| | | | Will India and Pakistan Stumble Into War? | | As we wait to see if India and Pakistan will escalate their conflict (which now includes disputed claims that Pakistan intercepted an Indian submarine), there's reason to hope they won't, Sumit Ganguly writes at Foreign Affairs: Each side has been playing to domestic audiences, and each has already taken enough military action to please them.
India and Pakistan have developed nuclear weapons since their last real war, and while that's the most worrisome component of today's conflict, the presence of nuclear weapons can actually calm things down, Ganguly argues: "[P]eering into the nuclear abyss concentrates the mind remarkably," he writes.
Less reassuringly, Caitlin Talmadge outlines the opposite case at The Washington Post: Nuclear weapons can keep a lid on things, or they can breed false confidence that lower-level skirmishing won't provoke a larger response from the other side, given the obvious risks of escalating things. When both sides believe that, those skirmishes can get more provocative—and things can spiral out of control. | | Netanyahu's Trumpian Turn | | Facing potential corruption charges, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted a tone of defiance, seeking to "defame" the judicial institutions that are weighing whether to prosecute him, Bernard Avishai writes in The New Yorker, in a Trumpian strategy of browbeating. What's odd about the allegations against Netanyahu is that he didn't seem to need the favorable media coverage he's accused of seeking, or gifts he could already afford, and there's a real possibility his Likud Party will lose in Israel's elections next month as a result of these allegations, Avishai writes.
Haaretz goes so far as to raise a more frightening prospect, in an editorial: that Netanyahu "may view a military flare-up as an electoral lifeline." | | An End to China's Rapid Growth? | | China's fast economic growth wasn't going to last forever, Daniel Moss writes at Bloomberg: The government just lowered its 2019 target to between 6% and 6.5% of GDP, and that's what the future might look like, as China "falls more into line with that of major economies and onetime emerging markets that have now matured, like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore." China's yearly growth hit 14% as recently as 2007, but it's tapered off steadily since.
China still has a long road to travel when it comes to basic economic development, Jonathan Kolatch writes in The Wall Street Journal, noting that substandard medical practices, contaminated food & consumer products, and villages yet to modernize are still commonplace. That reality, and the economic slowdown, are driving President Xi Jinping to reach a trade deal with Washington more easily, Kolatch writes. | | How to Stop Disinformation, Without Controlling Speech | | Liberal democracy could be in for an "interminable" war against online political disinformation, as Spain's former foreign minister warned, but the question is how to fight it without heavy governmental regulation of speech.
Atlantic Council senior fellow Daniel Fried's answer is to revive a version of the American "fairness doctrine," a post-World War II FCC regulation, scrapped in 1987, that mandated balanced media coverage of controversial issues. ("Maybe there ought to be an algorithmic requirement to send me stuff on all sides," Fried argued recently.) The idea is to impose that requirement on social-media companies, to avoid turning governments into "arbiters of truth." | | At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, traders can bet on the weather, and those bets reveal a consensus that the earth is indeed warming, writes Noah Smith of Bloomberg. That's important because financial investments tend to remove politics from speculation, and the world of finance (in theory) gives us a less-politicized look at the opinions of non-scientists.
At the same time, fossil-fuel stocks have performed well, meaning the consensus in finance seems to mirror Americans' hesitant opinions on climate, overall: Gallup has shown historical agreement that the world is warming, but those who "worry a great deal about it" or think it'll pose a "serious threat" in their lifetimes have hovered at 45% or fewer.
It's getting hotter, but the problem isn't as dire as experts have cautioned, traders and poll respondents seem to agree. | | | | | | |
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