Fighting white supremacists; sci-fi and Star Wars; two faces of Al Qaeda, and more

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The president provided neither evidence nor elaboration for his claims, making it unclear precisely what he meant by “election interference.” Most likely, Trump had in mind less Russia-style “active measures” than more mundane efforts, like politically-targeted trade retaliation and newspaper advertisements. His remarks Wednesday followed a week-old tweet in which he called China’s trade retaliation against “farmers, ranchers, and industrial workers” a form of election interference. Notably, in a tweet following his remarks at the United Nations, Trump pointed to the China Daily’s purchase of advertising in the Des Moines Register as further evidence.
These efforts by China differ in breadth, ambition and brazenness from those undertaken by Moscow in 2016, which included hacking private email accounts and working with third parties to time leaks for maximum political impact. In private discussions, many Chinese interlocutors have criticized Russia’s interference as a crude and reckless gambit that risked backfiring then and has proven counterproductive now. Left unstated was the notion that there is a better way to influence audiences abroad—one that finds more explicit expression in some Chinese government documents on foreign propaganda and influence work.
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When the government reports foreign interference, it must do so carefully. False, unsubstantiated or premature accusations can damage faith in the American electoral process and squander the credibility that will be sorely needed when serious interference occurs. After Trump’s erratic statements this week, the American public may tune out if Beijing escalates its interference at some future date.
In confronting this dilemma, policymakers must bear in mind a distinction between generalized foreign influence on the U.S. political environment and the covert action employed by Russia during the 2016 presidential election cycle. The Justice Department’s recently released policy on “Disclosure of Foreign Influence Operations” puts forward the kinds of standards that should be considered before the U.S. government takes the extraordinary decision to publicly disclose and attribute an influence operation.
The policy emphasizes that partisan political considerations must play no role in the decision to disclose and appropriately recognizes the need for any disclosures to protect intelligence and investigatory sources and methods. It also cautions that the timing of disclosure should be consistent with other Justice Department policies designed to avoid influencing an election. Perhaps most importantly, it clarifies that influence operations should only be publicly attributed to a foreign government when such activities can be attributed to that government with “high confidence.” This guideline implies a demanding evidentiary burden when the Department of Justice or any U.S. government entity takes the rare step of accusing a foreign government of interference in an election.
This is where President Trump’s U.N. statement falls short. It lacks nuance and evidence while overheating the political climate and potentially even laying a foundation for the president to contest the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It may also provoke the kind of overreach that could undermine liberal values from freedom of speech to freedom of association.
Such rhetoric is not only a disservice to American democracy—it also puts American security at risk. The challenge that China poses to U.S. domestic politics is real and requires serious and sober debate. Cheap rhetoric will only delay that discussion and squander the government’s credibility in tackling an increasingly salient challenge.

Russia is 4chan, china is Facebook (James Palmer, Foreign Policy)
Mike Pence’s equation of Beijing’s influence with Moscow’s hacking was misleading and dangerous.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on China last week was the proverbial curate’s egg: excellent in parts but spoiled by its rotten segments. It laid out the global challenge presented by an increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and reactionary Chinese state under Xi Jinping.
But it also contained dangerous exaggerations—for instance, Orwellian as China’s surveillance dreams might be, there’s no plan for a unified point-scoring system for citizens.
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The most worrying part of the speech was Pence’s attempts to claim that China is interfering in U.S. elections, and his equation of the Chinese threat with the Russian one. As so often happens, Pence was playing to an audience of one—a man desperate for any distraction from his own problems with Moscow. President Donald Trump, after all, had already made the absurd claim that it was China, not Russia, who hacked the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
There has been virtually no evidence of Chinese electoral interference in the United States, and Pence presented nothing new.
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Nor, as Pence claimed, does China want “a different American president.” As best they can be divined, China’s feelings on Trump are mixed. While the trade war has brought up some harsh language, he was feted on his visit to Beijing last year, and the state media has been considerably less vitriolic about him than either former President Barack Obama or the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. That whole section of Pence’s speech seemed designed to create a false equivalence between Russian and Chinese interference.
That ties into the Republican Party’s continued reluctance to take Russian electoral interference seriously—at least, as long as it helps them. That hasn’t infected all of the party; Republican representatives have helped ensure further sanctions on Moscow despite White House reluctance.
Beyond the partisan issues, though, there’s a deeper danger in equating Russia and China. Thinks of it in these terms: Russia is 4chan, and China is Facebook. If you’re not familiar with 4chan, imagine the worst losers you knew in high school—not the nice, dopey stoners, but the rat-faced scumbags trying to take upskirt pictures—and then imagine them encouraging each other to be even worse people online. Like 4chan, Russia is all about chaos, mixed with a hearty dose of anti-Semitism and homophobia.

Russia’s essential goal is to disrupt, harass, and sow discord among alliances through whatever means it has handy—often without thought for the bigger picture. It’s most comfortable on the offensive, whether that’s the Democratic National Committee hack, the invasion of Ukraine, or the cyberattack on Estonia. As the former security chief of a major cloud company put it privately, “Russians are the ultimate shitlords. They’re all tactics—China is all strategy.” Russian operations have been highly effective at using existing divisions for leverage—but they’ve also wrecked the country’s image and left it struggling with sanctions and international opprobrium.
China, on the other hand, is Facebook. It doesn’t want to throw things into disorder; it wants to set the norms of how the world behaves—and of what everyone sees and reads online.
Dealing with China’s global efforts will require intelligence, patience, and concerted effort from democratic leaders from Washington to Kuala Lumpur. Allowing it to become a partisan U.S. issue, or ignoring the genuine needs that drive states and institutions to accept Beijing’s bargains, will fatally hamstring what should be a unifying cause.

West Virginia’s voting experiment stirs security fears (Christian Vasquez, Politico)
Overseas residents will be able to cast ballots via mobile app on Election Day, using the same tech that underlies Bitcoin. But is that a wise idea?

Bacteriophages: a promising approach to fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria (Laura H. Kahn, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
In 2012, I wrote about bacteriophage therapy as one possible solution to worsening antimicrobial resistance, a major threat to human and animal health. Much has happened since then to highlight the antibacterial potential of phages, but unfortunately, minimal federal support and lack of pharmaceutical industry interest have hindered the research and development needed to make widespread bacteriophage therapy (aka “phage therapy”) a reality.
We should take advantage of phages’ evolutionary antibacterial capabilities and make them work for us.

The two faces of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Gregory D. Johnsen, War on the Rocks)
About a decade ago, four men sat down in front of a video camera in a safe house in Yemen and started to record. They were there, they said on the video, to announce the formation of a new group: al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or, as we have come to call them, AQAP.
Over the past 10 years, AQAP has become one of al-Qaeda’s most worrisome affiliates, carrying out attacks at home and abroad, from seizing territory in Yemen to putting bombs on planes bound for the United States. In 2010, shortly after the group was founded, the State Department estimated that AQAP had “several hundred” members. That number jumped to a “few thousand” in 2011 and then to “four thousand” in 2015. This year, the department put that estimate in the “low thousands,” although the United Nations put the number of AQAP fighters at 6,000 – 7,000. The upward trend largely holds true for the number of attacks the group has claimed. For the past two years, I tracked AQAP as part of the U.N. Security Council’s Yemen Panel of Experts. In both 2016 and 2017, AQAP claimed more than 200 attacks, a significant increase from the group’s early years when Yemen was relatively stable and AQAP was more focused on striking the West. But the numbers are misleading. AQAP may be bigger now, but it isn’t stronger. It may be carrying out more attacks, but it isn’t more of a threat.
At issue is what I call the two faces of AQAP: the domestic insurgency and the international terrorist organization.

Has Trump read his own counterterrorism strategy? (Stephen Tankel, Foreign Policy)
The president’s views don’t seem to line up with those of his team.