USA support Israel's ''sovereign decision'' to close UNRWA!

Gaza must all be fully demilitarized and without a governing role for Hamas-USA

Trump envoy expresses support for Israeli laws targeting UNRWA

US representative tells Security Council Jerusalem justified in effort to shutter UN agency over its ties to Hamas, rejects claims that doing so will spark humanitarian disaster

By Jacob Magid The Times Of Israel 28-01-2025

US Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Dorothy Camille Shea speaks during a UN Security Council meeting concerning the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) at UN headquarters in New York City on January 28, 2025.
(Photo by Yuki IWAMURA / AFP)

Breaking with the previous Biden administration, the Trump administration came out on Tuesday in favor of Israeli legislation to sever Jerusalem’s ties with the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA and to severely restrict its operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

“It is Israel’s sovereign decision to close UNRWA’s offices in Jerusalem on January 30. The United States supports the implementation of this decision,” US chargé d’affaires ad interim Dorothy Shea said in remarks during the UN Security Council’s monthly session on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Biden administration raised concerns over the extent to which Hamas has managed to infiltrate UNRWA and moved to freeze US funding to the agency following revelations that a number of its members actively participated in Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.

However, it came out against Congress’s decision to extend that freeze to this coming March — when lawmakers are expected to maintain the hold indefinitely.

Biden officials argued that UNRWA plays too essential of a role in Gaza’s humanitarian operations, and that it therefore should not be shuttered. It is behind many logistical aspects of aid delivery, including storage and transport.

The Knesset legislation passed last fall also bars Israeli officials from any contact with UNWRA, which the agency says will lead to the collapse of its operations in Gaza and the West Bank where coordination with Israeli authorities is essential.

Israel after passing the legislation said it would work with international organizations to ensure that a vacuum in the humanitarian effort would not be created by UNRWA’s departure, but Israeli officials have acknowledged to The Times of Israel that those preparations have not yet been completed as the law comes into place.

These concerns were not voiced by Trump’s interim envoy at the UN, who echoed Israeli stances questioning the UN’s objectivity.

“We are concerned about reports that returned Israeli hostages were held by Hamas in UN facilities during their prolonged captivity in Gaza. It is vital for a full and independent investigation to assess these very serious allegations,” Shea said. “Unfortunately, this follows a pattern of serious allegations on the misuse of UN facilities – particularly UNRWA facilities – by Hamas terrorists.”

For his part, UNRWA’s chief told the UN Security Council that the ban — due to come into effect on Thursday — would be disastrous and cripple the body’s work in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, claimed the ban would “heighten instability and deepen despair in the occupied Palestinian territory at a critical moment,” undermine the ceasefire in Gaza, and sabotage the enclave’s recovery and political transition.

“The relentless assault on UNRWA is harming the lives and future of Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territory. It is eroding their trust in the international community, jeopardizing any prospect for peace and security,” he contended.

Philippe Lazzarini (C), Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East, speaks during a UN Security Council meeting at UN headquarters in
New York Cityon January 28, 2025. (Photo by Yuki IWAMURA / AFP)

Shea, in turn, criticized UNRWA for “exaggerating the effects” of the Knesset legislation by “irresponsibly and dangerously… suggesting that they will force the entire humanitarian response to halt.”

“What is needed is a nuanced discussion about how we can ensure that there is no interruption in the delivery of humanitarian aid and essential services,” the US envoy said.

“UNRWA is not — and never has been — the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Many other agencies have experience and expertise to do this work and have done this work,” she said, echoing the Israeli stance. “UNRWA’s work has been tainted and its credibility questioned due to the terrorist ties to Hamas that UNRWA staff had that were exposed as a result of Hamas’s October 7 attack.”

Shea still urged Security Council members to support the US, Qatari and Egyptian efforts to scale up aid into Gaza.

“We must ensure Hamas or other terrorist groups are not permitted to seize, divert, or profit from this assistance – and that if it does so, it is reported immediately and held accountable,” she said, adding that Gaza must all be fully demilitarized and without a governing role for Hamas.

Notably, Shea said the US is “strongly committed” to implementing the ceasefire and hostage release deal. It appeared to be one of the Trump administration’s firmest statements yet in support of implementing all three stages of the agreement, amid calls from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners to resume the war after the first phase ends next month.

“The United States is strongly committed to implementing the ceasefire agreement, so that the hostages can return home and the people of Gaza can look toward a brighter future under new leadership,” Shea said.

US President Donald Trump and his Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff have also spoken about the importance of returning all of the hostages, but the former has also said he’s not confident the ceasefire will hold.

Netanyahu says he has received assurances from Trump that the US will back Israel in resuming the war if Hamas violates the terms of the ceasefire or stops negotiating in good faith regarding the terms of the second phase. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suggested that the premier has given him an assurance to resume fighting that isn’t conditional on whether Hamas violates the deal.

Shea — who is part of an interim staff running the US Mission to the UN until Trump’s nominee Rep. Elise Stefanik is confirmed by the Senate — was careful not to criticize Israel in her remarks or even suggest that Netanyahu is not supportive of sticking with the hostage deal.

The speech was overall a clear departure from the previous Biden administration, which also consistently sought to defend Israel at the UN, but did so while criticizing Israeli policy in the West Bank and for not doing enough to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza — and sometimes even exacerbating it.

Shea avoided criticizing Israel altogether, placing all of the onus for civilian casualties on Hamas.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon speaks during a UN Security Council meeting concerning
the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) at UN headquarters in New York City on January 28, 2025.
(Photo by Yuki IWAMURA / AFP)

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said at a press conference that UNRWA must vacate all of its properties in Jerusalem.

“UNRWA must cease its operations and evacuate all premises it operates in Jerusalem.”

“Israel will terminate all communication with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf.”

Danon said the ban on UNRWA “was not a political decision. It was simply a necessary one.”

“UNRWA has failed in its mandate. It has failed the people who were supposed to benefit from its services.”

He said UNRWA “had failed to investigate the widespread infiltration of its ranks by Hamas and other terrorist organizations.”

“No sovereign state should facilitate operations of an agency that threatens its national security and blatantly violates its laws.”

Israel, he said, is ready to cooperate with other UN agencies “that are not tainted by terror.”⍐

President Dissanayake’s congratulatory message to President Trump handed over

President Dissanayake’s congratulatory message to President Trump handed over 

January 28, 2025   ADA

Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United States Mahinda Samarasinghe has visited the US Department of State and handed over the congratulatory message of President Anura Kumara Disanayaka addressed to President Donald Trump on his assumption of office as the 47th President of the United States of America.

Ambassador Samarasinghe also handed over congratulatory messages of Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya and Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath addressed to the Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

During the meeting on 24 January 2025 with Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of South and Central Asian Elizabeth Horst along with Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Nicole Chulick, Ambassador Samarasinghe took the opportunity of discussing a wide range of issues relevant to both countries and in particular took the opportunity of mentioning the religious event to be held at the Embassy to invoke merit and blessings to those affected by the widespread  fire in Southern California. 

Ambassador Samarasinghe went on to mention that when the temples in the greater Washington D.C. were approached about the Buddhist religious event to be held today there was spontaneous agreement by the Chief Priests of all of the temples to participate at the event in recognition of the strong bilateral relations that exist today between the two countries, and in mindful of the numerous occasions that the United States has spontaneously assisted Sri Lanka at times of great calamity and need.

The U.S. side greatly appreciated this gesture of goodwill from Sri Lanka and will be participating at the event, a statement said.

Ambassador Samarasinghe was accompanied by Deputy Chief of Mission Rohana Ambagolla and Counsellor Chathuri Perera to the meeting. ⍐

Trump says to ‘clean out’ Gaza, urges Arab countries to take more refugees

Trump says to ‘clean out’ Gaza, 

Urges Arab countries to take more refugees

President Donald Trump said he wanted Jordan and Egypt to take in more Palestinians from Gaza so they could “maybe live in peace” there.

The Washington Post January 26, 2025  By Annabelle Timsit and Gerry Shih

President Donald Trump said he wants Jordan and Egypt to take in more Palestinian refugees as part of a plan to “clean out” Gaza, a controversial proposal previously advocated by voices on Israel’s right wing and among its military hard-liners.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he spoke with King Abdullah II of Jordan — whose country has historically taken in millions of Palestinian refugees — about the idea, which Abdullah and other Arab leaders have previously rejected.

“I said to him, I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess,” Trump said. “I’d like him to take people. I’d like Egypt to take people.”

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” he said.

“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace,” he added. When asked, he said this solution could be temporary “or it could be long term.”

It is not clear if Trump’s comments signal a change in U.S. policy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Sunday. The official readouts of the call from Jordan’s royal palace and the White House did not mention the suggestion of relocating Palestinians.

Human rights groups and the Biden administration have opposed a forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza or the occupied West Bank. Israel’s Arab neighbors also oppose it and have said they fear that Israel intends to force Palestinians out in order to weaken their case for independent Palestinian statehood. After Hamas attacked on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a counterattack that has forced nearly 2 million Gazans from their homes and left much of the Gaza Strip in ruins, drawing accusations from critics that Israel was seeking the deliberate removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

The idea has support among ultranationalists in Israel, who seek to establish settlements in the enclave. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said in 2023 that “the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world” was “the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region.” Itamar Ben Gvir, another far-right politician who recently resigned from Israel’s government over its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, previously said Palestinians should be encouraged to “voluntarily migrate.”

Even before war erupted in 2023, some Israeli strategists proposed encouraging Gazans to move to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt possibly in exchange for Palestinian statehood. The idea has been discussed by Palestinian, Israeli and Arab leaders for years but has remained highly controversial, given the repeated history of forced Palestinian displacement over the past 75 years. An estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled in the war of 1948 that led to the creation of the Jewish state — an event known as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic. Another conflict in 1967 displaced hundreds of thousands more.

Trump’s comments drew immediate criticism from Hamas and Arab governments. In a statement, Hamas accused the Trump administration of falling in line with Israeli plans and urged Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries “to emphasize their firm stances in rejecting any proposal of displacement or deportation” of Palestinians.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry in a statement Sunday reiterated its “unwavering support” for the Palestinian people and their rights to land, in accordance with international law. It strongly condemned actions that undermine these rights, including displacement and settlement expansion.

The country’s ambassador to Washington, Motaz Zahran, also previously rejected the idea in an op-ed in the Hill newspaper in October 2023. “Egypt’s stance is clear: it cannot be part of any solution that involves the transfer of Palestinians into Sinai,” Zahran wrote. “Such a move would trigger a second Nakba, an unimaginable tragedy for a resilient people who have an unbreakable bond with their ancestral land.”

The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, also rebuffed Trump’s proposal. “Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change," he said. “Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Weeks after the war began, former Israeli officials and allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including former deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, publicly floated the idea of temporarily relocating Gazans to tent cities in the northern Sinai Peninsula — a proposal that was criticized as being akin to ethnic cleansing of the Strip. A planning document written days after the Hamas attack by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, which was leaked and published by the Israeli website Local Call, also promoted the option of evacuating Gazan civilians to Sinai.

Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military officer who has long argued for encouraging Gazans to settle in Sinai, said the plan was mulled by Arab leaders long before the 2023 war broke out. Mahmoud Abbas, who leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has claimed on several occasions since 2014 that he rejected an offer from Egyptian leaders to settle Palestinians in the northern Sinai adjacent to the Gaza Strip and create a Palestinian state.

“We were pushing this idea years ago, and now it seems to have caught up,” Avivi said, referring to Trump vocalizing the resettlement proposal. “Gaza is ruined and ruled by a very harsh terror organization and many Gazans want to emigrate, so calling for Egypt to open the border is the most basic human thing.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian lawyer who has served as an adviser to Palestinian negotiating teams, said Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi will not want to be seen as giving “exactly what Israel wants: It wants Palestinian land, just not the Palestinians on it.”

“There’s nothing new in all of this,” Buttu said. “To just erase Gaza and build it with something new is to treat [Palestinians] as something replaceable, and the harm that Israel has done as somehow erasable.”

The idea is particularly sensitive because of Palestinians’ recent memory of displacement, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Chatham House think tank.

Many Palestinians fled 20th-century conflicts with Israel to nearby Arab countries, and today, there are an estimated 438,000 U.N.-registered Palestinian refugees in Syria, 493,000 in Lebanon and about 2.4 million in Jordan, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA.

After the start of the war in 2023, Palestinian authorities told The Washington Post in June that about 115,000 Gazans had crossed into Egypt since the previous October and were mostly living in limbo, with no legal status and nowhere else to go.

The question of large-scale displacement of Palestinians to neighboring countries is a “fundamental red line” for Arab countries, particularly Jordan and Egypt, Vakil said. Trump’s suggestion “really challenges and questions whether the U.S. can be a broker and supporter of Palestinian statehood,” she said.

In their call Saturday, Trump told Abdullah that the situation in Gaza was untenable.

“Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

Trump has broadly called for an end to the war in Gaza but has not been explicit about a path to achieve it. Privately, he has offered support for Netanyahu and his country’s offensives against Hamas and Hezbollah — telling the prime minister in a call in October to “do what you have to do,” as The Post reported at the time.

On Saturday, Trump said he overturned former president Joe Biden’s pause on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which was announced in May as part of an effort to reduce the civilian toll from Israel’s military operations.

When asked why he released the bomb shipments to Israel, Trump said: “Because they bought them.”

Niha Masih contributed to this report.

A worrying reality: Neither Russia nor China can be contained

 A worrying reality: Neither Russia nor China can be contained

Mohamed Lamine KABA, January 28, 2025     NEO

In a rapidly changing geopolitical context, the West faces a troubling reality: neither Russia nor China can be contained. It is a new multipolar era that exposes the flaws in Western strategies, weakens traditional alliances, and disrupts the established world order.

The leaders of Russia and China met to agree on a further joint strategy. Is the talk between Putin and Xi a ‘political signal’?

These and many other questions were touched upon by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President XI Jinping during a one-and-a-half-hour video conference on January 21. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President XI Jinping during a one-and-a-half-hour video conference on January 21. 

The leaders of Russia and China met to agree on a further joint strategy.

“We are coordinating our steps on other multilateral forums as well: in the UN and its Security Council, in the SCO, the G20, APEC. We are jointly in favour of building a fairer multipolar world order, we work to ensure indivisible security in Eurasia and the world as a whole. I can confidently say that the foreign policy connection and the joint Russian-Chinese work objectively plays an important role in international affairs”, the Russian President stated.

During the talk with Putin, Xi Jinping promised to defend, together with his Russian colleagues, the rights of the two countries, earned in blood during the Second World War.

“In the new year, I am prepared to raise Russian-Chinese relations to new heights with you, to withstand external uncertainties on the basis of maintaining the stability and stress resistance of Chinese-Russian relations in the name of the development and flourishing of the countries, international justice and equality”, said the Chinese President.

Is the talk between Putin and Xi a ‘political signal’?

The inconvenient reality reveals the ineffectiveness of containment strategies in the face of the rise of Russia and China. Despite economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure, Russia continues to strengthen its position in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, while China extends its influence through massive investments and initiatives such as the “new Silk Road”. This inability of the West to contain these emerging powers highlights the limits of its traditional policies and questions its global leadership. Moreover, this rise in power exacerbates the fragmentation within the West. Divergences on the management of geopolitical challenges create tensions between the United States, the European Union and NATO, weakening cohesion and compromising the capacity to respond to global threats. Threat insofar as the only point of agreement between Democrats and Republicans in the Western space is to consider China and Russia as existential threats. This situation is accelerating the transition to a multipolar world order, redefining traditional alliances and reducing Western influence on the global chessboard.

As a result, the current geopolitical and geostrategic evolution is disrupting the post-Cold War world order. The dynamic rise of China and Russia illustrates this transformation. With its rapidly expanding economy, China, now a leading global economic power, is extending its influence across the four corners of the world. Simultaneously, Russia is regaining a position of international leadership thanks to its strategic energy policy. The once hegemonic liberal world order is being challenged with the growing isolation of the United States, epitomized by the nationalist and protectionist shift initiated under the new Trump administration . Moreover, nationalism and protectionism are gaining popularity in the West, profoundly impacting national economic policies. At the same time, global governance is experiencing turbulence, with institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO under fire. Regional conflicts, from Syria to Ukraine, from Palestine to Israel, from Libya to South Sudan, exacerbate this dynamic.

The patent failure of containment strategies

Without a shadow of a doubt, the current geopolitical dynamics, as mentioned above, highlight the ineffectiveness of the containment strategies adopted by the United States, the European Union and NATO to limit the growing influence of Russia and China, which is part of a historical continuity. Despite unprecedented economic sanctions, Russia is strengthening its presence around the world, while China, through the “Belt and Road” Initiative, is expanding its global footprint through strategic infrastructure investments. These sanctions have paradoxically consolidated Vladimir Putin’s leadership in Russia on the global chessboard and pushed the country to develop new trade partnerships, reducing its dependence on the West. For its part, China has been able to circumvent the restrictions thanks to local technological innovation and strengthened economic alliances with emerging countries. This strategic reorientation towards Russia and China highlights the appeal of their development model, thus accentuating the limits of traditional Western policies. Faced with this development, the West must imperatively rethink its approaches in an increasingly multipolar international context, calling into question its historical supremacy.

The fragmentation of the West is evident

The West’s strategic cohesion, once a cornerstone, is now a thing of the past. The failure to contain the geopolitical ambitions of Russia and China has exposed deep fractures within the West, exacerbating differences over how to manage these threats. While Germany and France favor diplomatic and economic approaches to Russia because of their energy interests (despite aggressive rhetoric from political elites), Poland and the Baltic states opt for stronger security postures, influenced by their geographical and historical proximity. Similarly, complex economic relations with China divide European countries between commercial opportunities and security concerns. This division extends to NATO, where Turkey’s independent policies, such as the purchase of Russian S-400 systems, call into question the cohesion of the alliance. Financial and strategic disputes between the United States and some European allies add a further layer of complexity, weakening the coordinated response to threats (China and Russia are still considered existential threats in the Western space). For the United States, the traditional leader of the West, policies perceived as unilateral, such as the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the WHO or the potential imposition of tariffs, erode the trust of allies. These internal dynamics weaken the West’s position on the world stage, reducing its influence in the face of emerging powers (which it was supposed to contain) and redefining the balances of power in a rapidly changing world.

A new multipolar world order

In a rapidly changing global context marked by the emergence of a new multipolar order, the geopolitical scene is undergoing a dramatic redefinition of alliances. The rise of Russia and China as major geopolitical actors is redrawing international relations to the detriment of the traditional influence of Western nations. These emerging powers offer new economic opportunities and alternative political support, attracting many countries that are reassessing their strategic positions in the face of a changing global system. At the same time, Russian and Chinese strategies for expanding spheres of influence, notably through massive investments in Africa and Asia or strategic alliances in Latin America, are weakening the once uncontested dominance of Western powers. This new balance is challenging the liberal international system, weakening institutions such as the United Nations and the WTO. The multipolar governance models promoted by Russia and China challenge the principles of unipolarism, eroding the moral and political authority of the West. Thus, this profound upheaval signals an irreversible transformation of the world order, challenging Western predominance and opening the way to an era of growing rivalries on a global scale.

From the above, we can deduce that the West’s inability to contain Russia and China marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new multipolar world order. Faced with this inescapable reality, strategies and alliances must be reinvented to navigate a transformed and increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape.

It can be said that the US foreign policy, based on containing Russia and China, is nothing more than a sale of illusions, in the sense that neither Russia nor China can be contained.⍐

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University

Trump threatens country after country with U.S. economic weapons

In only a week, the president has floated financial reprisals for Mexico, Canada, Russia, Denmark and Colombia. The hostilities could backfire.

WP 28-01-2025 

 President Donald Trump has already threatened to impose major economic penalties on at least a half-dozen countries, alarming global leaders as he uses the prospect of sanctions and tariffs to force other nations to do what he wants.

Almost every day during his first week in office, Trump promised to hammer some country with potent economic weapons, rapidly reshaping U.S. foreign policy in pursuit of goals on everything from trade to migration.

Trump’s combative approach — applied to such key trading partners as Canada and Mexico; adversaries such as Russia; and smaller economies such as Colombia and Denmark — reflects his view that the United States is being routinely “ripped off” by most other countries. But the blizzard of demands that don’t always address only trade put him on track for simultaneous confrontations around the globe, which could escalate unpredictably to the detriment of the U.S. and global economies.

On Sunday, his administration announced, then backed off, tariffs and sanctions on Colombia, citing a deal on the deportation of migrants that the South American nation had initially resisted.

Successive U.S. presidents have stepped up their use of economic power over the past several decades. The early days of Trump’s second term, however, are already signaling a new stage of that trend, as the president stunned the world by saying he would be willing to pulverize the economies of even allied countries over seemingly routine policy disagreements — or over sudden demands for their territory.

“This is an aggressive exercise of U.S. economic power in a way we have not seen in a very long time — at least not in the post-World War II era,” said John Creamer, who was a senior diplomat for more than 35 years and was a deputy assistant secretary of state.

Trump told a GOP retreat Monday that tariffs would soon be announced on steel, aluminum and copper. Speaking with reporters Monday night on Air Force One, he said he had not yet chosen a tariff rate. He said he had a number in his mind that he wasn’t yet ready to share.

“It will be enough to protect our country,” Trump said.

Trump said tariffs “could be” both a way to raise revenue and be a tool to get what he wants from other countries. He said the United States was “at our best” economically from 1870 to 1913.

During his first term, Trump also imposed or threatened to impose tariffs on many U.S. trading partners, including allies such as France and Canada, as he sought leverage in freewheeling negotiations. He also imposed punishing sanctions on such countries as Venezuela and Iran. Campaigning last year, Trump promised “universal tariffs” far beyond what he’d enacted during his first term, falsely declaring they were paid by foreign nations rather than U.S. consumers, and vowed to revive tough sanctions on Iran and other countries.

Still, the extent to which Trump has already turned to these tools of economic coercion has proved striking.

Last Monday, he threatened that 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada would kick in Feb. 1 — this weekend — unless those countries act to curb migration and the fentanyl trade. On Tuesday, Trump floated 10 percent tariffs on all imports from China. On Wednesday, he said he would impose “high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions” against Russia unless it ended the war in Ukraine — a threat he reiterated on Fox News on Thursday.

On Friday, the Financial Times reported that Trump the previous week had threatened tariffs on Danish officials unless they were willing to cede control of Greenland. And on Sunday, Trump said he would impose tariffs and sanctions against Colombia unless it bent to his demands and accepted military flights returning undocumented migrants. That conflict appeared to abate Sunday night after Colombia agreed to his terms.

Meanwhile, Trump also issued an executive order renewing sanctions against the International Criminal Court in The Hague, after President Joe Biden had rescinded measures Trump imposed in his first term. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, told Congress that he would ensure major sanctions are reimposed on the Iranian regime. Trump also floated tariffs of 100 percent on the “BRICS” nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) if they pursue alternatives to the U.S. dollar.

“The Trump administration is really eager to demonstrate the power of sanctions and tariffs as a lever to get policy outcomes, and looking for policy opportunities to deploy it,” said Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs during the Biden administration. “There should not be any doubt: These are not a bluff; they are very, very eager to use them as a kind of proof of concept. It’s a chance for them to test these weapons.”

Advisers said these demands reflect a cohesive approach to the tools of economic coercion. Trump and his aides think tariffs and sanctions have too frequently been used as half-measures but they could force policy changes if the United States threatens to impose them with maximum force, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The people said they think threatening maximum sanctions — but not necessarily imposing them — will also allow the U.S. dollar to maintain its status as the world’s reserve currency, which Trump and Scott Bessent, his nominee for treasury secretary, have described as a top priority.

“It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that Trump is redefining U.S. foreign policy. Previously, U.S. presidents used commercial tools when dealing with commercial issues. But being a supreme negotiator, I’m sure Trump asked: ‘Why aren’t we using all our tools to make sure we get our way?’” said Juan Cruz, who was a senior aide on the White House National Security Council during Trump’s first term. “We’re seeing a willingness to use full-force economic tools to get what we want done, and that’s emblematic of what we’re going to see from now on.”

Trump advisers such as billionaire Elon Musk cheered news that Colombia had backed down as evidence that Trump could bully his way into securing policy victories.

Colombia announced on Monday the takeoff of a military plane to the United States that will bring 110 Colombian deportees, after overcoming diplomatic tensions with the Donald Trump administration. (Colombian Aerospace Force/Handout/AFP/Getty Images)

“These countries cannot respond. The asymmetry of market pain, the flight of their capital to the United States — these emerging markets would just get crushed,” said John Feeley, who served as U.S. ambassador to Panama from 2015 to 2019. Feeley quoted the Athenian historian Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

And yet this sort of pressure could still ultimately backfire in ways that expose contradictions in Trump’s policy goals.

Canada, Mexico and China are the nation’s three biggest trading partners. Those three export more than $1 trillion to the United States alone each year. Economists have warned that the imposition of tariffs will raise prices for consumers here — undermining Trump’s promise to control inflation.

Trump’s use of sanctions also has risks. Senior Treasury officials have been concerned for at least a decade that the overuse of economic sanctions could make the weapon less effective, by encouraging other nations to set up financial networks beyond U.S. detection. Sanctions and tariff threats against U.S. allies will give many countries added incentive to deepen their economic ties with adversaries such as China, leaving them less exposed to Trump’s financial retribution.

“It will accelerate efforts to build workarounds to U.S. sanctions and tariffs. You’re showing that everyone is vulnerable — not just adversaries like China and Russia — but allies like Canada, Mexico and Colombia,” said Edward Fishman, a sanctions expert who served in the Obama administration. “It will undercut the potency of U.S. economic weapons and undercut our efforts to get other countries on our side against China.”

Trump has largely threatened new tariffs and sanctions that he hasn’t imposed. But foreign policy experts point out that the threat must be executed at some point to be viewed by other nations as credible. The more countries Trump promises to punish economically, the greater likelihood of an escalation that hurts both countries.

“It’s a straightforward message. Whether the tactic will work or not, we’ll see,” said Caleb McCarry, who was a senior staffer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was the State Department’s lead on Cuba policy during the George W. Bush administration. “Once you actually pull the trigger, you have to live with the consequences.”

Samantha Schmidt and Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.

Trump calls China’s DeepSeek AI app a ‘wake-up call’

Trump calls China’s DeepSeek AI app a ‘wake-up call’ after tech stocks slide

Silicon Valley and Washington leaders said the app shows China can challenge the U.S. The Nasdaq lost 3 percent and chipmaker Nvidia shed $589 billion in market capitalization.

By Eva Dou, Aaron Gregg, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku and Shannon Najmabadi WP 28-01-2025

The sudden popularity of a Chinese artificial intelligence app called DeepSeek pummeled tech stocks and captivated Silicon Valley on Monday, prompting debate in political and tech industry circles about how the United States can maintain its lead in AI.

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President Donald Trump said late Monday that DeepSeek’s release “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win.”

Trump separately said he planned to place new tariffs on computer chips produced overseas, a policy that could create further challenges for the U.S. tech industry, which depends heavily on chip manufacturing in Asia.

The DeepSeek app rocketed to the top of the downloads chart in the Apple store over the weekend and remained there Monday after its release last week by a Chinese start-up of the same name founded in 2023. The app offers similar functionality to OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot, answering questions and generating text in response to a user’s queries.

Several tech companies that have banked on a surge of AI interest sold off Monday, with U.S. chipmaker Nvidia down almost 17 percent, losing $589 billion in market capitalization. The tech-focused Nasdaq composite index finished the day down 3 percent.

DeepSeek’s explosive debut also escalated concerns about China’s ability to challenge the U.S. lead in advanced artificial intelligence. Both nations have positioned prowess in AI technology as central to their future economic and military power.

The Biden administration introduced several measures intended to restrict Chinese AI development, including sweeping new export controls this month to limit the country’s access to powerful chips known as GPUs, which underpin advanced AI projects. Those latest controls were in part aimed at blocking Chinese efforts to circumvent previous export controls.

Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology, said former president Joe Biden’s policies had failed to limit access to American technology and created an opportunity for China and other foreign adversaries to make gains in AI development. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said in a post on X that DeepSeek “shows that the AI race will be very competitive.”

The Trump administration has shared few specifics about its own approach to AI policy. The president last week rescinded a sweeping executive order on AI signed by Biden in 2023 and signed an executive order of his own directing agencies to rescind all actions taken under the Biden order “that are inconsistent with enhancing America’s leadership in AI.”

Trump in his remarks late Monday in Doral, Florida, said that the U.S. had the “greatest scientists in the world” and that American companies could benefit from building on DeepSeek’s ideas.

He also criticized the billions of dollars of grants provided to encourage U.S. semiconductor manufacturing under the Biden administration, although the 2022 Chips Act that provided the funding received bipartisan support at the time. Trump said that tariffs he planned to place on imports of foreign-made chips would be more effective, but did not specify details of that policy or when it might take effect.

DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of the hedge fund High-Flyer, and says it has developed ways to create the AI models needed to power chatbots and other tools more cheaply. It claims to need fewer and less-advanced chips to develop AI software that can compete with technology from U.S. rivals.

Analysts said the Monday sell-off underscores anxieties about whether the massive recent spending by U.S. firms on specialized chips, data centers and related power infrastructure to power AI projects is justified.

Nvidia in particular has exploded in value in recent years because it dominates the market for the GPU chips at the center of the global AI race. It’s now one of three companies with a market capitalization above $3 trillion.

Leading tech firms have spent billions building out artificial intelligence technology for sale to large businesses. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post last week that his company plans to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion on AI and build a massive data center. OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank are leading the Stargate venture announced with Trump last week that seeks to spend up to $500 billion building out data centers to support AI projects.

Monday’s sell-off also shaved 1.46 percent off the broader S&P 500 index. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which contains fewer tech stocks, gained 0.6 percent. Wall Street’s fear gauge, the CBOE Volatility Index, climbed almost 22 percent.

Some analysts suggested that Wall Street’s reaction may be a premature reflection of fear in the markets, noting that U.S. companies have dominated artificial intelligence innovation so far. WedBush senior analyst Dan Ives, who has been bullish on AI, called Monday’s rout a “golden buying opportunity” despite the reaction in U.S. markets.⍐

China’s AI startup sending shockwaves through global tech

What’s DeepSeek, China’s AI startup sending shockwaves through global tech?

Chip giant Nvidia shed nearly $600bn in market value after Chinese AI model cast doubt on supremacy of US tech firms.By John Power Published On 28 Jan 2025 AJ 

DeepSeek, a little-known Chinese startup, has sent shockwaves through the global tech sector with the release of an artificial intelligence (AI) model whose capabilities rival the creations of Google and OpenAI.DeepSeek-R1’s creator says its model was developed using less advanced, and fewer, computer chips than those employed by tech giants in the United States.In a research paper released last week, the model’s development team said they had spent less than $6m on computing power to train the model – a fraction of the multibillion-dollar AI budgets enjoyed by US tech giants such as OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta.Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential tech venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, hailed the release of the model as “AI’s Sputnik moment”.The sudden emergence of a small Chinese startup capable of rivalling Silicon Valley’s top players has challenged assumptions about US dominance in AI and raised fears that the sky-high market valuations of companies such as Nvidia, Alphabet and Meta may be detached from reality.On Monday, Nvidia, which holds a near-monopoly on producing the semiconductors that power generative AI, lost nearly $600bn in market capitalisation after its shares plummeted 17 percent.US President Donald Trump, who last week announced the launch of a $500bn AI initiative led by OpenAI, Texas-based Oracle and Japan’s SoftBank, said DeepSeek should serve as a “wake-up call” on the need for US industry to be “laser-focused on competing to win”.

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek, which is based in Hangzhou, was founded in late 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a serial entrepreneur who also runs the hedge fund High-Flyer.

Though little known outside China, Liang has an extensive history of combining burgeoning technologies and investing.

In 2013, he co-founded Hangzhou Jacobi Investment Management, an investment firm that employed AI to implement trading strategies, along with a co-alumnus of Zhejiang University, according to Chinese media outlet Sina Finance.

Liang went on to establish two more firms focused on computer-directed investment – Hangzhou Huanfang Technology Co and Ningbo Huanfang Quantitative Investment Management Partnership – in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

In an interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in 2023, Liang dismissed the suggestion that it was too late for startups to get involved in AI or that it should be considered prohibitively costly.

“Reproduction alone is relatively cheap — based on public papers and open-source code, minimal times of training, or even fine-tuning, suffices. Research, however, involves extensive experiments, comparisons, and higher computational and talent demands,” Liang said, according to a translation of his comments published by the ChinaTalk Substack.

Liang said his interest in AI was driven primarily by “curiosity”.

“From a broader perspective, we want to validate certain hypotheses. For example, we hypothesise that the essence of human intelligence might be language, and human thought could essentially be a linguistic process,” he said, according to the transcript.

“What you think of as ‘thinking’ might actually be your brain weaving language. This suggests that human-like AGI could potentially emerge from large language models,” he added, referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that attempts to imitate the cognitive abilities of the human mind.

DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, Gregory Zuckerman, a journalist with The Wall Street Journal, said he had learned that Liang, who he had not heard of previously, wrote the preface for the Chinese edition of a book he authored about the late American hedge fund manager Jim Simons.

“Simons left a deep impact, apparently,” Zuckerman wrote in a column, describing how Liang praised his book as a tome that “unravels many previously unresolved mysteries and brings us a wealth of experiences to learn from”.

“Even my mother didn’t get that much out of the book,” Zuckerman wrote. 

 

DeepSeek’s research paper suggests that either the most advanced chips are not needed to create high-performing AI models or that Chinese firms can still source chips in sufficient quantities – or a combination of both.

California-based Nvidia’s H800 chips, which were designed to comply with US export controls, were freely exported to China until October 2023, when the administration of then-President Joe Biden added them to its list of restricted items.

In his 2023 interview with Waves, Liang said his company had stockpiled 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before they were banned for export. GPUs, or graphics processing units, are electronic circuits used to speed up graphics and image processing on computing devices.

Tanishq Abraham, former research director at Stability AI, said he was not surprised by China’s level of progress in AI given the rollout of various models by Chinese firms such as Alibaba and Baichuan.

“While there have been restrictions on China’s ability to obtain GPUs, China still has managed to innovate and squeeze performance out of whatever they have,” Abraham told Al Jazeera.

“I think it is a lesson to US companies that there is still a lot of performance they can squeeze out of.”

Tara Javidi, co-director of the Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing and Security at the University of California San Diego, said DeepSeek made her excited about the “rapid progress” taking place in AI development worldwide.

“My only hope is that the attention given to this announcement will foster greater intellectual interest in the topic, further expand the talent pool, and, last but not least, increase both private and public investment in AI research in the US,” Javidi told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, investors’ confidence in the US tech scene has taken a hit – at least in the short term.

Apart from Nvidia’s dramatic slide, Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft on Monday saw their stock prices fall 4.03 percent and 2.14 percent, respectively, though Apple and Amazon finished higher.

“If DeepSeek’s cost numbers are real, then now pretty much any large organisation in any company can build on and host it,” Tim Miller, a professor specialising in AI at the University of Queensland, told Al Jazeera.

“So, in this sense, the game has changed completely because there is a new ‘rule’ that anyone can play.”

Does this mean China is winning the AI race?

Not necessarily.

While tech analysts broadly agree that DeepSeek-R1 performs at a similar level to ChatGPT – or even better for certain tasks – the field is moving fast.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month that the company would release its latest reasoning AI model, o3 mini, within weeks after considering user feedback.

On Monday, Altman acknowledged that DeepSeek-R1 was “impressive” while defending his company’s focus on greater computing power.

“We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases,” Altman said on X.

“But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission.”

“Most entrepreneurs had completely missed the opportunity that generative AI represented, and felt very humbled,” Ma told Al Jazeera.

“It’s clear that they have been hard at work since. I think what this past weekend shows us is how seriously they self-reflected and took the challenge to ‘catch up’ to Silicon Valley. I think that for the US to retain its lead, Washington should focus on boosting Silicon Valley instead of on suppressing China.”

Abraham, the former research director at Stability AI, said perceptions may also be skewed by the fact that, unlike DeepSeek, companies such as OpenAI have not made their most advanced models freely available to the public.

“DeepSeek made its best model available for free to use. On the other hand, OpenAI’s best model is not free,” he said.

“So most people who use ChatGPT for free are shocked by DeepSeek and believe there is a huge jump in capabilities when OpenAI has had a similar performing model paywalled for a few months already. This pay-walling of frontier AI models leads to people not truly grasping the progress and capabilities of AI.”

Miller, the University of Queensland professor, said DeepSeek’s advances and other recent developments suggest that China is at least “up there” with the US in AI.

“I made somewhat of a throwaway prediction late last year that the next scientific breakthrough in AI could come from a small player such as an individual university researcher who doesn’t have access to much computing power – they would need to be smarter to compete,” he said.

“DeepSeek’s apparent progress is almost an example of this: by not having enough computational power to build models as large as ChatGPT, they had to be smart. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Source: Al Jazeera 28-01-2025 

 

DeepSeek launches new AI model

 DeepSeek launches new AI model as Trump cautions of ‘wake-up call’ to US industry

By Ma TongPublished: Jan 28, 2025

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek on Tuesday launched a new open-source multimodal model, following the buzz generated by its cost-effective open-source reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with rivals like OpenAI but at a significantly lower cost, sending ripples through the US stock market the day before.

According to information on the AI community platform Hugging Face on Tuesday, DeepSeek has released the open-source multimodal AI model Janus-Pro, an upgraded version of its earlier Janus model, which significantly enhances multimodal understanding and visual generation capabilities.

Its Janus-Pro-7B AI model outperformed OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion in a leaderboard ranking for image generation using text prompts, Reuters reported on Tuesday, according to a DeepSeek's technical report the Global Times read on Github, a proprietary developer platform. 

The latest development came after earlier in January the company released the latest open-source model DeepSeek-R1, which has achieved an important technological breakthrough - using pure deep learning methods to allow AI to spontaneously emerge with reasoning capabilities.

As a rapidly growing competitor to leading AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and others, the Chinese AI startup has garnered runaway attention in recent weeks.

US President Donald Trump said on Monday that Chinese startup DeepSeek's technology should act as spur for American companies and said it was good that companies in China have come up with a cheaper, faster method of artificial intelligence, Reuters reported Tuesday. 

"I've been reading about China and some of the companies in China, one in particular coming up with a faster method of AI and much less expensive method, and that's good because you don't have to spend as much money. I view that as a positive, as an asset," Trump said, according to Reuters. 

"The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company should be a wakeup call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win," Trump said in Florida, according to the report. 

The remarks also came as the news around DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the AI industry, with Nvidia bearing the brunt of the sell-off. The chipmaker, a linchpin of the AI supply chain, lost over $500 billion in market value, plummeting 16.86 percent in a single day. Other major tech players, including Alphabet and Microsoft, also declined, though Meta managed to trade in positive territory, Xinhua reported. 

Nvidia issued a statement on Monday after its shares tumbled, noting DeepSeek's advances show the usefulness of its chips for the Chinese market and that more of its chips will be needed in the future to meet demand for DeepSeek's services.

"DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant," Nvidia said in its statement.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman welcomed the debut of DeepSeek's R1 model in a post on X late on Monday. "Deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price. we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases," Altman said.

The success of DeepSeek showed that the Biden administration's four-year crackdown on China's AI and computing power has not only failed but has also spurred the country to forge a unique path for AI development, achieving significant progress in autonomous AI development, Ma Jihua, a veteran telecom industry observer, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"While the global AI community has been focused on increasing computing power, China has been pioneering a path through algorithm optimization, opening up a new approach that is cost-effective and equally efficient. This development holds significant importance for the global AI landscape," Ma noted.

"However, with the emergence of DeepSeek and the rapid advancement of China's AI industry, there is now greater potential for complementary cooperation between China and the US. Both countries can leverage their unique strengths, making collaboration more promising than ever before," Ma said. 

Industry observers reached by the Global Times previously said while China and the US, as the two leading powers in the global AI field, compete in the AI industry, there is also significant room for cooperation, especially in AI governance.⍐