WORLD ROUNDUPTrump’s Business Model Is to Break Europe | The Quiet Rebalance in Transatlantic Intelligence | Can More British and French Nuclear Cooperation Help Deter Russia?, and more
· Trump’s Business Model Is to Break Europe
· Why Did the White House Write This National Security Strategy?
· The Quiet Rebalance in Transatlantic Intelligence
· Can More British and French Nuclear Cooperation Help Deter Russia?
· Spanish Police Take Down White Supremacist Terror Cell
· Why Domestic Politics Keeps Complicating the Conflict Between Thailand and Cambodia
· Coup Contagion? A Rash of African Power Grabs Suggests Copycats Are Taking Note of Others Success
· German Far-Right Lawmaker Charged with Making Nazi Salute
· IS and Other Extremist Groups Use AI to Produce Fake Content and Recruit New Members
Trump’s Business Model Is to Break Europe (Majda Ruge, Foreign Policy)
Washington wants a free hand for Silicon Valley and Russia investment. The EU is an obstacle—and the far right is an ally.
Why Did the White House Write This National Security Strategy? (Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare)
The National Security Strategy is a very strange document—strange in what it includes, strange in what it leaves out, strange in its bombastic personalization of policy to President Trump, strange in displaying a certain meta-quality, and strange in its all-but-overt racism. Needless, perhaps, to say, this does not read like the national security strategies of any prior administration.
This National Security Strategy reflects any number of remarkable judgments, some of them merely eccentric, some of them far worse than that. Here is an example:
The document is not defining “border security” as an important element of U.S. security or as one of the most significant elements of it. It is defining it as the single primary element of American security.
The primary element of national security? This idea isn’t exactly new. But it is crazy.
I am willing to entertain the notion that the last several administrations may have underestimated the American people’s desire for a secure border. But to put the issue of border security as the top objective in one’s national security strategy is a kind of a nativist madness that is more about cultural—and let’s be honest, racial—anxiety about immigration than it is about any tangible security threat.
To call border security the primary element of national security, after all, you have to believe that controlling and limiting migration is more important to American security than, say, maintaining a functional and effective nuclear deterrence; having a military capable of protecting American interests at home and abroad, and stopping or deterring Russian and Chinese predations on allies. You have to believe it’s more important than having a coherent approach to protecting American critical infrastructure and cybersecurity and more important than stopping major terrorist operations. (Cont.)
