| | | | Don't Believe the European Doomsayers | | It may feel like Europe is teetering on the brink, with Brexit looming on the horizon, civil liberties being eroded in Hungary, and the "Yellow Vest" movement spreading from France to other countries. "[G]iven Europe's myriad woes, its citizenry is surprisingly upbeat," writes Matthew Karnitschnig for Politico Europe. "Public backing for the EU is the highest it's been in more than a generation, while support for the euro has reached record levels."
"Across the Continent (with notable exceptions), trains run on time, health care and education are accessible to all and generally sound, the justice system fair and cities safe," Karnitschnig notes. "Unemployment in the EU, though still a major challenge in some countries, has fallen to its lowest level since 2000. At a time when free trade seems increasingly under siege, the EU concluded two landmark trade agreements, with Canada and Japan.... Even most populists have given up on trying to leave the EU."
"[P]oliticians have been using the threat of Europe's pending demise as a rhetorical bludgeon" to further their agendas, Karnitschnig argues, but "[i]f the past decade of perpetual crisis has taught us anything, it's that whatever happens next, Europe's demise is the least likely outcome."
| | Two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee offer new insight into Russia's social media efforts to sow discord in the US and support Donald Trump. It's high time for America to overhaul its national security apparatus and mount an effective defense, writes Don Hepburn in The Hill.
"We face [an] existential threat from foreign intelligence agents. It may not yet compare with the human casualties of 9/11," but "there is a very real casualty by undermining the country's democratic institutions and global economic supremacy," Hepburn writes. "After 9/11, our nation's leaders realized the dire threat of foreign sabotage. To confront this terror threat, the president and the Congress... completely restructured the U.S. Intelligence Community."
Yet "[w]hile the FBI and CIA successfully focused resources on the terror threats in front of us, Russia and China walked in through our back door," Hepburn writes. "[T]heir agents have infiltrated our corporate boardrooms, scientific labs, universities, social media companies and political institutions with little or no detection."
That is why "America should have a domestic counterintelligence service to degrade and disrupt foreign intelligence operations on our soil, a service that combines both the intelligence tradecraft of the CIA and the investigative skills and law enforcement authority of the FBI."
| | Creating the Right Environment for Saving the Environment | | | Over the weekend, world leaders managed to strike an agreement for implementing the 2015 Paris climate accord. But the real challenge for climate action may lie at home, not on the world stage.
"Avoiding the devastating consequences of global warming means taking steps that will incur costs now," writes Mark Buchanan for Bloomberg. "Those costs can be painful, as illustrated vividly by the social unrest in France, triggered in part by President Emmanuel Macron's since-rescinded fuel tax."
However, "the real drive behind the protests" was not opposition to climate action but "a desire for fairness and political inclusion," Buchanan contends. "Reducing our carbon dioxide emissions in time will mean drafting better policies that steer people toward cleaner energy while lending social support to those hit the hardest."
Success "may well require more radical moves to drastically reduce inequality, both socioeconomic and political. Historically, people in wartime have been willing to accept considerable hardship and deprivation, but only because of broad political consensus that the burden was shared equally." | | This Is GPS, the Global Public War | | "Armed forces everywhere practice disrupting their adversaries' navigation. But the nature of GPS makes it an especially vulnerable point—a tool used by both military and civilians, and so potentially fragile that a single culprit... can disrupt it," writes Elisabeth Braw in Foreign Policy.
"In a war, sabotaging an adversary's satellite navigation system would deal an enormous blow to its armed forces, which would have to rely on inferior tools. Warships would traverse oceans less accurately, and aircraft would struggle to locate friendly ground forces," Braw notes. Already, "Russia [has] jammed GPS in Norway and the Baltic Sea" during military exercises "and has repeatedly done so in the Eastern Mediterranean," where it has been supporting the Assad regime in Syria.
The dangers of GPS reliance go beyond traditional forms of battle. "Disruptions of daily life are a crucial part of hybrid warfare," Braw points out. "By causing society to grind to a halt, or even just making daily services such as food, medicine or fuel supply, sewage, news media, or the internet function poorly, an adversary can dramatically weaken the target country without moving a single soldier. In recent years the Kremlin has been refining such practices."
| | And the Word of the Year Is… | | Merriam-Webster's 2018 Word of the Year is "justice," which saw a 74% increase in look-ups from 2017. The dictionary noted that the Mueller investigation led to frequent headlines about the Justice Department, while Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to become Supreme Court justice also transfixed the country. More broadly, "The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice."
Other dictionaries have also picked their Word of the Year: - Oxford Dictionaries: "toxic" (used to describe health hazards but also rhetoric, masculinity, and workplace environments)
- Dictionary.com: "misinformation" (the unwitting spread of fake news and falsehoods)
- Cambridge Dictionary: "nomophobia" (fear of being away from one's cellphone, i.e., no-mobile phobia)
Other Words of the Year from outside the English-speaking world: | | | | | | |
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