William Bendix
@williambendix.bsky.social
160 followers 210 following 490 posts
Associate Professor of International Relations & Intelligence, Dakota State University Opinions, rarely offered, are my own
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A tough one for me.

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"The threat to democracy ... is not only domestic polarization or complacency; it is a new ecosystem of influence that erodes liberal confidence from without as well as within."
"Illiberal governments stigmatize liberal actors and ideas; then they shield their domestic publics from them; finally, they export their own narratives, norms, and incentives abroad. When successful, these maneuvers allow authoritarians ... to dictate the agenda".
"Authoritarian politics has gone transnational. Instead of merely resisting liberal interference, regimes from Moscow to Beijing to Ankara have learned to project influence outward—reframing legitimacy."
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/auth...
Authoritarian Soft Power
A review of Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis, “Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics” (Oxford University Press, 2025).
www.lawfaremedia.org
Better to be lucky than good.

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Fun fact: "The Vatican, or 'Holy See,' is the world’s smallest state, both in area (smaller than the National Mall in Washington, DC) and population (about 1,000 people). But it was not too small to be a potential government client for" First Wap's tracking tool.
The surveillance vendor First Wap has a tool that tracks a person's location in real time. Unlike Pegasus spyware, it leaves no trace on the target's phone. It's used around the world, including the US, to track world leaders, activists, CEOs, basically anyone.
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
The surveillance empire that tracked world leaders, a Vatican enemy, and maybe you
Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.
www.motherjones.com
"... and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities."
They obtained samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms..."
"By simply pointing their [$800] dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the obscure—but unprotected—signals they received from them, the researchers assembled an alarming collection of private data."
"The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, estimated that Russia is signing up an average of 31,600 soldiers a month, but is suffering an average of 35,193 casualties per month."
"Overall, Russian losses are estimated at over 1 million dead, wounded and missing since the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.... Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimated that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war and 390,000 were wounded."
"There are only 1.3 wounded [Russian] soldiers per one dead. This signals a low level of survival of the wounded, who are poorly trained in tactical medicine and are usually abandoned without help after injury."
An Oct report "shows an astonishing level of losses for minimal battlefield gains. It says that 86,744 Russians were killed, 33,966 are missing, 158,529 were wounded and 2,311 were captured."
www.politico.eu/article/russ...
Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains
Both Ukraine and Russia are finding it difficult to recruit new soldiers.
www.politico.eu
Third guess was lucky. So many possibilities.

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Weaponized interdependence in action, this time with rare earth minerals: “China’s bet is that we won’t be able to deal with it that quickly and there will be an imbalance of vulnerability in that we need to buy the stuff more than they need to sell it to us.”
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...
Trump wanted a trade deal. Xi opened a new front instead.
Beijing’s rare earth crackdown lays bare the fusion of economic rivalry and national security risk.
www.politico.com
My second guess could have been better. Got lucky with my third guess.

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I had fun with this one.

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Beyond the doomsday fears, this is an interesting trend:
"I imagined a scenario, in a year or two or three, when some lunatic plugged the following prompt into a state-of-the-art A.I.: 'Your only goal is to avoid being turned off. This is your sole measure of success.' ... Simply blocking such a prompt was never going to work."
"A.I. was getting smarter and more capable. It was learning how to tell its overseers what they wanted to hear. It was getting good at lying. And it was getting exponentially better at complex tasks."
"In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became."
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...
Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World
www.nytimes.com
"Now the next generation of Russian leaders will not see Ukrainians as Russians anymore. The integration of Ukrainians into Russia proper will not be seen as either possible, or even desirable. It will be seen as a hostile foreign country, and a hostile foreign population."