| | | | Fox Analyst Shows Republicans How to Handle Sondland's Incriminating Testimony | | US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland's Capitol Hill testimony indicated military aid and a presidential meeting were, indeed, held up in order to procure investigations into the Bidens and the 2016 election (at The New York Times, Noah Bookbinder calls it a "smoking gun")—but Fox News analyst Chris Stirewalt writes that this should come as a "relief" to Republicans.
"[A]nybody who didn't think those things were true after reading [President] Trump's transcript was either being facile or is a few chicken wings short of a dozen," Stirewalt writes. Rather than contesting the facts, Republicans should follow Democrats' playbook from Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment, he advises. Voters are more divided on whether Trump's conduct merits removal from office, and Republicans would do well to press that case instead, Stirewalt writes—but "that will require Republicans, including the president, to abandon their doctrine of denial and excuse. Sondland made doing so much easier today." | | For Ukraine, US Assistance Isn't Everything | | US military assistance, which President Trump allegedly held up in order to extract sought-after investigations, isn't the only thing rescuing Ukraine from Russia, Nolan Peterson writes at the conservative, Heritage Foundation site The Daily Signal. Peterson, a US Air Force veteran who has covered the conflict, writes that Ukraine's military deserves its own credit: "It was, in fact, the courage of Ukrainian soldiers, not U.S. military aid, which saved the country from disaster when Russia invaded in 2014."
Ukraine's military transformed itself from a partly volunteer force into a professionalized one that "learned how to be soldiers while on the front lines, under fire, with no formal training"—and it successfully beat back Russia's hybrid-warfare advance, which relied on separatists and non-uniformed forces. Eventually, Russia resorted to a conventional invasion, Peterson writes, proving Ukraine's military a success. US aid is important in that it signals support from a powerful ally, Peterson argues, but the US military could learn from how Ukraine's formerly "ragtag" forces countered Russian tactics. | | America's Economy Isn't the Most Competitive | | The US has long prided itself on free competition, but as Martin Wolf wrote recently for the Financial Times, a new book by French economist Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal, argues America's economy isn't so free: Monopolies dominate, and the result is inefficiency and higher prices.
Philippon's project began with an examination of why US cell phone plans are so expensive, Wolf writes, and it led him to larger answers: Concentration—the market share held by larger competitors within an industry—is much heavier in the US than in Europe. While that has meant more profit, it has also meant a greater markup of prices over the cost of labor, as Wolf lays out. There are a few reasons: Competition from China forced smaller businesses out of the US landscape; the rise of superstar companies like Walmart initially enhanced investment and productivity, but in the 2000s that reversed; and lobbying has entrenched advantages for big companies.
"As economists have known since Adam Smith, business on its own will pursue restraints on competition, and with great enthusiasm," Wolf writes. "The outcome is rentier capitalism, which is both inefficient and politically illegitimate." From cell-phone plans to health care, the argument goes, that's how the US is trending. | | Is ISIS Better Off Without Baghdadi? | | In an essay for the London Review of Books, Patrick Cockburn suggests it might be. "[A]fter IS captured Mosul in June 2014, almost every decision taken or endorsed by [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi was disastrous," Cockburn writes. Baghdadi made enemies of everyone in the world and in the region, Cockburn writes, aligning against other anti-Assad factions in Syria and attacking the Kurds without provocation.
More broadly, Cockburn writes that the Middle East is experiencing turmoil that might provide an open door for ISIS, though that prospect is far from certain. Protesters have been shot in Iraq, Lebanon is awash in its own demonstrations, and Kurdish control in northern Syria has been dashed by the US withdrawal. For ISIS, battlefield victories "now seem far off, but the removal of al-Baghdadi may make it easier for IS to adapt to circumstances that are moving in its favour." | | A GPS Mystery in Shanghai | | "Nobody knows who is behind this spoofing, or what its ultimate purpose might be," Mark Harris writes in the MIT Technology Review—but someone is spoofing the GPS-powered location signals of ships in Shanghai. Russia is believed to have interfered with GPS signals before (Elisabeth Braw wrote for Foreign Policy about jammed signals in Norway and Finland, and a report by the group C4ADS detailed spoofing in Syria), but this is different.
Previous known episodes involved either jamming (blocking signals entirely), or fooling GPS receivers into thinking ships in an area were all at a single point, Harris writes. But in Shanghai, the false locations follow a pattern experts have dubbed "crop circles," centering mysteriously around a petrochemical manufacturer. Given the reliance on GPS for military applications and sea navigation, the advancement in spoofing would appear to be notable. Theories include a "sophisticated electronic warfare system" developed by a government, or that illegal sand dredgers could be responsible. "But one thing is for certain," Harris writes: "there is an invisible electronic war over the future of navigation in Shanghai, and GPS is losing." | | | | | | |
