| | | | What the Saudi Attacks Reveal About the Middle East | | | Regardless of who was responsible for the attacks on Saudi oil facilities, Mahsa Rouhi writes for The Guardian, they demonstrate that "the regional status quo is simply not sustainable." If Iran is indeed to blame, it's a clear signal that Tehran's "strategic patience" has run out, Rouhi writes—that it won't allow Saudi oil to flow while its own is blocked by US sanctions. If US accusations are true, and Iran orchestrated the strikes, Rouhi concludes they could bolster Iran's standing or spark a larger war. The attacks were sophisticated and reveal the vulnerability of global oil supplies, Pierre Noël writes for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, calling them the kind of event "that oil security specialists talk about all the time, but never happens." | | … And About the United States | | | Without incontrovertible proof of Iran's culpability, President Trump faces a credibility problem, David Sanger writes in a New York Times analysis piece; given his "loose relationship with the facts," it will be difficult for Trump to sell the US assessment and recruit allies to confront Iran. (As The Washington Post's Max Boot recently put it, why believe an administration that "just tried to falsify information about a hurricane"?) The US has wanted to get out of the Middle East for decades, Janan Ganesh writes in the Financial Times, but the crisis shows that's impossible—and that superpowers, even in decline, can't easily shed entanglements. World Politics Review Editor-in-Chief Judah Grunstein, meanwhile, argues the attacks reveal flaws in the US approach to Iran—from relying on sanctions to overestimating the threat Iran poses. | | With a deadlocked vote in Israel, no one knows what coalition will lead the country—but Haaretz writes in an editorial that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whether or not he keeps his job, has fallen short of the majority he would need to save himself from prosecution on corruption charges.
Netanyahu is now "in the fight of his life," writes the Financial Times' David Gardner, who notes Netanyahu has "always had a Houdini-like knack of getting out of scrapes, some of them of his own making." The Economist predicts Netanyahu "is not going anywhere yet" and will do everything he can to hold onto power. | | In Time for Its Anniversary, Maoism Has Returned to China | | That's the conclusion of Minxin Pei, who writes for the Nikkei Asian Review that as the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China approaches next month, it's clear that President Xi Jinping has brought back some hallmarks of Maoism.
Xi has purged officials, instituted a bellicose foreign policy, intensified domestic repression, and allowed market-based economic reforms to stall, Pei writes. China rose in the last 40 years only because it abandoned those tendencies, Pei writes, arguing Xi must face Mao's failures and prove that 70 years after its communist founding, China has learned from them. | | An Answer to Populism: More Referenda? | | | Populism is often seen as a broad, public reaction to failed elite governance, but Jan-Werner Mueller makes the opposite case in a Project Syndicate op-ed. Political elites catapulted populists to power in the first place, he writes, from the Republican partisans who nominated President Trump to the Conservatives who backed Brexit. Counterintuitively, Mueller argues that one way to defeat populism is by deciding more policies through public referenda—which would circumvent the problem of fractured liberal coalitions and reveal, with some clarity, whether populists really speak for "the people," as they claim. | | | | | | |
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