Mallen Baker: Faultlines

In this news round-up of the week for Friday December 5th 2025 - The US launches its new security strategy, and it doesn't mince words in laying out the real thinking behind Trump's bizarre foreign policy. The question is - will Europeans actually do anything about the admission that Trump aims to replace them all with far-right parties, that he aims to hand Ukraine to Russia, or any of the rest of it - or will they keep pretending it's business-as-usual? Also, the Ukraine Russia peace negotiations fizzle as they were always going to, and the EU rankles Trump's America by fining Elon Musk's Twitter. Also, I note a true unsung hero, and talk about a skunk and a raccoon.

President Trump assumed that waving a big stick in front of Venzuela's Nicolas Maduro would result in him agreeing to step down, since the US has all of its economic and military might to bring to bear. But Maduro has called his bluff, and suddenly Trump is finding that the ground is disappearing under his feet. The attacks against boats are attracting talk of war crimes. Congress is starting to get seriously unhappy. And the latest revelation about a second strike made just to kill survivors - a war crime in any similar context - has the administration changing its story daily as it slowly realises that consequences are coming. Let's discuss.

NATO is realising that the hybrid warfare being waged against it by Russia, via sabotage, airspace incursions, disinformation and hacking attacks, are too serious to continue to be shrugged off. So today one of NATO's top military leaders put it out there that NATO should be taking more aggressive and proactive action, and that such action would count as a defensive measure in the current situation. This matches the threat - but it suffers the one drawback that the lynchpin member of NATO is President Trump's United States. And Trump is very obviously a Putin ally. So could NATO adopt such a stance - or would it simply get vetoed?

According to the Washington Post, President Trump's defence secretary Pete Hegseth ordered specifically that there should be no survivors from the first of the US military strikes against boats in waters close to Venezuela. This meant that when two people survived the initial strike, the US navy carried out a second strike specifically just to eliminate those survivors - an act that would be considered by international law as murder, as a war crime, or both. The news has Republicans in Congress launching moves to hold the administration to account in another symbol of Trump's fading grip on his party. Let's discuss.

In this news round-up of the week for Friday, November 28th 2025. President Trump faces a major legal backlash as analysis shows hundreds of judges have ruled his latest actions on deportations to be illegal - and now a class action is coming that may force a change in policy. Taiwan shows how it is coming to terms with the unreliability of its greatest ally. Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff shows the world he's really all-in on Russia's side. And I reply to a viewer comment.

This week, we saw the Trump Administration trying to blackmail the EU with steel and aluminium tariffs to get it to dismantle its regulations on big tech. We saw scandal in Switzerland over the donations to Trump of a Rolex clock and a gold bar to get tariffs reduced there. And we saw Trump declare that, as the host of the next G20 meeting in 2026, he is going to bar South Africa from attending because he has special opinions that must be accommodated. But in all of them, there are - to different degrees, and with caveats - signs of growing restiveness with the Trump bullying. A lot of Trump's power is gifted to him by the targets of his attacks - and more and more leaders are starting to show signs of concluding that enough is enough. Let's discuss.

A couple of weeks ago, Michelle Obama said that America wasn't ready to vote for a woman as President. Today, in the UK - which has had three women Prime Ministers and counting - another woman in a top position - Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, got to hold the centre of attention of the country for a couple of days having complained about misogyny and 'mansplaining' that she has to deal with. These statements have to deal with an inconvenient truth. Let's discuss.

We've talked before about the two sides of MAGA - the personality cult / ideological part, which is noisy and enthusiastic at times, and perpetually confused with Trump's frequent inconsistencies - and the tech billionaire part, with their views on the post-democracy AI future they think they should be left to bring about. Earlier predictions that these two might not be the best of room-mates are becoming a safer and safer bet every day. Let's discuss.

As expected, European and Ukrainian leaders have been locked in urgent talks with the US as they try to negotiate down the Trump Ukraine Surrender Plan to something more acceptable. As they do so, Trump is plumbing new depths in his public expression of contempt for Ukraine, saying that it's leaders have not been sufficiently appreciative of everything he has done for them. For some reason, he failed to list all those things. But needless to say, in spite of the stupidity, it all matters a great deal. So let's discuss.

In this news round-up of the week for Friday, November 21st, 2025, we examine the text of Trump's Ukraine surrender plan and the attempt to force Ukraine to sign it, with the threat of letting Putin win the war if it doesn't. We also look at Japan's new Prime Minister facing a massive confrontation with China over Taiwan, and the UK's detailed COVID-19 inquiry report.