| | | | Opposition leader Juan Guaido has risked arrest in returning to Caracas today, forcing yet another potential crisis point in Venezuela.
No one knows what will ultimately happen in Guaido's struggle against President Nicolas Maduro, but Javier Corrales writes in The New York Times that Venezuela's military remains the lynchpin. It's fragmented into different groups, and Guaido hasn't yet found a way to appeal to them sufficiently, while international actors scratch their heads over how to sway the military without using military force.
A peaceful outcome is in doubt, CNN's Nick Paton Walsh writes: "[T]he longer tension builds, the less likely a negotiated solution between Maduro, Guaido and their backers becomes, and the inevitable and ugly march towards a darker episode in this crisis is assured." | | Macron Wants to Remake Europe | | French President Emmanuel Macron offers a laundry list of ideas in a new op-ed published in 28 languages, calling on Europeans to save their continental project. Macron wants new European mechanisms to rethink collective defense, guard elections, standardize asylum rules, protect major companies, develop new technology, impose new minimum wages, and cut carbon emissions to zero … among other proposals.
Realistic or not, Macron proposes a "Conference for Europe in order to propose all the changes our political project needs, which is open even to amending the EU treaties"—in other words, reworking the EU's founding documents—and hints at (re)including the UK.
It's a broad reply to nationalism, ahead of the European Parliament elections slated for May, and it shows that Macron's challenges with populist discontent in France haven't detracted from the urgency of broader European problems, writes Francoise Fressoz of Le Monde; they are, in fact, inextricably linked. | | Nuclear escalation is clearly suboptimal, but Tom Nichols argues in Foreign Affairs that it's also pointless. Supporters of America's INF Treaty pullout may be right that Russia was cheating and China has intermediate-range nukes of its own, but Nichols asks an important question: What, exactly, does America get by freeing itself to match them?
To threaten Russia or China with an amped-up arsenal of smaller nukes, America would have to deploy them farther East than during the Cold War—in countries like Poland or the Baltics—and in Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. That would be "insanely provocative," enhance the risk of miscalculation, and make Asian allies (who would likely want none of this) ripe targets for Chinese nuclear first strikes in a crisis.
It makes sense to want nuclear parity if a war has already begun, Nichols writes, but it misses the strategic point of building up arms: To deter enemies and prevent a war from starting, in the first place.
| | Huawei Will Take Over, One Way or Another | | Forget, for a moment, America's international struggle to bar Huawei from building 5G networks; the company is "progressing more rapidly—and on more technology fronts—than any other business in the world," writes Will Knight in the MIT Technology Review. It's making strides in AI technology, in particular, as Huawei's AI chips, software, and cloud computing each rival those of industry leaders.
Just something to keep in mind, as 5G draws most of the focus: An AI race is happening, too, and Huawei has multiple avenues to compete with the other tech giants. | | As ISIS territory recedes in Syria, it's worth noting the reasons to fear the group could return. Hassan Hassan detailed them in the last issue of West Point's CTC Sentinel: ISIS could "find gaps" between areas controlled by various factions on the ground, he writes; there is evidence, according to Hassan, that ISIS retains loyalists in territory held by the Western-backed SDF; desert terrain can make counterinsurgency difficult; and the US withdrawal will likely happen before Eastern Syria is fully secured.
And ISIS isn't the only jihadist group to watch out for: There could be room for al-Qaeda's regional offshoot to reemerge in its place, Hassan warns. | | | | | | |
