Welcome. Here’s some of what’s happening in the world this week. Today is Saturday, October 7, 2023.
Today a quick look at the US and Ukraine, then we have some background in plain English, a primer on the complicated Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict. We cast a wide net this week with updates and news from Slovakia, Egypt, Kenya, the Maldives, the Seychelles, we mark a couple of famous anniversaries and the U.S. Secretary of State channels Muddy Waters. Plus, there’s more fine weekend reading.
Common Sense and Whiskey does two things, travel and politics. On Tuesdays there’s a travel article and on Saturdays a political week in review. Common Sense and Whiskey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support what we’re doing here, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
UKRAINE: The United States is doing itself serious, lasting harm with its shutdown shenanigans. While the Biden administration continues to profess undying support for Ukraine’s war effort, the machinations involved in preventing a right wing Republican-led shutdown have resulted in aid to Ukraine being at least temporarily put on hold.
As Ian Bremmer points out, “Ukraine’s leaders now know the US isn’t a reliable long-term backer, even with a supportive president and the backing of most members of Congress.” As he says, “They knew that was a risk tied to Trump and next November’s US election. But now, Kyiv must deal with this risk immediately.” Everyone else in the world, allies and despots alike, will be taking the same lesson.
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Later this month the European Commission is expected to release its regular enlargement report, and most people think it will okay EU accession talks with Ukraine (and maybe Moldova). The extent to which this will turn out to be little more than a tried and true EU delay tactic will be hotly debated.
[It’s normal for the accession process to take four or five or six years. Beyond that, talks with Croatia stretched from 2003 until 2011 and with North Macedonia from 2005 until 2020 though both countries are now EU members. The EU and Türkiye (since 2005), Montenegro (2012), and Serbia (2014) are still in talks.]
Ukraine needs all the European support and stabilization it can get, but its membership would probably mean cuts in programs for present member countries. For example, some existing agricultural subsidies would probably need to be cut. Poland is now the largest net beneficiary, and the rocky relationship between Ukraine and Poland during the current Polish election campaign doesn’t augur well.
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There is a raft of downbeat opinion writing on the war this week. Read Hubris’ Downfall: The Hard Road Ahead for the Russia-Ukraine War in The National Interest, and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies has a think piece, Zelenskyy’s race against geopolitics, subtitled “Ukraine’s leader is moving against global trends that are shaping a new order indulgent towards Russia.”
We’ll talk a lot more about Ukraine as summer turns to autumn, but I want to devote more time today to a story that’s both complicated and pretty opaque for many people.
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NAGORNO KARABAKH: Hundreds of people apparently died in September and more than a hundred thousand are now displaced in what looks like an endgame to the decades long Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict. Azerbaijan has opportunistically seized on Russian weakness to capture territory and, in the process, to ethnically cleanse its regained territory of just about all of the last remaining 120,000 Armenians on Azeri soil.
First, some basics: Armenia has been a nation since Roman times and was among the earliest Christian lands. The language is Armenian. Azerbaijan speaks a Turkic language and is Muslim. “Nagorno” means “mountainous” in Russian, while “Karabakh” is a Turkic translation of the Persian name for the region, Bagh-e-Siah, which in turn means “Black Garden”. “Artsakh” is the Armenian term for Karabakh.
The precipitating event in this current, decisive conflict was an Azerbaijani claim that landmines, allegedly placed by Armenian armed forces, killed six in Azerbaijan’s Khojavend District in mid-September. This came after a debilitating nine month blockade of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh, during which neither food and supplies could get in, nor people out.
In retaliation Azerbaijan initiated a “peacekeeping” operation on September 19th and when a ceasefire was announced, it mandated removal of Armenian military assets from Nagorno Karabakh. On September 28th Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the ethnically Armenian exclave (in Armenian, the “Republic of Atrsakh”), signed a decree that will dissolve his government on January 1st.
How did we get here? This is the apparent culmination of a conflict that erupted when the Soviet Union collapsed. Its various constituent republics declared themselves sovereign nations and patchwork enclaves around the former Soviet space sought to escape the republics in which they found themselves all across the old union.
(As Masha Gessen helpfully recalls, “South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to break free from Georgia, the Transnistria Region fought to separate from Moldova, Chechnya wanted out of Russia,” and over time Russia pulled strings so that most of these are still so-called “frozen conflicts.”)
Nagorno-Karabakh was, legally, an autonomous region within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, overwhelmingly made up of Armenians. That wasn’t much of a problem in the USSR, when people could move about, but when Karabakh moved to politically attach itself to its ethnically-kin, newly independent Armenia, vicious fighting ensued. I remember anti-Armenian pogroms in 1990 in the Azeri capital, Baku, itself at a physical remove from Karabakh of around 230 miles. The war has alternated hot and cold since and casualty numbers vary but are well into the tens of thousands,.
Until last month.
The emptying of Nagorno Karabakh has been quite a spectacle. Because there’s only one road between Karabakh and Armenia, the so-called Lachin Corridor (which had been blockaded by Azerbaijan - see above map), one hundred thousand people arrived over the span of four days in the small and quickly overwhelmed Armenian valley and town called Goris.
The conflict may not be over, as things only get more complicated from here. Following its time tested policy of separating and isolating ethnic groups, the Soviet Union drew a patchwork map of its southern Caucasus region that left a bit of Azerbaijan separated from the rest of the Azerbaijan SSR – by Armenia.
This is Nakhchivan, the world’s largest landlocked exclave and a potential future flashpoint. In the USSR’s day, the separation was for internal control of various ethnicities and didn’t really matter practically because the whole southern Caucasus was just part of the USSR.
Baku wants to connect with Nakhchivan, not least because it would thereby attain a border with its patron Türkiye. It wants a corridor right across Armenian territory, which would, in the process, further surround and isolate Armenia. On September 24th the Azeri and Turkish leaders met – in Nakhchivan – to talk it over.
Does Azerbaijan negotiate from its new strength with Armenia for that corridor across Armenia to link Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan and thus to Türkiye? Does it just seize more land? Does Russia feel its interest in the region as a former Armenian protector is to stay and resurrect that role, either to prevent such a corridor or to police it?
Does the US insert itself again? It showed the flag briefly in a ten day military training exercise earlier in September near the Armenian capital Yerevan. As the New York Times had it at the end of September,
”The Biden administration rushed out two senior officials over the weekend to the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to offer comfort to Armenia’s embattled prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan. But it has so far resisted placing sanctions on Azerbaijan for a military assault that the State Department previously said it would not countenance.
“We feel very alone and abandoned,” said Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, Mr. Pashinyan’s former foreign minister.”
Russia maintains a military presence in Armenia and had been Armenia’s protector, but Russia is, of course, also preoccupied with its war in Ukraine. The Armenian news website Hraparak reported in May that Russia withdrew troops, Su-25 attack jets and Mi-24 attack helicopters from its military base in Gyumri, Armenia, in order to deploy them to Ukraine.
Russia is also no fan of Prime Minister Pashinyan, a former journalist who led protests in 2018 to depose the previous Kremlin-friendly Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. Pashinyan has said that “the security systems and the allies we have relied on for many years,” meaning the Russians, are “ineffective”, and that the “instruments of the Armenian-Russian strategic partnership” are “not enough to ensure Armenia’s external security.”
With no aid coming from Russia in last month’s flare-up Pashinyan must have felt he had little choice but to try an explicitly Western tilt; the Kremlin was predictably not happy with the joint Armenian/US military exercises.
Then last Tuesday the Armenian parliament voted to join the International Criminal Court, obliging it to arrest Putin if he visits. Not that there is any particular reason Mr. Putin would wish to visit, but the Kremlin calls the move “extremely hostile.”
The Kremlin may agitate for Pashinyan’s overthrow. Whether he survives or not, relations between Armenia and Russia will now be fraught.
Meanwhile Azerbaijan celebrates. It named a street in Stepanakert (the Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh capital) on Tuesday for Enver Pasha, “the Young Turk leader who is seen as one of the main architects of the Armenian genocide.”
Azerbaijan has been shrewd. It has moved to put Europe in its debt by substituting oil Europe lost from Russia with Azeri oil. One can imagine this was a conscious move to tamp down future protests from the Europeans when Baku made its move on Armenia.
[Further reading: The definitive work on the conflict is Thomas de Waal’s Black Garden, Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War.]
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SLOVAKIA: We talked about this at some length last week. Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová invited Robert Fico to take the first shot at forming a government early in the week as he and his SMER party emerged with the most votes after last weekend’s election. SMER starts with its own 42 seats, and will need to build a coalition to form a majority in Slovakia’s 150 seat parliament.
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POLAND: In the past week the parliamentary election polls have narrowed a bit. The governing PiS is on 36 percent to 30 for the main challengers, Civic Platform. Back on September 14th the race stood at 38-29. In addition, the two parties most likely to ally with the opposition Civic Platform are each up a point to ten percent and the far right Konfederacia, a potential (but controversial) PiS ally, has lost a point, to 9 percent. These figures all come from the Politico.eu poll of polls. See What Just Happened 16 and 29 for much more on this most important European election of 2023.
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ANNIVERSARIES:
Ten years ago this fall came a furious spate of titles about the Great War, in advance of the 100th anniversary of its beginning in 2014. Various theses about the causes of the war were advanced, but if there’s one thing just about all the authors agreed on, it’s that by the end of the war, if you asked the leaders of the various warring countries, they’d all say they wouldn’t do the same things again.
The debate today is whether Russia’s war on Ukraine might somehow be ended by negotiation or whether it will degenerate into WWI-like trench warfare. The lessons of WWI suggest that a protracted war in the trenches is something that, if leaders have learned anything from history, they should avoid.
The U.S. House’s decision to trade backing Ukraine for staying open for business came on an auspicious date – September 30th. That was the 85th anniversary of a memorable Neville Chamberlain remark about "a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing."
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EGYPT: President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared his candidacy on Monday for a third term in December’s presidential election amid his government’s new, scandalous alleged entanglement with US Senator Bob Menendez.
There is still independent journalism in Egypt, at least a little. Senator Menendez (D NJ) has been indicted for, among other things, taking bribes from Egyptian American businessman Wael Hana through his New Jersey company, IS EG Halal, which the Egyptian government granted an exclusive monopoly on the certification of U.S. food exports in the halal market to Egypt. This, Lawfare reckons, “would provide a ‘revenue stream’ from which Hana would make bribe payments.”
A 2019 article by independent media outlet Mada Masr pointed out that IS EG was “an unknown entity for many in the market” and that it had “no prior experience in halal certification or pre-existing ties to the American beef industry.” The article linked IS EG to the Egyptian government. Mada Masr’s article, headlined How the multi-million dollar business of certifying halal meat imports was monopolized, put it this way:
“An investigation by Mada Masr has revealed that IS EG operates alongside another private firm that is linked to a ‘sovereign entity,’ a term used to refer to high-level security institutions in (the Egyptian) government.”
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HAITI/KENYA: Russia and China abstained in a UN General Assembly vote last week that established a foreign-led anti-gang stabilization force for Haiti led by Kenya. US United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in an interview that the rules of engagement were yet to be worked out.
Kenya has pledged 1000 soldiers and the U.S. has pledged $100 million and another $100 million from the Defense Department in in-kind contributions. With cover behind the Kenyan lead, Antigua, Barbados, Barbuda and Jamaica say they’ll send troops. We’ll see who eventually turns up.
Canada’s Trudeau government declined to lead this effort earlier and, with Kenyan military already involved in peacekeeping in Sudan and South Sudan (as part of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan and the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei on the Sudan/South Sudan border), in Central Africa Republic (as part of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission), the Democratic Republic of Congo (as part of the East African Community Regional Force) and at its sometimes violent eastern border with Somalia, it’s unclear why newish President William Ruto, (sworn in in September 2022), would find a benefit in taking this on.
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MORE FROM KENYA: President Ruto shook up some people when, in late August, he ordered management of Amboseli National Park transferred from the Kenya Wildlife Service to the Kajiado County government, where the park is located. Here is a quote from the Amboseli Trust for Elephants.
“Needless to say, this directive was a shock to us at ATE. We immediately began to confer with other conservationists and Maasai leaders. We know that this will be a huge loss for KWS but we also realize that the creation of the Park in 1974 was, as the Maasai say, an historical injustice. All revenue from the Park currently goes directly to the central treasury of Kenya, which in turn makes an allocation to KWS for its custodianship of Kenya’s wildlife. Amboseli is one of the most popular and lucrative parks in the country. The other areas held by the Maasai people—the Maasai Mara in the southwest and the Samburu Game Reserve in the north—were never turned into parks but instead are reserves run by the county governments who collect revenue and thus earn directly from tourism.”
Amboseli is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country, readily accessible from Nairobi and home to abundant wildlife including elephants, giraffes, lions and zebras (especially elephants). It is also well-known for it’s mostly dawn and dusk views of Mount Kilimanjaro.
In 2013, the national government passed the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, giving counties the authority to manage wildlife resources within their borders, but it kept control of national parks as “assets of national importance.” Ruto’s directive fulfilled a 2022 campaign promise made in response to calls from the Maasai community, who argue that the national government has not been doing enough to protect their interests in the park.
Best I can tell, benefits include more revenue at the local level and more involvement for the local Maasai, potentially aiding in conservation practices, but there are worries the county government will be in over its head managing this asset of national importance.
Incidentally, here’s a photo I took in March 2023. Climate change marches on, as there was just about no snow atop Africa’s highest mountain.
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INDIAN OCEAN WATCH:
FIRST, THE MALDIVES: A lot of Maldivian politics is driven by politicians’ orientation — toward India or China? Last Saturday China won the latest round, with Challenger Mohamed Muizzu (China) defeating incumbent President Ibrahim Solih (India) in a runoff election. The margin was a healthy 54-46 percent. Solih campaigned on an "India First" policy. Muizzu “has supported Chinese loans and investment projects in the past,” Reuters reports.
Muizzu has been critical of the trade imbalance between his country and India but the imbalance between the Maldives and China is greater. India’s exports to the Maldives amounted to $416m in 2021, while it imported $49m from the smaller nation. China, meanwhile, exported goods worth $395m to the Maldives, and its imports were valued at $3.9m, says Al Jazeera.
NEXT, SEYCHELLES: Too good to ignore. Here we have a literal witch hunt. The main opposition leader in Seychelles, Patrick Herminie, has been charged with witchcraft. He puts it down to politics:
“Police say the case is related to the discovery of two bodies exhumed from a cemetery on the island of Mahé.
He has denied the charges, telling local media that his prosecution is a ‘political show’ to taint his image.
Mr Herminie plans to run in the 2025 presidential election under the banner of the United Seychelles Party.”
FINALLY, TWO ITEMS:
GOOGLE: This is reported to have been revealed at Google’s anti-trust trial last week:
“Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here's how it works. Say you search for ‘children's clothing.' Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for ‘NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,’ making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren't searching for at all. It's not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don't get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can't escape.”
AND THE SECRETARY OF STATE:
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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 ten articles, lose five pounds. Here we go:
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For residents of Kirkenes, on the border of Norway and Russia, espionage is an everyday fact of life. The Norwegian town where anyone might be a spy.
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When it came to assigning responsibility, President Zelenskyy didn't just single out the Russians. He also mentioned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and ex-French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"I invite Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha to see what the policy of 14 years of concessions to Russia has led to." The Day the War Really Began.
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The campaign language ahead of this year’s Polish general election is apocalyptic but the likeliest outcome is a chaotic stalemate. The country is so divided and dysfunctional after eight years of populist rule that it will be difficult to change much — no matter who wins. Poland’s election: Big hopes but no quick fixes
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February 2022: The Russian Federation began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine to help fulfill Putin’s desire to restore the Soviet Union. Chornobyl was the first destination of the Russian Army. After the Russians left, access was again restricted. An updated visit to Chornobyl (or, read my book).
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Though the world wouldn't catch on until disaster struck, a tight-knit community of seafarers, explorers, and bold submariners worried for years that Stockton Rush's OceanGate implosion was all but guaranteed. Susan Casey, author of The Underworld, reveals the hardest truths about the Titan. The Last Descent.
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No rational person is going to stay in a region with 115-degree heat, soon to creep up to 120 degrees, and within ten years or so, probably 130 degrees. Nor will they want to endure the water shortages. They’ll have to Go North.
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An MIT student and linguistics professor spot an emerging English phrase and examine what it tells us about syntax. Have you heard about the “whom of which” trend?
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Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars. Through partnerships and 3-D printing, NASA is plotting how to build houses on the moon by 2040.
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“Bug, which meant a bedbug in England, broadened to cover any insect, and sick, which referred specifically to a digestive upset, became a general term for any illness.” How British and American English drifted apart.
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Want to visit Afghanistan? Here’s a Trip Report: Afghanistan Under Fluttering Taliban Flags
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In Tuesday’s travel tale we’ll consider the plight of the medieval mariner, slighted and sequestered, hard-pressed and abused, gaunt, prey to the caprice of wind and wave, confined below decks on a sailing ship. If the captain doesn’t get the respect he demands, he will impose it. So will the sea.
Good weekend. See you Tuesday.