Foreign Stories in Spotlight. The U.S. Mayor Accused of Working for China. Nanny State: Gavin Newsom’s New Diaper Service. Former Starbucks CEO on Seattle’s Mayor ‘Bye-Bye.’ More

Foreign affairs grab the headlines this morning with the president heading to China, and Iran and the U.S. seemingly stalemated.

A Wall Street Journal headline describes the situation of the U.S. and China as “neither peace nor war.” An editorial in the same outlet proposes that Iran’s leaders (whoever they are) are willing to preserve this state because they believe that President Trump is “bluffing”:

Iran’s regime clearly thinks it can outlast a President who no longer wants the fight. “They think that I’ll get tired of this or I’ll get bored, or I’ll have some pressure,” Mr. Trump recognized in his Monday remarks, “but there’s no pressure at all. We’re going to have a complete victory.”

The problem is that he is under pressure, and everyone knows it. …. This is a regime that thinks it can absorb economic pain from the U.S. blockade longer than Mr. Trump can tolerate higher prices for oil and petrochemicals. Mr. Trump will have to persuade Tehran’s leaders they’ve underestimated him—and the pain.

An alternative scenario was revealed late yesterday at Fox Digital—it has Iran’s “power players” eyeing Russia to provide an Assad-style escape as talks falter: 

Golkar, a senior adviser at United Against Nuclear Iran, noted that flight destinations would likely depend on rank.

While top commanders like Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf might head to Moscow, lower-ranking figures would more likely seek shelter in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the IRGC maintains operational connections, he clarified.

“For the most senior figures, Russia would probably be the most likely destination, again as we saw with Bashar al-Assad,” Golkar said, noting many officials have already moved wealth into “financial networks outside Iran.”

Golkar explained that the “invisible state,” or Bayt-e Rahbari, was designed to survive decapitation, while the ideological cost of fleeing for leaders would be high.

“Inside the regime’s ideological culture, leaving the country during the collapse would look like desertion,” Golkar noted.

They won’t like the weather, but a piece in the London Spectator suggests they’ll find like-minded thugs (but not their own thugs). The Spectator story is an analysis of Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day oration, which lacked the army tanks:

The official explanation for the missing weaponry is the threat from Ukrainian FPV drones. That threat is real, and it is itself a humiliation: the center of the Russian capital can no longer be defended against a few thousand dollars’ worth of plywood and electronics. But the parade is not the cause of anything. It is a symptom of a quieter rearrangement inside the regime, in which power is shifting away from the technocrats who run the economy and towards the men who run Putin’s bodyguard.

It is a sign of Russia’s military depletion that Putin sent a soldier with one arm into battle.

President Trump is set to arrive in China for a summit with President Xi tomorrow evening. Hudson Institute Fellow Thomas Deusterberg writes that the president has a “strong hand” to play, despite the slanted media’s reporting that Xi holds all the cards. Taking His Posse: The president has invited Elon Musk, Larry Fink, Tim Cook, and other top CEOs to join the trip to the Xi summit.

Bill McGurn raises the matter of Jimmy Lai, champion of liberty, now in a Chinese prison. Freeing Jimmy Lai would be a win for President Trump but also for …

Freeing Mr. Lai would not only get him off Beijing’s hands. It’s a helpful concession to make when Mr. Trump is pressing Beijing over its imports from Iran.

Bringing China Home. A mayor in a California town is facing federal accusations that she was secretly working for China while in office:

Eileen Wang, former mayor of Arcadia, California, has been charged with acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China and has agreed to plead guilty to the felony offense, the Justice Department announced. She now faces up to 10 years in federal prison along with a potential $250,000 fine, though any sentence would be determined by a federal judge.

Federal prosecutors say Wang admitted she acted “at the direction and control” of Chinese government officials from at least 2020 through 2022, coordinating with individuals in the U.S. to spread pro-Beijing messaging, all without notifying the U.S. Attorney General as required by law. The conduct described by prosecutors occurred before Wang took office on the Arcadia City Council in December 2022.

Two more from our—uh—Foreign Desk: Brendan O’Neill on how a working-class revolt against “the death cult of globalism” led to U.K. PM Keir Starmer’s recent embarrassment in local elections, and Gerard Baker about the “coming apart of British politics,” a decade after Brexit.

“Doesn’t Add Up!” is the message the New York Post’s cover headline shouts. What doesn’t add up is that New York spends $43 billion on education, and the most per student in the nation, while its public schools are shrinking and its students are failing.

New York spends a walloping $44 K per student per year. It could be even more lavish when the Mamdani budget is completed. This has nothing to do with New York per se, but Geoffrey Conti, a Princeton professor, recently wrote a fascinating piece for the Washington Post on the religious illiteracy of Ivy League students, which hampers them in understanding (among other things) great literature.

Speaking of profound ignorance, we must not fail to note Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s astonishing remark that the American Revolution was a rebellion against billionaires—and AOC doesn’t even have the excuse of an Ivy League education!

Will hordes of mothers move to California, reversing the Golden State’s storied U-Haul exodus, to take advantage of Governor Newsom’s new diaper service? Alas, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal finds Gavin’s Diaper Service all wet:

California’s government can’t keep homeless off the streets, keep energy prices low, or do much of anything else well. But never fear, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state diaper service is here.

The California Governor who wants to be President said Friday that the state will soon begin providing every “newborn delivered in a participating California hospital” 400 diapers at no cost. “This is what affordability looks like,” he said. “It’s not a slogan. It’s a box. It’s a box of diapers.” Apparently he’s serious.

Droll: The WSJ editors say that the new program “gives new meaning to the phrase ‘nanny state.’”

“Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses It Made” is the title of a piece by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in (where else this morning?) the Wall Street Journal:

Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner. Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave.

In the state capital, the Legislature and governor have confronted difficult fiscal trade-offs by emphasizing taxation rather than reform or performance management. The theory appears to be that prosperity can be mandated through redistribution rather than generated through growth.

Washington has a broken tax system. The reliance on sales taxes—10.55% in Seattle—is deeply regressive. 

Maybe Washington state simply needs a free diaper service?

Ms. Must mentioned Miranda Devine’s column on the misguided empathy of liberal women that can turn deadly yesterday. Kat Rosenfield employs the phrase “suicidal empathy” in a Free Press story on the same phenomenon. The title of the piece is “I Don’t Want to Put Another Black Man in Jail.” The subtitle:

The murder of a New Yorker could have been averted if not for the suicidal empathy that is spreading among victims.