U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland January 26, 2018. (Photo: Reuters)

DAVOS: U.S. President Donald Trump will tell a top-level gathering of political leaders and chief executives on Friday that his administration will not tolerate intellectual property theft and trade abuses, senior U.S. administration officials said.

An official, briefing journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos, also sought to dispel any impression of disarray over the value of the dollar, saying there was no "daylight" between Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over the strength of the currency.

Trump said on Thursday he ultimately wants the dollar to be strong, lifting the greenback briefly and contradicting Mnuchin who depressed the dollar earlier when he said he was happy with its current level.

Mnuchin's comments supportive of a weaker dollar were seen by the markets as indicating a shift in U.S. policy and sent the greenback sharply lower, sparking concerns from European allies about a trade war.

"I don't think there's any daylight between the President and Secretary Mnuchin," one of the administration officials told reporters in Davos.

"I think that there were some people who took some comments that the Secretary made where he was essentially reciting and explaining in descriptive manner a basic economic principle and took it to represent ... some sort of policy announcement or shift."

"When you go back and look at the transcript of what he said, it was quite clear that that was not the case."

Trump is due to give the main closing address at the forum in Davos, where outright and veiled criticism of his America First agenda captured headlines ahead of the president's arrival on Thursday.

That agenda has included unilateral trade sanctions andthreats of more action, particularly against China.

"The United States will no longer tolerate things like thetheft of intellectual property or forced technology transfers orindustrial subsidies ... and dumping, trade abuses," the U.S.official told reporters in Davos.

Trump was due to give his speech at 1300 GMT.

The official said Trump's stance on trade should be viewedless as a warning than an explanation of his commitment to theinternational trading system and enforcing "rules of the road".

Trump is the first sitting U.S. president to visit theannual summit since Bill Clinton in 2000. He was greeted onarrival on Thursday by hundreds of curious delegates who snappedpictures as he entered the congress centre.

He made an immediate impression: apart from talking up the dollar, he threatened to withhold aid to Palestinians unless they pursued peace with Israel.

But the thrust of his visit has been to convince businessleaders to step up investment in the United States.

"A lot of people are coming back to the United States. Weare seeing tremendous investment and today has been a veryexciting day. Very great day and great for our country. Thankyou very much," Trump told reporters in Davos on Thursday.

After meeting the prime ministers of Britain and Israel on Thursday, Trump hosted a dinner with leaders of some of the world's largest firms, including Nestle, SAP and Siemens, Deloitte and Bayer.

Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality TV star, hadnever been invited to Davos before. He basked in the praise ofseveral executives, who applauded his tax cuts.

Two European executives told Reuters they were staying awayfrom the dinner because they did not want to shake Trump's hand.One of them consulted with his wife and children before decidingto dine elsewhere.

Those who showed up were treated to a meal of grilled beeftenderloin with green pea puree or fried Swiss pike perch withpurple carrot puree.

Trump gave each corporate leader an opportunity to describetheir businesses briefly. Many mentioned the corporate tax cutsthat Trump pushed through the U.S. Congress late last year as apositive sign of growth and investment, according to a Reutersreporter who was present.

His speech on Friday will follow a week of warnings byEuropean leaders on the dangers of nationalism, isolationism andprotectionism.

Without naming Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel evokedthe build-up to the two world wars and openly questioned whetherleaders had learned the lessons from those 20th centuryconflicts.

Before his trip to Davos, Trump imposed 30 percent tariffson imported solar panels, among the first unilateral traderestrictions made by the administration as part of a broaderprotectionist agenda.

Trump later told CNBC in an interview that he supported astrong dollar and expected the currency to rise.

"The dollar is going to get stronger and stronger andultimately I want to see a strong dollar," he said, adding thatMnuchin's comments had been misinterpreted.

There is broad concern in European capitals that 2018 couldbe the year Trump's 'America First' bark on trade turns into bite, as he considers punitive measures on steel and threatens to end the 90s-era North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

Policymakers have been openly critical of his foreign policybut with the U.S. stock market soaring, corporate tax cutspadding companies' pockets and U.S. consumers spending again,some companies here are quietly applauding the U.S. president.

Trump used a TV appearance from Davos to laud America'srelationship with Britain and sought to smooth over a recentbilateral spat caused by his retweeting of anti-Muslim videosoriginally posted by a leader of a far-right group.</s>(CNN) At first glance, a gathering of global elites focused on the world community -- in Switzerland, no less! -- would not seem like the sort of crowd with which Donald Trump would like to fraternize.

After all, Trump spent the entirety of the 2016 campaign promising to put "America First" and "Make America Great Again." He's pursued a similar agenda in the White House, insisting international trade deals involving the United States need to be re-examined and pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accords.

And yet, Trump -- and a number of his senior aides -- is at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a visit that will culminate Friday morning (8 a.m. Eastern Time) when Trump addresses the WEF delegates.

Remember that Trump's frame on the world, the lens through which he sees everything, is that of him on the outside looking in. His father was a major developer in Queens, not Manhattan. When Trump himself brought the business to Manhattan, the old money elites in the city never accepted this brash youngster. When Trump came to Washington in 2011 thinking about running for president, the political world laughed -- literally -- at him.

For Trump, then, Davos is another club that never wanted him, but now can't refuse him. It's a chance to rub the noses of the global elite in the fact that he won (even though they all thought he was a joke) and that his "America First" message is working -- as evidenced by the surging stock market and companies moving jobs back to the United States. (Chances of an Electoral College mention in Trump's speech? 50-50.)

Trump, probably, won't do any major rubbing it in during his speech. Previews of the address focus on the fact that "America First" doesn't mean "America only."

This is Trump, of course, so a bit of off-prompter freelancing is always a possibility -- particularly when he knows he has the eyes of the world on him.</s>Donald Trump has apologised for retweeting far-right campaigners who are accused of inciting religious hatred in Kent.

The US president hit the headlines for sharing three videos posted by deputy leader Jayda Fransen, which showed Muslims in a "derogatory" light.

Fransen, alongside Britain First leader Paul Golding, have recently appeared in court in relation to their campaign surrounding the rape of a girl in Thanet above a takeaway shop.

But in an interview with journalist Piers Morgan, a co-presenter on Good Morning Britain, he said he knew "nothing" about Britain First when he shared their tweets in November.

"If you are telling me they're horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologise if you'd like me to do that," he told Mr Morgan.

When asked if he was endorsing racists, Trump said: "I don’t know who they are, I know nothing about them, so I wouldn’t be doing that.

"I am, as I say often, the least racist person that anybody’s going to meet.

"I knew nothing about them. They had I guess a couple of depictions of radical Islamic terror.

"Radical Islamic terror, whether you like talking about it or not Piers, it’s a fact."

At the time, Fransen appeared to be delighted with the retweets, saying: "The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has retweeted three of deputy leader Jayda Fransen's Twitter videos!

"Donald Trump himself has retweeted these videos and has around 44 million followers! God bless you Trump! God bless America!"

Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding will stand trial at Folkestone Magistrates’ Court on Monday (January 29).

Trump's interview with Piers Morgan will be broadcast on Sunday, January 28 at 10pm on ITV.</s>Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Trump: "I don't know that [peace talks] will ever take place"

US President Donald Trump has threatened to halt aid to the Palestinians if they do not agree to take part in peace talks.

The state department confirmed he was talking about aid for economic and security assistance.

Mr Trump accused the Palestinians of "disrespecting" the US, and said: "Why should we do something for them when they do nothing for us?"

The Palestinians have rejected the US as a neutral broker in peace talks.

They are furious at Washington's controversial decision in December to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Former Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said of the US president's latest comments: "Trump could buy many things with his money, but he won't be able to buy the dignity of our nation."

Why the focus on Palestinian aid?

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland, Mr Trump said the US gives the Palestinians "hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and support" a year.

He chastised the Palestinian leadership for "disrespecting... our great Vice-President" Mike Pence by refusing to meet with him in the region earlier in the week.

And he said he was the first US president to link the issue of aid funding to the peace process.

"That money is on the table and it's not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace," he said, sitting beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace and they're [the Palestinians] going to have to want to make peace too or we're going to have nothing to do with it any longer."

Image copyright EPA Image caption Mr Trump accused Palestinian leaders of "disrespecting" US Vice-President Mike Pence

The US announced earlier this month that it was withholding more than half of a tranche of funding for the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, amounting to about $65m (£46m).

But the US state department later confirmed this was not the aid Mr Trump was referring too. He was instead talking about bilateral funding for economic support and some security training.

US bilateral aid to the Palestinians amounted to $260m in 2016. By contrast, Israel receives more than $3bn in military aid per year from the US.

Aid as a bargaining tool

Barbara Plett Usher, BBC News, State Department Correspondent

This seems to be the first time the White House has used aid as a bargaining chip to try to force the Palestinians to negotiate peace.

It's one way to "shake things up" in hopes of getting people "back to the table," according to the state department spokesperson Heather Nauert.

There would be at least a tremor if the US withheld the bilateral aid. Most of it goes to economic development projects, though some is also used to train security forces.

But the practical outcome of Mr Trump's statement might be limited. Israel needs the PA to run the occupied territories and may counsel against weakening it. Politically this has made the Palestinians even more adamant about rejecting sole US leadership of any peace talks.

Mr Trump's manoeuvre has also underscored the failure of President Mahmoud Abbas, who staked everything on the US-led process and now might have less than nothing to show for it. Perhaps this will be what it takes to "shake up" the ossified Palestinian leadership.

What about the peace process?

The US president said his administration had a "proposal for peace" that was "a great proposal for the Palestinians" and suggested Israel was prepared to make some concessions.

"You won one point," he said to Mr Netanyahu, referring to Jerusalem, "and you'll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place."

But he added: "I don't know that they [peace talks] will ever take place."

The last round of on-off peace talks between the two sides collapsed amid acrimony in April 2014.

What did Trump say about Jerusalem?

Mr Trump stood by his decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a move that broke with decades of a US policy of neutrality on the issue and put it out of step with the rest of the international community.

He told Mr Netanyahu: "Israel has always supported the United States so what I did with Jerusalem was my honour."

And he reiterated his view that by taking "Jerusalem off the [negotiating] table... we don't have to talk about it any more" - suggesting it could move forward the peace process.

"They [the Palestinians] never got past Jerusalem," he said.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Why the ancient city of Jerusalem is so important

The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel regards Jerusalem as its "eternal and undivided" capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem - occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war - as the capital of a future state.

What do the Palestinians say?

The Palestinian ambassador to the US said they were not being "disrespectful of anybody... we were just respectful of our rights and defending our internationally endorsed rights".

Dr Husam Zomlot admitted that the lack of US aid would "directly affect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent, vulnerable people all over the region".

But, he told the BBC, "financial pressure for coercive political agendas does not work.. especially when our position is supported by the international community".

He said Mr Trump had not just "taken Jerusalem off the table, he has taken the table altogether". He called for an international table "that can actually deliver us where we want to go".

Mr Abbas has dismissed previous threats by Mr Trump to cut US aid as "blackmail". He has also said he would not accept any peace plan proposed by the US.

Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused Donald Trump of "blackmail" over past threats to cut US aid

What does Israel say?

Prime Minister Netanyahu was effusive in his praise of Mr Trump over his decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

"By recognising history, you've made history, and we will always remember that," he told the US president.

He later told a meeting at Davos that "under any peace agreement the capital of Israel will continue to be in Jerusalem".

He also said that "the Palestinians should have all the power to govern themselves but none of the power to threaten us".

"In any political arrangement the Jews must retain security control in the area, because otherwise you'll have [the Islamic State group] ... We have a mosaic of failed states in the Middle East, and we don't want another one," he continued.

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Deng Guilian wasn't planning on going back to work _ until her husband was arrested while investigating Ivanka Trump's Chinese suppliers. She took a job at a local karaoke parlor. Now she gets three days off a month to see her two young children.

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(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik). Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., speaks to reporters following a Senate policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018.

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(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta). President Donald Trump waves as he leaves the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018, enroute to Davos, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum. Trump is ready to play salesman as he heads to an econ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on plans to change the immigration system (all times local):

The White House has unveiled a proposal that provides a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million young immigrants living in the country illegally, in exchange for new restrictions on legal immigration and $25 billion in border security.

The plan is being applauded by some in Congress, but blasted by conservative activists as "amnesty," and slammed by a slew of Democrats, who accuse President Donald Trump of holding "Dreamers" hostage to his hard-line immigration agenda.

Senior White House officials are casting the plan as a centrist compromise that could win support from both parties and enough votes to pass the Senate. But it comes with a long list of concessions that many Democrats, and conservative Republicans, especially in the House, may find impossible to swallow.

The White House says President Donald Trump is proposing to provide a path to citizenship for 1.8 million younger immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The plan is likely to get a mixed reaction on Capitol Hill.

Senior White House officials are offering a preview of Trump's immigration framework, casting it as a compromise that could pass the Senate.

Trump's plan would dramatically scale back family-based migration, limiting it to spouses and underage children, and eliminate the visa lottery program.

It would also include $25 billion for a border wall - and unspecified billions more for additional immigration enforcement measures.

The officials are speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss the plan before its release.

Democrats say they are heartened by President Donald Trump's support for an immigration plan that would provide a pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants.

But Republicans are being more cautious.

Moderate West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin said he's "very encouraged" by Trump's surprising words.

Among Republicans, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said he supports the citizenship pathway Trump described.

Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota called Trump's words "positive" and said Trump's description "gives us a better sense" of his views but added, "We have a long way to go yet."

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>Sitting in a chair across from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting last September, President Donald Trump was sober in his comments. The dispute between Israel and the Palestinians had gone on for far too long, he said, and U.S. officials had failed repeatedly to facilitate a Mideast peace deal that would end the conflict permanently. The Israeli and Palestinian people, Trump said, deserve much better than the status quo that’s held for decades. “I will do everything within my heart and within my soul to get that deal made,” Trump confided to Abbas during a cameo with reporters. “For so many years, I’ve been hearing about peace between Israel and the Palestinians…we’re going to see what we can do.”

At points during Trump’s first year in White House, it appeared that the mercurial, unconventional, scattershot real estate tycoon might just be able to hammer out the “ultimate deal.” He discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (or lack thereof) in somewhat magical terms, all but daydreaming about what a peace agreement would look like in the many interviews he gave as a Republican presidential candidate. During an MSNBC town hall at the beginning of the GOP presidential primary, Trump refused to be goaded into saying what party was at fault for the moribund peace process, telling Joe Scarborough that it wouldn’t help if he started to assign blame. “Let me be sort of a neutral guy,” Trump remarked. Months earlier, he even caused a minor political kerfuffle by questioning whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was really interested in a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Marco Rubio, who at the time was still viewed in Republican political circles as a potential president, was quick to exploit the comment, suggesting that Trump was putting Israel on the same playing field as its enemies.

Up until last fall, Abbas bought into the Trump-as-the-ultimate-dealmaker mystique. After the longtime Palestinian politician met the president at the White House for the first time in May of last year, Abbas all but declared that Trump was the only one who could salvage the two-state solution: “we believe that we can be partners…to bring about a historic peace treaty under your stewardship,” he said.

Whatever good will and mutual trust that existed between the two men is now gone. Nine months is an eternity in international politics, and even longer on matters related to the Holy Land. Abbas is now denouncing Trump as the man who killed the Oslo process for good. The Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a commonsense step to many American peace negotiators who have long argued that Western Jerusalem would be given to Israel in a final status agreement anyway, was seen by Abbas as a slap in the face to Palestinian national aspirations. The same man who talked about a rosy relationship with a new American administration in 2017 is, in the first weeks of 2018, attacking that same administration as extremely biased and hostile towards the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The Palestinian national leadership is by all indications done interacting with Washington on the peace file. If there is to be a peace process with Israel, Abbas has made it vocally clear that the Trump administration cannot be the one to manage it. Vice President Mike Pence’s recent trip to Israel, during which he fiercely defended the president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, was taken as further affirmation by Israeli-Arab lawmakers and Palestinian officials that Washington is contributing to the problem. What Pence has called a commonsense move—“The United States,” he said, “has chosen fact over fiction, and fact is the only true foundation for a just and lasting peace”—has been castigated by supporters of the two-state solution as another body blow to peace talks.

Trump has his own grievances, most of which are not new in Washington circles. The White House is puzzled beyond belief as to why the Palestinian Authority continues to grant stipends from its national budget to prisoners who have been locked up in Israeli jails for terrorist attacks. Mideast peace takes a notorious amount of patience, and Trump is not exactly into the whole patience thing; he sees little reason why the U.S. should continue to send hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to the PA if it isn’t interested in participating in a dialogue with Israel. Indeed, two weeks after Trump rang in the new year with two tweets describing the Palestinians as all talk and no action, the administration suspended a $65 million payment to the U.N. agency responsible for caring for the five million Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the region. State Department assurances that the aid freeze is not designed to punish the PA will be scant comfort to Abbas given Trump’s previous remarks.

The $64,000 question is how relations between Washington and Ramallah have disintegrated so rapidly. At least some fault lies with the PA, an organization dominated by old men past their prime who have proven over the years to be much more interested in blaming Israel for every conceivable ill than going back to the negotiating room. The Israelis share blame as well: with every house constructed on a West Bank settlement or East Jerusalem neighborhood and every resolution Netanyahu’s party passes, peace is dealt another setback. The Trump administration’s fault lies in the uncensored bluster of its president and a belief that using American aid as a stick will be enough of a sharp object to scare Abbas into U.S.-sponsored peace talks. The absence of a comprehensive peace plan from the White House, despite hundreds of meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials and a year of listening sessions, hasn’t helped either.

So, here we are, over two years after Donald Trump the candidate promised to do everything in his power to solve a problem that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, has been able to solve. It may be that 2018 ends up being historic—the year the last bit of oxygen keeping the two-state solution alive in the discussion is let out of the tank and the idea of a Palestinian state is suffocated to death.

Daniel R. DePetris is a foreign policy analyst, a columnist at Reuters, and a frequent contributor to The American Conservative.</s>When U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May returned to the grandeur of the British Embassy on Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue in January last year, her aides had no idea how spectacularly awry her visit to U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House had gone.

Debriefing her advisers, May remembered something: “Oh, yes,” she said. “He did hold my hand at one point.” Already fearful of the political fallout at home from getting too close to Trump, the astonished officials asked if the incident had been captured on camera. “Yes, I think so,” May replied, according to people present.

The resulting image, splashed on British front pages, came to define her visit, the first by a foreign leader after Trump’s inauguration. What May’s entourage couldn’t have predicted is that the gaffe would also turn out to be the high point in the first year of the latest incarnation of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K.

Just under 12 months later, the two are due to meet in Davos at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, and there’s unlikely to be any hand-holding. In that time, the alliance first coined by Winston Churchill and famously nurtured by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s has become increasingly dysfunctional and at its least cordial in decades.

The transatlantic ties are critical to May’s administration, while just convenient for Trump. The U.K. needs to forge new trade partnerships after leaving the European Union. The U.S. wants to reconfigure some of its relationships to protect American companies.

Rather than a tighter bond, a promised state visit and a future trade deal, Trump and May have clashed repeatedly in public-over intelligence leaks after a terrorist attack in Manchester, the Iran nuclear deal, and most dramatically after the president tweeted a message from a British far-right anti-Muslim campaigner.

“As the U.K. negotiates its departure from the EU it wants to be able to emphasize its Atlantic relationship,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The problem is the Trump administration is not providing the U.K. with that balance.”

Many of the current and former officials interviewed for this article asked for anonymity to speak candidly about the uneasy political aspect of the alliance, which is a sensitive matter on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Trump upended the world order by winning the presidency in November 2016, few leaders felt the vibrations as much as May. The soon-to-be U.S. president had supported Brexit and suggested making his supporter and her political rival, anti-EU campaigner Nigel Farage, the new British ambassador to Washington.

Her officials dismissed it. Matters worsened when it emerged that Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May’s co-chiefs of staff, had publicly ridiculed Trump as “a chump” on Twitter before they entered government and urged their colleagues to shun his team. The pair set off on a secret trip to the U.S. to rescue the alliance. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson followed and soon after May arranged to visit the U.S.

Trump was clearly pleased with the idea. “She’ll be my Maggie,” he reportedly told his aides, referring to Reagan and Thatcher.

In London, Hill was especially keen to keep Trump close. She argued that a strong alliance with America was just what Britain needed in order to make a success of Brexit. The prospect of accelerating a trade agreement with the U.S. was a major goal for the U.K.

Hill and Timothy planned May’s trip to the White House and took up the idea of offering the president a state visit in return, the highest honor that Britain can give a foreign leader. It would involve the president and first lady staying with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and attending a state banquet in his honor. May’s team believed such treatment would appeal to Trump’s vanity.

Senior diplomats and the U.K. security services had other ideas, according to some accounts. They wanted May to keep her distance from Trump until he had been office for longer, two people familiar with the matter said. However, one person involved doesn’t recall much internal disagreement.

“It was clear to me and others at the time that an offer of a state visit to President Trump was over the top and unnecessary,” said Katie Perrior, who served as May’s communications director until last June’s U.K. election was called. “Senior diplomats and civil servants both in the U.K. and U.S. raised their concerns through formal and informal routes, warning against rushing into it-and were ignored.”

Ultimately the offer was made. Shortly before May was due to leave the embassy for the White House, an urgent message arrived from from the palace. It said that the queen had agreed to invite Trump and his wife. May’s officials hastily re-wrote her impending statement moments before her motorcade left for the White House to include the invitation.

Over a meal of blue cheese salad and beef ribs in the White House banqueting room, Trump held forth on a wide range of topics. “The president had strong views on all of them,” recalls Chris Wilkins, then May’s strategy director, who was among the aides around the table. “He said Brexit’s going to be the making of us. It’s going to be a brilliant thing.”

Trump turned to May and told her he believed there were parts of London that were effectively “no-go areas” due to the number of Islamic extremists. May chose to speak up to “correct him,” Wilkins said.

Trump also discussed his British golf courses and his hopes that the relationship with May would be stronger than the Thatcher-Reagan alliance. “It was an hour of the president holding court and the PM being very diplomatic and not many other people saying anything,” Wilkins said.

It shows the contrast in personalities that make for an unusual relationship, albeit one still underpinned by enduring strategic military cooperation and cultural links. As one British official observed, Trump is a larger than life character and May is almost the complete opposite.

During formal phone calls between the two leaders, May finds it almost impossible to make headway and get her points across, one person familiar with the matter said. Trump totally dominates the discussion, leaving the prime minister with five or 10 seconds to speak before he interrupts and launches into another monologue.

In one phone conversation during 2017, Trump complained to May over the criticism he’d been getting in British newspapers. Amid warnings that Trump would face protests in the streets when he arrived, he told the prime minister he would not be coming to the U.K. until she could promise him a warm welcome.
• Trump blames ‘bad deal’ for London trip cancellation, but Brits think they scared him away
• Leonid Bershidsky: The EU has completely turned the tables on a scrambling Britain

May responded to say such treatment was simply the way the British press operate, and there wasn’t much she could do. In the secure bunker underneath the prime minister’s office, her advisers listened in to the call in astonishment at Trump’s demand.

British officials suspect Trump’s displeasure still lingers. The president canceled a planned trip to London next month for the official opening of the new U.S. embassy building. He claimed he disapproved of a deal to sell the old U.S. diplomatic headquarters. Some in May’s team now regret their “nightmare” decision to offer Trump a state visit.While the offer of a state visit still stands, British officials don’t expect him to take it up any time soon, or perhaps ever.

“The relationship has taken some knocks,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the U.S. “But there is so much substance to the relationship-commercial, defense, intelligence, foreign policy, cyber, culture, language and shared values-that we all have an interest in ensuring that it remains strong.”

Even if May and Trump patch things up on the slopes of Davos, there’s a cloud on the horizon: another royal invitation.

This time it’s to the wedding of the queen’s grandson, Prince Harry, and American actor Meghan Markle. None has been forthcoming. But if Trump does make it, at least he might know some of the possible guests: Prince Harry’s famous friends include Barack and Michelle Obama.</s>The presidency of Donald Trump has seen yet another unexpected and 'unpresidented' development. Trump said he is willing to apologise. For a tweet. His offer of an apology came with the explanation that he did not know who he was retweeted, when he retweeted incendiary anti-Muslim posts from a leader of far-right, hyper-nationalist British group.

The US President's offer of apology came in an interview with British television personality Piers Morgan on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Uncharacteristic statement from Donald Trump at an event that was uncharacteristic of him to attend.

"It (his retweet) was done because I am a big believer in fighting radical Islam terror, this was a depiction of radical Islamic terror," he said, adding that he "knew nothing" about Britain First, whose deputy leader Jayda Fransen.

"If you're telling me they're horrible people, horrible racist people, I would certainly apologize if you would like me to do that," Trump said, actually stopping short of delivering the apology.

"I am the least racist person that anybody is going to meet. Certainly, I wasn't endorsing anybody," Trump claimed.

Trump's retweets of the videos posted by Fransen sparked global outrage. Fransen had reacted, expressing happiness that her tweets had now been passed on to Trump's 44 million followers.

The video clips Fransen tweeted however were dismissed as hoaxes.

It would be safe to call Trump's offer of an apology a first. The combative US president has often taken to Twitter to air his grievances and say things that are quite often vastly at odds with what his own cabinet and officials say. Through all of this, Trump has never backed down from criticism of his Twitter activity.

At the time, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders had defended Trump's retweets saying it was his way of starting a conversation about border security and immigration.</s>The British government says US President Donald Trump will visit the UK this year.</s>As 2017 ended with billionaires toasting their tax cuts and energy executives cheering their unfettered access to federal lands as well as coastal waters, there was one sector of the American elite that did not share in the champagne celebration: Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts. Across the political spectrum, many of them felt a deep foreboding for the country’s global future under the leadership of President Donald Trump.

In a year-end jeremiad, for instance, conservative CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria blasted the “Trump administration’s foolish and self-defeating decision to abdicate the United States’ global influence — something that has taken more than 70 years to build.” The great “global story of our times,” he continued, is that “the creator, upholder, and enforcer of the existing international system is withdrawing into self-centered isolation,” opening a power vacuum that will be filled by illiberal powers like China, Russia, and Turkey.

The editors of the New York Times remarked ruefully that the president’s “boastfulness and belligerence and tendency to self-aggrandizement are not only costing America worldwide support, but also isolating it.” Discarding the polite bipartisanship of Washington’s top diplomats, Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, ripped Trump for dumping “principled leadership — the foundation of American foreign policy since World War II” — for an “America first” stance that will only “embolden rivals and weaken ourselves.”

Yet no matter how sharp or sweeping, such criticism can’t begin to take in the full scope of the damage the Trump White House is inflicting on the system of global power Washington built and carefully maintained over those 70 years. Indeed, American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they no longer remember how they got there. Few among Washington’s foreign policy elite seem to fully grasp the complex system that made U.S. global power what it now is, particularly its all-important geopolitical foundations. As Trump travels the globe, tweeting and trashing away, he’s inadvertently showing us the essential structure of that power, the same way a devastating wildfire leaves the steel beams of a ruined building standing starkly above the smoking rubble.

The architecture of the world order that Washington built after World War II was not only formidable but, as Trump is teaching us almost daily, surprisingly fragile. At its core, that global system rested upon a delicate duality: an idealistic community of sovereign nations equal under the rule of international law joined tensely, even tenuously, to an American imperium grounded in the realpolitik of its military and economic power. In concrete terms, think of this duality as the State Department versus the Pentagon.

At the end of World War II, the United States invested its prestige in forming an international community that would promote peace and shared prosperity through permanent institutions, including the United Nations (1945), the International Monetary Fund (1945), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947), the predecessor to the World Trade Organization. To govern such a world order through the rule of law, Washington also helped establish the International Court of Justice at The Hague and would later promote both human rights and women’s rights.

On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus — military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine — to grimly advance its own global dominion. At its core was an unmatched military that (thanks to hundreds of overseas bases) circled the globe, the most formidable nuclear arsenal on the planet, massive air and naval forces, and an unparalleled array of client armies. In addition, to maintain its military superiority, the Pentagon massively promoted scientific research, producing incessant innovation that would lead, among so many other things, to the world’s first system of global telecommunications satellites, which effectively added space to its apparatus for exercising global power.

Complementing all this steel was the salve of an active worldwide diplomatic corps, working to promote close bilateral ties with allies like Australia and Britain and multilateral alliances like NATO, SEATO, and the Organization of American States. In the process, it distributed economic aid to nations new and old. Protected by such global hegemony and helped by multilateral trade pacts hammered out in Washington, America’s multinational corporations competed profitably in international markets throughout the Cold War.

Adding another dimension to its global power was a clandestine fourth tierthat involved global surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) and covert operations on five continents by the Central Intelligence Agency. In this way, with remarkable regularity and across vast expanses of the globe, Washington manipulated elections and promoted coups to insure that whoever led a country on our side of the Iron Curtain would remain part of a reliable set of subordinate elites, friendly to and subservient to the U.S.

In ways that to this day few observers fully appreciate, this massive apparatus of global power also rested on geopolitical foundations of extraordinary strength. As Oxford historian John Darwin explained in his sweeping history of Eurasian empires over the past 600 years, Washington achieved its “colossal Imperium… on an unprecedented scale” by becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia” through its military bases and mutual security pacts.

While Washington defended its European axial point through NATO, its position in the east was secured by four mutual defense pacts running down the Pacific littoral from Japan and South Korea through the Philippines to Australia. All of this was, in turn, tied together by successive arcs of steel that ringed the vast Eurasian continent — strategic bombers, ballistic missiles, and massive naval fleets in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Pacific. In the latest addition to this apparatus, the U.S. has built a string of 60 drone bases around the Eurasian landmass from Sicily to Guam.

In the decade before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, there were already signs that this awesome apparatus was on a long-term trajectory of decline, even if the key figures in a Washington shrouded in imperial hubris preferred to ignore that reality. Not only has the new president’s maladroit diplomacy accelerated this trend, but it has illuminated it in striking ways.

Over the past half-century, the American share of the global economy has, for instance, fallen from 40% in 1960 to 22% in 2014 to just 15% in 2017 (as measured by the realistic index of purchasing power parity). Many experts now agree that China will surpass the U.S., in absolute terms, as the world’s number one economy within a decade.

As its global economic dominance fades, its clandestine instruments of power have been visibly weakening as well. The NSA’s worldwide surveillance of a remarkable array of foreign leaders, as well as millions of the inhabitants of their countries, was once a relatively cost-effective instrument for the exercise of global power. Now, thanks in part to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the agency’s snooping and the anger of targeted allies, the political costs have risen sharply. Similarly, during the Cold War, the CIA manipulated dozens of major elections worldwide. Now, the situation has been reversed with Russia using its sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities to interfere in the 2016 American presidential campaign — a clear sign of Washington’s waning global power.

Most striking of all, Washington now faces the first sustained challenge to its geopolitical position in Eurasia. By opting to begin constructing a “new silk road,” a trillion-dollar infrastructure of railroads and oil pipelines across that vast continent, and preparing to build naval bases in the Arabian and South China seas, Beijing is mounting a sustained campaign to undercut Washington’s long dominance over Eurasia.

During just 12 months in office, Donald Trump has accelerated this decline by damaging almost all the key components in the intricate architecture of American global power.

If all great empires require skilled leadership at their epicenter to maintain what is always a fragile global equilibrium, then the Trump administration has failed spectacularly. As the State Department is eviscerated and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson discredited, Trump has — uniquely for an American president — taken sole control of foreign policy (with the generals he appointed to key civilian posts in tow).

How, then, do those who have been in close contact with him in this period assess his intellectual ability to adapt to such a daunting role?

Although since his election campaign Trump has repeatedly bragged about his excellent education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as a qualification for office, he started there in the late 1960s thinking he already knew everything about business, prompting his marketing professor, who taught for more than 30 years, to brand him “the dumbest goddamstudent I ever had.” That brash unwillingness to learn carried into the presidential campaign. As political consultant Sam Nunberg, sent to tutor the candidate on the Constitution, reported, “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before… his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

As Michael Wolff has recounted in his bestselling new book on the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, a few months later, at the close of a phone conversation with the president-elect about the complexities of the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants, media mogul Rupert Murdoch hung up and said, “What a fucking idiot.” And last July, as no one is likely to forget, after a top-secret Pentagon briefing for the White House principals on worldwide military operations, Secretary of State Tillerson seconded that view by privately labeling the president a “fucking moron.”

“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns,” one White House aide wrote in an email, according to Wolff. “Trump won’t read anything; not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up half-way through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh claimed that dealing with the president was “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

Those qualities of mind are amply evident in the administration’s recent National Security Strategy report, a vacuous document that wavers between the misguided and the delusional. “When I came into office,” Trump (or at least whoever was impersonating him) writes darkly in a personal preface, “rogue regimes were developing nuclear weapons… to threaten the entire planet. Radical Islamist terror groups were flourishing… Rival powers were aggressively undermining American interests around the globe… Unfair burden-sharing with our allies and inadequate investment in our own defense had invited danger.”

In just 12 short months, however, the president — so “his” preface indicates — had singlehandedly saved the country from almost certain destruction. “We are rallying the world against the rogue regime in North Korea and… the dictatorship in Iran, which those determined to pursue a flawed nuclear deal had neglected,” that preface continues in a typically Trumpian celebration of self. “We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East… to help drive out terrorists and extremists… America’s allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances… We are making historic investments in the United States military.”

Reflecting his administration’s well-documented difficulties with the truth, almost every one of those statements is either inaccurate, incomplete, or irrelevant. Setting aside such details, the document itself reflects the way the president (and his generals) have abandoned decades of confident leadership of the international community and are now trying to retreat from “an extraordinarily dangerous world” into a veritable Festung America behind concrete walls and tariff barriers — in some eerie way conceptually reminiscent of the Atlantic Wall of beachfront bunkers Hitler’s Third Reich constructed for its failed Festung Europa (Fortress Europe). But beyond such an obviously myopic foreign policy agenda, there are vast areas, largely overlooked in Trump’s strategy, that remain critical for the overall maintenance of American global power.

All you have to do is note headlines in the daily media over the past year to grasp that Washington’s world dominion is crumbling, thanks to the sorts of cascading setbacks that often accompany imperial decline. Consider the first seven days of December, when the New York Times reported (without connecting the dots) that nation after nation was pulling away from Washington. First, there was Egypt, a country which had received $70 billion in U.S. aid over the previous 40 years and was now opening its military bases to Russian jet fighters; then, despite President Obama’s assiduous courtship of the country, Myanmar was evidently moving ever closer to Beijing; meanwhile, Australia, America’s stalwart ally for the last 100 years, was reported to be adapting its diplomacy, however reluctantly, to accommodate China’s increasingly dominant power in Asia; and finally, there was the foreign minister of Germany, that American bastion in Europe since 1945, pointingoh-so-publicly to a widening divide with Washington on key policy issues and insisting that clashes will be inevitable and relations “will never be the same.”

And that’s just to scratch the surface of one week’s news without even touching on the kinds of ruptures with allies regularly being ignited or emphasized by the president’s daily tweets. Just three examples from many will do: President Peña Nieto’s cancelation of a state visit after a tweet that Mexico had to pay for Trump’s prospective “big, fat, beautiful wall” on the border between the two countries; outrage from British leaders sparked by the president’s retweet of racist anti-Muslim videos posted on a Twitter account by the deputy leader of a neo-Nazi political group in that country, followed by his rebuke of British Prime Minister Theresa May for criticizing him over it; or his New Year’s Day blast accusing Pakistan of “nothing but lies & deceit” as a prelude to cutting off U.S. aid to that country. Considering all the diplomatic damage, you could say that Trump is tweeting while Rome burns.

Since there are only 40 to 50 nations with enough wealth to play even a regional, much less a global role on this planet of ours, alienating or losing allies at such a rate could soon leave Washington largely friendless — something President Trump found out in December when he defied numerous U.N. resolutions by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The White House soon got a 14-1 reprimand from the Security Council, with close allies like the Germans and the French voting against Washington. This came after U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley had ominously warned that “the U.S. will be taking names” to punish countries that dared vote against it and Trump had threatened to cut aid to those that did. The General Assembly promptly voted128 to 9 (with 35 abstentions), to condemn the recognition — eloquent testimony to Washington’s waning international influence.

Next, let’s consider the “historic investments” in a central pillar in the architecture of American global power, the U.S. military, mentioned in Trump’s National Security Strategy. Don’t be distracted by the proposed whopping 10% increase in the Pentagon budget to fund new aircraft and warships, much of which will go directly into the pockets of giant defense contractors. Focus instead on what once would have been inconceivable in Washington: that the proposed Trump budget would slash funding for basic research in strategic areas like “artificial intelligence” likely to become critical for automated weapons systems within a decade.

In effect, the president and his team, distracted by visions of shimmering ships and shiny planes (with their predictable staggering future cost overruns), are ready to ditch the basics of global dominion: the relentless scientific research that has long been the cutting edge of U.S. military supremacy. And by expanding the Pentagon while slashing the State Department, Trump is also destabilizing that delicate duality of U.S. power by skewing foreign policy ever more toward costly military solutions (that have proved anything but actual solutions).

Starting on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump has also hammered away at another pillar of American power, attacking the system of global commerce and multilateral trade pacts that have long advantaged the country’s transnational corporations. Not only did he cancel the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which promised to direct 40% of world trade away from China and toward the United States, but he’s threatened to void the free-trade pact with South Korea and has been so insistent on recrafting NAFTA to serve his “America first” agenda that ongoing negotiations may well fail.

As serious as all that might be, Trump revealed the deepest damage he was capable of doing to the geopolitical foundations of the country’s global power in two key moments on his trips to Europe and Asia last year. In both places, he signaled his willingness to deliver hammer blows to Washington’s position at those strategic axial ends of Eurasia.

During a visit to NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels in May, he chastised European allies, whose leaders reportedly listened “stone-faced,” for failing to pay their “fair share” of the military costs of the alliance and, while he was at it, refused to reaffirm NATO’s core principle of collective defense. Despite later attempts to ameliorate the damage, that sent shudders across Europe and for good reason. It signaled the end of more than three-quarters of a century of unchallenged, unquestioned American supremacy there.

Then, at an Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Vietnam in November, the president launched “a tirade” against multilateral trade agreements and insisted that he would always “put America first.” It was as if, in an Asia in which China was rising fast, he were again announcing that Washington’s post-World War II supremacy was an artifact of history. Appropriately enough, at that same meeting, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing the TPP agreement he had so symbolically rejected — and did so without the United States. “The U.S. has lost its leadership role,” commented Jayant Menon, an economist at the Asian Development Bank. “And China is quickly replacing it.”

Under Trump, in fact, Washington’s close relations with three key Pacific allies continue to weaken in visible ways. During a courtesy phone call upon taking office, Trump gratuitously insulted Australia’s prime minister, an act that only highlighted that country’s mounting alienation from the U.S. and a growing inclination to shift its primary strategic alliance toward China. In recent polls when asked what country they preferred as a primary ally, 43% of all Australians chose China — a once-unimaginable transformation that Trump’s version of diplomacy is only reinforcing.

In the Philippines, the inauguration of President Rodrigo Duterte in June 2016 brought a sudden shift in the country’s foreign policy, ending Manila’s opposition to Beijing’s bases in the South China Sea. Despite an aggressive courtship by Trump and a certain temperamental affinity between the two leaders, Duterte has continued to scale down the joint military maneuvers with the U.S. that were an annual event for his country and has refused to reconsider his decisive tilt toward Beijing. That realignment was already evident in a leaked transcript of an April phone call between the two presidents in which Duterte insisted that the resolution of the North Korea nuclear issue should rest solely with China.

It is, however, on the Korean peninsula that Trump’s limitations as a global leader have been most evident. In two uncoordinated, ill-informed initiatives — denigrating the Korean War-era U.S. alliance with South Korea and demanding total nuclear disarmament by the North — Trump fostered a diplomatic dynamic that has allowed Beijing, Pyongyang, and even Seoul to outmaneuver Washington.

During his presidential campaign and first months in office, Trump repeatedly insulted South Korea, demeaning its culture and demanding a billion dollars for installing an American missile defense system. No one should then have been surprised when Moon Jae-in won that country’s presidency last year on a “say no” to America platform and on promises to reopen direct negotiations with the North Korea of Kim Jong-un. Then, during a state visit to Washington last June, the new South Korean leader was blindsided when Trump called the free-trade agreement between their two countries “not fair to the American worker” and blasted Moon’s proposal for negotiating with Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un oversaw 16 rocket tests in 2017 that left his country with missiles that could potentially deliver a nuclear weapon to Honolulu, Seattle, or even by year’s end New York and Washington, while testing its first hydrogen bomb. Convinced that North Korea “seeks the capability to kill millions of Americans,” Trump became obsessed with curtailing Pyongyang’s nuclear program by any means, even threatening last August to unleash on that country “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Within days, however, then-White House strategist Steve Bannon exposed the empty bluster of all of this by telling the press, “There’s no military solution until somebody solves the part of the equation that… ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons.” So the threats failed and Trump flailed, repeatedly trash-tweeting Kim Jong-un as “little Rocket Man” and bragging that his own “nuclear button” is “much bigger” than the North Korean leader’s. These 12 months of bizarre, destabilizing presidential twists and tweets, almost without precedent in the annals of modern diplomacy, have pushed Seoul toward direct talks with Pyongyang — excluding Washington and weakening what had been a rock-solid alliance.

In the war of nerves with North Korea over its missile tests, Trump’s strategy of triangulation with China (that is, Washington nudges Beijing, Beijing shoves Pyongyang) has already inflicted a major, unrecognized defeat on American power in the Pacific. For the last six months, to encourage Beijing to pressure Pyongyang, the White House has suspended the “freedom of navigation” patrols that challenge Beijing’s spurious claims to territorial control over the South China Sea, effectively conceding this strategic waterway to China.

In a deft bit of dissimulation, Beijing has made a show of cooperation with Washington by expressing “grave concerns” over Pyongyang’s missile tests and imposing nominal sanctions, while playing a longer, smarter strategic hand. In the process, it has been working to curtail joint American-South Korean military maneuvers and neutralize the U.S. Navy in what China considers its home waters.

In this diplomatic edition of The Art of the Deal, Beijing is trumping Washington.

Quite understandably, many Americans have focused on the damage Trump’s first months in office have done domestically, from opening pristine wilderness areas and offshore waters to oil and natural gas drilling to threatening access to medical care, skewing the progressive tax code to favor the rich, cancelling net neutrality, and voiding environmental protections of every sort. Most if not all of these regressive policies can, however, be repaired or reversed if the Democrats ever take control of Congress and the White House.

Trump’s strikingly inept version of one-man diplomacy in the context of America’s ongoing global decline is an altogether different matter. World leadership lost is never readily recovered, particularly when rival powers are prepared to fill the void. As Trump undercuts the U.S. strategic position at the axial ends of Eurasia, China is pressing relentlessly to displace the United States and dominate that vast continent with what New York Times correspondent Edward Wong calls “a blunt counterpoint… synonymous with brute strength, bribery and browbeating.”

In just one extraordinary year, Trump has destabilized the delicate duality that has long been the foundation for U.S. foreign policy: favoring war over diplomacy, the Pentagon over the State Department, and narrow national interest over international leadership. But in a globalizing world interconnected by trade, the Internet, and the rapid proliferation of nuclear-armed missiles, walls won’t work. There can be no Fortress America.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Copyright 2018 Alfred W. McCoy
U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to stop aid to Palestine if they do not agree to partake in peace talks with Israel.