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...
Found this video about the Russian Spies arrested in the US. All their neighbors wondering if this really could be happening. This was something you used to hear a few decades ago. The whole thing about Russian Spies. It somehow one woman says does not seem and sound like something with the times. Times have changed and you don't really hear about Russian Spies these days. it also comes as quiet a rude shock to some of the neighbors as the spies they say lived normal lives and were very kind and courteous. An original post by Sociolatte