What a Trump presidency means for global wars and European security

Published

7 months ago

November 6, 2024

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Donald Trump said he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine if he returned to the White House – but any rushed deal will likely leave Kyiv much weaker and European security in even greater peril.

Another major flashpoint a Trump presidency will immediately seek to influence is the escalating conflict between Iran and Israel.

Mr Trump came close to direct war with Tehran during his first term in office and prior restraint could well give way to direct confrontation this time around.

US election latest: World leaders congratulate Trump after historic win

Then there is the overwhelming longer-term challenge posed by China, with North Korea another growing headache especially after Mr Trump tried but failed to woo the leader of the hermit state during his first stint as commander-in-chief.

Prior to the Republican’s win, hostile and friendly capitals around the world were gaming what a second Trump White House might mean for their respective national interests and for the most pressing global security threats.

Mr Trump’s track record of unpredictability is a challenge for traditional foes – but also for Washington’s closest allies, in particular fellow members of the NATO alliance.

The president-elect has made no secret of his frustration at how the US has for decades bankrolled the security blanket that protects Europe.

During his first term as president, Mr Trump threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance – a move that would almost certainly sound its death knell. His rhetoric did help to spur allies to dig deeper into their pockets and spend more on their militaries, though.

But the damage of years of underinvestment is deep and the pace of recovery is too slow for European NATO allies and Canada to credibly stand on their own as a potent military force any time soon.

In terms of immediacy when it comes to global crises, the impact of Mr Trump’s victory will be felt most acutely by Ukraine and also by Iran.

In the run-up to the election, the then-nominee repeatedly claimed he would quickly end the Ukraine war, though without explaining how or what peace would look like.

In an indication of where his priorities lie, however, he has accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being the “greatest salesman on earth” for securing tens of billions of dollars in weapons and other assistance that Washington has given to Kyiv.

Yet – coupled with Ukraine’s willingness to fight – that military aid is the biggest reason why Ukraine has managed to withstand almost 1,000 days of Vladimir Putin’s war.

Stop the flow of American weapons, and Ukrainian troops – despite their own ingenuity and the support of other allies – will simply lack the firepower to keep resisting the onslaught.

By contrast, US vice president Kamala Harris made clear that she viewed continued support to Ukraine as being as vital to US and Western interests as it is to Kyiv’s – a far more familiar stance that echoed the view of her NATO partners.

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While US support for Ukraine will undoubtedly change under a Trump administration, that is not the same as facilitating a complete surrender.

The president-elect – who portrayed himself as the ultimate dealmaker and adopted a new election slogan, “Trump will fix it” – will not want to be held responsible for the total absorption of Ukraine into Mr Putin’s orbit.

Putin and Iran

His relationship with the Russian president is a particularly interesting dynamic.

During his first term, he infamously said he trusted Mr Putin’s denials over his own intelligence agencies when it came to claims about Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

But with the right advice, might the returning President Trump be able to use his connection with Mr Putin to the West’s advantage?

At the very least, it adds a new level of unpredictability – which is perhaps the most important element when it comes to assessing the likely impact of the second Trump term.

On Iran, in stark contrast to his approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Mr Trump may well back much greater US military support for Israel’s conflict against Tehran and its proxies – perhaps even direct involvement by US forces in strikes on Iran.

He has an even tougher stance towards Tehran and its nuclear ambitions than Joe Biden’s administration.

His decision to rip up a major nuclear deal with Iran was one of his most significant foreign policy acts during his four years as president.

It is also personal, with Iran accused of hacking the Trump campaign in recent months – an attack that will surely only heighten tensions with Iran during the second Trump term.

US

Musk appears with black eye at White House farewell – as Trump says he’s ‘not really leaving’

Published

2 hours ago

May 30, 2025

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Musk appears with black eye at White House farewell - as Trump says he's 'not really leaving'

Elon Musk has formally left his role in Donald Trump’s administration.

Mr Musk sported a black eye at a press conference with Mr Trump in which the president confirmed the tech billionaire’s expected departure on Friday.

The billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X said his five-year-old son X Æ A-12, or X for short, was responsible for the bruising.

“I was horsing around with my son… I said ‘go ahead and punch me in the face’, and he did,” Mr Musk told reporters in the Oval Office.

“It turns out a five-year-old can punch, actually. I didn’t really feel much at the time.”

At the press conference, Mr Trump thanked Mr Musk “for his incredible service” with his work for his help setting up and running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and suggested he would continue to be “back and forth”.

The US president handed Mr Musk a golden key in a White House-branded box, which he described as a “special present”.

“Elon gave an incredible service. [There is] nobody like him. And he had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame, because he is an incredible patriot,” Mr Trump said.

“Some of the media organisations in this room are the slingers,” Mr Musk said when asked about the “slings and arrows” in an apparent dig at The New York Times.

The US president praised Mr Musk as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced”, commending him for “stepping forward to put his talents into our nation” by leading DOGE.

Meanwhile, Mr Musk, who was wearing a DOGE-branded baseball cap and a T-shirt with “The Dogefather” written on it, said it was “not the end of DOGE, but the beginning” and that the DOGE team would “only grow stronger”.

The 53-year-old added that he would continue to visit the White House and would still be an adviser to Mr Trump.

During the press conference, Mr Trump also turned to various conflicts around the globe, telling reporters that Israel and Hamas are “very close to an agreement” for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The president said an agreement with Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons was also “very close”.

Meanwhile, following recent tensions between India and Pakistan, Mr Trump took credit for de-escalating the situation between the two countries.

The US president had handed Mr Musk the task of cutting government spending by sacking federal workers and eliminating bureaucratic waste as head of the newly formed DOGE department.

Mr Musk oversaw drastic cuts to America’s humanitarian efforts, leading to criticism that the US was relinquishing some of its global influence.

Despite promising to save taxpayers as much as $2trn (£1.5trn), DOGE currently estimates its efforts have saved $175bn (£130bn).

Mr Musk claimed the savings could be even higher, saying in the Oval Office on Friday: “We do expect over time a trillion dollars in savings. Say by the middle of next year, with presidential support, we can do it.”

Mr Trump read out a list of savings DOGE has allegedly made, including cutting $101m spent on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies in the Department of Education, $59m on hotel rooms for migrants in New York, $42m on a project for social and behavioural change in Uganda, £24m “for an Arab Sesame Street” and $8m “for making mice transgender”.

But questions have been raised about whether the department has actually saved taxpayers as much money as suggested.

Meanwhile, Mr Musk – who famously brought his son X Æ A-12 to the Oval Office – has expressed frustration about resistance to his ideas, and clashed with other senior members of the Trump administration.

He claimed DOGE had been blamed for cuts that had nothing to do with his department.

“What we found was happening was if there were any cuts anywhere, people would assume that was done by DOGE,” he explained.

“We essentially became the ‘DOGE’ boogie man.”

It comes after Mr Musk’s father, Errol Musk, speaking to Gillian Joseph on The World earlier this week, insisted there had been “no rift between Elon and Donald Trump”.

As a “special government employee”, US law allowed Mr Musk to serve for 130 days, which would have ended around Friday.

He announced he was leaving in a post on X, in which he said: “I would like to thank President Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”

US

Elon Musk reveals when he hopes to launch mission crewed by robots to Mars

Published

8 hours ago

May 30, 2025

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Elon Musk reveals when he hopes to launch mission crewed by robots to Mars

Elon Musk has said he wants to send a spacecraft crewed by humanoid robots on a voyage to Mars by the end of next year.

The tech billionaire outlined his latest schedule for Starship in a video presented at the project’s Starbase home in Texas and posted online on Thursday.

The SpaceX founder had been set to give a presentation, called The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary, on Tuesday night, following a ninth test flight of the spacecraft earlier that evening.

But the speech was cancelled after the vehicle spun out of control about 30 minutes into the launch, having not achieved some of its most important test goals.

And on Wednesday, Musk confirmed his brief but tumultuous spell in the Trump administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was ending.

Musk warned there was no guarantee he would be able to meet the Starship timeframe he set out and much depended on overcoming a number of technical challenges, during flight-test development, especially a post-launch refuelling operation while orbiting Earth.

He previously said he aimed to send an unmanned vehicle to the red planet as early as 2018 and had targeted 2024 to launch a first crewed mission there.

Humans would land on Mars as part of the second or third flights, he said on Thursday, but the first trip would be in the hands of one or more humanoid Optimus design robots built by Tesla, the electric vehicle and battery maker he leads.

The current target to land a human on Mars using Starship is 2028, but it has yet to make an orbit of Earth.

Musk said he wants to make it so that “anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilisation can do so. Anyone out there. How cool would that be?”.

At the end of 2026, Mars and Earth align around the sun, reducing the distance between the two planets to its shortest, but still seven to nine months’ travelling time by spacecraft.

Musk said they had a 50-50 chance of meeting that deadline and if Starship isn’t ready by then, SpaceX would wait another two years before trying again.

NASA, which hopes to land astronauts on Mars sometime in the 2030s, is planning to use Starship to return humans to the surface of the moon as early as 2027 – more than 50 years after the last lunar landings of the Apollo era.

Starship’s previous test flights in January and March also failed, with the spacecraft exploding moments after lift-off, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and forcing scores of commercial jets to change course as a precaution.

Musk shrugged off the latest mishap on Tuesday with a brief post on X, saying it produced a lot of “good data to review” and promising a faster launch “cadence” for the next several test flights.

US

Federal judges rule Trump tariffs can stay in place for now – as president rages at trade court’s ‘country threatening decision’

Published

20 hours ago

May 30, 2025

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Federal judges rule Trump tariffs can stay in place for now - as president rages at trade court's 'country threatening decision'

A federal appeals court has ruled that Donald Trump’s sweeping international tariffs can remain in place for now, a day after three judges ruled the president exceeded his authority.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has allowed the president to temporarily continue collecting tariffs under emergency legislation while it considers the government’s appeal.

It comes after the Court of International Trade blocked the additional taxes on foreign-made goods after its three-judge panel ruled that the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes and tariffs – not the president.

The judges also ruled Mr Trump exceeded his authority by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The CAFC said the lower trade court and the Trump administration must respond by 5 June and 9 June, respectively.

Trump calls trade court ‘backroom hustlers’

Posting on Truth Social, Mr Trump said the trade court’s ruling was a “horrible, Country threatening decision,” and said he hopes the Supreme Court would reverse it “QUICKLY and DECISIVELY”.

After calling into question the appointment of the three judges, and suggesting the ruling was based on “purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’,” he added: “Backroom ‘hustlers’ must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!

“The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly.

“If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power — The Presidency would never be the same!”

The US president unveiled the controversial measures on “Liberation Day” in April, which included a 10% tariff on UK imports and caused aggressive sell-offs in the stock market.

Mr Trump argued he invoked the decades-old law to collect international tariffs because it was a “national emergency”.

Tariffs ‘direct threat’ to business – Schwab

The trade court ruling marked the latest legal challenge to the tariffs, and related to a case brought on behalf of five small businesses that import goods from other countries.

Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center – a nonprofit representing the five firms – said the appeal court would ultimately agree that the tariffs posed “a direct threat to the very survival of these businesses”.

US treasury secretary Scott Bessent also told Fox News on Thursday that the initial ruling had not interfered with trade deal negotiations with partners.

He said that countries “are coming to us in good faith” and “we’ve seen no change in their attitude in the past 48 hours,” before saying he would meet with a Japanese delegation in Washington on Friday.