Trump's Gaza Encore & Corporate H1-B's

Egypt nearly withdrew from the Gaza peace deal: Sisi leaned on Modi's India, a stalwart Trump ally, to compel Trump to force Netanyahu to accept the grim terms of the Gaza peace deal.

Specifically, should Netanyahu not stick to the existing Gaza peace deal, Egypt threatened to terminate plans to build a direct rail link from India to Europe.

Naturally, such a threat also became a bargaining opportunity for Sisi, and after promises made, a diplomatic and then commercial frenzy began between Egypt and India:

The Price of India's Egyptian Concessions: H1-B Flood

In his second Presidential term, Trump played it coy on H1-B's, never publicly committing, either way, to stop the H1-B replacement of native Americans in corporate work.

At the "height" of the Trump-Modi "trade war", there were gestures and some policy changes, e.g. the $100k "per visa" processing fee, that did meaningfully help gently coerce Corporate America to hire American residents or citizens instead of H1-B's.

However, domestic politics finds themselves subordinated to the needs of American capital markets, and that means strategic foreign capital inflows trump(pun intentional) domestic approval and popularity: you can re-engineer your base and survive and change in your constituency(i.e. dump white "Trump base" for a more conventional "moderate" base), but if capital markets crash, no matter how happy the "base", you are still out of power. If one observes the changing content and audience of Trump propaganda, it should become clear that the target "changed", and thus from the very top, part of the "old Trump base" found itself orphaned.

Trump Still Needs Venezuela, and Russia Still Needs Kaliningrad Railway... annnnd China Needs a New Trade Deal With Japan

Trump's commitment to end the war in Ukraine comes as part of a "greater bargain" to win Soviet (Russian, Iranian, and Chinese) support of a Gaza deal: the recent UN endorsement of the Gaza peace plan proved Trump won Soviet support.

... but Trump needs Soviet approval for integrating Venezuela into the American banking and financial system: for Russia, this comes at a price of additional Baltic concessions to Russia(namely, a Kaliningrad treaty preserving Russian control and an alternative to the "Baltic Railway" of the EU), and for China to ratify regime change in Venezuela, Trump will have to pressure Japan to make concessions to China on trade (or, "Taiwan", if one prefers the perennial pretext for Japan and China to formally begin trade talks without losing face).

Big-Picture: Trump Admin Winning in Foreign Policy But Losing Domestically

Rhyming a bit too closely with Nixon, Trump finds his administration winning in foreign policy but losing domestically: even down to finding jobs, everything has been mortgaged by Trump to guarantee his foreign policy objectives. This means things like Treasury yields and foreign exchange remain stable or even improve - the "macro" slowly begins to heal.

However, the question remains if the windfall of fresh "black money" from previously banned capital sources (money the Fed system wouldn't allow into the US economy, for political reasons) can flow quickly enough into the American economy and stimulate sufficient demand to finally boost employment, but such a discussion merits several, let alone a separate, blog post.