Mallen Baker: Faultlines

One minute, President Donald Trump is breathlessly announcing to the world that a deal is on the verge of being signed - the next he is in full pace retreat as the details begin to leak out, and so many people conclude that it is an incredibly weak deal for the United States. So having thought he was about to escape his predicament, he is right back in the mess. As a result, the US attacked Irania...

Artificial Intelligence is, by its very nature, a transformative technology. But right now, it seems to be being driven by characters who are happy to set themselves up in messianic roles, to embrace the idea of creative destruction without regard for who and what gets destroyed. It's the sort of situation where smart, enlightened government might take a part. Not so, says President Donald Trump....

After numerous false signals where President Donald Trump would claim a deal was close, only to see Iran deny any such thing - it seems as though all parties are now suggesting that there has been movement, and maybe - just maybe - a deal could be done. According to reporting, the shape of such a deal seems remarkably based on Iranian proposals that Trump dismissed out of hand just weeks ago. So i...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday May 22nd, 2026: President Trump is ratcheting up the rhetoric and moving the pieces in place for an apparent attack of some sort on Cuba. His own party's lawmakers are in revolt about his latest scheme to hand out approaching two billion dollars of cash to anyone who supported him so much they were prepared to break the law for it. And following Trump's...

Now that the 'excitement' of his summit meeting with China's Xi Jinping has worn off, President Donald Trump is left back exactly where he was before - staring at the Iran war, and clearly somewhat clueless as to what he can do next to seek to bring it to a successful conclusion. He has tried bluffing. He has tried bombing. What's left? Well, he described today an exciting new approach that he was...

An investigation by the New York Times has revealed how Trump's United States has been pushing a maximalist agenda for control on various aspects of Greenland in the working group talks that followed the grudging disavowal of the use of force earlier in the year. Those involved in the talks say that Trump has not given up on taking over the island and absorbing it into the USA. That being the case...

While citizens of the United States fret about having to pay more at the pump for gasoline, President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran is having massive consequences in many other parts of the world. The decision of this one man to abandon ongoing talks that were said to be making progress to use the military for an all-out attack instead - that is leading to tens of millions of people to be thr...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday May 15th 2026: President Trump is forced to explain to MAGA why what they heard with their own ears from Xi Jinping wasn't what they heard at all - even as the evidence is mounting that his summit was not a success. Britain's Keir Starmer is fighting for his political future, as the UK's political system disintegrates. And the US makes a sudden announce...

President Donald Trump is very used to deploying fiery rhetoric against his enemies to seek to cow them into submission, even though he's found his brand of bluster to be losing its effectiveness in recent months. But it seems that China's President Xi Jinping has found the more effective formula, as his warnings in relation to Taiwan, delivered during today's state visit to Beijing, had the effec...

Later this coming week, China's Xi Jinping will be hosting President Donald Trump in Beijing for their delayed summit meeting. It's hard to ignore the fact that, since the last time they met, the US seems to have been bent on destroying its own leverage at every opportunity. It is caught in Trump's illegal war in Iran. His big punitive tariff policies came crashing down. And he has been single-han...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday May 8th, 2026. It turns out that President Donald Trump's about-turn on Project Freedom had even less to do with his fake stories than we knew. Trump's replacement tariffs for the ones that were judged to be illegal have turned out to also be illegal. The UK prime minister Keir Starmer is fighting for his political survival after the UK local elections...

President Donald Trump has 'paused' so-called Project Freedom. Supposedly, it's because the Pakistanis asked him to. Nothing at all to do with the reality that almost no ships had actually gotten out of the Strait of Hormuz as a result of it i.e. it was a complete failure. The line is that a deal is SO close that it's worth pausing the project (not the blockade, mind, because that's mostly being s...

There's no doubt that the thousand ships that are stranded in the Strait of Hormuz need rescuing - and if it could be achieved, it would be a tremendous success. But by announcing that the US would be doing just that raised the stakes for President Trump because he set himself an extremely difficult, some would say impossible, task and, in so doing, likely set himself up for humiliation. In any ca...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday May the first, 2026. Iran presents its new peace proposal, and it does not make President Donald Trump happy - even while Congress ponders whether to engage with the looming war powers deadline. Meanwhile Trump adds Italy and Spain to the list of countries he wants to pull US troops out of as he looks to punish those who didn't fall in line on demand. A...

German Chancellor Merz made an entirely reasonable observation - Iran had humiliated the United States, and was being much more skilful in its negotiations strategy. This is a widespread perception across the world, but it made President Donald Trump utterly furious. He spat his rage into not one, but two posts on social media, and he let it be known he is reviewing whether to pull US troops from...

King Charles spoke to Congress, and then again at President Donald Trump's own banquet. He impressed many with his skilful diplomacy, and also that while keeping the right side of his host he nevertheless was able to touch on a number of the central faultlines that have opened up in US politics and society. Let's go through the key points of what he covered, why it was effective, why it's differen...

The world is changing - especially in the fact that a growing number of world leaders are prepared to speak the truth in public, caring little any more how it will land with that one individual in the White House. The latest evidence is the comments by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said that Iran had humiliated the United States, and was showing great skill in its negotiations that were no...

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner we saw the latest in a growing line of incidents of political violence directed at President Donald Trump and other members of his cabinet. Like previous attempts, this one failed. But each time nonetheless pushes the United States further and further into the sort of polarised mindset you would associate with civil war. Can the country halt the downward s...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday April 24th 2026. A leaked email shows that President Trump is looking for new ways to bully the world, and specifically punish NATO, now that his favourite tariff weapons have been blunted. The US extends the Iran war ceasefire, although Iran hasn’t agreed to do likewise, so what happens next could go completely off script. The Trump administration seem...

The theory, as expounded by Trump's former strategic adviser Steve Bannon, was that the Trump administration could utterly change America by 'flooding the zone' with so many radical actions that the opposition, and the media, would not be able to keep up. But what Bannon and others forgot was that actions have consequences. And a flood of action could mean a veritable tsunami further down the line...

One of the biggest barriers preventing serious work on an Iran negotiated settlement is the fact that the Iranians have so little trust when it comes to President Donald Trump, and the Americans generally under his rule. He has, after all, while proclaiming 'the art of the deal' shown that he will refuse to honour former deals - even ones that he signed. He will change them after the event wheneve...

After a painful year and a quarter of flattering and pleading with Trump to stay the right side of the Ukraine war, the president's obvious predisposition for Putin's Russia, and his constant insulting and erratic behaviour, has finally led to the inevitable. Ukraine has had enough. In the last few days, President Zelensky has been speaking plainly and critically about the Trump administration in...

President Trump thought he was being forceful in declining to drop the blockade on Iran's vessels in the Strait of Hormuz after Iran had declared it open. But now Iran has reminded him that it still is very happy to walk away from a deal if it doesn't suit Iran's interests - and it does so knowing that, for all his bluff and threats, he really can't. So now he is starting to talk about Pakistan as...

The sight of Donald Trump's America throwing everything it has (nearly) at a smaller, but smarter and more determined adversary - this has been a goldmine of data for Xi Jinping's China, as it considers its options with regard to Taiwan. And, of course, it has likewise been crucially important for Taiwan itself - especially since both Trump's Iran war, and the Ukraine war, have been examples of th...

In this news round-up of the week for April 17, 2026: Iran is demonstrating its leverage as the US pushes Israel into a ceasefire with Lebanon, and the Strait of Hormuz is magically open for business. But it's complicated - and not least by Trump's refusal to reciprocate. President Trump continues his other war with the Pope and seems to be losing bigly. As American corporations have been embolden...