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AP Investigation: 5 Things to Know About UN Sex Abuse - The New York Times

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Here are key findings on AP's investigation into in the U.N.'s peacekeeping crisis: 1. The AP reviewed 12 years of UN data on sexual misconduct and exploitation, and found an estimated 2,000 allegations against peacekeepers and personnel — signaling the crisis is much larger than previously known. 2. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, AP found, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time. 3. A U.N. investigation report from 2007 obtained by AP shows that 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers sexually exploited and abused at least nine Haitian children. No one was jailed, and Sri Lanka kept participating in U.N. missions in Haiti and elsewhere. 4. Sri Lanka refuses to specify what happened in the investigations into the soldiers who were disciplined for the child sex ring in Haiti and why so few were punished given that the U.N. internal report cited 134 soldiers. 5. In the latest U.N. annual report, Sri Lanka is cited for its "best practices" involving a paternity payment made recently to a Haitian woman. It took Sri Lanka nearly a decade to make the payment.

China Bets on Sensitive U.S. Start-Ups, Worrying the Pentagon - The New York Times

Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state-owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington. According to a new white paper commissioned by the Department of Defense, Beijing is encouraging Chinese companies with close government ties to invest in American start-ups specializing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and robots to advance China’s military capacity as well as its economy.

The Danger of Imperial Overstretch | Foreign Policy Journal

The second area in which the United States is overextending is the military. Aside from the cost of waging military conflict or maintaining United States presence abroad, there is a significant, unsustainable overstretching of military personnel and resources. According to the Center on Research for Globalization’s Jules Dufour, the United States is thought to own a total of 737 military bases in 63 foreign countries.[6]  Ferguson says the United States also suffers from personnel deficits, citing the 500,000 deployable troop limit which he says is not sufficient to win “all the small wars” the United States is waging and will have to wage in order to maintain the current military posture. [7] Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich summarizes the dilemma, concerned that the U.S. military will simply “drop from exhaustion,” as the U.S. tries to be everywhere, all the time.

Robert Kagan: America's Dangerous Aversion to Conflict - WSJ

Once again, they are people who never accepted the liberal world's definition of progress and modernity and who don't share its hierarchy of values. They are not driven primarily by economic considerations. They have never put their faith in the power of soft power, never believed that world opinion (no matter how outraged) could prevent successful conquest by a determined military. They are undeterred by their McDonald's. They still believe in the old-fashioned verities of hard power, at home and abroad. And if they are not met by a sufficient hard-power response, they will prove that, yes, there is such a thing as a military solution.

Robert Kagan: America's Dangerous Aversion to Conflict - WSJ

For a quarter-century, Americans have been told that at the end of history lies boredom rather than great conflict, that nations with McDonald's never fight one another, that economic interdependence and nuclear weapons make war among great powers unlikely if not impossible. Recently added to these nostrums has been the mantra of futility. "There is no military solution" is the constant refrain of Western statesmen regarding conflicts from Syria to Ukraine; indeed, military action only makes problems worse. Power itself isn't even what it used to be, argued the columnist Moisés Naím in a widely praised recent book.