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what does monopoly do and what do oligopolistic structures do to the domestic political structure?

properly understood liberalism clearly isn't premised on the absence of the state, its premised on a well-ordered set of relationships between individuals, the law and various types of representation. That structure is not necessarily robust if economic power becomes monolithic. There are ways of taming that by way of corporatism, in which you have an organized representation of economic interests. But you can also imagine systems in which it can become a sort of destructive set of flywheels of extremely explosive dynamics of gigantic interest groups contending with each other more or less in an unmediated direct form interest on interest.

a clash within the one-party state of different interests, of agglomerations of technology and capital, of different party factions

It's quite difficult to describe the Chinese regime in categories that are at all familiar without reducing it hopelessly and just failing to recognize its complexity

This sort of apocalyptic thinking of a history that's going to end with some sort of big bang, or some terrible ghastly discreditable whimper, rather than just facing up to reality in which the world is different and America's position is not what it was in 1945. Which is not after all the end of the world.

there are deeply intelligent, obviously brilliant political and legal theorists working in China, trying to articulate and make sense of the logic of this emerging power. One of the sources that they go to – and this has emerged from the tireless work of many translators of recent Chinese political writing and international relations thought is -- is a German political and legal theorist called Carl Schmitt.

We were fought to a stalemate in Korea. Vietnam was a debacle. And one of the key anchors of the ultimate demise of Soviet Union is, after all, an alliance with China. And in 1989 at the moment, as it were, where the chips are falling and the Warsaw pact is disintegrating in Eastern Europe, we have Tiananmen Square, the Communist Party basically giving notice that this regime change will not extend to them.

you can immediately see why Chinese scholars seized on precisely this logic for thinking through the emergence of Chinese power in the context of what they would diagnose as American empire

they also see in Schmitt a theorist of China's own potential empire, a zone of influence and power that would create its own structures of incorporation, its own norms. Given from China, defined by China, set and ultimately rooted in Chinese power, radiating out from East Asia, encompassing other states.

“One Nation, Two Systems” was precisely a kind of Schmittian vision of an overarching Chinese empire, with the pluralism that's contained within that. Safely contained with the acknowledgement that this is about China, under the leadership and the hegemony of the CCP, tolerating two systems. Of course, that isn't what we're seeing

It seems to me that there could be a horrifying originality to what they're doing. After all the tech dimension of what China's able to do now in terms of surveillance is beyond the wildest dreams of any previous authoritarian regime.

It too easily slides out of consciousness that the Chinese regime undertook what Foucauldians would call one of the most grotesque, grandiose, and very violent political experiments in history, the one-child policy. It pursued that towards the Han population. That it’s then also capable of taking those kinds of techniques and applying them to resistant population like the Uighurs or Tibetans or the Mongolians, I don't think it’s surprising. It's the same toolkit. In the eighties, it was ferocious in its intrusiveness, monitoring women's menstrual cycles, forced abortions. This stands alone. No one's ever done that before on that scale. It’s quite mind-blowing and too easily consigned to the history books.

Perhaps the common denominator is simply control and this being a matter of the highest possible political stakes. Not to be able to control this virus would be a far more serious blow to the prestige and legitimacy of a regime which has those kinds of pretensions than it is to the Trump administration in the U.S., which in the end just shrugs

he has one of the most hard-nosed answers to liberalism. He insists upon understanding politics as a distinction between friend and foe, friend and enemy. He insists that legal orders have real foundations in space and in power, in the taking of a territory, fundamentally. That they therefore have limits and necessarily have limits, that they define insiders and outsiders. That structures which are truly comprehensive threatened to emerge in the course of the 20th century

I think that ought to force us to reconsider this notion that the Cold War ended with us winning as it did in Europe. It didn't in Asia, and Korea feels the force of that, Japan feels the force of that, and the United States is now coming to terms with it too.

People across the national security spectrum said: You don’t have to like, respect, or agree with Cohen and Patel, but you underestimate their drive and Machiavellian prowess at your own peril.

“Kash had a meteoric rise,” a senior administration official explained. “He gets hired for the Russia collusion [investigation], and that put him at the president’s doorstep. For the past year Kash has swung the biggest dick in D.C. because he could just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to the president.’ And we were on emails with him where he’s telling four-star generals, ‘Hey, this is a White House priority. Don’t make me go talk to the president, because I will.’ And the generals always rolled over.”

The CIA gambit took place last year. In fact, when I had spoken with Cohen about the matter, he had told me, “The idea was to put Kash in as the deputy, which doesn’t require Senate approval, and then to fire Gina the next day, leaving Kash in charge…. Robert O’Brien, [Trump’s national security adviser], is the one who deep-sixed it.” When I pressed Patel further about these machinations, which had occurred in December, I saw him turn lawyerly: “That stuff is between me and the boss. That’s the only thing I don’t comment on. Ever. It’s executive privilege.”

On the leg back to D.C., Miller invited me up to his cabin. I asked him about the $1.5 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (a deeply flawed system I had covered at length for Vanity Fair)—a purportedly off-the-record conversation that someone in the Pentagon decided to simply post on the Defense Department’s website. What did this costly, badly flawed aircraft—27 years in the making—say about the Pentagon’s spending priorities? Miller started laughing before letting loose: “I cannot wait to leave this job, believe me. Talk about a wicked problem! I wanted to take that one on. F-35 is the case study…. [T]hat investment, for that capability that we’re never supposed to use…I’m like, ‘We have created a monster.’”

Sitting on his couch at the end of a surreal week, he finally took off the gloves. His target? The Defense Department itself, the largest organization in the world—and one he has served in various ways since he was 18. “This fucking place is rotten. It’s rotten.” Miller’s gravest concern, he said, involved a bedrock principle of American democracy: civilian control of the military. “When the system is weighted towards the Joint Staff and the geographic combatant commanders against civilian control, you know, we’ve got to rethink this.” He expressed a belief that by “idolizing and fetishizing” the top brass, members of Congress had ignored an erosion over time in the chain of command.

the Joint Chiefs were creating their own “security compartments” containing operational planning details “for the express purpose of hiding key information from career civilian and political leaders in the Pentagon”—up to and including the secretary of Defense. Talk about a deep state. “That means that policymakers were basing their decisions on partial information. It’s very dangerous and irresponsible, and that’s something I’ve actually highlighted in my conversations with [Biden’s] transition team.” I’ll admit it sounded loopy. To me it had all the elements of a Trump fever dream: The military and intelligence establishment was somehow scheming against the renegades. That is, until two other senior national security officials—with Miller and company—confirmed Cohen’s assertion.

‘Well, who are these people that have the complete picture?’ I felt like I finally did as acting SECDEF—to a point. I’m sure there’s still some stuff that was being compartmented. But I don’t know that for a fact.”

When the Liberian political entrepreneur Charles Taylor began an insurgency in 1989, he did so with arms and men from nearby Burkina Faso, whose leader Blaise Compaoré was practically a pyromaniac, lighting conflagrations in Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast as well. When Nigeria, which sees itself as the West African regional hegemon, sent troops to Liberia in 1990, ostensibly as a West African peacekeeping force (the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group), the aim wasn’t only to stabilize Liberia and prevent Taylor from taking power, but also to rein in Compaoré’s ambitions and cement Nigeria’s status as the West African powerbroker.

In a recent article in the Journal of Modern African Studies, some colleagues and I found that just 30 percent of African conflicts since 1960 were “internal” and the remainder a mixture of “internationalized internal” and “interstate”: fully 70 percent were actually internationalized in one way or another.

In the DRC, the U.N. Force Intervention Brigade (FIB) is a combat force to supplement the peacekeeping mission, with the aim of suppressing violent insurgents in the east of the country. The most powerful of those armed groups are backed by Rwanda. The FIB’s main troop contributors are South Africa and Tanzania—both of which have political interests in keeping Rwanda’s ambitions in check.

During the last 15 years, as the African Union and United Nations, along with regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States, have constructed a new peace and security order for Africa, these patterns of armed interstate rivalry have not gone away

pan-African cooperation to support anti-colonial insurgencies in southern Africa; of mutual destabilization in the Horn of Africa, as Ethiopia sought to cement its position as regional hegemon and undermined governments in Somalia and Sudan and they reciprocated; of Libya’s invasion of Chad and sponsorship of rebels across the Sahel and West Africa to try to establish Muammar al-Qaddafi as the big man of Africa; of rivalries between Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso fought out in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and of how the path towards Africa’s “great war” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was paved by interstate armed rivalries and proxy wars in the African Great Lakes, the Nile Valley, and Angola.

Similar calculations underpin Chad’s dispatch of special forces to Operation Barkhane in Mali, which is a French-led military intervention to fight al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other insurgent groups. Scores of Chadian soldiers have died, a price that the country’s government is willing to pay because of its own security interests

The backbone of the African Union Mission in Somalia, a combat mission against the militant group al-Shabab, is made up of troops from next-door Ethiopia and Kenya, both of which have used force against Somalia many times over the previous decades. So far, the mission has suffered somewhere between around 750 and 1,150 fatalities—losses that could only be borne by countries with national-security stakes in the outcome.

old patterns of cross-border conflict are now replicated under the banner of peacekeeping

Last year’s peace deal for South Sudan was first and foremost a pact between the country’s two meddlesome neighbors, Sudan and Uganda

Peace agreements for countries such as the Central African Republic, Mali, and Somalia first cater to the interests of the regional powerbrokers and only second deal with internal issues

conflicts are likely to follow the established patterns of combining covert intervention and support to proxies, but overt wars cannot be ruled out

The US has a key Cold War-era air base at Thule, used for surveillance of space using a massive radar. It is the US military's northernmost base, there to provide early warning of a missile attack on North America.

"Despite the Arctic nations' shared ambition to keep the region free of security policy disagreements, the military focus on the Arctic is growing. A power game is unfolding between great powers Russia, the United States and China that deepens tensions in the region."

There are competing territorial claims at the UN from Denmark, Russia, the US and Canada in the North Pole region, where energy and mineral resources are becoming more accessible.

in August Denmark sent a large support ship to Greenlandic waters for the first time. The Absalon, and sister ship Esbern Snare, are the biggest Danish naval vessels.

Greenland's population is about 56,000 and for decades the territory has been economically dependent on Denmark.The Self Rule Act of 2009 granted Greenland far-reaching autonomy, though Denmark retains control over foreign affairs, defence, security and immigration.Fisheries account for more than 90% of Greenland's exports, most of which go to Denmark, and prawn is the main species caught.

Denmark is helping Greenland to build three big international airports, one of them in the capital Nuuk. A Chinese bid for the airport project was rejected.

It would also aim to bring more transparency to purchases of high-end real estate, which many foreign nationals use to launder money into the U.S. And it would require that the State Department and the Intelligence Community report to Congress every 90 days on whether or not the Kremlin is meddling in U.S. elections. 

Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, have also raised concerns about the bill

I listened to the pilots, to their voices, and I trust them much more than I would trust myself. And they’re clearly seeing something extraordinary. Now, whether it’s alien life, who knows? It’s a plausible explanation. My point is that we should be agnostic about this and simply study it scientifically. Let’s do the science and then we can talk about what we found. Until we’ve done that, it’s all bullshit.

no one has bothered to actually look for UFOs. We’re looking for ETs around distant stars, we’re looking for comets, we’re looking at all kinds of other things in the atmosphere. No one, as far as I know, is seriously looking for UFOs.

The puzzle is that we’re not doing the science. To me, that’s the essential phenomenon that’s of interest.

if ETs were discovered, it would be the most important event in human history.

it could be a very dangerous event in the sense that we might see a collapse of state authority. We might see chaos. The possibility of contact with a civilization that has vastly more knowledge than we do is exciting and terrifying and unpredictable.

My feeling is that if they’re here, they’re almost certainly peaceful, because if they were not peaceful they would have wiped us out a long time ago. They can probably do it very quickly. So my assumption is they don’t mean any harm. But it’s still the case that society could implode or destabilize as a result of colliding with ETs.

I worry less about poking around and getting conquered and more about the potential realization that these things are here and then an internal implosion of our society. So I worry about my fellow human beings more than I worry about the aliens. So I guess in that sense, I disagree with Hawking’s premise that they’re out to get us. But sure, it’s possible they’re on a surveillance mission. But people have been reporting UFOs for at least 80 years, and that’s a really, really long surveillance mission. And also, why would they want to conquer us? That’s like us conquering ants.

people have speculated that any civilization that’s able to travel between the stars would have to become nonviolent, because they would never survive long enough if they’re violent among themselves to actually reach a point where their technology was that sophisticated. And human beings don’t seem to be as violent as we used to be, so there’s that.

For governments, there’s no real upside to talking about this. They can’t control this. If there are ETs, they don’t have the power to do anything about it. They’re helpless in the face of ETs. And there’s a big downside risk of social chaos, loss of authority, loss of control and all that. So I think governments have lots of reasons to let a sleeping dog lie, which is why the Navy’s thing is so surprising in a way.

I’m a strong disbeliever in any kind of conspiracy argument. I don’t think there has ever been a conspiracy to cover up the truth that we know that aliens are here. At most, we’ve covered up the fact that we have no idea what’s going on.

I only write articles where I don’t know the answer ahead of time

Montezuma could’ve prepared a lot better for Cortes than he did, had he only known Cortes was coming.

In early June, the International Crisis Group did something its leaders said was a historic first: It issued a statement on an internal crisis in the United States. The ICG, an independent organization headquartered in Belgium, analyzes geopolitics with the goal of preventing conflict. It is known for issuing authoritative, deeply sourced reports on war-torn countries — say, how to end the brutal conflict in Yemen.

In language similar to how it might describe fragile foreign states, the ICG cast the “unrest” as a crisis that “put the nation’s political divides on full display.” And it chided the Trump administration for “incendiary, panicky rhetoric that suggests the U.S. is in armed conflict with its own people.”

“Over the long term, the nation will need to take steps to end the police’s brutality and militarization as well as structural racial inequality if it wants to avoid similar future crises,” the ICG said.

The ICG decided it saw a confluence of factors in America that it sees in far more troubled countries. One appeared to be growing militarization of the police. Another was the seeming politicization of the military. Also key: Some U.S. political leaders, including Trump, seem determined to exploit racial divisions instead of pushing for unity. The ICG is now debating whether to launch a program that focuses on U.S. domestic issues in a systematic way

past U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat, all had credibility gaps when it came to promoting human rights while protecting U.S. interests. Obama, for instance, was criticized for authorizing drone strikes against militants that often killed civilians

“I think there’s a qualitative difference with this administration, for whom human rights seems to be treated purely as a transactional currency,”

In 2019, Freedom House released a special essay titled “The Struggle Comes Home: Attacks on Democracy in the United States.” The Washington-based NGO, which receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. government, was established in 1941 to fight fascism. Its report, which ranks how free countries are using various indicators, described a decline in U.S. democracy that predated Trump and was fueled in part by political polarization. Freedom House warned, however, that Trump was accelerating it.

The international furor against the Trump administration was especially intense in mid-2018, as the U.S. was separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, then putting the children in detention camps. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights called the U.S. actions “unconscionable.”

“There is intense racism and law enforcement abuse of human rights in China, in Russia, in Brazil and a lot of other countries that the United Nations has a hard time mustering the will to condemn,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a former senior human rights official under Obama. “But none of those countries is the indispensable nation. What human rights organizations and institutions are saying by focusing on the United States is something that they cannot explicitly admit, and that is that they believe in American exceptionalism. They understand that America falling short of its ideals has a far greater impact on the world than a Russia or a China doing what we all expect those authoritarian states to do.”

A top State Department official, Brian Hook, later wrote a memo to Tillerson arguing that the U.S. should use human rights as a weapon against adversaries, like Iran and China. But repressive allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, should get a pass, it said. “Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” Hook wrote.

the memo appears to have laid out the policy approach the Trump administration has taken on human rights, even after Tillerson was fired in early 2018. His successor, Mike Pompeo, frequently weighs in on human rights but almost exclusively to bash governments hostile to the United States or, occasionally, ones with which the U.S. has limited strategic interest.

it sometimes goes to great lengths to protect abusive U.S partners, as it has done by pressing ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia despite its assassination of a writer for The Washington Post

“The current administration doesn’t think most of its supporters care about international violations of human rights broadly,”

Human rights leaders say there are two noteworthy bright spots in the Trump administration’s record. It has put significant resources into promoting international religious freedom — routinely speaking out on the topic, holding annual ministerial gatherings about it, and launching an international coalition of countries to promote the ideal. A few weeks ago, Trump issued an executive order instructing Pompeo to further integrate the promotion of religious freedom in U.S. diplomacy. The administration also has used a relatively new legal tool, the Global Magnitsky Act, to impose economic sanctions on numerous individuals implicated in human rights abuses abroad. The sanctions have fallen on people ranging from Myanmar military officials suspected in the mass slaughter of Rohingya Muslims to an allegedly abusive Pakistani police official.

Trump administration officials also say human rights activists are never satisfied, no matter who is in the White House. This is not an unfair argument: The groups routinely criticize even administrations most friendly to their cause. Bush was eviscerated over his handling of the war on terrorism, especially his decision to invade Iraq, even though he and his aides asserted that they were liberating and protecting people. Obama’s human rights legacy was declared “shaky.” For U.S. officials who must make choices between bad and worse options every day, the endless criticism is frustrating.

Pompeo’s disdain for the human rights community is one reason he created what’s known as the Commission on Unalienable Rights. The secretary asserts that activists keep trying to create categories of rights, and that “not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right.”

Rights activists worry the panel will craft a “hierarchy” of rights that will undermine protections for women, LGBTQ people and others, while possibly elevating religious freedom above other rights

Privately, administration officials say they do a lot of excellent human rights work that doesn’t get attention. They note that Congress has kept up funding for much of that work, even though Trump has tried to slash that funding. They also argue that the Trump team’s objectives and priorities are clearer than those of past administrations, especially when distinguishing friend from foe. While Obama tried to engage Tehran and Havana, the Trump administration casts those regimes as irredeemable, and it’s willing to attack them on human rights to weaken them. On the other hand, while Obama kept Hungary’s leader at a distance, Trump has welcomed him to the White House. Critics may see that as another example of Trump liking dictators, but his aides say it is a way to limit Russian and Chinese influence in Eastern Europe.

“In comparison to the remainder of its human rights record, the Trump administration’s use of the Global Magnitsky sanctions has exceeded expectations,”

The religious freedom alliance, for instance, includes countries such as Hungary, whose government the U.S. is trying to court but which traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric. The religious freedom push also dovetails with a priority of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who have long pushed for greater protection of Christian communities overseas.

Under intense outside pressure, the administration imposed Magnitsky sanctions on more than a dozen Saudis for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi; but it spared the man the U.S. intelligence community considers responsible for the killing, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump has defended

The dire situation of Uighur Muslims in China illustrates how both the Magnitsky effort and the religious freedom effort have collided with Trump’s own priorities.

In recent years, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uighur Muslims, putting them in camps from which ugly reports of abuse have emerged. China claims it is “reeducating” the Uighurs to stamp out terrorist thinking in the population. Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress are furious over the detention of the Uighurs.

Pompeo, meanwhile, has raised the Uighurs as an example of why the U.S. must promote religious freedom. But Trump has been unwilling to use the Magnitsky sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the mistreatment of the Uighurs. He told Axios he doesn't want to impose the penalties because it might derail trade talks with Beijing, the success of which he sees as critical to his reelection

Trump’s diatribes against journalists — and his claims that many legitimate media outlets are “fake news” — are believed to have inspired some countries to impose tougher laws curtailing press freedoms.

When the State Department spokesperson recently tweeted out criticism of Beijing’s treatment of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, a Chinese official tweeted back at her with some of Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”

In 2018, a U.N. envoy, Philip Alston, unveiled the findings of an investigation into poverty in the United States. Alston has said he was initially invited to study the topic under the Obama administration, but that the Trump administration — under Tillerson — had reextended the invite. Alston’s report minced few words. The United States, he reported, was home to tens of millions of people in poverty, and that was likely to be exacerbated by Trump’s economic policies.

Nikki Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fought back. She called Alston’s work “misleading and politically motivated,” insisted that the Trump administration’s plans would lift people out of poverty, and argued that the U.N. should focus on poverty in less-developed countries.

The council instead requested a broader, more generic U.N. report on systemic racism and police brutality against Black people and also asked for information on how various governments worldwide deal with anti-racism protests. The resolution did, however, mention the Floyd death and the report is expected to cover the United States, among other countries.

indicative either of lax security procedures or an especially dangerous environment close to a sensitive U.S. facility — or both

rampant and increasing insecurity, including rapes, assaults, and robberies. They expressed disbelief that American technology could not provide more safety and said the U.S. was doing little to help those living just beyond the base’s borders.

Few in Agadez understand the purpose of the drone base or what Americans do there. They know only what they see, smell, and hear: the towers, walls, and fences; clouds of dust from speeding military vehicles; smoke from the burn pit; and the buzz of drones above their heads. The rest is a mystery.

“The Americans have drones, they have planes, they have sophisticated equipment,” Liman Ahar Fidjaji, the president of an Agadez-based religious center for the prevention of conflict in Niger, told The Intercept. “But it’s not helping.”

A day after the attack, local law enforcement arrested the man who shot the video, Ibrahim said. “I have no idea who told them, but they knew who he was and they said they were arresting him because he posted the footage on social media,”

while the road to “Base Americaine” was well lit, Tadress lacked electricity. “It’s really dark, so you can’t see and can be robbed or even shot. Trucks loaded with migrants to Libya drive very fast through the neighborhood. They can’t see and they hit children,”

wild rumors, including long-running speculation that Americans are surreptitiously mining gold at the base

Following the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military embraced a governmentwide trend toward privatization, including an increasing reliance on contractors. Since 2001, Pentagon spending has totaled more than $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors, according to a 2021 report by Hartung and Brown University’s Costs of War project. More contractors than U.S. service members, according to a separate Costs of War report, have died in post-9/11 military operations.

“We can’t know exactly who is getting paid and who is profiting because we don’t know where the money is going. It comes down to subcontracting that is not transparent and having very little oversight,” said Heidi Peltier, a senior researcher at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and the director of programs at the Costs of War project. Government reports, lawsuits, and investigations by inspectors general have found that 30 to 40 percent of contract spending through the Defense Department is generally wasted or lost to fraud, corruption, or other abuses, Peltier noted.

an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that the “Air Force did not construct Air Base 201 infrastructure to meet safety, security, and other technical requirements established in DoD, Air Force, and USAFRICOM directives.”

“If the bandits had an RPG and aimed it at the base, then I’m sure the Americans would have seen it and reacted,” he explained, using the shorthand for a rocket-propelled grenade. “The Americans have sophisticated tools. Drones are flying overhead every day and every night. But there are guys circulating in the streets around here with weapons. Why is that?”