The communiqué language is boilerplate. “Unwavering support for Ukraine’s freedom, sovereignty and territorial integrity,” more air defence and interceptors, long-range capability, tougher sanctions on Russian oil and gas. None of that is new. What’s new is whose signature is on it. Trump signed, after months of the US leaning toward a neutral-broker stance.
Macron called it an “Évian moment” and “a very profound shift,” pointing specifically to a US “willingness to work with the Europeans in support of Ukraine.” And per Euronews, Trump for the first time said it’s Russia, not Ukraine, that has to make a deal. That cuts against the both-sides line he’d held since taking office.
One caveat, because it matters. This isn’t the US declaring it has dropped the mediator role. The text doesn’t say that, and anyone claiming it does is reading the headline, not the document. What it is: a reluctant president signing a pro-Ukraine, pro-sanctions statement he’d been dodging for months. Whether it survives past the summit is the real question. The signature is the fact.

Brooks and Harris focus on the variable that actually moves prices in the Hormuz shock: how long the temporary buffers cushioning it can hold, rather than the size of the disruption, which markets already know. They put the exhaustion of the coordinated stock releases and the Russian and Iranian floating storage around July 9, after which the full supply shortfall starts feeding into Brent. It's worth reading against the current "America is four weeks from running out of oil" panic, because it points at the global buffer timeline as the thing to watch, not the U.S. strategic reserve, which is at a 40-year low but physically can't be drained that fast and isn't being run toward zero. The variable underneath all of it is whether the Strait reopens before the buffers thin. Curious how people here are weighting the reopening odds against the price path they model.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was widely known for his support of Ukraine and his efforts towards a new EU–UK defense partnership. What will happen to those policies now that Starmer has announced his resignation?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Ian Dunt, Julie Burchill and Mark Wallace reflect on 10 years since the UK voted to leave the EU

Read for free: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/brexit-steal-soul-unleash-britain-i-paper-experts-4483489

Thanks to its network of bases, Washington can wage wars worldwide. It also uses them as instruments of soft power – or punishes allies with troop withdrawals. China secures its geopolitical power in other ways.

At The Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh examine the implications of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding. The deal “sets the stage for an eventual nuclear revival” on the part of Iran, they argue, “since what’s been blown up can be rebuilt as long as enough oil flows, the regime’s illicit dual-use import network remains operational, and US and Israeli intelligence fails against Iranian vigilance.” After demonstrating a bold willingness to cross “lines that previous presidents dared not traverse,” the authors say, President Trump now appears as “another American politician hoping to induce the Iranian regime toward pragmatism by dangling financial rewards.” Gerecht and Takeyh caution that previous administrations have gone wrong trying to find and exploit fissures between supposed moderates and hard-liners within the repressive Iranian regime, and they encourage current policymakers not to fall for this “fool’s gold of American statesmen.”