Foreign Affairs: The End of Globalism

The process would be backed by the United States’ hard and soft power. Indeed, it was partially according to this logic that neo-liberalism’s offspring, the neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists, took America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And therein lies the problem; globalism was a Trojan Horse. It devoured globalization, turning it into a force that seemed unstoppable until it collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. [...]

China, more than any other developing country, has benefited from globalization. It saw itself transform from a poor agrarian economy into a global industrial powerhouse, all while lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty. Yet China chose to engage globalization on its own terms, embracing connectivity while decisively rejecting globalism. In turn, China was able to strengthen its one-party political system and open its market according to its own national development priorities. [...]

China’s ideas are fundamentally compatible with Trump’s vision. Strong sovereign nations are paramount to a functioning international system. The primacy of culture must be recognized, and enforcing uniform rules should never take precedence over national considerations. Multilateral institutions, moreover, should not be used to suppress bilateral engagements when bilateral arrangements are more effective. All these statements could have been uttered by Trump or by Xi. [...]

Trump’s victory was not an accident. It was the culmination of structural changes within American society that elites had ignored for too long. These forces will continue to push the United States and the world down a different path than the one they’ve been on for 25 years now. It is critical that Chinese leaders see this reality and respond accordingly. If China gets it wrong, trade wars, geopolitical confrontations, and even military conflicts could follow. It would be a classic case of the Thucydides Trap, in which a rising power strikes fear in an established power and tensions escalate into war. The United States has legitimate reasons to place itself first in its dealings with the world. China, more than any other nation, should be capable of understanding that. And China, also more than any other nation, could offer Trump’s America room to successfully adjust its national priorities. 

read the article 

Politico: An intellectual history of Trumpism

For most of the last 18 months, Donald Trump has been portrayed as a clown, a showman, an opportunist, a faux conservative, a political naïf, and an egomaniac bent on nothing but power and glory—but rarely as a man with an intelligible ideology. Yet if Trump’s ideas can’t quite be said to cohere into a unified worldview, and if his legion flip-flops deny him any claim to philosophical consistency, many of his signature promises and policies do add up to a set of ideas—populist, nationalist, authoritarian—with deep roots in American history. After a year and a half of dwelling on Trump the personality, it may be time to turn our attention to Trumpism.

To the extent that analysts have discerned any new philosophy behind Trump’s rise, they have focused on the vicious, bigoted internet stylings of the so-called alt-right. But the unabashed white nationalism, anti-Semitism and misogyny of that hitherto underground movement constitute only one strain of Trumpism. The larger ideology that the president-elect represents is a post-Iraq War, post-crash, post-Barack Obama update of what used to be called paleoconservatism: On race and immigration, where the alt-right affinities are most pronounced, its populist ideas are carrying an already right-wing party even further right. On a few economic issues, such as infrastructure and entitlement spending, they could direct the party toward the political center. On trade and foreign policy, they threaten to demolish the internationalism that has governed the GOP since Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. In each of these ways, Trumpism represents a significant break with the conservatism that has dominated the Republican Party for decades.

Where did these currents come from? Today’s populist right has its clearest origins in an early 20th-century backlash against a society that was becoming centralized, urban, cosmopolitan and interconnected with the world at large—tendencies that are still upsetting white rural America today. Just as Trump was boosted over the wall of 270 electoral votes by white Midwesterners, some of whom had previously voted Democratic, so it was formerly progressive elements from the country’s midsection that fueled the rise of a right-wing populism after World War I. That movement was never strong enough to win the White House, and it was largely discredited and marginalized by World War II. But in today’s post-Great Recession globalized world many of its ideas are suddenly reemerging with a vengeance. And now, for the first time in history we have a president, commanding all the powers of the Executive Branch, who espouses its ideas. That could mean a rollback of the core tenets of post-New Deal, post-World War II America, including the commitment to civil rights, civil liberties, and pluralism at home and to liberal internationalism abroad.

read the article 

The New York Times: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

But that’s the headline you’d write if you were just trying to maximize clicks. If you wanted to capture the philosophical significance of what Hamilton was saying, you’d take another tack. Rather than focus on miracles, you’d focus on the idea of “higher purpose” — the idea that there’s some point to life on earth that emanates from something that is in some sense beyond it. And — in hopes of generating as many clicks as possible, notwithstanding the philosophical significance — you’d put this in listicle form, laying out several misconceptions that Hamilton had implicitly dispelled. You could call these the “Three Great Myths About Evolution and Purpose.” [...]

You may scoff, but in 2003 the philosopher Nick Bostrom of Oxford University published a paper laying out reasons to think that we are pretty likely to be living in a simulation. And the simulation hypothesis has gained influential supporters. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and America’s de facto astronomer laureate, finds it plausible. The visionary tech entrepreneur Elon Musk says there’s almost no chance that we’re living in “base reality.” The New Yorker reported earlier this year that “two tech billionaires” — it didn’t say whether Musk is one of them — “have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

I’m guessing that will take awhile, and meanwhile I’d like to note an irony.

When an argument for higher purpose is put this way — that is, when it doesn’t involve the phrase “higher purpose” and, further, is cast more as a technological scenario than a metaphysical one — it is considered intellectually respectable. I don’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who dismiss it. I’m talking about how people dismiss it. The Bostrom paper drew flack, but a lot of it was from people who thought the chances that we’re living in a simulation are way less than 50 percent, not from people who thought the idea was wholly crazy.

read the article 

VICE: “I am waiting to die”: Syrians in Aleppo are posting final goodbyes online

As Syrian government forces closed in on the last sliver of rebel-held territory in Aleppo on Monday, trapped residents braced for the worst. Some posted final messages online, saying their possible final farewells amid the rumble of intensifying airstrikes and war planes overhead — the sounds of the Bashar al-Assad regime closing in.

“I am waiting to die or be captured by the Assad regime…Pray for me and always remember us,” photographer Ameen al-Halabi wrote on Facebook. [...]

Millions have fled Syria since the beginning of the civil war, flooding Europe and neighboring countries in the Middle East. More than 10,000 have fled in just the past 24 hours. And at least 100,000 remain, according to opposition officials, the Wall Street Journal reported.

read the article 

CityLab: Faster Rail Service Is Coming to America—Slowly

There’s a long and distinguished conservative tradition of hating on passenger rail projects, mainly because of the massive federal expenses they tend to incur. Republicans vigorously fought President Obama’s $8 billion pledge to power high-speed intra-city lines back in 2009 (alongside Vice President “Amtrak Joe” Biden, of course), and blocked his plans to fund road, bridge, and rail projects with a $478 billion infrastructure bill in 2015. (A whittled-down, $305 billion version passed later that year.)

Will Donald Trump be more sympathetic to trains than the average Republican? Possibly. The President-elect has compared America’s railroads to those of third-world countries and made envious references to Chinese bullet trains: "They have trains that go 300 miles per hour," he said in March. "We have trains that go chug-chug-chug." As a New York City developer, he also knows how rail connections can anchor serious real estate investments. His much-touted $1 trillion infrastructure plan hinges on leveraging big chunks of private lucre with very small amounts of public cash—the sort of financing scheme that could actually work for a rail project along a dense, inter-city corridor with lots of development opportunities. (What does his nominated DOT secretary, Elaine Chao, think about rail? Who knows?)

Despite having long been left for dead, those sorts of rail improvements and connections are coming to life in the U.S.—corridor by corridor, at varying velocities. In the absence of much dedicated federal funding, private investments are paying the freight in some cases; others are getting state funding. If Trump wants to create jobs with splashy infrastructure upgrades, giving these existing high-speed rail projects a cash injection might be a good bet. (Especially now that the Federal Railroad Administration finally released updated safety standards for high-speed trains, which stands to speed up project approvals in the future.)

Here’s a roundup of America’s motley fleet of unfinished supertrains.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Russia's Communist Party turns to the Orthodox Church

More than 25 years after the Soviet collapse, the party vocally appeals to Orthodox Christianity, Russia's dominant creed. The party's sole post-Soviet chairman Gennady Zyuganov called Jesus "the first Communist" more than once.

"It is a holy duty of Communists and the Orthodox Church to unite," Zuyganov wrote in 2012 in his party's first lengthy document on religion, because both institutions shared "common goals and enemies". The goals included censorship of "debauchery and violence" in mass media, eradication of Western liberalism and "its conception of human rights", e-government and sexual education in schools.  [...]

Its support has been waning for years; its loyalists are simply dying out. The age of an average party member is 56, and the number of members has fallen to about 155,000 - a trivial number in comparison with the 19.5 million Soviet Communists in 1989. The speeches of Zyuganov - balding, pudgy and famously uncharismatic - hardly attract millennials or middle-class urbanites, the main antagonists of the Kremlin. [...]

"All political forces should be together when it comes to the values of faith, morals, culture and our nation's unity," Russian Patriarch Kirill was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying in 2014 when he handed Zyuganov a medal of Glory and Honour, his Church's top award, on his 70th birthday.

In February, Zyuganov congratulated Kirill on the five-year anniversary of his enthronement. "One of the most serious mistakes of my predecessors was that they fell out with the Church," he told the patriarch.

read the article 

Deutsche Welle: Russia behind hack on German parliament, paper reports

Germany's "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" (FAS) quoted a high-ranking security official who said it was "highly plausible" that a cybertheft of files from a German parliamentary inquiry in 2015 was conducted by Russian hackers. [...]

FAS reported Sunday that 2,420 secret files published two weeks ago by WikiLeaks were documents that had been stored electronically at parliament in late 2014 and early 2015 for the Bundestag's own inquiry into the NSA. [...]

Wolfgang Bosbach, a conservative ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, told the "Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger" (KStA) newspaper: "The risk of exertion of influence through deliberate infiltration from outside with the aim of manipulating facts or opinion exists generally."

Rolf Mützenich, the Social Democrat parliamentary group's foreign policy spokesman told the KStA: "During campaigning we will have to prepare ourselves for distortion and false stories."

read the article 

National Public Radio: The U.S. And China: Two Centuries Of Infatuation And Disappointment

In the 19th century, more Chinese workers started coming because the U.S. signed a treaty with China in 1868, and as Pomfret writes: "By the time the treaty was signed, Chinese had been coming to the United States for almost two decades." They soon represented 10 percent of California's population.

Americans welcomed them. Chinese workers drained swamps to produce millions of acres of the richest farmland in the world. The Chinese were miners, laundrymen, cooks, small merchants and railroad workers. They helped build the West. A Republican who owned mines and built railroads told the California State Senate that Chinese workers were "men of iron" and "hardy, industrious laborers."

But once the Civil War ended in 1865, a huge pool of American men headed west to look for jobs. The economy slowed, and Americans turned on the Chinese. At that time, a higher percentage of Chinese were employed than white men, so state laws blocked Chinese entry to the U.S. and prevented those already here from working.

In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. for 10 years. It was the first time the U.S. specifically denied entry to a particular ethnic group. [...]

Pomfret describes the strange and complex situation as a "never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion, and disgust, only to return to fascination once again."

read the article 

Slate: Beautiful, Catholic Malta Is the First European Country to Ban Conversion “Therapy”

Malta became the first European country to ban gay conversion “therapy” —also known as torture—when the tiny island nation’s parliament unanimously approved a sweeping bill on Monday that categorized the practice as a “deceptive and unlawful act.” The new law prohibits medical professionals from attempting to alter a patient’s sexual orientation, under threat of fines or jail time. It also lowers the age at which a person may request a change in gender to 16, permitting anyone over that age to legally change their gender without filing an application in court or receiving parental approval. The law declares that no sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression constitutes a disorder or disease and requires the government to recognize the “lived gender” of non-Maltese people detained on the island. [...]

In 2011, the country held a referendum on divorce, and a majority of voters chose to legalize the formal dissolution of marriages. No longer would Western Europeans drawn to the island for natural landmarks like the luminous Blue Grotto be shocked to learn that couples, once married, were forever trapped in their relationship. [...]

In 2016, the government repealed a law that criminalized the vilification of religion “by words, gestures, written matter, whether printed or not, or pictures or by some other visible means.” Tourists and residents alike could finally take in the breathtaking views of the spectacular Maltese countryside while perched atop the walled city of Mdina without fretting that a stray comment could land them in jail. [...]

Malta, of course, retains its proud Catholic heritage and continues to celebrate church traditions that help to define the country’s identity. A majority of its citizens (and legislators) have simply decided that the government has no business enforcing discriminatory beliefs using the heavy hand of the law. In that sense, the country is really an inspiration, simultaneously a haven for LGBTQ rights and a nation of deep Catholic faith. Liberal Western values may be on the decline elsewhere in Europe. But Malta today is proving that a country can adhere to key traditional values, promote its own religious heritage, and recognize the dignity of every citizen—all at the same time.

read the article