Big Take Asia: The India-Pakistan Crisis and Truce
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Fast Company
5 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Trump signs executive order to extend trade truce with China for another 90 days
President Donald Trump extended a trade truce with China for another 90 days Monday, at least delaying once again a dangerous showdown between the world's two biggest economies. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he signed the executive order for the extension, and that 'all other elements of the Agreement will remain the same.' Beijing at the same time also announced the extension of the tariff pause, according to the Ministry of Commerce. The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. Had that happened the U.S. could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30%, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on U.S. exports to China. The pause buys time for the two countries to work out some of their differences, perhaps clearing the way for a summit later this year between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and it has been welcomed by the U.S. companies doing business with China. Sean Stein, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said the extension is 'critical' to give the two governments time to negotiate a trade agreement that U.S. businesses hope would improve their market access in China and provide the certainty needed for companies to make medium- and long-term plans. 'Securing an agreement on fentanyl that leads to a reduction in U.S. tariffs and a rollback of China's retaliatory measures is acutely needed to restart U.S. agriculture and energy exports,' Stein said. China said Tuesday it would extend relief to American companies who were placed on an export control list and an unreliable entities list. After Trump initially announced tariffs in April, China restricted exports of dual-use goods to some American companies, while banning others from trading or investing in China. The Ministry of Commerce said it would stop those restrictions for some companies, while giving others another 90-day extension. Reaching a pact with China remains unfinished business for Trump, who has already upended the global trading system by slapping double-digit taxes — tariffs — on almost every country on earth. The European Union, Japan and other trading partners agreed to lopsided trade deals with Trump, accepting once unthinkably U.S. high tariffs (15% on Japanese and EU imports, for instance) to ward off something worse. Trump's trade policies have turned the United States from one of the most open economies in the world into a protectionist fortress. The average U.S. tariff has gone from around 2.5% at the start of the year to 18.6%, highest since 1933, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. But China tested the limits of a U.S. trade policy built around using tariffs as a cudgel to beat concessions out of trading partners. Beijing had a cudgel of its own: cutting off or slowing access to its rare earths minerals and magnets – used in everything from electric vehicles to jet engines. In June, the two countries reached an agreement to ease tensions. The United States said it would pull back export restrictions on computer chip technology and ethane, a feedstock in petrochemical production. And China agreed to make it easier for U.S. firms to get access to rare earths. 'The U.S. has realized it does not have the upper hand,' said Claire Reade, senior counsel at Arnold & Porter and former assistant U.S. trade representative for China affairs. In May, the U.S. and China had averted an economic catastrophe by reducing massive tariffs they'd slapped on each other's products, which had reached as high as 145% against China and 125% against the U.S. Those triple-digit tariffs threatened to effectively end trade between the United States and China and caused a frightening sell-off in financial markets. In a May meeting in Geneva they agreed to back off and keep talking: America's tariffs went back down to a still-high 30% and China's to 10%. Having demonstrated their ability to hurt each other, they've been talking ever since. 'By overestimating the ability of steep tariffs to induce economic concessions from China, the Trump administration has not only underscored the limits of unilateral U.S. leverage, but also given Beijing grounds for believing that it can indefinitely enjoy the upper hand in subsequent talks with Washington by threatening to curtail rare earth exports,' said Ali Wyne, a specialist in U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group. 'The administration's desire for a trade détente stems from the self-inflicted consequences of its earlier hubris.' It's unclear whether Washington and Beijing can reach a grand bargain over America's biggest grievances. Among these are lax Chinese protection of intellectual property rights and Beijing's subsidies and other industrial policies that, the Americans say, give Chinese firms an unfair advantage in world markets and have contributed to a massive U.S. trade deficit with China of $262 billion last year. Reade doesn't expect much beyond limited agreements such as the Chinese saying they will buy more American soybeans and promising to do more to stop the flow of chemicals used to make fentanyl and to allow the continued flow of rare-earth magnets. But the tougher issues will likely linger, and 'the trade war will continue grinding ahead for years into the future,' said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. diplomat and trade official who now runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy.
Vox
7 minutes ago
- Vox
Stop romanticizing the 1990s. The data shows today is better.
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: 'the good old days.' Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. It's called 'nostalgia bias,' and it can lead to us unfairly comparing the conditions of the present to some better imagined past. Memory, as the political scientist Lee Drutman wrote in a smart piece last year, is like a record store: It stocks both the hits and stinkers of the present, but only the hits of the past. 'The old days were full of stinkers, too,' he wrote. 'It's just nobody replays the stinkers.' Nostalgia bias has become a bigger and bigger part of our politics, thanks in part to President Donald Trump's largely successful ability to leverage a collective longing for a supposedly better past. (After all, it's called 'Make America Great Again,' not 'Make America Great.') But it's hardly the domain of one party: A 2023 survey from Pew found that nearly six in 10 respondents said that life in the US 50 years ago was better for people like them than it is today. Fifty years ago was the 1970s, and it doesn't take too much historical research to see how that decade doesn't match up to our happy memories. (One word: disco.) But what about a more recent, seemingly actually better decade? One that's suddenly surfing a wave of pop-culture nostalgia? A decade like…the 1990s? Related The surprising reason fewer people are dying from extreme weather One 2024 survey from CivicScience found that the 1990s were the single decade respondents felt most nostalgic for (while the most recent decade, the 2010s, finished dead last). Nor, to my surprise, is this just the product of aging Gen X-ers pining for their flannel-clad youth — another survey found that over a third of Gen Z-ers were nostalgic for the 1990s, despite the fact most of them had not yet been born then, while 61 percent of millennials felt the same way. But look closely, and you'll realize that our memories of the 1990s are fatally blurred by nostalgia. Here are four reasons why the 1990s weren't as good as the present day. 1) A far more violent country I've written before about how Americans have this stubborn habit of believing the crime is getting worse even when it's actually getting better. But holy cow, was America violent and murderous in the 1990s! 2) A much poorer world At the start of the 1990s, nearly 40 percent of the entire world was in a state of extreme poverty, living on $2.15 or less a day. What that meant in reality was that for almost half the world, life was lived on the edge of grinding subsistence, much as it had been for centuries, with seemingly little chance for change. In China, for instance, some two-thirds of the population was in extreme poverty. The idea that the world's largest nation would ever become rich would have been laughable. Today, as I've written before, that picture has utterly changed. Just 8.5 percent of the world's now much larger population lives in extreme poverty, which translates to over a billion people escaping near-total destitution. While you might want to go back in time to the 1990s, I can almost guarantee that none of them would. But it's not just the world. The 1990s may be remembered by some as one long economic boom in the US, but real GDP produced per person has increased by 40 percent since the end of the '90s, while real median income has increased by nearly 15 percent. Nostalgia doesn't take into account compound growth. 3) A nearly unchecked HIV pandemic There are countless ways in which health statistics globally have improved since the 1990s — the child mortality rate alone has fallen by 61 percent since 1990 — but the most striking one to me is HIV. At the dawn of the 1990s the HIV epidemic looked unbeatable: The US lost 31,196 people to AIDS in 1990, and by 1995 it was the leading killer of Americans aged 25-44. Global AIDS deaths were racing toward the 2-million-a-year mark, and even when the first truly effective multi-drug cocktail debuted in 1996, it reached only a tiny share of patients globally. Today the picture has flipped. About 30.7 million people — 77 percent of everyone with HIV — receive treatment, and global AIDS deaths have fallen to around 630,000. In 2022 there were fewer than 20,000 AIDS deaths in the US, and many cities are realistically aiming to zero out cases and deaths in the near future. There's even real hope for an effective vaccine. 4) A less tolerant, less educated population Though it might not seem like it in our highly polarized present moment, a number of important social attitudes have flipped since the Clinton years. When Gallup first asked in 1996, just 27 percent of Americans backed legal same-sex marriage; support now sits at 71 percent, and it has been legal throughout the country since 2015. In 1991, fewer than half of adults approved of Black-white marriages, yet by 2021 that share had rocketed to 94 percent. Together these shifts mark a dramatic expansion of everyday acceptance for LGBTQ people, interracial families, and other forms of diversity. As decades go, the 1990s did have a lot going for them, though as someone who was in their late teens and early 20s during much of them — precisely the ages we're most nostalgic for — you can't take my word for it. And our current moment has no shortage of problems, including some that 30 years ago we would have considered dead and buried. But don't let your inaccurate memories of the past distort your ability to see how far we've come. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Washington Post
7 minutes ago
- Washington Post
D.C. doesn't need the National Guard, but crime is a big problem
I make a point of agreeing with President Donald Trump whenever he is right about something, and I'm afraid he is right that in D.C., crime and disorder is a major problem. It is not as big a problem as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, 'somewhat less of a problem than it was' is not really very good news.
