Tim Talks Politics - The Weekly Brief, August 17, 2018
The Weekly Brief - August 17, 2018
Middle East on the back burner?
The Mid East factored large in this week’s reporting on US foreign policy, especially after President Trump signed the Defense Department’s budget into law on Monday. The authorization act is more in line with the 2017 National Defense Strategy that emphasizes the threats posed by Russia and China over Mid East conflicts.
With that as context, it’s important to consider the relative power positions of allies and adversaries in the conflict ridden region.
The Council on Foreign Relations assesses Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed Bin Salman as politically weak in light of a diplomatic row with Canada, and Der Spiegel frets over the possibility of Iran collapsing under external and internal pressures.
The good news is that global terror attacks are down, even as groups like ISIS remain a threat.
Lawfare takes a unique approach to discussing the future of the Middle East by analyzing the prospects of federalist models of government in the region in a series of thought provoking essays.
Afghanistan boiling over?
The Afghanistan conflict continues to simmer, which is not good for anyone. War on the Rocks posts an article outlining how negotiating an end to the fighting with the Taliban won't achieve what is needed to give Afghanistan peace and stability. Events on the ground this week seem to bear this analysis out.
ISIS continues to make efforts at influencing fighting in Afghanistan, claiming a school bombing in Kabul this week. The Long War Journal reports that Al-Qaeda continues to maintain a strong alliance with the Taliban, and this comes after another week of heavy fighting between the Taliban and government forces saw the Taliban overrun government forces in two northern districts. Solutions to the conflict thus remain uncertain, but desperately needed.
Turkey gets its goose cooked
America’s diplomatic row continues with Turkey and the Turkish lira and economy continue to tank, this time in the face of American tariffs. Uncharacteristically generous, the Council for Foreign Relations suggests that Donald Trump seems to be the first American President to really understand Turkey and engage it accordingly. Another article from the Council on Foreign Relations notes that there's a long history of the West not understanding Turkey so this might be a step in the right direction.
November and the future of parties
Last week, I looked at studies that analyzed the ongoing primary elections. The main thrust of that series of studies was looking at the shape the Democratic Party was taking and asking the question “Is its Progressive left wing taking over or not?” The studies I cited suggest that establishment Democrats are doing better than their were more left-wing competitors. This week, FiveThirtyEight confirms that initial analysis.
Shifting attention over to the Republicans we find that, similarly, more establishment candidates and incumbents are holding their own against more Trumpist insurgents. Apparently, support for the Trump presidency is not necessarily a winning strategy.
The presence of such data hasn't stopped many, especially on the left, from arguing for a more leftist position for the Dems. The Atlantic argues that the Democratic party needs to develop a “race-class narrative” as a potential winning strategy.
What's interesting to me in all this is to consider the results of decisions and strategies based on bad data at assumptions. This doesn't necessarily mean that Democrats don't win or that they don't move to the left, or Republicans don't become the party of Trump. All those things could happen, but the initial data seems to suggest that they might not happen for the reasons we think.
Happy Birthday Trade War!
The trade war with China is reaching its first anniversary, which surprised me a little bit. It’s been a year already? So with a year gone it's helpful to think about the effects of the trade war. The American Interest reports that, as to be expected, there are losers on both sides, including American companies who use steel in their products.
China, itself, is also taking hits. Asia Times reports that the Chinese economy shows signs of cooling and tariffs likely slowed China's massive Belt and Road development project. Like any war, a trade war does have winners and losers, but winners are not necessarily defined by who gains more, but rather by who loses the least. In the US-China trade war, that question seems to remain unanswered.
The Ignoble Truths
A lot was said about the Catholic Church’s handling of abuse scandals this last week but the Catholic Church isn't the only institutionalized religion dealing with corrupt clergy. Asia Times reports on systemic corruption among Buddhist monks Thailand.
Synthetic biology and the future conflict
This didn’t really fit in anywhere else, but it's really worth paying attention to trends in synthetic biology. Many observers believe that this field will be a major development field economically and scientifically in the coming decade but there's been comparatively little written about its security defense implications.
Cybersecurity and society
When people think about cybersecurity and cyber warfare, they mostly think about preventing major hacking attacks on hard targets like infrastructure. However, as those infrastructure targets become more difficult to effect, cybersecurity issues are shifting to include the use cyberspace for communication and observation.
Daniel Byman of the Hoover institution writes a paper proposing an intelligence reserve corps for countering terrorism recruitment online, and the Council for Foreign Relations discusses the threat posed to civil society by regimes using cyber warfare to silence civil society groups. In both instances it's less dramatic than hacking a power grid but perhaps more relevant to the relationships between governments, citizens, and states.