Turkey intensified its attacks on Kurdish populations on southeast Turkey. President Tayyip Erdogan threatened to “annihilate” the Kurds involved in an uprising against Turkish control. The intensified attacks by both sides follow a two-year period of rather peaceful relations, but the civil war in Syria has unraveled the uneasy truce. As the Turkish-Kurdish gap widens, the Russian-Kurdish alliance strengthens. As the Russian-Turkish gap widens, the Turkish-Israeli alliance renews. The balance of power in the Middle East moves very fast–the US does not play that game very well or effectively.
The US and Russia have worked together to forge a UN Security Council Resolution that attempts to cut off the sources of funding for Daesh (the Islamic State). The resolution targets individuals and entities who have worked with Daesh selling oil and ancient artifacts. Experts estimate that Daesh pulls in about $80 million a month from these activities.
China has hosted its second World Internet Conference in Wuzhen and the different attitudes toward the internet were obvious. The Chinese prefer to allow national authorities to regulate the internet in a manner consistent with traditional conceptions of state sovereignty. In this model, China “censors topics deemed sensitive on domestic social media platforms — Tibet, the Tiananmen Square protests, the treatment of Uighur minorities in Xinjiang — while completely blocking access to Facebook, Twitter, Google, the New York Times and a host of other foreign websites.” The US and other liberal states prefer to think about the “stakeholders” in the internet which includes private and commercial interests in the network of interests to be satisfied. The struggle over control over the internet will likely continue for many years into the future.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued its annual report on the Arctic climate. The report notes that “the average surface-air temperature from Oct. 2014 to Oct. 2015 was about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 1981-2010 baseline.” The climate change is having a serious effect on the habitats of walruses and other arctic animals, and will likely have serious effects on the overall climate of the planet.
Macedonia became an independent state in 1991 after the dissolution of Yugoslavia (along with Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia). But its name has been the source of constant friction with its neighbor, Greece, which believes that Macedonia is the true name of a province in Greece. The Greeks are particularly irate since the majority population of the Republic of Macedonia is Slavic, not Hellenic. The Macedonian prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, has indicated that he is open to the possibility of a name change for the Republic.
The European Union has created a rapid reaction force of 1,500 to respond to border crises that arise when the flow of refugees overwhelms local forces. The new force is an attempt to preserve the Schengen Agreement which allows freedom of movement among the 28 nations in the agreement. But it also reflects a high degree of frustration over the inability of some of the states to manage the flow of refugees in an orderly fashion. Some members, however, fear that the new force will have the ability to infringe on their sovereignty.
The climate change agreement forged in Paris last week has been hailed as a dramatic step forward in the effort to slow down climate change. From a rhetorical and symbolic point of view, that assessment is certainly true. But many have doubts that these public commitments will be honored. Bill McKibben is someone who has been at the forefront of the effort to stop climate change, and his assessment of the merits of the agreement are not encouraging.
The Congo Research Group at the New York University has just published an essay, “The Landscape of Armed Groups in the Eastern Congo.” The Democratic Republic of Congo has experienced great violence since Belgian colonization in the late 1800s. As of today there are about 70 armed groups operating in eastern Congo and over 1.6 million people have been displaced. It is the most war-torn place on the planet, exceeding the violence we see on a daily basis in the Middle East.
Angela Merkel has earned deserved praise for her willingness to accept large number of refugees, but she has more recently been indicating that there are limits to how many refugees Germany can accept. Merkel does not accept some definitions of multiculturalism, and back in 2010 she indicated her reservations with the idea. She believes that the refugees should assimilate into German society and that Germany should not allow the development of parallel societies. She is trying to walk a very fine line in order to preserve German stability with the obligations of German power.
The massive influx of refugees into Germany has added new vigor to the country’s small right-wing. Polls indicate a high degree of political uncertainty as Germans begin to ponder what the long-term effects of the demographic shift might be. In the city of Leipzig a small demonstration by neo-Nazi supporters led to a counter-demonstration by lefties that exploded into violence. Many were injured as the police tried to restore order.
Fifty-five journalists in the world have been killed so far in 2015. Unfortunately, that number is consistent with earlier years and is testimony to the incredibly difficult conditions in which journalists work. Some of the murders, like the ones at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, get media attention. But many of the murders are not well-reported. The occupation is incredibly important for global civic society and the campaign against press freedom needs to be addressed.
Japan has a serious demographic problem: the number of elderly people is increasing dramatically and the number of young workers is not keeping pace. One way to solve this labor problem is to utilize robots as workers. One hotel in Japan has moved in that direction and one can be greeted by a dinosaur concierge or other such human substitutes.
An historic climate change agreement was signed today by 196 states in Paris. The goal is to restrict greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent a 2° C. temperature increase above historical averages. Additional language was added to the agreement voicing the aspiration to limit the increase to 1.5º C. The agreement, however, is historic only because states have made the commitment. In reality, the language of the agreement does not ensure that the commitment will be realized, although it does create mechanisms to verify and monitor those commitments. There are no enforcement mechanisms, nor are there any provisions sufficient to ensure that poorer countries will be assisted in reaching the goals. But the fact that the US and China have made a public commitment is a real breakthrough.
For the first time, women have been allowed to vote in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The voting was not necessarily equal: 1.35 million men and only 130,637 women were registered to vote. According to the report: “There are 6,917 candidates, of which there are 979 women, standing for 3,159 places on 284 councils.” The results of the elections will be announced on Sunday, but no matter what the outcome, the election marks a turning point in Saudi politics.
The simmering violence in Burundi exploded on Friday as almost 90 people were killed in violent protests against President Pierre Nkurunziza. The President ran for an unconstitutional third term and the move re-triggered ethnic violence which has plagued the country for many decades. That conflict, pitting Hutus against Tutsis, has dominated that region of central Africa in many different countries. That conflict has its roots in the tensions created by colonial rule by the Germans and Belgians in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The anti-Islam hysteria that seems to affect a small but highly vocal constituency in the US is not a new phenomenon. In the 19th century, the hysteria was directed toward Catholics, stimulated by the massive inflow of Irish and Italian immigrants into the US. The sentiment crystallized into the Know Nothing Party which actually ran candidates for President and won several local offices in the northeast. The Ku Klux Klan also ran hate campaigns against Catholics (and Jews) in the 1920s (in addition to its ongoing hate campaigns against blacks). The US Congress also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 in response to the growing number of Chinese coming into the US to work in the American West.
One of the most wanted individuals responsible for the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Ladislas Ntaganzwa, has finally been arrested. He was residing in Congo with a $5 million bounty on his head. He was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Ntaganzwa was the mayor of Nyakizu and orchestrated the killing of nearly 20,000 Tutsi. Rwanda has started extradition proceedings to bring him to trial in Rwanda.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk was giving a speech to the Ukrainian Parliament when he was assaulted by Oleg Barna, a member of the opposition party. The brawl is merely one index of the fragility of the Ukrainian political system as it is wracked by Russian-inspired turmoil in the east and by a deteriorating economy.
“We’re therefore building the structure of a new, transregional strategy for countering terrorism over the long term. This will be based on infrastructure we’ve already established in Afghanistan, the Levant, East Africa, and Southern Europe.
“Because we cannot predict the future, these regional nodes – from Morón, Spain to Jalalabad, Afghanistan – will provide forward presence to respond to a range of crises, terrorist and other kinds. These will enable unilateral crisis response, counter-terror operations, or strikes on high-value targets. But they’re about more – they’ll also allow us to enable partners to respond to a range of challenges. To pre-position equipment for ourselves and our partners. And to provide important opportunities to innovate, to develop new command-and-control structure, new ways to manage the force, new capabilities, and new operational concepts.”
The vision is remarkably similar to the policy of containment that the US adopted to confront the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War. It suggests that the US is committed to a very long-term strategy.
The Financial Times has a devastating article on the decline of the American middle class. It was once the envy of the world and now accounts for less than half of the American population. The decline is not an accident: it is the deliberate and considered outcome of policy decisions made in the US since the 1970s to deregulate the economy, to reduce taxes, and to protect capital at the expense of labor. Unless the pattern is changed, the US will not be able to restore its once vibrant middle class.
One of the central tenets of Dependency Theory is that the creation of wealth also leads to the creation of poverty–the determining factor being who produces the inputs and who sells the outputs. There is probably no better example of this phenomenon than the success of the Walmart chain of stores. Walmart was able to produce many goods in low wage areas of the world, primarily China. In so doing, many higher paying jobs in the US were lost as firms that could not compete with the low wage production. Researchers have estimated that about 400,000 manufacturing jobs in the US were lost as a result. The owners of Walmart became very rich (the three siblings are among the 20 richest Americans) and the workers in China who had jobs became richer (but hardly rich). But the workers in the US became poor since they lost their jobs. Wealth and poverty are causally related.
PressTV, the Iranian television news media, has released a video on the impact of globalization on Islam. The video is fascinating and offers a different perspective on how global trends have affected Muslim populations and how Islam is interpreted by those populations. It is not a perspective that Western media appreciate at all.
China has relaxed some of the restrictions on the movement of its citizens, a policy called hukou which made it difficult for migrants to receive medical care and education when they moved to take advantage of employment opportunities in the cities. The change will affect about 13 million people and will dramatically enhance labor mobility in the country. The move amplifies the effect of the earlier loosening of the one-child policy in China.
Pentagon officials have labeled the campaign rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as dangerous to American national security. Many Americans tend to forget that the rest of the world often listens carefully to the language of American elections, and do not fully appreciate how that language shapes US power. In this particular case, Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is clearly playing into the hands of those who believe that the US is on a “Crusade” to diminish the power of Islam in the world.
Bloomberg has developed a global “carbon clock” which outlines the significant variables concerning Carbon Dioxide as a greenhouse gas. It is a remarkable interactive graphic that expresses some complex ideas very directly and succinctly.
Daesh (the Islamic State) has produced a propaganda video in Mandarin to gain the attention of Chinese Muslims. China has become increasingly apprehensive about Chinese nationals who have gone to fight for Daesh and who might return to China to support the Uighur minority groups in the northwest province of Xinjiang. Some Uighurs have resorted to violent protests in order to gain greater autonomy for the Muslim Uighurs.
World Politics News 