World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

The stretch of warm weather in the Arctic continues.  Arctic News points out:

“On December 22, 2016, the Arctic was on average 3.33°C or 5.99°F warmer than it was in 1979-2000.”

“Within the Arctic, the Arctic Ocean is warming most rapidly. While the Arctic as a whole was as much as 3.34°C or 6.01°F warmer than in 1979-2000 on December 22, 2016, temperatures over much of the Arctic Ocean were at the top end of the scale that day, i.e. as much as 30°C or 54°F warmer than in 1979-2000.”

The warming is unparalleled in recorded history.  The warming of the ocean water is astonishing and will lead to further changes leading to warmer temperatures, such as the release of methane from the ocean floor.  But the warmth in the Arctic is paired with deep cold in Siberia (and now, North America), a combination that has led to a new hypothesis about climate change called “Warm Arctic, Cold Continents”.

US-China relations were roiled by a telephone call from Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, to President-elect Trump after the election.  Trump officials, and Mr. Trump himself, tried to pass off the call as simple courtesy from one leader to another.  But more information has been coming in that indicates that the telephone call was carefully planned, and the result of the pressure from Robert Dole, the Republican candidate for President in 1996 and now a paid lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird.  It  now seems clear that the telephone call was specifically planned to signal the People’s Republic of China that Mr. Trump was willing to play a “Taiwan” card to change US-China relations.

Jason Brennan asks an interesting question: “Democracy is the will of the people but what if the people have little clue as to what they are doing?”  In his essay on Brexit, Brennan explores the degree to which misinformation and deliberately distorted information affect the outcome of the referendum.  He raises a central question about whether democracy is capable of effective governance under such conditions.

Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal and Venezuela took Egypt’s resolution on the illegality of Israel’s settlements and put it up to a vote.  The resolution passed 14-0-1 with the US abstaining and refusing to use its veto.  The decision to abstain was immediately attacked by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said:

“Israel rejects this shameful anti-Israel resolution at the U.N. and will not abide by its terms….At a time when the Security Council does nothing to stop the slaughter of half a million people in Syria, it disgracefully gangs up on the one true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, and calls the Western Wall ‘occupied territory.’”

The move was also condemned by President-elect Trump who had earlier taken the rather extraordinary step of telling the Obama Administration to veto the resolution prior to the vote.  Trump tweeted:

“As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.”

After 20 January he does have a right to speak for the US.  But not today.

The international law on occupied territory is actually fairly clear.    The Fourth Geneva Convention deals with population transfers into and from Occupied Territories:

The US has regarded the settlements as an obstacle to peace since 1967 and has frequently called for the cessation of building additional settlements.  The US government’s position on the settlements has been very clear and the official US statements on them leave no room for doubt.  The Israeli interpretation of the Geneva Convention differs substantially from the almost total unanimity among legal scholars that the settlements violate the Geneva Convention and can be found here.  The Israeli position that the Jewish people have an historic tie to the land and that the land was never under the sovereignty of a Palestinian Arab state is unquestionably true.  The same argument, however, can be made for the non-Jewish populations that have occupied the land for a significantly longer period of time.

The UN resolution will, unfortunately, change nothing.  Israel will not abide by the resolution and the statements by President-elect Trump suggest that the US will stop putting pressure on Israel to cease building.

President-elect Trump ramped up his language concerning nuclear weapons, telling a morning talk-show host: “Let it be an arms race because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”  It is hard to process such loose language since the language trivializes the extraordinary destructiveness of the weapons and fails to appreciate the incredible expense of a nuclear arms race.  There is also nothing in the current security context which suggests that there is some weapons deficiency.  Will we use nukes to confront terrorism?  To fight climate change?  Would the US use nuclear weapons to get Russia out of Ukraine?  Or China out of the South China Sea?

Russian President Putin and US President-elect Trump injected a troubling note of uncertainty into world politics.  Both leaders called for greater attention to nuclear weapons, with Mr. Trump signaling the need to “expand” US nuclear capabilities.  I am still having a hard time trying to figure how to treat foreign policy by tweets and sound bites, so I don’t know exactly how to assess the seriousness of these statements.  But ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the US and Russia have tried to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals.  That crisis proved that once a certain level of destruction can be assured (the technical phrase is Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD]), the actual number of weapons is irrelevant.

There was to have been a vote in the UN Security Council today on a resolution sponsored by Egypt which condemned Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.  The US has in the past vetoed such resolutions, but there were many reports that the US would abstain on the resolution, allowing it to pass.  Egypt abruptly withdrew the resolution and the suspicion is that both Israel and President-elect Trump put a lot of pressure on Egypt to withdraw the resolution.  Given the weakness of Egypt’s economy and the fragility of its politics right now, it is unlikely that Egypt wanted to risk alienating either Israel or the US.

Russia, Turkey, and Iran are negotiating the fate of Syria and have pointedly excluded the US, the UN, and the European Union from the discussions.  All three have an intense dislike of Daesh (the Islamic State) and two of them (Russia and Iran) strongly support the rule of Syrian President Assad.  Turkey has apparently decided that its fear of Kurdish independence outweighs its reservations about Assad.  The three states have de facto formed an alliance against Sunni Muslims in the region, raising fears in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States that Iran’s dream of extending its Shiite influence all the way to the Mediterranean will be realized with control of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon within its grasp.  Israel will certainly fear Iran’s dominance over Hezbollah and Hamas, sworn enemies to the state of Israel.  And Western influence in the region will be limited to a much smaller range of states.

The cooperation seems to have allowed many Syrians to leave the besieged city of Aleppo but it is not clear how safe they will be.  There are reports that Iranian militias are killing Sunnis, raising tensions with Sunni-dominant Turkey.  Moreover, an end to the violence in Syria with Assad still in power will not relieve the migrant pressure in Europe since many Syrians were fleeing the Assad regime as well as the violence of the civil war.  Finally, the costs of rebuilding Syria after all the destruction will be far beyond the means of the Syrian state and it remains to be seen how much financial assistance Russia, Iran, and Turkey can grant to Syria.

So the three states may have achieved a tactical victory in excluding the Western powers from the negotiations, they have also completely “owned” Syria.  Syria has little to offer those three states in return for assistance, so blind allegiance will likely be the price for help.

Foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov (C) of Russia, Mevlut Cavusoglu (R) of Turkey and Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran

The Trump transition team has announced that Peter Navarro will lead the new White House National Trade Council.  Navarro is an economist from the University of California-Irvine and has written extensively against Chinese trade practices.   Not much is known about Navarro, but the Chronicle of Higher Education has a good backgrounder on him.  Navarro’s book on China was turned into a documentary and the poster for the film communicates a great deal about his attitude toward China.  Not particularly subtle.

Moreover, much of Navarro’s thinking about trade is idiosyncratic.  Matthew Yglesias has written an essay on Navarro’s approach which suggests that the underlying basis for his thoughts on trade policy are flawed.

For the second winter in a row, temperatures in the Arctic are expected to rise above 0°C.  The temperature rises are closely associated with the loss of sea ice cover and are part of a positive feedback loop that suggests even greater sea ice loss next year.  The polar vortex North America is experiencing this winter are due to the fact the the diminished temperature gradient between the usually cold Arctic and the warmer temperate regions are contributing to a weakening jet stream (hyperbolically suggested in the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”).

As Russian-Turkish relations go through yet another difficult phase, Ishaan Tharoor has written a short essay on the history of those relations.  Needless to say, the relations of close neighbors is often quite difficult, but the tension between the emerging Russian Empire and the declining Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was deep and enduring.  The struggle was over control of the Bosporus and the Black Sea, but was also amplified by the religious tension between the Muslim Ottomans and the Eastern Orthodox Russians.  Somehow, those tensions have never gone away.

Surprisingly, US-Russian tensions have undergone a dramatic transformation.  Yochi Dreazen has written an essay for Vox on the troubling questions surrounding the Russian role in the US presidential election and what it suggests about President-elect Trump’s relations with Russian President Putin.  In the article, Dreazen posts an interesting graph which suggests that Republicans now have a more positive view of Vladimir Putin, a massive change from the traditional Republican view of Russia.

The carnage in Berlin caused by a truck driven into a crowded Christmas market is causing havoc in the German political system.  Chancellor Merkel addressed the German people in terms that suggested that Germany needs to adhere steadfastly to its liberal values.  But other politicians are suggesting that German politics needs to change dramatically.  Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Social Union, the party allied with Merkel’s Christian Democrats, made an ominous speech after the tragedy:  “We owe it to the victims, their families and the entire populace to rethink and readjust our entire immigration and security policies.”  It is difficult to predict the direction of German politics in the near term.

The US is likely to respond to the charges that Russia was involved in leaking hacked computer materials in order to influence the recent Presidential election.  It is hard, however, to determine what the best response might be since the US is more vulnerable to computer hacking than is Russia.  Tim Weiner is a journalist with a long track record of ferreting out information about the US CIA and he has written a fascinating essay on how the US might respond, looking at a previous cyberwarfare effort in the 1980s.

The danger of private economic interests overriding national interests became quite apparent in the decision of the US Senate not to renew the “STAND for Ukraine” Act.  The bill would have made the sanctions against Russia for its intervention in Ukraine in 2014 stand for another five years.  ExxonMobil lobbied hard against the bill since the company has a long-standing license agreement with Russia to pump oil from the Arctic.  With the defeat of the bill, the new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson the CEO of ExxonMobil, can have the sanctions overturned with just an executive decision by President Trump.   In 2016, ExxonMobil spent $8,840,000 on lobbying expenses in Washington, DC.  The money was well spent since ExxonMobil has more land under its control in Russia than it does in the US:

“Exxon boosted its Russian holdings to 63.7 million acres in 2014 from 11.4 million at the end of 2014, according to data from U.S. regulatory filings. That dwarfs the 14.6 million acres of rights Exxon holds in the U.S., which until last year was its largest exploration prospect.”

The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was shot and killed in Ankara.   The Ambassador, Andrey Karlov, was speaking at a photographic exhibit when a 22-year old riot policeman shot him in the back.  The assassin shouted out “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria! As long as our brothers are not safe, you will not enjoy safety”.  The incident comes at a point when Turkish-Russian relations were improving although both sides are diametrically opposed on the question of whether Syrian President Assad should remain in power.  I have long wondered at how long it would take before Russia was being blamed for the slaughter of Muslims in Syria.  Russia needs to be careful since almost 15% of its population is Muslim and it is the fastest growing part of the Russian population.

Michael Klare is our colleague at Hampshire College and he has written extensively on world affairs, particularly on the role of resource constraints on politics.  His most recent essay is an examination of President-elect Trump’s energy plan.  It is based largely on the campaign promises made by Mr. Trump, so we cannot be sure that these policies will actually be followed.  But the incoherence of the plan is made clear by Klare.  In his words: “In other words, Trump’s plan will undoubtedly prove to be an enigma wrapped in a conundrum inside a roiling set of contradictions.” But following even a few of Mr. Trump’s policies will move the US far away from its promises to avert climate change.

I am not sure what to make of the phenomenon known as “fake news”. It is a current buzzword, but I sincerely doubt that there was ever a time when false stories were not circulated by those who wished to muddy political waters.  Some of the stories are truly unbelievable as is the current story circulating around Venezuela that the US is taking 100 Bolivar bank notes out of Venezuela in order to stimulate inflation and overthrow the government of President Maduro.  The 100 Bolivar note is now worth around 2 US cents and Maduro has announced his own intention to take the notes out of circulation in January and replace them with 500 Bolivar notes.  With an expected inflation rate of about 500% next year, the Venezuelan economy has already passed the point of collapse.

Joseph Kabila has been President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the last 15 years and Monday is supposed to be his last day in office.  But it does not appear as if he is prepared to step down, and his refusal to stand aside could trigger off violent protests.  The DRC is no stranger to violence:  between 1997 and 2003 almost 5 million people were killed in political violence. Since its independence in 1960, the DRC has never experienced a peaceful transfer of power.

Visual Capitalist has a beautiful visual graphic of international trade.  The graphic shows trade flows between countries and color codes the content of those flows.  If one clicks on a particular country, the graphic will show only the flows in and out of that country.  One can also zoom in and out of particular regions of the world.  Not surprisingly, the dominant flows are between countries in the northern hemisphere.

The Law and Justice Party in Poland has been slowly increasing the powers of the Polish state.  Last year it passed laws restricting the powers of the constitutional court and limiting the ability of protesters to assemble freely.  Protesters have surrounded the Parliament building to voice their concerns over the growing authoritarianism of the government.  The European Union has voiced its concerns over the loss of freedoms in Poland, but the Law and Justice Party refuses to change the laws.

James Fallows has written a very well-informed short essay on the US-China relationship and how President-elect Trump’s cavalier tweets about China are compromising a very delicate relationship.  His conclusion is somewhat encouraging, but the tone of resigned disappointment rings true:

“I do not believe the United States and China are likely to go to war. There are too many buffers on each side; too many many positive linkages; too much awareness on the Chinese side of U.S. relative military advantages—and on both sides of the potential risks.

“But if historians and citizens look back on our era as the transition point, when 40 years of relatively successful management of U.S.-China gave way to a reckless focus on grievances and differences, and a cavalier approach to a showdown, tweets like the one today will be part of their sad record.”

Let’s hope that President-elect Trump becomes a little more disciplined in this crucial relationship.

China seized a US underwater research drone in international waters about 50 miles off the coast of the Philippines.    The drone had been launched by the USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic research vessel.  When the Chinese took the drone, they were challenged by the Bowditch but the Chinese vessel did not respond to demands that the drone be returned.  The US has filed a formal protest, but the incident seems like another chapter in the continuing showdown between the Chinese and the Americans on the status if the South China Sea.

USNS Bowditch

President-elect Trump has indicated that he intends to appoint David Friedman as the next US Ambassador to Israel.  Mr. Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer who has worked with Mr. Trump in his legal affairs in Atlantic City but he has no diplomatic experience.  Mr. Friedman is on record as supporting the total Israeli annexation of the West Bank and to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  Both positions conflict with US policy since 1967 and the appointment is additional evidence that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is no longer a viable option.

Russian President Putin and Turkish President Erdogan are calling for negotiations on the future of Syria without the participation of either the US or the United Nations.  The two countries are an odd couple:  Russia favors Syrian President Assad and Turkey wishes Assad to be removed.  But the gambit reflects the growing confidence of both parties to fill perceived vacuums created by American disengagement from the conflict.  Whether the two countries can come up with a plan is doubtful.  But at this point, anything that could stop the slaughter in Syria would be welcome.

Last September, Chinese President Xi pledged to US President Obama that “China does not intend to pursue militarization” in the reefs it has built up in the South China Sea.  Photographs of those “islands” clearly show that that promise has not been kept.  The photos clearly indicate that anti-aircraft defense systems have been built up and that runways have been built that can accommodate any plane in the Chinese arsenal.   The Obama Administration has quietly challenged the Chinese claims of sovereignty by navigating near the islands in an assertion of the freedom of the seas.  These new weapons systems will make similar acts by the US significantly more dangerous.  It is unlikely that Obama will try to challenge these moves, instead leaving the issue for President-elect Trump.

Johnson Reef

US President-elect Trump’s cabinet appointments clearly suggest that he is likely not to support the sanctions regime against Russia that have been in place since Russia annexed the Crimea.  It also appears as if there is strong sentiment in Europe for dropping the sanctions as well.   As the year ends it appears as if Putin’s gambits in Ukraine and Syria will result in, at least, short-term victories.  We will have to see how strong Russian support for maintaining such a vigorous foreign policy can persist over the long-term.

The Pew Research Center has done another study on international migration.  According to the study:

“If all of the world’s international migrants (people living in a country that is different from their country or territory of birth) lived in a single country, it would be the world’s fifth largest, with around 244 million people. Overall, international migrants make up 3.3% of the world’s population today.”

The countries that send out the most migrants are India, Mexico, Russia, China, and Bangladesh, countries with relatively large national populations.  The flows are dynamic:  Mexico used to send a lot of migrants to the US, but the flows now are actually negative, with more leaving the US for Mexico.