World War III Home&Abroad
Trump’s Russia Statement
Trump announced earlier today that he would impose 100% secondary tariffs on any country that trades with Russia, unless Moscow agrees a ceasefire with Ukraine in 50 days. The new Senate bill from Graham and Blumenfeld, which has still to pass through Congress, would empower Trump to impose tariffs up to 500%.
The chances that Russia, China and India are going to take this nonsense lying down are slim. They will ignore and retaliate with their own tariffs, bringing us back to the tariff stalemate of a month or so ago. China has strong leverage in the domain of rare earths.
Trump also confirmed that he is making it possible for European countries to buy US-made weapons to send to Ukraine. These would include Patriots (though very few are available), short and medium range, ground and air to air missiles. There had been discussion in Kiev about being green lighted to use 500km JASMS style missiles that could penetrate deep into Russia and which have been used previously in the case, say, of ATACMS, though of course this is always a NATO-enabled capability rather than just a Ukrainian one, but it is not clear to me that this has been confirmed.
Overall Trump is risking yet another display of US hegemonic weakness.
In other developments related to the US 3-front war to re-assert US global hegemony, the Pentagon over the weekend has formally demanded that Japan and Australia make statements pledging to go to war with China alongside the US over Taiwan. I wonder if they are in the mood.
Multiple sources confirm a continuing top-down campaign of remilitarization and rearmament in Germany targetted at Russia. One German historian has predicted - in hopeful tones - that this is the “last summer of peace.”
In West Asia, the E3 - the three European powers most complicit in perpetrating the US/Israeli farce of the “Iran a Nuclear Threat Without Having a Single Nuclear Weapon, While Israel has 200” campaign, are meeting tomorrow when they will likely announce the “snapback” of sanctions on Iran and provide Israel with yet another green-light for a further attack on Iran.
They want to see the IAEA - which provided the (false) pretext (on the basis of ancient claims, resolved ten years ago) for the last Israeli attack, - return to Iran even though the IAEA’s complicity with Israeli and Western Neocons (when will we see a UN investigation?) is now plain for all the world to see.
As I have recently posted, the situation of Iran is becoming every day more embroiled with the extent to which Iran can anticipate strong material support from Russia and China should there be further conflict with US/Israel. More intense fighting in Ukraine may militate against Russia becoming too involved in its eastern extremities.
Added complications are emerging from Israeli ally Azerbaijan, and from Türkiye’s attempts to forge a Turkish-Kurdish-Arab alliance (including a military and maritime alliance with The Tripoli government of Libya) which may turn out to be a counterforce against an alliance between Israel and Syria to split up and take the north of Lebanon, working in the general direction of a Turkish claim to Syria and Iraq. The potential for an alliance between the Damascus government of HTS and the Kurdish SDF appears to have disappeared on account of Damascus opposition to an autonomous Kurdish region, and to the SDF having autonomous status within the Syrian army. Turkey agrees with Damascus on these points.
Other Ukraine
David Betz and Michael Rainsborough in a long article re-published today on Natylie’s Place, argue that one of the major lessons of the conflict over Ukraine is that the imagined promise of the digital revolution that it would render war cleaner and swifter in favor of Western interests has been demolished. The war has shown that industrial capacity matters; that mass still wins wars; that soft power is not eternal and that digital illusions are just that.
Burying Genocide
On Gaza, where the Gaza Health Ministrt reports that Israel has killed 1588 health works since October 7 2025, amidst 57,000 fatalities, of which 17,000 were children and 9,000 were children:
Burying Genocide – The BBC, Gaza And The Role Of The UK
Ukraine's Corporate Carve-Up Collapses?
Police State USA
Professor Jonathan Anthony Caravello of CSU Channel Islands, a legal U.S. citizen, was taken into federal custody during a protest against an ICE snatching of workers at Glass House Farms in Camarillo. CSUCI says that it is its understanding that Professor Caravello was peacefully participating in a protest—an act protected under the First Amendment and a right guaranteed to all Americans.