| | | | Fareed: While We're All Focused on Impeachment, Trump Is Upending US Foreign Policy | | "While impeachment has been dominating the headlines, we are missing a set of stories about US foreign policy that might prove equally consequential," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "The Trump administration has been doubling down on a policy of unilateralism and isolationism—a combination that is furthering the abdication of American leadership and the creation of a much more unstable world."
That policy includes demands that South Korea and Japan pay more to house US troops, failed overtures to North Korea, outsourcing Middle East policy to strongmen, and undermining America's commitment to European NATO allies.
Russia and Iran are often blamed for undermining the global order, Fareed writes, but "the greatest threat to the liberal international order right now is surely the Trump administration, which is systematically weakening the alliances that have maintained peace and stability and rejecting the rules and norms that have helped set some standards in international life." | | As The Economist recently wrote, highlighting the bleak tone at a Stockholm conference on Chinese-Western dialogue, Western hopes of a liberalized China have never been dimmer. Repression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang hasn't helped; nor have Hong Kong's riots. Some observers have struck a similar note on these problems: that conserving national unity (and the legitimacy it confers) is driving President Xi Jinping's various crackdowns.
"Regional conflicts in the future are the single biggest threat that China does not want to face again," George Friedman writes for Geopolitical Futures, posing Xinjiang and Hong Kong as major problems for Xi—at a time when the trade war, in Friedman's best guess, might be driving anti-Xi dissent in the Communist Party ranks. China's national myth rests heavily on its "Great Unification," a period of Chinese history lasting "intermittently from the second century BC to today," writes Weizhan Meng in the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly; in times past, it was the ability to unify China that gave a dynasty its legitimacy. Today, the US misperceives China as hostile to democracy, Meng writes: In reality, China simply prioritizes unification, and Chinese harbor anti-US views not because of any harping on liberalism and democracy, but because they believe the US seeks to split China, based on America's postures toward Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—especially given US ships blocked Taiwan's reincorporation, under President Truman. (And while China's government is viewed as repressive and anti-democratic, Meng writes, online speech reveals strains of sharper nationalism and accusations that Beijing is, on the contrary, too weak against the West.)
Those impulses may factor into Xi's philosophy, which Tanner Greer portrays, in a Foreign Policy op-ed, as a mix of cultural nationalism and Maoist-communist governing ideology. Reviewing François Bougon's 2018 book Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping, Greer writes that Xi's Maoist nostalgia was shaped in his humble youth; Xi's project now blends instilling self-sacrifice, protecting China from outside forces that could split it apart, and pursuing a "culture war" to insist on a homogeny that can hold the country together. | | Middle-Class Countries Will Thrive in the Automation Age | | Artificial intelligence and robotics—predicted to usher in a so-called "fourth industrial revolution"—will be a boon to middle-income countries, Richard Baldwin tells host Kelsey Munro in the latest episode of the Lowy Institute's "Rules Based Audio" podcast. While it's hard to say any jobs will be automated outright (tasks will be, but not entire positions, in Baldwin's view), Baldwin argues that a revolution in telework will lead to a new wave of globalization in the skilled services sector.
In the developing world, there are "lawyers, doctors, bookkeepers, accountants, tax fillers, financial report writes, who in the developing world are way underpriced by international standards, and as the barriers come down, they'll start to export" those services, Baldwin says. Rich countries have plenty of workers "in those same professions who are overpriced by international standards, and as the barrier comes down, they will have to find something else to do." In other words, middle-income countries with good Internet connections and strong professional service sectors will be the big winners. (Catch those comments around the 19:00 time mark.) | | The Other Class War: The 10% Vs. the 1% | | In the latest issue of American Affairs, Julius Krein (the journal's young, Trump-supporter-turned critic founder) writes that the "real class war" isn't between the working class and the elites but between a marginalized professional class (the 10%) and the ultra-rich (the 1% or, even more acutely, the 0.1%).
"Since 1979, the real annual earnings growth of the top 1 percent has more than tripled that of earners at 10 percent, while growth for the 0.1 percent is, in turn, more than twice that of the 1 percent," Krein points out—meaning a bigger division between the top strata than between the former elites and the working class. As a result, a disaffected upper-middle professional class has drifted from being Reagan supporters in the 1980s to the camps of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. These semi-elites are now driving politics against the oligarchs to whose club they no longer belong, Krein writes, with some sharp words for the latter grouping. | | | | | | |
