A Week of Boiling Tensions Over Iran

How Trump’s Policies Are Helping China

A Weekly Political News Magazine

American Sovereignty Is Safe From the UN

How Russia and China Undermine Democracy

Issue 1715 - October 05/10/2018

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Issue 1715 - October 05/10/2018

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A Week of Boiling Tensions Over Iran

As the world braces for the effects of unprecedented U.S. sanctions on Iran come November, Tehran allegedly continues to hatch terror plots in Europe and cheat the nuclear deal’s inspection regime.

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asserted that he aspires to shrink Iranian oil sales down to zero. Whether he comes close to that goal or not, it is clear that Iranian oil sales — and with it, the country’s economy — is about to take a substantial hit. According to Bloomberg tanker tracking data, the consequences have already begun, as buyers look elsewhere: Iranian oil exports fell to 1.7 million barrels a day in September, down from 2.5 million earlier this year.

Yet Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif struck an upbeat tone about economic matters during his visit to New York last week. He told a reporter that support from Europe to offset losses due to the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA has exceeded expectations. As Majalla reported last week, the EU has announced the creation of a “special purpose vehicle” to “assist and reassure economic operators pursuing legitimate business with Iran” — that is, to skirt U.S. secondary sanctions. The SVP remains to be tested, of course.

Iranian Opposition, NCRI demonstrate near Iranian Embassy in Paris on January 2018 ,6, in support protests in Iran.

(Getty)

by Joseph Braude* Last week saw heightened tension in international policy deliberation over Iran. A foiled Iranian bomb plot in Paris, new revelations of a secret Iranian nuclear facility, and anxiety over imminent U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil sector conspired to heat up rhetoric and raise concerns about the potential breakout of new proxy warfare in the Middle East.

ECONOMIC ANXIETIES GROWING AHEAD OF NOVEMBER 4 U.S. sanctions on Iran’s petroleum industry will kick in on November 4. President Trump has

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At the same time, there were signs this week that one JCPOA signatory — France — was souring toward Iran and the agreement. The context was a foiled bomb plot in Paris, allegedly hatched

by Iran, which targeted a meeting of an Iranian opposition group based there. France responded by freezing the assets of the Iranian spy ministry.

The action raised questions as to whether France will be able to fight Iranian-sponsored terrorism on the one hand and help Iran weather the blow of U.S. sanctions on the other.

A DRAMATIC SPEECH AT THE UN On the diplomatic front, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered new evidence about secret Iranian nuclear activity at a speech at the UN on September 27.

It won accolades even among some of his fiercest critics in Israel. The left-leaning newspaper Haaretz dubbed it “one of his most professional, effective, and persuasive appearances.” The assessment noted that after years under Obama

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in which Netanyahu’s warnings about Iran came across as the ranting of a “stubborn child,” few if anyone is dismissing him now.

“I am disclosing for the first time that Iran has another secret facility in Tehran,” he said, “ — a secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.”

Netanyahu also noted what he saw as a positive side effect of Iranian aggression: “By empowering Iran, [the nuclear deal] brought Israel and many Arab states closer together than ever before. Israel deeply values these new friendships. And I hope the day will soon arrive when Israel will be able to expand peace — a formal peace — beyond Egypt and Jordan, to other Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians.”

The Prime Minister made a further charge of duplicity against Hezbollah, alleging that it was hiding its own facilitates — sites it uses to boost precision missiles — not far from the Beirut International Airport. Netanyahu warned that Israel “won’t let them get away with it.”

In response to the Prime Minister’s subsequent accusation that the International Atomic Energy Agency has failed to enforce the monitoring and accountability mechanism of the JCPOA, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano insisted that his

As tensions heat up, there are concerns that the Trump Administration’s stated willingness to confront Iran is ahead of its level of military readiness

group had access to “all the sites and locations in Iran which it needed to visit.” He also implicitly cast doubt on the Prime Minister’s allegation of a new secret facility in Iran.

UNCERTAINTY OVER U.S. MILITARY PREPAREDNESS Meanwhile, as tensions heat up, there are concerns that the Trump Administration’s

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People walk in front of a currency exchange shop in the Iranian capital Tehran on August 2018 ,8.

(Getty)

stated willingness to confront Iran is ahead of its level of military readiness. In a report last week, U.S. military officials told the Wall Street Journal that the armed forces had not had an aircraft carrier in the Gulf since March — the first absence of that length in two decades. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is removing four Patriot missiledefense systems from Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain as part of a redeployment to deter

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Russia and China. The apparent contradiction between U.S. military priorities and political rhetoric has raised concerns that the rhetoric may be more bluster. *Middle East specialist Joseph Braude is the author of Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield). He is Advisor to the Al-Mesbar Center for Research and Studies and tweets@ josephbraude.

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American Sovereignty Is Safe From the UN Time to Focus on the Real Threats 14

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Protectiveness about American sovereignty is a sentiment widely shared among U.S. national security professionals and politicians Americans need to stop worrying about nonexistent threats and wake up to the real ones Assembly speech. “America is governed by Americans.” He was hardly the first U.S. president to make the point. George H. W. Bush put it positively in his 1991 address to the General Assembly, seeing international institutions as an asset in service of an international order “in which no nation must surrender one iota of its own sovereignty.” George W. Bush had a UN ambassador—John Bolton, now Trump’s national security adviser—famous for his fierce defense of sovereignty.

Even Barack Obama, despite his reputation for openness to global cooperation and multilateralism, strongly defended U.S. sovereignty in his 2013 address at the UN: “Different nations will not agree on the need for action in every instance, and the principle of sovereignty is at the center of our international order.”

United States President Donald Trump participates in a UN Security Council Meeting on Counter Proliferation at the UN Headquarters in New York City, New York, September 2018 ,26

By Bruce Jones The United States has less reason to worry about its sovereignty than any other country in the world. No other country enjoys as much freedom from external interference—military, economic, or diplomatic. Which is why other national leaders find it perplexing that U.S. presidents addressing the United Nations invariably find it necessary to proclaim yet again that they will never allow any arrogation of U.S. sovereignty.

“We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy,” U.S. President Donald Trump declared this week in his second UN General

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What’s so strange about this repeated message, and the underlying anxiety it reflects, is not just that there is in reality so little threat to U.S. sovereignty. It’s that to the extent there is a threat, it comes not from international institutions and agreements but from other sovereign states, as well as from rapid technological advances that are changing the relative power of state and nonstate actors, companies, and groups.

There’s a real debate to be had about how to protect sovereignty in the twenty-first century; it’s just not this debate.

OTHER PEOPLE’S SOVEREIGNTY To get a sense of how odd the U.S. obsession with international institutions violating its sovereignty is, consider the position of other countries. From a formal and legal point of view, all countries are equal and inviolable in their sovereignty, a legal principle enshrined most forcefully—ironically, given the U.S. perception of the institution—in the founding Charter of the United Nations. In reality, many states are unable to fully protect their sovereignty and have genuine worries that other

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countries and international institutions—in this, usually acting on behalf of Western powers—will trample on it.

For all the U.S. rhetoric against the sovereignty-encroaching dangers of multilateralism, there are only four important ways in which multilateral institutions have, on paper, the authority to intervene in major countries’ sovereignty.

The oldest of these is the UN Security Council itself, which under Chapter VII of its charter can take action against a country if the council deems that country a threat to “international peace and security.” But the United States can use its veto to block anything it wants at the council. (For the 188 countries that don’t have that blocking power, to have Washington moan about the UN threatening its sovereignty induces serious eye rolling.) The second is the World Trade Organization, which can adjudicate violations of its trading rules and impose its decisions on its members. Of course, countries can choose to ignore the WTO, but only at the cost of throwing hugely profitable trading relations into chaos.

A newer way that the international system can encroach on sovereignty comes from the authority of the International Monetary Fund to monitor the economic performance of major economies without the consent of the government in question. Yet this isn’t a new power for the IMF; it’s just that until recently, the United States was the one country in the world exempt from this monitoring. In 2008, George W. Bush extended the authority of the IMF to allow it to oversee the U.S. economy as well.

Finally, there’s the International Criminal Court. The ICC has the authority to begin investigations of Americans suspected of committing war crimes and ultimately to indict them. There are two safeguards here. The ICC can’t implement this authority unless the country in question isn’t using its own domestic legal provisions to handle suspected war crimes; when it comes to the United States, the U.S. legal infrastructure for dealing with alleged violations of the laws of war by its own citizens is second to none. What’s more, the UN Security Council can block ICC investigations if the council decides they are destabilizing.

Those safeguards aren’t perfect. The ICC prosecutor recently began considering an investigation into an American citizen, suggesting that she might use her own judgment to determine whether the state in question had indeed acted sufficiently, weakening the first check on the ICC’s power. And Washington might reasonably worry that it couldn’t muster a coalition in the Security Council to block an ICC move against the United States. Under normal circumstances, the combination of U.S.

diplomatic muscle and the votes of other great powers, which in general are just as concerned about the ICC encroaching on their sovereignty, would allow the United States to mobilize the necessary coalition to defeat the ICC. But in the current climate of geopolitical tension and anti-U.S. sentiment, it’s impossible to rule out a European veto or the ten rotating members of the Security Council banding together to protect the ICC. Bolton’s firebrand speech about the ICC in the run-up to the UN General Assembly reflects real concern about these developments.

GREAT POWERS AND SOVEREIGNTY When U.S. presidents defend sovereignty at the UN, they are often dismissed as simply playing to their base, especially when it’s a Republican president. Yet that is too simplistic.

Protectiveness about American sovereignty is a sentiment widely shared among U.S. national security professionals and politicians. In this, the United States frequently acts and speaks on the world stage in a manner quite similar to that of nonWestern powers, such as Brazil, China, India, and Russia, and unlike that of its European allies. Those who have the most sovereignty guard it most jealously.

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No country enjoys as much freedom from external interference as the United States, yet U.S. presidents addressing the UN invariably feel compelled to proclaim that they will never allow any arrogation of U.S. and values into the developing world, while keeping their fingerprints off it.

THE DEBATE WE NEED

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley vetoes a Russian proposed draft resolution that would 'condemn the aggression against Syria by the U.S. and its allies' during a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting concerning the situation in Syria, at United Nations headquarters, April 2018 ,14 in New York City. (Getty)

For that reason, the ICC was always at risk of running afoul of great power politics. Although the court has admirable objectives, its early efforts have been mixed at best, proving at least as destabilizing as humanizing. But the biggest concern is different: it’s risky to establish an important multilateral body with neither the support of the reigning global superpower nor that of its rising challenger. China was opposed to the ICC, although at the time it had insufficient diplomatic weight to block it. Not only will that institution lack diplomatic muscle if the leading powers don’t back it, but establishing it against their strong preferences risks eroding wider support for the multilateral system. We’re now seeing that price beginning to be paid.

This raises a wider point about the U.S. discourse about sovereignty and multilateral institutions, which often suggests that those institutions have power and can act against states.

But other governments and most policy professionals see them as, first and foremost, tools for states to use as they work with one another. What’s more, over the past 30 years, a number of states—those in the West and, above all, the United States—— have used international institutions to project their power

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That said, sovereignty is under growing threat. The challenge comes not from multilateral institutions but from the digital frontier. There are three main dynamics. First, Western security agencies increasingly see the need to ensure a constant flow of information from territory beyond their borders, from countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Yemen, to understand in real time how terrorist groups recruit and mobilize their members inside Western cities. States have always engaged in espionage against one another, but the scale and constancy of data collection on overseas citizens today is unprecedented.

Then there’s the very different challenge of governing the technology giants, whose information platforms have outsize effects on billions of people across almost every country by shaping the information they receive and the decisions they make. And most acute, there’s the threat of election tampering and political interference via information technology. Russia got there first with its attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but China’s expansive espionage efforts and digital maneuvering within the United States suggest that others will not be far behind.

Given these very real threats to the United States, Trump could have sparked an important debate about how countries defend their sovereignty against outside pressure or, more controversially, extend their sovereignty to deal with nonstate threats. He chose instead to contrast “the ideology of globalism” with what he called “the doctrine of patriotism.” It would be a surprise to Chinese cyberspies to discover they were part of a “globalist” experiment, just as it would be a surprise to UN officials to discover that they have the power to intrude on U.S. sovereignty. Americans need to stop worrying about nonexistent threats and wake up to the real ones.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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How Trump’s Policies Are Helping China Beijing Still Can’t Believe Its Luck

By Yadong Liu For the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, most Western commentators on U.S.-Chinese relations saw the Trump administration’s approach to China as a strategic failure; some even concluded that Chinese President Xi Jinping had duped Trump. Recently, however, a different narrative has emerged in Western media. According to this view, Trump’s pressure on China is working, and

Chinese leaders are worried. Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on 50$ billion of Chinese imports are hurting the Chinese economy at a time when China is overleveraged and growth is slowing down, advocates of this view assert.

Meanwhile, they say, Trump’s July meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was a brilliant tactical feint: by negotiating a “cease-fire agreement” over trade with the EU, Trump united the West against China.

In September, Trump showed his resolve by imposing

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Trump’s withdrawal from the TransPacific Partnership, his tough approach to trade with Japan, and his talk of removing U.S. troops from South Korea all served China’s interests Partnership, his tough approach to trade with Japan, and his talk of removing U.S. troops from South Korea all served China’s interests by accelerating the decline of U.S. influence in Asia, opening space for China to expand its influence even faster than it had ever thought possible.

China could hardly hope for a more cooperative occupant of the White House. There’s also good reason to think that China remains confident in its ability to manage Trump.

Based on conversations I have had with a person close to the Chinese leadership, Beijing does still see Trump as a much better U.S. president for China’s interests than the alternatives.

WINNING THE TRADE WAR

US President Donald Trump (2nd R) speaks to China's President Xi Jinping (L) in front of US First Lady Melania Trump (2nd L) and Xi's wife Peng Liyuan (R) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 2017 ,9.

(Getty)

tariffs on an additional 200$ billion worth of Chinese imports. At the same time, according to some reports, dissent over Xi’s one-man control of Chinese strategy is growing within China, and Chinese leaders are looking for ways to mollify Trump.

Yet this narrative is almost the exact opposite of the truth. The fact is that, despite escalating trade tensions, Beijing should still see Trump as the ideal U.S. president for China. Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific

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Beijing’s confidence is rooted in economics. In the game that Washington and Beijing are playing on trade, China holds a number of cards that are not well appreciated among American analysts—and perhaps not by U.S. policymakers either. Balance-of-trade statistics show that China runs a 370$ billion trade surplus with the United States but don’t show who is garnering the profits from these exports. Most of the Chinese exports that Trump is trying to strangle with tariffs are either produced or marketed not by Chinese but by Taiwanese, South Korean, and U.S. companies.

One example of this is the iPhone, which is produced with Chinese labor by Taiwanese-owned factories and marketed by Apple, a U.S. corporation. As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pointed out in warning against a trade war in March last year, “More than %90 of [the] profits [in examples like this] were taken by the United States.

We have statistics showing that last year, China-U.S. trade and investment created more than one million jobs in the United States.”

Moreover, much of the money that U.S. firms earn in China is not reflected in trade statistics, because it accrues to U.S. companies and joint U.S.-Chinese ventures that produce within China for the Chinese market. For some of the largest American companies, including automobile and aircraft manufacturers, the Chinese market is more

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important for future growth than the U.S. market. And if the trade war heats up, China has numerous legal ways to frustrate U.S. firms’ success in the Chinese market.

Washington would have no way to retaliate, because the U.S. market is not particularly important to Chinese firms .

TRUMP, INC.

Chinese leaders long ago took the measure of Trump. He is above all a businessman, not a strategist. What is more, his primary long-term concern is the profitability of his own enterprises, a goal that he prioritizes over the advancement of U.S. national interests. China has already been helpful to Trump’s personal bottom line. It has, for example, fast-tracked the approval of trademarks owned by Ivanka Trump and supported development projects in Indonesia that involve the Trump Organization. And Beijing, which is rarely bashful about offering business opportunities as incentives or paybacks to foreign politicians, can be even more helpful to Trump in the future.

As should be clear to Beijing, Trump’s primary interest is, not surprisingly, to stay in power. To do so, he needs to deliver a string of victories to his electoral base. His method has become clear: he creates an atmosphere of crisis and then stages a dramatic but cosmetic resolution that changes nothing. This was the pattern in his initial dealings with China, when he talked tough and then hosted Xi for a lovefest at Mar-a-Lago. He followed the same playbook with North Korea, first threatening war and then announcing an end to the North Korean threat, even as Pyongyang continues to build its nuclear arsenal. His meeting with Juncker to solve the U.S.-European trade dispute was another fake resolution of a manufactured crisis. Beijing remains unconcerned about a U.S.-EU common trade policy against China: the China market is too important to European firms for them to so explicitly take sides.

In the game that Washington and Beijing are playing on trade, China holds a number of cards that are not well appreciated among American analysts—and perhaps not by U.S. policymakers either

CHINA’S PLAN According to my source, China is willing to play along with Trump. Beijing performed its role in the first part of his little play, retaliating against his tariffs so as to help create a sense of crisis. But Beijing did not escalate: toplevel Chinese leaders maintained a courteous silence. They left the initiative with Trump.

In May, Beijing offered what is called in Chinese a “stepping-down platform,” when Vice-Premier Liu He proposed that China increase imports of U.S.products by 200$ billion by 2020. But Trump was apparently not ready for act two of his own drama and went ahead with the first batch of tariffs. Nevertheless, according to my source, the Chinese leadership still hasn’t given up hope fora resolution to the trade dispute before the 2018 midterm elections. The denouement will involve a commitment by

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US President Donald Trump (2nd R) speaks to China's President Xi Jinping (L) in front of US First Lady Melania Trump (2nd L) and Xi's wife Peng Liyuan (R) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 2017 ,9.

(Getty)

Beijing to reduce the U.S.-Chinese trade deficit. At the moment, Beijing’s planned concessions involve greatly increasing China’s purchases of U.S. products, especially energy. But the agreement will do nothing to alter China’s strategic race to take the global lead in core new-economy technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and 5G mobile networks. Trump will claim victory and Beijing will not contradict him, because the Chinese want him to stay in power.

For Beijing, the fundamental contradiction in current U.S.Chinese relations is structural: as China continues to catch up with the United States economically and militarily, there is bound to be tension. Beijing doesn’t expect Washington to give up its dominant position without a fight and never expected smooth sailing regardless of who won the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In that sense, Chinese leaders are aware of the challenges they face in the long term.

But for Chinese policymakers, the path forward should be

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Trump’s posturing—and his tendency to put his personal interests ahead of his country’s—has made things easier than Beijing ever dreamed they could be clear: work on China’s pressing domestic problems, grow the economy, and expand China’s international influence.

No amount of U.S. pressure will deter China from that course. Trump’s posturing—and his tendency to put his personal interests ahead of his country’s—has made things easier than Beijing ever dreamed they could be.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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How Russia and China Undermine Democracy Can the West Counter the Threat?

by Andrea Kendall-Taylor and David Shullman Russian and Chinese actions are converging to challenge the U.S.-led global order. Last month, China joined Russia in conducting the latter’s largest military exercises since the Cold War. As the war games kicked off, Russian President Vladimir

Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping shared pancakes and vodka in Vladivostok in yet another public display of their rapport. In addition to enhanced military cooperation, the two nations’ collaboration in international institutions and remarkably frequent high-level engagements reflect their growing agreement about how the world should be ordered. Central in this shared

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attached financial aid and weapons, diluting Western leverage to press for human rights and rule-of-law reform. And they proactively transmit their survival strategies to governments and leaders looking to shore up their domestic control. Both countries are convinced of the threat of Western-backed revolution and have responded not only by “diffusion-proofing” their own regimes but by persuading other governments of the dangers of Western engagement and teaching best practices for controlling their citizens and guarding against these democratic incursions.

China in particular has become an exporter of surveillance and policing tactics, with Chinese companies selling facialrecognition systems and training authoritarian governments on how to most effectively monitor phone and Internet activity.

Geopolitical changes, however, amplify these direct efforts as Russia and China engage with a broader spectrum of states.

China’s rising power and Russia’s assertiveness mean that they are expanding their networks of trade and patronage with many states at once—as the United States did in the aftermath of the Cold War—creating greater opportunities to encourage authoritarian tendencies. But even beyond buttressing likeminded autocrats, Russia’s and China’s international activism may also work to weaken democracies. Research shows that extensive linkages with the West (through aid, trade, and social networks) encouraged democracy and its consolidation after the Cold War. Russia’s and especially China’s growing ties now raise the risk of a growing global tide of authoritarianism.

Shifts in geopolitics also mean that Russia and China don’t have to intentionally engage in autocracy promotion to weaken democracy. Even without a deliberate strategy to export their models of governance, China’s rise and Russia’s assertiveness send a powerful signal to other leaders about the success of their models and alter perceptions about what constitutes a legitimate regime. Putin has offered a model of governance that others seek to emulate. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, seem to admire Putin’s strongman tactics and have adopted elements of

Russia and China are fortifying authoritarian tendencies around the world by facilitating leaders’ turn away from democracy and by making it easier for existing autocrats to remain in power

his repertoire to enhance their control. As Xi has consolidated his personal power, the Chinese system now looks more like the Russian one. Although there are important differences, Xi and Putin together send a potent message to onlooking leaders of the success and desirability of strongman rule.

REINFORCING RESILIENCE For too long, Western leaders have assumed that deep distrust and competition would drive a wedge between Russia and China.

But this prediction has not panned out. Instead, the countries’ strategies have become mutually reinforcing in powerful, if perhaps unintended, ways. The result is that Russia and China are fortifying authoritarian tendencies around the world by facilitating leaders’ turn away from democracy and by making it easier for existing autocrats to remain in power.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin (C-L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping greet players from Chinese and Russian youth Ice Hockey teams before a friendly match on June 2018 ,8 in Tianjin, China.

(Getty)

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attached financial aid and weapons, diluting Western leverage to press for human rights and rule-of-law reform. And they proactively transmit their survival strategies to governments and leaders looking to shore up their domestic control. Both countries are convinced of the threat of Western-backed revolution and have responded not only by “diffusion-proofing” their own regimes but by persuading other governments of the dangers of Western engagement and teaching best practices for controlling their citizens and guarding against these democratic incursions.

China in particular has become an exporter of surveillance and policing tactics, with Chinese companies selling facialrecognition systems and training authoritarian governments on how to most effectively monitor phone and Internet activity.

Geopolitical changes, however, amplify these direct efforts as Russia and China engage with a broader spectrum of states.

China’s rising power and Russia’s assertiveness mean that they are expanding their networks of trade and patronage with many states at once—as the United States did in the aftermath of the Cold War—creating greater opportunities to encourage authoritarian tendencies. But even beyond buttressing likeminded autocrats, Russia’s and China’s international activism may also work to weaken democracies. Research shows that extensive linkages with the West (through aid, trade, and social networks) encouraged democracy and its consolidation after the Cold War. Russia’s and especially China’s growing ties now raise the risk of a growing global tide of authoritarianism.

Shifts in geopolitics also mean that Russia and China don’t have to intentionally engage in autocracy promotion to weaken democracy. Even without a deliberate strategy to export their models of governance, China’s rise and Russia’s assertiveness send a powerful signal to other leaders about the success of their models and alter perceptions about what constitutes a legitimate regime. Putin has offered a model of governance that others seek to emulate. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, seem to admire Putin’s strongman tactics and have adopted elements of

Russia and China are fortifying authoritarian tendencies around the world by facilitating leaders’ turn away from democracy and by making it easier for existing autocrats to remain in power

his repertoire to enhance their control. As Xi has consolidated his personal power, the Chinese system now looks more like the Russian one. Although there are important differences, Xi and Putin together send a potent message to onlooking leaders of the success and desirability of strongman rule.

REINFORCING RESILIENCE For too long, Western leaders have assumed that deep distrust and competition would drive a wedge between Russia and China.

But this prediction has not panned out. Instead, the countries’ strategies have become mutually reinforcing in powerful, if perhaps unintended, ways. The result is that Russia and China are fortifying authoritarian tendencies around the world by facilitating leaders’ turn away from democracy and by making it easier for existing autocrats to remain in power.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin (C-L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping greet players from Chinese and Russian youth Ice Hockey teams before a friendly match on June 2018 ,8 in Tianjin, China.

(Getty)

Efforts to directly confront China and Russia over their antidemocratic actions are unlikely to yield results and may further bolster their collaboration. There are, however, tools that the West can deploy to counter this trend. In addition to upholding positive models of democratic governance, the United States and its partners should double down on bolstering the democratic resiliency of countries most at risk, including through supporting the development of independent, in-country expertise on China and Russia and bolstering investigative journalism and civil society, which can shine a light on authoritarian influence and national leaders coopted by it. The stronger a country’s regulatory environment, civil society, political parties, and independent media, the less effective authoritarian powers’ attacks on democratic institutions will be, and the less appeal the authoritarian narrative and model will have. Working with U.S. allies and partners to empower domestic constituencies to stand up

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China and Russia are also capitalizing on the rising tide of nationalism and discourse about sovereignty to portray Western support for democratic institutions as foreign influence that must be resisted against foreign subversion of their own democracies will be the most effective weapon against Chinese and Russian influence.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Learning to Love Kim' s Bomb The Upside of a Nuclear-Armed North Korea

by Joshua Shifrinson Upon returning from the Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June, U.S. President Donald Trump declared the North Korea problem “solved.” Many experts did not share his optimism.

Pyongyang, they argued, had done nothing to indicate that it was committed to “complete, verifiable, and

irreversible denuclearization.” And nothing since then—up to and including the recent meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York—has indicated otherwise. Trump, in other words, was fleeced.

The president’s North Korea critics are right: Pyongyang has taken no steps to denuclearize in the

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The North Korean regime is a military threat to several of its neighbors and, increasingly, to the United States. A nuclear arsenal could change these calculations North Korea. Washington may continue to call for denuclearization, and Kim may continue to issue vague halfpromises to keep this useful fiction alive. But the real driver of lasting regional stability may turn out to be North Korea’s bomb. Trump’s failure thus may sow the seeds for a new and better Northeast Asian power equilibrium.

A NEW NORMAL

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (L) and South Korean President Moon Jae-in (R) pose for photographs after signing the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula during the InterKorean Summit at the Peace House on April 2018 ,27 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (Getty)

last three months, and there’s no reason to think that it will anytime soon. Such critics are wrong, however, to assume that this is necessarily bad news. In fact, Kim’s nuclear arsenal may be more opportunity than threat.

It makes a new balance of power possible in Northeast Asia—one that could make the region more stable and reduce the risk of war. Ironically, such a settlement can succeed only if the Trump administration’s North Korea policy keeps failing.

With its nuclear arsenal in place, the survival of the North Korean regime is virtually assured. The regime in Pyongyang no longer has to rely on saber-rattling and warmongering to intimidate its neighbors and keep their superior conventional militaries in check. Just as important, Kim’s arsenal forces the United States, China, and other regional players to find ways to accommodate

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Since the end of the Cold War, North Korea has threatened stability in Northeast Asia on a number of fronts. The regime is a military threat to several of its neighbors and, increasingly, to the United States. This raises fears among regional players that they could be drawn into a war: a conflict between North and South Korea could drag in the United States (and perhaps Japan), while a conflict between North Korea and the United States could pull China into the ring. And were the regime in Pyongyang to collapse through domestic implosion or outside invasion, Beijing and Washington would confront differences that could easily ignite a war between the two. Put together, these factors have created a regional status quo that is extremely fragile and prone to crisis.

All of this may be changing thanks to the Trump administration’s actions. After Trump took office last year, his forceful threats against Pyongyang appeared to drive his administration into a corner: Washington had signaled that it would not live with a nuclear North Korea but was reluctant to bear the costs of war. But North Korea’s ambiguous pledge, in Singapore, to denuclearize “the Korean Peninsula” offered a facesaving way out: U.S. leaders now had a fig leaf to cover the failure of their nonproliferation agenda, allowing them to declare success and ratchet down the threat of war. Not for nothing did Trump declare that North Korea was “no longer a nuclear threat” after the June summit.

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His administration has stuck to its narrative even as it has become clear that North Korea hasn’t budged.

Accordingly, the United States has largely abandoned the idea of regime change through military intervention.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and growing capacity to target the mainland United States had already made a U.S. attack on the regime much less plausible in recent years, but the Singapore summit made this change explicit. In the run-up to the meeting, the United States stopped openly threatening military action against Pyongyang. At the summit, Trump pledged to provide “security guarantees” in exchange for denuclearization and later put deeds behind these words by suspending U.S.-South Korean war games that the North claimed were “provocative.”

Diplomatic momentum has picked up since the summit. Not only have U.S.-North Korean discussions proceeded apace—there is even talk of a second TrumpKim summit—but so too have negotiations between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. No one knows where these talks will go, but the process itself reduces the risk of miscalculation and normalizes the North’s relationship with its neighbors. North Korea’s time as an international pariah is over—a good sign, because any change to its nuclear program will require time, dialogue, and recognition of the country’s desire for economic and security concessions.

Finally, the recent round of diplomacy has clarified China’s continuing role as North Korea’s reluctant guardian. Leaders in Beijing initially worried that Trump might pull North Korea out of China’s orbit. But just the opposite has occurred: recognizing China’s status as a kingmaker, U.S. officials have sought to cajole and pressure it into supporting their North Korea agenda.

North Korea has taken no steps toward denuclearization in the three months since the Singapore summit which is not necessarily bad news

That China has not been fully cooperative is beside the point; the U.S. effort itself implicitly acknowledges that North Korea will remain a Chinese protectorate.

TRIPLE WIN Who can benefit from a new power equilibrium on the Korean Peninsula? The upsides for the United States and its allies are already evident: they can point to a notional promise of denuclearization to justify easing military pressure on Pyongyang. Even if the current diplomatic thaw remains incomplete, talks can reduce tensions, and—above all—help avoid miscalculations.

And with regime change off the table, the United States can focus on how to deter any threats that a nucleararmed North Korea might pose and determine how to keep Kim from crossing any redlines.

China has much to gain as well. Because a U.S.-led military campaign against North Korea is now far less likely, China has a more stable northeastern flank and greater leverage to set the terms of diplomatic developments in the region. It can also turn its attention toward ensuring Pyongyang’s safety from internal pressures. In short, the emerging regional settlement all but officially recognizes North Korea as part of a Chinese sphere of influence and gives China incentive to manage the area judiciously.

For the North Korean regime—with its nuclear arsenal intact, expanding diplomatic ties with its neighbors, and de-escalatory signals from the United States— the result is the best strategic position it has enjoyed in a generation. The only costs to Pyongyang are a formal commitment to the myth of denuclearization, a tacit agreement not to flaunt its nuclear capability, and a willingness to bow to greater Chinese influence.

In effect, the nascent settlement offers North Korea security from external threats in exchange for accepting its status as a client state.

GET REAL Paradoxically, the success of such a regional settlement depends on the very thing that makes it seem implausible: North Korea’s ability to target the United States and U.S. allies with nuclear weapons. Before Pyongyang developed this ability, a deal was near impossible: the

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This picture taken on July 2017 ,4 and released by North Korea›s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on July ,5 2017 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (C) celebrating the successful test-fire of the intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong14- at an undisclosed location.

(Getty)

United States did not see the Kim dynasty as anything but a regime change waiting to happen and did not accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Combined with Pyongyang’s belligerent posture and China’s fears of being drawn into a regional conflict, the American position made for a toxic mix. Today, by contrast, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal clarifies the distribution of power and interests in Northeast Asia: the survival of Kim’s regime is virtually assured.

The United States has effectively reached the extent of its power in the region, given what it is willing to risk. China no longer needs to fear being drawn into a regional conflict or losing its ally to the same degree as in the recent past, but must find new ways of managing its client. Inadvertent and unexpected though it might be, this security structure may be the least of several evils for the parties involved.

There is no guarantee that such a new regional equilibrium will come to fruition. Given the Trump administration’s ad hoc approach to foreign policy— and mounting evidence that North Korea is not actually moving toward denuclearization—the United

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States may not remain wedded to the denuclearization fantasy. Nor will it be easy to sustain the new power balance if it does come into being: foreign policy hawks in Washington will need winning over, skittish allies will need reassuring, potential North Korean provocations will need addressing. These are not easy tasks.

Still, as analysts warn that North Korean denuclearization remains a pipe dream, they need to place this assessment into a broader strategic context.

Precisely because the United States has been unable to reach a real denuclearization deal, a potential Northeast Asian settlement allowing the Koreas, China, the United States, and Japan to live with the status quo is on the horizon. Of course, such settlements are not always immediately apparent or formally ratified. Sometimes, they emerge only after periods of tension, posturing, disappointment, and retreat. Nevertheless, the United States’ failure to denuclearize North Korea may turn out to be an inadvertent success.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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conomy

USMCA Trade Deal: US, Canada Reach Last-Minute Accord to Conclude Talks on New NAFTA 30

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The new deal may help soften criticisms of Trump’s overbearing negotiating style and heavy use of tariffs, as the administration can now lay claim that it successfully completed a revamping of a major trade agreement earliest. But in striking an accord with Canada after settling with Mexico in late August, negotiators hit a crucial U.S.imposed Sunday midnight deadline that otherwise could have pushed President Donald Trump toward a breakup of the trilateral accord.

The U.S.-Canada deal came after furious negotiations in recent days and repeated threats from Trump and his chief negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, that the administration was prepared to leave Canada behind.

The agreement marks a milestone in Trump’s efforts to rewrite the United States’ most consequential free-trade pact, which he promised to overhaul or tear up. And it may help soften criticisms of his overbearing negotiating style and heavy use of tariffs, as the administration can now lay claim that it successfully completed a revamping of a major trade agreement.

“It’s a great win for the president and a validation of his strategy in the area of international trade,” said a senior administration official, in a briefing with reporters as midnight was approaching.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference to discuss a revised U.S. trade agreement with Mexico and Canada in the Rose Garden of the White House on October 2018 ,1 in Washington, DC.

by Don Lee In an eleventh-hour breakthrough that may have saved the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trump administration and top Canadian officials came to terms late Sunday on a deal — opening the way for the United States, Canada and Mexico to sign a renewed trade pact at the end of November.

The agreement still needs to be ratified by legislatures in all three countries, which won’t happen until next year at the

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Trump has repeatedly denounced NAFTA as a disaster for U.S. industries and workers. Administration officials said the new agreement would be renamed the U.S.-MexicoCanada Agreement, or USMCA. Lawmakers, business interests, labor and other civic groups reacted more cautiously to the news, saying they would carefully analyze details of the text of the new agreement.

Administration officials said the revisions to NAFTA include notable rule changes on auto sourcing, investorstate disputes and labor rights, as well as new or updated

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provisions on digital trade, financial services and other areas of commerce that were not major factors when the pact was ratified a quarter-century ago under the Clinton administration.

NAFTA took effect in 1994, and over the years it has eliminated tariffs, integrated the economies and boosted trade among the three countries to more than 1$ trillion last year. Many feared a collapse in negotiations would cause huge disruptions to sales and supply chains.

Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, however, did not succeed in winning concessions in some important areas that he had sought. While Canada gave ground in opening up its protected dairy market, Ottawa fended off another top U.S. priority to eliminate an existing NAFTA dispute-resolution mechanism that has allowed Canada to challenge U.S. anti-dumping duties on lumber and other goods. There also was no substantive change in government procurement rules, despite the U.S. bid to rewrite “Buy American” rules.

Negotiators spent a considerable amount of time on auto rules. NAFTA requires that 62.5 percent of the content of cars is produced in North America to qualify for tariff-free trade. Lighthizer initially sought to raise that threshold to 80 percent and establish a new requirement that 50 percent of the auto contents be sourced in the United States for zero-tariff treatment. Those moves were intended to curb offshoring to Mexico and increase auto investment and production in the United States.

16$ an hour, which Trump officials hope will shift more production and jobs to the U.S.

In the end, the parties settled on raising the North American rule of origin for autos to 75 percent. And they agreed to a novel scheme that 40 percent to 45 percent of the content of cars must be produced by workers making at least

But it was unclear how that formula will be implemented and when it would bear fruit. And analysts said important details were needed to ensure that the new labor rules negotiated would be enforceable.

NAFTA took effect in 1994, and over the years it has eliminated tariffs, integrated the economies and boosted trade among the three countries to more than 1$ trillion last year

“More work remains to be done,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Unless there are strong labor and environmental standards that are subject to swift and certain enforcement, U.S. firms will continue to outsource jobs to pay Mexican workers poverty wages, dump toxins and bring their products back here for sale.”

U.S. business groups took comfort in that the U.S. and Canada met the deadline, salvaging the trilateral agreement.

“Manufacturers are extremely encouraged that our call for a trilateral agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico has been answered,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers.

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Olivier Rabiller, president and chief executive officer of Garrett Motion Inc., center, rings a the opening bell celebrating the company's spin off from Honeywell International Inc. on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 2018 ,1. U.S. stocks rose toward records, while the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso gained after negotiators agreed to a new version of the Nafta trade pact.

(Getty)

Lawmakers and other groups also said it was too early to estimate the potential gains from the deal for American workers and companies. The White House previously had released publicly only a few pages summarizing some of the changes. People familiar with the substance of the accord that was struck with Mexico, most of which Canada earlier also had negotiated, had said some important details have yet to be hammered out.

Trade officials for the three countries have been at it for more than a year. Earlier this summer Lighthizer took a different tack by negotiating separately with Mexico and ultimately forging a bilateral agreement, putting pressure on Ottawa to join or face the possibility of being left out.

Just before Labor Day, Trump sent a notice to Congress of his intention to sign a new trade pact solely with Mexico.

end of September, to satisfy a congressional procedural requirement so they could sign a renewed trade pact Nov. 30. That was an important political consideration for Mexico, as its president-elect takes office Dec. 1 and did not want NAFTA hanging over him at the start of his term.

Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, faced considerable domestic pressure to stand up to Trump, who is highly unpopular in Canada. At the same time, Trudeau did not want to risk a breakup of the trilateral pact and the potential damage to Canada’s economy.

Trump’s hardball tactics have not made it easy for Canadian officials to cede ground.

In addition to his repeated threats to withdraw from NAFTA, Trump also slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum from Mexico and Canada, among other countries, to gain leverage in negotiations. Analysts were hopeful that those duties — a bargaining chip for Trump but bitterly resented

by Canada — would be lifted soon, but trade officials said Sunday there were no changes as of yet on the status of those tariffs.

The U.S. and Mexico sought to complete the talks by the

This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

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Sudan Archives Turns the Violin into the Soul of her Funk, Hip-Hop, African Rhythms ‘Sink’ into Her Unconventional Sound

by Jeffrey Fleishman She was a girl with a violin and a shy voice in a church choir.

Years later, she was wearing camo pants and black boots, making music pulled from the red dirt of Africa, home to spirits and ancestors, and feeling that a child from Cincinnati could bust out with her own songs and fix a gaze on the world.

Sudan Archives, a fashion chameleon and daughter of a preacher, twines funk, hip-hop and rhythm and blues into compositions with the violin as their soul. Her lyrics pinch and soothe; her improvisations scurry like blown shadows.

At 24, she’s a gatherer of riffs and whispers, a woman who not long ago was scrimping to buy loop machines and baking donuts in Los Angeles to make rent.

Her recent acclaimed EPs — “Sudan Archives” and “Sink” — show a predilection to explore and experiment. Her videos, shot in Africa and Inglewood, contrast the snarl and insouciance of this city with the earthen and ethereal of a faraway land of fishing boats, marketplaces and shacks where slaves once lived. Her hair blooms from dreadlocks to Afro, and, quite to her surprise, she is becoming a bit of a thing from Norway to Coachella.

“I’m not famous like a pop star, but something’s happening,” she says. “Imagine getting all this praise and then remember back when you were in the orchestra and took violin lessons and they said, ‘You need to not play like that.’ In the classical world, I have so much work to do. I’m just a little baby, a tadpole. But I created my own lane. This is my space. How do you be comfortable in a lane that’s limitless?”

Her stare is deep. Her candor disarming. “My lyrics are my inner poetry,” she says. “Little ideas, haikus and lines. But to be honest, I feel like my writing sucks.” The violin is her muse, “the base of my sound.”

Largely self-taught on the instrument, she found that European composers did not resonate with the visceral, ancient inclinations of Sudanese fiddlers and African songwriters and musicians.

“That music is more expressive to me. They’re singing and playing at the same time. The way they play is uncontrollably gritty,” says Sudan, who drums and plucks a violin so it can sound like water slapping rocks or the ping of a tripwire. “I’d Google and see the [African] tribes playing that way. I made a connection and thought maybe I can do my own thing. I don’t have to be this classical violinist. I can be an expressive

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Sudan Archives performs at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., on Saturday, April 2018 ,21. (Los Angeles Times/TNS)

string, out there, wild. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. My roots, even though I don’t know where in Africa I’m from.”

That sentiment figures in her name. She didn’t like her birth name, Brittney Parks. She and her mother changed it to Sudan (“black” in Arabic) and Archives (her compulsion for African history). She ironed her hair when she was a girl “because that’s what pretty meant.”

But as she scrolled deeper into her African identity, she followed the lead of her twin sister, Catherine, and shaved her head, letting her hair grow back natural. She smiles when she tells the story, tucking defiance into a laugh, which she does with ease.

SHE CREATES NEW WORLDS Spinning in a chair at Stones Throw Records in Highland Park, her hair flying, a taco and a coffee set before her, she seems a woman on the brink of an amusing mystery, a musician amazed at the fortune that has come her way, but unsure where it’s all headed: “No one was watching before.

When I put these songs out I had no expectation. I was making music in a bedroom. Then someone said let’s wrap it in a ribbon and put out in the universe.”

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There’s a confident precociousness at work too. Like many electronic music composers, she’s a performance artist and an alchemist, coaxing songs from loop machines and computer programs on an iPad that, like her violin, are integral to her creativity. Her songs, such as “Come Meh Way” and “Queen Kunta,” a brash cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta,” are born from a violin melody that is inlaid and spliced with technology. Or as she puts it: “I make this whole world by putting a bunch of … on top of it. People can’t put their tongue on what it is genre-wise.”

Sudan, says Matthewdavid, a producer who mixed and mastered Sudan’s EPs, is “fusing West African music into contemporary left-field electronic music. People are gravitating toward that ancient roots/future roots music. She was able to go to Ghana and dig into her roots, and I think through that discovery she has produced something really great. She’s accessible but still a little fringe, a little lo-fi.”

Sudan’s first musical memory was at Refreshing Springs Church of God in Cincinnati. Her father was the pastor, and her mother urged her to play violin in the choir. She didn’t know how to read music, but she trained her ear and, reluctantly, at the choir master’s request, started singing. She

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didn’t have a raise-the-rafters voice “so I did it in my own style,” she says. “I had these slight breaths, this different way of singing.”

Her mother wanted her and Catherine in the best schools. “We moved a lot. I always felt like a ghost,” she says. “I didn’t really know anyone. I didn’t go to prom.” Her parents split up and her mother started dating Derrick Ladd, who worked at LaFace Records with Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Ladd urged Sudan and Catherine to start a pop act. “He put us in studios,” she says. “But I didn’t like it. He wanted us to be big, but I didn’t want to be big. I wanted to have a job and do open mikes sometimes.”

She veered toward experimental music, sneaking out at night to clubs and learning about SP 44 speakers and the gadgetry that comprise the technological arsenal of a solo artist. That skill found its purpose when she moved to Los Angeles four years ago “and discovered my musical palette” while wandering through Amoeba Records. She came upon Francis Bebey, a pioneering Cameroonian-born musician who fused jazz, pop, and African styles.

“I saw this naked African lady with a basket on her head on the album cover [”African Electronic Music 1982-1975”],

and I thought, hmmmm. What is this?” says Sudan, who was working in a diner and doughnut shop, composing after hours on an iPad. “I checked the record out. I started digging. I got so curious.”

That culminated in “Come Meh Way,” a love song of syncopated beats and a slicing violin, and “Water,” a slow, sensual homage to Africa in which Sudan seems like a spirit swaying through a land of sorrow and splendor. Both videos were shot in Ghana and suggest an innate ease, as if a longgone daughter had returned to the coy village boys and fishing nets strewn along the shore.

A similar evocation of place — although one thousands of miles away — is summoned in “Nont for Sale,” a beat-box paean to self-discovery and escaping expectations. Shot at a beauty salon in Inglewood, the video embodies the heat, grit and attitude of a Los Angeles neighborhood, where Sudan, her Afro reminiscent of the ’70s funk star Betty Davis, sits a atop a vintage Buick convertible that rolls with regal aplomb through a parking lot.

“You only call me when you need something / I need to be free / Time to spread my wings,” she sings. “I don’t like leeches / All the nonsense gon’ get back with ya / Don’t got

Vocalist/violinist Sudan Archives performs during the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., onSaturday, April 2018 ,14. (Los Angeles Times/ TNS)

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Sudan Archives performs at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., on Saturday, April 2018 ,21. (Los Angeles Times/TNS)

time for snitches / You’re pulling me down thought you was my sista … Stay outta my flight path.”

Sudan’s migration to Los Angeles began, at least in part, on SoundCloud when she and Cary Allison, a producer and performance artist, started sharing music. They talked on Skype. “I told her,” Allison says, “get out of Ohio and come here and sleep on my couch.” They lived together for two years, listening through walls to each other’s music, including the classical scores Sudan was practicing as part of a course at Pasadena City College.

“I much prefer her own creations, though,” Allison says. “She just has something coming out of her. It’s not that she wants to be a star or wants the money to buy her mom a house. She has a way of connecting to people that’s not very logical, but it’s very moving. It’s the same with her music. It doesn’t always follow this simple meter or this easy to understand progression, but it’s super moving.”

wine and slurps oysters before a photo shoot in Griffith Park. She’s leaving for a Canadian tour the next day but is relaxed, the sound of traffic beyond her. She mentions her performance at Coachella this year; how her Sudanese friend Abdel El Tayeb flew in from Belgium with a gold, orange and white dress he had spent 300 hours sewing. He passed out from exhaustion in the ticket line.

He was revived. But Sudan, who had no management at the time, was running around looking for the stage she was supposed to perform on, “trying to figure out where to go, what I’m doing.”

She laughs at the recollection and swallows the last oyster.

Life is moving fast. She’s working on a new album, a story of her odyssey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles.

She’s journaling. She says she wants to read poets; to find precise words for the things she feels.

WHERE SHE’S GOING

To make syllables rise and play. But in sunlight and shadow, in the stirring of a breeze, she heads to the park, where a photographer waits beneath a sky hard and blue.

Not long ago, in the hours before dusk, Sudan drinks

This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

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ealth

Scientists Find Immune Cell with Unexpected Power to Fight Cancer Finding Could Help to Design |New Cancer Immunotherapies and Predict Responses to Them

by Bradley J. Fikes Researchers at the University of California, San Diego say a relatively unexplored pathway the immune system uses to recognize cancer is far more important than previously recognized.

The research highlights the complexity of the immune system, which consists of many different types of cells that interact with each other and abnormal and invading cells in a web of relationships that are still far from understood

The finding could help scientists design new cancer immunotherapies and predict responses to them.

When this pathway doesn›t recognize mutated genes, tumours that exploit the mutations are more common, the researchers found. The relationship is even stronger than that of a better-known pathway.

The research highlights the complexity of the immune system, which consists of many different types of cells that interact with each other and abnormal and invading cells in a web of relationships that are still far from understood.

Scientists led by Hannah Carter, assistant professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, researched the pathway between a subtype of T cells and a molecule found on immune cells.

Results were published this week in the journal Cell.

The study can be found at j.mp/cancermhc2.

T cells are a class of white blood cells that recognize

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T cells are a class of white blood cells that recognize and kill infectious microbes and abnormal cells, including cancer cells A healthy T cell, a family that includes CD+4 cells, which a UC San Diego study found has unexpected power in fighting cancer.

(NIAID/TNS)

and kill infectious microbes and abnormal cells, including cancer cells. The subtype examined in the study is called CD-4plus, or «helper» T cells. It works with a family of molecules presented on the surface of immune cells, called MHC 2.

A related family, known as MHC 1, has received most of the attention in cancer immune therapy.

But the study suggests MHC 2 could be even more important.

Normally, the MHC molecules signify the cells bearing them are «self,» and should be left alone.

When they present «nonself» molecules called antigens, such as from bacteria, viruses or cancer, they prime the immune system to destroy cells with those antigens.

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The two molecules play complementary roles. While MHC 1 is displayed on all cells, MHC 2 is displayed only on immune cells, and also can present more antigens.

The researchers found that when MHC 2 strongly binds to an antigen, that antigen is less likely to show up in a tumour. Any incipient cancers with this antigen are presumably destroyed early, before a detectable tumour forms.

This relationship is even more pronounced than a previous finding the researchers made with MHC 1.

That study was also published in Cell.

This article was published by San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC.

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echnology

What Clausewitz Can Teach Us About Cyberwar Military Tactics in the Age of Social Media 40

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The online world is now just as indispensable to governments, militaries, activists, and spies as it is to advertisers and shoppers weaponized. The online world is now just as indispensable to governments, militaries, activists, and spies as it is to advertisers and shoppers. And whether the goal is to win an election or a battle, or just to sell an album, everyone uses the same tactics.

This new kind of warfare takes all forms, from battlefield footage on YouTube to a plague of Nazi-sympathizing cartoon frogs. It can seem like a fundamental break with the past. And in some ways—the digital terrain on which the war is fought, the need to grab attention rather than material resources, and the extraordinary power of a few people—it is. Yet not everything about it is new. Efforts to shape how the enemy thinks, to control the flow of information, and to win wars while avoiding actual fighting have been around for centuries. Indeed, the best place to start if you want to understand the weaponization of social media is with the past.

ON CYBERWAR

wing group Patriot Prayer in Vancouver, Washington, September 2017.

(Reuters)

by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking A half century ago, two computers at UCLA and Stanford were linked together into the first computer network. It was called ARPANET, after the military research lab that funded it. In the years since then, the network of networks that grew out of that lab has developed into the Internet, the nervous system of modern commerce and communication.

With the rise of social media over the last decade, the Internet has changed to allow all of us to become individual collectors and sharers of information. As a result, it has also become something else: a battlefield where information itself is

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The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz was born in 1780, some 200 years before the invention of the Internet, but he would have implicitly understood almost everything it is doing to the world today. Raised in Enlightenment Europe, Clausewitz enlisted in the Prussian army at the age of 12. A decade later, when Napoleon unleashed war across Europe and launched a new age of nationalism, Clausewitz decided to dedicate his life to studying war. He wrote essay after essay on the topic, exchanging letters with all the leading thinkers of the day and rising to become head of the Prussian military academy. After Clausewitz died in 1831, his wife, Marie, edited his sprawling library of thoughts into a tenvolume treatise, which she titled On War. Clausewitz’s (and Marie’s) theories of warfare have become required reading for military officers around the world and have shaped every war fought over the two centuries since they were published. Fundamental military concepts, such as the “fog of war,” the inherent confusion of conflict, and “friction,” the way plans never work out exactly as expected when facing a thinking foe, draw on his monumental work.

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Clausewitz’s most famous observation was about the nature of conflict itself. In his view, war is politics by other means.

Or, as he put it, “the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.” War and politics are intertwined, he explained. “War in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.”

In other words, Clausewitz thought war was part of the continuum that includes trade, diplomacy, and all the other interactions that take place between peoples and governments.

This theory flew in the face of the beliefs of older generations of soldiers and military theorists, who viewed war as a sort of “on-off” switch that pulled combatants into an alternate reality governed by a different set of rules. To Clausewitz, war was simply another way to get something you wanted.

Winning, Clausewitz thought, was a matter of finding and neutralizing an adversary’s “center of gravity.” This often means defeating a rival’s army. But that is not always the most effective path. “The moral elements are among the most important in war,” Clausewitz wrote. “They constitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole. . . . They establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force.” Figure out how to shape or shatter your rival’s spirit, and you might win the war while avoiding the enemy army entirely.

That is easier said than done. In the time since Clausewitz wrote On War,successive waves of new technology have seemed to offer the means to drain an enemy’s spirit from afar.

Yet they rarely work. During World War II, for example, the United Kingdom endured years of indiscriminate bombing

by German planes and then rockets that sought to force the nation to capitulate. But the British turned what Prime

From the world’s most powerful nations to the pettiest flame-war combatants, all of today’s fighters have turned social media into a weapon

Minister Winston Churchill called their “darkest hour” into their finest one. A generation later, the same logic drove the United States’ “Rolling Thunder” bombing campaign against North Vietnam during the late 1960s. U.S. warplanes dropped more than 6.5 million tons of bombs and killed tens of thousands of people. But the North Vietnamese never seriously contemplated surrender.

The same has been true for new tools of communication.

A few years after Clausewitz died, governments and companies began to build the first long-distance telegraph wires. They were followed several decades later by radio and then television. Each new technology was used to wage information wars that ran alongside the physical fighting. Yet propaganda was almost universally ineffective. During the Blitz, one of the most popular radio stations in the United Kingdom was an English-language station produced by the

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Prussian general, Carl Von Clausewitz (1780 1831 -). (Getty)

Nazis—because the British loved to laugh at it. In the 1960s and 1970s, alongside the millions of tons of bombs U.S. forces dropped on North Vietnam were tens of millions of leaflets, which the North Vietnamese promptly used as toilet paper.

The Internet has changed all that. In the space of a decade, social media has turned almost everyone into a collector and distributor of information. Attacking an adversary’s center of gravity—the minds and spirits of its people—no longer requires massive bombing runs or reams of ineffective propaganda. All it takes is a smartphone and a few idle seconds. Anyone can do it.

The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz was born in 1780, some 200 years before the invention of the Internet, but he would have implicitly understood almost everything it is doing to the world today

Today, it is possible to communicate directly with someone you’re ostensibly at war with—to send them “friend” requests, debate them, or silently stalk their digital lives.

Opposing soldiers on a battlefield might find and then troll each other online. Social networks also create new ways to reach out and attack, even from thousands of miles away.

Propagandists can identify a few dozen sympathizers out of a faraway population of millions and then groom them to attack their fellow citizens. Voices from around the globe can stir the pot of hatred and resentment between rival peoples, sparking a war or genocide. They can even divide and conquer a country’s politics from afar, realizing the political objective of a war without firing a shot.

LikeWar has transformed how fast information spreads, how far it travels, and how easy it is to access it. This has reshaped everything from military operational plans to the news business to political campaigns. Great military surprises, such as D-Day or the “left hook” of Operation Desert Storm, are now impossible to pull off in a world in which even the supposedly top-secret Osama bin Laden raid was livetweeted by a café owner up late in Abbottabad. Some groups are already adapting to this lack of secrecy. ISIS turned this seeming problem into an essential part of its strategy when it announced its invasion of Mosul with a call for the world to put #AllEyesOnISIS.

None of these scenarios is hypothetical. Each of them has already happened. Each will happen many more times in the years to come.

In homage to Clausewitz, we call this new conflict “LikeWar,” as it displays many of the features of war that he identified but has moved to a place where “likes” are the coin of the realm. If cyberwar is about hacking networks, LikeWar is about hacking the people on the networks. It’s a place where military units, using the techniques of information warfare, change elections and where teenage digital marketers, wielding selfie-taking smartphones, change the course of military battles.

THE RULES OF LIKEWAR From the world’s most powerful nations to the pettiest flamewar combatants, all of today’s fighters have turned social media into a weapon. They are all trying to bend the global information environment to their will. In this way, LikeWar is just the latest iteration of centuries of warfare. But in other ways, LikeWar marks an abrupt and momentous development in war and international politics.

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Yet although the truth is more widely available than ever before, it can be buried in a sea of lies. Perhaps no country has better mastered this than Russia, which invented the concept of disinformation almost a century ago. Unlike the United States, Russia never separated the concepts of military and political influence operations. Today, it is reaping the rewards of being ahead of the game in LikeWar, using its online strength to substitute for declining military power.

Russia’s success highlights one of the hardest truths that Clausewitz expressed in his writing—one he would recognize in politics today. Just as the euphoria of the French Revolution spawned the autocracy of Napoleon, so authoritarians have managed to co-opt the once liberating force of social media and twist it to their own advantage. This is true across the globe, from crackdowns in Turkey (where someone we interviewed was thrown in prison for a single re-tweet) to China’s bold new social credit system, which is priming an entire society for digital control by taking all of a person’s online activity and turning it into a single “trustworthiness” score.

The Internet has granted governments not just new ways to

T

echnology

control their own people but also a new kind of global reach through the power of disinformation. In many ways, Russia’s far-reaching campaign to poison its foes’ domestic politics through social media is a form of exported censorship.

Russia’s actions don’t limit what people can say but rather help to flood the digital and political ecosystem with division, dissension, and distrust. It does so by pushing its own conspiracy theories and lies and supporting the extremes of any debate through an army of sockpuppets and bots.

Authoritarian governments had an early advantage in manipulating social media, but others are catching up. As everything is out in the open, more and more countries and groups are learning how to wage this new form of digital warfare.

HOW TO WIN A TWITTER WAR Clausewitz would have intimately grasped this back-andforth between thinking adversaries, but he would likely have faltered in understanding the battleground’s terrain, which shapes its tactics and strategies. This is not just a nineteenthcentury problem. One thing became clear toanyone who watched the 2016 Clinton campaign flail online or members of Congress embarrass themselves during Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony: social media remains difficult to understand even for many policymakers today. The terrain of LikeWar is a human-made environment, run by for-profit companies. Its platforms are designed to reward not morality or veracity but virality. Online battles may be about politics and war, but they are propelled by the financial, psychological, and algorithmic drivers of the attention economy.

The system rewards clicks, interactions, engagement, and immersion time. That changes what it takes to win, whether the fight is a marketing war or a real one, or the new strange

Everything you watch, like, or share makes a tiny ripple on the information battlefield, offering an infinitesimal advantage to one side or another

forms that meld them. Figure out how to make something go viral and you can overwhelm even the truth itself.

As we examined the tactics of everyone from ISIS’ top recruiter to Taylor Swift to U.S. President Donald Trump to neo-Nazi trolls, we found consistent patterns. For all the seeming complexity, there are rules governing whether and how something goes viral. The most successful information warriors are masters of its new rules to driving your message viral: narrative, emotion, authenticity, community, inundation, and experimentation. Time and again, these wars are won by those able to shape the story lines that frame public understanding, to provoke the responses that impel people to action, to connect with a plurality of followers at the most personal level, to build a sense of fellowship, and to do it all on a global scale, again and again, but using individual reaction to each attack as a moment for mass refinement.

The Internet has brought one other unprecedented change that would have stumped even Clausewitz: its laws of war are set by a mere handful of people. On networks of billions of people, a tiny number of individuals can instantly turn the

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SOFWERX hosted a Cyber Capability Expo at their newest facility in Tampa, Florida., October ,19 2017. (Getty)

tide of an information war one way or another. What Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey allow (or ban) in their digital kingdoms can make or break entire companies and change the course of international conflicts.

Unfortunately, as these social media companies belatedly begin to reckon with their growing political power (power they never asked for and have often proved ill equipped to wield), they are repeating past mistakes. Time and again, they have failed to prepare for the political, legal, and moral dimensions of their world-changing technologies, failed to plan for how bad actors might abuse them and good actors might misuse them. At each foreseeable surprise they turn to technology as the answer. This cycle is about to repeat itself as companies develop new forms of artificial intelligence.

They believe this might solve their problems of censorship and content moderation, but it is easy to foresee how AI systems will also be weaponized against their users.

and nations have had to spend the last few decades learning to understand digital threats and adapting their structures and strategies to deal with them. Now they will have to do the same for LikeWar. Everyone is part of this new kind of fighting. If you are online, your attention is like a piece of contested territory. States, companies, and people you may never have heard of are fighting for it in conflicts that you may or may not realize are unfolding around you. Everything you watch, like, or share makes a tiny ripple on the information battlefield, offering an infinitesimal advantage to one side or another.

THERE’S A WAR FOR YOUR MIND

Those who can direct the flow of this swirling tide can accomplish incredible good. They can free people, expose crimes, save lives, and prompt far-reaching reforms. But they can also accomplish astonishing evil. They can foment violence, stoke hate, spread lies, spark wars, and even erode democracy itself. Which side succeeds will depend above all on how much the rest of us learn to recognize this LikeWar for what it is.

Thanks to the rise of the Internet, individuals, companies,

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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