Free Republic

Cyril Ramaphosa must have prepped for an awkward meeting. After all, just a week earlier the Trump administration chartered a Boeing 767 to fly 59 Afrikaner farmers out of his country so they could claim refugee status amid allegations that the white population faced a genocide. But he may not have reckoned with Donald Trump’s sense of theatre. “Turn the lights down and just put this on,” he directed his aides in the Oval Office. “It’s right behind you.” Ministers, reporters, two of the greatest golfers of all time, and the world’s richest man craned their necks to watch as...

So far, American consumers have been shielded from much of the impact. But as the world of international shipping adjusts to his policies, the president is facing a potential reckoning. With the US-China trade war starting to gum up container traffic between the world’s two biggest economies, freight companies are warning of plunging bookings and a surge in “blank sailings” – where ports are skipped or voyages are called off altogether. Earlier this week, America’s most powerful retail executives trooped into the White House to deliver a blunt prognosis: tariffs on Chinese goods risked causing “empty shelves” in two weeks...

Donald Trump said Ukraine “may not survive” as the White House put pressure on Volodymyr Zelensky to give up territory seized by Russia.Ahead of the start of peace talks in Saudi Arabia this week, Mr Trump suggested Ukraine may cease to exist as a sovereign state.Mr Zelensky has been told he must show he is willing to cede land occupied by Russia if he wants Washington to lift its ban on weapons and intelligence sharing.The US president has repeatedly called for Ukraine to sign a minerals deal that would give the US access to 50 per cent of Ukraine’s mineral...

The United States has told its allies that it does not plan to participate in military exercises in Europe, according to reports.The move, the latest in Donald Trump’s pivot away from the bloc, would see America pull out of exercises beyond those already scheduled for this year.The withdrawal concerns exercises that are on the “drawing board”, according to Swedish newspaper Expressen.It means that Nato countries will be forced to plan exercises without the participation of the US military, the largest in the alliance.

Donald Trump is considering pulling US troops from Germany and redeploying them to Eastern Europe, The Telegraph can reveal.Mr Trump is weighing up withdrawing some 35,000 active personnel out of Germany in a move that would further sour US-Europe relations.The US president, who has repeatedly warned that Europe must commit more to its defensive capabilities, is becoming increasingly frustrated that the continent is “pushing for war”, sources close to the administration said.Around 160,000 active-duty personnel are stationed outside of the United States, a vast quantity of whom are in Germany.

Kyiv holds $15 trillion in natural resources which would help break the US’s dependence on China. The strategic significance of Ukraine’s mineral resources “cannot be overstated”, according to publicly-available Nato briefings. Its vast reserves span more than 100 metals across some 20,000 deposits, including several that have been identified as critically important by both the US and Europe.

When Ric Harris traded in his ageing Mercedes for a Tesla Model 3, he was instantly converted. “It was a bit like having a spaceship,” says the 51-year-old computer programmer. “It saved me an absolute fortune in fuel; the only thing it’s had done is tyres and topping up the windscreen washer fluid.” When he acquired the car on a company scheme, Harris did not consider the politics of Tesla’s billionaire owner too closely. “Elon Musk just seemed like a really interesting person. Everything he was doing seemed really positive,” he says. Four and a half years later, the car’s...