“American mediocrity goes mainstream—Western media reunites with reality after China pushes the rare earth button”. Sasha Breger Bush: October 29, 2025: Global News Roundup:

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(Publisher’s Note: I have previously published several articles from Sasha Breger’s Global News Roundup on this blog, (1, 2, 3) an excellent source of world economic analyses and trends. Here is another piece on the relative decline of U.S. global influence. As usual, carefully written and documented with mainstream sources to bolster her arguments. You could do FAR WORSE than subscribing to this on-going newsletter. Recently I have had the questionable good fortune to meet with most members of Colorado’s Congressional Delegation. Frankly, with few exceptions, their understanding of global trends, despite (or is it “because”?) access to intelligence data, their general knowledge, and here I mean basic knowledge, of international affairs is appalling. Most present little more than canned scripts. They would do well to follow Sasha Breger’s work. Images are mine. RJP)

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The Global News Roundup collects news stories from international (non-US) media sources on variety of pressing global issues and events.

Good morning! In April 2023, I published an article about the death of globalization and free trade. In a December 2023 end-of-year review, I shared an unpopular perspective on the US’s new role in the world: “Events this fall have mostly reinforced my strong sense that the US is no longer the leader of a globalized economic order, but rather has receded such that it now occupies a more middling and mediocre international position alongside many other countries, some of which are hostile to US interests and some less so. The US is no longer unique or special in the global economy.”

In recent weeks, mainstream American and European media have finally started reckoning with this harsh reality.

To start, the Economist wrote last week that,

China is winning the trade war”: “It has learned to escalate and retaliate as effectively as America. And it is experimenting with its own extraterritorial trade rules, thus changing the path of the world economy…Amid all the tit-for-tat, China is developing, by trial and error, a new set of global trading norms…It wants to build a Chinese-led system on the ruins of the old liberal trading order, one which will rival Mr Trump’s empire of tariffs. Already China has shifted the geography of its trade: in the year to September its goods exports grew by over 8%, even as those to America fell by 27%. China’s threats to limit rare-earth exports inspire fear because it dominates the market and could cripple Western manufacturing supply chains.

Thanks, Economist, for repeating what many of us have understood for years now. Indeed, it has been a recurring theme here on IPEwithSBB that the US has far less leverage against China than is typically assumed in the West. To give a couple of big examples, the sheer size of the Chinese economy has kept the Russian economy afloat over the course of the Ukraine War, permitting it to circumvent Western sanctions. The massive heft of the Chinese economy also lurks behind the de-dollarization process, as fear of future Western sanctions on China has pushed many of its trading partners to preemptively diversify away from the US in trade and financial arenas.

I have also repeatedly stressed US reliance on global markets for commodities procurement, including reliance on China for critical metals and minerals, a pressure point around which the US was and remains incredibly vulnerable. Over the past several years, IPEwithSBB has covered the global race for metals and minerals supplies; central bank gold stockpiling; Chinese controls on germanium, gallium, and graphite; the geography of rare earth production and refining, including China’s central position; and the trade-offs American policymakers face as they lose access to global markets for mined and extracted materials, including for critical metals like tungsten.

For its part, China continues to work to circumvent US trade aggression and establish new trade relations and partnerships. This week, China sealed a free trade deal with its neighbors in ASEAN: “The 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations is China’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade totaling $771 billion last year… China is seeking to intensify its engagement with ASEAN, a region with a collective gross domestic product of $3.8 trillion, to counter hefty import tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on countries around the world.”

Along similar lines, The Spectator reported last week that, “The American empire is consuming itself”. Referring to the recent spate of No Kings protests across the US, Olsen notes that,

For China and Russia, the spectacle of Americans turning on their own institutions confirms a long-held belief, namely that the United States is entering a phase of irreversible decline and may soon hesitate abroad…Xi’s doctrine of national rejuvenation rests on this contrast between order and disorder, endurance and exhaustion. His bet is that China does not need to defeat the West directly, only to wait for America to tire itself out.

Thanks, Spectator, for the “cutting edge” commentary. As my readers well know, the Presidency is not the only critical institution on which the US has turned. The self-inflicted American wounds upon which Xi is leveraging his country’s fate also include damage to the SWIFT system for processing international dollar payments (fatally wounded by sanctions on Russia, see, e.g., here and here for my prior coverage), the waning international integrity of American and European banks (which have frozen Russian and Chinese assets and even considered seizing them), and the international trading system that took the US many decades to build but just a few years to destroy (e.g., here and here), among many other recent examples.

And, the hits just keep on coming. In late September, the Dutch government nationalized Nexperia, a subsidiary of the Chinese semiconductor manufacturer Wingtech, which was put on the US “entity” list of sanctioned companies in December 2024. According to Reuters, the US had been pressuring the Netherlands to remove Nexperia’s Chinese CEO or risk Nexperia being added to the entity list—a “Dutch court document said records from a June 12 meeting between U.S. Commerce Department officials and the Dutch Foreign Ministry showed rising pressure to remove Nexperia’s Chinese CEO to help keep the company off the list”.

This serious escalation in the economic war has met with predictable consequences. China retaliated on October 4, banning Nexperia’s parent company from “exporting specific finished components and sub-assemblies manufactured in China”, which has in turn deprived European automakers of critical inputs: “Nexperia makes basic low-margin chips that are widely used in electronic systems in cars and control everything from lighting and airbag systems to locks and windows”. This week, Bosch announced furloughs for some staff and Volkswaagen is preparing for supply chain disruptions. American automakers are warning that the disruptions will cross the Atlantic any day now.

Chinese state media discussed the broader consequences: “[T]he Netherlands has set a dangerous precedent that private property rights can be suspended at the government’s whim whenever political winds shift… Should China then consider all Dutch investments in China as potential national security threats?” There are also some new, unverified social media reports that China has offered to re-start chip exports to the Netherlands in exchange for some major concessions, including use of the yuan for trade settlement. If this is true, China is upping its game and actively leveraging Western import dependence to internationalize its currency.

So, you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I read the following headline in Foreign Policy this month: “Is globalization a lost cause?” Thanks, Foreign Policy, but we already know the answer.

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(I  don’t like to do much marketing and self-promotion in my newsletters because the goal is to talk about current events and not about myself. But from time to time, I’m compelled to remind readers of the value contained within these Roundups, which I remain committed to offering for free. Put simply, reading IPE with SBB offers readers at least a 2-3 year head start on dynamics, trends, and issues critical for understanding a period of rapid global change, seizing new opportunities, and managing uncertainty, instability, and risk.

My small independent enterprise avoids many of the pitfalls that too often undermine the quality and timeliness of mainstream reporting. There is no secret political or economic agenda. There is no corporate hierarchy. No shareholders, no wealthy patrons or benefactors, no political contributors, no paid subscribers, no shadowy network of government informants, no advertisers. There are no limits on my speech or views other than those imposed by my own ethics, values, expertise, and courage. Thank you for your support and for referring the newsletter to a friend, colleague, neighbor, or business partner if you can.)

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The Tariff Emperor