World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Arctic sea ice is getting very thin, very quickly.  The cause of the thinning is the rise of sea temperatures due to global warming. The oceans are the primary sink for heat and some areas of the oceans (particularly off the North American coast) are heating up quite rapidly.  The Gulf Stream is carrying this added heat into the Arctic Ocean and thinning the ice.  Once the ice melts, then the waters above the Arctic Circle will begin to warm rapidly as well.

The Japanese monarchy is the oldest hereditary monarchy in world history, dating back more than 2,600 years.  The current Emperor, Akihito, is the 125th Japanese Emperor.  The position was made largely ceremonial after World War II, but the Emperor is still revered in Japan.  Akihito is now 82 and has indicated that he wishes to step down, but hard-line nationalists in Japan oppose that move, insisting that he must die before the throne can be passed on.  The Japanese Parliament must pass a law which would allow Akihito to step down.  If he does, he would be succeeded by his eldest son, 56-year-old Crown Prince Naruhito

Symbol of the Chrysanthemum Throne

Voters in Thailand have approved a new constitution which was written by the Thai military which has been in power since 2014.  The turnout for the referendum was low but the measure was approved by 61% of those voting.  According to The Economist:

“The charter introduces new electoral rules designed to produce weak coalition governments, which will be chaperoned by ‘independent’ commissions (stacked with the junta’s allies) who are to monitor politicians’ policies and moral conduct. The army will fully select the senate; assuming its support, the generals will need to persuade only a quarter of legislators in the lower house to back their choice of prime minister, who need not be an MP. The hurdles to amending the constitution are prohibitive.”

The results are a stunning rebuke to the pro-democracy citizens in Thailand and will leave the military firmly in control for the foreseeable future.

India has passed a constitutional amendment call a “Goods and Services Tax” which is one of the more important economic reforms implemented by the government of Prime Minister Modi.  India has 29 states and 7 union territories, and all of them has the ability to impose taxes on each other.   These taxes were an important source of revenue for each state and a method of competing with each other.  But the multiplicity of taxes made investment and manufacturing decisions very difficult and offered tremendous opportunities for corruption.  The new tax system is the beginning of a unified domestic market for India which will lower costs for many, but which will also make small business very vulnerable to larger firms (the Walmart effect in the US).  We will see how this neoliberal experiment affects the average Indian.

We have lost countless numbers of cultural forms over the centuries.  Some of these activities simply atrophied; some were ruthlessly wiped out by imperialism.  Retrieving old cultural forms is a way of asserting identity, particularly those forms that were wiped out by an invader.  Ukraine had an old tradition of the “flower wreath” which was discouraged under the rule of the Soviet Union.  Recently, as Ukraine struggles against Russian intrusions, the flower wreath has resurfaced as a way of re-establishing Ukrainian identity.

I have been following the health of the banking sector for some time.  My concern is that many international banks (such as Deutsche Bank) are perilously weak and I fear a repeat of the financial crisis of 2008.  One of the intriguing aspects of the banking industry is that many governments buy the debt of banks of their own country.  This observation seems trivial and easily explained by a sense of national loyalty.  But if weak governments systematically buy the debt of weak banks, then a serious feedback loop exists.  New research indicates that this condition in fact does exist and seems to be politically intractable.

The Pew Research Center is reporting that a record number of refugees sought asylum in Europe last year–1.3 million.  About half of these refugees come from three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.  Germany, Hungary, and Sweden were the three most sought after places of refuge.  The influx of refugees is causing serious political problems in Europe: a backlash against them is fueling the rise of nationalist and xenophobic parties which will unquestionably destabilize the political systems in Europe.

Soon after Iran released 4 American hostages last January, the Obama Administration sent $400 million to Iran as part of a legal compensation claim that had been festering since 1979.  Many believe that the money was “ransom” for the release of the hostages, something the US vehemently denies.  There is little question that the compensation claim has been a point of contention between the US and Iran for many years and that Iran was due the money.  But the timing certainly looks more than coincidental.  The critical question is whether this incident becomes fixed in the minds of others as a bargaining lever in future disputes over possible hostages.  That question is impossible to answer.

Rodrigo Duterte became President of the Philippines last May.  Duterte, who goes by the nickname “The Punisher”, vowed to smash the drug rings that have been operating in the country.  Since his election, more than 600 people have been killed on suspicion of being drug dealers.  The assassinations have all been conducted without the pretense of any due process and human rights activists are enraged by the conduct of the government.

Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, offered an apology to the island’s indigenous people who have suffered for centuries under Dutch, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese rule.  The indigenous peoples, who comprise about 2% of Taiwan’s population, are organized into several tribes which were unfortunately defined by the Japanese during the period of Japanese imperial rule. Many of the indigenous peoples reject these artificial classifications.  President Tsai shares ancestry with these people, and she has offered greater autonomy to them but it is hard to imagine what concessions would address the injustices these people have suffered.

Japan has issued a defense white paper that accuses China of “territorial aggression” in disputes over the East and South China Seas.  The paper asserted that China was attempting “to turn these coercive changes to the status quo into a fait accompli.”  The paper was issue after Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan called for a “people’s war at sea.”  The rhetoric between the two states is escalating rapidly after the decision of the International Arbitration Tribunal at the Hague that repudiated the Chinese maritime claims.

Climate change has been linked to an outbreak of anthrax in Russian Siberia.   Temperatures in the Arctic Circle in that region of Russia have actually reached 95° F.  Researchers believe that the anthrax spores, which can be frozen for many, many years, was released when the permafrost thawed.  One child and more than 2,500 reindeer have died from the outbreak and more than 60 people have been hospitalized.  The last time anthrax was active in the region was in 1941.

Climate change will have different effects in different parts of the world.  Most of the developed world worries more about warmer winters, but in the Middle East the concern is warmer summers.  The Economist summarizes the work of several research studies that have analyzed the effects of climate change on the region:

“Daytime highs, notes an academic study published in the Netherlands in April, could rise by 7ºC by the end of the century. Another UN study predicted Iraq’s sandstorms would increase from 120 to 300 per year. The region also has fewer coping mechanisms than before. Population increase has exhausted water supply, leaving two-thirds of the countries in the Arabian Peninsula and the “fertile crescent” without the minimum viable for human survival, according to UN figures. Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, is set to run out of water in 2019 or perhaps earlier. In Taiz, 160 (260km) miles to the south, the water table has already collapsed. Some people have air-conditioners, but power cuts—of up 16 hours a day in southern Iraq—make them useless.”

Needless to say, these types of changes will only increase the volatility of the politics of the region.

The European Union and Turkey are playing a dangerous game of chicken.   Earlier this year, the two sides reached an agreement that Turkey would keep many of the refugees fleeing from turmoil in the Middle East from going to Greece (at which point the refugees can travel visa-free throughout the Schengen Agreement area) as long as the Union allowed visa-free travel for Turkish citizens by this October (and a payment of about 3 billion euros).  The Union is balking at the agreement because of the human rights situation in Turkey which has deteriorated further.  Turkey raised the possibility of trashing the agreement which led the German Vice Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, to state today that the Union would not be “blackmailed”.  Who will blink first?  Probably not Turkey.

For the first time, the US has coordinated military strikes on Daesh (the Islamic State) with the UN-backed coalition government in Libya.  It is actually the third time the US has conducted air strikes in Libya, but the first two times were without the sanction of the Libyan government.  These strikes indicate that the US is now committed to the new Libyan government–a significant increase in commitments and suggest that the US is now engaged in its 4th war in the Middle East and Southwest Asia (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria).

The US Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have published the Joint Operating Environment, 2035 which is a projection of US strategic concerns through the year 2035.  It is a very long document but should be of special interest to those who are interested in questions of strategy.  The document is written in a very scholarly manner (it quotes von Clausewitz and Raymond Aron) and has a rather expansive view of important trends in world politics.  Some of the more important sections deal with the role of ideology and geographic and demographic changes.   One section addresses the future contexts for conflict and these contexts include:

• 1. Violent Ideological Competition. Irreconcilable ideas communicated and promoted by identity networks through violence.
• 2. Threatened U.S. Territory and Sovereignty. Encroachment, erosion, or disregard of U.S. sovereignty and the freedom of its citizens from coercion.
• 3. Antagonistic Geopolitical Balancing. Increasingly ambitious adversaries maximizing their own influence while actively limiting U.S. influence.
• 4. Disrupted Global Commons. Denial or compulsion in spaces and places available to all but owned by none.
• 5. A Contest for Cyberspace. A struggle to define and credibly protect sovereignty in cyberspace.
• 6. Shattered and Reordered Regions. States unable to cope with internal political fractures, environmental stressors, or deliberate external interference.

The level of generality in the document is quite high, but it provides a very good road map of what the Pentagon is thinking about.

The rise of right-wing extremism in Europe is an issue of concern to everyone.  The blog, Understanding Society, has an excellent review of some important research studies on nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment conducted by European researchers.  The analysis is dispassionate and straightforward.

Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece who led a losing fight against the IMF, the European Commission, and the European Union to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s sovereign debt.  He has written an interesting essay which makes the argument that both Trump and Clinton are key parts of the economic crisis in the world: Trump represents a proto-fascist alternative and Clinton represents the neoliberal alternative.   Varoufakis makes the case for a third way–a progressive stance quite similar to that of Bernie Sanders–as a way of addressing the slowly degrading global economy.

There is little question that there has been a sea change in attitudes toward globalization, particularly on the issue of foreign trade. Most of the developed states had long maintained a positive stance toward foreign trade, but in recent years a growing part of their populations have turned against free trade.  The middle class of most rich countries are now questioning whether free trade is in their interests. Whether this means that these states will turn to protectionist measures remains to be seen.  The change was also experienced by John Maynard Keynes in 1933:

“I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. I regarded ordinary departures from it as being at the same time an imbecility and an outrage. I thought England’s unshakable free trade convictions, maintained for nearly a hundred years, to be both the explanation before man and the justification before Heaven of her economic supremacy. As lately as 1923 I was writing that free trade was based on fundamental ‘truths’ which, stated with their due qualifications, no one can dispute who is capable of understanding the meaning of the words.”

“For these strong reasons, therefore, I am inclined to the belief that, after the transition is accomplished, a greater measure of national self-sufficiency and economic isolation among countries than existed in 1914 may tend to serve the cause of peace, rather than otherwise. At any rate, the age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war; and if its friends retort, that the imperfection of its success never gave it a fair chance, it is reasonable to point out that a greater success is scarcely probable in the coming years.”

Lord Maynard Keynes

The US currently gives Israel about $3 billion a year, the most that any country in the world receives from the US.  The US and Israel are apparently close to an agreement that would increase the amount to about $5 billion a year over a ten-year period.  The amount is huge and the deal is somewhat paradoxical given that the Obama and Netanyahu Administrations have often been at odds.  It is also inconsistent with the position of the US State Department condemning the continuing build-up of Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.  It is often very difficult to figure out what “real” policies actually are.

The Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has issued a blistering report on how the IMF has handled the various crises associated with sovereign debt in Europe–in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Cyprus.  The evaluation is breathtaking in its seriousness: that the IMF acted on the basis of documents that were not made available to the Independent Evaluation Office.  In an article for the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, points out that

“In Greece, the IMF violated its own cardinal rule by signing off on a bailout in 2010 even though it could offer no assurance that the package would bring the country’s debts under control or clear the way for recovery, and many suspected from the start that it was doomed.

“The organisation got around this by slipping through a radical change in IMF rescue policy, allowing an exemption (since abolished) if there was a risk of systemic contagion. ‘The board was not consulted or informed,’ it said. The directors discovered the bombshell ‘tucked into the text’ of the Greek package, but by then it was a fait accompli.”

The report validates criticisms that have been made by many outsiders over the years.  Given the power of the IMF, it is unfortunate that action on the failures will never make the front pages of most media.  In the meantime, three top executives associated with the failed Anglo-Irish Bank were sentenced to jail for conducting a fraud in 2008 that was part of the near-collapse of the global financial sector.  Note that no American banker has yet to be jailed for similar activities in the banking sector.

Israel has announced plans to build new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, a move that drew swift condemnation from international observers.  The Palestinian Authority considers East Jerusalem to be the capital of the future Palestinian state, but the build-up of Jewish settlements makes that outcome increasingly unlikely.  After the collapse of American-led efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations last year, the diplomatic effort toward that end shifted to what is known as the “Quartet“–the US, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations–to try to broker a peace.  In its report last February, the Quartet assessed the settlement issue in this way:

“The continuing policy of settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, designation of land for exclusive Israeli use, and denial of Palestinian development, including the recent high rate of demolitions, is steadily eroding the viability of the two-state solution. This raises legitimate questions about Israel’s long-term intentions, which are compounded by the statements of some Israeli ministers that there should never be a Palestinian state. In fact, the transfer of greater powers and responsibilities to Palestinian civil authority in Area C contemplated by commitments in prior agreements has effectively been stopped, and in some ways reversed, and should be resumed to advance the two-state solution and prevent a one-state reality from taking hold.”

Unfortunately, the international pressure has yet to yield a change in Israeli policy.

Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the rebel groups fighting against Syrian President Assad has renounced its allegiance to al Qaeda and announced that it will confine its militant activities to Syria.  The change is an attempt to remove the group from “terrorist” lists so that it will no longer be a legitimate target for the international forces fighting in Syria since it will no longer be aligned with international terrorist groups.  The change is unlikely to persuade Russia to refrain from attacks since the distinction between “domestic” and “international” terrorism is not pertinent to Russia’s clear objective of supporting President Assad.

China and Russia have announced that they are going to holding joint naval exercises in the South China Sea in September. The announcement raises tensions in the area since Russia has strongly backed China’s maritime claims in the region.  China and the US have been playing cat and mouse in the South China Sea, but the rules of interaction have been fairly civil and non-provocative.  The same cannot be said for Russia air activities close to NATO’s eastern border and over Syria.

We are beginning to get solid economic data from Great Britain after the Brexit vote, and the preliminary information suggests that the British economy has taken a big hit with rising unemployment and a sharp drop in consumer confidence.  The critical question right now is whether these preliminary results simply reflect the shock of the vote or a more structural change in the British economy.  And the question after that is how the EU will navigate difficult economic times without the British.

The opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics is a week away.  It was awarded to Brazil several years ago when the Brazilian economy was one of the top-performing economies in the world.  Since that time, however, the economic and political situation in Brazil has deteriorated precipitously.  Today protesters stole the Olympic torch as it was being passed to the city of Rio de Janeiro and extinguished the flame.  The protesters believe that all the money being spent on the Olympics should have been spent on the people of Brazil.

Arms sales from eastern and central European countries are fueling the violence in Syria.  Investigators have found that countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan are procuring arms certificates and then funneling the weapons to their allies in Syria.  The scale of the weapons trade is quite significant, and such transfers violate a number of international agreements that seek to control the flow of weapons.  The Syrian government gets its weapons from Russia without any restraint since they are government to government deals.

China is a very diverse country with a large number of ethnic minorities.  Some of those minorities chafe under rule from the central government in Beijing and tensions in both the Uighur and Tibetan communities have nettled the government for many years.  Such tensions are not unusual in the world, but the Chinese government has been remarkably unwilling to offer concessions to the groups in terms of political or cultural autonomy.  That unwillingness reflects a long-standing attitude in Chinese politics. 

Ethno-Linguistic Map of China

The Russian press is largely, but not completely, pro-Trump, and one commentator has gone as far as praising Trump’s “isolationism”.  The Russian press is far from free, but it is not centrally controlled.  Rather, the press picks up the signals from the government as to what line to take.  But the distaste for Clinton is clear–a vestige from Russian displeasure at her role in shaping American policy in Libya and Syria.  One commentator was quoted in Pravda:

“Hillary Clinton in the president’s chair… is insanity, a deadly danger to all of humanity which could threaten the very existence of our civilisation.”

Pretty strong rhetoric.