• 370: The U.S. Doesn’t Need Another Democracy Summit: It Needs a Plan to Confront Authoritarianism, submitted on 2023-03-28 07:40:20+08:00.
• 371: How to Protect American Democracy: U.S. Elections Are Still Vulnerable to Enemies Foreign and Domestic, submitted on 2023-03-29 21:56:38+08:00.
• 372: Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing China for War: The World Should Take Him Seriously, submitted on 2023-03-30 05:49:37+08:00.

370: The U.S. Doesn’t Need Another Democracy Summit: It Needs a Plan to Confront Authoritarianism, submitted on 2023-03-28 07:40:20+08:00.

—– 370.1 —–2023-03-28 07:42:17+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Jon Temin, Vice President of Policy and Programs at the Truman Center for National Policy. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff.]

Biden’s first Summit for Democracy, held virtually in December 2021, sought to galvanize democratic countries to work toward advancing democracy within their own borders. But the United States didn’t build an accompanying monitoring mechanism, making it difficult to track countries’ progress on the commitments they made. Nor has the United States made defending democracy abroad a major foreign policy priority, a puzzling decision given that Biden has described the struggle between democracy and autocracy as “the defining challenge of our time.”
As a candidate for president, Biden campaigned on the need to preserve democracy at home and abroad. Since taking office, he has championed voting rights and worked to strengthen democratic institutions within the United States. But his administration’s approach to defending democracy beyond U.S. borders has been much less vigorous. It has centered around organizing summits that bring together countries that are already largely committed to democracy, bolstering democratic reformers, and responding to broad, thematic challenges to democracy, such as the use of technology to limit individual freedoms. None of this requires making hard choices between values and interests when dealing with autocracies or backsliding democracies or confronting individual autocratic leaders.

371: How to Protect American Democracy: U.S. Elections Are Still Vulnerable to Enemies Foreign and Domestic, submitted on 2023-03-29 21:56:38+08:00.

—– 371.1 —–2023-03-29 21:59:57+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Lawrence Norden, Senior Director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law; and Derek Tisler, who serves as Counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.]

Effectively pushing back against election falsehoods can seem like an impossible task, but Americans have learned a lot in recent years, and there are communications strategies and legislative measures that can help blunt the effects of disinformation. The first is to continuously “pre-bunk” disinformation and direct citizens to trusted sources, before false information has been spread and believed. Analyses of online election-related conversations by the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Brennan Center, and others have found that high-profile election deniers rely on the same core false narratives over and over. This repetition means that it is possible to predict a good deal of election disinformation. Therefore, election officials, public leaders, and civic organizations can anticipate false points likely to be raised, train voters to recognize false information, provide factual evidence to rebut—or “pre-bunk”—recurring rumors, and direct voters to trusted sources.

372: Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing China for War: The World Should Take Him Seriously, submitted on 2023-03-30 05:49:37+08:00.

—– 372.1 —–2023-03-30 05:56:07+08:00:

[SS from the article by John Pomfret, former Beijing Bureau Chief for The Washington Post; and Matt Pottinger, Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. From 2019 to 2021, he served as Deputy National Security Adviser.]

It is too early to say for certain what these developments mean. Conflict is not certain or imminent. But something has changed in Beijing that policymakers and business leaders worldwide cannot afford to ignore. If Xi says he is readying for war, it would be foolish not to take him at his word.
The first sign that this year’s meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—known as the “two-sessions” because both bodies meet simultaneously—might not be business as usual came on March 1, when the top theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published an essay titled “Under the Guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Army, We Will Advance Victoriously.” The essay appeared under the name “Jun Zheng”—a homonym for “military government” that possibly refers to China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission—and argued that “the modernization of national defense and the military must be accelerated.” It also called for an intensification of Military-Civil Fusion, Xi’s policy requiring private companies and civilian institutions to serve China’s military modernization effort.