Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on in the world this week. Today is Saturday, July 12th, 2023.
Today, democracy in Thailand continues to struggle, the southwest Pacific is thick with diplomats, Google faces district court charges that it has monopolized the search market, we have the Trump news, updates on Ukraine and more.
UKRAINE: In retrospect it’s easy to see how America’s leadership and opinion leaders have been deceiving themselves. After a desultory and ineffectual Russian winter offensive, speculation in the West was almost jocular last spring as it awaited what it was certain would be a robust, maybe even decisive Ukrainian counteroffensive.
When that effort got off to an inauspicious start news coverage highlighted how Ukraine was holding back all those mighty Western-trained troops and equipment that would be key to the offensive, it wouldn’t be long now, but it was too early to worry. Now it’s time to worry.
Military experts and visitors to the front lines return muttering about unit cohesion. Officials have begun to float sobering news. We’re seeing darker headlines, and prescriptions on what to do run the gamut of commentators’ previous positions. The former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, for example, has been all in all along, and wants to press on:
Republican sentiment against an open checkbook for Ukraine has grown.
“In the spring of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, 34% of Republicans thought that the United States wasn’t doing enough to aid Ukraine, while only 17% thought that we were doing too much. By the summer of this year, the share of Republicans who believe that we are doing too much for Ukraine had nearly tripled to 44% while the share who believe we aren’t doing enough had fallen by more than half, to just 14%.
This will rightly worry Ukraine/EU/NATO leaders because as the US election approaches, all decisions will be filtered through the lens of that election. It’s tough to write this but as important as support for Ukraine is, persuading a majority of Americans not to reelect Donald Trump will, well, trump that support.
I’ve been writing all year that as time goes on, the pressure for a negotiated settlement will only grow. Part of this is because of the real danger, which McFaul acknowledges, that the longer the conflict drags, the more likely something crazy will happen that will threaten to widen the war.
President Biden has been intent on avoiding a wider war from the beginning, as, when the war was only weeks old, he made clear that “direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War Three.”
I expect that Putin, the Wagner Group and Alexander Lukashenka perceive this as an exploitable weak spot and are ‘kneeling on the bruise’ by loudly deploying some 250 Wagner forces to rattle around on maneuvers along the Polish border this week.
Poland, CNN says, “is planning to move around 10,000 troops to its eastern border with Belarus amid mounting concerns over Wagner forces in the region.” This is just the type of volatility that Biden is keen to tamp down, because it’s just the type of volatility that could quickly get beyond control.
[NOTE: Poland has a vitally important election on October 15th, and we’ll be talking much more about it in the next weeks.]
Pressure for negotiations will only increase as the summer fighting season winds down with the counteroffensive having turned out a disappointment for the Western allies. Perhaps in anticipation of this and jockeying for its best bargaining position, “The Biden administration on Thursday asked Congress to provide more than $13 billion in emergency defense aid to Ukraine and an additional $8 billion for humanitarian support through the end of the year.”
•
An aside: here is a paragraph from Owen Matthews’s Overreach, a book published in June in the US:
“In August, as his city came under sustained Ukrainian attack, the new head of Kherson’s regional administration, Kirill Stremousov recorded a defiant video message promising that the city would never be retaken – though it was clear from the domes of a cathedral visible over his shoulder that he was in Voronezh, Russia, rather than in Kherson.”
So, um, and here is where it’s good to be be a columnist rather than a journalist, is official Russia really this media unsavvy? Can the Kremlin not at least haul some green screens out to the hinterlands? Watching all those gladiator-a-thons on Russian TV makes it clear that the capitol has slick video producers. Y’all might consider sending a bunch of MacBooks with Final Cut Pro out to the provinces.
•••••
THE PRESIDENT AND THE FORMER PRESIDENT: The August 1 federal indictment has been picked over and analyzed until there’s not much original to say. Just a few observations: Mike Pence will be the star witness in the former president’s trial, and it will be an untelevised spectacle for the ages.
Mr. Trump’s partisans argue this is all unfair dirty politics on the part of the Biden administration. They may be fairly regarded as knowledgeable about dirty politics. Sarah Isgur and Michael Warren put this argument best when they point out it will be “a trial relitigating the 2020 election in the midst of the 2024 election brought by a Justice Department that is run by one of the candidates against the other candidate. Remember: The special counsel isn’t independent from DOJ. Jack Smith reports to Attorney General Merrick Garland.”
Mr. Trump (who apparently balked at not being called ‘President Trump’ by the Washington magistrate who arraigned him, of course, uses media to disparage pretty much anyone he pleases. Here is an ad that has gotten lots of exposure here in Atlanta this week, which accuses DA Fani Willis of, among other things, “hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting:”
The Atlanta Journal Constitution says The Trump campaign paid $79,000 for “the Fraud Squad” ad to run on cable news channels in metro Atlanta between Aug. 9 and 13.”
Despite all the Trump camp’s intentional misdirection, we may at least count our blessings that precious few people believe Trump’s stump claim that “I’m being indicted for you.”
•
It’s going to be tempting to try to run Biden from his basement again like they did in 2020 during Covid. Because if he trips and does a face plant on October 18th next year, something like that could put Trump back in the presidency, and we really, really can't have that, can we? So one would hope that operatives and big donors are talking back channel about having a candidate ready to draft, and viewed from here, I think never–Trump world's best shot would be Governor Whitmer.
More electable than Harris or Buttigieg, both of whom would represent too woke a candidacy for some persuadables in the current moment. I might personally prefer a Chris Murphy or Sherrod Brown, but not enough name recognition there and not enough time to develop it. Whitmer has name recognition, administrative experience and comes from a big industrial swing state.
One of my friends is pretty sure that at some point, 'after consultation with his family,' Biden will announce he's stepping aside. It seems responsible to prepare for such an eventuality. Question is, how can operatives and big donors make ready for a Biden pratfall — the coming campaign's October surprise — without blowing up everything?
And while I’m being a fount of anxiety: I fear this is the kind of thing that tends to get incumbent presidents beat. Whichever party they're from. It seems especially perilous for Biden because everybody says needs votes and enthusiasm from young people.
•••••
PACIFIC PORT WARS The US and China jockey for both physical and diplomatic space in the Pacific. More officials from the global north have insinuated themselves into the Western Pacific global south this summer than maybe ever.
Moving at the speed of, well, the State Department, “The State Department says it plans a massive increase in diplomatic personnel and spending for facilities at new U.S. embassies in the Pacific islands as the Biden administration forges ahead with efforts to counter China’s growing influence in the region,” The Hill reported in July.
That move came just eleven-plus years since former President Obama traveled to Honolulu, Indonesia and Australia to advance the message that “America is going to play a leadership role in Asia for decades to come.” State told Congress it will be opening four new embassies (Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu and Kiribati) and staffing them with around forty new hires.
The Solomons made some brief news last year when China and the Solomon Islands signed a security agreement. Rumors that something like this was afoot sent US Secretary of State Antony Blinken scrambling off on a slapped-together meeting in Fiji with 18 Pacific leaders, most attending online.
Feigning to be first and foremost focused on Pacific island affairs left Blinken forlorn and looking like it, standing alongside the acting Fijian Prime Minister, in Fiji, lamely promising to open a new embassy … in the Solomon Islands.
This was February 2022, and Blinken wanted to be anywhere but Nadi, the Fijian capital, because pretty much anywhere else would have been closer to his preoccupation that day, February 12th, less than two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, a scant year and a half later, State has notified Congress about its spending and staffing plans for it’s new embassy there.
The question of China’s Pacific expansion has festered for some time. The Sydney Morning Herald fretted that Chinese officials had approached Vanuatu officials about a security arrangement, and how that kind of thing could lead to a Chinese military base far too close to Australian shores.
Now China has built a port at Vanuatu’s second city, Luganville, on the island of Espiritu Santo, with the stated purpose to host cruise ships. But it’s big enough to service naval vessels too.
An online Vanuatu paper called it “geopolitically risky” and warned that it “involved a $US80 million loan from China” and “was financially unsustainable because of Vanuatu’s already-high debts levels to China.…
An Australian security analyst called the wharf “overkill” for the cruise industry. It is “large enough to accommodate large Chinese naval service combatants, guided missile destroyers and cruisers,” he said.
I checked and I can only find 61 cruise ship arrivals scheduled for 2023 in all of Vanuatu. Here is Luganville, Espiritu Santo, on our most recent visit.
Building a port for cruise ships could be good for China even if it really is just for cruise ships. The worry is that China could move on Vanuatu as they did at the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, what analysts call “debt trap diplomacy.”
That port, on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, was built with loans from a Chinese state-owned bank and opened in 2010. But when the Sri Lankan government struggled to pay its debt, under a 2018 deal Chinese firms emerged with a 70 per cent stake and 99 year lease.
“What the Chinese tend to do is that they put heavy investment into countries that simply don’t have the means to pay back the debt,” an expert told Australia’s Channel 9. “If China can get a country so deep in debt that it can’t pay back that debt, then they will take something else in return … (like a) port.”
(If China aspires to build naval bases in other countries, Hambantota, Bata in Equatorial Guinea and Gwadar in Pakistan are the three most likely locations for a Chinese naval base, says to be established in the next two to five years, according to an analysis by AidData, a research institute at William and Mary, in a new paper. Here’s that report, published at the end of July.)
Meanwhile back in the Pacific Secretary of State Blinken visited twice in July. The last week of July both Emmanuel Macron and Lloyd Austin were in the southwest Pacific — Macron in Vanuatu and New Caledonia and Austin on a once-postponed trip to PNG — at the same time, the Fijian Prime Minister declined an invitation to visit China, saying that whoops, he’d walked into a door, and for extra effect, wearing a shirt that may have been flecked with blood.
Macron went to New Caledonia to shore up its French territorial status (not a brilliant summer for former French colonies, see Burkina Faso/Mali/Niger.)
New Caledonia is an island archipelago two thousand miles northeast of Australia. In a series of referendums, the former colony has voted to remain affiliated with France as a territory, but vociferous resistance remains. Macron, who is having a tough time with his ‘old colonialism’ just now, left the former colony for Vanuatu where he denied what he called the ‘new colonialism.’
Keep in mind that while France “has 1.6 million citizens in the Asia-Pacific across seven overseas territories, including New Caledonia and French Polynesia, and an exclusive economic zone spanning nine million square kilometres (3.5m square miles),” it’s entire Pacific strategy was upended when in late summer 2021 “the (Scott) Morrison government killed off that $90bn French program in favour of seeking US and UK help to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.”
•
US Defense Secretary Austin’s visit to Papua New Guinea was the first time a US Defense Secretary had visited. He was there to discuss “implementing the Defense Cooperation Agreement signed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the capital, Port Moresby, in May.” US President Biden had been scheduled to make a first ever visit to PNG to sign that agreement, but had to return home to tend to the government-shutting hijinks of the loyal opposition in May.
Austin said the United States was “‘not seeking permanent basing’ on Papua New Guinea but would help the country expand its military capability, modernize its forces and increase their interoperability with the U.S. military.”
Blinken meanwhile, was in Tonga dedicating that new embassy and warning of “increasingly problematic behavior” and “unlawful maritime claims” from China, New Zealand, and talking about that new embassy there.
Finally Blinken joined Austin in Brisbane to talk bilateral relations with their Australian counterparts.
•••••
If you’re reading this as an email your provider may clip this post before the end. Try clicking on ‘view entire message’ to see the whole thing, or you can always read all content at Common Sense and Whiskey online.
•••••
THAILAND: An August 4th vote to elect a new Prime Minister was postponed again, three months after elections.Is there a crippling uprising waiting to happen or will the messy aftermath of last May’s election be papered over without violence? Let’s look at how we got here.
The Move Forward Party, or MFP, won 14 million votes and the most seats in the May election, and the military-aligned government of former General Prayuth Chan-ocha was thoroughly rejected. General Prayuth seemed to be relieved to go.
MFP’s platform vowed to cut military power and amend the royal defamation law, which criminalizes criticism of the powerful monarchy, which unsettled the royalist establishment.
In mid-July the military-appointed Senate voted down Move Forward’s prime ministerial candidate, Pita Limjaroenrat.
More than 14 million Thais voted for MFP and its radical agenda to cut the military from power, restructure the economy and amend the royal defamation law, which criminalizes criticism of the powerful monarchy.
But the party has rattled the royalist establishment, which has blocked its bid for power.
Last week Pheu Thai, the party that got the second-most votes in those elections, has pushed aside Move Forward, the victorious party, in its attempt to form its own coalition, saying it would nominate its own candidate for prime minister, Srettha Thavisin.
Move Forward was elected got the most votes by running on a platform of reform of Thailand’s lèse majesté laws. Here are the top three parties’ results. The United Thai Nation party in a distant third place is the military junta’s party:
In a viable democratic system Move Forward probably would have been able to form a parliamentary majority, but this was thwarted by the leaden thumb on the scales provided by a military government-appointed Senate of 250 people whose votes were required to attain a majority.
Nice to have 250 spare votes in your back pocket.
As a parting gift, after failing to muster a majority, Move Forward’s leader, a 42-year old Harvard educated House member named Pita Limjaroenrat, was suspended as an MP.
This is all a reprise of 2020 when a September rally saw what protesters claimed was a crowd of 100,000 challenging the then-new King Vajiralongkorn to reform. This led to the use of water cannon, a ‘state of emergency,’ and ultimately, the tense political atmosphere that has prevailed until this year’s election.
With Move Forward sidelined, the Bangkok Post reports that “On Monday, the leaders of the Pheu Thai and Bhumjaithai parties announced they would be the core of a bid to form a new coalition government.”
On Friday the Pheu Thai Party brought six small parties into its alliance to form a coalition government, lifting its number of House seats in the group to 228.
“On Wednesday afternoon, senior Pheu Thai figures including Dr Cholnan and Paetongtarn Shinawatra went to the Move Forward headquarters for talks with leader Pita Limjaroenrat and party executives.
Says the Post, “Pheu Thai is hopeful that Move Forward MPs will vote for the new coalition’s prime ministerial candidate even though the party that won the most votes in the election is now almost certain to be in the opposition.”
Questions for now are, will the junta, with their 250 back-pocket votes, back Pheu Thai (which at least has a history of governance) sufficiently to form a government? And whether or not they do, will young people, who felt sufficiently disenfranchised in 2020 to go to the streets, feel the same three years on.
•••••
ANTITRUST: Google has 95% market share in search, annual revenue of a little less than $300 billion, and 15 products with more than 500 million users. Beginning next month (September 12th) it must defend itself in US District Court against a charge that it has monopolized the search market. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the accusations laid out by the plaintiffs, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, as well as state attorneys general, if proved at trial, show that Google’s business model is illegal, and that the firm might need to be split up.
How does Google monopolize search?
Well, it pays $45 billion a year to have distributors refuse to carry its competitor’s products, signing deals with “Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb— to secure default status for its general search engine and, in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google’s counterparties from dealing with Google’s competitors.”
Matt Stoller calls this case ‘the big one.’ He has excellent coverage at his Substack newsletter here.
•••••
THE PHILIPPINES says China’s coast guard used a water cannon to block a Philippine military supply boat not far from the Filipino shore in the South China Sea. It seems that “a handful of its troops live on a rusty World War II-era ship that was intentionally grounded in 1999” on a submerged reef called Second Thomas Shoal (map).
And so it’s interesting to note that “The Philippines and the United States are set to launch joint patrols in the South China Sea this year amid heightened tensions in the region stoked by China’s increasing aggressiveness, a senior official in Manila said Wednesday.”
•••••
UNLIKELY ALLIANCE: The minister of defense of Bolivia, Edmundo Novillo, signed a memorandum of understanding with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Reza Ashtiani in Teheran.
The Iranian Defense Minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani said Latin American countries are of “special significance” in Iran’s foreign and defense policy.
•
Speaking of Iran, the government in Teheran closed the country for business on Wednesday and Thursday August 2 & 3 because of the heat. It “announced a nationwide two-day holiday because of increasing temperatures, state media reported Tuesday.”
Ahvaz, the capital of an oil-rich province in the country’s southwest, experienced 50 C (122 F) on August 1. We’ll talk at some length about the climate next weekend.
•••••
TANZANIA’s government has signed an unusual agreement with DP World, a Dubai-based management company, to run Dar es Salaam port. “critics said it damaged Tanzania’s national interest by giving DP World the right to manage coastal and lakeside ports in perpetuity,” the Financial Times reports.
“Clauses that have raised concern include one that prevents withdrawal from the deal ‘in any circumstances, including in the event of material breach, fundamental change of circumstances, severance of diplomatic . . . relations.’”
•••••
WEEKEND READING
Every weekend I suggest worthwhile reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds. Here we go:
•
Only 2.1% of Northern Ireland's population was born in the South, and only 1.3% of the Republic of Ireland's population was born in the North. Five Lessons from the Partition of Ireland.
•
How Edward Hopper Storyboarded ‘Nighthawks’
•••••
How to evade Captcha: A behind-the-scenes peek into the hidden world of human click farms. I Was a Human CAPTCHA Solver
•••••
Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon. Here’s a gentle primer.
•
What Counts as Seeing. A conversation between Alice Wong and Ed Yong
•
Life with humans turns these naturally incurious apes into explorers and better problem-solvers. That might provide clues to our own evolution. Captive Orangutans Are Curious (But Wild Ones Are Not)
•
The hydrogen jet looking to usher in hypersonic air travel. Paris to New York in 1.5 hours.
•••••
Climate change is making a place of extremes feel a lot more normal. Heat tourism: Living with Death Valley
•
SEO has given us “an internet littered with austere and joyless copy, engineered to reach a high rank on a particular search — meaning that the most popular results are, ironically, usually boring, low quality, and in some cases totally useless. While SEO itself is not Google’s fault - there will always be people trying to game systems - it is absolutely on Google to not have their search results crammed with low-quality content engineered to have the highest ranking.” The internet is already broken.
•
March 2021 saw the death of high-wire walker Carla Wallenda, the last living child of Flying Wallendas founder Karl. After almost a century of spectacular stunts – and several grisly accidents – the greatest of daredevil dynasties is still on the road. Fourth-generation wire-walker Lijana Wallenda explains why her family just can't keep its feet on the ground. Weirdos. The last of the Flying Wallendas
•
In a room at the Oslo Plaza Hotel, a young, elegant woman is found dead, with a gun shot wound to the head. Why did she check in under a false name? Why are the labels removed from her clothes? Why has no one reported her missing? Mystery at the Oslo Plaza
•••••
And finally, what I learned from taking a train across the US - a twelve minute video.
•••••
Thanks for reading Common Sense and Whiskey. While you’re here, why not sign up for a subscription? You get three posts a week and subscriptions start at the entirely reasonable rate of free.
Good weekend. For Tuesday’s travel tale we go to the beach in Anguilla. See you then.
Common Sense and Whiskey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.