• 58: [deleted by user], submitted on 2021-12-07 21:43:16+08:00.
• 59: Afghanistan’s Looming Catastrophe: Why the United States and Its Allies Must Act Now to Prevent a Humanitarian Disaster, submitted on 2021-12-07 21:44:09+08:00.
• 60: Keeping the Wrong Secrets: How Washington Misses the Real Security Threat, submitted on 2021-12-07 23:51:00+08:00.
• 61: Xi Jinping’s New World Order: Can China Remake the International System?, submitted on 2021-12-09 22:12:30+08:00.
• 62: Don’t Sell Out Ukraine: The West Must Respond to Russia With Strength, Not Appeasement, submitted on 2021-12-10 23:33:35+08:00.

58: [deleted by user], submitted on 2021-12-07 21:43:16+08:00.

—– 58.1 —–2021-12-07 21:43:26+08:00:

[SS from the article by P. Michael McKinley, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2014 to 2016]

“As winter begins, Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The challenge is providing relief on the necessary scale to meet the unprecedented needs of the Afghan people. The United States and its allies rightly seek to deny the Taliban government any legitimacy or funding until it provides guarantees for the rights of women, girls, and minorities and unequivocally cuts its ties to international terrorism. The U.S. Treasury, international donors, and organizations have frozen billions of dollars of Afghan assets and seek to channel humanitarian aid through UN relief agencies and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) still operating, with difficulty, inside the country. Meanwhile, despite the growing crisis, the Taliban have shown little sign of changing their behavior.
Confronted with this impasse, Western governments and international organizations are being forced to reconsider how they can deliver assistance more effectively. Doing so requires broadening the definition of basic humanitarian activities that are permitted under the sanctions regime and addressing the all-consuming question of cash liquidity for emergency operations. The time for decision is now: the window is closing for millions of Afghans as the humanitarian emergency on the ground intensifies by the day.”

59: Afghanistan’s Looming Catastrophe: Why the United States and Its Allies Must Act Now to Prevent a Humanitarian Disaster, submitted on 2021-12-07 21:44:09+08:00.

—– 59.1 —–2021-12-07 21:44:33+08:00:

[SS from the article by P. Michael McKinley, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2014 to 2016]
“As winter begins, Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The challenge is providing relief on the necessary scale to meet the unprecedented needs of the Afghan people. The United States and its allies rightly seek to deny the Taliban government any legitimacy or funding until it provides guarantees for the rights of women, girls, and minorities and unequivocally cuts its ties to international terrorism. The U.S. Treasury, international donors, and organizations have frozen billions of dollars of Afghan assets and seek to channel humanitarian aid through UN relief agencies and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) still operating, with difficulty, inside the country. Meanwhile, despite the growing crisis, the Taliban have shown little sign of changing their behavior.

Confronted with this impasse, Western governments and international organizations are being forced to reconsider how they can deliver assistance more effectively. Doing so requires broadening the definition of basic humanitarian activities that are permitted under the sanctions regime and addressing the all-consuming question of cash liquidity for emergency operations. The time for decision is now: the window is closing for millions of Afghans as the humanitarian emergency on the ground intensifies by the day.”

60: Keeping the Wrong Secrets: How Washington Misses the Real Security Threat, submitted on 2021-12-07 23:51:00+08:00.

—– 60.1 —–2021-12-07 23:52:26+08:00:

[SS from the article by Oona A. Hathaway, Professor of International Law at Yale Law School.]
“What a twenty-first-century approach to national security information requires is greater attention to privacy. Yet the United States has done little to protect the information about ordinary citizens that in a world of artificial intelligence and machine learning poses a growing threat to national security. The United States spends billions of dollars to protect classified information, much of which is already readily available from public sources. But it does little to enable its citizens, including those in important government positions, to keep their private lives from being documented, tracked, and exposed. In so doing, it is leaving pieces of the mosaic of U.S. national security lying around for its adversaries to gather up and put together.”

61: Xi Jinping’s New World Order: Can China Remake the International System?, submitted on 2021-12-09 22:12:30+08:00.

—– 61.1 —–2021-12-09 22:12:46+08:00:

[SS from the article by Elizabeth Economy, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of The World According to China.]
“Chinese officials and scholars appear assured that the rest of the world is on board with Xi’s vision, as they trumpet, “The East is rising, and the West is declining!” Yet many countries increasingly seem less enamored of Xi’s bold initiatives, as the full political and economic costs of embracing the Chinese model become clear. At the People’s Congress, Xi exuded the self-confidence of a leader convinced that the world is there for China’s taking. But his own certainty may be a liability, preventing him from recognizing the resistance Beijing is stoking through its actions abroad. Xi’s success depends on whether he can adjust and reckon with the blowback. Failing to do so could lead to further miscalculations that may end up reshaping the global order—just not in the way Xi imagines.”

62: Don’t Sell Out Ukraine: The West Must Respond to Russia With Strength, Not Appeasement, submitted on 2021-12-10 23:33:35+08:00.

—– 62.1 —–2021-12-10 23:33:59+08:00:

[SS from the article by Dmytro Kuleba, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine]
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a stark ultimatum. In a number of recent statements, he has demanded that the United States make “reliable and firm legal guarantees” that NATO will not expand eastward—or else, his entourage has hinted, Russia will invade Ukraine. Coming at a time when Russia is massing military forces along the Ukrainian border and stymieing peace talks to end the war in the Donbas region, Putin’s demand seems to offer a tempting prospect for the West: in exchange for merely cementing the alliance’s status quo, a deadly European war could come to an end and a new, even more devastating conflict could be avoided.
But it is foolish to think that providing such a guarantee would make Putin any less aggressive. History shows that pledges of neutrality by Ukraine or any other country in the region do nothing to abate Putin’s appetite; rather, they feed it. The best way to respond to such ultimatums is to ignore them altogether.
What cannot be ignored, however, are Putin’s increasingly aggressive intentions. Not only is a new large-scale invasion of Ukraine now on the table; Putin also hopes ultimately to rearrange Europe’s security architecture to the detriment of the West. For too long, the West has declined to take Putin’s ambitions seriously and responded with delay, indecision, and weakness. It is time to meet them with strength.”