China Bites Back
Plus: Mediocre Marco; Mediocre Palantir; IMF Hegemony; Ted Turner, RIP; Islamophobia-esque anti-Israel tropes; and more....
Welcome to another issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.
Note: There’s no Earthling this week, but I have a great excuse: I became a grandfather three days ago, and this turned out to be more time-consuming than I’d expected. For a picture of my cuter-than-average granddaughter, see below. (The photo is behind the paywall, but believe me: This kid is worth the money.) —Bob
SINICA
For years, China has played defense in the trans-Pacific tech war, adapting as best it could to a series of forceful American initiatives. The US kicked Chinese smartphone maker Huawei off the Android platform, constricted the eastward flow of microchips and chipmaking equipment, and strongarmed the Chinese owner of TikTok into placing the American version of the social media platform in American hands. And last year, acting under US pressure, the Dutch government tried to seize control of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia even though it was owned by a Chinese company—and relented only after the ensuing tug-of-war led to a global shortage of automotive chips.
But lately China has gotten more assertive. Last fall Beijing restricted rare-earth mineral and high-tech battery exports, last month it unveiled new tools for punishing foreign companies that participate in anti-China sanctions, and two weeks ago it struck again: After Meta bought AI agent maker Manus, which was founded by Chinese techies, Beijing got Meta to unwind the deal—even though Manus is based in Singapore, not China. On a recent episode of Sinica’s Trivium China podcast, tech consultant Kendra Schaefer explains the impetus behind Beijing’s decision to dust off a long-neglected foreign investment review mechanism for the occasion:
I actually totally understand why Chinese regulators are so mad… China spent the last two decades tweaking its innovation ecosystem, pouring subsidies into the innovation ecosystem, changing the way the entire sci-tech funding structure works, playing with the entire catalog of college majors to graduate more STEM students, right? I mean, this is a 20-year effort to generate companies like Manus that are globally competitive… So, they incubate these companies with all of this effort and all of the state funding. And then those companies take their toys and they go get acquired by a big foreign player. And so, I understand the state basically waking up to the fact that this is a major loophole. It’s kind of a national security issue.
Meanwhile, Beijing is having success in doing something Washington likes to do: export its “tech stack.” China is strengthening ties with frenemy Vietnam, which recently announced that it would let Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE supply core equipment for its 5G network.
A common view holds that international institutions are weak and ineffectual, while the real influence is exercised by powerful nation-states and multinational corporations. But in the Sahel region of Africa, the International Monetary Fund remains powerful even as the influence of other outside powers wanes, writes Alex Thurston in Foreign Exchanges. Military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have kicked out French troops, strong-armed multinational mining firms, and loudly declared their sovereignty—but the IMF’s grip on their budgets quietly survives these assertions of independence. And it’s not clear to Thurston that this influence will on balance be good:
The sweeping changes that the Sahelian countries have made in the military and political spheres—ending long-running Western security deployments, training programs, and more—have been paralleled by a large degree of continuity in their relations with the IMF. The juntas have asserted themselves vis-à-vis foreign energy and mining firms, but have been status quo actors when it comes to public spending. One wonders where the bulk of new royalties from gold, uranium, and oil will really flow, and whether ordinary Sahelians will end the decade any better than they began it… A reform program in Senegal faces the growing prospect of defeat at the IMF’s hands. There are major lessons here about where power ultimately lies.
International relations scholar Dan Drezner has been wrestling with the paradox posed by Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. On the one hand, there are Rubio’s “mushrooming fortunes within the MAGAverse,” where he’s considered a leading contender for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. On the other hand there’s… Rubio himself. “It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead,” Drezner observes. “Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump.” And reflexively affirming Trump’s foreign policy impulses can have bad consequences. While Rubio is “not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck,” he has helped create “the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible.”
So why has someone as mediocre as Rubio gotten so many good reviews within the Republican party? Well, he looks pretty good compared to others who have been seen in Trump’s company—an effect Drezner calls the “Bad Boyfriend Benefit.”
It works something like this: A bad boyfriend dramatically lowers overall boyfriend expectations of whomever they are dating. This means that, after the inevitable breakup, the next boyfriend — even if he is perfectly average — looks great by comparison… No doubt, compared to Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Howard Lutnick, Steve Witkoff, and the rest of Trump’s D-list crew, the fact that Rubio knows something about international relations and can speak with confidence about US foreign policy on camera is a plus.
Drezner assures us that “the Bad Boyfriend Benefit fades with time.” But “the honeymoon period can last for a spell…”
This week’s MSM obituaries of CNN founder Ted Turner rightly noted his extensive philanthropic activity—his legacy includes the UN Foundation, the Goodwill Games, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. But none of these testaments to his generosity were as personal as that of NZNet member Mark Leon Goldberg. In fact, if it weren’t for that generosity, Goldberg wouldn’t be an NZNet member. He writes:
In 1997, he famously pledged a billion dollars to support UN causes, leading to the creation of the United Nations Foundation. The UN Foundation, in turn, was one of my key backers early in my career when I launched the first blog about the UN, UN Dispatch. I would not be doing what I do today if not for his original act of philanthropy. [The] $1 billion pledge in 1997 was the single largest act of philanthropy at the time and inspired many of the other mega-donors in philanthropy today. What makes his commitment even more remarkable was that not long after his pledge, he lost a huge fortune in the AOL-Time Warner merger but still followed through on his pledge. He was fond of saying “You can’t take it with you,” when discussing why he’d given away so much of his wealth to causes that benefit humanity. Now that he’s gone, it’s worth taking a moment to remember what a difference he made.
In a podcast monologue, Peter Beinart argues that right-wing critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes are cherry-picking the Talmud to explain Israel’s crimes in much the way right-wing Islamophobes cherry-pick the Quran to explain Al-Qaeda’s crimes. Beinart argues that this framing is not just bigoted but strategically useful for the people pushing it, because it lets Western powers off the hook for the systems they sustain:
The danger in the way that Carlson and Fuentes and Owens talk is that it’s actually a way of trying to let white Christian Western countries off the hook: You know: Israel is this other terrible thing that’s the product of this peculiarly anti-Western alien civilization called Judaism or Jewishness, and we are not like that, right? This is what Carlson is getting at when he says things like, Israel hates Europeans, right? In fact, Israel could not do what it has done from the very beginning without the support of Europeans. To this day, it’s deeply entrenched and entangled in that system. And it’s important for people who want to change American policy towards Israel, and who want to oppose what Israel’s doing, to be clear about the terms in which they are making this criticism, and not to fall into this trap of suggesting a kind of civilizational divide between Jews on the one hand and white Western Christians on the other, or to suggest that Israel’s misdeeds are a result of a particular Jewish pathology. They’re not. They’re the one particular expression, a terrible expression in today’s moment, of the kinds of systems of oppression, of settler colonialism, of imperialism, of ethno-nationalism that we have seen across history and that we see all over the world.
Glenn Loury thinks he may have just gotten a preview of America’s future foreign policy discourse. In fact, he may have just hosted that preview. On the Glenn Show, centrist Shadi Hamid, author of The Case for American Power, defended his relatively hawkish views against restrainers on the left and right—Daniel Bessner and Andrew Day, respectively. After watching Bessner and Day team up against Hamid, Loury observed:
This conversation may model the country’s political dynamic in the coming years, with the center-left and center-right advocating for the revival and reform of older models of U.S. military projection, while the right and left galvanize grassroots support by taking, for different reasons, anti-militaristic positions. Perhaps the days of blank-check budgets for the military are coming to an end. As someone who’s become far more skeptical of US military intervention than I once was, and who sees unaddressed domestic problems mounting at home, I can’t say that would be a bad thing.
Silicon Valley defense contractor Palantir is commonly viewed as a tech powerhouse—a maker of products so sophisticated and valuable as to compensate for the controversy that accompanies the firm by virtue of its role in immigration enforcement and in AI-powered military targeting (and by virtue of the famously bizarre ideological intensity of CEO Alex Karp). But, suggests James Ball, writing in Transformer, maybe this view of Palantir has things backwards. Ball notes that “Palantir rarely seems upset at being credited with powerful and potentially nefarious capabilities” and writes:
Palantir’s controversy is not a tax on the business. It is the business. The brash narrative the company puts forward is a way to mystify what is ultimately a rather mundane product… A casual onlooker might be forgiven for thinking that Palantir is an AI company in the same vein as OpenAI or Anthropic, or an arms company like BAE Systems or Raytheon. In reality, it is neither. Palantir does not have a foundational AI model of its own, and has made no suggestion that it is trying to develop one. Similarly, it does not build surveillance devices, drones, or weapons hardware in any conventional sense. For all the company plays a role in surveillance networks, it does not build cameras…
Rather than direct your attention to one of Paul Bloom’s recent Small Potatoes posts, I will direct it instead to a couple of small potatoes. One is Paul’s daughter, born two months ago. The other is my granddaughter, born three days ago: