This week

• What does Donald Trump’s preference for endless renegotiations over permanent settlements tell you about his diplomatic dealmaking?
• Why is Moscow testing a new nuclear weapon? Sergey Radchenko on Vladimir Putin’s atomic threats—and what Western leaders are hearing in them.
• What’s driving the collapse of southern Africa’s postcolonial ruling parties? Hussein Solomon on the problems of turning a liberation movement into a government.

Weather report

• Why Asia could face an unusually active end to storm season

+ Cultural intelligence

• How did Hindu nationalism take over the world’s biggest democracy? Javed Gaya’s new book, Majoritarianism in India: Roots and Consequences.
• Is disco … undead?
• & The week in new music

The art of the deals

Thursday morning at a military airbase in Busan, South Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump and the Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary Xi Jinping shook hands for a meeting that lasted just under two hours. Trump emerged to declare it “a 12, with 10 being the best,” and announce a deal: China would pause its export controls on rare-earth minerals for a year, buy American soybeans, and crack down on Chinese fentanyl-precursor chemicals. In return, the U.S. would drop tariffs on Chinese goods from 57 percent to 47 percent. Markets rallied. The 100 percent tariffs Trump had threatened and scheduled for November 1 disappeared. Both sides agreed to keep talking—and to renegotiate the whole arrangement in a year.

The form of the agreement may feel familiar: Three weeks earlier, on October 8, after days of negotiations in Egypt, Trump declared that Hamas and Israel had reached the first phase of his Gaza peace plan. Hamas would release all hostages, hand Gaza’s administration to “independent technocrats,” and Israel would pull back to agreed lines. Trump called it a breakthrough. What Hamas didn’t agree to: disarmament or permanent exclusion from governance. Those questions—the actual substance of whether Hamas remains a player—were reserved for a second phase, still under negotiation.

The China framework defers the hard mechanics in a similar way: How exactly will Beijing demonstrate cooperation on fentanyl? What constitutes “substantial” soybean purchases—and how does enforcement work when China bought none in September, while sourcing from Brazil and Argentina instead? The rare-earth pause lasts one year, after which both sides will have to sit down again. “Every year we’ll renegotiate,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Two deals, three weeks apart, both deferring the hardest questions. At the same ASEAN summit where he announced the China framework, Trump brokered a Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire—another deal praised as a breakthrough that deferred mechanics to implementation phases. Is there a pattern here?

And if so, what is it?

New music

‘Disco Life’

Say She She is a Brooklyn outfit back with their third album, Cut & Rewind. They nail the disco strut of Chic in their glory years—the harmonies, the funk, the irresistible groove. Even if, as one chorus goes, they “never had a disco life.”

Clark Gu

Is disco … undead?