China Takes Aim at Silicon Valley

A technician monitors parameter index at the laptop assembly workshop of LCFC Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. in Hefei, Anhui Province of China. (Zhang Dagang/VCG via Getty Images)

From cell phones to toasters, semiconductors are crucial to the security of any electronic device. While the United States and Taiwan dominate the semiconductor industry, the CCP has declared that by 2025, 75% of computer chips used in China would be produced domestically. To advance its goals, the CCP has sponsored IP theft, firm acquisition, and talent poaching. China's greatest weapon, however, is market access. Writing in Real Clear Defense, Robert Spalding examines how allowing Chinese companies to fabricate the “heart” of modern technology would invariably allow the CCP access as well, rendering digital systems weapons for data theft and cyberattacks.

Africa's Sleeping Giant

An Ethiopian refugee child who fled fighting in Tigray province, sleeps in a hut at the Um Rakuba camp in Sudan's eastern Gedaref province, on November 16, 2020. (Ebrahim Hamid/AFP via Getty Images)

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, like former rock stars of the global do-gooding circuit Aung San Suu Kyi and Paul Kagame, has never been the figure his Western admirers imagined. As Walter Russell Mead writes in The Wall Street Journal, a new conflict is brewing in Ethiopia with potential for great devastation as Mr. Ahmed orders the Ethiopian army to force the restive northeastern Tigray region back into line. “Tribalism,” as ethnic nationalism in postcolonial Africa is sometimes dismissively called, is not a remnant of the past destined to fade as modernization progresses. It is a sleeping giant that, as it awakens, will test the stability and perhaps alter the borders of many African countries.

Biden's Big Tech Enigma

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee  on April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

We know very little about Biden’s plans for big tech—save for his transition team being stacked with Silicon Valley alumni. In Real Clear Markets, Kirk Arner and Harold Furchtgott-Roth note that American policymakers have shown an increasingly bipartisan animus towards big tech.  Many progressives assail America’s tech companies under a predictable rubric of big-is-bad, pre-Chicago school antitrust analysis. Conservatives, meanwhile, are often concerned with the censorship of conservative voices and perceived political bias of social media platforms. 

Moscow's Disinformation Toolkit

A Facebook logo is seen on a portable device with the logo of Russian state broadcaster Russia Today (RT). (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The internet, 24-hour news agencies, and the advent of digital media platforms have grown Russia’s information warfare arsenal, writes Richard Weitz for the International Centre for Defence and Security. During the Cold War it took Soviet intelligence years to plant disinformation in foreign publications that might be picked up in mainstream international media, but now the Kremlin can rapidly disseminate its talking points and favorite falsehoods throughout the world by using coordinated official and covert media postings. Nonetheless, the campaign has failed to obscure Russia’s own COVID-related setbacks, induce even Russian aid recipients to relax their economic restrictions, or gain visible high-level official support in Moscow.

Whitewashing ISIS

A woman holds her child while standing in a burned out area in the village of Aldeia da Paz, outside Macomia, Mozambique on August 24, 2019. The region has faced multiple attacks by an African branch of ISIS. (Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)

On November 10, Al Jazeera posted a breathtaking headline: “ISIS-linked attackers behead 50 people in northern Mozambique.” The subhead was equally horrifying: “Witnesses say the assailants herded victims onto a football pitch in the village of Muatide where the killings were carried out.” In Providence Magazine, Lela Gilbert examines the religious motivations behind the Islamic State’s violence, and the tendency of Western mainstream news sources to whitewash religious persecution from their global coverage.

BEFORE YOU GO...

It is easy to imagine the hardships associated with military service, writes H.R. McMaster, but it is more difficult to understand the less tangible rewards of service. In The Wall Street Journal, Lt. Gen McMaster explores what compels servicemen and -women to act courageously, endure hardships, take risks and make sacrifices.