America

Donald Trump has instructed his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea. The two countries have had a bilateral defense agreement since 1953, and it was in defense of the government in Seoul that 36,500 American service personnel gave their lives during the Korean War. (It is worth noting that, despite the signing of an armistice at Panmunjom in July 1953, the conflict is technically ongoing.) Trump’s hazardous decision to downgrade military cooperation with and support for South Korea has come as a surprise.

On his very first day as Colombia’s new President, Abelardo de la Espriella received a dramatic house-warming gift: a billion dollars, courtesy of Donald Trump. Three days later, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the country – but correlation is not causation. The President’s ten-figure donative arrived as aid for the militarized crackdown de la Espriella has promised against Colombia’s fearsome drug cartels and jungle guerrillas. And de la Espriella quickly showed himself eager to align with President Trump by adding Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, Trump’s signature new venture in Latin America. With this old-fashioned exchange of gifts, de la Espriella became the newest member of the eclectic global club of Trump allies. This is not a stable alliance.

One day President Trump wants to dial down hostilities with Iran. “We’re low-keying” the conflict, he said Sunday. A day later, though, he was keyed up. After Tehran demanded reparations from Washington as part of its attempt to resurrect June's Memorandum of Understanding, Trump said on Truth Social that it was the Iranians who should: Compensate America for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat. Now it is Trump who has become a hostage of Tehran The problem is simple. For all his bluster about staring down the mad mullahs, Trump is on the run.

This week Ed Miliband made his first trip to Washington DC since becoming Andy Burnham’s Foreign Secretary. He is 56 now, an MP of more than 20 years’ standing in his fourth cabinet role, yet there is something both boyish and gauche about him: the eternal younger brother. How would he fare as Britain’s envoy to President Trump and the cult of MAGA? Miliband had been invited to Washington by Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the pair met at an Association of South East Asian Nations foreign ministers’ conference in the Philippines last month. It had been rumored that the Trump administration was disappointed at Burnham’s selection of Miliband as Foreign Secretary, insofar as it is possible to imagine President Trump displaying much interest in the matter at all.

In an extremely rare bilateral move, the US and Japan have intervened to shore up the Japanese yen, which has been steadily losing value and sliding towards a 40-year low. The news was confirmed by the Japanese Finance Ministry this morning. President Trump preceded the announcement by explaining that the US was “always there to help Japan.” In truth, there wouldn’t have been much point in denying it – a Reuters photo showed a memo on US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Beasant's desk with the simple instruction “To Do – Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) 5-10 billion.” The dollar fell to 157 yen after the announcement, well down from the 164 (considered by Morgan Stanley the highest tolerable point for the Japanese government) of the previous week.  This is an extraordinary move.

The US Senate narrowly defeated a measure yesterday intended to crimp, if not terminate, President Trump’s ability to conduct hostilities against Iran. The 50-49 vote on a war powers resolution testified to the mounting hostility toward the military campaign among American voters, two-thirds of whom regard the conflict as a futile endeavor. The result is that Trump’s own popularity rating has plummeted to 32 percent, edging out Joe Biden’s 33 percent shortly before he declared that he was exiting the presidential race in July 2024. Presumably, this is one personal record that Trump will not be inclined to tout at his MAGA rallies. What is to be done? Two diametrically opposed camps have emerged on the right to advise Trump on Iran.

Summertime, and the living isn’t as easy as it used to be. The dying, though, is getting easier, especially if you’re in France, Canada or New York. New York’s MAID law will come into effect August 5: supposedly only for those whose deaths are expected within six months, supposedly through self-administered doses only. But the details don't matter. The important part is this: in New York, the state can now authorize the taking of innocent human life. In early July, the French Senate rejected euthanasia for the fourth time in a row. But the government invoked Article 45 of the French constitution and forced the legislation through, "creating a right" to assisted suicide (as if the state were the divine origin of rights, and could create them at the snap of a finger).

The US military has launched a fresh round of strikes against Iran – the second in the past 48 hours – after President Donald Trump declared the fragile ceasefire agreement between the two sides was “over.” Trump said the latest attacks were in “retribution” for Iranian strikes on three cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, in an angry tirade, referred to the Iranian leadership as ‘scum’ Trump added that if there were further attacks on shipping “it will get much worse!” The strikes hit a railroad bridge in Iran’s northeast, according to Iranian state media, as well as a military base in the coastal city of Bushehr, which is the site of the country’s only civilian nuclear plant.

Commentators were so busy fulminating against Trump’s FIFA shenanigans yesterday they mostly missed his intervention in the big story now roiling British politics. "They’re Running the 2024 Anti-Trump Playbook on Nigel Farage," the President posted on Truth Social, linking to an article on the National Pulse, an American media site founded by Farage’s old mucker Raheem Kassam. The point, now being repeated by Reform’s talking heads on TV, is clear. "They" – the SW1 elite – are trying to stop Nigel Farage, just as the Washington establishment mounted a ridiculously elaborate lawfare campaign to try to stop Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s quest for regime change in Iran has backfired horribly. The President misunderstood the resilience of the 47-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran, the strategic calculations of one-time ally Israel and the physical and political geography of the Strait of Hormuz. Vice President J.D. Vance appears now to be positioned as the public face of failure. The decision to launch the assault on Iran was underpinned by Israeli confidence that Iran’s leadership could be toppled and that the United States’ overwhelming firepower would produce shock and awe. It came in the immediate aftermath of plans to acquire Greenland, incorporate Canada, assert dominance over the Panama Canal and topple the then Venezuelan government. Cuba is no doubt next on Trump's list.

The heat is on. The R&B group Kool and the Gang may be co-headlining the historic "A Capitol Fourth 250th Weekend Celebration," but that isn’t doing anything to cool the flaring political tempers in Washington during a record heatwave. Instead, the two-week-long "Great American State Fair" on the National Mall to celebrate American emancipation from British tyranny has turned into the birthday party gone wrong. The first sign that things were going awry for the party planners came a few weeks ago with the clumps of algae that began clotting the reflecting pool in central DC, which President Trump had tasked a company called Green Water Solutions to renovate. The company was true to its name. Green Water produced green water.

J.D. Vance jokingly compared himself to Richard Nixon yesterday. "Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media... kinda sounds like J.D. Vance," he said at the Richard Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. "I’ve always liked Richard Nixon." At the same time, 8,000 miles away, in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian forces struck another ship, further undermining what critics have called "the Vance deal" – the "Memorandum of Understanding" between Tehran and Washington. And that suggests, at a foreign-policy level, the Nixon-Vance parallel is more apt than the 50th Vice President realizes. Of course, Nixon was Commander-in-Chief and Vance is not. And the Vietnam War is very different to America’s current fight with Iran.