| | | | The Biggest Threat to Trump's Kim Meeting Isn't Who You Think | | No one was more surprised – or alarmed – by the news that President Trump plans to meet Kim Jong Un than Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Don't be surprised if Abe uses his two days of talks with Trump this week to try to scupper that plan, suggests Jeff Kingston in the South China Morning Post.
"Japan worries that some quid pro quo may be worked out that requires reciprocal drawn-out steps by the United States and North Korea to relinquish nuclear weapons, and that part of the deal would require the US to remove the nuclear umbrella of extended deterrence that currently applies to South Korea and Japan. Abe hopes to convince Trump that talks are a waste of time, risky due to unrealistic expectations on both sides, and that Kim is untrustworthy. That should not be too hard," Kingston writes.
"So while [South Korean President Moon Jae-in's] peace express is steaming out of the station with everyone scrambling to get aboard, Abe wants to push the emergency stop button on this diplomacy.
"In doing so, he offers Trump a useful escape hatch, enabling him to say he tried diplomacy and blame Kim while resuming the fire-and-fury brinkmanship that he and his new advisers are more comfortable with. US Secretary of Defense James Mattis will have his hands full as the remaining adult supervisor to see what this window of opportunity offers."
| | The Surprising Logic of Trump's Foreign Policy: Mead | | | President Trump's foreign policy may seem erratic, but in the Middle East, at least, a more coherent strategy appears to be evolving, writes Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. Call it offshore balancing.
"Rather than seek to impose an order of its own design on the turbulent region, Washington would simply ensure that no other power or group of powers succeeds in dominating the Middle East," Mead writes.
"When the balance of power appeared secure, the US would have a low profile in the region; but when, as now, the balance appeared to be threatened, the U.S. would be more forward-leaning, working with partners who share its concerns to contain the ambitions of revisionist powers. Mr. Trump also seeks compensation from the countries whose independence America supports; rich allies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait should help pay for their defense."
"For Mr. Trump, this is a common-sense approach to a thorny problem, and while the pressures of events—and the united efforts of his advisers—may sometimes cause him to deviate, his inner compass always returns to this course." | | Another Crisis Brewing in Yemen | | | The United Nations has described it as the worst humanitarian disaster in the world. But behind the soaring death toll and devastating famine in Yemen, another health crisis is looming, argues Sam Loewenberg for The New York Times. And it won't just be Yemen that feels it.
"After years of bombardment that has crippled the food supply, destroyed basic infrastructure and disrupted medical care, Yemen has become a breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant disease, with potentially catastrophic consequences — and not just for Yemen," Loewenberg writes.
"The widespread prevalence of multidrug-resistant infections has nearly quadrupled the amount of time patients must spend in a field hospital to recover from war wounds. This extra time, plus the specialized antibiotics a patient requires to overcome a drug-resistant infection, means far fewer patients can be treated than the norm, and the care is much more expensive and difficult.
"Similar problems are reported to be occurring through the war-torn regions of the Middle East, including Iraq and Syria, and countries with extensive refugee populations, like Jordan." | | Donald Trump: Latin America Role Model | | President Trump may have skipped the Summit of the Americas last week, but the "nativist tendencies" of his "America First" agenda are finding a growing audience among the region's right-wing politicians, argues Omar G. Encarnación in Foreign Policy.
"Rio de Janeiro Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, a leading contender for the Brazilian presidency who has gladly accepted the moniker of the Brazilian Trump, has accused Haitian refugees in Brazil of 'bringing diseases to the country.' This echoes Trump's reported claim that Haitians immigrating to the United States 'all have AIDS.' Trump's charge that Mexico is sending 'rapists' and 'criminals' into the United States is reflected in the justifications offered by the presidents of Argentina and Chile for curbing immigration," Encarnación writes. "During Chile's 2017 presidential campaign, a recent wave of immigrants from Haiti and Venezuela spurred Piñera to criticize Chilean immigration laws for 'importing problems like delinquency, drug trafficking, and organized crime.'"
Is Latin America's rightward turn part of the populist phenomenon that has swept other countries in the West? Not really, Encarnación says.
"[T]he rise of the right in Latin America is for the most part a homegrown phenomenon. Above all, the right's rising fortunes are a counter-reaction to the hegemonic dominance of the left in the region's politics since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, for the better part of the Cold War era, the right all but disappeared from many Latin American countries due to its association with bloodthirsty military dictatorship during the 1970s and 1980s."
| | The Remarkable Decline of the World's Languages | | The world is becoming less diverse, linguistically, at least, with a language being lost every two weeks as its last speaker dies, Nina Strochlic writes for National Geographic.
"Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left," Strochlic writes.
The reason?
"Political persecution, a lack of preservation, and globalization are to blame for the dwindling language diversity. For much of the 20th century, governments across the world have imposed language on indigenous people, often through coercion. Some 100 aboriginal languages in Australia have disappeared since European settlers arrived. A half-century after China annexed Tibet, dozens of distinct dialects with unique alphabets are on the verge of extinction. Studies have shown that suppressing language impairs everything from health to school performance."
Still, diversity still finds a home in America's largest city. Strochlic notes: "There are some 800 languages spoken within the 10-mile radius of New York City, which is more than 10 percent of the world's estimated 7,099 languages."
| | The Air You're Breathing Probably Isn't Safe: Report | | Around 95% of the world's population live in areas where the air isn't safe to breathe, a new report suggests [pdf].
The report, by the Health Effects Institute, bases its findings on the World Health Organization's Air Quality Guideline of 10 µg/m3 of fine particulate matter, "the most consistent and robust predictor of mortality from cardiovascular, respiratory, and other diseases in studies of long-term exposure to air pollution."
According to the report, the highest population-weighted concentrations were in "countries in North Africa (e.g., Niger at 204 µg/m3 and Egypt at 126 µg/m3 ), West Africa (e.g., Cameroon at 140 µg/m3 and Nigeria at 122 µg/m3 ), and in the Middle East."
"The high outdoor concentrations in these regions were due mainly to windblown mineral dust. However, in some of these countries (Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon), high proportions of the population burn solid fuels in the home and may also engage in open burning of agricultural lands or forests, both of which can also contribute substantially to outdoor air pollution."
The countries with the lowest concentrations? "Australia, Brunei, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and several Pacific island nations." | | | | | | |
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