Walzing into a Saner Foreign Policy?

Plus: Iran’s Napoleon strategy, Big Tech goes to war in Gaza, one weird trick to beat climate change, nuclear battle of the sexes, and AI bears and bulls.

This week brought new grounds for hope that a President Kamala Harris would pursue a foreign policy that appeals to “restrainers”—the left-right coalition that wants US foreign policy to rely more on diplomatic and economic engagement and less on military force. 

Two weeks ago, NZN highlighted one cause for such hope—some not-very-blobbish views held by Philip Gordon, Harris’s current national security adviser. This week, Harris selected a running mate with a long history of promoting restraint.

Tim Walz has “real antiwar credentials,” writes Daniel Larison in Responsible Statecraft. Before becoming Minnesota’s governor, Walz spent more than a decade in the House of Representatives, where he tended to favor diplomacy over militarism in the Middle East—and vocally opposed new military action in the region even when that meant breaking ranks with President and fellow Democrat Barack Obama.

Walz’s penchant for engagement with would-be adversaries also stretches farther east. He’s long been an advocate of constructive relations with China, Washington’s current bête noire. In a 2016 interview, after criticizing Chinese military assertiveness in the South China Sea, he added: “I don't fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree… When we’re on the same sheet of music—two of the world’s great superpowers—there’s many collaborative things we can do together.” And, while serving as governor, he slammed Donald Trump’s trade war with China for “hindering our economy’s growth and weakening our country’s prosperity.”

This made political sense for Walz. China responded to Trump’s tariffs with steep tariffs on pork, and Minnesota is a leading pork producer. But there is reason to think Walz’s interest in trans-Pacific concord isn’t just a matter of political calculation. As the Washington Post recounted this week, the folksy midwesterner has a surprisingly extensive history of personal engagement with China.

In 1989, after graduating from college, Walz moved to Guangdong province, where he taught high school for a year. A few years later, he returned to China with his wife for their honeymoon. The couple went on to found a company that coordinated summer trips to China for American high school students.

This week hawkish conservatives, citing Walz’s personal history and his moderate views on China, cast him as dangerously “pro-China,” if not a Manchurian candidate. Fox News host Jesse Watters devoted a segment of his show to the dark implications of Walz’s “deep Chinese ties.” Former Trump official Ric Grenell said Walz is “the pick of Communist China.” 

Chinese analysts were less confident in their government’s ability to control Walz. Shen Dingli, a political scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, noted Walz’s past criticisms of Beijing’s policy toward Hong Kong and said that his deep knowledge of China might “make him more difficult for the Chinese government to deal with.” As a congressman, Walz supported bills drawing attention to Beijing’s human rights abuses, and as governor he called China out for backing Russia’s war on Ukraine. Still, Tang Xiaoyang of Tsinghua University told the Post that Walz could help a future Harris administration “make more pragmatic China-related policies instead of relying on ideology, stereotypical views and pure ignorance.”

There is one big asterisk here. Most of Walz’s pro-engagement comments about Beijing came before 2019, when he left Congress. In the intervening years, many once-dovish politicians have started talking tougher on China, whether because of a change of heart or because they read the political winds. It remains possible that Walz will follow suit.

However, he does seem to possess something that could help him resist the prevailing winds: a penchant for cognitive empathy, a skill often extolled here at NZN. As we sometimes note in the course of this extolling, cognitive empathy isn’t about feeling your adversary’s pain or otherwise identifying with the feelings of other actors. (That’s emotional empathy.) It’s about working to understand the perspective of other actors and trying to grasp the interests and motivations that shape their behavior. This understanding can help policymakers avoid unnecessary antagonism and, when possible, reach win-win outcomes to non-zero-sum games.

Walz has evinced such an understanding in various contexts and, perhaps as important, has an earthy and accessible way of expressing it.

Iran offers a good example. Walz was an early supporter of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump withdrew from in 2018. Before Trump dumped it, the accord had been keeping Iran’s nuclear energy program in check, in part by subjecting Tehran to an intrusive monitoring regime. In August 2015, Walz explained why the agreement was a good deal for America, and he did so in a way that the average American could understand, complete with a reference to the Dallas Cowboys: 

I'm really struggling with the folks on the other side. Of course you don't trust Iran, that's why you need inspectors on the ground. I don't know of a better deal. The ideal situation is Iran says ‘we're totally sorry, you guys are right, here's all our stuff, we'll never say anything bad about you again and we love the Cowboys.’ I think that's what people think. They're not going to do that.

Of course, vice presidents don’t always have much influence on foreign policy. But sometimes they do (with Dick Cheney, for better or worse, being an example). In any event, in a fractured world that seems to be descending into Cold War II, it couldn’t hurt to have a vice president who views diplomacy positively and realistically—and who knows a few words of Mandarin.

Western tech companies are helping Israel store large amounts of surveillance data, some of which has been used to identify targets for airstrikes that killed Palestinian civilians, according to an investigation by Yuval Abraham of the Israeli magazine +972.

Since the October 7 attacks, the Israeli military has collected huge amounts of data about Palestinians in Gaza, Abraham writes. Given the limited size of Israeli military servers, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has started storing less sensitive information in data centers owned by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

These cloud services have played a significant role in IDF operations, Abraham reports. An unnamed intelligence source told him, “During intelligence gathering, sometimes, you find someone who interests you, and say: ‘What a bummer, he’s not included [as a surveillance target], I don’t have the information about him.’ But the cloud gives you information about him, because the cloud has [information on] everyone.” Abraham obtained a recording of a presentation in which an Israeli colonel notes the “crazy wealth of services, big data, and AI” that the IDF gets from the commercial cloud services.

This Israel-Silicon Valley collaboration is an outgrowth of Project Nimbus, a 2021 agreement under which the Israeli government gave Google and Amazon the funds to build data centers in Israel. This allows Israeli agencies to “store information in the cloud during the war without fear from overseas courts—which, presumably, might demand the information in the event of a lawsuit against Israel,” Abraham writes.

According to Wikipedia, the contractual terms of Project Nimbus, “forbid Amazon and Google from halting services due to boycott pressure. The tech companies are also forbidden from denying service to any particular government entities. A Google spokesperson said that all Google Cloud customers must abide by its terms of service which prohibit customers from using its services to violate people's legal rights or engage in violence.”

Major tech stocks have fallen in recent weeks, raising fears that the past year’s wave of AI excitement has created a bubble.

It’s easy to understand why people are feeling antsy. In 2023, global corporations invested $189 billion in AI companies, and private investors in the US added $67 billion, according to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. But revenue streams from AI are, by comparison, meager. And, while many people have tried such large language models as ChatGPT, relatively few consumers have made AI a part of their daily life.

Though AI revenue is growing, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT (and a past Nonzero podcast guest), says that “truly transformative changes won’t happen quickly, and few—if any—will likely occur within the next 10 years.” Those comments appeared in late June in a much-discussed Goldman Sachs report that may have encouraged the subsequent stock downturn.

On the other hand… 

Jeremy Bowman of Motley Fool writes that financial bubbles burst “because conditions change in the underlying businesses,” and “right now, there isn't much evidence that demand for AI is slowing or that there's a fundamental problem with the new technology.”

Our crystal ball isn’t working at the moment (and, come to think of it, never was), so we figured we’d tap into the NZN braintrust. Tell us: Is the recent tech-stock drop 1) a bump in the road for AI or 2) a sign of a bubble that will sooner or later burst, revealing much of the current chatter about AI to be hype?

Why hasn’t Iran attacked Israel this week? A retaliatory strike was widely anticipated following Israel’s assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31. But an Iranian counterattack—and the regional war that many feared it would kick off—haven’t yet materialized.

The same can be said of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah’s promised retaliation for Israel’s assassination in Beirut of a Hezbollah senior commander, also on July 31.

So what gives?

This week, Middle East expert Joshua Landis came on the Nonzero podcast and offered a possible answer. While Landis didn’t predict that Iran and Hezbollah would forgo a counterstrike, he deemed that a distinct possibility and laid out the logic of non-retaliation.

In Landis’s view, the Gaza war is very bad for Israel—so bad that Israel’s enemies may want to avoid changing the narrative. (The following excerpt from the podcast conversation is lightly edited for clarity.)

Josh: Let me give you the counter argument for why Iran and Hezbollah might just give this a pass in terms of escalation.