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What We're Watching
Turkey’s military buildup — As we wrote on Tuesday, Turkey’s President Erdogan has accused the US of working with Syrian Kurds to build a “terror army” near the Syrian-Turkish border. Erdogan fears that Syrian Kurds provide inspiration and tangible support for Kurdish separatists inside Turkey. Turkish troops and tanks are now massing along the border as Erdogan warns that he’ll order an attack on two Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. What could go wrong?
A New Plan for Nukes — A new US nuclear strategy would allow the US to respond with nuclear weapons against “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” including those in cyberspace. It’s important that US strategy evolve to meet new kinds of threats, but it’s not always easy to determine a cyber-attack’s origin, and the introduction of nuclear weapons into such a murky environment raises lots of troubling risks.
Shinzo Abe’s Day Off — This week, Shinzo Abe, on the final leg of a tour of Eastern Europe, became the first Japanese prime minister to officially visit Bucharest, capital of Romania. But on Monday, Romania’s Prime Minister Mihai Tudose resigned. With no host to greet him on Tuesday, Abe and his wife spent part of the day at the Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum, which documents life in the Romanian countryside. No word yet on whether they hit the gift shop on the way out.
What We're Ignoring
Carles Puigdemont — The secessionist would-be Catalan president, who remains in self-imposed exile in Brussels, tweeted a video this week that mixed footage of the heavy-handed Spanish police response to Catalonia’s independence referendum with footage of a 1940 meeting between Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco. The video then cuts to footage of current Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. Signal has noted the excessive use of force by Spanish police before and during the referendum, but Puigdemont is now going out of his way to relieve us of any responsibility to take him seriously.
Venezuela Talks — Representatives of Venezuela’s government sat down with opposition leaders in the Dominican Republic yesterday. Yes, “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war,” as Winston Churchill once said, but we share the skepticism of the Mexican and Chilean mediators that much will come of talks between two sides that share virtually no common ground.
South Korean hockey fans –North and South Korea have agreed to ask the International Olympic Committee to approve a last-minute plan to allow them to form a unified women’s ice hockey team. But the South Korean team’s coach and conservative newspapers gripe that the plan will cost the South Korean team a shot at a medal. Thousands of South Koreans have signed online petitions to kill the idea. C’mon, folks. It won’t bring peace, but a North-South women’s hockey team would be much more fun and interesting to watch.