Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, June 17th, 2023.
Last Saturday’s column was filed from Finland, and on Monday my 3 Quarks Daily column will be a trip report, taking a look at, among other things, how the NATO honeymoon is going there.
Today we’ll talk about a Chinese aircraft carrier that kicked up an online storm, how the world it got isn’t the world the Biden administration expected, we’ll have short takes from Cambodia, Iran, Scotland and Uganda, we’ll take a look at the MAGA voter, and finish with a look back at Covid predictions, and how they turned out.
First, the federal indictment of the former president has generated enough keystrokes this week to employ Carpal Tunnel orthopedic surgeons the rest of the year, and ditto the ignominious end of Boris Johnson, so I think we ought to talk about something else, except to ask this: is it out of the question to amend the process of randomly assigning judges so that judges are removed from consideration who were appointed by the defendant?
THE WORLD has turned out more complicated than the Biden team may have anticipated. The administration came into office wanting to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated while he was vice president, while focusing on the far East. Now in it’s third year, instead it finds that China has brokered diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The administration thought at the beginning of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine that with minimal investment, it had a chance to set Russia’s military capabilities back, perhaps for a decade. Instead, as Russia hangs in there, things no longer feel that way.
In a ‘press conference’ on Tuesday Vladimir Putin explicitly claimed that Russian forces will win the war by outlasting Western support for Ukraine. There is an unmistakable increase in the number of mentions of a diplomatic settlement both from the Washington establishment and Biden administration officials, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who has said:
“what I will say is this: President Zelensky himself has said that this war will end ultimately through diplomacy.”
Should Russia ultimately hang on to the land it has seized along the northern Black Sea coast, for example, even if its primary aims will have been thwarted, it will have acquired some actual militarily useful assets, and will doubtless claim some sort of victory.
For that matter, as Owen Matthews writes,
“Putin is likely to declare any final outcome a victory, and his control over Russia’s media is so complete that there is a good chance he will succeed in convincing many of his people to believe him.”
Any compromise, or imposed settlement, could be more complicated for Zelenskyy than for Putin. Zelenskyy could face electoral backlash because a faction would likely arise that would oppose less than total victory for Ukraine.
All this as the administration has never made a secret of its preference to focus on the rise of China. And while distracted by Russia’s war in Ukraine, China has moved into a position in which, by becoming a diplomatic player, it increasingly challenges US effectiveness in the Middle East and now, even proposes to serve as broker in a European war.
[Funny how many of us thought Covid would change everything. I, for one, foresaw problems for China as a result of its repressive Covid policies. So much for predictions. Read the last item in this column for some Covid predictions that were smarter than others.]
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MAGA VOTERS: It’s the most ironic thing that first and foremost, MAGA voters are cowards. In its native habitat, the MAGA voter, all armored up and bristling with defiance, is someone who needs protection, from all the people that s/he derides, the brown at the border, the inner city poor, the trans scoundrels who lurk everywhere seeking to seduce their kids. The MAGA voter needs a strong leader, whom s/he sees in Donald Trump. For his part, the increasingly indicted former president has been brilliant for having recognized and exploited their weakness.
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THE FAROE ISLANDS: “Good luck” in Icelandic is hvelreki, with an idea something like “may a whole whale wash up on your beach.” The neighboring Faroese don’t wait for luck to produce whales. They spot them when they’re out sailing. The Grindadráp is on again in the Faroes. It is a spectacle in which, as The Guardian puts it,
“hunters surround pilot whales and dolphins with a wide semi-circle of fishing boats and drive them into a shallow bay where they are beached. Fishermen on the shore slaughter them with knives.”
In the past decade or so the annual event has become a spectacle in which international media gang up on the tiny archipelago. I’m not going to contend that the Grind, as it’s known, is anything but gross. But there are two sides.
For my book Out in the Cold, my wife and I visited the Faroes and I took what I think is a measured look at the question. For a Tuesday travel column later this month I’ll excerpt that section of the book.
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US MILITARY: Fifteen members of the US military were evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany this week, for injuries, apparently in a helicopter crash in northeast Syria. Seven more were injured and treated at the scene. Must the United States military be everywhere, all the time?
This article in al-Jazeera says
“the US had around 750 bases in at least 80 countries as of July 2021. The actual number may be even higher as not all data is published by the Pentagon.”
Here is the accompanying graphic.
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IRAN: The US’s formal posture toward Iran is to finger-wag and admonish. Informally, the two sides are talking. National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, and U.S. Special Envoy on Iran Robert Malley met Deputy Foreign Minister and Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri in Oman last month, Laura Rozen reports elsewhere on Substack.
Ms. Rozen calls them ‘indirect talks.’ I’m not clear what that means. Are they like Henry Kissinger’s old ‘proximity talks,’ conducted through a third party? Are they like in the British parliament, where politicians address one another in the third person? Do they just not look at one another while speaking? The Wall Street Journal reports that in at least three meetings in Oman, “Omani officials passed messages between the two sides.”
Whatever, Ms. Rozen says the talks were meant “both to convey ‘unambiguous’ warnings that Iran should not conduct weapons-grade enrichment; and to urge Iran to take steps to demonstrate that it is willing to de-escalate tensions.” But Foreign Exchanges World Roundup reported on Tuesday that there is negotiation going on:
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefed a Knesset committee on Tuesday about recent talks involving the US and Iran over what he characterized as a “mini agreement” on Iran’s nuclear program. According to him this proposal involves three main components—an Iranian pledge not to enrich uranium beyond the 60 percent level, the release of an unspecified amount of frozen Iranian government funds, and a prisoner swap.”
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NATO: We talked last weekend about the importance of the looming NATO summit, July 11th and 12th in Vilnius. There appears to be movement this week in the race to replace outgoing Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, with the Danish Prime Minister emerging as a favorite.
“Mette Frederiksen ticks several boxes: she's a sitting head of government and a woman – since its creation in 1949, NATO has been run exclusively by men. She also appears to have the support of the current secretary general, who on May 30 described her as "one of the most competent prime ministers in Europe," with whom he maintains ‘the closest contacts.’”
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish PM, was Secretary General from 2009 to 2014, the term before Stoltenberg’s, so that Mette Frederiksen would become the third Nordic NATO leader in a row.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Frederiksen (who was perhaps not coincidentally in Washington on June 5th for talks with Biden and CIA head Bill Burns) is opposed by Poland, which is instead promoting Prime Minister Kaja Kallas of Estonia.
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Reuters says this week that “NATO members are racing to complete a plan to provide long-term support to Ukraine.” Politico reported at midweek that in place of formal NATO security guarantees, talks are underway in which:
“the U.S., Britain, France and Germany are working together to provide those assurances to Kyiv. They would, in essence, formalize their military and economic support for Ukraine, keeping it flowing even after the fighting stops. However, neither a bilateral deal nor multilateral agreement would have the legal force of a treaty.”
Stoltenberg was in Washington this week to try and work that out, and deflecting the idea of pinning down a date certain for Ukrainian NATO membership. On PBS Monday he said, almost irritably for the unflappable SecGen, we’re just not gonna announce a date while a war is going on.
And Zelenskyy has told the Wall Street Journal, “If we are not acknowledged and given a signal in Vilnius, I believe there is no point for Ukraine to be at this summit.” Full jockeying now underway.
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In advance of Vilnius, The biggest exercise of Nato air forces in the history of the alliance is under way with 250 planes and 10,000 troops from 25 nations rehearsing their reactions to a potential conflict with Russia. “Air Defender 23” may cause delays to civilian air traffic in Europe through next week.
The London Times says:
“Under the command of the German air force, the aim is to train forces in how to swiftly move air reinforcements to Germany, a major logistics hub and staging area for Nato, should the war in Ukraine or another conflict escalate.”
NATO is swarming the zone around Russia this year. It lists 13 “major war games” in or near NATO countries in 2023. This compares to two in 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The four biggest in terms of personnel:
Trident Juncture 23: 50,000 personnel from 31 NATO countries and partner nations.
DEFENDER-Europe 23: 20,000 personnel from 20 NATO countries.
Steadfast Defender 23: 10,000 personnel from 10 NATO countries.
Swift Response 23: 10,000+ personnel from 10 NATO countries.
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CHINA: No, those aren’t cracks, they’re just “liquid pooling and running in rivulets across the deck.” A swirl of controversy flared last week after a commercial satellite image purported to show cracks on the deck of China’s third aircraft carrier, the Fujian. The Center for Strategic and International Studies runs a project called ChinaPower, which has decided there are no such large cracks in the vessel’s deck.
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SCOTLAND: Nicola Sturgeon resigned as Scottish First Minister in February and that was odd. There looked to be little prospect of her career goal IndyRef II, a second referendum on Scottish independence later this year, as had been her goal, but she didn’t seem the type to cut and run.
She had, after all, been in Scottish politics all her life. She spent summers in SNP youth camps, in one of which she met her future husband in 1988. She ran to become the youngest MSP in history in 1992, was defeated, but went on to tower over Scottish politics since her accession to the role of First Minister in November 2014.
Last Sunday she was arrested, questioned and released, “pending further investigation,” by Scottish police in what they call “Operation Branchform.” This follows the similar arrest and release of her husband, Peter Murrell, who had been the SNP’s chief executive.
It’s a financial scandal, about the misuse of some £600,000 in SNP party funds, a loan of some £107,000 to the party by Murrell, and, as Time has it,
“a luxury motorhome worth an estimated £110,000 ($137,000), which had reportedly been purchased as a “battle bus” for the Scottish elections in 2021 and was, at the time of confiscation, parked outside Murrell’s mother’s house.”
All this has given entrée to the Scottish Labour Party to chip away at the SNP’s once unassailable hold on the Scottish parliament and, shocking as the vertiginous fall of such a towering figure in Edinburgh is, will make for a hotly contested next general election late next year.
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THE HORN: Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said last week that 54 Ugandan peacekeepers were killed in an attack last week by militant group al Shabaab on a military base in Somalia, Reuters reported.
Al Shabaab, “said it carried out suicide bomb attacks and killed 137 soldiers at the base.”
Uganda’s authoritarian leader Yoweri Museveni is a fan of sending troops into his neighbors’ countries. Ugandan troops have been in Somalia since 2007 as part of an African Union Mission in Somalia there. They also serve as part of a regional peacekeeping force in South Sudan, in Democratic Republic of Congo to fight a Ugandan rebel group Museveni sees as a potential threat, and have in the past been stationed in various numbers and for various length of time in Burundi, Tanzania and Kenya.
Meanwhile
“At least nine Kenya Defence Forces troops were killed when a vehicle they were travelling in was hit by an explosive in Gherille in Gedo in Somalia.
Officials said five others were injured in the incident that happened Monday afternoon.”
And last night about 40 people, mostly students, were killed in the western Ugandan town of Mpondwe, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, and about a dozen miles from the main Uganda/Rwanda road. From the BBC:
“Some five suspected ADF rebels carried out the attack, burning the school buildings and looting the food store, the Ugandan army has said.
Some of the boys were burnt or hacked to death, Maj Gen Dick Olum from the army told the media.”
The ADF set off coordinated explosions in the Ugandan capital in 2019, killing three, and has been subject to cross border raids by the Ugandan military. The suspects fled toward the DRC's Virunga national park, the BBC reported.
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CAMBODIA: Hun Sen has ruled Cambodia for 37 years. Cambodia’s only major opposition party has been barred from running in July elections. The Candlelight party failed to provide registration documents, says the election commission, but the party says the police stole them. Last week Cambodia’s “Constitutional Council” rejected its appeal to be allowed contest election. From the land of no political surprises, Hun Sen, age 70, has suggested he may retire, and favors his son to succeed him.
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THAILAND: Investors in the Thai stock market are apparently wary of dispensing authoritarian rule. Following the election of reformists it now has the third-highest fund outflows in the world this year amid massive sell-offs following last month’s election, according to brokerage firm Asia Plus Securities.
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MEDIA: I wrote this in a previous column, but I have to re-up it one more time here, because incredibly, some podcast hosts apparently missed it:
Get to the point. I find I miss nothing by skipping five minutes into just about any podcast. This is the only time you might be sure you have the listeners’ attention so don’t waste it (!) and this is where amateur hosts drone on about how cool their new podcast is and all their plans for the future. Podcasters, put your content up front. A brisk, brief introduction will suffice, then, get to content. If the listener is interested s/he will wait until later for more bio about your interesting guests, or look ‘em up later without you.
As a matter of course, I use the progress bar to move two or three minutes into every podcast, in hopes of skipping the happy talk and promos. On the Pod Save the World podcast this week, the words, “But so Ben, let’s start with….” came at the minute mark of 9:03.
Really?
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THOUGHT: Most predictions are wrong in the sense of the quote from the Prussian Helmuth von Moltke about no battle plan surviving first contact with the enemy. In blog posts at the time, I made a series of predictions in the form of dairy entries as Covid descended across the land in 2000. Some I got right, some spectacularly wrong. Three years and a few months later, I thought it might be fun to have a look.
On the more right than wrong side of the ledger:
1 The virus undermines the commercial real estate market. When it becomes apparent how many more functions can be carried out remotely, companies will wonder why they need all those buildings.
2 Shorter, stronger supply chains on the other side of this? This looks like a safe bet.
3 Suddenly Amazon acts almost as a utility, prioritizing sales of items for the public good over the discretionary. (Although once everybody had a mask and hand sanitizer, things quickly reverted to form for Amazon.)
And I got lots wrong:
1. This is more of a milepost than 9/11. As time goes on we’ll measure everything as B.C. and A.C. Before Coronavirus and After Coronavirus.
2. It’s crazy the IOC hasn’t yet cancelled the Olympics. That shouldn’t be far away, I wrote.
3. “The ruble is the third-worst performing currency among emerging markets this month, losing about 10% against the dollar. The Brent oil price fell below $26 per barrel for the first time since 2003. Rumblings about Putin’s survival,” I wrote. Would that I had gotten that one right.
Finally, I also noted, “If nature is exacting revenge for human-induced climate change, as some suggest, it’s doing it in an odd way, chasing people away from public transportation.” I think that was right.
And I declared winners and losers during Covid, counting among the losers old and sick people in prison, and suggested they should be let out if they weren’t under the death penalty. For if they weren’t, perhaps by our lack of action, we would be imposing that penalty. Probably somewhere there is a case of this.
And winners? Hands, and dogs. Neither had ever had as much attention.
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That’s it for today. It’s Blinken to China this weekend and Modi to Washington on Thursday for a state visit. We’ll talk about it here, next Saturday. Every Tuesday CS&W publishes a travel column. Last Tuesday’s column was part one of a trip report from Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, and next Tuesday we’ll finish up with part two.
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Good weekend, see you Tuesday.