Group items tagged

As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far — sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment — would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.

In Munich, the mood was both anxious and unmoored, as leaders faced confrontations they had not anticipated. Warnings about Mr. Putin’s possible next moves were mixed with Europe’s growing worries that it could soon be abandoned by the United States, the one power that has been at the core of its defense strategy for 75 years.

Barely an hour went by at the Munich Security Conference in which the conversation did not turn to the question of whether Congress would fail to find a way to fund new arms for Ukraine, and if so, how long the Ukrainians could hold out. And while Donald Trump’s name was rarely mentioned, the prospect of whether he would make good on his threats to pull out of NATO and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with allies he judged insufficient hung over much of the dialogue.

Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.

Nor is it new for Russia to violate nuclear arms control agreements. In recent years, Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and de-ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Backing out of arms control commitments is part of Russia’s modus operandi.

What appears unprecedented now is that Russia could be working toward deploying nuclear weapons on satellites, which are constantly orbiting the Earth, to be detonated at times and locations of Moscow’s choosing.

Mensch, who started in academia, has spent much of his life figuring out how to make AI and machine-learning systems more efficient. Early last year, he joined forces with co-founders Timothée Lacroix, 32, and Guillaume Lample, 33, who were then at Meta Platforms’ artificial-intelligence lab in Paris. 

hey are betting that their small team can outmaneuver Silicon Valley titans by finding more efficient ways to build and deploy AI systems. And they want to do it in part by giving away many of their AI systems as open-source software.

Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI platform, said Mistral presents an intriguing test of how far clever engineering can push AI systems. “So where else can you go?” he asked. “That remains to be seen.”

There are many ways to explain the two biggest conflicts in the world today, but my own shorthand has been that Ukraine wants to join the West and Israel wants to join the Arab East — and Russia, with Iran’s help, is trying to stop the first, and Iran and Hamas are trying to stop the second.

They reflect a titanic geopolitical struggle between two opposing networks of nations and nonstate actors over whose values and interests will dominate our post-post-Cold War world — following the relatively stable Pax Americana/globalization era that was ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, America’s chief Cold War rival.

On one side is the Resistance Network, dedicated to preserving closed, autocratic systems where the past buries the future. On the other side is the Inclusion Network, trying to forge more open, connected, pluralizing systems where the future buries the past.

Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events

While we have reason to believe the future may be safe, we worry that the past is not.

History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative A.I. that can fake current events can also fake past ones

The key difference between the liberation of Auschwitz and Ohrdruf lies not in the reactions of the first liberators on the scenes but in what came after. The accounts of Red Army soldiers and American GIs are actually remarkably similar: they both speak of survivors as “walking skeletons;” they both describe the squalor the camp’s inmates lived in; they both mention the smell of death that lingered in the air and permeated far beyond the confines of the camp—which led to similar observations when locals living near the camps claimed to know nothing of what happened there to be deemed as nothing less than lies or willful ignorance

This impression was reinforced when the mayor of Gotha, the nearest town to Ohrdruf, wrote in his suicide note following his forced visit of the camp: “We did not know, but we knew.”

The difference was that Eisenhower was determined that the world should never forget what he saw. His Red Army counterparts were also quick to document what they found, but their leader Joseph Stalin was uninterested in the Holocaust as a reality. In the hierarchy of Nazi victims that Stalin created, no other group could surpass the suffering of the Soviet Union.

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.

But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?

To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.

the Mediterranean rush is turning Europe’s recent economic history on its head. In the 2010s, Germany and other manufacturing-heavy economies helped drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods, especially to China.

Today, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contribute between a quarter and half of the bloc’s annual growth. 

While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism