Donald Trump has reveled all his life in his ability to make deals. In the international sphere, some terms are translated. Lawyers specializing in negotiation use shock as a main tactic, veering between demand and accommodation in order to recalibrate the adversary’s expectations and break down emotional resistance.

It  seems likely that Brent Neiman’s  tariff formula was subject to Trump’s direct modification, for the purposes of:

• Negotiation shock.
• Brinkmanship.
• Political exigency, to establish a new normal before political or popular resistance develops.

Quoting from (Axios) Trump up, Dems down in new polls; Politics Part 7,

The deficit, that killer of nations, is mentioned less and less as the menace steadily grows. The choices offered so far: let the ill and elderly die in the street, or go broke as a nation….

Something has to be done.  But he difficulty of doing is illuminated by a napkin calc.

The 2023 World Bank  figure for  U.S. foreign trade, as a percentage of GDP, the latest published, is 25%.

Quoting from (IMF) Recession: When Bad Times Prevail,

They typically last about a year and often result in a significant output cost. In particular, a recession is usually associated with a decline of 2 percent in GDP. In the case of severe recessions, the typical output cost is close to 5 percent.

The imposition of tariffs at the levels of April 2nd  would have an effect that does not appear to have been anticipated, since it has not been studied with any significance. It would not result in a proportionate decline of imports. It would result in a supply chain collapse, as exporters cut their inventories, smashing the embedded chains of every country, including ours. You don’t buy what you may not be able to sell. A liquidity crisis would follow, a polite term for mass bankruptcy. The falling bond market, as large players seek liquidity, anticipates this. The supply chain  pile-up could result in a loss of GDP as high as 25%, five times that of a severe recession, a contraction not seen since  1929.

The napkin calc is just 25 divided by 5, a genuine black swan. You can get a little intuition from Largest Traffic Accident Pile-Ups In History.

Shock or brinkmanship may seem expedient tactics to circumvent the tedium of trade negotiations. But besides the Great Depression of 2025, another risk accrues, the loss of the goodwill of the United States, symbolized by Fort Knox, “the almighty dollar”, and the premium for the companies that trade on U.S. stock exchanges. For another context, see Dear President Trump, The Ghost of Henry Kissinger Redux.

Some on the  extreme right are promulgating the equivalent of an industrial Walden, with a broad return to smokestack industry. Let’s not overdo it.  Increased  representation of heavy industry is vital. But profit margins are lower, and the opportunities to multiply margins with productivity technology are limited. There is nothing inherently virtuous about it. Yet some people want the physicality of making things, and wouldn’t trade for white collar.

Peter Navarro  wants to make bicycles, an excellent starter industry for the world’s poorest countries. It leverages little more than basket weaving. Make reality of dreams instead. That’s what we’re good at. Let’s avoid ideology.  Make the jobs people want.

This is the time when the political opposition should devise practical, compatible alternatives or modifications of Trump’s program.

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Benjamin Franklin

The deployment of a large portion of the B-2 bomber fleet to Diego Garcia elevates this question.

Brinkmanship  originated with Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who defined it in the statement, “The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art.” The fundamental requirement of successful application is a lack by the adversary of a detailed knowledge of the player’s limits. During the period of ideological conflict, when unalloyed mutual assured destruction was the bedrock of defense, this condition was available to each player.

The last effective player was the team of Nixon/Kissinger (with Nixon largely absent) against Brezhnev during the Yom Kippur War, after which MAD faded into new moral imperatives. The cautious Soviet leadership ushered in with Brezhnev chose to prioritize survival over ideology, abandoning the kind of challenge to the West that would have required  the brinkmanship of elevated DEFCON.

No president has successfully practiced it since. The last noteworthy attempt was Trump vs. Kim Jong Un. No inference should be made that I think Trump could have succeeded. The ultimate judgment of whether Iran is a different case from North Korea is best left to the intelligence community. Open source offers some insight.

In comparison to North Korea, several problems have been solved or do not exist:

• Unlike production of plutonium by North Korea, Iran’s production of enriched uranium does not rely  on nuclear reactors, reducing the hazard of a radiological disaster.
• Intelligence is much more abundant; Iran has been successfully penetrated on multiple occasions.
• See (Axios) Pro-Iranian account leaks alleged U.S. intel on Israel’s attack plans; Iran’s Superstrength Concrete. The problem of penetrating Iran’s deeply buried installations may have been solved by a breakthrough demonstrated against the Houthis.

A bunker buster consists of a very heavy case containing a relatively small amount of high explosive. Prior to the Houthi strikes, the mission for this type  of ordinance was to destroy a target in one drop. But should the bomb make the penetration, it is disadvantaged by the small amount of explosive. The Houthi strikes  demonstrate a remarkably reduced CEP, with the ability to drop a chain of munitions down one hole dug by multiple penetrators. This includes JDAMs with much larger explosive charges. The hammer becomes a drill, with much greater reach.

The classic goal of brinkmanship, for Iran to abandon their nuclear program, is not a likely outcome, since a strike cannot cost them more than a treaty. An outcome in Iran’s favor, a strike failure, remains possible. While Houthi rocket bases contain explosive accelerants that finish the job, centrifuge halls contain toxic but nonexplosive uranium hexafluoride.

The likelihood of a strike is enhanced by the perception of brinkmanship failure with North Korea. A similar time urgency applies.

It’s still a dice game.

( CNN) Annotating the Trump administration’s Yemen war plans from their Signal group chat.

This link is provided to ensure wide distribution of SignalGate: Is Mike Waltz a Mole?

Signal is a secure messaging app. Nevertheless, security comes in different degrees. The below list consists of facilities that can be used to make a secure messaging app:

• basic public-key cryptography for key exchange
• basic TLS connection
• government standard 256 bit AES
• in lieu of AES, your favorite encryption protocol — unless this for government
• Post-quantum cryptography

An app that  is made of these protocols is only as secure as the metal it runs on. The metal can be compromised with a side channel attack. All of these thought-to-be secure protocols are also  vulnerable to  we-didn’t-think-of-that attacks. This is why the most secure computer networks, such as those  of the intel community, are air-gapped, with no electrical connection to the outside world.

Signal is only as secure as the guarantee by the phone of no side-channel vulnerability, which isn’t much of a guarantee at all. Phones are uniquely vulnerable to the Evil Maid Attack. and the update difficulty resulting from monolithic compilation of the drivers with the linux based Android kernel. Secure messaging has a heritage of promises made and promises broken.

None of the above is strange to me, and it should not be strange to you. The modern  penalty for naivete is severe. This is strange to me:

Why was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic a liberal magazine, a contact on Mike Waltz’s phone? The world of leakers is known to be byzantine, but what favor could Waltz  possibly curry from Goldberg?

The things you really want to know tend to be the things you’ll never know.

(YouTube) Drone swarms inside the U.S. could be spying — and the ability to detect, track them is lagging.

60 Minutes promotes the credible theory that the

• swarming of joint base Langley-Eustis by drone swarms for 17 days
• subsequent New Jersey sightings
• U.K. RAF events
• detections surrounding naval exercises
• similar events noted in (Wikipedia) 2024 drone sightings

were incursions by China. In the naval cases, this is particularly credible, and was addressed in US intelligence community UFO report; Reverse Engineering a Chinese Tic Tac; Part 2 and US intelligence community UFO report; Steam Powered UFOs; Getting Metaphysical, Part 3. Quoting from Part 3,

An entity which can field UFOs of such amazing ability would hardly need submarines, nor enjoy the corrosion of salt water.  Which is easier to envision:

• • • An intelligence failure relating to submarines and drones circa 2003?
    • Physics so far out of the box, we haven’t a clue?

There is a fundamental difference between the naval events and land incursions into the territory of the U.S. The naval events do not breach sovereignty, while the land incursions do. The foreign power that

• chooses land incursions over sensitive installations of lengthy duration
• employs en-masse numbers
• displays running lights
• has predictable patterns
• operates on regular hours, 7 p.m. to midnight — “shift work”
• has supreme confidence that the U.S. would not risk the use of heavy weapons proximal to civilians
• has supreme confidence of no mechanical failure

is not China. The likelihood of discovery and the penalty are too great.  Indeed, if we consider the risk associated with foreign execution versus a U.S. black project, black clearly wins, since black can  have real time awareness of what the target is thinking.

Langley-Eustis is 5 square miles. With any conventional sensor, it does not take 17 days of 40 drones per night to characterize 5 square miles. This points to an unconventional sensor, which points to a black project.

This was discussed in New Drone Insight; Black Program? Quoting,

I have a pretty good idea of the purpose of such a program. However, discussion raises an ethical dilemma. The program, if it exists, is a good one, beneficial to U.S. national security, and harmless to New Jersey residents.  Discussion, even  if it derives from open source, would damage our common national interest.

This does not exclude the presence of multiple actors with different motives.

(CNN) Trump wants a ‘Golden Dome’ capable of defending the entire US: ‘Strategically, it doesn’t make any sense’.

A primer on this subject:

• DARPA’s Glide Breaker; U.S. Hypersonic Strategies Part 1
• U.S. Hypersonic Strategies Part 2; Board Game for a Rainy Day
• U.S. Hypersonic Strategies Part 3
• U.S. Hypersonic Strategies Part 4
• U.S. Hypersonic Strategies Part 5
• Hypersonic Strategies, Part 6
• Hypersonic Strategies Part 7; Directed Energy Weapons

You may wish to read   Politics Part 6: The Missing Meta in November 8.

(Axios) Trump up, Dems down in new polls.

The history of American politics, as envisaged by political science, is divided into epochs called “party systems.”  A party system isn’t determined by which party is in power. It is a statement about how bags of attitudes and constituents become represented in a two party system, and perhaps a marginal, temporary third party.

The prominence of the idea does not guarantee correctness. In their desire to find order in chaos, various authors have sliced the cake in various ways. Minus the details, the concept cannot be denied legitimacy. The vestigial First Party System was composed of Washington’s advisors and others present during the American Revolution. In the period following 1828, denoted the Second Party System, the brand-new Democratic Party resembled the traditional conservatism of the modern Republican Party. Beginning in 1854 and continuing to late in the century, the Republican Party of the Third Party System was a radical force for civil rights. Party ideological alignments were  the opposite of today. Did this system end with the end of Reconstruction in 1876 or in 1896? I prefer 1876;  historians prefer 1896.

Things remain pretty clear during the Fourth Party System of the Progressive Era. The Fifth Party System of the New Deal was a transformative coalition of the poor and marginalized, and the genesis of “big government.” Alignment with Big Labor dates to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Many antagonisms with traditional Republicans remain based on this legacy. A personal anecdote. As a child who might have appeared thoughtful, I was repeatedly, randomly approached by elderly strangers who imagined it was important  for me to understand that FDR was an evil man, and to further this to subsequent generations.

With the Sixth Party System, things become more debatable, the timing murky. The Jim Crow laws of southern states were invalidated with actions like the 1954 Warren Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In response, the Republican Party devised the racist Southern Strategy, which gained them the presidency in 1968. But beginning with the New Deal, and continuing  into the 1980’s, the South benefited from a net inflow of federal money. The  money  ran out about 1983, but slowed the Republican takeover of southern congressional districts. Not until the Congressional elections of 1994, forty years after Brown , did the South flip Republican.

So the Sixth Party System, unlike predecessors, cannot be chronologically defined.  Yet remarkably, the advent of a Republican South had profound effect on the ideology of the Democratic Party.

Deprived of their rural  southern  base, which had a conservative cultural outlook,  the mainstream Democratic ethos became unmoored. Union labor, which had been culturally conservative, was diminished by  de-industrialization of the U.S. As the union rolls diminished, blue collar labor’s muscles atrophied. Deprived of the requirement of broad cultural inclusion of southern and union attitudes, the Democratic Party was free to drift to the left.

De-industrialization was consequent to the granting China permanent most-favored nation status in 2000, and the more general effects of globalism, which for a period of time afforded low inflation and a boost in living standard at a cost which would not be fully appreciated for a generation.

A constant of the U.S. political landscape is geography.  Throughout history, cities have been the sources  of intellectual ferment;  densely populated coastal areas combine awareness of human interdependence with cosmopolitan outlook. In areas of low population density, which is most of the U.S., the mythology of autonomy combines with exploitation of the land. The Sixth Party System, reflecting this political constant of nature, derives stability from geography.

New features of the Republican Party, of the Seventh  Party System are:

• De facto repudiation of American Exceptionalism, as the international and domestic responsibility to do good works.
• Intent to remedy  structural economic defects which accumulated since 2000.
• Intent to establish fiscal soundness.
• Nativism.
• Authoritarianism.
• Possible obstruction of the democratic process by groups that seek protection of what they see as their birthright.

If  the two-party system is to continue, the Democratic Party must develop a new opposable identity. As the Axios, CNN, and other polls reveal, there is rage against the perceived impotence of Chuck Schumer, a groundswell for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a strongly negative view of the party. Those who urge for activism may be overplaying their hand.  Although this administration may stumble on the economy, restoration of the Democratic Party to traditional parity may require an Eighth Party System.

The news media almost invariably discuss politics at the tactical level. You won’t read about the party systems, any more than you read about the next five years. The deficit, that  killer of nations, is mentioned less and less as the menace steadily grows. The  choices offered so far: let the ill and elderly die in the street, or go broke as a nation. The nation has been unable to resolve this further since the New Deal. It appears that the political process is incapable of  simultaneous compassion and responsibility. The words are too long.

Within four to six years, a new menace, with a conveniently short acronym, will become available to the Democrats. Their historic concern for the importance of wealth distribution  over wealth creation will become describable  as:

A.I.

As humans become vulnerable to  obsolescence, which is already happening to some knowledge workers, the job market will crater in every category. Those who want to work will be deprived of the dignity of work. Half of humanity possess less-than-average intelligence. What will happen to all the menials, truck drivers, cab drivers, deliverers, cooks, waiters, cleaners… when they realize that their replacements are not ethnicities, but machines? What will happen to the rest of us, as the machines displace white-collar and battle among themselves in the markets?

This threat is so alien to the political mind it is not yet perceived by either party. The Democratic Party, with its cosmopolitan roots, will seize it first, in resonance with a former alliance with Big Labor.

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(CNN Trump threatens new sanctions on Russia after weeks of conciliatory statements toward Moscow.

True to form, the Kremlin has interpreted Trump’s conciliation as a sign of weakness. Notably, they have already discounted Trump’s blustery, threatening exterior as a put-on.

Additional sanctions would have no effect on Russian thinking.

President Trump should note that negotiations in the framework of diplomacy are fundamentally different from negotiations in business. In business, in case of breach, one has recourse to the courts. In diplomacy, there is no such recourse. This is why Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy must be backed by force, or it becomes an empty exercise.

***Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile***