Trump: The Juggler

Alastair Crooke has had an article up at the Unz Review for a few days. It’s highly recommended. Crooke covers many of the issues we’ve been focused on, but his article presents the problems facing Trump in a systematic manner and at length. In doing so he also addresses the claims of some that Trump lacks a strategy and simply improvises. As I noted yesterday in a comment, the appearance Trump gives of being engaged in impulsive improvisation is a function of the fact that the Anglo-Zionist empire that Trump heads finds itself in constrained circumstances. Maneuvering room is at a premium, and that’s what Trump is looking for. Crooke sets much of this out in readable fashion, so I’ll summarize a bit:

A 'Trump Deal'? Juggling War, 'Easy War' and Negotiation

We start with good news and bad news. Good—this should sound familiar: Trump has a landslide based mandate. Bad: That mandate is largely based on domestic policy issues—immigration, lack of family sustaining jobs, etc.—but Trump’s campaign was largely financed by radical Jewish Nationalists who don’t much care about those issues. Their issue is the Jewish Supremacy Project in the Middle East and suppression by whatever means work of all criticism of their issue in America.

Thus Trump’s dilemma. He continues riding high in the polls, to the dismay of Dems, largely buoyed by domestic issues—rooting out illegal aliens and rooting out DEI. That’s what MAGA has always been about for Trump’s voter base, whatever it may actually mean to him. But Trump is forced to cater to the foreign policy agenda of Jewish Nationalists—revenge on Russia, revenge on Arabs, revenge on Iran—and that is embroiling him in difficulties he would be better advised to leave to others.

Perhaps worse, the US is in a fiscal bind, which is driving the Trade War with China but also some of Trump’s popular domestic initiatives. But there could be a bumpy road ahead for Trump’s base, in the form of recession:

Trump may for now have a mandate, but extreme danger lurks – not just the Deep State and the Israeli lobby. The Yellen debt bomb is the more existential threat. It threatens Trump’s support in Congress, because the bomb is set to explode shortly before the 2026 midterms. New tariff revenues, DOGE savings, and even the upcoming Gulf shake-down are all centred on getting some sort of fiscal order in place, so that $9 trillion plus of short-term debt – maturing imminently – can be rolled over to the longer term without resort to eye-watering interest rates. ...

The Tariff Shock and Awe was clearly designed to bring in huge amounts of revenue to plug the yawning fiscal gap—DOGE savings were never going to come fast enough to avoid the fiscal crisis looming for next year.

But China has refused to play along—partly due to boneheaded tactics on Trump’s part and partly due to Chinese resentment at the boogeyman part Trump has assigned them.

Here’s Crooke’s summary at an early stage of the article:

A major strand within the Trump Coalition (apart from MAGA populists) are the neocons and Israeli Firsters. Some sort of Faustian bargain supposedly was struck by Trump at the outset through a deal that had his team heavily peopled by zealous Israeli-Firsters.

Simply put, the breadth of coalition that Trump thought he needed to win the election and deliver an economic re-balance also included two foreign policy pillars: Firstly, the reset with Moscow – the pillar by which to end the ‘forever wars’, which his Populist base despised. And the second pillar being the neutering of Iran as a military power and source of resistance, on which both Israeli Firsters – and Israel – insist (and with which Trump seems wholly comfortable). Hence the Faustian pact.

Trump’s ‘peacemaker’ aspirations no doubt added to his electoral appeal, but they were not the real driver to his landslide.

And that leads to a fundamental problem for Trump. A president can only do so much for so long. MAGA may be first and foremost about an economic rebalancing of America, but Trump sold himself—as all presidents do—to the highest bidders. And those bidders were Jewish Nationalists. Juggling these two is proving to be quite a trick:

What has become evident is that these diverse agendas – foreign and domestic – are interlinked: A set-back in one or the other acts as a domino either impelling or retarding the other agendas. Put simply: Trump is dependent on ‘wins’ – early ‘wins’ – even if this means rushing towards a prospective ‘easy win’ without thinking through whether he possesses a sound strategy (and ability) to achieve it.

On the domestic front, radical leftist judges have slowed down some of Trump’s initiatives. It remains likely that Trump will win most of the legal battles, but in the public perception Trump has been bogged down.

The same thing has happened with what Trump had hoped would be quick and easy foreign policy wins. Any headway at all is proving illusory. As we predicted, the Russians would be more than willing to talk—and talk. The same will probably prove true with regard to Iran. On the other hand, whether China will be willing to talk at all remains an open question. And then there’s the war on Yemen, which is going nowhere good:

So those who talk about ending the Ukraine war through an imposed unilateral ceasefire (ie, the faction of Walz, Rubio and Hegseth, led by Kellogg) seem to assume blithely that the terms and timing for ending the war also can be decided in Washington, and imposed on Moscow through the limited application of asymmetric pressures and threats.

Just as China isn’t buying into the tariff and trade restriction ‘stuff’, neither is Putin buying into the ultimatum ‘stuff’: (‘Moscow has weeks, not months, to agree a ceasefire’). ...

And, in companion mode, those who talk about bombing Iran (which includes Trump) seem also to assume that they can dictate the war’s essential course and content too; the U.S. (and Israel perhaps), can simply determine to bomb Iran with big bunker-buster bombs. That’s it! End of story.

And so Crooke concludes:

It is plain that Team Trump has not thought through the risks inherent to their agendas.

Those risks include wider wars around the world, even as the US’s resources are ground down in attacks on Yemen.

As of the instant date, Trump has pivoted back to threatening Putin with secondary sanctions. With China, on the other hand, Trump is trying to convince the Chinese that he’s been talking to them—something that the Chinese adamantly deny. It remains to be seen how negotiations with Iran will develop, in the wake of what rather looks like a major Anglo-Zionist attack on Iran’s most important link to the outside world—the port of Bandar Abbas.

Elsewhere:

Trump’s polling must be telling him something about the public’s reaction to his genocide on Gaza. He actually claimed this past week that he had been making some weak kneed suggestion to Israel that maybe they should modify their starvation campaign. As if he’s not the one calling the shots:

The Starvation of Gaza

Israel ramps up its terror campaign.

How will Iran react to this?

Brian Berletic @BrianJBerletic

 "Peace" President Donald Trump Appoints Neo-Con Warmonger Michael Anton for Iran Talks...

Western media admits Anton is formally [sic = was formerly] a managing director of deep state equity firm BlackRock;

Anton previously served the first Trump administration and played a role during the Bush Jr. administration, selling lies about "nuclear weapons" in Iraq to justify the 2003 invasion;

Once again, the Trump administration commits itself to continuity of agenda under the "deep state" while posing as fighting it - even as he fills his administration up with servants of the unelected US corporate-financier establishment;

Anton's involvement in the Iran "talks" is also further evidence the US has no real intention toward peace and is simply setting Iran up the same way it set Iraq up;

Speaking of the corporate-financier establishment, ueber Zionist and Trump donor Bill Ackman—who played a prominent role in early repression of Free Speech—thinks Trump can win against China. This is a very long tweet, but the essence is in the first two paragraphs:

Some have suggested that because China takes a very long-term view, China can ‘win’ a trade war with the U.S. which, according to the conventional view, is a much shorter-term player than China.

The problem with this assessment is that the longer the tariffs persist, the more rapidly every company that has a supply chain based in China relocates it to India, Vietnam, Mexico, the U.S. or some other country.

Right. Someone needs to tell the Chinese that. Actually, it seems they figured that out quite a few years ago and have been doggedly working on building up their internal market—with success, although the process isn’t complete by a long shot. Ackman ends by suggesting a unilateral cut in US tariffs on China, claiming that would be a “strong move”—to facilitate companies like Apple moving out of China. But, then, what was the point in the tariff’s in the first place?

Here are some responses that Ackman got. I’m not an economist, so see what you think. Some of these critiques seem pretty sharp to me:

Doggy Dog @DoggyDog1208

You are wrong because:

1) China is the larger market. Far larger. By multiples. And growing at least 2x as fast. If you think otherwise… well… that’s exactly why Bessent and team ran right into the China wall.

2) Efficient high quality capacity will stay in China to source domestic and ex-US markets. Less efficient and lower quality capacity will by offshored, Galapagos-ising the US economy to permanent sloppy seconds.

3) There are now 192 economies to run transshipment trade. The US does not have the state capacity to enforce export sanctions on NVidia, an American company with a few banned products. How does it plan to stop transshipping by Chinese and global entrepreneurs?

4) in the medium term, the longer China waits, the greater the collapse of US domestic industrial output from lack or parts and REEs drying up and the more permanent damage is done. China is actually incentivised to draw this out until US REE inventories run out and America’s high tech manufacturing sector is destroyed.

Tell me why I’m wrong.

Ross Kaminsky @Rossputin

You're not wrong to say that China has strong incentives to reach an agreement but you understate their leverage in the situation. In particular, even though we import much more from China than we export to them, a high percentage of our imports are things we currently can't get elsewhere and a high percentage of their imports from us are things they can get elsewhere.

It's also worth noting that nothing has done as much as these trade wars to erode the position of the USD as the world's reserve currency which seems to be a goal of China's (thus the existence of BRICS) so in that sense they are getting another benefit here.

Deepak Shenoy @deepakshenoy

The difference is that China makes better end use goods now rather than just things that American brands outsource cost based production. They make phones that compete with and and better than Apples. They make cars that are better then the teslas made in China or in America. They make better things that they can sell to anyone and own the brands. America recognises this and has stopped the selling of Chinese cars in America. And Chinese 5g in other places.

The damage is done. America will find other sources and China will push its brands. And even as India catches up slowly to the manufacturing process of the Chinese, the Chinese will still be the biggest competitor of the US in innovation. Both countries will go insular and because of declining population and fear of cultural immigration, domestic growth will suffer. The next decade will be a decline in power, not a rise, in each of them. The rest of the world will be the battlefield.

Vik Sharɱa @vikrantnyc

You’re wrong because only 2.8% of their GDP relies on exports to the US. Even without tariffs, they lowered that from 2023 to 2024 for example.

And there are a lot more where those came from.

All this is what Trump is trying to juggle. He has strategies, but having a strategy doesn’t ensure success.