Avoiding a War Over Taiwan | Putin’s American Supporters | The New Cold War, China, and the Caribbean, and more

German Teen Charged with Planning School Bomb Attack  (AFP / Barron’s)
German prosecutors on Tuesday said they had charged a 17-year-old boy with allegedly planning a May school bomb attack that was only narrowly avoided when he was arrested the day before. The suspect, named as Jeremy R., planned the “right-wing extremist motivated attack” on a school he attended in the city of Essen using explosives and various other weapons, federal prosecutors said in a statement. “Teachers and a larger number of pupils were to be killed” in the massacre planned for May 13, they said. Jeremy R., who was 16 at the time of his arrest, had allegedly acquired the necessary materials to assemble pipe bombs and obtained information on the internet about how to build them. He had also assembled weapons including knives, brass knuckles, machetes, crossbows and arrows as well as firearms, the prosecutors said. Police in Essen stormed the teen’s room overnight on May 12, uncovering anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim materials as well as his own writings which suggested he was suffering from serious psychiatric problems. Investigators at the time said they had been tipped off by another teen who informed them that the young man “wanted to place bombs in his school”, located about 800 meters from his home.

How to Avoid a War Over Taiwan  (Thomas J. Christensen, M. Taylor Fravel, Bonnie S. Glaser, Andrew J. Nathan, and Jessica Chen Weiss, Foreign Affairs)
As tension rises between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, strategists on all sides seem to have forgotten what the American game theorist Thomas Schelling taught years ago: deterring an adversary from taking a proscribed action requires a combination of credible threats and credible assurances. Instead of heeding that lesson, a growing number of U.S. analysts and officials have called for the United States to treat Taiwan as if it were an independent state and to abandon the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” in favor of “strategic clarity,” defined as an unconditional commitment to use military force to defend the island in the event of a mainland Chinese attack. These calls have intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators even advocating for formal recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign country. Still others have called for a permanent (and significant) deployment of U.S. forces to Taiwan to lend credibility to the U.S. threat of a military response to a mainland attack. In testimony before the U.S. Senate last year, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, implied that the United States could never allow Beijing to control Taiwan because such an outcome would make it impossible to defend other U.S. allies in Asia.
But shifting U.S. policy toward support for Taiwan’s permanent separation from the mainland is more likely to provoke than to deter an attack on Taiwan. Deterrence requires credibility in both of its elements: threat and assurance. The threat requires signaling both the costs of a proscribed action and sufficient political will to impose those costs. The assurance requires conveying to the target, in a way that it can trust, that it will not be taken advantage of if it refrains from taking the proscribed action.
Avoiding war in the Taiwan Strait requires all sides to be deterred. At a minimum, Taiwan must be deterred from declaring formal independence, Washington must be deterred from recognizing Taiwan as an independent state or restoring a formal alliance with the island, and Beijing must be deterred from using military force against Taiwan to compel unification. All sides must not only be threatened with harm for crossing these redlines but also be assured that they will not suffer catastrophic losses to their interests if they refrain from these actions. Triangular deterrence has succeeded for over 40 years in keeping the peace across the Taiwan Strait. But rising tensions have made this delicate arrangement more fragile.

Richard Mosse Documents the Hidden War in the Brazilian Amazon (Economist)
In a powerful work of video art, the Irish photographer reveals the systematic destruction of the largest rainforest on Earth.

Kremlin Talking Points Are Back in the U.S. Debate  (Laura Thornton, Foreign Policy)
Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and midterm candidates are peddling Russian propaganda on Ukraine.

Africa’s Longest Oil Pipeline Takes Shape in Niger  (AFP / Nation)
At Gaya in southwest Niger, near the border with Benin, the longest oil pipeline in Africa is being built. With a projected length of nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) — including 1,250 km in Niger itself — the pipeline will connect oil wells in the eastern region of Agadem, a zone troubled by deadly jihadist incursions, with the Beninese port of Seme. Climate campaigners are clamoring for an end to investment in carbon-spewing fossil fuels. But in Niger — the poorest country in the world according to the benchmark of the UN’s Human Development Index — this project is seen as an economic lifeline.

Book Review: The New Cold War, China, and the Caribbean  (Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, Global Americans)
In just over 300 pages, MacDonald combines his intimate familiarity with the Caribbean, his training as an economist, and his conversance with strategic studies and China studies, to produce a book that is as perceptive as it is timely, with appropriate forays into history in order to explain contemporary developments. The author explains his intent to examine the slide into a new Cold War in the Caribbean, his primary argument being that the region’s “geopolitics have shifted from a period of relative great power disinterest in the aftermath of the Cold War to a gradual movement into a new Cold War in which a global rivalry between the United States and China is acted out regionally.”