American Tomahawks for Ukraine — Deterrence, Deception, or Market Theatre?
The Week That Shaped the World — 10–17 October 2025
American Tomahawks for Ukraine — What’s the Real Game?
It was one of those weeks when you could almost hear the world grinding its teeth.
Missiles, markets, meetings — the usual trio of modern faith.
Trump picked up the phone, Putin smiled somewhere in the distance, and within hours the headlines began to vibrate like tuning forks. Not diplomacy — performance. And every trader, journalist, and politician played along as if they’d forgotten the difference.
Further east, China reminded everyone who really owns the periodic table, while the G7 tried to look relevant in front of its own reflection. The BRICS, of course, didn’t bother explaining anything. They’re done asking for permission — they’ve started building exits.
Even the IMF managed to sound poetic this week, warning about “contained fragility.”
That’s the global economy for you: a chandelier that only looks safe until someone slams the door.
And over in Silicon Valley, a different kind of war — this one fought in algorithms and server rooms, where code is now the new artillery.
It’s tempting to think all of this is chaos.
It isn’t. It’s choreography — the same old dance between fear and profit.
The lights change, the actors rotate, the music speeds up, but the steps never do.
Stay with us. The noise is getting harder to separate from the news, and somewhere in that static — the future is already humming.
1.American Tomahawks for Ukraine — Deterrence, Deception, or Market Theatre?
It started, as global tremors often do, mid-air. Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Washington yesterday, on 16 October 2025, hoping to collect the Tomahawks Donald Trump had once promised. Instead, he found the door politely closed.
According to several reports, Trump changed his mind overnight — right after a private call with Vladimir Putin, and a follow-up conversation with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. The two agreed to host a future Trump–Putin meeting in Budapest, which Trump quickly branded “a real step toward peace in Ukraine.” Peace, it seems, now comes with stage lighting.
Our editorial board sees this differently. What’s unfolding is not diplomacy but psychological choreography. Trump, the showman-strategist, is playing the world like a tuning fork — striking fear, then relief, then fear again. It’s classic emotional disorientation: confuse, exhaust, and control. A society kept in suspense is a society easy to steer.
Behind the curtain, the financial orchestra plays in sync. Markets rise and fall with every presidential “maybe” and “we’ll see.” Each fluctuation generates billions for those who know the script. What looks like chaos is, in truth, structured volatility — a business model disguised as politics.
Putin, ever the pragmatist, appears content to let the act run. After all, when your opponent becomes your marketing agent, why interrupt the show?
So, are the Tomahawks off the table? Perhaps. Or perhaps they’ve served their real purpose already — to test how quickly the world trembles when Trump merely raises an eyebrow.
As one European analyst told Prime Economist today:
“This isn’t geopolitics anymore. It’s algorithmic theatre — and we’re all the data.”
2. U.S. Warns of Decoupling Over China’s Rare-Earth Export Controls
It always starts politely — in air-conditioned rooms with coffee and flags — before someone slips the knife between the trade agreements. This week it was Washington’s turn.
The message to Beijing was delivered with that slow American grin: “Keep playing games with rare earths, and we’ll cut you off.”
China, as always, didn’t blink. “National security,” they said — two words that now mean whatever you want them to. Chips, minerals, micro-drones — pick your excuse. By mid-day, markets had already started doing their usual nervous dance: neodymium up, dysprosium up, and analysts pretending they understood what either metal actually does.
What’s really happening is uglier. The polite fiction of “economic interdependence” is dying in real time. Washington has stopped pretending it can talk China into good behaviour. Beijing has stopped pretending it cares. Both sides are circling each other like an old married couple who can’t afford the divorce but can’t stand to share the kitchen.
At the G7, Europeans sat quietly, nodding like guilty shareholders. Someone muttered about “diversifying supply chains” — as if you can dig a mine faster than you can give a speech. Behind the smiles, everyone knows: without China’s metals, the West’s green transition is a PowerPoint fantasy.
A German delegate was overheard whispering, “Decoupling sounds easy until you realise your entire car industry is welded to Shenzhen.”
So the world watches, pretending this is just another trade spat. It isn’t. It’s the rehearsal for a split that could reshape the next fifty years. The West needs China’s earth; China needs the West’s demand. Both are now pretending they don’t.
“Globalisation was a marriage of convenience. The divorce, like most divorces, will be about who keeps the house — and the lithium.”
3. G7 on China — A Joint Warning on Economic Coercion and Critical Minerals
They all smiled for the photo, of course. They always do. Seven finance ministers lined up behind their flags, looking as if they’d just signed a pact to save civilisation. In truth, they were there to agree on how much of it still belongs to China.
The joint statement landed with diplomatic elegance: a “united response” to Beijing’s growing control of critical minerals. Words like cooperation, resilience, shared values floated across the press room like confetti after a dull wedding. The subtext, however, was pure anxiety.
Everyone in that room knows the numbers. China refines 90 per cent of the world’s rare earths. It doesn’t need tanks to dominate — it just needs to stop shipping cobalt for a month. One embargo, and Europe’s battery dreams would crumble faster than a polite British apology.
The Americans spoke loudly about “economic coercion.” The Europeans murmured about “balance.” Japan stared into its notes, remembering what supply chain panic feels like. And while the microphones hummed, traders quietly adjusted their portfolios — out of minerals, into nerves.
The irony isn’t lost on anyone. For decades, the West preached free markets to the world. Now, finding itself at the wrong end of dependency, it’s rediscovering the charm of industrial policy and state subsidies. Suddenly, “strategic autonomy” is fashionable again — the economic equivalent of growing vegetables after years of takeaways.
An Italian delegate summed it up, half-joking, half-defeated: “We want to stand up to China, but our wind farms keep begging for magnesium.”
So yes, the statement was “historic.” But so were the last twenty. The difference this time is tone — less sermon, more plea. The G7 is no longer lecturing China; it’s hoping she’ll pick up the phone.
“Empires don’t fall with wars anymore. They fall when their supply chains stop answering emails.”
4. Sweden, Estonia & Finland Pledge More Arms for Ukraine
Up north, they don’t shout. They prepare.
This week, Stockholm, Tallinn and Helsinki spoke with one voice — calm, clipped, and unmistakably armed. Sweden promised another round of artillery and air defences. Estonia sent word of drones and training teams. Finland, in its usual understatement, offered “enhanced assistance,” which roughly translates to: something that will keep the Kremlin awake.
The tone was different this time. Not the nervous solidarity of 2022, but something colder, more resolved. These are countries that still keep maps of invasion routes in their archives. They know what it means when the ground trembles east of the border.
In Moscow, the script was routine — provocation, escalation, NATO puppets.
But even Russian spokesmen sounded tired, as if repeating lines from a play the world stopped watching two seasons ago. The North, however, is not acting. It’s bracing.
The symbolism is sharp: Finland, once neutral to the point of ritual, now supplies weapons against the same neighbour it spent a century appeasing. Sweden’s neutrality, that sacred relic of the 20th century, is quietly dissolving into the smoke of another distant war.
A Finnish colonel said it better than any minister: “If Ukraine falls, the front line moves here. We’re not generous; we’re practical.”
And that’s the mood across the region — practical fear. Not hysteria, not heroics. Just the slow, methodical acceptance that the next winter could be more than just cold.
“In Northern Europe, patience isn’t peace. It’s the silence before reloading.”
5. BRICS Settlement Currency Nears Pilot Phase — A Shot at Dollar Dominance
Some revolutions begin with a speech. Others — with a spreadsheet.
This week, BRICS finance ministers quietly confirmed what the dollar-centric world has been dreading for years: the long-rumoured common settlement currency is no longer theory. It’s entering its pilot phase — digital, commodity-backed, and deliberately un-American.
The idea is simple enough to be dangerous. A shared system for trade among Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — one that sidesteps the greenback entirely. No SWIFT, no sanctions choke-points, no Washington oversight. A kind of economic underground railroad for nations tired of asking permission to trade.
The timing is exquisite. Sanctions fatigue has reached even neutral capitals. The seizure of Russian assets, the weaponisation of payment systems — all of it left a mark. What was once seen as “financial deterrence” now looks, to much of the world, like overreach. And every overreach breeds an alternative.
The numbers are modest for now. A handful of pilot transactions between Russia and India; a central clearing node in Shanghai; a test phase in digital yuan architecture. But the signal is enormous. It says: the monopoly is cracking.
Western economists dismiss it, of course. “Too complex, too fragmented, no trust,” they say — the same arguments once used against the euro, the Internet, and democracy itself. Meanwhile, the BRICS quietly stack gold, buy servers, and build their escape route from dollar diplomacy.
A South African delegate, asked if the project would work, simply smiled: “It doesn’t have to. It just has to exist.”
“Empires never notice the moment they’re replaced. The dollar won’t collapse — it’ll just wake up one morning to find the world pricing oil in another language.”
6. AI Investment Boom Shields the U.S. from Recession — For Now
The American economy, we’re told, is resilient. That’s the polite way of saying it hasn’t crashed yet.
This week’s data painted a curious picture: manufacturing stalled, consumer confidence flatlined — and yet the markets smiled. The reason? Artificial intelligence. Or, more precisely, the fantasy of it.
Tech giants continue to pour billions into data centres, chips, and the digital priests who claim to understand them. Wall Street, desperate for a story that isn’t about debt or decline, calls it “the new industrial revolution.” Economists call it what it is — a cushion made of speculation and silicon.
You can almost hear the hum of Nvidia servers standing in for the sound of factories. Investment in AI infrastructure has single-handedly kept the U.S. growth charts from dipping into embarrassment. It’s the same old American trick: when reality falters, build a new dream and monetise it.
The irony is rich. For years, Washington scolded China for building ghost cities — empty towers, no tenants. Now Silicon Valley builds ghost economies — vast data fortresses, no guaranteed profit. But investors don’t care. As long as the graphs go up, the gospel holds.
In one analyst call, a tech CEO was asked when AI would start paying for itself. He paused, smiled, and said: “It already has — just not in revenue.”
The world is buying this illusion because it wants to believe America still leads by invention, not inertia. And maybe it does. But the air feels thinner up here — and even the smartest bubbles eventually remember gravity.
“In the U.S., recessions are postponed, not prevented. We just rename them innovation.”
7. IMF Upgrades Asia’s Growth Outlook Despite Global Turmoil
It takes a special kind of optimism to work at the IMF. You spend your life forecasting disaster, then occasionally announce that it might arrive a little later than expected.
This week, the Fund declared that Asia — against all odds and spreadsheets — is still holding the line. Growth up, confidence returning, investors smiling like gamblers on a lucky streak.
India keeps humming, Vietnam keeps building, and even China, despite its property ghosts and credit fatigue, refuses to sink. The region, they say, will carry global growth on its back for another year. The question no one asks aloud: how long before it buckles?
Beijing’s factories are busy again, yes — but half of them are producing goods no one wants at prices no one can pay. Japan is pretending its debt doesn’t exist. South Korea sells chips faster than it replaces optimism. It’s a fragile miracle, but still a miracle.
Meanwhile in the West, the air smells of recession. Europe sulks over its energy bills, America drowns in election noise. Against that backdrop, Asia looks unnervingly competent — calm, productive, almost smug.
A Tokyo economist put it with the politeness of someone who knows he’s right: “We don’t need another miracle decade. We just need the others to keep underperforming.”
The IMF, of course, wrapped it in jargon — “resilient growth under adverse conditions.”
Jenkins would translate it differently: “Asia’s thriving not because the world is healthy, but because it’s the only patient still breathing without a machine.”
“The West prays for recovery, Asia just shows up to work.”
8. IMF Global Financial Stability Report — Systemic Fragility Rising
There’s a certain poetry to the way the IMF writes about crisis. You have to read between the spreadsheets to feel the panic.
This week’s Global Financial Stability Report arrived with its usual calm typography and its usual quiet terror. The tone was clinical; the message wasn’t. The world’s financial system, it seems, is stable — in the same way a chandelier is stable until someone slams the door.
Debt has swollen to record levels. Corporate defaults are climbing like ivy up the walls of polite denial. Banks, once the heroes of recovery, are now described in IMF language as “vulnerable to interest rate shocks” — the economic version of saying “don’t tap the glass.”
But the real tremor runs deeper. The Fund admits — gently, as it always does — that its models no longer quite match the world they’re meant to describe. Capital moves faster than regulation, technology outpaces oversight, and political tempers outlast fiscal patience. The machine still runs, but the gears grind louder every quarter.
Markets, naturally, pretended not to hear. Traders skimmed the executive summary, saw no immediate apocalypse, and went back to buying. The rest of us are left reading the fine print — a litany of polite warnings disguised as footnotes.
One passage stood out: “Systemic fragility remains contained.” Jenkins, translating from bureaucratese, would put it bluntly: “It’s contained, until it isn’t.”
A London banker told me over lunch, half-joking: “The economy’s like a Jenga tower. Everyone’s taking turns pulling pieces, and the IMF’s job is to write a 200-page report explaining why it hasn’t fallen yet.”
“The word ‘stability, has become a prayer — uttered mostly by those who don’t believe it anymore.”
9. Emerging-Market Debt Pressure — The Trap Tightens
In the quieter corners of the world economy, the music has already stopped.
From Buenos Aires to Nairobi, finance ministers are discovering that there’s no polite way to say “we’re out of cash.” Interest payments now eat half of some national budgets. Dollar debts swell, currencies shrink, and the IMF’s emergency phone lines glow red again.
The headlines still focus on Wall Street and Beijing, but the real breaking points are further south. Zambia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan — names that once flickered briefly through the news now return like ghosts at the door, still asking for time, still promising reform. Everyone knows how this story goes.
The trap is simple and merciless. Borrow cheap while the Fed smiles; panic when it frowns.
When Washington raises rates, the periphery bleeds first. It’s the oldest pattern in modern finance — empire by interest rate. The U.S. doesn’t need colonies when it has the dollar.
Meanwhile, investors, once seduced by the phrase “emerging markets,” are quietly retreating. Risk premiums climb, local banks wobble, and inflation chews through what little faith remains. For the first time in decades, even the optimists have stopped talking about “growth potential.” They talk about “containment.”
A Kenyan economist put it best: “We don’t default because we can’t count. We default because the world does the counting for us.”
And so the trap tightens — one bond auction, one IMF loan, one lost generation at a time.
No invasions, no sanctions, no coups — just the steady arithmetic of dependency, disguised as partnership.
“Globalisation promised opportunity, It delivered invoices.”
10. Google and Anthropic Join Forces on Gemini Ultra 2 — The AI Arms Race Heats Up
The new arms race doesn’t involve tanks or treaties — it involves datasets, GPUs, and the quiet hum of a server room somewhere in Oregon.
This week, Google announced its strategic alliance with Anthropic to co-develop Gemini Ultra 2, a large-scale model designed to outthink OpenAI’s GPT-5 and, if you believe the press release, “redefine intelligence itself.”
Silicon Valley calls this progress. The rest of us might call it panic. The partnership was born not out of idealism but fear — fear of falling behind in a race where speed trumps ethics and innovation rarely waits for regulation.
Behind the glowing demos and lofty mission statements lies something closer to a digital Cold War: tech giants carving up the cognitive frontier like post-war powers drawing maps.
Investors, of course, love it. Alphabet’s stock rose 6 % overnight, Anthropic’s valuation doubled, and analysts started whispering about “the dawn of true AI autonomy” — a phrase that sounds impressive until you realise no one knows what it means.
Meanwhile, smaller startups, once the soul of the AI movement, now watch from the sidelines as the giants consolidate every watt of computing power and ounce of data they can reach.
Jenkins puts it bluntly: “When intelligence becomes a monopoly, stupidity turns profitable.”
The ethical talkshops in Brussels and Geneva can hold all the panels they want — the code is already running.
The real question isn’t who builds the smartest machine. It’s who controls the one that outlives its maker.
“The Cold War never ended, It just moved into the cloud.”
