The soaring stock market has been the crux of Donald Trump's argument for the competence of his reign. It might be his favorite tweet subject, outside the "Failing New York Times."

Trump on August 18th: "Longest bull run in the history of the stock market, congratulations America!" August 24th: "Our economy is setting records on every front." September 11th: "Where are the Democrats coming from? The best economy in the history of the country would totally collapse if they ever took control!"

But since the market hit an all-time high on October 3rd, Trump has shifted his tweets to other subjects. This makes sense, given that it took a nasty dive. The worst was a two-day sell-off in the middle of last week, during which the Dow Jones Industrial average dropped 1,377 points.

On Friday, the Dow opened with a big round of buying, then plunged again, then wobbled all day before finally ending 287 points up. This allowed the financial world to spend the weekend relief-boozing instead of planning for The End.

Maybe the stock market isn't about to crash in the next 10 minutes. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be scared to our marrow over the future.

The sell-off last week was likely just a mild preview of what will happen once the blunt contradictions of Trump's major economic moves - crazy even by his standards - set in.

"We're fucked," a market analyst friend of mine put it this weekend. "It's all baked in the cake already." You don't have to be a financial expert to see the irreconcilability of these three problems:

1. Fed tightening

Under Trump, the Federal Reserve is trying to end a decade-long party. Massive programs of money-printing and low-to-zero-interest rate lending were implemented to keep markets moving after the 2008 disaster. Terms like "unlimited liquidity" began to catch on to describe the level of central bank support the financial world could expect in the post-crash universe.

Programs like Quantitative Easing in the U.S. (and analogs in Europe and Japan) had central banks pumping an extra $12 trillion or more into the economy over the past decade. The cash was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us in the form of real-world investment. But the vast sums of free money pumped into the economy produced dependably unimpressive economic growth overall (prompting headlines like, "$12 trillion... for this?").

Who benefited instead? You may be surprised to learn it was the financial sector!

QE and "ZIRP" (Zero Interest Rate Policy) allowed big companies to borrow recklessly and gorge themselves on buybacks of their own stock, which had the twin consequences of driving down bond prices and sending the stock market soaring.

The central banks of the world are finally trying to end the madness. The Fed is taking about $50 billion out of the economy every month, and now raising rates not just above zero, but close to (and perhaps even beyond!) neutral. The free-money era is over. Once the European and Japanese central banks follow suit, the net effect worldwide will go from "easing" to "quantitative tightening" in 2019.

Trump must be cursing his bad luck. After 10 years of Fed policy that turbocharged bank-sector profits and defined "austerity" as a thing for poor people, he's now got a terminally cheery Fed chief in Jerome Powell who keeps insisting the economy is finally healthy enough to start re-introducing the concept of pain to Wall Street.

"A wide range of data supports a positive view," Powell said earlier this month following a rate hike.

After last week's sell-off, Wall Street analysts whined and pointed the finger at Powell, implying that he was causing this mess by cutting off the magic money-tap too early.

"The current dip in confidence can be allayed were the Federal Reserve to signal it is easing off its quantitative tightening and rates rises," Jasper Lawler, research head at London Capital Group, wrote during the plunge last Thursday.

Trump agrees. He's ripping the Fed for raising interest rates, as in, why do we have to come back to Earth now?

"I don't want to slow it down even a little bit, especially when we don't have the problem of inflation," Trump said last week.

If the Fed turns off the rocket boosters entirely, he's in trouble because...

2. Trump's tax cuts depend on monster growth

When Republicans rammed through the administration's tax-cut package, more than a few analysts warned that the cuts were based on too-rosy projections of economic growth.

Groups like the Tax Policy Center warned, "Trump's tax cuts would drive new activity at first, but... the impact would be blunted in later years by rising deficits, forcing more federal borrowing."

A year later, the Trump administration has indeed had to sharply increase the scale of federal borrowing in order to cover the shortfall in expected tax revenue.

Few noticed when the Trump Treasury borrowed $488 billion in the first quarter of this year, beating the record of $483 billion set in the first quarter of 2010, when the economy was still recovering from a crash. There was talk that the Treasury would roughly quadruple the number of T-bills issued in 2018 versus 2017.

President Donald Trump delivers remarks on trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, in the Rose Garden of the White House.

This is part of the reason Trump wants Fed rates lower. He doesn't want to have to pay interest on the giant sums he will inevitably have to borrow to pay for his idiotic tax cuts.

"I think the Fed has gone crazy," he seethed, adding that "they seem to like raising interest rates, [when] we can do other things with the money."

Rising interest rates also hurt Trump's own bottom line. The prez supposedly owes $300 million to Deutsche Bank, and interest payments there go up or down in accordance with Fed policy.

"I'm paying interest at a high rate because of our Fed," he admitted.

It should be noted that even presidents whose personal fortunes are not massively affected by Fed policy have traditionally stayed mum about central bank moves. Trump's comments broke two decades of presidential silence about Fed policy.

So we have a Fed-tightening colliding with a ballooning public-borrowing need. Awesome! To this we add a third factor:

3. Trump's tariffs

Here's how dumb Donald Trump is. First, he announces a massive unnecessary tax cut that can only be paid for by unsustainably high growth. Almost immediately, he has to increase national borrowing to pay for it.

The traditional Treasury note supply goes up right away, but even that's not enough to pay the nut. In fact, this week - October 16th, to be exact - the government is going to debut a brand-new two-month Treasury bill, through which it hopes to raise $30-$35 billion immediately.

So we're going to have to sell more and more Treasury notes. On whom do we depend most of all to buy those notes?

That's right: China, which holds about $1.2 trillion in Treasury notes and about $1.5 trillion in U.S. debt overall.

In any trade war with China, the United States would seem to have an advantage. We import a lot more of their goods (last year, about $524 billion in Chinese products) than they import of ours (about $188 billion of U.S. exports). But all of this is moot if China suddenly stops buying U.S. debt, or even just slows down a bit.

Experts claim to think this is unlikely, given China's own dependence on U.S. Treasuries as a safe destination for its trillions in foreign exchange reserves.

Bloomberg over the summer wrote, "Treasuries are nearly as crucial an underpinning to China's economic plumbing as America's." They quoted a Goldman Sachs analyst who added: "We don't see any evidence that China is planning to use Treasuries as part of its trade negotiations."

But what if Trump's big populist gambit announced in September - slapping 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products - hurts the Chinese economy to the point where they can't afford to keep subsidizing our exploding debt? What if it just dulls their enthusiasm for doing so?

Under Quantitative Easing, we were inventing huge sums of cash to lend to ourselves, with the Fed buying as much as $45 billion in Treasuries every month. This time last year, the Fed had $2.5 trillion in Treasuries on its balance sheet.

Now that source of funding is drying up, and we're in a trade war with our other major borrower, and Trump thought this was the time to bet our national economic health on a tax giveaway.

Who comes up with these ideas?

As we've seen in recent decades, even smart people are fully capable of driving the American economy off a cliff. What happens when the dumbest administration in history gets a turn at the wheel? Maybe last week wasn't the time to start panicking. But that moment can't be far.

(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

Marx was certainly right in arguing that the point is not to understand the world but to change it, but what he underemphasized was that the world cannot be transformed if one does not understand what is to be changed. As Terry Eagleton rightly notes "Nobody can change a world they didn't understand." Moreover, the lack of mass resistance to oppression signals more than apathy or indifference, it also suggests that we don't have an informed and energizing vision of the world for which we want to struggle. Political struggle is dependent on the political will to change, which is central to any notion of informed agency willing to address the radical and pragmatic issues of our time. In addition to understanding the world, an informed public must connect what they know and learn to the central task of bringing their ideas to bear on society as a whole. This means that a critical consciousness must be matched by a fervent willingness to take risks, and challenge the destructive narratives that are seeping into the public realm and becoming normalized.

Any dissatisfaction with injustice necessitates combining the demands of moral witnessing with the pedagogical power of persuasion and the call to address the tasks of emancipation. We need individuals and social movements willing to disturb the normalization of a fascist politics, oppose racist, sexist, and neoliberal orthodoxy.

As Robin D. G. Kelley observes we cannot confuse catharsis and momentary outrage for revolution. In a time of increasing tyranny, resistance in many quarters appears to have lost its usefulness as a call to action. At the same time, the pedagogical force of civic ignorance and illiteracy has morphed into a national ideal. Tyranny and ignorance feed each other in a theater of corporate controlled media ecosystems and function more as a tool of domination than as a pedagogical outlet in pursuit of justice and the practice of freedom. Under such circumstances, when education is not viewed as central to politics itself, resistance withers in the faux language of privatized struggles and fashionable slogans.

For instance the novelist Teju Cole has argued that "'resistance' is back in vogue, and it describes something rather different now. The holy word has become unexceptional. Faced with a vulgar, manic and cruel regime, birds of many different feathers are eager to proclaim themselves members of the Resistance. It is the most popular game in town." Cole's critique appears to be born out by the fact that the most unscrupulous of liberal and conservative politicians such as Madeline Albright, Hilary Clinton, and even James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, are now claiming that they have joined the resistance against Trump's fascist politics. Even Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W. Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a proto-fascist. Writing in the New York Times, Hayden, ironically, chastised Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that "Post-Truth is pre-fascism." The irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush's illegal National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while the head of the NSA, he also lied repeatedly about his role in Bush's sanction and implementation of state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This tsunami of banal resistance and its pedagogical architecture was on full display when an anonymous member of the Trump's inner circle published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that he/she and other senior officials were part of "the resistance within the Trump administration." The author was quick to qualify the statement by insisting such resistance had nothing to do with "the popular 'resistance' of the left." To prove the point, it was noted by the author that the members of this insider resistance liked some of Trump's policies such as "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more." Combining resistance with the endorsements of such reactionary policies reads like fodder for late-night comics.

The Democratic Party now defines itself as the most powerful political force opposing Trump's fascist politics. What it has forgotten is the role it has played under the Clinton and Obama presidencies in creating the economic, political, and social conditions for Trump's election in 2016. Such historical and political amnesia allows them to make the specious claim that they are now the party of resistance. Resistance in these instances has little to do with civic courage, a defense of human dignity, and the willingness to not just bear witness to the current injustices but to struggle to overcome them. Of course, the issue is not to disavow resistance as much as to redefine it as inseparable from fundamental change that calls for the overthrow of capitalism itself. Neoliberalism has now adopted unapologetically the language of racial cleansing, white supremacy, white nationalism, and fascist politics. Unapologetic for the widespread horrors, gaping inequality, destruction of public goods, and re-energizing of the discourse of hate and culture of cruelty, neoliberalism has joined hands with a toxic fascist politics painted in the hyper-patriotic colors of red, white, and blue. As I have noted elsewhere:

Neoliberalism's hatred of democracy, the common good, and the social contract has unleashed generic elements of a fascist past in which white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, rabid misogyny and immigrant fervor come together in a toxic mix of militarism, state violence, and a politics of disposability. Modes of fascist expression adapt variously to different political historical contexts assuring racial apartheid-like forms in the post-bellum U.S. and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany. Fascism with its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful strongman, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and th superiority of a select ethnic or national group has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, economic orthodoxy, and ethical somnambulance a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.

Trump's election and the Kavanaugh affair make clear that what is needed is not only a resistance to the established order of neoliberal capitalism but a radical restructuring of society itself. That is not about resisting oppression in its diverse forms but overcoming it-in short, changing it. The Kavanaugh hearings and the liberal response was a telling example of what might be called a politics of disconnection.

While it is crucial to condemn the Kavanaugh hearings for its blatant disregard for the Constitution, expressed hatred of women, and its symbolic expression and embrace of white privilege and power, it is necessary to enlarge our criticism to include the system that made the Kavanaugh appointment possible. Kavanaugh represents not only the deep seated rot of misogyny but also as Grace Lee Boggs, has stated "a government of, by, and for corporate power." We need to see beyond the white nationalists and neo-Nazis demonstrating in the streets in order to recognize the terror of the unforeseen, the terror that is state sanctioned, and hides in the shadows of power. Such a struggle means more than engaging material relations of power or the economic architecture of neoliberal fascism, it also means taking on the challenge producing the tools and tactics necessary to rethink and create the conditions for a new kind of subjectivity as the basis for a new kind of democratic socialist politics. We need a comprehensive politics that brings together various single interest movements so that the threads that connect them become equally as important as the particular forms of oppression that define their singularity. In addition, we need intellectuals willing to combine intellectual complexity with clarity and accessibility, embrace the high stakes investment in persuasion, and cross disciplinary borders in order to theorize and speak with what Rob Nixon calls the "cunning of lightness" and a "methodological promiscuity" that keeps language attuned to the pressing the claims for justice.

Outside of those intellectuals who write for CounterPunch, Truthout, Truthdig, Rise Up Times, Salon, and a number of other critical media outlets, there are too few intellectuals, artists, journalists willing to challenge the rise of an American version of neoliberal fascism. It is not enough to report in an alleged "balanced fashion" on Trump's endorsement of violence against journalists, the massive levels of inequality produced under neoliberalism, the enactment by the Trump administration of savage policies of racial cleansing aimed at undocumented immigrants, and the emergence of a police state armed terrifying new technologies aimed at predictive policing. The real challenge is to tie these elements of oppression together and to recognize the threads of state violence, white supremacy, and fascist politics that suggest the emergence of a distinctive new political order.

Shock and outrage in the midst of a fascist politics is now undermined by the mainstream press which is always on the hunt for higher ratings and increasing their bottom line. Rather than talk about fascism, they focus on the threat to liberal institutions. Rather than talk about the mounting state violence and the increased violence of neo-fascist thugs such as the Proud Boys, they talk about violence coming from the left and right. Rather than raise questions about the conditions and a society in which more and more people seem to prefer authoritarian rule over democracy, they talk about Trump's eccentric behavior or keep tabs on his endless lying. This is not unhelpful, but it misses the nature of the true threat, its genesis, and the power of a corporate elite who are now comfortable with the fascist politics that Trump embodies.

An iPsos poll found that "a surprising 26 percent of all Americans, and 43 percent of Republicans, agree with the statement that the president "should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior." In addition, a majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum- 72 percent - think "it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information." Couple this with the fact that Trump has recently stated privately to his aids that he regrets reversing his policy of separating children from their parents at the border and you have a mix of fascist principles coupled with a dangerous demagogue who cannot bring the country fast enough to the fascist abyss. While it is true that the United States under Trump is not Hitler's Germany, Trump has tapped into America's worst impulses and as Jason Stanley and others remind us his ultra-nationalism, white supremacist views, and racist diatribes coupled with his attack on immigrants, the media, African-Americans, and Muslims are indicative of a politics right out the fascist playbook. If the public and media keep denying this reality, the endpoint is too horrible to imagine. If we are to understand the current resurgence of right-wing populist movements across the globe, economic factors alone do not account for the current mobilizations of fascist passions.

As Pierre Bourdieu once put it, it is crucial to recognize that "the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion." He goes on to state that left intellectuals have underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front. In part, this means that the left and others must make matters of culture and pedagogy central to politics in order to address people's needs and struggles. And they should do so in a language that is both rigorous and accessible. Matters of culture and consciousness in the Gramscian sense are central to politics and only when the left can address that issue will there be any hope for massive collective resistance in the form of a broad-based movement.

Trump has emboldened and legitimated the dire anti-democratic threats that have been expanding under an economic system stripped of any political, social, and ethical responsibility. This is a form of neoliberal fascism that has redrawn and expanded the parameters of the genocidal practices and hate filled politics of the 1930s and 40s in Europe in which it was once thought impossible to happen again. The threat has returned and is now on our doorsteps, and it needs to be named, exposed, and overcome by those who believe that the stakes are much too high to look away and not engage in organized political and pedagogical struggles against a fascist state and an omniscient fascist politics. We live in an age when the horrors of the past are providing the language and politics of illiberal democracies all over the globe. This is a world where dystopian versions of a catastrophic, misery producing neoliberalism merge with unapologetic death dealing visions of a fascist politics. We live in an era that testifies to the horrors of a past struggling to reinvent itself in the present, and which should place more than a sense of ethical and political responsibility on those of us bearing witness to it. As my friend, Brad Evans, notes under such circumstances, we live in a time "that asks us all to continually question our own shameful compromises with power," and to act with others to overcome our differences in order to dismantle this assault on human rights, human dignity, economic justice, equality, and democracy itself.

Corporate rule imposes a duopoly system in which one party is overtly white supremacist and the other party refuses to tackle racial oppression - but both pursue austerity and war.

While Donald Trump's Republicans strive to maintain electoral majorities through blatant appeals to white supremacy and constant scapegoating of Blacks and browns, corporate Democrats masquerade as the sensible political "center," around which most Americans -- except for small, "polarizing" minorities at the extremes of the spectrum -- can unite. The latest corporate attempt to paper over the nation's class and race contradictions was launched earlier this month by an outfit called More in Common, which works closely with corporate media and think tanks in the U.S. and Europe. Its new report, titled "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape," is an attempt to obscure the racism that animates majorities of white voters and to erase Black politics, entirely.

The More in Common study claims to have discovered seven "tribes" of political belief and behavior that comprise the American spectrum. None of these tribes revolve around race and class, yet, according to the authors, they each possess "distinctive beliefs, psychology and levels of engagement." The villains of this imagined tribal order, arrayed at opposite ends of the study's poles, are Progressive Activists, who supposedly make up 8 percent of the population, and Devoted Conservatives, at 6 percent. "Although they comprise just 14% of the population, their voices dominate public debate in the digital age," the More in Common folks lament. "They are more ideologically dogmatic, more hostile towards the other side, and more active in elections and on social media.">This is considered a very bad thing.

A national political consensus can supposedly be found among the middle groups: Traditional Liberals (11%), Passive Liberals (15%), Politically Disengaged (26%), Moderates (15%), and Traditional Conservatives (6%). When you subtract the disputatious and "highly ideological" Progressive Activist and Devoted Conservative "tribes," according to the authors, "most Americans - including both liberals and conservatives - are actually more reasonable than people on the other side are made to think." More in Common claims to have found that, once a person can be located among its seven previously "hidden" tribes "their views on a wide range of current issues could be predicted more accurately than by referring to their visible traits such as race, gender or income."

This is utter nonsense, with no grounding in race, class, or history. Stark differences have long separated Blacks and whites on issues of living wages and union rights (Black women are the group most in favor of unions, white men the least); war and peace (Blacks are most opposed to US military adventures abroad, whites most warlike, Hispanics in between, as usual); and the fairness of the criminal justice system, of which Blacks are near-universally skeptical.

Majorities of white people, across class and gender lines, voted for the virulently white supremacist Donald Trump -- with Trump piling up supermajorities in the Deep South. The GOP has thrived as the White Man's Party since 1968, supplanting the southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) precisely because white supremacy is the most dependable mass organizing principle for a rightwing corporate electoral party in the United States. Race works like a charm for making white folks forget about class in the United States, which is why the moneyed classes have constructed a duopoly electoral system that gathers the most racist whites in one party, while Blacks and other despised peoples are corralled in the other corporate party -- with both parties supporting global U.S. empire and warfare. Class has been effectively suppressed, except as racialized euphemisms and code words of American politics: "middle class," meaning "hard working, salt-of-the-earth, patriotic white folks," versus "the underclass," signifying "predatory" and criminal Blacks and other darker people, who need to be kept under surveillance and containment.

The More in Common outfit would have us believe that most of the anger and rancor in the U.S. polity is caused by the 14 percent of the population described as Progressive Activists, on the left, and Devoted Conservatives, on the right, who are determined not to get along, and that an "exhausted majority" of 67 percent of the people are ready for "compromise" on most issues. This is in synch with the aims of leadership of the Democratic Party, dominated by Wall Street and the high-tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley. The party's corporate leadership has no intention of yielding to demands for living wages, job security, single payer health care, and free universal college tuition, nor are they willing to lift the state of siege that has been imposed on Black America by the mass incarceration regime. The Democrats depend on the votes of Blacks and other minorities, and those whites that haven't thrown in with Trump's brand of white nationalism, but offer no programs that would substantially ameliorate deteriorating economic and social conditions -- nothing but more austerity and war. Therefore, the political crisis must be blamed on strident voices of the "far left and far right" -- like "Progressive Activists" and "Devoted Conservatives," the political categories invented by the More in Common political conjurers. Race must be erased as a demographic marker, along with class, on the theory that if you don't recognize racial and class conflicts, they will disappear.

Corporate Democrats believe they can attract enough disaffected Republicans to their side to make up for the leftish voters that abandon the party in disgust. The More in Common study is designed to encourage such an alignment. It urges traditional "moderates" of both parties to unite and form an effective electoral majority from the "center."

This is all about reinforcing the corporate "center," which has been destabilized, not only by Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP and surprise election victory, but most fundamentally by the collapse of wages and job security and the general demoralization caused by endless austerity and war -- the core policies of both corporate parties. Americans must be made to reject the "extremes" if the corporate consensus is to be reestablished. But racial oppression cannot be tackled without massive, and expensive, transformations of society, requiring whole new layers of democratization. To the extent possible, therefore, race must be eliminated from the conversation (except to avow that America loves all races). The More in Common brand of race-less and classless social science, which claims to more accurately describe Americans' political views "than by referring to their visible traits such as race, gender or income," is a perfect tool for corporate consensus-makers. The rulers won't have to do anything for anybody, because real demographics cease to exist.

The assault on "extremes of left and right" by the oligarchs that control the Internet -- most of them Democrats -- is another front in the escalating corporate war to reestablish the hegemony of the ideological "center" by purging those that cause "dissension" in society -- with or without a Russian connection.

Corporate pollsters have already largely disappeared the Black demographic from their surveys, which nowadays often neglect to break down public opinion by race. Some surveys even lump all "minorities" together, despite the fact that Hispanic opinion is most often somewhere near middle of the chasm that separates whites and Blacks. This, in a nation whose currently ruling political party, controlling all three branches of government and most state legislatures, shouts its white supremacism to the world.

The result is a two-corporate party system in which half of the duopoly is overtly white supremacist while the other half appeals to most of the nation's non-white voters but doesn't have the vocabulary to even begin to discuss the dismantling of racial oppression.

Totally under the radar of a news cycle consumed by the Pulp Fiction in Istanbul saga and the ever-mutating US-China trade war, leaders from no less than 51 Asian and European nations met in Brussels on Friday to talk about developing some measure of global stability.

The day before in Brussels had been lost on yet another unresolved soap opera - Brexit, with no credible deal in sight.

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), established in 1996, lists 53 partners - 30 European nations, 21 Asian nations, the EU and the ASEAN Secretariat. Members, apart from the whole EU, include three BRICS nations (China, Russia, India), Japan, Australia and New Zealand - attesting to its importance.

Even though ASEM's decisions are not binding, the 12th summit could not have happened at a more crucial juncture, according to diplomats, in terms of the pressing need for some sanity in international law and relations.

Even with the EU focused on Brexit, the fallout of migration and Italy's open defiance of Brussels in raising its budget deficit; and Asia worried about inter-Korean dialogue, US bombers flying over the South China Sea ahead of an ASEAN summit, and the Rohingya crisis, they still managed to conduct meaningful discussions.

After all, Eurasia-wide trade already tops trans-Pacific trade, and the gap will continue to grow.

They discussed connectivity and trade and investment, but also sustainable development policies, climate change, terrorism, nuclear non-proliferation, cyber-security and, last but not least, the theme that galvanizes right-wing populism: migration.

Arguably the key consensus point of the Asia-Europe entente cordiale is the need to preserve the WTO - for all its faults still hailed as the only rules-based mechanism capable of arbitrating the proliferation of trade wars.

In parallel, the EU is advancing business as usual, signing a free-trade agreement with Singapore and another one with Vietnam and finalizing the terms of a trade deal with Japan.

So what's the deal with BRI?

Then there's the heart of the matter: how the EU as a whole plans to position itself towards the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Last month, the European Commission (EC) came up with its own Asia-Europe connectivity strategy ranging from transport and energy to digital economy developments.

The EU motto is "sustainable connectivity" - privileging "sound regulatory frameworks", "fiscal responsibility", and with everything operating under "open-market" rules.

For the moment, that's still quite vague - and not substantially different from BRI's goals. Diplomats in Brussels constantly refer to the EU's External Investment Plan, focusing mostly on Africa and the "EU neighborhood", and theoretically able to draw investments up to 44 billion euros.

This map shows a few examples - but that's really a drop in the Atlantic compared to the reach, breadth and vast funding of BRI. Yet there's no question that a few European nations would like the EU mechanism to rival China's New Silk Roads.

EU divided, but talking about it

For the moment, the EU is - as usual - a divided house, pitting the pro-BRI Eastern Europeans and Italy, with a paralyzed France and Germany not exactly sure how to calibrate its strategy.

Arguably the top Brussels headache concerns Chinese investments in high-tech European businesses. Diplomatic corridors are abuzz with worries of technological transfers boosting the Made in China 2025 strategy. Berlin is now heavily regulating Chinese acquisitions in strategic sectors - but the EU as a whole still has not come up with a consensus strategy.

German industrialists know that for an export powerhouse the markets of the future are all in Asia - and especially China. Duisburg happens to be the key BRI terminal in Europe, as it hosts the Logport, one of the largest container ports in the continent. Twenty-five cargo trains arrive each week at Terminal DIT - the "China Terminal", coming from Chongqing and crossing Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland. In a not too distant future, this cargo will all move via high-speed rail.

The Mercator Institute for China Studies, a top think-tank in Berlin, has been releasing consistent reports on how Made in China 2025 is replicating the Germany: Industrie 4.0 technological leap, and how China will soon be building those ultra high-tech machines that for the moment shine worldwide as a symbol of German know-how.

Well, instead of becoming hostages in a sanctions crossfire, at least Asia and Europe are talking about it.