• * Trump Reigns Supreme
  • * The New Reality in South Korea
  • * Putin’s War: Ukraine’s Successful Drone Strikes/ Peace Initiative
  • * In Gaza, Aid Turns Deadly

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The President Who Would Be Absolute King

As Donald Trump rules like an absolute king, America’s CEOs cower, but there are notable exceptions.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has criticized President Trump. So have JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and a few others.

But largely, American CEOs have refrained from publicly opposing Trump’s policies.

That’s strange, writes CNN’s anchor Fareed Zakaria in his latest Washington Post column, because in the past they’ve felt free to do so.

During Barack Obama’s first term, we heard quite a bit from CEOs about business “uncertainty”.

Today, Zakaria writes, CEOs are largely silent as Trump pushes a budget plan that would add trillions to the national debt and destabilizes the business climate with the chaotic tariffs, which are themselves taxes on US businesses that import foreign goods.

Why haven’t CEOs spoken up?

“Trump has explained how he views the American economy,” Zakaria writes: “not as a vast and gloriously complex free market system with hundreds of millions of private transactions; no, to him it is one, big beautiful store.

‘I own the store,’ he explained, ‘and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.’

Business leaders must deal with America the way they used to deal with Third World dictatorships: Appease the supreme leader. And they are adjusting to this new model quietly without much dissent.”

The upshot is, according to one of The New York Times’ star columnists, Nicholas Kristof, the increased risk of war, of nuclear proliferation, of pandemics.

“Trump may have made our world more dangerous, perhaps for decades to come – and that will not be easily reversed” (June 9).

Back to Reality in South Korea

South Korea has a new president, Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party, who won victory by a large margin last week Tuesday.

Lee’s biggest challenge will be dealing with North Korea, John Delury writes in a Foreign Affairs essay.

Given Trump’s past openness to negotiating with North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, “Lee will have a rare window of opportunity to make progress” on that front, Delury  argues.

The bigger story, however, is domestic.

Lee defeated an opponent from the People Power Party, the conservative party of since-removed former President Yoon Suk Yeol, who briefly declared martial law in December.

Lee’s election marks a return to democratic normalcy, The New Yorker’s E. Tammy Kim writes.

Furthermore: “Lee wants to go beyond correcting Yoon’s strongman Presidency.”

Kim continues: “But his victory feels more like a reassertion of reality than a referendum on the values of either major party .  .  .

“It is a vote against Yoon and others who would embrace a return to the military dictatorships of the nineteen-seventies and eighties . .  .

‘Finally, that day of martial law is over,’ said a man who celebrated the results in front of the National Assembly .  .  .

“Lee’s win is the sign of a functioning democracy and a refutation of authoritarianism.” 

Ukraine Strikes Back

Last week Sunday, Ukraine’s military landed a significant blow when it used aerial drones to attack airbases deep inside Russia, including one in the Arctic Circle and another closer to Japan than to Ukraine.

Militaries around the world would do well to take note, commentators are warning, as Ukraine has exposed the dangerous permeability of national airspace in the drone-war era.

Drones have been a major component of both Ukrainian and Russian weaponry along the two armies’ long line of armed contact in eastern Ukraine, as Nataliya Gumenyuk recently detailed at The Atlantic and as Tim Judah recently wrote for The New York Review of Books.

Small, relatively cheap drones have become essential for surveillance, attack and even resupplying pinned-down soldiers.

One Ukrainian soldier told Gumenyuk that today, neither army would launch an offensive primarily with armored vehicles, because drones would destroy them too quickly.

It has been known for years that drones are an important component of modern warfare.

Retired NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and US Navy Admiral James Stavridis wrote in a Bloomberg op-ed in 2023 that the US and China are beefing up their arsenals for a military future that could involve swarms of small, AI-guided drones.

Sunday’s Ukrainian attacks revealed a different side of the story. The Ukrainian assault on Russia’s airbases “combined old-fashioned sabotage with the iconic weapon of the war in Ukraine,” The Economist writes.

“In doing this it illustrated two things. One is that new technology, deployed inventively, can be disproportionately lethal. The other is that the battlefield now stretches deep behind the front line, overturning the assumptions of the past quarter century.”

“By now Americans know about Ukraine’s remarkable drone strike” on Russia, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes.

“One urgent lesion beyond that conflict is that the U.S. homeland is far more vulnerable than most Americans realize .  .  . Americans are accustomed to wars fought far from home by a force of volunteers, but everyone in the U.S. will be on the front lines of the next conflict.”

Drawing the same lesson, New York Times opinion writer W.J. Hennigan (who writes about foreign policy and conflict studies) warns that the Pentagon has been slow to adapt to the prevelance of small cheap drones – a notable irony, given that the US military ushered in the drone-war era with its Predator and Reaper drones and their strikes from skies above Afghanistan and Pakistan.

US “military bases and aircraft hangars should be hardened to guard against the worst,” Hennigan writes.

“Congress is poised to set aside about US $ Dollar 1.3 billion this fiscal year for the Pentagon to develop and deploy counter-drone technologies. This is a good start. But the Pentagon’s most am bitious and expensive plans fail to address the threat.

Russia’s Show of Peace Talks Is Designed to Please Putin – and Trump

The Russian expert on Putin’s war, Alexander Baunov comments in Carnegie Politika: A Russian memorandum recently handed to Ukraine was crafted to satisfy Washington, create an illusion of progress, and allow Moscow to continue fighting (June 6).

After all, it is indeed astounding that the second round of direct Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations that took place in Istanbul on June 2 lasted just an hour.

That was significantly less than the telephone calls between Trump and Putin.

In normal practice, diplomatic contact between negotiators is usually much more intense than between heads of state.

Baunov writes that the so-called memorandum was designed to be a piece of professional diplomacy and to deliver a propaganda message for a domestic Russian audience, above all Putin himself.

It was also supposed to appeal to Trump.

Russian diplomats were, in fact, trying to satisfy the two ‘strongmen’ on both sides of the Atlantic.

They want Trump to be more enamored with Putin than with Zelensky, and they want Trump to see Putin as an ally when it comes to ending the war.

The Russian delegation succeeded in pleasing both Trump and Putin – and the latter still believes he is winning!

Ukraine’s memorandum was simpler and more internally consistent, though it also tried to please multiple audiences: the domestic public, the Europeans, and also Trump.

Baunov summarizes that the Russian memorandum makes the basis for a long, slow process of discussion, clarification, and attempts to find agreement.

And that, most importantly, “allows the Kremlin to continue waging war in Ukraine while this process unfolds.”

Israel’s Repressive Policy in the Gaza Strip

Recent news from Gaza has been disturbing, as Palestinians came under gunfire on separate occasions early last week while attempting to collect food aid.

The shootings happened at a relatively new aid-distribution site in the southern Gaza Strip, one of three set up by a US- and Israel-backed nonprofit beginning last month.

As CNN’s Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Lucas Lilieholm have reported, “The Israeli military said its forces opened fire multiple times after identifying ‘several suspects moving toward them, deviating from the designated access routes’.”

Dozens were killed and wounded.

Israel’s military said it first fired warning shots, then fired toward “a few individual suspects” who kept advancing toward Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops.

Depressing as that news may be, it comes amid a broader controversy over how aid should be distributed in Gaza, when it is allowed in.

That’s a complicated matter, given that Hamas, the local governing authority, is fighting a war with Israel and is labelled a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union (EU).

The local UN body, UNRWA, has faced accusations by Israel that staff members had participated in the October 7 brutal attacks on Israel.

One doesn’t have to look far to find allegations that Hamas steals or diverts food aid, although the UN has said there is no evidence – and has pleaded for access to Gazans when Israel has maintained a blockade (CNN/Fareed’s Global Briefing/ Chris Good, June 5).

Enter the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The US- and Israel-backed group set up controlled aid-distribution sites – two at the very south of the Gaza Strip, around Rafah, and another in central Gaza – beginning in late May, as Israel ended its most recent aid blockade.

Discussed briefly by Israel expert Dan Senor and Yedioth Ahronoth columnist Nadav Eyal on the latest episode of Senor’s ‘Call Me Back’ podcast, part of the goal is to avoid empowering Hamas and to safeguard aid delivery.

The UN and other critics have alleged that by centralizing aid at these sites – particularly in locations in southern Gaza – the distribution plan amounts to forced or incentivized displacement.

If Gazans want food, critics point out, they must move south, further away from their homes.

GHF has pushed back, saying it won’t be party to displacement and that it is proud to have delivered aid so far.

Contacted by the Zakaria/Good Global Briefing, GHF also noted plans to scale up its efforts “throughout the strip. Our top priority remains protecting the safety and dignity of those receiving aid.”

Still, in a recent New York Review of Books essay, Sari Bashi argued the current, Israel-approved aid-distribution arrangement should be considered as part of a longer story of Palestinian displacement.

Bashi wrote: “The plan to make Palestinians in Gaza accept further displacement as a condition of receiving food parcels is intertwined with another: to press them into leaving Palestine altogether .  .  .

“The Israeli far right has promised the ethnic cleansing of the Strip for decades, and the war may present a chance to make that proposal a reality.”

The current controversy is bound up with a decades-long issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Palestinian demands for “right of return” to the homes they fled back in 1948.

“Given the choice, many [Gazans] will seek asylum elsewhere,”

“International law requires Israel to let them do so .  .  .

“But they also have a right to come back .  .  .

“Well-founded skepticism of the Israeli’s government’s intention to allow return hangs heavy over individual decisions to stay or go, even as conditions worsen .  .  .

“ ‘ After more than nineteen months of forced starvation, dehydration, and displacement, we do not know how much longer we can hold on’ a Palestinian aid worker in Gaza recently told the BBC.”

The writer can be reached at:

shashipbmalla@hotmail.com