Read about the potential for climate cooperation across the DMZ. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about the potential for climate cooperation across the DMZ.

The Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas is a war frozen into place, delineated by blood and fortified in the nearly 70 years since the armistice. The DMZ is a human-made border, and it bisects rivers — the artifice of states imposed on natural formations. The Rimjin runs from north to south across the DMZ, where it changes names and becomes the Imjin. Bukhan flows north to south, and keeps its name the whole time. These rivers, and their watersheds, are a shared concern between the two nations. “Recently, South Korea called on [[link removed]] North Korea to provide notice before opening floodgates in anticipation of heavy rainfall but did not receive a response,” writes Daniel Jasper, “Climate change, it would seem, is outpacing diplomacy, and the growing potential for compounding disasters should instill a fierce urgency among all stakeholders.” Climate change, with its increases in both drought and flooding, threatens not within borders but through watersheds, and should be fertile ground for greater cooperation. “There are an infinite number of environmental issues that the U.S. and North Korea could discuss, but the most obvious is energy,” argues Jasper, seeing a path for diplomacy over wind power as an avenue for durable conversation, and managing climate emergency together.

Natalism Fatalism

The end of Roe v. Wade in the United States is a harrowing threat to reproductive freedom, removing from millions of people the right to abortion. Writing at World Politics Review, Rui Zhong draws parallels [[link removed]] to China’s One Child policy, which mandated abortions and sterilizations in an attempt to arrest population growth on behalf of the state.

“Mandatory abortions and sterilization were a priority back when China sought to control birth rates while climbing the development ladder to industrialization. Today, China has an aging workforce and low birth levels that are causing concern among policymakers tasked with sustaining a large, healthy pool of labor,” write Zhong.

In both instances, it’s state policy, not the choice of people, families, or women, that determines what happens during pregnancy. With the state party permitting a backlash to abortion, the body remains a battleground, even as the objectives of this war on women have changed.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Brainstorming Circular Squad

Post WWII, the United States emerged with the economy to rebuild the world, and the military to patrol it. These forces, linked at the dawn of American primacy, entered an easy compromise for a few decades, but ultimately the guns won out. Countries abroad had left-leaning governments overthrown, markets forced open, and the balance against American labor was written in the now-captive markets of the world reordered by empire. Building a Left internationalism for the 21st century in the US means understanding that pivot, and working domestically to undo its work.

“Securing labor rights, decriminalizing the border, and scaling back the security budget are only a few of the possible ways to meaningfully build left internationalism in the United States,” argues Aziz Rana in Dissent [[link removed]], in the opening salvo of an issue-wide debate over left internationalism in empire. These steps are seen as vital for building labor power, using solidarity to prevent it from being undermined by a precarious migrant labor market, and limiting the power of imperial war.

Dissent collects a symposium of other thinkers [[link removed]] to challenge and further envision a Left internationalism starting from Rana’s argument, though many disagree in part or in whole with his recommendations. The old world is dying, the new one could take many forms.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Ladder theory: Part I

On June 20th, 2019, the military of Iran shot down a US Navy-operated RQ-4 Global Hawk drone. The incident had many of the ingredients to transform from a single shootdown into a broader war: The drone was high profile and expensive, and tensions between Iran and the US had escalated since President Trump pulled the US out of the Obama administration negotiated Iran deal. Ultimately, however, it was the specific nature of the Global Hawk being a drone that kept its destruction from serving as the opening salvo of a broader war.

It is one thing to launch a war to avenge the death of a human. It is a much different problem to start a war to avenge the loss of some equipment.

But that’s not the end of the story. “ Wargame of Drones: Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Crisis Escalation [[link removed]],” by Erik Lin-Greenberg and published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, goes beyond intuition to offer a compelling look at why the destruction of drones is treated as less of an attack.

“Relative to the loss of an inhabited platform to hostile action, the loss of a drone should be less escalatory for two reasons,” writes Lin-Greenberg. “First, it is less likely to elicit an instrumental desire to degrade a rival’s military capabilities. Second, it is less likely to trigger emotions like anger that contribute to aggressive, risk-acceptant behavior.”

Real-life incidents of this style of de-escalation exist. The Global Hawk is likely the highest profile, but in 2015, Turkey shot down a Russian drone and then, a month later, an inhabited Russian plane, providing a grim A-B test; the drone shootdown was met with no response, while Russia launched retaliatory airstrikes after the plane was shot down. But wars, or near-wars, are already messy and ethically fraught, making them poor testbeds for theory.

Wargames have no such limitation, and so Lin-Greenberg fielded games with national security professionals, randomly varying if in the game the aircraft show down had crew onboard or if it was just a drone. While much of prior scholarship focused on whether or not the loss of a drone would spark a new conflict, initiating a war, Lin-Greenberg’s research here emphasized what happens in an ongoing war if a drone is shot down.

In the scenario, teams were told that a reconnaissance plane had been shot down by Ketunia, a fictional country bordering the equally fictional land of Dakastan. Half of the participants were told that the target was an old MQ-1 Predator drone. The other half were told it was an MC-12 Liberty intelligence aircraft, complete with a four-member crew, killed in the scenario.

As expected, the officers and game players who were told that a drone was shot down shrugged it off, treating it not as the grounds for a bigger war while still elevating the alert of forces. For those told it was a crewed plane, plans pivoted immediately to harrowing machines to recover, if possible, the remains of the dead.

Concludes Lin-Greenberg, “The deliberations of actual national security practitioners immersed in realistic crisis scenarios reveals that escalatory retaliation can be avoided after drone losses primarily because decisionmakers see little need to degrade a rival’s ability to conduct future attacks and because the loss of a machine does not trigger strong emotional reactions that can elicit more risk-acceptant behavior.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Anmol Irfan reported [[link removed]] on the national mood in Jamaica following the visit of a royal couple. The country, which won its independence from the British Empire in 1962 but still has the Queen as head of state, is working to sever that last royal tie. This is important and symbolic work, but running parallel to it is the broader call for reparations from the British crown. “Jamaican lawmaker Mike Henry has proposed an amount of 7.6 billion pounds for reparations,” writes Irfan, “which he derived from a 20 million pound payment made by the British government to slave owners in British colonies for the emancipation of enslaved people after slavery was abolished in 1833.”

Shirin Jaafari anchored [[link removed]] a story of Egyptian houseboat demolition with Ekhlas Helmy, an 88-year-old who lives in one of the 30 or so Nile houseboats in Cairo. These houses, built decades or longer ago, fall outside of modern codes and permitting. But Egypt’s government has set about evicting the residents and demolishing the residences. “Unfortunately, in the past two years, this government — led really, by the army — has been on a rampage bulldozing down tens of thousands of kilometers of old buildings, heritage, cemeteries, and in its place are coming up either highways and bridges or high-rises,” said writer Yasmine el-Rashidi.

Carol Hills interviewed [[link removed]] Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a public policy professor at George Mason University in Virginia, about migrant smuggling, in light of the over 50 deaths of migrants in a truck in San Antonio, Texas, last week. (Joshua Coe produced the interview). While the smuggling networks can be targeted, Correa-Cabrera emphasized that “the limitations with regards to legal migration, the lack of legal pathways when there is availability of jobs, that is what causes the growth and the existence of migrant smuggling networks that facilitate human mobility or the access of the people who are in need of the jobs in the United States.”

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

Don’t ask me, I only follow the stalk market [[link removed]].

Imagine, if you will, a constitution as a living document, written by living people [[link removed]].

You’ve been struck by / struck by / a crushing realization [[link removed]].

Sure, space is cool, but so is being in a place where bones work [[link removed]].

Insufficient slurp juche [[link removed]].

Once again [[link removed]] the United [[link removed]] Kingdom [[link removed]] is happening [[link removed]].

I log on [[link removed]] I log off I log on again [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

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

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.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]