Trump called it peace. What he actually built was a weapons corridor, and now it’s blowing up in his face and Iran have popcorn. Right, so Donald Trump said he’d built a bridge of peace, and what he actually built was an arms market with a flag on it. The TRIPP corridor — his grand plan to join Armenia and Azerbaijan, box in Iran and call it diplomacy — has gone the way of every Trump deal before it: the photo survived, the peace didn’t. Within months of the signing, the two sides were buying jets from opposite sides of another diplomatic split, India and Pakistan were dragged into the fallout, and Iran, the country Trump swore to isolate, has ended up even stronger than when he started. The cameras caught a handshake; history caught a scam. This wasn’t peace through strength, it was profit through instability — a 99-year lease on chaos sold as vision, and another Trump instigated project that may have run its course, having run on headlines and little else. Right, so Trump called it peace. The cameras caught the handshake, the flags, the podium, the promise of a corridor that would turn two old enemies into trading partners and show the world that American deal-making still ruled the map. Trump and his art of the deal. The ink was barely dry before the headlines declared it historic: Armenia and Azerbaijan signing a White House-brokered agreement to open a route through Armenia’s southern Syunik province, linking Azerbaijan’s mainland to its Nakhchivan exclave and on to Turkey. They called it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity — TRIPP for short — a modern Silk Road with Trump’s name on it, his ego must be stroked at all times, but living up to the more literal definition of the word now, as the plan has tripped up and fallen on its face. Washington sold it as the moment the Caucasus would finally break its habit of war. But the habit didn’t break. It just shifted. Within months both sides were buying new aircraft, Iran was running drills on its northern border, and the map Trump claimed as his triumph had become the outline of another arms race. Everything about TRIPP was built on imbalance. Armenia came to the table weakened, cut adrift from Moscow, far too preoccupied with Ukraine. Azerbaijan arrived emboldened, armed by Turkey, flush with energy money from selling its oil via Turkey to Israel, fresh from victory over Armenia previously. The deal that followed reflected that power gap: a corridor carved through Armenian soil giving Azerbaijan a direct road to Turkey and giving the US a permanent foothold in the one strip of land that still connected Iran to the Caucasus. On paper it was about trade and transit; in practice it was about control.

They say Lebanon is a failed state — but Iraq just proved that’s a lie. Same resistance, same logic, but only one faces US coercion. Why? Right, so apparently linking disarmament to foreign withdrawal is a mark of statehood in Iraq but a mark of failure in Lebanon. Same sentence, different accent, opposite outcome. Baghdad tells Washington the militias will stand down when the Americans finally pack up and go, and it’s called sovereignty. Beirut says Hezbollah will disarm when Israel stops crossing its border and breaching a ceasefire it has abused for almost a year now and it’s called collapse. Tom Barrack calls that proof that Lebanon is “a failed state.” Well he should know — Washington’s been rehearsing that diagnosis for years in Israel’s interests – how else do you turn a blind eye to thousands upon thousands of ceasefire breaches and still blame the victim of them? When a country stops being useful, the US stops calling it sovereign. “Failed State” in this playbook doesn’t mean collapse, it means disobedience. Iraq still fits inside the the banner of usefulness because it has oil and strategic importance; Lebanon doesn’t. It has Hezbollah and is therefore a threat to Israel in their book, even as Israel once again launches strikes across the south of their country. That’s the real divide. But the hypocrisy of Trump’s pro Israel goons isn’t going to go ignored.

They said trade with Israel was “paused.” The government’s own data tells a different story. The date it OMITTED Tells an even bigger one. Right, so the government’s own figures have given the game away. Buried in a Department for Business and Trade factsheet dated 31 October, because Halloween is frankly the perfect day to release news like this, it says exports to Israel rose 10.5 percent to £3.6 billion in the year to June 2025. That’s from the previous June, so that is basically Starmer’s first year in power — and it happened while Gaza continued to be burned and Labour claimed to have “paused” a trade deal out of principle. The truth is, they only paused the headlines. And those billions they’ve just announced? Well they are just the part they’re willing to print. It’s just the tip of the iceberg because they don’t include everything. They don’t include the arms licences, MoD contracts, offshore finance and hidden service deals – they all sit below the waterline. What they published is just the tip; what they’re profiting from is the iceberg. And for a government that talks so much about moral clarity, it’s remarkable how much they’ve managed to hide and now it’s going to blow up in their face. Right so the figures are not leaked. They’re not hearsay. They’re the government’s own numbers here, sitting quietly in a Department for Business and Trade factsheet from Halloween. In the twelve months to the end of June 2025 - the first full year of Keir Starmer’s premiership, so this is on him - British exports to Israel rose by £342 million, up 10.5 per cent, to £3.6 billion. Imports from Israel dipped slightly to £2.6 billion, a 4.6 per cent fall. People here not wanting to buy Israeli it seems, or invest in a nation so destabilised by its own crackpot and genocidal government, but actually that’s only a small part of the truth. The total value of trade between the two countries reached £6.2 billion, a 3.7 per cent increase on the previous year. Those numbers appear under the seal of His Majesty’s Government, not in a campaign pamphlet, they are official, they are shameful. The contradiction is in and of itself damaging enough to Starmer’s regime. In public the Labour government told the country it had “paused” talks on a new UK–Israel Free Trade Agreement. In private, or at least on paper, trade was still climbing. What was frozen was not the money; it was the accountability. The figures show that far from retreating, Britain deepened its commercial ties at the very moment it claimed to be distancing itself.