| | | | Washington must accept a nuclear North Korea | | "North Korea has tested a 'newly developed ultramodern' weapon in an event supervised by leader Kim Jong Un, state media said Friday, amid faltering nuclear disarmament negotiations with the United States," CNN reports.
So what's the right approach to North Korea? Ankit Panda for Foreign Affairs argues that "Washington needs to accept that North Korea will remain a nuclear power for the foreseeable future." Kim Jong Un "sees nuclear weapons as essential to his regime's survival and, ultimately, his security."
"Whether U.S. policymakers want to accept it or not, North Korea is the United States' third nuclear-armed adversary. To defend U.S. allies and the U.S. homeland requires Washington to make a serious effort to understand Kim's thinking about his arsenal."
"A stable deterrence relationship requires making Kim feel secure about his arsenal, not insecure."
Current talk about left-of-launch strategies "to disable North Korea's missiles before they can be fired" is not helping Panda argues. "Under the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Defense… began studying left-of-launch techniques for sabotaging North Korean launches." But that just "motivates North Korea to build a larger, more diverse system, and to launch first before the United States can disarm it."
What to do? "[T]he Pentagon should publish a public report" on what it would take for the US "disable an adversary's nuclear-capable systems."
"Congress, meanwhile, should elicit testimony from Defense Department policy staff on how, if at all, the United States is working to manage risks as it pursues these capabilities." And the US "should explore avenues by which Pyongyang might privately communicate components of its nuclear doctrine."
| | What would a functional immigration policy look like? | | Last night, in "language accusing President Donald Trump of attempting to rewrite immigration laws, a federal judge based in San Francisco temporarily blocked the government… from denying asylum to those crossing over the southern border between ports of entry." (CNN)
But how can the US fix its "immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace"?
To start with, Krishnadev Calamur argues for The Atlantic, look to countries like New Zealand and Australia for "economic migration." They "make it simple for anyone with a job to move and work there and offers them a well-defined path to citizenship."
A new system for the US also needs "low-skilled workers. Low-skilled migration already dominates the food and agriculture, social-care, and health-care sectors." Family migration provides a "support network for new arrivals, child care for relatives, and even loans for businesses."
"[F]ew people would seriously argue that the United States has been hurt economically by its preference for family migration. It remains the world's largest economy and among its most competitive."
Even though "[r]efugees are a tiny part of a rich country's immigration system," they're still a "focus of intense political debate in Europe and the U.S." because they are "viewed by their critics as taking up resources... (This is to say nothing of fears, however unfounded, that extremists may be using the system to slip into Western countries.)" But countries like Sweden "bet that accepting refugees today could pay off in the future"; "Sweden's economy is growing—and much of that growth has been fueled by those born overseas." | | Asia struggling with immigration policy, too | | | "While leaders of ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] spoke eloquently about mutual trade and investment at their summit in Singapore this month, they had little to say about another key flow in the region – migration," writes Syed Munir Khasru for Nikkei Asian Review. ASEAN's ignoring "the much bigger movements of other groups of people who daily cross their states' borders, mostly in search of a better life."
"Migrants, numbering around 6.5 million people, have largely been left out of the ASEAN integration process."
"This must change," Khasru argues. "It is time for ASEAN to respond more urgently to migrants' needs with coordinated policies both for refugees" and for "the much larger numbers of economic migrants… [C]ommon rules should be developed to give migrants more protection and dignity."
"Undocumented economic migrant[s] in ASEAN experience myriad mistreatments including… nonpayment of salaries, low wages, long working hours, and poor workplaces safety standards." Human rights violations against migrants include "physical violence and illegal detention, trafficking, and sexual abuse. Female migrants, for example from Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines, are sometimes treated like modern-day slaves."
ASEAN needs to be "benchmarking policies against international standards such as those of the EU, which are particularly robust. I am not suggesting EU-style freedom of movement but a common EU-based framework for the human rights of refugees and migrants," writes Khasru.
"For an institution like ASEAN, based on the mantra of noninterference, making common policies on a tricky issue like migration is challenging. But for the organization to mature and become more like the European Union, it must tackle hard topics, including migration." | | New research on European populism | | "Populism is sexy," writes political sociologist Matthijs Rooduijn for The Guardian in response to new research on 31 European countries released by The Guardian. "Populist parties have tripled their vote in Europe over the past 20 years. They are in government in 11 European countries. More than a quarter of Europeans voted populist in their last elections."
But the face of populism varies. Populism finds "fertile breeding ground," Rooduijn argues, in places where "mainstream left and right parties converge ideologically." For example, in France the far-right Front National campaigned against both the center right and the center left, portraying mainstream parties as "the political equivalent of Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
"In northern Europe," from Denmark to Sweden, "successful populists are mainly radical rightwing populists" with "a xenophobic nationalist outlook." By contrast, in southern European countries like Spain and Greece, where "the financial crisis hit… harder than most," populist parties "combine their populism with a radical leftwing main ideology"; the Italian Five Star Movement "combines populism with a diverse array of ideological stances." In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, it was centrist parties that came to "embrace populism and, even later, nativism."
But whatever the region, Rooduijn points out, "[m]any citizens take the view that ordinary, virtuous people have been betrayed, neglected or exploited by a corrupt elite." Meanwhile, "crises can make the activation of populist attitudes more likely." Financial crises and the "refugee crisis" didn't help. | | Be the Global Briefing Editor! | | | Hello loyal newsletter readers, Fareed here. Are you (or is somebody you know) eager? Ambitious? Do you have a passion for foreign policy? Are you a great reader of all things international? Can you write and edit well? If you answered "yes" to all of the above, please apply to be the next editor of this newsletter. | | | | | | |
