RoozCast

The US and China may be on the verge of resolving – or at least cooling – a heavyweight trade dispute that's already seen them slap tariffs on $360 billion worth of each other's goods. If all goes according to plan, a deal will be in place ahead of a summit later this month between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.  As the dust begins to settle between the US and China, the Trump administration's appetite for trade fights is as strong as ever.  

There's growing optimism that the US and China will soon wrap up a deal to end their $360 billion trade and tariffs drama. But even if China agrees to buy more US petroleum and soybeans or ease demands that foreign companies hand over intellectual property, President Trump's negotiators are unlikely to get Beijing to change on a more fundamental issue: the state's heavy hand in directing the economy and the advantages it gives many Chinese companies.  Which is nothing new.

Tomorrow, emergency supplies of food and medicine are expected to arrive in Venezuela by land and sea. Venezuela’s military, still loyal to President Nicolas Maduro, promises to stop the aid from entering. In a time of national crisis, the credibility of both the government and the opposition is now justly on the line.

Speaking of American-European disagreements, I've talked previously about the US pushback against Huawei, I would argue the world’s most geopolitically significant technology company. The Trump administration has been trying to persuade the European to ban the Chinese tech giant (Huawei) from their next-generation 5G information networks, citing national security risks. In fact just last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even warned of consequences for countries that don’t follow Washington’s line on the issue.

It seems that Mr. Putin wants to remove the internet. Well, sort of, kind of at least. Russia is taking steps that would allow the government to unplug the country from the world wide web and fall back on its own, internal Russian network.  It also appears that a Russian agency plans to perform tests on a prototype of the “RosNet”.

President Trump signed and announced an executive order requiring the US government to come up with a strategy and plan to improve America’s edge in artificial intelligence. Well, at least for now, It’s the closest Washington has come to set out a national strategy for AI since Mr. Trump took office, and comes almost two years after China's leaders revealed their ambitious plan to turn China into the world leader in AI by 2030.

It’s been a serious few days in the US-China lets call it -  tech cold war. The confrontation between the world’s single superpower (the US) and its biggest geopolitical rival (China) is still more economic and technological than ideological or military, but I believe it’s shifting pretty fast. Let's have a quick review.

As technology continues to evolve, and governments, citizens, and corporations respond to the political disruption that it creates, the question might not be so much the relative strength of democracy vs authoritarianism as what new systems of governance emerge to take their place.

Nicolas Maduro has utilized many tactics to stay in power. He’s introduced methods to try to avoid economic breakdown and collapse, he actually blamed product shortages and growing opposition on foreigners, borrowed billions from China and Russia, ordered crackdowns on protests, arrested critics, dismissed international journalists, stacked the judicial system and courts with friends cronies, stripped opposition-controlled legislatures of power, and rigged elections while firmly denying the country is in crisis.