China’s regional expansion in the Asia-Pacific will continue driving India into a security partnership with the United States and Japan as part of its Act East policy.
NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced yesterday that the alliance will send three thousand more troops to Afghanistan in support of Donald Trump’s new strategy to confront the Taliban. NATO’s decision emphasizes the importance of making sure that the United States and its allies have good reason to keep going after such a long, costly and ineffective occupation. As Trump mulled over what he admitted was the difficult decision to remain in Afghanistan, two new arguments for staying the course emerged. Both arguments, unfortunately, are dangerously flawed.
“‘Below five per cent’ is a huge psychological and physical setback for non-Muslims in an increasingly Islamist country. Once our population falls below 5 per cent, we are doomed. We will have to convert or leave the country.” Last week’s attack on Hindus at Thakurpara in Rangpur in which about 30 houses belonging to Hindus were torched and many more were looted follows a pattern. Islamist mobs, egged on by radical Wahhabi clerics, started burning and looting houses and attacking Hindus and temples after an alleged Facebook post by a Hindu defaming Islam. Investigations have revealed that the rumours about the Facebook post were patently false and spread by hardline Islamist clerics. Last year, too, false rumours about a fake Facebook post triggered widespread attacks on Hindus at Brahmanbaria that left hundreds of families homeless and 15 temples destroyed.
President Donald Trump is returning home from an Asian trip during which the United States and China announced agreements worth over $250 billion. This allows Trump, who built much of his political identity on his supposed negotiating prowess and willingness to stand up to China, to return home triumphantly announcing his success at standing up to China.
During his presidency, George W. Bush famously asked Hu Jintao, then president of China, what kept him up at night. Hu replied that it was job creation: how would he be sure that he could provide employment for the twenty-five million people entering the workforce every year? Hu’s China was a different era. The “peaceful rise of China” has given way to the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” and, at the 19th Party Congress last month, Xi Jinping unequivocally stated that China will now be “moving closer to center stage.”
The U.S. intelligence community is upping its early-stage investments in machine-learning companies — but Beijing is pouring in far more. 
In October the Chinese Communist Party enshrined Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road Initiative” (OBOR) in its constitution. The move again demonstrates how the sweeping plan linking China and Europe via land and sea routes now is at the heart of China’s foreign policy and international development strategy. However, the project is not simply unidirectional. The Belt and Road Forum for Global Development held in Beijing in May gave China an opportunity to both present itself as part of a recently coined global community of countries along the trans-Eurasian route, and as a leader of that community. It offered China a chance to present a China-centered vision of globalization, clad in the rhetoric of mutual development.
Just two weeks ago, the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh took place to international acclaim. Now, investor interest has turned to intense uncertainty, as power shifts unfold in the Gulf. But despite the short-term risks, Alex Damianou argues that the long term impact should be positive.
Without any new ideas from a technocratic government constrained by President Vladimir Putin's apparent indifference, the Russian economy is once again relying on consumers, who are borrowing more to buy real estate and imported products. The growth is real, but it's also meager. And it will be hard to sustain without bigger changes. On Monday, Rosstat, Russia's official statistics agency, announced that the country's gross domestic product increased 1.8 percent year-over-year in the quarter than ended in September. That's lower than Bloomberg's consensus forecast of 1.9 percent and slower than the 2.5 percent increase in the previous three months. The oil price jumped 20 percent during the quarter, but the economic statistics won't pick up the related growth until the fourth quarter. So far this year, the Russian consumer deserves most of the credit for the growing economy. After suffering through three tough years -- during which time oil tanked and the ruble devalued sharply -- they are buying things again. Unfortunately, most of the things Russians are buying aren't made in Russia. 
Editor’s note: War Books is a weekly MWI series, in which we ask interesting guests—practitioners, experts, or experienced students of war—to list five books that have shaped the way they understand war, warfare, and strategy. This edition of War Books originally appeared in 2016. The one that started the Horatio Hornblower series, which I love, especially how it follows his changes across the different levels of command, from midshipman to admiral, and yet the same anxieties bedevil him.
No terrorist group has capitalized on networked technology more than ISIS, both for recruitment messaging and commanding their fighters on the ground. The internet is their response to asymmetric disadvantage. Where they lack in infrastructure and resources of a state, they use the web to plan attacks, solicit money and reach out to potential members.
On the afternoon of September 19, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) launched from an airstrip near the Syrian capital of Damascus flew into the demilitarized zone that separates the Syrian-controlled area of the Golan Heights from that which is controlled by Israel. The Israeli military scrambled jets and launched a patriot missile to intercept what it identified as a Hezbollah drone approaching Israeli airspace. The Patriot missile, its flight accompanied by two Israeli fighter jets, successfully intercepted the drone in the air (Haaretz, September 19). The debris fell inside the demilitarized zone, near the ruins of the Syrian city of Quneitra.
If your computer has become slow and is starting to lag, it’s probably about time you serviced it. You can take it to a computer repair shop, but this will obviously cost you money, and a lot of what they’ll do you could easily do at home yourself. In other words, instead of paying out for pricey malware removal or a computer tune-up, why not simply do it yourself?
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