Trump calls off tariffs on Europe over Greenland after reaching deal ‘framework’
In an abrupt about-face on Wednesday, President Trump said he was calling off planned tariffs on European nations…
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https://www.newsbeep.com/368689/
Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos – The New York Times
President Trump, who is scheduled to speak in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, has been heaping dismissive scorn on many of the leaders he will greet there. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times.Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos
As European leaders try to engage with the American president over Greenland and the future of Ukraine, he is mocking them as weak.
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Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times.By Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek
Jan. 20, 2026, Updated 3:32 p.m. ET
President Trump and his entourage will be in Europe this week. And they are showing their contempt.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, already hobnobbing with elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, had a sharp retort when reporters asked him about European leaders’ efforts to block Mr. Trump from seizing Greenland.
“I imagine they will form the dreaded European working group,” Mr. Bessent said, calling it their “most forceful weapon.”
It is no secret that the president and his aides view Europe as a weak, ineffectual collection of nations dominated by liberal leaders and tangled in bureaucracy. His administration’s official national security strategy, released last month, said Europe had lost its “civilizational self-confidence” amid a “failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
But rarely has the mocking been so overt.
European leaders’ “most forceful weapon” is “the dreaded European working group,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Credit…Markus Schreiber / Associated PressEarly on Tuesday morning, as Europe’s leaders continued to wring their hands over the president’s latest threats to Greenland, Mr. Trump posted an apparently A.I.-generated meme that showed him hoisting an American flag while standing on the island.
Editor’s Note: The cartoonish image of standing on Greenland, from Truth Social, my edits, I cleaned it up a bit. 🙂 … –DrWeb
“Greenland. U.S. Territory. Est. 2026,” the meme read.
Mr. Trump had not even arrived in Switzerland yet. But as he prepared to speak there on Wednesday, he continued to heap dismissive scorn on the leaders he was about to greet.
When reporters told Mr. Trump that President Emmanuel Macron of France was not going to join the American-led “Board of Peace” overseeing Gaza, Mr. Trump waved aside Mr. Macron’s opinions as irrelevant, saying he would be “out of office in a few months.”
“I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and Champagnes, and he’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join,” the president said, flexing the power of the American market and underscoring France’s vulnerability to his whims.
He also posted flattering messages from Mr. Macron and Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, on Truth Social — showing just how much European leaders are heaping praise on Mr. Trump in what appears to be an attempt to keep him engaged.
“I will use my media engagements in Davos to highlight your work,” Mr. Rutte wrote in the message that Mr. Trump shared.
“Let us try to build great things,” Mr. Macron said, though he also noted: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”
Mr. Trump also targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, giving him his signature all-caps treatment as he complained that the United Kingdom had decided to give up sovereignty of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands, while retaining control of a U.K.- and U.S.-operated military base there.
In 2024, the United Kingdom relinquished control of the islands, a remote archipelago it had held since the colonial era, to Mauritius. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later praised the deal, which came after years of negotiations, and after a court found that Britain had acted unlawfully by detaching the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965.
“Our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia,” the president wrote on his social media site, accusing Britain of doing so “FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.”
He added that international powers “only recognize STRENGTH” and that giving away the island was an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY.”
Mr. Trump’s heckling has troubled European leaders, many of whom are hoping to communicate with him on the sidelines of the Davos meetings. Leaders from across the 27-nation European Union will also gather in Brussels on Thursday evening to discuss how to respond to his latest threats on Greenland.
As the United States looks like a more and more volatile ally — and a hugely unpredictable one — European leaders are saying the continent must move away from its tight ties to America.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos – The New York Times
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Many people criticised Zack Polanski for his skepticism of NATO because of not trusting the Trump administration.
He was right. The US National Security Strategy says one of their priorities is to "Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations". That's interfering in the politics of supposed allies, the kind of "influence operation" and "cultural subversion" they want to stop China doing.
Meanwhile, Russia is not considered a security issue beyond quickly ending the Ukraine war in their favour.
@anderspuck explains:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YAh-xEteBz4
Download the strategy: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
#NationalSecurity #TrumpAdministration #USpol #InternationalRelations #AndersPuckNielsen #EuropeanNations #NATO #InfluenceOperations #CulturalSubversion
European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft
#HackerNews #EuropeanNations #BoeingE7 #AWACS #DefenseNews #MilitaryAircraft
Exclusive: Creation of Ukraine’s Special Tribunal at risk over budget concerns
The creation of a special tribunal set up to try crimes of aggression against Ukraine is encountering budgetary…
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https://www.newsbeep.com/243130/
Trump-Putin summit starts on red carpet, ends in confusion
Trump-Putin summit starts on red carpet, ends in confusion
By Dave Lawler
Caption: Trump and Putin kick off the summit. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesFriday’s summit in Alaska began as a superpower spectacle, then abruptly ended without any indication of what was achieved or where things go from here.
Why it matters: President Trump didn’t get the ceasefire he came for, or the public commitment he wanted from Vladimir Putin to meet next with Volodymyr Zelensky. The leaders scrapped a planned lunch and departed early — but not before both declared the meeting a success.
Between the lines: It’s not hard to see why Putin likely left Anchorage satisfied. Images of Trump applauding as he walked down the red carpet were beamed back to Russia, and around the world.
The other side: Trump insisted that progress was made on a number of issues, though not on the “biggest” one, without offering any specifics.
Friction point: The inconclusive outcome might be most vexing to the party that was not in the room.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump-Putin summit starts on red carpet, ends in confusion
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On Politics: Why Trump wants to meet Putin
August 13, 2025Trump’s Washington
How President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.
Good evening. Tonight, our veteran national security correspondent, David Sanger, guides us through the stakes of President Trump’s upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin. We’re also looking at how the administration’s science funding cuts will affect research into health care disparities, and how Trump is exerting his influence over culture. We’ll start with the headlines.
At stake in Alaska: two egos, and a continent’s future
by Jess Bidgood and David E. SangerThere is nobody with more confidence in President Trump’s deal-making abilities than Trump himself.
Yet, as his Friday meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia draws near, he and his top aides are lowering expectations, suggesting it’s not Trump’s job to make peace between Moscow and Ukraine and calling the summit little more than a “listening exercise.”
Statements like that belie the enormous stakes of the first meeting between Trump and Putin since the Russian invasion, particularly for the parties who aren’t expected to be present, which includes the leadership of Ukraine and of the European nations that have been living with the war on their doorstep. For Trump, though, the motivation is personal — it’s a chance to reset a relationship he has long boasted about but has lately become rocky, while bringing his personal brand of deal-making to the world’s biggest stage.
There’s a lot going on here. So I called David Sanger, who has covered the White House and national security for decades and who has written books about superpower conflict, before he boarded a series of flights to Anchorage earlier today.
He walked me through the calculus of risk and reward around this meeting — and why Putin can claim a modest win before it even starts.
As you’ve written, it used to be normal for an American president to meet with the Russian leader. George W. Bush met with Putin roughly two dozen times. Joe Biden met him only once, in 2021. But Trump’s meeting will be the first for an American president since the Western world isolated Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. What does he stand to gain from it?
Trump sees himself as a peacemaker, and this is tied up very much in his oft-expressed desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which he usually combines with some kind of comment to suggest that the Nobel Committee would never give it to him.
He has taken credit for a cease-fire between India and Pakistan, although the Indians have a different version of that story. He took a direct role in a peace pledge signed between Armenia and Azerbaijan, at the White House, and there have been other regional conflicts in which he’s played an important role. The big ones, though, have evaded him.
Those, of course, are the Israel-Hamas war and the Russian war with Ukraine, which he famously declared that he would solve in 24 hours, on the basis of his long and, in his view, respectful relationship with Putin. He has now come to question whether that relationship is what he thought it was, or at least what he portrayed it as, because Putin has held a series of perfectly friendly, constructive phone calls with him and then continued on the same battle plan that he was on before, with considerable recent success.
If the president comes out of Alaska without an immediate or imminent cease-fire plan, I think it’s going to be difficult for him to portray this as a win. But a cease-fire alone won’t be enough.
Who has the most at stake here?
The country with the most at stake, of course, is Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who wasn’t invited. The second-most at stake is President Trump and the countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. Let me explain.
For Ukraine, the risk is that Trump will push for something he’s been referring to as a “land swap.” He doesn’t say that Russia would simply get the land that it has already taken militarily, which would be problematic enough, because it would reward Moscow and Putin for invading a sovereign state.
Trump’s use of the phrase “swaps” leaves you with the impression that he might be willing to award the Russians territory that they have not gained militarily, in return for something else.
Tell us about the risks for Trump.
The big risk for Trump is that whatever comes out of Alaska is just a delaying action. Putin may calculate that what he needs most is a relaxation of sanctions, a reopening of trade and time to rebuild his force so that a few years from now, he can attempt a re-invasion of the rest of Ukraine and use the territory he’s gained as a launchpad to drive toward Kyiv. That’s a huge risk, and the Ukrainians are rightly worried about it.
To forestall that, the Europeans and Zelensky are insisting on security guarantees and continued arms shipments to Ukraine, as well as making sure that Trump doesn’t make any concessions about where NATO forces can be deployed in Eastern Europe. All of those issues are as important — and over the long term, perhaps more important — than where you draw the boundaries between Russia and Ukraine.
And there’s one more risk for NATO. Will Putin use this meeting to drive a wedge between Trump and the NATO allies? That is Putin’s greatest dream.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: On Politics: Why Trump wants to meet Putin
#2025 #AlaskaMeeting #America #DonaldTrump #EuropeanNations #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Peace #Politics #Putin #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #Ukraine #UkraineWar #UnitedStates
Thursday, July 17, 2025
Putin unfazed by Trump’s threats, plans to fight on in Ukraine — Ukraine’s new ground drones are hitting the battlefield in ever-increasing numbers — Russia drops 500-kg bomb on shopping center in Donetsk Oblast — We are doubling the Ukraine Facility: EU proposes 100 billion euros for Ukraine aid fund in 2028–2034 budget — ‘Unbearable’ — EU’s Kallas raises alarm over Russia’s escalating chemical warfare in Ukraine … and more
https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/07/thursday-july-17-2025/
ok, so the #Trump #Junta is over-confident that they can take on half of the #population of the #USA, while securing the southern border, in the meantime pissing off #Mexico to the max, while securing the northern border combined with threats of annexation of #Canada, plus planning to steal its freshwater reserves, while also taking on the #EU, threatening its destruction / dissolvement, while taking on all #EuropeanNations at once with pushing Nazi parties & hate, while clashing with #China.
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