Just in time for Halloween: it's the death phone. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

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Just in time for Halloween: It’s the death phone [[link removed]]. Organized criminals need cell phones to do business, but, unlike some more disorganized [[link removed]] criminals, they also know that they can’t just go around texting about crimes on channels that police can easily monitor. As a result, some phone creators cater to the criminal market, making devices that are optimized for encrypted communication and hiding information in case of a police search. Of course, where there are illicit markets, organized crime follows, and soon a murderous Scottish crime syndicate known as The Brothers got into the phone manufacturing game. Their company, MPC, cleared an estimated $8 million in phone sales and data subscriptions and even tried to get tech journalists to review their products. But then a blogger who endorsed MPC phones was assassinated in Amsterdam, and the company fell apart.

Lake Chad isn’t shrinking

For a long time, the only fact people knew about Lake Chad was that it was shrinking. The lake, a major source of water in Western Africa, lost 90% of its water between the 1960s and the 1990s. Its continued decline drove countries in the region to plan a massive canal project to refill it. Yet, a new study [[link removed]] shows that the lake has been basically stable — and might even have grown — since 1990.

In that same period of stability for the lake, however, the people living around it have suffered a range of political crises, capped off by the rise of Boko Haram, a militant group from northeastern Nigeria. Lake Chad’s decline is often cited as a proximate cause of these crises, but if the lake has actually been stable, then the source of the crises must lie elsewhere — likely in the political realm.

Even if it is stable now, climate change is set to wreak havoc with the ecosystem surrounding Lake Chad, which only makes the question of how governance malfunctioned during a period of relative ecological stability more pressing.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Against ‘mowing the grass’

The White House announced last weekend that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a raid on Idlib, Syria, on Saturday. To many, Baghdadi’s death is a cause for celebration, but for longtime war on terror journalist Spencer Ackerman it seemed like more of the same [[link removed]]. Similar celebrations around the assassinations of Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with thousands of others associated with ISIS and al-Qaeda, have not heralded the end of America’s post-9/11 conflicts, and neither, Ackerman argued, will this one.

Military planners and civilian strategists agree that killing leaders of international terrorist groups will not result in lasting victory, but assassination remains America’s key counterterrorism strategy.

President Donald Trump’s statement on Baghdadi’s death also elided the extent to which his rise was a direct response to American actions. As Ackerman pointed out, Trump described his horror at seeing ISIS prisoners dressed in orange jumpsuits while neglecting to mention that the jumpsuits were an explicit attempt by ISIS to evoke conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] MIDNIGHT OIL

This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Ketian Zhang, an assistant professor of international security at the Schar School of Public Policy and Government at George Mason University. She studies rising powers, coercion, economic statecraft, and maritime disputes. Her dissertation — the basis for her recent article [[link removed]] in International Security — this year won an honorable mention from the international security section of the American Political Science Association.

WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?

My research agenda emphasizes how globalized production and supply chains affect rising powers' use of power, especially China's coercion. By coercion, I mean the use or threats of negative actions to force the target state to change behavior. Since 1990, China has used coercion for maritime territorial disputes, foreign weapons sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target and tools of coercion: Most cases of Chinese coercion are not militarized, nor does China coerce all states that pose the same threats to its national security.

My book project, “Calculating Bully: Explaining Chinese Coercion,” asks two central questions: When and why does China coerce, and – if coercion is chosen – what tools does China use? Contrary to conventional wisdom and in contrast with historical rising powers, my book manuscript demonstrates that China is a cautious bully, does not coerce frequently, and uses military coercion less as it has become stronger, resorting mostly to non-militarized tools such as gray-zone coercion. I identify the centrality of the reputation for resolve and economic cost in driving whether states coerce or not. States coerce one target to deter others, treating coercion as a signaling tool. At the same time, states are constrained by the imperative of developing the domestic economy and the potential of losing the target state’s markets and supply.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

For my book project, I examine three issue areas of Chinese coercion: China’s territorial disputes with states in East, South and Southeast Asia, its policy toward Taiwan, and its behavior toward states that received the Dalai Lama. For temporal variation, I examine cases in which — for the same country that is a potential target for coercion — China coerces that country and when it refrains from coercion. For instance, I analyze why China coerced the Philippines over disputes in the South China Sea in the 1990s and late 2010s, but not the early 2000s. For cross-national variation, I analyze cases in which for the same period and among comparable countries, China coerces some but not others. One empirical chapter in my book manuscript explains why China prefers to coerce the Philippines but not Malaysia. I also conduct analysis to generalize beyond China.

In my two years of fieldwork in China, I leveraged my native-Chinese language capability by conducting over 150 interviews with Chinese government analysts and former civilian and military officials. I interviewed foreign diplomats, officials, and military officers during my nine-month fieldwork in DC to triangulate against Chinese sources. This qualitative research allows me to use intra- and inter-case variation to test the hypotheses in my book manuscript. For example, it was through interviews that I heard former Chinese officials and policy analysts admit that China's rationale of coercion was to "kill the chicken to scare the monkey," coercing one state to deter others. This phrase is a direct evidence to one of the main arguments in my book project, but would never appear in publicly available Chinese documents.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Catherine Osborn traced [[link removed]]Peronism’s return to the height of Argentinian politics, a process that culminated in Peronist candidate Alberto Fernandez being declared the winner of Argentina’s presidential election yesterday. Poor economic conditions and a weakened relationship with the International Monetary Fund under outgoing right-wing president Mauricio Macri have driven a resurgence for the populist Peronists. Fernandez faces major challenges, however: Argentina faces a debt service bill of over $50 billion next year, which it is ill-prepared to pay.

William Hartung highlighted [[link removed]] a proposal from Congresswoman Jackie Speier that would require the Pentagon to notify Congress in advance when it decides to waive fees on foreign governments who buy American weapons. The waivers, commonly used as a way to offer discounts to reliable customers like Saudi Arabia, cost the US public $16 billion between 2012 and 2017 and operate effectively at the Defense Department’s discretion.

Miles A. Pomper explained [[link removed]] what 50 American nuclear weapons are doing in Turkey, and what the prospects might be for removing them. The weapons, a relic of the Cold War, have been a topic of debate as US-Turkish relations have deteriorated, but moving them elsewhere poses some thorny issues. For one, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has begun musing about developing a national nuclear capability for Turkey, a process that could be jump-started by removing the NATO weapons.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Last week in impeachment [[link removed]].

Documents released [[link removed]] this week through a brilliant FOIA request confirm that at least one person listened to “Revival,” Eminem’s 2017 comeback album. The Secret Service paid Mathers a visit over lyrics on the album in which the rapper threatened President Donald Trump with such horrors as being hit with a falling coffee pot and, more awkwardly, impeachment. Agents recorded that, when they began to read Mathers the offending lyrics, he recognized the song and rapped along with them, because of course, Eminem gives free shows to cops.

Teddy Roosevelt once convinced the French ambassador to the US to skinny dip in the Potomac with him — the ambassador joined the president under the condition that he could keep his gloves on, because “We might meet ladies.” Diplomacy [[link removed]] has come a long way since then — now we do it in the air, with authoritarians!

We challenge you to come up with, and tweet out, a more esoteric and brilliant international security Halloween costume than this one [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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