Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on in the world this week. Today is Saturday, July 8th, 2023.
Today, the NATO summit, damned campaigns, the Treasury Secretary roasts marshmallows in Beijing, there’s a new volcano in Iceland, hate speech in Finland, Senegal settles down, and is there such a thing as a scandal-free career these days?
HAPPY FOURTH: In our neighborhood in Midtown Atlanta, we relish counter-cyclical calm on holiday weekends. People flee the big city for the countryside; side streets empty of parked cars, even obnoxious, loud, demonstrative driving slacks off as the town clears out.
People are collectively grateful to flee town, borrowing the French tradition of abandoning Paris in August and the unofficial practice of suspending various government services in favor of hanging by the lake during Finland’s brief summer. Just plop down somewhere, chill and toast a marshmallow (see Janet Yellin, below.)
Could official Washington be wearing itself out with partisanship? At least one can hope. It sure is wearing out the rest of us.
The Supreme Court, in its term-ending decisions, did everything it could to deepen divisions on beliefs that are deeply-held by many people – on affirmative action, on gay rights, on giving young people a level playing field via student loan forgiveness.
What is it about August?
Some years ago the New York Times Magazine treated us to a recitation of what happens when cities empty out for summer break:
"‘What is it about August?’ demanded an exasperated George Bush after his second consecutive summer vacation was disrupted by global crisis -- the first instance being the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the second the 1991 Soviet coup. This bears examination.
Not only is ‘What is it about August?’ one of the former President's rare diagramable sentences, it might easily have been uttered by any number of his predecessors: by Woodrow Wilson as World War I gathered speed in August 1914; by John F. Kennedy when East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961; by Warren G. Harding when he unexpectedly died in office in August 1923.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb -- or ‘cosmic bomb,’ as it was christened by the War Department in an odd, proto-new ageism -- fell on Hiroshima. Three days later, the second fell on Nagasaki.
In August 1959, Chinese troops crossed into northeastern India during a now-forgotten border dispute. (Obscure, yes, but it still counts.)
An American destroyer was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, provoking the UnitedStates Congress to pass the resolution that would provide the legal justification for our involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as a rationale for Oliver Stone's career.
The Watts riots occurred in August 1965.
In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.
Last weekend the mass urban flight left behind an edgy, generally unsettling Buttigieg v. DeSantis mini-grudge match, (keywords ‘oiled-up’ and ‘homophobe’). That surely, is the undercard for bigger matches to follow. Starting next month.
Here in Georgia’s Fulton County, District Attorney Fani Willis has asked for extra protection around the courthouse in downtown Atlanta between August 7th and 14th, when she plans to reveal the conclusions of her Grand Jury looking into Donald Trump’s attempts to coerce the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger (a Republican), into ‘finding’ votes for him in the 2020 election.
She has asked that judges not schedule trials or in-person hearings during that time, apparently to minimize victims of any violence. She has asked that visitors to the courthouse be screened, she has asked the FBI for bomb-sniffing dogs, asked to close streets and sidewalks around the courthouse, to increase surveillance, and she has asked the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department for 500 extra officers, as she predicts her announcement "may provoke a significant public reaction." Fair to assume that the former president will be indicted again.
Just for the record, about indictments against presidential candidates: on the Saturday before he was elected in 2016, Donald Trump said “if she (Hillary Clinton) were to win this election, it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation we could very well have a sitting president under federal indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”
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NATO: The 74th annual NATO summit is next Tuesday and Wednesday in Vilnius, Lithuania. At last year’s summit in Madrid the allies were still off balance from Russia’s audacity in the then-four month old war on Ukraine. The invasion was too recent to set very much lasting policy. Better luck next week.
First things first. Housekeeping.
This year, like last, it turns out that the Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, sticks around, as confirmed last Tuesday. UK DefSec Ben Wallace wanted the job. Danish PM Mette Frederiksen did too. The US seemed to think this was no time to introduce a learning curve to the leadership, that decision prevailed, and it makes sense.
Stoltenberg, who last year passed up the chance to become head of Norway’s Central Bank by staying on at NATO, will have been on the job ten years when the 75th anniversary NATO summit convenes in Washington next July.
NATO has been preoccupied with the war, true enough, but next time the selection process needs to actually select someone. There is no lack of candidates. Maybe get to work on that earlier next time?
On Sweden’s accession bid, at the weekend the Swedes still held Turkish President Erdogan’s ire. Nevertheless, last week:
Swedish PM Krissterson came to call on Joe Biden in Washington on Wednesday. That same day Secretary of State Blinken talked to his Turkish counterpart, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, to encourage Türkiye's support for Sweden one more time, and Biden told Kristersson in front of reporters he was "anxiously looking forward to your membership" in NATO.
For Sweden, it's not over till it's over.
“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson Monday in Vilnius, Lithuania — before the alliance’s summit on July 11-12 — in a last-ditch effort to overcome Turkey’s objections to Sweden’s bid to join NATO, the NATO secretary-general said Thursday after a tripartite meeting at the security alliance's headquarters in Brussels.
“The challenge, Stoltenberg said, was to “bridge the gap between what Sweden has done and the understanding Turkey has relating to what Sweden has done.”
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Tomorrow, Sunday, Biden heads to Europe, first for a courtesy call on the United Kingdom’s new king, then to the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, then on to further talks in a day trip to Finland.
During the NATO summit itself, the alliance will adopt new defensive plans, described as:
“the most dramatic change…since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” says Matthew Van Wagenen, an American general in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe].
The idea is to adopt regional plans, for the north, covering the Atlantic and European Arctic; the centre, from the Baltic to the Alps; and the south, for the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and to assign countries individual areas of responsibility in a future conflict.”
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BELARUS: If Yevgeny Pregozhin is indeed in St. Petersburg, maybe he was never under Aleksandr Lukashenka’s care at all, but since the Belarusian president briefly claimed dubious credit for diffusing the mini-mutiny two weeks back, the presidents of the small Western states around him have taken the opportunity to remind the rest of the West that he’s still there, on the border of three NATO states.
CNN reported on Friday that:
“Presidents of Lithuania, Poland and Latvia wrote a letter to the NATO Secretary General and the heads of the NATO alliance, warning them about the threat "posed by Russia’s aggressive actions and the evolving situation in Belarus.”
"The cooperation between Russia and Belarus has deteriorated the security of the region and that of the entire Euro-Atlantic area,” they said, pointing to “Russia's use of Belarusian territory in its war against Ukraine, and Moscow stationing tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus, calling it ‘an escalatory move’ and ‘a direct threat to the security of our community.’”
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HAASS, AGAIN:
In What Just Happened 19 just last week I noted that Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) head Richard Haass was retiring “after a successful, scandal-free twenty year run. Not so fast, apparently. This week we found out that being CFR head was just Haass’s day job.
Haass and his CFR usually represent the government’s consensus view, and three months ago I wrote that:
“you can watch the consensus change by watching thought leaders. The most establishment of establishment organizations, the Council on Foreign Relations, gave Biden advance cover last week:
“The West has so far allowed Kyiv to set the aims of the war, but this policy has run its course as Ukraine’s goals are coming into conflict with other Western interests,” according to Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan. The time has come for the U.S. and its partners to formulate a diplomatic endgame, they write in Foreign Affairs. This endgame should include “a cease-fire as Ukraine’s coming offensive reaches its limits.”
There it is – the sensitive stuff out loud.
So Haass’s position is to negotiate a cease-fire. Now, on Thursday, NBC News reported
“A group of former senior U.S. national security officials have held secret talks with prominent Russians believed to be close to the Kremlin — and, in at least one case, with the country’s top diplomat — with the aim of laying the groundwork for potential negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, half a dozen people briefed on the discussions told NBC News.”
That group included Haass.
“Sitting down with Lavrov were Richard Haass, a former diplomat and the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, current and former officials said. The group was joined by Europe expert Charles Kupchan and Russia expert Thomas Graham, both former White House and State Department officials who are Council on Foreign Relations fellows.”
The discussions took place ‘with the knowledge of the Biden administration, but not at its direction,’ the report said.”
“With the knowledge of the Biden administration,” indeed. Just ten days ago Haass hosted Secretary of State Blinken in New York for a lengthy CFR public discussion in New York on Ukraine, among other subjects. You can read a transcript here. Blinken is also a CFR member.
In Kyiv, an official in Zelenskyy’s office said:
“Our position is unchanged — the fate of Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. Many times the president and all our official speakers spoke about it. Not anonymously, but quite specifically and publicly.”
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YELLEN TO CHINA: The US & China did record trade of $690.6 billion last year. US Exports to China increased by $2.4 billion to $153.8 billion, while imports of Chinese products rose by $31.8 billion to $536.8 billion, says to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that times were good.
The US Treasury Secretary went to China this week, and began her visit on Thursday with innocuous remarks: “My hope in traveling to China is to re-establish contact,” Ms. Yellen said. “There are a new group of leaders, we need to get to know one another.”
Awww.
After roasting marshmallows on the campfire, or something, officials were to discuss real issues, including each country’s concerns about the other restricting sensitive exports to the other. The US is in a drive to restrict companies from supplying machine tools to China that aid in the manufacture of semiconductor chip making equipment.
Yellin’s sing around the campfire arrival plea was welcomed with export restrictions on germanium and gallium, two raw materials used in chip making. China is thought to have some eighty percent of world reserves of these materials.
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In the last six months France’s Emmanuel Macron (January 25-26), Germany’s Olaf Scholz (February 8-9) and now Yellin, have come to call, each with titans of industry. From Zhongnanhai, it must feel like a good time to be a Chinese potentate.
[Along with Yellin are Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, Cargill CEO David MacLennan, Caterpillar CEO Jim Umpleby, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta and Visa CEO Alfred Kelly.]
When posturing was over and talks finally began on Friday, the NYT reports
“Ms. Yellen criticized the Chinese government’s harsh treatment of companies with foreign ties and its recent decision to impose export controls on certain critical minerals. She suggested that such actions justify the Biden administration’s efforts to make U.S. manufacturers less reliant on China.”
The talks continued today.
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ICELAND: At week’s end the island was anticipating a new volcanic eruption on the peninsula that connects the capital Reykjavik with the international airport at Keflavik. There are two live web cams here.
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FINLAND: Promoting abortion in Africa will fight climate change. That’s what Vilhelm Junnila, who served for about ten days as Finland’s Economy Minister, purports to think. As a result of that belief, and general odiousness,
“The Minister for Economic Affairs, Vilhelm Junnila (Finns), has announced his intention to resign after a scandal over his far-right links that saw his own coalition partners vote for a no confidence motion in parliament.”
It seems that in a 2019 parliamentary question Junnila urged the government to promote abortion in Africa which he claimed was a measure to stem population growth and fight climate change. Euronews reports:
“He said a solution for the climate crisis is to give more abortions to African women.
He called the concept climate abortions’. “
How does that work, you ask? Unclear.
Junnila has also openly flirted with Neo-Nazism.
His Finns Party voted to replace him with 37 year old third-term MP Wille Rydman, who said:
“my good friend Vilhelm Junnila has just had to resign from the post. In my opinion [the resignation] was due to unsubstantiated and stigmatising claims.”
Meanwhile a former leader of Junnila’s Finns Party, Jussi Halla-aho, 52, was elected Speaker of Parliament two weeks ago. He announced last week he is running to succeed Sauli Niinistö in presidential elections next February. Halla-aho has been fined for hate speech after Facebook “posts, which likened Islam to pedophilia.” He also “said Somalis are predisposed to stealing and living off welfare.”
This is the cheerless new conservative government that replaced the previous, Social Democrat-led Sanna Marin government. The top three parties all ended up within one percent of each other in April’s parliamentary elections, but the top two vote getters were new Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s National Coalition Party & the Finns, those two parties promptly allied, and we’re off to a predictable, dour start.
It was a very close election. It’s just that the conservatives, winning 20.8%, and the far right, at 20.1%, were the top two. Marin’s Social Democrats earned 19.9%.
27,003 votes separated the three parties.
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THE ORKNEY ISLANDS: Orcadians are looking for a little love and feeling neglected by Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. The Scotsman newspaper reported Tuesday that
“Council leader James Stockan wants Orkney Islands Council to look at different ways of being governed, saying they have been let down by both the UK and Scottish governments in recent years.”
Stockan floated the idea of the archipelago breaking with the United Kingdom and joining Norway.
At a meeting on Tuesday the council decided to order some studies. The BBC says:
“Orkney councillors have voted to investigate alternative methods of governance amid deep frustrations over funding and opportunities.
Council leader James Stockan said the islands had been "held down" and accused the Scottish and UK governments of discrimination.
His motion led to media speculation that Orkney could leave the UK or become a self-governing territory of Norway.
It was supported by 15 votes to six.”
Meanwhile the polling organization YouGov said summed up opinion across the country:
“Most Britons are apathetic about the archipelago’s continued presence within the UK.”
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SENEGAL: Macky Sall gave everyone a sigh of relief this week when he ruled out running for a third term in office in elections next February. He did so in a live speech on his Facebook page after two terms and a dozen years of rule which have led to periodic protests and dozens of deaths.
Sall was last elected in 2019 for a five-year term after a constitutional revision set a two-term presidential limit. I coulda if I’d a wanted but I didn’t, he suggested. Whatever, that’s good. It forestalls, at least for now, a further drift toward trouble in an increasingly lawless West Africa.
[My wife and I visited Dakar, Senegal’s capital, many years ago and our way was cushioned by having a friend in town, who was then a Peace Corps volunteer. For a more current view I recommend Chris Arnade’s Walking Dakar, in which he writes, “Life in Dakar is lived in the public, with privacy a luxury of the few, and most of public life is lived on the streets.”
That’s true from Dakar, which is the westernmost point on the African continent, straight across Africa, the Asian subcontinent and right through into Southeast Asia. His article’s part two is subtitled “Dirt, dysfunction, and depression.” He thinks “Dakar sucks, and it looks like it will keep sucking for the foreseeable future.”]
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SOUTH AFRICA:
“South Africa president Cyril Ramaphosa has been cleared by a state ombudsman of wrongdoing over the theft of thousands of US dollars stuffed into a sofa on his private game farm, a boost as he battles to put the biggest threat to his presidency behind him.”
Because who among us doesn’t keep thousands of dollars stuffed in our sofas? On our private game farms.
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THOUGHT: I have no plans to visit a beach this summer, but one of my picks for summer beach-style reads is David Grann’s new swashbuckler The Wager, which recounts a true-but-improbable tale of mutiny and survival in Patagonia. It reminds you that emergency amputations at sea without anesthetic were a thing in the mid-eighteenth century.
Next I picked up Diana Preston’s Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy and before the prologue was finished I learned they’d done at least two. That, now, was 1915. I was born in that century. Suddenly amputations without anesthetic weren’t a horror from the distant past.
I don’t meant this as a cautionary tale about the frailty or backwardness or enduring vulnerability of the human condition. Rather, I like to think that since such medical procedures are unthinkable today except under the direst of conditions (like being in a Saudi consulate), it’s proof of the rapid march of progress.
That, if you allow yourself to think so, is cause for optimism.
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TRAVEL: The week’s not-a-good-look prize goes to United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, who spent last week apologizing for deciding not to settle into seat 27E on one of his own airline’s six daily nonstops from Newark to Denver, and instead taking a private jet. CNN:
“The airline confirmed Kirby flew from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, and that the company did not pay for his flight. Teterboro is about 17 miles from Newark, New Jersey, where one of United’s largest hubs is located and which was the center of the airline’s meltdown this week.
In a statement, Kirby said he regrets that his actions distracted from the professionalism of United employees.”
Note that he didn’t regret that he did it. He regretted that he was a '“distraction.” In a statement he said that he had been “insensitive.”
It wasn’t his fault, of course. Earlier in the week he blamed the FAA for his company’s cancellation of flights affecting 150,000 customers, writing to employees that “The FAA frankly failed us this weekend.”
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Also not a good look: in the Republic of Georgia, the Georgian Dream government is not only starving its political opposition, it is apparently helping wealthy Russians enjoy a week at the beach in the French Riviera.
Plus, Alex Melikishvili (@A_Melikishvili) writes on Twitter that “Russian civilian aviation authority Rosaviatsia approved 284 flights from Russia to Georgia per week.” Here are the proposed flights:
Far as I can tell, approval of these flights is pending.
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FINALLY: In case you’re in the area, there’s big doings on Réunion Island this weekend. Don’t miss the Potato Festival today and tomorrow in the city of Le Tampon. The local paper says,
“Many activities and animations are planned, from the sale of the producer to the consumer with attractive prices, a culinary workshop, the competition of Mister Patate and many artists present!”
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That’s it for today. There’s a travel story here on Common Sense and Whiskey every Tuesday, and next Tuesday we visit Chernobyl’s reactor four.
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Good weekend, see you Tuesday.
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