Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Oct. 11

The Washington Post on the revival of the U.S.-China trade war

The United States and China, inveterate rivals yet inextricably interlinked, are once again barreling into a trade war nobody wants. Tit-for-tat tariffs and export controls, coming after a few months respite, once again threaten to damage the economies of both countries and derail global growth.

China on Thursday blindsided the White House by announcing sweeping new curbs on the export of critical raw earth minerals and magnets, needed in everything from laptops and electric vehicles to U.S. military fighter jets, submarines and missiles. Beijing added five new elements to the seven already subject to stringent export controls.

President Donald Trump responded Friday by announcing new 100 percent tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as new export controls on critical technology destined for China. Trump also threatened to scuttle a planned meeting later this month with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of an Asian leaders meeting in South Korea. That sit-down was supposed to lay the groundwork for a full-scale summit early next year.

Both sides left time for an off-ramp. China delayed the start of its new restrictions until Dec. 1. Trump delayed the imposition of his retaliatory measures until Nov. 1. This raises the possibility that the world’s two largest economies are mainly staking out hardline negotiating positions, with threats and ultimatums, to improve their bargaining positions.

Longer term, however, the past 48 hours point toward a looming era of increasing friction as the superpowers shift from competition with occasional cooperation to clashes and outright conflict.

China controls about 70 percent of the world’s rare earth mining and 90 percent of the global processing. It was entirely foreseeable that they would use this market power as a pressure point when Trump picked a fight with Xi earlier this year.

At the same time, China has its own pain points. The United States dominates in semiconductors and chip-design software that China cannot yet manufacture domestically and needs to compete in the artificial intelligence boom. The United States also remains the world’s largest consumer market and accounts for about 15 percent of their exports.

China’s willingness to play the rare earths card has pushed the United States to look elsewhere for alternative sources, something that America should have started doing decades ago. Despite the name, rare earths are actually not all that rare, but they are currently most easily and cheaply mined in China.

The United States has vast deposits of rare earths but significantly trails China and Brazil, partly because of deindustrialization but also because mining certain materials tends to create politically untenable levels of environmental damage. As a result, Trump has been looking to strike minerals deals with countries such as Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and possibly even Myanmar or Venezuela — all of which are embroiled in conflict but have significant assets below ground.

Even more frustrating than needing access to Chinese minerals to keep the economy going is America’s dependence on them processing and transforming its own minerals into finished products. The United States now exports 95 percent of its rare earths to China for processing because it costs so much less than doing it here. Trying to increase domestic processing capacity could take a decade or more, and permitting remains too cumbersome and slow.

Before the blowup at the end of this week, the two sides had been making conciliatory gestures on trade and seemingly trying to dial down the rhetoric ahead of the heads of state meeting. Trump nixed a $400 million lethal arms package to Taiwan, the self-governing democracy which China considers a renegade province. Trump also lifted a ban on selling AI chips to China. Beijing, in turn, toughened controls on two of the precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl, one of Trump’s demands. China also gave the preliminary okay for an American consortium to take 80 percent ownership of TikTok.

The bonhomie after summer trade talks in Geneva and London belied the reality that the United States and China are locked in a herculean struggle for influence and military superiority in the Asia-Pacific region that will define the 21st century. Escalating tensions have led some to speak fancifully of decoupling or delinking of the two economies.

The hard truth is that, for the foreseeable future, the United States and China remain mutually dependent. A trade war is in neither country’s interest. Since a divorce is unrealistic, at least anytime soon, it’s better Washington and Beijing go back to talking.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/11/china-trade-war-rare-earths-xi-trump/

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Oct. 9

The New York Times says you should blame Trump when your energy bill goes up

You do not have to care about climate change to believe that clean energy is an important and strategic resource. Solar and wind power are now cheaper than coal in many places and sometimes cheaper than oil and gas. Clean energy sources help both hold down costs for Americans and prevent the United States from having to import so much foreign oil from countries hostile to our interests.

These advantages help explain why the right energy policy for the United States is an all-of-the-above strategy. The country should continue using fossil fuels like natural gas while shifting toward cleaner energy that does less damage to the planet. The combination can help Americans struggling with slow-growing incomes while also addressing climate change.

President Trump, however, has rejected the all-of-the-above approach in his second term. He is instead waging a war on solar and wind power. It is a mirror image of the strategy that conservatives criticize the fringes of the environmental movement for favoring. Rather than trying to put oil companies out of business, Mr. Trump is going after clean energy, and Americans will face higher bills as a result.

Mr. Trump signed a law in July that repealed the clean energy tax credits enacted by former President Joe Biden, eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into wind, solar and electric vehicles. Mr. Trump has also directed his administration to enact new regulations on clean energy and start specious investigations into its use, including one looking into bird deaths caused by wind turbines. His administration is trying to cancel wind projects off the coasts of Massachusetts, Maryland and Rhode Island, which would provide enough electricity to power more than a million homes. “Windmills, we’re just not going to allow them,” Mr. Trump recently said. Even some oil executives have criticized these moves as shortsighted.

Mr. Trump ran for president promising to reduce the cost of living and of energy prices in particular. He has failed so far. Inflation remains near 3 percent a year even as economic growth and job growth have slowed. Electricity prices are almost 10 percent higher than they were a year earlier, according to the most recent numbers. The main reasons for the electricity price surge have little to do with Mr. Trump and instead involve demand from A.I. data centers and supply constraints from the war in Ukraine. Yet the Trump energy policies are not helping — and will soon make matters worse.

Energy prices are likely to rise the most in states that have not prioritized clean energy, including Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma, experts say. The repeal of the tax credits alone may push electricity prices almost 10 percent higher than they would be otherwise by 2029, according to National Economic Research Associates, a consulting firm. Gas prices will also increase over the next decade, according to Rhodium Group, a think tank, as consumers who would otherwise have driven electric cars continue using vehicles that burn fossil fuels.

Mr. Trump’s approach to wind and solar is part of a larger story. It is, along with his tariffs, extreme immigration policies and attempt to take over the Federal Reserve, one more example of prioritizing ideology over the interests of American families.

Mr. Trump’s energy policy also weakens America’s global standing by giving a competitive edge to the country’s chief geopolitical rival, China. For years China has meticulously grown its clean energy industry with government subsidies and other policies. Chinese companies now produce 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels.

Mr. Biden’s clean energy tax credits were meant to counter China’s moves. He understood that wind and solar would play an important role in the economy of the future, and that the United States should not let China control the global market. Mr. Biden’s approach was working, creating incentives for the private sector to build big clean-energy projects, including Toyota’s E.V. battery production facility in Liberty, N.C., and a Qcells solar panel manufacturing facility in Cartersville, Ga.

Low energy prices are also good for economic growth. If prices are higher here than in other countries, companies will invest less in America. Consider artificial intelligence: Technology companies are building data centers to power their bots’ processing abilities. These data centers use a lot of electricity. If energy supply cannot keep up with demand, America’s A.I. build-out will lag — again to the benefit of China.

The Trump administration argues that wind and solar are not reliable, and that has some truth to it. If the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining, power cannot be generated. But this objection is mostly a canard. Advances in battery technology will allow the country to use wind and solar energy during off-hours. Wind and solar also do not have to generate electricity at all times. We have other forms of energy — nuclear, hydro, geothermal and, yes, fossil fuels — to handle the moments that wind and solar cannot. When a country is pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy, varying sources of energy complement one another. They increase overall supply and hold down prices for everybody.

We understand why the political right has sometimes been frustrated by the left’s skepticism of energy abundance. In both Europe and the United States, environmentalists who are rightly worried about the costs and dangers of climate change have at times imagined that the transition could happen more quickly than is realistic. In truth, oil and gas will be necessary to keep prices low and power the economy for years to come. But the political left is not the problem today. The Democratic Party under Mr. Biden expanded domestic oil and gas production while making major investments in clean energy.

The Republican Party has long denied the severe risks that climate change presents and stood in the way of sensible policies to address the extreme storms, flooding and heat that are already happening. Under Mr. Trump, Republicans have gone even further. They have become the party that stands in the way of lower energy prices for American households.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/opinion/trump-energy-bills-prices.html

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Oct. 13

The Wall Street Journal on SCOTUS and racial gerrymandering

Here we go again. The Supreme Court keeps getting dragged into redistricting fights involving race, and this week the Justices will rehear a racial gerrymander challenge to Louisiana’s Congressional map. It could be a landmark that ends the cynical use of race by both major parties to advance their partisan interests.

In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v. Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

State Legislatures are caught in a legal vise. If they draw maps that consider race too little, they can be found to violate Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If they weigh race too much, they could run afoul of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Liberal groups sued Louisiana after Republicans redrew the state Congressional map following the 2020 Census. The map included one majority-minority district, but the plaintiffs said Section 2 requires a second. They reasoned that because blacks make up 30% of Louisiana’s voting-age population, two of the state’s six districts should be majority black.

Section 2 bars voting practices that discriminate based on race. It also guarantees that minorities have an equal opportunity “to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Congress’s aim was to prevent minorities from being disenfranchised by the likes of poll taxes.

The law’s text doesn’t mention majority-minority districts and stresses that it doesn’t establish a right to proportional representation. But the Supreme Court’s muddled Gingles precedent (1986) read into the law a requirement to draw majority-minority districts on two conditions: when minority populations are large, compact and politically cohesive, and when the majority votes “sufficiently as a bloc” to defeat a minority’s “preferred candidate.”

Courts and legislatures have struggled to divine what this means. Must a minority group’s “preferred candidate” be of the same race? How should courts determine if a minority population is “politically cohesive”? In the Louisiana case, the district court ruled for the plaintiffs and ordered the Legislature to draw a second majority-minority district.

Republicans then drew a 250-mile majority-minority district that snakes from the state’s northwest to Baton Rouge. The district isn’t compact and is barely contiguous. Non-black voters then challenged the new map as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. A lower court agreed, saying the second district violated Gingles.

In the Court’s recent Allen v. Milligan decision (2023), Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberals in requiring a second majority-minority district in Alabama because the minority population was compact. The other four Justices wrote in dissent that the majority misapplied Gingles and contended that courts should “apply a race-neutral benchmark” in deciding whether maps violate Section 2.

Yet Justice Kavanaugh emphasized in a concurring opinion that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” This echoed the Court’s SFFA v. Harvard decision striking down racial preferences in college admissions. Map-making now may be the only field in which government sorting by race remains legal.

The Court began to slide shut the door to racial gerrymandering in its landmark Shelby County (2013) decision, which struck down the Voting Rights Act’s Section 4 pre-clearance formula. The Court held that the formula was an anachronism from the Jim Crow era and didn’t account for racial progress. The same is true of the Gingles interpretation of Section 2.

As Louisiana argues, “race-based redistricting rests on an invidious stereotype: that all minorities, by virtue of their membership in their racial class, think alike and share the same interests and voting preferences.”

Justice Clarence Thomas has been making this argument for years in eloquent dissents, and he wrote last term that the Court’s “Janus-like election-law jurisprudence” has created an “intractable conflict between this Court’s interpretation” of Section 2 and the Equal Protection Clause. The result is that “states do not know how to draw maps that ‘survive both constitutional and VRA review.’”

Consider Texas, which was sued by the Biden Justice Department for not drawing enough majority-minority districts. With that case pending in the courts, the Trump Justice Department threatened a legal challenge claiming several districts were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Texas Republicans this summer used the Trump threat as an excuse to redraw the districts to increase their partisan advantage. Now they are being sued again under Section 2.

The Justices would do the country and themselves a favor by correcting the Gingles error and declaring that the Constitution forbids race-based map-making. As the Chief wrote in a 2006 redistricting opinion, “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-supreme-court-reckoning-for-racial-gerrymanders-35d361ec?mod=editorials_article_pos1

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Oct. 13

The Guardian says the relief is real, but will Palestinian suffering end?

The reprieve brought by the end of fighting in Gaza is immense. In Israel, the release of the living hostages has led to widespread elation. In Gaza and the West Bank there are also celebrations, as up to 2,000 Palestinian detainees start to be released – though there is distress, too, due to uncertainty about who is being freed and where they will be sent. In northern Gaza, people can finally return to dig through rubble for the remains of an estimated 10,000 missing people.

As recently as three weeks ago, the likelihood of a ceasefire appeared remote. But it has taken effect, and on Monday Donald Trump travelled from Jerusalem, where he was cheered in the Knesset, to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. There, he joined a high-powered peace summit of more than 20 world leaders, including Sir Keir Starmer. The plan for peace begun there is due to be continued at a conference in the UK. The US president, acting with international partners, did make this deal happen – despite, not because of, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hopes that the deal marks the first step toward Palestinian statehood are understandable – but, given historical precedent, somewhat optimistic. It offers no clear path to sovereignty for Palestinians and risks splitting, for the foreseeable future, Gaza from the West Bank. Then there is the utter devastation this war leaves behind. The lack of any timeline for Palestinian self-determination in Mr Trump’s plan gives the lie to vainglorious references, in his Knesset speech, to the “historic dawn” of a “golden age”.

The US president could not help himself polarising and personalising the deal in his speech. In a moment of relief – with the hostage release, ceasefire and resumption of aid – he chose to recast it as a morality play in which he alone restored Israel’s honour after supposed betrayal by former US presidents Obama and Biden. This despite the Biden administration a year ago having attempted a similar deal: a ceasefire tied to humanitarian access and eventual political talks.

A plan that denies one side meaningful agency cannot yield legitimate peace. The ceasefire and aid trucks are to be welcomed. But this is not yet political progress. Without mechanisms guaranteeing Palestinian participation and control over their own institutions, any deal risks freezing subjugation under the language of peace.

Gaza’s people desperately need humanitarian aid – and food and medicines must be the first priority. But reconstruction cannot wait. Amid 60m tonnes of rubble, Palestinians need help restoring homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and other institutions shattered by Israel’s invasion. For Gaza’s transitional administration to succeed, funding must flow quickly and security gaps be filled. Like much of Mr Trump’s peace plan, references to an international stabilisation force and a proposed “board of peace”, with Sir Tony Blair, are alarmingly vague.

Strong international support for the Palestinian Authority, enabling it to take over from Hamas, is probably the most promising possibility. The enormous suffering of the past two years means the moral case for a resolution to the conflict is arguably more urgent than ever. But while the ceasefire, the return of the hostages and commitment by Hamas to “demilitarise” Gaza should be acknowledged as positive steps, Mr Trump’s record gives little reason to believe he will deliver – or feel bound to try. Short-term relief does not mean that the prospect of a Palestinian state has been brought closer.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/13/the-guardian-view-on-peace-in-gaza-the-relief-is-real-but-trumps-promise-of-a-golden-age-rings-hollow

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Oct. 12

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Trump’s crackdowns on student visas

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

So declared Donald Trump in 2015, kicking off a presidential campaign rooted in hatred, fear and xenophobic myth — though at least tempered by the “good people” afterthought.

But 10 years later, it turns out “good people” from around the world aren’t welcomed in Trump’s America, either. Even foreign college students here legally and on their own dime to study in America’s great universities — the very definition of the “best of the best” — are getting the signal loud and clear that this president doesn’t want them here.

In St. Louis, as around the nation, colleges and universities have seen their enrollment of foreign students here on student visas plummet this year. Some of it’s due to stricter student visa requirements the administration is imposing for no good reason. Others are choosing not to come here out of concern about whether they will be allowed to stay and work after graduation — a concern exacerbated by the administration’s new $100,000 H-1B work visa fee on American employers who want to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.

Still others, presumably, are repelled by the toxic and increasingly brazen anti-immigrant rhetoric from the MAGA movement and its expanding campaign to rid America of anyone not born here.

That campaign is especially self-destructive when it comes to supporting American higher education. Unlike most American-born college students, foreign students who study here generally are paying top tuition rates, a financial lifeline for institutions that have struggled with diminishing public funding and declining enrollment by American-born students.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Monica Obradovic reports, a survey of four St. Louis-area universities found a drop in international enrollment of more than 2,700 students this year compared to last. St. Louis University alone has dropped by more than 1,500 international students. Washington University in St. Louis is down almost 1,000 foreign students. Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville is down 15%.

It’s part of a national trend that has dire implications for America’s economy. The NAFSA Association of International Educators estimates that foreign students contribute close to $44 billion to the economy annually, including supporting more than 378,000 jobs here. The New York Times reported this month that nearly 20% fewer international students arrived in the U.S. for the start of the current school year in August compared to last year. That’s the largest one-year drop on record except for the 2020 pandemic year.

Some of the administration’s student visa revocations have been in response to foreign students engaging in peaceful protest against U.S. policy regarding Gaza and other controversies. That’s a shameful statement to the world about how little our current president values our own First Amendment.

But most of the decline in international students is due to stricter student visa restrictions, travel bans from specific countries — and students simply (and understandably) declining to come here because of the current xenophobic political climate fueled by this administration. A spokesperson for Webster University in St. Louis County, for example, told the Post-Dispatch’s Obradovic that the private school has seen international enrollment fall at its three domestic campuses in favor of its seven foreign campuses.

The issue is bigger than money. International students tend to be the best and the brightest from their countries. A 2022 report from the National Foundation for American Policy found that fully one in four billion-dollar American startups have founders or co-founders who initially came here as international students. George Mason University reported in 2024 that almost one-third of Nobel laureates affiliated with American academic institutions were born somewhere else.

In terms of both economic and intellectual benefit to the U.S., these are exactly the “good people” Trump alluded to a decade ago. Yet under his current regime, they’re being expelled, barred or just convinced to stay away in record numbers. We’re all the poorer for it.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_a38b7049-7300-44a1-bdb7-d90f4b5fff9e.html