Nato must be ready for war with Russia by 2029 – Putin is ALREADY planning attack, Germany warns as Starmer pledges subs
Keir Starmer meanwhile announced 12 new nuclear submarines to combat the "immediate and pressing threat" from Putin.
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Flames and destruction after a Russian attack in Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine on Monday morning
Credit: Getty
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A huge crater blown into the ground by a Russian ballistic missile on Monday
Credit: EPA
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Russian Belaya Air Base in Irkutsk region, Siberia, was ablaze after a major Ukrainian drone strike over the weekend
Credit: East2West
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General Carsten Breuer said Nato is facing a "very serious threat" from Russia - the most severe he has seen in his 40 years of service.
Breuer explained that Russia is producing weaponry at a rapid pace - with around 1,500 battle tanks and four million rounds of artillery each year.
Crucially, not all of this is being directed to Ukraine - possibly indicating munitions are being stockpiled for use against Nato countries.
He said: "There's an intent and there's a build up of the stocks."
Breuer doubled down on his warning that "analysts are assessing 2029" as Russia's potential timeframe for an assault, concluding: "We have to be ready by 2029".
"If you ask me now, is this a guarantee that's not earlier than 2029? I would say no, it's not. So we must be able to fight tonight," he said.
In April, the general warned that Putin will have amassed a 3million-strong army by next year, and that he wants to "weaken and destroy Nato as an alliance and discredit our Western form of society".
The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are particularly vulnerable, he said.
Breuer said: "The Baltic States are really exposed to the Russians, right?
"And once you are there, you really feel this [...] in the talks we are having over there."
At least seven killed & dozens injured after bridge collapses and crushes passenger train in Russia
The Estonians reportedly use the analogy of being close to a wildfire and being able to "feel the heat, see the flames and smell the smoke".
Germany and other European nations "probably see a little bit of smoke over the horizon and not more," Breuer said.
The general added a call to action, urging fellow Nato nations to rebuild their militaries.
He said: "What we have to do now is really to lean in an to tell everybody: 'Hey, ramp up [...] get more into it because we need it.
"We need it to be able to defend ourselves and therefore also to build up deterrence."
Recognising this need, the British government announced that the UK will build a dozen new nuclear submarines armed with Tomohawk missiles.
The UK's nuclear warhead programme will also be bolstered, with Defence Secretary John Healey saying the deterrent is 'what Putin fears most'.
The government is in talks with US officials over the move, which would be the UK's biggest deterrent development since the Cold War.
The news came as part of the strategic defence review, designed to get Britain moving "to war-fighting readiness".
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General Carsten Breuer, Germany's Chief of Defence, said Europe must be ready to defend against Russia by 2029
Credit: Rex
7
Pictures show a huge stockpile of FPV drones hidden inside a secret compartment in a container
Credit: 24 TV/SBU
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Russian Tu-95 bombers burning 'en masse' during Ukraine's drone sting
Credit: Ukraine's Security Service
Starmer will say during a trip to Scotland: 'From the supply lines to the front lines, this government is four-square behind the men and women upholding our freedom and security.'
Up to 12 nuclear-powered subs will be built under the AUKUS security partnership with the US and Australia.
They are conventionally-armed with Tomahawk missiles and are mainly used as intelligence gatherers, lurking off hostile coastlines to intercept communications.
They can also deploy special forces and drones.
Russia's weapon stocks took a hit over the weekend when a daring Ukrainian drone plot blitzed 34 percent of Putin's cruise missile carriers, according to Volodymyr Zelensky.
And a raging Putin is now said to be preparing for a terrifying revenge attack.
What was 'Operation Spiderweb'?
OVER the weekend, Ukraine launched a highly-sophisticated, meticulously-planned drone attack inside Russia.
It marks Kyiv's longest-range operation of the conflict so far.
The plot involved 117 drones which had been smuggled into Russia inside trucks.
President Zelensky revealed it took over 18 months to pull off the masterful attack and hailed it as one for the "history books".
Over 100 drones were involved, each with their own pilot.
Zelesnsky also revealed the headquarters of the operation were "right next to the FSB", Russia's security service.
At least 40 aircraft were attacked, and Zelensky claimed that 34 percent of Putin's cruise missile carriers at the targeted airfields were blasted.
A £260million AWACS aircraft and bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons were also struck.
Ukrainian sources say that more than £1.5billion worth of damage has been inflicted on the Russian air force.
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The Herald Scotland
24 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Nobel Peace Prize winner? Trump faces serious challenges on conflicts
Serving both Republican and Democratic administrations, including under the presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross for decades was one of those tasked with navigating the most dangerous of diplomatic waters. It was interesting then to hear him opine last week on current US President Donald Trump's diplomatic negotiating style. 'There is a difference between producing cease-fires and pauses and ending wars,' noted Ross, speaking to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). 'The former stops fighting, the latter deals with the causes of the conflict and forges agreements that resolve the differences - or at least gets both sides to adjust their thinking and produces a modus vivendi.' Ross's comments came in a week that saw Trump issue a deadline of '10 or 12 days' to Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a cease fire over Ukraine. This weekend that agreement seems further away than ever after Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to 'be positioned in the appropriate regions' in response to 'highly provocative' comments by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. (Image: Jehad Alshrafi) Ross's remarks also came in a week when Washington's allies, France, the UK and Canada, broke with Trump to force a diplomatic shift on Gaza. For despite the US leader's boastful promises on bringing calm to the region as with his claim to be able to bring peace to Russia's war with Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to office, all of Trump's peace-making promises to date have been colliding with a more complicated reality on the ground. In short, Trump's supposed prowess on the peace-making front is not all it's cracked up to be, a point wryly made by Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker magazine a few days ago. 'Wars, it turns out, do not end magically because Trump clicks his heels and demands that they do so,' wrote Glasser in a recent column. 'Wars we end' AS even the most cursory of glances across the global geo-political landscape will quickly confirm, the prevailing reality is a far cry from when Trump in his January 20, 2025, inaugural address proclaimed that 'we will measure our success…by the wars we end.' And 'my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.' Despite the obvious shortcomings to date in this regard though, America's peacemaker-in-chief - in characteristic mode - has continued to claim great success, a point he was keen to emphasise during his recent trip to Scotland. 'We have many ceasefires going on. If I weren't around, you would have six major wars going on. India would be fighting with Pakistan,' Trump insisted in one of his speeches. As Trump sees it, should that much coveted Nobel Peace Prize come his way then he is only too deserving of it. 'If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,' Trump said in October. Trump's ever loyal mouthpiece, White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, never misses an opportunity to remind the world that it's 'well past time' that the president received the prize. Just these past days Leavitt at a press briefing listed the peace deals the Trump administration has supposedly brokered since taking office. Thailand and Cambodia were the most recent of Trump's peacemaker bona fides. Read more Tears and trauma: David Pratt in Ukraine DAVID PRATT ON THE WORLD: Whatever happens in Brazil's resentful and rancorous election, the result will have major repercussions for us all David Pratt in Ukraine: It's hard to comprehend this level of destruction David Pratt: Kremlin's protestations have a hollow ring as atrocities mount up 'The two countries were engaged in a deadly conflict that had displaced more than 300,000 people until President Trump stepped in to put an end to it,' Leavitt insisted. Other conflicts cited by Leavitt included, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) India and Pakistan and Serbia and Kosovo, that were all claimed to have been 'resolved' on Trump's watch. One curious outcome in at least two instances, however, was that in the cases of both Pakistan and Cambodia no sooner were hostilities ceased than their leaders announced that they would nominate Trump for the Peace Prize. Interestingly too in Thailand and Cambodia's case, Trump set a 19% levy on imports from both countries, lower than the 36% they originally faced, after earlier this month he threatened to block trade deals with them unless they ended their deadly border clash. Which brings us to another significant factor that many say undermines Trump's claims to be a peacemaker and mediator and instead casts him as global agitator – trade wars and tariffs. Economy plunge LAST week Trump plunged the global economy into a new round of mercantile competition after hitting dozens of US trading partners with tariffs while formalising recent deals with others, including the UK and EU. While such competition is nothing new in itself, as a Financial Times (FT) editorial on Friday pointed out, in Trump's case they are often flagrantly politically motivated. On the one hand Trump portrays the tariffs he has ordered on US trading partners as a simple rebalancing of global trading that is skewed against America. But as the FT points out, 'what is striking, however, is how some of the harshest new measures reflect blatantly political aims - shaped by presidential whim.' The newspaper cites the example of Canada, which has angered Trump with its own plans to recognise a Palestinian state making it 'very hard' says Trump to reach a trade deal. The FT also highlights India, already hit by a high tariff rate but which Washington has threatened with an additional penalty while rebuking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government for 'buying Russian oil and weapons'. Trump's stance says the FT also appears to reflect his dislike of India's membership of the Brics' bloc of emerging heavyweight markets and developing nations. During a summit of the 11 emerging economies last month, he threatened an additional 10 % tariff on any countries aligning themselves with the Brics' 'anti-American policies'. More than 100 days on from Trump's 'Liberation Day' set of initial tariffs, many say a new global trading order is taking shape, one that The Economist magazine recently referred to as 'a system of imperial preference.' This, argue some analysts, only adds incendiary economic fuel to an already destabilised world raising the risk that such trade wars might become shooting wars. Allison Carnegie is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and specialises in global governance and international institutions. Writing recently in the widely respected Foreign Affairs magazine, she said that Trump's trade wars are hardly without precedent and that while 'Trump may think his tariff regime will make the United States richer, safer, and stronger… history suggests it will do just the opposite.' 'In the near term, countries can benefit from wielding trade as a cudgel. But in the long term, trade wars leave almost everyone worse off,' Carnegie notes. 'When countries frequently use economic leverage to secure concessions from vulnerable partners, investment and economic growth go down. Political instability, meanwhile, goes up. States that chafe at economic coercion sometimes turn to their militaries in order to fight back. Countries that once cooperated because of commercial ties turn into competitors. Even close allies drift apart,' Carnegie noted. Few doubt the inherent difficulty in ending protracted conflicts like those in the Middle East and now in Ukraine. Both broke out during the previous administration enabling Trump to dub them 'Biden's wars'. 'Biden will drive us into World War III, and we're closer to World War III than anybody can imagine,' said the same Trump that on Friday moved US nuclear submarines in response to a social media post by Medvedev. On his presidential campaign trail, Trump often railed against Biden and such 'endless wars' and 'forever wars' and mused that he could resolve them. 'He has made comments on all of them that this could be done quickly or easily and that there are solutions to these problems," says Aaron David Miller, a State Department diplomat in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations - now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'And yet, he has not been successful in even identifying what I would consider to be a potentially effective strategy for managing or let alone resolving them. And therein lies the challenge,' Miller told broadcaster ABC News in recent interview. (Image: AP) 'Biden's wars' SIX months after Trump's inaugural address proclaiming that his presidency would bring 'a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable,' and denouncing 'Biden's wars', the data tells a very different story. For in that six months, Trump has already launched nearly as many airstrikes on foreign nations as Biden did within four years. A huge part of this of course was 'Operation Midnight Hammer' when Trump decided that he would order use of 30,000-pound weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an independent international data collection monitoring group, since Trump returned to the White House, the US has carried out at least 529 bombings in more than 240 locations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. His predecessor's administration launched 555 over its entire four years. 'Trump's preference for engagement begs the question: Does this contradict his promise to end America's wars - or are the foreign strikes how he wishes to keep that promise?' ACLED president Clionadh Raleigh said in a statement cited by the Independent last month. 'The recent airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites have been framed as a major turning point in US foreign policy. But if you take a step back, they don't stand out - they fit,' Raleigh added. Right now when not riling other nations through his own tariffs and trade wars, ending the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza by far poses Trump's biggest diplomatic challenge. In both cases he has his work cut out, not least say some in that he has appointed the same man, his friend Steve Witkoff, as the US envoy for all three sets of peace talks, involving Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Hamas and Israel-Iran. As the New York Times columnist Max Boot, recently observed this 'would test the powers of even a veteran diplomat' … and 'the task is all the more onerous given that Witkoff is a real estate developer with no background in diplomacy.' Meanwhile as Gaza bleeds and starves, Trump diplomatically muddles through as was poignantly described recently by another American columnist, Susan B. Glasser of the New Yorker. 'In a summer of horror for Gaza, it's hard to recall the unfulfilled promises of last winter, when Trump bragged, in near world-historical terms, of the 'EPIC' ceasefire that he and his team had helped broker,' wrote Glasser recently. 'Now, as Trump stands by and does close to nothing at all, what can we do but wish that he had, for once, been right?' Negotiating style MANY critics maintain that a huge part of the problem with Trump's negotiating style is that it fluctuates depending on the current state of his personal relationships with other world leaders. As his second term progresses Trump's priorities would seem to become more apparent by the day startling observers and US allies alike. Already there have been calls for US intervention in Panama, Canada and as recently as May, Trump announced that he didn't rule out employing military force to seize Greenland. He has also proposed a $1 trillion US military budget for 2026 - a 13.4 % increase - and again took action to withdraw US support from the UN. Critics continue to accuse him of shaping American foreign policy determined primarily by a desire to pursue his own vendettas toward those that rebuff him and in doing so use whatever means, economic or otherwise at his disposal. As Dennis Ross, rightly pointed out recently, there is indeed 'a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars,'. To achieve the latter, patience and lengthy negotiations are a prerequisite, and that, as we all know by now, has never been part of the Trump playbook.
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
I am a Palestinian. Keir Starmer's recognition plan is an insult
The Prime Minister announced last week that the UK would recognise the state of Palestine next month, but only if Israel does not meet a set of conditions which include agreeing a ceasefire, allowing in aid to the starving population of Gaza and engaging in a peace process which leads to a two-state solution. But Glasgow-based Wael Shawish, who is originally from Jerusalem and has family in Gaza, has said the conditional plan set out by Starmer is an 'insult' to Palestinians and is meaningless unless it is accompanied by tangible sanctions, such as an end to arms sales to Israel. 'It doesn't seem to be a genuine statement. They need to satisfy Palestinians – not just Starmer but other world leaders in the West – on why they are doing it now,' Shawish, who is part of the Scottish Palestinian Society, told the Sunday National. READ MORE: The National hosts Q&A with Peter Oborne on UK Gaza complicity 'I think there are a number of reasons [it is being done now] – one is that there is so much unhappiness in the West among the populations of these countries that makes the government divorced from the opinion of their people. 'So they want to do something to say 'okay, we are with you, you are angry, we are angry, we are taking steps and the step is to recognise the state of Palestine' not because the Palestinians deserve a state, but because Israel is misbehaving and we are punishing it by recognising Palestine. 'That is not the right way to go about it. We shouldn't be used as a stick to hit Israel with. We should get recognition because we deserve it. To use it as a bargaining chip to hit Israel with is an insult to us. "The only way this announcement could be meaningful is if it is coupled with sanctions or stopping exporting arms to Israel." On Starmer, Shawish (below) added: 'With all due respect to the guy, who was supposed to be a high-flying international lawyer, his knowledge of international law to start with seems to be doubtful." (Image: NQ) Daily images of starving children coming out of Gaza has led to a change in tone from several world leaders in recent weeks, with the UK's hand seemingly being forced by France which also plans to recognise the state of Palestine next month. Canada has since indicated that it will recognise a Palestinian state, but there are again conditions, such as the Palestinian Authority committing to elections and other democratic reforms with no involvement from Hamas. Shawish claimed Starmer and other world leaders may be starting to worry about their complicity in war crimes being carried out in Gaza and so have felt compelled to make an 'empty gesture'. 'Some of them [Western world leaders], having seen the images of the starving children, now can recognise that they cannot argue about the death toll as being part of the battle, as collateral damage,' he said. 'It is now clear that there is a starvation plan in place to starve the Palestinian people and when these leaders actually provide weapons to Israel, to kill whoever they can kill, with British weapons […] these leaders are now worried that if somebody goes to the international courts, they could actually stand before the courts for being complicit, if not partners, in that genocide that is taking place.' A group of legal figures in the House of Lords claimed last week that the UK recognising Palestine would not be compatible with international law, citing a Pan-American treaty from 1933 – to which the UK was not a signatory. There are several signatories of the Montevideo Convention who recognised Palestine as a state. An expert explained to The National that it was a 'cynical ploy' by peers and a 'ludicrous' interpretation of the treaty. The SNP have said they will press ahead with a vote on recognising [[Palestine]], saying that it must be based on 'principle, not preconditions'. But, like Starmer, the party has still been speaking of a 'two-state solution that we all wish to see'. Dr Richard McNeil-Willson, a Middle East expert at Edinburgh University, said he did not believe a two-state solution was viable, adding that if state recognition is to happen, there needs to be 'serious discussions' on what that state looks like. In a piece for The Conversation, law lecturer Malak Benslama-Dabdoub – based at Royal Holloway University of London – also outlined how analysts have warned that recognition of this kind risks formalising a state in name only and Palestine would end up a 'fragmented, non-sovereign entity without control over its borders, resources or defence'. Shawish – who recently said his family member came back from an aid point with a gunshot wound – is in agreement and said he does not believe in the viability of a Palestinian state. He said: 'Even if recognition says the West Bank and Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, subject to the borders of 1967, is that feasible? You've got one million Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Can you get them out? 'If you can't, is there any point in having a state that is a Swiss cheese shape where there are pockets of Israel's settlements in the middle of the state all over the place? 'How viable is that state going to be? How independent or sovereign? I don't believe in the feasibility of a Palestinian state. 'I don't see the two states that Starmer is talking about as a viable option. It is too late. Maybe 25 years ago it was possible, not today.' A UK Government spokesperson said: "We have announced our intention to recognise [[Palestine]] in September to protect the viability of the two-state solution. The first step in that process must be a ceasefire and there is no question about that. 'Our demands on Hamas have not changed. For there to be any chance of peace, the hostages must be released. Hamas must lay down its weapons and commit to having no future role in the governance of Gaza. 'We must also see significant progress on the ground including the supply of humanitarian support and for Israel to rule out annexations in the West Bank, and a commitment to a long-term sustainable peace. We will make an assessment ahead of UNGA [The UN General Assembly] on how far both Israel and Hamas have met the steps we set out. No one side will have a veto on recognition through their actions or inactions."
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
Donald Trump – peacemaker-in-chief or a global agitator?
Serving both Republican and Democratic administrations, including under the presidencies of George W Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross for decades was one of those tasked with navigating the most dangerous of diplomatic waters. It was interesting then to hear him opine last week on current US president Donald Trump's diplomatic negotiating style. 'There is a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars,' noted Ross, speaking to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). 'The former stops fighting, the latter deals with the causes of the conflict and forges agreements that resolve the differences – or at least gets both sides to adjust their thinking and produces a modus vivendi.' READ MORE: John Swinney brands Gaza as 'genocide' for first time as Fringe show disrupted Ross's comments came in a week that saw Trump issue a deadline of '10 or 12 days' to Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire over Ukraine. This weekend, that agreement seems further away than ever after Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to 'be positioned in the appropriate regions' in response to 'highly provocative' comments by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Ross's remarks also came in a week when Washington's allies, France, the UK and Canada, broke with Trump to force a diplomatic shift on Gaza. For despite the US leader's boastful promises on bringing calm to the region – as with his claim to be able to bring peace to Russia's war with Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to office – all of Trump's peace-making promises to date have been colliding with a more complicated reality on the ground. Ukraine In short, Trump's supposed prowess on the peace-making front is not all it's cracked up to be, a point wryly made by Susan B Glasser of the New Yorker magazine a few days ago. 'Wars, it turns out, do not end magically because Trump clicks his heels and demands that they do so,' wrote Glasser in a recent column. As even the most cursory of glances across the global geo-political landscape will quickly confirm, the prevailing reality is a far cry from when Trump, in his January 20, 2025 inaugural address, proclaimed that 'we will measure our success … by the wars we end'. And 'my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.' Despite the obvious shortcomings to date in this regard, though, America's peacemaker-in-chief – in characteristic mode – has continued to claim great success, a point he was keen to emphasise during his recent trip to Scotland. 'We have many ceasefires going on. If I weren't around, you would have six major wars going on. India would be fighting with Pakistan,' Trump insisted in one of his speeches. As Trump sees it, should that much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize come his way, then he is only too deserving of it. 'If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,' Trump said in October. Trump's ever-loyal mouthpiece, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, never misses an opportunity to remind the world that it's 'well past time' that the president received the prize. Just these past days, Leavitt, at a press briefing, listed the peace deals that the Trump administration has supposedly brokered since taking office. Thailand and Cambodia were the most recent of Trump's peacemaker bona fides. 'The two countries were engaged in a deadly conflict that had displaced more than 300,000 people until President Trump stepped in to put an end to it,' Leavitt insisted. Other conflicts cited by Leavitt included Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), India and Pakistan, and Serbia and Kosovo – all claimed to have been 'resolved' on Trump's watch. One curious outcome in at least two instances, however, was that in the cases of both Pakistan and Cambodia, no sooner were hostilities ceased than their leaders announced that they would nominate Trump for the Peace Prize. Interestingly, too, in Thailand and Cambodia's case, Trump set a 19% levy on imports from both countries, lower than the 36% they originally faced, after earlier this month he threatened to block trade deals with them unless they ended their deadly border clash. Which brings us to another significant factor that many say undermines Trump's claims to be a peacemaker and mediator and instead casts him as a global agitator – trade wars and tariffs. Last week, Trump plunged the global economy into a new round of mercantile competition after hitting dozens of US trading partners with tariffs while formalising recent deals with others, including the UK and EU. While such competition is nothing new in itself, as a Financial Times (FT) editorial on Friday pointed out, in Trump's case, they are often flagrantly politically motivated. On the one hand, Trump portrays the tariffs he has ordered on US trading partners as a simple rebalancing of global trading that is skewed against America. But as the FT points out, 'what is striking, however, is how some of the harshest new measures reflect blatantly political aims – shaped by presidential whim'. The newspaper cites the example of Canada, which has angered Trump with its own plans to recognise a Palestinian state, making it 'very hard', says Trump, to reach a trade deal. The FT also highlights India, already hit by a high tariff rate but which Washington has threatened with an additional penalty while rebuking prime minister Narendra Modi's government for 'buying Russian oil and weapons'. Trump's stance, says the FT, also appears to reflect his dislike of India's membership of the Brics bloc of emerging heavyweight markets and developing nations. During a summit of the 11 emerging economies last month, he threatened an additional 10% tariff on any countries aligning themselves with the Brics's 'anti-American policies'. More than 100 days on from Trump's 'Liberation Day' set of initial tariffs, many say a new global trading order is taking shape, one that The Economist magazine recently referred to as 'a system of imperial preference'. This, argue some analysts, only adds incendiary economic fuel to an already destabilised world, raising the risk that such trade wars might become shooting wars. Allison Carnegie is professor of political science at Columbia University and specialises in global governance and international institutions. Writing recently in the widely respected Foreign Affairs magazine, she said that Trump's trade wars are hardly without precedent and that while 'Trump may think his tariff regime will make the United States richer, safer, and stronger … history suggests it will do just the opposite'. 'In the near term, countries can benefit from wielding trade as a cudgel. But in the long term, trade wars leave almost everyone worse off,' Carnegie notes. 'When countries frequently use economic leverage to secure concessions from vulnerable partners, investment and economic growth go down. Political instability, meanwhile, goes up. States that chafe at economic coercion sometimes turn to their militaries in order to fight back. Countries that once co-operated because of commercial ties turn into competitors. Even close allies drift apart,' Carnegie noted. Few doubt the inherent difficulty in ending protracted conflicts like those in the Middle East and now in Ukraine. Both broke out during the previous administration, enabling Trump to dub them 'Biden's wars'. 'Biden will drive us into World War III, and we're closer to World War III than anybody can imagine,' said the same Trump who on Friday moved US nuclear submarines in response to a social media post by Medvedev. On his presidential campaign trail, Trump often railed against Biden and such 'endless wars' and 'forever wars' and mused that he could resolve them. 'He has made comments on all of them that this could be done quickly or easily and that there are solutions to these problems,' says Aaron David Miller, a State Department diplomat in the Clinton and George W Bush administrations – now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'And yet, he has not been successful in even identifying what I would consider to be a potentially effective strategy for managing, let alone resolving them. And therein lies the challenge,' Miller told broadcaster ABC News in a recent interview. Six months after Trump's inaugural address proclaiming that his presidency would bring 'a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable', and denouncing 'Biden's wars', the data tells a very different story. For in those six months, Trump has already launched nearly as many airstrikes on foreign nations as Biden did within four years. A huge part of this, of course, was 'Operation Midnight Hammer', when Trump decided that he would order the use of 30,000-pound weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an independent international data collection monitoring group, since Trump returned to the White House, the US has carried out at least 529 bombings in more than 240 locations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. His predecessor's administration launched 555 over its entire four years. 'Trump's preference for engagement begs the question: Does this contradict his promise to end America's wars – or are the foreign strikes how he wishes to keep that promise?' ACLED president Clionadh Raleigh said in a statement cited by The Independent last month. 'The recent airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites have been framed as a major turning point in US foreign policy. But if you take a step back, they don't stand out – they fit,' Raleigh added. Right now, when not riling other nations through his own tariffs and trade wars, ending the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza by far poses Trump's biggest diplomatic challenge. In both cases, he has his work cut out, not least, say some, in that he has appointed the same man, his friend Steve Witkoff, as the US envoy for all three sets of peace talks, involving Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Hamas and Israel-Iran. As Max Boot recently observed in The Washington Post, this 'would test the powers of even a veteran diplomat' … and 'the task is all the more onerous given that Witkoff is a real-estate developer with no background in diplomacy'. Meanwhile, as Gaza bleeds and starves, Trump diplomatically muddles through, as was poignantly described recently by Glasser of The New Yorker. 'In a summer of horror for Gaza, it's hard to recall the unfulfilled promises of last winter, when Trump bragged, in near world-historical terms, of the 'EPIC' ceasefire that he and his team had helped broker,' wrote Glasser recently. 'Now, as Trump stands by and does close to nothing at all, what can we do but wish that he had, for once, been right?' Many critics maintain that a huge part of the problem with Trump's negotiating style is that it fluctuates depending on the current state of his personal relationships with other world leaders. As his second term progresses, Trump's priorities would seem to become more apparent by the day, startling observers and US allies alike. Already there have been calls for US intervention in Panama, Canada and as recently as May, Trump announced that he didn't rule out employing military force to seize Greenland. He has also proposed a $1 trillion US military budget for 2026 – a 13.4 % increase – and again took action to withdraw US support from the UN. Critics continue to accuse him of shaping American foreign policy determined primarily by a desire to pursue his own vendettas toward those that rebuff him and in doing so use whatever means – economic or otherwise – at his disposal. As Ross rightly pointed out, there is indeed 'a difference between producing ceasefires and pauses and ending wars'. To achieve the latter, patience and lengthy negotiations are a prerequisite, and that, as we all know by now, has never been part of the Trump playbook.
