Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
If the recent U.S. presidential election campaign was about defining American reality, little has been decided. The ongoing inability to arrive at a shared worldview or even to agree on basic facts, abetted by a media that thrives on adversity to monetize attention, is deadly for the discourse in any democracy.
This crisis of social intelligence in which the perception of reality is unmoored from objective observation is even more consequential than the highly damaging quarrel between the official U.S. intelligence agencies and President-elect Donald Trump over Russian influence meddling. But the two are linked.
None of the intelligence professionals I know would ever consider themselves infallible. Yet they do strive mightily to establish the facts and resist partisan pressures to slant their findings. Professional intelligence analysis seeks to root out false signals, disinformation, unfounded rumor and subjective opinion. It is, in effect, the opposite of peer-driven social media which now has the most influence over American hearts and minds including, apparently, over the incoming commander-in-chief.
While the joint report on the Russian hacks released last week by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security was scored by some as less than conclusive, former NATO commander James Stavridis and cybersecurity expert Dave Weinstein believe it was highly effective. “Publicly laying this level of detail out sets a dramatic precedent that could serve a significant blow to Russia’s current and future cyberoperations in the U.S. and elsewhere,” they write. “The technical details of the report constitute an intelligence windfall for ordinary network defenders who have been starving for rich real-time threat information from the federal government to protect their systems against sophisticated actors.” A further report released Friday by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes that Russia aimed “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Writing from Moscow, Maria Snegovaya reports that most commentators there have greeted President Barack Obama’s recently announced sanctions in response to Russian hacking with “mockery and derision.” Official Russia, she says, has offered the usual retort: deny then distort.
If identifying and shutting down hackers has become a key task of intelligence agencies in these cyber times, the new challenge for education is to provide young people with the tools of social intelligence so they can tell fact from fabrication on social media. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg lays out the steps educators need to take to help students discern what is fake news or not. “The tools we’ve invented are handling us,“ he says, “not the other way around.” Teacher Lynn Kelley tells her students they fall victim to fake news when they lack the critical distance to be aware of their own biases and assumptions or when they are unable to evaluate claims without the relevant historical knowledge. Natalie Jackson reports on a poll that says most Americans think tweets are not the way a president should communicate.
The scientific consensus on climate change is perhaps the most contested fact by the new powers to be in Washington. These stunning motion graphics compiled by James Warner illustrate the toll a warming climate took on the planet in 2016. Dominique Mosbergen reports that, indeed, 2016 was the hottest year on record.
Nicolas Berggruen and I suggest how the incoming U.S. administration can promote renewable energy while creating jobs and security for Americans by jointly investing with China and Mexico in the infrastructure of a “solar border” instead of a wall. Guy Standing argues that a universal basic income would be a bulwark against far-right populism because it provides a secure economic base in people’s lives. “The response to these darkening times,” he writes, “must be to devise and rally support for a new income distribution system.”
In other global developments, yet another terror attack hit Istanbul on New Year’s Eve at a fashionable nightclub on the banks of the Bosphorus. Turkish journalist Ilgin Yorulmaz reports that, despite the aims of the terrorists, the responses to the attack are serving to unite a divided country. Mercy Corps’ Michael Bowers looks ahead to the humanitarian crises that should garner more attention in 2017 – in Yemen, South Sudan and Lake Chad. Ali Rodriguez reports that the economic situation has become so dire in Venezuela that even talented artists committed to the opposition can’t afford to stay and are fleeing.
Former Iranian National Security Council member Seyed Hossein Mousavian sees the potential for hope in the incoming U.S. administration. “While it might sound counterintuitive,” he writes, “Republican control of Congress and the presidency presents an opportunity for successful U.S.- Iran diplomacy. The U.S. government is now able to act in unison, enabling for novel approaches towards the region that may have previously been politically impossible.” In his piece, Mousavian also lists what he believes President-elect Donald Trump should know about Iran. One point is that America’s military presence in the Middle East has created instability there. Interestingly, while chaos gripping much of the Mideast is leading to disengagement by world powers, Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden explore why China is actually looking to invest more in the region.
In recent years, China was also always the poster child for the worst pollution in the world that came along with rapid growth. Now that China is trying to clean up its act, and India has joined the club of rapid growth, it is facing its own challenges. Bhargav Krishna writes from New Delhi that, “India’s under-funded public health system is straining to cope with the increasing burden of pollution-driven illnesses.”
Writing from Hong Kong Wang Xiangwei reports that President Xi Jinping, recently donned “a core leader,” denounced resistance to his reforms by local officials at a Politburo meeting this week after which his comments were splashed across national media. Former Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei argues that, despite Brexit and the Trump election, globalization is not doomed; it is just shifting East with China in a leading position. Taking a comprehensive strategic view of world events, Zbigniew Brzezinski proposes that the only effective response to the present crisis of global power is trilateral cooperation among the U.S., China and Russia. He warns that, “The U.S. should not act towards China as if it were already an enemy; significantly, it should not favor India as America’s principal ally in Asia. This would almost guarantee a closer connection between China and Russia. Nothing is more dangerous to the U.S. than such a close connection.”
Our Singularity series this week looks at the technological developments to watch in 2017 – artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, decentralized peer-to-peer networks, biosynthetic labs and autonomous vehicles. Finally, our latest column by the Future of Life Institute reminds us that, in many ways, 2016 was a year of hope with advances in AI and health as well as new moves to reduce the global number of nuclear weapons.
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s news coverage. Nick Robins-Early and Jesselyn Cook are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khannaare Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as theAdvisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
