Tim Bouverie recalls The Big Three’s fall-out with wit and sensitivity

A new star is born. The British firmament of modern political and military history is already a glittering one, but established names must now make way for a new companion, Timothy Pleydell-Bouverie. His first book, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, was a deserved success. His second, Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, proves that his debut was no flash in the pan.

Bouverie’s scope is wide, taking in the history of those relationships, which lay behind the creation and maintenance (just) of the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen: the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union. We start with British policy based on the presumed rock of the French army; with Stalin supporting the German economy and war machine after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; and with western outrage at Russia’s invasion of Finland in 1939. In London sits the unpleasant figure of Joseph Kennedy Sr, the US ambassador, delighting in what he foresaw as the inevitable defeat of Britain. We end with the total victory of the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, the last now our beloved Uncle Joe. And Poland, for whom we first went to war, betrayed.

Churchill understood that winning would be, for the democracies, a matter of maintaining public support. He often drove the chiefs of staff mad with schemes that made no sense at all in military terms, but were designed to build pride in the honour of the cause for which free people were fighting. Churchill’s ludicrous plot for a second British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to return to France after Dunkirk; his insistence on the doomed defence of Greece and his unswerving defence of France (in spite of all Charles de Gaulle’s insults) – all these derived partly from his sense of chivalry but also partly from his understanding that people had to believe in what they were fighting for: survival, yes, but honour, too.

In the period when the British Empire was fighting alone, it was vital to show the likes of doubting US ambassador Kennedy that we would fight, and would not be defeated. We were not the lost cause that the isolationists claimed. A good many desperate enterprises were undertaken to demonstrate that we were serious, including the partial destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir – allies who were friends only weeks before. In what is news to this reviewer at least, Bouverie shows that Churchill had cleared this with Roosevelt in advance.

After Hitler’s invasion of Russia, and then following Pearl Harbour, the great alliance – which in the end would defeat the Axis forces, was formed. In his book, Bouverie lays clear both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its strength was their common enemy; its weakness was their irreconcilable post-war aims.

Roosevelt passionately believed in the construction of a new world order, safe for the world and also for the almighty dollar. He was wholly unsentimental about his British ally’s future. Very hard bargains were driven in return for the supply of armaments – including forced sales to US interests of British overseas assets. Britain had rebuilt her net overseas assets after the First World War; all those and more were effectively sold cheap for dollars in the Second.

Unlike the Soviet Union, who likewise received massive US (and very considerable British) aid, we went on paying for all this to the US until the first decade of the 21st century. All our military secrets, Bouverie shows, were given to America, up to and including the atom bomb research. Bouverie could have mentioned penicillin, too. Nothing came the other way. But it was necessary: we had nothing else to trade. The Red Army drove west in Michigan-made Chevrolet trucks, but Stalin obliterated any memory of the Western help without which Russian heroism might well not have been enough.

The unity of the Big Three was often fractious and worse: Roosevelt could humiliate Churchill in front of Stalin every bit as much as Trump humiliated Zelensky in the White House. Bouverie charts the personal fallings-out and the reconciliations with great sensitivity and sometimes humour. Dreadful and dangerous beliefs in personal relationships often had terrible consequences. Poland was ultimately sacrificed at least partly because Roosevelt, and for a time Churchill too, genuinely trusted Stalin. Horrible things were agreed at Yalta and before involving the repatriation of people to their deaths in the Soviet Union – Uncle Joe was, after all, such a good chap.

Reading this powerful and well-researched book left this reviewer with one very uncomfortable feeling. Read from the point of view of an isolationist, right-wing American political adviser of today, you could find precedent in what the sainted Roosevelt’s did to the British for just about everything President Trump’s administration is currently doing to Ukraine. “Take their assets to pay for any help we give! Settle the boundaries of Europe in a way that satisfies Uncle Joe/my friend Putin! Russia’s interests do not really diverge from America’s! Good old Vlad just wants safe borders. Britain/Ukraine/Europe is on the way out anyway. And I have looked into Uncle Joe’s/my friend Putin’s eyes and I know I can trust him!”

But Roosevelt had another, very different side to him that ensured his legacy. He was determined “not to do a Woodrow Wilson” by letting the US scuttle home after the war to leave the world brewing up its next one. He believed profoundly in the values of liberal democracy and wanted his legacy to be a framework for peace, which would have the power and the prestige to prevent war. He left the embryonic UN and the Bretton Woods structures to try to ensure it. Roosevelt understood that the interests of the US and the almighty dollar depended on worldwide order. His safe place in history derives not least from his recognition that American power was the power of a law-based nation, and that spreading a law-based order was not only in the interest of his own people, but of the world as a whole. President Trump is said to admire FDR: he gets the ruthlessness, but does not seem to understand the greatness.

Could the US be about to seal a deal with Iran?

Any other day, any other week, and the revelation would have dominated headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. With leaders the world over preoccupied with the turmoil caused by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, however, the news that the United States had made overtures to Iran and that direct talks were to take place on Saturday had to take a much lower billing.

It has to be stressed, nonetheless, how much of a departure this is. It represents a far bigger turn in recent US policy than Trump’s first phone call to Vladimir Putin last month, which ended more than three years of isolating the Russian president following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It may not be quite “Nixon to China”, but it has the potential to transform the politics of the region and beyond.

The United States and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, when student revolutionaries held US diplomats hostage in their Tehran embassy for 444 days. There have been almost no contacts since, with one exception: the nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which committed Iran to limiting its nuclear activity to civil energy in return for the lifting of sanctions.

The US was a party to this agreement as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, but it had little effect on bilateral relations, and Trump withdrew the US from the treaty in his first 18 months as president, accusing Iran of violations. There is then a particular irony that it should be Trump, at the start of his second term, who is broaching talks on a new Iran nuclear treaty.

There are, though, many reasons why such a move could make sense and might even have a chance of success.

Trump has a liking for the grand gesture, and initiating talks with Iran after nearly half a century is surely that. As was how the disclosure was made: almost in passing during an on-camera meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli prime minister who has long seen Iran as an existential threat to his country. Last October, he authorised reprisal raids against an Iranian nuclear facility, and during his tenure, the threat of an all-out Israel-Iran war has never seemed far away.

That ever-present risk may be one reason why Trump has decided to talk to Iran, but other strategic and practical considerations militate for a change of policy now.

As seen in his first term, Trump has a way of focusing his foreign policy on just a few countries that he sees as particular sources of trouble, the point being that solving just a few problems can potentially defuse many others. Hence his intended – but thwarted – first-term rapprochement with Russia and his talks with North Korea.

For his second term, Russia again heads the list, with one of the hoped-for by-products being peace in Ukraine. But there were early hints that Iran could be a target for the Trump treatment, given its disproportionate capacity to destabilise the wider Middle East.

And now might indeed be the optimal time. Iran’s theocratic regime is facing more resistance – from women and young people – than it has for many years, and sanctions have left the country dangerously impoverished. The days of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, now in his mid-eighties, may also be numbered.

Regionally, Iran’s reach is nothing like it was only two years ago. Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks has included attempts to destroy not just Hamas, which had some support from Iran, but Iran’s powerful proxies, the Hezbollah militias in southern Lebanon. The sudden end of the Assad regime in Syria has left Iran without either the influence or the land corridors it had before.

There have also been signals, chiefly from the relatively new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, that Iran could be open to a rapprochement with the West. His speech at the UN General Assembly last September could be read almost as an overture to the US and Europe, and he has kept his job without any significant rowing back.

As yet, it is unclear whether any of this could translate into a readiness in Iran to consider a new nuclear agreement. Tehran has cast doubt on whether this weekend’s talks will be “direct” and insisted that there will be no concessions on nuclear policy.

What is clear, though, is that Trump senses a rare opportunity to transform relations with Iran and could potentially have others on his side – including Russia. Moscow has long harboured fears of a nuclear-armed Iran on its southern border while maintaining good channels to Tehran. For Trump to include Russia in a new diplomatic process with Iran could be a way of bringing Moscow back into the international fold, especially if the UK, France and Germany, who also underwrote the original nuclear agreement, were involved, too.

Three months into Donald Trump’s term is too soon to envisage Air Force One landing at Tehran airport and the US president descending the steps to a guard of honour, but strange things have happened, including first-term Trump’s stroll into North Korea at the DMZ. And if the stars were so aligned, it is not impossible that Trump could leave office having normalised US-Iranian relations, even if a new nuclear agreement remained a step too far.

Urgent passport renewal warning as price rise kicks in tomorrow

The price of a British passport will increase by 7 per cent tomorrow. The move, announced by the Home Office just three weeks ahead of the rise, will see the cost of a straightforward online application jump by £6 to £94.50 on 10 April 2025.

Why is this happening? Can you dodge the rise? And how does the cost compare with other European countries, in particular Ireland? These are the key questions and answers.

Yes. The rise on all passport fees is a uniform 7 per cent – more than twice the current rate of inflation. There was a 9 per cent increase in February 2023, and a further 7 per cent rise in April last year. It takes the cumulative rise in barely two years to 25 per cent.

The government says: “The new fees will help the Home Office to continue to move towards a system that meets its costs through those who use it, reducing reliance on funding from general taxation.”

Ministers insist the government does not make any profit from the cost of passport applications.

In addition, the Home Office says most people get their passports swiftly. Of every 1,000 straightforward applications, all but three are processed in three weeks or less.

The website PassportWaitingTime.co.uk says the average renewal of an adult passport currently takes 10 days, with a new adult passport taking 14 days.

Good question. Straightforward renewals are done online, with costs kept down as a result. Yet the fee – now rapidly approaching £100 – is nearly seven times the cost of a driving licence renewal, which is also an online proposition.

It is instructive to see where else the fees are going. Part of the revenue pays towards the cost of processing British citizens at UK borders. This looks unfair: people like me who are lucky enough to travel frequently will benefit disproportionately, even though we all pay the same for a passport.

The fee also goes towards “consular support overseas, including lost or stolen passports”. A niche issue, and arguably one that the affected travellers – or their travel insurers – should be fully funding in terms of lost or stolen passports.

Perhaps. I calculate you will be better off renewing by 9 April (the day before the increase) if these two conditions apply:

If you travel frequently to the European Union, possibly.

After Brexit, the UK asked for British travellers to be treated as “third-country nationals” by the EU and wider Schengen Area – complete with passport stamping on entry and exit. One passport page is consumed for every two return trips.

The issue is not actually about trips to Europe, because under Schengen Area rules border guards must attach extra sheets of paper if necessary; it is because many countries outside Europe demand a clear page – or two – for their visas.

Paying an extra £12 (soon to be £13) buys 20 extra pages.

Poorly. The UK passport is among the most expensive in Europe. The price rise will put British passports almost on a par with Italy (€116/£97) and Denmark (Dkr893/£100).

Switzerland is the only one that is significantly more expensive (140Sfr/£123).

Yet Switzerland and many other Schengen Area nations have an ID card alternative which is much cheaper and allows travel to more than 30 nations (but not the UK).

Anyone with the good fortune to have been born on the island of Ireland – or with the foresight to have Irish ancestry – is in the strongest possible position and might as well let their British passport lapse.

Irish passport holders travelling to the Schengen Area can use the fast track queue. They will not be subject to the entry-exit system red tape, nor will they need an Etias. And the restrictions on the time British people can spend in the EU do not apply.

From 2 April, every foreign visitor to the UK except the Irish will need an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA). That will make an Irish passport the most powerful in Europe, if not the world.

Irish passports are significantly cheaper than the UK – about £25 less, though extra charges for postage will reduce the savings.

Crucially, the republic also has much lower charges for children’s passports, which are valid for only five years rather than 10.

A family of four will spend £312 on UK passports from 10 April – almost twice as much as for Irish passports, currently €190 or £160.

In some circumstances: if you are visiting “incompatible” countries such as Israel and some Middle East nations; or if your employment or lifestyle requires you apply for visas that take a long time, while also having to travel abroad.

Applications are straightforward if you have reasons for needing a second passport.

WhatsApp issues urgent update over ‘spoofing’ hack risk

WhatsApp has issued an urgent update after discovering a vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain remote access to a user’s device through a shared image or file.

The security flaw involves a “spoofing issue” that allows cyber criminals to execute an attack through an attachment, according to an alert issued by WhatsApp’s parent company Meta.

Only versions of WhatsApp for Windows Desktop are at risk to the exploit, which is triggered as soon as a user opens a malicious attachment on their device.

“A maliciously crafted mismatch could have caused the recipient to inadvertently execute arbitrary code rather than view the attachment when manually opening the attachment inside WhatsApp,” the security advisory stated.

Meta did not share whether any WhatsApp users have fallen victim to the security issue. The Independent has reached out to the company for further details.

Security experts warned WhatsApp users to be weary of the images they receive, as well as sharing them with others in their group chats.

“Most people will be part of a WhatsApp group where it is common for images to be shared and this is where this vulnerability becomes dangerous,” Adam Pilton, a senior cybersecurity consultant at CyberSmart, told The Independent.

“If a cyber criminal was able to share this image either in your group or with someone you trust who then goes on to share it in your group, anybody in that group could unknowingly execute the malicious code associated with the shared image.

The latest bug, which was reported to Meta through a bug bounty programme, is part of a rising trend of malware being disguised as harmless attachments.

A recent report from cyber security firm SonicWall revealed that malicious attacks of this type rose significantly in 2024.

The company observed 210,258 never-before-seen malware variants, averaging 637 new threats daily last year.

“Cybercriminals are constantly developing new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to exploit vulnerabilities and bypass security controls, and companies must be able to quickly adapt and respond to these threats,” said Spencer Starkey, an executive vice president at SonicWall.

“Due to the speed at which new attacks are being created, they are more adaptive, and difficult to detect, which poses an additional challenge for cybersecurity professionals.”

Friction from Trump tariffs ‘could put 85% of NHS medicines at risk’

The availability of around 85 per cent of NHS medicines could be at risk unless the UK government strengthens its supply chains to prepare for worsening geopolitical tensions, ministers have been warned.

Manufacturers in Britain have urged the government to treat it as a defence issue, with the supply of drugs such as antibiotics under threat if global tensions continue to rise as a result of Donald Trump’s decision to impose hefty tariffs across the world.

If pharmaceutical and medical suppliers are hit by the US-led tariff war, the NHS could have to pay more for medicines, another expert has said.

The warnings come after health secretary Wes Streeting said UK medicines supplies could be impacted by the tariffs imposed on trade by President Trump.

Mr Streeting said during an interview on Sky News that there are a “number of factors at play” when it comes to the UK’s supply of medicines, including manufacturing and distribution challenges, and he warned that tariffs pose “another layer of challenge”.

The health secretary was responding after the US president said he was not looking to pause the sweeping tariffs that have plunged global markets into turmoil. Although the US tariffs have so far exempted the pharmaceutical industry, some medical devices and equipment are affected, so UK manufacturers would still be hit by 10 and 20 per cent tariffs when exporting to the US.

Some companies which rely heavily on exports to the US are likely to consider moving their manufacturing from the UK to America, according to RBC analysts quoted in Endpoints News, which could push prices higher for Britons. The UK also imports £4.5bn in medical products from the US, where companies may raise prices due to tariffs on imported raw materials.

Mark Samuels, chief executive of the British Generic Manufacturers Association (BGMA), which represents medicines manufacturers in Britain, told The Independent: “There have been around 100 products (medicines) in shortage for the last year or so, and that’s in peacetime, so it seems to me it would make complete sense to treat the nation’s medicines supply like defence… [medicines supplies] absolutely should be on the same level as defence.”

The BGMA chief said the government should prepare for the volatile geopolitical situation to put additional strain on the UK supply chain. “I would expect the government to make the resilience of the supply chain for generic and other everyday medicines their top priority. It’s not been a priority at all in previous governments. During the pandemic, the government woke up to the fact that most prescription medicines are generic medicine – 85 per cent of NHS prescriptions are generic.

“It makes complete sense [to treat it like defence], particularly as we have various state actors engaged in grey zone hostile activity. A good example of that is antibiotics. We don’t make any antibiotics in the UK: that’s not a resilient situation to be in.”

Other “life critical” medicines, such as drugs used by heart patients to prevent sudden death syndrome, would also be vulnerable, he said.

Generic-based medicines are copies of brand-name drugs which contain the same active ingredients.

Last year the BGMA warned medicine shortages were around double the number recorded in 2023, with vital antibiotics, hormone replacement therapy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drugs hit by severe shortages.

Mr Samuels also said ministers must focus on renegotiating post-Brexit medicines trade agreements with the EU, which have negatively impacted the UK’s manufacturing industry. Current rules do not allow UK manufacturers to sell medicines they made to the bloc but do allow EU manufacturers to sell to the UK.

Stockpiling would be a short-term solution, he said, but this would come with some additional costs.

Although no tariffs have yet been imposed on pharmaceutical products, Dr Sanchayan Banerjee, a behavioural economist at the London School of Economics, highlighted that the medical and pharmaceutical sector was the second-largest UK exporter to the US in 2024. Trade amounted to £6.6bn, with the US making up about 40-50 per cent of total sales for British companies such as AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline.

He told The Independent: “A reduced supply could mean higher-end prices for medications for consumers which will mostly fall onto the NHS, which already heavily subsidises drugs.

“To alleviate pressure, encouraging those who can afford it to go private; encouraging on-shoring drug manufacture; and modest increases in prescription charges will help smooth out these costs.”

The government was approached for comment.

The global event bringing fresh energy to planet-positive solutions

As we navigate significant environmental and social challenges, the return of ChangeNOW, the world’s biggest expo of solutions for the planet, is much needed to reinvigorate climate action. The 2025 edition, which will take place from April 24th to 26th, will host 140 countries, 40,000 attendees, 10,000 companies and 1,200 investors.

Visionary leaders, established businesses and start-ups alike will gather to showcase over 1,000 sustainable solutions and groundbreaking innovations in key sectors such as clean energy, biodiversity, sustainable cities and the circular economy.

The ChangeNOW 2025 summit will be held at the iconic Grand Palais in Paris, a nod to the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Reuniting for the occasion will be guest speakers Mary Robinson, the former (and first female) president of Ireland, Laurent Fabius, former French prime minister, Patricia Espinosa, former UN climate chief and diplomat and Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, leading climate scientist and professor – all of whom were in the French capital a decade earlier to help shape the Paris Agreement at COP21.

There may have been obvious setbacks to environmental policy around the world of late, the United States’ recent withdrawal from the Paris Agreement being a notable one. However ChangeNOW 2025 intends to reaffirm the spirit of Paris, while serving as a catalyst for progress ahead of COP30 and the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC). “Ten years after COP21, ChangeNOW is where leaders and changemakers converge to accelerate the ecological and social transition,” states Santiago Lefebvre, founder and president of ChangeNOW. “Thousands of solutions will be showcased demonstrating that meaningful progress is within reach.”

His message of positive climate action will be supported by a multitude of world famous faces who will be in attendance at the auspicious event. Natalie Portman, Academy award-winning actress, director, author, activist, and producer; Captain Paul Watson, Founder of Sea Shepherd and Ocean Conservationist; Hannah Jones, CEO of The Earthshot Prize and Olympic champion boxer and gender equality advocate Imane Khelif are just a few of the names set to appear at ChangeNOW 2025.

With over 500 speakers and 250 conference sessions exploring climate action, biodiversity protection, resource management, and social inclusion, ChangeNOW 2025 will also hear the insights of acclaimed corporate leaders from Accor, Bouygues, Henkel, Lidl, Nexans, and Saint-Gobain, who will explain how businesses can be the ones to drive real change.

And the event will not only be an opportunity for global policymakers to discuss next steps in climate action, it will also be a platform for nations to showcase local innovations through their country pavilions. Expect impactful solutions from countries including South Africa, The Netherlands, and Ukraine – demonstrating international collaboration on the topic of climate.

In addition to the packed program of speakers, workshops, exhibits and networking opportunities, ChangeNOW 2025 will host the Impact Job Fair on Saturday, 26 April, with over 150 recruiters and training organisations offering in excess of 600 roles. Dedicated to the public and young professionals, the interactive workshops, educational activities, and career opportunities in sustainable sectors on offer aim to inspire the next generation of changemakers.

The summit will also present the annual Women for Change conference and the accompanying portrait exhibition, which showcases 25 women who are set to have a significant positive impact on their communities, countries or on a global scale over the next 10 years. Created in 2021, the Women for Change initiative aims to platform and provide opportunities for women who are leading change around the world but require further recognition or investment to continue their work. The annual flagship event, which takes place on the afternoon of April 24th, offers women the chance to discuss new ideas, network with likeminded people, and also acquire funding to help solidify their leadership, and amplify their impact.

Step outside the Grand Palais and take a few steps to the Port des Champs Elysées, on the bank of the Seine, where the The Water Odyssey village awaits. One of the event’s standout features, the immersive 1,000 m² exhibition is open to the public and highlights solutions to maritime and river sustainability challenges – offering a mix of conferences, interactive displays, and sensory experiences to engage all ages.

For three days, ChangeNOW will transform Paris into the global capital of impact, bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and the public in the pursuit of sustainable progress.

Book your ChangeNOW 2025 ticket here

Trump has made China appear a beacon of free trade

The Chinese Communist Party, apostle of free trade. In a strange new world, that was the strangest thing, as shares crashed in reaction to President Donald Trump’s opening salvo of tariffs in a global trade war.

“The market has spoken,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, writing in English on Facebook – which is, by the way, banned in China. No double standards there, then. Beijing can always keep a straight face when it matters.

Politically, the Chinese government can scarcely believe its luck. It has stepped forward as a voice of reason and stability in a chorus of discord to promote the false narrative that it has been a model of good behaviour since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001, a date that seems destined to live in the textbooks as the peak of globalisation.

The Trump tariffs “are a typical act of unilateral bullying”, complained a spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry.

“This approach disregards the balance of interests achieved through years of multilateral trade negotiations and ignores the fact that the US has long gained substantial profits from international trade,” the spokesperson added.

The official news agency, Xinhua, said the tariffs were “a weapon to suppress China’s economy and trade” and told the United States to stop undermining “the legitimate development rights of the Chinese people”.

It would be a mistake to write off Chinese rhetoric. The regime of Xi Jinping is serious and its actions speak louder than words.

Clue: China has listed “legitimate development rights” as one of its “red lines” in dealing with the US. The term is code for the export-led economic model which has propelled the country to the rank of second largest economy on earth since it joined the WTO.

Understand that and you understand that for China this is existential. There could be no greater contrast to the whirlwind in Washington than the disciplined, efficiently executed responses announced by Beijing in nine statements outlining reprisals that went beyond mere numbers.

Xi himself did not deign to speak publicly, let alone do anything as vulgar as posting on social media in capital letters. The Chinese public would have thought it beneath his dignity.

Untroubled by such niceties, Trump swiftly posted to his followers online that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED.”

With all due respect to the American president, that is exactly what they did not do. The Xi hit list is ominous because it is well-planned and researched. The “Red Emperor” rules a mandarin class of sophisticated operators who do nothing else but study China’s opponents using every intelligence tool at their disposal.

The easy part for China was to impose reciprocal 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports from 10 April. It also suspended six American firms from exporting to China, launched anti-dumping actions in the medical sector and targeted the US giant DuPont with a probe into potential monopoly practices.

The hard part showed just how thoroughly the Chinese had done their work. No penguin islands or weird mathematics here. They banned the export of “dual use” items, which could have military or civilian applications, to 16 US firms, all in the technology sector.

Their key move was to put export controls on seven rare earth elements “to safeguard national security”. It’s on the public record that some of these are vital to US weapons systems.

The list of rare earths included terbium, which is used to enhance the properties of specialised magnets used in guidance systems, satellites and radar. The magnets are integral to the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter, Predator drones, cruise missiles and nuclear submarines.

Then there’s dysprosium, a rare-earth element of which China controls nearly all the world’s supply. It is used to make high-grade magnets that work in super-heated conditions and is found in the newest semiconductors. Other rare earths on the list are vital to jet engine turbine blades. All will now require special export licences.

China and America are thus in a new kind of war over technology and artificial intelligence. Both Joe Biden and Trump tried to choke the supply of advanced semiconductors to Chinese manufacturers, while China is seeking to choke the supply of raw materials to America’s tech champions.

It’s not hard to see how dangerous this could get. The founder of free-trading modern Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, once told me in an interview that “World War Two was caused because of empires and protectionism”.

He recalled that in the 1940s an oil embargo on Imperial Japan pushed its military leaders into war and he warned that if the West tried to isolate China economically “that is bound to lead to conflict”.

Lee was talking in the 1990s, when China stood on the threshold of globalisation. It joined the WTO only after hard-fought talks. But Charlene Barshevsky, who sealed the deal for the United States, later lamented that the Americans failed to use the WTO to punish Beijing when it broke the rules.

That created the belief that appeasement and elite inertia condemned the American working class to decline, the foundation story of Trump’s movement to Make America Great Again. So it is some irony that the Chinese have just filed a formal complaint about Trump’s tariffs – with the World Trade Organisation.

Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of The Red Emperor published by Headline Press at £25

The US president must stop his ‘Trump Slump’ becoming a global one

Most shocks in capital markets are, by definition, unexpected. They sometimes derive purely from some almost random-seeming shift in market sentiment, albeit with more deep-set fundamental factors at work. The Great Crash of 1929 and the stock market crash of October 1987 – Black Monday – fall neatly into that category.

Others are more clearly understood in real time, but still a shock: the global financial crisis of 2008 is comprehensible from a distance, albeit famously seen as a “black swan” event. Still others are more purely external – Arab nations imposing an oil curfew after the Yom Kippur war in 1973; or whatever bat, pangolin or Chinese lab assistant was responsible for the coronavirus getting loose.

The Trump tariff crash of 2025 is an altogether unusual affair – one of the few such catastrophes to befall the savings and livelihoods of millions of people caused by the stubbornness of one man.

Because it is Donald Trump – and he alone – who is responsible not only for the substance of his reckless shutdown of US trade with the rest of the world, but the deeply flawed design of the tariff schedules, the practically unprecedented suddenness of their introduction, and the incomprehensible rationale for the policy. Certainly, Mr Trump made no secret of his love for – “the most beautiful word” – tariffs.

But the scale and incompetence that has been attached to his attack on trade has stunned and appalled the world. Worse even than that, it has left people confused.

At one point over the weekend, serious analysts were suggesting that Mr Trump actually intended for the markets to crash. In most cases, this was not a product of the over-conspiratorial minds of the Trump cultists, but because the president himself had reposted a story on social media suggesting that he was “Purposely CRASHING The Market”. A White House spokesperson had to state that the president did not, in fact, deliberately wipe some $8 trillion off the world’s stock markets – another unwelcome precedent set by this president.

The question then arises: “What does Mr Trump think he is doing?” The answer is that no one knows, not even the president.

Some, including the president himself in his unorthodox Rose Garden presentation and his secretary for commerce, Howard Lutnick, suggest that it is all about reindustrialising the United States and generating “trillions” of long-term tax revenues. In his address to workers at Jaguar Land Rover on Monday, Sir Keir Starmer admitted that tariffs are “a huge challenge for our future, and the global economic consequences could be profound”.

Less than comfortingly, Mr Trump compares what he’s putting the previously healthy American economy through to a patient undergoing an operation. Others, occasionally also including the president himself, suggest it is merely another of his brilliant negotiating tactics, and point excitedly to the response of nations such as Vietnam, Israel and Argentina offering zero-tariff deals with America – but which would therefore yield zero returns for the proposed new US “External Revenue Service”.

Put simply, it is a matter of “Tariffs bad – uncertainty even worse”. Businesses and households cannot plan in such an environment, and that means that investment will be frozen for weeks, if not months, and a recession becomes ever more likely.

That is one imminent danger. Another is the way that the market contagion has spread from industrial and resources stocks to the banks, with the obvious worry that the trade recession will soon be joined by its evil twin, a credit crunch. As confidence drains from the world economy, companies are nervous about investing, banks are reluctant to lend, and savers will turn to safer havens than equities. Historically, such security was offered by the United States dollar; now, perhaps, not so much.

One of the great ironies in Mr Trump’s plan to boost the American economy is that, within a fairly short time, he will have plunged it into such a slump that he will need to take emergency measures to rescue it – tax cuts, and increasing the US budget deficit to pay for it. The Federal Reserve may find it has no alternative but to cut interest rates – usually a welcome move, but in this case merely proof of the disaster the Trump administration is inflicting on its people.

The net result may be stagflation: above-target increases while economic activity stagnates. It is analogous to what a combination of the Brexit shock and the reckless Truss experiment that crashed the UK economy in 2022 would do. It is that bad.

What can the authorities, including in the United States, do to prevent a slump? Unlike in 2008 and 2020, for example, in most Western economies, there is far less scope for borrowing at sustainable interest rates to support the economy.

In 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister and had to nationalise most of the British banking sector, the UK national debt-to-GDP ratio stood at about 36 per cent. By the time Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were faced with closing down the economy in 2020, it was 85 per cent. It now stands at 95 per cent, and trending higher.

If the present chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has barely enough fiscal headroom to keep to her fiscal rules, she will have to find some convincing explanations about the much more onerous costs of nursing Britain through what we may soon be calling “the Trump Slump”. That, of course, is not even accounting for the real cost of deterring Vladimir Putin and helping to defend Europe (that being another direct consequence of Mr Trump’s election).

Much the best move, and one still hoped for, is that Mr Trump accepts the manifold and genuine offers of constructive negotiations he’s had from world leaders, declares an early “victory” for his tactics, and announces a 90-day moratorium during which new, freer trade deals can be reached across the world.

It would be good news for all. The markets would calm, American voters would no longer fear opening their pension fund statements, and Mr Trump might turn his mess into a miracle of trade liberalisation.

The dangers if President Trump does press on with his mercantilist “medicine” for America are too gruesome to contemplate. At times such as this, what else is there other than optimism?