| | | | Fareed: Venezuela Tests Trump's Affinity for Putin | | Washington faces a big question over Venezuela, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column: "Will it allow Moscow to make a mockery of another US red line?"
President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have squared off amid Venezuela's crisis: Trump has publicly backed the head of Venezuela's National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the country's interim leader and has issued declarations "much stronger" than President Obama's red line on Syria, while Putin has propped up Maduro with military and economic support.
After the Mueller report, a "puzzle" remains over why Trump "has been unwilling to confront Putin in any way on any issue," Fareed writes, asking: "Will Venezuela be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?" | | In the Netherlands, a New Far-Right Party Is on the Rise | | The white-nationalist Forum for Democracy (FvD) is now the largest party in the Netherlands, after provincial elections last week, and we can expect it to influence Dutch politics "for years to come," writes Thijs Kleinpaste in Foreign Policy, profiling FvD's showman leader Thierry Baudet.
FvD will enjoy a majority in the upper house of the Dutch legislature, but we shouldn't conclude Dutch politics have taken a sudden right turn, Frida Ghitis writes at the World Politics Review; she chalks up the results, in part, to FvD capitalizing on last week's terrorist attack in Utrecht—and wonders if Baudet's movement will sustain itself, after finding a spotlight and the scrutiny that comes with it. | | | "Huawei's problem isn't Chinese backdoors," Wired's Lily Hay Newman writes: It's that buggy Huawei software lets anyone in.
As the US presses allies to keep Huawei out of their 5G networks, a British spy agency concluded again this week that Huawei's technology entails risks. But Newman points out that hackable gaps in the software weren't concessions to the Chinese government—they were just bugs. According to experts, she writes, most tech companies (Chinese or Western) wouldn't pass an audit like the UK conducted on Huawei's products. That should perhaps make us feel better about Huawei's intentions; about cybersecurity in general, not so much. | | AI Doesn't Have to Ruin the Future | | Robots may become our friends, yet: Although automation is poised to reduce jobs and exacerbate inequality, Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo write that it doesn't have to be that way, as plenty of AI technologies can help humans do their jobs better, rather than replacing them.
The problem is that AI is being developed by big firms focused largely on automating human tasks, rather than augmenting them—a market failure that may require policymakers to step in and push AI in a more human-friendly direction. | | Israel's Election Might Not Change Much | | If challenger Benny Gantz ousts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in April's elections, things might not change that much, Ian Bremmer writes at Time. Gantz "has offered voters a foreign-policy platform virtually identical to the Prime Minister's," taking a hard line on Iran and "avoiding promises" to work toward a two-state solution, writes Bremmer.
If differences do exist, the campaign's final stretch is likely to draw them out: The Jerusalem Post's Gil Hoffman writes that Monday's rocket attack from Gaza has refocused the election on security and will test each candidate. | | | | | | |
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