| | | | To Understand Why We're Divided, Look Here, and Here, and Here… | | | Anyone wanting to understand the biggest political dividing line in America could just as well look in Thailand or Turkey, writes Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Think "metropolitan elites" vs rural populists. "The split between a metropolitan elite and a populist hinterland is clear in Western politics. Less often noticed is that the same divide increasingly defines politics outside the West — spanning places with very different cultures and levels of development, such as Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Egypt and Israel," Rachman writes. "In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, a Trump-style populist, won power after running against the liberal elite of 'imperial Manila.' In Thailand, politics over the past decade has been defined by a bitter and sometimes violent split between Bangkok, the capital, and the rural north." "Resurgent nationalism can raise international tension, but the widening urban-rural divide suggests that the most explosive political pressures may now lie within countries — rather than between them." | | No, We Don't Need Another NATO | | | President Trump's remark during his press conference Monday with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte that he would set "no preconditions" for meeting Iran's leadership comes as the White House reportedly mulls the potential for an "Arab NATO" to help counter Iranian influence, Reuters suggests. Such an organization would be a terrible idea, writes Daniel Larison for The American Conservative. "It is difficult to see how a new alliance (tentatively named the Middle East Strategic Alliance) would fare any better than the existing Gulf Cooperation Council, which has been badly split by the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. It is even harder to see why Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar would want to join an explicitly anti-Iranian alliance," Larison writes. "A new alliance would represent more unnecessary and potentially costly commitments from the US, and it would tie the US even more closely to reckless despotic clients that have become liabilities. If it goes ahead, it would represent the intensification of almost everything wrong with US foreign policy in the Middle East, and it will sooner or later drag the US into more regional wars." | | Will the West Care About Khan's Biggest Challenge? | | | Even if he succeeds in finding support for a majority coalition, Imran Khan won't have much say on the two biggest concerns the West has about Pakistan, namely militant groups and nuclear weapons, writes Jeffrey Gettleman for The New York Times. Instead, his biggest challenge will be addressing an economy in crisis. "Pakistan is facing a balance of payments crisis, its currency has rapidly devalued, its debt is soaring," Gettleman writes. "Economists say the steps the next prime minister must take are obvious but painful. The national budget (including the military's) needs to be cut, Pakistanis must pay more for energy, old state-run businesses need to be privatized and taxes — many more taxes — need to be collected. "According to the Pakistani government, last year less than one million out of Pakistan's 200 million people paid taxes." | | English: The Supermassive Black Hole of Languages | | | English is spreading its tentacles unlike any language before it. It's not just about the number of people who speak it, writes Jacob Mikanowski for The Guardian. It's what it's doing to other languages, too. "Almost 400 million people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more," Mikanowski writes. "Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models…German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology." "Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogeneous and a little more bland." | | The Zombie Monitors Leave the West in a Bind | | Cambodia's election Sunday, which saw Prime Minister Hun Sen's party win in a landslide, has been widely dismissed as deeply flawed. And it has left Western nations that have long invested in the country's future in a bind, writes Shibani Mahtani in The Washington Post.
"The challenge now for Western governments that have backed Cambodia's experiment in liberal multiparty democracy over the past quarter-century is to figure out how best to respond without completely alienating the country, punishing its poorest or pushing it toward a ready ally — its largest trade partner, China," Mahtani writes. "Similar zombie monitors have been reported in Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sudan, Tajikistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, to name but a few countries. The appeal of fake election observation groups is evidently spreading."
| | Why China's Megacities Are Too Mega for Its Government | | | The growth of China's biggest cities has been breathtaking, with at least 20 expected to have a population of at least 5 million by 2020. That growth is a little too breathtaking for the Chinese government, writes Henry Grabar for Slate. "Last year, for the first time in memory, the country's two largest cities, Beijing and Shanghai, officially got smaller. They are not falling out of fashion: Prices are as high as ever, and economic growth in each metropolis is more than 6 percent. Rather, they are being constrained by government directives to contain 'big city diseases'—the pollution, congestion, and resource competition (for apartments, schools, medical care, and, in Beijing's case, water) that plague fast-growing agglomerations. Each city has set a population growth cap," Grabar says. | | | | | | |
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