AnalogBrief

The meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday was undoubtedly important. Its significance may lie less in what the two leaders agreed than in what the meeting itself reveals about the balance of power.

Democracy can restrain the struggle for power. It cannot make that struggle disappear.

The oil market initially treated the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as a crisis that economic self-interest would contain. But the Houthi threat to shipping in the Red Sea changed that calculation: with two strategic chokepoints now at risk, markets could no longer assume that disruption would remain limited.