Semafor Flagship-Asia Morning Edition.

"U.S. recession risk rises, China deflation pressures, U.S. soft power diminishes."

Views expressed in this geopolitical news and analysis are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 09 March 2025, 2228 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://trendsingeopolitics.blogspot.com).

 

Beijing  Damascus  Seoul March 10, 2025 Read on the web Flagship Sign up for our free newsletters→   The World Today US recession risk rises China deflation pressures Choosing Trudeau’s successor US soft power diminishes Spat over Starlink in Ukraine Syria clashes test new leaders South Korean leader released The limits of knowability New deep-sea mining trick Sail thou forth, Voyager A Japanese Netflix series rich with “humanist specificity” is a hidden gem. ↓ 1 US recession risk rises, shaking markets Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters US President Donald Trump declined to rule out the possibility of a recession this year, as investors grow increasingly wary of the country’s economic outlook. Trump told Fox News that a “period of transition” will eventually lead to growth, downplaying analysts’ concerns, and threatened more tariffs against Washington’s trading partners. Markets are less optimistic: Treasury bond yields have declined, manufacturing activity has contracted, expectations of further interest rate cuts have risen, and small businesses are planning more job cuts. That said, many analysts think a 2025 recession remains unlikely, and Trump’s approach has no modern precedent, making long-term effects hard to predict, The Wall Street Journal’s James Mackintosh wrote: But “confidence matters, and this isn’t a good way of boosting animal spirits.” ↓ 2 China deflation woes deepen Consumer prices in China fell last month for the first time in 13 months, as households remain cautious about spending amid the country’s economic malaise. Optimism over China’s tech sector has somewhat brightened investor sentiment, but the new data underscored the deepening deflationary pressures on the country as it navigates the escalating trade war with the US and tries to juice domestic consumption. At the country’s annual parliament session last week, leaders vowed to increase spending to address the “heavy and arduous” task of creating jobs and set the lowest inflation target in more than two decades — signaling Beijing is aware of the challenges it faces. ↓ 3 Liberals to choose Trudeau successor Evan Buhler/Reuters The race to become the new leader of Canada’s Liberal Party comes to an end Sunday, with the winner set to become prime minister at a pivotal moment for the country. Justin Trudeau’s successor will immediately be tasked with navigating a fractured relationship with US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly threatened tariffs and even Canada’s sovereignty, before having to steer the party through national elections later this year. Front-runner Mark Carney is “both the riskiest choice and the safest,” Canadian journalist Andrew Cohen wrote in The Globe and Mail: A former central banker, Carney has never run for office, but his economic know-how makes him well suited to take on Trump, analysts said. ↓ 4 Future of US soft power in question US President Donald Trump is threatening America’s global soft power dominance, several experts argued. Writing in the Financial Times, Joseph Nye — who coined the term “soft power” — argued Trump has a “truncated view of power limited to coercion and transactions.” The president’s questioning of allies and institutions — including the NATO security alliance — along with the dismantling of USAID has dented America’s attractiveness, Nye wrote, and opened the door for China: Beijing has invested billions in education and aid overseas, but it hasn’t made the same global inroads as the US. Trump’s retreat also boosts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rising soft-power influence as a “role model for strongmen everywhere,” Bloomberg’s Andreas Kluth wrote. ↓ 5 US-Poland row over Starlink access Stringer/Reuters A row erupted Sunday between the US and Poland over Ukraine’s use of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system. Warsaw pays for Kyiv’s Starlink access, but after Musk said Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse” if he turned it off, Poland’s foreign minister said the country could seek alternatives — sparking a rebuke from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The back-and-forth underscored how influential Musk and his businesses have become in US policy: Washington had already considered threatening to shut off Starlink as leverage in a minerals deal with Ukraine, Reuters reported. Rubio may be aiming to finalize that agreement Tuesday in Saudi Arabia at the countries’ first talks since US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Oval Office clash. ↓ 6 Fighting in Syria tests new leaders Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters Syria’s interim leader called for peace Sunday after hundreds were killed in the worst violence the country has seen since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Loyalists of the deposed president have clashed in recent days with government-affiliated fighters near the Mediterranean coast, the home of Syria’s minority Alawite community. The fighting presents a major test for the new government as it tries to unite the deeply divided country; it could make Kurdish-led forces in Syria more reluctant to disarm, while weakening Western and regional support for Damascus, Al-Monitor wrote. “The political transition in Syria is at the knife’s edge of collapse because of mistrust between armed and organized minority communities that do not trust the [new] regime,” one expert said. ↓ 7 SK president released from jail Kim Hong-ji/Reuters South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was released from detention Saturday, deepening the country’s political crisis ahead of an expected ruling as soon as this week on whether to formally remove him from office. Yoon, who was freed after a court canceled his arrest warrant on insurrection charges, cast his legal battles as “a resolute standoff against those who want to usurp power by illegal means.” Yoon, the first Korean president to be arrested while in office, still faces a criminal trial over his botched martial law declaration last year, which “opened a chasm” in the country. Thousands of police officers are set to deploy in Seoul ahead of the anticipated impeachment decision, The Korea Herald reported, as authorities brace for mass protests. ↓ Semafor Media Partner CEOs Larry Fink and Margaret Spellings are convening elected officials, corporate leaders, small business owners, union representatives, pensioners, and state and federal policymakers for the 2025 Retirement Summit to find bipartisan solutions and commitments. The theme of the event, “Redefining Retirement: It’s All of our Work,” highlights how critical it is for both the public and private sectors to think about retirement in new ways to help people live better, longer. March 12, 2025 | Washington, DC | Request an Invitation ↓ 8 Knowing what we don’t know Physicists are increasingly grappling with the idea that there are specific limits on what is knowable, and what is not. The concept that some questions will never have answers, known as undecidability, has long been familiar in math and computer science — consider trying to answer the question of whether an algorithm can run forever, for example. While some physicists argue that undecidability is inherently theoretical, others argue that “infinite theories are a close… approximation of the real world,” Quanta Magazine wrote. Researchers have observed undecidability in quantum and even classical systems, like ocean currents. “You’re trying to discover something about the way the universe or mathematics works,” one scientist said. “The fact that it’s unsolvable, and you can prove that, is an answer.” ↓ 9 New deep-sea mining technique Impossible Metals A new deep-sea mining technique could make accessing the seabed’s mineral riches less ecologically damaging, the BBC reported, but activists remained skeptical. Mining startup Impossible Metals’ autonomous machine is designed to find polymetallic nodules — “potato-sized lumps containing metals scattered on the seabed in vast quantities” — scan them for lifeforms, and then, if safe, retrieve the minerals using robotic arms. The deep seabed is largely unexplored, and while many scientists argue it should be left alone, the world needs metals like copper and manganese for the energy transition: “Anyone that doesn’t want to do deep-sea mining is implicitly saying we need to do more land-based mining,” one deep-sea mining firm executive said. ↓ 10 NASA tries to prolong Voyager probes’ life NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC NASA is doing everything it can to keep the incredibly long-lived Voyager probes going, with the agency cutting power to some of their scientific instruments. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft are the most far-flung human-made objects in the universe and the only to ever operate in interstellar space: Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and radio signals between it and our planet take 23 hours to arrive. Voyager 2 is some 13 billion miles away. Their mission was supposed to last five years, and almost 50 years on, their nuclear batteries are running low: Still, NASA hopes to keep the probes going into the 2030s as they are our only direct contact with the space environment beyond the Sun’s influence. ↓ Flagging March 10: China’s retaliatory tariffs on US imports take effect. India and the European Union hold trade talks in Brussels. Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny celebrates his 31st birthday. ↓ Curio Netflix A Japanese Netflix series from acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda is imbued with “humanist specificity,” leaning into everyday reality over the dramatic plot twists viewers have come to expect from TV. Asura follows four sisters who discover their septuagenarian father is having an affair. The characters begin as simple archetypes, but “the swerving path that real life takes won’t allow anyone to be defined so easily,” a reviewer wrote in Foreign Policy. Small dramas unfold, but “when you think you know where things are headed, you realize that you don’t — or, perhaps even more realistically, you realize that nothing is happening at all!” That realism might explain why Asura remains something of a hidden gem. ↓ Semafor Spotlight Lucy Nicholson/Reuters Key figures in American tech have softened their support for H-1B visas after a revolt from President Donald Trump’s MAGA base, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti reported. “We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into,” tech investor Marc Andreessen said on a podcast last month. Yes, the program is “rife with abuse,” wrote Albergotti — it’s also an open question how the US competes without it. 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