Vox Sentences: The official reason, and the real reason, the US is selling arms to Vietnam

The US kills the leader of the Taliban — and Pakistan is pissed; the post-neo-Nazis almost won in Austria; Obama lifts the arms embargo on Vietnam.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Taliban in disarray

Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

• Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor was killed Saturday in a drone strike in Pakistan. The White House confirmed Mansoor's death on Monday.

  [NYT / Gardiner Harris]

• Mansoor was still consolidating his rule of the Taliban, which he took over (hurriedly) in 2015. But his death throws the organization into even deeper disarray.

  [The Guardian / Jon Boone]

• What's likely is that whoever succeeds Mansoor will try to demonstrate his legitimacy by proving himself on the battlefield — the same strategy Mansoor followed.

  [WSJ / Jessica Donati and Habib Khan Totakhil]

• This would obviously not be great for the prospect of peace talks in Afghanistan. But since Mansoor himself wasn't exactly interested in peace talks, the US has decided this is a risk it's willing to take.

  [CNN / Nick Paton Walsh]

• Mansoor's death may, however, affect the US's relationship with Pakistan — which reportedly backed Mansoor in the Taliban's internal leadership struggles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the US didn't notify Pakistan in advance about the strike.

  [NYT / Mujib Mashal]

• Pakistan's government is claiming that the drone strike violated its sovereignty, which is both true and something the US has not typically concerned itself much with when it comes to drone strikes.

  [Al Jazeera]

The center cannot hold

Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images

• Austria's Green Party won the country's presidential election over the weekend. But the real story is that the far-right, post-neo-Nazi Freedom Party only barely lost.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The presidency is a largely ceremonial position. The reason the election matters is that it demonstrates a shift in Austrian politics, with the far right gaining ground.

  [LSE Europp Blog / Philip Rathgeb and Fabio Wolkenstein ]

• The Freedom Party is something of an innovator in Europe's new far right. Its rise from neo-Nazi holdouts to a populist (and racist) national agenda in the 1990s set the template for far-right parties across the continent.

  [The Journal of the International Institute / Anton Pelinka]

• And in the aftermath of a continent-wide panic over the influx of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries, the far right is on the rise throughout Europe.

  [Der Spiegel / Melanie Amann, Matthias Bartsch, Jan Friedmann, Nils Minkmar, Michael Sauga, and Steffen Winter]

• Some observers caution against reading too much into the rise of the Freedom Party, claiming that while its rhetoric might be far to the right, its policies aren't that far off from the centrist parties that have traditionally governed the country.

  [European Council on Foreign Relations / Gustav Gressel]

• But it's pretty hard to deny that the general political trend — not just the rise of the far right, but the hollowing of the center — is a problem that goes beyond Austria to the rest of Europe.

  [The Guardian]

Comrades in arms

Martin H. Simon-Pool/Getty Images

• President Obama announced on Monday that the US is lifting its 40-year embargo on the sale of arms to Vietnam.

  [USA Today / David Jackson and Thomas Maresca]

• The US has been holding out the promise of lifting the arms embargo as an incentive for Vietnam to improve on human rights, which it hasn't exactly done.

  [NYT / Gardiner Harris]

• (To prepare for Obama's visit to the country, in fact, the Vietnamese government cracked down on environmental protests after tons of dead fish started washing up on the country's beaches.)

  [Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

• Officially, the embargo lifting is part of a long process of warming relations between the US and Vietnam over the course of the 21st century.

  [Washington Post / Adam Taylor]

• It's not that memories of the Vietnam War are dead, exactly — 100,000 Vietnamese have been killed or wounded by unexploded bombs and mines since the war ended, and (as Michael Sullivan reports) schoolchildren are still taught how to avoid land mines.

  [NPR / Michael Sullivan]

• Rather, the Vietnamese have embraced the free market and therefore, by extension, America; at Quartz, Matt Phillips observes that the turn to economic populism in America and Europe has left Vietnam as "globalization's last big fan."

  [Quartz / Matt Phillips]

• Unofficially, the embargo lifting is almost certainly about China. China is flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, and the US wants its allies to be prepared.

  [Reuters / Matt Spetalnick]

• Of course, analysts think that China is likely to react poorly to the lifting of the embargo, which will exacerbate tensions further.

  [CNN / Gareth Corsi]

MISCELLANEOUS

New York City became great because of tall, dense building. But nearly 40 percent of the city's structures would be illegal to build under today's zoning rules. [NYT / Quoctrung Bui and Jeremy White]

• Cancer researchers are increasingly focusing on "exceptional responders": rare patients who recover post-treatment faster and more completely than anyone could've expected.

  [NYT Mag / Gareth Cook]

• "Risk assessment" scores are meant to help courts judge which defendants are likely to reoffend. But a closer look shows they mistakenly rate black defendants as dangerous — and white defendants as low-risk — at a startling rate.

  [ProPublic / Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner]

• Beware the Manchineel tree, whose fruit is sweet but also extremely toxic. Naturally it grows in Florida.

  [Atlas Obscura / Dan Nosowitz]

• Ghostbusters is still months away from release, but sexist YouTubers have already made it the most disliked trailer on the site.

  [The Atlantic / David Sims]

VERBATIM

"Between 20 percent and 30 percent of all dissertations that have been completed at Russian universities since the fall of the Soviet Union were purchased on the black market." [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• "[Moby's] been in a relationship for eight months now, his first in 10 years. It seems to be going OK, though he can’t really tell… He keeps having to ask his girlfriend things: 'Like, is it OK if I go to bed after you do?'"

  [The Guardian / Miranda Sawyer]

• "It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump's son, and they will be crowned American royalty."

  [White supremacist Andre Anglin, to Vice / Mitchell Sunderland]

• "We would just find great beats that were usually in people’s crates and had the name scratched out. So we did not know the name of the song was 'Walk This Way.'"

  [Joseph "Run" Simmons to Washington Post / Geoff Edgers]

• "It is my contention that the tendency of strategy games to turn even the woolliest of liberals into ravening tyrants is a result of a perspective that the games foist upon us. … People placed in positions of power do not become authoritarian because the system is ‘rigged,' they become authoritarian because in order to control a state they have to see the world like a state — and the state cares no more for individual humans than we do for the individual cells in our bodies."

  [Futurismic / Jonathan McCalmont]

WATCH THIS

Why Obama is one of the most consequential presidents in American history [YouTube / Christophe Haubursin and Dylan Matthews]

David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

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