| | | | Britain's Own Trump and Clinton? | | | Britain's general election is starting to feel like the U.S. presidential poll, writes Susan Glasser in Politico magazine, with increasingly beleaguered Prime Minister Theresa May looking like Hillary Clinton as she tries to fend off a left-wing version of Donald Trump.
Yet both "have taken their cues from the U.S. in ways that could prove risky. Like Clinton when faced with Trump, May has chosen to turn the contest into a referendum on her opponent, the hard-left [Jeremy] Corbyn, whose views are far outside the British mainstream and whose party members in parliament voted 80 percent in favor of dumping him as their leader," Glasser says.
Meanwhile, "Corbyn has been running what many British pols this week told me they consider a near-flawless campaign. His advisers speak openly of how they Trumpified their leftist boss, courting controversy rather than avoiding it, doubling down on the party's left wing rather than worrying about pivoting to the center, rallying the public with populist pledges to skip the messy foreign entanglements in favor of investing more back home." | | Merkel's "Irresponsible" Speech | | It's reasonable to blame President Trump for the current tensions between the U.S. and its European allies, writes Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel has "behaved irresponsibly" by delivering a speech that nearly announced the death of the Western alliance – and showed an "uncharacteristic deafness to the echoes of history" in the process.
"[B]y implying that the Western alliance is now coming apart, Ms Merkel has compounded the error that Mr Trump made when he failed to endorse Article 5. Both events will have encouraged the Russian government in its hope of breaking up the western alliance. That, in turn, makes Europe's security situation more dangerous," Rachman writes.
Meanwhile, "[o]ne of the truly impressive things about modern Germany is that, more than any other country I can think of, it has thought hard about the lessons of history, and learnt them with thoroughness and humility. So it is baffling that a German leader could stand in a beer-tent in Bavaria and announce a separation from Britain and the U.S. while bracketing those two countries with Russia. The historical resonances should be chilling."
| | How Trump Could Help Duterte: WSJ | | The Philippines needs help in its fight against ISIS, the Wall Street Journal says. It may be a good time for the Trump administration to step in.
"After Sept. 11, the U.S. provided the Philippine military with training, logistical and intelligence support, and funding for development projects in Mindanao. That helped past administrations contain Abu Sayyaf and other groups. Some 100 U.S. soldiers are stationed in Zamboanga, about 250 miles from Marawi City, but they don't seem to have played a role in the current fight.
"Instead the Philippines is looking primarily to China and Russia for help. While those governments may provide weapons, they can't offer the same intelligence and counterinsurgency expertise the U.S. brings. And their repression of Muslim populations in Xinjiang and Chechnya will exacerbate local suspicions."
| | China's Smarter AI Master Plan? | | China is making a huge push into the artificial intelligence field, investing billions in research programs – and threatening to leave the United States in the dust, suggest Paul Mozur and John Markoff in the New York Times.
"China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China's A.I. capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan," they write.
"China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research."
| | Can Trump Bring Peace to Ukraine? | | The Trump administration is pushing to restart the peace process in Ukraine, writes Josh Rogin in the Washington Post. And it might be one area where the president can find common ground with Europe.
"Germany and France have been involved in what's called the Normandy Format, an effort to implement the 2015 Minsk agreement, which is stalled due to cease-fire violations on the ground primarily by Russian-backed forces and a lack of Ukrainian political progress. Their hope is that the United States can break the impasse," Rogin writes.
"If the Trump team does its best to strike a deal with Moscow and fails, at least Putin's true intentions will be laid bare. Then the administration will have little choice but to pursue a path of actively pushing back on Russian aggression, increasing support for Ukraine's government and military, and abandoning the idea of yet another Russian reset."
| | | Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday. Bloomberg reports that he "has a tough task when he visits the White House this week: Convince President Donald Trump to advance trade ties that blossomed under the Obama administration." President Trump is expected to confirm whether the United States will exit the Paris climate agreement. Joseph Robertson writes in The Guardian that Trump could score a major win on one of the signature themes of his campaign – infrastructure – by publicly endorsing the deal. The Shangri-La Dialogue begins in Singapore this Friday, with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis expected to address the annual security gathering. Hugh White argues in the Straits Times that Mattis "would be foolish to repeat his predecessor's mistakes and promise tougher pushback against China than Washington is willing or able to deliver." But he adds that "tacitly accepting Beijing's fait accompli in the South China Sea would leave a big question mark over Washington's longer-term objectives and strategies in Asia." | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment