| | | | Fareed: This Is How America Should Respond to China's Rise | | "The Trump administration has many of the right instincts on China," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. But it needs a much better strategy.
"Beijing has taken advantage of free trade and the United States' desire to integrate China into the global system. The administration is right to push back and try to get a fundamentally different attitude from China on trade," Fareed writes.
Yet "history tells us that if China is indeed now the United States' main rival for superpower status, the best way to handle such a challenge lies less in tariffs and military threats and more in revitalization at home. The United States prevailed over the Soviet Union not because it waged war in Vietnam or funded the contras in Nicaragua, but because it had a fundamentally more vibrant and productive political-economic model. The Soviet threat pushed the United States to build the interstate highway system, put a man on the moon, and lavishly fund science and technology."
| | The Khashoggi Case Should Teach the West a Lesson. It Likely Won't | | | Some might be tempted to think that the disappearance – and alleged murder – of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul "will change the way the world now deals with Mohammad bin Salman and other autocrats in the region," writes Anthony Bubalo in The New Republic. Don't bet on it.
"Since the end of the Arab uprisings Western countries have reembraced regional dictators. In Egypt, for example, the Sisi regime has jailed thousands of dissidents. That has not stopped the French government, which likes to pose purer than the Trump administration on such matters, from selling Egypt arms. Embracing autocrats is seen, as it always has been, as pragmatic and prudent, both for stability's sake and for capitalism's. These regimes, it is claimed, are resilient: Western governments have no choice but to deal with them. But how truly resilient are the Middle East's autocrats, even young ones such as Muhammad bin Salman?" | | The Bavaria Election Is More than Just Regional Politics | | | Residents of Bavaria head to the polls on Sunday. But this isn't just any regional election, writes Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times. The repercussions will likely be felt far beyond a single German state.
The "vote is being closely watched as a referendum on [Chancellor Angela] Merkel's migration policy — and a measure of how much German and European politics are being reshuffled by feelings over migration, by the rise of the far right and by the collapse of the political center," Bennhold writes.
"Three years after more than a million migrants started arriving in Germany, a noisy and at times ugly election campaign in Bavaria has crystallized into perhaps the clearest battle of values yet." | | Why the World Should Be Watching Cameroon | | Cameroon's long-serving president, Paul Biya, doesn't get the same attention that Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe did. But as he works to secure himself another term following last week's tense election, the world should be paying far more attention, The Financial Times editorializes.
"The unraveling of this religiously divided and multi-ethnic country has the potential to destabilize swaths of central and west Africa — it is the bridge between the two. The unleashing of the country's enormous economic potential, would by contrast, provide a boon to the whole region," the FT says.
"Yet, there has been a near complete absence of international engagement. Rather than leveraging their influence to nudge Mr Biya to the door, successive French governments have served as his protector. If this was short-sighted a quarter century ago, when the seeds of today's crisis were sown, it is even more so now."
| | That Big Climate Report Is Probably Worse than You Think | | | Is the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as bad as you might have been hearing? Actually, it's probably even worse, writes David Wallace-Wells for New York Magazine. "Because the numbers are so small, we tend to trivialize the differences between one degree and two, two degrees and four. Human experience and memory offers no good analogy for how we should think about those thresholds, but with degrees of warming, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don't want to see even one," he writes. "At four degrees, there would be eight million cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone. Global grain yields could fall by as much as 50 percent, producing annual or close-to-annual food crises. The global economy would be more than 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change…Our current trajectory, remember, takes us higher still, and while there are many reasons to think we will bend that curve soon…it is worth remembering that, whatever you may have heard about the green revolution and the price of solar, at present, global carbon emissions are still growing." | | Why Europe Doesn't Have a Google | | Europe is unlikely to get its own tech titan to rival the likes of Google or Baidu, The Economist's Charlemagne columnist argues. To understand why, look at the continent's past.
"Of the world's 15 largest digital firms, all are American or Chinese. Of the top 200, eight are European. Such firms matter. They operate dominant online platforms and are writing the rules of the new economy," The Economist says.
"Europe's history explains the lag. In the 18th century, its lack of standardization made it the cradle of the industrial revolution. Rules and markets varied. Entrepreneurs who did not find support or luck in one country…could find it in another. All this created competition and variety. Today, however, Europe's patchwork is a disadvantage. New technologies require vast lakes of data, skilled labor and capital. Despite the EU's single market, in Europe these often remain in national ponds. Language divides get in the way. Vast, speculative long-term capital investments that make firms like Uber possible are too rarely available on European national markets." | | | | | | |
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