| | | | Has Trump's Relationship With Europe Changed? | | President Trump has had contentious NATO visits before, but this week's fissures were pronounced: They began with a testy exchange with France's Emmanuel Macron ("let's be serious") and concluded with Trump calling Canada's Justin Trudeau "two faced," in response to a video of Trudeau evidently mocking the US president, and canceling a press conference.
Personal spats aside, Mark Landler writes for The New York Times that the relationship has shifted: Trump has previously kept European leaders on the back foot, but "[a]s Europe changes, Mr. Trump is finding that he has to recalibrate his approach." Macron has supplanted Germany's Angela Merkel as Trump's "chief antagonist on the continent," and while the US president shows little restraint in wading into other countries' politics, he demurred on Britain's looming election—"a grudging admission that he is so unpopular in Britain that a full-throated endorsement of the prime minister [Boris Johnson] could backfire" and a stark contrast with how Trump harangued Theresa May.
A larger change may be afoot. "While Trump-friendly governments in Europe, like Poland's and Hungary's, still follow the polls and cross their fingers that Mr. Trump will get four more years in office," Ivan Krastev writes in a Times column, "European liberals are giving up hope." Spooked both by US vagaries and looming signs of a US-China Cold War, "European liberals have come to understand that American democracy no longer produces a consensual politics with a predictable foreign policy" and that elections mean not only a new president but a "new regime." Their response, Krastev writes, has been to worry less about Washington's winds. | | The US Needs a Decoupling Strategy | | If the US decouples its economy from China's, what happens next? Rana Foroohar asks that question in a Financial Times column, pointing out new Commerce Department rules making it easier to ban foreign technology. If the trend continues, the US will have segregated itself from Chinese tech advancements (while forcing the rest of the world to choose sides)—but in Foroohar's view, America lacks a strategy to win the ensuing competition.
Her answer is for government to get more involved. "[I]f America is going to compete with a state-run economy like China in the digital era—one that seems to support a winner-takes-all dynamic—we are going to need bigger, public-sector directed shifts," Foroohar writes. "To achieve those, we will also need changes in tax policy that allow the government to capture and deploy more of the wealth created by the private sector." | | Ukraine's Political Reality Show Is the Opposite of America's | | | Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky "is starring in a reality show that is very different from the program running on the Donald Trump network," Franklin Foer writes in an Atlantic essay. Freewheeling and attuned to public performance (he conducted a 14-hour press conference in a mall and urged officials accused of corruption to take polygraphs on a Facebook livestream), Zelensky nonetheless is committed to pushing Ukraine away from the personalized self-dealing to which Ukraine's oligarchs are accustomed, and which they instantly recognized in President Trump.
Detailing the relationships Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has developed in Ukraine—including his reception of the keys to a Jewish enclave founded by a Hasidic rabbi—Foer depicts Zelensky's team as perplexed by Giuliani's advances. Serhiy Leshchenko, the investigative-journalist-turned-politician who produced the "black ledger" that purportedly showed off-the-books payments to Paul Manafort (which forced Manafort's resignation from Trump's campaign and is now the center of a conspiracy theory about Ukraine and 2016) was told flatly he couldn't work in Zelensky's administration, for fear of alienating the US, Foer writes. More ominously, Foer suggests that President Trump, already proven susceptible by his ousting of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, can be manipulated by Ukraine's oligarchs. | | | Why are terrorists willing to die for their causes? As Scott Atran writes for Foreign Affairs, research shows it's not about rational choice, but about defending "sacred values." (Not necessarily those taken from religious texts, but values that help define identity; for ISIS adherents, the idea of a caliphate fits.) Behavioral studies of Iraqi fighters showed that members of ISIS and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (deemed a terrorist group by the US) were more motivated by such values than were members of Arab militias or the Iraqi Army. "The fighters expressed willingness to march into battle knowing they were outgunned, because they believed in the sacredness of their cause," Atran writes. Research indicates that asking about such values can trigger thinking that is less rational—and, interestingly, social exclusion and political marginalization can exaggerate the effect. Researchers took "38 men living in Barcelona, Spain, who expressed willingness to perform violent acts associated with jihadism" and had them play a computer game. At midpoint, half were excluded. Those who had been shut out of the game showed more activity in an "area of the brain associated with non-rational thinking" when asked afterward about both "sacred" and non-sacred values. They "expressed greater willingness to fight and die" for both—not only the "sacred" values, but the more pedestrian ones, too—suggesting marginalization not only intensifies the violent will but expands the set of beliefs that can motivate it. | | Markets Are Factoring In Carbon Risk. Is the Price Right? | | Analysts have worried for years about a "carbon bubble," the potential overvaluing of assets underwritten by the value of petroleum that won't ever be extracted from the ground, as the world weans off carbon. But in a Bloomberg column, Peter Orszag writes that two studies show markets are, encouragingly, taking carbon risk into account. According to one, the more undeveloped petroleum reserves a firm owns (compared with developed reserves more ready for extraction), the lower the firm's stock price; according to another, Orszag writes, "the market puts lower value on, and requires higher returns from, companies with higher levels and growth rates of emissions."
That's a good sign, but Orszag is less certain how good a sign it is: "What is not clear from either study, however, is whether the market is penalizing future climate exposure sufficiently to reflect the risks." | | | | | | |
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