| | | | Could China Win a Nuclear Arms Race With the US? | | If President Trump wants to "outspend and out-innovate all others" on nuclear weapons, as he promised in his State of the Union speech, could the US actually do it? Trump's thinking reflects Reagan-era calculus about outspending the Soviet Union, writes Atlantic Council Executive Vice President Damon Wilson, but it ignores China, which might have the resources to sustain such an arms race today.
And China may become a more active threat: The South China Morning Post reports China might rethink its no-first-use policy on nukes.
Democrats and allies may be comforted by Trump's suggestion that he wants a race if there's no multilateral arms-reduction deal that includes China, writes The Atlantic Council's Alexander Vershbow, a former NATO deputy secretary general and US ambassador to NATO. | | In a Nuclear Standoff, Will Europe Be Caught in the Middle? | | If the US and Russia indeed have a nuclear-arms race, Europe may have more to fear than anyone. Controlling Russian and American nuclear arms has been paramount to European security for more than 30 years, and the Trump/Putin standoff makes things even worse than during the Cold War, when arms-reduction treaties were signed, Der Spiegel writes.
Some fear it will allow Moscow to weaken and divide NATO, and the end of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty poses tough questions for the alliance on how to respond, Senior Fellow Judy Dempsey writes at Carnegie Europe. | | | A Pentagon report has warned ISIS will likely regain territory if the US pulls of Syria, as President Trump has promised—and that it constitutes a "battle-hardened" group of fighters capable of fighting a "decentralized insurgency."
The president himself doesn't appear to be sold on that idea.
Today, the Trump said the US will announce "sometime, probably next week" that it has retaken all of the territory once held by ISIS, and in December he tweeted that "[w]e have defeated ISIS in Syria." After National Security Adviser John Bolton suggested ISIS wasn't yet done, in pledging the US would stay in Syria until it was, Trump again reasserted the US would leave while denying he'd promised a quick withdrawal.
Either "100%" of ISIS's territory has been captured, or it hasn't, but it's not clear Trump is on the same page as his generals and intelligence chiefs when it comes to ISIS's capabilities and the kind of threat it poses in Syria, with or without territory. | | Will Trump's World-Bank Pick Go After China? | | One thing we might expect from President Trump's nominee to run the World Bank, Treasury Undersecretary David Malpass, is scaled-back lending to China. If he's appointed as the bank's president by its board, The Wall Street Journal points out he'll enter with a record of trying to "wean" China off loans financed in part by the US—a good thing, in the Journal's view, as China throws around its own economic weight, via its Belt and Road initiative.
As far as the bank's broader direction goes, Malpass could scale it back, David A. Andelman writes for CNN, warning he could put Trump one step closer to setting the agenda in global development. | | Tempering Economic Expectations for Guaido | | A major criticism of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been his country's impoverishment despite vast oil wealth. It produces one tenth of what Saudi Arabia does, despite having the world's largest reserves, and the decline of its state-run oil company has accelerated under Maduro, who handed control of it to a general after a drop in investment and an exodus of oil executives under Chavez, The Wall Street Journal wrote this week.
But if a decimated oil sector is the key to Venezuela's desperate economy, which is the key to its political crisis, we shouldn't expect too much improvement too quickly if opposition leader Juan Guaido succeeds in taking leadership of the country, Lisa Viscidi and Nate Graham write in the World Politics Review: Oil revenues would look like a short-term fix for a new regime, but they'll take time to develop, with infrastructure damaged, production falling, and deep debt for Venezuela's state-run producer. | | | | | | |
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