The Trump-Xi summit wound down Friday morning in Washington with tea.
That isn’t a metaphor. After three days of state ceremonies, bilateral meetings in the Oval Office, and a formal dinner Thursday evening attended by the chief executives of Nvidia, Tesla, and AMD, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump concluded the formal portion of the visit with tea and their spouses, followed by a visit to the National Archives. Xi urged Trump to formally oppose Taiwanese independence. Trump described the meetings as “great.” Neither government published a joint communique.
That last detail is worth sitting with. When Xi last came to Washington for a full state visit, in 2015 under Barack Obama, the two governments produced a joint statement on cybersecurity and climate that ran to several pages. What’s changed between 2015 and now isn’t that the two countries ran out of things to agree about. It’s that the things they disagree about have grown more foundational: the technology export controls, Taiwan, the tariff architecture that was never fully dismantled after 2018, the competing Pacific military buildups. A communique announces agreement. Both governments appear to have concluded that announcing the absence of agreement is more honest, and more stable, than announcing an agreement nobody believes. Three days without a public rupture may be what stability looks like right now.
For context: the last time a sitting American president visited China before any trade dispute had fully hardened was Nixon in 1972, when he arrived in Beijing to find a government that had been isolated from Western diplomacy for more than two decades. The opening that followed didn’t resolve the Taiwan question. It produced a framework for managing it. The Shanghai Communique of 1972 acknowledged that both sides of the Taiwan Strait maintained there was one China. It didn’t say which government was right. That ambiguity held, more or less, for fifty years. Whether the ambiguity survives this summit, and the ones after it, is the central question in American foreign policy. The tea on Friday didn’t answer it. (CNN)
The bond market spent this week sending a different kind of message.
Earlier this week, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note touched its highest level in 19 years, and the 30-year yield reached a 22-year high, according to analysts at the Schwab Center for Financial Research. US equity markets barely moved: the S&P 500 was down 0.02 percent, the Nasdaq up 0.01 percent. Financials and consumer discretionary sectors underperformed. Friday’s data releases included durable goods orders and the final University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading for September.
The last time 10-year yields were at current levels was roughly 2007, before the financial crisis began to unfold. The 30-year hasn’t been here since the early years of the Bush administration. Neither comparison is a prediction; the current economy is structured differently from both periods, and yields can reach a given level for reasons that don’t repeat. What the comparison does is clarify the scale. For a homebuyer, for a business borrowing to expand, for a federal government financing a multitrillion-dollar deficit, these rates are not a temporary inconvenience. They’re the cost structure the economy is operating inside. The Federal Reserve has been watching this for three years. It hasn’t resolved. (Charles Schwab)
At the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week that he is “very open” to a trilateral summit hosted by Turkey, bringing together himself, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan separately called for abolishing the UN Security Council’s veto mechanism and empowering the General Assembly. Both statements came on the sidelines of UNGA’s final days.
Zelenskyy proposed an energy ceasefire at the General Assembly on Wednesday, and Trump told reporters Thursday that he speaks with Putin regularly and that “something is going to happen.” Whether that something connects to this trilateral proposal, or exists separately, neither government has made clear. What’s clear is Turkiye’s positioning: the one NATO member that hasn’t joined Western sanctions on Russia, the government that brokered the 2022 grain corridor agreement, the country Putin takes calls from. That positioning has real diplomatic value, and Turkey is using it. The last time a Zelenskyy-Putin negotiation came close to a settlement, in Istanbul in 2022, it fell apart before anything was signed, and both sides have blamed the other for its collapse. Whether the conditions in 2026 are different enough to produce a different outcome is not something a sideline statement at UNGA can answer. (Anadolu Agency)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday to a hall that was largely empty. Many delegations walked out in protest of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, a demonstration organized by the Palestinian mission.
A mostly empty UNGA hall is a different signal than a hostile one. Hostility requires presence. What an empty hall signals is not anger, exactly, but something more settled: a calculation by dozens of governments that the political cost of being seen to listen outweighs whatever diplomatic benefit attendance provides. Netanyahu has addressed hostile UNGA sessions throughout his political career. The General Assembly passed a resolution in 1975 equating Zionism with racism, a measure it didn’t revoke until 1991. The relationship between Israel and the UN General Assembly has never been comfortable. What Thursday’s session represented was something beyond discomfort. The delegations that walked out weren’t leaving in the heat of the moment. They’d planned it. (Anadolu Agency)
A federal judge ruled late Wednesday that the White House must restore press access to journalists who had been barred from covering the administration. The Trump administration had blocked reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. Judge Kelly found the ban likely unconstitutional. By Thursday afternoon, all three outlets had been let back in.
What the ruling did not settle is the harder question it exposed: whether a future administration would comply with the same kind of order if it chose not to. Courts have found for fifty years that the executive branch can’t bar specific journalists without due process. That line has held through Nixon’s press enemies list, through subsequent administrations that tested it in different ways, and through several rounds of this administration’s litigation. The ban was issued, challenged, and reversed within a week. The precedent, for now, held. (NPR)
Denmark’s intelligence service issued a warning Thursday that Russia could target a neighboring NATO country in the coming months, while stressing that a full-scale invasion is highly unlikely and no attack is imminent. The assessment is consistent with a series of Nordic and Baltic security evaluations issued over the past two years as countries along NATO’s northeastern flank have updated their threat posture since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The phrase “neighboring NATO country” covers a significant portion of northeastern Europe: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Poland, and others. Finland joined NATO in April 2023, the most consequential change to European security architecture since German reunification, and its border with Russia runs for nearly 830 miles. Publishing a threat assessment rather than keeping it classified is a way of preparing a democratic society to understand what it may face. The alternative is being surprised. In 1939, Finland was not surprised when the Soviet Union invaded; Finnish military planning had anticipated the possibility for years. The resistance that followed, the Winter War, became a lesson in what adequate preparation enables. NATO’s northeastern members have been studying that lesson carefully since 2022. (Euronews)
The United Arab Emirates announced Thursday that it has suspended all flights by Iranian air carriers to and from the country until further notice. The suspension followed a new US ban targeting Iranian airlines.
The UAE-Iran relationship is one of the less-covered consequential dynamics in the Gulf. The two countries share proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global oil trade passes. Commercial ties between Dubai and Iran have persisted across decades of political friction: Dubai has long functioned as a major transshipment point for goods moving in and out of Iran, including during periods of heightened sanctions. A flight suspension is a pressure point, not a rupture. It can be lifted as quickly as it was imposed, and it probably will be. But in a region where each signaling move is read carefully by parties who know how to read them, someone in Abu Dhabi decided this week that the moment called for one. (The National)
And then there was this.
Pope Leo XIV departed Rome Friday for a four-day apostolic journey to France, following earlier trips this year to Monaco and Spain. It’s his first visit to France since his election in May of last year. The trip is expected to include meetings with political and religious leaders.
Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, is the first American-born pope in the history of the Catholic Church. The history of American popes, until sixteen months ago, was a history of absence: the office had existed for nearly two thousand years and had never been held by someone from the Western Hemisphere’s largest English-speaking country. There was a brief collective pause when it happened. There always is, when something that has never occurred finally does.
France is a specific choice for a European journey. French Catholicism is historically deep and numerically declining. The country that gave the Church Charlemagne’s legacy, Joan of Arc’s canonization, and several of the Second Vatican Council’s most influential theological architects is among the most secular nations in Europe today. What an American-born pope says to France, and what France makes of him, isn’t settled in advance. Some conversations take four days. Others take centuries. This one will probably take both, and the first chapter started Friday. (Vatican News)
