| | | | John Bolton had survived internal disputes before, but in the wake of his firing, analysts are pointing to a list of signs that foretold it. New Yorker staff writer and CNN global-affairs analyst Susan Glasser (who noted on Twitter that "this wasn't just Bolton v Trump, it was also Bolton v [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo and others in the administration"), highlighted a prescient piece in The American Conservative by Curt Mills, published only yesterday, asking if Bolton's time was finally up. Bolton, Mills suggested, threatened two goals Trump wants to accomplish before the 2020 election: ending the China trade standoff and the war in Afghanistan.
Bolton never really meshed with Trump's anti-war campaign promises, Mills wrote—even if, as The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins pointed out in May, the president liked his tough talk. Bolton's rise and fall amounted to a brief flirtation with aggressive foreign policy, according to Mills: "Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he didn't." | | We Are Unprepared for the Future of Tech | | In a New York Times essay, NSA General Counsel Glenn Gerstell writes that the US is unprepared for the changes technology will soon bring. New weapons like hypersonic missiles, artificial intelligence, and cyberattacks will alter global power dynamics, he writes. The US government hasn't planned carefully enough for this new reality, Gerstell suggests, while also pointing out that it's nearly impossible for a society to guard itself, as new technologies figure to be adopted quickly.
"[O]ther transformational technologies, such as railroads, electricity, radio, television, automobiles and airplanes, all took several decades before they reached that comparable level of ubiquity. Society had the time to sort out the norms, rules and laws governing those technologies and the respective roles of government and the private sector," he writes. In the near future, Gerstell warns, we'll struggle to keep up. | | Britain: No Country for Strongmen? | | | British Prime Minister Boris Johnson might not seem to share much in common with strongman leaders around the world, but his tenure at 10 Downing has become a test case for strongman politics, Gideon Rachman writes in the Financial Times. The strongman playbook has flourished worldwide, amid a wave of national leaders who "revel in a cult of personality and delight in their willingness to trample over political and legal norms"—some traits Johnson possesses, according to Rachman. Johnson's premiership will reveal how that style fares in Britain, Rachman writes: If the UK rejects those political tactics, he argues, "it will do a service to democracy around the world."
At the very least, Johnson's tenure is sure to coincide with political changes. As Fareed recently wrote, the Tories are morphing under his watch, and Carnegie Europe's Peter Kellner argues today that Britain's effective two-party system could crumble amid Brexit's turmoil. | | Until recently, the United Arab Emirates was a bold new player in the Middle East, inserting itself in the war in Yemen, aligning with Saudi Arabia, and backing regional proxies. That's all changed, Hassan Hassan writes for Foreign Policy, as the UAE has pulled a series of "surprising geopolitical U-turns"—including its withdrawal from Yemen. The "UAE is now trying to restore its reputation in Washington and other Western capitals by portraying itself as a small country seeking stability and prosperity through soft power and economic engagement, which is thus opposed to wars of all kinds in the Middle East," Hassan writes.
Thanks largely to the US Congress voting to pull support from the war in Yemen—a signal likely taken seriously in the UAE—Hassan writes that it's now unlikely a Saudi-UAE alliance will usher in a new, autocratic regional order. | | An 'Own-Goal' on the World Economy | | In a Foreign Affairs essay, Jared Bernstein offers up a detailed version of some arguments we've heard before: that President Trump's trade war might cause a recession, that policymakers now lack the tools to avert a crisis, and that the global economy is being mismanaged. "By definition, all recessions are market failures. But the next one may be a government failure as well," Bernstein writes. The trade war has hurt multiple sectors; Trump's tax cuts mean the US could face a downturn "with a debt-to-GDP ratio that is more than twice its historical average," about 80% as opposed to 35%; the Fed, which usually cuts interest rates by about 5% in a recession, will have little room to maneuver; and the government will be too indebted to enact Obama-style stimulus spending, should things go south. It's a compelling case that, on the heels of a recovery, Trump has kept the economy in first gear.
In other trade-war news, Kimberly Ann Elliott writes at the World Politics Review that even if Trump's tariffs are hurting China, there will be blowback at home, as slow Chinese growth is bad for US exporters and dampens US demand. Meanwhile, in his latest New York Times column, Tom Friedman concludes that the trade war has two main "battlefronts"—tariffs, and "what to do about Huawei"—and finds some willingness on Huawei's part to compromise, as the company's CEO suggests in a rare interview that Huawei could share its 5G technology. | | | | | | |
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