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The great-power competition between the United States and China is a defining feature of the first part of this century, but there’s little agreement on how it should be characterized. Some call it an ‘enduring rivalry’ analogous to the one between Germany and Britain prior to the last century’s two world wars. Others worry that America is like Sparta (the dominant power) and China is like Athens (the rising power) in the 5th century BC: the two are ‘destined for war’. The problem, of course, is that a belief in the inevitability of conflict can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

‘Enduring rivalry’ itself is a misleading term. Just think of all the phases the Sino-American relationship has gone through since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. In the 1950s, American and Chinese soldiers were killing each other on the Korean peninsula. In the 1970s, after US President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, the two countries cooperated closely to counterbalance the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, economic engagement increased, and the US supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Not until after 2016 did we enter the current phase of great-power competition, with one US official describing China as a ‘pacing threat’—meaning ‘the only country that can pose a systemic challenge’ to America ‘economically, technologically, politically and militarily.’

For the first time, the United States is facing two major nuclear powers, whose vital national security interests are in competition with the U.S. Both China and Russia have the means to threaten U.S. national security, he said. "But war with either is neither inevitable nor imminent." Fighting a war with Russia and China simultaneously would be very difficult, he added. A high state of readiness and modernization will deter aggression, and the fiscal year 2024 budget request of $842 billion will ensure that the joint force remains the most lethal and capable military in the world, he said. "There is nothing more expensive than fighting a war. And preparing for war is also very expensive, but fighting a war is the most expensive. Preparing for war will deter that war," he said.

Milley outlined global security efforts by the United States and its allies and partners. Security assistance for Ukraine should continue, as it is in the interest of national security, he said. Iran, he said, has taken actions to improve its capabilities to produce a nuclear weapon, he said. "From the time of an Iranian decision, Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon in less than two weeks. And it would only take several more months to produce an actual nuclear weapon," Milley said.

Innovation is key to strong economics, but where there is a lack of intellectual property rights and a high risk of counterfeiting, there is a reluctance to invest and innovate and, as a result, huge potential losses to a country’s economy.

Strong IPR has a clear positive impact on innovation and economic growth

This article looks at the wider economic impacts caused by high levels of counterfeiting, and how these impacts negatively affect all levels of society. The potential for physical harm to consumers, accidental or intentional, of counterfeit goods is clear. The results can be devastating, heartbreaking and even fatal. The physical dangers of counterfeits have been covered in previous Red Points articles. Similarly, the damage counterfeiting causes to legitimate brands is unquestionable. This analysis looks instead at broad national and global economic impacts of this illegal industry, and attempts to bring light to the range of harms caused by illegal counterfeiting. Lost tax revenue and economic activity

A key reason society suffers from the presence of counterfeiting is the lost potential tax revenue. A group of people working within a sector of organised crime such as counterfeiting is extremely unlikely to declare earnings of their illegal enterprise to the government. The amount of sales tax that nations lose out on globally each year is estimated to be from $70bn to $89bn, with an additional loss of $8bn to $22bn from other taxes. This is money that could be going into hospitals, roads and schools in order to keep citizens healthy, to facilitate economic growth in a country and to promote education and future innovation, but which instead finds itself in the hands of criminal organizations.

When the pandemic struck, the impact on the courts was immediate and far-reaching: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared a “statewide judicial emergency” and extended filing deadlines. Virginia’s Supreme Court issued an order suspending nonessential proceedings in circuit and district courts. The Iowa Supreme Court announced that it was pushing back criminal trials, while Alabama’s Supreme Court suspended in-person court proceedings.

Because criminal defendants have a constitutional right to face their accusers, criminal trials — unlike civil and family law cases — generally could not be conducted remotely. And amid fears of superspreader events, jury trials in cramped quarters seemed especially unwise.

It’s easy to construct climate disasters. You just find a current, disconcerting trend and project it into the future, while ignoring everything humanity could do to adapt. For instance, one widely reported study found that heat waves could kill thousands more Americans by the end of the century if global warming continues apace—but only if you assume people won’t use more air conditioning. Yes, the climate is likely to change, but so is human behavior in response.

Adaptation doesn’t make the cost of global warming go away entirely, but it does reduce it dramatically. Higher temperatures will shrink harvests if farmers keep growing the same crops, but they’re likely to adapt by growing other varieties or different plants altogether. Corn production in North America has shifted away from the Southeast toward the Upper Midwest, where farmers take advantage of longer growing seasons and less-frequent extreme heat. When sea levels rise, governments build defenses—like the levees, flood walls and drainage systems that protected New Orleans from much of Hurricane Ida’s ferocity this year.

And finally, let’s talk about climate change. This is a real threat to the world, and one that we haven’t dealt with yet. But there are a number of reasons to think that the doomer case is overdone.

For one thing, recent climate models have  most of the worst-case scenarios for warming. Although it’ll be very difficult to hold warming below the 1.5 degrees generally considered “safe”, there’s  that we can hold warming below the 2 degree level, which is around the point where words like “catastrophic” start to make sense:

Data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) show Canada is capturing less than half of its technological potential, allowing groundbreaking research and innovations to sit unused or be scooped up by foreign companies. Canadian researchers generate far more research in areas such as electronics, information communication technologies, chemicals, and biopharmaceuticals than the industry is patenting, based on the data in the WIPO report. “This shows significant gaps between academic outputs and what industry can commercialize in sectors like electronics, information communication technology, semiconductors and optics, and biopharmaceuticals, which are all highly specialized sectors with technologies that have the potential to be highly lucrative for the firms that commercialize them,” Lawrence Zhang (photo at left), head of policy at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation’s Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness, said in a commentary. For example, Canada filed 41,200 patents on information and communication technologies from 2001 to 2020, according to the WIPO report. But the number of potential patents Canada should be expected to have, based on its scientific publications, was 76,900.

Likewise, Canada had 39,400 patents on “biopharma” for the same period, compared with a potential of 90,900 patents. For chemicals, Canada had 12,100 patents compared with a potential of 23,800 patents. There are two possible reasons for this disparity between actual and potential patents, Zhang said. The first could be that Canadian academics are publishing research papers that are misaligned with what the Canadian industry needs. If this is the case, more should be done to realign university research toward industry needs, he said.

Republican China hawks have a problem. They're eager to sell us on the notion that China is, as old GOP hand Newt Gingrich puts it, "the greatest threat to a free America that we have faced in our lifetime." Gingrich pins China's ascendancy on its "totalitarian system, extraordinary organization, and immense population," brushing aside the economic liberalization and market reforms initiated by former leader Deng Xiaoping—which ushered China out of Maoist isolation and into the global market—as mere smoke and mirrors, a "40-year-long propaganda campaign" masking the "real China." This presents a quandary for the hawks. If they argue that China's meteoric rise is indeed the fruit of its "totalitarian system and extraordinary organization," does that mean they'll have to eat their words on the virtues of free enterprise and stop scoffing at socialist economies? Could it be that China has cracked the code on making a centrally planned economy thrive, a feat unseen elsewhere? Fortunately for the Republican hawks, a more politically palatable theory has taken root: China's ascent to becoming the world's second-largest economy and a tech behemoth wasn't a result of economic reforms or strategic planning but rather stealing.

In a landscape where political rhetoric often blurs reality, the narrative spun by America First Republicans and echoed by institutions from the FBI to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) portrays China's remarkable growth as the grand larceny of intellectual property (I.P.). Claims that China has siphoned off $200 billion to $600 billion annually in I.P. have found a home in numerous reports, with some hawkish voices now inflating that estimate to trillions.

The recently concluded 2024 Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore provided another useful opportunity for senior U.S. and Chinese national security officials to engage in face-to-face bilateral discussions and interact with officials and experts from other states. While these engagements have value in theory, they highlight three persistent problems in the practice of U.S.-China relations. First, the United States and China tend to talk past each other. Second, the United States and China have dissimilar systems, which makes identifying and engaging with appropriate counterpart officials very difficult. Third, the United States and China possess fundamentally different understandings about the role of third countries in managing confrontation and mitigating conflict.

The Dismal Art of Talking Past Each Other

Claim: During the October 3 Senate IP Subcommittee hearing on the SHOP SAFE Act, Matthew Schruers of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) claimed that by charging platforms — rather than brands — with the responsibility of vetting counterfeit items and sellers, the bill would harm small businesses.

Correction: While it is true that the SHOP SAFE Act would place the onus on platforms to identify and intervene against bad actors, it would not leave brands free from responsibility. The act would require brands to provide contact information and advance notice of their intellectual property to platforms, enabling the latter to implement effective preventative measures against counterfeit goods.

An estimated 61 million U.S. adults live with a disability, and many continue to push for their needs to be served in everyday settings. The retail industry has taken note and made significant strides toward ensuring physical and online stores are functional and user-friendly. Today on National Disability Independence Day (the anniversary of President George H.W. Bush signing the Americans with Disabilities Act), it is a great time to look at the innovative ways retailers serve consumers with disabilities. The digital landscape in particular offers countless opportunities for brands to prioritize accessibility. The Need for and Competitive Edge of Providing Accessibility According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in four U.S. adults currently lives with a disability. Blindness, age-related eye disease and vision impairment are among the most common disabilities, with around 12 million Americans aged 40 years and older having vision impairment — a number expected to increase over the next 30 years due to an aging U.S. population. Yet a 2019 study by Nucleus Research found that 70% of websites across various sectors had “critical blockers,” making them difficult for visually-impaired users to navigate. However, the report noted that retailers like Target, Best Buy and Amazon are leaders in e-commerce accessibility for shoppers with disabilities. Digital accessibility is the “process of making websites, mobile apps and other digital experiences usable for people with disabilities.” It recognizes that we all interact and engage with technology in diverse ways. For example, those with hearing, vision and cognitive impairments may need devices or digital features that can assist in navigating websites. The Web Accessibility Initiative describes the four main attributes of accessibility as having a site with perceivable information, operable interfaces, understandable content and robust capabilities. Not only does providing an accessible, user-friendly online experience help reach a large number of consumers with disabilities, but it’s also a promising edge for retailers. A 2018 report by Accenture found that inclusive organizations make an average of 30% higher economic profit margins, 28% higher revenue and twice the net income of competitors without the same level of effort. How Retailers Are Addressing Accessibility Both Online and in Stores Retailers are becoming accessibility leaders for consumers with disabilities. Brands such as Zappos, Walmart, Target, Amazon and Best Buy strategize site features and offerings that prioritize unique customer needs. This also reflects the dynamic edge that comes with being attentive to consumers’ needs and behaviors. Walmart launched its Accessibility Center of Excellence (ACE) in 2021. ACE focuses on three key areas: “deepening culture of awareness and action around accessibility; building the infrastructure needed to power accessibility across the organization; and creating leadership champions to engage associates to drive accessibility at scale.” Early work has involved partnerships between Walmart’s product and design teams to make online experiences more accessible. The omnichannel big-box retailer is increasing accessibility not only in its online store but in its physical stores, too, joining a growing list of brands implementing “sensory-friendly” hours to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for people with neurodivergent conditions. By offering “a quieter shopping environment” for back-to-school shoppers on Saturday mornings this summer, Walmart hopes to foster “a culture where everyone feels they belong.” In 2020, popular online shoe retailer Zappos launched a new shopping experience allowing consumers to purchase single and different-sized shoes, with brands like Converse and Nike participating in the pilot program. The offering falls under Zappos Adaptive, the brand’s response to disabled customers’ desire for more convenience and options in finding shoes. Its parent company Amazon’s accessibility hub features information on assistive technology, devices and services as well. Its marketplace offers reliable and fast delivery options, making it easier for consumers with disabilities to get the products they need in a timely manner without leaving home. Overall, retailers who prioritize accessibility have the upper hand. Not only are they tapping into a large, diverse market of consumers, but they are building a reputation as brands that value inclusion in tangible ways. Other accessibility features and steps to improve may include providing alternative text for product descriptions to help people using screen readers, streamlined navigation across the customer journey, clear error messages for users with cognitive disabilities, and ensuring automated captions are accurate. By continuously improving the accessibility of their online marketplaces, stores and services, retailers are an example to companies across sectors. Their focus on enhancing accessibility for individuals with disabilities has opened the digital experience up to a greater number of folks than ever, and that is something to celebrate. These efforts help foster a more pleasant shopping experience for customers and reflect the innovative spirit necessary for a thriving market.

Indigenous peoples have a wealth of IP, some of which comes in the form of traditional knowledge. Although there are many definitions of traditional knowledge, it can generally be understood as the knowledge, skills and practices that are passed down between generations of a community or group that forms part of the group’s culture and spirituality.

For Indigenous groups seeking better options for the long-term protection of their culture and traditional knowledge, one solution is the use of trademarks and official marks. These marks can help prevent cultural appropriation and can be renewed indefinitely.

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialistfeminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. 3 A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a worldchanging fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. 150 4 Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and 5 material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives 6 with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 151 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which 7 difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.

Moreover, scenario analysis excels at academia’s other goal: the discovery of new knowledge. Gerring (2011) already pointed out that both goals “are often in tension with each other” (p. 31). The more rigorous the methodological design, the more constraint must be put on the admissible evidence, limiting what researchers can hope to discover. Imagined on a spectrum between appraisal and discovery, scenario analysis would be far on the discovery end. As presented in the previous section, the iterative scenario development reveals hidden assumptions, challenges the status quo and makes explicit tacit knowledge of its participants (Ramírez & Wilkinson, 2016). It also counteracts biases, such as short-termism or linear thinking and enables constructive engagement with preconceptions. It thus helps reveal blind spots in our thinking and detect weak signals of change that might not yet express themselves empirically. Furthermore, scenario analysis allows for a uniquely comprehensive causal reasoning. Applying the positivist framework of most traditional IR methods to our example, one could consider European security in 2030 as the dependent variable. It is determined by the key drivers, which constitute independent variables. The different combinations and values of the causal variables account for the variance of the dependent variable, consequently producing different scenarios. Thus, “a good scenario is an internally consistent hypothesis about how the future might unfold; it is a chain of logic that connects drivers to outcomes” (Bernstein et al., 2000, p. 54). Also, the way a scenario plot is developed can be seen as a form of process tracing (Bernstein et al., 2000, p. 55). That is, projecting how a combination of certain key drivers can develop over time, what changes are expected to occur and identifying key events that might take place. Yet, in contrast to its traditional application in IR, process tracing during the scenario analysis pertains to the future, and not the past. For these reasons, we suggest the methodological admissibility of the MSG as an additional method in the toolkit of IR scholars.

Added-value of scenario analysis for IR scholarship

Let’s look at all the ways humanity in general and America in particular continue to unleash human creativity:

First, over the course of many centuries, humanity has steadily reduced the amount of time wasted on drudgery. Turning on a tap is more time-efficient than drawing water from a well. Finding the closest ATM is more time-efficient than waiting in line at the bank. That’s oodles of time freed up to do something creative.

E-commerce has grown so quickly and become such a dominant force in global trade that lawmakers and regulators the world over have had difficulty keeping up with the many challenges of an internet-enabled global marketplace.

From data privacy and consumer protection to issues of forced labor, counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, taxation, and more, e-commerce challenges many of the rules that govern traditional commerce. Consequently, those who are responsible for crafting the rules of governance for e-commerce are quite literally making it up as they — and we — go along.

Technology has transformed virtually every aspect of American life since the country’s founding over two centuries ago. The authors of the Constitution never could have imagined many of the conveniences of the 21st century. Instead of walking or riding to the local store to buy goods, Americans can shop from the comfort of their own home and have those items delivered to their doorstep from anywhere in the world. Instead of printing pamphlets and distributing them by hand or writing articles for the local papers, Americans can share their thoughts and opinions instantaneously across borders to anyone with an Internet connection. And instead of meeting and demonstrating in town squares, Americans can engage in political activism and organization on social media.

As stark as these differences seem, the principles laid out in the Constitution have endured in today’s connected world. The Founders recognized that unimpeded interstate commerce was crucial to the success of their fledgling nation, which led them to include the Commerce Clause in the Constitution, giving Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the states.1 By giving every business, from multinational corporations to local mom-and-pop shops, the ability to sell its products and services online and across borders, the Internet has made the Commerce Clause more relevant than ever.

Correction: While it is true that the SHOP SAFE Act would place the onus on platforms to identify and intervene against bad actors, it would not leave brands free from responsibility. The act would require brands to provide contact information and advance notice of their intellectual property to platforms, enabling the latter to implement effective preventative measures against counterfeit goods.

Additionally, holding platforms accountable for sales of counterfeit items that they facilitate would offer multiple significant improvements over the status quo. Platforms have a greater ability than brands to take action preventing the sale of dangerous items. Online marketplaces serve the same function as physical retailers, which are regulated under existing law in order to prevent the sale of counterfeit products. Holding platforms liable would provide a way for brand owners who have been harmed to obtain compensation for damages even when they are unable to take legal action against the seller itself, thereby incentivizing the platform to keep consumers safe.

Small businesses were also given a major boost when the findings of economist David Birch submitted that they were responsible for 80% of all new employment opportunities during 1968-1996. Although Birch recanted by admitting that the figure is dubious this statistic is frequently adduced to justify support for small businesses. Luckily, today there are ample studies guiding analysts to properly dissect the efficacy of small businesses.

Based on the data furnished by researchers it is evident that the importance of small businesses has been greatly embellished. For instance, innovation charity NESTA reported that during 2002-2008 in the United Kingdom, six percent of high-growth firms generated half of employment growth. Moreover, in their piece featured in the Harvard Business Review of Tuesday, February 3, 2014, Isenberg and Ross assert: “The literature consistently shows that a very small number, from one percent to six percent, or so, of all ventures in a region account for the lion’s share of net job creation and spill overs from entrepreneurship. However, increasing the number of start-ups has not increased the number of high-growth ventures.”