BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF - Blackwater Worldwide

Posted by BW Actual on Jul 29th 2025

Southeast Asia

Pres. Trump said yesterday that Thailand and Cambodia had reached a ceasefire agreement "through trade" after he intervened over the weekend with a threat to keep both skirmishing countries away from the "trading table" - and facing a 36% tariff on exports to the U.S. after Aug. 1 - unless they found peace.
They quickly agreed on a ceasefire that went into effect at midnight today. [It's not yet clear whether Trump dangled a specific lower tariff level that this ceasefire unlocks, or if this agreement only preserves the option to negotiate better trade terms through separate talks.]
Both sides' commanders are respecting the truce, and it looks likely to hold - despite some alleged violations by Cambodian foot soldiers. The roughly 260,000 civilians who were displaced by the fighting have already started to trickle back home.

China: Trade

U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met in Stockholm yesterday to discuss trade. Bessent seemed pleased with their first day of talks, and said he expects they'll agree to extend current tariff levels after their summit concludes today.
Analysts consider Bessent's optimism an indicator that U.S.-China trade tensions are easing, and some suggested that this week's talks have laid the groundwork for a possible meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi later this year.

China: Taiwan

In a likely related development, Trump's team reportedly blocked Taiwan's Pres. Lai Ching-te from stopping over in New York on his planned (but not yet confirmed) official trip to South and Central America in mid-August.
Taiwanese leaders frequently use such trips to the Americas as an excuse to hold meetings with U.S. officials during stopovers; in fact, sometimes those meetings are the purpose of the trip, and the onward itinerary is merely an excuse for a U.S. stopover.
China - which claims Taiwan and rejects its self-governance - hates this practice, and often asks U.S. officials to reject Taiwanese state stopovers.
In this case, it seems the White House complied with China's request to reject Lai's stopover - perhaps in the interest of staying in Beijing's good graces as the U.S. and China talk trade and prepare for a possible Trump-Xi summit.
After his U.S. stopover plans fell through, Lai signaled that he would postpone his Americas trip altogether.

China: Policy

Separately, China announced its first nationwide childcare subsidy in a bid to expand its slowly-shrinking population. Parents will receive an annual childcare stipend of 3,600 yuan (about $500) for the first three years after each child's birth (about $1,500 total), with payments applied retroactively from the start of this year. [Some Chinese localities already incentivize parents to have more kids; this new national stipend would augment existing local incentives.]
Similar programs in other countries have been found to entice parents to have kids sooner, but not necessarily to have more of them. Time will tell if the $1,500 Beijing is offering will tip the scale in China, where the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is among the world's highest on a relative basis, at $75,700 (per a YuWa Population Research Institute study).

Gaza

Two Israeli rights groups that have long criticized the government - B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights - accused Israel of genocide yesterday, marking the first time any major Israeli entity has invoked the weighty "g" word used by global humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International.
Pres. Trump also voiced concern for Gaza yesterday, disagreeing with Prime Minister Netanyahu that the territory has enough food and expressing support for a better aid distribution system to resolve the "real starvation" Gazans are suffering.

Russia

Pres. Trump said he was still "disappointed" in Pres. Putin's failure to make meaningful progress toward a ceasefire with Ukraine and shortened his deadline for a truce from 50 days to "about 10 or 12 days" from yesterday.
Trump threatened to impose "very severe tariffs" - including secondary tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil - if Putin fails to meet the newly shortened deadline.
Russia's Aeroflot grounded over 50 flights following a cyberattack claimed by dissident hackers in Belarus and Ukraine. The attack specifically targeted flights to and from popular vacation destinations like Sochi at the peak of summer travel. That suggests the hackers intended for their attack to force ordinary Russian holidaymakers to confront the reality of the war their president is fighting.

Sahel

Russia's Energy Minister, Sergei Tsivilev, led a delegation to Niger that concluded in a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on a new nuclear partnership that will see Russia's Rosatom advise the junta in Niamey on energy infrastructure and help it build nuclear power plants.
Russia previously signed similar MoUs with the other two junta-run members of the Alliance of Sahel States, Mali and Burkina Faso.