Ian Campbell

The CEOs of Anthropic and Open AI could hardly be making a more dire warning: the product on which they work, AI, could threaten humanity’s survival.  Their call is an extraordinary one: they positively want political leaders to step in and restrain their industry.  But President Trump brushed their fears aside. Does he understand AI’s risks better? No. He simply has other priorities.  

He’s in a mess. His war on Iran is a gamble that he’s losing. The Brent crude oil price was at $70 per barrel when Trump launched his attack on February 2028.  Today it is at $107.5 per barrel, a 54% increase. “They’re desperate for a deal”, he keeps saying about Iran’s despotic regime. That claim is fake. Iran’s leaders like having a big foreign enemy who turns out not to be able to beat them: it gives them all the more excuse to crush domestic opponents.  It’s Trump who is desperate for a deal.

More expensive oil means higher inflation for the entire world, not least car-addicted Americans.  The average US gasoline price was $2.98 per gallon in late February; now it is $4.32 per gallon, a 45% increase.  In February the US inflation rate was 2.4% and the next Federal Reserve interest rate move was expected to be down. Now inflation is up to 3.4% and the market expects the Fed to raise rates this Wednesday. 

Like the worried AI leaders, the Fed would just be doing its job, which is to prevent prices from rising.  But Trump gave the Fed a bit of pre-emptive abuse. “BE PATRIOTS for a change”, he said. The US should have the “LOWEST RATE of any country in the World”.

What Trump wants is the economy to keep growing and stocks to keep rising. He knows inflation is causing US consumer confidence to sputter but investment spending has been exploding – in AI.  Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are each expected to invest around $200 billion in AI this year.  Meta is expected to invest about $140 billion. 

The huge sums being spent by just these four companies are equivalent to around 2.3% of U.S. GDP. And as the tech barons’ data centres spread across the land, NABTU, North America’s Building Trades Union, is among the trade unions cheering them on. Rob Bair, president of the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council, said data centres “create a hell of a lot of construction jobs.”

AI is the current fuel of the US economy. Slow it down and the economy slows, too – and the AI-pumped stock market could plunge. None of that would be good news for Trump.  

The November mid-term elections are getting close.  As Americans suffer from rising fuel prices and overall inflation, rising interest rates, higher mortgage rates — all of them consequences of Trump’s import tariffs, profligate spending and ill-judged attack on Iran — Trump fears that the Republicans will be hammered and he will be blamed.  His grip on the lily-livered Republican Party might finally weaken. So too might his grip on power in the US.

The only risk on Trump’s mind is that his big show might finally be over. Human extinction, just like climate change, that other existential threat, isn’t even on the US President’s self-centred radar.

Donald Trump launched his assault on Iran’s repugnant regime with a lie about America’s vulnerability to it and a sense of invulnerability. A war from the air would be painless, at least for Americans. But the war has not turned out anything like Trump imagined.

Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a stranglehold, shutting off approaching a fifth of the world’s crude oil and natural gas supplies, as well as supplies of urea for fertiliser. This has driven up oil and gas prices and punctured government bonds and stockmarkets. An early morning post today on Trump’s Truth Social site, appearing at approximately 11.30am UK time, signalled that he is in talks with Iran and may end his offensive. Iran itself is denying any talks have taken place, keeping uncertainty high.

It would seem that Iran’s noose around the global economy has made Trump eager to call off his offensive. The popular uprising he called for was so unlikely as to be almost unimaginable. Those who rose up would have been mown down. The hardline regime has now shown it can hold off the world’s most powerful nation. The risk is that its success emboldens it, rather than harm it.

Just as everything in the global economy had to adjust to the sudden onset of war, it must now adjust to its likely ending. The Brent Crude oil price, higher still this morning in Europe before Trump’s post, is down by 10% on the day, at $100 per barrel.  At that level, however, it remains up by 62% in the past three months.

It seems likely that oil prices will ease in coming weeks provided tankers begin to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. But even then it will surely take months for oil prices to retrace to the $60-70 level at which they were earlier this year. For natural gas, damage to production facilities in Qatar must also be factored in.  Natural gas is also important for electricity generation and it continues to be likely that electricity tariffs will rise in many countries this year.

A consequent impact of rising prices is that central banks may think it prudent to raise interest rates to keep inflation in check – or, at least, they will put off the rate cuts that, in the US and UK, for example, had been widely expected. This too has knock on effects. Government bonds have fallen heavily since Trump launched the war, pushing up the interest rate or yield the bond offers and increasing governments’ debt servicing costs.  The UK 10-year government bond was paying a yield of 4.25% just before the war and that figure is 4.79% today, adding about £5bn to the government’s annual debt servicing cost – money that a cash-strapped government must find.

Government bonds act as a baseline for other borrowing, such as mortgages. Thus, in the UK, the average two-year fixed rate has also risen by about half of one percent in March, from 4.83 per cent to 5.35 per cent, according to Moneyfacts, which estimated that this would add an additional £900 to the annual cost of borrowing £250,000 over 25 years. The housing market will suffer. And the rise in bond yields is widespread, across Europe, the US and Asia, and so weak housing markets may be likely across the globe.

When Trump bombed Iran he triggered an inflationary wave. Ending the war cannot bring it to a halt. It will wash over the globe, reducing the spending power of consumers, companies and governments and slowing economic growth. Drops in the value of bonds and stocks will also reduce wealth and discourage investment and spending.  

Trump foresaw none of this. The self-proclaimed great peacemaker promised Americans an end to inflation and a golden age. Instead he is bringing inflation, a global slowdown, and impoverishment. Yet he will care about only one potential impact. Will the Americans who have backed him make him pay? Will his latest and greatest folly mark the beginning of his decline?

The US and Israeli strikes on Iran, coupled with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and retaliation against neighbouring states, is provoking dramatic rises in oil and gas prices.  Most extreme of all so far in the UK seems to be the rise in domestic heating oil (or kerosene).   

On January 29 I bought 1,000 litres of heating oil for £598.82. Today the cheapest quotation offered on the website of Boiler Juice, which acts as an intermediary between oil suppliers and consumers,  was £1,484.99, a staggering rise of 148%. Judging by the price chart on Boiler Juice’s website, virtually all of this increase has taken place in the five days since the February 28 attack on Iran.

The Dutch TTF natural gas price, the main European benchmark, is up by 56% since just before the attack on Iran.  Qatar supplies 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas and QatarEnergy has suspended production following Iran strikes. According to the European Commission, 29.5% of EU final energy consumption is supplied by gas. About three quarters of UK households use gas. Unless the spike in gas prices eases, the spending power of Europe’s consumers will suffer and economic growth will be lower.   

Crude oil prices are also up, though by far less than gas. The Brent Crude oil price, as I write, is $81.4 per barrel, a rise of 13.4% since February 27 and of 22.4% since February 5. Fear that an attack would take place had already pushed up the price.

UK diesel and petrol prices do not yet appear to have reacted significantly to the conflict.  The RAC Foundation puts the average UK petrol price yesterday, March 4, at 134.5 pence per litre, compared to 132.9 pence per litre on February 26, a rise of 1.2%.  Diesel prices have risen slightly more, by 1.5%, to 142.4 pence per litre over the same period.  As crude oil prices are rising fast, it is certain that in coming days and weeks motorists will have to pay more. For suppliers of food and all other freight transport, too, that means more cost. The inflation rate is going to rise.

How much harm will all this do?  For any unfortunate people needing heating oil urgently the harm is already large: hundreds of pounds more to pay than they expected. And some may have difficulty obtaining kerosene at all.  I rang a local supplier and they did not want to offer a price. 

But the more serious damage to consumers, companies and economic growth will depend on how long these price spikes last, and how high they rise. But when the offensive will end is uncertain. Donald Trump has not set out exactly what he aims to achieve. His reassurances on Tuesday that energy supplies from the Middle East would not be affected have already been proven entirely hollow. 

US consumers look, so far, to be less affected by energy price spikes than European ones. The US is self-sufficient and a net exporter of oil and gas.  Asia, by contrast, is dependent on Middle East supplies and will suffer significant harm from this crisis. But the impact on the US is nonetheless sufficiently large to have provoked sizeable falls in stock markets and in US government Treasury bonds. 

Iran’s regime is repugnant. So, too, is the Trump administration’s crowing over US military power and the death and destruction it can inflict. But it is rising prices and bombing markets that are more likely to make Trump’s war more unpopular at home.  And, just as with his “Liberation Day” import tariff increases in April last year, it might be plunging markets that make Trump seek a way out of another mess of his own making.

The U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran on February 28 trigger another war and another crisis. President Trump’s strategy looks fanciful; the economic consequences are real.

The Trump plan seeks to get a lot for a little: regime change through ‘decapitation’, without full-scale war. Ayatollah Khamenei has been killed. Trump has called on Iran’s feared Revolutionary Guard and armed forces to lay down their arms or face “certain death” and for the people of Iran to seize their chance, and power. 

But to who would Iran’s armed forces hand their weapons?  Unless the U.S. invades and puts boots on the ground it is unlikely that those who have ruled Iran so brutally for years will hand over their arms and power. It is perhaps more likely that any trace of domestic opposition will be dealt with still more ruthlessly, if such be possible.  Trump’s hope that Iran’s dictatorship can be removed without committing U.S. ground forces looks a pipe dream.

On oil supplies the impacts are less fanciful. Iran is threatening to prevent shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil from Iran itself and from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE passes through the strait: close to a fifth of global oil supply.  Crude oil prices are up by about 8% this Monday morning, to $77 per barrel for Brent Crude.  Banks are warning that the oil price could go above $100 per barrel if the conflict persists and the Strait is closed. 

Iran’s missiles launched at Israel and other neighbouring countries add to the harm: they have taken lives, sown fear, and caused destruction and disruption. 

The sudden jump in oil prices and in supply uncertainty represents a shock for the global economy.  All oil-based fuels will rise in price and so will the cost of transporting goods by road.  The US annual inflation rate came down by 0.3 percentage points to 2.4% in January, increasing expectations that the Federal Reserve might cut interest rates.  But if higher oil prices are sustained, inflation will go up and the hit to consumers’ incomes will be negative for economic growth. 

That creates a quandary for the Fed and for other central banks, such as the European Central Bank.  If inflation rises and growth slows because of an oil price shock, should they respond to the higher inflation with higher interest rates or pay more attention to lower growth and perhaps ease rates?  The central banks will, however, be wary of letting an oil shock push inflation up: that is what happened in the 1970s though, it should be said, the oil price rose manyfold in the 1970s and that is unlikely now.

A particular vulnerability for Trump are the US’s bubbly financial markets.  So far this year they have been nervous, with the rapid gains propelled by huge Artificial Intelligence investments scrutinised more closely by the market.  Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies, a highly speculative investment with no underlying value, have been hammered: Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two most prominent, are down  by 25% and 35% respectively so far this year.  Falling markets are an economic negative, too, as investors lose money and cut their spending.

There are many other US points of vulnerability, not least the Treasury debt market through which the government funds itself.  Lower US growth and higher inflation would add to the pressures on a government already running a very large fiscal deficit of around 6% of GDP and adding rapidly to the government’s debt mountain, now 120% of GDP – a ratio that has doubled since before the 2008 financial crisis. 

The US, seen historically as a bastion of sound money and rules-based policy-making, is running ever greater risks under the wild and unpredictable leadership of Donald Trump. It is hard to see what the US can gain from his attack on Iran. The dangers are more predictable, and great.

Bullying works for Donald Trump: it’s taken him to the top. But his bullying to get hold of Greenland may misfire. To try to blackmail Europe into selling him the giant frozen island, Trump is resorting to his favourite weapon – import tariffs. But they will hurt the US economy too. And a particular vulnerability for Trump is the pumped up balloon of US financial markets.

Trump claims that taking possession of Greenland is vital to America’s security. But the US has a base on the island now and, working with its NATO allies, can certainly defend Greenland successfully against distant China and Trump’s “good friend” in Russia, the murderous dictator and war criminal, Vladimir Putin.  Trump’s efforts to acquire the island have less to do with US security than with his insatiable ego.

Greenland’s area of 836,000 square miles is considerably bigger than Alaska and about three times the size of Texas. Its vast land mass is known to contain uranium and many minerals, not least rare earths, though the extent of the reserves is unproven. The economic attractions may be great, but they are not easy to tap. The vast island has about one hundred miles of road – and these are within its towns.  Seeking out minerals would be difficult and would take years. But Greenland may have another, more straightforward, instant gratification to offer Trump.

Acquiring Greenland would expand the area of the United States by about 22%.  Trump would be among the few presidents able to increase significantly the area of the United States. That’s definitely something for Trump to boast about.

And Trump may have something further in mind. If he can expand the territory of the United States by a fifth and stamp his authority across the world, from nearby Venezuela to distant Iran, why would Americans  want him to stand down as president? 

Trump has mooted the idea of a third term on several occasions. In April 2025 his official merchandise store began selling Trump 2028 baseball caps. The US constitution would have to be amended – or got round in some way. That would be difficult but Trump will think that he can bully his way to what he wants. Why not?

And yet Trump’s bid for Greenland may also reveal the limits to his power. 

Trump is threatening to increase import tariffs on Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK, by 10% on February 1^st but could raise the tariff to 25% in June if no agreement is reached. There is no question that this would hurt European exports to the US and weaken growth in Europe. But it would also weaken US growth and increase US inflation, impeding further cuts in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve – which Trump has also been bullying, unsuccessfully so far, eager to see rates cut, notwithstanding the inflationary risks. 

A further threat to the US is that the EU could fire back.  The EU discussed again on January 18^th an earlier plan to respond to Trump’s April 2, 2025 “Liberation Day” tariff assault. The plan, to levy tariffs on €93bn of US goods, was suspended after Trump backtracked. If the EU acts now Trump would finally have provoked a trade war.  That would be a completely negative step, harming growth in the West, and globally.  And markets would not like it.

Trump has already had a warning. His Liberation Day assault on the world last April hit US stockmarkets hard. The S&P 500 had plunged by 12% before Trump, a week after opening fire, retreated and postponed the introduction of tariff increases.

Now Trump is again taking the same risk. US stockmarkets recovered fast once Trump turned tail last April and are again pushing at record highs. The worries about lofty valuations and the concentration of the market in a few big leading companies are persistent. There are question marks too about whether US Treasury bond yields – the interest rate on the funds the government borrows – could soar given the disregard Trump is showing for a fiscal deficit in the region of 5-6% of GDP and government debt that, consequently, is surging, up from about 100% of GDP before the Covid pandemic to over 120% of GDP now.

Trump acts as though he can act recklessly in the US and around the world and there will never be a price to pay.  The markets are liable to tell him now that there is.

Trump might find that Greenland is too big even for him to swallow.

America First is gone. Imperial America is here.

By snatching President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has abandoned his previous plan to pull back from foreign wars while focusing on Americans’ concerns over taxes, jobs, inflation and immigration. The new Trump has his eyes on expanding U.S. power and territory. That is worrying, and not only for those in the western hemisphere, the self-professed U.S. sphere of influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

Today, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine finds justification. After all, Ukraine is in the Russian sphere of influence. And Taiwan quakes a little more. Perhaps now, in U.S. eyes, it’s a legitimate target for China, not an annexation that the U.S. would strongly resist. And for Trump himself where might be next, after Venezuela?

There are parallels that Trump would strongly deny between him and Hugo Chávez, the leader who led Venezuela into the abyss. Chávez first emerged with a failed coup attempt in February 1992. He went to jail but Venezuelans were forgiving and elected him to office in December 1998. Trump tried a bit of insurrection himself on January 6, 2021 after losing the 2020 election when he incited a mob to storm the Capitol. Yet many Americans ignored that crime and elected him to power again in 2024. Coup mongers with no regard for democracy make surprisingly appealing election candidates when people are unhappy – Robin Hood figures who promise bread and change.

But Robin Hood heroes don’t turn out to be good leaders. Between them Chávez and Maduro and chavista government have provoked seven million Venezuelans to flee the country. Trump has disrupted U.S. trade, threatened the independence of the Federal Reserve, further worsened the huge budget deficit and deployed the National Guard in Democrat jurisdictions.  And now he is expanding his reckless disregard for the law internationally.

He likes improvisation. Provided he is in charge, all will be well. María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader in exile, irked him by winning the Nobel Peace Prize last year. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” he says, and won’t be involved in a transition. Nor, it seems, will Edmundo González Urrutia, who ran against Maduro in the election last July. Instead Trump says the U.S. will run the country but has left the chavista government in place, minus its leader. That isn’t even a sketch of a plan.

Yet it seems unlikely that Venezuela will be the last of Trump’s new imperialist adventures. He has threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, and that risk must now be higher.  Cuba’s long-lived tyranny will also fear American intervention. Trump says he will act if the Iranian regime puts down protests. Greenland would take Trump’s imperialism to a new level. It is not a country run by a despot like Maduro, but entirely peaceful and stable.

A U.S. usurpation of Danish territory would explode NATO and the Western alliance and leave the world without any semblance of an international rule of law. President Putin would be further emboldened. How about taking the Baltics, or Moldova? If the imperial U.S. can intervene wherever it fancies, why not Russia or China?

A new age of empires is being born. The country that was once the leader of the free world is leading the way.

The cryptocurrency world is alarmed. Bitcoin, king of the tokens, hit an all time high of $125,482 on October 6 – and is worth $101,060 today, as I write.  The 5% drop today and almost 20% in less than a month has the market biting its nails. What’s next? Rally, or plunge?  But the questions go further and wider. The talk of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)- inspired bubble in financial markets has itself bubbled in recent months. Is crypto the canary that warns of a wider crash?

The simple answer is that it might be.  Ten years ago, in November 2015, a Bitcoin could be bought for $333. Even now, after its recent fall, that sum is just small change – a single Bitcoin is worth $100,000 more, a gain of 30,000%.  Spectacular fortunes have been made. But from what?  Tokens that have no intrinsic value, no revenue stream, no fundamental worth.  To this author, cryptocurrencies are modern-day versions of the Dutch tulip bubble of 1636, but less pretty.

Beneath every financial bubble a community and an infrastructure grows. There are crypto billionaires and millionaires, crypto trading platforms and many investors drawn to the explosive, money-making party. Yet on October 10, after President Trump made another import tariff threat against China and US stock markets reeled, the abrupt fall in cryptocurrencies was enough, reportedly, to force crypto investors with leveraged positions – bets placed with borrowed money – to sell fast, creating serious difficulties for crypto exchanges themselves.  What distress is a month of decline that has, so far, accelerated meaningfully today, liable to cause?  When cryptocurrencies fall from their perch, what else, if anything, will fall with them?

US stock markets are also down today, though not spectacularly: the Dow Jones index by 0.6% as I write, the S&P 500, a broader index of leading stocks, by almost 1%. The technology-heavy Nasdaq  is faring worst, down by 1.6%.  The reason is that it is in Tech and, especially, in companies involved in AI, that the gains have been most spectacular.   Nvidia, down by 3.3% today, is still up by 49% so far this year. And Palantir, another AI favourite, though down by 7.9% today, is still up by 273% in the past twelve months.

The questions that apply to AI stocks resemble, to some degree, the big crypto questions. Yes, clearly, AI represents an advance for humanity. But which companies will profit from it? And by how much? And is the far broader advance in US stock markets warranted? The Nasdaq, even allowing for its fall today, is still up by 27% so far this year and by 123% in the past three years, with those gains heavily concentrated in a handful of stocks.

This market, in my view, does resemble that of the late 1990s’ Dot Com bubble.  Then the excitement was about this new thing called the internet. And it has indeed proven important for humanity. But the bubbly 1990s’ party was so excessive that the Nasdaq took almost two years to drop to its nadir, down by 77% from its peak. 

The fall in markets hit the U.S. economy and the global one hard in the early 2000s. Big losses in markets mean investors suffer, obliging them to cut their spending. Growth slows, unemployment rises, interest rates drop. Recovery is often slow.

Wealth pumped up by a bubble is blown away when it pops. The crypto canary’s fall might not continue. But, if it does, it may indeed be a warning of danger for us all.

“Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots.”

The speaker was Donald Trump in 2007 in an interview with a Florida newspaper, the Sun Sentinel, and “the shots” were vaccines.  Trump’s theory related to the suspected rising prevalence of autism. Vaccines, the wealthy New York businessman suspected, were behind it.

Eighteen years later Trump is in his second term as US President and his medical theories in relation to autism, paracetamol (Tylenol in the US), and vaccines are getting fresh and far more potent outings than in the Sun Sentinel.  Now Trump can use the authority of the presidency and the weight of the government to spread his theories.

Trump’s theorising on autism seems to go back not just to observation of his own young children but to his friendship with Bob Wright, the former CEO of the NBC television network. Wright’s daughter, Katie, had an autistic son and Wright and his wife, Suzanne, founded Autism Speaks, a non-profit organisation “dedicated to creating an inclusive world for all individuals with autism” in 2005. 

Though Autism Speaks is not officially anti-vax, vaccine scepticism has run through its veins. Katie Wright, ABC news reported, said on the Oprah Winfrey show in April 2007, “We give 37 vaccines to babies under the age of 18 months. Nobody has shown that that’s safe … multiple vaccines at once. You look at food allergies, asthma, and autism — it’s all connected.”

Katie Wright’s outspoken anti-vax views led to tension between her and her parents and Autism Speaks. Yet Donald Trump said something similar in the 2007 interview with the Sun Sentinel, complaining that, “today they pump the children with so much at a very young age.” Where his own children were concerned, he said, “We do it on a very, very conservative level,” giving his children single shots of any vaccine with an interval in between.

Trump’s scepticism on vaccines appeared again during the Covid pandemic that emerged during his first term as president.  He did not set an example by being vaccinated himself and was reported eventually to have received the vaccine privately only in January 2021, shortly before vacating the White House.

Earlier, in April 2020, since sunlight and disinfectant killed the virus, Trump explored ways of using them as treatments. “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light,” he said, and, “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.” Trump also advocated the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, and said he was taking it himself.  

Some people followed Trump’s advice – and paid the price. A study published in February 2024 in the journal, Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, estimates that 16,990 Covid-19 patients in the U.S., France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Turkey died as a result of taking hydroxychloroquine.

And yet, when vaccines were successful in repressing the spread and deadliness of Covid, Trump was pleased to claim credit.  “People that aren’t necessarily big fans of Donald Trump are saying, ‘Whether you like him or not, this is one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine’ or any other medicine — any other age of medicine,” Trump said on December 8, 2020 at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit.

Trump’s views on Tylenol taken during pregnancy and the risk of autism were broadcast yesterday, on September 22, and he also opined on vaccines.  “This is based on what I feel. The mumps, measles and — the three should be taken separately. And it seems to be that when you mix them, there could be a problem. So there’s no downside in taking them separately. In fact, they think it’s better. So let it be separate.”

The likely result, especially if the president’s advice is followed by the US government, to which he appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, as Health and Human Services chief, is that it will be more difficult and expensive to vaccinate children, fewer children will be vaccinated fully, and many won’t be vaccinated at all.

Trump’s impact again is likely to be global. His discouragement of the use of vaccines may lead to the revival of some serious illnesses, leading to the deaths of many people, especially children, and do lasting harm to others. 

In medicine, as in climate science, Trump takes the world backwards. Sadly, the American President’s words have weight, even when they are based on no science at all, only on the relentless nonsense that is the hallmark of his presidency.  

Donald Trump is on his second state visit to Britain. King Charles is greeting him with royal pageantry, Sir Keir Starmer and his government with obsequious smiles. Few Britons share the warmth.  While Trump parades, the world is going to hell.  Putin continues to bombard Ukraine. Israel is committing genocide, with American weapons. Trump, the champion of the free world, is friendly to the perpetrators of violence, not to their victims.

He promised peace. The Ukraine conflict could be solved, he said on many occasions during the 2024 election campaign, “in one day” or “on day one” or “within 24 hours”.  Once in office he did turn up the heat, but on Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who was “ungrateful” and “gambling with World War Three.” Ukraine, not Russia, it seems, started the war.

Different treatment was required for Putin, the aggressor, poisoner of political opponents, de facto dictator, who has now killed over 50,000 Ukrainians. In Alaska the U.S. literally rolled out the red carpet. The nasty aggressor is fêted, the innocent victim humiliated. Trump’s view is twisted. He does not know right from wrong.

Gaza is another outrage. The United Nations has now called the destruction, killing and starvation by the Israeli government an act of genocide. World governments are calling for the horror to end – but the one government that holds sway with Israel, its backer, its arms supplier, the United States, continues to lend its support.  This week Israel stepped up again its assault. Marco Rubio, Trump’s envoy, visited – and made no objection. 

Israel denies genocide and points repeatedly to the appalling attack by Hamas in October 2023 in which 1,200 Israeli citizens died and 250 were taken hostage. We are the victims, it says. But it has now killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to a health ministry that is, it is true, run by Hamas. The pervasive destruction and the suffering, however, is blatant, and the independent accounts of slaughter innumerable. Israel is showing scant regard for Palestinian life as it demolishes huge areas of Gaza, restricts food and supplies, and threatens 2 million people with starvation.  The response to the initial aggression, terrible as it was, is utterly out of proportion and wrong.

The United Nations is trying to respond. It called again for a ‘two-state solution’ on September 12 in a 142 to 10 vote. But the scales are unbalanced. The vote that counts, the U.S. one, was against.

Trump has cried genocide himself this year. He put South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, on the spot in the White House in May. But genocide simply is not happening in South Africa.  Trump sees a genocide with white victims that is simply not taking place and misses one with tens of thousands of Arab victims before his eyes, carried out by his friend, Bibi Netanyahu, with weapons he supplies.

The calls for sharing of land seem only to encourage Israel to seize more. Settler violence drives Palestinians from their homes.  Trump’s depiction in February, in the White House, of a U.S. controlled “Riviera of the Middle East” that Palestinians would be free to inhabit or leave was a fanciful fiction that gave its blessing to a horrific reality: ethnic cleansing.

Trump’s perverse policies can only end badly.  Israel is turning itself into a pariah and creating enemies for itself, the United States and the West. Putin can laugh. He invades; Trump runs the parade. China, too, sees the weakness of the West. Decent people look on with horror. Under the vain and foolish leadership of Trump, the U.S. is no longer a force for good but a perpetrator of harm.  And the final perversity is that Britain’s leaders celebrate Trump royally not through admiration or liking, just in the hope of keeping an egomaniac happy and avoiding tantrums that will do the UK and the world further harm.

After four months the Donald Trump and Elon Musk bromance is over and the divorce is immediately very nasty.  Shares in Musk’s Tesla car firm have reeled. But to Republicans who believed the double act of the world’s richest man and its most powerful could “save Western civilization” the blow is of a different kind but equally heavy. It is a romance and split that reveals much about today’s America.

The marriage was made by a couple with the best of frugal intentions. There are many sides to Musk; one is a belief in small government and a balanced budget.  He was put in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He would find ways in which tax money is wasted, That appealed to a central Republican belief: that the government, especially when under the control of the profligate enemy Democrats, squanders billions and billions of Americans’ tax dollars. This is the internal threat to America.

Then there is the external one: the rise of China, its growing economy, now the world’s second largest, its expanding army, its espionage, its technology, its grip on vital raw materials around the globe, such as rare earths, needed for the battery age, its lack of respect for human rights or democracy in a Western sense.  Trump has made fighting China, by restricting US access to its exports and depriving it of American technological expertise, a big part of his mission.  

Here again Trump and Musk were largely together. Cheap Chinese electrical cars are Musk’s biggest commercial enemy. By imposing extraordinarily high tariffs on imports from China, Trump gave a huge measure of protection to Tesla.  

So far, so friendly.  The power couple crooned from the same song sheet. But Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to extend tax cuts for the rich but also increase government spending brought discord. Trump’s bill is not the left-wing ‘tax and spend’, more a right wing variant: ‘cut taxes (on the rich) and spend’.  Musk revolted,writing, “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.”

Why would he say that? The US government is currently running a deficit of around 6.5% of GDP.  It must borrow a similar amount annually to pay its way. Its debt, at present about 100% of GDP, is soaring. That threatens higher inflation. And foreign investors hold around one third of that debt – and they are widely reported to be becoming wary.  The ultimate threat is that Uncle Sam goes bust – or the Federal Reserve bails the government out, printing money to buy its debt while the dollar falls and inflation soars.  What would that be if not the fall of the US and of Western civilization?

Before the big, bad bill, Musk had already decided to retreat from DOGE to spend more time on Tesla, whose fortunes have been suffering. BYD, a Chinese car firm, outsold Tesla in Europe for the first time in April. It does not help that Musk, once seen as a new age genius and whizz kid, now cuts an unpopular figure around the world as a right-wing Trump-supporting extremist, giving his backing, for example, to Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

What does the messy end of the Trump Musk affair mean?  Both will suffer.  If Trump withdraws government contracts, as he is threatening to do, it will hurt Musk’s SpaceX. But Musk’s counter-threat, decommissioning Dragon, the spacecraft used by NASA to convey astronauts to and from the international space station under a contract worth $5bn, would also harm the US space programme.  Both sides may pull back from this part of the fight. Musk’s Tesla, meanwhile, looks vulnerable, to his unpopular image and popular Chinese competition.

Trump may be able to brush off Musk’s abuse and portray himself, as he so adeptly does, as the wounded party, just as he has when he has faced law courts on a variety of charges.  One Trump flaw is left exposed: he is no champion of fiscal responsibility.

What the Trump Musk romance and break-up shows more than anything, however, is the extent of delusion in today’s America.  The MAGA movement did see the twin supermen, mingling political  power, money and technological genius, as America’s defenders, able to save Western civilization against its mortal enemies: the Democrats and the Chinese.  

But Trump, so willing to discredit the 2020 election result and spur a violent uprising to try to overthrow it, is not even a defender of democracy, let alone truth, respect for human rights, or decency. And Musk is an extraordinarily clever maverick, with extremist views. Neither can be seen as a defender of Western civilization. Nor are the Democrats the devil. China meanwhile needs to be engaged, it is true, with caution because of its authoritarianism and lack of respect for human rights.

The worship of the Trump Musk marriage was a reflection of the MAGA delusion now prevalent in the United States today. It is not just fiscal balance that has been lost. The political fight has become akin to a computer game, a clash with aliens or between pure good and pure evil. Trump and Musk were Batman and Robin, heroes of the fight to save the West. And now they are together no more.

It is this level of delusion that is America’s greatest threat.