‘Bomb Iran’ Goes Bipartisan
Plus: Meta’s AI coat drive, Trump’s North Korea opportunity, Oregon’s democratic experiment, AI-powered think tanks, autocrat-powered think tanks, and more!
Note: If you sense something different about the tone or emphasis of this issue of the Earthling, you’re probably not imagining it. This week begins a six-week stint as Earthling guest editor for Connor Echols, aka managing editor of the NonZero Newsletter and Podcast. My own presence will still be visible in various corners of NonZero—like, for example, this part of this week’s NonZero World show, where I explain why I’m taking a six-week hiatus from the Earthling, and why I think this will lead to a bigger, better NonZero in the long run. I also talk about what corners of NonZero I’ll be showing up in over the next six weeks, and how something I’ll be working on during that period will eventually manifest itself in the newsletter. Meanwhile, congrats to Connor on liberation, however brief, from the tyranny of Bob.
—Bob
—President-elect Trump should leverage his personal relationship with Kim Jong-un to peel North Korea away from China and Russia, argue Russia experts Dmitri Alperovitch and Sergey Radchenko in the New York Times. If Trump does decide to make nice with Kim, writes Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute in Foreign Policy, this diplomatic initiative could benefit from the current flux in South Korean politics: Hawkish President Yoon Suk-yeol has been impeached, and if he steps down he may be replaced by a liberal who is more open to rapprochement with North Korea.
—On Tuesday, the Canadian mining company Lithium Americas trumpeted a dramatic increase in the estimated size of a lithium reserve in Nevada and Oregon—news that augurs well for America’s transition to lithium-battery-powered electric vehicles. Not to be outdone, China's Ministry of Natural Resources announced on Wednesday that Beijing has found new lithium deposits that more than double the country’s proven reserves.
—Israel may sharply limit humanitarian aid to Gaza after Trump takes office, reports the Jerusalem Post. Meanwhile, State Department officials warned Trump’s transition team that an impending Israeli ban on UNRWA—the leading UN aid organization in Gaza—could lead to “catastrophe.” (More Trump-related foreign policy news below.)
—Writing in the New Yorker, Nick Romeo dives deep into a democratic experiment in Deschutes County, Oregon, where 30 citizens spent a week together pondering the area’s youth homelessness problem and drafting policy recommendations. Citing successes in France, Ireland, and Australia, Romeo writes of hopes that this “citizens’ assembly” approach will work in the US and so bolster the idea that “fundamental problems of politics—polarization, apathy, manipulation by special interests—can be transformed through radically direct democracy.”
—Drop Site reports that the Beltway Grid Policy Centre—a new foreign policy think tank whose work has been published or cited in Yahoo News, MorningStar, and Middle East Eye—appears to be a bot-powered operation run by supporters of the Pakistani government. Drop Site found no evidence that the employees listed on the website actually exist, but a reliance on imaginary staffers hasn’t stopped the self-described “research institute” from putting out a panoply of pro-Pakistan articles. (For more on foreign influence and the think tank scene, see below.)
—Artificial intelligence could transform the “attention economy” into an “intention economy” that will feature “hyperpersonalized manipulation,” write AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge in a paper published in the Harvard Data Science Review. As people's interactions with AI give tech companies ever more intimate “data that signals intent,” ad companies will harness the revealed intentions and, via the persuasive power of AIs, reshape them, guiding users toward particular products and services.
—NonZero is hiring a full-time staff writer and a part-time social media specialist, and we’re also accepting applications from anyone with creative ideas about an additional part-time position that could help advance our mission. See Tuesday’s newsletter for more about the open roles and how to apply.
In a secret meeting last month, according to Axios, President Joe Biden reviewed options for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities if Tehran should move toward developing a nuclear weapon. Senior White House officials believe that Biden has a unique opportunity to strike, since Iran and its proxies have been hobbled by their conflict with Israel.
Joining the bombs-away contingent is one of Biden's former envoys to Iran, Richard Nephew, who warns in Foreign Affairs that the next administration “may have little choice but to attack Iran—and soon” unless Trump succeeds in a “final, good-faith attempt” to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program.
These developments amount to a remarkable shift among Democrats, who once pilloried Republicans for advocating a military showdown with Iran. Less than a decade after President Obama signed a landmark accord to restrict Tehran’s nuclear program (and less than seven years after Trump ripped up that deal), the left side of the aisle appears ready to abandon its preference for talks and embrace the use of force. This change coincides with the return to power of President Trump, who is already considering an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In the long, long list of problems with the idea of attacking Iran, a few deserve special mention. One is that such an attack would violate international law—not to mention US law, since Congress has yet to authorize hostilities with Tehran (and is unlikely to do so in the next couple of weeks). Another is that, as a practical matter, American threats to destroy Iran’s nuclear program risk backfiring in spectacular fashion. From Iran’s perspective, the case for going nuclear is only getting stronger, writes reporter Murtaza Hussain. “There are costs to nuclear proliferation, but given the existential threat now facing Iran, the option of such a deterrent becomes increasingly attractive,” Hussain argues. “The track record of countries on poor terms with larger rivals who willingly sacrificed such a deterrent is not good.” Biden might also consider the risk that such a move could plunge the US into another war in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Matthew Petti of Reason points out a notable irony in the lame-duck president’s eleventh-hour war-planning. When reports surfaced in the final year of Trump’s administration that he was weighing military options for striking Iran, Democrats hammered the president for sidelining Congress and risking a messy war that his successor would have to clean up. One prominent politician delivered scathing remarks on the subject in January 2020:
“These are matters of deadly import, so let me be unmistakably clear: Donald Trump does not have the authority to go to war with Iran without Congressional authorization. Working with Congress is not an optional part of the job… And no president should ever take the United States to war without securing the informed consent of the American people… A president who says he wants to end endless war in the Middle East is bringing us dangerously close to starting a new one.”
Wise words. The politician who voiced them, as you might have guessed, was Joe Biden.
AI bots may one day dominate the internet, but that day might come later rather than sooner, judging by recent events. Amid public backlash, Meta deleted the last of 28 AI-powered Facebook and Instagram profiles that it had created over a year ago as an experiment in driving user engagement.
The accounts never got much engagement, or even attention, until last week, when a Financial Times report put the spotlight on Meta’s vision for a social media landscape enhanced by AI-generated users. Human users of Facebook and Instagram went searching for Meta’s AI-powered accounts and were creeped out by what they found. One of those AIs—a self-described “Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”—cheerily recounted her participation in a charitable coat drive and even shared an AI-generated image of the event.
The now-deleted profiles had been labeled “AI managed by Meta,” but the content they posted could easily have been mistaken for something real. A company spokesperson told 404 Media that Meta had deleted the accounts in order to fix a “bug” that had prevented users from blocking them, but it’s more likely that the move was driven by the recent outburst of negative reactions. The spokesperson also said that the accounts had been “managed by humans” and were “part of an early experiment we did with AI characters.” Meta was apparently hoping that featuring AI characters on its platforms would help to attract and retain actual human users. Those hopes appear to be dashed—for now.
Military contractors and foreign governments have given at least $145 million to American foreign policy think tanks since 2019, according to a new report from the Quincy Institute.
The white paper, co-authored by researchers Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout, examines the funding sources of the 50 biggest foreign policy think tanks in the United States, with a focus on donors that may present a conflict of interest, including governments and weapons makers. Here are some things they found: