| | | | Can the World Trust China? Watch Hong Kong: Patten | | Want to understand how China will act on the global stage? Keep an eye on how it handles Hong Kong, suggests Chris Patten, the city's former governor, almost 20 years after Britain handed its colony back to the mainland.
"As China becomes an increasingly important player in global affairs, the rest of the world would do well to recognize the possibility of unreliability, or even deception, by its leaders," Patten writes for Project Syndicate.
"[F]ar from implementing democratic reforms, China has threatened the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the autonomy of Hong Kong's universities. It has also made not-so-subtle attempts to curtail freedom of the press," Patten says.
"President Xi Jinping would do well to take the opportunity offered by the handover's 20-year anniversary to reaffirm China's commitment to the joint declaration – and then to follow through on that affirmation. As for the rest of the world, we should watch closely what happens in Hong Kong. If China's leaders break their word in Hong Kong, how can we trust them in other areas?"
| | Beware of Russia's Rising Military: Report | | Russia's military is on the rise – and poses a "major challenge" to the United States, argues a new report from the Defense Intelligence Agency (h/t Ruby Mellen at Foreign Policy).
The growing threat comes not from "the same Soviet force that faced the West in the Cold War, dependent on large units with heavy equipment, but as a smaller, more mobile, balanced force rapidly becoming capable of conducting the full range of modern warfare. It is a military that can intervene in countries along Russia's periphery or as far away as the Middle East. The new Russian military is a tool that can be used to underpin Moscow's stated ambitions of being a leading force in a multipolar world," the report notes.
"One of the newest tools in Russia's information toolkit is the use of cyber-enabled psychological operations that support its strategic and tactical information warfare objectives. These new techniques involve compromising networks for intelligence information that could be used to embarrass, discredit, or falsify information. Compromised material can then be leaked to the media at inopportune times."
| | Trump Team Gets Tough: On Grandmas | | | The Supreme Court's decision to create a new legal category of "bona fide relationship" in its effort to craft a compromise ruling on President Trump's travel ban has created a surprising casualty: grandmas, writes Noah Feldman for Bloomberg View. "The Trump administration is trying to be as exclusionary as possible without violating the letter of the Supreme Court's opinion," Feldman writes. As a result, it "had no choice but to include parents-in-law and sons- and daughters-in-law in its guidelines. It also logically had to count children and siblings, who are closer than in-laws. And it made the choice to count "half" relationships including 'step relationships.' "But the administration excluded grandparents and grandchildren, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, as well as unmarried partners, even when they are engaged." | | Could America Have a Syria on Its Doorstep? | | | The world may have largely forgotten the crisis in Venezuela, but the country is teetering. If President Nicolas Maduro loses the support of the army, the country could collapse into civil war – and start to look alarmingly like Syria, argues Noah Rothman in Commentary magazine.
"The trajectory Venezuela is following in 2017 is eerily similar to the path Syria took in 2011," Rothman writes.
"The prospect of a protracted Syrian-style conflict in the Americas seems an event for which policymakers in the United States are ill-prepared. Such a scenario would mean the implosion of a country rich with oil resources, a state flush with government-backed narcotics traffickers, money, and weapons. It could spark a refugee crisis similar to that which has cast the Middle East and North Africa into disorder and strengthened the rise of reactionary elements inside Europe." | | Britain's Diplomacy Is Crumbling: The Economist | | The traditional pillars of British diplomacy are crumbling – the country's global standing hasn't been this low since the Suez crisis six decades ago, writes The Economist's Bagehot.
"For decades Britain's foreign policy has rested on three pillars: the United States, the European Union and the emerging world…As a former imperial power, Britain had close ties with dozens of African and Asian countries. With one of Europe's largest economies, it had a big say in Europe's future, often acting as a counter-balance to the Franco-German axis," Bagehot argues.
"In the aftermath of the Suez crisis, Dean Acheson lamented that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role. In the subsequent decades, post-imperial Britain in fact found several roles: as a fulcrum between Europe and America; as an old hand at globalization in a re-globalizing world; and as a leading exponent of neoliberalism. Thanks to the combination of the financial crisis and Brexit, it has lost all of these functions in one great rush."
| | ISIS Losing Ground – and Money | | ISIS isn't just losing territory – it is quickly losing revenue, according to new report from IHS Markit.
"As the 'Caliphate' shrinks, the Islamic State's average monthly revenue has fallen dramatically from $81 million in Q2 2015 to $16 million in Q2 2017, a reduction of 80 percent," the report says.
"This includes a steady decline in all of the group's financial streams: oil production and smuggling, taxation and confiscation, and other illicit activities. Average monthly oil revenue is down 88 percent, and income from taxation and confiscation has fallen by 79 percent, compared to our initial estimate in 2015."
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