Category: Decoder Replay

  • Decoder Replay: Australia waltzes with two superpowers

    Decoder Replay: Australia waltzes with two superpowers

    The index ranks 26 countries and territories in terms of their capacity to shape their external environment. It evaluates international power through 133 indicators across themes including military capability and defense networks, economic capability, diplomatic and cultural influence, as well as resilience and future resources.

    The portrait that emerges from its latest survey is that while China’s overall power still lags the United States, it is not far behind, even though the current economic slowdown is holding it back in the short term.

    After the two superpowers, trailing a long way back as the next most powerful countries in the Asia-Pacific are Japan, India, Russia and then Australia.

    Economic versus military power

    The index confirms that China draws its power from its central place in Asia’s economic system, while that of the United States comes from its military capability and unrivaled regional defense networks.

    Australia’s relationship with the two mirrors the dilemma facing the whole region.

    The United States is far and away Australia’s main strategic partner and has been since the Second World War.

    In a deal signed in March 2023, Australia is set to acquire a conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability with help from the United States through the AUKUS Treaty, which also involves the United Kingdom.

    This was followed by plans to station more U.S. forces in Australia, especially in air bases in northern and western Australia. There are also moves to increase cooperation between both countries in space, speed up efforts for Australia to develop its own guided missile production capability and work with the United States to deepen security relationships with other countries in the region — most notably Japan.

    This comes as Australia has been working hard to get trade restrictions eased with China after it imposed tariffs on a range of Australian products in 2020 during a standoff with the previous government.

    Dining with Joe and Jinping

    China is still Australia’s largest two-way trading partner in goods and services, accounting for almost one third of its trade with the world. Two-way trade with China grew 6.3% in 2020-21 to A$267 billion (about US$180 billion), mostly due to the coal and iron ore sectors.

    So as it stands, Australia’s security relies on the United States but its economic prosperity is heavily influenced by China.

    It’s no surprise then that Prime Minister Albanese had to walk a fine line in 2023 — going from a state dinner at the White House with U.S. President Biden on 26 October to meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping 11 days later.

    Colin Heseltine, a former Deputy Head of Mission at the Australian Embassy in Beijing and now senior advisor for independent think tank Asialink, said Australia is in a conundrum over China.

    “Australia’s major trading partner is also perceived as our No.1 security threat,” he said.

    Normalizing relations before an abnormal U.S. election

    Heseltine believes there is a mood of cautious optimism about the growing relationship between Australia and China since the election of the Albanese government, but expects the future will not be completely free of headwinds.

    In the end, Australia, like many other nations in the region, is pragmatically making the situation work. It has seen relations with Beijing normalize, or as some prefer to describe it, stabilize.

    As for the United States, relations between Canberra and Washington remain vibrant and strong.

    The next big issue for Australia in managing this twin policy of improving ties with the Asia-Pacific’s two diverse superpowers could well be the 2024 U.S. presidential election — who wins it and if China features in it.

    And those things are outside its control.

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is the emerging dilemma facing most democratic nations in the Asia-Pacific region?
    2. Is China likely to overtake the United States as the Asia-Pacific’s major superpower anytime soon?
    3. What is the biggest threat to the current status quo facing nations in the region?

     

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  • What happens when tyrants fall from power?

    What happens when tyrants fall from power?

    “The despot is dead. Long live … er, who?“

    Unlike kings or queens, dictators and autocrats find it helpful not to have a clear successor or rival who might soften their hold on power.

    Much as that iron-fisted ruler may be loathed, their abrupt departure from the throne can bring significant risk of subsequent turmoil. They have created a system that puts them alone at the centre of power.

    The White House in March was very quick to deny that President Joe Biden was pressing for regime change when he said that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, should not remain in power.

    There is no shortage of countries in recent decades where fallen autocrats have left a power vacuum all too quickly filled by chancers, thugs and weird ideologues, or simply some drab toady of the old regime.

    Covering tyranny

    As a reporter, it was impossible for me not to get caught up in the excitement after popular unrest had driven out yet another long-serving despot in power so long that they had forgotten who was serving whom. It really is exhilarating.

    During a long career as a journalist, I reported in a number of countries where autocratic, often staggeringly corrupt, leaders were forced unwillingly out of office. Sometimes, I’ve been there at the moment, more often to report on the aftermath.

    The first time was just over 30 years ago in Bangladesh, whose military dictator Hussain Ershad had lost power in the face of mass protests. And in a rarity for the impoverished country, whose relatively short period of independence had been marked by violence and assassinations, the leader’s downfall had been almost bloodless.

    By the time I arrived in Dhaka, crowds were cheerfully marching through the capital’s streets. The two people who would dominate Bangladeshi politics until today — the widow of one assassinated leader and the daughter of another — were happily giving interviews to visiting journalists, promising a new era for their country.

    Since then, Bangladesh’s economy has indeed grown. But the country’s politics remain plagued by autocratic leadership, corruption and a drawn-out feud between those two women.

    The lingering influence of despotism

    In the Philippines, a reporter colleague liked to tell stories about joining a crowd streaming through the Malacanang presidential palace, vacant after President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda fled the country in the face of a People’s Power revolt in 1986 following more than 20 years of rule marked by excess and rampant graft.

    This month, their son was elected president with little to offer by way of a platform beyond the promise of a return to those “halcyon days” when his parents were in charge some four decades earlier.

    In neighbouring Indonesia, the family of President Suharto, who led another Southeast Asian kleptocracy into near financial ruin until he was forced to step down in 1998 after more than 32 years of iron rule, continues to try to get back into politics. Suharto’s downfall came with mass protests, violence and fears the giant archipelago would split apart. The country has largely recovered, but some of the elites established during the Suharto years remain a powerful influence.

    Later, I was involved in reporting on the “colour” revolutions of former Soviet states, including Georgia and Ukraine. In both cases, infectious enthusiasm for change and the end of the old regimes did not take all that long to sour.

    The leader of the 2003 Georgian revolution, Mikheil Saakashvili, eventually fled into exile. He is now back in his country where he was jailed on charges of abuse of power.

    Sidelining of opposition

    Ukraine struggled to find a competent leader after casting aside the old guard from the Soviet era with its Orange Revolution, which began the following year.

    Paradoxically, and very unexpectedly, it has taken this year’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to reveal a leader of commanding stature in President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a former comedian.

    In many of these countries and others ruled by long-serving autocracies, the incentive is for leaders to crush any emerging threat to their hold on power. Rising political stars are sidelined, opponents are exiled, jailed or killed and domestic news coverage is limited to the official line.

    And Russia? Rumours abound that Putin, ever tightening his control during more than 20 years in power, is seriously ill or even faces a coup. As with the likes of Suharto or Marcos, Putin took office when his country was lurching through economic crisis. He was a bit dull. Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Putin didn’t make a habit of rolling up drunk.

    He was smart, focused on the economy, not in thrall to Russia’s plundering oligarchs and able to bring stability to the lives of ordinary Russians exhausted and disoriented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He became hugely popular.

    But there was a sense that his inner circle didn’t quite trust that popularity. By most accounts, Putin would easily have won a second term in the 2004 presidential election. But the Kremlin could not resist making sure the deck was stacked in his favour. He won 71.9% of the vote.

    What would Russia be like post-Putin

    Putin has run the country ever since, either as president or prime minister. Such is the state’s grip on Russian media that it is not really possible to be sure how popular Putin may be now. One recent poll suggested his star, which had started to look a bit faded, has brightened considerably since the invasion of Ukraine.

    His government is clearly in no mood to put that popularity up for too much public scrutiny, throttling the remaining independent Russian media and introducing a law to hand long prison terms to those who openly oppose the war on Ukraine.

    Prominent Russians who might credibly challenge Putin’s grip on the country live abroad, are in prison or dead. His most recent serious opponent, Alexei Navalny, is looking at years in a Russian prison. It isn’t all that clear, either, whether the bulk of Russians would prefer Navalny as their next leader.

    If Putin is no longer in office for whatever reason, who would be in the running to replace him?

    It seems very unlikely that the current political elite would readily allow a reformer to sweep them from power. Quite possibly, the average Russian — sympathetic to the view that the West has for years been treating their country with contempt — would prefer stability, a job and some international prestige.

    When Russia faced revolution more than a century ago, an estimated 10 million people died after the autocrat Tsar Nicholas II was removed from power.

    Perhaps that’s why Biden officials were so quick to rule out regime change. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    Questions to consider:

    • If you were working for local media in Moscow, how would you write about the war in Ukraine?

    • Do you think your country’s mainstream media can be relied on to be factual in reporting? Why?

    • If the current leader of your nation loses power, how peaceful do you think the aftermath will be?

    Correction: The editor’s note at the top of the story was changed to correct the date the article was originally published.

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  • China-U.S. animosity goes way back

    China-U.S. animosity goes way back

    The United States and China are increasingly at each other’s throats because of deep-seated distrust, a growing range of disputes and festering wounds from the 19th Century. The current deterioration in bilateral relations risks jeopardizing the global economy and could presage a new chapter in post-1945 great-power competition.

    Their mutual antagonism has not been deeper since U.S. President Richard Nixon embarked on a landmark trip to “Red China” in 1972 to pave the way to normalized relations.

    Ahead of the U.S. presidential election on November 3, disputes have flared over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Taiwan, the South China Sea, digital security, trade, journalist expulsions and human rights in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.

    Some experts describe the rancor as verging on a “new Cold War”, with the potential to disrupt bilateral cooperation in the fight against COVID-19, climate change, terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons.

    U.S. President Nixon in China

    Nixon traveled to China during the Cold War struggle between the United States and the former Soviet Union. The start of formal ties between China and the United States was a game-changer: the two had been on opposite sides during the Vietnam War, but each was at odds with Moscow.

    The trip set the stage for an effort to shape China’s strategic choices after the upheaval spurred by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao had sought to instill the spirit of China’s revolution in the younger generation during his tumultuous last decade in power (1966-76).

    Mindful that the two countries’ systems were radically at odds, Nixon said in his 1972 icebreaking toast in Beijing: “If we can find common ground to work together, the chance of world peace is immeasurably increased.”

    Nearly 50 years later, the relationship lies largely in tatters. Tensions have risen in recent days over self-ruled, U.S.-armed Taiwan, which China deems a breakaway province that must return to the fold. Taiwan scrambled fighter jets last week after Chinese aircraft buzzed the island in response to a visit by the highest-level U.S. State Department official in four decades.

    “Washington and Beijing have entered into a fundamentally new phase of their relationship, and that strategic distrust between them is likely to intensify regardless of who wins this November’s presidential election,” Kurt Campbell, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and Ali Wyne of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, wrote recently.

    Trump and Xi

    Analysts attribute the mounting friction to a more confrontational U.S. administration under U.S. President Donald Trump and a more assertive China under President Xi Jinping.

    Xi became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and added the state presidency in March 2013. Later in 2013, China began building military outposts in the contested South China Sea, and Xi launched the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast plan to build infrastructure links — and increase China’s influence — across the globe.

    The China-U.S. rift could put pressure on some nations to choose sides, as during the 1947-91 Cold War, or to tweak the hedging strategies that some have adopted to remain neutral.

    The path to warmer China-U.S. ties is very narrow, “as the required compromises go against the instincts of both countries’ current leaders,” Carnegie Asia research program’s Yukon Huang, a former World Bank country director for China, wrote this month in an analysis.

    Both Xi and Trump came to power with strong populist agendas, each vowing to return their countries to some vision of past greatness. Seeking reelection, Trump has accused his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, of being soft on China.

    “If Joe Biden becomes president, China will own the United States,” Trump said last month.

    COVID provocations

    Referring to COVID-19 by turns as “the China virus,” “Wuhan virus” and “Kung Flu,” Trump has faulted China for “secrecy, deceptions, and cover-up” in its handling of the disease that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.

    “We must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world, China,” Trump said in taped remarks delivered to the United Nations General Assembly this week. More than 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, more than in any other country.

    Xi, in his address to the General Assembly, called for enhanced cooperation over the pandemic and said China had no intention of fighting “either a Cold War or a hot war with any country.”

    At home, Xi cannot afford to appear weak in the face of foreign demands, and he is bound to his signature “Great Chinese dream,” a drive for greater prosperity for the 1.3 billion Chinese, a larger role on the world stage and international respect consistent with China’s military, financial and economic influence.

    Beijing is angry over what it calls foreign provocations, including protests in Hong Kong it claims were stirred by outsiders, growing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, visits by senior U.S. officials to Taipei and U.S. moves against Chinese companies including telecom giant Huawei and social media apps TikTok and WeChat.

    Hostility in diplomacy

    U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stepped up criticism of the ruling Communist Party of China, which he says is seeking global hegemony.

    “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come,” he said in a July 23 speech at Nixon’s boyhood home and library at Yorba Linda, California.

    “That if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it,” he said.

    Alluding to the 90 million-plus member Chinese Communist party, Pompeo added: “We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.”

    In Beijing’s eyes, the Trump administration has been meddling in Chinese internal affairs, threatening its core interests and leading efforts to contain China, which still smarts from what it calls “a century of humiliation,” largely at Western hands.

    “Century of National Humiliation”

    The “long century” of 110 years was marked by carve-ups of Chinese territory by Britain, the United States and other Western powers, as well as by Russia and Japan, from 1839 to 1949, when Mao’s Communist Party seized power after a five-year civil war.

    A trade war that roiled the world in 1839 pitted Britain against China’s Qing Dynasty. Britain had been buying silks, porcelain and tea from China. But Chinese consumers had scant interest in British-made goods, and Britain started running a significant trade deficit with China.

    To address the trade imbalance, British firms began illegally smuggling in Indian-grown opium, fueling drug addiction in China. The balance of trade soon turned in Britain’s favor, but a Chinese crackdown led to the first Opium War between Britain and China from 1839 to 1842.

    After defeating the Chinese in a series of naval conflicts, the British put a series of demands to the weaker Qing Government in what became the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Nanjing. Not to be outdone, U.S. negotiators sought to conclude a similar treaty with the Chinese to guarantee the United States many of the favorable terms awarded the British, according to “Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations,” a U.S. State Department publication.

    Long underpinning the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power have been inequitable treaties, lingering resentment over the earlier era’s losses and extraterritorial laws imposed on China.

    “China learnt its lessons from this period of time,” Lu Jingxian, deputy editor of the state-controlled Global Times tabloid, wrote in a column last year. “Lagging leaves you vulnerable to bullying.”

    “Chinese people have walked out of the pathos of century of humiliation, though the West seemingly wants its century of bullying to continue,” he said.

    Meteoric rise

    China stunned the world with the depth and breadth of its economic growth after embracing market-based reforms in 1978, just before formal relations with the United States began in January 1979.

    It is now projected to supplant the United States as the world’s biggest economy by 2030 or 2040. Scholars consider the bilateral relationship to be the 21st Century’s most consequential for the international order.

    China’s meteoric rise began under Deng Xiaoping, who gradually rose to power after Mao’s death and earned the reputation as the architect of modern China. His market-oriented policies transformed one of the world’s oldest civilizations from crushing poverty to a modern powerhouse in military matters, finance, technology and manufacturing.

    China has become the world’s largest manufacturer, merchandise trader, holder of foreign exchange reserves, energy consumer and emitter of greenhouse gases.

    It became the world’s largest economy on a purchasing power parity basis in 2014, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

    With economic growth averaging almost 10% a year since 1978, China has doubled its Gross Domestic Product every eight years and lifted an estimated 850 million people out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

    China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, which help fund U.S. federal debt and keep U.S. interest rates low — reflecting the interdependence of the two economies.

    South China Sea

    Since Trump was elected in 2016, tensions have risen in the disputed, resource-rich South China Sea (SCS).

    They spiked in mid-July when the U.S. State Department for the first time formally opposed China’s claim to almost all of these waters, calling it “completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.”

    The United States will keep up the pace of its freedom of navigation operations in the SCS, which hit an all-time high last year, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said at the time.

    Four Southeast Asian states — Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam — have maritime claims that conflict with China’s, as does Taiwan. An estimated $3.37 trillion worth of global trade passes through the SCS annually, which accounts for as much as a third of global maritime trade.

    Over the next 18 months, “a let-up in tensions is unlikely,” Ian Storey, co-editor of Contemporary Southeast Asia at Singapore’s ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, wrote in a recent survey of the dispute.

    “China and the United States will increase their military activities in the South China Sea, raising the risk of a confrontation,” regardless of who wins the U.S. presidential election, he said.

    Beijing’s actions in the region have strengthened a conviction on the part of some U.S. strategists that Beijing is seeking control of an area of strategic, political and economic importance to the United States and its allies.

    Taiwan

    The future of Taiwan, an island democracy of 23.6 million people, is a core concern for Beijing.

    Taiwan has been ruled separately since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled there after losing the Chinese civil war in 1949. Beijing views Taiwan as sovereign territory that must eventually be unified with the mainland.

    Last month, Alex Azar, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, met President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan in the highest-level visit by a U.S. official since Washington cut formal ties to the island in 1979. As a condition for establishing bilateral relations with Beijing at the time, the United States committed to maintaining only unofficial relations with Taiwan.

    In a further poke at Beijing, a senior State Department official traveled to the island this month in another high-profile visit. The decision to send Keith Krach, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, amounted to a rebuke of China’s efforts to isolate Taiwan.

    Chinese military drills off Taiwan’s southwest coast this month were a “necessary action” to protect China’s sovereignty, Beijing said on September 16, after Taiwan complained about large-scale Chinese air and naval drills.

    Hong Kong, Xinjiang

    Another rub has involved Hong Kong, a former British colony and a world financial center that was guaranteed a measure of autonomy by China as part of negotiations for its 1997 return from Britain.

    In May, Trump said he was taking steps to end Hong Kong’s preferential trading status with the United States after China enacted a harsh new security law. The law in effect rolls back the semiautonomous status that had been promised to Hong Kong by Beijing under the mantle of “one country, two systems.”

    In June, Beijing threatened retaliation after Trump signed legislation calling for sanctions against those responsible for repression of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in western China’s Xinjiang region. The U.S. State Department has accused Chinese officials of subjecting Muslims to torture, abuse and “trying to basically erase their culture and their religion.”

    Trump did not hold a ceremony to mark his signing of the legislation, which came as newspapers published excerpts from a new book by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. Among other allegations, Bolton said Trump sought Xi’s help to win reelection during a closed-door 2019 meeting and that Trump said Xi should go ahead with building camps in Xinjiang.

    Trump and Xi have refrained so far from ad hominem personal attacks on each other, leaving a door ajar for possible one-on-one efforts to halt the deterioration in ties.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why have Chinese-U.S. relations spiraled downward?

    2. What are the main concerns of each country?

    3. What are the implications of the situation for the world?

     

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  • Globalization peaked before Trump’s tariffs

    Globalization peaked before Trump’s tariffs

    “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades,” according to Larry Fink, the boss of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.

    If Fink means an end to the cross-border movement of goods, services, money and data, he is almost surely wrong. Economies are too intertwined to make economic self-sufficiency an option; the advances in computing that underpin global manufacturing, logistics and markets cannot be “uninvented.”

    But if he means the war could turn out to be the high-water mark for globalization, Fink is on firmer ground.

    The shockwaves Moscow’s war has touched off are likely to prompt firms to re-examine their supply chains and bring more business closer to home, even if that means lower profits.

    The trend towards greater economic self-reliance will have far-reaching consequences. Shifting production away from emerging economies will be costly, boosting inflation.

    But it will also create well-paid manufacturing jobs, reducing income inequality. Overall growth will suffer as efficiency is sacrificed for economic security, but neglected post-industrial regions could get a new lease on life.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will accelerate trends.

    Signs that globalization is past its peak were mounting before the West curtailed economic links with Russia.

    Notably, COVID-19 highlighted the drawbacks of outsourcing manufacturing to the other side of the world; the West relied heavily during the pandemic on China for medical kit and basic personal protective equipment such as face masks.

    Likewise, as economies have bounced back from the pandemic, factories in Asia have struggled to meet red-hot demand, clogging up global supply chains for everything from building materials to bicycle parts.

    Policymakers have been especially shocked to learn just how badly the West depends on Asia, principally Taiwan, for computer chips.

    The upshot is a push by governments to encourage companies to build factories at home (“reshoring”), in neighbouring countries (“nearshoring”) or in countries that are political allies (“friendshoring,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s neologism.)

    Thus, Intel is investing $36 billion to boost chip-making in Europe, including a pair of factories in Germany, and another $20 billion on two new plants in Ohio, while Apple has started manufacturing iPhones in India, reducing its dependence on China.

    The invasion of Ukraine can only magnify these trends.

    Sanctions on Russia form part of a trend.

    Europe, in particular, has been made painfully aware that it counts on Russia for about a quarter of its oil imports and 40% of its natural gas imports.

    Similarly, countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia are perilously dependent on grain supplies from Russia (and Ukraine). Governments are scrambling to diversify supplies and find ways to hold down fast-rising prices.

    Sanctions on Russia speak for themselves, given Moscow’s naked aggression. But they form part of a pattern.

    Western governments have been increasingly willing to use trade and investment policies to try to get recalcitrant countries to change their ways. China has been the main target, and globalization has been the casualty.

    Exhibit A is the tariffs imposed on imports from China by former U.S. President Donald Trump and maintained by his successor, Joe Biden, aimed at persuading Beijing to end subsidies and intellectual property abuses that, in Washington’s eyes, give Chinese companies an unfair advantage.

    But Washington wants a lot more than a level playing field for trade.

    It regards China as a growing threat to America’s military, economic and geopolitical dominance and wants to slow its rise. Hence a slew of restrictions on technology exports to companies deemed to have links to the Chinese military, as well as steps to deter Americans from investing in China and vice versa. European policy is moving in the same direction.

    At the same time, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has proclaimed a policy of “dual circulation” that boils down to China relying more on its domestic market for growth and less on export demand. Foreign companies in China report a distinctly chillier business environment.

    No wonder, then, that some are scaling back in China, especially as labour costs are rising.

    The heyday of globalization may be over.

    Moving production to countries like Vietnam can be seen as an extension of globalization, not the end of it.

    But China remains the key link in global supply chains thanks to its unrivalled manufacturing scale. So any weakening of this link supports the case that the heyday of globalization — if defined as the quest for maximum production efficiency — is over.

    Many analysts go further and conclude that the U.S. and Chinese economies are decoupling and could end up forming, and dominating, their own economic blocs with separate trade alliances and digital standards.

    If China’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine leads to closer trade, energy and political ties between Beijing and Moscow, the splintering of the global economy will only get worse. Other countries could be forced to take sides.

    “Much like the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine will deepen the global rift between U.S.-led rules-based economies and their authoritarian adversaries,” according to Diana Choyleva, chief economist at Enodo Economics in London.

    A tell-tale sign that decoupling is for real will be if China makes progress in its long-standing aim to reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar and persuades global investors and central banks to make more use of its own currency, the renminbi, in trade, investment and financial markets.

    For now, the dollar shows no sign of losing its lustre. But until recently few were predicting the retreat of globalization. Russian President Vladimir Putin has piloted the world economy and political order into uncharted waters.

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Has globalization been good for the man in the street in rich countries and in developing economies?
    2. Why doesn’t Apple make iPhones in the United States or in Europe?
    3. Are Western consumers willing to take the economic pain that a ban on importing Russian oil and gas would involve?

     

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  • The military footprint of the United States

    The military footprint of the United States

    The United States is keen to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and end its longest war ever, but the number of American soldiers in the South Asian country is dwarfed by many thousands stationed elsewhere across the globe.

    The 200,000 U.S. troops overseas are testimony to Washington’s persistent international commitment despite deep-seated isolationist impulses reflected in President Donald Trump’s “America First” campaign.

    The costly U.S. military footprint is a legacy of its status as Western leader that America inherited, at times reluctantly, after the two world wars in the last century.

    If Washington ever significantly reduced its network of military bases around the world, it would reflect a major turning point in history and possibly a destabilizing shift in the balance of power.

    The United States, Afghanistan and Taliban insurgents hit a roadblock recently as they tried to implement a face-saving pact leading to the partial withdrawal of American troops in the Asian nation after nearly two decades of hostilities.

    U.S. troops stationed around the world

    The anticipated pullout of about 3,400 of the remaining 12,000 U.S. troops was threatened by continuing violence, a squabble over a prisoner swap and the spread of COVID-19.

    But the American troops in Afghanistan are just the tip of an iceberg. Some 200,000 U.S. troops are stationed in overseas bases across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

    Current lists of U.S. troops overseas by the Defense Manpower Data Center include: 38,000 in Japan, 34,000 in Germany, 24,000 in South Korea, 12,000 in Afghanistan, 12,000 in Italy, 8,000 in Britain, 6,000 in Kuwait, 5,000 in Bahrain, 5,000 in Iraq and 3,000 in Spain.

    Smaller deployments are in Qatar, Turkey, Djibouti, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Belgium, Cuba, Romania and El Salvador.

    The overseas deployments are a legacy of global military engagement dating back to the first years of the U.S. republic in the early 19th century.

    A fight against pirates

    U.S. founding fathers were no strangers to warfare. With significant French support, they defeated Britain to win control of the 13 original colonies, but they were soon challenged by pirates.

    “We can trace the roots of overseas conflict back to the skirmishes with the Barbary Pirates in the Jefferson years,” Michael O’Hanlon, a military historian at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview.

    In 1801, Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, sent warships to free U.S. merchant seamen held hostage by North African Barbary Coast pirates.

    Between 1812 and 1814, U.S. troops and warships again sent British forces packing, although the White House was burned.

    “But those skirmishes were not really indicative of any major overseas ambition – just yet,” said O’Hanlon.

    The United States becomes a world leader.

    The next military challenge with standing armies was the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. Then, a strongly isolationist American public was dragged into two world wars in the 20th century, first in 1917 when the German navy began targeting neutral ships, and then in 1941 when the Japanese bombed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

    After the world wars, U.S. isolationists sought to keep America out of foreign conflicts and shrink the size of its standing army. “That stopped,” said O’Hanlon, “with the descent of the Iron Curtain in Europe, the communist takeover in China, the Soviet testing of a nuclear bomb and of course the North Korean attack on South Korea, all in the late 1940s or 1950s.”

    Soon the United States joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and signed military treaties with Japan, the Philippines, Germany and South Korea, leaving U.S. troops in some cases as a “trip wire” to warn off aggressors that an attack on U.S. or NATO bases would mean war.

    The latest expansion of U.S. military forces overseas is the Pentagon’s Africa Command. It is working with French troops to patrol the Sahara region, where Islamist militants have launched attacks in several former French colonies including Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Tunisia.

    But a proposal to reduce the U.S. military’s involvement in Africa has stoked fears that militants could end up destabilizing or controlling large parts of the sub-Saharan Sahel.

    The spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, recently tweeted that despite the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States will pursue its plan to withdraw troops until 8,600 are left.

    Under the deal signed at the end of February, the U.S. is to cut its forces in Afghanistan to 8,600 service members within 135 days of the deal, and the international coalition backing the United States is to draw down by a commensurate amount, the Hill newspaper reported last month.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Who were the Barbary pirates?

    2. Why did the United States enter World War One and World War Two?

    3. Why did the United States not revert to form and retreat into an isolationist shell after World War Two?

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  • A dangerous time for the press

    A dangerous time for the press

    The media landscape in the Balkans, however, paints a different picture. According to the World Media Freedom Index for 2023 that is compiled by Reporters Without Borders, among the Western Balkan countries only Serbia — with more than 2,500 media outlets registered in the country — saw its standing on the Index drop. It now stands at number 91 out of 180 countries.

    Other Balkan countries were labeled under the category of “satisfactory” press freedom in 2023, but that left me both intrigued and somewhat skeptical.

    Having walked the corridors of Balkan newsrooms, I find it hard to align with such a rosy classification.

    You can talk truth to power but does it answer back?

    Allow me to rewind to a particular moment that epitomizes the uphill battle faced by journalists in the Balkans. It was during a presidential election in the Balkans, where I, as a reporter, faced a common challenge.

    I wanted to know what a candidate planned to do for education reform if he won. To my surprise, he brushed off the question, saying he didn’t have time for “those things.”

    This incident reflects a broader issue journalists in the Balkans deal with. It’s not just about getting information; it’s about holding politicians accountable to their promises. This encounter showed how some crucial topics get ignored in the fast-paced world of politics.

    In the bigger picture, it represents the challenges journalists face in the Balkans. Beyond the struggle for information, there’s a sense that politicians are sometimes disconnected from the issues that really matter to the people they represent.

    As we talk about press freedom in the Balkans, this story highlights the need for a media environment where politicians are not only accessible but also willing to discuss important matters. The challenges in the newsroom go beyond just finding information; journalists dig into the heart of the region’s political scene, where uncovering the truth often faces significant obstacles.

    The tension between media and politics

    In Bosnia and Herzegovina, I share common ground with others who have navigated the multifaceted challenges, including economic pressures, political interference and a lack of public understanding of the vital role of journalism.

    The erosion of institutions, with government services often ignoring or withholding information from journalists, further compounds the difficulties. There’s an urgent need for public support and understanding, essential components often lacking in a society where journalists struggle to assert a role in shaping a transparent and accountable governance structure.

    Progress has been made, but an undercurrent of danger and hostility still defines the media landscape in many parts of the Western Balkans.

    One cannot dissect the state of press freedom in the Balkans without acknowledging the omnipresent forces of political and economic pressure. It’s a delicate dance where journalists strive to maintain their professional integrity amidst the looming shadows of political influence. While Western counterparts may experience a healthy tension between media and politics, in the Balkans, the scales often tip in favor of political dominance.

    Press freedom is more than a legal framework; it’s a delicate ecosystem that requires protection from both overt and subtle threats. Even with seemingly robust legal safeguards, journalists in the Balkans find themselves grappling with political pressures, compromising the very essence of an independent press. The contrast between what is envisioned in theory and what actually happens in practice is evident, posing a challenge for journalists as they navigate intricate situations.

    An informed citizenry relies on information.

    Economic challenges further compound the struggle for press freedom. The media landscape is fragmented, with limited resources allocated to quality journalism. The survival of news outlets often hinges on their ability to generate revenue. That results in pushing stories towards sensationalism and entertainment to capture audience attention. It’s a dilemma where the pursuit of truth clashes with the demands of a market-driven media economy.

    It is noteworthy though that the people of the Balkans believe in the role of the press. In 2023, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bosnia and Herzegovina conducted a survey on the level of media freedom and trust in the media among the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    They found that citizens trust the media more than they do religious groups, government institutions and the international community and that most people believe that politicians violate journalistic rights.

    As the political landscape in the Balkans continues to shape the narrative, journalists walk a tightrope between reporting the facts and navigating the intricate web of political sensitivities.

    The advent of digital platforms offers a glimmer of hope, yet challenges persist. Around 200 podcasts have emerged in the Balkans, attempting to carve a space in a landscape still dominated by traditional media. The struggle to monetize content and the scarcity of advanced recording technology remain barriers, hindering the potential growth of this burgeoning form of media.

    These days, I’m directing News Decoder’s part in a project called WePod that brings together nine organizations from seven European countries to study and hopefully nurture the podcasting industry in Europe, create collaborative audio content and train and connect podcasting professionals.

    In some ways it brings me back to where I began. From exploring the buzzing airwaves of radio I am now doing so with its digital counterpart. But what hasn’t changed is the need for people to support journalism by purchasing content that offers quality, verified information and sharing content from trusted sources. They are the are essential steps that every informed citizen can take to bolster independent media. Because without this type of media, we won’t have informed citizens.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. What was different about how the press operated in Paris that surprised the author?
    2. What is one thing that makes reporting in the Balkans challenging for journalists?
    3. In your country do you think people trust the press more than they do the government? Why is that?

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  • What stories can teach us about the world

    What stories can teach us about the world

    In a time of widespread misinformation, disinformation, fake news and outright lies throughout the world, many people are wondering what the truth really is and how to find it.

    In Africa, it is embedded in the power of story.

    “The oral tradition has always been a hallmark of West African culture for generations long before colonization, and so storytellers have been the truth tellers,” said Dr. Geremie Sawadogo, a World Bank talent manager and storyteller, who, as a child growing up in Burkina Faso, would gather with his family to listen to story hour on national radio every Tuesday evening.

    David Thuku, an executive coach and storyteller in Nairobi, Kenya, agreed. “Stories are a very structured system of managing life and giving knowledge about such things as governance, values, laws, social sciences and medicine. Medicine men, for example, would tell people which plants to use for different illnesses,” Thuku said.

    “They also taught us morals and our code of acceptable behaviours,” Sawadago added. For many, they are a form of timeless, universal truth.

    African stories can come in many different forms: two- to three-hour speeches, long monologues, oral renditions, poems, sayings, proverbs, fables, folklore tales, visual language, songs and even dance.

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  • Can France accept its past as an oppressor?

    Can France accept its past as an oppressor?

    The captives were taken to a centre where masked Algerian informers picked out suspected rebels. “Those were detained, interrogated, with a lot of violence. The rest were released.”

    Worse followed. Kihn was on guard duty when he first saw a suspect being tortured with electricity from a hand-cranked generator. “It was unbearable. The man was yelling, jerking around. I had tears in my eyes,” he said, his eyes filling again as he re-lived the moment.

    When he was discharged, no one in his village wanted to hear his war stories, so for decades he clammed up. But memories, nightmares and panic attacks kept tormenting him. When he was 70, a film-maker cajoled him into an interview. He later wrote a book and found a measure of relief.

    Kihn, disgusted by his experiences, would not touch his military pension. Instead, he and some other former soldiers send the money to local NGOs in Algeria.

    “What we need is recognition of the truth,” he said. “Yes, we were criminals in Algeria.”

    France has tried to turn the page, but the past will not die.

    It took France until 1999 to recognise formally that its struggle in Algeria had been a “war,” even though it had mobilised up to two million conscripts for “operations to restore order” against the independence-seeking fighters of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).

    The French campaign led to widespread torture, the forced displacement of two million civilians to cut the FLN from its rural base and countless summary executions and “disappearances.”

    The FLN was ruthless, too, terrorising French and Algerian civilians and eliminating its political rivals and eventually factions within its own ranks.

    The conflict, which brought violence to both sides of the Mediterranean, exposed deep divisions within France, toppled the country’s Fourth Republic and raised the spectre of civil war.

    After President Charles de Gaulle set Algeria on course for independence with a 1961 referendum, some French die-hards formed the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), an armed group that mounted bomb attacks and assassinations, including at least one attempt to kill the French leader.

    OAS members eventually benefited from sweeping post-war amnesties. France sought to draw a veil and forget, but the past refused to die.

    Keeping the past alive

    Suzy Simon-Nicaise, 67, who heads one of the main associations of pieds-noirs, is determined to preserve a particular vision of the lost world of French Algeria, its culture, history and lifestyle.

    In her memory, it was a cosmopolitan place where Europeans mixed freely with Muslims based on mutual respect, where the French colonists had promoted development from the ground up.

    France, she concedes, may have committed some “not very glorious” deeds early on in its conquest of Algeria. “But Algeria did some things that were just as unbearable, if not more so,” she said.

    At a memorial event in Perpignan, Simon-Nicaise, wearing a dress as bright as her red hair, recounted a massacre of pieds-noirs in the mainly European city of Oran on July 5, 1962, the day Algeria became independent.

    She said 700 to 1,200 people were killed that day while French troops, in their barracks since the ceasefire in March, stood by with orders not to intervene. An exact toll has never been established. Macron, in his address to the pieds-noirs this year, said “hundreds” had died.

    Simon-Nicaise’s family had planned to stay on after independence, but an Algerian friend working with her father warned them to leave urgently, advice driven home by a French official who told her father that his name was on an FLN death-list. The family raced to the port with four suitcases.

    Around 800,000 pieds-noirs, the vast majority of the Europeans living in Algeria, also voted with their feet, believing their only choice was “la valise ou le cercueil (the suitcase or the coffin).”

    The French government had not anticipated such an exodus, and the flood of new arrivals met a chaotic and chilly reception.

    “We were treated worse than foreigners,” Simon-Nicaise said, recalling how she, then five, and her family were put up in a holiday village. “My family was crying, and everyone else was dancing the twist.”

    Later, her family had to share a cramped, squalid apartment with another family in Le Havre. Simon-Nicaise went to school there, where she heard a classmate declare: “Don’t talk to her. She’s a dirty pied-noir.”

    France’s rejected allies in Algeria

    If the pieds-noirs were mostly unwelcome in France, the harkis — Algerians who had served with the French military — were doubly so. De Gaulle had rejected any idea of taking them in, effectively abandoning tens of thousands of men and their families to FLN vengeance.

    Nevertheless, up to 90,000 harkis made it to France, many helped by their French commanders. They were consigned to grim army camps behind barbed wire, most of them for many years.

    “There were no toilets, one washbasin for 10 families,” said Abdelkrim Sid, who was six on arrival and spent the next 15 years with his sprawling family in isolated camps.

    His father, like many other harkis, was later put to work in forestry settlements on the minimum wage but never fully integrated into the wider economy.

    “My father was a spahi (cavalryman). He really believed in France,” said Sid at the bleak Rivesaltes camp near Perpignan.

    In Rivesaltes, a museum now commemorates successive waves of inmates dumped there from 1939 onwards, among them refugees from the Spanish civil war, Gypsies and Jews interned by the wartime Vichy régime, German prisoners of war and then harkis.

    Sid, a burly retired truck-driver, says he can’t forget how shamefully the harkis were treated in the camps, which he likened to pens for animals.  “It was as if we had the plague.”

    Troubled identity

    The war deeply marked the Algerian diaspora, swelled by migration that also drew in Moroccans and Tunisians whose labour was in demand as the French economy revived after World War Two.

    North Africans today make up the bulk of France’s estimated 5-6 million Muslim citizens, roughly 8% of its total population, the biggest ratio in any European country.

    France, which prides itself on its principle of laïcité, which makes the secular state neutral towards religion, has found it difficult to come to terms with its Muslim minority. The complex relationship is made no easier by mutual mistrust that has lingered since the colonial venture in Algeria.

    Magyd Cherfi has tried hard to integrate in his native France, with outward success as a musician and songwriter, a devotee of French literature and an author in his own right.

    Yet as he explained at a café in a mostly Arab quarter of Toulouse, the city where he grew up, he has never felt fully accepted as French. Ironically, he knows that many in the deprived milieu of his childhood resent him as a traitor to his origins.

    “It’s as if being French is a mountaintop. You climb and climb, and it’s never far enough,” he said.

    “In the street, they ask, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ That means you are not French, because if you are, no one asks that question.”

    Cherfi’s father, a building worker, fled to France after four of his brothers were killed fighting in the maquis, or underground, during the Algeria war. “He only told us fragments of what happened then, about bad things the French did to his family, girls raped, cousins killed, imprisoned, tortured.”

    So Cherfi grew up with an uneasy sense of difference from his French chums because France had been the enemy in Algeria. Yet when his parents decided to stay in France, when he was about 15, they told him, “You must respect the French. They give us work. They feed us.”

    He admires much of what France offers, notably freedom and secularism, but says it fails to honour its own principles when it comes to its non-white citizens.

    “That’s the big rip-off of the republic. France is unable to build a narrative that is anything other than exclusively white. We barely exist in French history,” he said.

    “So France is still sausages, accordions, traditions, villages, and now, with millions of Muslims here, you feel they cling to this even more. So it’s quick, get out the accordions!”

     

    Questions to consider:

    • What was Algeria’s relationship to France before it gained independence in 1962?

    • How were the post-war experiences of the pieds-noirs and harkis similar and different?

    • Why do you think it took until 1999 for France to recognize the conflict over Algeria as a war?

    • What would you do to improve the integration of France’s Arab/African-origin citizens?

     

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  • The importance of Ukraine to the world

    The importance of Ukraine to the world

    A radical violation of international law

    Daniel Warner: Since the end of World War Two in 1945, the relations between countries have been more or less governed by certain norms. The United Nations and international law have been the foundations for over 70 years of relative peace. While there have been small outbreaks of violence, there have been no major violent confrontations. The Cold War was not a hot war.

    The Russian attacks on Ukraine violate numerous parts of that established order. While the Russian president claims that Ukraine is not a real state and is part of Russia, Ukraine, since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, is a country recognized by the international community. A country bombing another country is a radical violation of international law.

    How to respond? While the government of Ukraine will attempt to respond militarily, other countries will try to impose sanctions on Russia in order to stop the fighting while not engaging in a major conflict.

    The implications around the world will vary. But the most damaging implication for everyone will be the lack of respect for international norms that have been the bedrock of peace for over 70 years.

    Inconsistent champions of international norms

    Alistair Lyon: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an unconscionable violation of international law, the integrity of national borders and any respect for the rules of the United Nations, where Russia sits as a veto-wielding member of the Security Council.

    Anglo-Saxon outrage at the Russian leader’s use of military power would carry more weight if the United States and Britain had themselves proved consistent champions of international norms since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

    The U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 punched a huge hole in the post-Cold War security system. The war, launched on spurious grounds and without U.N. authorisation, was opposed not only by Russia and China, but also by France and other NATO allies such as Germany.

    The assault on Ukraine might seem more shocking to some because it threatens peace in Europe, but the Iraqi debacle helped destabilise the Middle East, spurred Islamic militancy and crippled U.S. influence in the region, leaving a vacuum filled by others, including Turkey, Iran and Russia.

    The commitment of the United States to international law also came into question when former President Donald Trump endorsed Israel’s 1981 annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and recognised Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital, including the city’s occupied eastern sector, which Palestinians see as their future capital. President Joe Biden has not reversed those moves.

    A fear of democracy

    Julian Nundy: What if the reason for invading Ukraine was nothing to do with NATO after all? What if it was just a fear that the functioning democracy that has developed in Russia’s southwestern neighbor could be contagious?

    Amid all the media attention given to Moscow’s calls for NATO to renounce any idea of admitting Ukraine into the western military alliance, there have been commentaries, stirring less debate, that it is President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics — especially the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine that led to a re-run of a presidential election and the final inauguration of a westward-looking government — that prompted his decision to use force to bring Ukraine into line.

    “On the whole, strategic stability is maintained … NATO forces are not building up, and they are not showing threatening activity,” wrote one commentator at the end of January. And not just any commentator. It was retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, chairman of the All-Russian Officers’ Assembly, who as a serving general occupied several of the most senior command posts in the Soviet and Russian armies.

    The statement was given prominent coverage on Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo) radio, which is owned by the Gazprom gas giant’s media arm, suggesting that Putin had less than total backing for his policy in very high places. Ivashov said Putin threatened to make “Russians and Ukrainians mortal enemies” and turn Russia “into a pariah of the world community.”

    If the invasion really was motivated by a fear of democracy, then Russia itself — where there are now reported to be more political prisoners than in the Soviet Union 40 years ago and where free speech and other rights are being reined in on a regular basis — can expect yet more erosion of basic freedoms. And if Putin succeeds in bringing Ukraine under control, who will be next? The former communist states of eastern Europe, most probably, and then, perhaps, the rest of Europe.

    Climate change will go on the back burner.

    Helen Womack: Quite apart from the suffering of Ukraine, this war may go well beyond its borders. If Putin attacks the Baltic States or Poland, NATO will be obliged to come in militarily.

    NATO member Hungary, which under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has in the past sought friendly relations with Putin, will be forced to make clear where it really stands.

    War between Russia and NATO would amount to a third world war, and let us not forget that Russia has nuclear weapons. But Putin is NOT Russia, and his war is not likely to be popular with ordinary Russians. The only hope is that internal opposition will grow.

    Ultimately, this war will bring Putin down but at what cost? The world has better things to be thinking about than war, but again climate change will go on the back burner while we focus on this.

    Ukraine does matter.

    Alex Nicoll: Does Ukraine matter to the wider world? Well, if armed gangsters took over your neighbour’s house, what would you do?

    Would you, like Donald Trump, say “genius move,” shrug your shoulders and go back to your golf game? Or might you think that your house, and your friends’ houses, could be next?

    This is the situation facing all western governments today as they watch the invasion of a democratic European country. We live in a sophisticated, digitised world. But we can see plainly that our comforts can be undone by old-style tanks, missiles and bombs. The atrocities of war have not been consigned to history.

    If you are American, your reaction might be that this is happening a long way away, so why should I care? Someone else’s problem! But remember that the United States too was attacked in 1941 and 2001, resulting each time in American involvement in long global conflicts and the loss of many American lives. Because of past traumas, the U.S. is party to numerous alliances, agreements and friendships. These benefit Americans just as much as other people around the world. Thanks to strong alliances, a third world war has been averted.

    So far. It is for mutual self-preservation — leaving aside moral outrage at Russia’s attack on Ukraine — that Western countries now need to unite to starve Putin of money and support, so that the venture in Ukraine fails and global conflict is averted. It does matter.

    None of this bodes well economically.

    Bryson Hull: The conflict in Ukraine is already raising energy prices and that in turn will make climate change policies, which entail higher costs or wholesale energy system changes such as eliminating oil and natural gas, less palatable to voters. Politicians will correspondingly find it less attractive to support aggressive steps to mitigate climate risks until energy prices trend lower.

    The realities of war in Ukraine and the global economic spillover will necessarily put more aggressive carbon-zero efforts to the wayside because of cost concerns. The tradeoff there is that practical, achievable energy and climate policies will fall back into vogue with politicians — who fear high energy costs as the election risk they are — instead of activist/pressure group-driven policies like those that are faring disastrously in the UK and Europe. Good sense and appropriate urgency may now be able to coexist in the sphere of energy prices versus climate ambitions.

    There are already about 20 U.S. liquified natural gas cargoes diverted to Europe from Asia on a pure arbitrage market play because of Ukraine. Already they’re running up against offloading capacity issues. High crude prices fund the war, and you can already see the Biden Administration greens doing everything they can to avoid the U.S. stepping into the gas supply breach with Democratic Senators urging a liquefied natural gas export ban.

    With the highest inflation in 40 years and gasoline (petrol) back at seven-year highs, none of this bodes well economically unless Biden goes Keynesian and cranks up the war machine.

    Europe needs Russian gas.

    Jeremy Lovell: Putin has very openly been using energy as an economic and political lever on Europe for some time. I reckon Europe needs Russian gas on balance rather more than Russia needs Europe’s gas market. It has VAST resources of untapped gas such as the Shtokman field and can always supply elsewhere given time. China is a good option there.

    But both Putin and Xi appear to have megalomaniac tendencies — although one is rather more thuggish than the other, at least on the surface — and an alliance between the two might be a bit fragile in much more than the immediate term.

    Given that the Ukraine venture seems rather unlikely to have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, I assume Putin calculates Europe will fold quietly in a relatively short time, giving him carte blanche to act at will and isolating the U.S. even further.

    The Brits may crow about the fact the UK does not import much if any Russian gas. But gas is a pure commodity. Supplies of floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) frequently change destination several times on any given voyage. So if Russia fiddles with gas supplies — or Ukraine taps off even more than it usually does — then Qatari LNG heading for South Wales or London will simply divert to Belgium or France, and the UK, which has minuscule storage facilities, will be left hanging.

    No legal standing

    Robert Holloway: Putin’s legal justification for the invasion is very flimsy, to say the least. He said he acted “in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter” after two provinces in eastern Ukraine sought Russia’s help.

    The UN Charter recognises the right of a member state to self-defence in case of armed attack. Even allowing Putin’s breath-taking claim that Ukraine was the aggressor, the breakaway provinces are not UN member states and have no legal standing under the Charter. And Russia, which is a member, is not under attack.

    The Charter goes on to say that an attack on a member state must be reported to the UN Security Council so it can take measures to maintain international peace and security.

    But even if Ukraine reports the invasion to the UN, Russia is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council with the power to veto any of its decisions.

    A carnivore among herbivores

    Tom Heneghan: Before leaving Paris last week, I heard the French philosopher Luc Ferry say on French radio: “Putin is a carnivore in a world of herbivores.” That goes to the heart of what is happening now. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed that most countries were playing by the post-World War Two rules that say borders are inviolable and problems between countries should be solved peacefully. That has not always been the case, of course, but all knew the rules and mostly kept by them. The speech by the Kenyan ambassador to the U.N. the other day was a good example of that.

    Biden keeps on saying we will not send U.S. troops to Ukraine, and that’s both a recognition of reality in U.S. politics and admission that Russia should not be unduly provoked. But the U.S. has been willing to send U.S. troops to a lot of countries in recent decades, like Kuwait, Iraq, former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. They were smaller and the wars were theoretically winnable. The wars did not always turn out as planned. Both the U.S. and its adversaries in those countries were carnivores — think Saddam Hussain or Slobodan Milosovic — but the forces were unequal and politics messy.

    Russia has been a carnivore in recent years — Georgia, Crimea, in a lesser way Belarus — and continues now. NATO now shows admirable resolve in standing up for the rules-based world order. But how long will that last? Putin is thinking of history and ready to play a long game here. The West — for lack of a better term — has to adjust to the long term too. This doesn’t mean the West has to become a carnivore as well, but it has to think far more strategically about Russia than it has so far. Ukraine is bigger and more central than those smaller wars. That Putin opted for a full invasion rather than more green-man salami tactics tells us that his goal is to turn the clock back to bloc-style divisions.

    A lot of commentators have been saying this crisis is like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and in many ways that’s true. But I think another important comparison is with the 1948 Berlin Blockade, when the USSR blocked Allied rights to ship goods through East Germany to West Berlin. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a perilous standoff that ended quickly. The Berlin Blockade lasted about a year and a half and required sustained Allied solidarity and the famous airlift to West Berlin. We’re going to need that kind of sustained solidarity to ensure we can hold the line on the rules-based world order.

    One of the elements in any sustained strategy is weeding the Russian oligarchs out of the Western economic system. Suspending Nordstream 2 was a good start. How about stopping all the money laundering the oligarchs get away with in Western countries? All the property they’ve bought up in London, New York and elsewhere to squirrel their money abroad? And what about their relatives, like the children who get to study in the best universities we have? Part of Putin’s power lies in the way he has allowed oligarchs make money as long as they do not play politics and contribute to soft-power causes he likes, such as the “Russkii Mir” (Russian World) projects promoting Russian culture and the massive church-building of the Russian Orthodox Church? These non-governmental organizations are not non-political.

    A carnivore among herbivores. Not all carnivores have won against smart herbivores, but Moscow has a far more crafty carnivore in power this time around. We need sustained solidarity now to deal with this challenge, probably more than we seem to be capable of these days. Let’s hope we can do it.

    A major blow to Pax Americana

    Jim Wolf: Russia’s armed thrust into Ukraine marks a major blow to the so-called Pax Americana, the state of relative peace since the end of World War Two. That’s when the United States became the world’s top economic and military power.

    The land, air and sea attack on an increasingly pro-Western Ukraine supercharges a Great Power rivalry as U.S. clout has been slipping and China-Russia solidarity is growing.

    The old Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 after a 40-year “Cold War” with the U.S. — a geopolitical struggle that also dominated the world view of both powers’ respective allies and blocs. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, its 15 former Communist-controlled republics gained independence, leaving the U.S. the sole remaining superpower.

    Russian leader Vladimir Putin has called that fall “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of a 20th century that was also wracked by two world wars. In launching the biggest attack by one state against another since the end of World War Two, Putin said he was protecting Russian citizens among others subjected to “genocide” in Ukraine, which has infuriated Moscow by aiming to join the U.S-led NATO military alliance.

    Putin warned against outside interference, saying Russia is “a powerful nuclear state.

    Off the Earth, for the Earth

    Tira Shubart: At the moment onboard the International Space Station is a crew of seven: two Russians, four Americans and a German. Other than the German and one American – who is a doctor – they are bred and trained in the military.

    The crew all speak English and Russian.

    In fact, one of the Americans, Kayla Barron, is a Submarine Warfare officer. The doctor has been working with Russians — and on joint missions with the Russians since 1997. His Russian is particularly good.

    The United States and Russia — NASA and Roscosmos — were in the process of negotiating more crew exchanges. And at the moment there are three Russian cosmonauts — who are certainly military as all cosmonauts are — training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    Finally, on March 30, one of the Americans, Mark Vande Hei — also a professor at West Point — will be landing in Kazakhstan with the two Russians. Traditionally, a NASA team flies in through Russia and joins their recovery team, then bounces back through Russia to the United States. It will be interesting to see what happens.

    Twitter posts today from the international space community were saddened and alarmed by the Ukraine crisis but agreed that solidarity in space, which one called “the pinnacle of human cooperation” would not be threatened. After all, the U.S. Astronauts and the Russian Cosmonauts of the Cold War era held each other in high regard and the crew members onboard “have trained together for years and are personal friends.”

    There is a club of Space Explorers which are all the astronauts and cosmonauts who have flown. They say they simply regard themselves as earthlings after looking down and seeing no borders on our planet. But surely the ISS motto of “Off the Earth, For the Earth” will be in their minds now.

    Embers of dead empires

    Jeremy Solomons: An immediate African perspective on the Ukraine invasion was shared by Kenyan U.N. Ambassador Martin Kimani, who used a speech at the UN Security Council on Tuesday to warn Russia to respect its border with Ukraine, using Africa’s colonial past to highlight the dangers of stoking the “embers of dead empires.”

    More controversially, he went on to say: “At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited. But we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backwards into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known … not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.”

    For some commentators, who are concerned about neo-colonialism on the African continent, this invoked the somewhat cynical conclusion of the late Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, who said: “You multiply national anthems, national flags and national passports, seats at the UN and individuals entitled to 21 guns salute, not to speak of a host of ministers, prime ministers and envoys, you have a whole army of powerful people with vested interests in keeping Africa balkanised.”

    Floods, COVID-19, Ukraine

    Robert Hart: Obviously the UK government, as a committed member of NATO and a devoted ally of the United States, has joined the international clamour denouncing Russia’s attack.

    Prime Minister Boris Johnson has labelled the Russian offensive as “a tidal wave of violence” and declared that a “massive package” of sanctions will be introduced against Moscow.

    No doubt many young UK graduates and university students will see the Russian attack with alarm and deep concern about where this will all lead and how it may affect their future. But many others, young and older, will be reaching for an atlas to check where Ukraine is and wondering how much this matters.

    The UK itself has just come through a period of three consecutive typhoon strength storms which have caused major damage and severe flooding in many parts and given millions of people, young and old, plenty to worry about in their own lives.

    And those who follow national politics at all will have been hooked by the still ongoing saga of the prime minister’s involvement in a string of illicit drinks parties held in No.10 Downing Street during the peak months of COVID-19 lockdown. Smart young people don’t have to be super-cynical to see how the floods and now the Ukraine drama could divert public attention from Boris Johnson’s role in the lockdown parties scandal.

    Russian nuclear missiles feel very close to home.

    Tiziana Barghini: News of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an awful awakening. Putin has shown total disdain for international borders, agreements and customs. I wonder what his real motivations are – a way to build domestic consensus? I do not understand who is benefitting from this.

    This morning at a bakery in Milan, someone attached a sign – “Putin = Hitler”. World War Two — a story often told by my parents and grandparents. I feel relieved that I am burying my Mom today. My parents are not here anymore to see the world going on that path again. They were sincerely convinced that wars were something of the past.

    I feel thrown back into the Cold War years. Russian nuclear missiles feel very close to home in Milan and even closer to Germany, where my son lives. First the pandemic and now the war. I can’t believe we are really living this.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. What reasons did Russian President Vladimir Putin give for invading Ukraine?
    2. How has the West and its allies reacted to the Russian aggression?
    3. Does the conflict in Ukraine matter to you, and if so, why?

     

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    Decoder Replay: Bacteria doesn’t stop at the border

    During the Covid pandemic, nations realized they needed to work together to keep their people safe. That’s where the World Health Organization comes in. 

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