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...
With all the verbal exchanges happening between Israel and Iran over the Iranian nuclear program. Most Israelis are worried that their PM Benjamin Netanyahu might launch a strike against Iran in the near future. To make their voice heard, there is a Facebook page asking their PM to delay any attack plans till after the 29th of May. If you click the about link on the page this is what is says: Netanyahu, No! no to war with Iran, untill Madonna's tour visit to Israel in may 29th. Clicking on the Info link on the page you get this message: War of any kind is bad, we call or leaders, prime minister Netanyahu and Barak, to avoid any attack of any kind against Iran or whatever, at least until Madonna's tour visit in Israel. god save the queen. The page is quiet simple and has not been able to get a large number of 'Likes'. As of now it is 179 likes and has 10 people talking about it. There is however a lot of conversation happening and each post has a lot of comments. The ...