Photo by Daniel Joseph Petty via Pexels
Welcome back to this bi-weekly installment of What Just Happened?!, a semi-comical digest of the most important news from the UK, US and the World. Look out for us every now and again, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The World
Having a MAGA influence on Europe
The Economist didn’t mince words in recently observing that “with aggressive and erratic protectionism, Mr. Trump is playing with fire”. Bullying allied nations and haphazardly upending the global rule-based order is spooking markets and disappointing investors, who generally anticipated Trump, Musk (et al.) being significantly more constrained then they have been. Be it by common sense or otherwise.
The US briefly paused military aid (and suspended intelligence sharing) to Ukraine on March 3rd before resuming it a week or so later. This appears to have been in part to coax Zelensky into agreeing to a minerals deal (that’s based on out of date resource surveying from the 60’s & is somewhat nonsensically supposed to provide some sort of security, for reasons we’re perplexed by). Supposedly, there is some sort of suggestion that Russia wouldn’t dare attack American investments, nor would they be able to just avoid them or continue to invade Ukraine around said assets?
As we’ve written about before (see: “A dictator” for whom I have “a lot of respect”), tying Military Aid to mineral deals is basically gangster behavior, more befitting of a ruthlessly self-interested oligarchy than an ally or global moral arbiter.
There is a slim silver lining in all of this though, the Europeans appear to be being shocked into action. Bizarre though it is that the past decade of Russian territorial incursion into Ukraine hasn’t appeared to precipitate the required sense of urgency or importance, the penny finally appears to be dropping. Having been shocked out of complacency by the Russian annexation of Crimea via Putin’s unmarked “little green men” (bearing no discernable Russian military insignia) in 2014, European states started to more seriously adhere to the NATO mandated 2% of GDP expenditure on defence.
Friedrich Merz, the inbound German Chancellor, has been working to lay the groundwork for raising defence spending to cold-war era levels by moving to raise the debt ceiling in anticipation of increasing military spending. During the Cold War, European nations spent closer to 4 or 5% on defence (currently the NATO mandated target is 2% of GDP) and Germany is possibly aiming for 3.5%. Interestingly, Merz won elections last month that also saw the German far-right make gains, and with a constitutional need to get a 2/3rds majority in order to change the debt-limit (and free up funds for defense) Merz is endeavouring to push these changes through the outgoing parliament. With the new representatives coming in on March 25th, Merz has a few more days yet to leverage the more moderate outgoing representatives.
Out with the Old, in with the Old
We wrote a fair bit on Syria towards the end of last year; a few months after the revolution Syria is on the brink of economic collapse, with cash shortages appearing across the country. More recently, sectarian clashes have killed ~800 people over less than a week (4 days or so) after forces loyal to the recently ousted Assad regime launched attacks in predominantly Alawite (an ethnoreligious group) regions; the following clashes involved government loyalists moving into these regions and ostensibly committing atrocities.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the current interim President of Syria, was second in command to an Al-Qaeda related organization in Syria, launching various bombings and terror attacks. It appears that much like the recently ousted regime, the new order is prone to cronyism and nepotism, insofar as appointing friends and relatives to high-profile positions is still the done thing. This is in addition to Alawite sects being sidelined, accompanied by warnings from those in the know that the current Syrian leaderships apparent failure to build bridges with this group might well be it’s ultimate undoing.
Blame Canada
In addition to Ontario imposing a 25% surcharge on electricity exported to the US (Michigan, Minnesota and New York) which will cost $400,000 a day while it’s in place, Canada has issued an “initial set of countermeasures” designed to incentivize the Trump administration to remove the recently imposed US tariffs (on March 4th, 25% tariffs on Canadian goods and a 10% tariff on Canadian electricity came into effect, both of which will hurt US consumers; this was followed by a March 12th 25% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminium, which will also hurt US consumers). The Canadian government has also reminded the world, soberly and matter of factly, that less than 1% of illegal Fentanyl flows into the US come from Canada. Despite the absolute nonsense that the Trump administration is spouting.
Chrystia Freeland, the deputy Prime Minister of Canada for half a decade up to 2024 who has recently been vying to replace the outgoing PM Justin Trudeau as the leader of the Liberal Party, described Trump as the biggest threat to Canada since the second world war. Freeland ultimately placed second to Mark Carney. Carney ultimately won in a landslide victory with almost 86% of the vote and has since visited the King of England in an historic show of support for Canada.
The Internet
DDoS the Twittersphere
Elon Musk ridiculously blamed a Twitter outage on Ukraine despite experts in the field (such as Chief Executives of major cybersecurity firms) quickly observing that this was nonsense. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are, you guessed it, distributed across a network of machines connected to the internet that all simultaneously, or in quick succession, hit a specified service with the intention of overwhelming the servers and degrading the experience of “well intentioned” users.
Amusingly, a key Internet Protocol (IP) address supporting Twitter (X, if you insist in abiding by the current zeitgeist) was not protected behind the Cloudflare security service that the site otherwise uses, which allowed for a group of hackers to target that particular address. The culprits appear to have been a hacktivist group called Dark Storm that anonymoushackers.net have identified as a Pro-Palestinian hacker collective. One has to feign surprise that Musk didn’t just outright blame the outage on “wokeness” or some such similar drivel.
Image: “everything I don’t like it Woke” – a book for basic dickheads
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