Donald Trump’s apparent climb-down from his 245 percent tariffs on Chinese imports has critics gleefully proclaiming his humiliation at the hands of China’s Xi Jinping. Not so fast, writes Henry Gao in Tablet. China, Gao argues, needs the U.S. far more than vice-versa, and the Communist regime’s relentless propaganda merely masks worsening structural economic weaknesses that would make a protracted trade war all-but unendurable.

The Frigid Isle
Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”


