The Autocrat in Your iPhone | Can the French Nuclear Industry Avoid Meltdown? | On Stopping Being Stupid, and more

Despite QAnon’s U.S.-centric narrative focusing on former President Donald Trump, the conspiracy movement has now spread across the globe. German-speaking communities have become the largest non-American audience for QAnon, finding a ready audience in the Reichsbürger movement, which falsely believes that Germany is still an occupied country because, they claim, there was never a formalized peace treaty with Allied forces after World War 2 (there was). One reason QAnon was adopted so widely in Germany is that there is a strong overlap between QAnon’s conspiracy narratives and those shared by the Reichsbürger movement, including the belief that the pandemic was created by the “deep state” as part of a long-running conspiracy to control the population.

The Autocrat in Your iPhone  (Ronald J. Deibert, Foreign Affairs)
There have been dozens of cases in which Pegasus or other similar spyware technology has been found on the digital devices of prominent political opposition figures, journalists, and human rights activists in many countries. Providing the ability to clandestinely infiltrate even the most up-to-date smartphones—the latest “zero click” version of the spyware can penetrate a device without any action by the user—Pegasus has become the digital surveillance tool of choice for repressive regimes around the world. It has been used against government critics in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and pro-democracy protesters in Thailand. It has been deployed by Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia and Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

Can the French Nuclear Industry Avoid Meltdown?  (Economist)
Emmanuel Macron envisions a national nuclear renaissance. First France’s reactors must survive the winter

The United States Couldn’t Stop Being Stupid if It Wanted To  (Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
Defenders of U.S.“global leadership” sometimes concede that Washington has overextended itself, pursued foolish policies, failed to achieve its stated foreign-policy aims, and violated its avowed political principles. They see such actions as regrettable aberrations, however, and believe the United States will learn from these (rare) mistakes and act more wisely in the future. Ten years ago, for example, political scientists Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth acknowledged that the Iraq War was a mistake but insisted that their preferred policy of “deep engagement” was still the right option for U.S. grand strategy. In their view, all the United States had to do to preserve a benign world order was maintain its existing commitments and not invade Iraq again. As former U.S. President Barack Obama liked to say, we just need to stop doing “stupid shit.”
George Packer’s recent defense of U.S. power in the Atlantic is the latest version of this well-worn line of argument. Packer opens his essay with a revealingly false comparison, claiming that Americans “overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments, never pausing in between, where an ordinary country would try to reach a fine balance.” But a country that still has more than 700 military installations worldwide; carrier battle groups in most of the world’s oceans; formal alliances with dozens of countries; and that is currently waging a proxy war against Russia, an economic war against China, counterterror operations in Africa, along with an open-ended effort to weaken and someday topple the governments in Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc., can hardly be accused of excessive “retrenchment.” Packer’s idea of that “fine balance”—a foreign policy that is not too hot, not too cold, but just right—would still have the United States tackling ambitious objectives in nearly every corner of the world.
Unfortunately, Packer and other defenders of U.S. primacy underestimate how hard it is for a powerful liberal country like the United States to limit its foreign-policy ambitions. I like the United States’ liberal values as much as anyone, but the combination of liberal values and vast power makes it nearly inevitable that the United States will try to do too much rather than too little. If Packer favors a fine balance, he needs to worry more about directing the interventionist impulse and less about those who are trying to restrain it.