Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger Article 50 on March 29, which formally begins the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union.
What's next: Negotiations over the exit, which can expected to last two years. Departing a single market won't be simple, and May has already said she wants a "hard" Brexit, rather than leaving one foot in the door. At this pace, the U.K. will be fully split from the E.U. by early 2019.
Axios' Mike Allen broke the news last week that President Trump plans to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago next month "for a lowering-the-temperature summit with vast economic and security implications."
Xi is entering the most sensitive period of his time in office, the year in which he's poised to secure a second five year term as head of the Communist Party. The transition is a volatile and tense period, and he does not want all of the complications that would come with an unstable relationship with the U.S. To get a preview of the talks I spoke with Richard McGregor, who wrote "The Party," a seminal book on China's Communist Party. The takeaway: China does not want (for the moment) to upend the status quo.
NATO is so unprepared for a cyber attack that the group of experts it assembled to write about cyber espionage can't definitively say whether it's legal or not. As the NATO Cooperative Cyber Centre of Excellence report put it, "cyber espionage, as a general matter, does not violate international law."
Why it matters: Countries under attack are paralyzed to defend themselves since the definition of a lawful response is unclear. That leaves NATO's responses to cyber attacks on member countries at a standstill.
