FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 6, 2025): In the months since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November, policymakers in Beijing have been looking to the next four years of U.S.-Chinese relations with trepidation. Beijing has been expecting the Trump administration to pursue tough policies toward China, potentially escalating the two countries’ trade war, tech war, and confrontation over Taiwan. The prevailing wisdom is that China must prepare for storms ahead in its dealings with the United States.
Trump’s imposition of ten percent tariffs on all Chinese goods this week seemed to justify those worries. China retaliated swiftly, announcing its own tariffs on certain U.S. goods, as well as restrictions on exports of critical minerals and an antimonopoly investigation into the U.S.-based company Google. But even though Beijing has such tools at its disposal, its ability to outmaneuver Washington in a tit-for-tat exchange is limited by the United States’ relative power and large trade deficit with China. Chinese policymakers, aware of the problem, have been planning more than trade war tactics. Since Trump’s first term, they have been adapting their approach to the United States, and they have spent the past three months further developing their strategy to anticipate, counter, and minimize the damage of Trump’s volatile policymaking. As a result of that planning, a broad effort to shore up China’s domestic economy and foreign relations has been quietly underway.
MONOCLE RADIO (February 6, 2025): Jordan and Egypt lead reactions to a seismic shift in US foreign policy in the Middle East. Then: why Taiwan is sending marines to its airport, why Austria can’t form a government and why Nissan and Honda won’t be doing business together. Plus: arts news with Ben Luke.
President Trump’s proposal to transfer millions of people out of Gaza was hailed by the Israeli right and condemned by Palestinians. Some experts say it may be a negotiating tactic.
Although the president had been talking about the idea for weeks, there had been no meetings on the subject, and senior members of his government were taken by surprise.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 5, 2025): Today, about 20 percent of southeastern Ukraine is under Russian occupation, including Crimea and large parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions. Russian President Vladimir Putin has painted the war in Ukraine as a nationalist campaign to repel Western advances and reclaim territory that, in his view, rightfully belongs to Russia. But conquest has another motivation: economic gain. If Russia maintains military control over these regions, it may be hoping to reap that benefit. At this stage, however, it is hardly clear that they would become economic assets for Moscow; supporting the war-torn territories could just as easily become a drain on its coffers.
The human costs of this war are enormous. Russian forces are ruling occupied Ukraine with an iron fist, engaging in a ruthless campaign of torture, kidnapping, violence, and arbitrary killing. Any assessment of the war’s economic consequences should not minimize its awful depravity or the immense suffering it has inflicted. But its economic outcome will affect future judgments of Putin’s decision to invade in February 2022. If Russia benefits economically from the occupation of Ukraine, the war may be remembered as a strategic success, albeit a coldblooded one. If Russia instead suffers economically, the invasion will be seen as a self-defeating, barbaric blunder.
MONOCLE RADIO (February 5, 2025): As Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s transitional president, meets Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, we ask: what role is Turkey seeking to play when it comes to regional security?
Then we discuss Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to the White House to see Donald Trump. Plus, a ceasefire in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, former Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg makes a comeback in Norwegian politics and press freedom in Czechia.
The billionaire is creating major upheaval as his team sweeps through agencies, in what has been an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.
The billionaire has used the social media site to boast of victories, lash out at enemies and conduct polls for the initiative he calls the Department of Government Efficiency.
After a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products took effect on Tuesday, China announced retaliatory measures, including tariffs and an investigation of Google.
Senate Panel Pushes Through Kennedy’s Nomination Along Party Lines
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican torn between his concerns as a doctor and supporting President Trump, voted to send Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as health secretary to the full Senate.
The ‘McKinley Tariffs’ were some of the largest hikes in U.S. history, but in his second term, McKinley changed his mind, and argued for more free international trade as a way of helping the U.S. economy. WSJ explores how McKinley used tariffs, how Trump is following a similar playbook and why McKinley. Actually came to speak out against them.
THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE (February 3, 2025): That Donald Trump may unleash a global trade war is a frightening but familiar risk. Less well understood is the danger that he may also provoke a tax war. One of his first actions on returning to the White House was to warn other countries that if they adopt tax policies America dislikes, he may double tax rates on their companies and even their citizens.
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