If we've learned one thing during the president's recent negotiations with China, it's that we don't have the cards. We can disrupt their entire manufacturing economy. We can threaten them with a level of unemployment, specifically youth unemployment, that they didn't see coming.But in the end, we got rules because of one thing, our well-known dependence on China for rare earth minerals. They got them. We need them.Although, it does make you wonder what the heck were we thinking when we started a trade war ...

Well, Brendan, you've been covering these negotiations closely over the past few months as tensions between the US and China have escalated and deescalated. How has that ticking clock played into these talks this week in London. Well, the focus for the past couple weeks for the Trump administration has really been on China.It's been almost exactly a month since they emerged from talks in Geneva, Switzerland. But what's happened in the meantime is China has shown the world how much leverage it has. China con ...