BRICS Faces a Reckoning | Dictators Are Learning from Each Other | Worries About China’s Cloud Computing Firms, and more

America’s Asian Allies Are Quietly Joining Forces to Confront China  (Josh Rogin, Washington Post)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China over the weekend clearly showed that Beijing is unwilling to address any of the national security issues that worry the United States and its Asian allies.
But Blinken wasn’t the only senior U.S. national security official in Asia last week. While the Beijing talks grabbed all the headlines, national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in Tokyo, participating in high-level diplomatic meetings with America’s top regional partners. Sullivan’s counterparts from Japan, the Philippines and South Korea all met with U.S. officials and (in various groupings) with each other. These meetings — in the long run — will prove more consequential for dealing with China’s rise than Blinken’s Beijing visit.
Another meeting in Tokyo that brought the U.S., Japanese and South Korean national security advisers together would have been unthinkable not long ago. But Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol have both taken significant political risks to move past historical grievances and join forces to confront their shared concerns regarding China’s regional aggression.

A Basement of Horrors in Seoul, Where Past and Present Collide  (Lauretta Charlton, New York Times)
The hostel in central Seoul has a lot to recommend it. The rooms are tidy and affordable enough for K-pop fanatics on a budget and families in need of lots of space on vacation. It’s perched at the base of Namsan, the scenic, leafy mountain peak in the heart of town. There’s even a rooftop with panoramic views of the city.
Just don’t try to go to the basement.
A small plaque on the ground is engraved with the words “Trail of National Humiliation,” a reference to the nearby location where the Japanese resident-general of Korea lived during Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula, which ended in 1945.
In the South, national monuments burned and strafed during the Korean War were rebuilt with precision and fidelity as symbols of national pride. But remnants of Japanese colonial rule were deliberately demolished in South Korea as recently as the 1990s.
The KCIA headquarters, however, where screams once echoed through hallways, has been allowed to stand. Some see it as a necessary reminder of the country’s flirtation with autocracy, others say it represents a bitter chapter that many would rather forget.

BRICS Faces a Reckoning  (Oliver Stuenkel, Foreign Policy)
In 2001, Goldman Sachs banker Jim O’Neill created the acronym “BRIC” to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China—countries he predicted would soon have a significant impact on the global economy. In 2006, Goldman Sachs opened a BRIC investment fund pegged to growth in these four nations. The moniker captured the global excitement about emerging powers at the time and transformed into a political grouping in 2009, when leaders of the four countries held their first summit. South Africa joined a year later.
BRICS as a political body has faced countless critics and doubters from the start. Analysts in the Western press largely described the outfit as nonsensical and predicted its imminent demise. In 2011, the Financial Times’ Philip Stevens announced it was “time to bid farewell” to the “BRICS without mortar.” A year later, another columnist at the paper, Martin Wolf, asserted that BRICS was “not a group” and that its members had “nothing in common whatsoever.” BRICS has also been described as a “motley crew,” “odd grouping,” “random bunch,” and “disparate quartet.” In 2015, Goldman Sachs decided to close the BRIC fund (which never grew to include South Africa) due to its low returns.
Yet as BRICS approaches its 15th summit in Johannesburg this August, the grouping is experiencing an unprecedented disagreement over enlargement. The outcome will be a test of BRICS identity in the face of rising Chinese influence.

America Cannot Afford to Be like Europe in Regulating Artificial Intelligence  (Luke Hogg, National Interest)
From government reports to briefings and hearings to legislation, AI is the topic du jour on Capitol Hill as lawmakers attempt to answer this question. While legislative proposals regarding AI vary widely, the ethos behind such proposals can generally be grouped into two categories. The first consists of proposals aimed primarily at mitigating potential risks of AI, which typically take a more heavy-handed approach to regulation in the name of consumer protection. The second takes a broader view of the AI ecosystem, attempting to foster innovation and global competitiveness with a more light-touch regulatory regime.
While both approaches are well-intentioned, the latter focusing on innovation and competitiveness holds greater promise. After all, the United States is not the only country developing AI systems, and amidst the Great Tech Rivalry it is essential that we remain globally competitive in cutting-edge technologies. If Washington is too heavy-handed in regulating AI, it risks becoming an innovation desert, like Europe.