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According to New York Times reporter Thanassis Cambanis, IS  left the staff at the Tabqa Dam unharmed and in place, allowing the facility to continue operations and even selling electricity back to the Syrian government. Similarly, oil fields under IS  control continue to pump. Indeed, IS  has shrewdly managed these resources to help ensure a steady and sustainable stream of revenue. As one IS fighter told the New York Times, while Assad’s loyalists chant “Assad or burn the country,” IS retorts “We will burn Assad and keep the country.” Beside revenue from oil and water, IS  collects a variety of commercial taxes, including on trucks and cellphone towers.

Whereas resources like diamonds or drugs motivate rebel forces to take as much as they can as quickly as they can, the need to manage capital and technology-intensive natural resources has actually increased the interdependence between IS and civilians. Already in effective control of significant amounts of oil and water, the Islamic State is one step closer to becoming a reality.

The negotiations which took place in Geneva in December fulfilled everyone’s expectation of achieving nothing

Internationally, it is clear that the efforts to resolve the Syrian situation have relegated the Yemen crisis far down the list of priorities.

four Médecins Sans Frontières medical facilities have been bombed in recent months, in addition to over 60 other medical facilities seriously damaged or destroyed

The latest report from the UN Sanctions Committee blames the coalition for violating international humanitarian law by ‘targeting civilians and civilian objects… including buses, civilian residential areas, medical facilities, schools, mosques, markets, factories and food storage warehouses and other essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sana’a, the port in Hudaydah and domestic transit routes.”[3]

The dramatic drop in oil prices has forced the Saudi regime into deficit budgeting for the first time in decades. The USD 200 million a month it spends on the war is a significant contributory factor.

“Human beings can never get rid of the interference of hormones or glucose.”

“It would not even consider the moral factors that conflict with strategic goals,”

“If one side of the strategic game has artificial intelligence technology, and the other side does not, then this kind of strategic game is almost a one-way, transparent confrontation,” he said. “The actors lacking the assistance of AI will be at an absolute disadvantage in many aspects such as risk judgment, strategy selection, decision making and execution efficiency, and decision-making reliability,” he said.

“The entire strategic game structure will be completely out of balance.”

“AI can think many steps ahead of a human. It can think deeply in many possible scenarios and come up with the best strategy,”

A US Department of State spokesman said the agency had “many technological tools” to help it make decisions. There was, however, no specific information on AI that could be shared with the public,

The system, also known as geopolitical environment simulation and prediction platform, was used to vet “nearly all foreign investment projects” in recent years

One challenge to the development of AI policymaker is data sharing among Chinese government agencies. The foreign ministry, for instance, had been unable to get some data sets it needed because of administrative barriers

China is aggressively pushing AI into many sectors. The government is building a nationwide surveillance system capable of identifying any citizen by face within seconds. Research is also under way to introduce AI in nuclear submarines to help commanders making faster, more accurate decision in battle.

“AI can help us get more prepared for unexpected events. It can help find a scientific, rigorous solution within a short time.

Zille encouraged residents to inform on water-hogging neighbors and become “water impimpis”—a callback to an apartheid-era term for black South Africans who spied for the white-dominated government.

Almost immediately after city leaders announced the first Day Zero predictions, they came under heavy scrutiny from citizens and activists, especially among Cape Town’s communities of color. Many in labor, socialist, and leftist organizations in the region didn’t believe Day Zero was even a thing. Elements from those organizations created the Cape Town Water Crisis Coalition, which protested Day Zero as propaganda designed both to cover up faulty city water management and to deny expanded access to low-income communities.

the management of the crisis has also sparked criticism from the African National Congress, or the ANC, the dominant party in the country. As the only opposition party to control a province, the DA is certainly used to strife with the ANC, but now old struggles over resources have brought that tension to a breaking point.

Deeply complicating the dynamic between the two parties is that the Western Cape is the major center of white demographic strength and political clout in the country, and that the DA—while embracing a membership of blacks, “coloured” multiracial descendants of indigenous peoples and Asian immigrants, and whites—often finds white leaders near or at the top

Under South Africa’s Constitution, the ANC is responsible for providing water to all citizens, but the actual infrastructure and services in the Western Cape falls upon the DA to manage

Last July, when confronted on Twitter by a black user who said that black residents in areas without running home water had experienced Day Zero from birth, Zille, who is white, responded with: “It must be a relief that you weren’t burdened by the legacy of a colonial water-piping system.” Zille, who’s faced harsh internal and external criticism for previous statements in defense of colonialism, this time suffered a rebuke from party boss Mmusi Maimane, and has since been officially suspended from party activities

Residents in well-apportioned suburbs pointed fingers at the mostly-black and poor residents of the so-called “informal settlements”—the tin-roofed, sprawling shanties that ring the outskirts of the city—despite the fact that these settlements use the least water per capita of any place in the province. And lacking internal plumbing and sewage, residents in the informal settlements often see in the city’s elites and governing class a neo-colonialist force, doling out resources at whim and mismanaging the commons

As they stand now, the Level 6B restrictions created by the city of Cape Town in January 2018 are supposed to limit residents to 50 liters per day, slash agricultural use by 60 percent below last year’s usage, aggressively push water-management devices and fines, and encourage the use of new fittings and other devices to minimize water waste.

Americans use somewhere around 90 gallons, or 340 liters, of water every 24 hours. That’s more than 700 pounds of water per day, and that’s not even counting what goes into the food you eat or the thirsty maws of the industries and services that sustain you

Right now, the water usage of the average Capetonian sits at about 125 liters per day, a dramatic decrease from the 200 daily liters of last year. Both of those levels sit below the average of developed cities worldwide, and well below the standard American usage of 340 liters.

the extreme social engineering brought about by the Day Zero campaign is unlikely to be a long-term solution to future water problems in Cape Town. Nor will it necessarily prove to be a sustainable model for other cities facing water shortages

“The climate projections for Cape Town indicate essentially a relatively consistent reduction in the amount of rainfall in Cape Town,” Wolski told me. “In the best case, it would be rainfall that is similar to what we have. But most of the projections indicate reduction.”

Environmental think tanks and journalistic outlets have published lists of cities that look likely to run out of water in the near future: São Paulo, Brazil, which faced its own Day Zero situation just a few years ago; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Cairo, Egypt; Mexico City; and—surprisingly, given its climate—Moscow, Russia. While each city has a very different set of reasons for its water woes, ranging from pollution to poor infrastructure to poor planning to desertification and drought, they all share a common challenge: Climate change will likely make the task of providing water harder, the populations thirstier, and the people angrier, even as many of the cities grow.

shortages in São Paulo sparked street fights, citizen mobilization, and major political dissent in the city

inequality manifests both in social stratification and in the development of water-delivery systems to those different strata

Mirroring class conflicts in the 20th century, the idea that access to water is a human right has become a driver of solidarity, hardening ad-hoc activist groups into major political movements. Extrapolating to the rest of a warming world, where racial and class barriers have been built into zoning and infrastructure, the uneasy detentes of segregated spaces and places could become new zones of conflict. All you have to do is remove water.

so far this winter the rainfall has helped raise the dam levels to just below 60 percent of capacity, which should put off the next crisis point for some time. Cab drivers, students, waiters, and tour guides spoke incessantly of the Day Zero crisis—and with plenty of real venom—but they mostly spoke of it as a thing that had happened, an event that was now being relegated to the past

many people in Lebanon blame the refugees for our problems – especially economic problems

I began taking part in an EU MADAD trust fund “Youth Resolve” project close to my home. It was run by UK aid agency CAFOD and Caritas Lebanon. Its main objective is to bring Syrian and Lebanese youth together.

We have been able to change some of the perspectives on both sides – among Lebanese people and refugees – and it inspired me to do more. People around me have started to understand that the Syrians did not come here by choice; they were forced to come here, and if they could go home, most of them would. These are all steps on the path to equal treatment.

We will be the ones raising the next generation, and we don’t need to do that based on opinions from another time. In the future, I hope to create a youth council back in Lebanon, where young people can share their views and be represented.

while Sri Lankan Christian leaders preach calm as their youth are tempted toward radicalization, the hope of transformation hangs in the balance

there was not enough evidence to conclude that there had been any intercepts. “There is little evidence to prove that the Patriot hit more than a few Scud missiles launched by Iraq during the Gulf War,” a summary of the investigations concluded dryly, “and there are some doubts about even these engagements.” This report — which called on the Pentagon to declassify more information about the performance of the Patriot and request an independent evaluation of the program — never saw the light of day. A fierce lobbying campaign by the Army and Raytheon spiked it, save for a summary.

There is enormous pressure on the Saudi government to show that it is taking steps to defend its citizens. By asserting successful intercepts — assertions that are uncritically spread in headlines — the Saudi government is able to present itself as fulfilling its obligations to protect its population. And, like in 1991, the perception that a defense is working helps keep a lid on regional tensions

The danger here is that leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United States will come to believe their own nonsense. Consider this: Despite that the fact that anonymous U.S. officials have confirmed that there was no successful intercept in November 2017, President Donald Trump had a very different impression: “Our system knocked the missile out of the air,” Trump told reporters the following day. “That’s how good we are. Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.” This is a theme Trump has returned to again and again. When asked about the threat from North Korea’s nuclear-armed missiles, Trump said, “We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97 percent of the time, and if you send two of them, it’s going to get knocked down.” Trump has repeatedly given every indication that he believes missile defenses will protect the United States.

Missile defense systems do not represent a solution to the challenge posed by growing missile capabilities or an escape from vulnerability in the nuclear age. There is no magic wand that can “knock down” all the missiles aimed at the United States or its allies. The only solution is to persuade countries not to build these weapons in the first place. If we fail, defenses won’t save us.

The Good Friday process also marked the last time that a U.S. administration would engage with Ireland as a modern country—as something more than a photo opportunity to impress clover-wearing, Riverdancing, green Guinness-drinking voters back home

failing to correct American misperceptions about Ireland helps Dublin tremendously – which gives the Irish good reason to keep up the tradition of putting on the poor mouth. If Americans treat Ireland as a poor country—and not as one that has a GDP per capita of $84,000, compared with the United States’ $62,500—that helps Irish diplomats lobby for special treatment. (Fair warning: The small size of Ireland’s population and its role in global finance make these comparisons difficult—but under just about any comparison, Ireland is fairly well ensconced in the high-income group and has the fourth-highest ranking on the United Nations Human Development Index, well above the United States.)

Ireland’s historic cultural transformation—ending the ban on abortion and greatly easing divorce—is in many ways symbolized by Varadkar himself. The youngest premier in the republic’s history, Varadkar is also half-Indian by descent and is partnered with another man, Matthew Barrett. Varadkar has apparently found it is either morally necessary or politically expedient—or both—to push back against traditionalist American politicians. In March of this year, Varadkar and Barrett breakfasted with Vice President Mike Pence and his family, where the Irish leader pointedly called out discrimination against sexual minorities. That’s a far different relationship than Kennedy or Obama ever had with an Irish leader. And Varadkar’s frostiness toward Pence mirrors the gap between Ireland’s current progressive image and the largely older, conservative, and white-identifying traditional Irish American constituency.

The threat of a hard Brexit and the reimposition of a hard border between the republic and the North jeopardize both political and economic stability.

In the absence of any major U.S. strategic interest in Ireland (which isn’t even a member of NATO), the greatest Irish leverage in Washington comes from fraying ties of family and identity. But that is far from the level of sustained influence and power that earlier generations wielded

U.S. investment and tourism are welcome, of course, but the focus of Irish diplomacy is squarely on Brussels

The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.

Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases (Brexit) and clear indications of it in others (Duterte). They’ve targeted corporations and industries. And they’ve certainly gone after mores: social media became the main battleground for the culture wars years ago, and we now describe the unbridgeable gap between two polarized Americas using technological terms like filter bubble. But ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle. But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale. Even actual hacks are increasingly done in service of influence operations: stolen, leaked emails, for example, were profoundly effective at shaping a national narrative in the U.S. election of 2016.

The substantial time and money spent on defense against critical-infrastructure hacks is one reason why poorly-resourced adversaries choose to pursue a cheap, easy, low-cost-of-failure psy-ops war instead

Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure

This shift from targeting infrastructure to targeting the minds of civilians was predictable. Theorists  like Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan saw it coming decades ago. As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

The 2014-2016 influence operation playbook went something like this: a group of digital combatants decided to push a specific narrative, something that fit a long-term narrative but also had a short-term news hook. They created content: sometimes a full blog post, sometimes a video, sometimes quick visual memes. The content was posted to platforms that offer discovery and amplification tools. The trolls then activated collections of bots and sockpuppets to blanket the biggest social networks with the content. Some of the fake accounts were disposable amplifiers, used mostly to create the illusion of popular consensus by boosting like and share counts. Others were highly backstopped personas run by real human beings, who developed standing audiences and long-term relationships with sympathetic influencers and media; those accounts were used for precision messaging with the goal of reaching the press. Israeli company Psy Group marketed precisely these services to the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign; as their sales brochure put it, “Reality is a Matter of Perception”.

If an operation is effective, the message will be pushed into the feeds of sympathetic real people who will amplify it themselves. If it goes viral or triggers a trending algorithm, it will be pushed into the feeds of a huge audience. Members of the media will cover it, reaching millions more. If the content is false or a hoax, perhaps there will be a subsequent correction article – it doesn’t matter, no one will pay attention to it.

Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead. Hostile state intelligence services in particular are now increasingly adept at operating collections of human-operated precision personas, often called sockpuppets, or cyborgs, that will escape punishment under the the bot laws. They will simply work harder to ingratiate themselves with real American influencers, to join real American retweet rings. If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.

Attempts to legislate away 2016 tactics primarily have the effect of triggering civil libertarians, giving them an opportunity to push the narrative that regulators just don’t understand technology, so any regulation is going to be a disaster.

The entities best suited to mitigate the threat of any given emerging tactic will always be the platforms themselves, because they can move fast when so inclined or incentivized. The problem is that many of the mitigation strategies advanced by the platforms are the information integrity version of greenwashing; they’re a kind of digital security theater, the TSA of information warfare

Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of  Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups

platforms aren’t incentivized to engage in the profoundly complex arms race against the worst actors when they can simply point to transparency reports showing that they caught a fair number of the mediocre actors

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation. We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.

Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets.

In the middle of the most serious global pandemic in a century, South Korea’s politics caused the nation’s foremost experts in infectious disease to cease advising the president.

Of course, culture is a real thing that guides people’s actions. It is entirely possible to have a sophisticated debate on, for example, how Confucianism influenced the South Korean public’s reception of the government’s response to the coronavirus. (The ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius provides rich material on practical governance in accordance with the Confucian web of obligations between ruler and subject.) But curiously, the Western media’s discussion of South Korea’s Confucian heritage never makes any reference to the actual Confucian texts. Instead, Confucianism is merely an excuse to introduce tired old stereotypes about Asians as mindless drones, ignorant to the true meaning of freedom.

South Korea’s success is thanks to competent leadership that inspired public trust.

Just as South Korea did, the United States and Europe could have moved in the earliest stage of the outbreak to implement a mass-scale test-and-quarantine program and minimize the damages of the coronavirus. By writing off South Korea’s response as culturally bound, the West is once again making the same mistake, failing to recognize that Asia’s solution could be its solution too.

the United States needs a dramatic overhaul to adapt to the global threats of the 21st century, which should include moving away from military engagement and toward international cooperation on issues from peacekeeping to greenhouse gas reduction to global health to banking reform. Such an overhaul should also include cutting the defense budget in half by 2035, and perhaps even getting rid of the Pentagon itself.

the United States retains a massive global military advantage, responsible for one out of every three dollars spent on defense worldwide and outspending the countries with the next seven biggest military budgets combined. But while that ensures dominance at confrontation on the battlefield, it is not so useful for the kind of conflicts the world still fights, dominated by guerrilla warfare. That is demonstrated by America’s not-winning streak over the past seven decades in civil conflict: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The “Global War on Terror” drags on; the two countries suffering the most terror attacks in the world are also the two countries the United States has invaded in the past 20 years.

The World Bank estimates that nearly two thirds of global wealth is intangible—inventions such as the internal combustion engine or the solar panel that allow people to produce more power with less resources than older technologies, institutions including systems of property rights and education—leaving only around a third to be accounted for by built infrastructure, land and natural resources combined. Only in poorer countries are natural resources a large proportion of total wealth

the technological underpinnings of high productivity, such as the engines and solar panels and property rights, are “non-rival”—we don’t have to fight for them. If I occupy land, you cannot. If I use the technology of the internal combustion engine or double-entry bookkeeping, you can use it at the same time. In fact, if we both use the same technologies, we both benefit even more.

land and resources simply aren’t worth the cost of the fight for successful economies. And that helps to explain why the conflict that remains is increasingly concentrated in poorer countries where natural resources are still relatively important, especially in sub-Saharan Africa

The low returns of war may also help to explain the limited military ambitions of China, which has the world’s second-largest defense budget—about 40 percent the size of America’s. While China clearly wants dominance in the South China Sea, the country has only two aircraft carriers—one of which is a secondhand boat left over from the days of the Soviet Union. It conducts bomber flights in international waters, but the two warships are limited to the same area. And it spends a smaller percentage of its gross domestic product on the military than does the United States: 1.9 percent compared with America’s 3.2 percent. China’s recent success has been built on global connections that have left it the world’s largest trading nation. A world war would tear apart those connections

one big, underappreciated reason for declining interstate war is that it doesn’t pay. Through most of history, global power and wealth have been determined by control of people, land and resources. Wars were fought over bodies and territory in zero-sum conflicts in which the victor took the spoils. Caesar was considered a Roman hero because he brought as many as 1 million slaves back from his Gallic wars alone. And as late as World War II, physical resources were still a key concern—Japan’s need for oil, Germany’s desire for Lebensraum (“living space”).

This low efficacy of the Department of Defense is primarily because the military is limited in its ability to keep the peace in countries where much of the population doesn’t want it there at a cost in lives, finance and time that is acceptable to U.S. voters and lawmakers.

Rising productivity has increased carbon emissions and other pressures on global sustainability. Connectivity leaves people worldwide more exposed to threats from elsewhere including viruses real and virtual alongside financial contagion. These new national security challenges require a collective response: We can’t bomb our way out of climate change or financial crises—we have to cooperate through international organizations, agreements and the shared financial incentives for signing on to them.

The total number of people working in the Department of Defense itself (none of whom are in the field actually defending or deterring war) climbed from 140,000 in 2002 to just shy of 200,000 in 2012. Nearly three-quarters of a million civilian federal employees work for the Defense Department—add in the Department of Veterans Affairs and that’s about half of the total civilian federal workforce

an institution that was recently declared simply unauditable due to complexity, failed systems and missing records—this after a $400 million effort involving over 1,200 auditors

Retired Lieutenant General David Barno and colleagues from the Center for a New American Security have listed seven “deadly sins” of defense spending in a recent report, ranging from redundant overhead through inefficient procurement systems to excess infrastructure to a bloated retirement system that could generate annual savings of $49 billion if rectified. If that sounds too large to be plausible, in 2015, the Department of Defense itself reported administrative waste and excess bureaucracy cost the institution an annual $25 billion.

A budget cut to 1.5 times the military spending of our nearest competitor (China) would free up about $150 billion of the current $649 billion in U.S. spending (as reported by the World Bank). Taking $100 billion of that and adding it to the U.S. overseas development assistance budget would also bring the U.S. aid ratio up to 0.7 percent of gross national Income—the U.N. target.

over 10 years, the United States could move toward 2 percent of GDP going to defense, down from today’s 3.2 percent—that’s the target set for NATO as a whole back in 2006. And perhaps in 15 years, U.S. military spending could reach the current global median: 1.5 percent of GDP

Each American citizen—man, woman and child—currently pays an average of $1,983 a year to the Department of Defense. Over an average lifetime, that adds up to $156,000 per person. It is a simply incredible sum for a country at zero risk of invasion and with a reasonable aversion to violent territorial expansion

The Gulf Stream is separate from the jet stream that has helped to bring extreme weather to the northern hemisphere in recent weeks, though like the jet stream it is also affected by the rising temperatures in the Arctic. Normally, the very cold temperatures over the Arctic create a polar vortex that keeps a steady jet stream of air currents keeping that cold air in place. But higher temperatures over the Arctic have resulted in a weak and wandering jet stream, which has helped cold weather to spread much further south in some cases, while bringing warmer weather further north in others, contributing to the extremes in weather seen in the UK, Europe and the US in recent weeks.

Research in 2018 also showed a weakening of the AMOC, but the paper in Nature Geoscience says this was unprecedented over the last millennium, a clear indication that human actions are to blame. Scientists have previously said a weakening of the Gulf Stream could cause freezing winters in western Europe and unprecedented changes across the Atlantic.

As well as causing more extreme weather across Europe and the east coast of the US, the weakening of the AMOC could have severe consequences for Atlantic marine ecosystems, disrupting fish populations and other marine life.

we may be sure that without Washington to encourage their ambitions and save them from the consequences, even the most expansionist European members of NATO will in fact be very glad to do nothing

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.

greater awareness of the potential impact of natural as well as man-made shocks will accelerate tendencies not toward deglobalization but rather toward reglobalization: a reshuffling of supply chains and at least a partial reduction in the concentration of capacity inside China

The disruption caused by the pandemic creates an opportunity for U.S. policymakers to reassess and recalibrate their generally laissez-faire approach to globalization.

Another reason for attempting to shift existing supply chains and, in particular, for trying to preserve and expand domestic manufacturing capacity is that doing so could help boost the overall productivity, international competitiveness, and long-term growth prospects of the U.S. economy. That, in turn, would generate more of the aggregate resources necessary to sustain a protracted strategic competition with China, while at the same time enhancing the well-being of many American workers.

Even if the value-added from the final assembly of consumer goods is relatively small, from a strategic standpoint it would be preferable if the resulting gains accrued to the economies of U.S. friends and allies rather than to China. The physical relocation of some portion of existing supply chains could also help slow China’s efforts to extract sensitive technology through industrial espionage or coerced joint ventures.

Even a largely market-driven dispersion of supply chains and a lesser degree of concentration in China should help to reduce risks and increase resilience.

To the extent feasible, the United States should seek to source imports of critical goods from a trusted production network of facilities in friendly or allied countries, at least some of them located far from China.

During World War II and the opening stages of the Cold War, the federal government used the tax code in a focused fashion, extending the so-called rapid tax amortization privilege to promote expansion in sectors where resource requirement calculations revealed gaps that could stall defense mobilization. In the 1950s, federal agencies also used procurement guarantees to encourage the maintenance of capacity above anticipated market demand for certain minerals and machine tools by promising to buy a portion of the resulting output. Some of these were then placed in stockpiles for possible future use.

The U.S. government could use similar tools today if, for example, it wanted to expand the nation’s ability to manufacture personal protective equipment and ventilators, items that might be needed to combat the next pandemic.

Globalization is not an unstoppable natural force, propelled solely by technological progress and autonomous market forces; instead it is a man-made phenomenon with contours shaped by the choices of states as well as firms.

China’s emergence as an irresistibly attractive manufacturing platform was partly due to the sheer size of its working-age population and the falling costs of communication and transportation, but also due to deliberate government policies designed to aid in the acquisition of foreign intellectual property while keeping the cost of land, labor, and capital low and exchange rates favorable.

the migration of manufacturing capacity from the advanced industrial countries reflected not only the profit and loss calculations of individual companies but also the permissive policies of Western governments that concluded in effect (in the U.S. case) that what was good for Apple or 3M was good for the United States.

if it results in excessive dependence, an addiction to low costs can create serious commercial and strategic risks

There are obvious dangers here. Sharpened tools of trade and industrial policy can be abused by irresponsible leaders seeking to pander to voters and pay off supporters, or they may be captured and exploited by special interests.

if combatants purposely compelled people to flee during the conflict, then victims will need greater security assurances to return, along with accountability mechanisms that recognize these violations and provide restitution and justice. Rarely are state or nonstate actors held responsible for displacement.

an international refugee system that is increasingly seen as feckless and disconnected from the realities of modern migration. That’s because in civil wars, civilians are valuable assets for armed groups. If people are given the ability to escape conflict-affected countries, then they are not compelled to “pick a side” through their movements. Armed groups are deprived of vulnerable recruits and propaganda pawns. Leaving the country may still be perceived as treachery, but at least crossing the border puts civilians beyond the reach of all warring parties and makes them eligible for international protection. Limiting the possibility of exit only stands to embolden combatants while forcing people to decide between bad options.

strategic value in enacting more generous asylum policies as a tool of conflict management

hostility toward immigrants and surges of nationalist sentiment have been accompanied by political leaders recognizing the advantages of welcoming refugees from other countries. A prominent example is the Cold War. For the United States, accepting emigres from the Soviet Union and allied countries was a foreign-policy priority meant to signal the discontents of communist rule and the relative merits of American values and institutions. Today, the refugee system is in desperate need of reform, which could gain some momentum if more emphasis is placed on articulating and promoting the strategic benefits of asylum and refugee resettlement.

AGRA, initiated in 2006, heralded a new campaign to bring the kind of input-intensive agriculture to Africa that had failed to take hold on the continent when the first Green Revolution swept through much of Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

AGRA worked with governments to speed the development of high-yield commercial seeds designed for Africa’s wide range of soils and climates and to facilitate the delivery to farmers of those seeds and the inorganic fertilizers that would make them grow.

Many warned that it was seeking to impose Western technologies inappropriate for the continent’s soils, farmers and food systems. Some decried the lack of consultation with African farmers on the nature of the interventions.9 Others pointed out the serious flaws in the first Green Revolution: water supplies depleted and contaminated with chemical runoff; farmers indebted due to high input costs while yields declined after their initial increases; and the loss of crop and diet diversity as Green Revolution crops took over the countryside

African farm groups like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) also warned of the loss of food sovereignty, the ability of communities and nations to freely choose how they wanted to feed themselves, as large commercial firms could come to dominate local markets backed by new government policies designed to ensure market access.

Only one country, Ethiopia, shows anything resembling the combination of yield growth and hunger reduction Green Revolution proponents promised, with a 73% increase in productivity and a 29% decrease in the number of hungry. Note, however, that neither of these is on track to meet AGRA’s goal of doubling productivity (100% increase) and halving the number of hungry (which would be a 50% decrease). Ghana is the only other AGRA country that shows decent productivity growth with some decrease in hunger. Malawi achieved relatively strong yield growth but only a small reduction in undernourishment.

These data suggest that Green Revolution programs have not produced a productivity boom through intensification but rather an extensification onto new lands. The promotion of extensification is a serious contradiction for Green Revolution proponents. The explicit goal of “sustainable intensification” is to minimize pressure on land and water resources while limiting further greenhouse gas emissions. To the extent Green Revolution programs are encouraging extensification, they are at odds with national and donor government commitments to mitigate climate change. Depending on individual countries’ land endowments, extensification can be a serious problem. Rwanda, for example, is densely populated and does not have vast tracts of uncultivated arable land.

Evidence would suggest that the main beneficiaries are likely not the poorest or most food-insecure farmers but rather a growing number of medium-scale farmers who have access to more land and are already integrated into commercial networks. Only a fraction of such farmers come up from the ranks of smallholders; many are new investors in farming from urban elites. One study showed that a tiny fraction of smallholders is likely to become commercial farmers.18

Cassava, a key staple in Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and many other AGRA countries, saw a 6% decline in yields. Overall, roots and tubers, which include nutritious crops such as sweet potatoes, experienced a 7% decline in yields. Groundnuts, another critical staple source of protein in many countries, saw an alarming 23% drop in yields.

The Staple Crop Index shows that Rwanda’s apparent success in maize has come at the expense of more comprehensive food crop productivity.

The total number of undernourished in AGRA’s 13 countries has increased from 100.5 million to 131.3 million, a 30% increase, from before AGRA to 2018. Only Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali report a significant decline in the absolute number of chronically hungry residents

One of the negative consequences of the Green Revolution focus on maize and other commodity crops is the declining importance of nutritious and climate-resilient crops like millet and sorghum, which have been key components in healthy diets. These are rarely supported by African governments or AGRA; meanwhile, input subsidies and supports for maize and other favored crops provide incentives for farmers to decrease the cultivation of their own crop varieties

AGRA seems to be feeding Africa’s worrisome trend toward locking in path dependency on input-intensive agriculture, much to the detriment of smallholder farmers

Unlike industrial-scale farmers in developed countries, their path has not yet been determined; there remain opportunities to chart paths different from the high-input agriculture model promoted by AGRA.

Agroecology is one of the systems giving farmers the kinds of innovation they need, farming with nature to promote the soil-building practices that Green Revolution practices often undermine. Building on farmers’ knowledge of local conditions and food cultures, multiple food crops are grown in the same field. Compost, manure and biofertilizers — not fossil-fuel-based fertilizer — are used to nourish fields. Biological pest control decreases pesticide use. Researchers work with farmers to improve the productivity of their seeds rather than replacing them with commercial varieties farmers need to buy every year and douse with fertilizer to make them grow.25 AFSA has documented the effectiveness of agroecology, now widely promoted among its member organizations as a key step toward food sovereignty.26 Such initiatives also achieve productivity increases more impressive than those achieved by Green Revolution programs. One University of Essex study surveyed nearly 300 large ecological agriculture projects across more than 50 poor countries and documented an average 79% increase in productivity with decreasing costs and rising incomes.27 Such results far surpass those of the Green Revolution.

It is time for international donors and African governments to change course, to shift their agricultural development funding toward the kinds of low-input sustainable farming that many small-scale farmers in Africa are pioneering under the banner of agroecology. With substantial support, like that provided to Green Revolution programs, agroecology can be Africa’s food future