| | | | Fareed: Trump Doesn't Have a Foreign Policy | | It's understandable if anyone is suffering whiplash from President Trump's decisions on the world stage, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. To list just a few examples, Trump disparaged Middle East involvement then killed Iran's top general, withdrew from Syria only to keep troops there to guard oil, and alternated "fire and fury" with overtures to Kim Jong Un.
"Trump does not have a foreign policy. He has a series of impulses—isolationism, unilateralism, bellicosity—some of them contradictory," Fareed writes. "One might surge at any particular moment, triggered usually by Trump's sense that he might look weak or foolish. They are often unleashed without any consultation, and then his yes men line up to defend him, supporting the president's every move with North Korean-style enthusiasm, no matter how incoherent."
Despite its mistakes, the US is known for reliability and careful planning, Fareed writes. "That hard-won reputation is being squandered in arena after arena around the globe." | | War in the Disinformation Era | | After its missiles struck Iraqi bases, reports in Iran promptly (and falsely) claimed US casualties, Tyler Cowen notes in a Bloomberg column. Which leads him to a question: As disinformation becomes more common, what will it do to war?
For one, military strikes could become less impactful. If authoritarian, media-controlling countries like Iran are attacked, they can simply claim they weren't (and be believed by their citizens), suffering less political cost at home. Actual retaliation could become less necessary, as such countries can falsely claim to have hit back. That being the case, their threats of retaliation may be less plausible. At the same time, strikes will have to be more vivid to have an effect.
"In a world of fake news, the major powers may well find fewer attacks to be worthwhile. That's the reassuring part," Cowen writes. "What's worrisome is that, when attacks do come, they will have to be very public and very decisive. … They will have to be the kinds of attacks that cannot easily be countered by fake news and media censorship." | | Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gets a lot of attention in the West, but his counterpart in the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, is the region's true power player, Robert F. Worth writes in The New York Times Magazine. MBZ, as he is known, has developed the Emirates into an outsized presence, with wide influence and one of the Middle East's best militaries. Some believe MBZ engineered the Muslim Brotherhood's ouster in Egypt, Worth writes; he also brokered the blockade of Qatar and was responsible for most ground gains made by the UAE-Saudi alliance in Yemen—all while driving an agenda to reform Emirati society at home, through efforts like a draft. He acts out of an abiding opposition to Islamism, Worth writes, and his outlook is autocratic but progressive by certain lights.
"This may be the central enigma of M.B.Z.'s tenure: He is a socially liberal autocrat, and his country looks different depending on where you stand," Worth writes. "Weighed against the standards of Western human rights groups, the U.A.E. can easily look like a hyper-capitalist slave colony whose leader wants to crush all dissent. When you compare it with Syria or Egypt, the U.A.E. is almost a model of enlightened liberalism." | | How to Judge the Soleimani Strike | | In its latest cover story, The Economist writes that we simply don't know yet whether the Soleimani strike was "masterstroke or madness." Iran's reprisal might not be over, the magazine warns, predicting its Revolutionary Guards "are likely to pursue other tactics, including cyber-attacks, suicide-bombings by proxies, assassinations of American officials and an array of means they have honed over the years." But the real answer will come over the long term, and it will depend on whether the strike makes Iran less aggressive in the region—and in its nuclear development—or more.
As for Iran's response, Tom Nichols commends it in The Atlantic, surmising Iranian leaders managed to hit back while giving "the Americans a plausible way out of a crisis Trump created." | | | After the energy boom ushered in by fracking and shale oil, Alex Gilbert, Morgan Bazilian, and Sterling Loza write for Foreign Policy that a new "bonanza" could be on the horizon with the development of gas hydrates (explained as "ice-like combinations of water and natural gases") that can be drilled offshore. Deposits are large, the authors write: They "could potentially supply the world with more than 1 million exajoules of energy, equivalent to thousands of years of current global energy demand. And they are nearing commercial production, with some ventures looking to be only half a decade away." The shale boom saw US oil production increase several times over, and the authors thinks undersea hydrates will be a bigger deal—all the more reason, they argue, to start making rules for drilling and mitigating risks. | | | | | | |
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