“The U.S. has provided defensive arms to Taiwan on a bipartisan basis for over forty years. That aid is not a bargaining chip — it is required by law and essential to preserving peace and deterring China.” -@SenatorShaheen
https://t.co/sr8XOuG4Ts
Trump’s offer of US energy to China during the summit carries immense consequences.
China has always sought the cheapest available energy to fuel its industrial base, and Iranian crude, heavily discounted under sanctions, served that purpose for years. Cheap U.S. energy offers Beijing an alternative that does not come with Gulf relationships to manage or Chinese companies to protect from U.S. sanctions.
However, reading Beijing's repositioning as a strategic alignment with Washington against Tehran entirely misreads the relationship. What the past several months have demonstrated to China is that enabling the Islamic Republic generates compounding liabilities, and those liabilities now have a price tag attached to specific Chinese firms. A less entangled China is not a hostile China toward Tehran, but a China that can afford to watch Iranian decisions produce their own consequences without intervening to soften them.
https://t.co/WBYg4O9rMf
We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.
The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://t.co/TgJBeodWYK
My latest
Xi-Trump Summit: Iran's Shrinking Margin
Key Takeways
What the past several months have demonstrated to China is that enabling the Islamic Republic generates compounding liabilities, and those liabilities now have a price tag attached to specific Chinese firms. A less entangled China is not a hostile China toward Tehran, but a China that can afford to watch Iranian decisions produce their own consequences without intervening to soften them.
https://t.co/WBYg4O9ZBN
Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s family is putting huge chunks of the empire on sale, quickly building up a vast stockpile of cash. Here’s why. https://t.co/HQT91OLiYt
🚨 President Trump THANKS Xi Jinping for the INCREDIBLE welcome ceremony in Beijing
"That was an honor like few have ever seen before."
"The relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before."
"You and I have known each other now for a long time. In fact, the longest relationship of our two countries that any president and president has had. And that's, to me, an honor.
We've had a fantastic relationship. We've gotten along. When there were difficulties, we worked it out.
I would call you and you would call me, and whenever we had a problem, people don't know. Whenever we had a problem, we worked that out very quickly, and we're going to have a fantastic future together. Such respect for China, the job you've done.
You're a great leader. I say it to everybody. You're a great leader.
Sometimes people don't like me saying it, but I say it anyway, because it's true. I only say the truth. And I just want to say on behalf of all of the great delegation that we have, we have the greatest businessmen, the biggest and, I guess the best in the world."
My latest
Trump's Iran Card
As the military action proceeded, the United States made gains across the map aimed at limiting China’s reach.
The Pentagon locked in a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with Indonesia — the archipelago that sits astride Malacca, Sunda and Lombok, three straits through which most of China’s energy imports flow.
In the Philippines, a new 4,000-acre US-governed economic security zone on the Luzon Strait is anchoring an American presence at the doorstep of the South China Sea.
In the western Balkans, the US signed deals at Dubrovnik’s Three Seas Initiative Summit — a $1.5 billion Croatia-Bosnia gas interconnection, a $6 billion Albanian LNG framework and a $58 billion AI data center investment — foreclosing Chinese capital from the Adriatic in a single package.
Trump heads to Beijing this week carrying immense leverage over China.
https://t.co/vudBqZX9kh
Hezbollah received an estimated $700 million annually. The Houthis, the Popular Mobilization Forces, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a range of other proxies all drew from the same source. Ideology may explain why men join a revolutionary movement, but it rarely explains why they stay, and it never explains why they fight consistently for a long period and in different domains and areas. That requires payment, logistics, and a state capable of delivering on its end of the arrangement.
https://t.co/gKGfGkhva1
The Chinese Communist Party isn’t just restricting faith, it’s rewriting it. Under Xi Jinping’s “sinicization” campaign, core teachings are being stripped away with commandments erased, references to God removed, and even biblical passages rewritten to align with Party doctrine.
Churches are surveilled, clergy are forced to pledge loyalty to the state party, and children are barred from worship. This is not religious freedom, it’s subjugation. No government has the authority to rewrite faith or claim ownership over the soul.
Chairman @RepMoolenaar made his position clear in a letter to @SupportJimmyLai last year, "You know that across China today, the Party is carrying out its most systematic campaign of religious persecution since the Cultural Revolution. The Party calls it the “sinicization of religion.” But you know what it really means is subjugation. You know that the Party demands that every conscience, every congregation, and every creed bow before its rule. You know that religious leaders who refuse to join Party-controlled “patriotic” churches are detained, disappeared, or silenced."
https://t.co/eDkDgUdHLB
My latest
Iran's Economy is Collapsing
Understanding the IRGC's Dilemma
The IRGC likes to boast about its immunity to external pressure, but the economic situation reveals an organization that is disoriented, operating a model so rigid and so dependent on conditions that no longer exist that it has no productive response to the pressure now bearing down on it.
https://t.co/JFD2w56ajE
What most ceasefire commentary has missed is that the military campaign's pause does not mean the conflict has paused, because the economic campaign is running at full force, its targets extending from Tehran’s financial network to the Chinese industrial architecture that keeps it alive.
https://t.co/l70mgLm0J9
The Biden administration’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine mandate was wrongfully forced onto our warfighters.
It was unjust, and we are doing EVERYTHING we can to make it right.
China has been telling the world it is abandoning the dollar. The Council on Foreign Relations just published a detailed analysis showing that China may actually hold more dollars off its official books than on them. The de-dollarization story is largely a magic trick.
Here is how it works in plain terms. China's official foreign exchange reserve, managed by an agency called SAFE, used to hold about 79% of its assets in US dollars back in 2005. By 2019, that number had dropped to 55%. That is the number that gets reported. That is the number that generates headlines about China dumping the dollar.
But while China was reducing the dollar share of its official reserves, it quietly stopped growing those official reserves altogether. They have been stuck at roughly $3.3 trillion for eight years. All the new money China accumulated went somewhere else entirely, into the foreign lending of state-owned policy banks like the China Development Bank, into the foreign assets of state commercial banks, and into various state investment funds. None of this is fully disclosed. None of it shows up in the headline de-dollarization numbers.
CFR senior fellow Brad Setser ran the math. China's official reserves hold approximately $1.8 trillion in dollars. But Chinese state commercial banks hold an estimated $1 trillion in dollar assets abroad. The policy banks hold close to another $1 trillion in foreign claims, most denominated in dollars. The China Investment Corporation, the country's sovereign wealth fund, holds roughly $450 billion in foreign assets, the majority in dollars. Add it all up and China's total dollar holdings across all state entities likely exceed $4 trillion, more off the official books than on them.
Every debt restructuring case where China's policy banks were involved, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Angola, involved dollar-denominated loans. Not yuan. Not euros. Dollars.
The de-dollarization narrative serves a specific purpose for Beijing. It signals geopolitical independence from the US financial system, which is valuable messaging for domestic audiences and Global South partners. But the actual financial behavior of Chinese state entities tells a different story. China's banks are still borrowing and lending predominantly in dollars. China's investment funds are still holding predominantly dollar assets. The label changed. The exposure did not.
China is telling the world it is exiting the dollar while quietly holding more of it than ever. That is not de-dollarization but a very well-executed press release.
#China #CCP #Dollar #DeDollarization #Geopolitics #Finance #CFR #Economy #GlobalFinance #SAFE