| | | | Why US Treatment of Migrant Kids Shouldn't Surprise Anyone | | The Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy on undocumented migrants sparked global condemnation — and left many questioning how America could treat immigrant families this way. For a clue, just look at how badly it treats its own children, suggests Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic.
"This is a country that professes to care about children at their youngest and most fragile. But here, for every 100,000 live births, 28 women die in child birth or shortly thereafter, compared with 11 in Canada. This ratio has more than doubled since 1990…Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women," Lowrey writes.
Meanwhile, "the United States has a higher child poverty rate than nearly all other OECD countries, two, three, or even four times as high as in nations comparable in terms of per capita income. As many as 1.5 million families caring for three million kids live on less than $2 per person, per day, in cash income."
| | The World's Biggest Refugee Crisis? America's Backyard | | | The images of migrant children being separated from their parents at the US border represent just the tip of the iceberg, write Robert Muggah, Maiara Folly and Adriana Abdenur for Americas Quarterly. Latin America is experiencing a "displacement crisis."
"Organized crime and violence is forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes every year. At least 17 of the top 20 most homicidal countries in the world are in Latin America and the Caribbean. And while the region has traditionally been welcoming to new arrivals, that spirit of solidarity is dissipating in part from the sheer scale of population displacement, which has overwhelmed response capacity at the national and municipal levels," they write.
"It is neither Syria nor South Sudan that faces the world's largest displacement crisis, but Colombia, where there were 7.3 million registered internally displaced people as of early 2017." | | Why Erdogan Needs to Go: The Economist | | | Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a breath of fresh air when he was first elected, in 2002. But power rots leaders — and it's time for Turkish voters to show him the door in Sunday's elections, The Economist argues.
When he came to power, Erdogan "showed that an Islamist party could govern with moderation; women in Turkey are free to wear what they like. The economy has boomed," The Economist writes. Fast forward to today, though, and an increasingly autocratic Erdogan is undoing many of his country's achievements.
"After a period of breakneck [economic] growth, a hard landing seems imminent. The war against Kurdish militants has resumed…As relations with NATO and the EU deteriorate, Mr Erdogan has struck up an alliance of convenience with Russia.
"The vicious attempted coup of July 2016 deserved to fail. But Mr Erdogan's revenge has been indiscriminate and disproportionate." | | Halting US "War Games" Is Playing with Fire | | The Trump administration this week appeared to make good on the President's summit vow to suspend "provocative" war games with South Korea. The dangers to the US go well beyond hurting its military readiness, write Abraham Denmark and Lindsey Ford in Foreign Policy.
"By training and exercising side by side, the United States and South Korea have built trust, interoperability, and the personal relationships that have sustained our alliance for decades. These relationships and the trust we've built don't only matter militarily; they have played a central role in sustaining our alliance through repeated political upheavals, disagreements, and economic disputes over the years, which the authors of this article have experienced firsthand," they write.
"The US alliance with South Korea, like our broader network of Asian alliances, also plays a stabilizing role in Asia. It has helped prevent further conflict on the peninsula and in the region for over six decades. We should not allow North Korea or China to suggest otherwise."
| | Europe's Populists Should Be Careful What They Wish For | | Populists in Europe should be careful what they wish for when they cheerlead German nationalism, writes Philip Stephens for the Financial Times. The country isn't about to return to its militarist past, but a Germany First approach to policy would leave the rest of Europe as the losers.
"Most Germans would probably spend less on defense. And why not? The nation is too powerful to be threatened by its neighbors. Berlin can always reach an accommodation with Moscow: Russian energy for German technology makes for a natural fit. Let Poland and others on the EU's eastern frontier pay for NATO if they feel threatened by Russia," Stephens writes.
"Germany is some way off reaching such judgments. Ms Merkel is still convinced — and rightly so — that the nation's long-term interests reside in liberal internationalism. The chancellor will not easily surrender her convictions. But she has been weakened. After 12 years, her time is running out."
| | How Trump Gets Space Wrong Even When He Gets It Right | | President Trump was onto something this week when he proposed creating a new military branch called the Space Force, writes Fred Kaplan for Slate. Unfortunately, it's the right problem, but the wrong solution.
"The US military depends on satellites for everything — for intelligence, surveillance, navigation, communications, even for the accurate guidance of its weapons (GPS satellites make 'smart bombs' smart) — but these satellites are vulnerable to attack and disruption," Kaplan writes.
Meanwhile, "we have neither firmly stated what we would do in the event of an attack on our vital satellites nor created (and visibly deployed) the means to carry out that response.
"Yes, we need to set that policy, and soon, but that should be the job of the political and military leaders who rely on the satellites — not on the officers of a special Space Force, who might have different priorities." - For another opinion on Trump's Space Force announcement, watch Fareed's interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson on GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
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