| | | | After Election, Eyes on Bibi's Scandal | | Now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has held onto power, attention will turn back to his corruption scandal, writes The Times of Israel's David Horovitz. Amid the horse-trading involved in forming a new government, Horovitz wonders if Netanyahu will secure support for passing a law in the Knesset to immunize himself from prosecution. Netanyahu's allies have said they wouldn't support such a move, but the prime minister himself didn't rule it out in a recent interview.
Depending on how things go with the pending corruption charges, Israel might need to hold another election sometime soon, The Atlantic Council's Shalom Lipner suggests. | | Reasons to Relax About Belt and Road | | China's Belt and Road Initiative has raised security concerns in the West, as China snaps up ports and gains influence around the world. But we should all calm down about it, Deborah Brautigam argues in The American Interest: Belt and Road isn't about Chinese global domination, but about meeting developing-world demand for infrastructure. (Plus, China owns a minority stake in most of those ports.)
On that point, a new paper from the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy agrees: Belt and Road is just a drop in the bucket of infrastructure investment needed by developing countries, the authors note. One thing America should worry about, however, is that Belt and Road's labor and business practices will become the global norm, they write. | | Trade War Casualty: Sub-Saharan Africa | | As the US/China trade war continues to weigh on the global economy, exports from sub-Saharan Africa will become a particular casualty, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies brief citing IMF predictions. As Chinese production slows amid the trade dispute, it will import fewer commodities, lowering their prices and hurting commodity-rich countries in Africa.
A rise in commodity prices had provided a bright spot in 2018 for countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger; the trade-war hit will come at a time when growth has already slowed in sub-Saharan Africa, from 2.5% in 2017 to 2.3% in 2018, according to the World Bank. | | | Until recently, carbon pricing was the top idea in climate policy; it enjoyed bipartisan support in the US as recently as 2008, when John McCain backed cap-and-trade as a presidential candidate. But David Leonhardt chronicles its collapse in The New York Times Magazine, as emissions-taxing and trading proposals have been shot down, from the US to Australia to France.
Several reasons are at play: Voters are more attuned to costs after the financial crisis, conservatives are less willing to compromise, and subsidizing renewals is just more popular than imposing taxes. As a result, climate activists have found more positive messages—focused on more renewables (as opposed to less carbon) and spending-based initiatives like the Green New Deal. Those ideas may be more popular, Leonhardt notes, but less effective in cutting emissions. | | Libya's Lesson on Regime Change | | As war and suffering escalate in Libya, the country has become a "nightmare" scenario of Western regime change, Daniel Larison writes in The American Conservative. Many, including President Obama, have lamented the aftermath of Moammar Gaddafi's ousting, but the country now includes all of the worst elements of foreign powers deciding to intervene: A former CIA asset is leading a siege on the UN-backed government, regional powers have treated Libya as their "playground" for eight years by backing rebel forces, and American forces have had to withdraw.
Whatever the outcome of the current fighting, Larison writes, the "legacy of upheaval and destruction" left by the 2011 intervention will endure. | | | | | | |
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