Can Trump and Musk ever make up?

Right now the arguments and tirades and social media blastings going on between Donald Trump and Elon Musk make it near-impossible for there ever to be a reconciliation. But it all seems so pointless and silly and childish for these two individuals to carry on stamping their feet and vowing enmity etc etc. Children throw their toys out of the pram, adults are supposed to be more reasonable and wise and practical. So this massive battle between the two biggest egos in the United States has to come to an end at some point. Otherwise Musk is going to deploy all his money towards the Democratic party and disaffected Republicans in order to have Trump's big, beautiful bill thrown out. Could he do that? It sounds like he could. So, Musk has the potential to do almost as much damage to Trump as Trump can do to Musk. There's talk of Trump removing all government aid to the Tesla company. But that would undermine the economy, crash the job market and put efforts to go electric in the car business on the back burner. Everyone loses out. It's time the president of the United States and his ex-buddy, the richest man in the world (or was), to call a halt to all this stupidity and get back to being on the same page for the sake of the nation as a whole. But I doubt it will happen.

Goliath versus Goliath

There have been numerous examples in history of David v Goliath, with the smaller one winning against the big brute. But now we have two Goliaths going at each other, Donald Trump v Elon Musk.Two mighty beasts, one with more power than the other and the other with more money than the other. Musk is taller than Trump but he doesn't have a MAGA support base behind him and he hasn't been elected to anything. So, however this mighty clash of egos goes down, Musk will lose and will regret taking on the president. In fact, he could face ruin if he doesn't kiss and make up. So far there is no sign of that happening despite hints from Trump that he might have a call with Musk and sort it out. That all fell through when Trump declared he wasn't interested in talking or thinking about Musk. Musk is pissed off, seeing all his work on slashing budgets and sacking people to save money being washed down the sink with Trump's big, beautiful bill which will add more than $2 trillion dollars to the nation's defecit, undoing all his hard work to chop the federal budget into a meaningful size. Musk has left the White House and Washington and gone to save his company Tesla from collapse. He has already lost as much money as most Third World countries have in their coffers to last the year. It sounds like we need a moderator here to bring the Goliath v Goliath boxing bout to an end before things get totally out of hand.

Will Putin invade the Baltics?

Senior military types across Europe are warning that Putin will turn his attention to the Baltics once he has either crushed Ukraine or forced a surrender by Kyiv. If this is true, and it might be, then we are talking about a potential war between Nato and Russia in the next two to five years. Is this really realistic or are people now getting so jumpy about this crazy world that they have convinced themselves that Putin wants world domination and is hell bent on carving up Nato once and for all.? Again, it's a scenario that can't be dismissed. These military chiefs read the intelligence every day and should know what they're warning about. Or is it really about persuading their governments to spend a helluva lot more on defence, on the basis that deterrence prevents wars and our deterrence and Europe's deterrence is currently unimpressive? All of this foreboding, of course, has been brought on by the man in the White House, Donald Trump, who has not given the sort of assurances about defending Europe to which all his predecessors have been committed. So, a major incursion (not quite an invasion) by Russia against, say, Lithuania, should trigger Article 5 of the Nato Treaty and every member of the alliance then goes to its aid. Putin would be gambling that Nato will do no such thing because Trumpo might say to Europe, "You do it, we're not going to get involved because we have China to worry about." It's a gamble Putin might think worth taking. My view is that Putin has been so humiliated by the way Ukraine has fought back aginst his invasion army that I think he will hesitate to make the mistake of attacking any member of the Nato alliance. This hesitation will be doubled if every member of the alliance starts spending big money on defence, like the five per cent of GDP which Trump is demanding. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, has claimed today at a Nato defence ministers' meeting that many alliance members are already showing enthusiasm for five per cent, but he didn't include the UK in his list. There is no way Keir Starmer is going to find the money to commit to five per cent of GDP on defence. He's struggling to commit to three per cent and won't get to 2.5 per cent until 2027. Putin will be watching and calculating.

Iran Supreme Leader rejects Trump's nuke proposal

This is not good news for Donald Trump. Very recently he indicated there would be a hig deal with Iran to stop them working on a nuclear weapon as if an announcement was imminent. But it never happened and now Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, has rejected outright the proposal from Trump that Iran gives up enriching uranium. Iran has always said that it has every right, like all countries in the world, to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and that it will never give up this right. The trouble is Iran is rapidly pushing ahead with enriching uranium towards a weapons-grade level which means the ayatollah's talk of "peaceful purposes" doesn't hold much water. It looks, and has always looked, like Iran actually wants to build a nuclear bomb, whatever the ayatollah says, and he only has to give his say-so and within months they could be enriching uranium to the 90 per cent level required for fissile material for a weapon. So, there's a total impasse yet again, and no sign of a deal which is very bad news. Trump really hasn't yet had any sort of breakthrough foreign policy success. In fact, the opposite. The war in Ukraine is raging on. The war in Gaza is getting worse by the day. More deaths, more destruction. What's Trump going to do if Iran continues to block attempts to reach a diplomatic deal to end the nuke threat. That would be three foreign policy failures.

Britain's strategic defence review is a hollow plan without the right cash

The Labour government's ambitious strategic defence review publishd yesterday was full of bold talk and fancy phrases that when analysed sound like they were written by someone well-versed in the gobbledigook of Whitehallese lingo. For me, the stand-out fiugure was the promise by the government to increase the size of the regular army from its current figure of around 70,000 to 75,000 by 2034. That pretty much sums up the state of our armed forces today. An army of 75,000 in the next nine years is not going to put off people like Vladimir Putin or any foreign leader who fancies his chances to grab a bit of Britain's diminished empire around the globe. Ok, the review is also full of dreamy talk of drones and other unmanned vehicles and super hi-techness and a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. But where is the money going to come from? The hoped-for 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence won't be enough, not for the long term. The aspirational three per cent ain't going to happen for years and as for the Naop secretary general's wish for all alliance members to increase their spending to 3.5 per cent or even five per cent of GDP, how can the UK agree to that when it's struggling to reach 2.5 per cent? Of course, there is only way out and that's to increase income tax by one or two percentage points. But the Labour government "promised" in its manifesto that it wouldn't raise income tax. Ever. This promise will have to be cast aside, and very soon. Then the popularity of the governemnt is going to sink. It's a hard road ahead for this country and for this government. The strategic defence review could end up just being 140 odd pages of unfulfillable wish lists.

Ukraine's attack on Russian bombers is a massive turning-point in the war

Carried outwith precision and daring, Ukraine's security forces have damaged or destroyed dozens of Russia's strategic bombers inside Russia, depending on whether you believe Kyiv's claims or Moscow's downplaying statements. Whatever is the full truth, there is no question that Ukraine has dealt a huge blow to Russia's military and to Putin's confidence. In a covert operation codenamed Spider's Web, 117 drones were launched against Russian strategic bombers in five different bases, allegedly attacking 34 per cent of Moscow's long-range cruise-missile-armed aircraft. Not from a long range but from close up, with the drones fired automatically from trucks nearby. It's a staggering achievement and it will make Putin realise that all his treasured military aircraft parked in the open air on bases without hangers to keep them safe, will now be vulnerable to Ukrainian attack. It's a turning point so massive that I believe Putin will be forced to take drastic action to try and show that he is still winning the war. Could he use tactical nukes against Ukraine? He will be sorely tempted. If he does, then the war will spread to Nato. This is such a dire thought that I hardly dare put it into print. But far from seeking an end to the war, Putin is going to accelerate and expand the conflict. He has built a war economy and is producing so many tanks that he will want to use them. The promise by Sir Keir Starmer today to start converting Britain into war-readiness sounds bold but perhaps too late. Al the things he has promised, such as more nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered submarines, will take years. Putin might make his move well before then.

What does Pete Hegseth mean by "imminent"?

Talking to a bunch of top people in the foreign and security policy business in Singapore, Pete Hegseth, the Trumpite US defence secretary, warned that a Chinese attack on Taiwan was "imminent". What does he mean by "imminent"? The definition of imminent is "likely to happen at any moment" and is generally accepted to mean that whatever it is is on the very point of occurring. Like, a person's death is "imminent", ie he has hours to live. So is that what Hegseth meant? That China is literally poised to invade Taiwan, like tomorrow or the next day at the latest? Surely not. I don't think so. If it was true, there would be signs of a massive build-up of PLA warships, amphibious craft, fighter jets, ballistic missiles all turned in the direction of Taiwan and so on. But there is no sign or any intelligence of this going on. Nor do I think Beijing is actually ready for an invasion of Taiwan. Politically, Xi Zinping might just risk it in the belief that Trump won't bother to retaliate by defending Taiwan, but, militarily, the PLA needs more time for rehearsals. They've got until 2027 when Xi said Taiwan will be back under the Beijing fold whether by diplomacy or force. So, not imminent then, not tomorrow or next week or even next month. Hegseth was stirring it up, I guess, and he certainly did that with Beijing which warned him to stop interfering.