TOK Teacher
Afghanistan has gone from being the “good war” that the United States must win to the longstanding burden that, like the British, the Soviets and a series of others, it now seeks to unload.
Series of 9 videos (around 20 minutes each) on various China related topics.
In its laser focus on military restraint, the present debate about endless war overlooks the financial architecture of U.S. empire.
To keep Iraq amenable to a U.S. presence, the State Department turned to the United States’ “dollar power”—its vast control over the supply and distribution of the dollar, the global reserve currency—and threatened to cut off Iraq’s access to its Federal Reserve account, which would effectively paralyze the government’s ability to provide basic services. Faced with this threat, which according to one Baghdad official “would mean collapse for Iraq,” Iraqis have backed away from their call to banish U.S. troops. The American military looks set to remain in the country indefinitely.
https://newrepublic.com/article/156325/end-forever-war-end-dollars-global-dominance
Ethiopia is staking its hopes on its $4.5 billion hydroelectric dam. Egypt fears it will cut into its water supplies. President Trump is mediating.
The dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the $4.5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam — Africa’s largest, with a reservoir about the size of London — has become a national preoccupation in both countries, stoking patriotism, deep-seated fears and even murmurs of war.
Washington is in an intensifying standoff with Beijing. Which one will fundamentally shape the twenty-first century?
To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth. Its government is deciding which features of the global status quo to preserve and which to reject, not only in business, culture, and politics but also in such basic values as human rights, free speech, and privacy. In the lead-up to the anniversary, the government demonstrated its capacity for social surveillance. At the Beijing University of Technology, where students trained to march in the parade, the administration extracted data from I.D. cards to see who ate what in the dining hall, and then delivered targeted guidance for a healthy diet. In the final weeks, authorities narrowed the Internet connection to the outside world, secreted dissidents out of town, and banned the flying of drones, kites, and pet pigeons.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-future-of-americas-contest-with-china
The Anywheres constitute about 25 percent of the British population, but they dominate the political class, and it is their concerns that are paramount in public policy. The Anywheres favor “progressive individualism.” They place a “high value on autonomy, mobility, and novelty” and a “much lower value” on “faith, flag, and family.” Anywheres are “comfortable with immigration, European integration, and . . . human-rights legislation,” which “dilute the claims of national citizenship.”
In contrast to the people who see the world from “anywhere” are the people who see the world from “somewhere.” The Somewheres are more rooted and socially conservative, older, with less formal education but a greater attachment to tradition, the Crown, and the nation.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/07/31/david-goodhart-the-road-to-somewhere/
My colleagues and I studied places in the United States where people’s activism actually had an impact — places where leaders built a constituency and turned the actions of that constituency into countervailing power. We interviewed experts all over the country to identify these outliers, then selected six of them for deep investigation. The six represented different issues, different places and different constituencies. We asked, what do they have in common?
An IB Global Politics Site 