Editor’s note for Friday, October 9, 2020

My thoughts today:

Hillary Clinton has published an opinion piece in Foreign Affairs titled “A national security reckoning — How Washington should think about power.” She directly addresses U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s tough-guy-I-smash-commies rhetoric:

Myopia about national security also manifests in the simplistic frames applied to complex challenges, such as insisting on seeing competition with China through the lens of the Cold War. In a speech in July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered this pearl of wisdom: “I grew up and served my time in the army during the Cold War. And if there is one thing I learned, Communists almost always lie.” That’s a remarkably unhelpful way of approaching the challenge.

Huffing and puffing about Communists may rile up the Fox News audience, but it obscures the fact that China — along with Russia — poses an altogether different threat from the one the Soviet Union did. Today’s competition is not a traditional global military contest of force and firepower. Dusting off the Cold War playbook will do little to prepare the United States for adversaries that use new tools to fight in the gray zone between war and peace, exploit its open Internet and economy to undermine American democracy, and expose the vulnerability of many of its legacy weapons systems. Nor will such an anachronistic approach build the global cooperation needed to take on shared challenges such as climate change and pandemics.

You might not agree with her, but do read the whole thing.

Our word of the day is COVAX, formally known as the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility, which is written in Chinese as 新冠肺炎疫苗实施计划 xīnguān fèiyán yìmiáo shíshī jìhuà.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief