Stories we are following this week:

President Trump remains ambivalent on new Russia sanctions

Contradictory statements from the White House are leading to confusion over whether or not new sanctions will be slapped on Russia.

The threat was originally made by Nikki Haley, who said that new sanctions would be announced early this week. The sanctions are a response to Russia’s indirect support for Syria’s chemical weapons program. Haley, speaking on NBC’s Face the Nation, said they would target companies providing the kind of equipment that could be used in the production of chemical weapons.

However, Haley’s assertion was dialed back almost immediately on Sunday night by a White House spokesperson, who said that the sanctions proposal was merely under consideration and not yet a done deal. This more cautious note was echoed earlier today when White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders maintained that a decision on sanctions has yet to be made.

Ultimately it appears unlikely that we’ll see more sanctions slapped on Russia at this juncture, and if they do come down they can be expected to be more style over substance, possibly targeting new individuals in President Putin’s inner circle rather than industries. President Trump has been hesitant to expand the more biting sanctions against the Russian economy, and has repeatedly expressed a willingness to work with Putin. A propaganda circus has also descended over Syria, with France and Russia declaring that they both have irrefutable evidence of the attack being either authentic or a hoax respectively. Lack of consensus and delays in the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) gaining access to the attack site in Douma suggest that the gaze of the US media will have moved on by the time the public gets its answers – if they ever do – and by then any pressure for President Trump to slap new sanctions on Russia will have dissipated.

France’s Macron adopts the mantle of defender of Europe’s democratic values

A key consequence of Viktor Orbán’s decisive election victory earlier this month is that the ideological battle between Europe’s liberal and illiberal blocs is on track to heat up. Orbán has become the impromptu leader of the latter group. Along with Poland he has challenged the idea that the European Union can dictate political norms in member countries. Brussels on the other hand had adopted a wait-and-see strategy, hoping that an electoral backlash in Hungary would solve the problem for them. Obviously that didn’t come to pass, and both blocs are now headed for a direct confrontation.