FOREIGN POLICY.
Readers paying close attention may have noted that TWOP has assigned 0minutes to covering the important foreign policy issues of Ukraine and Gaza recently. This is not because they are not important: Ukraine must be enabled to win and Israel must be prevented from liquidating the Palestinians who remain in Gaza.

What has seemed pointless was to expend effort to try to follow the constantly oscillating nonsense of US foreign policy interventions. When Trump announced that he would go to Budapest to talk to Putin after talking to him on the telephone just hours before Zelenskyy arrived in Washington, it seemed like a no-brainer that after Putin had successfully headed off Tomahawk deliveries to Kiev, Vlad would back-pedal like mad on the whole “ceasefire” possibility. So, TWOP took the principled stand of ignoring the whole thing. Today’s announcement from the White House that no summiteering is planned imminently was a gigantic yawn.

Gaza is a little trickier because a ceasefire was achieved as a result of Trump pressure on Netanyahu after the ridiculous mis-step of Israel’s attempt to blow up Hamas negotiators in Qatar. The Qataris are giving Trump a jet for heaven’s sake – that could only go one way! But TWOP’s in-depth analysis suggested that at some point Israel will find the excuse it has been looking for to re-start combat and level the rest of Gaza to rubble having (thankfully!) levered the rest of the Israeli hostages out of Hamas’s control. But the excuse will come, or be manufactured and the genocide war will get back on track. So again, no TWOP coverage.

Thank us later. Look at it as saving your time and energy.

Added on Tuesday 28th October

“Told you so’s” are always quite annoying, but edited on 29th October to say that while the Trump turnaround on meeting Putin again took only hours to materialise, the Israeli identification of an excuse to re-start the “ground war” has taken slightly longer than we thought likely on 21st October.

However, this evening (28th October) and on the grounds that some Hamas soldiers opened fire on IDF positions and the truly repugnant handover of incorrectly identified remains of dead hostages, Bibi has announced his decision “to immediately carry out forceful strikes in the Gaza Strip.” This slight delay in returning to battle suggests that the combined restraining powers of the Kushner-Witkoff-Blair axis on Israeli policy is 1) greater than expected, but 2) not enough to stop Bibi lobbing a few more missiles at Gaza….