CHACRDIGEST
APRIL 30th, 2025
#43
TARIFF TURBULENCE AND SPACE JAMMING
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To misquote Edwin Starr, ‘Tariff, huh, what is it good for?’. Commentators across the spectrum have been unusually consistent in their answer – ‘absolutely nothing’. Damning condemnation of both the shortand medium-term global consequences came from Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics podcast, who went so far as to suggest this “is the makings of a global economic crisis” and later released a subsequent episode entitled Is a Financial Crisis Looming? The RUSI article US Trade and Trump’s Tariffs – Disruption or Design? considers that “whenever there is a tectonic plate-shift in world order, then geopolitics and economics move in synch and reinforce each other”, concluding that President Trump is aiming to destroy the liberal world order and kill off globalisation in order to replace it with a nationalist economic model. Chatham House asked if the tariffs marked the end of globalisation, whilst acknowledging that it is the beginning of a longer-term vision based on a seductive theory that the US can have both power and freedom of action, at home and abroad. Equally they acknowledged that US tariffs will encourage allies to decouple from their US security reliance. Rym Momtaz concluded in a Carnegie Europe article that Trump’s tariff announcements have upended the fundamentals of American and, by extension, Western hegemony, but for Europe they are an opportunity to reset the terms of the transatlantic bargain, stem the rise of illiberal populism and emerge as a real power.
In a month that also saw the death of Pope Francis, renewed hostilities between India and Pakistan and tentative hope for a constructive peace in Ukraine, the Center for Strategic and International Studies issued its Space Threat Assessment 2025, detailing the continuing trend of widespread jamming and spoofing of GPS signals.
USA In the US, the public version of the annual national threat assessment shows a marked distinction from the previous iteration. David Ignatius’ Washington Post article was analysed by Daniel Flitton, who concluded that “compared with last year’s version, the assessment shows a different ordering of threats to emphasise drug criminals, a new focus on Greenland, and discussion of the Ukraine war that accords with Trump’s negotiating strategy”. This focus on subjects that personally interest President Trump is concerning from a neutrality perspective, although Flitton adds he detects no “fudging [of] the facts.” Nevertheless, as the Washington-based Center for Climate and Security points out, it makes no mention of climate change. John Ullyot, a former spokesperson in Trump’s first term, resigned from the Pentagon at the beginning of April. His article in Politico speaks of a Pentagon in disarray under Pete Hegseth’s leadership, and of an organisation suffering the fallout from two episodes of Signal-gate and the firing of key staff (including the chief of staff). However, Ullyot advocates firing Hegseth, not because of his incompetence, but so President Trump can maintain the reputation for accountability that he feels President Biden failed to achieve.
RUSSIA AND UKRAINE The terms of peace in Ukraine are hotly contested, with public announcements unlikely, at this stage, to reflect what is really happening behind closed doors. Dr Andrew Monaghan, writing for the Wilson Center, discusses how, in the Cold War, it was considered critical to see Moscow’s activity in holistic, global terms to understand their view of the future. The West, Russia and the international context has changed, but Monaghan points out, whilst the current era presents a baffling set of problems, it has a valuable strategic inheritance. Dr Jade McGlynn also points out that the 2021 Russian National Security Strategy and Foreign Policy Concept in 2023 reveal roadmaps for how Russia intended to act and the kind of world it imagined. She concludes: “A new world order is upon us”, but critically, “Russia did not force this world into being, it understood its direction… As the liberal international order weakened, Moscow articulated a coherent alternative — not as a utopia, but as a diagnosis.” Russia foresaw this and as Western democracies falter, “Russia’s ideological map is no fantasy. It is the reality we failed to prevent”.
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