The trade war launched by the Trump administration against China may not have been solved by a 2½-hour dinner between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump at the G20 in Buenos Aires on Saturday. But it may have opened a path towards a drastic realignment. Way beyond the histrionics surrounding the “family pic” –…
I knew there was something wrong with Donald Trump’s presidency the day he bombed the airbase at Al-Shairat in Syria. It was a turning point. I knew it was a mistake the moment he did it and argued as such at the time. No act by him was more contentious. It cost me hundreds of…
THERE WAS A high-five from Vladimir Putin. And for Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi it was business as usual. At home, Saudi Arabia’s media trumpeted Mohammed bin Salman’s meetings with world leaders, tweeting pictures of his encounters, which also included the presidents of South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa. However, Western leaders appeared to avoid…
President Donald Trump’s cancellation of his planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Buenos Aires G20 is another sign of the now almost certain demise of his declared “America First” agenda – and perhaps of his presidency. Supposedly decided in response to a Ukraine-Russia naval incident in the Kerch Strait, dumping the meeting…
The G-20 in Buenos Aires on November 30 could set the world on fire – perhaps literally. Let’s start with the US-China trade war. Washington won’t even start discussing trade with China at the G-20 unless Beijing comes up with a quite detailed list of potential concessions. The word from Chinese negotiators is not at all…
President Donald Trump’s second foreign trip, to attend a G-20 summit meeting, demonstrated how far and how fast U.S. global leadership and influence have fallen. This observation is warranted despite the usual tendency in the media to overplay summit meetings and the atmospherics surrounding them, in contrast to inattention given to ordinary but important diplomacy…
