| | | | | If a slow post-crash recovery and high unemployment have driven politics for much of the last decade, what are we to make of the current jobs boom across advanced economies? Two thirds of them enjoy record-high employment levels, The Economist recently noted, writing that "unemployment, once the central issue of political economy, has all but disappeared from the political landscape in many countries." In a Project Syndicate op-ed, Nobel-winning economist Michael Spence seeks to put the boom in context: Unemployment "can no longer be considered sufficient to measure the health of an economy, let alone the well-being of its labor force," he writes, arguing that economic grievances have not gone away. With employment at peak levels, it's just that workers worry now about "a wide range of areas, including security, health and work-life balance, income and distribution, training, mobility, and opportunity." In other words, high employment may have magnified the importance (political and otherwise) of things like inequality and overall well-being. | | The Dangers of 'Great-Power' Thinking | | | For all the recent talk of world politics slipping back into a "great-power" era—reminiscent of pre-World War times, when empires, unbound by international rules, clashed out of self-interest—Michael J. Mazarr writes in Foreign Affairs that things aren't so bleak. Today's major powers like China, Russia, and the US are industrialized and have nuclear weapons; they have reasons to prefer peace and economic development over all-out territorial wars, which, today, could destroy the world. What's more, that kind of thinking is deleterious for the US in particular. The more America imagines itself in unbound, militaristic competition with other countries, Mazarr writes, the more it sacrifices its advantages: leadership of an alliance system that holds most of the world's economic and military power, not to mention the international system it worked to build. | | | Eurozine Editor Simon Garnett makes a concise observation about the results of Europe's elections: "Eurosceptics are still nowhere near capable of challenging the pro-European centre. At the same time, that centre is now much more unstable, as liberals and greens increasingly become the preference of the liberal, youthful, metropolitan electorate." While some have argued that Europe's political center is dying, the rise of the far-right—and of those liberal parties along with it—simply means that Europe is entering a new era of political dealmaking, Susi Dennison writes at the European Council on Foreign Relations, echoing Garrett's point about the newly shaky middle. Members of the European Parliament will need to form new alliances with smaller-party kingmakers, in one-off coalitions over different issues, she writes; with Europe divided geographically over issues like immigration, the newly jumbled crowd of lawmakers headed to Brussels will have no choice but to work across new and different party lines. | | Asia's Most Powerful Countries, Ranked | | | The Australia-based Lowy Institute has published its "Power Index" of countries in the Asian sphere—stretching from Russia and India to the US—across a host of economic, military, and diplomatic measures. America takes the top slot, with China a close second, but the US lead is slipping (from an advantage over China of 10 points out of 100 last year, to 8.6 now). Other key takeaways, per the report's authors, are China's weak defense alliances, the potential for Japan and India to work together in containing China's rise, and Japan's position as a leader in diplomatic influence, as the region's new banner-carrier for the liberal international order. | | Will Trump Change Iran's Strategy? | | | Reasons to doubt President Trump's Iran strategy have been laid out by many commentators—Daniel DePetris of Defense Priorities, for instance, sums up the risks of backing Iran into a corner and casts doubt on the notion that Iran is as powerful, and as bad, as imagined—but Abdolrasool Divsallar lays out a potential longer-term consequence in a post at LobeLog: That "maximum pressure" will prompt Iran to fundamentally change its military doctrine. Iran has previously strategized for defensive deterrence, but as Trump's pressure campaign diminishes Iran's capabilities and raises the potential threats against it—including from non-US enemies who might seize on Iran's US-induced weakness—Iran may adopt a new military strategy to fit the new context, Divsallar writes, one of "maximum retaliation," aimed at posing threats farther afield from its borders and becoming more aggressive in general. That's dangerous in the short term, but it could also mean a new strategic paradigm for Iran moving forward. | | | | | | |
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