| | | | After President Trump announced the withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria, CNN's Nick Paton Walsh calls it a betrayal of America's Kurdish allies in the region and a gift to Iran, Russia, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Not only that, it comes as ISIS is starting to regroup, and Trump's move "mocks the allegiances made with those who suffered most in defeating ISIS"—without a plan to keep the group in check.
Late last month, the congressionally mandated Syria Study Group concluded a report warning against US withdrawal. ISIS has not been defeated in Syria, the authors wrote, and Assad has not won the war; the former is reconstituting itself as an insurgency, while Assad is locked in a deadly stalemate. Although the report argued things will get worse if the US pulls out, Steven A. Cook wrote at Foreign Policy that such warnings ring hollow in Washington, reflecting a broad "transition underway in US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East." | | America Misses the Free-Trade Wave | | While the US pursues a trade war and levies tariffs on allies, the rest of the world is undergoing a free-trade renaissance, Shannon K. O'Neil writes at Bloomberg. Asian countries enjoy market access after coming up with a replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership; Africa is working toward a new free-trade zone, Latin America's Pacific Alliance trade bloc of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru is looking to expand its reach; and Japan struck a deal with the EU.
As a result, other countries are poised to set new trade rules in America's absence, O'Neil writes. "When historians look back, they may depict this as a time when free traders set new rules for decades to follow," O'Neil writes—and if the US stays on the sidelines, it won't have a say. | | Get Ready for China to Rule the Internet | | The era of Chinese President Xi Jinping "will be remembered for putting an end to the West's naive optimism about the liberalizing potential of the Internet," Adam Segal writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. Beijing has made large investments in semiconductor development, AI, and quantum computing, aimed in the first instance at reducing Chinese reliance on US suppliers and in the latter two at jumping ahead.
Alongside those efforts, China is spreading its model of Internet governance—driven by state control and national sovereignty over speech and data rules—by building tech infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative and, increasingly, by taking a more active role at the UN. "Beijing's vision of the Internet is ascendant," Segal writes, suggesting the US should come up with an alternative besides its model centered on private companies. | | Stop Saying 'THE' Ukraine! | | President Trump may call it "the Ukraine," but the country dropped "the" from its name when the Soviet Union fell, writes Liesl Schillinger in a Foreign Policy op-ed—detailing not just that move 30 years ago, but why some say it's offensive to keep calling it "the Ukraine."
Including "the" not only ignores history, Schillinger writes, it connotes regional status (like saying, for instance, "the" Midwest) on a country that has struggled since 1991 to maintain its independence. Ukraine's name derives from a word meaning "borderland," and using "the" treats Ukraine's proper name as a common noun—specifically, implying it's "the borderland" of a greater Russia. As Schillinger argues, it's a linguistic put-down. | | | | | | |
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