World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Europe is currently going through a heat wave that threatens to set all time records for high temperatures in a number of places.  The hot air is coming from North Africa and Spain and Portugal are the main sufferers of the torrid heat right now.  The heat in France is so high that nuclear power plants have been temporarily shut down because the water they release is making the rivers too hot, killing off fish.  Most Europeans don’t have air conditioning since such high temperatures are unusual, so the effects of the high heat are serious for vulnerable populations such as the elderly.  Many people are interpreting the heat wave as a sign of global warming and that explanation becomes more plausible every day this summer.

The US has imposed sanctions on Turkey for  the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson who has been under Turkish arrest since the attempted coup against President Erdogan in 2016.  Brunson has lived in Turkey for the last 23 years and his detention has become a cause célèbre among American evangelicals.  Turkey is now retaliating with its own sanctions.  The issue is creating an even deeper rift between the US and Turkey, even as the Middle East is becoming less hospitable to US interests.

A board of experts has submitted a report to the UN Security Council after a six-month review of North Korea’s nuclear program.  According to Reuters:

“(North Korea) has not stopped its nuclear and missile programs and continued to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea during 2018.”

The report clearly indicates that the UN sanctions program against North Korea is not being implemented by several nations and that North Korea has found several techniques to evade them.  The report was submitted on Friday and the US has not responded to the critique.

Robert Fisk has published a story in The Independent in which he traces the serial numbers of weapons used in the Syrian civil war.   Not surprisingly, many of these serial numbers can be traced back to US corporations which sold them to the US or its allies.  Weapons sales need to have an End User Certificate (EUC) which certifies that the weapons are being sold only to users who are trusted to use the weapons in a manner consistent with US national security.  But many of these weapons have been used by actors in the Syrian civil war who are hostile to US interests.  Perhaps they are weapons that were “captured” by enemy forces from friendly allies.  But Fisk raises a number of questions which undermine that possibility.   Someone is making a lot of money selling American weapons to attack American interests.

Stephen Walt is one of the most rigorous realist thinkers in the field of international relations.   In this blog, I have posted many articles raising questions about the wisdom of letting the US-back liberal international order degrade in the absence of a viable alternative.  My position has always been that even a bad world order is better than no world order (think of what driving a car would be like without rules of the road and police to enforce those rules).  But Walt raises very strong questions about whether it makes sense to maintain the liberal world order and his essay has made me think more seriously about my position.

As the word war between the US and Iran continues, Iran has announced that it will hold its annual naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz.   These exercises are designed to make credible Iranian threats to close the Straits in the event of an attack against Iran.  But Business Insider notes that this year’s exercises will be larger–including up to 100 naval vessels, although none that seriously threaten the US Navy)–and earlier in the year than usual.  Oil producers who rely on the Strait of Hormuz, such as Kuwait, are getting prepared for a potential blockade of the Strait.

The various conflicts in the Middle East are placing increased attention on one of the reasons why the region is so central to the great powers–its role as a primary supplier of petroleum and natural gas.  The region, however, is far from the economic centers that are the primary consumers of those resources.  The transportation infrastructure–primarily oil tankers and pipelines–to move the resources from the producers to the consumers is the most vulnerable part of the world energy system.  The primary sea routes from the Middle East to Europe, Asia, and North America must pass through two small straits at the end of the Arabian peninsula, the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.  The Council on Foreign Relations has published a blog post on the strategic significance of those straits.  It is incredible that so much of the global economy depends on such a small number of choke points.

Violence erupted in Zimbabwe as protesters filled the streets charging election fraud.  Supporters of Nelson Chamisa, who heads the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), believe that the national election results were manipulated.  Official election results have not been posted yet and are not expected until Thursday, but many in the country believe that incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa will be the beneficiary of corrupted results.  At this point it is impossible to know what the truth actually is, but the protests suggest that the level of popular suspicion in the country about the integrity of the process is very high.

This will be the last blog post that will also be posted on Facebook.  Facebook has changed its policy about re-posting and its new terms are not acceptable to me.  So if Facebook readers wish to continue reading these posts, they will have to subscribe to the WordPress Site (https://vferraro1971.wordpress.com/)

US intelligence agencies have determined that North Korea continues to work on missile development.  The new data conflicts with US President Trump’s tweet several weeks ago that North Korea is “no longer a Nuclear Threat.”  Abigal Tracy, writing in Vanity Fair, assesses the outcome of the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore:

“Despite several setbacks in U.S.-North Korea relations since the summit, Trump remains satisfied with the results. “You haven’t had a missile fired off in nine months,” he boasted at a press conference with Italy’s prime minister on Monday. “We got our prisoners back. So many things happened. So positive.” Yet even as he brags about his “great meeting” with Kim, reality is setting in. Citing officials familiar with the intelligence, The Washington Post reports that work is advancing on at least one, if not two, liquid-fueled intercontinental missiles at a research facility in Sanumdong, the same factory where the Kim regime produced the first such missile capable of reaching the U.S. Meanwhile, there are also reports that uranium enrichment continues at another North Korean facility, Kangson. During his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed that the Kim regime continues to produce fissile material, but declined to say whether missile production is ongoing.

President Trump’s announcement that he is willing to meet with Iranian President Rouhani, just 8 days after tweeting a very hostile threat to Iran, suggests that he regards summit meetings as more important than substantive agreements.

For the first time as an independent nation-state, Zimbabwe held an election without the possibility of Robert Mugabe being elected.  Mugabe led an independence movement in the British colony once know as Southern Rhodesia and succeeded after a 15-year war of national independence in 1980.  He was overthrown in a coup d’etat in November of 2017, leaving the country much the poorer because of corruption and miserable economic policies.  The election held today was between Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, and Nelson Chamisa.  Turnout for the national election was about 75% and electoral observers have suggested that the election was run smoothly.  We should know the results in 5 days.

India has issued a National Register of Citizens (NRC) for the state of Assam and the list does not contain the names of about 4 million residents who are believed to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.  All the unregistered people are Muslim and those whose names have been omitted do not know what the next steps may be.  Human rights activist Suhas Chakma described the situation:

“The National Register of Citizens is the biggest exercise for disenfranchisement in human history. This NRC has few parallels such as expulsion of 300,000 Indian origins persons by General Ne Win of Myanmar in 1960s, expulsion of over 80,000 Indian origin people by Idi Amin of Uganda, the denial of citizenship to over 500,000 Indian origin Tamils by successive governments of Sri Lanka and in the last three decades, the expulsions of the Rohingyas by Myanmar.”

The uncertainty has created a security problem.  Assam has invoked tighter security measures after the publication of the list: “Security has been put on high alert, with section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code imposed in seven of the state’s 33 districts. Under section 144, the assembly of more than four people is prohibited.”  The move is consistent with other moves against “foreigners” made by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Europe does a better job of addressing income and wealth inequality than the US.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has evidence that income and wealth inequality cannot be addressed through normal market mechanisms but only through direct fiscal intervention by the state.  In all states, however, inequality of both metrics is increasing, not decreasing.  In the US, inequality is worse now than in 1928, the year before the economic collapse that brought on the Great Depression.

One of the more important determinants of the stability of a political system is the belief among citizens that the system offers a better life if one plays by the rules.  In the US, that belief is often referred to as the “American Dream” but other societies, notably in China, have similar visions.  And, generally speaking–with the notable exception of African-Americans–Americans did experience upward mobility:  children often did better than their parents.  Researchers have found, however, that this phenomenon no longer appears to be true in the US:

“We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The result that absolute mobility has fallen sharply over the past half century is robust….we find that increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. In contrast, changing the distribution of growth across income groups to the more equal distribution experienced by the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the ‘American Dream’ of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.”

The last sentence is important because it indicates that simple economic growth will not change this declining mobility.  To increase income mobility will require an explicit effort to redistribute income.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security ran a simulation of a pandemic to determine how prepared current institutions are for an outbreak of a serious new virus.  The exercise is pretty straightforward:

“The scenario begins with an outbreak of novel parainfluenza virus that is moderately contagious and moderately lethal and for which there are no effective medical countermeasures. The virus is called “parainfluenza clade X.” Outbreaks of disease first appear in Frankfurt, Germany, and Caracas, Venezuela, and are spreading person-to-person. The disease is spread primarily by coughing and causes severe symptoms requiring hospitalization and intensive care in about half of the people infected. Overall, 20% of the severely ill patients die.

“As the narrative continues, the disease spreads within countries and internationally at an accelerating rate, overwhelming medical facilities. Outbreaks overseas start to infect US soldiers. The first US cases occur on a small college campus in New England after the return of a foreign exchange student. As the pandemic becomes increasingly severe, the EXCOMM must deal with a variety of diverse issues that have policy, political, and ethical dimensions.”

One hundred years ago, the world experienced a global pandemic called the Spanish Flu and estimates are that between 1918-19 somewhere between 20 and 40 million people died from the disease.  That outbreak is regarded by many as “the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351.”  The Johns Hopkins exercise, therefore, was, in some important aspects, not far-fetched.  Indeed, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) has itself conducted two such simulations, called Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm.

The simulation assumed a human-made (“bioengineered”) virus called Clade X.  According to the exercise:

“The Clade-X adversary is a non-state actor called “A Brighter Dawn” (ABD). This fictitious organization was modeled in part on Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese doomsday cult that developed and used chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s in Japan.”

The Aum Shinrikyo attack occurred in Japan in March 1995 and involved the use of the nerve gas Sarin (which has also been suspected in the Syrian government attacks on rebel positions).  The leader of that attack, Shoko Asahara, as well as six other members of the group were executed by Japan on 6 July 2018.

Business Insider ran a story about the simulation and it characterized its lessons after the simulation concluded:

“Yet by the day’s end, representing 20 months after the start of the outbreak, there were 150 million dead around the globe, and 15 to 20 million deaths in the US alone. With no vaccine for the illness yet ready, that death toll would have been expected to climb.

“‘I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this,’ Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health Security and the designer of the Clade X simulation, told Business Insider. ‘And it’s not because they are not good or smart or dedicated, it’s because we don’t have the systems we need to enable the kind of response we’d want to see.’

“If efforts to develop a vaccine continued to fail, Toner said a disease like this could kill 900 million people, or more than 10% of the world’s population.”

The exercise was broadcast over Facebook and one can view it on YouTube.

The Uighurs are a Muslim minority ethnic group living in northwest China.  They are culturally more closely related to Central Asians they they are to the Han Chinese who are the dominant ethnic group in China.  In recent years there has been a great deal of unrest among the Uighurs who believe that central control from Beijing threatens their cultural identity.  The rise of terrorism has also raised concern within the Beijing government because some Uighurs have been involved with the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.  As the protests have continued, the Chinese government has placed the Xinjiang Province of China under heavy surveillance, the likes of which have rarely been seen before.  Digital technology has made the intense surveillance possible.

We know precious little about the decision-making process in North Korea.  The Council on Foreign Relations has published a very good summary of what little we do know and it offers a good insight into what we can expect as the US continues to try to persuade North Korea to denuclearize.  The North Koreans have just returned some of the remains of US military personnel who died in the Korean War, fulfilling a promise he made to US President Trump at the SIngapore Summit.  But many analysts believe that North Korean has no intention of ever denuclearizing.

This post has been updated.

It seems clear that the Pakistan Movement for Justice, the party of Imran Khan, has won the national election in Pakistan.  Although there were many charges of corruption and fraud in the election, few protests have broken out in Pakistan against the legitimacy of the election.  The election is only the second time in Pakistani history that a change in government occurred by normal democratic processes, but even so there remain deep suspicions in the country that the Pakistani military was heavy-handed in its desire to see the party of Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, lose the election.  [This statement is not completely accurate.  In the Pakistani general election of 2008, a peaceful transfer of power was effected from a military government to a civilian government.  In the general election of 2013, power transferred from a civilian government to another civilian government after a normal 5 year term.  I am grateful to a careful reader for drawing my attention to this necessary correction. A more accurate sentence would read “a peaceful change in civilian governments after the completion of an appointed term”. ]  It is difficult to assess the impact of Khan’s victory, but, at this point, it seems consistent with the victories of other populist politicians in the world.  In terms of foreign policy, Khan’s party will likely be constrained by the Pakistani military which suggests that sympathy and support for the Taliban in Afghanistan will continue.  Khan will also probably continue Pakistan’s close economic ties with China.  Khan will also toe the military line on Kashmir and ties with India. 

Imran Khan

David Wallace-Wells has written an essay for New York Magazine on climate change which is, quite frankly, terrifying.  As I was reading it, I kept telling myself to relax because he was extrapolating from current trends with no accounting for possible modifications for human behavior.  And that caveat is always a good thing to keep in mind when reading predictions about what the earth’s climate might be like in 2100.  But I was also aware of two factors that were alarming.  First, is that these have been, to date, few modifications in human behavior to avert the worst case possible.  Perhaps as the evidence becomes more compelling, we will take stronger measures, but as of now, there is no reason to believe that the worst case will change the emissions of greenhouse gases.   But each day that we delay, makes the worst case more likely.  The second, more disturbing, factor was that some of the worst cases will, in fact, alleviate the crisis.  If, for example, tropical diseases mutate, become more pervasive, and more difficult to treat, then the human population will decline.  The same is true for food shortages, migrations that induce conflict, and shortages of critical resources such as water.  In other words, the system is capable of self-regulation–just very unpleasant self-regulation.  It makes absolutely no sense to ignore worst cases simply because they do not seem likely,  Ignoring worst cases makes them very likely.

There is an interesting dance going on between US President Trump and Russian President Putin.  After the Helsinki meeting between the two, it seemed doubtful that there would be another meeting since many–Republicans and Democrats alike–did not believe that Mr. Trump had acquitted himself well.  It was surprising, therefore, that President Trump suggested another meeting between the two to take place in Washington, DC “sometime in the fall”.  That suggestion, however, was not greeted warmly by most observers and Mr. Putin did not respond at all to the suggestion.  The suggestion was then withdrawn and replaced by a suggestion that a meeting should take place after the first of the year.  Today, however, Mr. Putin indicated that he had invited Mr. Trump to Moscow while they were in Helsinki and that he was open to meeting President Trump in Washington, DC.  All this back and forth–which would have occurred in the background in normal circumstances and not in the open–suggests that Mr. Putin is taking great pleasure in jerking Mr. Trump’s chain.  It is becoming crystal clear who is the alpha dog in this contest.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting that “senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran’s nuclear capability, perhaps as early as next month.”  It is hard to assess this rather dramatic claim.  It is true that the rhetoric between the US and Iran has been quite inflammatory since the US pulled out of the nuclear agreement.  Not only was US President Trump’s all-capitalized tweet highly unusual, but Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani is quoted by the BBC that he warned President Trump that “if the US attacks Iran it ‘will destroy all that you possess’.”  But the US has been “preparing” to bomb Iran for many years and it is no secret that Israel has been encouraging such a move.  Nonetheless, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that “National security adviser John Bolton convened a meeting Thursday of Pentagon and other top officials as the Trump administration considers how to flesh out its strategy on Iran.”  The meeting is only the third that Bolton has called in his tenure as National Security Adviser and he had argued  prior to his appointment that the US should attack and overthrow the Iranian government. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and Saudi Arabia has halted oil shipments through the Red Sea and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb after it claimed that Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen attacked two oil tankers in the Red Sea.

Mona Yacoubian of the US Institute of Peace has written a well-informed essay on the interests of Israel and Iran in Syria.  Since February of this year, Israel has launched a number of armed attacks against Iranian positions in Syria, trying to prevent Iranian influence from growing stronger so close to Israel.  Prior to the Syrian civil war, Iranian influence was most pronounced in Lebanon and was exercised through Hezbollah, an Iranian ally well-positioned in the Lebanese government.  The rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, however, posed a serious problem for Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.  A confrontation between Israel and Iran in Syria seems almost inevitable as the Syrian government tries to eradicate the rebels in the southern part of Syria–as the Assad forces get closer to Israel, the Israelis have to figure out who controls Assad in that region which borders the Golan Heights–Russia, which the Israelis would prefer, or Iran, which Israel would consider a serious strategic threat.

The Jiahao Flag Co Ltd in Anhui province, China, is busy cranking out banners and flags for US President Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.  According to Reuters who interviewed the factory manager Yao Yuanyuan:

“At about $1 apiece, even suppliers to the Trump campaign, who, Yao says, are located both in China and abroad, can’t resist the low price. Yao’s factory has been making Trump banners since the time his tag line as a candidate was ‘Make America Great Again’.

“’Sales have been great ever since 2015,’” she said.”

But Trump’s threats of tariffs against Chinese products may increase the price of those banners and deter Chinese manufacturers from supporting his campaign.

“Trump’s effort to wrest better trading conditions from China threatens that price advantage, and his hardline stance could eventually repel suppliers like Yao.

“’If he continues to demand tariff increases as he has been, or if he continues to agree with those who are against China, I definitely would not be able to accept (more orders),’ she said.”

“’Everyone can have a patriotic heart, but this won’t improve his economy, and instead it could make us Chinese just shoot ourselves in the foot.’”

We will have to see how this unfolds.

The Economist has a fascinating article on the differences among European nations in attitudes toward immigrants.  The issue is important because of the recent sharp rise in animosity toward refugees in some European countries.  Some believe that the influx of refugees is responsible for this rise in xenophobia, but a more careful analysis suggests a different explanation: the underlying racial and ethnic diversity of the nation.  The article points out that:

“….the general pattern is clear: barely 1% of respondents in eastern Europe and Scandinavia had some non-Western ancestry, compared to 6% in the south and west of the continent. Overall, these measures of ethnic diversity can explain nearly a quarter of the differences between how countries have changed their sentiment to immigrants since 2014.”

The results of the study are very interesting, but they fail to explain the rise of xenophobia in the US, which is a significantly more diverse than most European nations.  But perhaps, the rise in xenophobia in the US is concentrated in populations that are demographically homogeneous.   I lack the data to explore that proposition.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is predicting that inflation in Venezuela will reach one million per cent by December of this year.  The inflation rate is among the highest ever recorded and comparable to the hyperinflation in Germany in the 1930s.  It is the result of extended deficit spending by the government of Nicolas Maduro and the declining rate of oil production in the country.  There are widespread shortages of necessary goods such as food and medicine, the people have resorted to barter, and those people with the means have left the country, pouring into Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil.  There is rampant corruption in the country, and the crime rate has soared.  Even the botanical garden in Caracas, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has fallen into disrepair.  The country has collapsed, but it is impossible to see how it will recover.