| | | | Why China Feels Good About the Trade War | | China expert Andrew Nathan details in Foreign Affairs some reasons why China feels it's winning the trade war: China has already replaced US agricultural imports, tariffs may hit US workers harder than Chinese, and its state-run economy can create new jobs more easily to absorb damage.
China is taking a long view, Nathan writes, with President Xi predicting "containment and provocation" from the US until 2049, when China will (he believes) surpass it. "Trade war or no trade war, decoupling or no decoupling, China is on the path to economic independence from the United States," Nathan writes; consequently, when Xi and President Trump next talk, the Chinese leader might offer Trump a worse deal than the one China has left on the table.
While Trump appears bent on rectifying the US-China trade deficit, Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng write for Project Syndicate that US multinationals will feel the most heat. They reap outsized sales revenue from their investments in China, and if the trade war drags on, those firms stand to suffer most, they write. | | How to Deescalate With Iran | | Tension between the US and Iran "has the world on edge," Mahsa Rouhi writes at The National Interest, as Iran has calculated that President Trump will shy from war before his reelection campaign, while Trump has offered a "mishmash" of pressure and diplomacy.
Rouhi's solution: Each side should make clear its red lines and what it would concede in order to begin negotiations. "Without clear intent and perceptions, the stalemate will only continue because neither side has the domestic political space to go out on a limb for an uncertain outcome," she writes. | | | Emmanuel Macron is confronting populism at home (in the gilets jaunes) and abroad (in Europe's nationalist parties), and two new essays delve into how the young French president is faring.
In The New Yorker, Lauren Collins profiles Macron as a sometimes-intransigent character who can act defiantly in the face of criticism—who has nonetheless mostly succeeded with his "grand débat" town-hall tour, effectively taking his medicine. "What is Macronism?" Collins asks, seeking to encapsulate his governing philosophy. "It's a form of machine learning, in which Macron and his apparatus try to perform the task of reforming France without having been pre-programmed."
Domestic unrest has, ironically, accompanied a strengthening of Macron's position, Didier Fassin surmises in the London Review of Books, as France's traditional parties have sunk, even as the crisis has revealed Macron's "limitations." Macron uses populism in his own way—albeit of a centrist variety—and displays some authoritarian tendencies, Fassin writes; his aims at broader influence face uncertain prospects, as he presents Europe with an unnecessarily stark choice between progressivism and nationalism. | | Why ISIS Could Come Back Even Stronger | | ISIS "is not defeated," according to a report by the Institute for the Study of War, which points out a grim reality: ISIS "is stronger today than its predecessor Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was in 2011, when the U.S. withdrew from Iraq"—which suggests it could come back stronger, compared to its initial rise out of AQI's ashes.
As its territory collapsed, the group had plenty of time to disperse, vanishing into Sunni Arab communities and refugee camps, while planning a comeback. ISIS has as many as 30,000 supporters, the authors write, while AQI had only 700 when the US withdrew in 2011. ISIS is already turning back toward insurgency, while launching "spectacular" attacks abroad, they find. The bottom line: America shouldn't withdraw from Syria and is disregarding the ISIS threat at precisely the wrong time. | | Can Europe Save Multilateralism? | | That's the question posed in a new policy brief from the European Council of Foreign Relations. As the "US, China, and Russia have each sought to challenge or disrupt the existing, post-1945 world order," it could be up to Europe to preserve a functioning multilateral system. Doing so will require Europe to stop America from undermining the WTO; consolidate diplomatic power among the UK, France, and Germany—and get more European countries to work in concert with those three; forge internal agreement over migration; and work together at the UN Security Council.
Europe must also recognize that the US and China increasingly see it as a "target to split or co-opt" and prepare itself for that pressure, authors Anthony Dworkin and Richard Gowan find. | | | | | | |
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