| | | | Fareed: Trump Presidency Making America Irrelevant | | Donald Trump's presidency "is making the United States something worse than just feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column.
"The most dismaying of [a recent Pew Research poll's] findings is that the drop in regard for America goes well beyond Trump. Sixty-four percent of the people surveyed expressed a favorable view of the United States at the end of the Obama presidency. That has fallen to 49 percent now. Even when U.S. foreign policy was unpopular, people around the world still believed in America -- the place, the idea. This is less true today," Fareed writes.
"In 2008, I wrote a book about the emerging 'Post-American World,' which, I noted at the start, was not about the decline of America but rather the rise of the rest. Amid the parochialism, ineptitude and sheer disarray of the Trump presidency, the post-American world is coming to fruition much faster than I ever expected."
| | Why U.S. Should Welcome China's War Games | | China's naval build-up – including its joint war games with Russia's navy in the Baltic Sea this week – has alarmed many U.S. officials. But it shouldn't, The Economist editorializes. In fact, the United States should encourage the Chinese navy to take part in more activities outside its own territory.
"If China wants to show that its warships can operate in distant seas, there is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it is entirely right that China, as a global economic power, should play a larger part in providing the maritime security on which global trade depends. It is already taking part in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden -- something for which its base in Djibouti will play a useful supporting role," The Economist says.
"Deploying its navy far beyond its own waters might also help China understand that America, too, has good reasons for doing so. China frequently huffs about American warships in the western Pacific, refusing to accept one of the Pentagon's main reasons for deploying there: that America has a vital stake in the security of Asian trade."
"Such exercises are an important way to prevent confrontation triggered by misunderstanding. And China's inclusion would help ensure that its increasing naval assertiveness bolsters global security, rather than threatens it."
| | Why Sharif's Removal Should Worry the West | | | The Pakistani Supreme Court's decision to disqualify Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office following a corruption probe is bad news for Pakistan, India and the West, argues Mihir Sharma in Bloomberg View.
"The headlines will tell you that Sharif was forced out amid accusations of corruption -- and that's true, as far as it goes," Sharma says. "Unfortunately, it doesn't go very far. In fact, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Sharif was dismissed because, as with the others, a secretive military 'establishment' decided to fire him. That's bad news for Pakistan; again, a democratic mandate appears to have been shown to be of no account when compared to the wishes of the army. Nor is it good news for Pakistan's neighbors -- or the West."
"When Sharif was elected, you could hope that, under him, Pakistan would grow closer to India and the West, crack down on terrorism, and reform its economy. You can no longer expect any of that. Instead, it's far more likely Pakistan will turn to China to help shore up its patronage-based economy." | | The Most Important Story You May Have Missed | | Forget the turmoil in the White House or even the Republican efforts to replace Obamacare. The most important story this week was the announcement of the use of gene-editing "to alter the DNA of a single-cell human embryo," suggests Noah Rothman in Commentary magazine. In other words, a significant step on the path toward genetically modified humans.
"The speed with which this scientific milestone was reached has outpaced society's ability to process it. Already, the outlines of a conflict over the nature of this practice -- its ethicality, its utility, and its displacing effects on the American workforce -- are visible, but no one seems prepared to talk about them. What was once science fiction is perfectly thinkable today. It's time to do some thinking."
"This leads us to ponder the public-policy implications of a world in which genetic modification is a fact of life. [National Institutes of Health] guidelines will constrain some in the United States from overreaching, but every nation will have its own standards, and genetic medical tourism is undoubtedly the industry of the future. Should Congress seek to limit or even prohibit the practice of elective embryonic genetic engineering? Is such a notion constitutional, to say nothing of economically and socially advantageous?" Rothman says.
| | Is World Facing Second Wave of AIDS? | | Global death rates from HIV/AIDS have plunged over the past decade. But the reality is that new infection rates aren't improving. And with wealthy nations including the United States set to cut spending on HIV, the world could see "a massive second global wave of AIDS," writes Laurie Garrett in Foreign Policy.
"Three problems are driving the global fight against HIV into a new danger zone," Garrett writes. "First, new infections increasingly involve forms of the virus that are already resistant to the primary drugs used to treat and prevent HIV infection. Second, the world is fast approaching the limits of manufacturing capacity for anti-HIV first-line drugs, and the ceiling is far lower for second- and third-line treatments. And third, there aren't sufficient financial resources applied to the AIDS problem now, and signals from major donors -- especially the U.S. government -- offer a grim future of diminished resources and greater demands on very poor countries to finance their own HIV fights without outside help."
| | The 1% Aren't the Biggest Global Wealth Story | | The media's focus on the world's poorest or the high-flying lives of the one percent overlooks an arguably bigger story: the dramatic rise of the world's middle class, argue Wolfgang Fengler and Homi Kharas for the Brookings Institution.
"Today, around 3.3 billion people belong to the global middle class. This is now the world's largest group, which continues to rise rapidly. In fact, the middle class is on track to reach 4 billion by 2021 and 5 billion by 2027, representing 60 percent of the world's population," they write.
"Even though some people talk of a declining middle class in the West, the truth is that the global middle class is growing at an unprecedented speed. Every second, some five people enter the middle class. As people are moving up the income ladder, the group of 'near poor' is declining at equal pace…" | | | | | | |
