… means taking on an unnecessary adversary in an unnecessary dispute with an economically powerful entity hardly lacking in highly skilled and motivated actors defending not only their interests but their foundational laws. Break out the popcorn.🍿 6/fin

The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process, everyone else. This reminds me a lot of the Iraq invasion, but on a global scale.

1/ Trump has been conned by Putin. Russia isn’t a global superpower—its GDP (~$2 trillion) is smaller than Italy’s and about 1/15 the size of the US. 🧵

Don’t just focus on the security breach + the total contempt for Europe The Signal chat also shows: • Fear of questioning Trump - even when they don’t understand • No strategic doctrine • No State Dept • A VP + Def Sec obsessed almost entirely with media, PR and messaging

Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us. So we

Germany's powerful Sparkassen (359 local savings banks with €2.5 trillion in assets) are a key obstacle to completing the banking union (together with the Italian government). Why? THREAD on my Silicon Continent post 1/11

En España, el 33% de las contratas públicas se hace con una sola oferta y el 9% es adjudicación directa sin concurso, según datos de la Comisión Europea. O sea, casi la mitad de las adjudicaciones se hace sin competencia, un caldo de cultivo muy favorable a las corruptelas.

The EU-US trade deal is here - it's probably not the end of uncertainty as the details are ironed out, but it's a momentous deal. In sum, it's a political defeat for the EU, but in economic terms I see it as, under the circumstances, a win of sorts. 🧵

As for the commitments on investment, energy and weapons purchases they'll have little effect (and the EU has little power to direct these things in any case). 600 billion of investment represent 4-5 years of EU FDI in the US, not hard to reach over Trump's term.

Proud to lead the new Chair on Strategic Autonomy at Universidad Pontificia Comillas, inaugurated today in Madrid by Prime Minister GR Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Debate interesante con líderes de industria para reflexionar sobre cómo Europa puede actuar con mayor independencia, confianza y propósito en el mundo.

Our Flag. The Flag of Freedom. #EU

A deserved recognition — and a powerful symbol for a country that has endured it all and emerged stronger

If this is true, the closest comparison for the Venezuela operation isn't Iraq but Panama. In both cases, the invasion was portrayed as a police action to capture a head of state to stand trial in the US for drug trafficking. Operation Just Cause, unlike Operation Iraqi Freedom,

Why do people keep getting Trump wrong? Amid all the noise, I found this helpful. warontherocks.com/2026/01/trumps…

BREAKING: Magali Lafourcade, judge in the case of Marine Le Pen, disclosed that she received a visit from 2 envoys of Trump in May 2025 who tried to pressure or lobby her in the case. The request to meet them came from the US Embassy in Paris. She immediately announced the

Congress could have prevented this catastrophe from unfolding, but the American political class was too spineless even following a failed coup d'etat, and now these people are blaming Europe for not being able to clean up the mess they left us with. x.com/GavinNewsom/st…

Excellent, lucid analysis by Francis Fukuyama.

This is a huge story in China right now given how big an outcry the installation of this caused back in 2017: Chinese tourism to South Korea was stopped, the Lotte Group was essentially shut down in China (nearly all of Lotte Mart's 112 Chinese stores were closed down due to

In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with the IRGC demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents - including hundreds of