China is hoping to become the Detroit of the battery-powered electric vehicle industry. Sales of electric vehicles are expected to reach 1 million this year alone, and the government has big plans for expansion. But this welcome trend comes with a perplexing side effect: China is now using up more lithium-ion batteries than anywhere else in the world. What to do with them?Throwing those batteries away could be environmentally hazardous. Recycling them, meanwhile, turns out not to be very profita

US President Donald Trump’s plans for a trade war aren’t ostensibly focused on Europe, but Trump himself appears to think they are. He said on Tuesday that “the European Union has been particularly tough on the United States,” making it “almost impossible for us to do business with them.” Fact-checking Trump on this is pointless, but it’s worth pointing out that the US is on the verge of poisoning its favorite well for no obvious reason.　There is talk that Canada and Mexico could be excluded fro

President Donald Trump has upended expectations and interrupted the drumbeat toward war on the Korean Peninsula with his agreement to meet Kim Jong-un at “a time and place to be determined.” But what happens if talks with “Little Rocket Man” blow up on the launching pad?　The odds are high. Few analysts expect Kim to give up North Korea’s nuclear deterrent, which he sees as vital to his regime’s survival. (See: Moammar Gadhafi, 1942-2011.) Kim’s existential stakes and Trump’s mercurial brinkmansh

Donald Trump’s decision to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is in character. The US president loves outlandish plot twists that confound critics and supporters alike.Agreeing to this meeting was questionable. It’s something previous presidents have refused to do, and with reason: It’s a concession that demanded something valuable from the other side. Trump has not secured that, and he appears to have acted impulsively. This isn’t encouraging -- but the decision has been made and wha

Donald Trump wants to help the steel industry in the US, and he’s announced plans for protective tariffs. By way of explanation, Trump claims that the steel industry has been “decimated by decades of unfair trade and bad policy.”　He’s correct about one thing: This has been a problem many decades in the making. But it’s a problem rooted in disastrous decisions made by the steel companies themselves when Trump was still in elementary school.　At the end of World War II, American steel had no real c

Even since China’s Communist Party revealed that it would scrap term limits on the presidency -- meaning the post’s current occupant, Xi Jinping, can now serve for life -- there has been much hand-wringing over what one-man rule could mean for the Chinese economy. Autocracies, we’re told, never end well, leaving economists and the business community concerned that the reforms the economy requires to return to solid footing, already slow in coming, may never be implemented.　There’s cause for worr

There are two ways to look at Sunday’s Italian general election results. 　One is simply to focus on the arithmetic. From that perspective, the outcome is really not that different from what was expected. There was no outright winner: Neither the center-right coalition, nor the center-left nor the anti-establishment Five Star Movement managed to win a majority of seats. The vote produced a hung parliament, which will make it very hard to form a government. That means a period of instability lies

One thing seems certain about Xi Jinping’s move to establish himself as China’s dictator for life: The bolder and more openly assertive foreign policy he has pursued since taking power five years ago is here to stay. The conventional wisdom is that the US, its Asian allies, and the broader international order are therefore in for a rough stretch, as China demands its place in the sun. 　What’s indisputable is that Xi’s approach to foreign affairs marks the culmination of a break with Deng Xiaopin