| | | | Fareed: The World of Tech May Split in Two | | The Trump administration's blacklisting of Huawei "might well be China's Sputnik moment, with seismic consequences," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column.
Cut off from Western supply chains, China may begin to develop its own processors and phone operating systems—in effect, a separate technological system of its own, spurred by President Trump.
"Watching China's technological prowess these days, it is easy to imagine the country rising to this challenge," Fareed writes. "We might be moving toward a bipolar world in digital technology with two walled-off ecosystems: US and Chinese."
That avoidable decoupling would not only make the world less prosperous, as Fareed writes, it also would have consequences for global democracy. As a Quartz report from Zambia illustrates, less-expensive Chinese tech is attractive to the developing world, but it also lets governments enjoy greater controls—meaning that as China powers a vast expansion of connectivity in places like Africa, it's also giving a boost to repression and authoritarianism. | | China Grows Anti-American, and an Algorithm Says It Won't Back Down | | China had held off criticizing America or publicizing the trade war, but since President Trump piled on new tariffs, China has revved up a propaganda machine that's fanning anti-American nationalism, Minxin Pei writes in the Nikkei Asian Review.
Which, according to a computer algorithm, is a sign that China won't back down in the trade war. Researchers at George Mason University and Bates White Economic Consulting have fed China's state-run newspaper, the People's Daily, into an algorithm that "reads" it and predicts whether Chinese policy will change. According to the algorithm, "China has not yet shown any signs of backing down on the US demands" on trade, they write in The National Interest. | | May's Resignation Changes Little | | | If the resignation of British Prime Minister Theresa May changes anything, it will be to push Britain closer to a no-deal Brexit—the outcome May wanted to avoid, while using the threat of it as a bargaining chip—writes The New York Times' Ellen Barry, who will discuss Brexit and May's departure on GPS this Sunday. Post May, the basic conundrum of Brexit remains unchanged, writes The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum; The Economist agrees, writing that May "will not be the last prime minister to be brought to tears by Brexit"—even if a candidate like Boris Johnson wins the position with a populist pitch, as Prospect magazine has predicted will be likely. | | Why the Iran Standoff Is Different From 'Fire and Fury' | | In the Trump administration's escalating standoff with Iran, international-security (and Iran) expert Mahsa Rouhi of Harvard's Belfer Center offers reasons for optimism and fear in the latest episode of the Institute for International Security Studies podcast "Sounds Strategic."
First, the good news: Iran may want to negotiate, after all. Iran's slow walk away from the nuclear deal, and its actions in the region, are aimed at building "leverage for negotiations," Rouhi says; viewing them as simple provocations would be a mistake.
Next, the bad: This situation is much more volatile than America's standoffs with North Korea under Trump, or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Regional uncertainty and the presence of multiple interested actors can "change the calculations at any time, and I think that is what's creating a dangerous situation," Rouhi says. The roles of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, and Syria all make the situation less predictable. That's one reason why it's "useless" to think America can change Iran's regime in an enduring bilateral standoff, in the same way it approached the Soviet Union, as Eldar Mamedof recently put it in a post at LobeLog—and why Trump can't use the same approach with Iran as he did with Kim Jong-Un. | | Democracy's Midlife Crisis? | | | In a New York Review of Books survey of four books on the decline of democracy, Adam Tooze finds, perhaps, the two most interesting ideas coming from Timothy Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America), who posits that our current politics are a "wild oscillation" between the uncompromising views of liberal modernization and populist nationalism, and who suggests the answer is to adopt some flexibility between these two fatalistically advocated extremes; and David Runciman (How Democracy Ends), who posits that democracy, as a political ideology, has a natural life cycle, and we're in its midlife crisis. References to 1930s fascism are "tics" of that midlife anxiety, and while it's a comforting notion—that democracy isn't quite at its end—it's also a depressing one, in that further decline is on the way. | | | | | | |
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