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...
Images Credit: Yahoo News The famed city that never sleeps is ignoring orders to flee and in fact many are on the beach soaking up the sun and surf. There is always a calm before the storm and that's what is being enjoyed. There is also a little skepticism about the actual strength of the Hurricane, since it has no visible eye according to some reports and that it has already weakened. Since it cannot muster its own strength . Yahoo news reports that ' Many other New Yorkers, and visitors, offered a sense of humor as they waited for the storm. At a dive bar near Rockaway Beach, regulars toasted "Happy Hurricane!" as they downed late-afternoon beers and burgers. On Rockaway Beach, Katie Richardson was heading to swim and surf with her friends, who all arrived on Thursday from Austin, Texas. She said she barely made her flight as airlines began to scale back service to New York. Now in New York, the 27-year-old and her friends planned to make the most of their time in...