Mallen Baker: Faultlines

Today, the Financial Times reported on a leaked proposal for Russia to engage in a disinformation and influence campaign in support of the re-election of autocrat Viktor Orban. This comes as his opponent in next month's election, Peter Magyar, is significantly ahead in independent polling. But President Vladimir Putin does not want to lose his best ally in Europe. President Donald Trump likewise....

Trump has started talking in terms of the war being complete, and stressing that it was just an 'excursion' - a sign, according to stock markets and commodity traders, that he is looking pretty urgently for an off-ramp from the Iran war. Is Trump, some are asking, about to TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) out of the Iran war? Well, unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. In a war, it doesn't fa...

Even before Iran had announced the selection of its new Supreme Leader, President Trump and Israel had said they were intending to assassinate whoever it was - unless Trump was involved in the selection. It's a breathtaking statement of imperial ambition - and one that has not been revised after the revealing of Mojtaba Khamenei as that leader. It's also a major breach of the last 400 years of sta...

Xi Jinping's China sees itself as the rising primary power in the world, soon to take over from the fading old empire of the United States. But it knows its new, rapidly growing military, is untested, and may remain so up until it gets called into action over Taiwan. So it has been taking a very keen interest in President Donald Trump's war in Iran, and took the unusual step of releasing five of t...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday March 6th 2026. The first of Trump's Cabinet Secretaries to be fired is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump declares that he will only accept Unconditional Surrender from Iran, but don't worry - it's not REALLY a war. We discuss something you may not have noticed, sparked by the appearance of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Offic...

Most of the international community know that President Donald Trump's war on Iran, having been launched without any sort of imminent threat, having been focused on assassinating all the leadership of the regime, is illegal under international law. Hence why they have not been queueing up to take part in the offensive operations. But so far, they have mostly been muted in their criticism. Step for...

President Donald Trump has muttered darkly about the need to take federal control of the mid-term elections. And now, the evidence suggests that his team has a plan for how to do it - how to take control, and you have to presume to seek to get the outcome that he desires. This is the key pivot point for American democracy - because this will either be the moment that shocks America awake to its de...

War is a serious business. You would hope. But since President Donald Trump announced the start of the war against Iran, the US conduct has been typified by constantly changing commentary on why the war was started, and what its objectives are, constant lying about various details, and nothing that suggests that the mortal danger created for American servicemen and Iranian civilians is being creat...

There are seven ways that President Donald Trump has broken, or significantly altered, the US system, and the global political or economic system. Ways that mean that, when he has finally left office, the world will still remain a very different place to how it was when he most recently found it. Let's look at each of those seven ways, along with the two that either are not yet broken, or might ye...

President Trump has declared war - not a special military operation, not an in-and-out abduction. A full-on offensive assault with the stated goal of regime change. The assault has targeted the country's senior leadership, has been accompanied by calls to the people to rise up and depose their government. And the argument has been that this is okay because the regime is genuinely deplorable and de...

In this news round-up for the week of 27 February 2026: If 2025 was about corporate cowardice and capitulation to the Trump revolution, 2026 is seeing more and more standing up to the bullying. So the AI company Anthropic - threatened with massive sanction by the Pete Hegseth's Pentagon - has regardless refused to give it the right to use its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Ne...

Today saw Hillary Clinton being quizzed in Congress about the man she never met, while President Trump, who is all over the files, faces no such pressure. We have news that certain key files, including testimony about Trump's alleged wrongdoing, is being withheld by the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, across Europe, real people are feeling much more robust repercussions for their own part in one...

Trump promised that the State of the Union address 2026 would be 'long, because there's lots to talk about'. Some of that talk is likely to be peevish, complaining, even angry. After all, having started the year on a high, it's been pretty much a massive slog ever since. And especially with the huge setback on tariffs, that we have to pretend wasn't a setback at all, and the uncomfortable fact tha...

In (yet another) moment of the truly surreal, President Trump announced this weekend that he is sending a hospital ship to Greenland to help with all the people getting sick there who are being left untreated. Which is odd, since that's not happening. It seems, on its face, to be the world's clumsiest attempt to curry favour with a people who you've literally just united against you by threatening...

In this news roundup of the week for Friday February 20th 2026. The Supreme Court strikes down President Trump's emergency tariffs in the single biggest setback since he started his second term. We discover exactly why Trump flip-flopped yet again on the UK transferring ownership of the Chagos islands. And Trump makes a dramatic new announcement - about aliens.

Trump's Board of Peace had its first meeting today, and it was pretty much what you would have expected. Lots of praise for Trump, lots of big promises for the great future ahead of Gaza with all the development that will be coming - and relatively little attention to the tricky obstacle that none of it can happen until Hamas agrees to disarm, which they show little inclination to do. And while Tr...

It would be entirely possible for President Trump, or A.N.Other autocrat, to seek to dismantle the guardrails of democracy in their country and all the rest of it, while still keeping a firm grasp of what is, or isn't reality, and dealing with it as needed. But that is not the current way, because Trump is determined to believe only his own version of reality, even when that is massively and easil...

Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, and he made probably the most cogent and professional speech on behalf of the MAGA world view we've heard. Unfortunately, the sentiments it expressed stood in stark contrast to the words of his boss and the actions of the administration - a fact that was not lost on his audience. But the quality of the spe...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday February 13th 2026. As the Epstein Files revelations have continued to appear, the talk has turned to just how far-reaching the so-called Epstein Class has turned out to be - and it's feeding a real push for messaging around the midterm elections. The Trump administration abolishes the basis for most climate regulation in America. And Trump is staring I...

As the Munich Security Conference kicks off this year - the same one that was made famous last year thank's to JD Vance's speech telling Europeans to shape up - NATO is conducting exercises in Greenland. The official story is that this is all about reassuring US President Trump that the country is defended against the nefarious Russians and Chinese. But it is obviously widely understood that it's...

President Trump has attacked Canada again, and this time said that he will prevent the opening of a new bridge between the two countries. And this is ostensibly because of a long list of supposed grievances, up to and including something about China banning ice hockey. But the real story is more prosaic, and one that seems unlikely to go away any time soon. As much to do with the quiet but determi...

Greenland was the pivotal moment. Before then, appeasement was the only game in town. But now, Europeans are increasingly joining Canadians in resisting Trump's America in the ways that are available to them, and governments are frantically seeking to reduce their exposure, and to "derisk" their integration, with the US economy. This is going to take time, but it's worth noting some of the ways th...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday February 6th 2026, President Trump is getting very focused on the mid-term elections. We discuss what that’s likely to mean. And because he likes to share the love, the Trump state department Is allocating pots of cash for subverting European democracy - Or ‘spreading American values’ as they describe it. And bad news if you’re fed up of hearing about T...

Out of all the names that have come out in the latest massive tranche of Epstein files, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, and all the others - not one of them are that of Britain's prime minister Keir Starmer. And yet, right now he is seriously at risk of the scandal sinking his premiership as many of his own MPs turn against him. And it all comes down to his appointm...

In this news round-up of the week for January 30th 2026 - Trump's string of humiliating retreats in recent days continued with this week's abject U-turn on the subject of ICE operations in Minnesota, and the killings there of protestors. The Trump administration also is caught out having meetings with Albertan separatists, looking for support to break up Canada. And the UK risks enraging Trump by...