| | | | A Dangerous Election for Israel? | | On Sept. 17, Israel will vote for the second time this year, and Chuck Freilich warns in a Haaretz op-ed that the election could be Israel's last as a Jewish democracy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's West Bank annexation plan, if enacted, would spark Palestinian violence and erode Israel's Jewish majority, Freilich writes—all while Israel's democratic norms are already declining.
Netanyahu has shifted Israel's consensus away from negotiating for peace, Nasser bin Nasser writes at the Middle East Institute, while The Economist warns that even if Netanyahu doesn't follow through with annexation, he's at least normalized the idea. | | A New Era of Trump Foreign Policy? | | John Bolton's exit signals a new phase of US foreign policy, Thomas Wright suggests at The Atlantic, as President "Trump wants to write a new chapter, closing the one marked 'Militarism and Maximum Pressure' and opening one called 'Dealmaking and the Pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize.'" We're in for a whirlwind era of free-form summitry, Wright proposes, predicting a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will arrive soon.
Writing for The New Yorker, Susan Glasser asks whether Bolton's exit really matters. Given that Trump follows his impulses anyway, he might as well consider not having a national security advisor at all, Glasser writes. | | How Hong Kong Can End Its Chaos | | | As protests continue in Hong Kong, William Overholt writes in the Nikkei Asian Review that the only way out is for Beijing to recommit to Hong Kong's independence and grant its leaders some flexibility. The alternative, Overholt writes, is international business fleeing the city, "ending Hong Kong as we know it."
In an editorial, Bloomberg suggests some compromises, such as creating a forum for citizens to air grievances about police violence, offering prosecutorial leniency to nonviolent protesters, and allowing public debate of electoral reforms. Writing for CNN, Michael Bociurkiw argues that Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam should resign and that city leaders need to get creative in addressing housing costs and inequality. | | Will Huawei Sell Its 5G Tech? | | | After Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei told The Economist his company would be willing to sell its 5G technology to a Western competitor, for a one-time fee, the magazine asks whether his plan could work. While such a deal would alleviate spying concerns and remove pressure from Western countries to choose between 5G connectivity and their own allies, the magazine writes that it's not clear Beijing would allow such a sale (5G tech, after all, is a point of national pride) or that any firms are in position to buy it. | | Inequality Is Here to Stay | | As inequality rises, Craig Zabala and Daniel Luria argue in the most recent issue of American Affairs that the economy is simply returning to its natural state. After the Gilded Age, they write, inequality was staved off thanks only to a "perfect storm"—of lost wealth by the upper class, the New Deal, strong unions, and war spending—that would be hard to replicate.
"In retrospect, the four and a half decades from 1933 to 1978 were a historical aberration," they write. "The longer-term trend toward more inequality in capitalist economies, which prevailed before this period, has resumed after it. That leads us to conclude that there may well be no technocratic or tax policy fix for capitalism's tendency to generate ever more inequality." | | | | | | |
