Trump

I see Donald has started his campaign to become The President again in this years Election, Anyone think he will get there ?,

And Boris has pitched in to big him up.

I think Boris and Farage are competing to be Dictator Governor General of the provence when we become part of the Russian Empire.

If he gets in again he will stop all US arms to Ukraine as he's Putin's puppet!

I don't know where you get that from flipper, Donald is a true Yanky GI Joe who eats Mama's apple pie and will defend Uncle Sam at all costs,

Trump-Putin relationship

That report looks a little shaky to me. Trump is not a Billionaire by accident and Did't become president by birth right, His opponents are fighting his right to get in the contest due to his tactics in the last campaign in the high courts and Trump has supporters in the high courts so. Its going to be an interesting situation,,,,

Sorry tom, but I think you are being incredibly naive if you think that rapping himself in the flag makes him loyal to the state, but that is what fascism is all about.

He has declared himself loyal to Vladimir Putin: chosen to believe him over the intelligence supplied to him by US military, NATO and US security services.

He has declared that if elected, he will trash the constitution and legal services, go after those who have opposed him and remove any constraints on his powers.

The leader above the law.

ie 'THE FUHRERPRINZIP'

The trumpian maggots no doubt believe that the loss of freedom in such an authoritarian state will not hurt them.

Boy! what a shock they are in for!

It is almost (I stress almost, as there would be consequences for the whole world ) almost, worth seeing him elected again to enjoy the schadenfreude of American Nazis suffering as a result of their own actions.

I Kinda get where you're coming from Ena, He has been accused of being a supporter of ' white supremacist' but, never admitted it in Public and Many Afro-Americans like him , He has Great support in ' redneck Texas' so' there are arguments from All around, I like him to be honest even though he is deeper than the Ocean, I think he has the potential to get in the contest and Win it, I can't see Biden getting re elected,

Steve Bannon was on Peston last night and he was asked about Trump and what he would do if he got in to power again ???? And he said he speaks to trump daily and they have been training people to take over key jobs in the government from day one this time... Also he will pull out of helping Ukraine and he believes all Russian speaking Ukraine should go back to the "Russian Empire".

tomplum From the 12th of feb the daily show with Jon Stewart will be back on TV in the USA you may find it a good way to get information on the Elections.... you can find it on YouTube

Tom p
Think about this Putin has threatened the west many times he wants to take over if trump withdrew his support putin in would see that as a green light he wouldn't attack USA we would be first in the firing line not trump would not support US nothing to like about him

Don't like that current fellow Biden....summat about him Trump has an arrogant Aire about him....but he has achieved in his lifetime.

Joe Biden is 'out to lunch'

America has already stopped sending military aid to Ukraine, because the US Congress has refused to authorise the $60 billion in aid, which Biden wants to send to Ukraine.

Joe Biden is old and doddery
BUT
Donald Trump actually exhibits more clinical signs of dementia.

Ok

Well they are both 'out to lunch' LINK

Yes,

Sadly, the same here.

I suspect that Kier Whatsit will make a very poor PM

But

Allowing the current crop of thieves/crooks/con men/swindlers a further term in office will probably inflict damage from which it will take a long time to recover.

Surfer Tom. I'm not supporting Trump but, If I was a Yank I would Vote Trump and I think if Putin started moves anywhere, America would react no matter who the President was,
I started this thread because I heard on the radio about him making a serious bid for the President and wondered how many think that. he will get there. My view is, It is possible but its highly improbable, ITS AMERICA and the Land of opportunity so. It just might happen

Tom, did you miss Donald saying that he would NOT act to support European countries against any action by Putin?

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump, says if re-elected, Trump will pull USA out of NATO.

NATO probably could readjust to function bowt the Septics, but it would take years to become sufficiently effective. Putin will recognise the opportunity to act before such a stage is reached.

Ok

So America pulls out of NATO.

That would mean that America was alone in the world, any trouble in the Middle or Far East and in the Pacific, America is on it's own, I know that NATO is primarily for the defence of Western Europe, but NATO allies normally help each other out in other parts of the world, but if America abandoned NATO and Western Europe, then Western Europe would abandon the USA.

So if Putin attacked a NATO country triggering the response that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on every NATO country, how would a NATO without America fare in a war with Russia ?

Very poorly as things stand. BUT, Russia has a GDP about the size of Italy's. It is dwarfed by the GDP of NATO countries, even bowt America.

That is why I think the danger exists.

A reduced NATO can easily develop the means to stand up to Russia.

Do you think Vlad will allow that to happen, or would he strike before NATO2 finds its feet?

Ena

I don't agree, although a lot of the NATO countries don't spend the 2% of GDP on defence, there are 31 countries in NATO, with weaponry which is a hell of a lot better than anything Russia has, the war with Ukraine as proved that, so Russia wouldn't have a cat in hells chance of beating NATO, with or without America in it.

I would never predict the outcome of a war.

Emergent factors not predicted tend to pitch things in totally obscure directions.

I would prefer not having to find out.

Me too

Going back to Tom's question.

Hundreds of Millions of Americans will vote next bommy day.

Their votes will count for nothing.

A few thousand voters in a small number of swing states will determine which candidate becomes the next president. (Their electoral college system elected Trump in 2016, even though Hillary Clinton secured far more votes from the nation as a whole.)

This means that managing the campaign for those very few votes will determine the outcome.

Money will count
Tactics will count
Connections will count
Media manipulation will count
Voter interference will count
Russia will no doubt have influence
Threats and intimidation are already abounding

Whatever the outcome, no reason to believe that it will bear any relationship to what people want.

According to opinion polling, most Americans want nether Biden nor Trump to be their next President.

Tts
Putin is the one who has caused all this. Now he his after support from China Iran and north Korea also terrorist like ena say. Don't predict a war outcome

Ok

Trumps going for the childrens vote

and the crowds love it,

it seems the more infamous you are the better chances you have . only in america .

He comes across as the least genuine person I've ever come across he,d slot right into the Tory cabinet

I think Donald and Boris are out of the same Gene Pool and are too far advanced for us to understand,

I think Donald and Boris are out of the same Gene Pool and are too far advanced for us to understand, tomplum Are you having a giraffe??

Threats and intimidation are already abounding ena malcup's We are seeing that already with Iran launching three satellites and North Korea fires cruise missiles off the east coast.... Trump will use that to his average as he is the only one that is "crazy" enough to attack back... and that would not surprise me if Korea russia and china will build up tension just to get Trump elected !!!

popularization and Nationalism have no interest in GEOPOLITICS and if trump is elected and pulls out of NATO god help little old England now we are out of the EU...... I have traveled a lot round the world and i go to what were great city's and see theses building what now are falling to pieces and have a lot of poverty today and i wonder what happened??? i am starting to understand ........

William Hague on TV today said if Trump is re-elected it would pose a threat to UK. He is likely to again indulge in his passion for imposing tariffs, which he seems not to understand, and will likely bring about decreasing world trade leading to recessions in various countries.

So, Tories not necessarily pro Trump: its the populists who are.

In respect of UK/Russia/NATO.

This today from The Telegraph:

"Wasteful Britain needs to buy a new arsenal for war with Russia
Story by Lewis Page • 12h

The world is changing fast and not for the better. Russia is transitioning back into a Soviet-style war economy, and its military power will increase enormously. At the moment we are kept safe, at very little cost to ourselves, by the heroic sacrifices of the Ukrainians. That can’t go on forever.

One way or another the fighting in Ukraine will stop, quite possibly due to a ceasefire imposed on the Ukrainians by the next US president. The Russian armed forces will then be able to reorganise, rearm, conscript, and build.

The ceasefire will end at a time and place of Vladimir Putin’s choosing. One notes that he has just visited Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave in the Baltics, long seen as a potential flashpoint in a future Russia/Nato war.

German planners have constructed a scenario in which Putin might provoke a war by moving into the Suwalki Gap, the territory along the Poland/Lithuania border between Kaliningrad and Belarus.

It’s important not to be defeatist about this. If the poorly equipped, poorly funded Ukrainians could not only stop the Russians cold but push them back almost everywhere – as they did – it’s clear that the relatively well-equipped Nato nations could inflict disaster on the Russians.

Foolish optimism and then equally foolish disappointment over last year’s Ukrainian counter-offensive has obscured the reality that Russia’s invasion has indeed been a colossal failure.

The entire Russian army, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of new conscripts and munitions from North Korea and Iran, has barely managed to take and hold a few Ukrainian provinces: and this against the Ukrainian army alone, armed with only a limited selection of Western weapons.

Fighting the many nations of Nato and the full crushing weight of Western military technology, the Russian army could expect a much bloodier nose still.

But that was the Russian army of 2022. The Russian army of the near future, disengaged from the Ukrainian meat grinder and with hugely increased funding, will become a lot bigger.

Worse still, that was the Nato of 2022. It’s perfectly believable that the next president of the United States will be Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull America out of Nato, and has reportedly said “Nato is dead” and “I don’t give a s--- about Nato”.

If the US pulls out of Nato, it takes with it 70pc of all the alliance’s defence spending. Of course, not all US defence spending goes on supporting Nato, but anyone who has worked as part of Nato forces will confirm that America does indeed account for the great majority of the alliance’s military power.

So not only will future Russia be stronger: future Nato may be a lot, lot weaker.

Then there’s China, nowadays the second largest military spender in the world. The Chinese are constantly probing at the defences of democratic Taiwan, and are also engaged in a long-running campaign to simply snatch most of the South China Sea in outright defiance of international law.

Meanwhile an international naval taskforce, as ever mostly from America, is engaged in serious fighting north and south of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait in an attempt to keep one of the world’s major trade routes open.

If Putin manages to snatch Ukraine or part of it, he will not stop there. If China manages to snatch Taiwan and the South China Sea, it will not stop there. If the Houthis are permitted to shut down the Red Sea, others will be emboldened and the Strait of Hormuz or the Malacca Strait may be next.

If we decide these things are not our business and let our enemies expand and dominate – and profit from these activities, as they choke our trade and conquer our allies – we will none the less wind up fighting them in the end, when they get round to us.

It’s better to fight the Chinese navy in the Taiwan Strait than in the Torres Strait just north of Australia. It’s better to fight Russia in Poland or the Baltics than in France or – God forbid – on this sceptred isle. It’s better to fight while we still have free and democratic allies to fight alongside, rather than let them fall and find ourselves alone when our turn comes.

And it’s so much better and cheaper if our enemies see us there on the other side of whatever line they are thinking of crossing, and decide that they can’t win. Deterrence is so much better and cheaper than fighting.

Truly, if you want peace, prepare for war.

All this means that the time for Britain to start rearming is now. The peace dividend is over: finished. We are in several new Cold Wars now. For those who prefer a 1930s analogy, we need not just a 1930s-style rearmament but one considerably bigger, one sufficiently impressive that the Blitzkrieg would never have been launched and the Japanese would never have begun their Pacific war. That would have been expensive but much, much cheaper than the Second World War turned out.

As a baseline, in the 1980s with the Cold War at its height, British defence spending was between 4pc to 5pc of GDP. Today, it is barely above 2pc. Defence minister Grant Shapps has stated an ambition for 2.5pc, but declines to give a timetable. Most of our political establishment thinks this is ambitious or even extreme.

This shows the blindness of the British political class on military matters. Nobody reasonable could deny that the threat level is at least as high as it was in the Cold War. The discussion should not be about if or when we might boost defence spending by 10pc to 15pc: it should be about increasing it right now by 100pc.

It’s not even as though we’re talking about large amounts of money here. Annual defence spending is running at about £46bn. Total government spending is – unbelievably, almost – approaching £1.2 trillion.

Doubling the defence budget would involve just a 4pc haircut for the other departments. Alternatively you could find most of the money by reassigning the international aid budget and closing down much of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, leaving a few useful bits. I’m probably being a bit old-fashioned here, in fact, by suggesting that spending more on one thing should mean spending less on others.

So we can easily afford to rearm: and we should spend that money. It is absolutely critical, however, that we spend it on rapidly making our armed forces more powerful, not on other things.

That sounds obvious, but unfortunately it isn’t what we normally do. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is routinely expected to do the work of the Department for Business, the Department of Work and Pensions and so on.

In particular the MoD is expected to create and sustain large numbers of well-paid British civilian jobs apart from its own substantial body of civil servants. These jobs are often expected to revive rundown cities and regions, reducing unemployment and delivering social benefit.

The MoD is also expected to provide finance on very generous terms to nominally UK-based companies so that they can develop profitable products which, it is hoped, may bring in export business. Defence money is even expected to preserve the Union.

What all this means is that it’s possible to shovel large amounts of cash into the MoD and see very little come out in terms of actual improved military capability.

Worse still, by trying to make defence spending do many things at once, we wind up achieving none of them. The civilian jobs appear in tiny numbers given the money spent, and then require constant new spending or they disappear again. Over time they disappear anyway.

We don’t get the saleable products and export industries, either. And, rather than the people of Scotland feeling pleased that so much MoD work is placed there, there is a persistent myth among them that they get less than their share.

Experience has shown that some readers may not believe these things, so here are some examples.

A large amount of our defence industry nowadays belongs to just one company, BAE Systems plc. People still tend to refer to it as British Aerospace or BAe for all that the company changed its name 25 years ago. That made sense, as it is no longer British nor particularly focused on aerospace.

Long ago in the 1990s, not long after its creation by the government, BAe – as it then still was – had 127,000 British employees. It later absorbed other large British workforces such as that of Marconi.

Today, despite constant and enormous revenues from the British taxpayer throughout its existence, BAE has 93,000 employees worldwide. Barely 30,000 of them are in Britain.

Giving defence money to British companies does not even preserve British jobs, let alone create them. In this case, it has resulted in a British company using its UK revenues to move offshore.

Another popular way to spend defence money is on attempts to revive the British shipbuilding industry. There are often foolish dreams that dead shipyards, restarted by MoD contracts to build warships and fleet auxiliaries, could then go on to compete in building merchant shipping. Well-paid jobs in the yards would bring new life to post-industrial towns.

You would think people might have learned from the attempt in the early noughties to build two fleet auxiliary amphibious ships on Tyneside in the moribund Swan Hunter yard, which had built no ships since the 1980s.

The project was a disaster. It was planned to cost £148m with the ships delivered in 2004. By 2006, one ship had been delivered in terrible condition and one was launched but not fitted out. The government had been compelled to hand over no less than £309m.

Nobody on Tyneside had built a new ship from scratch for a long time: the yard was learning on the job, and the government had to keep giving it money just so it could pay its workers.

In the end, even the Labour government of the time realised that this was not sustainable and Swan Hunter closed down again. The ships were finished in Scotland.

This sort of thing illustrates the madness of trying to run military procurement as a social benefit scheme. And it shows us just why we get so little defence – such small amounts of military power – for our money.

But the lesson of Tyneside has not been learned. Another yard that has not built a ship for decades, Harland & Wolff in Belfast, is currently being reanimated with £1.6bn of defence money. Maybe one day the Royal Fleet Auxiliary will get the promised new fleet of solid support ships.

That would be nice as it only has one such vessel at the moment, RFA Fort Victoria – often, as now, broken down and without a crew – and a naval task force without a solid support ship is a sorry thing. But even Harland & Wolff don’t think they’ll have the job done until well into the 2030s, long after the coming crisis with Russia.

If the Swan Hunter project is any guide it will cost double, take much longer, and still not deliver usable ships in the end.

There are many other examples showing the folly of paying British industry to build things it does not know how to build. It is a longstanding problem which is now becoming very urgent.

We must shift to buying existing products off the shelf, very often from overseas makers. Creating civilian jobs, subsidising industries and bribing devolved regions should not be Ministry of Defence priorities: there are other budgets and departments for those things.

The Poles, understandably, have realised the urgency and are simply buying tanks from South Korea and weapons from the US: we should be doing similar things.

Specifically we should just buy some support ships from yards which can do the job now. We should just buy combat aircraft from America, rather than embarking on a foolish attempt to reinvent American wheels under the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP, aka “Tempest”).

This shows every sign of turning into another disastrous money pit like Typhoon/Eurofighter before it and Tornado F3 before that. Again, even its backers admit that GCAP will not produce any usable equipment before 2035.

If Typhoon is any guide it will be many years after that before any aircraft appear and the cost will be titanic – enough to eat up any amount of extra funding for very little in the way of military effect. We spent £23bn to acquire our current fleet of 90-odd usable Typhoons, making them the most expensive fighter jets ever built anywhere.

They were also ridiculously late – an entire generation late, in fact. The first Typhoons went operational with the RAF in 2007. These aircraft have recently been described as “early fourth generation” by the MoD. Embarrassingly, the US air force had by then had the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor for two years.

Oh, and a note for the “let’s not be dependent on America” people: all advanced Western military equipment contains controlled US technology. The Typhoon cannot even be sold to anyone without US consent – and it’s pretty hard to sell anyway. It hasn’t been an export success.

We need more airpower a hell of a lot sooner than 2045 or so, and we need it to be reasonably up to date and effective. It’s time to take the GCAP money, double it at least, and start buying the only fifth-generation fighter which is available in the near term: the F-35 from America (partly British made, though).

We also need to buy the weapons and equipment which enabled the US to defeat three significant Soviet-equipped tank armies almost without loss in 1991, 2003 and 2011. We do not want to be forced to fight the horrifying meat-grinder war that the Ukrainians are fighting now: we want to fight the way “we” (actually the USA) fought against the Iraqis and the Libyans.

So no, it should not be a priority for us to build huge stockpiles of 155mm artillery shells and masses of guns to fire them from. That is First World War technology and it leads to a First World War situation, as we see now in Ukraine.

Nor should it be a priority – for us Britons at least – to build a massive armoured force centred on main battle tanks. We have seen a massive, heavily equipped tank army invade Ukraine, and we have seen that army stopped cold and mostly forced to withdraw by opponents who had few tanks, and old-fashioned ones at that.

Western tank enthusiasts – the great majority of serving and former Army officers among them – said that this failure was because Russian tanks aren’t very good and Russian commanders don’t know how to use them. Some doubt was cast on this when the Ukrainian counter-offensive, equipped with Western tanks, also failed.

Tanks and armour are not the war-winners that their advocates claim they are, and in any case our European allies have lots of them. But Iraqi and Libyan T-72s were not defeated by Western tanks, they were smashed from the air. This could be done because America had suppressed opposing air defences and ruled the skies: this is what we need to be able to do to Russia.

This is Suppression or Destruction of Enemy Air Defences, SEAD/DEAD. As Professor Justin Bronk of RUSI writes: “The Russian air force appears unable to do this, but, aside from the US, all other Nato air forces also lack this capacity … if the US was committed to a major war elsewhere or otherwise politically unwilling to shoulder the primary SEAD/DEAD responsibilities, Nato air forces would face similar problems establishing air superiority over territory contested by Russia.”

SEAD/DEAD is what we need: the capability that will let us smash Russian ground forces from the air, and avoid the bloody stalemate of Ukraine. It involves lots more F-35s, certainly, but also a lot of other new weapons and equipment.

It would be simpler and cheaper to just buy the stuff the Americans use, as it costs money and takes years to integrate non-American weapons and equipment onto the F-35.

We will also need more drones, more electronic warfare planes, more radar planes and more air refuelling tankers. We need a massive arsenal of long-ranging precision strike weapons, both air and surface launched: we should stuff our warships full of Tomahawk cruise missiles and arm our soldiers with the new US Precision Strike Missile.

We should make sure we can do SEAD/DEAD from our aircraft carriers as well as land bases: there are other enemies than Russia. That means equipping the ships with catapults and arrester wires, so that they can carry E-2 Hawkeye radar planes and EA-18G Growler electronic warfare birds – and probably some ordinary F-18s too.

That would also mean that we can switch from F-35B jump jets, which can’t carry as much fuel and weapons as other warplanes, to fully capable F-35C tailhook planes. Equipped in this way, our carrier air wings would also acquire the vital ability to conduct their own air-to-air refuelling.

And no, it would not cost huge sums to fit “cats and traps”: that idea was exposed as fiction some time ago. We would actually save a lot of money with the switch to tailhook jets.

There are many other things that our doubled defence budget will need to be spent on: speeding up the arrival of our new nuclear deterrent submarines so that the current occasional need for six-month patrols can be abandoned, for instance.

But the headline capability that today only the US has is SEAD/DEAD: that is what, in British hands, will not only be capable of defeating Russia – but better still, will deter Putin from making his move in the first place.

There is no time to mess about trying to have a pork-barrel industrial subsidy scheme as well. We need to prepare for war now.

Ena

It is not going to happen, Russia cawn't fight their way out of a paper bag, never mind cause NATO any trouble .....

I think the essence of the article is that, as found in Ukraine, if you do not establish air supremacy, you end up fighting WW1 style battles, and Putin may well be prepared to make cannon fodder of his people. Not sure if we would, or indeed should, follow suit.

However, should Trump get returned, the way he, Putin, and Netanyahu have buddied-up over recent years, I do not think we will even get the opportunity. Farage is already on manoeuvres to get dim lizzy's supporters behind him. He too is a buddy of these authoritarians, so it is likely they will lever him into control of UK, to administer it as their puppet.