HALF-FULL REPORT 04/11/25
Volatility And Alignment
Europe’s initial response to Trump’s tariff policies is to organize a summit with China and opening talks to remove tariffs on Chinese EVs, despite the potential harm to its automobile industry. This highlights the disconnect between the European Davos economic elites with Europe’s political elites. The politicos are acting more carefully.
Spain’s Prime Minister Sanchez is prioritizing economic ties with China rather than building European consensus. This get tough approach against Washington seems more like a get-Trump approach than a search for pragmatic solutions. By appealing to public emotions rather than looking for a strategic and results oriented stance, European leaders are not acting in Europe’s best interests.
They fear populism more than the tariffs.
Europe is following a re-risking strategy towards China and increasing European dependency and vulnerability. This mirrors the famous “Wandel durch Handel” policy towards Russia, which aimed at pacification but ended in disaster.
Aligning with China risks aligning Europe with the Dragon Bear during a new Cold War with America. This is a dangerous strategy.
The UK’s oldest foreign policy is to never, ever, ever, allow Germany and Russia to form and alliance. Getting cozy with China, and by default, the Dragon Bear, suggests that British foreign policy is no longer in friendly hands.
Chinese nationals were recently captured by Ukraine, fighting on behalf of Russia. This demonstrates the growing Dragon Bear axis. Europeans have not responded.
It is becoming clear that state actors are choosing sides between China’s global offerings and the American offerings. Each has its set of norms and rules.
Either Europe aligns with the USA for energy, trade, and defense, or it falls to the Dragon Bear bloc. Or perhaps Europe is attempting to build its own geopolitical counterweight to both blocs. It is not clear where the nations of the Middle East will fall, except for Iran, which belongs to the Dragon Bear.
History proposes that Europe does not have the willpower to go its own way. No matter what they say.
So instead, look for most of Europe to attempt to create a zero-tariff free trade zone for vehicles and industrial goods with the USA. This will be a massive victory for the United States if it happens. This should be the main focus of discussions.
Europe may be economically comparable to the U.S. and China, but it lacks the same level of geopolitical influence, particularly in discussions concerning Ukraine and Russia. To regain strategic control, the EU needs to push forward a broad geoeconomic plan. This includes speeding up free trade agreements with India and ASEAN countries, finalizing pending deals like the FTA with Mercosur, and fully ratifying CETA with Canada. These agreements can help Europe diversify its global market and strengthen its supply chains.
In addition to trade policy, the EU should incorporate regional projects into its Global Gateway strategy. Combining the Three Seas Initiative, which focuses on digital and physical infrastructure and energy connectivity in Central and Eastern Europe, with the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, can create a strong North–South connectivity axis. This axis should concentrate on digital infrastructure, physical transport, critical raw materials, and dual-use capabilities to boost Europe’s strategic autonomy and competitiveness.
Lastly, the EU must quickly integrate the Western Balkans and Eastern European candidates into the single market. This would speed up positive effects, improve regional stability, and protect against external influence or internal collapse, especially as pressure from Russia and China increases in Europe’s outskirts.
In summary, the EU needs to shift from a reactive to a proactive geoeconomic stance, strengthening internal unity, diversifying external partnerships, and establishing itself as a rule-shaping power in the emerging multipolar world.
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Chinese Manufacturing Capacity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFiWEjCedzY
China cannot stop their manufacturing economy. They cannot even slow it down. Without the American market, China will flood the world with its production. Those economies that do not understand this will drown.
Libs are changing their social media profile pics from Ukrainian flags to Communist China flags to signal their faith in statism and their hatred of the United States. Some simply opt for images of Winnie-the-Pooh.
They lied to us about immigration. They lied to us about trade. Likewise, they lied to us about Iraq. They lied to us about Covid-19. And they lied to us about China.
We protected China from themselves for a long time, and now it is time to administer the tough love. Sure, big finance used China to make the global finance elite stupendously wealthy. But now the globalist paradigm is changing, and big finance has not figured out what comes next. Hence, the market volatility.
The problem is the globalist economic model is based on stealing intellectual property, cheating the regulations, and dumping excess capacity. It is all well and good to have empathy for the plight of the Chinese citizen/subject during deglobalization. But never forget that they have been taught to feel nothing but contempt for you.
Big finance sees this as a story of Treasuries, debt, currency manipulation, crypto and the possibility of war to wipe out excess capacity and start again. All this is worth understanding, but these things are barely possible for citizens in the West to understand. There is no hope for the Chinese masses that are so locked down, programmed, and obedient.
The global narrative spinners are pushing their “sell America” narrative this week. At the same time, the spinners are trying to separate Trump from his base with every imaginable scare tactic, claiming Trump is unpredictable and inconsistent, and oh so dangerous to the global financial elites.
It won’t work. Middle America understands Attitude Adjustments. They see what Trump is doing is about the same as the Friday night going’s on at every bar and honky-tonk across America. The MAGA base relates to Trump and what he is doing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j0SuY4n6Ic
China cheats and steals and until Trump walked into the bar, there was no recourse. It is long past time, and things are going to hurt. China has been part of the WTO for decades and has never obeyed the rules. Americans are banned from litigating in their courts.
This is no longer about tariffs, as nobody had the brass to take on China before Trump. Finally, we have an administration that says enough.
What we have here is the beginning of a color revolution in China. Xi can only remain as the supreme leader if people are employed. If we wipe out all trade with China, the United States is still the world’s number one economy. As things fall into place today, China is the only global enemy in a trade war, and we are still very much in the negotiation stages.
Chinese manufacturing cannot be turned off or slowed down without creating major social problems. Xi will have little choice but to dump goods in the BRIC countries and Europe. Look out Brazil, those water pails will be dumped on your shores, and Indian shores, but especially within Russia. Russian industrial capacity might be destroyed by the onslaught of goods.
China likes to tell the world that they have a 5,000-year-old culture. They do not, China is 50 years old with the new China beginning with the erasure of five millennia of corruption and cronyism during the Cultural Revolution. They have no historical precedent to deal with a decline in their rate of growth, or the world outside organized industrial enterprises.
Everything the CCP is and stands for is tied to organizing the masses for production.
China has urgently been building a market in the BRICS countries to replace the USA, but they have not completed their plans. It is reported that they can shut down the American electrical grid via computer worms in the communication and control hardware they sold American utilities, but the reality is different. Much of the American grid has not been modernized and can still be operated by linemen driving out to throw switches manually. We are critically short electrical linemen.
Canada knows that it will be a mistake to become the new dumping ground for Chinese goods, and this likely had much to do with their capitulation on tariffs. They face the choice of eventual free trade with the USA, just as they promised under NAFTA and the USMCA, or face having their industrial base wiped out by a desperate China. Canada is transshipping commodities such as cement and steel from India into the United States by re-tagging Indian production as native Canadian. This will either stop or be greatly reduced.
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China in the Arctic
I spent a year at Adak Naval Air Station, way out, 1,200 miles out, on the Aleutian chain. I was there to clean up spent fuel that was lost or dumped from WWII through the later Clinton years so that the base could be decommissioned and turned over to the Aleut Indian Corporation. The intent was to convert the land to a perpetual bald eagle sanctuary and prevent development of any kind. The Aleut tribe was given the land as trustees under a deal struck by Madeline Albright with Vladimir Putin.
The USA ceded three Aleutian Islands to Russia to build radar sites, and vacated Adak Island, in exchange for looking the other way during the Kosovo War. It was the only loss of sovereign American territory in history.
The Trump Administration is considering reactivating the former naval airbase at Adak, which had been a key Cold War SOSUS station, which used a string of undersea listening devices to detect submarines. However, the Aleut Corporation was discovered to be in secret negotiations with a Chinese “shipping company” to lease the former American base to China.
Developing the base and leasing it to China is way outside the intent of turning the island over to the Native American tribe. Republican Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan discovered the hanky-panky and brought it to Trump’s attention.
Trump believes that restoring Adak would yield a similar benefit as building up Greenland, and it would protect vital sea lanes and complicate Chinese access to the Arctic.
My time at Adak was hard, the wind blows constantly with gusts well over 100 mph during storms and maybe 30–40 mph during calms. The land is a muskeg, a type of coarse grass on mud that is always somewhere between frozen and impassible.
We brought a thermal desorber, a type of furnace that looks like an asphalt plant, to the island by barge, along with excavators, loaders and dump trucks. Contaminated soil was dug up, burned in the furnace, and returned to the ground so that bald eagles could fish in unpolluted waters. A lot of money was spent, and the thought of turning the island over to China is almost unthinkable.
This smacks of the same problem with the Panama Canal treaty.
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Trump Digs Coal
Trump signed four executive orders on Tuesday, aiming to revitalize the U.S. coal industry. This sector was once a cornerstone of American industry but has been in a steep decline for decades because of the low price of natural gas, and the hostile permitting directed towards industry that is not located on the natural gas distribution network.
Domestic industry powered by coal at $0.50/million BTU is so vastly more competitive than European industry powered by Russian natural gas at $4.50/million BTU that it has long been the globalist demand that coal must die. The narrative spinners did their best to make this happen.
The thing is, coal can be stockpiled at the end user’s facility. It does not depend on an instantaneous supply chain like pipeline gas or the electrical grid. Sure, rail lines can be impacted by cyberattacks, bombings, or sabotage, but rail lines can be repaired and bridges can be bypassed.
In other words, coal usage, and the way that its storage is distributed instead of concentrated, is a national security concern. Clean coal is a general phrase meaning combustion in modern furnaces such as fluidized bed designs at relatively low temperature. Sulfur is captured with limestone powders or slurries.
The problem is that Obama’s EPA manipulated companies to cut up their coal handling machinery and to rip up their rail lines in exchange for one-time grants after the 2008 financial crisis. All of this capital equipment must be replaced before coal can be brought back into heavy industry.
Re-industrialization cannot proceed without coal because the natural gas distribution system does not have the universal capacity or physical network to supply new sites. It is expensive to permit and install miles and miles of industrial capacity gas pipes to all the sites requiring thermal energy.
Oil prices are far too volatile to base re-industrialization on.
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Changes at the EPA
In a recent executive order, President Trump instructed several agencies responsible for regulating energy and the environment to revise various environmental regulatory programs so they expire by October 2026.
This includes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Energy Department, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and Fish and Wildlife Service. The order encompasses all regulations under laws concerning energy appliance standards, mining, offshore drilling, and the Endangered Species Act.
However, it remains unclear if this order will also affect EPA regulations under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, or Safe Drinking Water Act, as the agency has been directed to provide a list of statutes that should be subject to the order.
The White House stated that this move aims to stimulate innovation and benefit the public by removing outdated regulations. From a practical direction, we have our old lightbulbs and shower heads back.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a series of 31 historic actions aimed at advancing President Trump’s executive orders and contributing to the Great American Comeback.
These actions, which represent the most significant deregulation effort in U.S. history, are intended to lower the cost of living for Americans, boost the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and empower states to make their own decisions, all while protecting the environment.
The actions include reconsideration of various regulations on power plants, the oil, and gas industry, vehicle emissions, and air quality standards, as well as ending the Biden-Harris Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon and redirecting enforcement resources to EPA’s core mission. These efforts aim to create American jobs, lower costs for families, and work with states and tribes to resolve implementation plan backlogs.
And this, my friends, is a victory that I never imagined possible. We are getting our country back.
Mike Ryan is a chemical engineering consultant to heavy industry.