A tough call in the Arctic. For months, Norway’s Port of Kirkenes has been negotiating with the Chinese state-owned shipping firm COSCO (not to be confused with an American big-box retailer) on a long-term lease to operate part of the port. The deal would include significant investments in Kirkenes.

COSCO is massive: Its container fleet has more capacity than any other shipping company in the world, and it holds major stakes in ports in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United States.

The deal looks sweet for Kirkenes—but it might fall through.

Earlier this month, Norway’s minister of justice said the government was prepared to block it; the country’s center-right opposition party has asked Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store to intervene; and as Gahr Store visited  Beijing this week—meeting with President Xi Jinping and a delegation of Norwegian business leaders—there was no mention of Kirkenes at all. What’s going on here?

Kirkenes isn’t an ordinary European port. It’s above the Arctic Circle, only a 20-minute drive from Russia and 53 nautical miles from the Russian Port of Pechenga. And ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Kirkenes and ports like it have become more strategically important.

At the same time, Moscow and Beijing have been working more closely together in the Arctic; and according to Norway’s security service, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to build up its position and intelligence activities there. COSCO itself, meanwhile, has links to the CCP—every COSCO ship carries a party official—and even, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, links to the Chinese military.

As Martin Wolf emphasized on The Signal earlier this year, security concerns like these have become a primary focus for the U.S. and its European allies in international trade—especially trade with China.

After the fall of Soviet communism more than 30 years ago, the West’s priorities in global commerce had been opening new markets and increasing trade around the world. But as geopolitical competition with China has been heating up in recent years, the economics of deals like the Kirkenes lease—however sweet—are becoming less important than their implications for global and national security.

—Michael Bluhm

A big bet on the Russian border. The Ukrainians stunned the world on the morning of August 6 by, of all things, invading Russia—crossing over their northeastern border into the Russian Federation’s Kursk region. At the same time, the Russians continued to take territory in Ukraine’s East and threaten the key transportation hub of Pokrovsk. In the U.S. and Europe, meanwhile, the Ukrainians have been pressing the case that the Kursk incursion showed it could win on the battlefield—and that they should, accordingly, now be free to use weapons from Western powers to attack inside Russia.

All very shocking and disorienting. What does it mean for the war? Today, Robert Hamilton looks at the risks and rewards of Kyiv’s unexpected gamble—and how it’s changing interpretations of the conflict in Ukraine, in the West, and not least, in Russia.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Sylvanshine.’ Oakland-based guitarist and composer Chuck Johnson conjures other worlds, with cathedrals of shimmering guitar. Here, on his new album Sun Glories, Johnson is supported by the saxophonist Cole Pulice; together, they evoke the great outdoors on a beautiful morning.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: The Contest Over National Security. In April 2023, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave a speech outlining Washington’s new economic strategy. To have the National Security Advisor, not the Treasury Secretary, hold forth on economic policy might seem strange—but it’s a sign of how economic issues have become part of the American national-security brief. Sullivan said that the White House wants a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Domestic economic policy, in other words, isn’t separate from the United States’ “security competition” with rival powers—especially China.

Last week, Sullivan made the point to the Financial Times that the U.S. isn’t the only country linking economic policy with national security. “The role of national security in trade and investment policy and strategy is rising everywhere,” he said.

Meanwhile, the American administration is preparing to impose 25 percent tariffs on Chinese cargo cranes, citing the risk of the Chinese government using them to spy on American harbor operations. President Joe Biden has also promised to put some $20 billion into bringing crane manufacturing back to the States. And the 2022 Chips and Science Act is subsidizing American and allied countries’ semiconductor-chip industries to the tune of $39 billion.

But these moves haven’t angered only Beijing. As the Financial Times reports, Tokyo is unhappy with Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion takeover of U.S. Steel—opposition Biden has motivated on national-security grounds.

From one perspective, the question may be why national security now increasingly includes economic security—but from another, it might be why it wouldn’t have before?

The answer to which, according to Peter Roady in his new book, The Contest Over National Security: FDR, Conservatives, and the Struggle to Claim the Most Powerful Phrase in American Politics, is: It did—for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the 1930s, Roady writes, President Roosevelt made the case that national security encompassed protection not only from foreign threats but from economic want, as well. Roosevelt’s understanding of national security never won out; his successors developed a much more limited national-security state, putting military strength above all else. But while Biden hasn’t entirely revived Roosevelt’s vision, he’s speaking Roosevelt’s language.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Before the Lightning Strike.’ This track—by Liew Niyomkarn, from her new album In All Possible Places at Once—blends field recording with electronics to build anticipation of the lightning strike in its title … thought it doesn’t resolve. Niyomkarn is from Thailand but currently based in Brussels. Her music draws you into a natural world, even—maybe especially—if you live in an urban one.

—Brendan Hasenstab

The non-ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. On September 1, the Israeli military found the bodies of six hostages in tunnels under the Gaza Strip. Hamas had recently shot each of them multiple times—almost a year after capturing them during the October 7 attack, in which the group killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 others prisoner.

Since the discovery, there’s been massive pressure on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach an agreement with Hamas to secure the return of the remaining hostages. The day after the bodies were found, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Israel, for a general strike called by the country’s largest trade union, to protest the Netanyahu government’s failure to get the hostages back—despite months of negotiations.

Israel’s political elites have also publicly pushed Netanyahu to make a deal. Israel’s military commanders, meanwhile, have said for some time that they have largely finished their operations in Gaza, as ordered by the cabinet.

Hamas, too, is under pressure to stop the fighting—from Palestinians, tens of thousands of whom (more than 40,000, according Gaza Health Ministry) have been killed in Israeli strikes with much of the Gaza Strip now in ruins. Hamas itself has lost most of its troops.

So why haven’t the two sides come to an agreement?

Media reports say there are critical sticking points in the talks—above all, on the future presence of Israeli troops in Gaza and on the role of Hamas in running it. But this is a conflict with major geopolitical stakes. And as can be the case with such a conflict, the direct combatants aren’t the only parties to the talks.

The United States, Egypt, and Qatar have long been mediating these negotiations, and the upcoming U.S. presidential elections appear to be a key consideration. The American administration has strong political reasons to reach a ceasefire soon: A deal could help the election prospects of Vice President Kamala Harris—as bringing hostages back would play well among many voters who support Israel, while stopping the fighting would do likewise among those who support Palestine.

The elections could also factor into Netanyahu’s calculations, though, as he’s had far better relations in recent years with Republicans than Democrats—and he might well imagine he’ll get a deal more to his liking later, if Donald Trump wins in November. It’s not clear, meanwhile, what Egypt and Qatar are saying to Hamas.

—Michael Bluhm

Manufacturing the weapons of the new Cold War. The device you’re reading these words on contains maybe the most important military technology in the world: the semiconductor chip. Not only does it power critical drivers of the emerging global economy, such as AI and big data; every piece of advanced military hardware relies on these little wafers—typically, thousands of them.

So in October 2022, the United States imposed a ban on exports of top-end chips and chip-making equipment to China, aiming to slow its economic and defense growth. Since then, the U.S. has struck deals with all five manufacturers of cutting-edge chips to build new plants in the United States—announcing the fifth and final of them, with South Korea’s SK Hynix, in early August.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has been building up its own semiconductor industry—and Huawei, the country’s leading chip firm, recently said it had developed a chip as good as any made in the West. So who’s got the upper hand here? Today, Chris Miller looks at the state of play in the struggle for supremacy over the technology that could determine the coming balance of global power.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Camouflage.’ From The Primordial Pieces (2024), here’s the pianist and composer Leo Chadburn with a kaleidoscopic piano piece that swirls and swoops, dives and shifts in alternate time signatures. The song might give you the sensation of whirling through the clouds. It features just one real chord change, which appears only briefly before disappearing into the churn.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Putin’s War on Ukraine. On August 6, when Ukraine launched its incursion into the Kursk region, it was the first time Russia had been invaded since the Second World War—and a dramatic twist in the current war. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had been hoping to conquer Ukrainian territory, not lose Russian territory. How did he get here?

As Anatol Lieven noted in 2022, three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin believed that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were bound together historically in a common, great civilization. The Ukrainian state may not have wanted to see their country under Russian rule; but the Ukrainian state, in Putin’s view, was after all run by a fascist clique that had little to do with everyday Ukrainians. So why wouldn’t everyday Ukrainians greet the Russian army with flowers?

Samuel Ramani’s new book, Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution, takes a complementary view: Putin’s fundamental motivation, Ramani says, was to counter the “color revolutions” in neighboring countries. If Putin could extend Russian hegemony over Ukraine, he could not only reverse its “Euromaidan” uprising of 2014 but ultimately undo its “Orange Revolution” of 2004, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003, and the entire pattern of nationalist-democratic revolutions in the region.

Putin’s counter-revolutionary stance is popular in Russia, Ramani says, because it has “historical legitimacy”—a broad resonance with Russians’s common sense of their country’s historical identity.

In the nineteenth century, Tsar Alexander I earned the moniker “Policeman of Europe” for combating revolutionary forces and mores. In the twentieth, the Soviet Union—far from exporting revolution—was a force of reaction through the Warsaw Pact: The Soviets crushed popular uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. That counter-revolutionary tradition survived the fall of the U.S.S.R., too: During the constitutional crisis of 1993, Russia’s acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, warned that ongoing unrest in the streets would turn Russia into a “huge concentration camp.”

Of course, the counter-revolutionary tradition would be nothing without another of Russia’s traditions: the revolutionary tradition. That may be less visible in Russia at the moment, but Putin evidently doesn’t like seeing it among his neighbors.

—Gustav Jönsson