| | | | With Iran, Trump Is in a Corner | | | "This is not a drill," Joe Cirincione and Mary Kaszynski warn in a post at LobeLog: President Trump has maneuvered dangerously close to war with Iran. Among their main concerns is that he'll be shamed into a military strike by Gulf allies who want a US war with their Persian rival; "It's easy, they will whisper, unless, of course, the president is afraid to strike," Cirincione and Kaszynski write. Trump's approach to Iran has been similar to his "Fire and Fury" strategy with North Korea, they surmise. The problem is that Iran "has called Trump's bluff," Seth J. Frantzman writes in The National Interest, presenting the US president with his "first real nightmare scenario." It's time to accept that Tump's maximum-pressure campaign won't produce concessions, Masoud Movahed writes in a Boston Review essay examining the US sanctions strategy. Trump may not want a war, but he has "navigated himself into a dangerous corner," Mohaved writes, concluding that the only way for both sides to save face and deescalate is for Trump to lift sanctions and try to renegotiate the 2015 nuclear deal. | | The Huawei Ban Has Sparked Chinese Self-Reliance | | | As Fareed has argued, President Trump's blacklisting of Huawei may well spur China to develop its own technologies, independent of Western-made microchips and software. In a Foreign Affairs essay, Lorand Laskai details the moves China is making in that direction. "[T]he Trump administration's actions against ZTE and Huawei have turbocharged China's self-reliance drive, aligning the interests of government and industry," Laskai writes, noting that while China's government has favored "indigenous innovation" of technology since before Trump's actions, some industry giants had dismissed the idea, preferring to take advantage of global supply chains. But since Trump's Huawei ban, industry has gotten on board with building Chinese tech from the ground up. China faces disadvantages in the short term (Chinese-made microchips, for instance, are currently inferior), but the country has a history and culture of self-reliance that could serve it well over the long haul, Laskai writes. | | China's Missing Trade-War Leverage | | | Observers have worried that if the trade war escalates, China has plenty of strings to pull—but none of them are really all that threatening, Salvatore Babones writes in Foreign Policy. China could cut its US-soybean purchases, but in that case, Europe would pick up the slack; China could ban its exports of rare-earth metals, but a previous effort along those lines caused little pain; and China's $1.1 trillion in US Treasury bond holdings may sound scary, but that sum pales in comparison to the $22 trillion in US debt outstanding, and the market could easily absorb a Chinese dumping of US bonds. "The simple fact is that China needs the United States more than the United States needs China. In itself, that's no reason to start a trade war," Babones writes. "But if the trade war really does heat up, there's little doubt who will win." | | Can Mid-Sized Powers Save the Day? | | | With Russia, China, and the US all turning away from liberalism, it might be up to mid-sized countries to uphold international rules and norms, Roland Paris writes in a new Chatham House report. France and Germany have sought to promote an "Alliance for Multilateralism," and Paris writes that "middle powers" like Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, South Korea, and the UK could band together to play the lead role in saving the liberal order. Efforts at cooperation between these countries have been "fragmented and uncoordinated," but agreement on things like preserving the Iran nuclear deal and resuscitating the Trans-Pacific Partnership indicate there's some hope. With better coordination, middle powers might be able to shape international norms on things like trade, cybersecurity, and detentions of foreign nationals, leveraging their collective power in a strategy of "plurilateralism," Paris suggests. | | | | | | |
