that much more difficult. There is stillhuge US firepower in the region and Donald Trump might just have another bash but we know for sure that Iran will respond in kind by attacking US bases in the region and targeting energy plants in the Gulf. All pointless destruction for no reason other than to prove to Trump that the new regime in Tehran is not going to back down. Basically, the war was avoidable. There was a kind of deal on the table but Trump ignored it. Now he is stuck in an unholy mess and talking of an economic D-Day against Iran. The poor Iranian people, none of whom want this war to continue ruining their lives, will suffer even more. But they have leaders, both clerical and military, who don't care a fig for their personal suffering. All they want is to survive as a regime and mastermind hatred towards the US and the West. It really is time for all this hatred and revenge to be brought to a close. But I fear the presence of Trump in the White House and the bullies of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran are going to make a deal impossible. This is a catastrophe for the world.