| | | | In an interview with Der Spiegel, former Defense secretary and CIA chief Leon Panetta offers a broad critique of President Trump's approach to diplomacy, citing Trump's "maximum pressure" tactics on trade and in his approaches to North Korea and Iran.
"You can use maximum pressure, you can create chaos, but you'd damned well better have a plan to resolve the issue. And I don't think he thinks that far ahead," Panetta says. Trump has succeeded in keeping everyone off guard—adversaries like Iran really do face an unpredictable actor in Trump—but on America's most important diplomatic fronts, it's not yet clear whether Trump will get any results, Panetta argues. | | Gaming Out the US-Iran Standoff | | In a new study, the Center for a New American Security suggests some possible eventualities if the US and Iran escalate tensions. None sounds comforting: Among them are Iranian proxies killing Americans in Afghanistan, firing rockets into Saudi Arabia from Yemen, besieging a Saudi town, or kidnapping US citizens working in Iraq; Israel launching a failed, covert attack on an Iranian nuclear facility or assassinating nuclear scientists in Tehran; the US striking Iranian ships and mine-storage facilities; and the US and Iran broadly engaging in a "tit-for-tat cycle that could ultimately move outside their control."
Coauthored by Ilan Goldenberg, whose recent Foreign Affairs essay sketched out some possibilities of how a war with Iran might go, the paper concludes that Iran and the US remain the most important actors (Europe, China, and Russia have "limited" influence to step in), high-level communication between the US and Iran may be necessary to deescalate in a crisis (though those channels appear to be closed), and returning to the 2015 nuclear deal would be "incredibly complicated—much more so than people may realize in the lead up to the 2020 US election." | | The World Faces a Refugee Crisis | | | While the US deals with its own crisis over its asylum system, Stewart Patrick writes in the World Politics Review that the world is "in the midst of a global crisis of displacement, one that is testing both established humanitarian principles and the will of wealthy countries to ease the plight of those affected." According to UN figures, the total number of world refugees shot up to 74.8 million in 2018, from 43 million five years earlier; caused by conflicts like the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, it's the "worst refugee crisis since World War II," Patrick writes.
The global system for settling refugees remains underfunded, the politics around welcoming refugees can be divisive, and countries resist letting asylum seekers reach their borders—all of which, in Patrick's view, amounts to a "collective failure of political will." | | Don't Fear the 'Splinternet' | | That's what Martin Sandbu advises in a Financial Times op-ed. Picking up on fears that Europe will segment itself off from the rest of the Internet by imposing regulations the rest of the West may dislike, Sandbu argues that a separate system may not be so bad. If EU data and privacy regulations irk American tech giants, or prevent Europe from developing AI technology by blocking data collection, then so be it; Europeans will simply end up with "dumber" AI and fewer microtargeted ads, Sandbu writes.
As authoritarian governments develop their own systems of controlling the Internet, Sandbu suggests that democratic societies can choose their own systems as well. For Europe, having one that fits its citizens' preferences is worth the price of a splintered cyber landscape. | | Winners and Losers of Regionalization | | The US-China trade war will force a major shift in global supply chains, Willy Shih writes in the Nikkei Asian Review, with multinationals moving production out of China to avoid tariffs. It's the "beginning of a much more regionalized world in which the companies running production supply chains will have to factor in international politics to a much greater degree than before," he writes, predicting countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico will all benefit from companies looking to produce within their borders.
Interconnected supply chains have been a fact of life in recent decades: 2016 World Bank statistics showed semi-finished or component goods accounted for 21% of global imports and exports, and the WTO touted in 2013 that such goods "have comprised over 50 percent of exports and over 60 percent of imports in Asia, since the year 2000." But as the world shifts from globalization to "regionalization," Shih writes, the landscape of supply chains "promises to be far more complicated and costly, and the benefits to consumers and to nations of free trade are likely to be sharply attenuated"—thanks to lost efficiency and the cost or reorganizing production. A new system could take a decade to fully settle in, Shih suggests. | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment