| | | | | The US and NATO "don't have much choice now other than to rethink whether Turkey still belongs in the alliance," The Wall Street Journal concludes in an editorial, now that Turkey has begun taking shipments of Russia's S-400 anti-aircraft missile system. Turkey has sought the Russian missiles while also planning to purchase US-made F-35 fighters—which, it is said, the Russian S-400 was designed to shoot down. US lawmakers have been warning that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can't have it both ways, and the Middle East Institute notes that Turkey has drifted toward Russia and won't be able to participate in other NATO weapons programs, possibly threatening its participation in the alliance. The West's relationship with Turkey has unraveled over more than missiles and planes, Nick Danforth writes for Foreign Policy: The Arab Spring raised suspicions of the West in Ankara, Erdoğan grew warier after a failed coup against him and "Western cheerleading" for Turkish protesters, and the US and Turkey have backed competing factions in Syria. | | | Iran is falling into an American-laid trap, goaded by the Trump administration into a reaction that will leave it isolated, the Financial Times warns in an editorial. By attempting to block a British tanker and threatening international shipping, Iran risks losing its legitimate moral high ground and could leave European powers feeling they have "no choice" but to side with the US, the paper writes. In the face of US sanctions, Iran and its people see less benefit in sticking with international nuclear agreements, former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian writes for Foreign Affairs. Its commitment not to advance a nuclear-weapons program could come into question, he suggests, as Iran drifts further away from the international order. | | A New Space Race, Over Satellites and Deterrence | | | Anti-satellite weapons have been around since the Cold War, but "as satellites become more intertwined with every aspect of civilian life and military operations, the chances are increasing that someone, somewhere will decide that attacking a satellite is worth the risk—and just possibly trigger the world's first full-blown space war," Niall Firth writes in the MIT Technology Review. The race for dominant space-based capabilities is already ongoing; a true space war might include militaries shooting down satellites, spoofing or jamming GPS signals, launching cyberattacks against satellites, or firing lasers to disable their sensors. The US is already working on ways to get around these threats, one option being to launch satellite "constellations in which any one satellite is not that important," Firth writes. | | Has Trump Put North Korea Negotiations on the Clock? | | | That's what Naoko Aoki suggests at The National Interest. Given the personality-driven, leader-to-leader approach President Trump has taken with Kim Jong Un, there's a danger that "North Korea may only be willing to seriously negotiate a deal over the short term while it can be implemented by the Trump administration," Aoki writes. "That does not bode well for denuclearization talks, which are better measured in weeks and months rather than in days." Trump's is not the only US administration to have negotiated with North Korea, but his style, effectively, may be putting negotiators on the clock to sort through myriad complicated issues. It also means Pyongyang will be watching the 2020 US election very closely, Aoki writes. | | Our AI Future: Utopia or Dystopia? | | | Writing at Project Syndicate, Sami Mahroum offers a potential roadmap to AI utopia: Governments, he argues, may be able to expand services at little cost thanks to AI technology. (A 2017 Deloitte report predicted AI could help with paperwork and reduce backlogs for programs like Medicare and Social Security, for instance; Las Vegas already uses AI analysis of Twitter to catch food-poisoning outbreaks and guide inspections, the report noted.) That could lead to a "new AI-driven social contract," with governments distributing the economic gains of AI to citizens, Mahroum suggests. A much darker view comes from Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher in The Atlantic. Along with fundamental changes in human behavior and cognition, AI could lead to computer-driven war, unconstrained by human strategies to avoid conflict, they warn. "If AI develops new weapons, strategies, and tactics by simulation and other clandestine methods, control becomes elusive, if not impossible," they write. | | | | | | |
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