Good morning. It’s Saturday, February 4th, 2023.
The hardly headline news has come that Boris Johnson won’t go away. He was in Washington this week, where he spoke, saw all the important Republicans and members of Congressional organizations like the Republican Study Committee, and picked a media fight with Tucker Carlson, which surely delights them both.
Harper Collins has announced Boris Johnson’s memoir, though not trivial details like a publication date. Publicists say it will be a “memoir like to other.” Of course it will.
The former Prime Minister will play for maximum adoration in his press, in the Telegraph, Sun and Mail, and he will surely settle on a publication date not too long before the next election.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s ‘100 days’ headlines came on Thursday. His supporters contrasted his administration with that of his predecessor Liz Truss, characterizing her brief reign with words like ‘ill-fated.’ It sure was. It was just a bad idea, and a sign of a political party that’s out of ideas. It looks like the new Sunak administration is less a chance to right the ship and more a way to delay the coming Tory bloodbath as long as possible, and it looks like everybody knows it.
So how long might the Sunak flag wave? When is the latest an election could be held? The maximum term of a Parliament is five years from the day on which it first met. This parliament first convened on December 17, 2019, and so, no matter what shenanigans it gets up to, it must be dissolved by December 17, 2024.
There’s a lengthy explanation here of the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022, that ends up “As such the latest possible date for the next general election is 28 January 2025.” Make a note. I’ll set a countdown clock and keep you posted. Starting from today, it’s just 724 days.
How perfectly dreary, and the prospect of as many as a hundred more days, seven times over before an election, that’s all the more dreary. The thinking among Tories now seems to be, let this less-harmful-than-our-last-couple-of-PMs, relatively bland placeholder keep corruption scandals on our usual low boil until everyone forgets how abjectly we’ve handled the last 22-1/2 years of governance.
It’s a lesson to consider in our own politics: a brash showman who fronted for a disastrous Brexit, followed briefly by an ill-fated, last-gasp neolib fetishist, and now, drawn into a corner, the Tories choose to ride things out behind a wealthy, personality-free technocrat.
Let the record show, personality-free does not equal not dangerous.
A thought experiment: suppose that, having put on a bad look standing behind a garrulous, bombastic leader in the past Republican government, reticent Republicans go the personality-free route themselves next time. Maybe, they’re thinking, how about we nominate somebody who doesn’t want to fight with everybody about everything, everyday? Maybe we can get a player elected who comes without all the vainglory of the last guy.
Go with the personality free guy? That’s what they’ll be testing all this year. And if press reports are to be believed, actual people may actually be thinking, look at our bench, Pompeo and Haley and Pence!
Oh my.
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Meanwhile back in the UK, it’s not easy to reign after your mother:
Here is a link to a video from last Tuesday. January 31st is the date for a particularly pagan event in Lerwick, Shetland Islands, called the Up Helly Aa firelit procession and galley burning. This is from a live stream that apparently meant not to miss a minute of the fun, but if you skip to around 1:20:00 you’ll see the good part:
How about that.
They do a pagan dance around a pole at midsummer in other Nordic parts, but at least it’s not (usually) freezing.
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The Prime Ministers of Finland and Sweden stood side by side last week to reassert that Türkiye’s dour efforts to separate the historic allies, won’t. Their Foreign Ministers said so earlier in the week, and the PMs reaffirmed it.
The Sultan wants his election victory first.
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While NATO membership is by no means a requirement for Swedish arms sales, Stockholm might be forgiven for expecting its defense industry may cash in on its coming NATO integration. Case in point is the JAS 39 Gripen C/D fighter jets built by Saab AB.
Authors from the UK-based Royal United Services Institute said in a report Monday that after looking at the Russian air war and requirements for Ukrainian air defense, the Swedish aircraft was ‘by far the most suitable candidate’ of Western-manufactured combat jets that could meet operational needs.
Here is perhaps more background than you’re really after.
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People smarter than I have been writing think pieces asserting that German Chancellor Scholz “genuinely believes that support for Ukraine beyond the bare diplomatic minimum would be a dangerous provocation to Russia.” There’s even a whole book about Germany’s Russia Problem whose publication I thought was excellently timed last September, and which has grown, if anything, even more timely.
At pains not to provoke Russia, Germany’s stance has the effect of dividing the western alliance and undermining Germany’s presence at the center of it. More articles to this effect will populate the trans-Atlantic chatter.
• The three Baltic Foreign Ministers each Tweeted the same message two Saturdays ago:
• Articles pile up, casting aspersions like "At the center of the roadblock is Germany," and calling Germany “the great roadblock at the heart of the continent.”
As it spreads, opinion like this is going to be disastrous for Germany. The Scholz government must either continue to feign nonchalance or do something, somewhere, about it. Almost like leadership.
In an interview with David Ignatius on Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken commended Germany’s military backing for Ukraine even as Berlin was being hammered by other NATO allies for not providing Leopard tanks quickly to Kyiv. “Nobody would have predicted the extent of Germany’s military support” when the war began, Blinken said. “This is a sea change we should recognize.” That’s the kind interpretation.
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These days we talk about the US & Ukraine having different strategies as a matter of course. There was a flurry of American officials to Kyiv a couple weeks ago and press reports had it at the time that they were there to urge Kyiv to abandon the battle for Bakhmut in favor of a more southerly push.
On the one hand the US rightly feels invested and wants to put its deepening investment where it thinks best. On the other, the US is quick to say, Ukraine is under attack and we wouldn’t presume to tell them what their aims should be.
Which will it be? How it all comes out, I can’t even squint and see yet.
I can’t imagine how completely Russia would need to be beaten for actual peace to break out. A comprehensive Russian defeat being so unlikely argues for a negotiated better-than-nothing sort of peace deal. But pick any hundred schemes for a meaningful cease fire and none of them looks viable to me.
Both sides are developing their spring plans now so we’ll learn more soon. The Ukrainian military command has been known to cry wolf in this war but its warnings of an early spring Russian effort ring true just now, as Russia will want to press any advantage they think they might have before new Western tanks enter the battlefield.
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The European Commission is financing a Finland-based stockpile of rescue and health care equipment for use by EU countries dealing with radiation and nuclear-related emergencies, the Finnish government announced on Tuesday.
The new chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence (CBRN) stockpile will be placed in decentralised locations in Finland.
The effort, dubbed rescEU, is expected to cost around 242 million euros, with the stockpile consisting of protective gear, radiation measuring instruments as well as medicines.
You could be forgiven for calling the Nordics hoarders. Norway does the same thing with seeds. Here is a really big deal seed vault, in all it’s otherworldly glory, just outside Longyearbyen, Svalbard.
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This week a flurry of articles have come saying, essentially, after finally moving Germany off the mark on its tanks, and now with the addition of a few American tanks, now finally, now we need a plan. Suddenly opinion leaders think it’ll take more than just hardware to beat the Russians. Apparently, you’re gonna need a strategy too.
Nicolas Tenzer makes this point in a newsletter, and Roger Boyes in a column for the Times of London (which, alas, is behind a paywall) cautioning against a forever war. These are early, tentative signposts pointing to Ukraine fatigue up ahead. You watch.
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The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda are shooting at each other again. Here’s a photo of a Congolese government Sukhoi SU-25 fighter jet on the runway at Goma, a city of around a million in the DRC on the Rwandan border. Rwanda apparently shot this plane with a surface to air missile, claiming it invaded Rwandan airspace, an entirely plausible claim given the airport is in sight of the border. Rwandan leader Paul Kagame, a former refugee and leader of a Tutsi rebel militia, accuses the jet of shooting up a largely ethnic Tutsi militia in Congo called the M23, which is active north of Goma in North Kivu province.
The conflict in the African Great Lakes region is hugely complex, involving multiple actors, governments, obscure militias, illicit resource extraction and splintered ethnic loyalties. The whole topic is complicated, obscure and daunting. In case you’re game, besides the many books about the Rwandan genocide itself, here are two about the fighting:
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, the Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns
Africa’s World War, Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catasprophe by Gérard Prunier
Even the titles are daunting.
Africa’s Great Lakes region is a beautiful part of the world astride the Rift Valley, a geologically active region that includes 11,385 foot volcano Mount Nyiragongo, just north of Goma in the Virunga mountains. As if human-on-human conflict weren’t enough, Nyiragongo eruputed in May 2021, destroying “about 3,600 homes and buildings, forced evacuations of 400,000 residents and killed at least 32 people.” This eruption caught seismologists by surprise, and it’s just one part of what makes the region not just politically unsettled, but geologically unstable too.
Consider Lake Kivu, which forms part of the Rwanda/DRC border at Goma. Because Africa is being tectonically pulled apart along the Rift Valley, hot springs below the lake
“feed hot water, carbon dioxide and methane into the lake’s bottom layers. Microorganisms use some of the carbon dioxide, as well as organic matter sinking from above, to create energy, producing additional methane as a byproduct. Kivu’s great depth — more than 1,500 feet at its deepest point — creates so much pressure that these gases remain dissolved.”
The carbon dioxide and methane trapped at the bottom of Lake Kivu worry scientists. (read about the science here). They fear a catastrophe even larger than the curious case of Lake Nyos, which fills a crater on the “Cameroon Line,” another fault along which the African continent is separating.
Lake Nyos was a horror of its own. One night in 1986 heavy rain pounded the land around Lake Nyos. A local health care worker named Emmanuel Ngu Mbi took shelter in the village of Wum and slept.
The next morning he hopped onto his bicycle and began pedaling. He saw an antelope lying dead along the path, and then rats, dogs, other animals. At the next village he was astounded to see dead bodies everywhere. Overnight a cloud of volcanic carbon dioxide rent the lake and displaced all the air. It crept along the ground and some 1746 people and all their livestock died.
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Unfortunately for themselves and the world, alongside the fighting militias, the danger from active volcanoes and malevolent erupting lakes, the Virunga mountains are home to these guys:
Something like a third of the roughly 1,000 mountain gorillas in the world live in Parc National des Volcans, among the fighting and poaching and erupting.
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An armed assailant stormed Azerbaijan’s embassy in Teheran a week ago and killed a guard. An article in the Iranian press blamed the victim:
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The American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Bongbong Marcos in the Philippines last week. Marcos cast his country’s lot with the US in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Austin visit added four bases to the existing Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) allowing US troops access.
Manila and Washington have a mutual defense treaty and have been discussing U.S. access to four additional bases on the northern land mass of Luzon, the closest part of the Philippines to Taiwan, as well as another on the island of Palawan, facing the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.
EDCA allows U.S. access to Philippine bases for joint training, pre-positioning of equipment and building of facilities like runways, fuel storage and military housing, but not a permanent presence. The U.S. military already has access to five such sites.
Earlier in the week Austin announced “deployment of advanced weapons such as fighter jets and bombers to the Korean Peninsula,” too.
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We talked here about Myanmar last week. The journalist Cristina Maza points to Southeast Asian MPs who together “urge the Thai government to stop engaging with the Myanmar junta and help refugees.” Ms. Maza publishes a newsletter called Lazo Letters and I like it. Have a look at it here.
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Undoubtedly, one comes closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and nobles.
Undoubtedly
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Time always runs out. Next week I hope to do a little European geography talk about two fairly obscure little places, Kaliningrad and Moldova. Kaliningrad is a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania, the Baltic Sea and Belarus. I’ll haul out the maps and we can speculate about what happens to Kaliningrad if ever there’s NATO/Russia fighting.
Moldova, between Ukraine and Romania, has one of those frozen conflicts left over from the Soviet collapse. Let’s consider how it might be able to use Russia’s war on Ukraine to take its country back.
Thanks for joining me, and please consider a subscription. Prices start at the very attractive rate of free, but if you contribute, I’ll mail you a signed copy of my book Out in the Cold.
Most Saturdays we’ll do a column like this. Most Tuesdays I’ll post a story about travel to a less than mainstream location. There are three posts so far, about Greenland, Rapa Nui and Giraffes. Next Tuesday that column will visit Lapland in winter, in the very, very cold and very, very dark.
Sign up for my Twitter feed @BMurrayWriter. Have a look around EarthPhotos.com. Lots and lots of photos of places I’ve been, Albania to Zimbabwe. And please make ample use my constantly updated Twitter list of 200 experts on Russia’s War on Ukraine.
Thanks for your time. See you Tuesday.