ITK Daily | March 27

Happy Monday.

Here’s today’s ITK Daily.

To be ITK, know this:?

America’s foreign policy has lost all flexibility?Fareed Zakaria

+ In 1995, the journalist and scholar Josef Joffe wrote an essay that described two paths for American grand strategy after the Cold War. He called them “Britain” or “Bismarck.”?

+ The first was to emulate Britain in its traditional approach toward geopolitics, by building alliances against any rising powers that seem hegemonic but to otherwise stay uninvolved.?

+ Joffe argued that this “balance of power” strategy would be impossible for America as a preeminent power and linchpin of the international order.?

+ Instead, he advocated a strategy as the broker, drawing on Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who unified Germany and made it Europe’s leading great power in the late 19th century.

+ Bismarck famously depicted the ideal situation for Germany as “not that of the acquisition of territory, but of an overall political situation in which all the powers except France need us and are held apart from coalitions against us by their relations to each other.”

+ In making the opening to China while simultaneously pursuing detente with the Soviet Union, Kissinger ensured that Washington ended up with better relations with Beijing and Moscow than they had with each other.

+ Today, however, Washington has lost the flexibility and suppleness that would inform just this sort of strategy. Our foreign policy today usually consists of grand moral declarations that divide the world into black and white, friends and foes.?

+ Those statements quickly get locked in place with sanctions and legislation, making policies even more rigid. The political atmosphere becomes so charged that merely talking with a “foe” becomes risky.

+ There is now a whole slew of countries with which the United States has either no relations or only limited, hostile contact — Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Myanmar, North Korea.

+ America’s unipolar status has corrupted the country’s foreign policy elite. Our foreign policy is all too often an exercise in making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort made to understand the other side’s views or actually negotiate.

+ All this evokes the inertia of an aging empire. Today, our foreign policy is run by an insular elite that operates by mouthing rhetoric to please domestic constituencies — and seems unable to sense that the world out there is changing, and fast.

Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers: To keep up with China, the Defense Department is trying to lure private capital.?WSJ

+ The Pentagon is seeking to enlist Silicon Valley startups in its effort to fund and develop new weapons technology and more-nimble suppliers, as the US races to keep pace with China’s military advances.

+ The push to tap private capital comes in the midst of concern that US defense-industry consolidation has led to dependence on a few large companies that rely on government funding for research and is hampering innovation.

+ “China is organized like Silicon Valley,” and the Pentagon is organized more like a Detroit auto maker, he said. “That’s not a fair fight.”

+ The Biden administration recently requested $115 million to fund a new Pentagon unit called the Office of Strategic Capital, which is designed to attract more investment, particularly venture capital, into companies producing technology and products viewed as critical to the military.

+ Roughly $6 billion annually is now flowing from private capital into the U.S. defense and aerospace market, up from around $1 billion in 2017, according to PitchBook Data Inc., which tracks private funding.

An anxious Asia arms for a war it hopes to prevent: Doubts about both China and the United States are driving an arms race in the Indo-Pacific with echoes of World War II and new levels of risk.?NYT

+ Asia and the Pacific are steering into an anxious, well-armed moment with echoes of old conflicts and immediate risks. Rattled by China’s military buildup and territorial threats — along with Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and doubts about U.S. resolve — nations across the region are bolstering defense budgets, joint training, weapons manufacturing and combat-ready infrastructure.

+ The meeting in Moscow this past week between China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia pointed to the powerful forces lining up against the West. The appearance of Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, in Ukraine’s capital at the same time further emphasized that one deadly conflict can quickly become knotted up with power struggles thousands of miles away.

+ Xi has made his intentions clear. He aims to achieve a “national rejuvenation” that would include displacing the United States as the dominant rule-setter in the region, controlling access to the South China Sea, and bringing Taiwan — a self-governing island that China sees as lost territory — under Beijing’s control.

+ In response, many of China’s neighbors — and the United States — are turning to hard power, accelerating the most significant arms race in Asia since World War II.

+ On March 13, North Korea launched cruise missiles from a submarine for the first time. The same day, Australia unveiled a $200 billion plan to build nuclear-propelled submarines with the United States and Britain that would make it only the seventh nation to have them.

+ Japan, after decades of pacifism, is also gaining offensive capabilities unmatched since the 1940s with U.S. Tomahawk missiles. + India has conducted training with Japan and Vietnam.?

+ Malaysia is buying South Korean combat aircraft.?

+ American officials are trying to amass a giant weapons stockpile in Taiwan to make it a bristling “porcupine” that could head off a Chinese invasion, and the Philippines is planning for expanded runways and ports to host its largest American military presence in decades.

+ In 2000, military spending in Asia and the Pacific accounted for 17.5 percent of worldwide defense expenditures, according to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2021, it accounted for 27.7 percent (with North Korea excluded, making it an undercount) and since then, spending has shot up further.

+ “In Australia, in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and now the Philippines has given the U.S. more access. Why?” said Bilahari Kausikan, a former permanent secretary of Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Because China has been unnecessarily aggressive.”

+ Many countries also worry that working with the United States could make them targets of Chinese military or economic punishment, and in exchange they are requesting more trade and training from Washington — demands that Congress has failed to address.

The French defense industry is gradually getting ready for battle: The state has boosted orders for Caesar guns, shells, and missiles, mainly to build up stocks.?Le Monde

+ The sector is experiencing bottlenecks in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

+ "We have identified about 200 of them and have already eliminated more than 30," said Emmanuel Chiva, director of armaments. He is also working on an "industrial reserve," as recommended by Nicolas Chamussy, CEO of Nexter: employees and young retirees from the defense, automotive or mechanical industries could be involved on a voluntary basis to train upstream and even participate in production in a scenario where France was directly threatened.

The end of the peace dividend: Democracies hope that by preparing for war, they can once again avoid it.?FT - Editorial

+ As western governments are realising, the technological sophistication of weaponry makes modern warfare cripplingly expensive

+ Democracies will have to share technology, intelligence, burdens and procurement more broadly and deeply than in the Cold War.

+ AUKUS is an ambitious attempt to put such principles into practice, its three members committing to co-operate not just on submarines but on hypersonic missiles, AI, and quantum computing.

+ The EU is breaking new ground, agreeing last week to spend €1bn on joint orders of ammunition, and use €1bn to reimburse member states for supplying rounds to Ukraine from existing stocks.

+ In the Cold War stand-off between two superpowers, direct conflict was ultimately avoided. Today’s complex geopolitical picture will make repeating that feat all the harder.

Russia embraces China’s renminbi in face of western sanctions: Shift away from using ‘toxic currencies’ for trade and reserves accompanies an increase in yuan-denominated bank accounts.?FT

Why Chinese apps are the favorites of young Americans: It isn’t just the algorithms but lessons from a competitive culture.?WSJ

+ The concern around TikTok in Washington is drawing fresh attention to how Chinese apps have woven themselves into the fabric of young Americans’ lives—and what makes them so popular.

+ Four of the five hottest apps in the U.S. in March were forged in China. Algorithms are often cited as their secret sauce. An often overlooked facet is how cutthroat competition for users at home has given Chinese firms a leg up over Western rivals.

+ Much like during China’s rise to manufacturing dominance a few decades ago, Chinese tech companies have harnessed a labor pool of affordable talent to constantly fine-tune product features.

+ The nonstop drive to get better even has a term in China’s tech industry: “embroidery.” “Everybody works on improving their craft, stitch by stitch,” said Fan Lu, a venture-capital investor who invested in TikTok’s predecessor Musical.ly.

+ Chinese internet companies’ organizational efficiency is overlooked by their American competitors, say investors, engineers and analysts. The Chinese firms spend lavishly to push their apps in the U.S. They leverage China’s one billion internet users to test user preferences and optimize their AI models at home, then export the tech overseas.

Netanyahu fires defense minister who called for halt to judicial overhaul: NYT reports minutes after the announcement of Yoav Gallant’s dismissal, demonstrators began filling the streets throughout the country, hoisting Israeli flags and shouting, “De-mo-cra-cy!”

The Times: Israel protests as Netanyahu fires minister who opposed court overhaul

Israel boils as Netanyahu ousts minister who bucked court overhaul: NYT reports protests broke out shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired the defense minister, who had called for a halt to efforts to weaken the judiciary.

Netanyahu fires defense minister, sparking mass protests: Le Monde reports Netanyahu abruptly fired Yoav Gallant on Sunday, a day after he called on the Israeli prime minister to halt a planned judicial overhaul that has fiercely divided the country. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv, following the announcement.

The trilemma that EU leaders must tackle: There are clear contradictions in Europe’s desire to invest more, maintain strict budgets, and avoid common spending.?Martin Sandbu?

Starmer hoping to win 20 ‘tartan wall’ seats?The Times

Masters of reinvention — where next for the Conservative party??Three new books assess the social, historical, and ideological factors shaping the Tory electoral strategy under Rishi Sunak.?FT

+ What do the presidents of the EU, US and France have in common? Answer: each has struck a deal in 2023 with Rishi Sunak.

+ It is a truism of political scholarship that the Tory party has an infinite capacity for reinvention. It is arguably the world’s most successful centre-right political party, governing for two-thirds of the past 100 years.

+ To gain a full picture he widens his lens to capture not just the Tory party and its leaders and members, but the “party in the media”. This is the penumbra of newspapers and magazines, and the editors, commentators, bloggers and think-tankers who are now as much a part of the party milieu as its MPs.?

+ How different societies find it so difficult to achieve widely shared goals, like democracy, equality, a decent welfare state, security from crime and sustainable prosperity. Each goal poses collective action problems that we can’t readily solve, since our preferences collide and we can’t always reconcile individual self-interest with mutually beneficial outcomes.?

+ The Conservative party has been adept at navigating these forces in the past. Whether in or out of office, it will reinvent itself again.

Protester critical and French police hurt in ‘horrifying violence’: The Times reports a demonstrator is fighting for his life after an environmental protest ended in “scenes of horror” when police fought activists who used petrol bombs, axes, metal spikes, and other weapons.

French pension reform: Elisabeth Borne reaches out to opposition ahead of protests: Le Monde reports the French prime minister said Sunday she would meet opposition leaders early next month and was open to talks with unions after weeks of protests against pensions reforms. But she also said the pensions reform would go ahead, subject to approval by the Constitutional Council, which will rule on the constitutionality of the legislation.

Trash talk: When garbage becomes political in France: In light of France's garbage collector strike, some pro- and anti-strike garbage strategists are managing their trash with political intentions.?Guillemette Faure

The top 10 Republican presidential candidates for 2024, ranked: Trump reclaims the top spot — for now, at least.?Aaron Blake

The rise and rise of the branded residence: From Armani to Aston Martin, the world’s luxury powerhouses want to keep you suite.?FT

Rowing Blazers expands its preppy portfolio with Chipp: One of the big Ivy League brands is back — with a touch of irreverence.?FT

+ Having spent years in sandy trenches with a fossil brush, Jack Carlson has a fondness for long-dead things. Classic American prep is one of them. In 2017, the former archaeologist founded Rowing Blazers, a contemporary-priced brand with a tongue-in-cheek take on collegiate style.?

+ Now, he is expanding his ambitions with the launch of the Blazer Group and a new addition to his portfolio of licensed brands: Chipp, a Manhattan tailor once renowned for making John F Kennedy’s suits.

+ Alongside Rowing Blazers, Chipp and Warm & Wonderful, the Blazer Group portfolio also includes British knitwear brand Gyles & George and Arthur Ashe — the latter a new label the founders created last year, after licensing the name from the US tennis star’s widow. Carlson is the creative director of all five.

+ There is also a Manhattan store, informally called the Clubhouse, filled with varsity flags, an old boat and vintage clothing. Together, the group’s annual revenues are estimated to land somewhere between $10mn and $25mn, according to analysts and confirmed by the duo.

+ The Blazer Group’s decision to license instead of acquire brands outright aligns its business model more with the New Guards Group, the now Farfetch-owned company that operates the licences for Off-White, Heron Preston and Palm Angels. Acquiring would require “significantly more money and time investment”, says Rosenzweig. There is also only one creative director salary to pay: Carlson’s.

Following controversy, Balenciaga returns to the fundamentals of fashion: On March 5, artistic director Demna Gvasalia presented the label's first collection since late November, when it was accused of promoting crimes against children, giving rise to a boycott.?Le Monde

Behind Apple and Amazon’s billion-dollar bet on movie theaters: Two of the world’s largest technology companies are counting on a 100-year-old idea to help their streaming services.?Bloomberg

+ Apple plans to release its biggest movies in theaters?at least a month before they appear on its streaming service, Apple TV+.

+ That includes a new movie from Martin Scorsese, a drama about Napoloeon from Ridley Scott and a couple titles starring Brad Pitt.

+ Amazon released one of the biggest box office draws of the year in Creed III and is about to put a Ben Affleck movie on more than 3,000 screens. Both Apple and Amazon are going to spend $1 billion a year on movies that get proper theatrical releases.

+ Now every major studio – including those owned by technology giants like Amazon and Apple – believes in movie theaters. Except for one, and that is Netflix. We’ll get back to them. So, what changed?

+ The simplest answer for Apple and Amazon is that they had to promise a theatrical release in order to win certain projects. Like Netflix before them, Apple and Amazon are still proving themselves as movie distributors.

+ Apple TV+ has about one-eighth as many users as Netflix. Amazon’s video service accounts for less than half of the viewership of Netflix in the US. If you are going to spend nine figures on a single movie and you don’t have a large and engaged streaming audience, you need to find a way to make sure more people see the film.

+ When studios release movies in theaters, they tend to spend millions of dollars to promote the title and drive people to leave their homes opening weekend. That generates awareness for the title, which often benefits the film when it appears on streaming service a month or two later.

+ Marketing is a big reason most people in Hollywood still believe movies need a theatrical release to be an “event.”

+ Amazon and Apple can’t yet release movies in theaters on their own because they have elected not to hire teams of people that know how to put out a movie on thousands of screens worldwide. They need help from companies with the global marketing and distribution savvy.?

‘Zoom Towns’ exploded in the Work-From-Home era. Now new residents are facing layoffs: People relocated to smaller cities in search of lower costs and a better quality of life. Job cuts are pushing them in unexpected directions.?Bloomberg

Work-From-Home era ends for millions of Americans: Share of businesses with workers on-site most of the time neared prepandemic levels in 2022, Labor Department finds.?WSJ

Bloomberg: Work-From-Home endures, defying pushback from bosses like Dimon

+ In many US cities, the share of job ads with the WFH option is rising.

+ South stands apart as Florida and Texas offer few remote jobs.

Paris wins battle to regulate dark stores after court decision: France’s top administrative court ruled that dark stores are warehouses, allowing Paris and other cities to boot rapid-delivery sites from residential areas.?Bloomberg

Elon Musk puts Twitter's value at just $20 billion: Le Monde reports Twitter's CEO has put the current value of Twitter at $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, according to an internal email seen by American news media.

Wine growers fear funding will wither after fall of Silicon Valley Bank: The tech lender was a crucial pillar to vintners north of San Francisco.?FT

Bloomberg: First Citizens said to near deal for Silicon Valley Bank

+ SVB became the biggest US lender to fail in more than a decade.

+ A deal to buy SVB could be reached as soon as Sunday.

‘The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars’ review: Deceiving to thrive: From cuttlefish to cuckoos, the natural world abounds with con artists and tricksters.?WSJ

+ Nearly every species includes lotharios (of both sexes) that sneak around doing their best to hide their gallivanting from their social partners.

+ The largest arena for natural deception concerns sex, and such deception is most commonly practiced by males.?

+ During courtship, they strut and preen, advertising themselves to be sexier (larger, healthier, more aggressive defenders of any potential offspring) than they actually are.

+ Such strategies are widespread because, across species, individuals of each sex often seek “extra-pair copulations” (EPCs)—something that researchers were largely ignorant about before the emergence of DNA fingerprinting, which revealed that social monogamy doesn’t always correspond to sexual monogamy.

Why do rich people love quiet??The sound of gentrification is silence.?Xochitl Gonzalez

+ The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. + But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.

+ Silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.

Why tartan is the fabric that never goes out of fashion: As the new blockbuster exhibition dedicated to Scotland’s favorite fabric at the V&A Dundee shows, fashion still loves a Highland fling.?The Times

+ Brown is the new black, plain is the new print and tartan is, well, the new tartan.

+ This renewed appreciation for the fabric comes as no surprise to Professor Jonathan Faiers, a fashion scholar whose book on the subject is the basis for a new exhibition, Tartan, at the V&A Dundee.

+ “Tartan is never in and out of fashion, it is fashion,” Faiers writes in the foreword, noting that while the world has been upended many times during its jagged history, tartan has stood firm.

+ The idea behind the exhibition, which opens on Saturday, is that tartan is too important, too imbued in history, in social culture, in politics, in gender ideology, to be considered as a trend.

+ “As a nation we love to hate its kitschness but we also marvel at it in highly credible works of art, it’s so broad ranging.”

+ Tartan is a cloth for aristocrats, but it’s one for rebels too. When Highland dress was banned by the English in the Dress Act of 1746, an exemption was made for the military, and tartan (which although not entirely banned remained controversial) continued to be worn by Scottish military regiments, among them the famous Black Watch.

+ When punks adopted tartan centuries later, it was about sticking two fingers up to the establishment. Their tartan of choice was the Royal Stewart, official tartan of the monarch, also a consistent favourite of Vivienne Westwood.

Live Formula One? You’re better off watching it on the telly: He flew by private jet to the Bahrain Grand Prix but got a better view from a sofa (in a palace).?Jeremy Clarkson

+ This is the problem with Formula One as a live event. You have to be very lucky to see an incident, and even if you do it’s usually over in a flash and there are no slow-motion replays to help you understand what caused it. This, then, is a sport that has only ever really worked on television.

+ There’s another issue too. When I go to Stamford Bridge, I want to see Chelsea win. But in F1 no one has ever really cared who gets to stand on the top step. And we’ve never really known the drivers because, unless they went on to be Michael Schumacher, they were just men in helmets with silly Eurotrash names.

+ And then along came Netflix and its hugely successful Drive to Survive series. This enabled us to meet not just the drivers but also the team bosses.?

+ I know that clever editing created storylines where there were none, and I know that series five is a bit “yee-hah” American, but suddenly we had goodies and baddies. And even more suddenly we found we were able to talk about the sport to our teenage daughters.

+ My youngest had no interest in motorsport at all until Netflix came along.

George Washington University is moving on from ‘Colonials’: The move comes amid a reckoning of the fraught history of team names across American sports. Potential new names include: “Ambassadors,” “Blue Fog,” “Revolutionaries” and “Sentinels.”?NYT

+ George Washington University will soon choose a new nickname for its athletic teams, dropping “Colonials” after years of pressure from students who said the name was entangled with violence toward Native Americans and other colonized people.

+ The campus community, in the heart of the nation’s capital, has narrowed a list of 10 replacement candidates to four finalists: “Ambassadors,” “Blue Fog,” “Revolutionaries” and “Sentinels.”

+ The school’s mascot will remain George 1 — George Washington’s head, which a uniformed student wears.

+ Opposition to the Colonials nickname erupted in 2019, when the student body voted to remove it, and the “Anything But Colonials Coalition” was formed, according to a report a university moniker committee released in 2021.

Steve Cohen’s amazin’, maddening, money-losing bid to own New York: Once a symbol of Wall Street excess, Cohen has invested lavishly in the Mets, becoming the most beloved billionaire in Queens. Is that enough to reverse team history??NYT

+ People own teams for all sorts of reasons: boredom, passion, civic mission, macho flex. Images can be retouched, stories recast. Winners write history, and can rewrite it.

+ Cohen is at once an extreme version of a type — the munificent steward, willing to lose money in a show of how much money he’s made — and a model all his own, his tenure rocketing toward something that can feel like a referendum for the man, the Mets, their city and the sport itself.

+ Baseball is grappling with the ramifications of Cohen’s runaway spending in the nation’s most capitalistic major league, where no salary cap constrains him and only one team thought to buy Super Bowl ad time just because it could.

+ In dozens of interviews with allies, adversaries, current and former employees and players, the Cohen rendered is by turns paradoxical and straightforward: He can be brusque and solicitous, open-minded and closed off, faithfully process-driven but seemingly convinced of his own destiny in any venture.

+ Those who know him say his view of subordinates can be similarly binary — morons and moneymakers, doers and duds — producing sometimes savage encounters in the workplace.

+ ohen’s speaking manner betrays a certain wear-you-down relentlessness. He often begins sentences with “listen” and ends them with “right?” — a tic that conveys his wishes clearly: Hear him out and kindly agree with him.

+ “I would compare him to Steinbrenner,” said Richard Koshel, 81, a former Brooklynite now living in Florida who was visiting the spring facility in a Tom Seaver shirt. “Only he has more money.”

Antonio Conte: Tottenham Hotspur manager leaves by ‘mutual agreement’ after outburst: The Times reports Stellini will take charge for the rest of the season.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc?

Marc A. Ross | Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal

Caracal produces ITK Daily.

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