Counterfeit Titanium Got into Boeing and Airbus Jets | What Africa Can Learn from China’s Rise | World Order is in a Downward Spiral, and more

Hopefully, the parties will reach a cease-fire deal before Netanyahu’s speech, which was rescheduled from June 13 because of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. That would change the atmosphere significantly. But if the situation then is roughly the same as it is today, Republicans would be giving Netanyahu cover to resist any pressure from the Biden team. Perhaps that is their goal.
Still, lawmakers should ask themselves whether the short-term political benefit of this tactic is worth the potential long-term damage. What’s different from 2015 is that Israel’s standing among the broader American public is more in question than ever before. The objective of both parties should be to preserve bipartisan support for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship for future generations. Netanyahu’s speech could be a step backward from that goal.

What Africa Can Learn from China’s Rise  (Howard W. French, Foreign Policy)
Since the big wave of independence from European rule swept Africa in 1960, no country on the continent has joined the exclusive club of the world’s richest nations.
Africa is hardly alone in this regard. Since World War II, almost all of the countries that have ascended to wealthy status were European beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, Western settler colonies such as Australia and New Zealand, and a handful of Asian rim countries. The exceptions to this are a select few: states that are fabulously rich in oil and gas.
Still, Africa dominates lists of the world’s poorest nations. If natural resource wealth alone predicted economic success, many African countries—some of them among the world’s most dismal performers, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Guinea—would rank as upper-middle-income societies or perhaps have joined the rich world by now. What we find instead are some modest successes: a couple dozen lower-middle-income countries and a handful of upper-middle-income countries, such as Botswana and Namibia.
Economic performance is not the only measure by which Africa often comes in last. As a longtime writer about Africa, it has always seemed to me to be the continent that receives the most grossly inadequate attention from the rest of the world. This is as true for foreign investment as it is for political engagement and diplomatic efforts in crisis management. It is also the case for press coverage. Sudan, for example, has collapsed into a catastrophic civil war in the past year, producing starvation, 10 million refugees, and untold casualties with hardly a claim on the world’s attention.
However much neglected, facilitating Africa’s economic rise is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Over the coming decades, Africa will be where most of global population growth occurs. In an era of rapid aging in many rich societies, it will generate the world’s largest pool of youthful labor. Whether the continent can build robust middle classes will go far in determining the size of global consumer markets. And if its middle classes do not grow, Africa will become an ever larger source of international migration and the panic accompanying it in the West. Furthermore, reaching global climate goals will require figuring out a way to produce vastly more energy for Africa’s people without emitting carbon on the scale of the West or, more recently, China and India. Today, in many parts of the continent, individuals consume far less electricity per year on average than a typical U.S. refrigerator.
A considerable portion of Africa’s economic difficulties can be put down to ravaging foreign influences. These range from a deep and extremely tragic history of exploitation and subjugation, mostly at the hands of Europeans during the centuries of trade in enslaved peoples, 12 million or so of whom were taken from Africa to power Western wealth creation.
Another deep current of tragedy runs through Africa’s outright takeover by Europe late in the 19th century and relatively brief period of subsequent colonization, which is the subject of my forthcoming book.
Since the continent’s independence era, yet other external factors have contributed to Africa’s failure to take off economically. One of these is the rise of China over the past four-plus decades. China has industrialized on such a massive scale, and with such cheap labor initially, that few other so-called underdeveloped countries have been able to rise sharply in its wake. With its deep fragmentation into 54 mostly small and often landlocked countries—a legacy of colonization—Africa has been particularly hobbled in this respect.
What I would like to focus on for the remainder of this column, though, are the internally imposed impediments that Africa faces. (I say “internally” while fully recognizing that no country can be considered outside of its history.) African countries must address these problems if they are to find a path toward greater prosperity. 

World Order is in a Downward Spiral  (Robert D. Blackwill, National Interest)
The international system is well into its most challenging period since the years that led up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the liberal world order gradually erodes. U.S.-China relations are on a path to an eventual confrontation while the balance of power in Asia shifts against the United States. A Russian dictator seeks to overthrow the European security system that brought peace and prosperity to the continent for many decades. The war in Gaza demonstrates the failure of successive American administrations to contend with the hegemonic ambitions of Iran effectively. Diplomacy has yet to mitigate the abiding danger in any of these cases.
All of this occurs as the United States tears at the fabric of its domestic peace and stability. Is it any wonder that adversaries contend and allies worry that America is in permanent decline? Where is a sensible U.S. grand strategy, from either side of the aisle, utilizing prescriptive diplomacy to counter these three associated threats to the future of the American people and the liberal international order?