Paweł

🇪🇺🇨🇦 Canada is at the European Political Community Summit because, according to Kaja Kallas, VP of the European Commission: "Europe is not just about geography, it's also about the values and principles we share." No wonder Europeans hate EU bureaucrats

Poland Paid $50 Billion for America’s Friendship. Turns Out That Wasn’t the Deal. Poland has spent fifty billion dollars on American weapons. F-35s, Abrams tanks, Patriots, HIMARS. The full catalogue, ordered with the desperate enthusiasm of a country that shares a border with Belarus. Last week the Pentagon scrapped plans to deploy 4,200 troops to Poland. The brigade had already held a send-off ceremony, shipped its tanks, and sent advance personnel into Europe. Then came the call. Don’t bother. Poland was blindsided. Their officials found out by ringing American congressmen. JD Vance turned up at the White House briefing today and told a Polish reporter he was overreacting. It was just a delay, he said. Europe needs to stand on its own two feet. Poland spends nearly four percent of GDP on defence. It hosted American troops and paid fifteen thousand dollars per soldier per year for the privilege. It sent men to Iraq when Washington asked, even when France and Germany quietly suggested that everyone involved might regret it. Rumsfeld once called Poland the most pro-American country on earth, including America itself.  The reward for twenty years of that devotion is being told, by a man who has never heard a gunshot in anger, to look in the mirror.

Look how friendly they are.

🇵🇰🇹🇷🇸🇦🇶🇦 4 major Islamic powers are quietly building something that looks a lot like NATO. Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi, and Qatar are expanding defense coordination at a speed that Washington hasn't fully processed yet. Here's what each brings to the table: -Pakistan: nuclear weapons and one of the world's largest standing armies. -Türkiye: Bayraktar drones, advanced missiles, and 80% domestic military production. -Saudi and Qatar: the oil and gas money to fund weapons programs, bases, and everything in between. Why does this matter? The Iran war exposed something that couldn't be ignored anymore. Regional powers watched how U.S.-dependent security arrangements performed under pressure, and a lot of them didn't like what they saw. The response is this: a potential military bloc that answers to no one in Washington, with the firepower and funding to back it up. A NATO-style Islamic military alliance changes the balance of power in the Middle East fundamentally. Source: DiplomaticEdit

🇺🇸🇯🇴 The U.S. is quietly moving chess pieces into Jordan while everyone wonders when the ceasefire will end. C-130 variants and multiple C-17A heavy transport aircraft have been spotted repositioning to Aqaba Airport. At the same time, U.S. Navy P-8A surveillance coverage dropped from 3-4 aircraft to one. Here's what that tells you: C-17s and C-130s are not strike aircraft. They carry troops, equipment, and supplies at scale and at speed. You don't mass heavy airlift in a forward position because the situation is calming down. The P-8A reduction is the other signal. Fewer surveillance flights either means less to watch, or the watching is now being done differently and closer. Jordan sits between Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Aqaba specifically gives them rapid access to the Red Sea corridor and the broader region. The U.S. military doesn't park this kind of capacity in Jordan for optics. Something is being prepared, pre-positioned, or kept on very short notice to move. Whether that's an evacuation contingency, a rapid reinforcement option, or the early logistics footprint of something larger, nobody outside the Pentagon knows yet. But the hardware doesn't lie. Source: New York Times

🇺🇸🇨🇳 Between previous U.S.-China summits and the one that just took place, a fundamental shift has happened. America is now negotiating with China as a peer, not a dominant power. In 2013, Obama went to California to meet Xi as the leader of the unipolar world, welcoming a rising China into an American-built order on American terms. In Trump's first term, he banned Huawei, weaponized semiconductors, and reframed the entire Pacific around containing China. This week, Trump flew to Beijing, accepted a personal tour of the Temple of Heaven, showered Xi with praise, and left touting soybean deals instead of demanding much more. At this point, Trump needs Xi more than Xi needs Trump, and Beijing extracted maximum symbolic value from that leverage. Obama tried to integrate China into the American order, Trump's first term tried to break it, Trump's second term is accommodating it. That isn’t a negotiating strategy, it’s acceptance of a new world order.