Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts
the stars to flight.
And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain.

Cosas de España

TBH, nothing in Spain seems worth commenting on compared with what’s happening elsewhere. In respect of which it’s hard to decide what not to comment on than on what to address.

Portugal

How to annoy the (usually relaxed) Portuguese . . .

The UK

As the Chancellor of the Exchequer desperately searches for savings – while not raising income tax – it’s looking inevitable that the forecast that there’ll need to be Net Zero trade-offs will prove accurate. Can anyone really be surprised?

Europe

Has Vance’s Munich speech signalled a new European order?

Diplomats said they are still trying to work out the intent behind Vance’s words. Some feel the speech was primarily aimed at a US audience or meant to gain Trump’s attention.

Other European leaders fear that: The idea of the West as it has existed for the last 60 or 70-odd years certainly is in suspense, and that’s the optimistic way of putting it. Trump and Putin are carving up the world into spheres of influence. We fall into the American sphere of influence and Trump et al feel that means we have to do whatever they say.

En passant, Vance’s gobsmacking address was a lecture on democracy from a man who believes Trump’s lies re the 2020 election, and who hasn’t criticised the Jan 6 riots or the pardoning of criminals. Even though he’d said some of them wouldn’t happen.

A diplomat from one EU country said Vance and Musk’s approach was reminiscent of an abortive campaign by the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to build a pan-European far-right insurgency, but this time with the weight of the White House behind it. However, Ulrich Speck, a German foreign policy analyst, says he doubts that any campaign to instigate a hard-right takeover of European capitals would work. “Europe’s right is not united and there is a lot of anti-Americanism,” he added. “Bannon failed when he tried to turn Europe into the breeding ground for his movement. Musk and Vance may be intrigued by that idea but it won’t fly.”

So . . . . What next from the terrible trio of Trump, Musk and Vance? An allegation that gun laws are undemocratic and must be abolished in Europe and elsewhere? Or else!

Germany

Vance’s speech was seen in Berlin as “supercilious, arrogant, smart-alecky and completely inappropriate in its subject matter”. . . . “The problem is the extremist party [the AfD] that Trump and Vance regard as their kindred spirits”.

The USA

Just another day in what many of us would regard as a pretty sick society . .

“The Trump administration fired 300-400 nuclear employees, as they didn’t know what their job was… And now they are scrambling to get them to come back.”

Critics believe that a hollowing out of many essential taxpayer-funded services, especially in healthcare, support for veterans, and military and defense expenditure, will come with a lucrative corresponding financial windfall for private companies, including those owned by Musk.

This is a fight – with the AP press agency – that Trump is clearly happy to have, especially as it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and to the rule of law

The president’s full-court press to dominate media and control cultural institutions is straight out of the authoritarian playbook It was classic Trumpian showmanship, from the highest perch in the world. It was also the latest salvo by the 47th president and his allies to control language, influence media narratives and reshape cultural institutions in ways that some compare with the Soviet Union or other authoritarian regimes from history.

Long a master of branding, Trump is making propaganda a core element of his strongman presidency. This comes as little surprise to critics who regard it as an extension of last year’s election campaign in which he sold himself as a champion of the forgotten people and victim of a weaponised justice department.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history and Italian studies professor at New York University, describes Trump as “one of the most successful propagandists in all of history”, as skilled as the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in his use of images, symbols and repetition. She adds: “The cult of personality is that you must be omnipotent but you’re also omnipresent, you’re everywhere. It’s not just old-school dictatorships like North Korea today or communist China where the face of the leader is everywhere.” “Nowadays, for example, Modi in India is the most followed leader in the world. He’s a genius at Instagram. When he ran for office in 2014, he used holograms so he could be in a hundred places at the same time. Being everywhere and inescapable is part of making the population depend on you and on no one else.”

Vance is not the Herald of the Apocalypse, he’s just another VP in the impossible job of being a mouthpiece to a mouth, confused about his master’s mind: confused (I suspect) even about his own.

Trump

Trump is not Chamberlain, he’s King Lear, only fitfully lucid, his grip on reality weakened and his vanity bloated by a world too ready to take him on his own terms. But he isn’t always wrong. [True enough].

It’s an irony that a man who has used the law all his life to bludgeon opponents and to get what he wants might well now be topped by the courts from riding roughshod over the Constitution.

I’m listening today to a podcast on Caligula. I keep waiting for them to say who he reminds them of . . Thank god Trump doesn’t have a horse.

Mr Smug and his boss . . . Or at least his superior at negotiating. But, then, who isn’t?

Russia/Ukraine

‘We must have justice for Russian atrocities committed in Bucha’, says Vadim Yevokymen, whose father died in the massacre there. His fear is that President Trump’s peace deal will include leniency for war crimes – and that Ukraine will never heal.

As for that peace deal. . . There are said to be 3 scenarios:-

• The first is a simple ceasefire, that may or may not lead to a wider peace process. This could last only days or weeks but might also extend into a long-term freezing of the front line, leaving Moscow in control of more than 19% of Ukraine (and Kyiv controlling 0.003%of Russia).
• The second is a more elaborate ceasefire, buttressed — as Kyiv demands — with security guarantees, perhaps including European peacekeepers along the line of contact.
• The third and, for now, least likely prospect is a true peace process, which will still probably see Russia in control of all or most of the occupied territories, but formally recognising the sovereignty of Ukraine and its right to chart a path westwards — eventually perhaps into the European Union — again backed by guarantees.

Whatever the outcome, Putin will spin this as a victory. It is an open secret that the Russian leader is obsessed with his legacy, asking historians how he will be assessed in a hundred years’ time. He will still be regarded as a tsar who in a moment of hubris needlessly destroyed the international reputation and military machine he had spent 20 years building, while driving hundreds of thousands of Russia’s most talented citizens into exile. However, there is now the prospect that posterity will also consider Putin a rather more capable political operator than his western rivals, whose fragile unity against him ultimately cracked.

Long Quote of the Day

A month into Trump 2.0, Mr Vance and other senior outriders such as Elon Musk are full of ideological hubris and jubilant self-regard. But the vice-president’s use of Maga-style culture war rhetoric to attack European governments amounted to more than mere trolling. In deeply ominous fashion it also shredded the idea of a “west” that shares fundamental values. . . . In the post-cold war era, the transatlantic alliance was founded on a common commitment to international norms that this White House holds in sneering contempt. Mr Trump’s brutally transactional approach is infused with a Hobbesian cynicism – witness his determination to exploit Ukraine’s vulnerability to seize 50% of its rare earth minerals on favourable terms. . . . Europe must swiftly learn to adapt to an isolationist US that sees it as an ideological adversary and economic competitor. . . . . European nations will need to find the unity to stand up to “America-first” bullying tactics, and begin to lay foundations for greater strategic and economic autonomy. . . . The task now is to find ways to safeguard the European model from an increasingly sinister US administration that would love to see it fail. [All of this must be music to the ears of – the beleaguered – M Macron, who has long wanted an EU army and a return to French leadership of The Project. Hence the meeting in Paris today.]

The Way of the World

An optimistic take on things from a British ex-MP: Far from signalling a policy of appeasement, this Munich, unlike its earlier namesake, signals an awakening understanding of the need to prepare for war if war is to be avoided. . . . There is time. Russia is in no position to invade a western European or Nato country. And time is not on Moscow’s side. . . . You can read (on his Substack) Tim Leunig, the LSE economist on the dire state of the Russian economy, desperately inflating its own currency to replace lost armaments from an exhausted stockpile, running out of human cannon fodder even from the far reaches of its overstretched empire.

Spanish

• Cacheo: Frisking
• Micción: Urination

Did you know?

How being a parent physically alters your brain (dads included) . . ‘Baby brain’ is real. Increasing evidence suggests having kids causes big changes in our grey matter, and not always for the worse. The explanation.

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• For those thinking of moving to Spain:– This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers. And this is something on the so-called Beckham Rule, which is beneficial – tax-wise – for folk who want to work here. Finally, some advice on getting a mortgage. And this article ‘debunks claims re wealth and residency taxes’. Probably only relevant if you’re a HNWI. In which case, you’ll surely know what that stands for.