| | | | How China Helps North Korea's Missile Program: Report | | North Korea's missile program has been getting a crucial boost -- from China, reports the Washington Post's Joby Warrick.
"[D]espite China's public efforts to rein in North Korea's provocative behavior, Chinese companies continue to act as enablers, supplying the isolated communist regime with technology and hardware that allow its missiles to take flight, according to current and former U.S. and U.N. officials and independent weapons experts," Warrick writes.
"China has officially denied that such illegal exports exist, but investigations show restricted products were shipped privately to North Korea as recently as [2015]. Still unclear, analysts said, is whether the Chinese government tacitly approved of the exports, or is simply unable or unwilling to police the thousands of Chinese companies that account for more than 80 percent of all foreign goods imported by North Korea each year." - Unprecedented measures. China should consider unprecedented steps, including restricting oil imports to North Korea, if Pyongyang continues with its provocative behavior, the semi-official Global Times editorialized. "Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program is intended for securing the regime, however, it is reaching a tipping point. Pyongyang hopes its gamble will work, but all signs point to the opposite direction."
- Playing the trade card. President Trump is "offering up an unconventional deal to China," writes Walter Russell Mead for the American Interest. "Concessions on trade in exchange for cooperation on North Korea."
"Trump's willingness to use trade as a bargaining chip with China for help with North Korea is a good window into his overall approach to foreign policy, and helps explain his frequent remarks that his predecessors have been getting 'bad deals' on trade." - Ready for another nuke test? North Korean monitoring service 38 North says the country's Punggye-ri nuclear site is "primed and ready" for a sixth nuclear test."The activity during the past six weeks is suggestive of the final preparations for a test," 38 North analyst Joseph Bermudez told CNN.
| | NATO's Most Powerful Weapon: Memes? | | NATO might have no peer on the conventional battlefield, but if it wants to fight Russian trolls and groups like ISIS, it needs to embrace a new tactic: "memetic warfare," suggests Robbie Gramer in Foreign Policy.
"The problem is that NATO, like governments everywhere, are pretty terrible at the internet," Gramer says. "Memes aren't really part of NATO's arsenal yet, even if the alliance is desperately trying to tap into ideas from the private sector about how best to use social media."
"Kremlin-backed trolls and internet-savvy ISIS supporters run circles around government social media programs, often run by stodgy diplomats with no authority to be creative."
| | How to Save Brazilian Democracy | | | A stagnant economy and growing public anger have left democracy in Brazil "at its most vulnerable point since the return of civilian rule three decades ago," argues Brian Winter in Foreign Affairs. "Only by renouncing their special privileges and committing to genuine reform will Brazil's politicians be able to ward off disaster and regain the public's trust."
The most obvious way of building trust, Winter says, would be to "abolish Brazil's so-called privileged standing, a law under which only the Supreme Court can judge senior government officials, including the president, cabinet ministers, and members of Congress, for alleged crimes. This provision…was designed to shield high-level public servants from politicized verdicts by lower courts.
"But given that the Supreme Court deals with more than 100,000 cases a year, trials of politicians usually drag on for several years -- if they occur at all. The result is near impunity for the estimated 22,000 people who currently enjoy some version of this privilege." | | Why Russia Can't Have its own "Great Firewall" | | Russia is taking a leaf out of the Chinese internet censorship playbook. But it's probably too late to the game to be effective, writes Emily Parker for Pacific Standard. "The Kremlin will find that, once you give people Internet freedom, it's not so easy to completely take it away."
"It was once easy to dismiss China's local technology players as mere copycats …," she writes. "But now, some of these companies, notably Tencent's WeChat, have become so formidable that we may soon see Western companies imitating them. In the meantime, Chinese Internet users aren't necessarily longing for their Western competitors.
"In Russia, however, American sites like YouTube have become very powerful."
| | No Won't Mean No for Erdogan: Bayrasli | | Even if he loses this Sunday's referendum, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is unlikely to abandon his efforts to expand his powers, writes Elmira Bayrasli in the New York Times.
"Turkey's president is a fighter and he will go to any lengths to get what he wants. In the face of a defeat at the ballot box, he is likely to amp up his war against the Kurds, making him seem like an embattled defender of the nation," Bayrasli says. "This move would also help him win support from nationalist voters who don't normally back him. It also looks possible that if he is denied further power by way of constitutional amendment, he will seek it by extending the state of emergency -- maybe even indefinitely."
| | Hungary is the most vulnerable to subversive Russian influence out of a group of four Central European nations, according to a new report from a European think tank.
Globsec Policy Institute, based in Slovakia, noted a "growing rift between Hungary and Western Europe on many fundamental issues," which it said was "largely a result of Hungary's sliding into illiberalism and the attraction of Hungarian political elites towards the Russian geopolitical orbit."
Of particular concern was Hungarian media, with its "vast concentration of media ownership by the pro-government oligarchs and entrepreneurs, who are – according to experts interviewed for this study – completely biased in issues related to the EU, NATO and Russia."
Also surveyed were Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. | | | | | | |
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