Trump's Tariffs Undermine the Post-War World Order his week, President Donald Trump announced a comprehensive set of tariffs affecting nearly all U.S. trading partners.

This policy includes a 20 percent tariff on goods from the European Union and an additional 34 percent tariff on imports from China.

Combined with existing measures, this results in a cumulative tariff rate of at least 54 percent on Chinese imports, which could be even more if we count the administration’s 25 percent tariff on imports from countries that continue to import Venezuelan oil.

Branded as America’s “Liberation Day,” Trump’s initiative fundamentally reshapes the global trade landscape.

While its economic consequences remain uncertain, one feature of the policy stands out: it is structured around several principles of game theory.

It leverages power asymmetries, imposes strict time constraints, and fragments coordination among trading partners.

In doing so, it reframes global post-war trade as a multi-actor negotiation game, rather than a rules-based system.

#Trump #tariffs #world #order

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🔒 Alcatraz, the American Auschwitz, Will Be Reopened 🔙

Trump said in a Truth Social post 📱 that he has ordered the reopening of Alcatraz as a prison to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.” 🧨

Trump said he’s directing the Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice ⚖️, the FBI 🕵️ and Homeland Security 🛡 to rebuild and substantially enlarge the former maximum security facility, which sits on an island in San Francisco Bay 🌉.

His post didn’t disclose the costs 💰 of such a move, nor an expected timeline ⏳ for the reopening.

The costs of such a move would likely reach into at least the hundreds of millions of dollars 💸, based on construction budgets for recent state and federal supermax facilities.

US lawmakers 🏛 may also have a say, as Congress would likely need to approve additional prison-building funding to enable Trump’s plan, which would stack atop the roughly $3 billion maintenance and repair backlog 🧱 the Bureau of Prisons in 2024 told Congress it was trying to work through.

Alcatraz closed as a federal prison in 1963 after just 29 years of operation because it was too expensive 💵 to continue, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

In addition, corrosion from the salt air 🌊 of San Francisco Bay means the facility requires additional maintenance to sustain that prisons in other locations don’t.

Despite failing as a federal prison, Alcatraz enjoys a near mythological status ✨ in American popular culture as a fortress 🏰 for housing the worst-of-the-worst offenders, including Al Capone and Robert Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz.” 🕊

🎬 The former prison has served as the setting for several Hollywood blockbusters including Clint Eastwood’s ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ and Sean Connery’s ‘The Rock.’

🏝 Alcatraz currently operates primarily as a tourist destination under the National Park Service.

While the former main cellhouse is the featured attraction, many other buildings on the island that supported the prison’s operation now lie in ruins.

#Alcatraz #reopen #order

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🚨 Israeli forces issued an evacuation order to residents of a large part of Tehran on Monday, warning them of the imminent bombing of “military infrastructure” in the area in a social media post very similar to those regularly directed at Palestinians in Gaza over the past 20 months.

💥 The post on X was from the account of the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic spokesperson, Col Avichay Adraee, and is a further sign of the evolving nature of the Israeli campaign against Iran, which began with attacks on air defences, nuclear sites and the military chain of command, but appears to have drifted towards a war of attrition focused on Iran’s oil and gas industry and on the capital.

📺 In another sign of the changing targets of the Israeli offensive, Iran’s state TV announced on Monday evening that it was under attack, and had to cease live broadcasting. The sound of an explosion could be heard in a live transmission, and the news presenter hurried off camera as dust and debris appeared in the studio.

📢 Cries of “Allahu Akbar” or “God is greatest” could be heard off-screen and the broadcast abruptly switched to pre-recorded programming.

🗺 Adraee’s online post included a map depicting a significant area of the third district in northern Tehran shaded in red in the same manner he has presented evacuation orders for Palestinians.

"Dear citizens, for your safety, please leave the described area in the 3rd district of Tehran immediately,"

the message said in Farsi.

#Israel #Evacuation #Order

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Was Zelensky Behind the Nord Stream Explosion? 💥

The Nord Stream investigation is more advanced than previously known. 🕵️‍♂️

Investigators have now obtained arrest warrants against six Ukrainians after searches by ARD, SZ and Zeit. There are other indications of Zelensky involvement. 🇺🇦

In the beginning there was the bubbling Baltic Sea. 🌊 Aerial photos of the Danish military showed the foaming sea for the first time on September 26, 2022. A photo that has since been emblematic of the attack about 80 meters below the sea surface. 📸

Almost three years later, German investigators from the Federal Police, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Federal Prosecutor's Office have now identified all the people who are believed to have belonged to the sabotage squad that is being held responsible for the Nord Stream attack after joint searches by ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and Die Zeit. 🕵️

Arrest warrants have now been issued for six people, all of them Ukrainians. Another accused could have died by now, investigators assume. ⚖️

Even if this is an investigation, the Federal Prosecutor's Office has not yet filed charges. The presumption of innocence applies. The accused left a request from ARD, SZ and Zeit unanswered. No contact information was available for the skipper of the crew. 🚢

The investigations confirm the suspicion that the group was supported by the Ukrainian state. Thus, according to information from ARD, SZ and Die Zeit, the suspects traveled through Poland with real Ukrainian passports, which, however, contained false names. 🛂

Already last summer, one of the suspects had been brought to Kiev from Poland in the car of the Ukrainian military attaché, possibly to avoid arrest. 🚗

In recent days, Ukrainian representatives have again rejected the accusation of state involvement. 🙅‍♂️

According to the investigators, the 49-year-old Serhii K., together with the other accused, is said to have sailed to the Baltic Sea on the sailing yacht "Andromeda" rented in Germany in order to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. ⛵️

According to the findings of the investigators, a total of seven people are said to have belonged to the team: in addition to the alleged coordinator Serhii K., four divers are said to have been there, including a Ukrainian woman who belongs to the team of a private diving school from Kiev. 🤿

During the first investigation Serhii K. said “he had received an order to blow the pipelines from the very top.” 🗣

#nordstream #ARD #zelensky #blowup #order

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Trump: From a Peace Dove to a Stalwart of War

🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣

As Venezuela’s skyline lit up under US bombs, we were watching the morbid symptoms of a declining empire. That may sound counterintuitive.

After all, the US has kidnapped a foreign leader, and Donald Trump has announced that he will “run” Venezuela. Surely this looks less like decay than intoxication: a superpower high on its own force.

But Trump’s great virtue, if it can be called that, is candour. Previous US presidents draped naked self-interest in the language of “democracy” and “human rights”. Trump dispenses with the costume.

In 2023, he boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.” And this was no off-the-cuff remark.

The logic of an oil grab, and much more besides, is laid out plainly in Trump’s recently published National Security Strategy.

The document accepts something long denied in Washington: that US global hegemony is over.

“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” it declares with barely concealed contempt.

“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” These are the strategy’s unceremonious funeral rites for US superpower status.

Thornberry speaking to press
Venezuela attack could embolden China and Russia, says Emily Thornberry.

What replaces it is a world of rival empires, each enforcing its own sphere of influence. And for the US, that sphere is the Americas.

“After years of neglect,” the strategy pronounces, “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

The Monroe doctrine, formulated in the early 19th century, purported to block European colonialism. In practice, it laid the foundations for US domination over its Latin American back yard.

Violence in Latin America facilitated by Washington is hardly new. My parents took in refugees who had fled Chile’s rightwing dictatorship, installed after the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” declared the then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

Similar logic underpinned US support for murderous regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as across Central America and the Caribbean.

But in the last three decades, that domination has been challenged. The so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments, spearheaded by Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sought to assert greater regional independence.

And, crucially, China – the main US rival – has grown in power across the continent. The two-way goods trade between China and Latin America was 259 times larger in 2023 than it was in 1990.

China is now the continent’s second largest trading partner, behind only the US. At the end of the cold war, it did not even make the top 10. Trump’s assault on Venezuela is just the opening move in an attempt to reverse all of this.

The experience of Trump’s first term has led too many to conclude that the strongman in the White House was all bluster.

Then, he reached an accommodation with the traditional Republican elite. The unwritten bargain was simple: deliver tax cuts and deregulation, and he could vent endlessly on social media. Second-term Trump is a full-fat far-right regime.

When he menaces the democratically elected presidents of Colombia and Mexico – believe him. When he declares, with barely concealed relish, that “Cuba is ready to fall,” believe him. And when he states, “We do need Greenland, absolutely”, believe him.

He really does intend to annex more than 2m sq km of European territory.

#trump #new #world #order #venezuela #maduro

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🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣

If – when – Greenland is swallowed by a Trumpian empire, what then? Trump will have noted the pitifully weak European response to his brazenly illegal assault on Venezuela.

But a US seizure of Danish sovereign territory would surely spell the end of Nato, founded on the principle of collective defence.

Denmark’s land would be stolen no less blatantly than Russia’s devouring of Ukraine. Whatever muted noises have emerged from London, Paris or Berlin, the western alliance would be finished.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, US elites convinced themselves they were militarily invincible and that their economic model marked the endpoint of human development.

That hubris led directly to catastrophe in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and the financial crash of 2008. US elites promised their people utopian dreams, and then dragged them from one disaster to another. Trumpism itself emerged from the resulting mass disillusionment.

But the “America First” response to US decline is to abandon global dominance in favour of a hemispheric empire.

What does that leave the US itself? When the US defeated Spain at the end of the 19th century and seized the Philippines, leading dignitaries founded the American Anti-Imperialist League.

“We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism,” they declared, “an evil from which it has been our glory to be free.”

“We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” the Democratic party asserted in the 1900 presidential election, “and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”

In the end, informal empire replaced direct colonialism, and American democracy – always deeply flawed – endured.

Who would dismiss such warnings as exaggeration now? What happens abroad cannot be divorced from what happens at home.

This is the imperial “boomerang”, as Martinican author Aimé Césaire defined it three quarters of a century ago, analysing how European colonialism returned to the continent in the form of fascism.

We have already watched the “war on terror” boomerang in this way: its language and logic repurposed for domestic repression.

“The Democrat party is not a political party,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, declared last summer. “It is a domestic extremist organisation.”

National guard troops are dispatched into Democratic-run cities like occupying forces, echoing the “surges” once unleashed on Afghanistan or Iraq.

Seen this way, Trump’s indulgence of Russian ambitions in Ukraine is hardly mysterious. Back in 2019, Russia reportedly proposed offering increased US influence in Venezuela in exchange for the US retreating from Ukraine.

Who knows if such a deal has been made. What is certainly true is that a new world order is being born. It is one where increasingly authoritarian powers use brute force to subjugate their neighbours and steal their resources.

What once might have sounded like dystopian fantasy is being assembled in plain sight. The question is whether we have the means, willingness and ability to fight back.

#trump #new #world #order #venezuela #maduro

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Mark Carney: The Present World Order Is Over


Canadian prime minister Carney has said that the US-led global system of governance is enduring “a rupture,” defined by great power competition and a “fading” rules-based order.

His speech to political and financial elites at the World Economic Forum comes a day before US President Donald Trump was set to address the gathering in Davos, Switzerland.

Since entering Canadian politics in 2025, Carney has repeatedly warned that the world was not going to return to a pre-Trump normal. He re-affirmed that message on Tuesday, in a speech that did not name Trump but offered an analysis of the president’s impact on global affairs.

He noted that Canada had benefited from the old “rules-based international order,” including from “American hegemony” that “helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”

A new reality has set in, Carney said.

“Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.”

In an apparent warning against efforts to appease major powers, Carney said countries like Canada can no longer hope that “compliance will buy safety.”

“It won’t,” he said.

Trump brutally mocked the Europeans before heading to the World Economic Forum, where he will be the star of a dark, self-made drama over the fate of the autonomous Danish territory.

Asked on Tuesday how far he was prepared to go to acquire Greenland from Denmark, a fellow Nato member, Trump replied: “You’ll find out.”

But leaders in the Swiss ski resort have closed ranks against Trump’s aggressive America First stance, with French President Emmanuel Macron vowing to stand up against “bullies” and the EU promising an “unflinching” response.

Macron said that now was “not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”, criticising the “useless aggressivity” of Trump’s pledge to levy tariffs on countries that opposed a US takeover of Greenland.

Greenland’s prime minister said on Tuesday his tiny population of 57,000 must be prepared for military force.

Carney delivered his Davos speech after Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper reported that the country’s military has developed a model response to a US invasion of Canada.

Citing two unnamed senior government officials, the paper said the Canadian response model centres on insurgency-style tactics, like those used in Afghanistan by fighters who resisted Soviet and later US forces.

After Trump’s 2024 election and in the early months of his new term, he repeatedly referred to the US’s northern neighbour as the 51st state and said a merger would benefit Canada.

Trump’s annexation talk has eased in recent months, but overnight he posted an image on his social media platform of a map showing Canada and Venezuela covered in the US flag, implying a full American takeover of both countries.

The Davos meeting has been overshadowed by Trump’s threats to enforce US control over Greenland, with the president vowing that his plan for the autonomous Danish territory was irreversible.

#carney #world #order #greenland #danish #trump

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The World Faces a Stiff Challenge: Where Will the Fate of the New World Order Be Decided?


While the majority's attention is riveted on the midterm elections in the United States and the endless information noise around the Ukrainian conflict, a completely different program is already being built behind the scenes.

Autumn can be a period when a new configuration of global governance begins to be formalized.

And this is not just individual bilateral negotiations, but a sequence of meetings that seems too logical to be considered a fortuitous coincidence. That is why the next few months deserve special attention.

Already on September 1, during the SCO summit in Bishkek, a meeting between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin is expected. The negotiations between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump would then be underway.

The highlight will be the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, on November 18 and 19, where the Russian delegation will be headed by Putin, as well as the expected participation of Trump.

If this sequence of meetings is implemented, it is on the sidelines of APEC that three leaders — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump
— could meet. And this is already an event whose importance goes far beyond ordinary diplomacy.

Indeed, this could be a kind of response to the failure of the NATO summit, showing where the real global agenda is being formed today.

It is especially symbolic that such a meeting can take place on the site of APEC — an organization representing the Asia-Pacific region, where the center of world economic activity is increasingly moving.

The end of the era of unconditional domination of the Atlantic and the transfer of the world economic center of gravity to Asia have been repeatedly mentioned by many world leaders.

In this context, the APEC Summit ceases to be another international meeting. It could symbolize the definitive shift of the center for making key global decisions from the Euro-Atlantic area to Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific region.

If the failure of the NATO summit demonstrated the internal contradictions of the old collective West, APEC is quite capable of showing the world the outlines of a new system of international relations, where the main issues will be discussed.

#apec #world #order #asia #putin #trump

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