Niko Jaakkola

leaders like trump are why sun tzu had to write a bunch of advice like "don't write your enemy a letter detailing what tactics you really don't want them to do"

Hague-seth.

there's a theory that if only Britain exploited North Sea oil we'd be secure from a global energy price shock

which totally ignores (or doesn't understand) the fact that energy prices are global and a rise in UK production (from a declining basin) would have negligible impact on that global price

Line chart of Brent crude oil price

Thursday: "I can't believe the Strait of Hormuz is closed and oil is less than $90 a barrel."
Tuesday: "I can't believe the Strait of Hormuz is still closed and oil is back below $90 a barrel."

As an extension of the administration’s argument for further destroying any would-be Iranian nuclear operations, Witkoff warned in a Fox News interview this week that Iran “controlled 460 kg of 60%” enriched uranium at the facility — a level that would bring Iran roughly one week away from being able to have weapons-grade material. However, during negotiations, the Iranians told Witkoff and Kushner that they would turn over that uranium as part of a new nuclear agreement with the U.S., according to the Persian Gulf diplomat who spoke with MS NOW. The Iranians also told Witkoff that the country enriched the uranium after President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA brokered by the Obama administration.

launch witkoff into the sun

www.ms.now/news/trump-i...

MAGA and Trump causes a godawful mess, moves on; the people of Iran, the rest of the world, and perhaps some future non-MAGA US president are left to deal with it. Almost certainly Trump voters will not acknowledge what they have caused. This is 2026.

Then we would be left with an Iranian regime even more hostile towards the US and its allies than before, potentially emboldened by denying the US and Israel strategic victory, while still in possession of c.440kg of highly enriched uranium. Wonderful.

As an IR professor, it's depressing that this is outperforming all others as the best theory of US foreign policy

The message that Xi & Putin read is: Trump caves in at the merest hint of serious pushback.

A weakening of US deterrence makes the world a more dangerous place for us all. And for what? So that Trump and Hegseth could pretend to be "tough guys" for a week. Would be funny, if not for all the death.

We spent approx. $9B to murder those Iranian schoolgirls so now we can declare victory.

This is the most blasé admission of a war crime by a US president in history.

Trump has just disclosed, without prompting, that the US Military committed a war crime - literally just to brag & make his Republican audience laugh about unnecessarily killing 100+ Iranians instead of capturing them.

Great how Europe is redeploying some of its best equipment away from Russia to deal with a crisis created by our "security guarantor."

😞😞During the execution of a combat mission on the Eastern front, the commander of the 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade, Hero of Ukraine Alexander Dovgach, was killed, the Air Force command reported.

Nino3.4 region sea surface temperature forecast.

Wow, that's a monster signal for El Niño in today's new ECMWF seasonal forecast.

Rubio’s Promise to “Unleash Chiang” Won’t Land Well in China The secretary of state's odd reference to regime change in China likely damaged prospects for nuclear arms talks.

'It’s not difficult to imagine that Xi and other Chinese leaders could interpret Rubio’s public call to “unleash Chiang” as a warning of what is waiting for them if they don’t play ball with the Trump administration' blog.ucs.org/gregory-kula...

it's been painfully clear since at least January 2025 that we are exiting one era and entering another -- but there was, in my view at least, a possibility that, were say Democrats to win commanding majorities come November, Trump neutered or removed, and a Democrat to take the WH in 2028 --

1/

...after all, if Trump doesn't feel real pain for his dumb decision this time, he will go on to do something even dumber. And then we would actually need the stockpile.

So France is saying the G7 is not there yet on releasing oil stockpiles

Makes sense. If I were a European politico I'd want to add a little more market pressure on Trump to change tack in Iran before addressing oil prices

The EU understands the value of market pressure..

Yeah, and the worst thing is -- they're running the country!

It would be one history‘s great plot twists if Trump has now managed to alert the entire world to why they should transition away from single-use fossils to renewables as quickly as any possible - even while having dismissed global warming.

And Hormuz isn‘t even Asia‘s biggest risk.

A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans ...

This @shaunwalker7.bsky.social piece, 3 weeks ago, emphasised how European intelligence agencies didn't believe their US colleagues' warnings about Putin bc of lingering distrust after the 2003 Iraq shambles. CIA/USA regained credibility for a few short years; now Trump is burning through it again.

This. The US is running down its stock of weapons (including Patriot ammo) and the G7 is already, 10 days in, thinking of burning through 25-30% of its strategic oil reserve.

Russia can prolong its murder campaign in Ukraine, and China can just sit & watch any capacity to protect Taiwan erode.

a man in a blue shirt and tie is asking how 'd that go for you ALT: a man in a blue shirt and tie is asking how 'd that go for you

If Trump manages to cause a properly big crisis (economic / geopolitical), the worry is that the electorate will not react by voting in competent politicians next time round, but an even dumber bunch of populists.

boy in retrospect, really shouldn’t have elected the worst person in the entire country president. that, it appears, was less than wise

It’s the TOFU*—Trump Only Fucks Up—trade now.

*believe this was originally a @katie0martin.ft.com suggestion

It helps if you start from the perspective that actually saying 'due to this war, things will get worse' is more helpful than making unduly optimistic claims.

Vance, 9/28/24:

Europe’s impotence extends to energy The political momentum behind decarbonising the continent’s energy system has dissipated

-decarbonising Europe’s energy system is more achievable than previously thought

-yet, leaders seem tempted to pull back from that task in a misguided effort to protect the economy — they tend to listen more to incumbent companies than to their challengers

-creative destruction has few champions

The consequences of this war for Americans will be bleak and take decades to unfold, but it will impoverish and provincialize them in ways that would have been unimaginable ten years ago

And yet many (if not most) will fail to see it, because people are terrible at counterfactual reasoning.