WSJ: On Track for Cold War With China
It’s been another barnburner week in world politics, and for a change some of the biggest events were neither generated by nor centered on Donald Trump.
Not that America’s president didn’t make waves. Tariffs rose and fell with the usual dizzying speed, and the trade standoff between the U.S. and China began to register in collapsing demand for shipping containers and airfreight deliveries. A dramatic mini-summit between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump in St. Peter’s Basilica heralded a possible thaw in U.S.-Ukrainian relations as more Trump officials expressed frustration with the Kremlin’s response to American peace proposals.
While Canada and Australia concluded election campaigns in which Mr. Trump’s unpopularity drove the debate, the Trump administration announced an overhaul of the State Department and reversed plans to strip thousands of foreign students of their visas.
Not all the big news stories, however, bore Mr. Trump’s fingerprints. An explosion of reportedly Chinese-delivered chemicals used for solid missile fuel devastated Iran’s largest port. A terror attack on tourists in Kashmir, with gunmen reportedly shooting people who couldn’t or wouldn’t recite Islamic verses, left 26 dead as tensions between India and Pakistan soared to their highest levels in a quarter-century. With India threatening military strikes and cuts to river flows from India-controlled areas into Pakistan, the potential for war between two nuclear-armed powers is real.