| | | | Will the Iran Conflict Drag On? | | Is Iran's retaliation over, or should the US expect more attacks after the killing of Qasem Soleimani? At Politico, Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney advises the latter. Iran has been escalating steadily since May in the hopes of getting the US to drop its economic sanctions, Maloney writes—a goal that remains "as pressing as ever" amid Iranian unrest.
The US has tacked on more sanctions since Soleimani's death, and the imperative for Iran is now "magnified by an ideological and strategic zeal to settle scores for Soleimani's death" and achieve other gains, like pushing the US out of the region. (After all, the Soleimani strike led Iraq's Parliament to oppose hosting US troops in the country, as Fareed has noted.) "This is a regime that has orchestrated terror attacks from Buenos Aires to Bulgaria; it wields considerable cyber capabilities as well as a network of semi-autonomous proxies," Maloney writes, suggesting Tehran might not be done. (Iran has consistently denied involvement in any attacks.)
Not everyone agrees: In the Sydney Morning Herald, University of Toronto Professor Aurel Braun argues that in Trump, Iran's leaders have run up against a mercurial American president best left unprovoked. Their response to Soleimani's death "was not only uncharacteristically weak but it reflected the fear of an all-out confrontation," Braun writes. "Iranian overreach met Trumpian unpredictability." On top of that, the tragic downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 has sparked protests in Iran and could further chasten its leaders against "dangerous foreign adventures." | | Taiwan's Election 'Stunner' | | There are reasons not to read too much into Taiwan's Saturday election results, Taipei-based freelancer James Chater writes for the New Statesman: Pro-independence President Tsai Ing-wen's reelection victory has been viewed as a sign of deepening anti-China sentiment, but her opponent, Han Kuo-yu, made a series of mistakes including sexist and racist gaffes and an ill-timed visit to the Chinese government's office in Hong Kong; on top of that, the party-line vote (a part of Taiwan's balloting) showed a much smaller advantage for Tsai's party.
That said, China was the dominant issue, Gary Schmitt writes for The American Interest: "[A]fter events in Hong Kong, [Chinese President Xi Jinping's] less than subtle bullying of Taiwan, and a greater appreciation for the overt and covert efforts by the mainland to influence political opinion and races on the island, most Taiwanese were not willing to take the chance that a candidate of a party still mouthing versions of 'one China' would be given the land's highest office." Tsai's margin of victory—more than 57%, to Han's 38%—was "impressive," given that it's "rare for an incumbent whose policy track record was not seen as wildly popular to sweep to reelection, let alone keep the existing majority in the Legislative Yuan (LY), Taiwan's national assembly."
The results are likely to irk Beijing, stoke concerns about retaliation, and complicate the relationship between Taiwan, China, and the US, Sarah Zheng writes for the South China Morning Post. | | Is Australia Paying a Price for Its Resources? | | | Australia has ridden its natural resources to economic success, Gideon Rachman writes in a Financial Times column, but that now looks shortsighted amid the country's massive fires. "[B]y participating so eagerly in the mining boom, Australia might also have been helping to dig its own grave," Rachman writes. Australia is by no means the only country to fuel growth with emissions, but Rachman points critically at some Australian politicians' tendency to deny the need for action: Now, the fires have "led to a backlash against Scott Morrison, the prime minister, who once waved a lump of coal around in parliament, urging his audience not to be frightened of the stuff."
As that political drama unfolds, the fires are only adding to the world's climate problems: As James Temple writes for the MIT Technology Review, Australia's emissions are otherwise on the decline, but the fires "have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere … more than the total combined annual emissions of the 116 lowest-emitting countries." | | If the "phase one" US-China trade deal is but a small-scale, face-saving arrangement concerning soybeans, then we're still left with the bigger problems many hoped the trade war could solve—like state subsidies for Chinese firms, intellectual property theft, and difficulties imposed on foreign business. Right?
Wrong, according to Weijian Shan, who writes in Foreign Affairs that some of those big-ticket items have been on their way to resolution, in some cases since before the trade war started. "For those watching China closely, the increased effectiveness of intellectual property protection has been clear to see," writes Shan, who chairs a private equity group that does business there. Intellectual property courts began springing up in China in 2014, and in 2018 China removed a ban on majority foreign ownership of companies; its current cap of 51% will vanish this year. What we're left with, then, is a lingering war over tech: China wants the US to lift American bans on Chinese tech firms—and it's unlikely to stop subsidizing them, as Beijing seeks to compete with the US in technology for decades to come. To find a larger resolution, Shan writes, each side will have to be clear about its broader goals and demands. | | AI Won't (Necessarily) Save Online Discourse | | Tech executives have pointed to artificial intelligence as a potential tool to help weed out disinformation and fake accounts on social-media platforms, but Samuel Woolley writes for the MIT Technology Review (in an excerpt of his new book, The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth) that AI might be of greater benefit to nefarious actors online.
Currently, bots operate crudely to disrupt online conversation; empowered with AI, social media's bad guys could accomplish a lot more, using more sophisticated disinformation tactics and deploying advanced denial-of-service attacks run by smart botnets. One example Woolley notes: When two data scientists let an AI machine design and run its own phishing campaign, it was more successful than a human-driven competitor, Gizmodo reported in 2017. AI can help platforms like Facebook and Twitter identify nefarious content, Woolley writes, but his broader argument is that new technology may threaten our information environment as much as it'll help platforms clean things up. | | | | | | |
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