NEWS WRAP

US playing hypersonic catch-up

• Missile technology to be fast-tracked | Australia, the US and Britain will work together to fast-track the development of hypersonic missiles in a bid to catch up with China and Russia. Both Asian powers have conducted successful tests and fielded versions of hypersonic missiles, while the United States has lagged behind in both developing the weapons and mastering cutting edge military technology. READ MORE HERE
   

• United States to investigate Russian war crimes | Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky outlined a list of alleged Russian atrocities, in a speech to the UN Security Council yesterday. Scenes in Bucha, near Kyiv - where civilian corpses were strewn in the streets - are being repeated across other parts of the country, he says. Asked if Russia’s actions amount to genocide, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday the United States “will look hard and document everything that we see, put it all together..." READ MORE HERE
   

• Arrest over Sacramento shooting | Sacramento police made their first two arrests in connection with the shootings that killed six people and wounded a dozen others in the heart of California's capital early on Sunday morning. Investigators determined at least two shooters had allegedly fired more than 100 rounds during the attack. READ MORE HERE
   

• COVID hospitalisations hit new US low | Hospitalisations for COVID in the United States have reached a low since the pandemic was declared, but case numbers in the UK are surging – indicating another swell in cases for Omicron subvariant BA2. There have been 980,000 deaths in the United States to date, slowly approaching the one million mark. READ MORE HERE
   

• Ketanji Brown Jackson poised to be confirmed | Republican senators Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney said they'll vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the US Supreme Court. All 50 Senate Democrats, including the two independents who caucus with them, are expected to vote for Jackson's confirmation. If confirmed, she will be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. READ MORE HERE

ANALYSIS

The normalisation and mitigation of conspiracy and misinformation

Dr Rodney Taveira
Lecturer in American Studies, United States Studies Centre

Long before QAnon or Pizzagate, conspiracy was enmeshed in American culture from its earliest days. Newly independent Americans were virulently anti-Masonic. The 19th-century Protestant majority was strongly anti-Catholic. After the Second World War, US senators and conspiracy theorists alike claimed godless Communists hid under beds and in the highest echelons of US institutions.

The paranoid style of each movement is expressed through conspiracy theories. These theories most commonly hold that bad foreign actors are plotting to take down the United States and its experiment in democracy.

Yet in addition to conspiracy, two newer catchwords have emerged in the age of social media, President Donald Trump and COVID-19: misinformation and disinformation. While often mistakenly used synonymously, these phenomena are distinct.

Misinformation “constitutes a claim that contradicts or distorts common understandings of verifiable facts.” By definition, misinformation is false. This falseness, however, is politically and ethically neutral; after all, ignorance and misunderstandings are normal features of our social lives. Claims hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19 were unsubstantiated, but like most misinformation about COVID treatments, were shared in an effort to try and help others.

Disinformation, on the other hand, is misinformation deployed to deliberately deceive and destabilise. When foreigners pretended to be Americans and ran online campaigns to shift votes in the 2016 election, they knowingly shared misinformation to achieve a certain outcome.

Conspiracy occupies shakier, less defined ground that, in turn, affects the foundations on which judgements are made about misinformation and disinformation. It is the assigning of intent in terms of a worldview that drives and spreads beliefs.

Conspiracy fuels both sides of US politics. The Russiagate assertions that Trump was a Manchurian candidate are as ridiculous or reasonable as claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. The dangers of partisan institutions touting conspiracy for political gain are evinced by the January 6 Capitol riot.

This is an excerpt from Dr Taveira's contribution to the Centre's recent State of the United States report 

BY THE NUMBERS | STATE OF THE UNITED STATES

US population falling at record levels

In 2021, the United States recorded its slowest population growth since at least 1900, at just 0.1 per cent as the figure above shows.

The second-lowest growth rate occurred in 1918-19, during the influenza pandemic and First World War. In absolute terms, 2021 was the first time the US population grew by less than one million people since 1937. The working-age population (aged between 15 and 64) recorded an outright decline for the third straight year in 2021.

These outcomes are partly attributable to the pandemic, which closed US borders, increased mortality and deferred births. But it also reflects longer-term trends, including record-low fertility rates. US population growth has been slowing since the early 1990s, much of which is driven by lower net international migration (NIM), the balance of migrant inflows and outflows. From a recent peak of just over one million in 2015-2016, NIM fell to just 247,000 between 2020 and 2021.

This is adapted from Threats to and opportunities for US economic and technical power by Dr Stephen Kirchner in this year's State of the United States report. 

VIDEO

Alliance Dinner 2022 | Prime Minister Scott Morrison

The US-Australia alliance — and the deep, long-standing channels of trust and cooperation it has fostered between Australia and the United States — are being tasked with more issues and with more urgency than at any point in its 70-year history.

To mark not just the milestone of the formal alliance reaching 70 years, but that the US-Australia alliance is critical in meeting Australia’s great strategic and security challenges of today and the foreseeable future, the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, American Australian Association Ltd and Perth USAsia Centre hosted an Alliance Dinner in Canberra. Other remarks included US President Joe Biden (read by the White House Indo-Pacific Affairs Coordinator Kurt Campbell), Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese, Australian Ambassador to the United States Arthur Sinodinos, US Chargé d'Affaires Michael Goldman and former Prime Minister John Howard.

Catch more analysis on the United States on the USSC YouTube channel.

THE WEEK IN TWEETS

#Ketanji'sConfirmation