Relations between China and the US have been tense ever since Trump started his mercurial behavior with tariffs, raising and lowering and raising them again so frequently that I gave up trying to keep track. Trade relations between the US and the rest of the world seem more and more like a poker game in which the US starts out with a huge pile of chips and keeps raising the stakes, forcing out the smaller players, the countries that cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the economic giant, so that they fold. The one exception is China which does have the resources to stay in the game. Up until now, they seem to have been content to be in a reactive mode, matching the US as it raises the ante.

But in a surprising development, China took the lead in raising the stakes, imposing new measures that would enable them to restrict the export of rare earth materials that are crucial for electronics.

China’s Ministry of Commerce on Thursday unveiled its most expansive rare earth export controls to date, allowing Beijing not only to restrict shipments of raw materials and magnets — as it has in the past — but also any devices that incorporate those elements. Because Chinese rare earths are embedded in everything from iPhones and electric vehicle motors to fighter-jet sensors, the rules effectively give Beijing potential veto power over vast swaths of global manufacturing.

The vast potential reach of China’s action, and the U.S.’s counteraction, was on display Friday: Trump’s tariff announcement sent stocks tumbling, with the S&P 500 dropping more than 2 percent, its worst day since April.
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This year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado and Trump will be mad that he did not get it.

The peace prize was tarnished when it was awarded to the war criminal Henry Kissinger and it did not redeem itself when it gave the prize to Barack Obama who had done nothing to deserve it. But Trump clearly feels that he too deserves it and has been campaigning hard for it.

While Trump has played down his chances to win the prize, he has been active behind the scenes, phoning Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, in Oslo this summer to tell him he wanted to discuss the “Nobel peace prize … and tariffs”. He regularly brings up the award; usually as he makes the tenuous claim to have ended six or seven wars since his return to the White House.

“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump said last year during the presidential race.

The obsession has become a running joke among foreign diplomats seeking to lobby their interests, including at a regular breakfast among European ambassadors where a common topic is how to keep Trump engaged in the support of Ukraine.

“Anytime he is talking about solving seven wars, he is really sending a message: give me the Nobel,” said one senior European diplomat based in Washington.
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Trump’s new push for a peace deal to end the [Gaza] war kicked into gear during last month’s UN general assembly, where he met with Arab leaders and then approved a 20-point peace plan that he announced during a White House summit with Benjamin Netanyahu in late September.

The timeline for the award has played an active role in trying to reach a deal this week, as officials have regularly said they believed a peace deal would be ready by Friday – the same day as the Nobel committee announces its choice.

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That India has for some time been a rising economic power, there can be no doubt. It has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country and having a large domestic market undoubtedly helps in the creation of large businesses and industry. For the longest time, relations between US and India were cool, mainly because India, starting with its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, pursued a non-aligned foreign policy that chose to not align itself with either of the then two main power blocs of the US and the USSR. As a result, The US tended to see India’s traditional rival Pakistan as more of an ally and favored it.

That changed quite dramatically with the rise to power of Narendra Modi as prime minister, a right wing Hindu chauvinist who assiduously cultivated good relations with the US, especially with Trump. And for a while, the two seemed to be best friends. But recently, there has been a dramatic cooling of relations, with Trump putting some of the harshest tariffs on imports from India.

Isaac Chotiner tries to understand the dramatic shift by talking with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As Vaishnav says, the 50% tariff on India is a major blow to India..
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