| | | | The US Is Wrong About China, and the Consequences Will Be Dangerous | | America is leaping into a wrongheaded, 100-year conflict with China, Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times. As the US frames China as an economic and ideological threat, its hawks will find an enduring enemy—and the rest of the world will have to deal with the consequences.
The US is substantively wrong in its analysis of China—the latter's ideology doesn't really threaten the US, there is no civilizational conflict, and the US can't halt China's rise, even if it wants to—and its combative approach will produce a dangerous result. It is likely to cause "deep hostility" among China's people, wreck the liberal international order, and undo globalization, Wolf predicts, all while President Trump undermines alliances and disregards the international system.
There are those who think tensions will deescalate—Bill Dudley predicts at Bloomberg that Trump will soon ease off the trade war—but Wolf's conclusion that the US is waging "the wrong war, fought in the wrong way, on the wrong terrain" makes today's biggest geopolitical confrontation sound like a tragedy. | | US Foreign Policy, According to Trump's Twitter Feed | | What are President Trump's foreign-policy priorities? His Twitter feed may offer some clues: As The Economist notes, the group Worldmapper has combed through Trump's Twitter feed (on behalf of Oxford University's research library) and found 1,384 tweets mentioning either foreign countries or Puerto Rico, which the group includes with an asterisk. Trump mentioned Russia the most (in 297 tweets), followed by North Korea (163) and China (158).
Russia may recede from Trump's tweets with the Mueller report behind us, but as Oxford's Benjamin Hennig points out, Trump has used Twitter to drive foreign policy in novel ways, and this map generated by Trump's country-tweet figures (created by Worldmapper and released by Oxford), may tell us something about his priorities:
 | | Press Freedom Is Down, Thanks in Part to Democracies | | | Press freedom has declined across the world in the last decade, according to a new report by Freedom House, and democracies are partly to blame. Unlike traditional autocracies, which still use means like censorship to control speech, illiberal democratic leaders are making greater use of oblique methods, including "government-backed ownership changes, regulatory and financial pressure, and public denunciations of honest journalists."
As Zselyke Csaky writes in The Washington Post, Hungary and Serbia are prime examples, where government-friendly press outlets are favored and funded. "The problem has arisen in tandem with right-wing populism, which has undermined basic freedoms in many democratic countries," Freedom House finds; worldwide, 16 countries have seen their press-freedom scores drop in the last five years. The current rankings, per Freedom House's map:
 | | Belt and Road Fills a Western Void | | China's Belt and Road Initiative has gained traction largely because the West has failed to deliver, according to a working paper by Bushra Bataineh, Michael Bennon, and Francis Fukuyama, recently released by the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
Belt and Road projects have their problems—including debt, oversight, and local backlashes—but Western development lending has been slow-footed and hampered by cumbersome requirements, the authors write, leading to a boom from China. "It is true that China is actually performing what Western governments have promised and, in the past, delivered: the provision of roads, electricity, railways, ports, and other facilities necessary for economic growth," the authors conclude. "Today Western development institutions are hamstrung to the point that they can no longer further the goals for which they were created. China is simply filling the gap." | | What Does Germany Still Owe? | | Germany's post-World War II obligations were settled at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, but reparations—a sticking point in those talks, as US president Harry Truman wrote in his diary—have reared their head again. Greece has already requested billions from Germany, and Polish legislators are working on a demand that would bring the countries' combined total requests of new, post-WWII reparations to $1.2 trillion, Leonid Bershidsky writes at Bloomberg.
As Germany has flourished as an economic force since the war, it should consider its obligations, Bershidsky advises: "[E]ven if the German government doesn't need to pay more than $1 trillion to Poland and Greece—money it doesn't have—it should be more accommodating on matters of common economic interest," he writes. | | | | | | |
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