| | | | Don't Be Fooled By Trump's Travel Ban "Win": Michaelson | | The Trump administration might have scored a partial victory with the Supreme Court's decision to reinstate the travel ban on those without direct links to the United States. But don't be fooled – the long-term prospects for the ban don't look good, argues Jay Michaelson in the Daily Beast.
"[E]ven if the court's hard right…disbelieve the arguments that the travel ban discriminates on the basis of religion and exceeds executive authority, there will still be the question, come October, of why a three-month temporary ban is still necessary seven months after it was put into place," Michaelson writes.
"[W]hat's really going on is that the Trump administration doesn't know what 'extreme vetting' means any more than you or I do, and the ban is a temporary-on-the-way-to-permanent policy that is as much about politics as about national security. There's no correlation between being from these six countries and being a terrorist – on the contrary, most of the terrorists in recent European attacks have been citizens of the countries they attacked. The travel ban is a broad action that is about anti-Muslim politics, not national security policy."
| | Our Dystopian Future Is Already Here. In China: WSJ | | Anyone fearing a dystopian future in which governments can watch your every move would do well to look at the example of China. Because the future has already arrived, suggest Josh Chin and Liza Lin in the Wall Street Journal.
"By 2020, the government hopes to implement a national "social credit" system that would assign every citizen a rating based how they behave at work, in public venues and in their financial dealings," they write.
"China's technology companies are helping lead the way, scooping up unprecedented data on people's lives through their mobile phones and competing to develop and market surveillance systems for government use.
"Facial-recognition technology is one of the most powerful new tools in the surveillance arsenal. Fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, these systems can measure key aspects of a face, such as distance between the eyes and skin tone, then cross-reference them against huge databases of photographs collected by government agencies and businesses and shared on social media."
| | Will Seoul Fall Victim to "America First"? | | | South Korean President Moon Jae-in faces an unenviable task at his meeting with Donald Trump this week: Persuade the American president to give diplomacy a chance, or risk his country becoming a victim of Trump's "America First" foreign policy, argues Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times.
"Trump has repeatedly insisted that North Korea will never be allowed to develop an intercontinental nuclear missile that could threaten the U.S. In public and private, he and his senior aides have insisted that America will, as a last resort, use military action to counter the North Korean threat. The consequences would be horrendous," Rachman writes.
"Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all concluded that the risk of the devastation of Seoul -- a city of 10 million people -- ruled out a strike on North Korea. But Mr Trump could come to a different conclusion." | | The Crisis that No One Is Talking About | | The worst humanitarian crisis since World War II is unfolding across four nations, with about 20 million people threatened with famine, writes Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post. "Not heard of this? That's the problem."
"According to U.N. and private relief officials, efforts to supply enough food to stem the simultaneous crises in South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria are falling tragically short so far, in part because of inadequate funding from governments and private donors. Of the $4.9 billion sought in February by the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for immediate needs in those countries, just 39 percent had been donated as of last week," Diehl writes.
"That resource gap could be attributed to donor fatigue, or to the sheer size of the need. But, in part, it's a simple lack of awareness."
| | What Happened to America's Talent? | | The world is looking increasingly combustible. And a dearth of diplomatic talent – especially in the Trump administration – could make things even worse, suggests Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy.
"[T]he greatest achievements of U.S. foreign policy since World War II has been its ability, when it chose, to keep wars from breaking out or to end them quickly when they did occur," Walt argues. "The combination of military strength and skilled diplomacy helped keep the peace in Europe and in much of Asia throughout the Cold War, and often (but not always) played a stabilizing role in the Middle East. It required not just credible military power, but also politicians who understood how the world worked and what the interests of others were, had a clear sense of America's own interests, and were sufficiently consistent that others could count on them to do what they had promised.
"If the past 25 years have taught us anything, it is that few foreign-policy problems can be solved simply by blowing things up. The United States is still unsurpassed at that sort of thing, but the real challenge is devising political solutions to conflicts once the guns have fallen silent. We've been singularly bad at this in recent decades, and Trump's disdain for diplomacy and efforts to gut the State Department will just impair us even more."
| | President Trump is scheduled to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Washington this week. Michael Fuchs and Brian Harding write in Newsweek that "the top priority for the summit must be to keep disagreements private and restore public confidence in the strength of the alliance. Trump has to restrain his instincts to speak negatively about the alliance and both sides must make clear in public that there will be no daylight between the two on the importance of the alliance."
NATO defense ministers will meet in Brussels on Thursday. Bloomberg editorializes that one task for the organization should be to "stem the flow of refugees trying to reach Europe from North Africa. This would be more than a humanitarian exercise; it would be a counterterrorism operation. Wherever refugees gather in hopelessness, violent extremists have a fertile recruiting ground. And the number of refugees is staggering." | | | | | | |
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