General Offensive - General Uprising

At about the same time I recorded this, Netanyahu got onto his flight home from Washington. He said, in effect, that President Trump was going to go back to the Iranians with all three Israeli demands: no Iranian nukes, no Iranian ballistic missile production and no Iranian proxies (Hizballah and the Houthis in particular) in the Middle East. President Trump posted to Truth Social that he’s going...

Witkoff and Kushner are going to Israel for meetings. The Israeli Chief of Staff General Staff is in America for meetings. Open Source sites are marking down every chalk heading into the region, and of course the USS Delbert D Black is steaming around the Red Sea (other ships are available). Subtle it ain't. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get acce...

Britain’s main export to China is cars, not Scotch whisky. A 5% reduction in China’s tariff on whisky isn’t going to add much to Scotland’s balance of trade with the People’s Republic. Maybe it’ll hit £180M a year? Compare that with more than £5Bn a year in British cars exported to China (and China’s 15% tariff on importing big diesel vehicles like Range Rovers). Starmer was promised visa-free tra...

I’ve been made aware by my social media advisor panel (I have 20something daughters) that Substack does a fairly poor job of creating clips for posting to the socials. The ‘AI’ appears to be particularly good at creating thumbnails in which I’m blinking. I’ve also seen that YouTube shorts based on those clips do very well if I’m in front of a bookcase, less well from my desk in my study. I’m not s...

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Yes, European leaders need to be robust in responding to the American approach to Greenland, but the Governor of California telling the rest of the world not to truckle and bow to the man with the flamethrower is rich. If anyone needs to take a robust line with America’s Chief Magistrate it's the elected representatives of the American people. Gavin Newsom does a good line in snotty posts on Xitte...

Completely setting aside the question how you impose a tariff selectively on some EU members (a lot of French wine is going to be entering the USA from Irish ports), and setting aside whether EU states will use the so-called ‘Trade Bazooka’ against America, and setting a side whether King Charles is taking a Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George to Washington with him, and setting a...

Is the Executive Committee of the Gaza Board of Peace the same as the Founding Executive Committee of the Gaza Board of Peace? Did the White House run the list of names for the Peace Board past the Israelis before announcing the list? If not, why not? Did Steve Witkoff figure that Bibi Netanyahu’s people wouldn’t notice, or was he trying to bounce Israel into accepting yet another version of Hamas...

With US resources stretched into the previously quiet Caribbean, and Administration attention focused, oddly, on pulling NATO to bits over Greenland; the Iranian protesters weren’t going to get any help. They will take little comfort in the knowledge that the Secretary of Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council is now subject to US sanctions. The Iranian government have received the signal that...

I started my day talking about Iran in the pre-dawn. I expected to be asleep by now, and you can see how bloodshot my eyeballs are, but I paused to answer a question from a journalist. I'll leave you to figure out what the question was, but here's what I told him. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nusbacher.substac...

Almost the first thing I ever did on social media was live tweet a lecture by Joe Nye. His concept of 'soft power' was in almost every way brilliant. The name, however is rubbish. It invites us to imagine that enduring cultural power is ineffective, unreliable, or incompatible with combat power. This is the time of year when I come to Windsor Castle. I focus my mind on leadership, and I can't forg...

It’s really an excuse to talk about Mao Zedong’s method for waging revolutionary war, which is important because it’s proven effective over the last 100 years or so. Mao used it, Ho used it (which is how I got the name for this short-short podcast series, General Offensive! General Uprising!), and a book about the British Army mocked us for still teaching it in the 1990s as though it should have b...

This connects to American operations in Venezuela a few days ago; and it connects to the ever-so-slightly surprising American focus on Greenland. I know some of my American friends view the hemispheric sphere of influence as a stepping stone to a future in which the US and China are two superpowers. It will be interesting to see whether you can get there from here. Coming video comments: Why I kee...