The Battle for Eurasia | The Arab Spring Is in Its Death Spiral | Cold War II Is All About Geopolitics, and more

standoff between America and the Soviet Union. Rather than embrace the prospect, Washington needs to take a step back, think through the stakes, and come up with a plan to avoid a geopolitical rupture that would substantially raise the risk of a great-power war and leave a globalized world too divided to manage shared problems. Moscow has already thrown down the gauntlet by invading Ukraine. But ties between the United States and China are not yet beyond repair—and China’s mounting economic and military strength makes it the more significant competitor.

Chinese Deploy WZ-8 Drone to Base Within Reach of Taiwan  (Didi Tang, The Times)A Chinese supersonic drone capable of spearheading an attack on Taiwan has been spotted at an upgraded military base.
US satellite imagery shows a WZ-8 reconnaissance drone parked outside newly built hangars in the Lu’an airbase in eastern China, a bomber base that has been revamped to host the drone.

The U.S. and China Are Caught in a Technology Trap  (Rishi Iyengar and Robbie Gramer, Foreign Policy)
China is smarting from a series of Western sanctions and export controls that have squeezed its own industries. U.S. technologies, such as the most advanced chips as well as the equipment and know-how needed to make them, are out of bounds for Beijing. The country that made such a great leap forward in the 1950s is trying to do the same with its domestic production of semiconductors and other sensitive technologies that have run on Western inputs.
So far, the United States and many of its allies, including Japan, Taiwan, and European countries with sizable tech industries, have most of the control over those supply chains and technology, and consequently, most of the leverage over Beijing. But that could change in the coming decades as Beijing seeks to wean itself off of dependence on the West. Or not—China’s industrial policy program to boost domestic output of key technologies has been a slow learner.

Cold War II Is All About Geopolitics  (Jo Inge Bekkevold, Foreign Policy)
In Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War, Michael Doyle writes that he remembers with nostalgia the optimism of the early 1990s.
Cold Peace is an important book, but it has one major weakness: It fails to address geopolitics as the main factor molding the new cold war. Doyle states that “it is geoeconomics, rather than geopolitics, in which the contest for world leadership will play out.” Omitting geopolitics, though, tells only half the story of the emerging cold war. It reminds me of the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” coined by then-U.S. presidential candidate Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign. The phrase has since come to encapsulate the supremacy of economics over politics. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, however, we have seen governments gradually reassert themselves over the economy with industrial policy, emissions regulation, and new limits on globalization. Similarly, with the return of great-power rivalry to global affairs, the liberal school of thought—with its emphasis on economic interdependence, ideology, and domestic institutions—has lost some of its explanatory value. Indeed, in order to make sense of contemporary world politics, one is tempted to invoke Clinton: “It’s the geopolitics, stupid!”