Êpa! Já estão fazendo cenários para uma confrontação de fato entre EUA e China, ou melhor, os EUA atacando a China - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 Paranoia em alta em Washington. Entre militares é “normal”: eles vivem disso. Entre acadêmicos é disfuncional, pois embota o pensamento. Mas é o que acontece em situações “imperiais”. Os gregos já sabiam disso, aliás, o próprio Tucídides. Sempre tem um cavalo de Troia...

As consequências mais visíveis da confrontação hegemônica artificial alimentada pela paranoia do Pentágono — estimulando comportamento similar na contraparte chinesa — são o gasto inútil com brinquedinhos que nunca serão usados, e perda geral de oportunidades de bem-estar em todo o mundo, nos impérios e nas periferias.

Desde Troia, o primitivismo de certas reações humanas não se alterou (mas nenhuma Helena está em causa, pois as “paixões” são sempre entre os próprios homens, dotados de instintos primitivos por natureza).

A coisa anda realmente paranoica. Inacreditável como esses malucos do Pentágono andam convencendo acadêmicos brilhantes de que a "armadilha de Tucídides" não é apenas uma analogia equivocada, mas uma base para o exercício dos seus piores instintos confrontacionistas. 

Tem um momento em que os imperadores perdem a cabeça, como ocorreu em Roma, no Império Otomano, e quiçá no Império chinês e até no Japão imperialista, para não falar nos colonialistas europeus e seus malucos do espaço vital da MittelEuropa. Bando de alucinados...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

By Ishaan Tharoor with Ruby Mellen  Email  The Washington Post, March 8, 2021

How the U.S. and China could go to war

Military vehicles carrying missiles in Beijing on Oct. 1, 2019. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

It’s 2034 and a war is about to begin. A flotilla of three U.S. naval destroyers is furrowing a path through the South China Sea, a contested body of water that is the thoroughfare for a significant proportion of global trade. Near the ominously named Mischief Reef, they encounter and board a Chinese vessel. And then things start to spiral.

Far-reaching cyberattacks cloud the United States’ ability for strategic action. Conventional warfare and sea battles lead to dramatic losses for both sides. An array of other countries get pulled into a conflict that sees strategists resort to the most dangerous of measures. Ultimately, no one really wins.

The scenario may be speculative, but it’s all too real, says Adm. James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO who imagines these events as co-author of “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” which publishes Tuesday. The book, written with novelist and combat veteran Elliot Ackerman, is what Stavridis describes as “a tale of cautionary fiction,” tapping into a rich tradition of Cold War storytelling — think John Hackett’s “The Third World War” or Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” — that made clear the apocalyptic disaster that war between the Soviet Union and the United States would represent.

“Part of why we never ended up throwing nuclear weapons at each other during the Cold War is that we imagined how terrible it would be, how gripping and societally destructive it would be,” Stavridis told Today’s WorldView.

Stavridis hopes he can stoke the public’s recognition of the grim consequences of Sino-U.S. escalation. His page-turner — “crisply written and well-paced,” as The Washington Post’s review describes it — involves a cinematic cast of characters: A sphinx-like Chinese defense attache who loves munching on M&Ms; a gnarled, three-fingered brigadier general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; a maverick U.S. fighter pilot gripped by World War II nostalgia; an overworked Indian American White House deputy national security adviser whose family connections in the motherland influence the course of the war.

Beyond the fiction, though, is a road map to war that could easily translate to the real world. “The novel lays out a pretty plausible ladder of escalation that goes from a conventional attack to a second conventional attack to a third conventional attack to America deciding to pull a tactical nuclear weapon and use it,” Stavridis said. “That’s more real [a prospect] than I wish it were.”

The action in “2034″ takes place 15 years from when Stavridis and Ackerman began writing the book, a framing of the future that allowed them to “create a world where the technology is roughly the same, but the underlying tensions are going to be coming to a head,” Stavridis said, acknowledging “the timeline of China’s advance, its military, its artificial intelligence capabilities, its cyber-capabilities.”

In their telling, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has expanded from its network of infrastructure and economic deals into a significant geopolitical enterprise that includes enhanced security relationships with countries such as Iran. The United States, meanwhile, has an unnamed female president who is intriguingly not affiliated with either of the two traditional political parties. The post-partisan administration she leads still cannot avoid the miscalculations and blind spots that see a maritime dispute explode into ruinous global war.

In Washington’s national security establishment, a growing body of policy papers and think tank reports chart similar terrain. The inexorable waning of U.S. military supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region will lead to a more tense standoff. Both sides will be — or already are perceived to be — drawing “red lines” over an array of interests, from freedom of navigation in the South China Sea to Chinese claims over Taiwan. The United States may feel compelled to redeploy more of its strategic assets to China’s neighborhood, while China may grow all the more insecure as Washington beefs up its security cooperation with Asian allies.

As strategists plot a burgeoning hemispheric great game, they are also reckoning with the risks of escalation. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chief of staff of the Air Force, told reporters last year that a conflict with an adversary like China now would see “combat attrition rates and risks … that are more akin to the World War II era than the uncontested environment to which we have become accustomed” in recent decades.

“While planning to win a war with China remains necessary, it is no longer sufficient,” warned a 2016 report from the Rand Corp. “The United States must also consider how to limit war and its costs.”

Both U.S. and Chinese officials insist that they have no interest in provoking conflict or locking horns with the other in a new Cold War. But the hubris of great powers has often instigated calamity. “Nations are like people, and they can become overconfident in ways that lead them to make bad choices,” Stavridis said. “Certainly that’s been the case for the U.S. in many occasions.”

A disastrous Sino-U.S. war is not “preordained,” he added, pointing to moments in the novel “when either side could have pulled the keys out of the car.”

“Big doors can swing on small hinges,” Stavridis said.

O plano de recuperação de Biden é MAIOR que o PIB do Brasil: US$ 1,9 trillion - James Hohmann (WP)

From The Washington Post, January 15, 2021 

By James Hohmann with Mariana Alfaro  Email  Biden throws Obama-era caution to the wind with a big ask for coronavirus stimulus During the Great Recession 12 years ago, nervous about sticker shock, President Barack Obama sought to keep the price tag for his Recovery Act under $1 trillion. On Thursday night, undeterred by Republicans rediscovering their allergy to deficit spending, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled an “American Rescue Plan” that would cost just under $2 trillion.  Then he announced that he will appear before a joint session of Congress next month to ask for even more. “I know what I just described will not come cheaply,” Biden said during a Thursday night speech in Wilmington, Del. “But failure to do so will cost us dearly.” Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal includes $400 billion for provisions to fight the coronavirus with more vaccines and testing, while reopening schools; more than $1 trillion in direct relief to families, including stimulus payments and increased unemployment insurance benefits; and $440 billion for aid to communities and businesses, including $350 billion in emergency funding to state and local governments. The incoming president used his prime-time address to unabashedly make the case for deficit spending. “In this moment of crisis, with interest rates at historic lows, we cannot afford inaction,” Biden said. “It’s not just that smart fiscal investments, including deficit spending, are more urgent than ever. It’s that the return on these investments — in jobs, in racial equity — will prevent long-term economic damage and the benefits will far surpass the costs. A growing number of top economists has shown even our debt situation will be more stable — not less stable — if we seize this moment with vision and purpose.” This week’s body count and jobs report make the case better than Biden ever could for going big. Nearly 1 million Americans filed new unemployment claims last week. This was up by 181,000 from the week before, the largest increase since the beginning of the pandemic and the highest number of new unemployment claims since August. An additional 284,000 claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the insurance program for gig and self-employed workers. After 140,000 people lost their jobs in December, the first decline in months, the total number of Americans enrolled in unemployment programs at the start of this year was 18.4 million. For more than 40 weeks now, the number of new jobless claims has been higher than the worst week of the Great Recession.  The United States may surpass 400,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus before Biden takes office. At least 387,299 fatalities have been reported, including 3,856 on Thursday. More than 4,000 deaths were reported on Tuesday and Wednesday. About a million new cases a day are being reported. The vaccine rollout continues to be plagued by problems. While 30.6 million doses have been distributed, only 9.7 million people have received shots, according to the CDC, far below what President Trump had promised by the end of the year. Biden called these numbers a “dismal failure” and reitered his goal to distribute 100 million shots by the end of his first 100 days in office. “This will be one of the most challenging operational efforts we’ve undertaken as a nation,” he said. “We’ll have to move heaven and Earth.” Nevertheless, Biden’s big ask is remarkable considering how little breathing room he has on Capitol Hill.  For a stretch in 2009, Democrats controlled 60 seats in the Senate and 256 seats in the House. After Georgia’s results are certified, Democrats will hold 50 seats in the Senate – with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris available to break ties – and 222 seats in the House. After the Recovery Act passed, Democrats moved on to health care and climate change, though cap-and-trade never passed the Senate. In the 2010 midterms, though, they lost control of the House. This happened, in part, because many voters felt that the Obama administration was not sufficiently focused on the struggling economy. Even as the Senate prepares for a second impeachment trial of Trump, Biden aides say he is determined to convey that he is focused primarily on the pocketbook and public health issues that preoccupy most Americans. Biden allies see demonstrating this to voters as key to holding their narrow majorities in the 2022 midterms. This week, he is not giving voice to the anger at Trump. He has been letting other Democrats, and some Republicans, do that. He will give another covid-related speech this afternoon. “We know how to multitask there,” Harris told NPR in an interview that aired Friday morning. “We have to multitask, which means, as with anyone, we have a lot of priorities and we need to see them through.” Biden faces pressure from his left to do even more on coronavirus relief. But the president-elect is holding out hope to woo at least 10 Senate Republicans to back his bill with a filibuster-proof majority. This could prove difficult with such a large price tag. “Incoming Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) had urged Biden to consider a higher price tag than what he was initially eyeing for the proposal,” Erica Werner and Jeff Stein report. “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who will chair the Budget Committee, has said he is working to put together a massive stimulus bill that could pass under special budget rules with a simple majority vote in the Senate, instead of the 60-vote margin normally required. Biden, however, wants to try for a bipartisan majority on his first bill — although his team appears to have conducted little outreach to congressional Republicans on the plan.  “Democratic aides say that if Republicans do not appear willing to cooperate, they can shift gears quickly and move to ‘budget reconciliation,’ the procedure that would allow them to pass legislation without GOP votes. That’s how Republicans passed their big tax-cut bill … Even holding enough Democrats together to pass legislation along party lines could prove a challenge. The most conservative Senate Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), has already expressed skepticism about the need for a new round of stimulus checks, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that Biden isn’t going far enough by proposing $1,400 checks, even though Biden’s approach means most people will end up with $2,000 given the earlier batch of $600 checks.” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said additional stimulus is needed in the United States as the pandemic is “moving from bad to worse.” She characterizes this period as an “unprecedented race" between the virus and the vaccines. “We are still faced with tremendous uncertainties about the exit from the health crisis and we do have a difficult period ahead,” Georgieva told Heather Long, adding that “there is scarring” we have yet to fully understand.

USA: o declínio de uma grande democracia - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

Trump’s authoritarian style is remaking America

Ishaan Tharoor

The Washington Post, February 13, 2020

President Trump speaks at a rally Feb. 10 in Manchester, N.H. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Over the course of his presidency, there have been myriad warnings about President Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. He has played to the fears of his critics by blowing past the republic’s increasingly creaky system of checks and balances. And with the aid of a right-wing echo chamber, he has pushed forward a narrative that conflates national interest with his personal gain, patriotism with unflinching loyaltyto the occupant of the Oval Office.

As Trump embarks on a reelection campaign and basks in the aftermath of the Senate impeachment trial — in which, thanks to a Republican Party wholly captured by Trumpism, acquittal was seemingly always a fait accompli — he is adding to the strains on America’s polarized democracy. His calls this week for prosecutions of his perceived enemies and public attacks on federal judges and prosecutors involved in cases against his allies were so abnormal that it led to an unlikely rebuke from Attorney General William P. Barr, a Cabinet official largely viewed by Trump’s opponents as shamefully acquiescent.

The Washington Post’s White House reporters described a president“simmering with rage, fixated on exacting revenge against those he feels betrayed him and insulated by a compliant Republican Party.” He is willing to test the rule of law even further and is comfortable doing so, they reported, “to the point of feeling untouchable.”

“If a president can meddle in a criminal case to help a friend, then there’s nothing that keeps him from meddling to harm someone he thinks is his enemy,” Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney, told my colleagues. “That means that a president is fully above the law in the most dangerous kind of way. This is how democracies die.”

The president’s demagoguery has left a deep mark on American society. An investigation by my colleagues sifted through 28,000 reports of bullying in U.S. schools and found hundreds of incidents in which Trump-inspired rhetoric was used to harass children, especially students from Hispanic, black or Muslim backgrounds.

“Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America,” my colleagues wrote. “Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.”

This unsettling trend speaks of a deeper malaise and entrenched divisions. David Roberts at Vox argued that the United States is in the grips of an “epistemic” crisis: A decades-long right-wing project to create its own media bubble cemented a polarized political reality in which rival camps can’t even agree on the facts of their disagreements.

“That is what a tribalist like Trump wants: for communication and compromise across tribal lines to become impossible, so that loyalty becomes the only measure and everything is reduced to pure struggle for dominance,” Roberts wrote.

Lawmakers are still trying to check Trump’s power. On Thursday, every Democratic senator and eight Republicans in the Senate passed a resolution to curb Trump’s ability to order future strikes against Iran. But Trump is almost certain to veto the latest effort by Congress to assert its oversight authority over an emboldened executive.

Former Trump administration officials have emerged in public to criticize the president’s behavior and policies, including former White House chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday. Myriad Republican politicians and operatives in private bemoan Trump’s hold on the party, but few are willing to risk overt dissent. Those who do are dragged through the coals by Trump and his loyalists.

“The Republican Party is betraying democracy, and these are historical times,” Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor and author of “How Fascism Works,” told Business Insider. “The Republican Party has shown that it has no interest in multi-party democracy. … They are much more concerned with power, with consolidating power.”

The ruling party’s cynicism has engendered visions on the left of its wholesale defeat.

“The Republican Party is now a reliable opponent of equality and a malignant force in American life — a cancer within a patient in denial about the nature and severity of her condition,” wrote the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu. “It should be not only defeated but destroyed — vanquished from the American political scene with a finality that can only be assured not by electoral politics or structural reforms alone, but by a moral crusade.”

This is, of course, hardly the first time the United States has been so divided. An important piece in the New Yorker by Harvard historian Jill Lepore examined the sense of democratic crisis that was felt by many Americans in the 1930s. She details the astonishing New Deal-era civic engagement that took place in response, the profusion of debates, publicly backed artistic projects, town halls and radio shows that drew in millions around the country.

“Our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” the historian Charles Beard argued at the time, when explaining how Americans would resist the pull of communism or fascism. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.”

There’s plenty of arguing now in America, but it’s hard to see any glimmers of civic reconciliation.

Programa nuclear iraniano: o coracao da materia -- Mark Hibbs entrevistado por Max Fisher

WorldViews

A nuclear expert explains, in very basic language, the science at the heart of Iranian nuclear talks

BY MAX FISHER 

The Washington Post Blog, November 12 at 7:00 am

Iran's ongoing negotiations with world powers over its nuclear program, most recently this weekend in Geneva, have not yet resulted in a deal. This weekend's talks fell through, according to some reports, because French representatives worried about how the agreement would have dealt with Iran's nuclear facility at Arak.

The details of the facility, how it works and why it's so controversial can be confusing. To get a better understanding of it and the other scientific issues at the heart of this very political process, I talked to Mark Hibbs. As a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's nuclear policy program, Hibbs understands both the science of the Iranian program and the politics around those scientific issues. A lightly edited and compressed transcript of our phone conversation follows.

Can you explain to me, very simply, what are the main technical issues in these negotiations with Iran? In other words, what are they negotiating over?

The two main parts that are of concern are the uranium enrichment program and the heavy-water reactor [in the city of Arak].

Can you explain the dispute over uranium enrichment first?

The question is, how much enrichment should an agreement with Iran permit Iran to do? What would be the enrichment level? Where would Iran be permitted to do the enrichment, and, finally, what happens to the enriched uranium when it comes out of the enrichment plant?

Iran has been building up an inventory of enriched uranium. Most of it is 3 percent enriched or 5 percent enriched. It's "low enriched" uranium fuel, at the level of enrichment that normally is used for normal nuclear power reactors, like the reactor Iran has at Bushehr. There is a small nuclear inventory that Iran is enriching at [its nuclear facility at] Fordow, at a second enrichment plant, and that's enriched to 20 percent. And the problem is that 20 percent enriched uranium. The amount of work that's necessary, the amount of processing of the uranium to enrich it to 20 percent, that gets you most of the way there to enrich it further to 90 percent, which is what you would want for a nuclear weapon. The concern is that there has been, in recent years, a small but growing amount of 20 percent enriched uranium, which is the focus of a great deal of tension in this negotiation, because that would be the inventory that's closest to bomb grade.

They have slowed down the accumulation of this 20 percent enriched uranium. They've slowed it down to a crawl, and they haven't crossed that line. That is an indication that Iran is aware that this is a sensitive matter. That being said, in a negotiation to try to solve the Iranian crisis, the powers negotiating with Iran want to eliminate this threat. They want all of the 20 percent enriched uranium removed, converted to other nuclear materials that can't be readily accessible. And there hasn't been a discussion on it on how best to do that.

Most of the time, since about 2006, the countries negotiating with Iran have been preoccupied primarily with schemes to get that 20 percent uranium out of the country, and more recently there has been a discussion about an alternative approach which is to take the 20 percent enriched-uranium inventory and convert it into an oxide form, which would be less accessible in the sense that Iran would have to take a number of processing steps to convert that back again into metal.

The French are involved in that; the Americans are involved in that. Politically, ultimately it has to do with what you believe to be Iran's intentions. Technically, it has to do with what your assessment is about Iran's capabilities, the question of would Iran be able to reconvert the uranium, how quickly would Iran be able to do that and would they be able to do it fast enough that they wouldn't be detected.

What about Iran's heavy-water reactor in the city of Arak? Some reporting suggests that the negotiations in Geneva fell apart because the French didn't think the agreement was tough enough on this reactor. What does a heavy-water reactor do, and why is this one so controversial?

Okay, I am going to walk you through some basic science. [Laughs] The uranium fuel in the reactor core is surrounded by what's called a "moderator." The moderator in most reactors is water. For example, in a power reactor that makes electricity, there is enriched light-enriched uranium surrounded by a water moderator, which permits the nuclear reaction to happen. In the case of this Iranian reactor, the moderator is not normal water, it's heavy water. Heavy water is water for which the hydrogen isotope has a proton and a neutron, instead of just a proton, making it denser. You can make it through several chemical processes.

Heavy water moderates the reactor less efficiently than the normal, light water does. What that means for the reaction is that the deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, absorbs fewer neutrons, which are released spontaneously by the fuel in the system. It means that there's going to be a lot more neutrons in that nuclear system, in the core of that reactor. That means that the natural uranium fuel, which is to a large extent over 70 percent of the uranium in that fuel, is isotope U-238.

The excess neutrons in that system get absorbed by that natural uranium. They absorb the neutrons and it transmutes the uranium into plutonium-239, so you're creating plutonium by doing that. That's what you're doing in your reactor. The heavy water permits the reactor in Iran, or will permit the reactor in Iran, to be very efficient at producing plutonium.

Which is used for making nuclear weapons.

Correct. The design of the reactor is considered a red flag for nonproliferators. They see the heavy water, together with the use of the natural uranium fuel, the U-238 in the fuel, as a red flag. It's a reactor that can be very efficiently used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

This gets to the heart of the problem. The United States has a very firm position about this. It has taken the view that the reactor in Iran is a bomb factory. The Iranian narrative says the reactor is supposed to be used for medical isotope production and for general research.

Who's right?

In a sense the problem that the negotiators have about this project is that both of them are right. The reactor can be used to make bombs, but it's also perfectly suitable for a large number of peaceful-use applications.

What this problem reveals is a disconnect between the nonproliferation community, which sees the heavy water reactor and its neutrons as a threat because they can be used to make bombs, and then you have the nuclear research community, academic people mostly, who use heavy water reactors in many countries to produce neutrons that they need for new nuclear research. So nuclear researchers will tell you that the most valuable reactors in the world are those that create the most neutrons, and in fact these heavy water reactors do that.

But if you take the position as the U.S. government has taken, that there is no justification for this reactor in Iran other than making bombs, then there's no way that you could justify a solution that would permit Iran at the end of the day to have this reactor.

But Iran says it doesn't want a nuclear weapon, so presumably its position is that it should be allowed to keep the reactor.

Iran will make the argument that it should have the reactor, because the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog] is inspecting everything in Iran. And Iran has agreed to implement a so-called Additional Protocol, which is an agreement that provides a far greater level of IAEA intrusiveness into the program. So the Iranians will argue, "If we're demonstrating our nonproliferation bona fides to you, to the IAEA, then you should let us have the reactor."

So what was the big disagreement over Arak? Some reports say that the deal at Geneva this weekend fell through because the French diplomats had some concerns about how it would deal with the Arak reactor.

The French were not satisfied that this agreement really addressed the future of this reactor. The French were saying, "What we want to see happen is for the Iranians to agree not to do any more work on this reactor for six months or more. And during this period of time, we will sit down with Iran and we'll discuss how to go forward about the long-term future of this project."

What we have heard is that the preliminary agreement that had been discussed was that Iran had agreed not to start up the reactor for six months. And if that's the case, that wouldn't suffice. That reactor probably cannot be started up anyway during the next six months, because the Iranians are having trouble finishing the project. They're under sanctions and there's things that are missing. So they can't finish it.

In other words, if Iran had agreed not to start up the reactor for six months, that would have been pretty meaningless since they probably weren't going to be able to do that anyway.

That's why I think that in the longer term, when we look at this in a week or so, maybe in a couple of weeks, we'll look back and we'll see the French intervention is something which was constructive and positive. And it's not something that happened because a few people in a negotiating team weren't happy for one reason or another. I think there are issues here that have to be addressed.

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Brasil: um pais rico que financia os pobres americanos; o Tesouroagradece...

Não o nosso Tesouro, claro, mas o deles.

O nosso torra pelo menos 35 bilhões de dólares por ano -- repito: US $ 35.000.000.000 -- para manter essas reservas remuneradas a 2,5% ao ano, emitindo títulos da dívida pública brasileira que ele remunera a 10% na média.

Quem é o estúpido nessa história?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

WorldViews

This surprising chart shows which countries own the most U.S. debt

• BY MAX FISHER

• October 10 at 12:08 pm

It's no secret that China is the world's largest foreign holder of U.S. debt – and that Beijing is, for this reason, expressing a lot of concern about the U.S. shutdown and now possible default that could significantly devalue their investment. This chart, of foreign debt-holders by country, really drives home why China is so preoccupied with our internal squabbles. They've got $1.28 trillion riding on the U.S. economy. Move your cursor over the chart to see who holds how much debt:

The depth of China's investment in the United States is also a reminder of how closely the two economies are linked, and the degree to which any U.S. setback also harms China, which is just emerging from its own very different sort of debt crisis.

This chart is also an important reminder, though, that China is not, as it's so often described, "America's banker." China holds the largest share of U.S. debt but less than a quarter of the total $5.6 trillion in foreign-held debt.

And China's share is not the largest by a very wide margin; Japan has $1.14 billion worth, which is pretty close to China's investment. You might be surprised by that, given how little we talk about Japan's investment in U.S. Treasury securities, versus China's. While we heard a lot of similarly scary rhetoric in the 1990s about how Japan was "taking over" the United States, we've come to accept the idea that Japan investing in our economy is just a financial decision – and a vote of confidence in American wealth – rather than part of any nefarious plot to control us from afar.

When Japan's finance minister urged the U.S. to avoid defaulting on its loans this week, we took it as a serious warning, as opposed to construing as "scolding" the similar sentiments from our "Chinese bankers." Of course, the U.S. has a much friendlier political relationship with Tokyo than it does with Beijing, which goes a long way to explaining why we see it so differently, but China doesn't want to see its investment tank any more than Japan does.

The third-highest foreign holder of U.S. debt is Brazil, with $256 billion. European countries hold about $1 trillion in combined U.S. debt; $1.14 trillion if you include Russia. The largest holder of U.S. debt is, of course, the United States itself; the majority is American-owned.

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter orFacebook.

Venezuela = Iraque? - zona de guerra para o Departamento de Estado

A notícia certamente não é uma surpresa, mas talvez ajude a convencer burocratas em vários serviços diplomáticos do mundo a conceder um adicional de risco, e proteção ampliada, para quem trabalha em Caracas, ou na Venezuela, de maneira geral.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

State Dept. report for Caracas personnel: Crime level 'critical' Two U.S. embassy personnel were wounded by gunfire outside a Caracas night spot early Tuesday morning, according to the State Department. The details of the incident are unclear, but it draws attention to the Venezuelan capital's high crime rate . (Washington Post) State Dept. report for Caracas personnel: Crime level ‘critical’ By Caitlin Dewey, Published: May 28, 2013 at 5:10 pmE-mail the writer A Venezuelan soldier patrols the Petare slum in Caracas on May 23, 2013. (REUTERS/Jorge Silva) Two U.S. embassy personnel were wounded by gunfire outside a Caracas night spotearly Tuesday morning, according to the State Department. The details of the incident are unclear, but it draws attention to the Venezuelan capital’s high crime rate . According to the AP and State Department spokesman William Ostick, the two embassy workers were injured at ”some sort of social spot” — a nightclub, according to several reports in the American press, and a popular strip club called Angelus, according to local journalists. Wherever they were, they received non-life-threatening injuries and are expected to recover. Ostick would not specify the injuries. According to AP, a police spokesman said one was wounded in the leg and abdomen, and the other in the abdomen. Caracas retains the dubious distinction of being “the world’s murder capital” —Reuters reports that its murder rate, at upwards of 55.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, is one of the highest in the world. There are more than 15 million illegal weapons in the country, according to a 2011 State Department report. Crime has gotten so bad, in fact, that President Nicholas Maduro sent 3,000 soldiers into the streets to establish checkpoints earlier this month, and promised to wage war on TV shows that promote a “cult of weapons. Violence has bled from Caracas’s slums — where the State Department bans embassy employees from so much as driving, unless they’re on a highway — into its more affluent neighborhoods, like the upper-middle-class residential district where the embassy employees were injured Tuesday morning. That neighborhood, Chacao, is home to a mall and a number of government employees, both Venezuelan and American. (A 2011 report by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security says the majority of embassy personnel live in Chacao, Baruta or El Hatillo.) But even in those areas, the bureau warns, “armed robberies continue to occur regularly, day or night,” and other crimes against foreigners, such as kidnaps for ransom, have become more common. The neighborhood falls in what the U.S. Embassy in Caracas calls “the orange zone,” or an area where direct-hire personnel are discouraged from travelling after 8 p.m. and before 6 a.m. The bureau further warns diplomatic personnel not to wear valuables, use international credit cards or take public transportation in Caracas, especially to or from the airport: Embassy employees and visitors have been robbed at gunpoint while walking on the street and while driving. The high volume of vehicular traffic, combined with the poor conditions of roads, has created major traffic problems within Caracas. Armed bandits patrolling the streets on motorcycles prey on potential victims waiting at traffic lights or stuck in heavy traffic. To sum up the State Deparment’s most recent assessment for employees, “the criminal threat level for Caracas is CRITICAL.” Of course, until the State Department or a local police agency releases a more detailed statement, it’s impossible to know what happened Tuesday morning.

Grandezas e tragedias da educacao superior nos EUA: discurso de formatura - Richard Cohen

Richard Cohen

Opinion Writer

The richness of learning

By Richard Cohen, The Washington Post Blogs, May 27 E-mail the writer

President Jones, members of the faculty, assorted notables, proud parents and financially indebted graduates. I come before you on this auspicious day to say something about the degree you have just been awarded. You have been told it is not worth the papyrus it is printed on. I am here to tell you it is worth a fortune.

In preparing for this commencement speech, I assembled a file of newspaper stories about the cost of college, the burden of student debt and how much you can expect to earn in your first year after graduation — assuming, of course, that you can even find a job. The numbers are daunting. Unless you are graduating from one of those name-brand elite institutions — Harvard, Yale, etc. — you’re probably not going to make much your first year out. In fact, we now have many examples ofcommunity college graduates earning more than those with bachelor’s degrees. In Virginia, the difference can be $20,000 a year.

What’s more, people often come out of school burdened with debt — about $24,810 on average, but an astounding $41,230 in Washington, D.C., where many residents have advanced degrees. This is hardly small change, of course, but aside from Washington, we are talking the price of a new car — without the premium package. This is a debt your average young person gladly takes on without whining to Congress. I add that just to provide some perspective and get you riled up.

The figures concerning salaries and debt are not to be dismissed. But they, too, need some perspective. College, after all, is not solely about earning power — although you are forgiven for not knowing this. College, believe it or not, is about education — and that, boys and girls, is not something you can put a number on. Let me give you a word: anthropology.

This is a word I’m not sure I ever heard in high school. But when I got to college, I had to take a year of it to satisfy a science requirement. I did one semester of physical anthropology and one of cultural — and about 40 years of both ever since. I became enthralled with the study of evolution, with paleontology, with my pal Australopithecus africanus and with the “sexing” and “racing” of skulls. Give me a good skull and to this day I can give you the sex and the race of the dearly deceased. I was CSI Cohen before there was CSI anything.

I still keep up with anthropology. I try to stay somewhat current in sociology and psychology, my major and minor before I lost my way and took up journalism — and I do these things not for credit but for fun. College taught me how to have fun with knowledge. It enriched my life in ways that cannot be quantified. I came out of college with a debt, but my real debt was to my professors.

When I wanted to become a writer, I found teachers who showed me how. One of them, John Tebbel, a former newspaperman turned author, took me aside. He praised. He criticized. This is how it’s done, kid. The man changed my life.

See, this is the part of college no one talks about anymore. It’s all about numbers — what it costs and what you can earn. It’s all about a financial investment — how much in and how much out, as if value is always about money. But there’s value in the discovery of fine art or cinema or literature or. . . anthropology. And — very important — you will get an overview of the world, not just your little area but all the rest. This will make you a better citizen, which is nice, and will give you greater control of your life, which is also nice.

About a month ago, a hostess at a dinner party asked the table what college had done for them. Absolutely nothing, one person instantly responded. I braced for a cascade of negativity, but to my surprise it never came. Guest after guest praised their education and how it had made them a richer, happier person. I was gratified.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s fine for you to say, Cohen. You’ve got yours. You’re not poor and scratching for a job. True enough. But you will find truth in the cliche that money cannot buy happiness. This has been the case for thousands of years — or, as I like to put it, since Australopithecus africanus.

You can Google that.

Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive.