WSJ What’s News - Can Europe Broker a Peace Plan for Ukraine?

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

A.M. Edition for Mar. 3. European leaders scramble to patch up differences between Kyiv and Washington following Friday’s public clash between Presidents Zelensky and Trump. The WSJ’s Laurence Norman reports that although British and French-led plans to put troops on the ground in Ukraine are attracting growing support, they still require buy-in from the U.S. Plus, consulting bosses scramble to defend billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts. And state legislatures resume their push to protect kids online, putting app-store operators on the defensive. Luke Vargas hosts. Check out our special series on how China’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan is challenging the West.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want to own part of the company that makes your favorite burger? Now you can. With partial shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own less than one full share, so expensive stocks are within reach. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. Ukraine's allies rally around President Zelensky in London, but how much can they do for Kiev without American support? Plus consulting bosses scramble to defend billions of

dollars in US government contracts and state legislatures resume their push to protect kids online, putting App Store operators on the defensive. We've seen bills in at least nine states introduced in the last couple of months and they think that using the app stores is a bit cleaner because there are only a couple of big app stores in Apple and Google and so in theory it should be easier for them to verify the ages of users before they can download apps. It's Monday, March 3rd. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News,

the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. After publicly clashing with President Trump on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with nearly 20 allies in London yesterday, a last-minute diplomatic gathering that attracted the leaders of Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and Turkey in a show of support for Kiev. But beyond optics, I asked the journal's Deputy Brussels Bureau Chief Lawrence Norman what concrete progress came of the gathering. So the UK and France are working on plans that would put a force of thousands of Europeans

into Ukraine under a peace deal. It wouldn't sit on the border, it would be placed elsewhere in Ukraine, but it would include aircraft, possibly sea assets as well, and the idea would be that it would be a deterrence in case Russia wished to invade Ukraine again. And there's a sense that other allies are beginning to get interested and this is becoming more serious as a prospect. They had two other tasks in London. One was to patch up the row between Trump and Zelensky

and to get the Ukrainians and the Americans to agree on a deal for minerals in Ukraine. It's not clear that that move forward. And secondly is that even the Brits who are very clear that they are willing to put troops in Ukraine under a peace deal say they need Washington to provide some kind of protection for those European forces if they come under attack from Russia. And Donald Trump has been anything but clear about whether he's willing to commit that." Meanwhile, Israel says it is stopping the entry of goods into Gaza after a ceasefire officially expired over the weekend without any agreement with Hamas on what comes next.

Hours before the ceasefire expired, Israel said it had agreed to a US proposal to extend the agreement, which would see the release of more hostages and delay until April talks to permanently end fighting, but that Hamas had refused the offer. Hamas said Israel was using its control over aid to Gaza to force it into a new agreement, rather than allowing it to have a say. Both sides are preparing for a return to fighting, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said over the weekend that he had used emergency authorities to speed up the delivery of about $4 billion in military aid to Israel.

We are exclusively reporting that executives at some of the biggest U.S. consulting firms are meeting with Trump officials to defend their contracts amid the administration's push to slash federal spending. That says the General Services Administration, or GSA, has given procurement officials at federal agencies until Friday to list and justify consulting contracts they intend to keep from 10 companies, including Booz Allen, Accenture, and Guidehouse. According to the GSA, the 10 highest-paid consulting firms are set to receive more than

$65 billion in total fees across 2025 and future years, money that has yet to be spent. In meetings with Trump officials, executives were told that the government still sees value in consulting, particularly in rolling out advanced technology and modernizing agencies. Chinese buyers are getting around U.S. export controls to order NVIDIA's latest artificial intelligence chips. According to our reporting, traders in China are selling computer systems with Nvidia's Blackwell chips installed by routing them through third parties in nearby regions like Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan, with some sellers promising delivery within six weeks.

Nvidia said it would investigate every report of possible product diversion and take appropriate action. The gray market activity poses a fresh challenge for Washington, which is weighing how to manage a technological arms race with Beijing. And speaking of the great power rivalry between the world's top two economies, we're working on a special series about how Beijing is using its trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure program to undercut American dominance on the world stage.

The second episode of Building Influence is out now on the What's News Feed. 25% U.S. tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico are set to go into effect tomorrow, along with an extra 10% tariff on products from China. While another 11th hour deal to push back that deadline remains a possibility, our colleagues at WSJ's Take on the Week podcast wanted to figure out the likely market impact should those measures, plus more trade action promised by President Trump, come into effect. Chad Bowne, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that the worsening spat with China could hit the American heartland particularly

hard. Well, agriculture back in the first trade war, that was China's choice for how to retaliate against the United States. So American farm exports, American farmers are very, very reliant, very dependent on the Chinese market for their sales, especially for products like soybeans. And so I think the concern there is, well, if President Trump decides to re-escalate things with China, China might choose to re-escalate by going after American farm products. They haven't done it yet. That was not part of their retaliation package so far, but they could. And to hear that full interview, including Chad Bowne's analysis on how tariffs could hit the chips industry, North American manufacturers, and overall U.S. GDP, check out the latest episode of WSJ's Take on the Week.

You can listen and subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to us. And in other news investors will be watching, we are exclusively reporting that Energy Major Shell is exploring the potential sale of its chemicals assets in Europe and the U.S. as it refocuses on its more profitable oil and gas operations. That is according to people familiar with the matter who say the process is in its early stages and Shell has yet to commit to any final decisions. And crypto prices got a boost yesterday after President Trump said he'd move forward with creating a crypto strategic reserve that would include Bitcoin and Ether, as well as three

smaller and riskier tokens. Trump didn't offer more details, but he's expected to host and speak at a first-ever White House crypto summit on Friday. Coming up, state legislatures are picking up the fight over online child safety and who should be responsible to verify the ages of social media users. That story after the break. Let's revisit a story now that we spent a good deal of time talking about here and on what's new Sunday last year, the fight over online child safety.

The journal's Amrith Ramkumar reports that fight is back on at state houses around the country and it now features a rift between some of America's largest tech and social media platforms. Amrith, walk us through what's been going on lately. It sounds like there's been kind of a flurry of activity. Yeah, we've seen bills in at least nine states introduced in the last couple of months, including Utah, South Carolina, Hawaii, South Dakota. They're basically called App Store Accountability Bills, the latest in a long string of things

that lawmakers have attempted. And so they think that using the app stores is a bit cleaner because there are only a of things that lawmakers have attempted. And so they think that using the app stores is a bit cleaner because there are only a couple of big app stores in Apple and Google and they collect a lot of data on users already. There's also a new coalition of roughly 60 child safety groups and individuals, and that coalition is now going to be pushing for more of these App Store bills across the country. So they're trying to build on this momentum.

Sorry to cut you off. What about any activity in Washington? Yeah, lawmakers at the state and even federal level definitely feel a lot of pressure to get anything done in the kids' online safety realm. Senator Mike Lee introduced a bill last year, and I recently talked to him, and he said he plans get anything done in the kids' online safety realm. got killed after lobbying by Meta and Google, but it passed the Senate and it would have imposed a duty of care on big internet platforms and made them much more responsible basically for the content that they host and that they let miners access. So this is going to be a long fight and there will be lots of lobbying on both sides.

About that fight, what are the App Store operators saying to try to take the heat off of them? I had someone tell me it's like the policy equivalent of a game of not it. Apple and Google definitely don't think that they should be the ones responsible in a lot of these cases. And some of it has to do with the fact that they don't think they should be singled out. And child online safety advocates in general safer on these devices and online. are basically that they've already taken a lot of steps charge of flagging to social media companies and apps. If there were minors and potentially violations of laws, they think that would actually lead to a breakdown in user privacy

expectations because they would be the ones sharing their ages and other information with all these other apps and platforms. Amrith, I know that privacy concerns and just overall skepticism about the efficacy of trying to age verify online in the first place have been perennial issues in the online safety debate. Has there been any movement in addressing those pitfalls? Those pitfalls are definitely present. The companies and others are really trying to find tech-oriented solutions around that. So Google said that they're going to start experimenting with a machine learning-based

age estimation model. said that they're going to start experimenting and age could be estimated without breaking that privacy barrier, as you say. But that's definitely the main thing that non-profits and tech industry groups go to when they fight these in court. They find free speech and privacy issues and then they hone in on those. So that's the big challenge for lawmakers is making sure that these laws of airtight. that and the contracts idea that they're preventing miners from entering in contracts. They use the analogy that a miner can't open a bank account and make a lot of big transactions without parental consent, and this should be similar. That was Wall Street Journal tech policy reporter Amrith Ramkumar.

Amrith, thank you so much for bringing us this story. Thanks for having me. And that's What's News for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Kate Boulevard with supervising producer Christina Rocca. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show.

Until then, thanks for listening.