How Poland Beat Authoritarianism | U.S. Is Dangerously Downplaying the Global Terrorism | Threat | Misreading China, and more

Almost every Pole I spoke with earlier this month, as I marched through Warsaw’s think tanks and ministries, was proud to share that their country is on the verge of going nuclear, and on a massive scale. Whether those plans make sense is another question.
The nuclear push is framed as belated climate policy after years of neglect. Poland’s energy system has nearly 80 percent dependency on fossil fuels—the highest in the EU. Crossing the German-Polish border by train, one quickly notices the spotty presence of wind turbines and solar arrays on the Polish side of the Oder River, in stark contrast to the German landscape, with jumbo clean energy parks lined up one after another. But Poland is no longer denying or ignoring the climate crisis. In fact, it thinks it has an answer for it.
The conservative government recently announced plans to build eight full-size conventional nuclear reactors at three locations and as many as 100 small modular reactors (SMR) in coming years. The groundwork for one advanced pressurized water reactor (PWR)—the very first nuclear power plant on Polish soil—has already begun. In September, one of Poland’s state-owned utilities contracted the U.S. firms Westinghouse Electric and Bechtel to develop an AP1000-model PWR that is supposed to commence energy generation in just 10 years’ time. The price tag: $20 billion—and counting.

Netanyahu Hasn’t Just Lost His Credibility on Security  (David E. Rosenberg, Foreign Policy)
As prime minister, Netanyahu cannot escape responsibility any more than then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir could in the aftermath of the 1973 war. Just days after this month’s massacre, while people were still digesting the depth of the tragedy and in any ordinary crisis would be backing the country’s leader, a poll showed that only 21 percent of respondents thought that Netanyahu should stay on as prime minister after the war ends. If elections were held today, his Likud party would lose 40 percent of its Knesset seats.
He will inevitably be linked to the policy failure that allowed the massacre to occur because the tech-based approach to fighting Hamas reflected the defense-oriented policy advocated by Netanyahu, which was designed to contain Hamas rather than vanquish it. “We abandoned the residents of the Gaza border to the high-tech nation and forgot that we were in the Middle East,” one reserve officer told Haaretz.
There were some good reasons for that approach, but they were informed mainly by Netanyahu’s purely political strategy of keeping Hamas alive and kicking and ruling in Gaza. That way, there would be two Palestinian leaderships. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank might aspire to a diplomatic solution, but it could never claim to speak for the Palestinian people or deliver peace so long as Hamas was in control of Gaza and pursuing its policy of violent resistance. Israel could thus justifiably say that it had no peace partner.

What Hamas Wants  (Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic)
Somehow, few saw this eruption of inhumanity coming. The consensus was that Hamas was a mostly rational actor that could be reasoned with. To hawks, although the group was an anti-Semitic Iran proxy, it could be deterred through political and economic incentives, because it felt responsible for the welfare of the Gazan people. To doves, Hamas was a quasi-legitimate national resistance movement whose occasional bouts of violence were simply intended to draw attention to that struggle.
Successive Netanyahu governments and security officials, far less sympathetic to the Gazan plight, nonetheless spent recent years lifting economic restrictions on the enclave, granting thousands of work permits for Gazans, and transferring hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars to Hamas in exchange—they thought—for relative quiet.
But it turned out that Hamas wasn’t being pacified; it was preparing. The group was less committed to national liberation than to Jewish elimination. Its violence was rooted not in strategy, but in sadism. And in retrospect, well before the Rosh Hashanah plot, the signs of Hamas’s atrocious ambitions were all there—many observers just did not want to believe them. What Hamas did was not out of character, but rather the explicit fulfillment of its long-stated objectives. The shocking thing was not just the atrocity itself, but that so many people were shocked by it, because they’d failed to reckon with the reality that had been staring them in the face.

Misreading China  (Aaron Sarin, Persuasion)
China’s economy is in trouble. Foreign investment is plummeting; youth unemployment is at an all-time high. Prices have experienced their sharpest drop since the global financial crisis. Debt has climbed to 282% of GDP. In the West, mainstream media have no doubt that China is heading for disaster. The country is becoming “uninvestable,” we hear, “the condition is systemic.” How have we moved so quickly from glowing exuberance to such a drastic lack of confidence?
The only thing predictable about China, says Bettina Schoen-Behanzin, vice president of the European Chamber, is its unpredictability. “That is poisonous for the business environment,” she says. While it may well be a good idea to disengage from an aggressive, expansionist, totalitarian state, the notion of imminent collapse seems likely to fall wide of the mark—just like the euphoric praise of recent years, another iteration of the West’s chronic tendency to misread China, viewing it always through extremes.

US Boosts Funds for Infrastructure Program for Developing Nations Above $30 Billion  (Michael Lipin, VOA News)
The Biden administration tells VOA that in recent months it has increased the amount of U.S. public and private funds for a multilateral program to build infrastructure in developing nations, surpassing the $30 billion figure that it announced in May.
But some observers say it will be tough for the U.S. to meet its pledge to raise $200 billion in the next five years for the program launched by the Group of Seven advanced economies. The program called Partnership for Global Infrastructure, also known as PGI, is a competitor to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which marks its 10th anniversary this year. Other G7 members have pledged to raise $400 billion by 2027.

Hamas’s Hostage-Taking Handbook Says to ‘Kill the Difficult Ones’ and Use Hostages as ‘Human Shields’  (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic)
A hostage-taking manual that an official in the Israel Defense Forces told me was recovered in the aftermath of the Hamas attack suggests that the group’s hostage-taking on October 7 did not go according to plan. Right now, more than 200 hostages are thought to be in Hamas’s hands in Gaza. The manual suggests that the group at first intended not to spirit all of them into Gaza, but instead to take them hostage where they were found inside Israel, possibly for a protracted standoff.
The Atlantic obtained a copy of the manual from an IDF official, who vouched for its authenticity and who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the materials. Israeli President Isaac Herzog had earlier referred to the document in an interview on CNN, calling it “an instruction guide, how to go into civilian areas, into a kibbutz, a city, a moshav [agricultural co-op].” He said it described “exactly how to torture them, how to abduct them, how to kidnap them.”
The hostage-taking, according to the manual, is meant to happen “in the field,” in areas that have been “cleansed” and brought under control. After the hostages are brought together, it says, they should be culled (“kill those expected to resist and those that pose a threat”); the others should be bound and blindfolded, then “reassured,” to keep them docile. “Use them as human shields,” it says, and use “electric shocks” to force compliance.
“Kill the difficult ones,” it adds. It specifically notes the need to separate women and children from men—confirmation that the snatching of children was planned from the start, and not the product of some kind of excess fervor following battlefield success. The manual specifies that only senior field commanders should negotiate with Israeli authorities, and then only with the advice of their own superiors, presumably still in Gaza. The final section, which has circulated online but was not included in the IDF version, advises the hostage-takers to threaten to kill prisoners if they revolt, or if Israel attacks or tries to gas them. 

Biden Turns a Few More Screws on China’s Chip Industry  (Rishi Iyengar, Foreign Policy)
For the second year running, the United States has marked the onset of autumn with a salvo against China’s technology sector.
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced additional curbs on the export to China of advanced semiconductors and the equipment used to make them, honing in further on Chinese artificial intelligence capabilities that have potential military applications and closing loopholes that Beijing could exploit to get what it needs from third countries. The updated export controls came almost exactly a year after the administration’s first restrictions on semiconductor sales to Chinese companies, which altered the trajectory of U.S.-China tech competition significantly enough that they have come to be known in trade policy circles simply as “October 7.”
The new rules—which aim to iron out kinks in the original Oct. 7 armor—include a wider range of AI-capable semiconductors, making it harder for Chinese firms to game the system by bunching together several chips that aren’t subject to the restrictions. Put simply, according to the 295-page regulatory filing, it “prevents the workaround of simply purchasing a larger number of smaller datacenter AI chips which, if combined, would be equally powerful as restricted chips.”

The Biden Administration Is Dangerously Downplaying the Global Terrorism Threat  (Charles Lister, Foreign Policy)
In a series of interviews earlier this month timed to coincide with the 22-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, senior U.S. counterterrorism officials provided, in the words of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, “what amounted to an obituary” for al Qaeda in its original Afghan heartlands. National Counterterrorism Center Director Christy Abizaid said al Qaeda “is at its historical nadir … and its revival is unlikely,” having “lost target access, leadership talent, group cohesion, rank-and-file commitment, and an accommodating local environment.” Another senior official described the remaining forces as “a nursing home for AQ seniors.” To all extents and purposes, the media reporting that resulted sounded like a proclamation of victory—and in one case, the Taliban were even singled out as an integral “partner” in this achievement.
As with most things, however, the reality is both more complex and far less encouraging. Although downplaying the current terrorism challenge amid an ever-greater emphasis on great-power competition makes political sense, the complete picture in 2023 is troubling: Today, there are more terror groups in existence, in more countries around the world, and with more territory under their control than ever before. While U.S. and allied attention turns away from combating terrorism threats abroad, it is not just China and Russia seeking to fill gaps—it is also the likes of al Qaeda and the Islamic State.