Free Republic

As polar ice melts in the Arctic, shipping lanes are opening up, making the region a new zone of superpower competition. Writer Rana Foroohar got an up-close look aboard the USS Healy, a Coast Guard icebreaker. She says that traversing the North Pole by ship — once a "largely conceptual" route — is now becoming a "real possibility" for two or three weeks a year. "If you are taking one of these Arctic routes, you can save as much as 40% of the time it would take you to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and depending on the...

The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply in August amid an influx of goods related to the artificial intelligence build-out and the vagaries of import tariffs, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Imports swelled 4.3% for the month, pushing the total imbalance to $105.6 billion. That marked a 13.7% jump from July and was ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for $102 billion. It also was the steepest deficit since the all-time gap in March 2025, recorded just before President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” announcement of “reciprocal” tariffs against U.S. trading partners. Though the monthly total was up, the year-to-date deficit...

Novel medicines can’t be treated in the same zero-sum way as semiconductors or electric vehicles, where one competitor’s win comes at the expense of the other, says Juliana Liu for Bloomberg Opinion.As Washington and Beijing tussle for dominance in frontier technologies, there’s one area in which competition shouldn’t preclude collaboration: innovative medicines. Beijing’s latest five-year plan for the biotechnology sector details how the country wants to lead the field globally. Unusually for an industrial blueprint, it comes with numeric targets. By 2030, Chinese drugmakers are expected to have made a “major leap” in competitiveness with sales of new medications growing...

U.S. Coast Guard and FBI are probing cyber incidents impacting foreign-flagged ships en route to the U.S., raising concerns about maritime cybersecurity amidst geopolitical tensions. On September 17, U.S. authorities confirmed that the Coast Guard and FBI conducted investigations aboard two foreign-flagged vessels headed for the United States, indicating compromised computer networks. This unusual operation took place on August 21 and August 24, amidst growing concerns over cyber vulnerabilities in the maritime sector. The Incident The joint Coast Guard and FBI operation was prompted by signs of cyber breaches on the vessels, with the Coast Guard confirming involvement of “foreign...

Washington said that the competitiveness fund included in the budget would “impede” partnership with the US because of provisions favouring “made in Europe” products. In a document sent to EU legislators and seen by Euronews, the US has threatened the EU with retaliation if it does not scrap European preference provisions in its multiannual budget. EU member states are currently discussing the EU’s long-term budget (2028-2034), which includes a €402 billion fund dedicated to competitiveness that favours the production of key goods within the EU, including in defence. The measure would potentially exclude foreign firms from EU financing to protect...

Jewels Jones ®@JewelsJonesLive1. Trump landed in Dublin this morning and the Irish establishment had spent a week bracing for a disaster that never came. 150 lawyers signed a letter. Protest groups organized. A message got carved into a beach. Here’s what actually happened. 🧵Sep 13, 2026·Jewels Jones ®@JewelsJonesLive·17h2. His first stop was President Catherine Connolly, a progressive who has called his Iran campaign “a deliberate assault on international law” and once described him as volatile and a bully. She greeted him with a military honor guard. He called her “terrific.” That’s how it went all day.Jewels Jones ®@JewelsJonesLive·17h3. She gave...

Strategic patience for the win? Iran's regime leaders thought they could force the US to buckle by strangling the global economy at the Strait of Hormuz. The US, however, has an actual blue-water navy, and that tends to matter in blockades involving a country entirely reliant on sea trade for its only valuable export economy. As the Wall Street Journal concedes, Donald Trump's Hormuz blockade is a lot less "leaky" than the IRGC's. And as Trump himself pointed out yesterday, the Strait may not matter for very much longer anyway:By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran...

President Donald Trump on Friday doubled down on his threat to cut off trade with countries that have surpluses with the U.S. unless the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates. “What I’m saying, very simply, is that we should be paying the lowest interest rate in the world,” Trump said in the Oval Office Friday afternoon. He had been asked about his Truth Social post earlier in the day declaring, “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.” Trump issued that sweeping ultimatum after urging the Fed and its chairman, Kevin Warsh, to “get...

So close, and yet so far. Only last week, Canada and the US were finally on the cusp of reaching a long awaited trade deal. Already Trump had announced the joyous news on Truth Social, already Canadian prime minister Mark Carney had celebrated securing the “best terms” for Canada and called for provinces to lift the ban on US alcohol. Then, somehow, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Late last Friday, Carney told Canadian negotiators to walk away, saying Washington was offering “a bad deal.” Trump promptly reimposed the 50 percent tariffs on goods imported from Canada that...

President Trump floated the possibility of rebranding Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” in a shot across the bow against Canada’s most populous province — whose premier threatened to cut off electricity and minerals to the US. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump declared on Truth Social Tuesday. On his very first day back in the Oval Office last year, Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,...

At a conference I attended recently in DC, I had the chance to show a lot of my colleagues around the downtown monuments. For them, many from other countries, seeing the Lincoln, the Washington, the Capitol, was once in a lifetime – for me, it was Tuesday. At one point, a German in the group – fatigue in his voice – asked me, “Tell me… How can Americans keep voting for Trump?” The term Trump was shorthand for Americans’ embracing nationalism and rejecting globalism, which seems oh-so backwards to our European cousins. I think he expected me to dance around...

Will President Trump's trade policies lay the foundation for a new Bretton Woods system, or will Beijing's economic model continue reshaping the global order? n this episode, Mike Steger examines the growing economic confrontation between the United States, Canada, Europe, and China, arguing that the real battle is not simply about tariffs, but between two competing visions of civilization. From China's strategy of dominating global manufacturing through subsidized exports to President Trump's effort to revive the American System and establish a new international economic order, Mike explains why the future of global development may hinge on rebuilding the principles that...

Chinese cars are increasingly driving a wedge between the US, Mexico and Canada ahead of a July 1 deadline to renew North America’s faltering free-trade pact, deepening a rift already torn open by Donald Trump’s tariffs. The US is the only major market Chinese cars have yet to conquer — but it remains firmly off-limits. Washington has in effect banned them to combat suspected surveillance technology amid fears the vehicles, heavily subsidised by Beijing, would kill off America’s domestic auto industry. By contrast, Mexico’s love affair with cheap Chinese cars has made it Beijing’s top car export destination and Canada...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government can continue collecting the 10% worldwide tariff it imposed in February while legal challenges to the levies continue to work their way through the courts, a federal court ruled Thursday. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington decision handed a procedural win to the Trump administration, concluding that its case was “likely to succeed on the merits.’’ At issue are temporary 10% worldwide tariffs President Donald Trump imposed after the Supreme Court in February struck down even broader double-digit tariffs the president had imposed last year on almost every country on Earth....

... nations failed to establish or effectively enforce comprehensive legal prohibitions against importing goods produced wholly or partly through forced labour.While a subset of countries — including Canada, Mexico, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the European Union — will see 10% tariffs imposed due to specific enforcement failures, Australia has been grouped with jurisdictions like China and India under the higher 12.5% tariff bracket...

Australian beef exports to China could be hit with a 55 per cent tariff within days. Earlier this year, Beijing announced a quota on Australian beef of 205,000 tonnes a year...

France taking a leading role in applying Ukraine War pressure on Russia with another seizure of an oil tanker. The tanker "Tagor" taken in the Atlantic Ocean last Sunday more than 700 kilometers (435 miles) off the coast of Brittany. France and other European countries have seized 'shadow fleet' merchant vessels... In what could be called 'economic warfare' French authorities fining Chinese low-cost clothing maker Shein 22 million euros (25.342 million dollars). The fine linked to difficulty for buyers to return clothing and questions over materials used by Shein to make clothing... France's national counterterrorism prosecutor's office (PNAT) probing Israeli...

European negotiators agreed late on Tuesday to implement the controversial trade agreement concluded last summer with the US. However, the deal — signed in the Scottish city of Turnberry — remains fragile as long as US President Donald Trump continues to use tariffs as a tool of political pressure. Diplomats and MEPs reached an agreement late on Tuesday to implement the contentious EU-US agreement, which eliminates duties on most US industrial goods imported into Europe. The negotiations concluded two weeks after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose 25% tariffs on EU cars if Europeans did not implement the agreement...

The Trump administration and GOP lawmakers are seeking to win over U.S. farmers, a core constituency for the president during his 2016 and 2024 White House wins that has been aggravated by rising prices caused by his trade policies and the Iran war. Ahead of a midterm election season where the GOP is working to win every vote it can, the White House and its allies in Congress are reaching out to farmers in red and blue states alike. On the way back from Beijing after his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump assured farmers that they would...

A U.S. Court of Appeals has paused a ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) that had struck down President Trump’s second round of tariffs. They have issued a short-term administrative stay on the CIT's ruling, although they are considering a longer one. The new set of tariffs was immediately enacted following the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the original Liberation Day tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and put a baseline 10 percent tariff on all U.S. trading partners. The new tariffs were originally blocked last Friday.