| | | | In an Emergency, US and Iran Need Ways to Talk | | | Tensions with Iran have only heated up, and writing about how a war could be avoided, Jon B. Wolfsthal makes a practical recommendation at LobeLog: Set up some communication channels. Should "ships collide, airplanes stray off course, or some other unanticipated interaction between our forces take place, the two countries don't have a clear playbook in place to avoid a conflict," he writes. Politically, the US may have crossed a Rubicon with the 2015 nuclear deal, Ariane Tabatabai and Elisa Catalano Ewers write at Foreign Policy: President Trump's critics may be calling for him to deescalate and revive the deal, but "too much has happened" for that to be realistic, they write. | | The US Has Armed Its Gulf Allies. Now What? | | | The war in Yemen marks a departure for the US, writes Elana DeLozier in the Hoover Institution's Caravan: After selling loads of weapons to its Gulf allies—in some cases, more planes than there were trained pilots to fly them—it is now finding out what happens when US weapons are unleashed without US oversight. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pursued their own goals in Yemen, making the US responsible, by association, in the eyes of the world, for what happens there. A key ingredient is missing: US input and oversight. When NATO allies go to war, there's some degree of consensus and shared responsibility; in the Middle East, less-experienced US allies are now pursuing their own agendas, and civilian casualties have resulted. The answer, DeLozier suggests, is that the US should think more carefully about preserving leverage in situations like this and "clarify that it is in its national interest to support allies, but not necessarily to support their wars." | | | Voters will go back to the polls on Sunday in Istanbul, after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government annulled the prior mayoral-election results upon his party's defeat. As Nate Schenkkan writes in Foreign Affairs, the loss has destabilized Erdoğan's party a bit, causing it to waver between its nationalist message and softer appeals. Erdoğan's party faces a conundrum, as it squares off against opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu, Schenkkan writes: "you cannot truly win an election you've already lost." Either Erdoğan's AKP loses again (and loses face) or wins amid a cloud of illegitimacy. Gönül Tol of the Middle East Insitute agrees, writing that if Erdoğan's AKP candidate wins, "voters' faith in the electoral process will suffer another blow," while a win by İmamoğlu would give the opposition an opening to govern well and crack Erdoğan's political base. | | Fareed: Hong Kong's Protests Remind Us of China's Fragility | | | While no one knows how the story of Hong Kong's protests will end, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, "it highlights something we tend to forget: the fragility of the Chinese political system." China's economic growth has been impressive, but unlike other countries that have gotten richer, China has not turned toward democracy, bucking a global trend. China may offer cultural arguments for why its autocratic system is the right fit, but Hong Kong and Taiwan both serve as reminders that Chinese societies can and do prefer democracy. With millions in Hong Kong making that preference clear, Fareed writes, "it might well turn out that the trade war with the United States is one of [President] Xi's lesser problems." | | 'Digital Authoritarianism' on the Rise | | | In a New America Foundation essay, Justin Sherman notes that authoritarian countries are exporting technologies that help governments control their citizens—by using AI for facial recognition, for instance, or screening tools to monitor Internet traffic for government criticism. Along with it, Sherman writes, governments like China are exporting their notions of how the Internet should be run: Where the West has focused on "freedom," expression, and net neutrality, "autocrats have upheld the notion of 'cyber sovereignty,'" he writes. While it'll be worth watching how countries act, it's also worth paying attention to how they talk. Digital autocracies prefer different, more sovereignty-driven language in international agreements and in international bodies like the UN, as the rules of the road are agreed upon through institutions, and one can tell where different countries stand by how they talk about how the Internet should be governed. | | | | | | |
