Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Sept. 27

The Washington Post says there will be a cost to Donald Trump treating adversaries better than allies

America’s adversaries, especially those with nuclear weapons, sometimes seem to be treated more kindly by President Donald Trump than the country’s oldest friends. Such U.S. unreliability risks encouraging nuclear proliferation by pushing countries to look out for themselves.

Last week underscored the dynamic: Trump rolled out the red carpet in Washington for Chinese President Xi Jinping while continuing to hold in abeyance a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Trump has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G-20 summit in Florida in December. And Trump expressed a desire to buy potash, a critical fertilizer ingredient, from Belarus, Russia’s close ally, instead of Canada.

Trump caught European Union officials off guard last Tuesday by saying that he would support a U.S. ban on diesel exports. The irony is that Trump cajoled the officials last year to buy more and threatened tariffs if they didn’t. Now, worried about the midterms, Trump was threatening to cut off their supply as winter nears. Cabinet secretaries seemed to talk the president out of the move, but the message to Brussels was that Europe cannot count on U.S. diesel deliveries.

On the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Trump signed a deal with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland to give the United States expanded security rights over the Arctic island. The agreement isn’t all that different from the status quo before Trump threatened in January to annex the NATO member’s territory. That pointless saber-rattling prompted Europe to scramble troops to defend the island in case of a U.S. invasion.

Regarding Taiwan, Trump seems to have made no concessions during Xi’s state visit, fortunately, even though the president, while visiting China in May, called the island “a very good negotiating chip.” China longs for the U.S. to drop its neutral stance regarding Taiwan and openly oppose independence for the self-governing territory. Trump hasn’t gone that far, yet the arms-shipment delay continues. Anxieties are growing in Taipei that the U.S. might not come to its defense if invaded by its larger neighbor.

Taiwan is not alone in questioning the durability of America’s commitments, especially amid the heavy burn rate of U.S. weapons stockpiles during the inconclusive Iran war. Prompting allies to become stronger and more self-reliant, as the U.S. has been urging for years, is desirable. But stirring their doubts about America’s staying power undermines U.S. credibility.

South Korea was blindsided in August when Trump abruptly ordered a substantial reduction in planned joint military exercises, saying the exercises sent a “hostile” message to the regime in Pyongyang. Trump apparently was also upset that South Korea did not offer support for the U.S. in the Iran war. The president has said he intends to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un before the end of the year.

The result of all this is growing public support in South Korea for building an independent nuclear arsenal instead of relying on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for its survival. The debate has shifted from the fringes to the mainstream. Polls this year show that nearly 70 percent of South Koreans back building a nuclear weapon.

Saudi Arabia is also considering going nuclear amid growing fears that the U.S. cannot be counted on. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked Trump to launch airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen earlier this month after the Iranian-backed rebels bombed a critical Saudi oil pipeline. Trump refused to intervene. The Post reported on Friday that the U.S. intelligence community assesses that Saudi Arabia has not ruled out the option of developing a nuclear weapons program.

The Saudis are already hedging. Witness their mutual defense agreement with Pakistan and Turkey last month that called aggression against one of the three an aggression against all.

No U.S. allies are publicly foreswearing the partnership, instead insisting it remains strong, but some are clearly looking for backups and alternatives. Such anxiety is not helped by Trump’s chumminess with Xi.

China makes no secret of its desire to supplant the U.S. as the world’s dominant power. Beijing may have contributed to the deaths of American soldiers by sending intelligence to Iran that helped it target U.S. bases in Jordan. China continues to provide economic support that helps prop up Tehran. At home, China adds to its nuclear arsenal and the number of warheads aimed at the U.S.

The main deliverable of Xi’s visit, beyond good vibes, seems to have been the extension of a trade truce for two months, until Jan. 10.

Trump is right to advocate for more burden-sharing by U.S. allies. New global security arrangements and regional alliances can enhance America’s global reach. But networks created out of fear of a U.S. retreat risk leaving America more isolated and with fewer friends to trade with. They also reflect weakening trust in what has been one of America’s greatest strengths — its word.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/09/27/trump-lavished-xi-allies-feel-no-love/

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Sept. 24

The New York Times says Donald Trump is undoing the global influence of the United States

The world is facing at least three crises today that cannot be resolved by any one country. Two are longer-term and arguably existential: the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and the growing impact of climate change. One is shorter-term and damaging the global economy: the disruption of shipping lanes in the Middle East. All three require the kind of high-level international cooperation that helped manage other challenges, like the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War and the damage to the ozone layer.

Yet almost nobody expects meaningful progress during this week’s meetings in Washington between the leaders of the two most powerful countries, President Xi Jinping of China and President Donald Trump. Beneath the pomp of Mr. Xi’s visit, the agenda appears notably unambitious. At most, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that America can hope for commercial deals and modest A.I. safety progress.

The low expectations for the visit underline the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to American influence and global well-being. He is an undisciplined politician who puts his personal interests above the nation’s, running an administration that has no coherent strategy for solving major problems. He is instead often exacerbating the world’s biggest problems.

No matter who was president, negotiations with China would be difficult. Mr. Xi is an autocrat who has centralized authority, oppressed his country’s citizens and built partnerships with the world’s most repressive regimes. Yet Mr. Xi does tend to be a ruthless tactician, and China and the United States do have overlapping interests on several major issues, including A.I., climate change and Middle East shipping lanes.

The notion that Mr. Trump could effectively represent America’s interests on these issues seems ludicrous at this point. Even on his own terms, his signature second-term actions, like the tariffs and war in Iran, are failing. No wonder that China’s leaders reportedly see his presidency as a gift to their ambitions for greater global influence. Americans are left to imagine the progress that could have been attempted this week with another president.

The first area of potential cooperation is A.I. safety. The rapid advancement of A.I. capabilities requires government regulation to limit the possibility that such tools could become uncontrollable and destructive. No one country can assure its own safety from these dangers. International cooperation is needed to mitigate the threat.

American A.I. models pose great risks because they are the most powerful. But China’s models are not far behind and pose their own risks because they tend to be open-weight, with their internal rules available for other users to alter. Fortunately, China has reasons to want safeguards. China’s spy chief recently warned that A.I. threatens one-party control there. China, like every country, also fears biological weapons.

Mr. Trump evinces little concern about A.I.’s risks and little interest in regulating it. He has said that the United States must beat China in the A.I. race, without regard for safety. That race does matter, but there are ways for the United States both to compete with China and to work together on the risks. The right policy is a mix of competition and cooperation, as this country pursued with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Today, the United States should make the scientific investments to remain ahead of China while negotiating over shared threats like bioweapons and A.I. systems that escape human control.

A second issue on which America urgently needs China’s help is in the Middle East. In response to Mr. Trump’s reckless war, Iran has restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, while the Houthis, a terrorist group allied with Iran, have expanded their disruption of traffic through the Red Sea. The price of oil has risen worldwide as a result.

Persuading Mr. Xi to pressure Iran to reopen the strait would not be easy. Mr. Trump is damaging America’s international status so badly that the Chinese leader can follow the dictum attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Still, China has an interest in the free flow of oil and lower energy prices. China’s economic growth has weakened in recent years, and higher oil prices do not help. The government’s stated position in talks with Iran is that it should reopen the strait. China certainly has the leverage to push Iran for a deal: It has been Iran’s largest customer for oil, buying 90 percent of its exports in recent years.

If anything, the third issue — climate change — is the one on which U.S.-China talks could offer the most promise if Mr. Trump were not president. China once was an obstacle to climate progress, complicating the attempts of the Obama administration to negotiate a global framework. Over the past decade, though, China has increasingly been willing to address climate change. Its world-leading renewable energy industry would benefit from international agreements that increase reliance on batteries and electric cars.

These three issues obviously do not represent a complete agenda for an ideal U.S.-China summit. Several others would be even trickier, including China’s support for Iran’s and Russia’s militaries and China’s increasing aggression toward Taiwan and several Asian countries. Realistically, any one meeting would probably not make much progress on the thorniest issues. But the United States and China are not merely rivals for international power; they also have shared interests in global stability.

American presidents going back more than 100 years have believed the country had an interest in taking a leading role in the world. America is far from perfect. But when it led, the world often benefited through expanded prosperity, security and democracy. The progress enhanced this country’s global prestige and influence along the way.

Mr. Trump shows little care for these benefits. He uses international relations to seek personal enrichment, praise from sycophants and equal standing with authoritarians. His flailing presidency leaves Americans with the thinnest of hopes for this week’s summit: that he does not further damage the national interest.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/opinion/trump-xi-washington-summit.html

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Sept. 23

The Wall Street Journal says tariffs and trade wars have made farming in the U.S. harder

JD Vance was in Iowa last week, trying to shore up GOP support in the heartland. “We want farming to be easier in the United States of America, not harder,” the Vice President told the crowd in Council Bluffs. Farming is always hard, but what could be making it even harder these days?

Hmmm. Could it be President Trump’s tariffs and trade wars that have raised farmers’ costs and lost them markets abroad due to retaliation? Asking for a friend in the Midwest.

While Mr. Trump can claim all he wants that foreigners pay his tariffs, Deere & Co. said on an earnings call last month that it expects “direct tariff expense of approximately $1.1 billion for the fiscal year.” That figure doesn’t include the refunds the company is getting for the tariffs that the Supreme Court held illegal, but it’s a show of the burden. Mr. Trump’s border taxes filter through supply chains to all kinds of parts and equipment, making it harder for farmers when they buy tractors, combines, harvesters and planters.

Likewise, Mr. Trump can say over and over that the U.S. doesn’t need anything from Canada, but the Farm Belt knows it depends on potash fertilizer from America’s northern neighbor. Mr. Trump’s latest 50% tariffs on Canada specifically didn’t apply to potash, which ought to be telling. Some Canadians, however, have debated using their potash as leverage against the U.S. if trade tensions escalate.

Countries that respond to Mr. Trump’s tariffs also know how to target Mr. Trump’s supporters in red states. Between March 2025 and February 2026, retaliatory tariffs cut U.S. agricultural exports to China by $14.9 billion, annualized, according to a May report from North Dakota State University. Nearly half of that was soybeans, though it also included beef, cotton, tree nuts and corn.

Iowa’s exposure to that loss of Chinese sales was $1.2 billion by itself, though the researchers cautioned that this figure wasn’t the net harm to farmers, which was “smaller after accounting for redirected sales.” Chinese President Xi Jinping has promised to buy more U.S. soybeans, and maybe he will repeat his promise to Mr. Trump this week. Yet the Agriculture Department last year also announced $12 billion in “bridge payments” to help farmers through “market disruptions.”

Republicans are now in political danger in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, states that “oughta be fat guy layups for us,” as Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy put it last week. If the Administration wants farming in the U.S. to be easier, then stop the policies that make it harder.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-gops-farm-belt-economics-problem-c331d5f7?mod=editorials_article_pos14

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Sept. 24

The Philadelphia Inquirer say Donald Trump’s attempt to muzzle the press is an attack on the First Amendment

Pressed recently on President Donald Trump’s expulsion of three news organizations from the White House, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) shrugged it off as indistinguishable from Trump’s own past suspension from social media platforms, saying, “So it goes both ways.”

Huh? The senator is either remarkably ignorant of the Constitution from which he derives his power, or shameless enough to pretend to be.

What Barrasso didn’t appear to understand is that the First Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, doesn’t go both ways: It protects us from the government, not vice versa. Specifically, it guards the expression of citizens and publishers against state censorship and interference. Government officials can neither dictate what Facebook posts nor punish CNN for what it airs. If the First Amendment doesn’t mean news organizations can report on the government freely without being barred from public buildings and events as a result, it doesn’t mean anything.

Trump’s latest trampling of the Constitution is in that sense too clear to be muddied by senatorial sophistry. He expressly denied CNN, Politico, and MS NOW entry to the White House based on the content of their reports, in particular their failure to sufficiently glorify him. This is the essence of what the First Amendment prohibits.

It’s far from Trump’s first or most consequential authoritarian challenge to the country’s long-protected freedoms of expression and the press. Since his first term, he has derided legitimate journalism as “fake news,” encouraged violence against reporters, and called the press the “enemy of the people,” echoing Josef Stalin and other despots. In his second administration, he has graduated to leveraging the power of the federal government against the media, using the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to try to force late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air; wielding government power over mergers and more to reward corporations that rein in independent journalism; and menacing journalists and their employers with lawsuits, investigations, and arrests.

But the ban may be Trump’s most glaring violation of constitutional press protections to date. As the affected organizations noted in a lawsuit filed in federal court this week, the policy “could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment.” The president himself called it a “ban on the free press” and attributed it to the organizations’ “negative” coverage.

The courts have blocked his earlier attempts to exclude individual reporters as well as a parallel Pentagon policy instituted by his defense secretary. Even the Trump-friendly U.S. Supreme Court could be hard-pressed to justify this one.

In addition to laying the groundwork for his next legal defeat, the president’s lockout gave the fractious press corps rare cause for collective action. With other networks declining to provide pooled camera coverage in solidarity with the banned organizations, the lack of competent recording at a ribbon-cutting for a new White House helipad this week ensured an idling chopper drowned out Trump’s remarks — not that very many people missed them.

It was the sort of pseudo-news event that only raised more questions about the value of broadcasting much of what the president says. Journalists who direct their attention elsewhere are bound to transcribe that much less fake news.

ONLINE: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-ban-cnn-msnow-politico-first-amendment-media-20260924.html

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Sept. 25

The Guardian says Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping was more show than substance

Within days, two high-profile Chinese visitors will arrive in the US – envoys of friendship, as Xi Jinping described them when he met Donald Trump at the White House this week. The giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, will be hosted at Atlanta zoo. Beijing dispatched the first panda pair to the US in 1972 following President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to China. It uses the animals to indicate satisfaction or displeasure with other nations. But it also charges heftily for their lease: reportedly, around $1m a year per pair. Americans’ views of China have warmed from a pandemic nadir, but are unlikely to be shifted much by two animals, however charming. These days they are more of a token gesture than a striking symbol.

It is telling that the announcement was one of the main takeaways of Mr Xi’s visit to Washington. Expectations were low after May’s stalemate summit in Beijing, but this meeting still struggled to meet them. The US president gave Mr Xi a lavish welcome – unusually, travelling to meet the “strong, vibrant and fit” Chinese leader off the plane. He insisted that they had “never gotten along better”.

In a sense that is not surprising. Mr Trump admires and envies authoritarians with untrammelled powers. Chinese state media were welcome at the White House, unlike CNN, MS Now and Politico. Since he rarely pays even lip service to human rights, the treatment of Uyghurs or jailed Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong – facing another lengthy sentence for his international advocacy – were never likely to figure large, whatever the hopes of protesters outside.

Mr Trump told Mr Xi that any Chinese help for Iran is unacceptable; Mr Xi said that the US should adhere to the “correct position” of opposing Taiwanese independence. Beijing wants Washington to shift from the long-held stance of “not supporting” it. That would be a grave mistake, but Mr Trump has given worryingly mixed messages on Taiwan.

It is striking how little of consequence has emerged from the summit given that this is arguably the most consequential diplomatic relationship in the world. A two-month extension of the trade war truce was announced as Mr Xi arrived in the US. China’s curb of rare earth exports has checked Mr Trump’s appetite for an economic offensive; Beijing is anxious about its struggling economy. But if they are more wary of the fallout, they are also more fearful of the other side gaining ground. AI is central to this battle. Mr Trump has resisted all calls to restrain development because “Whoever wins AI, wins.” Mr Xi said it had to be managed responsibly, but Beijing has attacked “threat narratives”, fearing that the US wants to prevent it catching up.

CNN last week highlighted the dangers: the US military reportedly prepared to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East after an intelligence report said it was carrying nuclear weapons components – only for officials to realise that the partially AI-generated analysis had misidentified the cargo. Controls on development are desperately needed, but neither side is willing to accept them. Even the limited AI dialogue and “notification hotline” for AI safety proposed by Scott Bessent, treasury secretary, seem to be rather less than meets the eye. This summit should be viewed with alarm not because it saw substantive developments – but because it illustrates the dangers of drift.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/25/the-guardian-view-on-trump-and-xi-a-show-of-friendship-but-no-real-attempt-to-address-the-tensions