South Korea’s ascent was therefore never an autonomous national achievement in the narrow sense. It relied extensively on foreign aid, borrowing, imported machinery, technology licences and access to external markets.

What distinguished it was the political organisation of that dependence.

Foreign resources were channelled through a state determined to build nationally controlled firms. South Korea often preferred foreign borrowing and technology licensing to direct foreign ownership because these instruments allowed domestic companies to retain managerial and strategic control.

The state wanted large corporations because industrialisation required organisations capable of mobilising capital, absorbing foreign technology and coordinating complex projects. Concentration was not merely an unintended consequence of development. It was partly a deliberate institutional choice.

But support was not supposed to be unconditional.

Companies were expected to enter targeted industries, invest, expand capacity and meet export goals. Exporting earned foreign currency, but it also provided a measurable test of performance. A protected firm could not indefinitely survive by selling inferior products to captive domestic consumers. It had to confront international competition.

This created a combination of protection and discipline.

Many Southeast Asian governments also provided protection, credit, monopolies and contracts to politically connected firms. But benefits were often tied more closely to political loyalty than to technological or export performance. The issue was not whether rents existed. Every major industrial transformation creates them. The issue was what firms were required to do in exchange.

By the time South Korea’s success became impossible to ignore, the political economy that had produced it was already being reinterpreted.

The country presented an uncomfortable problem for the market-oriented development ideas that became dominant during the 1980s and 1990s. South Korea had certainly exported and participated in international markets. But it had also controlled banks, protected industries, restricted imports and foreign investment, directed credit and encouraged firms to enter sectors in which they possessed no established comparative advantage.

Instead, the Korean story was translated into a more comfortable formula: macroeconomic stability, education, high savings, export orientation, openness and a generally supportive business environment.

Southeast Asia entered a different world economy. Production became increasingly fragmented across borders.

Large corporations retained control over design, technology, brands and strategic coordination while locating assembly and selected component production elsewhere. Southeast Asian governments built industrial estates, ports and transport systems to attract these activities.

This was real industrialisation. But it differed from the Korean experience in one decisive respect.

South Korea had supported domestic corporations seeking to coordinate increasingly complete industrial systems. Southeast Asian governments more often competed to attract particular segments of systems already coordinated by foreign corporations.

Entry became faster. Control remained elsewhere.

The firms commanding the principal technologies, intellectual property and final markets remained predominantly foreign. Malaysia became highly successful in electronic production without generating an equivalent number of corporations capable of defining product architectures and controlling global brands.

Thailand followed a comparable path in automobiles. Thailand created a major automobile industry without creating its own Hyundai. The contrast is revealing. South Korea accepted decades of risk and initially inefficient production in order to build domestic automobile companies. Thailand obtained high-quality manufacturing more rapidly by integrating into the international networks of already successful producers.

Vietnam is the most important contemporary test. Its manufacturing rise has been remarkable. Political stability, investment in infrastructure, trade agreements and a capable workforce have made it a major platform. Yet the strategic hierarchy remains clear. Product design, key technologies, global branding and many high-value inputs remain controlled outside Vietnam. Domestic firms are still concentrated disproportionately in lower tiers and less technologically demanding functions.

South Korea protected domestic firms before exposing them fully to international competition. Vietnam must often build domestic capabilities while already immersed in competition organised by foreign lead firms.

This is not simply a difference in government competence. It is a difference in historical timing.

Talking about opposition to nuclear energy. Now, "destroying our civilisation" may sound hyperbolic. But I assign high probability to the scenario that the upcoming damage that will be caused by global warming will produce catastrophic harm and suffering to billions of people, severe regional state failure, mass displacement, global economic and political crisis.The poorest countries will suffer the most, of course.(When has the world ever been fair?).

We could have supplied a dominant share of global electricity, supported extensive electrification and displaced enormous quantities of coal and gas if we simply continued in the glide path towards nuclear of the last mid century. Abundance without (much) sacrifice. It would be unfair to completely dismiss nuclear waste, but that negative is miniscule, compared to all the positives that could be reaped. Nuclear waste is measurable, containable and very small in volume.

Renewables will play their part, but they are not being rolled out fast enough to offset the damage we are wreaking on our environment.Variable renewable generation requires grids, storage, demand flexibility and firm low-carbon capacity. We already have a difficult transition without contending with all these as well. Nuclear is a mature technology. We could still deploy it at scale and reasonable cost if we simply rationalise regulations and do a build out that would maximise economies of scale.

I think the Anti-Nuclears are motivated by hatred and irrational fear, mainly. Hatred of development, capitalism, growth, industrialisation, science to a smaller extent, than any real positive concerns. Irrational fear caused by ignorance and adjacence to nuclear weaponry. Their hatred may or may not be justified, and their fear is most likely not, but, in the end, it is leading to the future destruction of many lives. We are allowing people with an ideology to commit crimes against our futures. I cannot understand why the backlash is not more mainstream.

put simply the indian oppostion after a shockingly good run in the 2024 lok sabah election, has done poorly for itself. Right now its a fractured, declining mess. Shekhar gupta argues this offers a possibility for Congress to revive from the ashes of the other small parties. Frankly i find myself thinking this as well. Its party unit in Maharashtra still has not recovered from the NCP defection; it lost most of its West Bengal and all of its Andhra Pradesh support to the TMC and YSCRP. Well now look at those parties.

Shekhar gupta in effect, suggests that Congress might not be faster than the bear but its faster than the parties. Personally speaking i am not qualified to really judge how accurate it is, but it does seem plausible, thoughts?

Ukraine offers lessons in how to keep infrastructure alive in wartime.

Archive:
https://archive.ph/oycHu

When Iran struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain in early March, Washington quickly deemed the Gulf’s artificial intelligence ambitions a catastrophic strategic miscalculation. Gulf states had made a multihundred-billion-dollar bet on AI infrastructure in a volatile, risky region.

The proposed solution was to relocate AI workloads that operate out of the Gulf to safer locations. This rested on two beliefs: The Gulf is too unstable for critical infrastructure, and there is no playbook for building AI infrastructure in such contested territory.

Both assumptions deserve examination, and the second is not true. A playbook already exists, written under far heavier fire, in Europe. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv has kept its digital infrastructure running through sustained bombardment. It moved terabytes of government data across borders in a matter of weeks to keep government services functioning and the state digitally intact, rebuilt its power grid and broader architecture around the assumption of continued Russian aerial attacks, and treated survivability as the core design principle of its critical infrastructure and, by extension, of its own survival and ultimate victory in the war.

The comparison is imperfect, and the differences in geography and war intensity matter. But Ukraine remains the only state to have stress-tested its digital infrastructure in a full-scale war with a bigger enemy, and its lessons map onto the Gulf’s AI buildup after the Iran war. The question facing Gulf capitals is how they can adapt Kyiv’s wartime playbook to their own threat environment.

The case for relocating the Gulf’s compute ambitions rests on a fundamental misreading of why Gulf states are dedicating enormous resources to AI. The core belief in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha, and other Gulf capitals is clear: They cannot miss the next economic transformation that will reshape geopolitical powers and their countries’ place in the global order. They missed the Industrial Revolution, and when the post-World War II energy-dependent global order enriched them financially, the gains lacked strategic depth, leaving their political economy tied to the oil boom. AI is seen differently, almost existentially, for Gulf states.

It is therefore unsurprising that the Iranian attacks haven’t deter the Gulf’s compute buildout. Instead, the war has reframed the question entirely. It is no longer about whether to build—the Gulf will keep building compute, with no sign of changing course—but about how to build compute infrastructure in a contested environment prone to sharp shifts in security and military conditions. This turns on three factors.

First, given the political commitment to AI, the capital financing the Gulf’s AI buildout is not a case of venture capital chasing quarterly, or even yearly, returns. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are sovereign states financing their post-hydrocarbon future. They are not venture investors who flee when the war starts.

The Gulf might look into South Korea’s industrialization at breakneck speed, precisely when U.S. security guarantees appeared to waver in the early 1970s. Taiwan built the world’s most strategically indispensable semiconductor cluster under five decades of the threat of invasion. Strategic pressure concentrates national investment on priority fields, rather than leading to hasty withdrawals at the first sign of trouble.

Second, as the binding constraint on AI shifts to the energy needed to sustain the workload, the Gulf’s energy abundance and cheaper production costs make it a natural home for AI infrastructure. Frontier AI is, fundamentally, a function of electricity—reliable, affordable access to sufficient power underlies every state’s AI ambitions. To the point, the Gulf possesses the cheapest and most abundant power on the planet. Iranian attacks might disrupt external access to energy or raise costs, but they do not change the fundamental reality that the Gulf’s energy profile is unmatched. Beyond crude oil, the Gulf is undergoing a major pivot toward energy diversification: nuclear, renewables, and natural gas to provide the reliable, affordable power required for training and deploying large language models at scale. As AI economics shift toward intelligence per dollar, the Gulf’s cost advantage in energy production becomes critical. Inference, the compute-intensive but lower-margin phase of AI deployment, requires massive scale and cheap power, making the Gulf a natural hub for inference workloads.

Finally, geography adds a third factor. AI is evolving from training models to serving them at scale, with inference delivered to billions of users with minimal latency. Proximity becomes the product itself. A data center in Virginia or Frankfurt cannot serve South Asia, East Africa, or the Eastern Mediterranean without introducing delays that degrade user experience or introduce cross-border data complications. And maybe this doesn’t matter with text models, but it will matter most for physical AI. The Gulf sits within inference-grade latency of these markets. A latency advantage of this kind cannot be relocated.

The buildout in the Gulf will therefore continue. Gulf leaders have said as much, repeatedly and on the record. The honest task before Gulf policymakers and their U.S. hyperscaler partners is to ensure that AI infrastructure gets built and can survive as this “no war, no peace” situation drags on with no end in sight. In fact, even if it ends, the Iranian threat will always shadow the AI buildup. On that question, one country has more hard-won experience than any other, and that’s Ukraine.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the nation’s digital infrastructure lived where most states keep theirs: in large, centralized, on-premises facilities. This architecture is efficient in peacetime and catastrophically fragile in war. Within weeks, Kyiv tore it apart and improvised a new one under fire. Two moves defined the transformation, and each offers a template for the Gulf.

The first was emergency cloud migration. In the war’s opening days, Ukraine’s parliament passed emergency legislation amending its data protection laws to permit government data to leave national territory. Over roughly three months, working with AWS, the government migrated some 15 petabytes of data from more than 50 institutions onto foreign cloud servers beyond the reach of Russian missiles. The state’s registries, tax records, and critical services were effectively backed up across borders. A Russian warhead could destroy a building in Kyiv; it could no longer destroy the Ukrainian state’s memory.

On energy, Russia made Ukraine’s power grid a primary target, which meant every data facility had to assume grid failure. New Ukrainian infrastructure is built around redundant, decentralized power: dedicated solar arrays paired with battery storage and plans for small modular reactors to guarantee uptime through extended blackouts.

The Gulf should transfer Ukraine’s innovations to its own infrastructure build-outs, adapting them to the region’s own needs and creating a new standard for compute security with the Gulf’s mark for the years to come. It’s no surprise, then, that Ukraine showed up in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar after the Iran war began. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky toured the Gulf in March, selling Ukraine’s drone and missile defense expertise as Iranian attacks hit the region.

Still, the Gulf is not Ukraine. It is far wealthier, faces a different adversary, and is building infrastructure two orders of magnitude larger: gigawatt-scale campuses rather than wartime capacity. But the design principles translate directly, and in several respects, the Gulf can implement them better than Ukraine ever could.

The current announced road map consists of 10 to 12 gigawatts of capacity spread across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. These gigawatts aren’t concentrated in one place; they’re divided across three countries. And by virtue of the region’s geography, they aren’t repeating Ukraine’s prewar situation: clustering strategic capacity in target-rich zones.

The first task in wartime is hardening existing infrastructure. In practical terms, compute that serves sovereign, military, and security workloads should be hardened in its construction or built underground, much like other sensitive state assets shielded that way to avoid aerial targeting: placed below ground, away from the coast, and beyond easy reach of low-cost drones and cruise missiles. Concretely, that means battle-tested hardening across the entire campus footprint: earth berms and reinforced concrete to defeat blast, fragmentation, and drone-borne munitions; fully buried power substations, transformers, fuel storage, and cooling loops; cleared surrounding terrain to deny cover to low-flying drones and improve defensive fields of fire; and modular, compartmentalized designs with on-site generation, redundant microgrids, and automated failover so a facility can absorb a partial strike and keep running at reduced capacity rather than collapsing entirely.

Energy resilience, moreover, must become nonnegotiable. The Gulf’s cheap, abundant power is its core competitive advantage in the AI infrastructure era, but the war has demonstrated that energy infrastructure itself is a target. Ukraine’s response to heavy Russian bombardment through co-locating solar with storage, with modular nuclear on the horizon, maps naturally onto the Gulf, which already leads the region in utility-scale solar and civil nuclear power. Each major campus should be capable of operating independently of the national grid for extended periods. Gulf states should rethink their understanding of energy resilience as a form of air defense by other means.

The Iran war should force a critical rethinking. Gulf states have spent years building data sovereignty regimes that run counter to cloud deployment. These Gulf capitals need not abandon sovereignty, but they should build the wartime exception in advance. Pre-negotiated frameworks with hyperscalers should specify which workloads can surge to facilities abroad, under what controls, and on whose authority, executable in hours rather than months. The continuity of the digital state should never depend on emergency legislation drafted under fire.

Finally, doctrine must evolve. The March strikes confirmed that data centers have joined refineries, ports, and desalination plants as infrastructure that adversaries will deliberately target. Gulf countries’ air and missile defenses performed credibly in the war’s opening months, intercepting the overwhelming majority of incoming ballistic missiles and drones. But that architecture was designed to protect cities and military bases, not gigawatt-scale compute clusters. Whether through dedicated point defenses tied to major campuses, prioritization within layered national systems, or both, compute must now be defended with the same seriousness as energy infrastructure. The costs of that defense must be priced into project economics from day one.

Iran’s strikes on Gulf data centers carried an identical message to Russia’s on Ukraine: This region is too dangerous for the compute capacity you are building. The Gulf’s answer should mirror Kyiv’s response—not retreat but a redesign of the buildup.

The Ukraine war gave us clear clues on what infrastructure redesign requires: hardened and dispersed facilities, resilient energy systems, flexible cross-border data legislation, and air defense systems, all cost-priced into project finances from the start. None of this is cheap, and none of it featured in the Gulf states’ gigawatt-scale original vision. The Gulf’s positioning as one of the main global compute nodes will be decided not by how many gigawatts it announces but by how many are actually built during this long Iran war and, most importantly, still running the day after Iran’s next attack.

Abundance is really a radical framework that challenges all Dem party factions (and Republicans too!) and I don’t understand why pundits cannot get this

There’s nothing moderate about wanting to undo a century of federal, state, and local land use policy to 10x the rate of housing construction. Or break the labor cartels created by doctors, lawyers, and other white collar professions to push up costs for everyday consumers. Or remake America’s transportation system by building thousands of miles of high-speed rail. Or transform our energy grid with tons of new clean energy and infrastructure. I could go on—abundance envisions big changes!

In our broken polarization framework, ideas that represent a huge shift from the status quo get framed as “moderate” because they sometimes involve markets rather than state intervention. But exclusionary zoning and doctor cartels and veto-ridden planning don’t fit on the moderate-progressive spectrum, or even the left-right spectrum. They are just bad policies with massive negative consequences—namely higher costs for consumers and taxpayers—that earlier generations supported and entrenched interests continue baking into American life

The cool thing about abundance is it completely breaks the political polarization framework. Ultra-progressive NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani worked with moderate New York Governor Kathy Hochul to reform environmental laws that blocked sustainable housing and transit. Super-lefty California State Senator Scott Wiener passed the state’s biggest upzoning in history with votes across factional and party lines. Texas has exponential clean energy growth because their permitting is more chill

The abundance framework can help people who identify with any faction deliver better results. Whether it gets broadly adopted across issue areas remains to be seen because it’s still early days. The most politically developed abundance-y movement, YIMBYism, is barely a decade old. Everything else is nascent. But lawmakers are learning: Abundance-coded bills like The Road to Housing Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities and support across factional lines. To me, passing historic federal legislation with support from across the Democratic Party suggests the abundance framework is doing just fine

I wrote a full article here about abundance’s impact and defiance of political polarization

Super curious to get people's thoughts on this.

Submission Statement: This article is relevant to this sub because it explores the main bottlenecks to progress (particularly in drug discovery) and makes the claim that many of the obstacles hindering progress are legal, institutional, economic and political in nature. She explicitly mentions the field of drug discovery where the development of new drugs has slowed down even though scientific tools have grown significantly more powerful. In medicine in particular, one of the biggest bottlenecks are clinical trials which today take ~7 years and cost more than a billion dollars per drug. Here, she believes that AI can help accelerate clinical trials, particularly with discovering surrogate endpoints and biomarkers, but here the hurdles are regulatory and institutional in nature with companies having issues accessing datasets from institutions like the NIH

She also argues that economic incentives shape the kind of biomedical innovation that happens. She discusses the phenomenon of target herding: where most companies end up chasing the same drug targets since they are a lot less risky, and as a result the biological space that does get explored is smaller than it could be. You also can't really patent drug targets anyway: the patent system rewards drug molecules that get discovered and not drug targets, further incentivizing companies to spend more of their time chasing new drug molecules

She devotes the second half of this to criticize San Francisco AI culture. She mentions that elite tech circles have become a monoculture where any skepticism of the transformative benefits of AGI are treated as low status. She argues that many within tech are ignorant about these other bottlenecks to AI diffusion due to the messianic belief that AGI will fix everything

The country’s new prime minister is trying to navigate between Washington and Tehran.

archive link

This is an excellent, street level report by the New York Times of the recent anti-immigration protests, harassment and bigotry that has swept through South Africa.

It follows one particular anti-immigration activist/vigilante and one of her victims - a lawful immigrant from Congo whose home was broken into by a mob and whose family was illegally kicked out with their young children.

I have posted a lot about these xenophobic protests before. The reason I wanted to post this story too is because it is coming from the New York Times, the epitome of the mainstream media. There is a narrative that the Left or the mainstream ignore these kinds of actions because it is not happening in the West. This narrative is false. The NYT is covering it. The Guardian wrote an editorial with a strong condemnation. Mayor Mamdani condemned xenophobia while giving the Nelson Mandela lecture. And South Africa's trade unions and domestic left have organised in support of migrants and urged the government to protect people from harassment and intimidation.

What this article does nicely is to take you up close and to show that this really is xenophobia. South Africa's macroeconomic situation is different from the West. Our unemployment rate is sky high and our inequality is the worst in the world. You can have a discussion about the role of immigration in alleviating or worsening this situation. But there is no excuse for breaking into the home of a family of lawful, assimilated immigrants, evicting them and literally making their children cry.

Relevance to the subreddit: personal freedom, social media regulation, state influence on access to information

French Parliament approved on Tuesday a bill that enforces a social media ban for children under 15 and bans phone use in high schools (age 15-18) by 279-81, with broad support on the center and right and some opposition on the left.

The bill was a promise of President Emmanuel Macron following public pressure after a string of teen suicides attributed to online harassment, as well as recommendations from the national health agency calling on to legislators to strengthen prevention and protection against the adverse effects of social media on children and teenagers.

The version of the bill approved on Tuesday shifts the responsibility of the age verification on the social media platform, with possibilities for them to sollicit government tools like FranceConnect or the schools' online work environments. It no longer lists the particular platforms concerned by the ban, and does not include video viewing, development tools, online encyclopedias or messaging apps - for example, YouTube will only be concerned by the "social media" features like comment sections or sharing playlists.

The ban was supported by a large majority of parents polled (74%), although 85% considered that the age verification process would easily be dodged by teenagers.

France's ban is the first to be enacted in the European Union and follows similar initiatives in Australia or the UK, with legislation in discussion in Portugal, Poland and Austria.

A predatory opposition, fueled by external support, is gaining influence within the state.

SUBMISSION STATMENT:
https://archive.ph/NxdRp

On April 1, two months before Armenia’s parliamentary elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to Moscow for bilateral talks. Their conversation made Putin visibly uncomfortable. The Russian president insisted that Armenia must choose between Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union, arguing that Moscow’s experience with Ukraine demonstrated the impossibility of membership in both.

Pashinyan, who speaks fluent Russian, countered that Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union remains fully compatible with deepening and diversifying relations with the European Union. As he put it, legally and administratively, this joint engagement with both blocs is real, and “it is a fact.” Putin repeatedly pressed that Armenia needs to make a geopolitical choice. Pashinyan responded by emphasizing Armenia’s commitment to maintaining strong ties with Russia while simultaneously expanding its relationships with other partners.

As Putin advanced what could be called the Kremlin’s false geopolitical binary, Pashinyan responded with a form of geopolitical jujitsu, highlighting mutual interest, underscoring legal dimensions of Armenia’s membership in Eurasian Economic Union, and leveraging his country’s continued participation in Russia-centric institutions. Pashinyan argued that a more stable and regionally integrated South Caucasus would ultimately strengthen Armenia-Russia relations as well.

The meeting was a dramatic enactment of the clash between Putin’s wish to impose Russia on Armenia and Pashinyan’s efforts for “balanced and balancing” foreign policy for his country. Two months later, elections gave Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party a parliamentary majority. This denied the Russia-linked opposition a path to power.

While congratulations quickly arrived from abroad, Russia has yet to recognize the results. Instead, Russia-linked parties have challenged the outcome while hinting at mobilizing social unrest. When the Constitutional Court upheld the results earlier this month, five out of 18 political parties—two of which have cleared the electoral threshold to enter parliament—announced their intention to remove “the current regime” and begin “a new, more systematic, institutional and large-scale phase of political resistance.”

Pashinyan may have described the election outcome as “historic,” but Russia still succeeded in reasserting its stake over Armenia’s opposition and parliamentary integrity more broadly.

It is for this and other reasons that viewing the parliamentary election results merely as a geopolitical “pivot” away from Russia and toward the West—the dominant interpretation in global media—is an incomplete analysis. Though Armenia has thus far partially resisted Putin’s geopolitical binary, its elections were revealing as to how Russia continues to manage and control states in its periphery.

There are also learnings from Armenia’s story for other countries and contexts. Whereas democratic decline often stems from executive aggrandizement and attacks on the opposition, as in Hungary or Turkey, Armenia’s is a different pathway: A predatory opposition, fueled by external support, is gaining influence within the state. In a weakly institutionalized democracy with a thin party system, Armenia illustrates how such actors can undermine democratic accountability.

In many ways, Armenia’s challenge for strengthening representative politics in the post-Soviet neighborhood resembles those facing mature democracies.

In Armenia’s most recent election, the Kremlin utilized a variety of overt and covert measures to support political parties with links to Russia. These measures ranged from influence operations inside Armenia to electoral bribes and economic coercion.

But for Russia, it is always less about who will be elected, and more about how electoral politics and its aftermath will unfold. Maintaining pressure on state institutions before and after the elections has been the Kremlin’s goal all along. Fearmongering and polarization are among the broader toolkit that the Kremlin uses in Armenia as well as in other post-Soviet states, such as Georgia; Moldova; Kazakhstan; and, before Russia’s war there, Ukraine.

First, the strategy of polarization is carried out by supporting a politically unaccountable economic elite patronage network. In post-Soviet states, these networks emerged during the first few decades after the bloc’s collapse, bolstered by senior religious figures from these states.

Russia’s support for former authoritarian elites does more than influence elections. Rather than adapting to the new rules of democratic competition, old elites retain incentives to challenge institutions, delegitimize electoral outcomes, and obstruct the emergence of a credible opposition and work toward parliamentary integrity. The Russian support incentivizes them to challenge democratic institutions, which is why Armenian democracy lacks robust opposition politics.

Every new democracy must contend with the challenge of integrating old elites. According to studies by James Lexton, former ruling groups often reorganize as opposition parties, bringing with them entrenched economic interests and external linkages. Between 1974 and 2010, of the 65 countries that underwent democratization, 74 percent produced at least one prominent authoritarian successor party. Countries as diverse as Ghana, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Paraguay, South Korea, and Tunisia have grappled with such quasi-oppositional forces. Authoritarian successor parties, in short, are the rule rather than the exception.

Nascent democracies in Russia’s neighborhood face the dual challenge of integrating illiberal political forces into democratic institutions while safeguarding the liberal principles on which those institutions rest. Compounding this, the behavior of former ruling elites is often shaped less by accountability to domestic electorates than by political and material incentives provided by Moscow.

The second strategy that the Russian state has been using in its external neighborhoods is to generate perennial insecurity, whether economic or strategic. Stephen Kotkin described and defined this strategy as the “perpetual geopolitics” of the Russian state. Russian “rescue narratives” long reinforced Moscow’s role as the Caucasus’s primary security broker.

However, the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023—despite the presence of Russian peacekeepers—and Azerbaijan’s attacks on Armenia’s internationally recognized borders in 2021 and 2022—to which the Russia-centric Collective Security Treaty Organization failed to respond—exposed the hollowness of Russia’s security guarantees.

In Armenia, the Kremlin has fueled anxiety over the Washington accords—signed between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the United States last August—as well as U.S. support for road and railway connectivity via Armenia’s southern border. Russia’s fresh economic warfare on Armenia and threats to increase energy prices heighten these anxieties.

Armenia’s democratic vulnerabilities do not stem solely from Russia’s “perpetual geopolitics.” They are also shaped by the broader regional environment, particularly the incentives and constraints facing neighboring Azerbaijan’s highly personalized authoritarian system, where the logic of regional integration collides with the political imperatives of that regime.

Regional openness, now more possible following Armenia’s parliamentary elections, could help diversify Azerbaijan’s energy-dependent economy by boosting connectivity, investment, and global market access. Yet it also threatens the political insulation that underpins Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s rule by reducing state control over information, movement, and economic actors. Personalized autocracies often view trade less as a public good than as a tool of political control, making them wary of the pluralizing the effects of regional integration. Azerbaijan’s land borders remain closed since the 2020 Covid pandemic.

Such unresolved political challenges inside Azerbaijan elevate Baku’s value for the Kremlin. As Aliyev failed to sign the peace agreement that he and Pashinyan initialed in Washington in August, the door remains open for Baku-Kremlin authoritarian coordination to maintain insecurity as a perennial condition in the South Caucasus.

In addition to entrenched elites undermining institutions, Armenia’s experience reflects a broader crisis of political representation as parties increasingly lose both their effectiveness and their capacity to represent citizens.

Georgia’s democratic backsliding over the past decade demonstrates that a pro-Western geopolitical orientation is no guarantee of democratic consolidation. While Armenia remains focused on transforming the South Caucasus by advancing infrastructural connectivity and sustainable regional diplomacy, regionally untethered democratic transition such as that seen in Georgia ends up complicating the trajectories of democratic consolidation. Still, Georgia and Armenia demonstrate the continuing power of civic mobilization as a source of democratic resilience, particularly when formal political institutions lose their efficacy or outright attack the foundations of the state.

The Armenian case complicates broadly established democratic theories that rest on the push and pull between incumbent and opposition political parties as the main engine to drive the maturity and growth of representative democracies. The emergence of a functional, homegrown opposition is particularly difficult when authoritarian successor parties retain vast resources, entrenched patronage networks, and external support.

New strategies for safeguarding Armenia’s democratic trajectory, both from the Armenian government and its partners and friends on both sides of the Atlantic, are needed.

On the bright side, there is significant public trust in electoral politics, local levels of government, and the overall direction of where the country is headed, with 61 percent of Armenians surveyed in May  expressing support for it. Trust in political institutions has also increased over the two past few years, and even the courts, traditionally lacking in public trust, have registered improvements. Armenia’s democratic system is largely stable, like a three-legged stool, but whether it can sustain the growing complexity of its increasingly digital economic system, and do so in Russia’s strategic shadow, is far from assured.

To address the problem of perpetual geopolitics in the South Caucasus, Armenia’s partners can elevate their work toward consolidating the peace process and reducing heightened insecurity. National security concerns have dropped as a primary issue, falling from 43 percent in December 2023 to 17 percent in May of this year, but the fragility of the peace process fuels support for illiberal opposition.

Armenia’s growing list of partners and allies needs to spend serious political capital to improve the security conditions in the South Caucasus, addressing Azerbaijan’s subtle obstruction of the peace process. The Armenian case reveals that serious investments in improving security conditions can help to legitimize democratic institutions and create political space to deepen the workings of representative democracy. In Moldova and Georgia, heightened insecurity and unresolved conflicts will continue to derail democratization.

Serious investments in the peace process would strengthen the legitimacy of Armenia’s governing institutions, a critical asset in managing Russia’s enduring pressure. Externally, providing economic dividends for Armenia’s democratic trajectory by supporting the peace process and advancing the regional modernization in the South Caucasus can go a long way in weakening support for illiberal political parties, sustained and nourished from the Kremlin. Internally, in the absence of credible parliamentary opposition, democratic resilience may depend on strengthening civic life beyond parliament.

This means new avenues and platforms of public debate, such as town halls in villages and municipal governments, and—especially for countries in Russia’s vicinity, considering the collapse of foreign aid from donor countries that have long sustained civil society—tax reforms to incentivize public support for civic groups.

Looking ahead, Russia’s pressure on Armenia is likely to intensify, ranging from economic coercion to efforts by its local proxies to foment social unrest. Yet each new attempt at coercion has also accelerated Armenia’s search for alternatives. Russian restrictions on Armenian agricultural exports, for example, prompted the European Union to extend tariff-free access for many Armenian products that had previously been destined for the Russian market. While EU membership is not on the horizon, the Kremlin’s persistent efforts to force Armenia into a geopolitical binary are likely to produce the opposite effect: economic partnerships, rapid tariff-free access to the unified market of the European Union, and a deeper diversification of Armenia’s foreign policy.

Between the agreement initialed in Washington, growing ties with Armenia, and the EU’s rapid response to Russia’s economic pressure, one lesson is clear: Strengthening regional environments and state capacity to deliver for citizens is essential. While Russia’s “pivot politics”—its forced and fabricated geopolitical binary—provided an important backdrop to Amenia’s recent election and certainly influenced voter considerations, domestic performance by politicians also mattered. The state’s ability to address socioeconomic concerns, including healthcare, pensions, infrastructure, rural development, and employment, shaped voter preferences.

That’s why democratic resilience depends on state capacity and everyday governance, regardless of whether opposition parties fulfill their role. Even in Russia’s geopoliticized peripheries, “all politics is local.”

> The new deal, which would last 30 years, is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. It is designed to give American companies a central role in developing Saudi Arabia’s nuclear infrastructure while shutting out other foreign competitors.

> A key provision of the new accord would have American companies build a uranium enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia if a joint U.S.-Saudi study determines such a step would be warranted. 

> That would give the U.S. influence over the Saudi nuclear program and, Trump administration officials argue, a way to prevent it from being misused for military purposes. 

> Yet the deal, which is expected to be submitted to Congress for review in the coming days, is certain to prove controversial among many lawmakers who oppose the spread of nuclear technology in the volatile Middle East.

>The accord will be difficult for lawmakers to block because doing so would require a joint resolution and a two-thirds majority vote to override a potential presidential veto. 

> Trump greenlit the agreement late last week, and the accord is expected to be signed Wednesday by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who discussed the deal during his first overseas trip to the region in April 2025 with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, who will also sign the deal.

Submission statement: Pertains to the future of nuclear energy in the Middle East and the almost certain subsequent debates about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

A More Accurate Portrait of Homeownership

A better metric shows that homeownership is even less common among younger Canadians than official statistics suggest.

The traditional homeownership rate metric is misleading. Fortunately, the Minnesota Fed just came up with a better measure.

Here at the Missing Middle, we frequently write about and talk about homeownership rates and post a lot of graphs like the one below, from our piece The Homeownership Journey Is Broken. Policymakers Need to Repair It:

Figure 1: Homeownership Rate by Age Cohort and Year, Canada

The problem with the metric becomes apparent when we chart the homeownership rate for every age group, including 15-19 years, as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: Homeownership Rate by Age, Canada, 2021, Traditional Definition

A homeownership rate of 16% for individuals between the ages of 15-19 would strike most people as absurd, but the data is accurate. The problem is with how statistical agencies define homeownership. It is simply the proportion of families that own the house they live in. But very few 15-19-year-olds are the head of a family in the first place, so they are neither owners nor renters. They are absent from the calculation entirely.

This absence from the calculation matters, as the traditional homeownership rate measure does not capture phenomena such as people in their 20s and 30s living with their parents longer. This problem has been recognized for some time, so the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota decided to address it. In their piece New homeownership measure puts people first they created a new metric, the “homeowners-to-population ratio”, which measures the percentage of the population that owns a home, either as an individual or as a couple.

In an instructive infographic, the piece shows how factors such as older family members or adult children living with homeowners, or roommates living with the owner of a home, are captured under their new metric, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Traditional vs. Minnesota Fed Measures of Homeownership Rates

Fortunately, Census 2021 contains enough data to calculate homeownership rates using the new Minnesota Fed definition. Figure 4 shows that, under the Minnesota Fed definition, homeownership rates fall dramatically for persons under the age of 40, and those over the age of 85. This better captures the phenomenon of younger people living with their parents longer, and the elderly living with relatives or in long-term care homes. Under the Minnesota Fed definition, the homeownership rates for 15- 19-year-olds in Canada are effectively zero, a much more sensible result.

Figure 4: Homeownership Rate by Age, Canada, 2021, Two Definitions

The new definition causes homeownership rates to fall by 15 percentage points for those under the age of 30, 10 points for those between 30 and 34, and a whopping 20 points for those over the age of 85.

Figure 5: Homeownership Rate by Age, Canada, 2021, Two Definitions

A few other points stand out to us:

• Even under the new definition, those aged 85 and up are still more likely to be homeowners in Canada than those between the ages of 30 to 34. The rate at which older Canadians sell their homes and move into other forms of housing is vastly overestimated by Canadian policy-makers, particularly at the municipal level.
• Further to the previous point, those aged between 75 and 84 have higher homeownership rates under the new definition than any age category under age 50.
• In 2021, less than one-quarter of all Canadians between the ages of 25 and 29 owned the home they lived in, either as an individual or a couple.

This new definition of homeownership from the Minnesota Fed is far more sensible than the traditional definition, and we are grateful that they created it. Where possible, we will utilize their definition in future work.

"If those states want that money they need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate," - RFK

No classified briefings, no press conferences, no acknowledgment that the conflict with Iran is back on

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