Foreign Policy Summer 2019

Greg Autry is the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference. He served on the transition team and as White House liaison to NASA under the Trump administration. Jeongmin Kim is pursuing a master’s degree in political science at Seoul National University. Her research focuses on North Korean politics and comparative studies of contemporary authoritarian regimes. Kim worked previously at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and at Reuters’s Seoul bureau. David Runciman is a politics professor at Cambridge University and a staff fellow of Trinity Hall. His books include Political Hypocrisy, The Confidence Trap, and How Democracy Ends. His next book, Where Power Stops, will be…

IN 2017, YOUNG PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD FIRED BACK at an Australian millionaire who chided them for “spending $40 a day on smashed avocado and coffees” and still expecting to be able to buy a home. But in South Korea, a generation of frustrated young people is reclaiming the idea of frivolous expenses—from cab rides to expensive sushi—as a psychological survival tool dubbed shibal biyong. Loosely translated to “fuck-it expense,” the term is a compound noun combining shibal (a swearword for frustration) and biyong (expense). It first appeared in late 2016, with the earliest tweet about it referring to “an expense that I would not have spent if I weren’t under stress,” such as “an impulsive food delivery or a cab ride.” The post caught on, and the term was named…

ECONOMISTS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS GENERALLY THINK of poverty as a chronic, binary phenomenon: People are either poor or they are not. But reality is not so simple. Worldwide, 300 million people live nominally above the poverty line but regularly go hungry for some portion of the year. This seasonal deprivation is related to the agricultural crop cycle. The period between planting and harvest is a so-called lean season during which prices of staples rise and job opportunities become scarce for landless agricultural workers. This period is predictable in timing and geography. Colloquially known as the “hunger season” in many parts of Africa, it is called njala in Malawi, musim paceklik in Indonesia, and monga in Bangladesh. And its impact is extremely widespread, given that 80 percent of the world’s poor still…

MANY WESTERN PARLIAMENTS ARE DOMINATED by people with law degrees, but China’s leaders are mostly trained as engineers and scientists—or so goes conventional wisdom. Advocates for this supposed Chinese approach, such as the entrepreneur Elon Musk, argue that it produces leaders who adopt a pragmatic and technocratic framework to solving problems. And those scientist-politicians, the theory goes, are more likely to govern efficiently, in part because they are unburdened by ideology. But advocates for China’s supposed technocracy are not only wrong about the background of Beijing’s current leadership. They are also fundamentally mistaken about how their training shapes policymaking. China’s leaders today—including President Xi Jinping himself—have been molded less by their education and more by the need to consolidate control and prevail in the brutal internal power struggles of the Chinese…

CRITICS OF ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu have long compared him to illiberal nationalists, such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and strongmen who have consolidated control to stay in power, such as Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But to understand Netanyahu’s ability to survive against daunting political odds—he faces potential indictment for alleged corruption and recently failed to form a government—there is a better comparison: Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia. ARGUMENT Netanyahu and Vucic each preside over unresolved violent conflicts in which their more powerful countries are widely viewed as the aggressors. Both began as propagandists who learned to portray their countries as victims to the world. And both later leveraged their narrative skills to drive their individual political ascents—by portraying themselves, simultaneously, as victims and saviors. Like Israel, Serbia…

WHO WILL SAVE THE PLANET? MEET FIVE UNLIKELY SAVIORS OF THE EARTH’S CLIMATE CRISIS. CENTRAL BANKS: PAGE 16 SPACE RESEARCH: PAGE 24 THE BOTANIST: PAGE 27 THE YOUNG: PAGE 30 SUBTLE SHIFTS: PAGE 34 IN OCTOBER 2012, THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM got its first taste of the effects of climate change when Hurricane Sandy roared through lower Manhattan, shutting down Wall Street. Amid the blackout, the power remained on in the tower containing the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, offering to the world a striking if accidental symbol of a future age of climate inequality. As the investment bank stood firm, the U.S.government’s outpost on Wall Street, the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, made plans to pull up stakes. In response to the hurricane, the Fed created new backup capacity for market…