| | | | Cold Water on the Bahrain Conference | | As Jared Kushner convenes the Trump administration's Palestinian-investment conference in Bahrain, analysts have showered cold water on his approach. It's not clear that a political plan will ever emerge, Muriel Asseburg and Hugh Lovatt write at Foreign Policy—and "without a firm political marker to guide international investments, there is no guarantee that the Trump administration will seek to fund and support projects that genuinely help Palestinians or bolster a two-state solution."
Past efforts to inject cash into Palestinian territories have not produced results, Amira Hass writes in Haaretz—they've amounted to charity, to "mitigate the economic disasters that Israel has caused"—deeming Kushner's investment plan a "ship in the desert." The Middle East Institute's Gerald Feierstein goes so far as to suggest that attendees in Bahrain are mostly there to curry favor with the Trump administration—not to help solve Palestinians' enduring predicament.
Amid all this criticism, Kushner's approach does have its supporters, from The Jerusalem Post, which criticizes Palestinian leadership for boycotting the conference, to Israel's UN ambassador. | | Trump's War-Crisis Pattern | | | President Trump may pride himself on unpredictability, but his brinksmanship falls into a very predictable pattern, Robert E. Kelly writes for The National Interest. In the cases of Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and now Iran, Trump's moves can be diagrammed in four steps, Kelly writes: Trump first inflames tensions where no immediate threat exists, then makes "outsized demands," after which divisions emerge between the president and his hawkish advisers, before he finally demurs on military action.
Trump is obviously "gun-shy," despite his threats, and the predictability of this cycle is increasingly obvious to the rogue states Trump seeks to confront, Kelly concludes. | | Brexit: An Idea of the Past | | A hard Brexit is being sold based on a 1990s worldview that no longer holds true, Gideon Rachman writes in a Financial Times column. That's when leading Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage seem to have formed their outlooks, he writes; Brexit would be a sound idea if the world were still headed for freer trade, China were simply an emerging market, and the US were an unflinching "anchor" for the West.
But none of that is true anymore. As the world moves into a protectionist era, with trade blocs poised to raise steeper barriers, it is "the worst possible time for the UK to consider leaving its own" bloc, the EU, which happens to make "almost all of the modern threats—from a resurgent Russia to climate change and trade wars" easier to deal with. | | In Defense of 'National Developmentalism' | | Somewhere between open-borders progressivism and Trumpian protectionism lies the right response to globalization, Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind write in the latest issue of American Affairs.
Dubbed "national developmentalism," the idea is to embrace international competition, reject the notion that free trade and unregulated markets are always good, and use tariffs and subsidies selectively to boost industries that add the most value. It's a blend of liberal and conservative impulses that both prizes big firms and sees the government play a more active role in guiding economic strategy; it's how the US, Germany, and Japan all got rich in the first place, Atkinson and Lind write. | | The US pressure campaign against Iran could pose problems in Iraq, Alex Vatanka writes in Foreign Affairs. Others have noted the presence of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and the potential for retaliation within Iraq by Iranian proxies, but Vatanka outlines the deep political and trade ties the two countries enjoy. With the US ratcheting up sanctions, Tehran is turning toward Iraq to fill in the trade gaps, and the two countries are interconnected enough that complying with US sanctions will be difficult for Baghdad.
If Washington forces Iraq to choose between Iran and the US, Vatanka warns, it could backfire. | | | | | | |
