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...
Story so far: Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian leader who fled the country after more than 23 years of dictatorship rule, may have fallen because of WikiLeaks and Facebook and the whole social media revolution. This is what the Telegraph has to say " Mr Ben Ali may also have been the first victim of Wikileaks. Cables by an American ambassador giving colourful descriptions of the lives of luxury pursued by his family, and the business empire it controlled, were eagerly emailed around the country, despite a repressive system of censorship. Descriptions by other ambassadors of other leaders' political and personal attitudes have not been much less graphic. On the plus side, protesters also seemed to understand that despite the deaths of scores of rioters, there were limits to how far modern leaders could go in maintaining their rule by force. Maybe that was also a lesson of the crushing of Saddam Hussein, who knew no such limits, by George Bush and Tony Blair. " Prote...