| | | | Zarif: Don't Start a War With Iran | | "We've never started a war—we will never start a war," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tells Fareed. "But we will defend ourselves, and anybody who starts a war with Iran will not be the one who ends it."
The full conversation will air Sunday on GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN. In it, Zarif also accuses President Trump of an "economic war" in which Iranian "civilians are the primary targets."
International tensions are high in the Strait of Hormuz, and Zarif says that "these waters are our lifeline," protesting efforts to make them "insecure for one country and secure" for others. As for the strait's geopolitical significance, a new Foreign Affairs essay by Allen James Fromherz offers a detailed account of the delicate power balance in what he calls "the world's most valuable and vulnerable trade and maritime chokepoints." | | That's how Melinda Liu describes Hong Kong in Foreign Policy: a city where two systems of government are coming into conflict. The city is "starting to resemble the ideological struggle of an earlier era, when the Berlin Wall was erected in the early years of the Cold War," Liu writes. Liberal values and autocracy are in close proximity, as they were in Berlin, and lines are even blurred: A Hong Kong train station run by Chinese customs officials "symbolizes inroads made by the Chinese system into Hong Kong, but now it also plays a role in exposing mainland Chinese to things that are banned from being propagated on the mainland."
As the epicenter of a new Cold War between China and the West, Hong Kong's protests and political developments are being watched closely from afar, Liu writes. | | America's Energy Independence Won't Last Forever | | | While the shale boom has given the US a respite from dependence on foreign oil, Ruba Husari of the Middle East Institute writes that such good times won't last forever—and that the US will need its Persian Gulf alliances to keep securing oil in the future. "According to the best estimates, at some point in the next 5-10 years, shale oil will plateau and eventually the production curve will be reversed," she writes. "Securing supplies from the Gulf might not be as important as it was in terms of volume right now, but it would be short-sighted to base a strategy for regional presence or engagement on short-term sufficiency." US oil production has freed President Trump to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, Husari writes; if the boom plateaus, the US may need to stay invested in the Middle East, politically, to keep its oil supplies flowing and to maintain its aggressive posture on the world stage. | | On an Asymmetric Battlefield, US Will Need to Use All It Has | | The Center for Strategic and International Studies makes that case in a new paper on US competition in what's referred to as hybrid or "gray zone" warfare—a style of conflict that stops short of full-on war. (Used most notably by Russia, it includes things like proxy attacks, cyber war, disinformation, political interference, or any asymmetric tactic designed to confuse and harass an adversary while stopping short of full-scale military conflict. Russia's annexation of Crimea, with the help of soldiers wearing unmarked uniforms, and its interference in the 2016 US election are prime examples; similar tactics are used by US adversaries China and Iran.)
To counter those tactics, the authors write that America will need to leverage its alliances, establish deterrence in the cyber arena (for instance, by coordinating responses to cyber-attacks with allies), and wield its economic power. The authors suggest America also should strengthen its own democratic institutions to play defense, for instance by including media literacy as a "core element" of public education. Rather than a weakness, democracy should be seen as a strength on the "gray zone" battlefield; the more appealing liberal democracy is, the more readily American citizens will resist political interference, and the more smoothly the US can recruit help from allies, they argue. | | The 'Backlash' Against Xi Jinping | | | In a new book-length Lowy Institute paper, China expert Richard McGregor offers a history of President Xi Jinping's rise and a theory to go along with it: that Xi faces a backlash both domestically and internationally, after charging hard on both fronts. Thanks to anti-corruption efforts that took down "innumerable patronage networks," Xi has made enemies at all levels of Chinese government, McGregor says in the latest episode of the Lowy Institute podcast "Rules Based Audio." Under Xi, China's authoritarian turn has coincided with newfound assertiveness outside its borders. "I think people have finally sort of woken up to what a big deal this is," McGregor says. "It's not just the new superpower on the block, it's a very different sort of superpower from the US." | | | | | | |
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