WorldAffairs: Communism vs. COVID-19

 Vietnam may have limited resources to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but it’s made up for it with proactive policies and manpower. The country mobilized tens of thousands of military personnel, health care workers and ordinary citizens to fight COVID-19. This level of collective action requires a unified front, and though it was ultimately successful, Vietnam is still an authoritarian country that weathered a 20-year, famous civil war. There are plenty of Vietnamese people who, with good reason, don’t trust their government, and our guest on the podcast, Nguyen Qui Duc, is one of them. He’s a journalist and restaurant owner who joined us to describe his experience in Vietnam during a global pandemic.

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Social Europe: The big failure of small government

From the United States and the United Kingdom to Europe, Japan and South Africa, governments are investing billions—and, in some cases, trillions—of dollars to shore up national economies. Yet, if there is one thing we learned from the 2008 financial crisis, it is that quality matters at least as much as quantity. If the money falls on empty, weak or poorly-managed structures, it will have little effect, and may simply be sucked into the financial sector. Too many lives are at stake to repeat past errors.[...]

Consider two core government responsibilities during the Covid-19 crisis: public health and the digital realm. In 2018 alone, the UK government outsourced health contracts worth £9.2 billion ($11.2 billion), putting 84 per cent of beds in care homes in the hands of private-sector operators (including private-equity firms). Making matters worse, since 2015, the UK’s National Health Service has endured £1 billion in budget cuts. [...]

New Zealand is another success story, and not by coincidence. After initially adopting the outsourcing mantra in the 1980s, the New Zealand government changed course, embracing a ‘spirit of service’ and an ‘ethic of care’ across its public services, and becoming the first country in the world to adopt a wellbeing budget. Owing to this vision of public management, the government adopted a ‘health first, economy second’ approach to the current crisis. Rather than seeking herd immunity, it committed early to preventing infection.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

Typically the preparation of the animal is where you have exposure. By the time it’s cooked and prepared, the virus would have been dead. It’s more common that transmission is through the animal shedding or people slaughtering the animal, when they’re exposed to bodily fluids, blood, and secretions. With the avian influenza from poultry, a lot of the exposure and infections go back to the preparation of chicken for cooking. In Egypt, for instance, when you look at who was infected, more common than not it was a woman, directly responsible for slaughtering and preparing the animal. [...]

Certainly. We’ve been able to identify bats as reservoirs for coronaviruses and documented specific bat populations as reservoirs for Ebola virus. We want to understand how each of these bats operate within an ecosystem. Do they have certain behaviors and practices that either keep them remote from or proximal to human populations? The bat population in which we isolated the Ebola virus in West Africa was a species of bat that also tends to co-roost within human housing, so it elevates the opportunity for spillover. [...]

Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. [...]

Oh, sure. It was predictable. It’s like if you had no traffic laws and were constantly finding pedestrians getting whacked by cars as they crossed the street. Is that surprising? No. All you need to do is to better manage how we set up crosswalks, how we establish traffic rules and regulations. We’re not doing that. We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Blew Up The Iran Nuclear Deal. Now He Wants Allies To Help Him Get An Iran Nuclear Deal.

Trump prepares to meet Thursday and Friday with leaders of the world’s largest industrial economies at the G-20 summit in Japan with the idea, according to the White House, of gaining their cooperation in lowering tensions with Iran. “This is a chance for the president to engage with a number of different international leaders, among our closest partners and allies, to obtain their support and to have discussions about how we can encourage Iran to enter into negotiations,” a senior administration official said this week on condition of anonymity. [...]

“He’s taken his usual tactic, which is aggravate everyone in advance, up the ante, be obnoxious, with the hope of then acting like the non-abusive parent in the face-to-face meeting,” said Wendy Sherman, the former State Department official who led the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran agreement that Trump scrapped. “What that gets him is not really clear at this point.” [...]

rump also turned his attacks against Vietnam for its tariffs — “Vietnam takes advantage of us even worse than China” — and Japan, also for purportedly taking advantage of the United States through its defense treaty: “If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III. We will go in and we will protect them and we will fight with our lives and with our treasure. We will fight at all costs, right? But if we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television.” [...]

Adding to the difficulties, she said, is Trump’s tendency to swing from position to position, often undercutting his own administration’s work. Trump went from threatening “fire and fury” on North Korea to praising its dictator within weeks. He threatened to shut the border with Mexico, then reversed. He threatened tariffs on Mexico, then reversed on that, too.

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99 Percent Invisible: Making It Rain

This was the beginning of a top secret military project called Operation Popeye. The goal was to actually create more rain in Southeast Asia by artificially extending and intensifying the naturally occurring monsoon season (which ran from April to October) by a month on either side.

Humans — especially military humans — have wanted to control the weather for a long time. Some rainmaking ceremonies have ancient roots. “It goes back to traditional rainmaking ceremonies,” explains historian Jim Fleming. “Turns out that if you do a rain dance for up to two weeks it’ll probably rain and then you can take credit for that.”

Fleming says that in the 19th century — after the Civil War — a theory began to develop that major military operations were somehow disrupting the clouds and causing big rain storms. So in the 1890s, the federal government actually simulated battle activity in Texas during a drought. They fired off cannons and created explosions. “The locals loved it,” explains Fleming. “They loved to go out on the hillside and watch the cannonading, but it was during the monsoon season. So there was a really good chance it was going to rain anyway.”

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The New Yorker: What Went Wrong in Vietnam (February 26, 2018 Issue)

For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. We got nothing for it. [...]

The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes. Geopolitics helps explain our concerns about the fate of Vietnam in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Relations with the Soviet Union and China were hostile, and Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula were in political turmoil. Still, paying for France to reclaim its colony just as the world was about to experience a wave of decolonization was a dubious undertaking. [...]

Our international standing was never dependent on our commitment to South Vietnam. We might have been accused of inconstancy for abandoning an ally, but everyone would have understood. In fact, the longer the war went on the more our image suffered. The United States engaged in a number of high-handed and extralegal interventions in the affairs of other nations during the Cold War, but nothing damaged our reputation like Vietnam. It not only shattered our image of invincibility. It meant that a whole generation grew up looking upon the United States as an imperialist, militarist, and racist power. The political capital we accumulated after leading the alliance against Fascism in the Second World War and then helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe we burned through in Southeast Asia. [...]

The South Vietnamese who welcomed the American presence after 1954 were mainly urbanites and people who had prospered under French rule. Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.

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Politico: China’s trash ban forces Europe to confront its waste problem

Of the 56.4 million tons of paper EU citizens threw away in 2016, some 8 million ended up in China, purchased by recycling centers that turn it into cardboard and send it back to Europe as packaging for Chinese exports. That same year, the EU collected 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, and sent 1.6 million tons to China.

At the end of last year, Beijing put an end to the practice, putting in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste. Only eight weeks later, Europe is struggling to deal with mountains of plastic and paper waste. [...]

The EU is to some extent a victim of its own success. For years, European leaders have touted the benefits of limiting and reusing waste. Just last month, the European Commission presented its vision for the future of plastics, exhorting Europe to turn waste into an economic opportunity. [...]

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe’s capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

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Slate: Smoothing an Elephant

Yascha Mounk and Branko Milanovic discuss what his famous elephant curve says about the ills—and the gains—of globalization, how the left’s concern with inequality is being turned against its concern with internationalism, why economic causes of populism are often expressed in cultural ways, and how a determination to increase the financial and educational endowments of ordinary citizens can combat inequality and boost their living standards.

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Financial Times: The end of the Chinese miracle

The New York Times: Obama, Acknowledging U.S. Misdeeds Abroad, Quietly Reframes American Power

Mr. Obama had similarly confronted American misdeeds this year in Cuba, Argentina, Vietnam and Japan, each time raising decades-old but still sensitive actions, framed in the language of reconciliation. In comparison, the last Democrat in the White House, President Bill Clinton, did so once and only indirectly: admitting, in a speech delegated to his secretary of state, the United States’ role in Iran’s 1953 coup.

Mr. Obama’s series of speeches reviewing historical trouble spots highlight several unusual facets of his worldview. They fit within his larger effort to reach out to former adversaries such as Cuba and Myanmar. They assert his belief in introspection and the need to overcome the past. And they highlight his perspective that American power has not always been a force for good.

The White House is not eager to call attention to this practice. The administration is still sensitive after being accused by conservatives of “apologizing for America” in 2009, after Mr. Obama spoke critically of his Republican predecessor during visits to Egypt and France. [...]

Professor Lind stressed that none of Mr. Obama’s comments constitute apology. But nor is the controversy around them without substance. Rather, these speeches touch on a longstanding domestic political divide over the nature of American power. [...]

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said this idea, though widespread in the United States, is something of a fallacy. Only Americans believe that the United States’ power is inherently virtuous; elsewhere, people see this idea as not only false, but dangerous.

“The disjuncture in the way that this is seen abroad and at home is one of the huge problems in U.S. foreign policy,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is American. “This is an image that Americans have of themselves but is simply not shared, even by their allies.”

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