WORLD ROUNDUPWhat Really Went Wrong in Eastern Germany | Patrolling for Taiwan Deterrence, and more

What Really Went Wrong in Eastern Germany  (Paul Hockenos, Foreign Policy)
The Sept. 1 elections in the two eastern German states of Saxony and Thuringia have hit Germany like a cyclone, delivering the strongest-ever turnout for an extreme right-wing party in the postwar era. In Saxony, the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) captured 31 percent, landing it narrowly behind the Christian Democrats (CDU), and in Thuringia, where the AfD is led by a twice-court-fined ideologue and outspoken neo-fascist named Björn Höcke, the party took 33 percent of the vote, the highest of any party, and thus also the mandate to form a government. The new populist party Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)—a rightist offshoot of the Left Party that boasts anti-immigration planks and pro-Russian sympathies—landed in third place in both states.
Although it is unlikely that another party will partner up with the AfD in governance—they all say they refuse to do so—the results raise resounding questions for modern Germany. How can such an extreme hard-right party perform so well in postwar Germany, a country that, in both its eastern and western postwar incarnations, made preventing the return of a racist, authoritarian leadership its very raison d’être? Why is this phenomenon so pronounced and radical in the country’s east, the territory of former communist East Germany, almost 35 years after the Berlin Wall fell?
Germans are now asking: How could everything go so wrong? Several recently published books by German authors offer a reckoning—and some answers.

How Did a Minority of Israelis Come to Wield So Much Power?  (David E. Rosenberg, Foreign Policy)
On July 29, a day before rioting by anti-immigrant protesters broke out in Britain in the wake of a deadly stabbing attack, dozens of Israeli right-wingers stormed two army facilities to protest the arrest of soldiers for allegedly abusing a Palestinian prisoner. What the two incidents had in common was the role of social media in organizing and fanning the flames of far-right violence and an underlying foundation of populist distrust of government. But they differed in one very important way: In Israel, the protesters were openly backed by some government officials and lawmakers; indeed, at least two Knesset lawmakers and a junior cabinet minister were among the rioters. The events in Israel thus were more analogous to those in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
The ordeal in Israel began when military police came to arrest nine reserve-duty soldiers at the Sde Teiman detention