Andrea Gilli

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov: Kissinger, I believe, once said that Washington’s relations with both Beijing and Moscow should always be better than relations between Beijing and Moscow themselves. This is the kind of game the Americans — and colonial powers in general — have played for many years. Divide and rule. We know this game well. It is still very much alive in Western politics.

🚨 THE U.S. BOND MARKET IS SCREAMING A MASSIVE WARNING. While the S&P 500 just hit a fresh record high of 7,501, the bond market is pricing in higher interest rates for longer. The 30 year yield is at 5.085%. The 20 year is at 5.092%. The 10 year is at 4.538%. Every maturity is rising at the same time. Stocks are at all time highs because the AI boom is driving earnings and the market is pricing in years of continued growth. Bond yields do not care about AI. They care about a $2 trillion annual deficit, oil at $100, persistent inflation and a government borrowing more money every single day to fund a war. Both cannot be right. And historically it is not the bond market that is wrong.

My assessment: As I've been saying since the start, China's biggest strategic miscalculation was assuming the Americans would eventually tire of Iran and look for a way out. They did not. They imposed a blockade, went after Chinese firms and refineries by name, and turned Beijing's Iranian bet into a direct liability for the Chinese economy. Every capital in the region that got hit by IRGC watched where the missiles came from and reached the same conclusion: the weapons that threatened them had CCP fingerprints. Xi and Wang Yi spent most of their time telling every government in the Middle East that Beijing was the indispensable commercial partner with no geopolitical agenda. That story required Arab tolerance of China's relationship with Iran, and that tolerance is gone.

President Zelensky’s former chief of staff and de-facto national security advisor Andriy Yermak has been jailed, with a $3.2 million bail set by the independent anti-corruption court this morning. Not many countries have the truly independent judiciary and anti-corruption prosecutors that exist in Ukraine. The United States doesn’t.

🇺🇦🇺🇸 Secretary of the Army Driscoll: "Ukraine's Delta common operating system, their modular open system architecture, C2 system is absolutely incredible. It fully integrates every single drone, sensor, and shooting platform into just one single network. Ours does not." Wow, if only Ukraine was offering the United States some sort of deal that would facilitate the sharing of this technology.

Europe’s trade problem is not industrial collapse. In 2025, the EU still ran a €128B goods trade surplus. Without energy dependence, Europe’s goods surplus would be roughly €427B. The U.S. is the opposite with a massive structural goods deficit — around $1.2T in 2025. Europe still exports machinery, vehicles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and industrial goods at scale. Its weakness is dependence: imported oil, gas and LNG Europe does not need America’s deficit model. Europe needs to keep investing heavily in renewables, storage, cross-border grids, nuclear and hydrogen to reduce energy dependence

There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars: 1) Profiting from a monopoly 2) Insider-trading 3) Political payoffs 4) Fraud 5) Inheritance Don’t believe the self-made myth.