United States

After a mangled deployment of Trump's aircraft carrier "armada" during which miscommunication between the White House and the Pentagon meant the USS Carl Vinson would arrive off the North Korea coast weeks after what Trump had initially suggested, on Saturday Japan's public broadcaster NHK aired footage of the U.S. aircraft carrier sailing off the coast of Nagasaki prefecture in southern Japan, hours after the latest failed ballistic missile test by North Korea..

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals?

So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS.

He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and Obama had plunged the country.

Just three days after Turkish warplanes killed at least 20 US-backed Kurdish fighters along the Turkey-Syria border as well as several Kurdish peshmerga troops on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq, footage posted by Syrian activists showed the US has deployed troops and APCs in the contested region, in a move that could potentially drag the US in a conflict where it already finds itself mediating between two so-called US ally forces in the proxy war against Syria.

US military casualties abroad are starting to pile up again. Two weeks after the US dropped the MOAB over a cave complex in the Nangarhar region in Afghanistan, reportedly in an attempt to flush out ISIS operatives, on Friday the Defense Department reported that on Thursday two Army Rangers died during a raid on the same compound in Afghanistan.

From the May 2016 lows, the number of US oil rig counts have only declined 3 times and this week was no exception. Up for its 15th week in a row (+9 to 697), its highest level since April 2015, the rig count continues to pull US crude production higher, stymying OPEC efforts at balance, leaving the bullish case for oil fading fast.