Defeating an Earlier Virus | Pandemics Promote Peace | Sharing GPS Spectrum, and more

The threat from ISIS will be greater after the release of 1,000 of its returned fighters from European prisons over the course of 2020, chief analyst at the UN told The National. Efforts to reform Europeans from the ISIS battlefields through official deradicalization programs are largely regarded by officials as having failed to change the beliefs of members.

Pentagon, Senators Blast FCC Decision to Let Company Share GPS Spectrum (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
Space Force chief, Pentagon tech leaders, and the Armed Services chairman led calls to reconsider the controversial license for Ligado.

Do Pandemics Promote Peace? Why Sickness Slows the March to War (Barry R. Posen, Foreign Affairs)
“Even after a vaccine is developed and made widely available, economic troubles may linger for years. … How long is the pacifying effect of pessimism likely to last? If a vaccine is developed quickly, enabling a relatively swift economic recovery, the mood may prove short-lived.”
“Interstate wars have become relatively rare since the end of World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a four-decade Cold War, which included an intense nuclear and conventional arms race, but they never fought each other directly, even with conventional weapons. Theorists debate the reasons behind the continued rarity of great-power conflict. I am inclined to believe that the risk of escalation to a nuclear confrontation is simply too great. COVID-19 does nothing to mitigate such risks for world leaders—and a great deal to feed their reasonable pessimism about the likely outcome of even a conventional war.”

The Russians Manipulated Our Elections. We Helped (David Ignatius, Washington Post)
“When Russian intelligence officers plotted their campaign to destabilize American politics in 2016, they had nearly a century of experience in covert manipulation to draw upon. The Internet had given the Russians new tools for this mischief. But their secret weapon was us—an open, divided, angry America. That’s the lesson of Thomas Rid’s superb new book, ‘Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.’”
“The manipulators were opportunists: They poked at the holes and fissures in our political life and helped turn our simmering rage into a boil. But we did most of the work for them, as we amplified Moscow’s leaks and lies in the aftermath of its 2016 covert action and agitated ourselves into a state of near-hysteria. Russia set loose a virus, but we journalists and citizens, ever more obsessed with Russian ‘meddling,’ were the mules who carried it.”
“As foreign intelligence agencies seek to shape America’s political reality, citizens may become so hardened and skeptical that they stop trusting anyone, concluding that it’s all just ‘fake news.’ That’s the real affinity between American demagogues and Moscow. They both traffic so much in disinformation that an exhausted, disoriented public doesn’t know what to believe.”

Screenings Were Porous as Trump Spurred Exodus from Virus Hot Spots (Zolan Kanno-Youngs, New York Times)
A House report found that Americans fleeing Asia and Europe to beat the president’s travel bans faced few temperature checks or other rigorous screenings to see if they were bringing the virus home.