Geopolitics

The Economist cover, November 15, 2025 Haven’t had time to read it yet — dropping the link here first. Download this issue of The Economist EPUB format TE-2025-11-15.epub

The Economist cover, November 8, 2025: Rebalancing the World The Economist has always excelled at using polished prose to gloss over savage fractures, dressing up the disintegration of the postwar free-trade architecture and superpower zero-sum warfare as a dignified “Rebalancing the World.” Peel back the magazine’s glossy rhetoric, however, and one confronts an unyielding reality: the high priests of globalization are boarding up their doors, tariff iron curtains are slamming down, and major economies are locking each other in a death grip over industrial subsidies and zero-sum geopolitical spheres.

The President’s Contradictory Posture # In public, President Trump has spent weeks deriding Zohran Mamdani as an extremist, a communist, and a threat to New York City. He has also insisted that he is “much better looking” than the 34-year-old Mamdani. But in private, according to two people who disclosed the president’s remarks on condition of anonymity, Trump has described the New York City mayor-elect as a talented politician — sharp-minded and quick with an argument.

The Rare-Earth War The Rare-Earth War # —— China’s strategic confidence and resource sovereignty amid the reshaping of global geopolitics Preface # I studied geology at China University of Geosciences. As an undergraduate, as part of an academic activity organized by the university, I wrote a short paper titled “The Rare-Earth War.” Back then, the “war” was mostly a metaphor in the academic sense, an exploration of the relationship between resource competition and technological rivalry. Many years on, the world has shifted beyond recognition, and the scenarios once argued on paper are now playing out in reality. Taking up the pen again to rewrite “The Rare-Earth War” fills me with emotion.

Along the marble corridors of Washington there are no innocent victims—only priced lobbying invoices and bargaining chips laid out on the cutting block. TikTok’s miraculous survival between Capitol Hill and the White House was never a triumph of cross-border corporate virtue; it was an absurd theater of raw power choreographed by Silicon Valley ambushes, K-Street black money, internal corporate purges, and extortion by populist strongmen. Silicon Valley’s Hidden Daggers and the K-Street Ledger # Behind the endless congressional hearings, the fingers actually pulling the triggers were rival executives lurking in the shadows.

The November 2025 issue of The Economist sketches a fractured global architecture: an escalating tech war between Washington and Beijing on one side, and defensive contraction alongside balance-sheet recession risks across major economies on the other. The Economist November 2025 cover - a deep dive into global economic trends Politics and Diplomacy: Strategic Decoupling Without Departure # US-China rivalry in semiconductors and infrastructure continues to escalate: new export controls meet supply-chain rerouting and localized component substitution. Beijing deepens bilateral ties across the Middle East and the Global South through energy and industrial infrastructure pacts. Domestic governance doubles down on preserving baseline stability amidst external containment. US-China “decoupling” is like a separation where nobody moves out: they shout about breaking up, but deep down they are still calculating chip allocations.