For a reasonably open world
To prevent the sustainability agenda from becoming a casualty of Russia’s war on Ukraine, policymakers and citizens must recognize the imperatives raised by the crisis and adjust their strategies accordingly. That means making our approach to environmental, social, and governance issues both more holistic and more granular.
Read the entire article on the site of Project Syndicate.
As columns of Russian troops began pouring into Ukraine nearly two months ago, the United States and its allies started supplying Kyiv with weapons and equipment for what many expected to be a short war: sniper rifles, helmets, medical kits, encrypted communications, lots of bullets and the portable, shoulder-held Stinger and Javelin missiles that quickly became icons of the conflict.
Defying the odds, Ukraine held on to its capital and pushed Russia from the north. Now, as the Kremlin switches gears and begins a concerted effort to capture eastern Ukraine, Washington and its allies are pivoting as well, scrambling to supply Ukraine with bigger and more advanced weapons to defend itself in a grinding war.
The West is focused on sending longer-range weapons like howitzers, anti-aircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones, armored trucks, personnel carriers and even tanks — the type of arms that President Joe Biden said were tailored to stop “the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine.”
“The steady supply of weapons” has helped “ensure that Putin failed in his initial war aims to conquer and control Ukraine,” Biden said last week. “We cannot rest now.”
Then, after a video call with allies on Tuesday, Biden told reporters that the United States would send more artillery to Ukraine. He is expected to announce a new military aid package for Ukraine in the coming days, according to a person briefed on his plans. The aid amount will be on par with the $800 million package of weapons and artillery that was announced last week, the person said.
But the strategy comes with a notable risk: antagonizing Russia so much that it ignites a wider, international conflict.
Russia recently sent a formal warning to the United States, saying that Western deliveries of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine could bring “unpredictable consequences.”
U.S. officials say the warning shows that the weapons being sent are making a big difference on the battlefield. So, for Washington at least, concerns about supplying arms that Russia might consider “escalatory” have ebbed — as has the initial worry that Ukraine will use longer-range weapons, like jet fighters, to attack Moscow itself and set off a bigger war.
Officials in Washington are now grappling with how much intelligence to give the Ukrainians about bases inside Russia, given that the Ukrainians have already made small helicopter raids on Russian fuel depots. The White House has also held back on supplying some weapons that could strike Russian forces across the border, like rocket artillery, ground attack planes and medium-range drones.
Some argue the Americans are being too cautious.
“Seven weeks ago, they were arguing over whether to give Stinger missiles — how silly does that seem now?” said retired Lt. Gen. Frederick B. Hodges, the former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. “We have been deterred out of an exaggerated fear of what possibly could happen.”
Anxiety about provoking a wider war persists among some NATO allies, most visibly in Germany, which worries that supplying Marder infantry-fighting vehicles, considered one of the world’s best armored vehicles, could be perceived by Russia as making Berlin and NATO parties to the war.
Robert Habeck, an influential minister in Germany’s new government, has said that supplying tanks would be an escalation and should be a matter of consensus within NATO and the European Union. “Heavy weapons are synonymous with tanks, and all NATO countries have so far ruled this out to not become targets themselves,” he said.
But these are sovereign — not alliance — decisions, and Washington and numerous allies are shipping such weapons anyway, concentrating on supplying Soviet-era weapons that the Ukrainians know how to use, along with Western arms the Ukrainians can absorb fairly easily.
Russia is striking Ukraine with abandon, complicating the flow of these newer weapons from Ukraine’s western borders with Poland, Romania and Slovakia to the battle in the east. That presents another risk: that Russian attacks could also stray across the Ukrainian border and hit NATO countries, “every inch” of which Biden has vowed to defend militarily.
How this logistical race goes could well shape the outcome of the war.
Russian forces, having suffered an embarrassing retreat from northern Ukraine and the suburbs of the capital, Kyiv, are repositioning for what the Kremlin and Ukrainian officials call a pivotal offensive to take eastern Ukraine.
Unlike many of the earlier battles, this one is expected to feature more tank battles on open ground, more long-range artillery and more weaponized drones.
The Western effort is both sprawling and expensive, with as many as 30 countries, not all of them members of NATO. The push now is to get countries with Soviet-era tanks, artillery and perhaps even fighter planes to provide them to Ukraine, with the promise that the United States will replenish them with more modern, Western-made arms in return. There is an especially acute need for Soviet-bloc standard 152-millimeter howitzer shells, since NATO uses a different, 155-millimeter shell.
The United States has also agreed to provide some 155-millimeter howitzers, along with 40,000 matching rounds, while trying to buy Soviet-standard ammunition from countries that use it, including nations outside Europe, like Afghanistan and even India, a long-standing buyer of Russian arms.
But that is not enough, Hodges argued. “We are still not thinking big,” he said. “We are still not thinking in terms of Ukraine winning.”
Unlike the early part of the war, when many countries seemed to compete to announce what they were providing Ukraine, the current race is being run largely in secret.
Much of the coordination, including how to get materiel into Ukraine, is being handled through the United States European Command, or EUCOM, based in Stuttgart, Germany, and through a blandly named International Donors Coordination Center set up with the British.
The command said that it established a “control center” to coordinate weapons and humanitarian assistance “from around the world” for Ukraine in early March. But it declined to discuss the details.
The Pentagon gave a hint, saying that the State Department had authorized transfers to Ukraine of American-provided defensive equipment from more than 14 countries this year.
But nations are trying not to advertise to Moscow exactly what is being provided. France says it has supplied 100 million euros of military equipment to Ukraine, without specifying what it has sent. Some countries have no desire to goad the Russian bear.
A clear example was the confusion over reports that Poland had supplied more than 100 Soviet-era T-72 and T-55 tanks to Ukraine. Poland refuses to confirm any such shipment.
Not all nations are being coy. The Czech government says it has supplied Ukraine with T-72 tanks and BMP-1 armored vehicles, while the Slovak government has made a big show of supplying a Soviet-era S-300 anti-aircraft missile system.
As for Germany, part of the problem is that its own supply of working armor is so low that it has little to spare. Beyond that, learning to operate a modern British, American or German tank can take up to six months, while Ukrainian fighters would have little difficulty operating familiar Soviet-era armor.
“We don’t really have time to get a lot of heavy American armor into Ukraine, and there isn’t time to train the Ukrainian military,” said Robert Gates, a former U.S. defense secretary. “But there is a lot of former Soviet military equipment still in the arsenals of the East European states.”
The United States, he said, “ought to be ransacking the arsenals” of former Warsaw Pact countries for armor and anti-aircraft systems, “with a promise from the U.S. to backfill over time with our equipment to our NATO allies.”
That is exactly what the United States is racing to do, Pentagon officials said, describing their own efforts to persuade the Slovaks to provide the S-300 missile system to Ukraine. On March 9, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin began speaking with their defense minister, Jaroslav Nad, and has agreed to send in Patriot batteries to replace it.
Similar conversations are taking place with other allies that have Soviet-era weapons and ammunition, the officials said. The Americans say they are also speaking several times a day with their Ukrainian counterparts about what Ukraine wants and needs, and what Western countries think they can best provide.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeatedly expresses gratitude for the aid but wants more, sooner. He admitted to being fed up with listing the same set of requirements over and over again to different national interlocutors, telling The Atlantic in Kyiv: “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.”
There are also supply issues with Western weapons, like the older Stinger anti-aircraft missile or the Javelin anti-tank missile.
The Pentagon has urged manufacturers to ramp up production. So far, some 7,000 Javelins have been given to Ukraine, about a third of the total American inventory, which will probably take three or four years to replace, wrote Mark F. Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Last week, the Pentagon met with leaders of eight large military contractors, like Raytheon Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., to discuss how to overcome any supply problems – both to replenish American weapons stocks that have been drawn down to help Ukraine and to keep Kyiv in the fight. The two companies together make the Javelin, and Raytheon makes the Stinger.
The United States alone has spent or allocated some $2.6 billion worth of such materiel since the war began Feb. 24, and the European Union has provided €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion). But there is no prospect of U.S. or NATO troops going to the aid of Ukraine, officials say. The West is providing the weapons and intelligence — and cheerleading from behind.
The known list of what has been provided already is long, and there is little doubt that supplies from NATO countries — and the training of Ukrainian forces after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, not to mention Ukraine’s tenacity and adaptability — have surprised the Russians, badly damaged their morale and extended the war.
In the months leading up to the war and afterward, the United States and its allies have sent Ukraine 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons and 60,000 anti-tank weapons, including 10,000 provided by Washington, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last week.
The United States has also provided more than 50 million rounds of ammunition, 7,000 small arms, 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets, and night-vision goggles, encrypted radios, armored trucks and personnel carriers, largely drawn from pre-positioned U.S. military stockpiles, much of it in Europe, according to the latest public list from the Pentagon.
Since the invasion, the Pentagon has cranked up its vast logistical and transportation network. Within four to six days after the White House approves a transfer of weapons from American military stockpiles, the Pentagon has been able to load the materiel onto cargo planes and fly it to about half a dozen staging bases in countries near Ukraine, chiefly Poland and Romania.
From there, U.S. officials say, the weapons and equipment are loaded onto hundreds of trucks and shipped into western Ukraine using a variety of overland routes. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson, said it takes about 24 to 48 hours for the weapons to make their way from the staging areas into the hands of Ukrainian troops.
“Eight to 10 flights a day are coming into the region, not just from the United States, but from other nations as well,” Kirby said. “That stuff isn’t sitting around.”
Despite repeated threats to do so, the Russians have rarely tried to stop this flow of Western materiel into Ukraine. Pentagon officials say the Russians have been busy fighting in other parts of the country and fear Ukraine’s air defenses. “That flow still continues,” Kirby said.
Britain, which has been more public about its contributions in the post-Brexit period, has supplied about $588 million of materiel, including anti-tank and anti-ship missiles and long-range artillery.
Training the Ukrainians on new equipment in the middle of a war is a challenge, though. About a dozen Ukrainian soldiers were already training in the United States, and the Pentagon has taught them to use modern armed drones, like the 700 or so Switchblade drones that Washington is now providing.
Military officials call the weapon, which is carried in a backpack, the “kamikaze drone,” because it can be flown directly at a tank or a group of troops and is destroyed when it hits the target and explodes.
Bigger armed drones, like American-made Predators or Reapers, would be difficult for Ukrainians to fly and would be easily destroyed by Russian fighter planes. But Pentagon officials said the small, portable kamikaze drones could prove more cost-effective and elusive against Russian armored convoys.
After the White House announced the latest $800 million tranche of weapons for Ukraine last week, Kirby said that American soldiers would train Ukrainian forces in neighboring countries to use some of the newer, more sophisticated equipment Washington is providing, like radar systems, as well as the 155-millimeter howitzers and 11 Mi-17 helicopters.
“We’re aware of the clock, and we know time is not our friend,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2022 The New York Times Company
By Collins Nnabuife – Abuja On Apr 19, 2022
A group #DiasporaSupport4Adesina has said that with former President Olusegun Obasanjo reportedly endorsing the President of African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina in 2021 for the number one seat in the country, means that Nigeria will experience transformation under Adesina led government.
The group in a statement signed by Dr Tony Bello, Chairman and Founder, Shine Bridge Global Inc., Chesapeake-Virginia, USA, said they were not surprised that Chief Obasanjo would endorse Dr Adesina for the highest office in the land because of the achievements he recorded as Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development and as the President of AfDB.
“On May 2, 2021, an article came out in a national newspaper, the Vanguard, attributed to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo signalling Dr Akinwumi Adesina as the best person to occupy the position of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
“If you conduct a poll today asking Nigerians who the cap of Nigeria’s leadership best fits, we are certain that most will support Chief Obasanjo’s choice of Dr. Akinwumi Ayodeji Adesina, President of Africa Development Bank (AfDB) and one-time Minister of Agriculture.
“This is one of the many reasons why we, in the Diaspora, are giving support to the efforts being made to co-opt Adesina into the forthcoming Presidential race. We have examined his contributions and personal commitment towards a better Nigeria, and Africa at large.
“As Nigeria’s political barometer, Chief Obasanjo’s residence has become a beehive of activities for politicians and political groups seeking his endorsement! Obasanjo is not shy to quick criticisms of leaders for non-performance in office, especially leaders who came to elective positions through his support.
“We are therefore not surprised that Chief Obasanjo would endorse Dr. Adesina for the highest office in the land. However, we are certain that Adesina’s presidency will not suffer any shortcomings to face the criticism of “Baba”, as Chief Obasanjo is fondly called in Nigeria”, the statement said.
The group further said that recognizing the urgent need for economic resurgence, President Muhammadu Buhari invited Adesina to articulate a roadmap for Nigeria’s economic resurgence at the 2021 Midterm Ministerial Performance Review Retreat.
The retreat according to the group had all the Nigerian government functionaries, including the Executive, Legislature as well as State governors.
The group therefore expressed hope that Adesina’s presidency will usher in a robust economic resurgence that will, in addition, put an end to our children drowning in the high seas of Africa and Europe in their quest for a better life.
The group also recalled how Obasanjo has successfully identified and supported the candidacy of the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, Former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in 2011 and Late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2007.
Dr Bello through the statement, said when Dr Adesina was given the opportunity to serve as Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, he distinguished himself as a selfless servant to all Nigerians.
“He worked tirelessly with his team to transform the mindset of millions of smallholder farmers and the youth that “agriculture is a business, not a development program.” He advocated for policy and institutional reforms that attracted private sector investment commitments of over $5 billion into Nigeria’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA).
The statement further stated that Dr. Adesina had recently engaged with President Joe Biden’s Administration and his top-officials including Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Secretary of Treasury on climate financing among other global economic challenges facing Africa and Africans at home and in the United States.
“It is therefore not surprising, that Chief Obasanjo, himself, a globally recognized leader in domestic and international politics, has gone so far as to beckon on Dr. Adesina as one best prepared and fit for the job of the President of Nigeria after the incumbent, President Buhari,” the statement added.
Read the article on the site of the Nigerian Tribune.
Bill Dudley, Bloomberg Opinion & Former New York Fed President, argues that the slower the Fed moves, the harder the landing will be. John Lipsky, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Distinguished Scholar and former IMF First Deputy Managing Director, says the war in Ukraine has the potential for very serious and long-lasting disruptions in grain markets. Daniel Skelly, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Head of Market Research & Strategy, says he’s seeing mixed messages from the stock and bond markets. Michelle Meyer, MasterCard Chief U.S. Economist, says consumer spending is still strong in the U.S. Alina Polyakova, Center for European Policy Analysis President & CEO, says Mariupol is the only thing standing in the way of Russia connecting its land and naval forces in Ukraine.
Apr 18, 2022
Listen to the episode on the site of Bloomberg.
CHRONIQUE – Comment répondre à ce désir de France dans un Moyen-Orient déçu par l’effacement américain, inquiet par l’hégémonisme commercial chinois, sceptique sur les intentions russes?
Comme le chef de l’État est le chef des armées et de la diplomatie, une élection présidentielle est toujours l’occasion de repenser les priorités de la politique étrangère de la France. Évidemment, le premier sujet sera celui de la défense de l’Europe face à l’agressivité militaire de la Russie, au pillage technologique de la Chine, à l’hégémonie juridique et financière de l’Amérique. Pour avoir une chance de contrer ces trois monstres, la France ne pourra pas se passer du levier européen. Cela prendra du temps car, à 27 membres, l’Union européenne est devenue une machine extrêmement lourde.
Mais, immédiatement, la France pourrait, seule, relancer sa politique arabe. De l’eau a coulé sous les ponts depuis que Charles de Gaulle a formulé la sienne, le 29 juin 1967, juste après le troisième conflit israélo-arabe. Guérie des blessures de la guerre d’Algérie et soucieuse d’afficher une politique d’équilibre au Moyen-Orient, la France tendait la main à toutes les nations arabes.
Everyone in Europe is tense watching the elections in France. Though Emmanuel Macron is taking the lead, a Marine Le Pen win is more likely than in the last elections. A Le Pen victory would be catastrophic for the EU and even endanger its existence.
Le Pen inherited her father’s National Front party, which advocated an ultra-nationalist and vehemently xenophobic stance. Though she tried to rebrand the party by changing the name from “Front National” (National Front) to “Rassemblement National” (National Rally), the party’s ultranationalism did not change.
This ultra-nationalism brings with it an anti-Europe stand. The ultra-nationalist who adheres to a rigid and jaded national identity sees in the integration of a larger framework such as the EU a dissolution of their character as French. Another reason for this stand is that with the EU they have less control over their borders. If she wins, Le Pen will exercise discrimination against EU citizens in France, in opposition to some of the founding principles of the union. The ascension of Le Pen, who is against sanctioning Russian energy and is overtly sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin, would be catastrophic for Europe — especially at the moment.
A united Europe presents a threat to the Russian leader, while a disunified Europe represents an opportunity for influence. The war in Ukraine has shaken the European psyche. Now Russia is the main threat, while for a long time it was Islamic extremism, especially for the French. This could be a drawback for Le Pen. Suddenly, her main tagline, which is to fight Islamism, is less attractive and her admiration for Putin is a liability.
Nevertheless, Le Pen has been able to adapt. She has been campaigning on the cost of living, focusing her message on the working class who she calls the forgotten France. She has held small rallies in poor areas outside major cities, describing Macron as an elitist who is out of touch with reality. Le Pen’s messaging has partly justified her pro-Russian stance by focusing on energy prices — particularly, that her audience live in remote areas and rely on driving long distances. She is against sanctioning Russian energy as it will increase the price of fuel for those people.
On the other hand, Macron has lost his appeal for immigrants.
Initially, he was seen as sympathetic to immigrants. After his arrival at the Elysee, he gradually shifted to the right. His position on the cartoons and on France’s colonialist past in Algeria, among other issues, has turned off an important faction of his original constituency. Macron’s position on Islam has been somehow targeted to show a strong stand on national security and French principles. However, he has helped Le Pen indirectly by normalizing racism. Le Pen is no longer seen as a hardcore far-right racist as she is taking a similar stance to the supposedly “centrist” president. Hence the voters that once turned out in droves on election day to vote her out will remain at home as for them Macron is no better. On the other hand, she is touching on the average French citizen’s daily struggle while Macron comes across as arrogant and detached from the grassroots. Macron has just started ramping up his campaign.
Macron’s mistake was that instead of governing as a centrist, he migrated to the right and lost his distinction from Le Pen.
Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib
The fight today is between the right, represented by Macron (though he presents himself as a centrist), and the extreme right, represented by Le Pen. Macron has been able to benefit from the absence of the socialist party, which has not presented an audible message. Anne Hidalgo, who represents the center left, only received 1.7 percent support. The left has been hijacked by the extreme left, such as Jean-Luc Melenchon, who wants to tax 100 percent inheritance on everything above €12 million ($12.9 million), which is a killer to the free market economy.
There are many factors that can play into the equation now.
The key now is the voters of Melenchon, who received 22 percent in the first round. Polls show that 34 percent will vote for Macron and 30 percent will vote for Le Pen. Macron’s mistake was that instead of governing as a centrist, he migrated to the right and lost his distinction from Le Pen. Her defeat will depend on how many people will go to the polls to vote her out.
Though Le Pen did not mention the word “Frexit,” as people now realize the lies that led to Brexit and their consequences, she will set a French preference in all international relationships, which will weaken the negotiating power and weight of the EU on the global scene. Nevertheless, the French generally are proud Europeans and want to see more French leadership at the heart of the union. Hence it will be difficult for her to break existing agreements.
The three main powers in the EU previously were Germany, France and the UK. With Brexit, the European policy became mainly a Franco-German policy, and the two countries balance each other in decisions. The fact that there are two main powers in the EU ensures a minimum level of multilateralism that the union is founded on. The EU needs members with political muscle to drive it, especially when it comes to foreign policy. While Macron has called for more federalized power and an ever-closer union, Le Pen will probably do the opposite and will greatly weaken the EU.
The election of Le Pen would not only have an effect on French citizen state relations and French foreign policy but on the entire future of Europe. If Le Pen wins and Europe and NATO — which she has pledged to withdraw from — are in crisis, they have no one to blame but the incumbent president who normalized the far right.
Read the original article on the site of Arab News.
Russia’s struggle both feeds and blunts Xi’s ambitions for the island
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Experts say Beijing is evaluating Moscow’s performance in Ukraine. (Source photos by Kremlin/Reuters and AP)
TOKYO — When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, many policymakers and pundits in the U.S., Europe and Asia warned about the possibility of the conflict triggering a security crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
Seeing U.S. President Joe Biden unable to stop the aggression and reluctant to intervene militarily, Beijing may be tempted to start planning an invasion of Taiwan, they said.
Seven weeks on, the key questions now are what lessons China has learned from Russia’s war of aggression and how they will affect Beijing’s strategy for Taiwan. The answers could greatly affect global stability.
The conflict has led Chinese leaders to hold two contradictory views based on what they have learned from the war, according to Japanese and U.S. experts: One is that an attempt to annex Taiwan by force could have disastrous consequences for China; the other is that it is still possible to stage a military campaign to seize and control the island.
But Chinese leaders may now realize how hard it would be to forcibly occupy Taiwan after seeing the dismal performance of the Russian military in Ukraine.
Chinese nuclear-powered submarines take part in a military display in the South China Sea in 2018. © ReutersThe Ukraine crisis has proved that military superiority does not guarantee victory. Horrifying images of atrocities perpetrated by Russian troops have been captured by smartphones and news cameras and spread around the world, making Russia a global villain.
A former senior U.S. military officer who has been involved for years in developing Washington’s China strategy said Ukraine has overwhelmed Russia — not only militarily but also in information warfare, garnering Ukraine massive support from Western nations. China must have been shocked, he added.
History is littered with examples of small countries beating bigger and more powerful foes. In the 1970s, the U.S. suffered a bitter defeat in Vietnam. The Soviet Union and the U.S. both failed to win their respective wars in Afghanistan. Moscow pulled forces out of the country around 1988, while Washington withdrew in the summer of 2021.
The Chinese military has carefully studied this history, but it must have been disturbed by how Ukraine has pushed back Russian forces from areas around Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other strategic locations.
For the U.S., the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan were large-scale campaigns that took place far from home. Russia is now struggling to subdue a neighbor with which it shares a border.
This is a dire warning to the Chinese military about its ambition to take over Taiwan. Beijing has also been rudely awakened to the fact that it will not be easy to stage a surprise attack on the island.
Since last autumn, Russian moves to mass troops along the border with Ukraine were closely monitored by satellites and disclosed to the media. If China opts to invade Taiwan, it needs to deploy far more troops and warships in the Taiwan Strait. Such moves would be immediately known to the entire world and trigger a global backlash.
Ukraine’s tactical success in resisting Russian assaults should also make China think twice before invading Taiwan. Yasuyuki Sugiura, senior research fellow at the Japanese Defense Ministry’s National Institute for Defense Studies and a specialist in Chinese military affairs, has been impressed with the way Ukraine’s defenses have withstood missile, cyber and bomber attacks by Russia.
“China’s initial operations against Taiwan would involve attempts to paralyze and destroy the island’s air defense system with missile, cyber and bomber attacks so that its special forces could parachute in for ground operations,” says Sugiura. “Such plans would not be viable if air defenses cannot be disabled swiftly.”
Adding more doubt to Beijing’s strategy has been the quick and concerted action by major Western democracies to impose economic sanctions on Russia. It would be difficult for these powers to impose similar sanctions against China, whose economy is 10 times larger than Russia’s. Still, it has become clear that China would face serious and damaging economic sanctions if it invades Taiwan.
Yasuhiro Matsuda, professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia and an expert in China-Taiwan relations, says leaders in Beijing must be “getting cold feet after having witnessed the sanctions slapped on Russia.” It has become clear that China would suffer from harsh sanctions for years even if it can occupy Taiwan by force, he pointed out. “If such sanctions push the Chinese economy into a downturn, the Communist government would lose public support.”
Attack helicopters launch missiles during a military exercise Taiwan conducted in 2019 to simulate a Chinese invasion. © ReutersDespite these deterrents, however, Russia’s war in Ukraine still may have emboldened Chinese President Xi Jinping to pursue his ambition to seize the island.
Especially worrisome is Beijing’s renewed recognition of the power of nuclear arms. The Biden administration has cited the risk of nuclear warfare with Russia as the reason for its refusal to intervene militarily in the war.
Though far smaller than Russia’s stockpiles, China is said to have a nuclear arsenal of more than 300 warheads. Some Japanese and South Korean policymakers are worried that Xi now believes that China’s nuclear arms would also deter Washington from taking military action if it invades Taiwan.
The question is what will influence Xi’s decision.
The answer will be determined by how Russia’s invasion pans out. In the short term, Ukraine’s surprisingly effective resistance will lead Beijing to rethink its Taiwan strategy and deter an attack on the island.
That does not mean, however, that Xi will give up the idea of annexing Taiwan by force. Beijing will learn lessons from Russia’s mistakes and take steps to make China less vulnerable to economic sanctions by the West. China will also take every means possible to bolster its military might with an eye on an eventual invasion of Taiwan.
Yet, everything is based on the assumption that Xi receives accurate information and reliable analyses from his military and other sources. If, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Xi is surrounded by sycophants who feed him only “good news,” the world could face a very dangerous China.
Read the original article on the site of Nikkei.
MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin interviews Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass for a general discussion about “the state of the world.”
“Ukraine is both a reflection of it and a driver of it, but you have a couple of things going on here at the moment that make this a remarkable moment in history,” Haass said. “The revival of the familiar stuff of history, geopolitical competition, obviously with Russia now i Europe, China in Asia, increasingly called the Indo-Pacific. A lot going on.”
“Three decades after the end of the Cold War, suddenly this is not the world that lots of people were expecting or hoping for,” Haass said. “And the whole other set of challenges from climate change to Covid and the rest, these global issues.”
Watch the video on the IAPP Youtube chanel.
How should the business world respond to the increasing pressure to change its ways fast to address the climate crisis?
David Kotler: As a banker, I’m looking at it from a money perspective and the figures coming out of the most reputable studies on this are just staggering. We’re looking to have to spend $130 trillion between now and 2050 to get to net zero. That translates to around $4.5 billion a year, every year, if we have any hope of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees.
Governments and the private sector are going to need to work hard to find the capital to affect the energy transition, and it’s not going to be easy. Take the European oil majors alone. The top five have a market capitalisation of more than $500 billion. That’s a huge amount of capital to have to transition.
Financial markets, businesses and policymakers are going to have to get very creative and think quite differently about how we finance this. Commercial banks in particular will need to be inventive if they’re going to be able to move their loan books away from traditional clients into new areas. We are seeing some traction in the insurance sector, where big players like AXA are no longer willing to lend money to oil and gas projects. But the challenge remains huge: how can the market deploy the vast amount of capital that we need to drive the energy transition.
Hélène Rey: From the macro-economic point of view, it’s just as daunting.
Covid-19 gave us a glimpse of what’s at stake. In 2020 global emissions dropped by 6% during lockdowns. But the trade-off for the global economy was devastating, with negative growth of -3.5% and even worse for advanced economies.
To reach our target of 1.5 degrees, we would need to reduce emissions by at least 6% every year between now and 2030. This is out of our reach, unless we radically change the structure of our economies. Doing this would entail huge investment, as David says, and entail knock-on effects for businesses and investors that are hard to predict.
The thing is: we really don’t have much choice. In terms of economic costs, climate change is another black swan, just like the crisis of 2008. Black swans are extremely costly and disruptive events, which are hard to predict. For climate change, some economists are speaking of a green swan. The difference is that we already know it is coming and we can already say that costs will be huge. There is therefore a real imperative to start defining the incentives, policies and business responses to meet this huge challenge now; and to focus resources on the technologies we need to drive the energy transition. Things look pretty bad for us if we don’t act immediately.
DK: As green technologies have evolved over the last few years, there’s been a concomitant drop in their costs. We’re also seeing tremendous improvements in energy efficiency across areas like solar energy and offshore wind turbines; especially as capital investment in these technologies has picked up. One of the most promising and exciting technologies under development right now is hydrogen, which has multiple applications in shipping and air travel and beyond.
That said, we still need to see more collaboration between governments and private sector financial institutions to really unlock the potential of green technologies. One good example of this is the original subsidy regime for offshore wind in the UK, which included a Government backed Green Investment Bank that helped to crowd in private capital. More of these kinds of mechanisms are needed around the world; particularly in hydrogen where we want to see production scaling up and costs coming down.
There is a cause for cautious optimism in the upswing in energy efficiency driven by technology. That and the increasing flow of venture capital and alternative forms of funding into new energy businesses, as investors around the world look for “the next Amazon” in renewables.
HR: In Europe there are also some encouraging initiatives recently. The Next Generation EU recovery package has a significant amount of money earmarked for green projects, and there’s a collective desire to bring together the right minds and resources to pull off the next break-through in this space.
The challenge we face here is two-fold: there’s a need to change production technology but at the same time, we need to drive scalability and global transferability. It’s not just about pushing the frontiers in science; it’s also about ensuring that other countries – emerging economies and less developed ones in particular – can also benefit from green innovation. We need to see greater diffusion of new technologies all over the globe.
We also need to replace our legacy energy production – the so-called brown technologies. And the solution here is probably a price system or carbon tax. In the EU this is starting to happen, with the price of carbon rising recently to 60 Euros per ton. China has introduced a similar emission trading system, though prices remain low there with surging demand for energy. Nonetheless, increasing the cost of carbon systematically and predictably should have the effect of incentivising investment in renewables, as brown technologies provide lower and lower returns over time.
DK: I agree that rewards and penalties are a great means of incentivising behaviours. Though, the problem with the penalty is that you need governments to align and have a unified approach. Otherwise, you have the risk of organisations moving operations to lower carbon tax areas, creating market distortions and effectively slowing the transition.
HR: Yes, any differentiation in prices opens the door to carbon leakages and the delocalisation of production – a kind of brown dumping. Carbon adjustment mechanisms are needed at borders to ensure a level playing field. And we need everyone to be on board. Whatever policies and practices we enact in Europe, we still only account for 8% of all global emissions. We need everyone to pull their weight because frankly, we’re all in this together.
We need to find the mechanisms – carbon offset trading markets for instance – that will help create and sustain a truly globalised strategy.
DK: Well recently, we’re seeing the cost of debt increase and the knock-on effect of financial institutions making borrowing more expensive and less available to the big oil and gas companies, as the cost of capital has increased.
Traditionally big oil and gas producers would borrow to invest in new plants that have a lifespan of 30 to 40 years. With the cost of debt on the rise, banks have more doubts about these kinds of long-term commitments. And if you add in the increasing ubiquity of carbon tax and rising carbon costs, they become less and less attractive. The world is starting to change for these brown technology companies, and quite dramatically.
HR: Oil and gas plants are assets, and in today’s economic climate, assets face two types of risk. First, there’s the physical risk, much of it associated with climate change itself: things like drought or flooding. Then there’s the transition risk associated with the price of capital increasing, as well as the take-off in carbon tax, as David says. These risks have enormous implications for the value of assets like oil and gas plants. And banks are increasingly sensitive to their exposure, not only to these risks, but to correlated and interconnected risks in the insurance sector who have to underwrite these assets. Financial institutions, be they banks or insurers, have to grapple with a lot of complexity with these brown companies. And there’s often a dearth of really solid, granular data surrounding plants: where are they located exactly? We do not know enough about the physical risks they face.
Banks have real and justified concerns around the lack of mandatory disclosure too. There is no real transparency or standardization when it comes to companies having to disclose information about their CO2 emissions for instance.
DK: This is an area where the market is nonetheless driving some innovation. We’re beginning to see more and more third-party certification groups that can issue a rating for green-house gas emission – a kind of Standard & Poor set up in carbon footprints. Increasingly, commercial banks and other lenders are demanding to see a full audit of emissions before they approve credit. These benchmarks are moving more, as lenders are also open to public scrutiny and criticism: they don’t want to be seen as lending money to unscrupulous or polluting organisations.
Clearly, there are encouraging signs in the market. Although the challenges ahead remain enormous and there is a long way still to go.
HR: Yes, the window for action is more or less now. Our efforts to slow climate change need to happen as quickly as possible to ensure our goals are realistic or even remote possibilities.
DK: I think companies are going to have to make a decision about whether they will continue to support fossil fuels in the longer term without a concrete plan. My feeling is that organisations are going to be obliged to make a real plan about energy transition; and those that fail to come up with a convincing plan will be penalized in the minds of investors. I think the financial markets provide a market mechanism to penalize, and reward those who take the right decisions.
HR: The way the macroeconomic context is moving, it’s no longer an option to remain static in the corporate world. Relative prices are going to be changing. Climate change is advancing and technology is advancing to keep pace.
To stay ahead, you need to be thinking ahead and factoring in things like the rising price of carbon, new technologies changing the energy scene, and new incoming regulations that are hard to predict. The status quo is no longer a choice.
Read the article on the site of LBS.
Middle Eastern and North African countries, after decades of turmoil, are starting to come together to find solutions to regional issues.
The Middle East and North Africa have been political hotspots for the last 70 years. This was not limited to the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab conflicts. The interests of global and regional powers clashed there, with alliances often changing. New borders, carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the victors of World War I, led to the creation of artificial nations and the emergence of non-state political and military actors.
The region unfortunately allowed foreign actors to play a role in their interstate relations. This increased tensions between local powers, but also affected the internal affairs of these countries. It is significant that the agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear aspirations, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was only signed by Tehran and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China) as well as Germany. None of the neighboring countries or regional powers, like Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, were involved. The deal had important flaws, and did not demand that Iran halt its sponsoring of terrorist activities and its warmongering in Lebanon and Yemen. The JCPOA was then canceled by the Trump administration. Iran remained a major sponsor of terrorism in the region and beyond.
In other areas, diverting interests between global and regional powers led to wars, unrest, and diplomatic and economic conflicts. The main regional powers were Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. Turkey, a NATO member, maintained good relations with Israel until the mid-2000s but otherwise tended to not get involved in Middle Eastern politics.
In the 1960s, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser tried to play a leading role in the region. Cairo pushed for a socialist union of Arab countries, threatened Israel and caused unrest in Yemen, while still managing to remain unaligned throughout the Cold War.
At the time, Mohammad Reza Shah’s Iran played a stabilizing role – but this ended in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini took over and created the Islamic Republic. A bloodbath ensued during the brutal Iran-Iraq war. Chemical weapons were used, especially by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Iran was supported by the Soviets and Iraq had Washington’s tacit backing.
The West also carried out direct military interventions during the two Iraq wars and bombings in Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya.
The continuing threat posed by Tehran’s subversive activities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen is uniting the Arab countries.
With the start of the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011, a protest movement triggered by food price inflation, the cards were reshuffled. The military took over in Egypt to cast out a radical Islamist government led by the Muslim Brotherhood after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. He resigned under pressure from protesters, but especially from then U.S. President Barack Obama. In Libya, Qaddafi, a tyrant and sponsor of terrorism, was killed, and the civil war that followed is still unresolved a decade later. Opposing factions have various foreign sponsors. Meanwhile, Syria’s devastating civil war started as a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, combined with pressure from the U.S., Russia, Turkey and Europe. The rise of Islamic State (also known as ISIS or Daesh) complicated matters, and Kurdish fighters in both Iraq and Syria contributed to crushing the terrorist organization.
Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan – first as prime minister, then as president – Turkey started to play a more active role in the region, becoming a crucial actor in the conflict in neighboring Syria. Moreover, Kurdish terrorism caused problems for Ankara.
Relations between Turkey and Israel started to deteriorate some 15 years ago. Ankara adopted a more Islamic (although not radical) leaning and antagonized President El-Sisi’s Egypt. This affected the country’s relations with Saudi Arabia, which supports Mr. El-Sisi.
However, the area has begun to come together and is trying to find regional solutions. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are now important players. The continuing threat posed by Tehran’s subversive activities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen is uniting the Arab countries. The Abraham Accords agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, unofficially approved by Saudi Arabia, is a sign of this regional rapprochement.
Turkey’s relations with key countries are improving, not only with Israel but also with Saudi Arabia – as demonstrated by the fact that Ankara has now transferred the jurisdiction for procedures concerning the Jamal Khashoggi murder to Riyadh.
Hopefully, this trend will limit Iran’s harmful activities. Lifting sanctions without Tehran’s commitment to stop sponsoring terrorism would have negative consequences. In this context, it would be preferable if the JCPOA agreement in its proposed form was not renewed. This would also improve Israel’s security and create a more favorable environment to solve the Palestinian conflict.
Read the article on the site of GIS.
Israel’s outgoing air force chief Amikam Norkin said this month that Israel has lost its air supremacy over Lebanon after a drone was nearly shot down by Hezbollah a year ago. Tel Aviv has an understanding with Russia whereby the latter gives the former the freedom to operate in Syrian airspace and hit Iranian and Hezbollah targets, while at the same time Israel regularly violates Lebanese airspace to conduct reconnaissance operations. However, Norkin’s testimony shows that such operations are no longer effective, so what will Israel do next?
Israel is in a tough spot. The recent attacks in Tel Aviv show the limits of its attempts to “manage the conflict” with the Palestinians. What applies to Lebanon and Syria also applies to Palestine. Israel has been trying to keep the conflict under control and contain its symptoms rather than cure its causes. But this is not working.
The best remedy would be to solve the Palestinian issue by realizing a two-state solution. However, no Israeli leader has had the courage to take this step by making concessions and relinquishing the Zionist dream of acquiring Judea and Samaria. An outsider can see that the most pragmatic solution would be to divide historical Palestine into two states and live in peace. However, the Zionist ideology is based on the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. Hence, the concession has a larger significance than giving up land — it requires a major shake-up of the Israeli psyche.
It is unlikely that Naftali Bennett’s fractured and incoherent coalition government, which gathers a wide spectrum of political parties whose only common denominator was a desire to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, will make such a concession due to the major popular backlash it would likely provoke. While the Arab countries at last month’s Negev summit urged Israel to resume negotiations regarding a two-state solution, Bennett rebuffed their request, claiming that the current conditions are not suitable.
The Palestinians are insisting on an end to the occupation, which is not something the Israelis are yet ready to offer. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas does not want to repeat Yasser Arafat’s mistake. Arafat went to Oslo and promised his people a state and he ended up lingering in fruitless negotiations while his people remained under occupation with no viable state on the horizon.
Israel has recently suffered attacks in its main cities. Meanwhile, America’s return to the Iran nuclear deal is imminent. With it, Iran will be emboldened, but Tehran will try to prove to its domestic audience that it did not give up on its values, meaning it is unlikely to decrease its proxy activities in the region. As for the agreement between Israel and Russia, the war in Ukraine is putting it to the test.
It is today facing an increased internal threat, while it can also no longer keep Hezbollah and the Iranian militias in Lebanon and Syria under control.
Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib
Iran was against the decision to remove Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, while Israel supported it. Previously, Russia was trying to keep Iran contained in Syria and Israel’s airstrikes were serving this purpose, but now Russia needs Tehran more than ever. Will the understanding between Israel and Russia on Syria hold? On Saturday, Israel launched a daylight attack, which is unprecedented, as all its previous strikes were conducted at night. However, Russia can threaten to revoke the understanding to get some type of support from Tel Aviv.
Iran, on the other hand, which has improved bargaining power with Russia, is in a better position to sabotage such an understanding.
So Israel is today facing an increased internal threat, while it can also no longer keep Hezbollah and the Iranian militias in Lebanon and Syria under control. Therefore, what will it do? The Biden administration is not so focused on Israel. Unlike the Trump administration, it does not seem to be willing to use its capital with Arab countries to push them to normalize ties with Tel Aviv.
Israel is growing increasingly nervous about Hezbollah’s military capabilities. A preventive strike could be an option, but it is a difficult one. Last year’s Gaza war showed how public opinion is no longer in favor of Israel. Also, if Tel Aviv strikes to neutralize Hezbollah’s arsenal, the group will retaliate. Hence, it will incur huge damage before it can neutralize the pro-Iran group.
Israel is now in wait-and-see mode. It nervously awaits the signing of the nuclear deal and how Iran will act after that. No one is expecting Tehran to take it easy. On the contrary, all parties are assuming Iran will increase its activism. If so, what will Israel’s response be? Since its inception, Israel has resorted to military strikes whenever it has been faced with a threat. However, recently, with every strike, Israel has been slowly losing. Its enemies have been able to inflict more damage and it has been increasingly drawing criticism. It is unlikely that Israel’s Arab allies will support it if it strikes an Arab country.
Though the Negev summit took place to discuss creating a front to face Iran, this front will not materialize if Israel attacks Lebanon, even if that inflicts damage on Hezbollah. Who will the next casualty of Israeli insecurity be? Could it be Lebanon? Maybe, but again, if Israel takes this path, it will not be a walk in the park. It will be a hard and costly option to take.
Read the article on the site of Arab News.
CHRONIQUE – Même si le peuple ukrainien accepte un jour de renoncer à adhérer à l’Otan – ce qui est tout sauf certain -, le pays continuera à s’équiper d’armes occidentales.
La guerre déclenchée par Vladimir Poutine contre l’Ukraine dure depuis plus d’un mois et demi. Elle n’est donc pas la blitzkrieg qu’elle était censée être dans la tête des dirigeants russes. Dans le même intervalle de temps, au printemps 1940, l’Allemagne avait réussi à vaincre l’armée de la France et le corps expéditionnaire du Royaume-Uni, deux puissances qui avaient gagné la guerre vingt-deux ans plus tôt. Les Français avaient été défaits, mais ils s’étaient battus avec courage, perdant 60.000 soldats, morts au champ d’honneur. Les Britanniques avaient eu quant à eux 4500 tués sur le sol français.
Sanctions are an important and powerful weapon, and they are putting some pressure on the Kremlin. But unless the West employs them judiciously, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who appears to believe his paranoid propaganda and oversees the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, may conclude that his regime has nothing to lose.
MADRID – The gruesome scenes left behind after Russia’s withdrawal from Bucha, where Ukraine accuses Russian troops of torturing and slaughtering civilians, have intensified pressure on the West to provide more offensive weapons to Ukraine and for Europe to ban Russian energy imports. But beyond the legitimate question of Europe’s willingness to pay such a high price on Ukraine’s behalf lies the stark reality that sanctions are hardly a silver bullet.
Calls for sanctions began well before the invasion. When Russia was massing troops near Ukraine’s border, the Ukrainian government – and some American lawmakers – urged the United States and Europe to impose preemptive sanctions and offer Ukraine stronger security guarantees. But Western leaders demurred, arguing that sanctions would impede their ability to reach a diplomatic solution.
Read the entire article on Project Syndicate.
Le chef de la diplomatie européenne Josep Borrell a annoncé son intention de lancer la discussion sur un embargo pétrolier. Mais l’arrêt des achats de pétrole russe divise les 27.
Publié le
Josep Borrell a annoncé son intention de lancer lundi la discussion sur un embargo pétrolier, « mais une proposition formelle n’est pas sur la table », a reconnu vendredi un haut fonctionnaire européen. « L’unanimité est nécessaire pour l’adoption des sanctions. Or on voit bien les dépendances vis-à-vis de la Russie dans plusieurs Etats membres », a-t-il souligné.
L’Allemagne, l’Italie, l’Autriche et la Hongrie sont très dépendantes du gaz russe. « On ne va pas présenter quelque chose qui ne passera pas. Les propositions doivent être faites au moment opportun », a-t-il expliqué.
Depuis le début de la guerre en Ukraine fin février, le Kremlin a engrangé 27,3 milliards de dollars avec les achats de pétrole, gaz et charbon de l’UE, selon Velina Tchakarova, directrice de l’Institut autrichien pour l’Europe et la politique de sécurité (AIES).
L’UE a décrété un embargo sur les achats de charbon mais leur montant est très inférieur à ceux de gaz et pétrole.
Les ministres vont en revanche valider le déblocage de 500 millions d’euros supplémentaires pour financer et livrer de nouvelles armes à Kiev, selon plusieurs diplomates de l’UE.
« Les sanctions sont importantes, mais elles ne résoudront pas le problème dans le Donbass. La bataille dans le Donbass sera décisive pour l’issue de la guerre », a souligné samedi Josep Borrell.
La Russie bombarde l’Ukraine depuis la mer à partir de navires situés hors de portée des armes ukrainiennes et les forces de Kiev ont besoin « d’armes à longue portée et de davantage de véhicules blindés », a expliqué un haut responsable européen. La Slovaquie a annoncé vendredi avoir fourni à Kiev un système de défense anti-aérien russe S-300.
Lors de leur réunion, les ministres s’entretiendront avec le procureur de la Cour pénale internationale (CPI), Karim Khan, du soutien de l’UE aux enquêtes sur de possibles crimes de guerre en Ukraine.
Lire sur le site de L’Obs.
Rama touched down in Berlin on Sunday, where he took part in an official welcoming ceremony. His agenda for Monday includes meetings with the Mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, the Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Scholz.
Following the meeting with Scholz, a press conference will be held.
The Albanian premier is expected to ask for Scholz’s support amid Albania’s EU accession bid. Albania’s bid to join the bloc has been linked to its neighbour, North Macedonia. While both countries have, on paper, satisfied requirements, Bulgaria has vetoed the latter over historical and human rights issues.
“Albania cannot wait any longer for the two neighbours to resolve their quarrel. Our course in that direction will fully change,” Rama said on Thursday in Tirana
Meanwhile, the feeling in Brussels is that enlargement is dead and that Albania only got a unanimous vote to continue accession because they knew the Bulgarian veto against North Macedonia would stop progress in its tracks.
However, other sources say that following Ukraine’s bid to join the EU, Albania and North Macedonia will get the green light in June. An opinion on the accession of Ukraine, including whether the process can be sped up, is expected during the same month.
Sources say that a positive assessment for Ukraine could not be on the table unless Albania and North Macedonia progress.
Serbia and Montenegro are in the lead out of the Western Balkan six. But Montenegro’s accession process has stagnated somewhat, and while Serbia continues opening chapters, there is no real political will to join the EU.
Albania and North Macedonia are next, waiting to formally start talks, while Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina are yet to get candidate status.
After Scholz met the Austrian Chancellor in late March, he said, “We must take care to strengthen and support the neighbouring regions. Any further delay will make the Western Balkans more vulnerable and open to third-party influence.”
The chairman of the EU enlargement committee in the German Bundestag, Green Party politician Anton Hofreiter, told DW in an interview that he hopes the opening of negotiations will take place after the French presidential election. “I have the impression that the EU is also aware that the region and Europe will become more stable and stronger, with the membership of Albania and Northern Macedonia in the European Union,” he added.
Read th article on the site of ExitNews.
Alongside U.S. President Barack Obama’s attempt to renew the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a former military officer was tasked with reviving the Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Frederic C. Hof’s new book sheds light on Netanyahu and Assad’s reactions
Syrian President Bashar Assad and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on two separate occasions. Credit: Amos Ben Gershom and AFP
From 2009 through 2014, when Barack Obama was president of the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel, the Israeli-Arab peace process was centered around attempts to reach an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Two efforts, one led by Obama and the other by Secretary of State John Kerry, ended in failure and increased Israel-U.S. tensions.
A lesser known fact is that alongside these efforts, the Obama administration made a covert attempt to mediate between Israel and Syria. This mediation was cut short due to the civil war in Syria in March of 2011, but according to U.S. mediator Frederic C. Hof, it was on a promising track, with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Netanyahu both showing surprising willingness to engage in serious negotiations on an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement.
This mediation effort was the sixth attempt to settle the dispute between Israel and Syria. Between 1992 and 2011 Syria and Israel had complex relations, with ongoing attempts to settle the conflict and reach a peace accord alongside an armed struggle conducted mostly by proxy, with Syria supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, during that time Israel discovered a Syrian attempted, aided by North Korean, to build a nuclear reactor and produce nuclear weapons in it. In 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the Israel Air Force destroyed the reactor.
During these years the United States played an active role in attempts to settle the Israeli-Syrian conflict. In the early phases of this effort, the “American peace team” led the way. Syrian ruler Hafez Assad viewed the peace process with Israel not as a bilateral process, but a trilateral one, similar to that which produced peace between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s.
He was not solely interested in peace with Israel for its own sake. Assad, of course, wanted the Golan Heights returned, but no less than that, he wanted to establish new relations with the United States, to legitimize Syria in Washington’s eyes and to obtain U.S. economic aid. Therefore, even when Syria held direct talks with Israel, Assad insisted that American diplomats participate in them and maintain the tripartite nature of the process.
During the last decade of the previous century, and in the year 2000, President Clinton personally enlisted in the effort and met twice with Hafez Assad in an attempt to overcome the inherent difficulties in the Syrian-Israeli negotiations. The American peace team was composed mostly of experienced diplomats who began their careers under President George H.W. Bush, remaining in their positions under Clinton, with two of them – Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk – continuing under Obama as well.
The American peace team was the embodiment of what is known in Washington as the “revolving door,” through which diplomats and academics come and go between government, academia and think-tank posts. In the late 1990s, there was in a most interesting exception this tableau. A problematic figure of Lebanese descent, George Nader, who had been making the rounds since the 1980s between Washington, Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem, connected the Assad regime with the first Netanyahu administration, enlisting cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder for a mediation effort between Netanyahu and Assad. The effort, which began surprisingly well, eventually failed, leaving scars on both Damascus and Jerusalem. This effort revealed that Netanyahu was willing to make far-reaching territorial concessions in order to reach a deal with Damascus, and that direct contact with Assad, rather than through intermediaries, produces better results.
It was important to Israel to hold direct negotiations with Syria, unmediated by a third party, since Israel rightly viewed the very holding of direct talks as a sort of normalization – the very same reason that Hafez Assad and his successor and son Bashar sought to minimize direct contacts and preferred mediation. In 2008, when then-Prime Minister Olmert decided to renew the negotiations with Syria, he agreed to Turkish mediation (which like former efforts, began promisingly and ended in failure and in Turkish-Israeli tensions.)
In 2009, Frederic Hof entered the picture. He was enlisted as an adviser by Senator George Mitchell, who had been appointed by Obama as an envoy to the Middle East, to conduct the Israeli-Arab peace process. Mitchell assumed the task after a distinguished career in the Senate and an impressive peacemaking success in Ireland. He, like Obama, focused (unsuccessfully) during his mission on the Israeli-Palestinian track, and left the attempt to revive the Israeli-Syrian negotiations in the hands of his assistant, Hof. In his new book, “Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace,” he recounts his experience.
Hof was brought on by Mitchell after a career as an army officer and in the State Department; he served as the U.S. military attaché in Beirut. He gained expertise as well as a reputation as the leading expert at drawing the boundaries between Israel and Lebanon and between Israel and Syria (which became known as the June 4, 1967 lines). When Mitchell came to him with his request, Hof was heading a consulting firm – a typical track in Washington. Hof says that he lived in Syria as a student as part of an American-Syrian exchange program; since then, his dream was to help bring peace between Syria and Israel.
When Hof assumed his new position, he encountered two main obstacles. In the Obama White House and in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, there was not much enthusiasm for another attempt to forge peace between Israel and Syria. This was due to a well-known issue:
Syria was demanding – and already had been since the days of Hafez Assad – that the negotiations begin with a commitment by Israel to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights. Israel, meanwhile, refused to make such a promise before receiving concrete proof of Syria’s intention to achieve a full peace and to meet Israel’s security needs.
In 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin found a solution to this issue. He entrusted U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher with a conditional and hypothetical willingness for a complete withdrawal from the Golan in return for a sufficient package of peace and security. Various versions of this formula were used by prime ministers Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu (when Lauder was an envoy), Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, but this was not enough in the end, and Hof sought a different way to solve the issue.
Hof overcame the difficulty he encountered within the Obama administration by joining up with Dennis Ross. Hof and Ross are very different. Ross is an exceptionally creative diplomat, who knew how to make his way through the maze of a number of U.S. administrations and to navigate between Israelis and Arabs. He therefore played a central role in the peace process from its inception until 2011. Hof, meanwhile, went into his job in the administration with the outlook he gained as an army officer. He operated through orderly procedures and respected the hierarchy into which he was embedded. The contrast and combination between the two were fascinating and productive.
Ross made it clear to Hof that in order to succeed in his task, he had to earn the backing of the president and to meet with Netanyahu. Hof wondered how he could get to the president and meet with Netanyahu when he was subordinate to Mitchell. He wrote in his book that he had grown up in a traditional home and was then subjected to 20 years of structured life in the U.S. Army – “respect for authority was as natural as breathing.” Hof respected Mitchell and the hierarchical framework in which he found himself, but with Ross’ help he was also able to meet with Netanyahu and with Obama, and in the end he began the job of mediation between Netanyahu and Bashar Assad.
Most of Hof’s book is a description of his meetings with Assad and Netanyahu in early 2011, which were surprisingly successful. Hof and Ross overcame the issue of guarantees when they presented a U.S. working paper that included a reference to the June 4th lines. Surprisingly, the formulation worked for both Assad and Netanyahu. As opposed to previous efforts, the main point of the U.S. mediation was not the usual formula of “land for peace” but “land in return for strategic change.”
In other words, in exchange for a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, Israel was supposed to receive not only peace with Syria but also Syrian disengagement from Iran and Hezbollah. From the time of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the trilateral Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance had been seen by Israel as a grave strategic threat, and the formula presented by Hof and Ross was enough to convince Netanyahu to agree to enter serious negotiations based on it.
Hof describes in detail the reactions of Assad and Netanyahu to the U.S. plan. With proper caution, he does not claim that the effort was inevitably headed for success, and does not reject the possibility that one or both of the two parties could have jumped off the train before reaching the destination.
In any case, the effort was cut short due to the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in March 2011. As a result of the war Assad became an illegitimate ruler in the eyes of the world, including Israel, viewed as a war criminal who killed about half a million of his citizens and used chemical weapons against them, and the issue of the Israeli-Syrian agreement was removed from the agenda, at least for a substantial number of years.
With the conclusion of his mediation efforts, Hof remained in the Obama administration, became an ambassador, and together with the former ambassador in Damascus, Robert Ford, he coordinated U.S. policy in Syria. The two diplomats were burned by Obama’s policy, especially when in 2013 Obama decided at the last moment not to attack Syria after its massive use of chemical weapons against a civilian population, which he had described a year earlier as a “red line.”
Ironically, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a hand in stopping Obama from striking Syria, by promising that Damascus would eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile. Needless to say, this promise was only partially kept and Assad continued to use chemical weapons against the civilian population in the following years.
In 2015, Putin was encouraged by Obama’s hesitancy and intervened directly in the civil war in Syria. In cooperation with Iran, he tipped the balance in Assad’s favor. At present, when Putin is waging a cruel war with its neighbor, bombing civilian targets and destroying residential neighborhoods, it’s hard not to see the connection between the Russian intervention in Syria and the present crisis in Ukraine.
In any case, Hof, like Ambassador Ford, was disappointed by the Obama administration’s handling of Syria. Both resigned and became outspoken critics of Obama and his policy. This criticism is blatantly expressed in Hof’s book as well.
Read the article on the site of Haaretz.
In an exclusive interview with Hichem Ben Yaïche and Nicolas Bouchet, leading financier Tidjane Thiam, now executive chairman of the investment company Freedom Acquisition, relates his vision of Africa and his belief in building more on the human capital of the continent.
The situation of each of us is always the result of a will and of circumstances. Sometimes the will prevails over the circumstances and sometimes it is the opposite. My career began in the private sector, by choice. I wanted to get to know the business world in depth, hence my years in consulting.
After that, following the death of President Houphouët-Boigny at the end of 1993, I was called back to Côte d’Ivoire in 1994 by President Bédié to the Department of Control of Major Works (DCGTx). I left my career in the West to go and do that for a few very rewarding years. I learned a lot there and, I hope, also brought a little to the country. Circumstances again dictated that there was a coup in Côte d’Ivoire at the end of 1999.
The adventures associated with this event brought me back to the West and to consulting. In 2002, I was called by a headhunter who offered me a senior position in the City, London, with Aviva. I accepted it because it was really interesting and because Richard Harvey, for whom I was going to work, was someone quite extraordinary. A few years later, in 2007, another insurance group, Prudential, then called me and I became its managing director from 2009 to 2015, as later at Credit Suisse. All this is already more or less known.
I am now entering the second half of a career that began in 1986. After 36 years spent in both the public and private sectors, I am now in a moment of pause and reflection, but also of commitment since it coincided with the Covid-19 crisis, in which I had to play a role.
Today, I have a portfolio of activities that all fascinate me. I have commercial activities with my company Freedom Acquisition Corporation, where I raised 345 million dollars, the board of directors of Kering which owns brands like Gucci, Yves-Saint-Laurent, Boucheron, Balenciaga and of which I chair the audit committee. And more generally, I have a role of mentor since some entrepreneurs are sometimes kind enough to ask me for advice and I am always very happy to discuss with them.
I also have a number of activities more in the nature of public service missions. Thus, I am consulted on various issues by heads of state and governments. I help President Kagame and Rwanda to make Kigali an international financial center. I belong to a number of think tanks like the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington. I also carry out more specific missions such as my participation in 2020, at the request of David Malpass, head of the World Bank, in the committee which appointed the new director general of the IFC, Makhtar Diop. Sport is one of my passions and I have the great pleasure and honor of having been elected a member of the IOC (International Olympic Committee).
In short, I am not unemployed!
I was born in Africa. Genetically and culturally, I am African. I have never put my culture in my pocket, which has a cost that I assume. I have never deprived myself in my public statements of making abundant reference to my African culture. Everyone who has worked with me knows a number of Ivorian or Senegalese proverbs that have come into common use with them.
After the years spent in Côte d’Ivoire at the head of the DCGTx then the BNETD and the many projects carried out during this period, I have never stopped leading an action for Africa. I had the honour in 2003-2004 to be associated by Prime Minister Tony Blair with the Commission for Africa, which was really a very important moment. This work later led to the G8 at Gleneagles and all the debt forgiveness that drove African growth in the 2010s. I am proud to have been able to take part in this.
I had the pleasure, at Prudential, which was not present in Africa before my arrival, to create Prudential Africa. A football lover, I was watching the AFCON a few weeks ago and I saw the Prudential Africa commercials taking place there, which gave me a certain satisfaction. I couldn’t resist sending a message to Matt Lilley, whom I had appointed at the time boss of Prudential Africa, because the little discussion we had had in my office in London had an impact on reality. But I don’t want to multiply the examples…
One of the things that this experience teaches you for me is the permanence and importance of the human element in everything that we do.
I had a basic scientific training but I must admit that I have evolved a lot compared to my convictions at the start of my career. I believed then, like many people who have this type of training, in equations. My faith in equations has only diminished since then and my awareness of the importance of the human element in everything we do has only grown.
In the end, we can only act through men and women, their conviction, their motivation, their hearts and minds. Unfortunately, in classic Cartesian-type training, we are taught above all to speak to the mind – to the brain – and not at all to the heart, that is to say to the heart, to the guts. In the end, people only act and are moved by emotions, by the heart.
I love this well-known and almost overused anecdote of John Fitzgerald Kennedy visiting NASA when it was planning the mission to the Moon. Meeting a sweeper, he stops and asks him: “And you, what are you doing?” The street sweeper replies: “Mr. President, I am helping to put a man on the Moon!”
That sense of mission and vision is really, really important. Good for them, human beings are ultimately only motivated by such things. That’s what I learned.
To make the link with the importance of the human element, the answer belongs and can only belong to Africans themselves.
The challenges are many and real. What we Africans have in the face of these challenges is our intelligence, our capacities, our emotions, our determination and our convictions. It is the only material we have to work with.
Raw materials are good, but they are only worth if we are able, first, to extract them and, second, to manage them well. It always comes back to the human element and human capital. So you have to manage to combine three things.
The first is private initiative. For me, to trust someone is to trust the human race. Human beings, faced with a situation of pressure, are endowed by nature with the ability to rise, to be creative, to act. Rather than preaching, we must trust African men and women. In a nutshell, let the private sector, private initiative develop.
The second, closely linked to the first – and which is not possible without it – is to invest in this human capital. Which brings us to the issue of health and education. The two elements feed and reinforce each other.
For the third element, creating a favourable environment, it is important to make a distinction between the “hard” components and the components that I will call “soft”, in a way the hardware and the software. They must both be adequate. The “hard” environment is what we talk about every day and what I was doing in Côte d’Ivoire: roads, wells, bridges, airports, container terminals, thermal power stations, hydroelectric dams, solar panels… infrastructure in the broad sense. The “soft” is actually what matters most.
I include in the list of these “soft” elements fundamental things such as respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, the absence of corruption, the refusal of violence, etc. These elements, when present, provide a favourable framework for private initiative. If I had to sum up my thinking in one word, it is about culture. It’s the culture, what’s in people’s minds that guides their behaviour and ultimately it’s the behaviours that matter more, more than roads and bridges.
If it is necessary to acquire knowledge, to learn equations and to know how fluid mechanics works, in reality, the way you are going to organise your business, inside to be competitive, and outside outside to go and win in the markets, must deeply take into account what you are and reflect it. That is to say, take into account your culture.
We talked a lot at the beginning of the 21st century about soft power, which could be translated by influence, the fact that others seek to imitate you and are inspired by your example. All countries are engaged in a race for soft power. They realise, more and more, that this is the real power. Take, for example, what the United States has done in Silicon Valley through Facebook, Instagram, Netflix. They have changed the way we all live! The creation and then the success of Netflix had a direct impact on hundreds of millions of lives.
People settle in, binge and watch series. That is real influence. And we see that soft power today can slow down or even stop the advance of divisions and tanks…
We are moving towards a world where it is the intangibles that have the most value. If you look at the balance sheets of companies today, it is no longer the factories, the walls and the computers that make the bulk of their value. What matters more and more is what is called goodwill, i.e. the value of intangible or intangible assets of companies such as brands or intellectual property.
Yes, she has no choice! You have to participate, otherwise you will be progressively marginalised. We must not be mistaken in war. We rarely win the war with the techniques and technologies of the previous war. We must be aware today that we are all engaged, all countries on all continents, in a battle for innovation, for intellectual capital and for intangibles. This is what determines the value of an Apple or a Google. The latter has very few physical assets but is worth nearly $3 trillion thanks to the intelligence of employees that the group has been able to hire and motivate.
All of this may seem far removed from our African concerns. But I was recently talking to an entrepreneur I know in Silicon Valley and was surprised to learn that he has already made seven significant investments in Africa and the Middle East! It is developing pharmacies to distribute medicines to 400,000 registered patients in Ghana, and is also investing in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
Technology is to be seen as a lever that can allow us to win. States have long led efforts to foster African integration. At the same time, major progress is actually being made by the private sector with the motive of profit and economic success. I know seven or eight companies that are each already in about 15 African countries and allow money to be sent from one country to another in Africa in complete safety. This is economic integration achieved by people who have been well trained, for many, in Africa.
Africa is thus beginning to reap the dividends of the investment it has made in its human resources across the continent and in the diaspora. These women and men are putting everything they have learned at the service of the African economy. This is how we will win.
In itself, satisfaction is always to be fought and I remain eternally dissatisfied, not only about Africa. Dissatisfaction is one of the most powerful engines of evolution!
On the contrary, we must go faster than the others. If we are less advanced than the others, it is not by working less that we will manage to catch up with them and even less to exceed them.
That said, you need a healthy appreciation of things and know how to motivate without discouraging. No complacency, therefore, but we must also know how to appreciate, given the challenges faced by previous generations, the path that they have enabled Africa to travel and which remains important.
Donors remain an important actor in Africa. They play a useful role and we are lucky to have an African, Makhtar Diop, at the head of the IFC and Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgarian origin, at the head of the IMF. They both understand the dynamics I have just described and provide significant support to the continent. The European Union and other donors are not left out.
That said, there is such a disproportion today between the resources of public actors and those of private sector actors that the most important challenge for Africa in the years to come is to benefit from the masses of private capital available in the world. Some are counted in tens of billions of dollars and others in hundreds of billions.
The development we are currently seeing in Africa is ahead of my expectations and that makes me rather optimistic. Twenty years ago, I could not call an investor from Silicon Valley and hear him speak to me spontaneously about Africa. Today, when I call them, they no longer speak of Africa but of Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt. It means that they have come down to the country level, put us on the map and a fundamental step has been taken. Now, when they call me, it’s no longer to ask me whether to invest in Africa or not, but where to invest in Africa. They want to be enlightened on the dynamics of the countries. It’s very positive.
In the long run, the only real solution to debt is growth and that will come from the things I just told you about. To look at the debt is often to look at the symptom rather than the evil. Debt is not bad in itself if you have enough growth and pay it down. All the states that have taken off economically have gotten into debt at some point because they needed more capital than their own savings capacity.
The obsession must be economic growth. In this context, it is necessary at all costs to obtain better mobilisation of the domestic resources of African economies. The development of local financial institutions and in particular that of funded pension systems, given the youth of the population on the continent, is essential to finance and stimulate investment.
Economic growth is an imperative that is all the more important for Africa as population growth is very high there. This is a little less the case now, but back when there was 3.8% population growth in Côte d’Ivoire, every year the annual economic growth was less than 4%. We were backing up! It is still extraordinary when having 4% growth is a very good economic performance. This additional pressure in Africa is real but, as China has shown, it is possible to have explosive growth for a long time.
I don’t want to award good and bad points between countries. Things are happening that are working. In terms of opportunities, we must start with agriculture because one of the first economic opportunities is still to feed human beings, especially in the context of increasing urbanisation. You can see great dynamism throughout the agricultural sector.
African peasants sweat blood and water to produce an agricultural harvest in a very hostile environment where, very often, 40 to 60% of this harvest is destroyed by insects or rots on the edge of the field. We can see huge gains to be made all along the agricultural production chain. There are many companies that have been created in this field. For example, there are often tensions in West Africa between herders and farmers.
A young Ivorian entrepreneur makes mini-mills that allow the surplus of agricultural production to be transformed into animal feed. Suddenly, this company created a win-win situation. The cultivator’s harvest, which was rotting, is now valued. The herder who was always in conflict with him is happy because he can now feed his cattle. This is what I have in mind when I talk about innovation, human capital, creativity. This idea comes from an Ivorian engineer. He was in the region he knows and where he has friends. The combination of knowledge and local knowledge necessarily leads to innovations that improve things. Throughout agriculture, there are extraordinary opportunities. In town too.
In Egypt, there are companies that are developing a lot in local delivery. Financial services is another area where we know very well that there is a major problem with SME financing when it comes to small loans, in the order of $1,000 to $3,000. Many digital solutions are being put in place. In Nigeria, I have spoken to promoters who do referral-based lending and experience less than 1% loss. All of this is done digitally by taking advantage of the expansion of cell phones.
There are endless investment opportunities. One of the most interesting things about all these winning African companies is that they are expanding to 10, 14, 20 countries. There is a contagion of success when they manage to achieve something. This is done by osmosis, without major declarations or major conferences, but close to the ground.
No, I really prefer to stick, for now, to what I know. I’m quite busy as it is and I manage to talk to everyone and be listened to, which is an advantage. My goal right now is to have influence. For the rest, the future will tell.
Yes, I’m working on something. I believe that we must strive to continue a very African tradition, which consists of the older ones sharing their experience with the younger ones. I have learned a lot in my life from my readings and I hope to never stop until the day I leave the planet. Here, I am currently reading Homo Migrans [not yet translated into English – editor], an extraordinary and fascinating book by Jean-Paul Demoule, where he explains that we are all descendants of migrants. He gives a statistic that I did not know: throughout the ages and everywhere in the world, only 3% of human beings migrate; 97% of human beings die where they were born. This is a very long-term statistic.
I encourage anyone who has an experience to write to share it. For a long time, I was in action and told myself “Actions speak louder than words”. I arrive at a more nuanced position today, with perhaps a better balance between “action” and “words”…
It’s just a matter of circumstances. I think, if I had lived in the 19th century, it would have been America. The 20th century will have been largely, in its second half, the century of China. The scale of this transformation is unparalleled and unprecedented. Ezra Vogel, America’s foremost expert on China, describes in detail the transformation that Deng Xiaoping has achieved and says that never has one human being lifted so many human beings out of poverty. I think it’s true: 700 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. When I went to China for the first time in 1984, there was not enough to eat there. China had $259 billion in GDP for 1.2 billion people. This country is now creating $17 trillion. This transformation has extremely profound implications for everyone. No one in the world can think of being unaffected by such a major shift in the distribution of economic power on our planet.
We forget today that, in the 1970s, Asia was considered a vast disaster. We deplored the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the coups in the Philippines and Thailand. Many people then believed more in Africa than in Southeast Asia. Today is an ocean of prosperity. I had the chance to meet Lee Kuan Yew for a few hours that I will never forget. He told me, “Singapore’s goal is to spread prosperity.” At first there were only the four Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, exceptions in a sea of misery. Now look at Vietnam where I have been very often, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia. All are extraordinary.
The heavy trends that we designed together remain. I talked about intellectual capital. What got us out of the Covid crisis? The doctor who created BioNTech is the son of Turkish emigrants in Germany. The answer to this problem came out of a man’s brain. If there is one thing that the health crisis has vividly illustrated, it is the importance of intellectual capital and knowledge. We were all distraught, shutting ourselves up and hiding. This man, Uğur Şahin, and his wife, Özlem Türeci, liberated us.
Ask yourself, whenever a child does not go to school, where we would be if Mr. Uğur Şahin had not gone to school. Every time a child is out of school, you have to ask yourself this question. We may be cutting off an arm from humanity. This is why this question of investing in men, women and children is at the heart of everything. We can only get out of this. Whether it’s Covid or Ukraine, at the end of the day, it’s all about men and women.
There is, through what you say, a pressing appeal to this civilisation of humanism. But as we can see, today there is a war that is devastating a country.
There will always be tension. What I am saying is a call to put the long term before the short term. We have a natural propensity, nature made us like that, to do the opposite. This transition will only happen with a great conscious and deliberate effort at all times. It’s in everyone’s interest to raise children even if every dollar put into a child’s education doesn’t go to consumer spending, buying a TV or buying a steak. You have to deprive yourself to invest for the long term.
You can’t be me and not be optimistic! My mother was illiterate and never went to school. I could have been illiterate too. I was put in school. I was able, by the grace of circumstances and of God, to manage two of the biggest companies in the world. And I was born in Abidjan! I am not an emigrant born in Paris. I passed my Baccalaureate at the Lycée Classique in Abidjan. And I got to do what I could do.
I’m not saying this out of false modesty, but it’s important that everyone understands that I’m not exceptional. There are many people like me in Africa. Every time I meet Westerners, Europeans and even you who give me all these compliments, I want to tell them that I am not unique. I do not have the ambition to be the exceptional “token black”. I think there are many Africans as talented if not more talented than me. They simply do not have the opportunity to express themselves and have not had the opportunity to access knowledge and express their talent. Yes, I am optimistic because I think any African of my generation can tell a story similar to mine. I think 99% of Africans have illiterate grandparents, like my mother was. My mother was born in 1931. Many Africans born in the 1930s did not go to school. We are all descendants of these generations. Look at how far we’ve come since on all fronts!
This is what determines my optimism, along with my love of my culture, which is never to the detriment of other cultures. Africa has a lot to bring to the world. What would music be without our input? What do people listen to, everyday, everywhere? In Beijing, in Rangoon, I hear our music. I hear the voice of Africa speaking everywhere. So why be shy and complexed? You have to take responsibility.
I say it, you can only succeed by being yourself. You have to be yourself, have confidence, set a goal and not give in to short-term temptations. We must put the long term before the short term and I am sure that, if not this generation, the following generations will see an Africa that the world will seek to imitate rather than teach it lessons.
The challenges are many and real. What we Africans have in the face of these challenges is our intelligence, our capacities, our emotions, our determination and our convictions. It is the only material we have to work with. This question of investing in men, women and children is at the heart of everything. We can only get out of this.
Read the article on the site of New African.
The U.S. Federal Reserve will have a difficult job ahead trying to cool the hottest inflation in four decades without triggering a recession, a former International Monetary Fund chief economist said.
“I’m not as optimistic as most people — I still think it’s going to be very, very tough,” Olivier Blanchard, now a fellow at the Peterson Institute, said Thursday in an interview with Lisa Abramowicz and Tom Keene on Bloomberg. “The Fed is going to have a hard time slowing down the machine. It has to admit that it has to stall the machine a lot and we don’t want a recession.”
On Wednesday, minutes of the Fed’s March meeting showed policy makers signaled they will reduce the central bank’s massive bond holdings at a maximum pace of $95 billion a month as part of their plan to curb inflation.
The minutes also show that many of them viewed one or more half-point increases as possibly appropriate going forward to cool off prices.
Watch the interview on the site of Bloomberg.
La découverte du massacre de Boutcha en Ukraine a suscité l’indignation dans le monde entier. De nombreux responsables politiques occidentaux appellent à ce que la justice internationale soit saisie.
Euronews s’est entretenu avec Didier Reynders, le Commissaire européen à la Justice qui a évoqué la nécessité de récolter les preuves sur le terrain pour juger les responsables de ces crimes.
“Le premier objectif est de collecter les preuves, de les préserver et de donner suffisamment de matériel aux procureurs ukrainiens, européens et à ceux de la Cour pénale internationale qui a la compétence universelle d’organiser non seulement l’enquête, mais aussi de poursuivre les responsables de ces crimes”, explique Didier Reynders.
Pour le commissaire européen, il y a déjà des preuves évidentes de crimes de guerre commise sur le territoire ukrainien :
“Nous avons relevé des preuves très évidentes de crimes de guerre à Boutcha et dans d’autres villes. Mais pour aller plus loin, nous devons recueillir toutes les preuves possibles. Il peut s’agir de vidéos, de témoignages et de tous types de preuves possibles. Nous sommes tous choqués par les images, mais le délai de la justice est assez long, c’est pourquoi nous devons recueillir ces preuves pour entamer des poursuites et organiser un procès.”
Nouvelle aide militaire à l’Ukraine, renforcement des sanctions contre la Russie: les Occidentaux durcissent mercredi leurs positions après la récente découverte de nombreux cadavres à Boutcha.
L’Union européenne a de son côté promis de nouvelles sanctions “cette semaine” contre la Russie. La Commission européenne a proposé que les Vingt-Sept cessent leurs achats de charbon russe, qui représentent 45% des importations de l’UE, et qu’ils ferment leurs ports aux bateaux opérés par des Russes.
Le président ukrainien Volodymyr Zelensky réclamait ces derniers jours des sanctions alourdies et la mise de la Russie au ban de la communauté internationale.
Moscou rejette toute accusation d’exactions, accusant les autorités ukrainiennes de préparer des “mises en scène” de civils tués dans plusieurs villes pour faire condamner le Kremlin.
Lire l’article sur le site de Euronews.
Au moins 50 personnes, dont cinq enfants, ont été tuées par des roquettes visant la gare de cette ville de l’est du pays, selon un nouveau bilan. De nombreuses personnes attendaient le train pour fuir la région, sur laquelle se concentrent désormais les forces armées russes. L’UE « condamne fermement » cette attaque.
Par Les Echos
Alors que de nombreux témoignages font état de massacres commis par les troupes russes avant leur retrait de la région de Kiev , l’Union européenne a adopté, ce vendredi, de nouvelles sanctions contre la Russie. Côté diplomatie, l’Assemblée générale de l’ONU a suspendu, jeudi, la Russie du Conseil des droits de l’Homme pour ses atteintes « flagrantes et systématiques » aux droits humains. La présidente de la Commission européenne, Ursula von der Leyen, est arrivée ce vendredi à Kiev. Elle est accompagnée du chef de la diplomatie de l’UE, Josep Borrell.
Sur le terrain, une nouvelle frappe russe a fait 50 morts ce vendredi dans la ville de Kramatorsk, dans l’est de l’Ukraine. La roquette a frappé une gare bondée où étaient massés des civils cherchant à fuir la ville. Les autorités ukrainiennes redoutent par ailleurs une « attaque massive » dans la région de Louhansk, dans l’est du pays. Les Etats-Unis, eux, s’attendent à ce que le conflit dure « des mois ou plus ».
CAIRO (AP) – Each day brings new financial burdens for Ikhlas Zakaria, a single mother of six who sells cups of tea at a roadside stand in a provincial town in Sudan. Prices for basic goods have skyrocketed, and at times she can only provide one meal a day for her children.
The cost of the water she boils for tea has doubled. Two of her children dropped out of school a few months ago to work in the fields, but their earnings are shrinking as dry spells hurt harvests.
“The situation has become impossible,” said Zakaria who lives in the war-ravaged Darfur region and whose husband left several years ago.
Across Sudan, living conditions rapidly deteriorated since an October military coup sent an already fragile economy into free-fall. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and currency devaluations have compounded the economic pain.
The October 25 military takeover upended Sudan’s transition to democratic rule after three decades of repression and international isolation under autocratic President Omar al-Bashir. The African nation has been on a fragile path to democracy since a popular uprising forced the military to remove al-Bashir and his extremist government in April 2019.
The coup also stalled two years of efforts by the deposed government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok to overhaul the economy with billions of dollars in loans and aid from major Western governments and international financial institutions. Such support was suspended after the coup.
The previous government also floated its currency to stop black market trading.
“The economy has been shrinking since the revaluation and this has been exacerbated after the coup,” said Sabna Imam, a Sudanese economics researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
But a more recent devaluation pushed prices higher: In March, the Sudanese pound slipped further, at one point trading at 800 to the dollar. It recovered some value but by then the damage was already done.
It triggered dramatic price increases for bread, fuel, electricity, medicine, healthcare and public transportation. In February, inflation reached nearly 260 per cent, according to the country’s census agency.
United Nations (UN) envoy to Sudan Volker Perthes warned that the country is now at risk of missing critical World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) deadlines and the prospect of some USD50 billion in debt relief is no longer secure.
“The combined effects of conflict, economic crisis and poor harvests will likely double the number of people facing acute hunger to about 18 million people by the end of this year,” he told the UN Security Council.
Many of Sudan’s over 45 million people are already living in poverty.
In Nyala, West Darfur’s provincial capital, where Zakaria lives, the price of sugar and petrol is twice what it was weeks ago. To make ends meet, Zakaria raised the price of a cup of tea by 50 per cent. Some of her customers can’t afford that now.
In the capital of Khartoum, relentless anti-coup protests have paralysed the city as protesters barricade streets to pressure the generals. With the latest bout of inflation, people were forced to cut their consumption by half, according to Ahmed al-Tayeb, who sells groceries in one of the city’s main markets.
He said he’s seen significant shortages in basic goods partly because of the closure of main highways linking the capital to Red Sea ports and the Egyptian border to the north.
Two UN agencies – the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – are warning that the worst is yet to come.
The FAO said 5.6 million people are affected by the dry spells in addition to the 9.8 million people who are food insecure due to the economic crisis. It said this season’s rain level in most provinces is less than normal, with lengthy dry spells expected into the summer.
The two agencies said recent bouts of violence in the Darfur and Kordofan regions have damaged farms and left many jobless.
“In Sudan, we are currently sailing into the perfect storm,” the WFP’s head of programme in the country Carl Paulson said. He said a number of factors are to blame, most recently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The invasion has driven up prices of fuel and food worldwide, but this is a bigger issue for poor countries in Africa and the Middle East, which depend heavily on imports to feed growing populations. Russia and Ukraine are the source of 87 per cent of Sudan’s imported wheat.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said over USD1.9 billion is needed in 2022 to provide assistance and protection to 14.3 million people in Sudan.
Sudan has for years struggled with an array of economic woes. The country was plunged into an economic crisis when the oil-rich south seceded in 2011 after decades of war, taking with it more than half of public revenues and 95 per cent of exports.
Sudan was also an international pariah after it was placed on the United States’ (US) list of state sponsors of terror early in the 1990s. This largely excluded the country from the global economy and prevented it from receiving loans from international institutions like the IMF.
Former US President Donald Trump removed Sudan from the blacklist after the transitional government agreed to pay USD335 million in compensation for victims of attacks carried out by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network while the terror leader was living in Sudan.
Imam, the economic researcher, said Sudan had been expecting USD700 million in the 2022 budget in foreign loans and aid to ease the burden of austerity measures, including the currency flotation and slashing of subsidies for bread and fuel.
But with suspension of such aid, the military-led government has increased taxes and other fees by 145 per cent.
“This adds to people’s sufferings,” she said.
Read the article on the site of Borneo Bulletin.
DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
In a terrible war, you can kind of forget that millions of Ukrainians are still working their normal jobs. That’s especially true in the majority of Ukraine, which is not under Russian occupation. In between curfews and air raid sirens, many Ukrainians are still buying coffees from cafes. They’re still paying their phone and electricity bills. And to do that, they’re using their banks.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
And maybe surprisingly, Ukraine has managed to avoid a financial collapse despite being pummeled by Russian bombs. That’s because there’s been this mammoth effort to keep the banking system running during this war. To keep the money flowing requires radical actions from the top at Ukraine Central Bank all the way through to the worker who is loading up the ATMs with cash. And how Ukraine has managed this is by following the playbook from really any financial disaster.
This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I’m Adrian Ma.
WOODS: And I’m Darian Woods. Today on the show, an international economist tells us four steps to keep your banks running during a crisis. And a Ukrainian banker tells us how that’s playing out on the ground while trying to keep his staff safe.
SERHII NAUMOV: I will not tell you many details. We cannot openly say many things.
WOODS: What we did learn after the break.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MA: To find out how Ukraine is keeping its banking system afloat, we spoke to Nicolas Veron. He’s with the think tanks Bruegel and the Peterson Institute.
NICOLAS VERON: There’s been a lot of surprises, I think, on all fronts since the war started. So there is – there’s much to be humble about.
WOODS: And one surprise was in Ukraine’s banking system. Ukraine is a fairly new democracy, and it’s been dogged by these episodes of really high inflation. Several years ago, the country did reform its monetary system and it got inflation under control. But then Russian forces, a few months ago, started building up along the Ukrainian border. So you can imagine, you know, on top of how dangerous the situation was, financially, Ukrainians would have been feeling a little on edge and ready to take their money out of the bank.
VERON: It is completely rational at an individual point of view. It’s also destabilizing at the collective point of view. So that’s what economists or game theorists call a collective action problem.
MA: A collective action problem. What’s right for each individual person is terrible for the economy at large. And in this case, that means a lot of people converting their savings into dollars and euros from the local Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia. Which is, you know, understandable because some people might be afraid of the currency collapsing.
WOODS: Yeah, the hryvnia had been getting less and less valuable in the last several months in the lead up to the war. Also, all that demand for cash withdrawals is a really big problem for banks. So when you have a bank account, it has – I don’t know – $5,000 in it, the bank doesn’t actually have those $5,000 in bills in its vault. It’s already lending most of your money out.
VERON: Kind of a stampede, a collective dynamic that would become completely uncontrollable and highly destabilizing. And so to avoid the stampede, you say just, you know, people cannot move.
MA: And so the central bank is going to try and essentially stem the flow of money out of the country. This is the first of four actions a central bank can take in a crisis, which we’re going to call a freeze-frame. It’s like hitting the pause button on a video game. It gives a central bank time to scramble, get its house in order and temporarily try and stop a panic from spiraling out of control. And the way Ukraine’s central bank did that within hours of the Russian invasion was, one, by fixing the exchange rate and also by using these things called capital controls.
WOODS: Capital controls meant most people couldn’t convert hryvnias to dollars or euros. You weren’t even allowed to send money to your PayPal account. And fixing the exchange rate meant that the few transactions that were allowed, the government made these specific exchange rates that were frozen in time that couldn’t change with any market forces.
VERON: And that’s what had been discovered by the refugees, especially, who came to Europe with, you know, banknotes, stashes of hryvnia but have found it very difficult to exchange them for euros or dollars.
MA: Refugees not being able to convert much of their savings into local currency is one of the reasons capital controls cannot last forever. They start to create other problems. And just like with a paused video game, eventually, you’re going to want to restart. And so in the meantime, the central bank needs to bolster the banking system. And that’s action No. 2 – phone a friend.
WOODS: Specifically, Poland – on the same day of the invasion, Ukraine signed an agreement with Poland saying that they could swap about a billion dollars’ worth of Ukrainian hryvnia for the Polish currency at an agreed rate. And that is a huge help because it allows Ukraine to pay other countries in a more stable currency.
MA: The other friend was the International Monetary Fund. At its heart, it’s a bank for countries in financial trouble. The IMF gave Ukraine a no-strings-attached $1.4 billion loan in early March.
VERON: That was disbursed immediately to help the Ukrainian government with their urgent spending needs that the IMF very euphemistically puts it.
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WOODS: Some of those urgent needs were part of the third step that can be used to stem a financial crisis. Step 3 – load them up; lend banks a lot of money for any withdrawals they need. The central bank said it would loan banks an unlimited amount of hryvnia, Ukrainian cash, whenever people wanted to withdraw it. And by announcing this policy that Ukraine’s banks would have a way to make good on any cash needs, this was a way to calm everybody down and avoid a bank run.
MA: But to convince everyone the cash will actually be there when you need it, you need the help of the retail banks. And that’s step No. 4 – cash out.
NAUMOV: It is really difficult to deliver cash.
WOODS: This is Serhii Naumov, the CEO of the Ukraine’s second largest bank, Oschadbank.
NAUMOV: On the road, you will for sure be under fire. This is very dangerous.
MA: When we spoke to Serhii, he was in a home office in the western part of Ukraine with a blue and gold Ukrainian flag pinned behind him on the wall.
WOODS: Serhii’s staff have come up with all kinds of ways to keep safe when delivering cash to ATMs and bank branches. And Serhii didn’t want to give exact details about how his staff might be finding safer times or safer routes to travel or maybe even using different vehicles. But he did say this.
NAUMOV: Our people there show that they are really brave. In some cases (laughter), they do things like a hero, trying to transfer cash if it is not possible, even by using the – some rivers stopped the boat (ph) – in order to bring money to allow people to get payments.
MA: They used a boat to cross the river because the bridge had been bombed by Russian forces. I mean, that’s pretty impressive.
WOODS: Yeah, that’s thinking on your feet. It’s pretty amazing.
MA: Yeah, yeah. But ultimately, Serhii says he has an even bigger worry than getting cash to banks. He’s worried about his staff. In some towns, he says, his bank has started to evacuate employees, but they haven’t been able to get everyone out.
NAUMOV: Sometimes people, they don’t want even leave in some cases. And they are still working to the final end, you know?
WOODS: Yeah. I mean, it is a devastating situation at the moment. I mean, how is that for you personally?
NAUMOV: I mean, who is prepared for such this scale of war? But together with team, with people, with support, I mean, we are working. We are working, and it is not easy, but this is our reality. We have to work.
MA: So far, Ukraine has not faced financial freefall, even while fighting this devastating war. This is the big surprise Nicolas was talking about.
VERON: We’re discovering the reality of this commitment of Ukrainians to their national idea, which takes many form on the battlefront, but also in the financial world.
WOODS: And while the future is anyone’s guess, the country’s financial resilience, at least for now, is a testament to the fast action from officials at Ukraine’s central bank, from Serhii at Oschadbank and from Serhii’s delivery drivers improvising a cash delivery system along a river somewhere in Ukraine.
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WOODS: We want to thank Joel Wasserman. He’s an English teacher in Ukraine who helped connect us with Serhii. And we also want to say hi to our students, INDICATOR listeners Anna M. (ph), Anna K. (ph), Alena (ph), Alexy (ph) and Serhii. We’re wishing you all the best.
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MA: This show was produced by Jamila Huxtable and Nikki Ouellet with engineering by Isaac Rodrigues. It was fact-checked by Corey Bridges. Viet Le is our senior producer. Kate Concannon edits the show. And THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.
Listen to the podcast on the site of NPR.
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Armed conflict between the world’s two superpowers, while not yet inevitable, has become a real possibility. The 2020s will be the decade of living dangerously
As images of destruction and death emerge from Ukraine, and refugees flee the country in their millions, the world’s attention is rightly focused on the horror of what many once thought an impossibility in the 21st century: a large-scale modern war in Europe. In this grim moment, however, it is all the more important to think through and coldly reassess the dangers presented by other potential conflicts that could be sparked by growing geopolitical tensions. The most significant among these is the risk of a war between the United States and China. The salutary lesson of our time is that this scenario is no longer unthinkable.
The 2020s now loom as a decisive decade, as the balance of power between the US and China shifts. Strategists of both countries know this. For policymakers in Beijing and Washington, as well as in other capitals, the 2020s will be the decade of living dangerously. Should these two giants find a way to coexist without betraying their core interests, the world will be better for it. Should they fail, down the other path lies the possibility of a war many times more destructive than what we are seeing in Ukraine today – and, as in 1914, one that will rewrite the future in ways we can barely imagine.
Armed conflict between China and the US in the next decade, while not yet probable, has become a real possibility. In part, this is because the balance of power between the two countries is changing rapidly. In part it is because, back in 2014, Xi Jinping changed China’s grand strategy from an essentially defensive posture to a more activist policy that seeks to advance Chinese interests across the world. It is also because the US has, in response, embraced an entirely new China strategy since 2017, in what the Trump and Biden administrations have called a new age of strategic competition. These factors combined have put China and the US on a collision course in the decade ahead.
We have arrived at a point in the long evolution of the US-China relationship when serious analysts and commentators increasingly assume that some form of crisis, conflict or even war is inevitable. This thinking is dangerous. The advantage of diplomatic history – if we study it seriously – is that the risk of talking ourselves into a crisis is real. The discourse of inevitability takes hold, mutual demonisation increases, and the public policy response, ever so subtly, moves from war prevention to war preparation. The sleepwalking of the nations of Europe into war in 1914 should remain a salutary lesson for us all.
In my view, there is nothing inevitable about war. We are not captive to some deep, imaginary, irreversible forces of history. Our best chance of avoiding war is to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking and to plan for a world where the US and China are able to competitively coexist, even if in a state of continuing rivalry reinforced by mutual deterrence. A world where political leaders are empowered to preside over a competitive race rather than resorting to armed conflict.
Indeed, if we can preserve peace in the decade ahead, political circumstances may eventually change, and strategic thought may evolve in the face of broader planetary challenges. It may then be possible for leaders to imagine a different way of thinking (the Chinese term is siwei) that prioritises collaboration over conflict, in order to meet the existential global challenges confronting us all. But to do that, we must first get through the current decade without destroying each other.
Ihave been a student of China since I was 18, beginning with my undergraduate degree at the Australian National University, where I majored in Mandarin Chinese and Chinese history. I have lived and worked in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei through different diplomatic postings, and have developed many friendships across greater China. I have travelled back to China and Taiwan regularly in the past 40 years, including in my role as prime minister of Australia, personally meeting with Xi Jinping and other senior Chinese leaders. I admire China’s classical civilisation, including its remarkable philosophical, literary and artistic traditions, as well as the economic achievements of the post-Mao era in lifting a quarter of humanity out of poverty.
At the same time, I have been deeply critical of Mao’s depredations of the country during the Great Leap Forward of 1958, which left 30 million dead from starvation; the Cultural Revolution, which led to millions more deaths and the destruction of priceless cultural heritage; and human rights abuses, which continue to this day. I am still haunted by the thousands of young faces gathered in Tiananmen Square in late May 1989. I spent the better part of a week walking and talking among them – before the tanks moved in on 4 June. I have simply read and seen too much over the years to politely brush it all under the carpet.
That’s why I could not avoid the whole question of human rights when, in 2008, I returned to Beijing as Australia’s prime minister on my inaugural visit. On the first day I delivered a public lecture in Chinese at Peking University, where I argued that the best classical ideals of friendship within the Chinese tradition – the concept of zhengyou – meant that friends could candidly speak to each other without rupturing the relationship. With those ideals in mind, I raised human rights abuses in Tibet in the middle of my speech.
The Chinese foreign ministry went nuts. So, too, did the more supine members of the Australian political class, business community and media, who did what they always do and asked: “How could you upset our Chinese hosts by mentioning the unmentionable?” The answer was straightforward: because it happened to be the truth, and to ignore it was to ignore part of the complex reality of any country’s relationship with the People’s Republic.
Just as I have lived in China, I’ve also lived in the US, and have a deep affection for the country and its people. I am intimately aware of the differences between the two countries, but I’ve also seen the great cultural values they have in common – the love of family, the importance that Chinese and Americans attach to the education of their children, and their vibrant entrepreneurial cultures driven by aspiration and hard work.
No approach to understanding US-China relations is free from intellectual and cultural prejudice. For all my education in Chinese history and thought, I am inescapably and unapologetically a creature of the west. I therefore belong to its philosophical, religious and cultural traditions. The country I served as both prime minister and foreign minister has been an ally of the US for more than 100 years, and actively supports the continuation of the liberal international order built by the US out of the ashes of the second world war. At the same time, I have never accepted the view that an alliance with the US mandates automatic compliance with every element of American policy. Despite pressure from Washington, my political party, the Australian Labor party, opposed both the Vietnam war and the invasion of Iraq. Nor am I complacent about the failings of American domestic politics and the unsustainable economic inequalities that we find increasing across American society.
The judgment I bring to bear on US-China relations also reflects my personal loathing for jingoistic nationalism, which, regrettably, has become an increasingly prominent feature of Chinese and American public life. This may be emotionally satisfying to some and politically useful for others, but it brings about no good whatsoever. Above all, when it comes to international relations, nationalism is a very dangerous thing indeed.
The current state of US-China relations is the product of a long, contested history. What emerges across the centuries is a recurring theme of mutual non-comprehension and suspicion, often followed by periods of exaggerated hopes and expectations that then collapse in the face of differing political and strategic imperatives. Over the past 150 years, each side has blamed the other for the relationship’s failings.
In its narrowest conception, the modern relationship between China and the US has relied on common economic self-interest. At other times, this has been supported by a sense of shared goals in the face of a common enemy – at first the Soviet Union and, after 9/11, to a much more limited extent, militant Islamism. More recently, China and the US have developed shared concerns about global financial stability and the impacts of climate breakdown. Human rights have always remained an underlying point of friction. Despite occasional flirtations by the Chinese Communist party (CCP) with various forms of political liberalisation, there has been, at best, a sullen tolerance for each other’s political systems. For a long time, these various pillars – economic, geostrategic and multilateral – combined to support the relationship in a way that’s been relatively robust. But one by one, over the last decade, each pillar cracked.
Most Americans, including educated elites, struggle to understand how politics works in the People’s Republic of China. And the lack of American familiarity with the Chinese cultural canon, its logographic language, its ancient ethical concepts and its contemporary communist leadership can cause Americans to feel uncertain and distrustful about this newly emerged rival for the mantle of global leadership.
This chasm of distrust has been growing for many years. Washington no longer believes in China’s self-proclaimed “peaceful rise”. The US national security establishment, in particular, now holds the view that the CCP has never had any compunction about deceiving its political or strategic adversaries. It sees such language as little more than a diplomatic ruse, while China spreads its influence, backed by military power, throughout the world. It points to island reclamation in the South China Sea, the building of Chinese naval bases around the Indian Ocean, and Chinese cyber-attacks on the US government as evidence of the reality of Chinese aggression.
Each side points to the other as the guilty party. Beijing does not buy Washington’s claims that it has no interest in “containing” China’s rise. As evidence, China points to increased arms sales by the US to Taiwan despite repeated American promises to reduce these, the trade war that Beijing sees as a concerted effort to cripple its economy, and the American campaign against Huawei, which it sees as an effort to stymie China’s technological advance. Beijing reads Washington’s insistence on freedom of navigation for itself and its allies in the South China Sea as hostile interference in Chinese sovereign waters.
In Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, the ancient Greek historian concluded that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”. Taking this as his starting point, the Harvard professor of government, Graham Allison, has developed the notion of the Thucydides Trap. This, he explains, is “the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power”. According to Allison’s model, based on his examination of multiple historical case studies, where this dynamic is present, war is more likely than not.
In many respects, many elements of Thucydides’s Trap are already present in the US-China relationship of today. It is relatively easy to envisage a series of events that mutates into a sort of cold war 2.0 between the US and China, which, in turn, runs the risk of triggering a hot one. For example, hackers could disable the other side’s infrastructure, from pipelines and electric grids to air traffic control systems, with potentially deadly results. More conventional military exchanges are also within the realm of the possible. The US has Asian allies it has sworn to protect, and China’s ambitions push up against those alliances. From Taiwan to the South China Sea and the Philippines to the East China Sea and Japan, China is increasingly testing the limits of US defence commitments.
While Beijing’s chief aim for the modernisation and expansion of its military has been to prepare for future Taiwan contingencies, China’s growing military, naval, air and intelligence capabilities represent, in the American view, a much broader challenge to US military predominance across the wider Indo-Pacific region and beyond.
Of greatest concern to the US is the rapid expansion and modernisation of the Chinese navy and its growing submarine capabilities, as well as China’s development, for the first time in its history, of a blue-water fleet with force-projection capabilities beyond its coastal waters. This has enabled China to expand its reach across the Indian Ocean, enhanced by a string of available ports provided by its friends and partners across south-east Asia, south Asia and all the way to east Africa and Djibouti in the Red Sea. Added to this is a wider pattern of military and naval collaboration with Russia, including recent joint land-and-sea exercises in the Russian far east, the Mediterranean and the Baltic. These have caused American military thinkers to conclude that Chinese strategists have much wider ambitions than just the Taiwan Strait.
Changes in the balance of power are one part of the story. The other is the changing character of China’s leadership. Not since Mao has China had a leader as powerful as it has right now. Xi’s influence permeates every level of party and state. He has acquired power in a way that has been politically astute and brutal. To take but one example, the anticorruption campaign he has wielded across the party has helped “clean up” the country’s almost industrial levels of corruption. It has also enabled him to “clean out” – via expulsion from the party and sentences to life imprisonment – nearly all the rivals who might otherwise have threatened his supreme authority.
For Americans who imagined that as China adopted a free market economy it would one day become a liberal democracy, China’s new leadership represents a radical departure. As Washington sees it, Xi abandoned any pretence of China ever transforming itself into a more open, tolerant, liberal democratic state. He has also adopted a model of authoritarian capitalism that is less market-driven and prioritises state enterprises over the private sector, and he is tightening the party’s control over business. Even as Beijing appears determined to rewrite the terms of the international order, the US also sees Xi as fanning the flames of Chinese nationalism in a manner that is increasingly anti-American. The US sees Xi as determined to alter the status quo in the western Pacific and establish a Chinese sphere of influence across the eastern hemisphere.
Washington has also concluded that Xi decided to export his domestic political model to the rest of the developing world by leveraging the global gravitational pull of the Chinese economy. The ultimate objective is to create an international system that is much more accommodating of Chinese national interests and values. Finally, the US has concluded that these changes in China’s official worldview are underpinned by a powerful Chinese party-state that is increasingly on a self-selected collision course with the US.
Of course, China doesn’t see it like that. Xi’s view is that there is nothing wrong with China’s political-economic mode, and that while Beijing offers it to others in the developing world to emulate, it is not “forcing it” on any other state. Xi points out the considerable failings of western democracies in dealing with core challenges, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. He argues that China has modernised its military in order to secure its longstanding territorial claims, particularly over Taiwan, and he makes no apology for using the Chinese economy to advance its national interests. Nor does he apologise for using his newfound global power to rewrite the rules of the international system and the multilateral institutions that back it, arguing that this is precisely what the victorious western powers did after the second world war.
The CCP’s goal under Xi is also to pull China’s per-capita GDP up to “the level of other moderately developed countries” by 2035. Chinese economists typically place that somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000, or a level similar to South Korea. This would require a further doubling or tripling of the size of China’s economy. Given the party’s controversial 2018 decision to remove the two-term limit on five-year presidential terms, Xi could remain China’s paramount leader through the 2020s and well into the 2030s. It is likely to be on his watch that China finally becomes the largest economy in the world, supplanting the US after more than a century of global economic dominance. With this shift in the global balance of power, Xi will probably feel emboldened to pursue a growing array of global ambitions over these next 15 years – none more consequential to him than to see the return of Taiwan to Beijing’s sovereignty.
In the eyes of China’s leadership, there is only one country capable of fundamentally disrupting Xi’s national and global ambitions. That is the US. That’s why the US continues to occupy the central position in Chinese Communist party strategic thinking.
Xi is no neophyte in his understanding of the US. He visited the country during his earlier political career, once as a junior official in the 1980s, where he famously stayed with a family in rural Iowa, and again more than 20 years later when, as Chinese vice-president, he was hosted by then US vice-president Joe Biden on a weeklong visit to various American cities and states. In 2010, Xi sent his only child to Harvard University for her undergraduate degree. Xi also hosted multiple US delegations throughout his political career, in Beijing and in the provinces.
Despite all this, Xi neither speaks nor reads English. His understanding of the US has always been intermediated through official Chinese sources of translation, which are not always known for accuracy or nuance. And official briefings, generated from China’s foreign policy bureaucracy and intelligence community, rarely see the US in a benign light. (Chinese officials, wary of angering Xi, also provide analyses that conform to what they believe he wants to hear.)
Still, Xi’s direct experience of the US exceeds the direct experience of China of any American leader, including Joe Biden. No American leader has ever spoken or read Chinese, and all have been similarly reliant on intermediate sources. As a Mandarin speaker, I was fortunate as foreign minister and prime minister of my country to be able to communicate directly with my counterparts and other Chinese officials in their own language. More western political leaders will need to do so in the future.
For many reasons, much of the American strategic community discounts the idea of China’s peaceful rise or peaceful development altogether. Instead, many believe that some form of armed conflict or confrontation with Beijing is inevitable – unless, of course, China were to change strategic direction. Under Xi’s leadership, any such change is deemed to be virtually impossible. In Washington, therefore, the question is no longer whether such confrontation can be avoided, but when it will occur and under what circumstances. And to a large extent, this mirrors the position in Beijing as well.
There is, therefore, a moral and a practical obligation for friends of China and friends of the US to think through what has become the single hardest question of international relations of our century: how to preserve the peace and prosperity we have secured over the last three-quarters of a century while recognising the changing power relations between Washington and Beijing. We need to identify potential strategic off-ramps, or at least guardrails, which may help preserve the peace among the great powers while also sustaining the integrity of the rules-based order that has underpinned international relations since 1945.
To borrow a question from Lenin: “What is to be done?” As a first step, each side must be mindful of how their actions will be read by the other. At present, both sides are bad at this. We must, at a minimum, be mindful of how strategic language, actions and diplomatic signalling will be interpreted within each side’s political culture, systems and elites.
Developing a new level of mutual strategic literacy, however, is only the beginning. What follows must be the hard work of constructing a joint strategic framework between Washington and Beijing that is capable of achieving three interrelated tasks:
1) Agreeing on principles and procedures for navigating each other’s strategic redlines (for example, over Taiwan) – which, if inadvertently crossed, would probably result in military escalation.
2) Mutually identifying the areas – foreign policy, economic policy, technological development (eg semiconductors) – where full-blown strategic competition is accepted as the new normal.
3) Defining those areas where continued strategic cooperation (for example, on climate change) is both recognised and encouraged.
Of course, none of this can be advanced unilaterally. It can only be done bilaterally, by senior negotiators who have been charged by the two countries’ presidents with an overarching responsibility for the relationship. As with all such agreements, the devil will, of course, lie in the detail – and in its enforcement. Such a framework would not depend on trust. It would rely exclusively on sophisticated national verification systems already deployed by each country. In other words, the integrity of these arrangements would not rely on Ronald Reagan’s famous “trust, but verify” approach, which Reagan insisted on with the Soviet Union, but rather on “verify” alone.
A joint strategic framework of this type will not prevent crisis, conflict or war. But it would reduce their likelihood. Of course, it would also not prevent any premeditated covert attack by one side against the assets of the other as part of a complete violation of the framework. But where a joint framework could assist is in managing escalation or de-escalation in the event of accidental incidents at sea, in the air or in cyberspace.
I’m not so naive as to believe that any agreed-upon joint framework would prevent China and the US from strategising against the other. But the US and the Soviet Union, after the near-death experience of the Cuban missile crisis, eventually agreed on a framework to manage their own fraught relationship without triggering mutual annihilation. Surely it’s possible to do the same between the US and China today. It is from this hope that the idea of managed strategic competition comes.
Certainly, the rest of the world would welcome a future in which they are not forced to make binary choices between Beijing and Washington. They would prefer a global order in which each country, large and small, has confidence in its territorial integrity, political sovereignty and pathways to prosperity. They would also prefer a world whose stability was underpinned by a functioning international system that could act on the great global challenges of our time, which no individual nation can solve alone. What happens next between China and the US will decide if that is still possible.
Read the original article on the site of the Guardian.
Russia’s destruction in Ukraine could go on for a long time. If the two sides are to find an agreement, the West will have to stop fueling Russian fears of domestic interference.
United States President Joe Biden delivered an important and, at times, emotional speech in Warsaw. The U.S. leader emphasized NATO unity and called its collective defense principle, Article 5, “a sacred commitment.” He harshly deplored the Russian invasion and brutality against the Ukrainian population. Toward the end, apparently departing from the prepared text, he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot stay in power.”
Mr. Biden visited Poland following an emergency summit at the NATO headquarters in Belgium. Poland is the main destination for Ukrainian refugees. The president met displaced Ukrainians near the border and then flew to Warsaw, where he gave the mentioned speech.
At the start of the invasion, Moscow likely underestimated Ukraine’s defensive capabilities while overvaluing the aptitude of its own armed forces. A brutal war of attrition has ensued. Ukrainians have shown impressive grit and fighting skills. However, in the long term, Russia is stronger. The U.S. and NATO have restricted themselves to supporting Kyiv with war materiel and economic sanctions against Russia.
Under these circumstances, the destruction in Ukraine may continue for an extended period, even though the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will try to avoid this outcome at all costs.
Russia is mainly interested in the eastern part of the country, and it also wants to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. However, its overarching objective is to prevent the U.S. and Western Europe from interfering in the Russian Federation’s internal affairs. The Kremlin thinks in terms of realpolitik and zones of influence.
Turkey has been working hard to keep the Kyiv-Moscow talks alive. This dialogue is critical to get both sides to agree to a cease-fire and prevent further destruction of Ukraine. Most likely, the Kremlin has little appetite for expanding its faltering invasion into Western Ukraine, where Russian forces could meet with even stronger resistance. Western Ukraine has a Polish-Austrian history; the Soviet Union incorporated it following the 1939 partition of Poland between Stalin and Hitler. President Putin cannot be interested in creating an Afghanistan-like asymmetric battlefield in Ukraine.
The West must stand firm against this Russian aggression. However, NATO will continue to avoid direct military involvement unless the conflict escalates. It probably is an illusion – even if many in the West harbor it – that Russia’s policy would change if President Putin was removed from power.
Russia’s overarching objective is to prevent the U.S. and Western Europe from interfering in the Russian Federation’s internal affairs.
There is only one realistic way to avoid further bloodshed and destruction in Ukraine. Moscow and Kyiv need to reach an arrangement that, on the one side, would validate the West’s point that such transgressions are not allowed and, on the other side, would let Russia feel that the West is ready to respect its internal governance system. For such an agreement to come into existence, it must be based on realpolitik, not a desire to punish.
It is a welcome development that the talks in Turkey are now conducted directly between Kyiv and Moscow, without the involvement of the U.S.
The conflict in Syria offers a valuable lesson: good negotiations start with no preconditions. After the start of the civil war there in 2011, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama and the European governments put forth a precondition: President Bashar al-Assad had to go first and be put on trial. That made a solution impossible. Had negotiations back then been pragmatic and without preconditions the disaster that eventually caused hundreds of thousands to lose their lives and millions to be displaced could have been prevented. President al-Assad is still in power.
Sadly, even the most justified urge to punish can block solutions that, while imperfect, may prevent bloodletting. Pragmatism is the foundation and essence of prudent statesmanship. Of course, this does not relieve leaders from their duty to defend their country and protect citizens’ freedom.
In the dramatic present circumstances, the U.S. president’s angry words about Mr. Putin were counterproductive and dangerous, and a show of poor statesmanship. Russian imperialism is not limited to President Putin personally; we need to acknowledge it as a historical trait. Following the Warsaw speech, the White House tried to walk the statement back, but President Biden stuck to his guns: he had expressed “moral outrage,” he said, while denying that he was “articulating a policy change.” This incident will only enhance Russian fears of foreign intervention in their internal affairs. The massacre in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, revealed to the world last week, illustrates the brutality of the war. The expression of outrage is justified, but the underlying problem will not be solved by a change of regime in Moscow.
It is undoubtedly good news that the negotiations in Turkey are now taking place without further American and Western European presence.
Read the original article on the site of GIS Report.
In 2019, former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard used his last speech as president of the American Economic Association to put forward a provocative yet simple idea: In a world where interest rates are very low, governments can afford to take on more debt.
The gist of his argument: As long as the economy is growing at a rate faster than the interest rate on government borrowing, financing debt should be sustainable.
Fast forward three years — Governments around the world borrowed trillions to combat a global pandemic that walloped their economies and are now faced with rising interest rates to combat soaring inflation. In the U.S., fiscal responsibility is back in vogue — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has pushed for deficit reduction, a message also embraced by the White House, which needs Manchin’s support to salvage its social spending agenda.
Blanchard, who has a forthcoming book, Fiscal Policy Under Low Interest Rates, chatted with MM about U.S. debt, the Biden administration’s Covid response and the role of fiscal policy in combating inflation. (He’ll discuss the book at an event today hosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he is a senior fellow.)
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
You said in a recent magazine piece, give me a specific country in a specific time and I’ll tell you whether the level of debt is safe right now. So what is your view of U.S. debt?
“I don’t worry about U.S. debt. There is going to be a bump in real rates due to the need to decrease inflation, but after this, we should go back to a world in which the real rate remains negative, or zero. So in that context, you can clearly afford more debt. It’s not the end of the world, even when you take account of the uncertainty. So if we need to have larger deficits for a good reason, then it’s fine.”
“I’m not against debt, but it has to be used for the right reason.”
Sen. Joe Manchin has raised concerns about new spending programs that may add to deficits over the coming years. Is he right to be concerned?
“I think he’s partly right. If we are going to have to spend more, there’s no particular reason not to make us, the American taxpayers, pay for it now. There’s no reason to basically push it to the future. For example, child care — I’m very much in favor of child care, I think child care is absolutely essential. Why should it not be financed by taxes? Why should it be financed by debt? What is the argument for delaying the cost to future generations? I don’t see it.”
“I think that this administration got derailed at the beginning in doing too much and in not worrying enough about the macroeconomic effects on the economy, the overheating and the inflation. I think that they went too far.”
Do you think deficit reduction should be a priority right now?
“Deficits are going to come down because some of the pandemic spending is going to go away. But we should try to prevent very large deficits going forward, if they are not justified. In the U.S., the primary deficits even before Covid were too large. There is no question. So we have to have a plan, such that at least we don’t increase debt or the debt ratio.”
Senator Manchin has also argued that we should reduce deficits now because inflation is high. Do you agree?
“These are two completely different issues. We need to reduce inflation because we don’t want too high inflation.”
“Inflation comes from demand today, and we basically have to slow down demand now. And that’s what the Fed has to do. We can have a discussion about whether inflation will come down on its own, whether the Fed will have to tighten and increase interest rates a lot. But that has absolutely nothing to do with Build Back Better. BBB is relevant to what happens in the next 10 years.”
“If I were him, I would make the argument that, if we’re going to do good things for people, we should pay for most of it today. Which seems to me to be a much better argument than saying, oh, inflation is high.”
Is there a role for fiscal policymakers to play to help bring down inflation?
“My sense is the Fed is still the primary mover, because it is the one which says it wants to achieve 2 percent inflation. So that hopefully gives people a sense of where the Fed is trying to go, and that affects expectations.”
“The other way to slow down inflation would be with a dramatic deficit reduction, a big tax increase, and people would spend less. This would increase unemployment, which would lead to less wage pressure, less price pressure. But how to control demand and bring inflation under control can be done much better by the Fed. In this case, fiscal policy should not stand in the way, one way or the other, either by being too tight or being too loose.”
Read the original article on the site of Politico.
With the field and debate dominated by two far-right candidates and Macron’s mixed legacy, it seemed that all was to play for in this Sunday’s French presidential election. But war in Ukraine has unsettled the field, forcing U-turns on Putin from some candidates and penalizing Macron’s preference for international diplomacy over campaigning. CNN’s Jim Bittermann reports from Paris.
Watch the report of the CNN website.
Rétablissement de la grandeur, lutte contre le nazisme, rejet multiforme de l’Occident… telles sont les cordes sensibles sur lesquelles Vladimir Poutine joue pour susciter l’adhésion de la population à son intervention en Ukraine, analyse dans une tribune au « Monde » Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, spécialiste de la Russie.
« Les Russes veulent-ils la guerre ? » Ainsi commence une célèbre chanson soviétique, devenue symbole du pacifisme dans le pays qui a subi les plus grandes pertes humaines lors de la seconde guerre mondiale. Pourtant, si le conflit que Vladimir Poutine livre à l’Ukraine horrifie une partie des Russes et pousse certains d’entre eux à protester ou à fuir à l’étranger, beaucoup semblent la soutenir.
Quelles fibres de l’âme russe le maître du Kremlin a-t-il réussi à toucher pour susciter une adhésion à sa sanglante aventure ? Depuis l’annexion de la Crimée en 2014, la population russe baigne dans une propagande féroce. Omniprésente dans le champ informationnel russe, l’Ukraine était ces dernières années l’objet du mépris et de la haine d’innombrables commentateurs.
De nombreux Russes n’acceptent aujourd’hui que le récit diffusé par les chaînes publiques nationales, même face aux témoignages des parents proches ou aux vidéos des prisonniers russes en Ukraine, qu’ils considèrent comme victimes ou vecteurs de la propagande ennemie. Quant à la propagande russe, elle joue sur plusieurs cordes sensibles.
Tout d’abord, la nostalgie de l’URSS qui ne s’est jamais vraiment estompée : trente ans après sa disparition, 63 % des Russes continuent à regretter l’Union soviétique ; la majorité impute son effondrement à la « trahison des élites » et à la « perfidie de l’Occident ». Pour préserver la paix sociale, l’Etat russe n’a jamais officiellement condamné le Parti communiste. Lénine gît toujours dans son mausolée sur la place Rouge et Staline reste la personnalité historique la plus admirée.
Il n’y a pas eu de lustration en Russie, et les anciens agents du KGB tiennent aujourd’hui tous les rênes du pouvoir. Le travail sur la mémoire historique a été essentiellement mené dans les milieux intellectuels urbains, notamment par l’association Memorial, récemment dissoute. La population russe est vieillissante : parmi les 37 millions de retraités, nombreux sont ceux qui restent très attachés au passé soviétique et arrivent même à convertir une partie des jeunes à leur quête d’une époque perdue de grandeur nationale.
Lire l’article sur le site du Monde.
If there is one person other than Vladimir Putin who can end Russia’s war in Ukraine, it is Chinese President Xi Jinping. But Xi has so far remained on the sidelines and is likely to stay there, owing to various domestic political vulnerabilities and his own lack of courage and imagination.
CAMBRIDGE – Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he could quickly capture Kyiv and replace Ukraine’s government. Whether he was misled by poor intelligence or by his own fantasies about history, his “smash and grab” failed in the face of effective Ukrainian resistance. He then turned to a brutal bombardment of cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv to terrorize the civilian population into submission – as he had previously done in Grozny and Aleppo. The tragic upshot is that Ukraine’s heroic resistance has been accompanied by increasing civilian suffering.
Is there any way to end this nightmare quickly? One possibility is for Chinese President Xi Jinping to see that he has a “Teddy Roosevelt Moment.” After the brutal war between Russia and Japan in 1905, Roosevelt stepped in to mediate. He pressed hard for the parties to compromise and ultimately prevailed, thereby boosting America’s global influence and winning himself a Nobel Peace Prize.
Read the entire article on the site of Project Syndicate.
Avant le sommet de l’Otan à Madrid en juin prochain, les dirigeants des pays Baltes continuent d’alerter sur la nécessité de renforcer la protection de leurs pays après l’invasion de l’Ukraine.
Par Virginie Robert, Emmanuel Grasland
Pas assez écoutés – malgré les annexions successives par la Russie de territoires en Géorgie, au Donbass et en Crimée -, et se sentant encore plus vulnérables depuis l’invasion de l’Ukraine, les pays Baltes n’ont de cesse de réclamer une protection plus importante des membres de l’Alliance atlantique qu’ils ont rejointe en 2004.
« Il faut que l’Otan se prépare aux menaces futures » et il n’y a qu’une réponse possible : « une dissuasion crédible, visible, et efficace », plaide le président d’Estonie , Alar Karis, dans une tribune publiée par le « Financial Times » mardi. Cela passe selon lui par une présence permanente et renforcée sur le flanc est de l’Otan, qui succéderait aux rotations actuelles et mettrait la Pologne et les pays Baltes à égalité avec l’Allemagne, l’Italie ou le Royaume-Uni.
Lors du Sommet de Varsovie en juillet 2016, l’Otan a établi une présence avancée renforcée (« enhanced Forward Presence », eFP) dans les pays Baltes et en Pologne avec des bataillons multinationaux. La France vient d’ajouter 150 soldats aux 300 présents en Estonie, où les Britanniques sont la nation cadre. Mais ce dispositif est encore jugé insuffisant.
Les pays Baltes réclament une aide sur terre, sur mer et dans les airs pour avoir « le muscle nécessaire afin de bloquer Poutine » qui cherche « à restaurer les frontières de l’Otan de 1997 et créer un nouveau rideau de fer en Europe », assure Alar Karis. Du grain à moudre pour les membres de l’Alliance atlantique qui vont se retrouver en juin à Madrid.
« Les pays Baltes se sentent à l’avant-poste de l’Union européenne et de l’Otan face à la Russie. Par rapport à la question ukrainienne, ils sont extrêmement engagés et ne cessent de dire qu’il faut aller plus loin et qu’on n’en fait pas assez. En général de concert avec la Pologne », explique Céline Bayou, enseignante à l’Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales et spécialiste de la région.
Imants Lieģis, ancien ministre de la Défense et ancien ambassadeur de Lettonie en France, raconte combien la situation a été extrêmement tendue en Lettonie après l’invasion de l’Ukraine. « Les gens étaient inquiets. J’ai rassuré ma femme en disant que nous faisions partie de l’Otan. Elle m’a répondu que ses parents avaient quitté le pays en 1944 avec une valise et qu’elle ne voulait pas se retrouver dans cette situation. »
Les pays Baltes, depuis qu’ils sont sortis du giron soviétique en 1991, sont passés du collectivisme à une économie de marché, du parti unique au pluralisme. Il leur a aussi fallu construire un discours national, plus évident pour la Lituanie riche d’une histoire millénaire que pour l’Estonie et la Lettonie. Alors qu’il y avait moins de 10 % de russophones dans les trois pays Baltes avant 1939, on compte désormais 30 % de russophones en Lettonie , 25 % en Estonie et 6 % en Lituanie.
« Les pays Baltes n’ont cessé de dire pendant des années que la Russie était une menace mais ils étaient souvent considérés comme des russophobes au sein de l’Union européenne. Aujourd’hui, les leaders d’opinion et les élites politiques de ces pays se disent : enfin, on nous écoute, enfin l’Europe a compris », explique Katerina Kesa, estonienne et enseignante à l’Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales.
Face à la menace russe, les dangers sont multiples : dépendance énergétique, cyberguerre, campagnes de désinformation, attaques hybrides avec l’envoi de migrants syriens orchestrés depuis la Biélorussie.
Les pays Baltes ont fait des choix stratégiques pour leur sécurité : intégration à l’Otan, protection des Etats-Unis, adhésion à l’Union européenne. « Nous voulons que les Américains et les Européens travaillent ensemble car ce sont les démocraties qui sont défiées », explique un conseiller diplomatique pour qui l’appui américain est une « question de survie ».
Les Baltes éprouvent en revanche la plus grande méfiance vis-à-vis du concept d’autonomie stratégique européen et de défense européenne. « Quels sont les objectifs, quelles sont les lignes rouges ? » s’interroge un diplomate balte. Toute architecture sécuritaire ne peut s’entendre qu’avec l’Alliance atlantique, car l’Union européenne est très loin d’être une puissance militaire. Coincés entre la Russie, la Biélorussie et le couloir de Kaliningrad, les risques de conflits conventionnels, voire nucléaires, leur paraissent plus réalistes que jamais.
Lire l’article sur le site des Echos.
PARIS – Beyond the immense tragedy which Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war has brought upon Ukraine and its people, we are starting to grasp its potentially devastating consequences for the global sustainability agenda.
Already, the COVID-19 pandemic redirected global attention and resources away from the targets enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, as countries focused on their immediate public-health needs. Now, Putin’s war is intensifying the economic, social, and geopolitical pressures countries face, while deepening divisions among them. This does not bode well for efforts to address the shared challenge of climate change.