BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF - Blackwater Worldwide

Posted by BW Actual on Aug 18th 2025

Coming Up This Week

Ukraine's Pres. Zelensky - and several key European leaders traveling with him - will meet Pres. Trump in Washington today. More on that below.
The Kansas City Fed hosts its annual Jackson Hole economic summit starting Thursday. This year's theme is "Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy."

Commodity and coin market prices

Ukraine

Presidents Trump and Putin met in person in Alaska on Friday. Trump described the meeting as "productive," but walked away without a ceasefire deal for Ukraine and reported back to European leaders that Putin wasn't ready to stop fighting.
Trump did, however, secure a consolation prize: he says Putin agreed to allow Western troops in Ukraine to keep the peace after the war ends.
It would likely be a European force, given Trump's aversion to sending U.S. troops to fight costly foreign wars, but Trump said the U.S. could provide a backstop for it in the form of security guarantees. That's a significant reversal to Trump's longstanding refusal to offer security guarantees, and it allows Ukraine more latitude to make concessions toward a ceasefire with stronger recourse if Putin reneges on his side of the deal.
With the Putin meeting behind him, Trump will hear Pres. Zelensky's side today during meetings in Washington.
Zelensky will be flanked by several heavyweight European leaders, including Italy's Prime Minister Meloni, Finland's Pres. Stubb, the UK's Prime Minister Starmer, France's Pres. Macron, Germany's Chancellor Merz, Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, and Mark Rutte of NATO (in rough order of favor with Trump).
European backup should help Zelensky avoid a repeat of his disastrous last meeting with Trump in the White House; the Europeans also want to show their support for ending the war raging in their backyard.

Hezbollah

Naim Qassem, Hezbollah's new-ish leader, said the Iran-backed militia was ready to fight Lebanese army efforts to take the rest of its guns, which the Lebanese parliament approved last week - despite Qassem's appeals to not "waste time on the storms stirred up by external dictates." [Qassem perceives - probably correctly - that Israeli and American pressure is driving momentum for disarmament.]
Back in May, Hezbollah largely complied with the Lebanese army's Israel-backed disarmament efforts in the south as a condition of its then-fresh peace deal with Israel and to secure international reconstruction funding by playing nice.
However, analysts had warned then that the militia would stop cooperating as soon as the feckless army crossed its boundaries. That time now seems to have come.
Though weakened by a brief and embarrassing war with Israel last year, Hezbollah remains popular and is probably still stronger than the Lebanese army. Thus, the army's disarmament efforts will probably fail without strong Israeli or U.S. backing, which looks unlikely right now.

Bolivia

Centrist candidate Rodrigo Paz led Bolivia's first round presidential poll that took place yesterday, with 32% of early results. Conservative ex-President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga trailed behind him at 27%. Paz and Quiroga will face each other in a runoff on October 19.
The vote was a thrashing for the ruling leftist Movement for Socialism (MAS), whose candidate won just 3%. It was the MAS's worst-ever result and an ignominious end to its 20 years in power.
It was also a humiliating defeat for populist ex-Pres. Evo Morales, who was barred from running after impregnating a 15-year-old, and unconstructively urged his supporters to spoil their ballot instead of voting for an eligible candidate. Few did.

India

India's Prime Minister Modi announced sweeping new tax cuts alongside a parallel campaign to encourage Indians to use more domestic goods instead of imports.
Though Modi's tax cuts will strain the government budget, analysts say they'll boost his Bharatiya Janata Party's standing ahead of state and local elections this fall. They also suggest that a pivot to domestic goods could help India better weather a possible trade war with the U.S.

DRC

Today was the deadline that DRC and the Rwanda-backed M23 had set for finalizing the preliminary truce they agreed to last month, but all they could come up with after extensive Qatari mediation was an impotent - but not entirely hopeless - statement that "significant efforts have been made."
Neither side has explicitly given up on peace talks, but their soldiers on the ground in eastern DRC haven't given up their war, either.