The National Interest

Jenny Roe

Environment, Americas

Access to the shoreline is great, but what about places not on the coast? 

Officials are increasingly recognizing that integrating nature into cities is an effective public health strategy to improve mental health. Doctors around the world now administer “green prescriptions” – where patients are encouraged to spend time in local nature spaces – based on hundreds of studies showing that time in nature can benefit people’s psychological well-being and increase social engagement.

Much of this research to date has focused on the role of green space in improving mental health. But what about “blue” space – water settings such as riverside trails, a lake, a waterfront or even urban fountains?

You probably intuitively know that being close to water can induce feelings of calm. And many poets and artists have attested to the sense of awe and magic that water can evoke. But can it deliver the same wide-ranging benefits that urban green infrastructure brings to mental health? A few studies have shown that water bodies score just as well – if not better – in supporting psychological well-being as compared with “green” nature.

So far the evidence is sparse, though, and mostly limited to coastal settings in Europe. What if you’re in one of the 49 countries in the world, or 27 American states, that are landlocked with no ocean shore? For natural capital to deliver health benefits to people, it needs to be right next to them, integrated into the everyday fabric of their world.

Targeting everyday well-being

If you do have access to blue space, it can make you happier, reduce your stress levels, improve your quality of life and make you more sociable and altruistic.

This was the finding from one study my collaborators and I carried out in West Palm Beach, Florida. A short walk along a downtown waterfront with a design intervention we devised improved both perceived and physiological stress, as measured by heart rate variability.

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James Holmes

Security, Americas

For more than just countering China.

Key point: The advantages of basing forces Down Under are legion, the case for doing so increasingly captivating—for both allies.

Some ideas are worth broaching even when it’s plain no one will act on them instantly, in whole, or even in part. They make sense even when vagaries of politics or strategy may rule out implementing them. They force people to think—and on occasion, the times catch up with the idea. Case in point: back in 2011 my wingman Toshi Yoshihara and I bruited about the idea of basing U.S. naval forces in Australia. We went big. Under our proposal, an aircraft-carrier expeditionary strike group or another heavy-hitting fleet contingent would call some Australian seaport home.

That would make Oz a U.S. naval hub on par with Japan, where Yokosuka and Sasebo play host to the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

The idea occasioned some buzz in policy circles, and it was more than whimsy. There is a historical precedent. After all, Australia acted as an unsinkable aircraft carrier during the Second World War. It was a staging point floating just outside imperial Japan’s “Southern Resource Area” in the South China Sea. Fremantle, in Western Australia, offered safe haven to U.S. Navy submarines sent forth to raid Japanese mercantile and naval shipping. The ledger of Australian contributions to Allied victory unrolls virtually without bound.

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Donald L. Losman

Security, Americas

The elevation of economics from a supporting role to that of a war aim is morally very questionable. 

The role of economics in America’s National Security Strategy (a document mandated by Congress upon the Executive branch in the 1980s) has undergone a remarkable, yet wholly unnoticed metamorphosis.  An examination is long overdue to unmask this evolution and question its validity, and particularly so with U.S. troops now maintaining oil fields in Syria.

President Trump’s strategy document has four pillars.  The first is a rather traditional ‘protecting the homeland,’ with border security being a new, added point.  Pillar III, ‘advancing peace through strength,’ is hardly new.  And Pillar IV, ‘advancing American influence,’ is similarly traditional.  Pillar II, however, ‘promoting prosperity,’ is a purely economic goal, the likes of which has not been seen in years.   Further, its subtitle, “Economic Security is National Security,” is a highly dubious claim. 

Clearly, supply availabilities have always been a concern to military planners.  A strong economy, however, was traditionally deemed an enabling mechanism to finance a war rather than a war goal. The concept of a defense industrial base, another enabling mechanism (and one noted in the Trump strategy), became more prominent in the U.S. in the post-World War I period and demonstrably clear after World War II because it was America’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ which had propelled the Allies to victory.   But it was the Arab oil embargo of October 1973 – deemed the cause of oil shortages, inflation, and recession – that launched the economic component toward morphing into a desired goal in itself.  When oil prices spiked again after the 1979 Iranian revolution, Jimmy Carter subsequently announced that any attempt to control the Persian Gulf would be addressed by all means necessary.  In March 1980, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, the precursor to the U.S. Central Command, was activated.  

The 1980s security strategy documents focused on the Cold War, with Reagan’s 1988 document noting “America's economic strength sustains our other elements of power,” a clear designation of economics as a war-supporting mechanism.   George H.W. Bush’s 1991 strategy broadened the definition of national security, with a concerted effort to expand the concept to include economic health.

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Paul R. Pillar

Politics, Middle East

Netanyahu’s government has pursued policies toward Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians that have been increasingly and blatantly indefensible in terms of peace, justice, and international law.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under indictment for corruption, has been launching vociferous counterattacks that sound quite familiar to anyone (including editorial pages of the mainstream U.S. press) who has been following a parallel story of high-level wrongdoing in the United States. Netanyahu said that earlier reports of the conduct that led to charges against him were “fake news.” He has labeled investigations into the matter a “witch hunt”.  Now he is saying that the indictments are part of an “attempted coup.”  The similarities between a beleaguered Netanyahu and Donald Trump extend beyond such rhetoric to larger habits of never admitting wrongdoing and constantly attacking their accusers. Their common objective has been the retention of power free of any introspection about larger values.

Both heads of government have long histories of demagoguery, with an apparent disregard for possibly violent consequences. Netanyahu’s history includes stirring up hatred against political rivals who participated in the Oslo peace process—rabble-rousing that the family of the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin believes, with good reason, was partly responsible for Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jewish Israeli. More recently, Netanyahu’s racist rhetoric has featured warnings about Arabs turning out to vote “in droves”. 

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Mary Chesnut

Security, Europe Middle East

Established in the wake of the Cold War, the Open Skies Treaty has provided the United States, Russia, and dozens of other countries in Europe with reassurance regarding each other’s intentions and capabilities. What happens when it goes away?

Established in the wake of the Cold War, the Open Skies Treaty has provided the United States, Russia, and dozens of other countries in Europe with reassurance regarding each other’s intentions and capabilities. Signed in 1992 and entering into effect in 2002, the treaty provides for overflight rights by surveillance aircraft on short notice over the territory of the signatories. These overflights help the signatories identify deployments of military equipment and infrastructure, thus providing early warning of impending attack and transparency with respect to military buildups. Together with a raft of other treaties (including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), New START, and the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE)), Open Skies helped create an architecture for managing security concerns in post-Cold War Europe.   

Recently, however, the treaty has come under attack from opponents within the United States. Other parts of the security architecture have already fallen away, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the CFE, and most recently the INF. Every arms control agreement crystallizes a particular strategic and technological reality, and not every agreement can survive geopolitical and technological changes. The Open Skies Treaty, however, represents a low-cost answer to an age-old problem of international security, providing a mechanism for monitoring deployments of military forces and providing assurance to vulnerable nations. Discarding the treaty would represent a surrender to anti-arms control fetishism, rather than to a careful assessment of the security interests of the United States.

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Patrick Mendis

Security, Asia

The West can excoriate China all it wants on its debt traps, lack of transparency, and pernicious diplomacy. But unless the West comes up with better solutions, that dirt road, for the developing world, is still a dirt road.

Ever since President Xi Jinping announced China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) strategy—now called the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)—in 2013, the United States has sought to thwart, obstruct, or counter the Beijing initiative. The latest of these efforts comes in the ambiguous form of the Blue Dot Network (BDN) scheme, which was announced on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Bangkok, Thailand on November 4, 2019.

Leading the U.S. delegation, with the conspicuous absence of President Donald Trump at the summit, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross told in a conference call with reporters that “we have no intention of vacating our military or geopolitical position” in the Indo-Pacific region. To illustrate President Donald Trump’s commitment, U.S. officials launched the administration’s BDN blueprint in several ways at different times and venues of the ASEAN Summit. Initially, the BDN was officially announced by a representative of the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) at the Indo-Pacific Business Forum in Bangkok, which was attended by some one thousand people, including more than two hundred American corporate executives.

Driven by the Washington-based OPIC, in partnership with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), the BDN was meant to serve as a multi-stakeholder initiative that will harness governments, private sector, and civil society to “promote high-quality, trusted standards for global infrastructure development in an open and inclusive framework.”

The details of BDN were later unveiled in a panel discussion of representatives from OPIC, DFAT, and JBIC. U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Keith Krach claimed that “this endorsement of Blue Dot Network not only creates a solid foundation for infrastructure global trust standards but reinforces the need for the establishment of umbrella global trust standards in other sectors, including digital, mining, financial services, and research” in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.

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Denis Corboy, William Courtney, Kenneth Yalowitz

Security, Eurasia

A flawed presidential election, use of force against protesters, and political manipulations by the secretive billionaire who heads the ruling Georgian Dream Party have strained public confidence and brought mounting public protests.

Georgia’s status as a post-Soviet democratic leader is under challenge. A flawed presidential election, use of force against protesters, and political manipulations by the secretive billionaire who heads the ruling Georgian Dream Party have strained public confidence and brought mounting public protests. Domestic calm may hinge on improving political dialogue and conducting free and fair parliamentary elections in fall, 2020.

Independent Georgia has made substantial democratic progress, aided by multiparty elections, robust civil society organizations, and media freedoms. In 2003 the Rose Revolution—a peaceful uprising against political stagnation—accelerated democratic momentum.  Now Georgians may again be tiring of poor governance and lack of transparency. A National Democratic Institute poll last July found that 60 percent of respondents evaluate the performance of the current government as “bad.” 

Democratic momentum persisted until last year’s presidential election. National Democratic Institute observers cited aggressive, personalized, and unprecedented attacks by senior state officials against the country’s most respected civil society organizations, “abuse of administrative resources,” and the lack of a level playing field, even though “fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly, and association” were largely respected.

Some hoped the flawed election was an aberrant democratic setback, but perhaps not.

Last June, Interior Ministry forces used disproportionate force, including rubber bullets, against anti-government protesters, partially blinding two. More than one hundred participants were hospitalized. In an insensitive step last September, the ruling Georgian Dream party promoted the interior minister to prime minister rather than hold him accountable for the June excesses. 

Beyond these measures what has caused unrest and democratic backsliding?

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Farok J. Contractor

economy, Americas

Is Argentina intentionally weakening the peso?

President Donald Trump slapped new tariffs on Brazil and Argentina after accusing them of manipulating their currencies to boost exports.

It wasn’t the first time Trump has labeled another country a “currency manipulator” for supposedly meddling to keep its own currency weak or undervalued. China received that epithet from the president long before it felt the pain of his trade war.

But the truth is more complicated than Trump makes it out to be.

Everyone does it

The first thing to understand is that government efforts to influence their exchange rates – which is often dubbed currency manipulation – is extremely common, as I’ve seen firsthand in my work as an international business professor.

All but 31 of the International Monetary Fund’s 189 members meddle, in a mild or total fashion, to influence or fix their exchange rates. Only a few major currencies, such as the dollar or euro, are allowed a “free float” based on market forces of supply and demand with minimal or no government intervention.

Other governments have a variety of ways to manage their currencies. Some peg their currencies to a fixed rate, as long as they can afford to keep it there. Others tie their currencies to a major but stable currency like the euro or a basket of different ones. For example, the Lebanese pound is tied to the dollar at a fixed rate of 1,507.5 to 1.

About 16% of IMF members use a “managed float,” in which they allow market forces to play a role but with the government buying or selling their own currency as needed to bias the exchange rate upward or downward. Argentina and Brazil both adhere to a managed float system.

Why weaken a currency

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Lyle J. Goldstein

Security, Asia

A new trilateral exercise with South Africa may be a sign of coming attractions, but the United States should not overreact.

These are heady days for strategists tracking the development of Russia-China relations. Nearly every day brings a new surprise. Some are inclined to see the relationship as a mere “marriage of convenience”—fleeting in time and lacking in substance. More and more, however, this “quasi-alliance” seems quite durable and also to have legs. 

Rather concrete developments in the relationship may range from the seemingly mundane, but actually ultra-critical completion of the first-ever bridge across the Amur, finally connecting the twin cities of Blagoveshensk and Heihe in the interior of Northeast Asia. But almost a thousand kilometers to the north, a Chinese-made super ice-hardened LNG tanker plies Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR), even in the wintertime—an unprecedented feat of engineering and navigation.

Strategists focusing on the military domain also find a rather full plate. Back in the fall, the South Korean Air Force sortied en masse and warning shots were even fired to indicate displeasure with the first-ever joint aerial patrol by Russian and Chinese strategic aviation. Tokyo was also not amused by this stunt, of course. Then, at Valdai, Russian president Vladimir Putin made the interesting announcement that Beijing and Moscow would cooperate in the critical sphere of early warning systems—a rather important tool for advanced military establishments. Now, the Russian and Chinese navies are carrying out the first-ever naval exercise with a third country: South Africa. One could dismiss the exercise as another ploy to gain attention without significant strategic meaning, but that might also be a mistake when viewed in a larger context.

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Dalibor Rohac

Security, Europe

Low expectations have led to poor outcomes.

Make no mistake, the half-day meeting of NATO leaders in London is a minefield. Most observers will be relieved if the alliance can get it over with without explosive rhetorical exchanges, tweetstorms, or other mishaps. President Trump, in particular, has been long distrustful of the usefulness of the alliance for the United States — though today he said (correctly!) that NATO “served a great purpose.”

Yet, it is troubling that for a NATO summit to qualify as a success these days, it is simply necessary to avoid larger fallouts and to preserve the status quo, or at least its appearances. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” means that long-standing problems continue to fester, making transatlantic security architecture more fragile than it may seem from the rising levels of defense spending in Europe and the military build-up on NATO’s eastern flank.

One of such long-standing issues is the continuing failure of the alliance to confront authoritarians in its midst. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the alliance has been defined not so much by its enemies as by its values. Yet, countries such as Erdogan’s Turkey continue to violate those values — and act against the US and Europe’s interests in practical ways, including through its behavior in Northern Syria and through its purchases of Russian military equipment.

Likewise, Orban’s Hungary has moved markedly in the authoritarian direction during recent years, while simultaneously seeking to undermine the alliance’s efforts to help Ukraine, inviting the Cold War-era, Russian-led International Investment Bank to move its headquarters to Budapest, and normalizing relations with Assad’s Syria.

To tolerate such excesses is to encourage them further. And insofar as authoritarian regimes do indeed behave differently and less predictably in the international arena than democracies, keeping Turkey and Hungary unchallenged, under the alliance’s fold, represents a ticking time bomb.

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Henry F. Fradella

Security, Americas

‘Stop-and-frisk’ can work, under careful supervision. In mid-November, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized publicly for his backing of a practice intended to reduce violent crime that had for years been criticized as racially biased. “I realize back then I was wrong, and I’m sorry,” he said.

But his apology, made at a predominantly black church in Brooklyn, puzzled many observers. That included scholars of criminal justice like ourselves.

Bloomberg has long been a vocal supporter of a policy the city police department officially called “Stop, Question, and Frisk,” including during his time as New York’s mayor. In an effort to control crime, police aggressively and indiscriminately stopped and questioned people on the streets or in public housing projects. Police also often patted down suspects to check for weapons.

His apology was confusing because that phrase, often shortened to “stop and frisk,” is used to describe two different things.

As we wrote in our book, “Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic,” one is a legitimate, constitutionally sanctioned tactic, grounded in a police officer’s reasonable suspicion that a particular person is engaged in criminal activity.

The other is an illegitimate, broad crime-control strategy that, more often than not, ignores the law’s requirement that a particular person be reasonably suspected of breaking the law.

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Michaela Dodge

Security, Americas

A movie tells us what we can do about it.

Key point: The threat of nuclear annihilation is ever-present.

The Heritage Foundation’s documentary “33 Minutes” may not be the most cheerful holiday season film, but its warning to the American public about the risk of nuclear attack could not be more timely.

In recent years, North Korea’s missiles have grown in range and capability. The most recent missile it tested, the Hwasong-15, can reach anywhere in the continental United States. This is a deeply alarming development.

When the documentary was first released in 2007, and then updated in 2016, the idea of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile being able to reach the entire United States remained a fearful yet still unrealized possibility.

Now that North Korea has signaled its intention to continue developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of threatening the U.S. with nuclear warheads, it is all the more important for the Trump administration’s Ballistic Missile Defense Review to fund comprehensive missile defense.

The documentary’s title, “33 Minutes,” refers to the maximum amount of time the U.S. government would have to respond to an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile from anywhere in the world. Beyond showing this short response time, the film vividly depicts the threat of a nuclear attack and its destructive consequences.

The first and most well-known form of attack is the use of a nuclear weapon to physically destroy a major city like New York. The second is the use of such a weapon to generate an electromagnetic pulse.

The bomb that leveled much of central Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 had an explosive yield of 15 kilotons. North Korea’s nuclear test in October was the equivalent of 250 kilotons of TNT.

As the film’s narration observes, the 9/11 terror attacks, which used commercial airliners as weapons, resulted in 3,000 deaths and $80 billion in damage. A nuclear bomb dropped on Manhattan would cause hundreds of thousands of casualties and trillions in damage.

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Military and Aerospace Electronics

Technology, Americas

The race is on.

WASHINGTON – As the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) scrambles to keep ahead of China, it’s relying more and more on public-private partnerships called consortia to connect it to innovative high-tech firms. Breaking Defense reports. Continue reading original article

The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:

5 Dec. 2019 -- The latest example comes in an announcement Monday that only members of the National Spectrum Consortium can bid on pilot projects to install prototype 5G networks to manage radar and radio spectrum, “smart warehouse” logistics, and other functions on four military bases.

Writ large, over the last three years, as the Pentagon has nearly tripled spending on streamlined Other Transaction Authority (OTA) prototyping contracts, more than half that money has gone to consortium members.

Some 49 percent went to consortia administered by a single management contractor, South Carolina-based Advanced Technology International (ATI). And future prospects look good. One group, the Space Enterprise Consortium – run by ATI – may even see its Air Force funding increase 24-fold.

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Matt Weidinger, Angela Rachidi

Society,

These rules are consistent with longstanding federal policy of expecting work-capable adults to work instead of depending solely on government assistance.

Recently the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released final rules that strengthen work requirements for non-disabled people without dependents who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps.  These rules are consistent with longstanding federal policy — in both SNAP and the cash welfare Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program — of expecting work-capable adults to work instead of depending solely on government assistance. Currently, unemployment is low and wages are rising fastest for people in entry-level jobs, providing an opportune time to help more adults in low-income households improve their financial well-being by strengthening work requirements in SNAP.  

The new rules center on who can be exempt from an existing SNAP requirement that certain recipients work in order to receive benefits for an extended period of time. The rule applies to a group called “able-bodied adults without dependents” or ABAWDs. As that title suggests, people in this group are able to work, are working age (18-50), don’t have disabilities, and don’t have dependents — people who are considered to be the most work-ready. Overall, only 3 million of the 18 million households that currently collect SNAP benefits include one or more ABAWDs.  The remaining households, including children, seniors (in fact, anyone over age 50), people with disabilities, or people caring for dependents are unaffected by the ABAWD work requirement and the new rules.

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Charlie Gao

Technology, Americas

Cheap and effective.

Key point: It is one of Boeing's most successful exports.

The F-5E “Tiger” is one of U.S. aerospace industry’s largest export successes. Designed as a budget lightweight fighter, the F-5E is still operated by many nations around the world despite the availability of more modern fighters.

Its continued service is enabled by miniaturization of electronics, which allows for more powerful radars and more systems to be integrated into the same spaces as the original system. This approach is exemplified by the F-5EM operated by Brazil, one of the most advanced variants of the F-5E flying today.

Brazil first acquired F-5Es in 1974 after comparing it to rival NATO light fighters like the Harrier, Jaguar, Fiat G.91 and A-4 Skyhawk. Forty-two units were purchased originally, followed by twenty-six more in the 1980s.

These aircraft served in without much modification until CRUZEX I aerial exercise in 2002. The exercise simulated conflict between the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) and a French Armee de l’Air force equipped with Mirage 2000s with E-3 Sentry AWACS support. The results were abysmal, with France expected to take air superiority in a real conflict despite some good simulated kills by FAB Mirage IIIs.

This sparked a significant push to modernize the FAB’s capability to defend Brazil’s airspace. Modernization of the Mirage III was explored but deemed to be cost ineffective. The F-5E showed much more promise.

In the 1990s, Chile, facing a similar need to modernize, created their own variant, the Tiger III Plus with assistance from Israel Aircraft Industries. A similar program with newer technology could be done with the FAB’s F-5Es.

The program began in the 2000s when a contract was awarded to the Brazilian firm Embraer to modernize forty-six F-5Es with European and Israeli technology. The key aspect of the modernization was to “extend” the legs of the F-5E from being a short-range “point defense” fighter to something that could cover more ground over Brazil’s rather large borders.

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Robert Farley

Security, Asia

But it didn't happen. Why?

Key point: For Imperial Japan, size mattered.

In January 1936 Japan announced its intention to withdraw from the London Naval Treaty, accusing both the United States and the United Kingdom of negotiating in bad faith. The Japanese sought formal equality in naval construction limits, something that the Western powers would not give. In the wake of this withdrawal, Japanese battleship architects threw themselves into the design of new vessels. The first class to emerge were the 18.1-inch-gun-carrying Yamatos, the largest battleships ever constructed. However, the Yamatos were by no means the end of Japanese ambitions. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) planned to build another, larger class of super battleships, and had vague plans for even larger ships to succeed that class. War interceded, but had Japan carried out its plans it might have deployed monster battleships nearly as large as supercarriers into the Pacific.

“Super” Yamatos

The A-150 class would have superseded the Yamatos, building on experience with that class to produce a more formidable, flexible fighting unit. Along with the Yamatos, these ships were expected to provide the IJN with an unbeatable battle line to protect its Pacific possessions, along with newly acquired territories in Southeast Asia and China.

The A-150s would theoretically have carried six 510-millimeter (twenty-inch) guns in three twin turrets, although if problems had developed in the construction of that gun they could have carried the same main armament as the Yamatos. The 510-millimeter guns would have wreaked havoc on any existing (or planned) American or British battleships, but would also have caused substantial blast issues for the more delicate parts of the ship. The A-150s would have carried heavier armor than their smaller cousins, more than sufficient to protect from the heaviest weapons in the American or British arsenals. The secondary armament would have included a substantial number of 3.9-inch dual-purpose guns, a relatively small caliber suggesting that the A-150s may have relied on support vessels to protect them from enemy cruisers and destroyers.

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Dan Goure

Security, Eurasia

Put will Putin pull the trigger?

For almost two decades, Russia has been interfering in the domestic politics of other nations. According to one report, Russia has interfered in the political processes of at least 27 North American and European countries since 2004.  The Kremlin has several goals for this assault:  first, to undermine the legitimacy of Western governments and principles such as the rule of law and human rights; second, to weaken major institutions such as the European Union and NATO; and third, encourage the formation of pro-Russian governments.

A wide variety of techniques and tactics are being employed, including generating false news stories about pro-democracy movements, hacking the communications of government institutions and political parties, funding pro-Moscow political movements, and using international organizations such Interpol to harass political opponents. The effects of this undeclared war are particularly pernicious in so-called semi-consolidated democracies, such as Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Moldova.

One of the Putin regime’s favorite tricks is to support pro-Russian political parties while simultaneously doing everything possible to undermine the credibility of pro-Western parties and politicians. In some instances, Russian money has gone simultaneously to both pro-Russian and extreme nationalist parties. This would seem to be a self-contradicting strategy. However, the Kremlin’s primary objective is to undermine the power of centrist parties that have dominated European politics for decades and to encourage those countries to pursue anti-Western and anti-EU policies.

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Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

And it nearly happened. 

Key point: A Taiwanese-Chinese nuclear standoff would have destabilized the entire region.

It would have been one of the greatest crises of postwar Asia: the revelation of a Taiwanese atomic bomb. For Taiwan, the bomb would have evened the odds against a numerically superior foe. For China, a bomb would have been casus belli, justification for an attack on the island country it considered a rogue province. Active from the 1960s to the 1980s, Taipei’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons were finally abandoned due to diplomatic pressure by its most important ally, the United States.

Taiwan’s nuclear program goes back to 1964, when the People’s Republic of China tested its first nuclear device. The test was not exactly a surprise to outside observers, but it was still Taiwan’s nightmare come true. Chinese and Taiwanese air and naval forces occasionally skirmished, and it threatened to turn into all-out war. Suddenly Taipei was confronted with the possibility that such a war could turn nuclear. Even just one nuclear device detonated on an island the size of Maryland would have devastating consequences for the civilian population.

From Taiwan’s perspective, a nuclear arsenal would be the ultimate guarantor of national sovereignty. Even if the United States split with the country, as it eventually did, Taiwanese nukes would keep the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at bay, a deterrent not only against Chinese nuclear power, but against conventional forces as well. In hindsight, this would have had a good chance of success, as North Korea’s own procurement of nuclear weapons has made the United States and South Korea reluctant to retaliate over the country’s various military provocations.

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Kyle Mizokami

Security, Asia

It could happen.

Key Point: China only has so much patience, and won't let the entire peninsula fall into American hands.

North Korea is both a blessing and a curse for China. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an independent state that is openly hostile to the United States and other regional powers. Pyongyang’s military is a deterrent to attack without posing a direct threat to China. As a result, nearly a thousand miles of China’s borders are occupied by a regime that finances its own defense and will never fall willingly within the U.S. sphere of influence.

The situation is far from perfect. While North Korea has traditionally been a Chinese client state, ties between the two countries have deteriorated in recent years. Pyongyang’s fiery anti-American rhetoric and nuclear weapons program have provoked the United States, making North Korea a major point of contention between Washington and Beijing. The country’s flagrant violation of international norms have tested Beijing’s patience.

There are persistent rumors that Beijing has long prepared to intervene in North Korea, whether in the aftermath of a government collapse or should the country’s leadership make credible threats against China. No one outside of Beijing knows what those preparations might be, but we can outline some scenarios. One thing seems reasonably certain, however: if China goes into North Korea, the presiding regime, whether of Kim Jong-un or someone else, will not survive.

One possible scenario is a military incursion into North Korea in response to regime collapse. An imploding economy, military coup, or Syria-like rebellion could all cause the regime to fold, and it will likely fold quickly. When it does, the national food distribution system will likely fail, causing refugees to flee the country. Given that the border with South Korea is notoriously fortified and the Russian border is relatively far and remote, the least difficult border to cross is into China.

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Subhash Kak

Security, Americas

A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors.

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity and, therefore, the Google announcement should be taken “with a large dose of skepticism.”

This wasn’t the first time someone cast doubt on quantum computing. Last year, Michel Dyakonov, a theoretical physicist at the University of Montpellier in France, offered a slew of technical reasons why practical quantum supercomputers will never be built in an article in IEEE Spectrum, the flagship journal of electrical and computer engineering.

So how can you make sense of what is going on?

As someone who has worked on quantum computing for many years, I believe that due to the inevitability of random errors in the hardware, useful quantum computers are unlikely to ever be built.

What’s a quantum computer?

To understand why, you need to understand how quantum computers work since they’re fundamentally different from classical computers.

A classical computer uses 0s and 1s to store data. These numbers could be voltages on different points in a circuit. But a quantum computer works on quantum bits, also known as qubits. You can picture them as waves that are associated with amplitude and phase.

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