When the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, took to the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week to lament how “great economic powers” were dismantling the international order, it seemed clear that he was talking about the United States. He might have been talking about China as well. Not a week earlier, Beijing had revealed that China’s trade surplus ballooned by 20% in 2025, to $1.2tn. Despite Donald Trump’s wall of tariffs that crashed Chinese sales to the US, its overall exports expanded more than 5%. Sales…
Tag: US news
US intelligence agencies disagree with Trump’s opposition to Chagos deal, says Starmer
US intelligence agencies disagree with Donald Trump’s newly found opposition to the Chagos deal, Keir Starmer has said, as he underlined how the US administration had supported the deal as it bolstered their defences. The prime minister made his remarks, which could undermine the US president’s fresh view of the deal as an “act of great stupidity”, on the flight to Beijing for a visit that will cover UK national security among other issues. Downing Street sources have told the Guardian the agreement, which was formally approved by Starmer and…
Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight amid threats from climate crisis and AI
Planet closer to destruction as Russia, China and US become more aggressive and nationalistic, says advocacy group Earth is closer than it has ever been to destruction as Russia, China, the US and other countries become “increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic”, a science-oriented advocacy group said on Tuesday as it advanced its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds until midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist members had an initial demonstration on Friday and then announced their results on Tuesday. Continue reading… The Guardian
Canada has no intention of pursuing free trade with China, says Carney
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said on Sunday his country had no intention of pursuing a free trade deal with China, responding to Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 100% tariff on goods imported from Canada if the US’s northern neighbour went ahead with a trade deal with Beijing. Carney said his recent agreement with China merely cut tariffs on a few sectors that were recently hit with them. The prime minister said that, under the free trade agreement with the US and Mexico, there were commitments not to pursue…
Trump’s wrecking ball pushes US allies closer to China
If geopolitics relies at least in part on bonhomie between global leaders, China made an unexpected play for Ireland’s good graces when the taoiseach visited Beijing this month. Meeting Ireland’s leader, Micheál Martin, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said a favourite book of his as a teenager was The Gadfly, by the Irish author Ethel Voynich, a novel set in the revolutionary fervour of Italy in the 1840s. “It was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on…
Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariff over possible deal with China
Donald Trump on Saturday said he would impose a 100% tariff on all Canadian imports if the North American country makes a trade deal with China. Beside that tariff threat, another Trump foreign policy maneuver to make news on Saturday involved the president announcing the US had taken the oil that was on recently seized Venezuelan tankers. The US president wrote on social media that if the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, “thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products…
China blocks Nvidia H200 AI chips that US government cleared for export – report
Suppliers of parts for Nvidia’s H200 have paused production after Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the newly approved artificial intelligence processors from entering China, according to a report. Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which appeared in the Financial Times citing two people with knowledge of the matter. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment made outside regular business hours. Nvidia had expected more than one million orders from Chinese clients, the report said, adding that its suppliers had been operating around the clock…
Mark Carney in China positions Canada for ‘the world as it is, not as we wish it’
Mark Carney’s trip to Beijing this week secured what he described as a “preliminary but landmark” trade deal and a recognition – welcomed by Beijing – that countries are operating in a “new world order”. Carney’s visit is the first time in nearly a decade that a Canadian prime minister has been welcomed in Beijing. It comes after years of a deep freeze in the relationship between Ottawa and Beijing that Carney wants to thaw, in order to reduce his country’s precarious reliance on the United States. Guy Saint-Jacques, a…
Australia’s confidence in Trump’s US has evaporated. What will it take for the alliance to rupture?
Perched high above Canberra stands a stylised American eagle statue on a towering column. Colloquially derided as the Phallus in Blunderland or the Chicken on a Stick, the Australian-American Memorial was paid for by mid-century Australians “to commemorate the service and sacrifice of American men and women in the defence of Australia” during the second world war. But there is perhaps another way to interpret an 80-metre statue high above Australia’s defence headquarters: that of a malevolent power monitoring a subordinate. For seven decades Australia has sought and found security…
The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age
In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and…