America: Incertitude or vengeance? ...Tariffs or blackmail or both, at a price ... Drones: on & on, Ukraine & beyond....And for our paid: China vs US, up in the air + our global Cartoon Gallery
In this weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, we continue to explore how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world.
To emphasize, we cover lots of ground—diving each week through 30+ newspapers & 100+ websites on every continent to distill the world. So, you may not want to read it all, but it's all here for you!
How others see America
Incertitude … or vengeance?
Whether it’s Le Monde on a truce in Gaza after two days of Trump-Netanyahu at the White House…
Truce in Gaza facing Trump, Netanyahu maintains uncertainty
….or tariffs as blackmail?
We begin with the Toronto Star, on fentanyl again?…
As the Star’s Kristjan Lautens points out:
Fentanyl seizures by the United States Customs and Border Patrol at the Canada-U. S. border represent less than 0.1 per cent of all U.S. fentanyl seizures between 2022 and 2024, according March data from Canada’s fentanyl czar, a position that was created in February in response to Trump’s initial tariff threats and demands.
Or more off the scale: how dare you prosecute my friend and fellow would-be autocrat for organizing a coup d’état:
A message from US President Donald Trump landed like a grenade in Brazil, bringing the relationship between the two countries to an all-time low. Trump pledged to impose tariffs on Brazil at a rate as high as 50%. He accused the country of "attacks" on US tech companies and of conducting a "witch hunt" against the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, a longstanding ally who is facing prosecution over his alleged role in a plot to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election.
The move follows a fresh round of political sparring between Trump and the current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It further strained a relationship that was already tense.
Trump had earlier threatened members of the BRICS group - of which Brazil is a part - with tariffs, accusing those countries of anti-American positions. The bloc includes India, Russia and China and has grown to include Iran. It was designed to counterbalance US influence in the world.
Remember, Trump began this whole Tariff Offensive to try to level vast trade imbalances with other countries. But the US Trade Representative’s own numbers show the US sold way more goods to Brazil than Brazil sold to the US, and that gulf is only widening…dramatically:
As Solveig Godeluck, US correspondent of Les Echos, the leading French business daily observed, the impact goes way beyond even Brazil:
Brazil is also part of an emerging group, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which has a knack for irritating Donald Trump because it seeks alternatives to the dollar and trade with the United States. The populist leader has promised to apply 10% additional tariffs to this club and to countries "that align with the BRICS' anti-American policies." "We don't want an emperor," Lula da Silva retorted on Monday, during a BRICS summit in Rio earlier this week….
The global tariff war sought by Donald Trump looks more like a plan for global extortion than a reasoned policy to redress trade imbalances.
Moreover, after having given a "partly" political justification for his 50% rights, the president pastes into his text the standardized and vague paragraphs of the other letters. The decision suddenly appears entirely motivated by serious and valid commercial criteria, when in reality these are pretexts.
And then the coup grace ….
We wound up on Saturday at the pinnacle—30% across-the-board for Mexico and the entire European Union.
And the real losers?
Each European country has its own problems, though hardly solutions:
Italy
La Stampa: “For Italy , the estimated impact could reach 35 billion euros.”
Germany
ZDFHeute: “‘The tariffs in place since April have already caused German exports to collapse. The German auto industry, for example, is talking about burdens amounting to billions,’ says ZDF economic expert Florian Neuhann.”
Tagesspiegel: "‘Gross domestic product would grow by 0.5 to 0.6 percentage points less next year,’ predicts Moritz Schularick, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW).”
Spain
El Español: “From aluminum to ceramics: 80% of Spain's exports to the US are affected by Trump's tariffs. The direct impact could exceed €7.1 billion, not including the effect the tariff will have on components exported to the EU for later sale in the US.”
France
Sud-Ouest: Among the most exposed French sectors are aeronautics—which represents a fifth of France's exports to the United States—luxury goods (perfumes, leather goods, etc.), wines and cognac. This tax rate would be a "catastrophe" for the French wine and spirits sector, reacted Jérôme Despey, head of the viticulture branch of the FNSEA union.
Solveig Godeluck, this time joined by her Brussels counterpart Karl De Meyer, leading Les Echos:
Donald Trump has struck again.
Such a level of taxation on European goods would be unprecedented in recent history. It illustrates a negotiating method to which the European Commission is unaccustomed. Admittedly, Donald Trump did not follow through on his earlier threat to apply a unilateral 50% tariff. But it is far more than what the United Kingdom (10%) or Vietnam (20%, it seems) negotiated.
“Build and produce in the United States”
The European Union, like Mexico, is guilty in the eyes of the American president of not having agreed to a trade deal this week. Wednesday was the initial deadline for the United States to negotiate new tariffs with all its partners, but only three countries did so. While China fared relatively well, the United Kingdom and Vietnam both had to give up significant concessions.
And around the world, panic began setting in….
Like in Thailand, as the Bangkok Post reported:
The Federation of Thai Industries (FTI) is gathering data from 47 industrial groups for the Finance Ministry to negotiate lower retaliatory tariffs and protect Thailand’s competitiveness in the US market.
The FTI has voiced mounting concern over the United States’ imminent enforcement of reciprocal tariffs targeting 22 countries, including Thailand, beginning Aug 1.
And repercussions? Already, The Economist is worried about another coup. (I covered two of them back in the 1970s for The New York Times)…
….and the precipitating factors were no less dire today) as The Economist continued:
Gridlock in Thai politics tends to end one way. Thailand is the only middle-income country in which the armed forces regularly seize power. There have been a dozen coups since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, two of them in the past 20 years. Now, Thais are asking if another putsch is on the cards. On June 28, thousands rallied in Bangkok to demand the prime minister’s dismissal. On July 1st, the constitutional court suspended her.
A new bout of instability is the last thing Thailand needs. President Donald Trump wants to hit it with tariffs of 36%; Ms Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s distracted government did not open negotiations with America until the beginning of July, months after its foreign peers. Its export industries are under pressure from lower-cost Chinese goods.
Meanwhile, tariff-takings have already begun pouring into America. As India’s financial daily Mint reported:
And as Bloomberg elaborated:
The US posted a $27 billion overall surplus in June compared with a $71 billion deficit in the same month last year.
But guess who’s paying this Treasury windfall? For the most part, it’s American consumers. And with the tariffs Trump’s announced this week, June’s comparative trickle is poised to become a tsunami beginning August 1. It’s only likely to get worse … much worse.
Here’s what the authoritative Yale Budget Lab concluded, as of their July 11 publication date [before Mexican and European levies were disclosed]:
The Budget Lab (TBL) estimated the effects all US tariffs and foreign retaliation implemented in 2025 through July 11, including the announced 35% tariff on Canada.…
Current Tariff Rate: Consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 18.7%, the highest since 1933. After consumption shifts, the average tariff rate will be 17.9%, the highest since 1934.
Overall Price Level & Distributional Effects: The price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 1.9% in the short-run, the equivalent of an average per household income loss of $2,500 in 2025$….
Commodity Prices: The 2025 tariffs disproportionately affect clothing and textiles, with consumers facing 39% higher shoe prices and 37% higher apparel prices in the short-run….
[So far]
Real GDP Effects: US real GDP growth over 2025 is -0.8% lower from all 2025 tariffs. In the long-run, the US economy is persistently -0.4% smaller, the equivalent of $120 billion annually in 2024$.
Labor Market Effects: The unemployment rate rises 0.4 percentage point by the end of 2025, and payroll employment is 578,000 lower.
The bottom line: a lot of pain in the pocketbook, and more than a half million more folks will have lost their jobs.
[So far]
Special for the Paid !
We will explore much of this and more next Friday at our Unleashed Conversation for our lightly paid members….
For new paid subscribers, an inscribed copy of my latest book, A Red Line in the Sand. Along with a weekly portfolio of cartoons, largely from Cartooning for Peace … and Friday a weekly live conversation with Andelman…this coming Friday, July 18 with a very special guest:
United States correspondent for Les Echos, the national business newspaper in France. She covers current American economic and political news: economic conditions, economic policies, business life, foreign trade, diplomacy, and elections. She specializes in social welfare, the Internet, telecommunications. She is the author of several books on technology and finance.
There is no one better positioned to help us understand how the world, or at least Europe, is perceiving and dealing with America under Donald Trump.
How others see the World
drones, Drones, DRONES….
It is becoming crystal clear, even to Donald Trump, that Vladimir Putin is persuaded he can win the war in Ukraine and bring this nation first to its knees, then under his sway, all without an American president in quest of a Nobel Peace Prize playing any role whatsoever. So it hardly came as a shock when the Institute for the Study of War reported this week:
Russia will be able to routinely launch over 1,000 drones per strike package by Fall 2025, echoing a recent warning from Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces Commander Major Robert Brovdi that Russia could escalate its strike packages to include over 1,000 Shahed-type drones per day. Ukrainian electronic and radio warfare expert Serhiy "Flash" Beskrestnov estimated on June 20 that Russia has increased Shahed production sevenfold and forecasted that Russian strike packages may soon incorporate up to 800 Shaheds—a forecast that is in line with the July 8 to 9 Russian strike package. ISW has reported that Russia is significantly expanding its long-range drone production capabilities for modified Geran-2 drones (the Russian-made analogue of the Iranian-origin Shahed-136 drones), including by opening production lines with companies in the People's Republic of China (PRC).
The continued increase in the size of strike packages is likely intended to support Russian efforts to degrade Ukrainian morale in the face of constant Russian aggression. Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat reported that Russian forces used over 400 decoy drones in this strike package in order to overwhelm Ukrainian air defense. Russian forces have equipped their decoy long-range drones with warheads and have also modified their strike drones with warheads designed to inflict a wide spread of damage, indicating that Russian forces aim to maximize damage against areas in Ukraine writ large—which disproportionately affects civilian areas.
All of which David Callaway—former editor-in-chief of USA Today and creator of Substack’s Callaway Climate Insights—explored in some depth for Unleashed Conversation on Friday. Callaway’s riveting new book Un-regulated Militia, explores what can happen when waves of thousands of drones attack. This was supposed to be a decade or more in the future. Today, he believes such a timetable is becoming increasingly compressed with the West very much ill-prepared.
The full video of our Conversation with Callaway may be found below the line for our lightly paid subscribers.
Meanwhile, Defense One has sussed out that dramatically more Patriot missiles may be on the way….
Then there’s France vs Russia
Faced with the Russian menace, France wants to reinforce its defense
During his press conference, the army chief of staff, General Thierry Burkhard, reminds that Russia has designated France “its principal adversary” in Europe.
Moscow is waging a hybrid war against the West, made up of disinformation and cyber attacks, actions in space and under the sea... Russia "is a nuclear and conventional military power," he continued. It possesses "all the attributes of a totalitarian state: a centralized decision-making capacity, conditioning of the population," he added. For Europe and France, it is "a lasting, close and significant threat." By 2030, "it will constitute a real threat to our borders," the officer estimated, summarizing the objective sought, according to him, by Vladimir Putin: "to weaken Europe and dismantle NATO."
And Britain vs. France? No longer…
Once that “special relationship” meant Britain and America.
Today’s Guest of Honor
Remember when it was Donald Trump seated at the right hand of his new bestie, Emmanuel Macron, for the 14th of July military parade down the Champs Elysées (and that gave Trump the idea for his own feeble birthday parade years later)? As the BBC chronicled it, eight long years ago:
Well this year, it will be Indonesia—the world’s most populous Moslem nation—as guest of honor. It will feel the slap of Trump tariffs just like France. But a whole lot more unites them, as the Presidence de la Republique put it this week:
Mr. Prabowo SUBIANTO, President of the Republic of Indonesia…guest of honor at the July 14 military ceremony, will see its troops parade alongside French forces on the Champs-Élysées, a symbol of the strategic defense partnership that unites our two countries.
The meeting will also focus on continuing to strengthen strategic cooperation between France and Indonesia, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, and on reaffirming the convergence between Paris and Jakarta, particularly on issues of peace and security in the Middle East.
What’s new on ‘paid’
Now, for our most highly valued, but lightly paid, members, a stunning close-up look at who’s winning the race for air superiority between the US and Chinese militaries—from Beijing’s perspective…plus a broad portfolio from the world’s greatest cartoonists, courtesy of Cartooning for Peace and Le Monde….
Meanwhile one win, one loss in the global cartooning community’s quest for freedom of expression. In India, Cartooning for Peace reports sadly:
Meanwhile, stunningly bail has even been denied, “the Madhya Pradesh High Court finding that…the Prime Minister [was] portrayed ‘in an undignified manner’ and that the cartoonist's action was ‘deliberate and malicious and aimed at outraging the religious feelings of the complainant and the public at large by insulting their religion, which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony in society.’"
And besides, outside on bail he might have felt the urge to express himself and draw again.
Indeed, India is ranked 151st out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.
On the other hand, as it happens, CfP was thrilled to report:
After five long years of proceedings, punctuated by postponements, the Istanbul Court of First Instance finally ruled in favour of acquitting cartoonist Zehra Ömeroglu.
The Turkish cartoonist was on trial for ‘obscenity’ due to a cartoon published in LeMan magazine in 2020 and faced a sentence of six months to three years in prison as well as a fine.
