The editorial board of the City of London’s Financial Times had to admit in a May 16 statement that the just-concluded summit discussions between presidents Trump and Xi “did at least restore some stability,” but they also complained: “But in the sweep of history this summit was a missed opportunity… The US, for now, appears to have given up on the idea of tackling or even talking about global imbalances and trying to influence China’s economic policies.”
The editors wrote: “The good news from this week’s summit is that, after a decade of increasingly fractious exchanges between the world’s two great powers, Trump and Xi appear, for now, to have stabilized the relationship.” The bad news, for City of London, is that “the challenge posed by China’s stranglehold over many rare earth minerals appears to have been parked. There was also no sign that China offered to put pressure on Iran to reach a deal with the US on its nuclear program.”
