Talk World

Donald Trump spent the evening sounding like a jilted lover on social media: China, he wailed, has tightened its choke-hold on rare earths again. In retaliation, he vowed to slap 100 % tariffs on every Chinese product that still reaches American shelves. Translation: he’s losing his cool, because Beijing just hit back—hard. Here’s what happened. Washington and Beijing had agreed to meet in Frankfurt on 10 November to talk trade. The customary choreography calls for both sides to smile, lower the temperature, and arrive with goodwill gestures. Instead, Team Trump decided to manufacture leverage. On 14 October, the United States will begin charging any Chinese-owned, Chinese-built or Chinese-flagged vessel a “port fee” of US $1 million per call—or US $1,000 per dead-weight ton, whichever is higher. Carriers whose fleets are more than 50 % Chinese-built will pay the full million; smaller shares ratchet down to US $750 k or US $500 k. The message was classic Trump: cancel the fee if you wa...

Call them Front-Lines rather than “theaters”; each is already hot enough to burn American fingers and, taken together, they sketch the outline of the post-1945 order’s successor. Front-Line One: the Middle-Eastern tar-pit Since Hamas burst out of Gaza’s fence on 7 October 2023 Washington has waded deeper into the Levantine swamp—exactly the quagmire the Blob swore it would avoid. (Yesterday’s note covered the details: the carrier groups, the frantic shuttling of Blinken, the slow-motion emptying of U.S. ammo bunkers in Israel’s shadow.) Front-Line Two: the European trip-wire What happened this week shows the second front is no longer “emerging”; it is operational. The Hungarian-Ukrainian drone farce Budapest detects a UAV over its airspace. Kyiv instantly blames Moscow. Hungarian intelligence shoots back: the flight path was scripted in Ukraine, the paint job is Russian—nice try, but we’re not your useful idiot. Forty-eight hours later Zelensky flips the script: “Hungarian drones are s...

  (And Why Washington Can’t Walk Away) A 2,000-km drone punch On Tuesday the Houthis did it again: two cheap drones flew the length of the Arabian Peninsula, slipped through overlapping Israeli and American air-defences and slammed into two targets in the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat. Tel Aviv imposed an almost total news blackout, but smartphones are faster than censors: videos of panicked families sprinting for shelters went viral, and a leaked hospital tally says more than twenty people were admitted, several in serious condition. The blame game that broke the Sunni firewall Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s first reaction was the usual “their leaders are dead men walking”. His second outburst was the one that rewrote the rules: he publicly accused Egypt and Saudi Arabia of helping the Houthis guide the drones. In the fractured politics of the Arab world that charge is radioactive. For seven years the “Sunni bloc” – Riyadh, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Amman – has watched from the b...