| | | | Fareed: Afghanistan Hangs in the Balance | | | "The Trump administration's emerging deal with the Taliban has the potential to bring greater stability to Afghanistan, after an 18-year inconclusive war in that country," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "Or it could reignite the Afghan civil war, emboldening terrorist groups and plunging the nation into another decade of turmoil—which might then force the United States to return to the battlefield in large numbers." That possible deal could see the US withdraw a significant number of troops, and Fareed warns against making concessions that would be hard to reverse "while the Taliban makes paper commitments that it can easily violate." America can reduce its presence while still maintaining order, Fareed writes. "But first, Washington needs to make sure it doesn't just end the war but also wins the peace." | | Russia and China, Banding Together | | | In the face of American pressure, military cooperation between Russia and China "is set to become closer," suggests Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center. The two countries conducted joint air patrols over the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan for the first time last month, he points out, concluding that "US dual containment of Russia and China is producing a predictable result: the China-Russian strategic cooperation." China's rise could eventually worry in Russia, Dimitry Alexander Simes observes in The National Interest. "While Russia has its reservations about the implications of China's new military strength and its track-record of reverse engineering foreign technologies, its interest in forming a united front with Beijing to counterbalance the West is even greater," he writes. "Only one question remains: will it be this way for long?" | | Our 'Financial Twilight Zone' | | | The global economy, and the policymakers managing it, have "ended up sliding back in the financial twilight zone," Adam Tooze writes in a Foreign Policy essay. Unemployment is low (America's is 3.7%), but amid headwinds (the world economy is slowing down, and central banks are failing to reach inflation targets), monetary policymakers are scrambling to consider new means of stimulus, given that interest rates are already near rock bottom. It's a sign that "we have reached the limit of what monetary policy can be expected to do," Tooze writes, noting that calls for Europe's central bank to buy stocks (which Japan's has already done), prompted the Financial Times' Merryn Somerset Webb to protest that doing so would amount to admitting "the only way to save capitalism is to begin to nationalise it." Though he might not share Tooze's apoplexy, Eric Lonergan suggests in the FT that central banks must enter a phase of finding new methods to give money away, like the aforementioned stock buying, sending checks directly to citizens, or splitting interests rates for lending (dropping them below zero, to pay government borrowers to take money) and borrowing (raising them, to give citizens returns on their savings accounts). | | What the Current Protests Mean for Russia's Future | | | As protests have broken out in Russia, sparked by local election officials' move to bar some candidates from September ballots, Samuel A. Greene of the International Institute for Strategic Studies writes that the government's crackdown is more aggressive this time around, marking a departure from how Russia has handled previous demonstrations. (Even when those culminated in organizers' arrests, the Kremlin took a softer line up until the end, he writes.) This, Greene concludes, is a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin faces a classic conundrum for autocrats: He must show powerful elites that he will fend off challenges to the current order, while repressing protesters more aggressively only solidifies their resolve. The current protests are interesting, Nikolas K. Gvosdev writes for The National Interest, because they're taking place under the shadow of questions about Putin's 2024 term limit and as Russia's first post-Soviet generation comes of age. They're a "warning sign of the problems lying ahead," he writes, as the Kremlin seeks a difficult balance between maintaining control and electoral legitimacy. | | How Brexit Is Stirring Up Ireland and Scotland | | | Since Scotland and Northern Ireland voted "Remain" in 2016, the possibility has been raised that Britain itself could be split up in Brexit's wake. Two new op-eds in the New Statesman explore that possibility. In Ireland and Northern Ireland, calls to unite are no longer issued only by hard-line Irish nationalists, Finn McRedmond writes: A "new case for Irish unity has been ignited by Brexit, one grounded in economic logic, shorn of unpalatable historic reference, and championed by moderate Irish politicians." In Scotland, meanwhile, Rory Scothorne writes that while Brexit has amplified talk of independence and highlighted Scotland's preference for liberal governance, and while Boris Johnson may epitomize Scotland's "crudest caricature of a pompous, entitled and bungling English Tory … the quick fix of flattery-by-comparison can only take up the slack for so long." In other words, Scotland's differences from England may be starker, but that doesn't mean it has the economic strength to stand alone. | | | | | | |
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