Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Trump’s all-sticks-and-no-carrot approach to trade talks is making it difficult for even friendly foreign governments to reach an agreement they fear could be political suicide back home — no matter how much the White House threatens their economies.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/29/us-india-trade-deal-00430438
Trump Is Slapping a 50 Percent Tariff on Home Appliances
https://reason.com/2025/06/16/trump-is-slapping-a-50-percent-tariff-on-home-appliances/
Trump administration military aid halt will only encourage Russia, Ukraine warns
https://www.politico.eu/article/us-military-aid-halt-will-only-stimulate-russia-continue-war-ukrainian-foreign-ministry/
The Iranian government is corrupt and needs enemies to hold its people together. This is why it treats the U.S. as the great Satan and Israel as the little Satan. There’s no deep reason why Israel and Iran should be enemies or why Iran and the U.S. should be enemies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vS8GGPKtqI
“China on Friday signaled it would approve the export of rare earth minerals to the US, hours after White House officials said the two sides had reached a deal, in what would be a major breakthrough following weeks of negotiations over US access to the key materials.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-china-formalize-deal-rare-075006013.html
“The Iranian parliament, led by the charismatic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was trying to limit the power of the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh nationalized the oil fields, provoking a British blockade, while also clashing with the shah over domestic policy.
Mossadegh trusted the United States as a neutral mediator, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. The Eisenhower administration suspected that Mossadegh was too close to communists, and the CIA supported a coup d’etat by destabilizing the country. In August 1953, after months of protests subsidized by the U.S. and the U.K., monarchist generals in contact with the CIA surrounded Mossadegh’s house with tanks, bringing the shah back to near-absolute power.
Instead of allowing Britain to regain its dominance over Iran, the Eisenhower administration forced Iran to accept an American-led oil consortium. And the CIA helped train the shah’s fearsome new secret police, the SAVAK. When the shah finally fell in 1979, young revolutionaries took revenge by raiding the U.S. embassy, which they called a “den of spies,” and holding everyone inside hostage for more than a year. That began a 46-year conflict that continues to this day.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/23/a-brief-bloody-history-of-all-the-times-the-u-s-caused-chaos-in-the-middle-east/
Trump wants NATO to spend more on defense. Here’s who is actually paying.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/22/trump-nato-defense-spending-winners-losers-00409979
Eric Edelman, Suzanne Maloney, and Andrew Miller: How Weak Is Iran? | Foreign Affairs Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFdWYUNDwSU
NATO allies agree to 5 percent defense spending goal
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-allies-defense-spending-goal-spain-gdp/
“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have all been meeting with foreign officials seeking agreements to stave off the crushing tariffs President Donald Trump has threatened to impose next month.
But Trump’s three-headed negotiating team is often working at cross purposes, or at least that’s how it seems to 11 foreign officials, business leaders and advisers on trade talks, who say they are receiving mixed messages from different departments, in what one person close to the talks described as a contest for Trump’s loyalty.
Their differing approaches have occasionally slowed down progress, the foreign officials say, like when the Commerce Department tightened restrictions on some Chinese technology in May, quickly derailing an agreement with Beijing that was negotiated by Bessent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/22/there-is-not-a-singular-voice-countries-cant-figure-out-who-in-trumps-circle-to-listen-to-on-trade-00415851