Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, April 15, 2023.
The name Common Sense and Whiskey comes from a book in which I suggested you can handle whatever comes at you in this world with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey. At last, for the first time since Covid, we’ve been off on a good, long, proper adventure trip, inviting the world to throw stuff at us. Which it did.
We spent the week from 30 March until 5 April on the island of Réunion, a French overseas département in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. It’s just a lovely place and, judging from the surprise with which we were received, it apparently sees few Americans. Here, Grand Galet Falls, in the south of the island. More photos at the end of this column.
You know when those email auto-replies, when people write something like, ‘I’ll be out of the office and I’ll have limited access to email,’ and you know that’s not true because anybody with a cell phone and intent can get email, and you know that’s just that person sneaking in a slack day?
These last few weeks I’ve been claiming the ‘limited access to internet’ excuse, but with at least some justification. No, really. While it’s theoretically possible we might have bought Tanzanian and Zambian SIM cards to stay in touch, we didn’t, and for several days at least, while we were transiting those two countries on a train, the world’s news went by without us, and no catastrophe befell us or the world. I’m letting that be a lesson.
Anyway, that’s my excuse for why this week’s list of what just happened is a little abbreviated.
First, and this is just happening now, Khartoum woke to heavy fighting this morning, apparently between the army and the paramilitary group called RSF. Here’s an explainer from Al Jazeera, and I found this New York Times piece good for getting the lay of the land a few days ago.
Besides that story, here are a few other things that have caught my eye this week:
There’s been a lot of talk about NATO’s center of gravity shifting north and east as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine, toward Poland and the Baltics. It’s true enough that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have been stalwart wartime allies to Ukraine.
The war has shown that NATO aspirant Ukraine has the most effective fighting force in Europe right now; it has resulted in Finland’s accession to NATO, with Sweden waiting in the wings, and it has realigned the entire Baltic Sea region against Russia. Meanwhile France and Germany, usually thought of as NATO’s big continental ‘anchors,’ are both struggling with troubles of their own making.
In France, President Macron’s woes start with a popular revolt against a new law raising the retirement age by two years. Adding to widespread worker resentment is the way Macron went about it; facing defeat in a vote, he forced the measure through by parliamentary maneuvering. (This procedure was endorsed by France’s Constitutional Council yesterday.)
But Macron’s troubles aren’t just domestic. This week the French president came under withering criticism for flying out to Beijing not just to change the subject domestically, but also to pitch for new business and play statesman. In the process he roiled relations with the US, Taiwan and parts of Europe, saying in effect that Europe should stay out of any conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan.
Macron suggested instead that Europe should act as a "third pole," independent of both Washington and Beijing on the Taiwan question. But a core European message in Russia’s war on Ukraine has been that Ukraine’s territorial integrity is an international concern. It’s hard to see why Taiwan’s borders should be less inviolable than Ukraine’s.
Staking out an independent French position is something that President Macron does. Presuming, as he also does, to speak for Europe, he found himself cautioning that there was a ‘great risk’ of Europe becoming ‘caught up in crises that are not ours.’ He warned against the continent becoming a ‘vassal’ of the United States while standing with his hand out in Beijing.
The German MP Norbert Roentgen tweeted that the French president "managed to turn his China trip into a PR coup for Xi and a foreign policy disaster for Europe." Little Marco (R-FL) suggested that if Europe doesn't ‘pick sides between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, then maybe we shouldn't be picking sides either [on Ukraine],’ the implication being that if Macron doesn’t want to get involved in Taiwan, maybe he could just handle Ukraine himself, then.
For all that, Macron’s self-aggrandizement is just posing, positioning France (and himself) as the leaders that other Europeans aren’t seeking. For Germany, it’s worse.
Politico was blunt in its Wednesday National Security Daily newsletter:
Germany’s land forces cannot fulfill their NATO commitments, according to a leaked memo from a top soldier, German newspaper Bild reported.
A division that Germany promised to NATO isn’t fully ready for battle, the newspaper reported citing a message from Alfons Mais, the army’s inspector general, to the armed forces’ inspector general.
Berlin had promised the fully-equipped army division in response to the war in Ukraine as early as 2025, the newsletter reported.
Neither are things moving anywhere near fast enough in the ongoing rebuilding of the Bundeswehr which, at the current pace, may take half a century, Internationale Politik Quarterly reports.
“Ponderous parliamentary approval and outdated procurement procedures, inadequate for peacetime let alone wartime, have hindered the ordering of vital equipment and meant little of the special fund was spent or even committed in 2022.”
At this rate, the Financial Times suggests, “Germany’s armed forces upgrade will take 50 years to complete.”
In the end, Paris/Berlin needn’t fear a challenge from a new Tallinn/Riga/Vilnius axis, but it’s not for nothing, all this talk of continental drift in the center of gravity.
Since the last What Just Happened column, Finland has joined NATO, in a lightning fast process that took less than a year. The ceremony came on 4 April in Brussels.
Two days before, the Social Democratic Party-led government of Sanaa Marin was edged out by the center-right National Coalition Party, led by 53 year old former Finance Minister Peter Orpo, who is now in coalition talks to form a government. The top three parties’ vote totals were separated by less than 30,000 votes among 4.2 million registered voters.
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Also since last time, Milo Djukanovic, the leader of Montenegro for more than thirty years, accepted his resounding defeat at the hands of Jakov Milatovic, a 36-year-old former economy minister, and seems to be ready for a peaceful transfer of power.
Djukanovic had been in or adjacent to power in Montenegro since, pretty much, forever. His first stint as Prime Minister predated Montenegrin independence, all the way back to 1991, when he assumed the office at age of 29 to serve the then State Union of Serbia & Montenegro.
Milatovic’s campaign aimed high, for a Montenegrin place in the European Union within five years. (Compare and contrast: neighboring Albania, whose border lies a scant ten miles from the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, applied for EU membership in 2009 and was granted ‘candidate status’ in 2014, where it remains.)
Careful what you wish for. Some Milatović’s supporters waved Serbian flags at his victory party and he made no secret of his ambition to strengthen ties with Serbia.
In the runoff pro Russia and Serbia interests united behind Milatović, who had run second to Djukanovik in the first round of voting. Milatović, who studied in the US and at Oxford, failed in his victory speech to address any personal commitment to NATO. Milatović’s loyalties bear watching.
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Donald Trump underwent a full day of under-oath testimony before the New York attorney general in a civil fraud case on Thursday. The former president has separately been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in a hush money scandal, and there is talk that he, and possibly some of his associates, may be indicted again here in Georgia.
For procedural reasons, that action might come about a month from now. In Fulton County a regular grand jury would have to bring indictments, and the next regular grand jury panel begins the first week of May. A special purpose grand jury has already heard evidence, and its forewoman, Emily Kohrs, previously said it recommended the indictment of several people.
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Jury selection began Thursday for the Dominion Voting Systems defamation trial against Fox News. That ought to be fun.
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Briefly: The population of an area of Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh, which is claimed by Armenia, is overwhelmingly made up of Armenians. It is linked to Armenia by a contested route called the Lachin corridor, and on Tuesday clashes there killed seven soldiers, the two sides trading machine gun and artillery fire, in was the most deadly incident since September.
An article in Foreign Affairs this week expresses fear that when this conflict again flares, it could spread to involve a wider cast of international actors.
“If war between Armenia and Azerbaijan breaks out again, Iran will likely provide more overt support to Armenia than it has in the past because the stakes are now much higher. Last October, a top IRGC commander and military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader stated that Armenia had expressed interest in purchasing Iranian drones.”
It goes on:
“In one potential scenario, Iran might choose to conduct missile and drone attacks on what the Iranian government claims are Israeli bases in Azerbaijan, similar to operations it launched in recent months against Israeli “strategic centers” in the Kurdish-dominated regions of Iraq. (Iraqi Kurdish officials have denied the claim that such bases exist.) Then, Azerbaijan and Israel—perhaps with the cooperation of Turkey—might seek to foment an insurgency among ethnic Azeris in Iran, which could, in turn, provoke the Iranian military to venture into Azerbaijan itself.”
Read the whole article.
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U.S. Secretary of State Blinken is in Hanoi at the weekend meeting with the Vietnamese General Secretary and Prime Minister, in hopes of upgrading relations with a country that shares the American wariness toward China.
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Norway is expelling fifteen Russian diplomats, it said on Thursday. It suspects them of spying while working at the Russian embassy in Oslo. The Russians called the government’s decision “an extremely unfriendly step and promised retaliatory measures.
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A company called Airfinity believes there’s a 27.5 percent chance that a pandemic as deadly as COVID-19 could strike in the next ten years. Airfinity calls itself a predictive health analytics firm.
This is silly. Here is an obscure company with an effective marketing arm which has produced a mostly useless number with an overly exact “.5%” thrown in to make a rough guess look more precise.
It’s a safe bet there will be a pandemic as deadly as Covid one day. My independent modeling estimates the chances at 97.4 percent, and it may or may not be that that day will be in the next ten years.
About a one in three chance of a new virus in the next ten years sounds reasonable to me. My guess turns out to be remarkably similar to predictive health analytics firm Airfinity’s then, doesn’t it? And you know what, it was a wild guess that, even if it’s spot on, isn’t very important.
My analytics suggests an 86.2 percent chance that somebody in the Airfinity press outfit is smiling over their over-precise forecasting numbers. And while I have you, it might rain.
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Media news: the BBC’s downgrading of its BBC World news channel product debuted last Monday, and the result is predictably disappointing. The approach from ‘new broadcasting house’ seems to be mostly ‘nothing to see here folks, keep moving,’ but it’s a clear pull back of resources, besides, I guess, a personnel bloodbath.
The channel has shrunk to five presenters, augmented by the domestic newsroom. It seems to have been repurposed into chasing airplanes. In its first week I caught it showing live coverage of Donald Trump’s airplane taking off from Florida, its prominent passenger off to plead to felony charges. It featured a very extended wait for Emmanuel Macron to emerge from his jet onto Chinese soil, and it followed the adventures of Joe Biden on the island of Ireland. In each case, the best minds on call for the BBC prattled on, covering their retainers.
BBC’s digital director Naja Nielsen said “people should not expect any kind of ‘big bang’ at the beginning of April – we’re bringing in the changes gradually.” She was right. It just looks like a smaller channel.
Paul Royall, a news editor, said “The end result of all this is more choice and more flexibility as opposed to a reduction,” accurately reflecting the BBC’s certainty that all this will be seen as the reduction of resources that it surely is.
Joanna Gosling, David Eades, Tim Willcox, Jane Hill, Ben Brown and Geeta Guru-Murthy are among the presenters known to international viewers who didn’t make the cut.
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Finally, we finished our recent Africa trip on the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, here:
It’s a really pretty place. Here are a few more tourist photos, and I’ll have these and several more on EarthPhotos.com soon:
That’s it for today. We’re back on our regular schedule, with a travel-related column on Tuesdays, weekend reading suggestions on Friday and a week in review column like this on Saturdays. For next Tuesday’s travel column, look for a story about a walking safari among a wall of buffalo in the Zambian bush.
Thanks for reading. While you’re here, why not sign up for a subscription? Prices start at the very attractive rate of free. Good weekend, see you Tuesday.