For many Russian students, the academic year started last Friday with tips on planetary domination from President Vladimir Putin. “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind,” he said, via live video beamed to 16,000 selected schools. “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the […]
Should the U.S. fear growing Russian progress in artificial intelligence? Last week, Vladimir Putin told students, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” That caught the interest of noted AI phobe / profiteer Elon Musk who tweeted, simply and ominously: “It begins…” Read Here – Defense One
North Korea looks pretty scary at the moment, firing off missile after missile, threatening to target Guam, and, on Sept. 3, testing what the regime claims was its first hydrogen bomb. And the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un—so ruthless he may have had members of his own family murdered—might be just crazy enough to push the button to initiate a catastrophic […]
Trump did not create the American empire. He knows nothing of its creation, does not read history and would be happy to see it collapse under its own weight, as the British, French and Dutch empires have collapsed in his lifetime. Brexit appealed to him as a deliberate casting-off of the kind of responsibilities and […]
If you’d asked Pentagon officials on Wednesday morning, “How many U.S. troops are deployed to Afghanistan?” they’d have told you “about 8,400.” If you ask them now, they’ll tell you “approximately 11,000” — maybe a thousand troops less than the actual best estimate. Read Here – Defense One
Trump said he studied Afghanistan in great detail, and that after Friday’s meeting with his national-security team at Camp David, Maryland, he arrived at three conclusions about U.S. interests in Afghanistan: “First, our nation must seek an honourable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made; second, the consequences of a […]
History might not be a perfect guide, of course, given the unusual circumstances we now face. North Korea has reached the point of perfecting its missile systems. It may well be unwilling to subordinate the pace of testing to political calculations when it is so close to the goal-line. As for the U.S., whose president […]
The stakes are high for the U.S. as tensions in Asia ramp up. The country has $1.3 trillion of two-way trade with the region, based on annualised data in the first six months of this year. That’s 52.5 percent of America’s total foreign trade. But that is only part of U.S. linkage with Asian economies. […]
The global financial crisis, which began ten years ago this month, showed that the Western-led rules-based international order’s long-term survival is not inevitable. It is often assumed that if and when the United States loses its place as the global hegemon in that system, China will be the country to lead the world. But what would […]
China has a clear strategy to control the Pacific, west of Hawaii, and challenge the US for dominance in the eastern Pacific. In 1950, the US articulated its strategy to box in China and the Soviet Union. The first line of defence was based on the First Island Chain, enclosing five seas: Okhotsk, Japan, Yellow, […]
looking beyond borders 