| | | | Europe Breaks Up—Or Does It? | | Europe's election results offered many possible takeaways—for instance, that the far right is "becoming a permanent feature," as Ivan Krastev put it in The New York Times, or that France's Emmanuel Macron was the real loser, after Marine Le Pen's party outdid his, as Hugo Drochon wrote in the New Statesman—but The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum assembled one of the more balanced.
Europe, she writes, "is becoming a single political space," with far-right and far-left parties copying their analogues in other countries, as Europe's political contestation morphs into one conversation. The far-right made gains (though not as big as some had predicted), but so did their opponents on the left, as a "backlash" has emerged; it's a time when old party structures may fail to hold, Applebaum predicts, as a new debate emerges. | | The Coming War Over Deepfakes | | In a Chatham House essay on deepfakes—false videos in which a speaker's face and voice are mimicked—James Ball poses a fundamental question: What happens to politics when no information can be believed? As disinformation gets more advanced, it also becomes more dangerous—imagine "what damage could be caused if words were put into the mouth of Benjamin Netanyahu and fake footage broadcast across the Arab world, or into the mouth of Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and shown across India, or Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn in Britain," Ball writes—and he predicts a coming arms race of sorts, in which new AI programs seek to detect and debunk ever-advancing AI-created falsities.
But that's less important than a more basic and difficult question, Ball writes: How to restore enough public trust so that false information isn't so readily accepted. | | | If humans are to successfully reduce carbon emissions, nuclear energy will need to be a part of the solution, according to a new report from the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Nuclear is the largest source of low-carbon energy worldwide in advanced economies, but due to its steady decline, the "overall share of clean energy sources in total electricity supply in 2018, at 36%, was the same as it was 20 years earlier," the agency writes. From the report:
Despite nuclear's cost efficiency (it yields cheaper electricity than renewables, the IEA finds), safety concerns have long hindered it, and this IEA graph shows how big disasters have led countries to stop building new plants:
 | | Time to Give Up on China? | | | For decades, America has assumed that China would gradually liberalize, open its markets, and improve its human-rights record—but that strategy simply hasn't worked, George Washington University's David Shambaugh advises in the latest episode of Rules Based Audio, a Lowy Institute podcast. It's a point echoed by Andrew A. Michta in an op-ed in The American Interest, which well encapsulates the pessimistic view of China: that it's bent on global economic and naval expansion and will come to dominate Eurasia through its Belt and Road Initiative. In all of this doom and gloom over China's trajectory, we also find a note of optimism from Michta, who advises that the West has the economic and political wherewithal to constrain China, by setting rules on trade and market access, if it can get its act together and successfully coordinate a response to China's rise. | | What Modi Teaches Us About Personality Cults | | | The recent election victory of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP "will be a case study in how to upend the conventional assumption of electoral politics that an incumbent is judged on his record of performance against his own promises," Shashi Tharoor writes in Project Syndicate. India's economy has lagged under Modi; he failed to deliver on promises of reform; and in spite of that, an army of WhatsApp propaganda warriors, a well-organized party machine, and "larger-than-life imagery" allowed him to emerge victorious—and has left Modi's "New India" dominated by the politics of his personality cult, Tharoor writes. | | | | | | |
