China

Tuesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Get ready for Trump’s ‘FAFO’ foreign policy

President Donald Trump posted an AI-picture of a gangster version of himself on Instagram at around 3 p.m. Sunday. Behind the fedora-clad figure, the text “FAFO” — short for “fuck around and find out” — appears alongside a smiling face.  What happened earlier that Sunday, and the machine-made picture that followed, tells us a lot about how Trump 2.0. will deal with the world.  After two planes carrying Colombian illegal aliens departed the United States this weekend, self-proclaimed humanist and former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s president, refused to allow the plane to land. “I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory,” Petro said on X.

Friday

Casey Chalk

Panama celebrates a quarter-century’s ownership of its greatest asset

New Year’s marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collective freakout known as Y2K, when overwrought tech aficionados joined forces with Luddites to warn the world of the pending apocalypse of computer infrastructure that could run the global economy but was evidently incapable of resetting to “00” in date codes. Those chiliastic projections obviously did not come to pass, which is why we can spend 2025 reflecting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day’s other Chicken Little situation — consternation over the transition that would, some skeptical parties feared, have catastrophic consequences for infrastructure central to the daily functioning of global markets, the final turnover of the Panama Canal.

Panama

Friday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why we must not forget Hong Kong

Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time — a few days after the signing in Beijing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the former colony’s transfer to mainland rule in 1997. It was a moment of apprehension, but at least the timetable had been set. And how lucky I was to have experienced that extraordinary outpost as it was then, in such contrast to what China’s masters have made it now. The Christmas Day service in St. John’s Cathedral, overhead fans stirring the turbid air, was a poignant glimpse of Hong Kong’s past. Norman Foster’s Hongkong Bank building, the most expensive in the world at the time, was approaching completion as a symbol of commercial confidence in the future.

Hong Kong

Thursday

Juan P. Villasmil

I was censored from talking about Chinese influence in Latin America

I represented the United States at the sixth Youth and Democracy in the Americas Summit at the Organization of American States, or OAS, last month. Most Latin Americans know this organization well, though most here in the US don’t. It is the premier regional political forum, the region’s European Union, a sort of mini-UN. When tyrants steal elections and jail journalists, the OAS becomes the center of the spectacle.  It has a reputation for defending liberty. But when it comes to China, matters get murky. So much so that the organization is willing to censor American voices that tell the truth about China’s regional ambitions. The appointment of Florida senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state may augur a new era of US focus on its hemispheric neighbors.

China

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Trump’s very catholic cabinet

Donald Trump’s second term administration is taking shape, and thus far it’s turned out to be impressively Catholic in its approach — representing Trump’s dominance of the Republican coalition and his capacity to ignore the worst instincts of some of his more vocal supporters on the New Right who see governance through a naive lens. One of the questions heading into this term was who Trump would disappoint by being insufficiently one thing or the other — by being too radical in some areas or too modest in others. But at this point, there are very few people disappointed in the names he’s chosen, outside of a handful of very online voices who had fantasies of their favorite pundits and follows on X getting a shot at cabinet positions.

cabinet

Wednesday

Cockburn

Tim Walz had ‘passionate’ fling with daughter of CCP official

Good news. Contrary the speculation of the likes of Tucker Carlson, “Tampon Tim” is not gay... because he had a passionate fling back in 1989 with a woman from China. Bad news: he made the daughter of a top-ranking Chinese Communist Party official feel “cheap and common.” According to the Daily Mail, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz “sipped tea, made love and listened to George Michael hits” with Jenna Wang when they were both in their twenties. “Tim was very passionate and very romantic. I can still remember dancing with him to our favorite song, 'Careless Whisper,” Wang told the Mail. “We were deeply in love and I wanted to marry him and start a family. When it didn't happen, I felt very unhappy and sad. Tim's behavior was very selfish.

tim walz affair fling chinese jenna wang

Friday

The Spectator

Kamala unleashes radical economic agenda

The long wait for Vice President Kamala Harris’s policy platform is over... well, at least on the economic front. Harris released her economic plan on Friday after weeks of running at the top of the ticket for the Democratic Party. The rollout, however, was less than stellar, as Harris proposed a mix of Soviet-style price controls with more popular policies pilfered from former president Donald Trump’s speeches and policy platforms.Harris said in the past week that she would end taxes on tips for service workers, which Trump promised back in June to do. The plan also runs counter to policies the Biden-Harris administration implemented that empowered the IRS to go after serviceworkers’ tips. Today, reports said Harris also intended to increase the child tax credit to $6,000.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Another ‘Squad’ member axed

Missouri trims Bush Talk about Squad goals: another of the most progressive members of Congress lost her Democratic primary last night, as Cori Bush was beaten by Wesley Bell in the race for Missouri’s 1st district.Bush first won her seat after playing a prominent role in the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the post-George Floyd protests in St. Louis — with one local particularly pleased to see the back of her.“Bye bye Cori Bush,” tweeted Mark McCloskey, co-star of the infamous viral gun-toting photo with his wife Patricia, taken as they faced down the Bush-led protest outside their house. “You may have torn down my gate, but the people of St. Louis tore down your career. And I ‘spat on your name.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, August 2024

Can the GOP do normal? I switched from Dem to Rep in 2014 after the disasters of the Obama presidency and the Dems’ loony hatred of the West and the US became clear. Since then I’ve not voted for the Rep nominee for president once, although I have voted for Reps down the ballot and have written in a Rep for president each cycle. I’m looking forward to the day when the GOP’s weird swooning over the orange one is over. - Thomas Nienow ‘Justice’ and the fall of a republic Great article and I hope you’re wrong.

letters

Friday

Elisenne Stoller

China’s slow but sure infiltration of America

As it becomes clearer that China and the US have entered a new Cold War, Beijing’s spy operations have grown more flagrant and provocative. Whether it be flying spy balloons, buying farmland near US military bases or even establishing a secret police station in New York City, China is slowly but surely infiltrating the US. In February 2023, a US fighter jet shot down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic. The balloon crossed into US airspace over Alaska in late January before passing through Canada and into Montana. While the balloon was able to transmit information back to Beijing in real time, CNN reports the government doesn’t know exactly what intelligence was gathered.

xi jinping wang huning wargame militarizing IP china

Monday

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky

The space race gets serious

We are shifting from the early era of space exploration to a more serious phase extending ever further from Earth’s orbit, focused on key opportunities such as mining and manufacturing as well as military purposes. This newly expanded playing field will determine not only who rules in space, but who ends up dominating Earth. The protagonists include some familiar faces — the US, Russia and the European Union — but much competition will come from emerging powers, notably India and China, both of which look upon the “final frontier” as critical to their economic and military futures. Yet the rise of non-state space entrepreneurs, notably SpaceX, has introduced a fresh and potentially decisive factor to the new space race.

space
Hong Kong
Algy Cluff

Inside the handover of Hong Kong

During the negotiations between the UK Foreign Office and the Chinese government that led to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, I was engaged in the fruitless search for oil in the South China and Yellow Seas, in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or CNOOC (“Snook”). These arrangements were the first to be concluded with western companies since the Cultural Revolution. They were conducted with a chilly civility in Beijing — then still a spartan city to say the least, with only two hotels available to western visitors. We were installed in the north of the city in a hotel designed allegedly by I.M. Pei, about an hour’s drive from the CNOOC offices.

xi jinping wang huning wargame militarizing IP china
Dennis Unkovic

Explaining China’s IP problem

Since man’s early origins, the desire to possess gold has been a universal obsession. Gold was once viewed as the ultimate symbol of power and wealth. Governments amassed vast quantities of gold to finance their economies and political ambitions. Until the mid-twentieth century, leading national currencies were directly tied to how much physical gold was housed in national treasuries. But 500 years ago, Sir Thomas More got it right when he described gold as something “which in itself is so useless.” Today, rather than gold, what truly represents a nation’s strength is its ability to innovate and control technologies.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Joe Biden’s TIME interview: the good the bad and the ugly

President Joe Biden sat down for an interview with TIME magazine in the White House last week. The questions centered around foreign affairs, with interviewers Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs asking about D-Day, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, nuclear power, China, inflation, tariffs and immigration. Back in March Americans generally agreed that the economy and foreign affairs were weak points in Biden’s administration. The TIME interview is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Cockburn identified a few overarching themes: Biden accused TIME of misreporting and leaving his accomplishments unreported. The first accusation: “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.” Another theme: senility.

joe biden time magazine

Sunday

Calla Jones Corner

My father’s trunk reminds me of one of my earliest Memorial Days

Perhaps we all have our first memories of celebrating Memorial Day. Mine comes from 1945 when my father returned from the Pacific Theater of World War Two. I was only two. My father didn’t have to go to war as he had a family and was “safe” from the draft. Nevertheless, he volunteered after being recruited by the newly founded OWI, or Office of War Information. The OWI wanted men and women, like my father, whose graphic, photography, writing and communication skills at J. Walter Thompson, the worldwide advertising agency, had been noted and would help defeat the Japanese. He felt it was his patriotic duty and was buoyed, no doubt, by having close friends with families who had volunteered.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, June 2024

The rise of reverse gaslighting Sir — To an otherwise excellent article, I have a small correction. In 1860, the Southern states did not keep Lincoln off the ballot. Unlike today, where voting ballots are printed by the states, in 1860, voters were not presented with official ballots at polling stations that allowed them to check off which candidate they were voting for. Instead, a nineteenth-century ballot or “political ticket” was a slip of paper, provided by each party, listing their candidates for whatever offices were up for election. This allowed voters to easily “vote the ticket” for their party without having to know the names of every candidate and office.

letters

Thursday

Charles Lipson

Why Gaza and not the Uighurs?

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.” Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces. But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity.

gaza

Monday

Ben Domenech

Lessons from the foreign aid votes

The past week has presented a fascinating object lesson in the continued tension over the direction of foreign policy and national security in the MAGA era, on what matters and what doesn’t, and who matters and who doesn’t, when it comes to finding a true forward-looking Trump-Reagan fusion. I wrote about this in the context of reviewing the new book by Matt Kroenig and Dan Negrea, who wrote a Ukraine-focused piece for Foreign Policy last week. But that’s just writing, not voting — and this week brought votes that include more useful indicators of what’s going on.

foreign aid

Tuesday

Cockburn

Ex-TikTok employees sound the alarm over ties to China

Cocaine Mitch may be onto something. Last week, the senator called on his colleagues to pass a bill banning TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Now ex-TikTok employees are coming forward with stories detailing the company's entanglement with China.  According to eleven former employees interviewed by Fortune, TikTok has deep ties to Beijing through ByteDance which the company has tried to conceal. Some of the employees were with the company as late as last year, after the launch of Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative to store data of American citizens in the US. Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist at TikTok, worked for a Beijing executive during his time at the company.

tiktok
space technology
Spectator Editorial

Is the West ready to face the challenges of advancing technology?

The theme of this month’s edition is technology. The advancement of space exploration, defense technologies, artificial intelligence and the like should excite us. Yet the geopolitical issues they present are great and Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with them. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top autists if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class on p.12. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on, as tycoons seek to cash in on the final frontier.