U.S.-China Perception Monitor: “Possible Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and China’s Choice”

In the sense that an escalation of conflict between Russia and the West helps divert U.S. attention from China, China should rejoice with and even support Putin, but only if Russia does not fall. Being in the same boat with Putin will impact China should he lose power. Unless Putin can secure victory with China’s backing, a prospect which looks bleak at the moment, China does not have the clout to back Russia. The law of international politics says that there are “no eternal allies nor perpetual enemies”, but “our interests are eternal and perpetual”. Under current international circumstances, China can only proceed by safeguarding its own best interests, choosing the lesser of two evils, and unloading the burden of Russia as soon as possible.

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A just cause attracts much support; an unjust one finds little. If Russia instigates a world war or even a nuclear war, it will surely risk the world’s turmoil. To demonstrate China’s role as a responsible major power, China not only cannot stand with Putin, but also should take concrete actions to prevent Putin’s possible adventures. China is the only country in the world with this capability, and it must give full play to this unique advantage. Putin’s departure from China’s support will most likely end the war, or at least not dare to escalate the war. As a result, China will surely win widespread international praise for maintaining world peace, which may help China prevent isolation but also find an opportunity to improve its relations with the United States and the West.

Hu Wei

A clear and concise argument against Chinese support for Putin, but I fear that we are overestimating the weight of rational arguments in foreign policy – after all, a full-scale invasion of another country is hardly rational in terms of costs vs. benefits. Indeed, other channels support the ‘no-limit partnership’ with Russia for its supplies of energy, food and other raw materials, and to potentially rely on Russia’s nuclear arsenal as deterrence in the event of a conventional war with the US in the South China Sea. Publicly China has declined to ‘take sides’, which roughly translates into tacit support for Putin. A position that resulted in a frosty atmosphere at a recent EU-China summit and that is unlikely to change substantially in favor of Western interests.

The New Yorker: “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine”

I’m curious what you think, if any, of the moral dimension to what’s going on in Ukraine right now.

I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if you’re fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it because you have no choice for strategic reasons. In other words, what I’m saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.

But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now. So my argument is: the strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move NATO eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine.

Isaac Chotiner

This interview was heavily criticized on Twitter and after reading it I can see why. It mixes circular reasoning (‘I stated this, therefore it must be true’), contradictory statements (contemporary Russia doesn’t have the economic foundation to sustain a powerful military, yet it’s somehow one of three great powers alongside the US and China), impractical policies (fostering friendly relations with the Russians as part of a balancing coalition against China is a good idea in theory, but in practice the right moment to engage in that policy was the early ‘90s – instead the US treated Boris Yeltsin as a drunken fool and dismissed Russia as a marginalized declining power that couldn’t possibly threaten anyone despite its large military and nuclear arsenal), assumptions that Putin’s decision making is overall rational (if it were, he never would have invaded Ukraine in the first place), and dismissing the agency and security needs of Eastern European states (who voluntarily aligned with NATO and the European Union to achieve prosperity and regional security precisely because they were afraid of a resurgent Russia). And I appreciated that the interviewer pushed back on some of Mearsheimer’s assertions.

Wired UK: “I stumbled across a huge Airbnb scam that’s taking over London”

Among a sea of Airbnb profiles, one thing seems clear: whoever is behind this is probably called Christian. Or Robert. I scroll through my inbox, remembering that when I booked my Airbnb I had been spammed with emails from a management company. That company, Continental Apartments, had offered to upsell me, among other things, a portable air conditioner (from £15), an additional set of linen (from £35), a highchair (from £16.67), an airbed (from £127.78) and a London Cheese Experience (from £25). A company number listed on the website of Continental Apartments (which is embellished with reviews from delighted clients – Lance K, Annie G, Joel S, Marcellus N – the profile pictures of whom have all been taken from stock photo libraries) leads to a firm called Lusso Management, which was founded in May 2018 by a German man called Christian Robert Baumann.

I had, finally, found my Christian. And my Robert. But I’d also found something else. A scam, co-ordinated across a number of Airbnb accounts, encompassing hundreds of listings and thousands of reviews. Many of the reviews and host profiles are fake or misleading, and, in some cases, the properties listed don’t exist. In one instance, pictures on a listing in London Bridge are mirrored versions of the pictures used on another. The bottle of wine on the counter, the microwave and the washing machine are all, curiously, backwards. Two other listings, which appear to be from the same building, again use the mirroring trick to flip the lounge, bedroom and kitchen.

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According to Inside Airbnb, a service that scrapes Airbnb to shine a light on the platform’s impact on cities around the world, there are an estimated 36,964 listings on Airbnb in London that are listed by a host with at least one other listing. While Airbnb presents itself as a sharing economy company, the business of hosting is becoming increasingly systemised and professionalised, with critics arguing that businesses are able to make huge sums of money at the expense of local residents who are unable to access properties locked away by the short-term rental gold rush.

James Temperton

Wherever there’s quick money to make coupled with lax regulation or enforcement, there’s bound to be people exploiting the situation by scamming others – and Airbnb is no exception. Fake profiles writing fake reviews for fake properties – one has to wonder how much of Airbnb’s listings are artificially inflated this way, especially in popular cities like London.

Wired: “How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook”

But over the past year or so, Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has begun to look a little less invulnerable. Lawmakers have increasingly arrayed against it, and at brief moments—like the January 2021 mass exodus from WhatsApp, and a second one that followed a Facebook outage in October—the powerful network effects that drive Meta’s supremacy have seemed to shift briefly into reverse. Somehow Telegram, with its tiny staff, has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of those stumbles.

Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app”. This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to turn on the app’s “secret chats” function (which few people actually do); and that only individual conversations, not those among groups, can be end-to-end encrypted. For the millions of people who use Telegram under repressive regimes, experts say, that confusion could be costly.

But the term “messaging app” is itself somewhat misleading, in ways that lead many to underestimate Telegram. Over the years, the app has become a deliberate hybrid of a messaging service and a social media platform—a rival not only to WhatsApp and Signal but also, increasingly, to Facebook itself.

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Its blend of private messaging and public channels makes it a perfect organizing tool: ideal for evangelizing in public and then plotting in secret. I call it the one-two punch, says Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina who studies Telegram. You can do both propaganda and planning on the same app.

It’s been vital to pro-democracy protesters from Belarus to Hong Kong, but the global right seems to find Telegram particularly congenial. In Germany, a movement against Covid restrictions used the app to organize huge demonstrations in central Berlin in 2020, leading to the storming of parliament’s steps by a mob of extremists, in a sinister foreshadowing of January 6. (The stated aim of some protesters was to show Trump that they were ready for him to liberate Germany from a deep-state conspiracy.)

Darren Loucaides

I have always been somewhat skeptical of companies founded by Russians (including Revolut, which has grown quite popular here in Romania) – no matter how strongly they may deny connections to the Russian authorities, a repressive government could always find ways to coerce the company into complying with its demands, however illegitimate (same goes for Chinese companies). This extensive piece has only increased my apprehension; Durov’s admiration for Mark Zuckerberg, his cult-like status inside the company and outward secrecy, their (fortunately unsuccessful) forays into cryptocurrencies and almost complete lack of a sustainable business model, are all reasons to remain cautious of Telegram and its future. I personally like Telegram more than WhatsApp and similar messaging apps; it has a nicer interface and feels more well-built – probably owing to the Durov brothers’ background in mathematics and engineering – but everything else surrounding it feels shady.

IEA: “Emergency measures can quickly cut global oil demand by 2.7 million barrels a day”

If fully carried out in advanced economies, the measures recommended by the IEA’s new 10-Point Plan to Cut Oil Use would lower oil demand by 2.7 million barrels a day within four months – equivalent to the oil demand of all the cars in China. This would significantly reduce potential strains at a time when a large amount of Russian supplies may no longer reach the market and the peak demand season of July and August is approaching. The measures would have an even greater effect if adopted in part or in full in emerging economies as well.

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Since the majority of oil demand comes from transport, the IEA’s 10-Point Plan focuses on how to use less oil getting people and goods from A to B, drawing on concrete measures that have already been put to use in a diverse range of countries and cities. The short-term actions it proposes include reducing the amount of oil consumed by cars through lower speed limits, working from home, occasional limits on car access to city centres, cheaper public transport, more carpooling and other initiatives – and greater use of high-speed rail and virtual meetings instead of air travel.

IEA News

Perfectly sensible recommendations, but I fear parts of the public in many countries would vocally oppose their adoption, particularly restricting urban car use during weekends. The recent crisis reminded me that we used to have similar restrictions in Romania in Communist times, namely cars with odd numbers on their license plates were permitted to circulate on odd days and vice versa – a similar initiative now, no matter how beneficial for society, would only invoke the specter of poverty and dictatorship of those past times.

The Verge: “EU targets Big Tech with sweeping new antitrust legislation”

The EU has unveiled its biggest ever legislative effort to balance competition in the tech world. The new Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is intended to rein in the power of the largest tech corporations and allow smaller entities to compete with the mostly US-based firms. So far, the EU has tackled antitrust issues on a case-by-case basis, but the DMA is intended to introduce sweeping reforms that will address systemic issues in the whole market.

Today’s announcement targets interoperability of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, with the EU saying that vendors will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. The EU says that this should give users more choice in how they send messages, without having to worry about what platform the recipient is on. There’s also a requirement that users should be able to freely choose their browser, virtual assistants or search engines.

The legislation hasn’t passed yet — the EU says the language has to be finalized and checked, at which point it’ll have to be approved by Parliament and Council. In a press conference held early Friday morning, Vestager said she expects DMA to come into force sometime in October. Owners of messaging platforms will likely have staggered obligations, from three months to four years, depending upon the complexities of the integrations requested.

James Vincent

As usual whenever the EU moves forward with legislation against US tech giants, there was a flurry of negative comments claiming that this initiative will be banning privacy and encryption in the name of competition law and similar nonsense (mostly coming from the US tech giants themselves).

Ars Technica: “Americans want to be carbon neutral, don’t want to take needed steps”

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center announced the results of polling that asked the US public its thoughts on how to address climate change. While the usual partisan split was apparent, the survey highlights an even larger challenge that policymakers will face: the US public supports contradictory things when it comes to climate policy.

Nearly 70 percent of the public favored taking steps toward the goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. Yet less than a third support transitioning off fossil fuels.

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There are some obvious problems here with people not having a firm grip on reality. People still don’t think humans are causing climate change, or they somehow refuse to recognize that reducing fossil fuel use will lead to cleaner air. But those have been issues for a while, and the people who believe those things are unlikely to support a pathway to carbon neutrality anyway.

The larger problem is that even the people who claim to support putting the US on a path that leads to carbon neutrality don’t seem to realize the sorts of changes it requires. Given that, many of them are unlikely to support the policy changes that are needed to get there.

John Timmer

Climate policy is far from the only topic where the broader public wants certain outcomes, but is unwilling to contribute to the solution, or is supporting measures that would exacerbate the problem. Take the pandemic: I think everyone can agree that we wish it to be over, but many are perfectly content to shift the burden of ending the pandemic onto others by denying to vaccinate or wear masks, arguing that their personal risks are low. Or the war in Ukraine: many are up in arms for the US government to intervene and enforce a no-fly-zone, ignoring the potential for rapid escalation of hostilities; others advocate for more sanctions on Russian oil and gas imports, but balk at paying higher fuel prices. A similar dynamic seems to be plaguing housing policy in the US, though I admit I have only read about it superficially.