28 Jan 2023
The world’s in real flux. Call it a hinge moment if you like. Trendy but true, because really, think about it, game on, just about everywhere you look, among just about everybody, and no outcome is foreordained. It’s a wild, unsettled time.
The ‘Post Cold War’ is over but as much as everybody wants it to be, the new cannot be born.
The ‘Post Cold War’ kind of ran alongside a muddy agglomeration of loose ends and leftovers that began in Berlin, spanned the chaos of the former Soviet space in the 1990s, the turn-of-the-century tech boom and bust, the US’s unwieldy unipolar moment and the fundamental shake-the-world-by-the-shoulders of the 2008 financial crisis.
All that no longer suits the world we’ve got, but through all the years since the Berlin Wall, 1989, right up to now, no simple, succinct, graspable framework has come along for us to hold on to. And events continue to pile up.
- Russia is being pushed into China’s arms whether China wants Russia or not. Russia and China are not natural ethnic, cultural or historic allies and now that they have to learn to live with one another, they may find they like one another even less than they thought. That relationship is in flux.
- China aspires to control Taiwan, but by the beginning of 2023 Zhongnanhai will surely have tempered its immediate cross-channel aspirations. Chinese leadership has been learning by watching how difficult it is to subjugate an unwilling people, and in Taiwan, China has additional physical challenges Russia doesn’t face in Ukraine.
(China has longer term aspirations in the South China Sea, see the nine dash line in the map, but for the moment, maybe best to concentrate on one teeming, well defended 25 million person island at a time.)
Add to China’s concerns the wreckage of China’s crashed Zero Covid policy. A glaring error of governance is one of the few things that can make the rulers of the world’s most surveilled state visibly afraid of its own people. So while the Central Committee tries to keep a low profile and contain the immediate damage, for now, on Taiwan, China will surely bide its time for now. China’s politics is in flux.
- The wider security structure in East Asia is also in flux. Japan’s new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida put on a loud visit to Washington in January, making sure everybody heard him as he talked about arming up (and doubling defense spending). One loud visit does not implementation make, though. A fundamental, constitution-changing policy shift like that will need to hold up across administrations. Money must be spent, hardware and personnel assembled. While we wait to see if Japan really means military business, the situation in East Asia remains in flux.
- Then there is Europe, which is a continent clearly in flux not just until the war is over, but for perhaps another decade after that, as rebuilding (eventually) starts, regime change (perhaps) comes to Russia, and the question of Russia’s place in Europe is debated. These are big questions, and there are more: reinventing European energy policy, where Ukraine fits in future European security architecture, and policy ramifications that grow out of individual countries’ the new appraisals of their neighbors, and how they performed in the war.
Things changed last Tuesday when the Scholz administration relented on the tank thing (discussion below). Turns out you can’t change eighty years of policy without at least weeks of handwringing and the sacrifice of a minister or two. Apparently you can’t wende on a pfennig.
Widen the lens a little though, and Germany is hardly the only struggling country. Inconsistent messaging reigns right across Europe. Just about everybody has belittled France’s ineffectual self-nomination of Macron as Europe’s Putin whisperer. Along with the Balts and Poland, the United Kingdom (at a 1500 mile remove from Kyiv), is eager to fight. I expect this is a backhanded way of saying ‘we’re sorry for Brexit but look here, we’re not irrelevant, really we’re not!’. There are, as always, issues to be settled all around the periphery of the EU, including how the future integration of Finland and Sweden plays out (not a good week on that front). Safe to say that for now, Europe as a whole is also in flux.
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The easy part is to predict change. Predicting how things will play out, well, that’s the trick. Let’s all watch and see, but there is one prediction I’d like to put forward here for your consideration:
A few years from now, Ukraine is gonna be a big boss man in Europe. The conversation isn’t about whether Ukraine can survive, the way it looked a year ago when US intelligence gave Kyiv and Zelenskyy’s government three days to live.
I have a favorite story about a trip to Papua New Guinea, when standing in crumbling, decrepit and dangerous old Port Moresby, everything mildewed and old, amid crime and country people marking time by the moon and wearing cowrie shells, I discovered that PNG was an envy of the world with its superior cell phone service. What they had done was, they skipped over wired telephone technology entirely and went straight from beating drums to cell towers.
Ukraine is going to skip right over the struggle to comply with NATO standards. It will be full of battle hardened troops with NATO quality weaponry and a lot of experience. Compare & contrast with Lukashenka’s troops in neighboring Belarus, who have never fought - in the 30 year history of their country - beyond whacking their own citizens for crowd control.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began the shift of NATO’s center of gravity east toward Ukraine, and north toward Poland and the Baltic states, after the war this shift will accelerate in recognition both of their sacrifices and support for Ukraine, and the simple fact that this is where all the tension is nowadays, so it’s where all the arms go.
Further, with the eventual accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, an emergent Nordic/Baltic block will give more weight to existing Baltic demands for strengthening the alliance’s northeastern flank. As things stand just now, the sore thumb sticking out in the region is Germany as a reluctant partner.
Geographically, Germany will still be in the thick of things. Not so France. Any eastward shift is a shift away from France. I believe this is what Macron is thinking as he increases France’s defense budget dramatically; he means to be the one to keep the lights on on NATO’s western flank. To pair with Kyiv.
Caveats, of course. Kyiv’s newly increased clout can be tempered by the extent to which NATO may exclude it from security architecture postwar, though they would be foolish to do so. That, and Ukraine will need a frightening sum of enduring aid to rebuild.
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Briefly, on the week in tanks: Germany’s decision to send their Leopard tanks, their agreement that allies can do the same with theirs, and the American statement of intent to send M1 Abrams tanks tell us a few things. First, the USA doesn’t want this war to go on forever, so they’ve decided to go way more in for a Ukrainian victory. Remember a couple of weeks back we noted a flurry of advisors between Kyiv, Washinton and points in between.
Last February the Biden administration seemed to be privy to Russian war plans even before the fighting started, preemptively declassifying and disclosing spy stuff in attempts to forestall, or at least upset the execution of, Putin’s military plans. Based on all this recent jockeying, either the Americans are worried about what they think is coming in the Russian spring offensive, or they’re worried Ukraine isn’t going to be able to handle it.
Consider the withering pressure the Americans put on the very tentative Scholz administration, sending both the Joint Chiefs chair and the Defense Secretary to a meeting in Germany on the 20th of January to urge deployment of those Leopard tanks. When that didn’t work, the Biden admin has now said it will send its top of the line tanks, the ones they were ruling out a week before, in part because of their complicated electronics and jet engines.
This will reopen the argument that Putin might feel forced to use nuclear weapons. The US has made a show of stopping well short of having U.S. military personnel actively involved in this war up to now (having General Milley meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in Poland, for example).
Deploying the M-1 will be seen as what it is - deepening US involvement in the war. The US has taken pains to insure that Russia and NATO have never been in direct, open conflict. It will be the first instance of face-to-face US involvement, in a manner of speaking, since tank combat is close range combat. This week’s decisions seem to me to take the war into a fateful new area. The US is more full frontally involved, with some of its advanced hardware bound for the front lines.
Perhaps next week we can discuss what about the coming spring offensive(s) has got the US so actively involved? And then there’s Robert Habeck - the German Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. He’s an interesting character, an author with a following across his country even before becoming a politician, a guy who has done all the twisting circus clowns do with balloons to the Green party’s positions that he ran on, yet outside of Green hardliners, it looks like he’s admired for it all the more. But enough of this for now, maybe next week.
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In Africa, put this on your radar, via the Foreign Exchanges newsletter on Substack. No sooner is a Tigray peace in prospect than here comes Ethiopian-on-Ethiopian ethnic violence:
The AP, citing a number of “witnesses,” is reporting heavy fighting in recent days between Amhara regional security forces and the rebel Oromo Liberation Army group. According to these accounts the fighting began on Saturday, when OLA militants attacked an Amhara security outpost in the town of Jewuha, killing over 20 people. Fighting has spread to other nearby towns and Amhara officials say they’ve engaged the assistance of federal police and military forces. Thousands of people are reportedly being displaced by the fighting.
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Next week: Tuesday, Jan. 31, to Sunday, Feb. 5: Pope Francis is scheduled to visit the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. Anything that brings Congo to the headlines stirs a little envy in me, because one of the several missions I’ve always meant to accomplish is to cross the Congo River at Kinshasa, a trip I’ve always imagined as humid as a sauna, a little frightening, and one of the most colorful, visually stimulating experiences I’ll bet I’ll ever have. As a former French colony, Brazzaville, capitol of Republic of the Congo (often simplified to ‘Congo Brazzaville’), perches just across the river from Kinshasa, and ferries ply the route everyday.
Books to read: In the Forest of No Joy by J. P. Daughton is subtitled The Congo-Ocean Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism. And East Along the Equator: A Journey Up the Congo and Into Zaire By Helen Winternitz. And that’s just about the western half of Dem Rep Congo, a country just about too massive to even consider as a whole (although that’s what David van Reybrouck has done with his daunting book Congo, The Epic History of a People).
As for the other, eastern side of Congo, I’ve just about been there. Almost. I’ve seen it (here it is).
Once with a free day we drove down to the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi and enjoyed lunch at a terrace on the shores of Lake Kivu, overlooking Goma, Congo, just across the way. A steady stream of UN cargo jets ferried in who knows what, presumably to support the UN peacekeeping effort called MONUSCO. Congo is so massive that even though Kinshasa is a port on the Atlantic, Goma is largely supplied (when not by air) from east African ports like Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. Read also V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which features a fictionalized version of Kisangani, and maybe have a look at Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone By CIA spy Larry Devlin. If you’re interested in more, read The best books about African adventures, something I wrote for a nice site for readers called Shepherd: the Best Books a while back.
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And finally while we’re on the continent, does anybody have a better name for an autocrat than the leader of Benin? His name is Patrice Talon.
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Remember that the early internet brought the cost of voice communication dramatically down, and fast? For some years American consumers grumbled that ‘customer service,’ having been sent to cheaper offshore call centers, became incomprehensible and ineffectual.
These days I find call center calls with my dear fellow Americans, if not as incomprehensible, then at least as ineffectual. Is it just me?
It has to be the script they suit up with when they come into work and their apparent inability to deviate therefrom into humanity. Blame the two-hour-old coffee in the bottom of the Bunn?
I called the HVAC repair people after business hours and a live voice surprised me. I told it, “Oh hi, I was just thinking what I would tell the machine.” This plunged the live voice into stunned silence.
Spontaneous remarks had not been addressed on her script.
Pause, and a time wobble.
“Your address?”
Ah. On this conversation, we shall interact only as machines.
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I like this brisk, well presented and right about on my non-academic level study (via Adam Tooze’s Chartbook). It’s titled What Makes Countries Rich and What Keeps Them Poor. Short answer: extractiveness versus inclusiveness.
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Last week here we talked about the Czech presidential runoff, underway this weekend. It’s politics as usual nowadays, as Signal, the GZero newsletter has it:
Babiš, a Euroskeptic populist billionaire who leads the opposition in Parliament, says Pavel will drag the country into a war with Russia. Pavel, a Europhile who once headed NATO’s military council, says his opponent is a scaremongering liar.
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How does a George Santos get elected in the first place? Andrew Mueller makes the case that it’s the voters, stupid. He puts it this way in his review for New Humanist of Tom Nichols’s Our Own Worst Enemy:
“Our Own Worst Enemy makes a persuasive case that all such symptoms have essentially the same cause: the wilful retreat, by a great many adult inhabitants of wealthy, safe and free countries, into a state of toddler-like fury at anything that contradicts, thwarts or upsets them. Trump’s victory in 2016 was the most obvious manifestation of this. A transcendentally ignorant, risibly unqualified blowhard and buffoon – and arguably America’s worst unimprisoned citizen – Trump presided over an administration of astonishing corruption and ineptitude. Last November, 74 million Americans declared that they wanted four more years of it.”
Pith is what I admire about Mueller, the book critic. It’s on display daily on the Monocle suite of internet radio programs. Monocle’s flagship product is its glossy magazine, but it also has a daily, subscribable, written component. Here’s an excerpt from a column by Editorial Director Tyler Brûlé, who seems to be sprouting diacriticals, last Sunday:
There’s a crisis in service, retail is imploding, it’s impossible to run a restaurant and airlines are having to hire tens of thousands of flight attendants. At the same time, it has never been more difficult to retain staff and some companies are now so desperate that they’re paying potential recruits to simply show up for an interview. How did we get here?
For sure, the world’s big consultancies have various theories and fancy solutions (for sale) but let’s cut to the chase. The reason for the shortage of staff in frontline positions is that both the public and private sector have created a climate where the joys of working remotely are being celebrated and those who have to make the commute, put in the hours and be in direct with customers and suppliers are not recognised for their efforts and, too often, looked down upon because they’ve become the 21st-century version of blue-collar workers.
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And before we leave Congress’s nutty troublemakers, I suggest we all go ahead and learn about a Congressional maneuver known as the Discharge Petition. By June you’ll have to know it. If you go ahead and find out about it now you can amaze your friends.
https://indivisible.org/resource/legislative-process-101-discharge-petitions
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It’s been a really bad week for Sweden and Finland on the NATO accession front. Maybe I’ll work up a full article, but for now I heard a producer from France 24 quoted saying “it’s not a joke but people don’t take him seriously” about President Erdogan, and I think that’s about it. This was a week both Sweden and Finland would prefer to forget, so let’s everybody put our weapons down and step back. That’s the Finnish Foreign Minister’s idea, anyway. Pretty grim recap.
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Also from that part of the world, it was just such a shocking, terrible loss of life. The Baltic is a shallow sea and by 1994 travel by sea was high-tech reliable. Still, 852 people managed to lose their lives one night on a regular run between Tallinn and Stockholm. I’ve followed this story for all this time because I was on the same ship on the same route not long before.
This latest inquiry found that the bow visor, the end piece that opens up so vehicles can roll onto and roll off of “ro-ro” ferries, “had not been inspected and that, among other shortcomings, was too heavy and incorrectly mounted.”
For in depth reportage, read A Sea Story by William Langewiesche. It’s the kind of writing Langewiesche really excels at, a long, inside look at a compelling story (He did a similar long article on that Malaysian Airlines airplane that went missing).
FINAL NOTE: The Finnish state broadcaster YLE has just agreed on rights to the Olympics for the rest of the decade. The Finnish government has a “list of socially significant events that should be broadcast on free-to-air TV channels for people living in Finland,” and they’ve decided the Olympics is one of those events. Unlike the thinking on the British and American right, and much to their chagrin, there are systems in this world in which profit doesn’t drive everything.
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So there you go, that’s what I think. What do you think?
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