On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
This has got to be one of the cutest Christmas videos on the internet right now. A little girl sends has wish to Santa and ask for a Daddy to be home from Iraq. Santa comes to school and gives all the little children the presents they had asked for except her. She wanted her daddy, this part of the video has made many grown people cry, including the news anchor so be warned. This is Steve Hartman's "On the Road," series. A warm and touching video. Bringing dad home for Christmas.
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