It’s all a question of how the US wants to pull out of the war. The decision they have to make is whether they value the relationship with Russia or Europe more. Forcing Ukraine to take the deal would burn bridges with Europe, but it would open opportunities to restart economic relations with Russia. Given that European economy is crashing, and that the US now sees China as the main threat, it’s entirely possible they make a cynical decision to prioritize securing resource deals with Russia over Europe.

Exactly, also this is gonna keep markets nervous because nobody knows what happens after 90 days. So, the US will have a hard time recruiting countries against China in the meantime.

There was already a 25% tariff on a lot of goods from China before the trade war started. Now they’ve agreed to a flat 30% tariff, so basically Trump managed to raise tariffs on China by 5%.

https://www.commerce.gov/news/fact-sheets/2024/05/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-action-protect-american-workers-and

I think whether a deal is made or not will ultimately depend on the US. If Trump pulls weapons from Ukraine then the war is over, so he has a huge amount of leverage over them. Whether the US will eventually agree to Russian terms is the real question here.

The funny part with the whole thing here is that Europeans made an ultimatum to Russia to agree to an unconditional ceasefire. Then Putin came out with a statement that a ceasefire can only come as a result of negotiations, and then suggested a concrete date and place to hold negotiations. He masterfully outplayed them diplomatically here.

So looks like they dropped the tariffs to 30% and China dropped theirs to 10%. Still funny, but was hoping China would just force them to drop them entirely.

I’m hoping that the trade war disaster is going to sober them up a bit.

My biggest worry is that the US will end up flipping the table realizing they lost the economic war and start an actual war.

I gotta say, the final season of America is beating all expectations so far.

As a side note, I have questions about the math here.

Indeed, I’m guessing this is a result of China having expected this turn of events and having been preparing for this eventuality for a while now. Meanwhile, the US failed to make similar preparations on their end simply assuming that they’re still and indispensable economy for the world. One way to look at it is that China is fighting a trade war with a single country, while the US is fighting a trade war with the whole world. Every country the US offends in the process will start looking towards China as an alternative.

The US has been clamoring for decoupling for so long, and now they’ve got it. One of those be careful what you wish for moments.

I bet we’ll have a repeat of this

exactly what I’m expecting

The US lost more jets in the past month fighting Yemen than Russia has fighting a high intensity conflict in Ukraine.

ok yeah totally agree

Yeah that’s the triumph of the will part, they think if they just wish for something hard enough it’ll happen. I guess the modern term for this is manifesting. :)

I find I like mind over matter because it gets to the core of the difference in philosophy between idealists and materialists.

Europeans really bought into the whole mind over matter thing I guess. 🤣

I’m hoping that people running India are aware enough to realize that they’re not gonna be better off in case of a nuclear holocaust.

They do, but as far as I know that dispute is not related to the one between India and Pakistan.