Mallen Baker: Faultlines

Yesterday, it emerged that the Trump team has been asking its (former) allies Japan and Australia a very strange question - demanding clarity from them on a subject for which the US has a policy not to provide any such clarity. It is, of course, the question of what would they do should China invade Taiwan. But is it really asking? Or is it creating the impression of preparation as part of an oper...

Canada thought it was making good progress in negotiations with the Trump team - then he announced even higher tariffs against it. Vietnam thought it had agreed a deal with a much lower tariff figure, but then Trump simply announced a higher one. The first countries through the gate are finding - and the rest of the world is noting - that nothing Trump or his team say can be trusted, that any deal...

The US President just announced a massive 50% tariff on Brazil. Nothing to do with the usual excuses - trade deficits - the US has a trade surplus with Brazil. No, instead he is punishing the country for the fact that it is prosecuting former strong man authoritarian president Bolsonaro - one of the leaders Trump saw as 'one of us'. Why is it prosecuting him? Well, he denied the election result th...

Trump has muttered, he has grumbled, he has occasionally threatened, but never has there been the slightest sign that he would actually take action of any sort against Vladimir Putin's Russia over its war against Ukraine. But now it suddenly seems as though that might be about to change. Not only did Trump ensure the weapons flow to Ukraine restarted, but he has strongly hinted his interest in end...

Another day, another round of tariff dramas. Trump revealed the new tariff rates he was 'granting' to various countries via letter, along with a new deadline for those countries to come to a deal with him before the rates come into force. It's just another way of seeking to bully the world into agreeing to give one-sided deals to the most powerful country in the world, and to string out the proces...

So Elon Musk is launching a new political party in the US. And former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is doing something similar in the UK, albeit with a very different political bent. And you're adding those to the existing UK 'upstart' party Reform UK, which is already doing extremely well in the polls. But wait ... aren't both of these countries famously and rigidly two party systems? Aren't third...

China has had a public line on Ukraine for the last three years - studied neutrality that didn't entirely fool anybody. Well, yesterday it blew that up with a frank admission to a top level delegation from the EU that left them astonished. Not for the reality of it, but for the fact that they would even admit it. Because they said yes - China will not allow Russia to be beaten in the Ukraine war....

For an administration that talks a lot about free speech, President Trump sure seems to sue a lot of news media companies for reporting on things he wishes they wouldn't. He also is suing a lot of social media companies. To all appearances, these are about chilling free speech, while also extorting significant sums of money for Trump's 'presidential library'. It's not even subtle, but we're gettin...

It came out of the blue, with all the NATO allies of Ukraine having thought they'd done a great job of keeping Trump on side at last week's NATO summit. Suddenly, they were learning that Trump had paused weapons already agreed to be sent to Ukraine. Not only that, but Trump was suddenly taking a direct call with Vladimir Putin to discuss all the possibilities of how they could work together. This...

The controversial Trump Budget Mega-Bill squeaked its way through the Senate, thanks to the casting vote of JD Vance. And now it has come back to the House somewhat changed from how it was when it left. Specifically, with more debt loaded into it. And more severe cuts to Medicaid. Democrats are convinced this bill is going to come back to haunt the Republicans, and by all accounts Republicans fear...

We know that big changes are happening in the world. Some of them are well known as cycles in history, and affect the current geopolitical order. But there are also four aspects where what we face is unique to our time - things the human race has never dealt with before. And the most important of those four is the one the effects of which are coming whether we like it or not - and sooner than the...

Musk has largely gone back to focusing on his own businesses - but he couldn't help making a last public stab at President Trump's big budget bill which will eviscerate support for EVs and clean technology, while boosting it instead for fossil fuels. He must be reflecting how badly served his original missions for Tesla and SpaceX have been by his biggest single mistake surely in his life - gettin...

Lots of people have gotten excited about an upset win for an old-fashioned socialist candidate in the New York Mayoral race. Notwithstanding the implications or otherwise of the politics of it, the real lesson that Democrats and everyone else involved in politics should be paying attention to is the fact that someone finally showed up the dismal level of what passes for political campaigning right...

Suddenly, Trump had a moment and called off the ongoing trade talks with Canada. The reason - or, at least, the excuse - was the incoming Digital Services Tax about to be implemented (and running as a forerunner to the same device in the EU). Now the trade war is back on. Trump will be announcing the new tariff rate for Canada in the coming week, and it's unlikely to be a minor affair - because it...

We heard all the promises during the confirmation hearing for Robert F Kennedy Jr. He was not anti-vax. He was not promoting conspiracy theories. He was not going to be messing around with immunisations schedules for children. Well, that didn't last long. Right now, fundamental changes are being made that remove actual vaccine expertise and replace it with pseudoscience and quackery. It's early da...

Trump's use of military force in Iran has made his enemies and rivals sit up and take notice - especially those in China who have been evaluating the likelihood of the US intervening should they finally decide to make a move on Taiwan. How much has really changed because of what just happened over Iran's nuclear programme? And what are the huge mistakes President Trump is making that is giving Xi...

The NATO Summit came to a relatively successful conclusion, given the rather limited ambition it had set for itself. But throughout the event, Trump insisted on a version of reality of the recent US military strike against Iran's nuclear sites, that is not supported by evidence, and demanded that everyone else should actively agree. And this in spite of the fact that a preliminary assessment by hi...

All of Trump's team were on message - the US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites was a one-off strike, not a declaration of war, and certainly not directed towards regime change in Iran. Then Trump floated exactly that, and it seemed that he was piling pressure onto Iran to capitulate. Did this mean he didn't think he'd completely destroyed Iran's nuclear capabilities? Did it mean that he was trying...

So the President Trump's United States just dropped a bunch of its 'bunker buster' bombs on the nuclear enrichment sites in Iran. Technically, that means it has joined the war between Iran and Israel. But it all depends on what happens next - because neither Trump nor Iran has an interest in taking each other on in a long drawn-out conflict. That said, even if it ends quickly (no guarantee), Trump...

The Trump Administration's trademark abrupt bullying has just led to key regional ally Japan cancelling an annual security summit. Between America's sudden unreliable ally status, and its assault on Japan's economy via tariffs, it is now quickly re-evaluating its options. Just as all that is happening, the US has woken up with a start to not one, but two ways they might be directly threatened by C...

You read that right - The Fordow nuclear enrichment site in Iran, located as it is beneath a mountain, is considered by some in the Pentagon to be so hard to reach, that even America's famed 'bunker-buster' might not get the job done. In which case, the only conceivable alternative - well, it would cross a red line that the world has been observing without fail for eighty years. And yet we know th...

New research by the Pew Research Centre has looked at worldwide attitudes to President Trump, and as a consequence Trump's America. Some of it won't be hugely surprising - yes, with the exception of five countries in the sample, Trump is viewed negatively. But some of the results are less intuitive, some are downright bizarre. And many of them tell a story about how we see the world, and what we'r...

The G7 Summit of 2025 may come to represent the last gasp of the old rules-based world order, condemned to impotence and irrelevance as President Trump pondered whether to enter the war with Iran, and showed the shift symbolically be leaving the summit half way through. But there's a lot at stake in just how Trump's new 'might-makes-right' world order gets shaped - and an early taste of the glory...

The most frequent setbacks to the Trump Administration have been in the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court with its Trump-appointed judges - as things it seeks to do are found to be illegal. Of course, this has been met with Trump bluster - lots of name calling and probably empty threats to do with impeachment. But the authoritarian playbook has plenty of history for how such issues get...

The G7 summit is under way in Canada, and the biggest agenda item by far is the war between Israel and Iran. Almost certainly, nothing said or done there will make the slightest difference. Since Russia's war on Ukraine showed up the brutal logic of nuclear-armed power, the entire world has shifted in ways that weren't first apparent. And that means that Israel will stop at nothing to prevent Iran...