A heady throng of tech billionaires, ministers, corporate titans and the king of the Netherlands have convened in Sweden for the 71st Bilderberg meeting

– the publicity-shy annual policy conference that has long sustained conspiracy theorists

– hosted this year by the fabulously wealthy Wallenberg family.

The four days of transatlantic talks are taking place at the swanky Grand hotel,
which is owned, like so much else in Sweden, by the Wallenbergs.

The Swedish PM, Ulf Kristersson, turned up for welcome dinner on Thursday evening,
and would have been about halfway through his second plate of meatballs when the first of Israel’s rockets dropped on Tehran.

What better time for the prospects of world war three to go up a gear than in the middle of a Bilderberg conflab,
with #nuclear #proliferation slated for discussion,
and the heads of Nato and MI6, and two of America’s most senior military officers in the room.

They’re joined in Stockholm by the CEOs of several major defence suppliers such as Palantir, Thales and Anduril.

Even the quietly spoken host of the conference,
Marcus Wallenberg, happens to run an arms company.
-- He’s chair of Sweden’s largest defence contractor, Saab.

The Tehran attacks slot happily into the conference agenda,
which includes the topics
“Middle East” and the rise of an “authoritarian axis”

– what Bilderberg insider Nadia Schadlow,
a former deputy US national security adviser,
describes as
“the growing collusion among revisionist powers”.

According to Schadlow:
“An authoritarian axis is rapidly coalescing around China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,
disrupting the belief that an international community has taken shape in the aftermath of the cold war.”

Earlier this year, the Economist magazine, whose editor sits alongside Schadlow on Bilderberg’s steering committee, struck a similar note, declaring:

“The rupture of the post-1945 order is gaining pace.”

But the Economist handed Donald Trump a fair chunk of the blame for “junking the transatlantic alliance”.

What this means for Bilderberg is that seven decades of hard work nurturing the postwar international order are in danger of going up in – literal – smoke.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/15/bilderberg-hroup?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The U.S. and China Should Consider Partnering in Space

As the U.S. presidential campaign barrels toward its big, traditional fall push, both contestants have found ways to emphasize the centrality of Washington’s #competition with Beijing to the country’s future.

To be sure, the United States and China have different strengths.

Partly due to its openness, the former has enormous soft power.

America has ubiquitous cultural influence.

It has far greater per capita wealth and other advantages, albeit some of them shrinking, ranging from technological innovation and economic productivity to world-leading higher education.

China, meanwhile, has eclipsed the United States as a force in international trade
and has leveraged its large surpluses and national savings to become the biggest global lender.

As a result of massive, sustained investments in its military and many defense-related industries, from ship building to artificial intelligence,
China has also become a formidable competitor in military terms.

To avoid conflict, realities like these, of tight competition between starkly different but increasingly well-matched rivals
—and moreover, rivals whose economies remain substantially connected
—will require tremendous creativity from those who manage the countries’ relationship.

The key question is how can Washington and Beijing avoid allowing ever more of their dealings with each other to devolve into a series of zero-sum contests?

One of the most powerful avenues for serious, high-level cooperation is one that has never been pursued. It exists in the skies above:
space.

Currently, both countries are investing heavily in space exploration in ways that do nothing to further their sense of trust or common purpose.

By law, in fact, the United States has ruled out cooperation in space with China since 2011.

As two big issues amply illustrate, though
—one of them a looming crisis and the other a shared human challenge
—there has never been a better time to reconsider this ill-conceived restriction.

For some, mention of an impending crisis might bring to mind the dangerous ongoing problems of NASA’s present Starliner mission,
whose Boeing vessel has suffered serious failures, creating an elevated sense of danger and uncertainty about the return to Earth of that mission’s astronauts.

But beyond the 2011 law, national pride prevents Washington from enlisting help of any kind from Beijing with this challenge. M

It would be unrealistic to expect anything to change in time for China to play any role in getting the Starliner crew back to Earth safely.

However, a situation like this underscores what China and the United States could gain by forming a mutual aid agreement to extend their good offices in the case of manned civilian missions in distress in the future.

There is another looming crisis, however,
one with much smaller immediate stakes than the Starliner mission,
and therefore one for which Beijing and Washington should be able to fashion an agenda of deep cooperation more easily.

The problem is the #proliferation of #space #debris, which poses serious risks to manned missions in orbit and to the satellites that both countries, and indeed the whole world,
are increasingly reliant on.

Over the years, both countries have contributed heavily to this problem,

with a recent incident involving a failed Chinese rocket serving as a timely reminder of the accumulating danger.

Even without tackling something as politically challenging as shared missions, pairing crew members, or space station visits,
the two countries should be able to work out a cooperation on this issue
—one that could help build confidence between them,
as well as reassure the rest of the world that their competition has reasonable limits.

The second potential area for cooperation
—the shared human challenge
—involves something of a much higher order than clearing space junk.

To the casual observer, the United States and China appear to be competing over bragging rights involving exploration of the moon.

As everyone knows, the United States first landed astronauts there in 1969, making this pursuit something of an anticlimax for some,
including people in Congress who authorize spending.

But in fact, beyond lingering scientific aims,
missions to the moon these days are largely about eventual human travel to Mars.

The moon is useful as a slingshot, and especially as a source of minerals and water,
the latter of which can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen and used as fuel.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/27/the-u-s-and-china-should-consider-partnering-in-space/