| | | | After Trump's DMZ Trip, Focus Returns to Lower-Level Talks | | Analysts are still debating the merits of President Trump's surprise visit to North Korea, and while there's little agreement on whether the impromptu excursion will produce results, some have concluded that restarting lower-level talks—a putative upshot of the meeting—is ultimately a good thing. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein of the Foreign Policy Research Institute calls that "by far the most important aspect of the summitry between the US and North Korea because like Hanoi showed, if the nitty-gritty isn't worked out beforehand, then summits themselves matter very little."
Névine Schepers of the International Institute for Strategic Studies agrees, calling lower-level talks "crucial" to progress and arguing that without "regular negotiations designed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides, the high-profile meetings between Trump and Kim will achieve very little diplomatically." | | The US Needs a New Deterrence Strategy | | That's what US Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), a former Marine Corps captain and intelligence officer, argues in the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly. The US has traditionally relied on the threat of retaliation to deter its enemies, but Gallagher writes that such a strategy is no longer feasible, given the growing capabilities of China and Russia.
Instead, he argues, the US should adopt a strategy China has been known to use: deterrence by denial. It's a shift in mindset that involves planning less for retaliatory strikes and more for denying adversaries the ability to make advances in the first place—and, perhaps more significantly, one that recognizes a decline in America's relative military might.
Practically, a "denial" strategy can involve placing missiles, mines, forces, or sensors in or near contested areas, to block an enemy encroachment. For the US, it would mean spending differently, Gallagher writes: Instead of "buying more of everything," Congress and the Pentagon should first ask if weapons systems can block Russia from invading the Baltics or China from seizing Taiwan. | | | Despite President Trump's announcement of a reprieve from his Huawei ban, the Chinese tech giant appears to be girding for a more permanent separation from US suppliers. In an interview with the Financial Times, conducted before Trump's comments, Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei had this to say about the US and its tech producers: "We don't know what they are doing … We have switched from seeking development to fighting for our survival. We are trying to gather together scientists to make the most advanced future technologies, so that we can [just] fight back."
That puts Huawei in line with other Chinese tech giants, and with the Chinese government's line on tech independence, the paper reports. That could be bad for US business, as Chua Kong Ho writes at the South China Morning Post that "[i]ronically, the best course of action to ensure US superiority in tech may be to supply Huawei and China's tech ecosystem," in order to avoid seeing China develop its own microchips and a smartphone platform that would compete with Google's Android. | | Are Remittances Better Than Foreign Aid? | | In the Hoover Institution journal Defining Ideas, David R. Henderson defends remittances—money immigrants send back to their home countries—from critics who say they drain money from host countries' economies. In reality, remittances help "offset the 'brain drain'" of emigration, as émigrés can make more money, in richer countries with more valuable currency, and send that spending power back home. Remittances also function like foreign aid, but without the risk of corruption: Henderson notes that in "some extreme cases, heads of governments that receive foreign aid have spent much of it on themselves," while remittances go directly to families.
True, remittances aren't channeled for the guided purpose of economic development, but they stack up favorably, by the numbers: The World Bank noted a global budget of foreign development assistance totaling $162.8 billion in 2017 (the US spends around $50 billion), while an estimated $625 billion in remittances flowed around the world in that same year—a total that has since gone up. | | China Doesn't Need Hong Kong | | While China once needed Hong Kong as its link to the world of trade, that's no longer the case, Eswar S. Prasad argues in a New York Times op-ed. It's not that Hong Kong has declined, but since China joined the WTO, and since its own economy has swelled, trading partners and investors are now "willing to overlook deficiencies in its corporate and public governance," and Hong Kong simply doesn't serve the same role for Beijing.
That spells trouble for Hong Kong's pro-democratic movement, Prasad concludes, writing that "there is no mistaking Beijing's plans for Hong Kong, which do not include preserving what its people and international investors once cherished—the value placed on free enterprise along with democracy, freedom of expression and the rule of law." | | | | | | |
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