Tabla de contenidos para September 2018 en Foreign Policy

I IT’S WIDELY UNDERSTOOD THAT WARFARE EVOLVES with the technology available to combatants. But it’s often forgotten that tactical leadership—the art of command in battle—likewise evolves. For centuries, fighting generals such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Hannibal, and Saladin exemplified tactical leadership, creating great reputations in the process. Today, however, lieutenants and corporals play the battlefield roles once held by these famous leaders. The U.S. military uses the term “strategic corporal” as shorthand to capture the growing battlefield responsibility held by leaders of junior rank. That responsibility has become both immense and increasingly routine. For years now, corporals and lieutenants as young as 20 years old fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have regularly made split-second, life-altering decisions with staggering amounts of firepower at their disposal and have been expected…

A AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ARMS RACE IS COMING. It is unlikely to play out in the way that the mainstream media suggest, however: as a faceoff between the United States and China. That’s because AI differs from the technologies, such as nuclear weapons and battleships, that have been the subject of arms races in the past. After all, AI is software—not hardware. Because AI is a general purpose technology—more like the combustion engine or electricity than a weapon—the competition to develop it will be broad, and the line between its civilian and military uses will be blurry. There will not be one exclusively military AI arms race. There will instead be many AI arms races, as countries (and, sometimes, violent nonstate actors) develop new algorithms or apply private sector algorithms…

PEOPLE WHO FORM THEIR IDEAS about the U.S. military based on Hollywood movies might get the impression that cutting-edge technology is standard in the fighting forces. In fact, the opposite is true. At nuclear sites around the country, technicians still use floppy disks. Only this summer is the U.S. Navy expected to upgrade from Windows XP, an operating system long since scrubbed from home computers. The new F-35 stealth fighter jet, touted as the most sophisticated in the world, was first conceived of in the 1990s. So when the Defense Department announced last year that it wanted to partner with Silicon Valley to build a massive cloud storage unit where it could securely warehouse and categorize the secret data it collects from intelligence agencies and the military, some experts scoffed.…

EVEN BEFORE U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP LANDED in Brussels in mid-July to trash-talk NATO allies, it was clear that the European Union was in crisis. In Germany, a weakened Angela Merkel was forced to either tighten migration policy or lose her coalition (she chose the former); in Italy, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the ascendant right-wing Lega party, railed against his country remaining in the eurozone; Hungary and Poland were continuing their creep toward authoritarian rule; and Britain was struggling to figure out Brexit. The opening in May 2017 of a new museum in Brussels devoted to promoting Europe might have served to bolster the flagging union. Yet all it has managed to do is generate more controversy. The House of European History, which was created by the European Parliament,…

What are your current priorities? In 2019, Ukraine will have parliamentary elections and our number-one priority is to keep up the pace of our efforts in order to secure accelerated economic growth, and we must keep moving forward with our reforms, a prerequisite to continue to receive international support. I would like Ukraine to be a reliable and strong partner for the United States and other democratic allies. We need to be a country that respects human rights and one with a fair and just courts system, and this is exactly the direction we are moving in. What have been some of the government’s accom-plishments during these years? Our agenda was to build up a new Ukrainian state, and I’m proud to say we have managed to renew stability and…

As a result of far-reaching reforms initiated by the National Bank of Ukraine which saw the removal of over half of the country’s banks from the market, Ukraine’s financial sector is in muchimproved shape. The 2016 nationalization of Privatbank, the country’s largest commercial bank, after a stress test revealed capital shortages, was lauded by IMF head Christine Lagarde as an important step in its efforts to safeguard financial stability. Now, with the cleanup almost complete, confidence in the system is returning. “The steps we’ve taken have contributed to increased profitability and public trust in the banking sys-tem,” said Yakiv Smolii, governor of the National Bank of Ukraine. “The banks that are currently operating have shown a profit of 8 billion hryvnias ($300 million) for the first quarter of 2018, and…

MHP has seen exponential growth in the last two decades, skyrocketing from a 10-person operation in 1998 into the leading poultry company in Ukraine The backbone of MHP has always been a sound business model. Having carefully studied poultry companies around the world, its founder and CEO, Yuriy Kosyuk, saw an opportunity to build a globally competitive protein company from the ground up. “We eliminated the problems our competitors have and built a company that was smart and efficient. We have a competitive edge because we control every-thing,” said Kosyuk. Vertical integration is the key to the success of the company, which in 2017 exported 220,983 tons of chicken meat to 63 countries and employed nearly 28,000 people. Through man-aging every step from growing the grains for feed, to incubating…

WARNINGS ABOUT ECOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse. Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level.…

MILITARIES AROUND THE GLOBE ARE RACING TO BUILD ever more autonomous drones, missiles, and cyberweapons. Greater autonomy allows for faster reactions on the battlefield, an advantage that is as powerful today as it was 2,500 years ago when Sun Tzu wrote, “Speed is the essence of war.” Today’s intelligent machines can react at superhuman speeds. Modern Chinese military academics have speculated about a coming “battlefield singularity,” in which the pace of combat eclipses human decision-making. The consequences of humans ceding effective control over what happens in war would be profound and the effects potentially catastrophic. While the competitive advantages to be gained from letting machines run the battlefield are clear, the risks would be grave: Accidents could cause conflicts to spiral out of control. Consider what has already happened with…

1. In 1984, a science fiction movie starring an up-and-coming Austrian-American actor took the box office by storm. A cybernetic organism is sent back in time to seek out and kill the mother of a great war hero to prevent his subsequent birth. The cyborg scans a phone book page and begins methodically killing all women named Sarah Connor in the Los Angeles area, starting at the top of the list. If The Terminator were set in today’s world, the movie would have ended after four and a half minutes. The correct Sarah Connor would have been identified with nothing but a last name and a zip code—information leaked last year in the massive Equifax data breach. The war against the machines would have been over before it started, and…

Kyrre Einarsen peered over the ship’s bridge into the gray waters of an Arctic fjord. Flanking the vessel were the jagged, treeless peaks that define the islands of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago deep in the Arctic Circle. Ahead of his ship was the vast and empty Greenland Sea. All that was missing was the ice. Einarsen, a lieutenant commander with the Norwegian Coast Guard, and his small crew were on a three-week patrol around the region, nearly 600 miles north of mainland Norway’s northernmost tip. It was May. Even five or six years ago, Einarsen said, the fjords around Svalbard were iced over at that time of year. “You couldn’t go into this fjord without icebreaking capacity,” he said. This May, there wasn’t a chunk of ice to be seen,…

WHEN I ARRIVED AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY in the early 2000s, students from different parts of Europe flocked to national clubs for a taste of home and an opportunity to speak their native tongues. Most of the events these clubs organized took the form of benign clichés: The Italian Society hosted pasta nights, and the French Society served up artsy movies with a side of wine and cheese. Only one nationality was conspicuously absent. Instead of founding their own club, students who, like me, had grown up in Germany flocked to the European Union Society. The European Union Society was not an exclusively German affair. It included a few students from countries too small to sustain their own social life at the university, as well as the odd Brit or Spaniard…

When Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was elected in 2014, the challenges that lay ahead were vast. Russia had just invaded Crimea and pro-Russian groups were attempting to overtake the region of Donbass. At the same time, Poroshenko’s mandate was to not only completely shift the country’s foreign policy toward the West but also to save the economy and transform the post-Soviet state into a modern liberal democracy. Four years on, and progress has been remarkable. Through a slew of reforms and strategic alliances with Western nations and international bodies, Ukraine has seen both a return to economic growth and has restored national security. “When I was elected, any American or NATO officer was prohibited even to enter our Ministry of Defense. Today, we have the most effective level of co-operation,…

FEW POLITICAL IDEALS END UP AS OBJECTS OF NOSTALGIA. The ones that thrive live on the streets and in daily life; the ones that die do so obscurely. But the Nordiska Museet, the great anthropology museum in Stockholm, houses an exhibition devoted to a single word—one that until recently breathed life into Sweden and now, in its absence, haunts its national politics. The word is folkhemmet, and the ideal it represents—and the vacuum left by its disappearance—helps explain the surge of reactionary populism now shaking the country’s political order, as well as the continent’s. Folkhemmet also happens to have no English equivalent. The literal translation—the people’s home—is clunky, but it does capture the central concept: home. The exhibition in Nordiska Museet makes that clear. It displays an entire reconstructed apartment…

HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS DEPENDED ON THE SEA. For as long as there have been fishermen, there have been conflicts over fish. And though it may seem anachronistic, the odds that a squabble over fishing rights could turn into a major armed conflict are rising. The return of great-power competition has actually increased the likelihood of a war over fish. The past 17 years of the fight against terrorism, and Washington’s renewed focus on developing high-end capabilities to prepare for great-power conflict, have led to a lack of preparation for a low-end, seemingly mundane but increasingly likely source of conflict in the world: food. As incomes rise around the world, so too does the demand for food—especially protein. The United Nations currently estimates that between mid-2017 and 2050, the number of…

IN MANY WAYS CHARKH SEEMS like a typical rural Afghan district. With little development or industry to speak of, its population of 48,000 ekes out a living mostly from farming. Poverty is common; those who can find better jobs elsewhere leave and send money back to support their families. But a closer look at Charkh reveals a divergence from what one may expect of an average Afghan district. Administrators there are widely seen as fair and honest, making them outliers in a country consistently ranked among the world’s most corrupt. Locals say there is remarkably little crime. Disputes among neighbors or families are rare, and when they arise, the district governor or judge quickly settles them. A health official regularly monitors clinics to make sure that doctors and nurses are…

After a precipitous drop in GDP during 2014-2015, Ukraine’s economy has steadily returned to health, posting growth of 2.5 percent last year. And besides improving the business climate and financial stability, the government’s unfaltering commitment to reforms has seen it qualify for four tranches of a $17.5 billion program from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help stabilize the country’s macroeconomic situation. “This government’s goal is to be the most business friendly in the history of independent Ukraine,” said Daniel Bilak, director of Ukraine Invest, the country’s investment promotion agency. In 2017, the country brought in $2.3 billion in foreign direct investment, up from a low of $410 million in 2014, and officials believe that figure is set to increase. A 2017 International Investor survey of 214 of the top…

Source: UkrLand Farming This As the world’s population increases, UkrLand Farming, Ukraine’s largest agricultural holding company, is set to gain economic and political clout by playing an increasingly important role in global food security Known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine is endowed with the fertile “black soil” that has helped to make the country one of the world’s most important producers and ex-porters of agricultural products. Scientifically known as chernozem, this soil is one of the most fertile in the world and makes up around 58 percent of Ukraine’s total arable land, which is equal in size to around 30 percent of Europe’s total arable land area. “Ukraine is like Brazil was 20 years ago, but it happens to be situated in the heart of Europe”OLEG BAKHMATYUK, CHAIRMAN AND…