Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, April 29, 2023.
President Erdogan’s health
The week’s most consequential electoral news. The Turkish President cancelled three days of campaign activities at the end of the week, blaming a stomach bug. So far his opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, seems to have decided not to engage on the issue, plowing ahead instead. The election is May 14th.
Here is Erdogan, said to be conducting business as usual the day after he became ill during a TV interview. You’re not thinking that background is really there, are you?
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The mystifying Mr. Pence
I’m puzzled about Mike Pence. No poll in the past twelve months has had the former VP over 13%. His top poll number in 2023 is eight percent, in an Emerson poll in February. No one thinks this man is a future president. Yet there he is, wandering around Republican haunts subjecting himself to ridicule, calling his wife mother, and just being so … so … strange:
(The Twitter/Substack feud keeps me from being able to embed this tweet. Click the photo to see the former vice president attempt to interact with ordinary people, or click here.)
Meanwhile on Thursday Pence visited the Elijah Barrett Prettyman Federal Building in Washington, where he testified before a grand jury the day after one last Trump attempt to block his testimony failed. We’ll see whether it affects Pence’s prospective campaign. Could it hurt?
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Elsewhere in the Republican Party
As the Vice President was testifying before a federal grand jury (as Trump-associated people do), Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was zipping through his “Look August with Foreign Leaders” tour. This is a ritual designed to imbue domestic pols with foreign policy cred by implication.
(Candidate Obama was great at this. His campaign world tour took him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan, Berlin and London. Chancellor Merkel, who later became Obama’s biggest backer in Europe, shook her finger, stood her ground and ruled out his upstart desire to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate)
But about Governor DeSantis. Soon as he had gone all bobblehead in Japan …
( Click the photo or click here )
… there he was in Jerusalem posing with a Republican field organizer,
… and by Friday he’d made it all the way to London, where Prime Minister Sunak apparently hasn’t yet signed on to the Republican campaign team. The Florida governor had to hang with the Foreign Minister, who doubtless was keen to focus on international issues that are important to the Florida governor like Snow White, banning books and all that other anti-woke foreign relations stuff.
If nothing else, Governor DeSantis has shaken up the race this week by winning the crucial “how fast can I fly around” sweepstakes.
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Too much tourism
I looked forward to a visit to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris the first week in April, having reserved tickets long in advance for an exhibition comparing the works of the two French painters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. The exhibition turned into more of an endurance run because of the utter crush of ticketed attendees.
By the time the entranceway had disappeared from sight everyone attending had been jostled, invaded and stepped on. By the halfway point of weaving and jockeying through the gantlet I was convinced that if there’s still Covid out there, we’d get it (we didn’t). By the end of the exhibit we were glad to simply flee the hordes and get out of the whole place rather than see what else the museum had to offer.
I’ll grant you this is a first world problem, but it’s one that’s grim and spreading.
A new display was introduced in a bookshop in Venice that reveals, painfully and in real time, the number of beds available in the city to tourists: at 48,596 (and counting), it is perilously close to overtaking the number of residents in the city: 49,365 (and falling). As recently as 2008, the respective figures were 12,000 and 60,000.
there are fines of up to €2,500 for walking the paths above the Cinque Terre (five villages in Liguria) in flip-flops or sandals; you are no longer allowed to eat snacks outside in the centre of Venice or in four central streets in Florence; you can be fined €250 just for sitting down on Rome’s Spanish Steps; and one beach, in Eraclea, has even banned the building of sandcastles (maximum fine €250)
During the peak season, the Balearic island of Mallorca now has more than 1,000 flights landing every day.
You have to buy a ticket now to go to visit the city of Venice: “In January, Venice even introduced an entrance fee (varying between €3 and €10) to access the city and its islands.”
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Changing World
We've known for years that the world’s institutional post-WWII architecture, (the UN Security Council, for example) is no longer fit for purpose. This week South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the governing African National Congress party had resolved that South Africa should quit the International Criminal Court, which last month issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It shows the existing system's accelerating collapse, and points to a coming period of lawlessness.
(follow @BMurrayWriter on Twitter)
Russia
Russia looks like a country I’ll never visit again and I’m sorry for that, but I’m happy to have seen what I have, a big swath of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Lake Baikal, trips to St. Petersburg, Karelia (as recently as 2019) and Moscow a few times, including getting a glimpse of the last years of Communism during the Gorbachev administration.
The Russian leadership just will not let up. Poisoning, defenestration, shootings on bridges and in stairwells. In case their slow poisoning scheme doesn’t work, officials have made new plans to detain Alexey Navalny for an extra thirty years.
CNS reports that last week “Officials ruled that Mr. Navalny and his lawyers would have until May 5 to familiarize themselves with 195 new volumes of court files” in the case. Six or seven days, 195 volumes of files. Problem, comrade?
Obviously there will be no visiting Russia as long as there remains a Putin administration. Plus, whatever comes after may require a further purge and disinfection, with all the chaos that may incite. We’ll have to wait and see. That’s too bad when we have a little cabin not a hundred miles from Russian Karelia, in our little town of Varkaus, on Lake Saimaa.
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Sudan
Last night a convoy of buses with some 300 Americans left Khartoum, hoping to evacuate the civilians by sea, through Port Sudan, around 500 miles away. The US hasn’t committed troops to the effort. It apparently feels it can enforce the evacuation without them, with armed drones. That’s novel.
Just weeks ago a transition was to begin “setting up a new civilian administration with a timetable for elections in two years.” Instead, on April 15th fighting started and already “water supplies have been cut off, and electricity is intermittent; hospitals are in crisis. A city of seven million people has had no operating bakeries, no food supplies coming in, and no markets for a week.”
Alex de Waal, the go-to guy on the Horn of Africa, wrote the quotes in the paragraph above in an article in Foreign Affairs, where he also wrote, “the conflict is a disaster. Failing to halt it is a devastating indictment of the multilateral order, and especially of the quad,” the mediators who were supposedly steering the transition toward civilian rule.
Still, all governments pick where to get involved; they have to. de Waal writes that the Trump administration largely handed off the whole Sudan problem to Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, none of whom wanted an Arabic-speaking democracy in the Horn.
It could be that the US government is busy behind scenes, working with other governments to broker peace. If it is, and if it gets results, it will deserve credit. But you can’t take on everything, everywhere. There’s just so much time, and expert benches are only so deep.
Where, for example, is the envoy for the Horn? The position called US Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa has had a revolving door since its creation April 2021, when it was established to try to manage the Tigray conflict, among other regional concerns.
In the spring of 2021, with the new administration just getting its bearings, a special envoy looked like a way to take a regional approach to issues like the frictions between Ethiopia and Sudan and Egypt over the Renaissance dam, refugee flows, and to manage the Tigray conflict, where Eritrea was heavily involved as well as Ethiopia. But the first envoy Jeffrey Feltman left after around nine months on the job. His replacement, David Satterfield, lasted three months. His successor, Ambassador Mike Hammer, came over from his previous post as US Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo. If you search news results on Google for “Ambassador Mike Hammer,” the most recent results you’ll find date from last fall.
Where is former UN Ambassador, now USAID Director Samantha Power on this one? She’s working aid to Sudan, staging the US effort from Kenya initially, she said Sunday. Her formerly outspoken voice could be potent in this crisis. She visited the region in summer 2021 and was snubbed by the Ethiopian Prime Minister. Has she been pulled back, muzzled, what?
With its reelection announcement this week the Biden team stressed it would fight to secure Americans’ fundamental liberties. You heard the word Freedom a lot.
If the US stands at a distance from Sudan, is that because the administration’s focus is only on freedom for Americans? Or is the Biden team just drawing a line around things it is going to have time for?
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Ecuador. Shades of Peru
There may be nobody left who wants to be President of Ecuador. President Guillermo Lasso is in a tough spot, as were his two predecessors. He’s threatening to dissolve the Congress if it impeaches him.
An attempt to dissolve the Peruvian Congress didn’t end well. President Pedro Castillo was impeached and arrested after he tried that in December. The Congress there voted to remove him from office and his bodyguards and/or police apparently stopped him from heading to the Mexican embassy seeking protection, and he was “escorted onto police premises where Peru's attorney-general detained him on suspicion of rebellion.”
In Ecuador, there is a constitutional clause that apparently would allow Lasso to force new elections, although it would require him to stand in a poll, too. Maybe not a good idea to have such a provision, which is just about guaranteed to cause national upheaval. Charmingly, the maneuver is known as known as "two-way death.”
Alongside the procedure that may or may not result in impeachment, this week politicians argued over whether it’s is even legal: The party of former President Correa said on Twitter "two-way death" is the only answer to the crisis. The National Assembly President, an independent, said "two-way death” would be unconstitutional.
Maybe Ecuador is ungovernable right now; we will see. President Correa has been sentenced in abstentia to serve an eight-year jail term for bribery. He lives in exile in Belgium. Correa’s vice-president and the man who succeeded him as president, Lenin Moreno (who didn’t run for reelection) left office with an approval rating of nine percent. Last month a judge approved bribery charges against Moreno, who now lives in Paraguay, in a hydroelectric plant construction scheme.
President Lasso faces accusations of embezzlement around a shipping contract for crude oil (which he denies). Impeachment hearings ended Thursday and lawmakers have ten days to issue a report.
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Robert D. Kaplan
I’ve been reading Robert D. Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind and I think it’s his most edifying book since Balkan Ghosts in 1993. For many Americans (including then-President Bill Clinton), Balkan Ghosts was essential reading during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.
(Balkan Ghosts opened up a world of further great books. If you haven’t already, try Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Gray Falcon and The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric, among many others).
Mr. Kaplan has his critics (here and here are two, and especially, there’s Tom Bissell), but he has had a long, prolific and influential career, traveling widely – often to frightening places – and publishing twenty-one books.
I was a critic too for several years and several books. I think maybe that “the president read my book” thing got a little too far into Mr. Kaplan’s head. Take a look at an article he wrote for Stratfor headlined Why Moldova Urgently Matters.
It begins “NATO’s Article 5 offers little protection against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iulian Fota, Romania’s presidential national security adviser, told me on a recent visit to Bucharest.” Right. Got it. RDK meets with the Romanian Foreign Minister.
A couple sentences down the road he mentions, “As Romanian President Traian Basescu told me….” Got it. RDK meets Presidents, too.
Shortly we learn that RDK met the county council president in Iasi, Moldova and that “Alone with me in the empty theater, Adomnitei (the council president) declared, “Here is Europe, here is its history and culture, its artistic values, and maybe soon its political values. Here is the borderland of the Habsburg Empire. We need your help to defend us.” These days, politicians plead with RDK for help.
It doesn’t take long for this: “Moldova’s very identity is still somewhat an issue, the prime minister, Iurie Leanca, admitted to me in a long interview.” Natch. The Moldovan PM confides in RDK too. He admits things.
“I cannot help but recall the dark political landscape in Yugoslavia while reporting there in the 1980s in advance of the violent break up of that country in the 1990s.” RDK reminds us of his war cred.
“My writing apparently helped influence a White House policy of inaction from 1993 to 1995.” RDK was good there for a while at reminding us about stuff.
Somewhere along the line though, Kaplan decided he had made mistakes, the biggest of which was his support for the Iraq war against Saddam. His new book The Tragic Mind has a tone of humility and earnestness. Kaplan is back to teaching, not preaching. I’m enjoying The Tragic Mind very much, and I recommend it.
It pairs well with a podcast (the written version is here) titled “Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times.”
Kaplan’s thesis is roughly that tragedy isn’t when bad stuff happens. It’s when all choices require bad stuff to happen to good people. Along similar lines, here is Snyder quoted about Zelensky’s decision to stay in Ukraine once the Russian invasion began:
“Zelensky said that while most western observers had expected him to flee, he had never felt as if he had any real choice. That’s an argument that he helped me to make, Snyder told me. Being free means that you actually end up in situations where you won’t actually feel like you have a whole bunch of options. Snyder was talking about what he described as Zelensky’s “choiceless choice.”
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Fallout from war
There was that bomb (or two) that a Russian jet dropped on Belgorod a week or two back. But that wasn’t the only trouble in the region. A total of 30 people have been killed and 123 wounded since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov says, as per Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti.
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Then there’s this
Good old solid, stalwart, earnest, honest, NATO-seeking Sweden’s Swedish Space Corporation launched a rocket 150 miles into the air which went off course and landed in Norway, and apparently, nobody in Sweden told anybody in Norway.
This caused some friction between the allies because this happened during military exercise Aurora 23, the biggest exercise in Sweden in more than 25 years, involving more than 26,000 soldiers from fourteen countries, which started on April 17th. Whoops.
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That’s it for today. Let me know what I missed.
Every Tuesday CS&W publishes a travel column. Tuesday we’ll kick off two weeks of travels among the non-humans. I’ll serve up links to help you delve into animal arcana. Like these:
Giraffes’ eyes are among the largest of terrestrial mammals and their peripheral vision is so wide-angled they can essentially see behind themselves. •
Some flowers tailor their petal shape, color, texture or nectar’s scent or flavor to attract a single pollinating species. •
In Japan, one crow population uses car traffic to crack open walnuts •
Puffins have two distinct phases of their lives: four months on land to breed, with the rest of the year spent out at sea. •
There’s lots more, Tuesday.
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Good weekend, see you Tuesday.