Who Won the Summit? Some Guy Named Thucydides. Columnist: Dems Can’t Survive Without Open Borders. Never Speak Ill of Fauci. Karen Bass’s Burning Issues. More
We must bid farewell to the summit between President Trump and China’s President Xi. President Trump will once again have access to his trusty cellphone.
Both leaders want to stabilize relations between the two countries, but they may mean different things. President Trump touts “hundreds of billions” in U.S. tech companies whose CEOs met with Xi. Larry Kudlow gives the win to President Trump in an RCP offering headlined “Mr. Xi Can Saber-Rattle, But Mr. Trump Has the Goods.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was just a cipher, so to speak:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a fierce China critic, was banned in 2020 from entering the country. On Thursday, however, he sat across from Chinese officials in Beijing — with a nameplate displaying a new Chinese spelling of “Rubio” that perhaps made his visit possible as part of President Donald Trump’s entourage.
The change predated Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chinese state media and official records began using a different transliterated character for the “Ru” or “Lu” in Rubio’s name after Trump named him secretary of state in 2025.
The unexpected star of the gathering was some fellow named Thucydides. “About That Taiwan ‘Thucydides Trap’” is the headline on a Wall Street Journal editorial today:
Who knew Xi Jinping was a student of ancient Greek history? The Chinese President warned President Trump in this summit meeting on Thursday about the “Thucydides trap,” but don’t be fooled by the historical reference. His real point was warning Mr. Trump not to risk a war by interfering with China’s designs to retake Taiwan—by force if necessary.
Thucydides was the great ancient historian of the Peloponnesian War, and he argued that a rising Athens frightened Sparta and led to war. Harvard political scientist Graham Allison popularized what he called the “Thucydides trap” by identifying a dozen times in history when a rising power threatened an established power and war resulted. World War I was an example as a rising Germany threatened Britain as Europe’s leading power.
Getting what Mr. Xi likes about the analogy? In his reading, China is the rising power and America the hegemon fearful of being surpassed. He is warning Mr. Trump in pointed terms not to interfere with China’s ambitions or the result could be a destructive war. …
Speaking of Thucydides and traps, one risk is that Mr. Xi really believes China is a rising power that can become a new Middle Kingdom in which everyone else is a vassal state. His economy depends too much on exports for jobs, the country is aging fast, and its military hasn’t fought a real war in decades. He might fall into his own trap if he thinks the U.S. really is in decline enough for China to risk a war.
The Free Press also explores the Thucydides angle. Aaron MacLean explains why Xi introduced the popular highbrow theory into the discussion, suggesting that in the wake of Xi’s nod, it “must then be bliss for Graham Allison.” Xi seems to have Thucydides in his brain.
President Trump said that Xi, whom he invited to Washington, will help him with the Iran War. As far as I have seen, there is no update on the fate of Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong newspaper proprietor, who is languishing in a Chinese prison. Did President Trump ask for freedom for Jimmy Lai?
Meanwhile, Mark Clifford, president of the Committee of Freedom for Hong Kong Foundation, proposes cutting off Hong Kong’s financial support for Iran:
Some of Hong Kong’s banks and traders are a vital pipeline for moving cash to Iran. New research from the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation finds that entities in Hong Kong may be the most important connection between Iran and the international financial system—and the location of the most vital intermediaries routing key parts to Iran for drones and missiles, based on physical evidence on battlefields and customs data as well as U.S. indictments and designations. …
While Operation Economic Fury is a good first signal, Treasury’s current approach looks more like whack-a-mole than a strategy. Treasury already has slapped sanctions on more than 40 Hong Kong entities since 2020 for ties to Iran. Banking giants HSBC and Standard Chartered together paid billions in fines in 2012 and 2019 respectively for violating Iran sanctions. But dealing with Hong Kong’s terror-haven status requires a systemic approach.
Optimistic Headline of the Day: “After the Ayatollah,” by Jason Greenblatt in the Tablet. Greenblatt begins, “Something has changed in the Iran nuclear negotiation that many analysts are not fully accounting for.” One Thing that Did Not Change: President Trump’s authority to pursue the Iran conflict. GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski’s vote for a war powers measure was canceled by maverick Democratic Senator John Fettrman, who broke a tie.
President Trump is not the only high official who has been gallivanting. CIA Director John Ratcliff flew to Havana this week to meet with officials of the communist regime about fuel shortages and growing street protests. CBS reports that the U.S. is moving towards indictment of Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former President of Cuba and Fidel’s brother. Cuba’s downing of two planes operated by Cuban exile groups could be key.
“Why won’t Democrats moderate on immigration?” asks Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen. He offers a clue:
Democrats need these unlawful foreign residents to offset the departure of Americans fleeing to less oppressive red-state governance. But Trump’s border policies have halted the flood of illegal migrants that Biden unleashed, while his deportation policies seek to remove them….
Because the fact is, conventional politics alone doesn’t explain why Democrats are running headlong into public opinion by fighting Trump’s efforts to deploy ICE agents to their states and seeking to defund ICE on Capitol Hill. But add in the inescapable census math, and a method starts to emerge from the madness. For the Democratic Party, open borders are existential.
LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, whose house burned down in the LA fires, is being attacked because he no longer lives in a trailer. In another story on the closely watched race, Guy Benson writes about incumbent Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign (“Karen Bass Is Terrible at This”):
Accusing Pratt of “exploiting grief” over the Palisades fires is a stunning approach, not just in light of Bass’s prominent failures in handling that disaster, but because both Pratt and his parents lost their homes as a result of the catastrophe. He is not “exploiting” someone else’s grief; this event affected his family in the most personal way imaginable.
What is actually reprehensible, to borrow her word, is this cheap and clueless line of attack from a politician who presided over the devastation that motivated Pratt to try to unseat her.
Democrats have a high regard for whistleblowers, right? Weeeel, they’re selective. David Marcus writes about a CIA whistleblower who gave testimony this very week:
It was an amazing sight in the Senate on Wednesday, as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., held an explosive hearing featuring a CIA whistleblower testifying on COVID origins, and not a single Democrat bothered to even show up.
Every chair on the left of the dais sat empty as high-ranking CIA official James Erdman outlined the duplicity and lies, not just of the government during COVID, but especially of disgraced former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, which is precisely why the cowardly Democrats took the morning off.
According to Erdman, suppression of the lab leak theory, now widely accepted as how the COVID pandemic began, “was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci, injecting himself into the IC [intelligence community].”
We started this morning with the China summit. In closing, Rep. Kim Young reminds us that the Chinese Communist Party monitors the most intimate aspects of private life in China:
Flip off the lights, hop in your car, connect your phone to Bluetooth, and turn on your favorite podcast for the drive to work. That everyday routine depends on copper, lithium, and a whole host of other critical minerals that power batteries, speakers, navigation systems, electric motors, and modern communications technology.
These materials are so deeply embedded into our daily lives that most Americans would never think twice about them. But they should.
