| | | | Has Trump Endangered Intelligence Sharing? | | As President Trump has sought help from foreign governments in Ukraine and Australia (and now, The Times of London reports, the UK), Daniel Flitton of the Australia-based Lowy Institute writes in a Guardian op-ed that he has damaged trust in America among its intelligence-sharing partners.
Trump seems to believe Australia, with which the US shares intelligence as part of the Five Eyes network, sabotaged his presidential campaign—"a new twist on 100 years of mateship," Flitton writes in a related Lowy Institute blog post. (As Katharine Murphy details, also in The Guardian, the focus of Trump's conspiracy theory appears to be an Australian diplomat's reporting of George Papadopoulos's Russia-Clinton-dirt claims.) Trump's request for help in investigating the origins of the Mueller probe "raises the danger of politicising intelligence material," Flitton warns, putting allies and intelligence partners in a bind.
For Ukraine, however, there may be a silver lining to the saga, writes Joanna Hosa of the European Council on Foreign Relations: The country needs help fighting both Russia and corruption, and Trump's scandal lends a wider audience to President Volodymyr Zelensky's appeals. | | Huawei and 'Weaponized Globalization' | | America's spat with Huawei reveals the darker side of globalization in two ways, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman write in the latest issue of Global Asia. First, it reaffirms that global interconnectedness enables spying with a wide scope; after all, they write, the NSA used the same advantage, via America's central position in global telecommunications, that the US now fears China could exploit. Second, the way in which America has clamped down on Huawei reveals that, in a globalized landscape, some countries enjoy greater control of important "nodes" in the system; the US, for instance, has exploited its influence over tech supply chains to put Huawei on the outs.
As a result of both phenomena, "global networks seem less a harbinger of market efficiency than a plaything of nation states warring for strategic advantage," they write. | | Or, at least two new Foreign Affairs essays make that case. While China's success is often attributed to the liberalization and opening that followed Mao Zedong's death, President Xi Jinping is turning China back to its Maoist past by tightening state control of ideology and society, Elizabeth Economy writes. ("Xi Jinping Thought" is included on college entrance exams and promoted through an app, for instance, while China's pilot social-credit systems define good behavior.) Xi's revival of Maoist practices is "not in service of a return to the past but in order to advance his own transformative agenda," Economy writes.
Russia, too, is revisiting its dictatorial past under President Vladimir Putin, writes Andrei Kolesnikov. Stalin's purges, war with Finland, and pacts with Nazi Germany were later disowned, but official voices are now praising Stalin's moves as Putin elevates him, in seeking to reclaim Russia's grandeur, Kolesnikov writes. It's not about communism, he argues, but about showing "the country is in the same position as it once was." | | Another Kind of 'Foreign Influence'? | | | In The Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead offers an argument about another kind of "foreign influence," aside from election meddling: the "soft corruption" of elites. It's become more common in recent decades for US and foreign firms to hire influential people to gain connections, Mead writes, turning a critical eye toward both Hunter Biden and the Clinton Foundation, as examples. (The former's employment by a Ukrainian gas company, and the latter's charitable solicitations before 2016, were likely viewed by foreign nationals as a way to gain influence in the US, Mead asserts.) Congress needs to examine foreign efforts to curry favor through business and financial channels, Mead argues, while protecting US firms that do business in places where corruption is the norm. | | Why Conservatives Should Embrace Globalism | | | Populists and nationalists ignore something important about globalism, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes in The American Interest, reviewing Dalibor Rohac's book In Defense of Globalism. Despite fretting on the right about supranational agreements and entities like the Paris climate accord and the WTO, Western democracies have entered these relationships willingly, as a means to solve global problems that specifically require international cooperation, and they're free to withdraw at any time. As global cooperation has increased, so have personal freedom and economic prosperity—two things conservatives usually embrace, Schoenfeld writes on Rohac's book. | | | | | | |
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