There will be no let-up for Palestinians in Gaza

The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanoan has been widely welcomed. But not in Gaza because there is no complementary ceasefire deal for them and now that israel Defence Forces troops can switch all their efforts back to Gaza, the tiny strip of territory is going to feel the full brunt of Israel's firepower against the Hamas remnants. Many more people are going to die in the crossfire and bombings. Already the figure, according to the Hamas-run health mnistry in Gaza, is 44,000, although at least 15,000 of those will have been Hamas fighters. Hamas has lost all of its key leaders but somehow is still posing a threat to IDF troops and to Israel itself. Of the 30,000 or so Hamas members, probably fewer than half that number are still alive. But with their mass of tunnels and underground bunkers, they are fighting on. The IDF, with Hezbollah shut down, at least for the moment, the order given by Benjamin Netanyahu to annihilate Hamas will be grimly pursued. Gaza over the next few months is going to see more destruction. And the poor hostages who have managed to stay alive face another terrible, desperate winter. It's time this war ended.

Can Biden do the double whammy, a ceasefire in Gaza as well as Lebanon?

For good longlasting legacy reasons, President Joe Biden is keen as mustard to get a ceasefire in both Gaza and Lebanon before he trots off into the retirement sunset. He and his envoys have managed a ceasefire with Hezbollah, although there will be huge room for trouble if Hezbollah fighters start crossing the line drawn beyond which they are supposedly banned from overstepping. The last time there was a line drawn, in 2006 after a stalemate war with Israel, it didn't take too long before they were back in southern Lebanon and firing rockets at Israel like before. So the current ceasefire will have to be monitored very very robustly. Not by UN peacekeepers of course who have a pretty poor record for monitoring anything, but by US spy satellite systems. But a ceasefire has been agreed and we'll see whether it holds. But whether it will lead to a deal in Gaza is another thing. I don't think Benjamin Netanyahu is ready yet for a deal with Hamas. Actually he doesn't want a deal at all if it means Hamas survives for another day of fighting. But there are remnaining hostages to consider and so some sort of deal will have to be done. But I suspect Netanyahu will bide his time. Which means Biden probably won't get his double whammy ceasefire victories. By January 20 when Donald Trump becomes president, there is almost bound to be fighting going on in the Middle East, possibly involving both Hezbollah and Hamas.

All charges against Donald Trump are effectively dropped

Donald Trump didn't just win the US 2024 election, he also, as a consequence, won every case against him for allegedly committing federal crimes.The charges have effectively been dropped, includinhg the most serious one in which he was accused of being involved in the attempted intervention to reverse the 2020 election result, as well as the removal of thousands of classified documents to his home in Florida, and the hush money he is accused of paying a porn star to keep her mouth shut during the 2016 election. Oh and the 34 business fraud charges being brought by the New York attorney general. All thrown into the waste basket, theoretically until Trump has completed his four-year term. But no one imagines that after four years, the new justice department will reinstate all the charges and put the second-time-round ex-president on trial at the age of 82. And anyway, if Trump is followed by his vice president, JP Vance, as the 48th president, there is no way he is going to do that to his political boss. So the huge saga of trying to get Trump convicted of nefarious crimes is over. Once and for all. What a masive victory that is for Trump. He must be saying to himsrelf, thank God I won the election, otherwise....The dropping of the charges of course is all about the constitution which stiupulates that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, and Trump is very nearly the sitting president.

All of Biden's men and women just two months to go

It must be a strange feeling of relief and regret for the thousands of Biden-appointed officials who will be out of a job in two months' time. This is the way it has to be. It's something like 4,000 officials across government who have to go when a new president steps in. You get used to all the big names, such as Antony Blinken, secretary of state, Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and Lloyd Austin, defence secretary. They will all vanish, along with their Biden-appointed advisers. I'm sure they will all be making arrangements for new jobs in the private sector or perhaps just taking a break after four years of hard grind and mass travelling around the world. That's the relief bit. But the first morning they wake up after January 20, 2025, they will have to come to terms with the fact that they no longer have the trappings of power, no chauffeur-driven cars available, no Secret Service protection, no desperate calls from foreign leaders seeking help, no huge decisions to make. That's the regret bit. As for Joe Biden, I suspect he will eventually feel huge relief but with a large splash of nostalgia as well. However, in his case, he will still have all the stuff that goes with being an -ex-president, including Secret Service bodyguards. But he won't have to make any more speeches with the whole world watching to see if he slips up, slips over, or just looks lost. His biggest regret is that he wasn't allowed to have another go at beating Trump. He had to hand over that job to Kamala Harris and she failed.

Putin threatening to hit the UK with hypersonic missile? Really?

If the world was lucky enough to have responsible political leaders who actually devote their waking hours to ensuring peace and prosperity on the planet, we would all be able to sleep at night and plan for the future without fearing the world might come to an end at any moment. But we don't. We have Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un and the warmongers in Tehran and Beijing who want to disrupt international order and go about threatening everyone. This time it's Putin threatening to fire hypersonic ballistic missiles at those who dared to give long-range weapons to Ukraine to launch into Russia. In other words, the US and UK. Well, he's not going to do that because that would lead to conflagration. But he still gives out the warning because he knows, as the owner and sole controller of thousands of nuclear warheads, he can scare the pants off everyone if and when he likes. But is this responsible leadership? No, it's not. It's all bluff (hopefully) but dangerous bluff. What he is really doing is upping the ante and raising the stakes and all the other cliches, in order to give himself maximum leverage when or if he agrees to chat to Donald Trump about bringing the war in Ukraine to an end. Russia does hold most of the leverage cards, so somehow President Zelensky and his exhausted army have to try and grab some territory back from the Russians in the next two or three months to give them a sporting chance of negotiating not too awful a peace settlement. As of now, Putin holds the trump cards (pun intended).

Warnings of a global war from someone Trump trusts

The new emerging axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea has created “the most serious and most dangerous challenge” since the second world war, a former top US military chief has told The Times. “China, Russia Iran and North Korea are working effectively together. What has happened is that they have perceived us, the US, to be weak and that we have lost the political will to confront them,” General Jack Keane said. He warned that the danger will have to be rapidly addressed when President-elect Donald Trump takes power in January. It will mean a comprehensive reform of the Pentagon to rebuild the military, fix the ossified business practices and replenish the defence industrial base. The retired four-star general and former vice chief of the US Army, is one of the most influential military figures in Washington. Everyone seeks his advice, democrats and republicans, including the man who is to be the 47thpresident. They go way back. When Trump won the election in 2016, he wanted Keane to be his defence secretary. But tragically, the favoured general’s wife had just died. Keane reluctantly declined the job. Now with the same president about to return to the Oval Office, Keane has been laying out the challenges ahead for him and his national security team. The war in Ukraine is top of the list of dangers for Trump’s administration. The axis of China, Russia and North Korea is no more clearly defined than in the war in Ukraine, where thousands of troops from Pyongyang are now fighting alongside Russian soldiers against Ukrainian forces who seized 1,000 square kilometres of territory in western Russia’s Kursk region in August. “At the moment there are 10,000 North Korean troops who have joined the Russians. But is this a one time deal or do we have the beginnings of a pipeline of North Korean troops coming to support Russia? “ Keane questioned. “Another country fighting alongside Russia to try and overthrow Ukraine? This is the biggest escalation of the war .” This week’s launching by Ukraine of the US ATACMS long-range missile and Britain’s Storm Shadow cruise missile into Russia for the first time, and President Putin’s firing of an experimental intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile against Ukraine in retaliation have raised the danger levels of a potential global war. Could there be a peace settlement, promised by Trump, with such an inflammatory atmosphere increasing by the day? “Putin is accelerating things. I’m in favor of negotiating with Putin when it is in Ukraines best interest. But I don’t think he really wants to negotiate a deal. He still wants to take the whole country, “ Keane said. “However, he has significant challenges. He’s been trying to take the whole Donbass region in the east for eight months. But he has had only small but steady tactical successes., no major operational gains, and he’s suffering 30,000 casualties every month. In October it was 57,000. That’s staggering. “But he doesn’t want to go for another mobilisation because of the fear of stirring up protest. He won’t go to recruit in western Russia where the educated live, he goes to the rural areas and poor communities and gives them money to join up. He’s avoiding a national call-up because he knows it will be resisted. When the soldiers from these poor families are killed they received 150,000 dollars for every dead body. For people in impoverished communities, it’s a huge figure and it buys their silence. “He also has significant equipment problems. Russia has lost so many tanks and other armoured vehicles his industrial base can’t keep up. Thousands of vehicles have been destroyed. “ “Mechanised offensive operations as we know them have effectively ceased because of Ukraine’s drones. The technology of warfare has changed. It was always said that the best way to destroy a tank was with another tank. But that’s not the case anymore. Drones and anti-tank weapons and anti-tank mines have taken over. “The Ukrainians have also developed long-range drones that can go hundred of miles into Russian territory. So I don’t think they are in danger of losing their country to the Russians. “So If we can help [President] Zelensky by giving him everything he needs and fund their drone forces, they should be able to take back lost territory in 2025. But support for the war is eroding and the soldiers are exhausted. The new recruits replacing them are not so well trained. They can pick their skills up as they fight but then they become casualties.” Will Trump do as he pledged and start to end the war on his first day in office? “I think there’s a difference between what has been said in the campaign and what is now being discussed among the people with the responsibility for dealing with the war. These people are all getting classified briefings and they likely know that what is needed is a favourable outcome for Ukraine, at a minimum, when negotiations end. “The pressure on Zelensky is enormous. This is not only about giving up the 18 per cent of territory the Russians have seized, it’s about giving up Ukrainian lives. The Ukrainians living in these areas will be subjugated under Russian domination. This is what Zelensky cannot allow to happen. He needs leverage so that he gives up less territory. That’s why we have to give him everything he needs.” To meet the growing threat from the new anti-West axis, Keane envisages significant changes at the Pentagon under the Trump administration. As a member of a congressional commission which examined every facet of President Biden’s defence strategy, Keane gained unique insight into the way the Pentagon appears to have failed to adapt to meet the new security challenges. “Our assessment was that the DoD [department of defence] challenges were more formidable than at any time in eight decades. “In the last four years we haven’t increased our defence budget because of inflation. It has been flat under Biden. This was irresponsible and reckless. We have got to prioritise our capabilities to deter a major conventional war, ie with China. China is the most rapidly developing military in the world and it has been going on for 20 years. “The acceleration in their defence capabilities has been extraordinary and they outgun us and outman us in every platform except submarines. Meanwhile our army is the smallest it has been since prior to the second world war, the air force is the smallest in 40 years and our navy which needs 360 ships is something in the low 290s and there is no hope of getting even close to the number we need for ten to 15 years. “The Trump team has got decisions to make and they are going to have to be made pretty soon. We have war in Europe and war in the Middle East and President Xi [Zinping] threatening war. There is the potential for the first time since the second world war of another global war. “We were prepared to deal with a global war when we had the Soviet Union [as the West’s adversary] but are we prepared now to confront a global war? Our Commission concluded we are not prepared. “One of the problems is that our defence industrial base is depleted. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union we had 55 Tier 1 defence companies [biggest and best] . Today we have just five, such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin. That gives you a sense of how the industry has collapsed. “The war in Ukraine has been a major learning lesson. We have raided our war stocks to send weapons and munitions to Ukraine and it forced us to come to grips with what the stockpiles should be for our use. When we conduct war games now with China in mind we find that some key weapon systems run out after two weeks and others in several weeks, which means we could lose. That needs to be fixed. “We have to reach out to the commercial non-defense sector to purchase items they can produce very rapidly. At the moment Congressional restrictions prevent us from purchasing tens of thousands of drones. Compare this with Ukraine. By the end of this year they will have developed in Ukraine 1.4 million drones with some the help from US and Eoropean companies operating in Ukraine. Next year they aim to have five million. We build at best a few hundred drones a year. The Pentagon is trying now to turn this around. “We need to persuade Congress to give us more agile funding so that we can buy drones off the shelf and get them into operation. We have to change the Pentagon’s business practices. We have thousands of civilians involved with these weapons programs but it’s all about the emphasis on cost, performance and schedule which drives a risk averse process . We test, test, test everything and it drags on. It takes too long and it costs too much. If we don’t change the business practices in the Pentagon a portion of any increase in the defence budget in the next administration will just be squandered. “Again, look at Ukraine. They have managed to do serious damage to the Russian navy without having a navy just by developing and deploying aerial and underwater drones. We can’t wait years to get them through Congress. Congress writes the cheques and nothing gets done without their authorisation. In the DoD we need competent people who have the right experience. The status quo is no longer viable. The Trump team are coming up with names. the sort of people who will turn things round. “

Does Putin really want a peace plan for Ukraine?

Donald Trump is still two months away from becoming the 47th president of the United States, and yet his return to the Oval Office in January has already provoked a flurry of policy U-turns by the White House and rising expectation, even in Moscow, of a deal to end the war in Ukraine. Elements of a potential settlement reportedly agreeable to President Putin have emerged on Reuters today based on kite-flying suggestions by Russian officials. While there is nothing particularly new in the broad outline of Moscow thinking, the fact that Russian officials are pushing it out in some detail reflects an awareness in the Kremlin that with Trump in power, the potential for a deal that will satisfy Putin after 1,000 days of war, might be on the cards. Anything that pleases Putin will be rigorously opposed by the European members of the 50-nation US-led coalition backing and arming the Kyiv government who still believe, or at least claim they do, that Ukraine can win the war. However, Trump has boasted on so many occasions that he will fix things on his first day in office that Putin, as well as President Zelensky, are preparing themselves for the man who promotes himself as the master dealmaker. President Biden, too, has responded in his own way to the imminent arrival of Trump in his place. His decision, after months and months of reluctance, to authorise Kyiv to fire American ATACMS long-range missiles into Russia and to send anti-personnel land mines to Ukraine, was claimed to be in retaliation for the presence of 10,000 North Korean troops alongside Russian forces. But for Biden, it was much more than that. He wanted to remind Trump that under his administration, Russia was never going to win the war. So, are there real prospects for a settlement or is the latest reporting from Moscow all part of another Putin-inspired game plan to reset in concrete his personal red lines for a deal which haven’t really changed ever since the first attempts were made to end the war as far back as 28 February, 2022, four days after the Russian invasion. According to the Reuters report, Putin is making it clear he is ready to discuss a ceasefire deal with Trump, but not on the basis of any handover of Russian-occupied territory. Nato membership for Ukraine must also be abandoned but Putin is open to some form of security arrangement being put in place., provided Ukraine is declared a neutral state. The Moscow deal would effectively freeze the conflict along the current frontlines although there could be negotiations over the precise carving up of the four eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, location of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, and Kherson. The Russian officials said there might be some leeway over small patches of ground Moscow holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions in the north and south of Ukraine. Crimea, annexed by Russia without a fight in 2014, would never be given up. There is no official Kremlin confirmation of the latest Moscow thinking. Indeed, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has said that Putin would not countenance freezing the conflict, presumably because in recent months Russian troops have been making small but steady gains in eastern Ukraine, forcing Ukrainian troops back. Putin has in the past admitted he would consider the deal first outlined at a “peace” conference in Istanbul in April, 2022, in which Ukraine would have to accept permanent neutrality in return for international security guarantees underwritten by the five permanent members of the UN security council, the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. But no Nato troops on Ukrainian territory. This appears to be his thinking today. But while Russia is winning mini victories in the war, the next two months are likely to be among the toughest for Ukraine, as Putin piles on the leverage he wants to force Kyiv into a humiliating peace settlement. Nato leaders are still voicing their hopes that somehow Ukraine can reverse the setbacks on the battlefield and build its own heavyweight leverage to make Putin agree on territorial concessions. This is why Zelensky sent combat-proven troops into Kursk in western Russia in August. But while it seemed to be a bold move and a clever strategy, it could ultimately fail, as Russian and North Korean troops have begun to seize back some of the 1,000 square kilometres of occupied territory in Kursk. A ceasefire deal, if it happens, will be a tussle between Putin who is determined to present his “special military operation” to the Russian people as a victory for the motherland as well as two fingers to the US and Nato, which spent multi-billions of dollars to arm Ukraine, and Zelensky who called upon his people to make unbelievable sacrifices in order to preserve and protect the whole of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Giving in to Putin in a Trump-brokered deal would not just be devastating for him personally but might also bring to an end his political career as the warrior leader.