| | | | Why the "Workaround Trump" Days are Numbered: Stephens | | Until now, foreign powers troubled by the statements emanating from the White House have largely been able to ignore President Trump, or go around him and deal with his senior officials, writes Philip Stephens in the Financial Times. But those days might be numbered.
"Nine months of dealing with a capricious White House has seen allies turn to a policy of 'workaround' -- ignore the Twitter storms, deal with the grown-ups, notably U.S. defense secretary Jim Mattis, and hope something can be preserved of the old multilateral system beyond the day of Mr Trump's departure," Stephens writes.
"The strategy is running out of road. Mr Trump's disavowal of the Iran nuclear deal threatens to tear up the most successful exercise in collective security for a generation. At best, it destroys the credibility of the U.S. in international efforts peacefully to forestall further nuclear proliferation. Mr Trump might just as well have hung a sign on the White House declaring Washington can no longer be trusted by friends or adversaries alike."
"Congress could avoid an open breach with America's allies by declining to re-introduce sanctions against Tehran. The damage to the standing of the U.S., though, has already been done."
| | Tillerson's "Love Letter" to India | | Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a rare public speech Wednesday outlining U.S. policy toward India. Call it a "love letter to New Delhi," write Emily Tamkin and Robbie Gramer for Foreign Policy.
"In terms of defense ties, Tillerson built on growing U.S.-India military cooperation that ramped up late in the Obama administration, calling the two countries 'bookends of stability' in a troubled part of the world. He stressed growing defense cooperation between the two countries, and especially the annual three-way military exercises including Japan that are at the center of U.S. efforts to push back against China in the greater Indian Ocean area," they write.
"But a potential problem is that India has for decades gone its own way in terms of foreign policy -- and even with a more pro-Western leader in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that old notion of 'nonalignment' or 'strategic autonomy' remains alive and kicking among many Indian policy mandarins. Even in recent years, for example, India has redoubled defense and economic ties with Russia, even while it spurned the U.S.-led trade pact Trans-Pacific Partnership.
"That calculus may slowly be changing in part in response to China's economic and military transformation, said Milan Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment."
| | ISIS Takes Another Hit on the Battlefield -- and in the Wallet | | | The fall of Raqqa is more than just a military defeat for ISIS. As the group loses ground, it is also losing cash, reports Maria Abi-Habib for the Wall Street Journal.
"In 2014, the extremists ruled an area the size of Belgium and presided over some eight million civilians from whom it extorted money and collected taxes and fees for basic services," Abi-Habib writes.
"Now that the extremist fighters have been defeated in their de facto capital of Raqqa, which fell to U.S.-backed forces in Syria on Tuesday, the group is likely to try to become a more traditional hit-and-run insurgency. That means it will no longer be able to generate revenue in the same ways, or to tout an ambitious, state-building project that its supporters found so appealing and that set it apart from other jihadist groups." | | Why Japan Could, But Won't, Go Nuclear | | The speculation over whether Japan, faced with an unpredictable North Korea and rising China, might consider developing its own nuclear deterrence, misses an important point, argues Richard A. Bitzinger for the Straits Times. Yes, Tokyo might have the technical capacity to construct a nuclear bomb relatively quickly. But there's a lot more to becoming a nuclear power than building the actual bomb.
"In the first place, Japan would need to test and re-test its nuclear capabilities. Yes, supercomputers can simulate some of the characteristics of a nuclear explosion, but ultimately Japan would probably have to conduct several nuclear tests, over the course of several years, to create a reliable nuclear force," Bitzinger writes.
"But how would it deploy such a weapon? On aircraft? Japan has no nuclear-capable aircraft, no bombers or specialized strike aircraft…At the same time, Japan would have to build a whole supporting infrastructure for its nuclear weapons. Specialized, extremely secure storage facilities would have to be built at airbases and naval stations to secure nuclear weapons."
| | When Computers Teach Themselves | | Google's artificial intelligence arm DeepMind made headlines last year when its AlphaGo computer program beat a top-ranked Go player. But the company has gone one better, writes Ian Sample, creating "an AI so powerful that it derived thousands of years of human knowledge of the game before inventing better moves of its own, all in the space of three days."
"The feat marks a milestone on the road to general-purpose AIs that can do more than thrash humans at board games. Because AlphaGo Zero learns on its own from a blank slate, its talents can now be turned to a host of real-world problems," Sample writes for The Guardian.
Still, "[w]hile AlphaGo Zero is a step towards a general-purpose AI, it can only work on problems that can be perfectly simulated in a computer, making tasks such as driving a car out of the question." - For goodness sake, change your password. "The threats to our most personal data, our businesses, our infrastructure, our democracy, are absolutely real," writes Google executive Gerhard Eschelbeck for CNN Opinion. But you don't have to be a cyber whizz to see why the problem might get worse.
"According to recent research (ironically, based on anonymized data collected from security breaches), the most common password last year was '123456.' A Google survey shows the No. 1 thing experts do to secure their data is update their software; that wasn't even in a top-five answer for non-experts in the same study. When I'm out of the 'security bubble' and talk to people about important security measures like two-step verification and security keys, I get blank stares.
"We aren't even close to where we need to be."
| | Meatless Mondays – Coming to a Workplace Near You? | | | Argentina is renowned for being a meat-lovers' paradise. But with high obesity rates and growing concern over the environmental impact of cattle, change is coming -- from the top, The Economist notes. And not just for Argentinians. "In a bid to start a debate on health and the national diet, [Argentina's presidential palace] has instituted meat-free Mondays. For one lunch each week, the canteen will only serve vegan options to the 500-plus employees, including President Mauricio Macri," The Economist notes. Daily beef consumption per person in the country "is over double the recommended amount. And health concerns are not the only ones cited by those looking to reduce meat consumption. The livestock sector accounts for 15% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions -- the equivalent of all the vehicles in the world. Animal pastures have been blamed for 90% of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Beef is a particularly voracious user of water, with 15,000 liters of water needed to produce a kilogram of the meat." Meanwhile, "Portugal passed a law this year requiring a vegan option at public institutions. The UN's International Resource Panel has called for governments to tax meat products." | | | | | | |
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