Policy Currents | The newsletter for policy people
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** May 27, 2025
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Are you interested in learning the skills to conduct real-world policy research? Ready to fulfill your passion to help change the world for the better? Students at the RAND School of Public Policy get to do both. Full-time and part-time master's degree programs are available at our campuses in Santa Monica, CA, and Arlington, VA.
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China’s Leadership Speaks in Code
Chinese Communist Party leaders communicate in slogans, linguistic formulations, and key phrases collectively called tifa. These coded messages are used to convey policy directives to party bureaucrats. In a new report, RAND's Howard Wang outlines the main characteristics of tifa, how it's used, and what all this illustrates about China's thinking.
Wang concludes that analyzing tifa can reveal key insights into "what the party tells itself it is doing and why." Such insights are increasingly important to understanding the party under Chinese President Xi Jinping's leadership and could prove "enormously consequential for U.S. policy."
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It's Time to Rethink U.S. Defense Strategy
RAND's David Ochmanek is the latest guest on our new podcast, Policy Minded. The conversation focuses on a 2023 study Ochmanek led on the erosion of U.S. military power and influence. He discusses why U.S. defense strategy and posture have become "insolvent," lessons from the war in Ukraine that the United States could apply to future conflicts, and what U.S. forces can do now to adapt. For example, he says that the way the United States thinks about projecting power to defeat aggression must "change fundamentally."
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Assessing Global Catastrophic Risk
What's the risk of a comet colliding with the planet? Could nuclear war wipe out humanity? What about a supervolcano? RAND researchers considered apocalyptic scenarios like these in a recent analysis. The resulting report outlines ways to improve the understanding, measurement, and management of potential existential threats to humanity. As one of the study's lead authors, Anu Narayanan, says in a new video, "To prevent the end of the world, we first need to understand the risk on a deeper level."
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** RAND Recommends
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- Most clicked last week: a new primer about suicide among U.S. veterans and recent advances in prevention.
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- As North Korea-Russia ties grow stronger, RAND's Bruce Bennett tells Politico that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is trying to build a military capability to compensate for the "miserable job" he's done managing his country's economy.
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- RAND Europe's Mehdi Shiva explains how innovative financing tools can help governments navigate economic uncertainty while meeting increasing public health needs.
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** Events
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Admissions Webinar: Master of National Security Faculty Panel
Thursday, May 29, 2025 (Online)
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