The Weekly Leaf
This week, President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Beijing, the World Bank and IMF held their 2023 Spring Meetings in Washington, and a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents were leaked online.
Read more below.
This Week's Content Highlights
Features from the Aspen Strategy Group Members
Chris Brose, David McCormick, and Ryan Evans for War on the Rocks: "Powering American Renewal With Innovation"
Mark T. Esper and Deborah Lee James gave keynote remarks for the Atlantic Council: "Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption: Interim Report Launch"
Michael Froman and Samantha Power for the Global Inclusive Growth Summit: "Inclusion by Choice, Not Chance"
Michael J. Green et al. for the National Endowment for Democracy and the United States Studies Centre: "Sunnylands Joint Statement"
Kay Bailey Hutchison for Fox 4 Dallas-Fort Worth: "Texas: The Issue Is - Former Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison Discusses Foreign Policy"
David Ignatius for The Washington Post: "The Leaked Documents on the Ukraine War Are Chilling"
Nicholas Kristof for The New York Times: "How to Avoid a War With China"
Joseph Nye for Great Minds: "What Makes a True Leader"
Meghan O'Sullivan and Jason Bordoff for Foreign Affairs: "The Age of Energy Insecurity"
David Petraeus, Anna Borshchevskaya, Michael Knights, and Bilal Wahab for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: "Twenty Years After Saddam: The Future of the U.S.-Iraq Relationship"
Penny Pritzker quoted by Diego Mendoza for Semafor: "Former Sec. Pritzker: Decoupling From China Is 'Very Scary'"
Jack Reed quoted by Ken Dilanian, Michael Kosnar, and Rebecca Shabad for NBC: "FBI Arrests 21-Year-Old Air National Guardsman Suspected of Leaking Classified Documents"
Condoleezza Rice interviewed by Rich Karlgaard for Forbes: "Condoleezza Rice on Geopolitical Risk and Technology’s Role—And the Global AI Race"
David Sanger for The New York Times: "How the Latest Leaked Documents Are Different From Past Breaches"
Rising Leaders in the News
Congratulations to ASG Rising Leader Shannon Payne ('23) for receiving the Award for Outstanding Programmer at a Large Paid-Staff CBM at the Global Ties U.S. 2023 National Meeting for her work at WorldDenver!
Tweet of the Week
Things to Know
Content Relevant to Aspen Security Forum Discussions
Thorsten Benner for Foreign Policy: "Europe Is Disastrously Split on China"
Ivo Daalder for POLITICO: "Xi Is Fixated on Ending China's Century of Humiliation"
Simone Preissler Iglesias for Bloomberg: "Lula Backs BRICS Currency to Replace Dollar in Foreign Trade"
John Keilman for The Wall Street Journal: "America Is Back in the Factory Business"
David Lawler for Axios: "Biden to Mark 25th Anniversary of Good Friday Agreement in Belfast"
Amy Magdy for the AP: "Saudi Diplomat: Talks With Houthis Aim to Revive Yemen Truce"
Robert D. McFadden for The New York Times: "Benjamin B. Ferencz, Last Surviving Nuremberg Prosecutor, Dies at 103"
Gideon Rachman for the Financial Times: "Why Taiwan Matters to the World"
Eric Schmidt interviewed by Andrew Sorkin for CNBC: "The Biggest Issue With AI Will Be How People Interact With It"
Jim Sciutto for CNN: "Military Exercises Suggest China Is Getting 'Ready to Launch a War Against Taiwan,' Island's Foreign Minister Tells CNN"
P.W. Singer and Josh Baughman for Defense One: "China Gears Up for Cognitive Warfare"
Justin Worland for TIME: "The World Bank and IMF Want to Rethink Climate Finance"
From the Archives
Revisit our conversation on U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific from the 2022 Aspen Security Forum.
Elizabeth Economy, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Admiral Linda L. Fagan, Commandant, U.S. Coast Guard
General Charles Flynn, Commanding General, U.S. Army Pacific
Keoki Jackson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MITRE
Moderator: Joseph Nye, Co-Chair, Aspen Strategy Group and Dean Emeritus, Harvard Kennedy School
Book of the Week
By Marie Yovanovitch
"Marie Yovanovitch was at the height of her diplomatic career when it all came crashing down. In the middle of her third ambassadorship—a rarity in the world of diplomacy—she was targeted by a smear campaign and abruptly recalled from her post in Kyiv, Ukraine. It was a time of chaos and pain, for her and for the nation.
Yet Yovanovitch was no stranger to instability and injustice. Born into a family that had survived Soviet and Nazi terror, she first saw the corrosive effect of corruption in Somalia while cutting her teeth as a diplomat in the male-dominated world of the 1980s State Department. She was an eyewitness to the 1993 constitutional crisis in Russia and the street fighting in Moscow. And she rose to the top of her profession in the crucible of the former USSR, where she saw how President Vladimir Putin adeptly exploited corrupt leaders in neighboring countries and undermined their developing democracies. Nowhere was Putin’s aggression clearer than in Ukraine, where Russia meddled in elections, launched cyberattacks, peddled misinformation, illegally annexed Crimea, invaded the Donbas, and attacked Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. But when Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post it became clear just how dangerously close to the edge America itself had strayed."
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