Talk World

Something almost unthinkable happened today. Here’s the short version: under intense pressure from Washington, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, still flew to Moscow and announced—in public—that New Delhi will buy even more Russian oil, dig deeper into Russian mines, and send thousands of Indian techies, builders, and engineers to ease Russia’s labor crunch. In return, Sergey Lavrov promised India a seat at the table in developing the Russian Far East and Arctic shelves, and pledged to snap up larger volumes of Indian pharmaceuticals, farm goods, and textiles to narrow the bilateral trade gap. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s the exact opposite of what the White House wanted to hear. Donald Trump had already warned New Delhi: “Buy Russian crude and your tariff rate jumps from 25 % to 50 %.” Above 36 %, most economists treat two countries as having, for all practical purposes, broken commercial ties. In plain English: economic divorce. So when Jaishankar’s plane ...

Tokyo just dropped a bombshell: July exports plunged at the fastest pace in four years, and the culprit is sitting in Washington. According to Japan’s Ministry of Finance, outbound shipments fell 2.6 percent year-on-year, but the real story is the 10.1 percent nosedive in sales to the United States. Cars took the biggest hit—exports to American showrooms collapsed 28.4 percent. The reason is simple: former President Donald Trump’s tariff war. Starting with a blanket 10 percent levy on all Japanese goods, Trump then slapped an eye-watering 27.5 percent tariff on automobiles. His stated goal was to “bring manufacturing home” and close America’s yawning trade gap; for Japan, it feels more like economic strangulation. For decades, Tokyo has watched its industrial crown jewels picked off, first by South Korea and then by China. Shipbuilding, consumer electronics, semiconductors—one sector after another shrank or migrated. The latest indignity came last year when South Korea’s per-capita gro...

Air Force One was still idling on the tarmac when Vladimir Putin’s Ilyushin lifted off for Moscow—no lunch, no handshakes for the cameras, no joint communiqué. In less than four hours the first face-to-face meeting between Donald Trump and Putin in six years was over, leaving diplomats and journalists scrambling for explanations. The choreography had already shifted at the last minute. What was billed as an intimate one-on-one became a three-on-three huddle: Trump flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff; Putin backed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and presidential aide Yuri Ushakov. The sudden expansion was widely read as a hedge—an insurance policy urged by European capitals and Kyiv against any private “handshake deals.” With the famously hawkish Rubio at the table, Trump could nod, smile, and still be yanked back from the brink. After barely three hours of talks and a perfunctory press spray, both leaders bolted. The working lunch for senior dele...

The biggest bubble in the United States isn’t in housing, crypto, or even the stock market—it’s in artificial-intelligence hype itself. A recent dispatch by Tech Buzz China founder Masha Ma should have sent chills down Silicon Valley’s spine. Ma, fresh from a field tour of Chinese AI facilities, admits she’s “no energy expert,” yet after weeks of briefings and site visits she writes: “China no longer worries about whether it can power its data centers. The problem is solved.” Another specialist added that China keeps national power reserves at 80–100 percent above peak demand—double what it actually needs—so adding AI workloads doesn’t even register as a grid risk. Compare that with the U.S., where utilities are scrambling to plug new generators into an aging grid. Permits take years, locals file endless lawsuits, and market rules differ from state to state. The bottleneck isn’t technology; it’s governance. I flagged this mismatch more than a year ago: the limiting factor for American ...

A flood of messages hit my inbox overnight, all asking the same thing: “What really happened when Trump met Putin?” Here’s the short version: the summit only reinforced the conclusion I drew months ago—the standoff between Washington and Moscow is shaping up to be the single most intractable problem on the planet. The meeting produced no breakthrough. Instead, it offered five small moments that, taken together, look a lot like an empire stepping on its own rake. The optics were pure Cold-War cosplay The choreography began before either plane touched the ground. Trump insisted on arriving second, a classic power move, so the Russians were forced to cool their heels in Alaska. Yet Moscow got the last word: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov strolled into the hotel wearing a white sweater that, in the wind, flashed the scarlet Cyrillic “CCCP.” The Soviet Union dissolved 34 years ago, but the symbolism hit its mark—Alaska was once the frozen front line of the Cold War, and the sweater was no f...

Over the last few days, readers have been asking me to handicap the Putin–Trump meeting scheduled for tomorrow. Here’s the short version: it’s going to be a spectacular piece of theater—nothing more. The two sides are so far apart on price that the whole exercise is doomed to fail. Picture a flea-market haggle in which one guy demands a thousand dollars and the other offers a single buck. They can talk all afternoon, but the gap will still be 999 dollars wide when the lights go out. Trump’s own words already signal retreat. On 13 August, the former president—who once boasted he could end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours”—told reporters the summit will be merely “exploratory.” After seven months of failing to deliver on that promise, even he no longer sounds confident. The subtext is obvious: the briefing books are full of demands neither side can accept. Moscow has just slammed the door on the core issue. Also on 13 August, Russian Deputy Foreign Ministry spokesman Fyodor Faytsev ruled o...