| | | | Why 2018 Could Get Ugly in Asia | | Adversaries and allies alike are wrestling with what the Trump presidency means for the international order. And "the highest-stakes Trump mind-reading is taking place in China," writes Edward Luce in the Financial Times. "Russia may present an immediate threat to America's allies in Europe. Beijing poses the transcendent challenge."
"One of the reasons [President Xi Jinping] played nice with Trump in April was to keep things calm until the next Communist Party Congress, which takes place in September. Once Xi has cemented his hold on the presidency for another five years, he will be freer to pursue his foreign policy goals. Chief among these is consolidating China's control of the disputed South China Sea islands. Taiwan is also in Xi's sights," Luce writes.
"The scope for accident, and miscalculation, is high. Will Xi call Trump's bluff? Does he, like Putin, see Trump as a paper tiger? Worse, could they misread Trump as a paper tiger when in fact he would prove trigger-happy in a showdown? There is no way of telling." - China's "Racist Park" is disappearing, and along with it a host of other poorly or indelicately translated names, thanks to a government order aimed at improving the quality of English translations – and the country's image, reports Kou Jie in the People's Daily.
The new standards require that English "not be overused in public sectors, and that translations not contain content that damages the images of China or other countries. Discriminatory and hurtful words have also been banned."
| | Is ISIS Leader Dead? Does It Matter??? | | Russia has "doubled down" on its claim that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may have been killed, The Independent reports. Bernard Haykel, director of the Institute for Transregional Studies at Princeton University, emails Global Briefing that if true, it would be "another nail in the coffin" of the organization.
"As ISIS has lost battles and its core territory in Iraq and Syria, its claim to being the one true imperial global Muslim state has lost its sheen. It is also quickly losing whatever claim it has to religious legitimacy for those who are attracted to its ideology," Haykel says.
"With the death of al-Baghdadi, the organization would need to decide on whether to appoint and declare a new caliph. In jihadist political terms, ISIS's demise will represent a boost for al Qaeda, whose ideology and mode of operation, is more that of a non-state actor.
"Unfortunately, and despite ISIS's certain death, the conditions for jihadist politics continue to prevail throughout the Middle East. These consist of such things as the disenfranchisement of large populations of Sunni Muslims, relative economic deprivation and the inability for advancement, persistent and high poverty rates, poor education, authoritarian rule that lacks accountability and transparency, and large majorities of young populations who are connected to the world through the Internet and social media. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's death, even if true, is no cause for immediate celebration."
| | How Canada is Coping with Trump: Fisher | | Canada has found a unique way to manage relations with the Trump White House – going around it, writes Max Fisher for the New York Times.
"Canadian officials have fanned out across the United States, meeting with mayors, governors, members of Congress and business leaders on matters from trade to the environment," Fisher says.
"Ministers' schedules resemble those of rock bands on summer tours. They travel armed with data on the precise dollar amount and number of jobs supported by Canadian firms and trade in that area." | | Putin Has a Plan: Yakabuski | | | The Trump administration might not have a coherent plan for the Middle East, but Vladimir Putin's Russia certainly seems to, suggests Konrad Yakabuski in the Globe and Mail.
"It is allied with Sunni-led Saudi Arabia in attempting to prop up oil prices – so far unsuccessfully – and with Shia-led Iran in propping up Mr. al-Assad. It is allied with Qatar and Iran in developing the massive offshore gas fields those two countries share," he writes.
"While the clueless Mr. Trump tweets his support for Saudi Arabia in the standoff with Qatar – seemingly equating U.S. interests with his own business interests in the region – his national-security team is left scrambling to mediate a conflict that threatens the future of the U.S.-backed Gulf Cooperation Council and perhaps even a critical U.S. air base in Qatar.
"Mr. Putin, it seems, has been thinking several steps ahead of them all." | | How Will Senate Health Bill Stack Up with Rest of World? | | Senate Republicans on Thursday finally revealed their until now secret health care bill, which would see significant changes to America's health care system. Writing in March, Foreign Policy's Robbie Gramer looked at how U.S. health care stacks up against other developed countries. In short: Lots more money, with little more to show in terms of results.
"[T]he United States spends twice as much per-capita as other developed countries on average, and nearly three times as much as the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. U.S. citizens spend an average of $9,024 a year on healthcare, compared to an OECD average of $3,620 according to the OECD's data on healthcare from 2016," Gramer says.
"But spending more money on health care must mean better health care, right? Wrong again. Numbers from online publication OurWorldInData.org show the United States is a stark outlier in life expectancy vs. healthcare expenditure over time — and not a good kind of outlier."
| | Trump's Big Break on Afghanistan | | President Trump's approach to Afghanistan is set to be markedly different than the one pursued by Barack Obama, writes Peter Bergen for CNN Opinion. And that starts with a "long-term and open-ended deployment," he says, citing a senior U.S. official.
"For the Taliban, the Afghan government and Afghanistan's neighbors such as Pakistan, the headline of Obama's [2009] West Point speech was not the surge of new troops, but the withdrawal date. This had the counterproductive effect of encouraging the Taliban to wait out the Americans," Bergen writes.
"It also undermined confidence among Afghans and it affected the hedging strategy of Pakistan's military intelligence service, ISI, which has long supported elements of the Taliban.
"The Trump administration won't replicate this mistake --there will be no announcements of withdrawal dates, according to the US official."
| | The Planet is Going to Get Much More Crowded: Report | | The world's population is projected to grow to almost 10 billion by 2050, rising from 7.6 billion to around 9.8 billion, according to a new U.N. report. More than half of the additional 2.2 billion more people are expected to be born in Africa.
"Africa's share of global population, which is expected to grow from roughly 17 percent in 2017 to around 26 percent in 2050, could reach 40 percent by 2100," the report notes. "At the same time, the share residing in Asia, currently estimated as 60 percent, is expected to fall to 54 percent in 2050 and 43 percent in 2100." | | | | | | |
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