Luka Levaj 🚜

It’s exceedingly rare when a policy paper from a Washington think tank sets off a firestorm on both sides of the Pacific, but it’s exactly what happened with @jekavanagh's “A Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia”, published by Defense Priorities on September 10. Even today, some 3 weeks after publication, it's still being argued over: this week a professor of strategic deterrence at the U.S. Naval War College weighed in on "the commotion" around it (xitter.gq/JRHunTx/status/2104785…). You also had coverage from Seoul's Chosun Ilbo (chosun.com/english/world-en/…) and Tokyo's Japan Times (japantimes.co.jp/commentary/…) to Germany's Deutsche Welle (dw.com/en/us-asia-western-pa…), which reported that it had “alarmed U.S. allies in Asia.” To be fair, Kavanagh has quite the resume so it's no surprise her words carry weight: before Defense Priorities, she ran the Army Strategy program at the RAND Corporation, the Pentagon's semi-official think tank, then was a senior fellow at Carnegie. She also teaches at Georgetown and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Hard to think of a more mainstream Washington CV. And what she proposes in the report is indeed radical, especially coming from someone with such an establishment pedigree. She proposes that every single mutual defense treaty in Asia be effectively terminated or phased out, including those with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, and that U.S. forces should retrench to the second island chain, far away from China’s coast. All in all, it’s no exaggeration to say that her proposal does in fact amount to undoing the entire security order the U.S. has built in the region over three quarters of a century. So... why? Why would someone with such deep roots in the very institutions that built the U.S. security order argue it just isn't sustainable anymore? That U.S. forward bases in Asia are, in her words, "vulnerabilities not assets, all risk and little reward"? Is Kavanagh just an outlier, or is she the canary in the coal mine, the first mainstream voice to put two and two together and say out loud what the rest of the establishment will soon have no choice but to admit? That's what my latest article is all about: a deep look into the military reality behind her conclusions, the Asia that would come after, and why, read between the lines, her report is above all a testament to how well Beijing has played the long game. As I put it in the conclusion: "The surest sign a strategy has worked is when your rival concludes, in its own interest, that it should do what you wanted all along." This is the link to the article, enjoy the read: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…

This is really crazy: Europe is really entering a new Dark Age. I've been following Leonid for years and the guy is anything but "pro-Russia": he is, as far as I can see, objective and neutral, one of the basic requirements for being an actual journalist. Which seems to be precisely the issue in today's Europe: anything but an ideological commitment to one side of a conflict automatically makes you a "propagandist" for the other. It wouldn't be the end of the world - or at least less bad - if it were only about labelling, but Leonid's (and others') cases show that this also means outright persecution by European governments, with campaigns to destroy people's lives. As I often remind, there is only one civilization that used to literally burn people alive for their ideas: Europe. Unfortunately it looks like the urge to punish heresy is alive and well.

If you really want to understand where the world is at and where it's going, you probably cannot get anything more meaningful than the OECD's PISA study - a global test given every 3 years to an insane 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries. No report globally, by any institution, better captures whether countries are building or squandering their future. The latest PISA results just came out yesterday (oecd.org/en/publications/202…) and the results are genuinely fascinating, and in some way pretty depressing. Why depressing? Because, sadly, the numbers show that the world is getting dumber: as you can see on the first graph below 👇, since roughly 2012 scores in science, reading, and mathematics have been in continuous decline across OECD countries. The reading score is particularly concerning: it literally cratered, dropping 28 points since 2015, the equivalent of almost 1.5 years of schooling lost according to the report. To make matters even worse, the reading skill that's dropped the most across the board is precisely the one we most desperately need: the capacity to critically assess what you read, cross-reference sources, and tell signal from noise. On average, sadly, 15-year-old kids globally are - more and more - incapable of slowing down and actually thinking about what they're reading. Interestingly though, when you look into the details, this great "dumbing down" isn't across the board: it's overwhelmingly concentrated in wealthy Western countries, while many developing countries are actually getting significantly smarter. For instance rich countries like Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway are in freefall, while countries like Cambodia, Türkiye, and the UAE are posting big gains. To be clear, this doesn't mean that developing countries are now "smarter" than rich ones: save for one notable exception, that's still not the case. But they are catching up fast, both because rich countries are getting "dumber" and because they're themselves getting smarter. The one exception is, as you'd expect, the "smartest" of them all, by a huge margin: China. It is pretty much in a league of its own: just look at the ranking in the table (only kids in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang got tested - 4 regions covering 200 million people). China's maths results are particularly insane: according to the report, the best level in maths - level 5, where "top performers" begins - starts at 607. The AVERAGE kid in China is 612: "normal" Chinese kids are at a level that is considered elite in the rest of the world. In fact, and that's probably the funniest number in the entire report, look at the column called "Share of low performers in science, reading and mathematics": China is only at 1.8% 😅 Which means that only 1.8% of Chinese kids are rated as low performers in all 3 subjects, almost a rounding error. Even Singapore, the second best and generally considered best-in-class in education, is at 6.8% - almost 4 times worse. My country France, is at 21.3% - almost 12 times worse 😢 All of this - incidentally - dispels the common myth that there would be some kids who are just genetically beyond redemption and simply can't be taught: China proves that with the right system, virtually every child can reach proficiency. So what does this all say about the world and where it's going, besides the fact that, if the future belongs to those who can think, China has never been better positioned to own it? I think the more general picture is this: there is nothing inevitable about any country's trajectory. Finland was the world's education darling fifteen years ago - now it's in complete freefall (see the last graph 👇). Cambodia was at the bottom of every table - now it's posting the biggest gains ever recorded in the study. What changed wasn't the children: it's still Finnish kids (Finland has one of the lowest levels of immigration in the West), and it's still Cambodian kids. It also doesn't matter much - or at least it matters less - if a country is wealthy or not. For instance in Southeast Asia, both Malaysia and Indonesia - the 2 biggest ASEAN economies after Singapore - are faring very badly, while Thailand and Vietnam, both poorer, have better educated kids whose scores are continuing to improve. So that's the final takeaway: the kids don't change, they all have potential, always, as China's 1.8% proved. What does change is what adults decide to do with that potential. It's both hopeful - because it means any country can choose to turn things around at any time - and also sad given the results - because it means so many countries are choosing to fail their children.