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A year ago, Trump promised a new era during the first major foreign trip of his second term. On his recent visit to Beijing, the war with Iran and economic strain clouded his diplomacy.
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A view from Thomas Massie's district in Kentucky.
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Having deferred to the president for months, G.O.P. lawmakers missed crucial milestones to try to limit his war powers. That has tied their hands in seeking parameters and exit criteria.
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We speak to two prominent Israeli thinkers, historian Omer Bartov and journalist Gideon Levy, about the founding beliefs of Zionism. Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, is the author of the new book Israel: What Went Wrong? Bartov says the early Zionist movement had liberatory intentions, aiming to emancipate the persecuted Jewish minority in Europe and modeling itself after other contemporary ethnonationalist movements. He then argues that while Israel had the opportunity to "become a normal state" and "issue a constitution that would provide equality to all its citizens, would define its borders and create a legal framework" that could also acknowledge and redress the Nakba, it chose another path. Instead of remedying its foundational violence, he says, the modern Israeli state has become increasingly "militaristic, centralized, expansionist, racist and, as we've seen since October 2023, genocidal." Though Bartov does not identify as an anti-Zionist, he says Israel "must discard Zionism, it must put it on the garbage heap of history, and it must redefine itself, going all the way back to 1948."
Levy, on the other hand, says Zionism has never been reformable, because the movement, from its very beginning, "started wrong, without the belief or the conviction that we can live together." He contests Bartov's assertion that early Zionist intentions became warped over the 20th century, and says instead that the violent dispossession of Palestinians is embedded into the premise of the movement. "This very same attitude, this very same policy never stopped ever since '48," Levy contends. His latest piece in Haaretz is titled "Zionism Didn't Go Wrong, It Was Always Built This Way."
Both Bartov and Levy also respond to the Israeli government's threat to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times for publishing a column by longtime opinion writer Nicholas Kristof about systemic sexual a
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Representative Steve Cohen has represented Memphis since 2007. After Republicans redistricted his seat, he is leaving the field, possibly to his young rival, Justin J. Pearson.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump's first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it's not clear if any new agreements are likely. Trump traveled to China with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with a delegation of top U.S. executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
The summit comes after years of rising hostility between the two superpowers, but leaders recognize the importance of improving the bilateral relationship, says Zhao Hai, director of international political studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. "This is a very critical historical moment [at] a crossroad, and both sides now are working together to establish a stable relationship that will have a global ramification," he says.
We also speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting economic chaos have strengthened China's position.
"China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran," says Werner. "So it has some experience in this realm, sort of acting as a broker towards peace."
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