Michèle Flournoy, Professor Joseph Nye, Professor Jason Furman, and Andy Browne discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect the global balance of power and what it will take to restore international cooperation... Read the full article here: Full Article
"Israel will very likely have a new government soon. Benny Gantz made this possible by agreeing on March 26 to form a national unity government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Gantz’s critics have savaged him for doing so. They are outraged because, after the election, Gantz was in a relatively strong position. Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc had 58 seats, but the anti-Netanyahu bloc had 62—including 15 seats from the largely Arab Joint List. The Joint List’s leader, Ayman Odeh, made clear the [...]
"Henry Kissinger warns that many existing domestic and international institutions that have helped govern the past decades will not survive the Covid-19 crisis. He is surely correct. "Which institutions will endure, and what will replace those that meet their demise? Will, as Kissinger describes it, the revival of the 'walled city' prevail? Or will the seriousness of this moment catalyze the global cooperation that has been in such short supply to make globalization more resilient in the face of future threats? [...]
"There is a similar sense of helplessness, however, said Julianne Smith, a former security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now at the German Marshall Fund. 'You don’t know when terrorism or the pandemic will strike, so it invades your personal life. With terror, you worry about being in crowds and rallies and sporting events. It’s the same with the virus — crowds spell danger...' "Unlike Sept. 11, 'when a single set of events united the country in [...]
"As the coronavirus circles the globe, it’s proving a startling reminder of just how interconnected our world has become. The virus has moved along our global supply chains, and it can be stopped only with global cooperation. But the war of words between U.S. and Chinese officials last month shows how the pandemic can bring out the worst in the two countries. While the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is now an opening for both nations to reverse course, and they [...]
"'I don’t want to give an impression that we bestowed the answer key for dealing with such a challenging and unprecedented crisis,' Monaco said. 'But the idea was to identify issues that would say these are the kinds of things you need to be planning for and thinking about now.' "What does it mean for the federal government to be prepared? 'Oftentimes, the gauge is no mistakes, no criticism, just complete smooth sailing,' Monaco said. “That to me is not the [...]
"A large group of prominent American foreign-policy experts, including former high-ranking White House officials from both parties, is calling on the Trump administration to work more closely with China to stem the coronavirus epidemic..." Read the full article here: Full Article
"'Iran is carrying out a relatively low-cost but effective strategy to increase the pain for the US and for our Iraqi friends, so deterring Iran is not going to be a one-off event but will require a willingness to strike again and again,' said Mike Singh, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. 'The question is: is the US willing to pursue an indefinite campaign against Iranian proxies in the region given the clear desire—especially [...]
"We present a lightly edited interview about Israel’s technology- and surveillance-heavy approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, Matthew Waxman, Liviu Librescu Professor of Law at Columbia University, and I talk to Yuval Shany, a noted Israeli human rights expert and professor at Hebrew University. We cover the particularly fraught political crisis that the virus exacerbated, the Israeli government’s use of counterterrorism tools to trace contacts of infected individuals, and the significance of locational privacy in the face of a deadly [...]
"On Tuesday, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo unveiled a detailed framework for restoring democracy in Venezuela that was immediately rejected by the man who would need to step aside for such a transition to occur: Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, given that just last week the U.S. Department of Justice charged Maduro with narco-terrorism and put a $15-million price on his head. "Many Venezuelans reacted with understandable satisfaction to the indictment of Maduro [...]