Tit-For-Tat Gerrymandering Wars Won’t End Soon – What Happens In Texas And California Doesn’t Stay There

Gerrymandering dates back to struggles over U.S. foreign policy in the early 1800s and is named for a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Elbridge Gerry.

BY GIBBS KNOTTS AND CHRISTOPHERA. COOPER

Congressional redistricting – the process of drawing electoral districts to account for population changes – was conceived by the Founding Fathers as a once-per-decade redrawing of district lines following the decennial U.S. census. Today it has devolved into a near-constant feature of American politics – often in response to litigation, and frequently with the intent of maintaining or gaining partisan advantage.

Polls show widespread public disapproval of manipulating political boundaries to favor certain groups, a process known as gerrymandering. However, we currently see little hope of preventing a race to the bottom, where numerous states redraw their maps to benefit one party in response to other states drawing their maps to benefit another party.

The most recent round of tit-for-tat gerrymandering began in Texas. After drawing their post-census congressional maps in 2021, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, at President Donald Trump’s behest, are advancing a new set of maps designed to increase the number of Republican congressional seats in their state. The goal is to help Republicans retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections by converting five Democratic seats to ones that will likely result in a Republican victory.

In response, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing to redraw his state’s map. Under Newsom’s plan, Democrats could gain five House seats in California, offsetting Republican gains in Texas. The California Legislature approved the new maps on Aug. 21 and Gov. Newsom signed the bills that day. Next, the maps will be presented to California voters in a special election on Nov. 4, 2025 for approval.

Newsom vows that he isn’t trying to disband the independent redistricting process that California enacted in 2021. Rather, he proposes to shift to these partisan gerrymandered maps temporarily, then return to independent, nonpartisan redistricting in 2031.

Democrats in Illinois and New York, and Republicans in Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina, have signaled that they may follow Texas and California’s leads. Based on our research on politics and elections, we don’t expect that the wave will stop there.

Rules for mapmakers

Redistricting has always been an inherently political process. But the advent of widespread, easily accessible computer technology, increasingly predictable voting patterns and tight partisan margins in Congress have turbocharged the process.

There are ways to tweak this gerrymandering run amok and perhaps block a bad map or two. But none of these approaches are likely to stop partisan actors entirely from drawing maps to benefit themselves and their parties.

The most obvious strategy would be to create guardrails for the legislators and commissions who draw the maps. Such guidelines often specify the types of data that could be used to draw the maps – for example, limiting partisan data.

Anti-gerrymandering rules could also limit the number of political boundaries, such as city or county lines, that would be split by new districts. And they could prioritize compactness, rather than allowing bizarrely shaped districts that link far-flung communities.

These proposals certainly won’t do any harm, and might even move the process in a more positive direction, but they are unlikely to end gerrymandering.

For example, North Carolina had an explicit limitation on using partisan data in its 2021 mapmaking process, as well as a requirement that lawmakers could only draw maps in the North Carolina State Legislative Building. It was later revealed that a legislator had used “concept maps” drawn by an aide outside of the normal mapmaking process.

In a world where anyone with an internet connection can log onto free websites like Dave’s Redistricting to draw maps using partisan data, it’s hard to prevent states from incorporating nonofficial proposals into their maps.

Courts and commissions

A second way to police gerrymandering is to use the courts aggressively to combat unfair or discriminatory maps. Some courts, particularly at the state level, have reined in egregious gerrymanders like Pennsylvania’s 2011 map, which was overturned in 2018.

At the national level, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims presented “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts” and ultimately were better suited to state courts. There are still likely to be claims in federal courts about racial dilution and other Voting Rights Act violations in gerrymanders, but the door to the federal courthouse for partisanship claims appears to be closed for the time being.

A third option is for states to hand map-drawing power to an independent body. Recent studies show that independent redistricting commissions produce maps that are more competitive and fairer. For example, a nonpartisan scholarly review of the 2021-2022 congressional and state legislative maps found that commissions “generally produce less biased and more competitive plans than when one party controls the process.”

Commissions are popular with the public. In a 2024 study with political scientists Seth McKee and Scott Huffmon, we found that both Democrats and Republicans in South Carolina preferred to assign redistricting to an independent commission rather than the state Legislature, which has been in Republican control since 2000.

Studies using national polling data have also found evidence that redistricting commissions are popular, and that people who live in states that use commissions view the redistricting process more positively than residents of states where legislators draw congressional lines.

A national solution or bust

While redistricting commissions are popular and effective in states that have adopted them, current actions in California show that this strategy can fail if it is embraced by some states but not others.

Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for tit-for-tat gerrymandering. Litigation can help at the margins, and independent redistricting can make a difference, but even the best intentions can fail under political pressure.

The only wholesale solution is national reform. But even here, we are not optimistic.

A proportional representation system, in which seats are divided by the portion of the vote that goes to each party, could solve the problem. However, removing single-member districts and successfully implementing proportional representation in the United States is about as likely as finding a hockey puck on Mars.

A national ban on gerrymandering might be more politically palatable. Even here, though, the odds of success are fairly low. After all, the people who benefit from the current system would have to vote to change it, and the filibuster rule in the Senate requires not just majority but supermajority support.

So, brace for what’s about to come. As James Madison famously observed, forming factions – groups of people united by a common interest that threatens the rights of others – is “sown in the nature of man.”

Gerrymandering helps factions acquire and retain power. If U.S. leaders aren’t willing to consider a national solution, it won’t disappear anytime soon.

This article has been updated to clarify that California voters will consider their state’s proposed new maps in a special election on Nov. 4, 2025.

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New Research Suggests That Studying Philosophy Makes People Better Thinkers

Students take a philosophy test in Strasbourg, France, on June 18, 2024. Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images

BY MICHAEL VASQUEZ AND MICHAEL PRINZING

Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning, according to our new study published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. They also tend to display more intellectual virtues such as curiosity and open-mindedness.

Philosophers have long claimed that studying philosophy sharpens one’s mind. What sets philosophy apart from other fields is that it is not so much a body of knowledge as an activity – a form of inquiry. Doing philosophy involves trying to answer fundamental questions about humanity and the world we live in and subjecting proposed answers to critical scrutiny: constructing logical arguments, drawing subtle distinctions and following ideas to their ultimate – often surprising – conclusions.

It makes sense, then, that studying philosophy might make people better thinkers. But as philosophers ourselves, we wondered whether there is strong evidence for that claim.

Students who major in philosophy perform very well on tests such as the Graduate Record Examination and Law School Admission Test. Studies, including our own, have found that people who have studied philosophy are, on average, more reflective and more open-minded than those who haven’t. Yet this doesn’t necessarily show that studying philosophy makes people better thinkers. Philosophy may just attract good thinkers.

Our latest study aimed to address that problem by comparing students who majored in philosophy and those who didn’t at the end of their senior year, while adjusting for differences present at the start of their freshman year. For example, we examined students’ performance on the GRE, which they take toward the end of college, while controlling for scores on the SAT, which they take before college.

We did the same when analyzing survey data collected by the Higher Education Research Institute at the start and end of college. These surveys asked students to, for example, rate their abilities to engage with new ideas or have their own ideas challenged, and how often they explored topics raised in class on their own or evaluated the reliability of information.

All told, we looked at test and survey data from over 600,000 students. Our analysis found that philosophy majors scored higher than students in all other majors on standardized tests of verbal and logical reasoning, as well as on self-reports of good habits of mind, even after accounting for freshman-year differences. This suggests that their intellectual abilities and traits are due, in part, to what they learned in college.
Why it matters

Public trust in higher education has hit record lows in recent years, according to polling by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup. Meanwhile, the rapid advance of generative AI has threatened the perceived value of a traditional college degree, as many previously vaunted white-collar skills are at risk of being automated.

Yet now more than ever, students must learn to think clearly and critically. AI promises efficiency, but its algorithms are only as good as the people who steer them and scrutinize their output.

The stakes are more than personal. Without citizens who can reason through complex issues and discern good information from bad, democracy and civic life are at risk.
What still isn’t known

While our results point to real growth in students’ intellectual abilities and dispositions, they do not capture everything philosophers mean by “intellectual virtue.” Intellectual virtue is not just a matter of possessing certain abilities but of using those abilities well: at the right times, for the right reasons, and in the right ways.

Our measures do not tell us whether philosophy majors go on to apply their newfound abilities in the service of truth and justice or, conversely, for personal gain and glory. Settling that question would require gathering a different kind of evidence.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

The Orwellian Echoes In Trump’s Push For ‘Americanism’ At The Smithsonian

A screenshot of President Donald Trump’s Aug.19, 2025 Truth Social post about the Smithsonian. Truth Social Donald Trump account

BY LAURA BEERS

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.

It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.

It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.

Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.

Winners write the history

Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.

Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.

As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”

This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.

The Ministry of Truth

The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”

The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.

Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.

The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.

But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”

At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.

The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.

Down the memory hole

Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.

Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.

Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life ofHarriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.

Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.

Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.

Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”

Repressing thought

Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.

According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”

The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.

If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.

It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.

As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.

This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.

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‘There’s No Such Thing As Someone Else’s Children’ – Omar El Akkad Bears Witness To The Destruction Of Gaza And The West’s Quiet Assent

BY CLARE CORBOULD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND

ASSOCIATE HEAD (RESEARCH) OF THE

SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL

SCIENCES, DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

Omar El Akkad does not want you to look away. An award-winning journalist and novelist, El Akkad was born in Egypt, lived as a teenager in Qatar and Canada, and migrated as an adult to the US, where he now lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

His essay collection, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, draws on his life, from childhood to new fatherhood. He combines these reflections with a sharp grasp of modern history to examine responses in the west to “the world’s first livestreamed genocide” in Gaza.

Finding that response wanting, he urges readers to watch, listen, reflect and act.

As someone whose parents migrated to the west for the freedoms and opportunities it would afford their children, El Akkad has an acute sense of the past events, ideas and structures that have shaped the present. He pays keen attention to the legacies of colonial rule.

Witnessing history

El Akkad’s descriptions of atrocity are not easy to read. Nor is his blunt demand to do something. Yet the force of his observations and the bite of his prose make it hard to turn away.

His purpose is akin to many famed witnesses in history. Contemporaneous statements about violence often serve later as testimony in determining what happened, who was responsible, and what recompense is due.

Think of George Orwell on propaganda in Spain. Or British journalists Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge exposing famine in 1930s USSR, while other western communists looked away. Or Victor Klemperer’s diaries, published after the war, which tracked how the Nazis twisted everyday speech.

Above all, this kind of testimony guards against future claims of innocence, against the reassuring assertion that “they didn’t know what was going on” or “they were of their time”.

Less well-known to Australian readers may be American journalist Ida B. Wells, but El Akkad’s fire and fury also brought her to mind. In the 1890s, Wells fiercely attacked lynching in her own newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech. She investigated specific instances of ritualised mob violence.

Wells also catalogued how news outlets told those stories. They minced words to protect the perpetrators, while smearing the reputations of the dead, who were always named.

El Akkad also pays close attention the way the violence in Gaza is framed and described. He observes how reporters use the passive voice, which not only hides the names of killers but implies mass death came about by accident or magic. “Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect’s Home,” read one Guardian headline, he notes.

Both Wells and El Akkad show how victims of racist and colonial violence are cast as already guilty. With lynching, the pretext was often an accusation of rape, though that was rarely the actual spark. Far more common were disputes between men over land, pay, labour organising, business competition or voting drives.

In the case of Gaza, the media mimics the claims of Israeli politicians, its military and allies of both. They all cast civilians as terrorists or terrorists-in-waiting, even children. The words clean the consciences of onlookers. They launder harm as if it were cash.

Modes of resisting

As the book’s title, which began life as a viral tweet, goes: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Bearing witness to the atrocities and the gutless responses, El Akkad reminds liberal readers that if Gaza had happened in the past, they would condemn the violence. What’s more, they would imagine that, had they been alive at the time, they would have firmly resisted the wrong or even taken a heroic stance against it.

One blistering passage will hit very close to home for Australian readers:

I read an op-ed in which a writer argues that the model for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence is something like Canada’s present-day relationship with the Indigenous population, and I marvel at the casual, obvious, but unstated corollary: that there is an Indigenous population being colonized, but that we should let this unpleasantness run its course so we can arrive at true justice in the form of land acknowledgments at every Tel Aviv poetry reading.

As well as diagnosing the problem, El Akkad surveys and evaluates modes of resisting what is happening in Gaza. He discards as ineffective the old appeal to westerners’ self-interest. Pointing out that horrors they permit elsewhere will eventually come for them just doesn’t work.

His essays were written between the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and August 2024, when the US presidential campaign was in full swing. Much of his energy goes to addressing the “lesser of two evils” debate about voting in a democracy where the options are far right and, at most, centre-a-bit-left. Only from a relatively protected position, he observes, could one vote for the Democratic Party on the grounds that the other side “would be so much worse”.

Making this case, El Akkad says, rests on a quiet assent to mass death. He calls this a “reticent acceptance of genocide” and asks liberals in the United States (and by implication in other western democracies) to examine their consciences.

The remedying action El Akkad proposes is widespread negation, or “walking away”. People, en masse, must refuse to accept that the meagre promises of the less conservative political parties are the best options on offer.

This will require sacrifices. El Akkad provides examples of people he admires: the writer who refused a prize from an organisation that had been silent about Gaza; the teacher brave enough to talk with teenage students about the intolerable rate of children and civilians (not “noncombatants”) dying. Most starkly, he writes of Aaron Bushnell, the US Air Force veteran, whose last words before setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. were “free Palestine”.

Systematic violence

Like Wells, El Akkad links systematic violence to the structures that underpin the modern world. Chief among them is capitalism. Real change, he suggests, will come when enough of us, to use the old 1960s parlance, “drop out”, though he prefers “negation”, a word that that implies there is something to defy.

It is time, he argues, for a well-educated western citizenry to say “enough”. Our phones are smart enough; we are (collectively) rich and sated enough.

It might be hard at first, but we will learn that “maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter”.

Doing so might just halt a genocide. In time, this kind of collective action might also stop other looming calamities, not least climate collapse. El Akkad’s steady focus throughout the book on the death, maiming and immeasurable psychic injury to the children of Gaza makes that case feel urgent.

If that sounds hyperbolic, El Akkad might ask what children you had in mind when you flinched from his diagnosis and prognosis. Your answer likely turns on the location, colour and wealth of the children you have in mind. Children in Tuvalu, for example, know he is not exaggerating.

In one of the book’s most arresting lines, El Akkad asks: “How does one finish the sentence: ‘It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …’”

Better, he suggests, that we all behave in a way whose ethics is grounded in the claim: “there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”

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Zelensky Leaves Washington With Trump’s Security Guarantees, But Are They Enough?

European leaders flanking Zelensky and Trump at the White House. Aaron Schwartz/Consolidated News Photos Pool/EPA

BY SONIA MYCAK

RESEARCH FELLW IN UKRANIAN

STUDIES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL

UNIVERSITY

The last time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House earlier this year, he was berated by Donald Trump.

On Monday, he returned with European leaders by his side. He emerged with some signs of progress on a peace deal to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The presence of the European leaders no doubt had a great impact on the meeting. After Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, they were concerned he was aligning the United States with the Russian position by supporting Putin’s maximalist demands.

We see from Trump’s statements over the last couple of months, the only pullback from his erratic pronouncements, largely based on Russian disinformation, seems to come when a body politic around him brings him back to a more realistic and informed position. So, this show of European unity was very important.

Security guarantees remain vital

There was considerable progress on one critical part of the negotiations: security guarantees for Ukraine.

It is significant that the US is to be involved in future security guarantees. It was not that long ago Trump was placing all the responsibility on Europe. So, this signals a positive development.

I listened to the briefing Zelensky gave outside the White House in Ukrainian for Ukrainian journalists. He explained it will take time to sort out the details of any future arrangement, as many countries would be involved in Ukraine’s future security guarantees, each with different capabilities to assist. Some would help Ukraine finance their security needs, others could provide military assistance.

Zelensky also emphasised that funding and assistance for the Ukrainian military will be a part of any future security arrangement. This would involve strategic partnerships in development and production, as well as procurement.

Zelensky made a point of this at a news conference in Brussels prior to Monday’s meeting. It is a priority for Ukraine to have a military strong enough to defend itself from future Russian attacks.

Reports also indicate the security guarantees would involve Ukraine buying around US$90 billion (A$138 billion) of US military equipment through its European allies. Zelensky also suggested the possibility of the US buying Ukrainian-made drones in the future.

According to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, there was also discussion about an Article 5-type security guarantee for Ukraine, referring to the part of the NATO treaty that enshrines the principle of collective defence for all members.

However, contrary to popular belief, NATO’s Article 5 does not actually commit members of the alliance to full military intervention if any one member is attacked. It allows NATO states to decide what type of support, if any, to provide. This would not be enough for Ukraine.

Ukraine has already seen the result of a failed security arrangement. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia guaranteed to respect Ukraine’s borders and territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

However, look what happened. Russia invaded in 2014 without any serious consequences, and then launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.

Given this, any future security guarantee for Ukraine will need to be rigorous. Ukrainians are very cognisant of this.

Loss of Ukrainian territory

Prior to his Alaska summit with Trump, I would have said Putin is not interested in any kind of deal. We saw how in previous meetings in Istanbul, Russia sent low-level delegations, not authorised to make any decisions at all.

However, I think the scenario has changed because, unfortunately, in Alaska, Trump aligned himself with Putin in supporting Russia’s maximalist demands. It’s highly likely Putin now believes he has an advocate for those demands in the White House.

This could mean Putin now perceives there is a realistic chance Russia could secure Donbas, the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

I don’t believe Ukraine would ever agree to any formal or legal recognition of a Russian annexation of Crimea or any of the other four regions that Russia now partly occupies – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Zelensky has been adamant Ukraine would not cede territory to Russia in any peace deal. And he alone cannot make such a decision. Changing any borders would need a referendum and a change to the constitution. This would not be easy to do. For one thing, it’s a very unpopular move. And Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territory would not be given a free and fair vote.

Putin’s war against Ukraine is an attempt at illegally appropriating very valuable land. In Alaska, he demanded Russia essentially be gifted the entire regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, including land not currently occupied by the Russian military.

This land has extensive Ukrainian military fortifications. Giving up this territory would leave Ukraine completely exposed to future Russian invasions – the country would effectively have no military protection along its eastern border regions. This would put Russia in a very advantageous position in future plans to regroup and attack again.

Even if Zelensky felt compelled to agree to some kind of temporary occupation and a frozen conflict along the current front lines, I don’t believe Ukraine could give up any land still under Ukrainian control.

In a recent Gallup poll, 69% of Ukrainians favoured a negotiated settlement to the war as soon as possible. In my view, this reflects the fact the United States, under the Trump administration, is proving to be an unreliable partner.

A settlement that rewards Russia for its genocidal war against Ukraine would set a very dangerous precedent, not only for the future of Ukraine but for Europe and the rest of the world.

At recent negotiations between the two sides in Istanbul, the head of the Russian delegation reportedly said “Russia is prepared to fight forever”.

That has not changed, no matter what niceties have occurred between Trump and Putin. They are prepared to continue to fight.

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AI Is About To Radically Alter Military Command Structures That Haven’t Changed Much Since Napoleon’s Army

This U.S. Army command post, seen from a drone, is loaded with modern technology but uses a centuries-old structure. Col. Scott Woodward, U.S. Army

BY BENJAMIN JENSEN

PROFESSOR OF STRATEGIC STUDIES AT

THE MARINE CORPS UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF ADVANCED WARFIGHTING,

SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE, AMERICAN

UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL

SERVICE

Despite two centuries of evolution, the structure of a modern military staff would be recognizable to Napoleon. At the same time, military organizations have struggled to incorporate new technologies as they adapt to new domains – air, space and information – in modern war.

The sizes of military headquarters have grown to accommodate the expanded information flows and decision points of these new facets of warfare. The result is diminishing marginal returns and a coordination nightmare – too many cooks in the kitchen – that risks jeopardizing mission command.

AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software powered by large language models – can automate routine staff tasks, compress decision timelines and enable smaller, more resilient command posts. They can shrink the staff while also making it more effective.

As an international relations scholar and reserve officer in the U.S. Army who studies military strategy, I see both the opportunity afforded by the technology and the acute need for change.

That need stems from the reality that today’s command structures still mirror Napoleon’s field headquarters in both form and function – industrial-age architectures built for massed armies. Over time, these staffs have ballooned in size, making coordination cumbersome. They also result in sprawling command posts that modern precision artillery, missiles and drones can target effectively and electronic warfare can readily disrupt.

Russia’s so-called “Graveyard of Command Posts” in Ukraine vividly illustrates how static headquarters where opponents can mass precision artillery, missiles and drones become liabilities on a modern battlefield.

The role of AI agents

Military planners now see a world in which AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software that can perceive, decide and act on their own initiative – are mature enough to deploy in command systems. These agents promise to automate the fusion of multiple sources of intelligence, threat-modeling, and even limited decision cycles in support of a commander’s goals. There is still a human in the loop, but the humans will be able to issue commands faster and receive more timely and contextual updates from the battlefield.

These AI agents can parse doctrinal manuals, draft operational plans and generate courses of action, which helps accelerate the tempo of military operations. Experiments – including efforts I ran at Marine Corps University – have demonstrated how even basic large language models can accelerate staff estimates and inject creative, data-driven options into the planning process. These efforts point to the end of traditional staff roles.

There will still be people – war is a human endeavor – and ethics will still factor into streams of algorithms making decisions. But the people who remain deployed are likely to gain the ability to navigate mass volumes of information with the help of AI agents.

These teams are likely to be smaller than modern staffs. AI agents will allow teams to manage multiple planning groups simultaneously.

For example, they will be able to use more dynamic red teaming techniques – role-playing the opposition – and vary key assumptions to create a wider menu of options than traditional plans. The time saved not having to build PowerPoint slides and updating staff estimates will be shifted to contingency analysis – asking “what if” questions – and building operational assessment frameworks – conceptual maps of how a plan is likely to play out in a particular situation – that provide more flexibility to commanders.

Designing the next military staff

To explore the optimal design of this AI agent-augmented staff, I led a team of researchers at the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Futures Lab to explore alternatives. The team developed three baseline scenarios reflecting what most military analysts are seeing as the key operational problems in modern great power competition: joint blockades, firepower strikes and joint island campaigns. Joint refers to an action coordinated among multiple branches of a military.

In the example of China and Taiwan, joint blockades describe how China could isolate the island nation and either starve it or set conditions for an invasion. Firepower strikes describe how Beijing could fire salvos of missiles – similar to what Russia is doing in Ukraine – to destroy key military centers and even critical infrastructure. Last, in Chinese doctrine, a Joint Island Landing Campaign describes the cross-strait invasion their military has spent decades refining.

Any AI agent-augmented staff should be able to manage warfighting functions across these three operational scenarios.

The research team found that the best model kept humans in the loop and focused on feedback loops. This approach – called the Adaptive Staff Model and based on pioneering work by sociologist Andrew Abbott – embeds AI agents within continuous human-machine feedback loops, drawing on doctrine, history and real-time data to evolve plans on the fly.

In this model, military planning is ongoing and never complete, and focused more on generating a menu of options for the commander to consider, refine and enact. The research team tested the approach with multiple AI models and found that it outperformed alternatives in each case.

AI agents are not without risk. First, they can be overly generalized, if not biased. Foundation models – AI models trained on extremely large datasets and adaptable to a wide range of tasks – know more about pop culture than war and require refinement. This makes it important to benchmark agents to understand their strengths and limitations.

Second, absent training in AI fundamentals and advanced analytical reasoning, many users tend to use models as a substitute for critical thinking. No smart model can make up for a dumb, or worse, lazy user.

Seizing the ‘agentic’ moment

To take advantage of AI agents, the U.S. military will need to institutionalize building and adapting agents, include adaptive agents in war games, and overhaul doctrine and training to account for human-machine teams. This will require a number of changes.

First, the military will need to invest in additional computational power to build the infrastructure required to run AI agents across military formations. Second, they will need to develop additional cybersecurity measures and conduct stress tests to ensure the agent-augmented staff isn’t vulnerable when attacked across multiple domains, including cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Third, and most important, the military will need to dramatically change how it educates its officers. Officers will have to learn how AI agents work, including how to build them, and start using the classroom as a lab to develop new approaches to the age-old art of military command and decision-making. This could include revamping some military schools to focus on AI, a concept floated in the White House’s AI Action Plan released on July 23, 2025.

Absent these reforms, the military is likely to remain stuck in the Napoleonic staff trap: adding more people to solve ever more complex problems.

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Sanctuary Cities In The US Were Born In The 1980s As Central American Refugees Fled Civil Wars

Protesters outside the federal courthouse in San Antonio, Texas, rally to oppose a Texas ‘anti-sanctuary cities’ bill on June 26, 2017. AP Photo/Eric Gay

BY LAURA MADOKORO

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

CARLETN UNIVERSITY

Sanctuary cities in the United States, which limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, have drawn the ire of President Donald Trump during both of his administrations.

Border czar Tom Homan said in July 2025 that the Trump administration would target sanctuary cities across the country and “flood the zone” with agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue deportation goals.

I am a historian of migration. I have found that the concept of sanctuary takes many forms, from gestures of kindness and advocacy to more formal approaches such as churches protecting migrants at risk of arrest and deportation.

In the U.S., sanctuary city policies have historically been designed to support undocumented immigrants and refugees, especially those facing deportation. Ordinances based on these policies are often used by local authorities to signal the need for substantive immigration reform.

New public sanctuary policies

Today’s sanctuary practices, and the federal targeting of sanctuary cities, are largely the result of the way sanctuary took shape across the U.S. in the 1980s.

During this period, churches, city officials and activists assisted migrants fleeing the violent conditions created by U.S. proxy wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

In the early 1980s, migrants arriving in the U.S. confronted restrictive asylum processes. To a large extent, this was the result of the Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge the extent of human rights violations perpetrated by U.S.-supported regimes in Central America.

In 1984, the federal government approved less than 3% of U.S. asylum claims by applicants who had fled El Salvador and Guatemala. By comparison, asylum claims were approved for over 30% – and in some cases, 60% – of refugees from Iran, Afghanistan and Poland.

In response, U.S. activists and church and city leaders began to advocate on behalf of refugees from Central America. They sought to effect change at home and abroad, eventually coalescing into what became known as the Sanctuary Movement.

This largely decentralized coalition focused on protecting refugees by providing safe housing, often in churches, and advocating for their right to seek asylum. And they engaged in public outreach to raise awareness about the conditions in Central America and the U.S. government’s role in conflicts there.

The goal was to change U.S. policy. As one sanctuary worker in Texas said in 1985, according to accounts compiled at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin: “Sanctuary offers a way, by which folks can, number one, be safe from the fear of death, and, number two, speak out as to what is really going on in Central America.”

The Sanctuary Movement also led to organized visits to the U.S.-Mexico border to witness the ways in which migrants were being treated by U.S. immigration officials. In Texas between 1983 and 1985, for instance, people were invited to document the activities of immigration officials at Port Isabel Detention Center.

Members of the Sanctuary Movement also shared some of the horrors they learned about from missionaries and refugees arriving from Central America, according to accounts in the Benson Latin American Collection.

As a member of the Rio Grande Border Witness group conveyed, according to records preserved in the Benson Latin American Collection, there were repeated stories out of Central America “of women being raped and stabbed” and “of fathers being murdered in front of their families.”

As awareness about violence in Central America increased, more people and congregations in the U.S. became involved in the Sanctuary Movement. At its peak in 1986, the movement included 300 churches that endorsed sanctuary for Central American migrants and the principles underpinning the Sanctuary Movement.

Public and symbolic

It was during this peak that U.S. cities first began making sanctuary declarations and later passed binding ordinances.

In 1985, Berkeley, California, which had previously declared itself a sanctuary city for conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War, made one of the first sanctuary city declarations on behalf of refugees from Central America. Its resolution reaffirmed the city’s “support for the principle of sanctuary and for those groups which engage in this time-honored tradition of humanitarian assistance.”

City officials said that no city employee would “violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigations, public or clandestine, by engaging in or assisting with arrests for alleged violation of immigration laws by the refugees in the sanctuaries or by those offering sanctuary.”

Cities such as San Francisco and Santa Fe, New Mexico, followed with declarations or binding ordinances. These initiatives were often specifically crafted for migrants from Central America and contained critiques of U.S. foreign policy and asylum policy.

A 1989 San Francisco ordinance, which is still in effect, was inspired by the notion that the U.S. had special obligations to the citizens of El Salvador and Guatemala because of its role in the conflicts there.

There was powerful rhetoric and symbolism in the sanctuary city resolutions passed in the 1980s. This holds true for the present, as sanctuary declarations and policies have become increasingly polarizing in today’s political climate.

Moreover, as I note in my own work, public acts of sanctuary can come at a cost, often at the expense of the very people they are meant to help. In an effort to raise public awareness and sympathy, those in need of refuge often have their most harrowing moments laid bare for public consumption.

The Sanctuary Movement that began in the 1980s, in part to protest U.S. support for repressive governments, has endured for more than 40 years as an expression of concern for and solidarity with immigrants who come to the U.S.

The question now is how the movement will evolve in the face of the Trump administration’s threats.

Some sanctuary city leaders, such as Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, have responded by pointing to the value of policies that foster community trust and help keep all residents safe. How other leaders and communities respond remains to be seen.

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What It Will Really Take to Electrify All of Africa

A village in Tanzania has some grid power as well as off-grid solar power.
Malin Fezehai/New York Times/Redux

BY G. PASCAL ZACHARY

I dined recently with Joe, a Nigerian who manages a 400-hectare rice farm in the north of his country. Nigeria imports about 2.4 million metric tons of rice annually, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers like Joe are helping to move his country of 237 million people toward self-sufficiency in rice.

But farmer Joe has a handicap. “For me, the power grid is a fiction,” he says. “I don’t get any electricity from the grid, and I never will.”

Five years ago, Joe installed solar panels to power his farm’s irrigation system, which draws water from a nearby river. His milling and bagging machines, meanwhile, still run on diesel generators. When Nigeria ended its fuel subsidy in 2023, Joe’s fuel costs soared, reducing the money he can invest in more land and other improvements.

What is holding back Africa’s electrification?

Joe’s predicament is not unique. In sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people—about 53 percent—still have no access to electricity. Even this grim statistic understates the problem, because “access” can mean just enough wattage to illuminate a few LED lightbulbs some of the time. It’s not what Western Europeans or North Americans would consider electricity.

And traditional power grids in sub-Saharan Africa are hampered by poor reliability and frequent outages. Even when offered electricity, many customers can’t afford to pay, and so theft of service is endemic. Where grids do exist, “they are outdated, unstable, and lack customer connections,” the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported in 2023.

“I’m a bit tired of imprecise measures of access if that access doesn’t translate into the potential for substantial improvements and increases in consumption,” says Christopher D. Gore, a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, who studies electricity usage in the region. “Our latest research shows that [sub-Saharan] households are happy to have any electric light but remain dissatisfied with the minimal supply, the price, and the quality of both grid and solar power.”

The electricity deficit may well be worsening. In a 2024 report on universal energy access in Africa, researchers from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, in Washington, D.C., concluded that “demand is significantly outstripping supply, and the energy crisis is deepening.”

To address this dire shortage, the World Bank and the African Development Bank announced an initiative last year called Mission 300, to bring electricity to 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa—about half the number who lack access now—by 2030. Such a rapid expansion means bringing electricity to an additional 4.2 million people every month on average.

While plausible, the expansion faces headwinds, most notably from the sub-Saharan’s net population gain of about 2.5 million people per month. If that population growth continues for all six years of the initiative, there will be an additional 180 million people requiring electricity access.

“The challenge is large. Africa’s population is projected to double by 2050,” says Barry MacColl, a senior regional manager at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), who covers Africa from Johannesburg. “Expanding national grids can be expensive and slow, especially in rural and remote areas, where most of the unelectrified people live.” For example, South Africa’s main utility, Eskom Holdings, estimates it will need to spend 390 billion rand (US $22 billion) over the next decade to expand and upgrade its aging power grid and prevent future blackouts.

Large differences in electricity access persist among and within African countries. According to a 2020 report from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, in the East, West, and Southern African regions, about half the people have access to electricity, but the percentage falls to a mere 30 percent in Central Africa, where nearly 100 million folks have no electricity access. And according to the World Bank, about 82 percent of urban residents had electricity access in 2023, but only 33 percent in rural areas. (The North African countries aren’t part of the sub-Saharan region, and, except for Libya, have electrification rates of 100 percent.)

Off-grid solar’s untapped potential in Africa

Fossil fuels still play a big role in Africa’s power generation. Natural gas is the single largest source of electricity generation, while coal is significant only in South Africa. Together, they account for roughly two-thirds of the continent’s electricity production, according to BloombergNEF. While new gas-fired plants continue to be built, the trend is shifting toward renewable energy sources.

Small-scale off-grid technologies, especially solar power, are widely viewed as the strongest path to expanding electricity access to rural communities and underserved urban areas. UNCTAD estimates that Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best global solar resources. That translates to a solar potential of over 10 terawatts. “Off-grid solar and storage is taking off in a big way,” says Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council in London. “There are already about 600 million people, almost all in sub-Saharan Africa, who use off-grid solar and storage at least once a week.” Dunlop expects to see a 40 percent increase in solar installations next year in the region.

Off-grid solar power lends itself to bottom-up bootstrapping in rural areas by communities, small farms, businesses, and residential customers. To make the technology more affordable, the expansion of microfinancing will be key, as Mwoya Byaro and Nanzia Florent Mmbaga point out in a 2022 study in Scientific African.

I know firsthand the difference off-grid solar can make. My Nigerian-born wife and I own a walled compound of three homes in southern Nigeria, where members of her family live. We recently installed solar lights atop 5-meter-tall poles. They now illuminate communal areas that were formerly dark at night. The compound and the neighborhood aren’t connected to the grid, though, so for indoor electricity, our relatives still rely on diesel generators.

The future of hydropower in sub-Saharan Africa

“The hydro space is a huge growth area target,” says MacColl of EPRI. As with solar, Africa uses only a small fraction of its hydropower potential. Mini hydropower dams from 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt are important for remote and small communities of around 50 to 500 homes, MacColl says. Large dams are under construction or have been recently completed in Angola, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Zambia.

But constructing hydropower dams is costly and carries the risk of corruption and mismanagement that comes with big projects, as well as the cost of connecting a new power source to the power grid. For instance, Nigeria’s $5.8 billion, 3,050-MW Mambilla dam, which will become the largest source of electricity in the country, has been in the planning stage for over 40 years, and completion isn’t expected before 2030. Climate change’s impact on rainfall and temperature is also upending estimates of how much electricity hydropower dams across the region can produce.

Could nuclear power help electrify Africa?

Even nuclear power may play a role in closing Africa’s electricity gap. The African Energy Chamber, an industry group based in Johannesburg, notes in its 2025 Outlook Report that “a significant number of countries in Africa are considering embarking on nuclear power programmes.”

Today, only South Africa has nuclear power. But Ghana, which runs a research reactor, is planning its first nuclear power plant with assistance from China, Japan, and the United States. Uganda has chosen a site for its first reactors, as has Kenya. And the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority says it has signed technical agreements on nuclear power with France, India, Russia, and South Korea. But in all these cases, generating electricity from nuclear power is at least a decade away, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Kenya’s electrification success story

Ultimately, increased access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa will come from a variety of sources. One success story is Kenya, where off-grid electricity, primarily from solar, is complementing expanded grid access. The government’s Last Mile Connectivity Project aims to extend the grid to an additional 280,000 residences, 30,000 businesses, and health centers and schools in all 47 counties, according to the African Development Bank, which helped fund the effort. Previously, the national utility, Kenya Power, succeeded in increasing the number of grid-connected households in the poorest urban areas from 3,000 to 150,000. Kenya also has the largest wind farm in Africa, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project. The 310-MW plant’s 365 turbines account for about 15 percent of Kenya’s installed electricity capacity.

These sustained efforts doubled Kenya’s electrification access rate between 2013 and 2023 to 79 percent. Kenya Power now aims to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the most populous sub-Saharan country, the outlook for electricity access is cloudier. Joe, the Nigerian rice farmer, is considering installing more solar on his farm, to expand his mill. With more electricity, he says, “we can grow more rice, and mill and bag more for our people.” If the power grid won’t—or can’t—come to him, at least he has the means to generate his own electricity to meet his own needs.

While off-grid solar could bring electricity to millions of people, hydropower is “Africa’s renewable-electricity powerhouse, largely thanks to excellent resources in the East and Central regions of the continent,” BloombergNEF reported in 2024. Six countries, led by Ethiopia, get most of their electricity from hydropower.

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Japanese Film Noir High And Low Is A Remarkable Example Of Nail-Biting Tension – And Now It’s Inspired Spike Lee

In the first half, the film resembles a chamber-play. Toho

BY KRISTIAN RAMSDEN

PH.D CANDIDATE IN ENGLISH,

CREATIVE WRITING AND FILM,

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

“Wake up y’all. The king is here!”

So proclaims Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s new film, Highest 2 Lowest, where Washington portrays a hip hop mogul, David King, who finds himself the centre of a high-profile kidnapping case.

Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic crime drama High and Low. In that film, Toshiro Mifune plays high powered executive Kingo Gondo, who, on the eve of the most important night of his career, receives a surprising phone call informing him that his son has been kidnapped.

Kurosawa’s film begins as a corporate thriller before transforming into a police procedural as detectives traverse the streets of Yokohama in the hope of solving the crime. At the same time, the film sees the director examining social tensions under the surface of reconstruction-era Japan.

More than just a historical document, the film stands up as a remarkable example in nail-biting tension, 60 years after release.

From America …

Kurosawa’s original film is already derived from an American source, adapted from King’s Ransom (1959), an instalment in a series of police procedural paperbacks collectively titled 87th precinct, from author Ed McBain.

The novel’s prose is streamlined and action oriented. Simple sentences like “The room was full of cigarette smoke” or “The 87th Precinct building was on Grover Avenue” read like blueprints for a screenplay.

McBain was a pseudonym for the screenwriter Evan Hunter, who would adapt many of his own novels, including King’s Ransom, for a short lived TV series of the same name which aired from 1961–62.

The series was a late entry in a trend of procedural TV shows popular in Eisenhower’s America, epitomised by The Naked City (1958–63) and Dragnet (1951–59).

… to Japan

The Japanese studio Toho bought the rights for King’s Ransom for US$5,000 in 1961. Kurosawa must have sensed the opportunity for second chance, having been disappointed in his earlier attempt to make a detective film with 1949’s Stray Dog.

However, believing McBain’s novel “wasn’t particularly well written”, he started to make radical adjustments.

The biggest change Kurosawa makes to the novel is to split it into two distinct sections.

In the first half, Kurosawa takes the majority of McBain’s novel and restricts it to the sleek living room of Gondo’s nouveau riche mansion. Gondo’s luxurious air conditioned home overlooks the sweltering overcrowded shanty towns of Yokohama – yet the curtains are often drawn.

This section resembles a chamber-play. Kurosawa’s masterful blocking of the actors forces the audience’s eyes to shift around the widescreen frame; examining each character’s reaction in real time to every gradual reveal of information.

In the second half, Kurosawa abandons the claustrophobia of Gondo’s living room and sends the investigation into the streets below. Abandoning the plot of the novel, this is when the film’s observations of contemporary Japanese society come to the forefront.

An era of Americanisation

The film comments on the “Americanisation” of Japan that took place in the postwar era. Following the end of American Occupation, Japan entered into an unprecedented period of production, prosperity and profit known as the Economic Miracle.

A huge demand for “Western” cultural and commercial goods reshaped much of private and public life. The “three sacred treasures” of domestic goods during the 1960s would be the colour television, the automobile and the air conditioner. The continued presence of United States Army bases allowed the proliferation of American comic books and magazines, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll records.

But for the Japanese, America was both a figure of aspirational culture, and of ongoing military control. During protests in 1960 hundreds of thousands protested against American military expansion. Violent clashes with the police ensued, and one young student was killed. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower cancelled a scheduled visit and Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi was forced to resign.

This split vision of America is almost directly reflected in the dual structure of High and Low. Gondo’s home represents desire; the streets of Yokohama represent violence, and Kurosawa employs the aesthetic of film noir in intensifying the anxiety of the urban environment.

The film was released one year prior to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which sought to reintroduce Japan onto the world stage, showcasing the country’s remarkable transformation.

Kurosawa presents audiences with the repercussions of such progression, asking us to consider the lives and choices of those who have been left behind.

And back to America again

Kurosawa’s films have proved fertile material for American remakes. Seven Samurai (1954) became The Magnificent Seven (1960 and 2016); Yojimbo (1961) became A Fistful of Dollars (1964); and Last Man Standing (1996) and The Hidden Fortress (1958) were an inspiration behind Star Wars (1977).

High and Low has long been earmarked for an American remake. In 1993, Martin Scorsese tried to get a version off the ground, and in 2008 Scorsese tried to pass directing duties to Mike Nichols. Now finally, Lee’s version has premiered at Cannes and to positive reviews.

Kurosawa’s original film continues to impress over half a decade later.

It is ranked 77 on IMDb’s top 250 films of all time and is number six on a similar list from Letterboxd.

In late 2024, the film received a 4K restoration and, along with numerous other Kurosawa classics, was part of a Kurosawa retrospective across cinemas worldwide.

The film has had a remarkable shelf life. It has transcended not only its low brow source material but also language, culture and history.

If Lee’s remake manages to capture even a small portion of the original, then it’s sure to be a great film.

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With New Weapons, Cash And Battleground Experience From Ukraine, North Korea Has Become Much More Formidable

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un smile together in Pyongyang, North Korea, on June 19, 2024. Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik Kremlin/AP

BY ADAM SIMPSON

SENIOR LECTURER, INTERNATIONAL

STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF AUSTRALIA

The war between Russia and Ukraine is taking place in Europe, but its security implications are increasingly being felt in Asia, too.

North Korea has benefited tremendously from its decision to supply enormous quantities of ammunition and soldiers to Russia in return for advanced nuclear and missile technology and diplomatic cover.

North Korea’s involvement in the conflict is transforming it into a much more capable and technologically advanced rogue state in east Asia. This evolving threat may soon prompt South Korea to reassess its security strategies in an increasingly challenging international environment.

How has North Korea helped Russia?

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began to turn into a protracted conflict in late 2022, Moscow faced a problem: it was at risk of running low on ammunition and soldiers to send to the front lines.

Its diplomatic overtures to North Korea began soon after.

In July 2023, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu was warmly received by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a visit to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

In a matter of weeks, high-resolution satellite imagery showed what looked like the establishment of a new munitions supply route from North Korea to Russia.

Around that time, Russia was using about 5,000 artillery shells per day. Around the time the first North Korean shells would have arrived at the front lines several months later, the rate suddenly increased to an average of 15,000 per day.

In September 2023, Kim travelled to Russia for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, where he was given the red-carpet treatment at a space satellite launch facility.

In mid-2024, Putin repaid the favour, making his first visit to Pyongyang in 24 years. He signed a new strategic partnership treaty with North Korea that included mutual defence clauses – each country pledged to provide immediate military assistance if either faced armed aggression.

Soon after, a deployment of 11,000 North Korean troops was headed to the front lines to help Russia retake the Russian region of Kursk, part of which had been captured by Ukraine.

Now, following another visit by Shoigu to Pyongyang in June of this year, Ukrainian officials say another 25,000–30,000 North Korean soldiers are heading to Russia in the months ahead.

North Korea is also sending thousands of builders and deminers to help rebuild the Kursk region.

What is North Korea getting out of the deal?

Estimates from a German think tank suggest North Korea has earned anywhere from US$1.7 billion to $5.5 billion (A$2.6 billion to $8.5 billion) from selling war materiel to Russia since 2023. The think tank also estimates North Korea may also be receiving up to half a billion US dollars annually from the troop deployments.

Russia is also helping North Korea modernise its ageing Soviet-era military.

For example, Russia appears to have provided assistance to Pyongyang in building a critical new air-defence system, an airborne early warning system, tanks with improved electronic warfare systems, a naval destroyer with supersonic cruise missiles, and air-to-air missiles.

In addition, North Korean soldiers have received valuable modern combat experience using artificial intelligence and drones against a highly skilled Ukrainian military.

And Russian soldiers have also tested North Korea’s weapons in combat, such as ballistic missiles, which will assist in their future research and development.

With Russian expertise, North Korea has also made recent progress on technologies associated with launching satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can deliver numerous miniaturised nuclear warheads.

These developments mean South Korea and its allies will need to deal with a much more battle-hardened and technologically advanced North Korean military. Its antiquated systems, historically limited by isolation and a range of international sanctions, are now being rapidly transformed, making it a much more formidable foe.

How can South Korea adapt to the new threats?

South Korea’s new liberal president, Lee Jae Myung, is much less hawkish on North Korea and Russia than his predecessors.

Instead, Lee is doing his best to ease tensions with the North. For instance, he recently ordered propaganda speakers to be removed from the North Korean border, which I visited this week.

Though North Korea also dismantled its own propaganda speakers from the border, it has largely rebuffed other overtures from South Korea. The regime’s rapidly expanding Russian ties give it little incentive to resume international talks aimed at reducing sanctions.

Lee may soon find the evolving situation across the border requires a much more proactive security policy.

South Korea may seek to bolster coordination with its main ally, the United States, and others in the region, such as Australia.

For example, joint military exercises between South Korea and the US later this month will specifically focus on the threats posed by the North’s advancing missile program, as well as drones, GPS jamming and cyber attacks.

Current South Korean law prohibits it from sending arms to war zones, but Seoul has helped Ukraine indirectly and stepped up its sales of weapons elsewhere in Europe.

And though Lee skipped the recent NATO summit that his predecessor had attended three years in a row, he may need to reverse course and continue deepening ties with the bloc if his soft diplomacy approach with the North doesn’t bear fruit.

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