Science & Technology

NPR's Ari Shapiro speak with political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who studies civil resistance movements, about the protests China and Iran.

Joseph Nye writes that even at this early stage, there are at least eight lessons— some old, some new— that the world is learning (or relearning) from the war in Ukraine.

Will China succeed in what some call its grand strategy of displacing American power? Whichever scenario emerges also depends on the strategy the US chooses in response, rites Joseph Nye.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

In the wake of a series of damaging cyber intrusions on private businesses controlling critical pieces of U.S. infrastructure, Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Juliette Kayyem says that countering the growing threat will require erasing the "legal fiction" that cyberattacks are different than physical attacks on American civilians.

The fuel crisis the Colonial Pipeline shutdown has caused underscores the serious, real-world consequences that bargain has for Americans. As the Biden administration begins to implement its national cybersecurity strategy, it must take steps to address Russia’s strategic negligence toward cybercrime.

Stephen Walt writes that political institutions are not permanent phenomena: they are artificial human creations and only as enduring, adaptive, and effective as people make them. He hopes for a serious and sustained process of democratic change, one that respects the nobler features of the U.S. constitutional order yet addresses all the ways in which The United States has failed to live up to its own professed ideals. The alternative, he fears, will be something much more dangerous. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic devastates the world, nuclear power plants must remain safe and secure to provide electricity for food supply chains, emergency response teams, hospitals, and telecommunications in countries home to more than half of all people. Meanwhile, the Islamic State terror group has already announced its intent to exploit the pandemic, and other violent extremist organizations are also taking pains to use the crisis for their own purposes.

Henry Kissinger warns that many existing domestic and international institutions that have helped govern the past decades will not survive the Covid-19 crisis. He is surely correct.

Unipolarity is over, and with it the illusion that other nations would simply take their assigned place in a U.S.-led international order. For the United States, that will require accepting the reality that there are spheres of influence in the world today—and that not all of them are American spheres.