Eksis

Man is hostage to all the others and everything that not created out of his own freedom.

[Lee Harris @leee_harris]

In light of AI panic have been thinking about this great David Graeber essay, on the controversy among evolutionary biologists over whether animals can play, and whether humans evolved consciousness in order to lie
https://t.co/HMacjngQSg

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Anthropic is trying to “destructively scan” every single book in the world. The more hazardous and worrisome form of destruction is less obvious.
https://t.co/YP1NryP0Iy

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

“The past five months have revealed not that the world has become immune to energy crises but that market forces, policy, and government investments in energy security have paid off,” write @JasonBordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan.
https://t.co/41ZYh9UxTB

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

A Nobel laureate’s pedophilia was an open secret among the scientific community. Rachel Aviv reports on a scientist’s dark legacy.
https://t.co/Gbha5iZHAe

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

81 years ago today, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb. A hundred thousand people were killed. John Hersey's pioneering piece, "Hiroshima," tells the stories of six who lived. A young woman working in a tin plant, a doctor at a private hospital, a widow, a German missionary, a young surgeon, and a local reverend—all wondered why they had survived the blast, which arrived as a soundless flash. "It seemed a sheet of sun," one recalled. Revisit Hersey's intimate, deeply reported piece following those survivors through the deadly day, and the ruin and recovery that followed: https://t.co/FDIG4Pqwyh

[Evan A. Feigenbaum @EvanFeigenbaum]

I wrote this essay for @TheNatlInterest ten years ago in 2016—before Donald Trump took office for the first time as President but when the contours of a U.S.-China crackup were already extremely visible to me:

(1) the "securitization of everything," as flows of goods, capital, people, technology, and data became refracted through the prism of national security rather than the prism of commercial and public benefit.

(2) the American use of regulatory and administrative instruments to curtail the flow of technology and knowledge to China.

(3) the growing extraterritorial use of these instruments, cornering third players by sharpening the contradictions they faced in their own choices.

(4) China's evolution from loathing to copycatting the American sanctions toolkit, as Beijing began to formalize and institutionalize its once largely informal use of economic coercion.

(5) the vulnerability of technology especially to securitization—and the tension between the American impulse to control and the Chinese impulse to indigenize.

(6) the collapse of domestic political consensus for productive relations.

(7) and the marginalization in the domestic politics of both countries of those who argued for a different approach and/or risk-taking to build relations.

Ten years later, not everything in this essay has held up.

But a great deal of it, I think, has held up well—and quite a lot of it seems to me to have been both prescient and predictive of where we have now landed.

I'm especially wistful about the opening sentence at the very top of the essay:

"For most of the past four decades, American presidents have presumed that a 'successful' China would be good for the United States. But this is no longer the case."

That accurately, in my view, depicts cold reality in today's Washington.

But I'm even more wistful about the lines with which I ended the essay because Trump, across two administrations, has been about much more than tariffs. He has also taken issue with some of the fundamentals of American policy in Asia, not just as practiced by recent administrations but stretching back to the 19th century.

Trump seems to idolize 19th century American administrations, largely for their protectionist impulses. But American policy in Asia has had a consistency to its other dimensions that I think is being lost.

I closed the essay this way:

"American interests in the Pacific have been consistent for more than a century: open markets; open regionalism; freedom of navigation; no exclusionary blocs or dominant regional hegemons that might exclude the United States; support for political and economic openness; and, in the postwar period, support for allies.

It would be the height of irony if the United States, Asia’s principal champion of openness since the nineteenth century, begins to close itself off from the region. If the new administration pursues tough-minded, productive relations with China, but anchors it very firmly within this larger context of strategy in Asia, then it will be off to a realistic start."

Sometimes, American policy in Asia has fallen short of this ideal. But as a matter of strategy, the American approach has been largely consistent from the Open Door to the Cold War and onward into its aftermath.

I have spent about 15 years now critiquing U.S. strategy in Asia writ large. But reflecting on this ten-year old China essay with a decade of hindsight, it's more than clear that these strategic objectives are not really at the core of American policy.

It's fun to look back at your prior writing. This old essay makes interesting re-reading a decade later.

https://t.co/vHE3wb1B3o

[Five Books - Expert Book Recommendations @five_books]

Ideology is a dirty word in some quarters, but politics would be unrecognisable (and probably undoable) without ideologies. We have experts recommending books on political ideology, covering Maoism, fascism, anarchism, Communism and every other "ism".
https://t.co/sbJ90zJG0q

[何頻 @MJTVHoPin]

https://t.co/ATfp9M7Ezw

[Lingling Wei 魏玲灵 @Lingling_Wei]

To mark the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, re-sharing my column on memory, history, and shattered expectations: After Tiananmen, a Past That Didn’t Pass and a Future That Didn’t Come. https://t.co/fF3Dcautrw

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

Read @Jack_Watling on the trends making a cease-fire more likely in Ukraine:
https://t.co/k5hzwxrTtu

[何頻 @MJTVHoPin]

習近平的中國：科技炫目、軍力雄厚——卻是一片經濟狼藉

政府重金投入人工智能、電動車與軍事力量，消費者信心卻已搖搖欲墜，就業市場日益黯淡

習近平執政逾十年，中國軍力大幅提升，工廠主宰全球製造業，科技先鋒與矽谷的差距正在縮小。

然而，其經濟的重要板塊已是一片狼藉。一場龐大的房產崩潰摧毀了數兆美元的財富，消費者信心被掏空，就業市場陷入寒冬。

這種反差，折射出習近平已將國家安全列為優先於經濟的施政取向。他正引導數千億美元，用於追求人工智能、半導體、電動車等戰略領域的自主可控；與此同時，他在本可創造更多就業、壯大中產的經濟改革上步步退縮。

這一切，皆服務於他以軍事實力與工業力量為基礎的「民族復興」願景——一個在特朗普總統赴北京會習之際，注定要充分展示的戰略。

[The New York Review of Books @nybooks]

“Iranian democrats who were ‘against the war’ desire regime change no less fervently than those who petitioned Trump to attack. The difference is that they want Iranians, not foreigners, to do the job.” —Christopher de Bellaigue https://t.co/Fo7SgCfWNW

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

“If Tokyo can seize the opportunity, Japan’s defense revival may one day reshape the global arms industry, one that has long been dominated by a handful of suppliers,” writes Matthew Finkel.
https://t.co/ttAadua7qx

[何頻 @MJTVHoPin]

https://t.co/sNI2cLMW2u

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Walter Benjamin aspired to be “the foremost critic of German literature,” but his real talent was for grasping the richness and complexity of vernacular culture.
https://t.co/7nLShkJqMa

[Lingling Wei 魏玲灵 @Lingling_Wei]

"Without a clear plan to deal with Chinese competitors, some of them said in interviews, the arrival of affordable, high-tech Chinese cars could upend a U.S. industry that contributes $1.3 trillion to the economy each year." @ryanfelton
https://t.co/ICagKOrmG9 via @WSJ

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

“The world today looks disconcertingly like the one of the early twentieth century,” writes Odd Arne Westad. How can the United States and China avoid the blunders that led to World War I?
https://t.co/W6Cbk24w70

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

In Iran, Russia and China “have every interest in miring the United States in a simmering, low-intensity war that consumes U.S. resources and undermines its international standing,” write Jon Alterman and @AliVaez.
https://t.co/pcCTLL5kRy

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

A compromise with Iran today “would contribute more to the underlying goals of regional stabilization and American credibility than the alternatives of regime change or allowing Tehran to re-create the means to threaten the region,” writes James Jeffrey.
https://t.co/MuBOViCY83

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

“Ultimately, Beijing doesn’t see regime change in Iran as a worst-case scenario,” writes Yun Sun. “China is willing to work with whatever leadership emerges after the strikes as long as it protects oil flows and prioritizes shared economic interests.”
https://t.co/k9k2zLbipj