Are We Inching toward World War III?

Plus: Agentic AI breakthrough, Arkansas lithium rush, Cheney-Harris lovefest, Pentagon deepfakes, the AI suicide case, Sinwar gets the last word, and more!

Is Russia about to take “the first step to a world war”? That’s how Ukrainian President Zelensky has characterized any involvement of North Korean troops on Russia’s side in the Ukraine war. And this week brought more evidence that such involvement is coming. 

White House spokesman John Kirby said around 3,000 North Korean soldiers have traveled to Russia this month for training and possible combat. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called the development “very, very serious.”

Up until now, the only foreign soldiers involved in the war have been individual volunteers and military advisers and (on Ukraine’s side) small numbers of special forces whose exact locations and military roles remain obscure. The overt deployment of a large contingent of foreign troops would represent a new kind of foreign involvement and a significant expansion of the war.

A big question—if you’re wondering whether “world war” is too strong a term for what could unfold—is whether this expansion could lead to reciprocal expansion on the Ukrainian side. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin ally, dismissed claims of imminent North Korean involvement but also said that any such foreign involvement on Russia’s side “would be a step towards the escalation of the conflict” because Ukraine’s allies would invoke it as a reason to deploy NATO troops in Ukraine.

Indeed, longstanding advocates of increased western support for Ukraine are already invoking the North Korea prospect as cause to revisit the idea, floated by French President Emmanuel Macron in February, that Europe should send troops to Ukraine. “[W]e have to get back to ‘boots on the ground’ and other ideas proposed by Macron,” Lithuania’s Foreign Minister told Politico.

For now, this proposal would face formidable opposition within NATO. Last week, during President Biden’s visit to Berlin, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters, “We are making sure that NATO does not become a party to the war, so that this war does not turn into a much greater catastrophe.” Still, the prospect of North Korean troops joining the battle ratchets up the pressure on people like Scholz and Biden. This week House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner, a longstanding Ukraine hawk, said the US should “seriously consider taking direct military action against the North Korean troops” if they enter Ukraine. Of course, if such military action also took out Russian troops, the US would find itself in direct conflict with two nuclear powers.

Meanwhile, South Korea is worried about what weaponry or other assistance Russia might give North Korea in exchange for military manpower—all the more so in light of the mutual defense pact signed by Putin and Kim Jong Un this summer. Seoul has responded to Pyongyang’s dispatching troops to Russia by offering intelligence and other aid to Ukraine via NATO. John Everard, former British ambassador to North Korea, told the New Statesman, “If North Korean troops fight for Russia, then tensions in two areas—the Korean Peninsula and Ukraine—will have welded together. This would greatly complicate the global situation and, because of the international alliance system, would increase the risk of other states being dragged into conflict.”

As for how long that list of states might get: Financial Times foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman, in a piece that wasn’t about the North Korea development or even the Ukraine War in particular, recently wrote about the “disquieting possibility… that various regional conflicts could become increasingly entangled. They already touch each other at various points. Russia and China have conducted joint air patrols near Alaska and the Sea of Japan. Iran has supplied weapons to Russia. If Israel attacks Iran, Russia might return the favor or seek to profit in other ways. With the western alliance distracted by conflicts elsewhere, China might see a chance to up the pressure in Asia.”  

The good news, for those who hope NATO will avoid direct involvement in the Ukraine war, is that Ukraine suspects the initial deployment of North Korean troops will be not in Ukraine but in the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukraine staged an incursion and continues to occupy land. It would make sense for Putin to use them there, thus ensuring the frustration of Zelensky’s hope that the Kursk incursion would take a bigger toll on Russian troops than on Ukrainian troops. And so long as the North Koreans stay on the Russian side of the border, it will be harder to argue that NATO should respond in kind.

On the other hand, depending on the performance of the troops, Putin may be tempted to deploy them more widely. North Korea is reportedly sending special forces from the country’s XI Corps, a relatively well-trained, 200,000-strong group of soldiers. “[I]f North Korea’s mass army has quality units, these are it,” writes Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy.

Three weeks ago, on the NonZero podcast, Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan, author of the book AI Snake Oil, said reports of the “agentic AI” revolution are overblown. Though asking a bot to go online and book you a flight may sound like a simple request, getting the bot to comply remains a daunting challenge. “Even to get the earliest flight out of Newark or whatever is very, very hard,” said Narayanan. “Moving the mouse to the right part of the screen—that's an incredibly difficult problem for AI.”

Well that barrier didn’t last long! This week Anthropic—maker of the highly regarded Claude chatbot—said it has developed a feature that enables a bot to “use computers the way people do—by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text.” For now the feature is available only to developers, but Anthropic said that once it is released into the wild, you’ll be able to, for example, say to your chatbot, “use data from my computer and online to fill out this form.”

The tool—which operates by taking successive screenshots and counting pixel coordinates—is for now, Anthropic acknowledges, “cumbersome and error-prone.” Still, said Alex Albert, head of developer relations at Anthropic, this “is a fundamentally new capability for AI models” and “the first step toward a completely new form of human-computer interaction.”

An example of what the first step feels like: During a debugging session, Albert recounted, an Anthropic engineer decided “to ask Claude to navigate to DoorDash and order enough food to feed a group of people.” The result was three “Ultimate Pepperoni” pizzas from Papa John’s. Depending on your taste, that may be a bit too much AI autonomy.

This week, the NonZero Newsletter published an essay by NZN staff writer Andrew Day on the fentanyl crisis and US-China relations. Andrew writes that everything you’ve heard about Beijing’s role in the crisis is wrong—at least, if you’ve been relying on the narrative emanating from China hawks like Republican Senator Tom Cotton. For those who haven’t yet read the piece, here’s a taster: 

From the way many people talk about the problem, you’d think the Chinese government was manufacturing mountains of fentanyl and shipping it to America by the container load. In reality, Beijing’s contributions to the crisis have been passive and indirect. Meanwhile, those in Washington who are most vocal about the crisis are among the biggest obstacles to addressing it. Many of them have leveled wild accusations about Chinese “drug warfare” and advocated confrontational policies that have tended to make Beijing less cooperative on fentanyl and other issues…

Again, here’s the article. If you prefer to listen to essays rather than read them, check out the NZN-member-only audio version. And if you’re not an NZN member but would like to become one, well, that can be arranged.

In recent months, NZN has pointed to signs that a future President Kamala Harris would be a dove on foreign policy—or, at least, dovish by the standards of the foreign policy establishment. Can that assessment survive the Harris campaign’s controversial embrace of former congresswoman Liz Cheney?

Cheney has become a high-profile surrogate for Harris, campaigning in swing states. Like her father—former Vice President Dick Cheney—she has urged fellow Republicans to vote for Harris to defeat Donald Trump. Cheney the elder, you may remember, championed the Iraq war, the torture of detainees, and other hawkish policies. Cheney the younger, “like her father, is a committed hawk and a believer in the aggressive use of American power (and that doesn’t mean soft power) around the world,” notes the New Yorker.

Advocates of foreign policy restraint worry that Cheney’s campaign trail prominence could portend a Cheney-esque foreign policy in a Harris administration. Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, tried to put those worries to rest this week during an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “We’re not gonna take [the Cheneys’] foreign policy decisions and discussions and implement those,” Walz promised.

The vice presidential candidate added that the Cheneys’ support for a Democratic ticket signals a united front to protect democracy and gives moderate Republicans “permission” to vote blue. But it remains an open question whether Harris’s embrace of the Cheneys is a wise political move, given its potential to alienate progressive Democrats and feed Trump’s narrative that he’s taking on a corrupt uniparty establishment.

All of which means, NZN readers, that it’s time for another poll: 

Last week’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was all but livestreamed. As the news of Sinwar’s death broke, the Israeli military released drone footage depicting his final moments. It’s a striking clip: The most wanted man between the river and the sea is shown covered in dust, with a keffiyeh wrapped around his face and a severe wound to his right arm. He appears lifeless before grabbing a stick and throwing it toward the drone that’s capturing the footage.

The video turned out to be a kind of Rorschach test. Israeli commentators saw a “a rat out of his hole” who had met a “coward’s end.” Those more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause had a different reaction.