New York Times, Book Review, 2 décembre, article payant
How the World’s Largest Democracy Slid Toward Authoritarianism
“The New India,” by Rahul Bhatia, combines personal history and investigative journalism to account for his country’s turn to militant Hindu nationalism.
THE NEW INDIA: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Rahul Bhatia
Extraits:
Rahul Bhatia’s new book began from bewilderment: He wanted to know what was happening to the people he loved.
In the opening pages of “The New India,” Bhatia recalls how one relative went from being an affable goofball to angrily disparaging Muslims as “less than human.” Another relative transformed from an apolitical humanist into someone who insisted that India needed a “benevolent dictator.” An aunt started calling Muslims “savages.” Bhatia was startled by such vitriol. He had been taught that secularism and equality were the bedrock of India’s mainstream political culture. “Our elders had raised us with values that they had abandoned themselves.”
Bhatia, a journalist based in Mumbai, set out to learn more about the virulent strain of Hindu nationalism that has swept through India in the last decade. The result is this kaleidoscopic account of “the unmaking of the world’s largest democracy” since Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014.
Considering the urgency of Bhatia’s subject, it’s only appropriate that he brings a multitude of methods to bear in “The New India.” The book showcases his skills as an investigative journalist and memoirist, an intellectual and storyteller. He was stunned when the people he knew started to resuscitate centuries-old disputes and spout venomous slurs about Muslims. “This unfamiliar country had begun to justify even murder if the occasion demanded it,” he writes. He needed to find “where the poison was coming from.” (…)
“The New India” chronicles how this radical, supremacist movement — one that is emphatically at odds with India’s post-independence commitment to religious pluralism — has been so successful. Shortly after independence, the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, warned a friend of the danger posed by “reactionary and bigoted Hindus”: “If these people had their way, neither you nor I would have a tolerable existence.” Over the decades, the R.S.S. gained power through a potent combination of grievance-mongering and determined organizing. “I still don’t know how an ideology this stupid came to dominate us,” a historian of the R.S.S. told Bhatia. “It’s amazing.” (…)
Bhatia’s arguments here are intriguing, albeit notional. But they connect to one of the book’s major themes: how everyday experiences have shaped Indian politics. He suggests that technological optimism is fueled by political frustration; people place their hopes in smooth and speedy tools instead of the friction-filled realm of justice and rights.
Something similar might be said for the appeal of authoritarianism. “A hard country made it tempting to dream of easier paths,” Bhatia writes, “of instant justice, of what citizens would do if they were prime minister for one day, the corruption that technology would solve, of all the change only a strong leader could bring.” (…)
Bhatia’s book ends before this year’s national election, when Modi and the B.J.P. eked out a narrow win with diminished support. But destruction is swift, while rebuilding takes time. Nisar’s efforts — slow, arduous, cumbersome — are the opposite of efficient. “It’s like something has come and uprooted a tree,” he told Bhatia. “It takes years for a tree to grow again.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/books/rev
L’Express, 29 novembre, libre accès
Sahel : au Tchad comme au Sénégal, l’armée française n’est plus la bienvenue
Afrique. Le Tchad a annoncé jeudi soir rompre ses accords de défense avec Paris. Même décision au Sénégal, où le président a informé de la fermeture à venir des bases françaises.
The Guardian, 29 novembre, libre accès
Swedish PM says Baltic sea now ‘high risk’ after suspected cable sabotage
Regional leaders meet after undersea telecoms cables severed, while Chinese ship remains at anchor nearby
Wall Street Journal, 28 novembre, article payant
And the Fair Land
An editorial published annually since 1961: For all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators.
Full article:
Any one whose labors take him into the far reaches of the country, as ours lately have done, is bound to mark how the years have made the land grow fruitful.
This is indeed a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure and so in a way past belief of those who have not seen it. Even those who journey through its Northeastern complex, into the Southern lands, across the central plains and to its Western slopes can only glimpse a measure of the bounty of America.
And a traveler cannot but be struck on his journey by the thought that this country, one day, can be even greater. America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.
So the visitor returns thankful for much of what he has seen, and, in spite of everything, an optimist about what his country might be. Yet the visitor, if he is to make an honest report, must also note the air of unease that hangs everywhere.
For the traveler, as travelers have been always, is as much questioned as questioning. And for all the abundance he sees, he finds the questions put to him ask where men may repair for succor from the troubles that beset them.
His countrymen cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure. Their spirits are not quieted by the thought that the good and pleasant bounty that surrounds them can be destroyed in an instant by a single bomb. Yet they find no escape, for their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe.
How can they turn from melancholy when at home they see young arrayed against old, black against white, neighbor against neighbor, so that they stand in peril of social discord. Or not despair when they see that the cities and countryside are in need of repair, yet find themselves threatened by scarcities of the resources that sustain their way of life. Or when, in the face of these challenges, they turn for leadership to men in high places—only to find those men as frail as any others.
So sometimes the traveler is asked whence will come their succor. What is to preserve their abundance, or even their civility? How can they pass on to their children a nation as strong and free as the one they inherited from their forefathers? How is their country to endure these cruel storms that beset it from without and from within?
Of course the stranger cannot quiet their spirits. For it is true that everywhere men turn their eyes today much of the world has a truly wild and savage hue. No man, if he be truthful, can say that the specter of war is banished. Nor can he say that when men or communities are put upon their own resources they are sure of solace; nor be sure that men of diverse kinds and diverse views can live peaceably together in a time of troubles.
But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere—in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.
We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.
And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/and-the-fair-land-8093ea25?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
Wall Street Journal, 21 novembre, article payant
India Welcomes Donald Trump’s Second Term
Many view the president-elect’s return to the White House as an opportunity to boost ties between Washington and New Delhi.
Extraits :
Some countries have greeted Donald Trump’s election with despair. In India, the dominant feeling is hope.
Many pundits and policymakers in the world’s most populous nation view Mr. Trump’s return to the White House as an opportunity to boost U.S.-India ties. They’re optimistic about the president-elect’s rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They appreciate Mr. Trump’s clear-eyed view of China and Pakistan, as well as the cabinet members he has nominated to implement his foreign policy. And they believe Mr. Trump will end the war in Ukraine and repair U.S. relations with Russia. Trump 2.0 puts India “in a geopolitical sweet spot,” tweeted Yusuf Unjhawala, a foreign-policy expert with Bangalore’s Takshashila Institution.
Mr. Trump’s devotees in India also believe that the incoming administration is less likely than the outgoing one to listen to left-leaning Western nongovernmental organizations and publications that are hostile to Mr. Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Some of Mr. Modi’s most prominent foreign critics—such as the financier George Soros—are also foes of Mr. Trump. The proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” puts Mr. Modi in the same bucket as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who are also loathed by progressives.
Unlike China, Russia or Iran, India won’t be among the most pressing concerns facing the new administration. Nonetheless, since Mr. Trump was first elected, India has become a bigger player on the world stage. In 2016, India’s $2.3 trillion economy was the world’s seventh largest at market exchange rates. Today, India’s $3.9 trillion economy is the fifth largest. Bilateral trade in goods and services grew from $114 billion in 2016 to $195 billion in 2023, which made India America’s ninth-largest trading partner.
During his first term, Mr. Trump appeared to build rapport with Mr. Modi. The leaders spoke together at joint rallies in Houston in 2019 and Ahmedabad in 2020. On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Modi as “a friend” and “the nicest human being.” According to media reports, the Indian prime minister was among the first global leaders to congratulate Mr. Trump on his election victory this month. (…)
This doesn’t mean U.S.-India relations won’t face hiccups during the second Trump administration. The war in Ukraine and the U.S. promotion of liberal democracy are complex issues not easily addressed. Last time round, India’s protectionist trade policies led to a mini trade war between the two countries. And Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration will almost certainly ruffle feathers in New Delhi. On the whole, though, India has good reason to welcome Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.
Le Monde, 20 novembre, article payant
Au G20 de Rio, la grande mésentente entre les Occidentaux et les Etats émergents du Sud
Le président brésilien Lula a voulu évité les sujets qui fâchent, comme la guerre en Ukraine. Mais celle-ci a pesé sur la rencontre, alors que Sergueï Lavrov, le chef de la diplomatie russe, était convié en marge du sommet.
Extraits:
Au dernier rang et tout sourire. Une « photo de famille » a bien eu lieu, dès le premier jour du sommet du G20, lundi 18 novembre à Rio de Janeiro (Brésil), en présence de Sergueï Lavrov, le chef de la diplomatie russe.
Depuis l’invasion de l’Ukraine par les troupes de Moscou, le 24 février 2022, les dirigeants des vingt principales économies de la planète évitaient de s’afficher en compagnie du ministre des affaires étrangères de Vladimir Poutine. Cette fois, la présidence brésilienne a usé d’un subterfuge pour rassembler les uns et les autres, non pas sous la bannière officielle du G20, mais au nom de l’Alliance contre la faim, grande priorité du président Lula pour l’occasion. Le président français, Emmanuel Macron a même profité du moment pour serrer la main, sans lui parler, au chef de la diplomatie russe. Pour l’anecdote, un second cliché a été pris, mardi, sans Sergueï Lavrov cette fois, mais avec le président américain, Joe Biden, absent la veille.
Lula aura tout fait pour éviter une empoignade sur l’Ukraine, afin de ne pas creuser davantage le fossé, chaque jour plus profond à mesure que le conflit tourne à l’avantage de Moscou, entre les Occidentaux et les Etats émergents du Sud, Chine en tête. En séance, lundi, il n’a pas hésité à interrompre – « de manière brutale », selon un officiel européen –, les débats sur le projet de conclusions. Mais la guerre n’a cessé de peser sur les discussions, qu’il s’agisse des risques d’embrasement au Proche-Orient, mais surtout du conflit entre Moscou et Kiev. (…)
En l’absence de Vladimir Poutine, Sergueï Lavrov n’a pourtant pas eu besoin de faire beaucoup d’efforts pour éviter que son pays ne soit pointé du doigt par le G20. Nombre de partenaires de Moscou, comme la Chine ou l’Inde, qui demandent la cessation des hostilités, avaient averti qu’ils n’accepteraient pas, dans la droite ligne du précédent sommet, à New Delhi en 2023, de langage condamnant la Russie. Compte tenu du rapport de force, les Occidentaux se faisaient peu d’illusions sur leur propre capacité à imposer un langage plus musclé. (…)
« Aujourd’hui, les pays du G20 se réunissent au Brésil. Ont-ils dit quelque chose ? Rien », a déploré le président Volodymyr Zelensky, depuis Kiev, regrettant l’absence de « stratégie forte » des Etats présents à Rio. (…)
Autre tendance préoccupante : le sommet n’a pas empêché les différents « blocs » de se concerter… l’un contre l’autre. Le ministre des affaires étrangères chinois, Wang Yi, a ainsi rencontré son homologue russe pour évoquer les tensions entre les deux Corées, que la guerre en Ukraine vient encore nourrir depuis l’engagement de soldats du Nord aux côtés de la Russie. La Chine est « disposée à travailler avec la partie russe pour renforcer encore la coopération et l’alignement » stratégique entre Moscou et Pékin, a dit Wang Yi. De leur côté, les sherpas américain, français, britannique et allemand se sont entretenus de la suite de leur engagement en Ukraine, pour surmonter le choc du retour de Trump à la Maison Blanche. (…)
Dans leur déclaration finale, ils reconnaissent « le besoin d’augmenter la finance climatique » pour la porter à « des milliers de milliards de dollars ». Ils ne s’avancent pas pour autant sur les modalités de ces financements réclamés par les pays les plus vulnérables. Et ils ne reprennent pas dans leur communiqué des termes plus ambitieux, comme l’engagement à « opérer une transition juste, ordonnée et équitable vers une sortie des combustibles fossiles », qui avait été arraché à la dernière COP, à Dubaï. (…)
Der Spiegel, English Edition, 19 novembre, libre accès
Editorial by Dirk Kurbjuweit : Donald Trump and the New World OrderThe End of the West
Donald Trump’s return to the White House shows that liberal democracy has failed. It proved unable to provide a coherent structure to the post postwar era.
Extraits :
One era is coming to an end and a new one is beginning. Nothing marks this shift as clearly as the election of Donald Trump to a second term as president of the United States. The West has lost its dominance and the shared foundation of values, which has been crumbling for some time, is now collapsing. There are tensions everywhere – between countries and within societies. The right wing is on the rise in Italy, France and Germany. The West as a block of liberal democracies no longer exists. (…)
The system’s strength was its concern for people, for the individual. Prosperity for all through social equality, more rights for women and homosexuals, the absence of authoritarian impositions by the state: All of this made the West attractive in the decades that followed World War II. Those who lived in the West enjoyed their freedoms and their high standard of living. A broad center developed, the pillar of liberal democracy.
The age of totalitarian ideologies, which were essentially political religions, was followed by a phase of rationality, of scientifically based reason. Politics was pursued with the utmost solemnity, because so much was at stake: preventing the return of fascism and standing up to the Soviet Union. (…)
How could that which began so promisingly now end with Donald Trump, a man who disrupts the system and whose policies are rooted in lunacy?
The initial steps forward in liberal democracies were social advances. But at some point, the social questions were considered to have been largely resolved and the era of social democracy came to an end. The majority of society, after all, was doing well. Progressive politics shifted to fresh challenges: doing away with patriarchy and establishing new freedoms for minorities – important projects to be sure.
But this shift was not managed well. Center-left politicians in particular – the Democrats in the U.S. and the Greens in Germany, for example – paid too little attention to the fact that the issue of equity, that concerns of social decline, don’t simply vanish when the general level of prosperity is high. The resulting impression was that center-left parties did too little for workers, for the center of society. The high cost of living is now seen as one of the most important reasons for Trump’s victory. (…)
Beyond that, governments were unable to establish the fight against climate change early on as a sensible, self-evident project. Hesitation, equivocation and dawdling continued for so long that the challenge grew too large, to the point that many people began fearing for the lives they had grown used to. Trump was able to profit from that as well, by denying the facts. (…)
The fear of war and authoritarian rule initially made it easy for those in government to hold societies in Western countries together. When this bond dissolved, liberal democrats failed to provide a coherent structure to the post postwar era. Some simply lacked the requisite earnestness, as exemplified by the embarrassing disintegration of Germany’s governing coalition in these difficult times. They lost a large part of society, to the point that many voters feel better represented by authoritarian voices. What a tragedy.
The resuscitation of the West can only be successful if we finally understand that almost all issues are also social issues, whether it be economic policy, migration policy or climate policy. Rational politics remains the correct course of action. But it absolutely must have a heart.
Le Figaro, 15 novembre, article payant
«Le rapprochement Moscou-Pyongyang est un revers tactique pour la Chine»: le flirt Kim-Poutine inquiète Pékin
DÉCRYPTAGE – L’Empire du milieu redoute que l’alliance militaire n’attise les tensions à ses portes, sur la péninsule coréenne.
Extraits :
(…) La Russie et la Corée du Nord sont « deux États indépendants » et la façon dont ils coopèrent est « leur affaire » a ajouté sèchement le diplomate. « Les Chinois ne sont pas contents, car ils ont été laissés dans le noir », juge Chun Yung-woo, ancien conseiller présidentiel, à Séoul. Moscou et Pyongyang n’ont pas démenti officiellement ces renforts, et affichent au grand jour leur nouvelle alliance gravée par un traité de défense mutuel signé en juin, lors d’une visite en fanfare de Poutine au royaume ermite.
Cette fuite en avant belliqueuse vient renforcer l’agacement de la Chine de Xi Jinping, spectatrice de ce flirt qui menace de semer en retour l’instabilité à ses portes, en plein bras de fer avec l’Amérique de Donald Trump. « Pékin craint que l’alliance entre Moscou et Pyongyang n’exacerbe encore la situation déjà dangereuse sur la péninsule coréenne », juge Shi Yinhong, de l’université Renmin, à Pékin. Avec à la clé, un possible dérapage frontalier qui ramènerait l’attention de Washington sur la poudrière nucléaire d’Asie du Nord-Est. Séoul et Pyongyang sont à couteaux tirés le long de la DMZ ces derniers mois, marqués par des incursions de drones, et l’explosion des dernières routes reliant les deux frères ennemis. Kim a également testé un missile balistique intercontinental (ICBM), à la veille de l’élection américaine.
Fidèle à son culte du secret, la Chine se garde de publiquement briser la solidarité affichée face à l’Occident avec son « partenaire sans limite » russe, et son turbulent allié nord-coréen, lié par des intérêts stratégiques conjoint à long terme. Mais le tango entre Kim et Poutine à l’œuvre depuis l’invasion de l’Ukraine marque un nouveau rapport de force tendu, au sein du triangle Pékin-Moscou-Pyongyang, fleurant bon la guerre froide. Alors que les deux hommes forts se sont vus à deux reprises en moins d’un an, à Vladivostok en septembre 2023 puis à Pyongyang en juin, le président chinois n’a plus rencontré publiquement Kim depuis cinq ans.
Fidèle à son culte du secret, la Chine se garde de publiquement briser la solidarité affichée face à l’Occident avec son « partenaire sans limite » russe, et son turbulent allié nord-coréen, lié par des intérêts stratégiques conjoint à long terme. Mais le tango entre Kim et Poutine à l’œuvre depuis l’invasion de l’Ukraine marque un nouveau rapport de force tendu, au sein du triangle Pékin-Moscou-Pyongyang, fleurant bon la guerre froide. Alors que les deux hommes forts se sont vus à deux reprises en moins d’un an, à Vladivostok en septembre 2023 puis à Pyongyang en juin, le président chinois n’a plus rencontré publiquement Kim depuis cinq ans. (…)
Pékin est pris de court par cette coopération entre son « partenaire » russe et son turbulent allié, qu’elle ne peut dénoncer publiquement, drapé dans son principe de « non-ingérence ». « La Chine ne peut pas dire grand-chose, et la Corée du Nord comme la Russie n’écouteraient pas ses conseils », juge Shi. Le géant redoute des transferts de technologie qui permettraient à Kim d’accélérer sa fuite en avant nucléaire, avec un potentiel effet domino sur Séoul et Tokyo. (…)
« Le rapprochement Moscou-Pyongyang est un revers tactique pour la Chine, mais lui sied sur le plan stratégique à long terme face aux États-Unis. La péninsule permet d’accaparer les forces américaines en cas d’opération dans le détroit », juge Chun. Le pivot asiatique de Poutine à l’œuvre depuis l’invasion de Kiev vient en effet encore compliquer la tâche du Pentagone dans ce verrou stratégique.
Déjà sous Mao, le sort de la péninsule et celui de Taïpei étaient inextricablement liés : la guerre de Corée avait repoussé l’invasion de l’île rebelle prévue par le Grand Timonier. Sept décennies plus tard, le 38e parallèle offrirait un théâtre de diversion précieux à l’Armée populaire de libération de Xi.
New York Times, Guest Essay, 14 novembre, libre accès
Trump Changed the Game With China. Now He Could Win It.
Extraits :
Donald Trump’s first term signaled a historic shift in U.S. policy toward China. His strategic blend of economic pressure, unpredictability, sanctions and tariffs knocked Beijing off balance. It was a turning point: Washington moved from passive acceptance of China’s revisionist ambitions to assertive opposition. The Biden administration has wisely maintained and in some cases expanded on this framework.
Mr. Trump’s second term could help America to win this strategic contest altogether.
China faces an array of challenges, especially a stagnating economy, making it vulnerable to the president-elect’s assertive tactics. If Mr. Trump can couple the blustery style of his first term with a more focused strategy and tighter discipline, the next four years are a golden opportunity to keep Beijing on the defensive and permanently transform the rivalry in America’s favor.
For China, the ideal outcome in the U.S. election would have been another four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s cautious approach. (…)
But Mr. Trump isn’t content with merely managing the competition with Beijing. He aims to win it. His zero-sum approach and unconventional tactics — as well as an emerging cabinet of China hawks — are likely to deny Mr. Xi the breathing room he desperately needs and push the Chinese leader into a high-stakes test of wills he cannot easily control or predict.
Despite a decade of projecting outward strength, China is, in fact, a declining power, its rise having been undone by Mr. Xi’s mismanagement, heavy-handed repression and strategic blunders. The country faces crippling debt, record-high youth unemployment and a shrinking, rapidly aging population. His ideology-driven approach, which places the Chinese Communist Party at the heart of economic decision making, has eroded business confidence, spurred capital flight and led to unprecedented drops in foreign investment. China’s era of sky-high growth is giving way to a stagnation reminiscent of Japan’s so-called lost decade, a period of deflation and economic inertia from which Japan has yet to fully recover. Even Mr. Xi cautioned citizens last year to be prepared to “eat bitterness,” a Chinese phrase signaling hard times ahead. (…)
The U.S. economy, meanwhile, is gaining momentum, and Mr. Trump — who views China’s centrally planned, manufacturing-heavy model as predatory and harmful to American workers — seems ready to aggressively leverage U.S. strength, as he did in his first term. (…)
The bluster and brinkmanship of Mr. Trump’s first term could also prove invaluable regarding Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s goal is to bring the democratically ruled island under Chinese rule, by force if necessary. Mr. Trump, however, is threatening tariffs as high as 200 percent on Chinese goods if China takes military action. The president-elect summed up the situation best when he noted last month that Mr. Xi wouldn’t dare provoke him over Taiwan because the Chinese leader knows that he’s “crazy.”
Chinese anxiety over Mr. Trump’s return is already surfacing. (…) after Mr. Trump’s decisive election victory, Chinese leaders quickly struck a more conciliatory tone, calling for peaceful coexistence and a new era of cooperation. (…)
Mr. Trump’s bold style isn’t for the fainthearted. In a time of fierce global competition, he sees balance as weakness and coexistence as capitulation. Yet if he can draw from past lessons, engage with our allies and stay disciplined, he just might be crazy enough to confront China — and win.
Craig Singleton (@craigmsingleton) is a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He previously spent more than a decade serving in national security roles in the U.S. government, focused on East Asia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/opinion/china-trump-us-rivalry.html
The Economist, Leader, 14 novembre, article payant
America’s lame-duck period : How to avoid global chaos in the next ten weeks
Risks abound in the limbo between now and Donald Trump’s swearing-in
Extraits :
Even before America’s election, the world was unstable, with wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, among other places, and crackling tensions in the Pacific. The next ten weeks could bring new perils. Donald Trump wants to upend American foreign policy, but won’t take office until January 20th. The authority of Joe Biden’s lame-duck administration is shrivelling. That creates a period of limbo, which America’s enemies could exploit, breaking rules and escalating conflicts to lock in gains. Despite their differences, Mr Biden’s and Mr Trump’s teams must work together to deter them.
Mr Trump’s early appointments suggest his foreign policy will indeed be radical. Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, his picks for secretary of state and national security adviser, may sound like old-school conservatives, hawkish on China and Iran. But they are where they are because they have adopted Trumpian positions: vocal loyalty to the leader, impatience with NATO and the war in Ukraine. The new trade tsar may be Robert Lighthizer, an arch-protectionist itching to wage a new tariff war. The Pentagon will be run by a novice keen to blow up the deep state. Mr Trump appears hungry to strike deals and take unconventional advice. His staff have not yet signed up to rules on using secure communications, and are ignoring the norm that an incoming administration refrains from foreign dealings until it is in office. On November 8th he called Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, with Elon Musk on the line.
Faced with this, countries have an incentive to create facts on the ground, fast, that will put them in a favourable position in January. Some of those facts are welcome: free-loading American allies are suddenly boosting defence spending, for example. Others may be disruptive. Vladimir Putin may escalate his offensive to try to grab more Ukrainian territory before any peace talks begin. Israel may hammer Gaza, Lebanon and beyond, hoping that the new administration will let it “finish the job” in Iran and agree to lopsided ceasefires. China may probe to see how much it can bully Taiwan or the Philippines without provoking a serious reaction; tensions in the South China Sea are rising.
The Biden and Trump administrations detest each other, but they have a common interest in deterring such things. (…)
Both teams should therefore agree and articulate a common framework for the lame-duck period. To keep the rapacious Mr Putin at bay, America should send more weapons to Ukraine and ease restrictions on its use of long-range missiles. In the Middle East, both teams should make clear to Israel that a unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear sites in the coming weeks will not receive American military support, which it would probably require to succeed. In the South China Sea, China needs to hear that America’s position on maritime rights has not wavered. Future historians may describe the next ten weeks as the moment when America shifted from its post-1945 internationalism to a new and more isolationist foreign policy. But if Team Biden and Team Trump act wisely, the lame-duck period need not bring global mayhem. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/11/13/how-to-avoid-global-chaos-in-the-next-ten-weeks
The Economist, 14 novembre, article payant
National Security : Mike Waltz wants America to focus on the threat from China
Donald Trump’s national security adviser draws bracing lessons from his army days
Extraits :
“DAMMIT, DAMN, damn, damn!” A young Afghan girl lay dead and Mike Waltz seethed in frustration. An Afghan police unit working with Green Berets under Mr Waltz’s command had killed the child with indiscriminate gunfire unleashed in response to a Taliban attack. The shooting was justifiable but the police had ignored their training, Mr Waltz writes in “Warrior Diplomat”, a memoir published a decade ago about his combat service and tours as a Washington policymaker. The book doubles as a primer on the causes of America’s military failure in Afghanistan and an intellectual autobiography of the man Donald Trump has selected to be his national security adviser.
Mr Waltz is amply qualified for his new role, which involves managing and co-ordinating inter-agency processes. But he models a distinctly Trumpian version of a job often given to Ivy League-educated strategists. Mr Waltz’s credentials are long on the school of life and short on erudite studies of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. He retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel after earning four Bronze Stars, two for valour. After winning election to the House of Representatives from Florida in 2018, Mr Waltz evolved into an ardent acolyte of Mr Trump while serving on the three big national-security committees in the lower chamber: armed services, foreign affairs and intelligence.
Mr Waltz is an outspoken China hawk but also thinks America made wrong turns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and should learn its lessons in hubris, as well as in equipping its strategy with the right resources. (…) On the eve of the vote, in an essay written for The Economist with Matthew Kroenig, a Georgetown professor, Mr Waltz argued that, if elected, a second Trump administration should quickly wind up the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, to free up military assets to confront and deter China.
The premise of this agenda is questionable: if winding up Middle Eastern wars was easy, there wouldn’t be so many of them. On Ukraine, Mr Waltz started out as a hawk but evolved to align with Mr Trump’s scepticism about American involvement. In his essay for The Economist, he dismissed providing aid to Ukraine indefinitely as a “recipe for failure”. Yet if Mr Putin refuses to talk, he noted, America can “provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions” than the Biden administration imposed on Kyiv. Such an escalation would “probably” bring Mr Putin to the bargaining table. He does not say what he would recommend if it doesn’t.
Mr Waltz has not advocated leaving NATO, but European readers of “Warrior Diplomat” may be unsettled by his bracing criticisms of the alliance’s performance in Afghanistan. (…)
If Mr Trump carries out his campaign promises to slap 60% tariffs on China, expect Mr Waltz to press the public case for confrontation. Yet Mr Waltz is a thoughtful, fair-minded ideologue who is comfortable with complications, his memoir makes clear.
His temperament may help him referee and manage debates in the Situation Room—deliberations marked by an extraordinary amount of yelling and digression during Mr Trump’s first term, according to memoirs by participants. As a retired colonel, Mr Waltz may have to assert himself with Pentagon generals and admirals who measure colleagues by the number of stars on their shoulders.
He will bring to his new job one clear lesson from his prior experience of Washington: interagency decision-making on national-security matters almost always suffers from “unrealistic timelines or no timeline at all”, he writes. One timeline Mr Waltz may not wish to dwell on is his own. During Mr Trump’s first term, often frustrated by the advice he received from headstrong aides, the president ran through four national security advisers in four years. ■
Wall Street Journal, 13 novembre, article payant
Trump Faces a Different World in Term Two
Some adversaries have passed from the scene, while others have grown tougher.
Extraits :
No sooner had Donald Trump secured re-election than speculation at home and abroad turned to what kind of foreign policy he will pursue in term two. It’s not easy to predict. Mr. Trump’s foreign-policy instincts are mixed. He genuinely doesn’t want to preside over a new round of “endless” wars, small, hard-to-win conflicts in faraway places over issues that he believes are marginal to core American interests. But he also likes being a powerful world figure whose interventions on global issues are decisive. The president-elect is no neoconservative interventionist, but he is hard to restrain.
Events more than doctrines will ultimately drive and define Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. That’s how it goes. George W. Bush came to power wanting to reduce foreign policy’s place in American life—until he and the nation were mugged by 9/11. Barack Obama did not expect to be overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi and dispatching troops into Syria and Iraq when he took the oath of office. Joe Biden had no idea that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would overshadow his presidency.
Similarly, what Mr. Trump wants may matter less than what foreign powers decide to do. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan, a Russian attack on a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, a major terror attack on the U.S., or an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon would force huge changes in American policy.
That said, some changes in world politics since 2017 offer Mr. Trump greater scope than when he took the oath of office for the first time.
Take Europe. When Mr. Trump entered the White House, the experienced German Chancellor Angela Merkel, soon to be joined by France’s then-popular President Emmanuel Macron, led a formidable coalition of countries. (…)
On climate, divisions inside Europe and voters’ concerns about energy costs have weakened Mr. Trump’s opponents. On migration, European attitudes have moved toward Mr. Trump. The European Union is less self-confident, more aware of its security deficit, more worried about China, less united and less strongly led than at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s first term.
On Ukraine and Russia, the Olaf Scholz-Joe Biden policy of keeping Ukraine on a short leash antagonized Russia without opening a path to victory for Kyiv. One can make a strong case for increased support to Ukraine as part of a plan to force Vladimir Putin to retreat. One also can argue that it would be more honest as well as cheaper and more realistic to accept that Ukraine must reach an agreement with Russia on terms acceptable to Moscow. But the muddy middle course Messrs. Biden and Scholz unfortunately chose offers little hope, and leaves Mr. Trump free to change course.
In the Middle East, there is a vacuum in America’s Iran policy. In 2017 the Iran nuclear deal enjoyed the strong support of key U.S. allies. Despite sustained efforts, Team Biden failed to revive the old nuclear deal or to find another path for U.S.-Iran relations. With last week’s criminal charges over an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Mr. Trump, the president-elect has much stronger legal and political standing for tough anti-Iran policies than he did in 2017. (…)
China’s still-growing economic problems give Mr. Trump some leverage over Beijing as well. Xi Jinping is trying to bail out the construction industry and local governments and to stimulate spending among Chinese consumers hit hard by the housing downturn. Massive overinvestment has led to excess capacity in export-dependent industries ranging from automobiles to steel. That makes Mr. Xi vulnerable to American trade pressure and, perhaps, eager to strike deals with Mr. Trump.
Despite these opportunities, the world remains a dangerous place. (…)
China, Russia, Iran and North Korea do not want America to be great. They want it to fail. Mr. Trump can succeed only by outwitting and outmaneuvering foreign adversaries that are smarter, better resourced and more ruthless than the hapless Democrats he defeated last week.
Wall Street Journal, 10 novembre, article payant
Deals and Deterrence: Trump’s Foreign Policy in a Dangerous World
The president-elect is expected to showcase U.S. economic and military might, seeking to instill fear in adversaries and extract greater accommodation from allies
Extraits :
With the world a more dangerous place than when President-elect Donald Trump first took office, current and former advisers expect he will navigate widening conflicts by building deterrence against foreign rivals while favoring transactional policies with U.S. allies.
The U.S. hasn’t been feared enough overseas during the Biden administration, according to these advisers. By showcasing American economic and military might, the second Trump presidency should bring peace or, at minimum, prevent further escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East and beyond, they said.
“It’s going to be a return to peace through strength. Deterrence is going to be restored,” said Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who could play a senior role in the incoming administration. “American adversaries understand that the things they’ve gotten away with over the last four years will not be tolerated any further.”
Executing such policies is easier said than done, especially with Russia, Iran and North Korea coalescing into an informal military alliance that has the economic and diplomatic backing of a rapidly rearming China. (…)
Unlike Biden, who hasn’t spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin since February 2022, Trump has signaled that he is aiming to negotiate a settlement of the war in Ukraine with Putin. Such personal diplomacy might be helpful in weakening the new anti-American axis, said retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served in top national-security positions in the Trump administration.
“It all starts with personal relationships,” said Kellogg, who wasn’t speaking on behalf of the campaign but is being considered for a senior job in the new administration. “A President Trump will reach out to key leaders to try and find a way to work through a problem. You always have stronger options available, like sanctions or brute force, but it is not the option of first choice.” (…)
“I don’t think Trump has a plan to destroy alliances, but he also doesn’t really care about them,” said Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “He thinks they are rip-offs for the American public, and that allies are like relatives who come to your house to borrow money and then stay all day and use your pool.” (…)
The U.S.-China relationship is likely to dominate Trump’s second term. He is expected to double down on his hard-line approach, which the Biden administration by and large continued, former and current advisers said. Trump might return to the trade war that marked his first administration and invest more in U.S. military preparedness for a possible conflict in the Pacific.
The president-elect is more wary of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whom he blames for the Covid-19 pandemic and, because of its disastrous consequences, his loss to Biden in 2020, two former Trump administration officials said. Trump also was angered by Chinese attempts to hack his 2024 campaign.
Trump won’t have the same willingness to take Xi at face value, one of the former officials said. (…)
“He wants to insert the U.S. into every conflict in the world to meditate, to bring about diplomatic solutions,” the former Trump White House official said. “That’s going to be a major centerpiece for what he does, being kind of a broker for peace all over the world.” (…)
The Economist, 9 novembre, article payant
Global disorder : America’s allies brace for brinkmanship, deals—and betrayal
From Ukraine to Israel there is a frantic scramble to flatter and sway Donald Trump
Extraits :
LIKE QUIZ-SHOW contestants trying to bash the buzzer first, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, and Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, raced to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory—though each for very different reasons. The rush by these and other leaders around the world, such as Emmanuel Macron of France and Lai Ching-te of Taiwan, to ingratiate themselves with America’s next president reveals much about the perils and opportunities they foresee under Mr Trump, whose only constancy in foreign policy is his unpredictability.
Mr Zelensky praised Mr Trump’s “decisive leadership” and commitment to “peace through strength”, perhaps hoping that flattery might do better than an appeal to principle. He moved quickly to try to win the incoming president’s favour ahead of any prospective deal that Mr Trump might try to impose on Ukraine to end the war it has been fighting since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Mr Netanyahu’s message was also fawning as he hailed “history’s greatest comeback”, quite a compliment from the original comeback king. Mr Netanyahu may hope that Mr Trump will give him even more of a free hand in the wars Israel is fighting in Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran, but he must also worry whether Mr Trump’s pledge to “stop the wars” might be achieved by squeezing support for Israel.
Mr Trump’s election comes as America and its allies face their most daunting threats since at least the end of the cold war. These include “the potential for near-term major war”, a bipartisan commission mandated by Congress warned earlier this year. And the risks are mounting, as adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea increasingly make common cause. A further escalation in the conflict between Israel and Iran, for instance, could well draw American troops directly into another war in the Middle East. Yet at this moment of heightened peril, America’s friends and foes alike are preparing for the possibility that Mr Trump may upend its foreign policy and weaken the network of alliances that have been the pillars of Western security. (…)
In the uncertain period before the next administration takes over, America’s allies are scrambling to mitigate some of the risks that may arise from the election of a president who regards allies as a burden and approaches mutual defence with the calculus of a gangster. “They want protection, they don’t pay us money for the protection,” Mr Trump has said. “The mob makes you pay money.” Mr Trump boasts that he coerced NATO countries to spend more on defence during his first term, with some justification. Many expect the pressure to intensify in his second. (…)
The trouble for America’s allies, though, is that nobody knows for sure what Mr Trump’s foreign policy will be. Some things seem certain, such as trade wars with friends and foes alike . He will probably again accommodate some autocrats and threaten to abandon allies or renegotiate terms with them. Tensions with Mexico will probably rise over trade, migrants and drug-trafficking. (…)
Given Mr Trump’s repeated criticism of aid to Ukraine and his refusal to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, many worry that one of his first moves in office would be to capitulate to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. Yet people in his entourage—or at least people who hope to be in it—suggest that Mr Trump would not be such a soft touch). Republican insiders argue that he knows that defeat in Ukraine would be a political liability, just as the withdrawal from Afghanistan was for Mr Biden. (…)
A diplomatic deal crafted on decent terms may yet be welcomed by Ukraine, whose position on the battlefield is weakening. Ukraine would, however, want membership of NATO to guarantee its security. Mr Pompeo is an advocate of that but other advisers may resist it, as would Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor. (…)
Mr Trump was a disruptive force during his first term but the international scene was relatively calm. He returns to power at a time of rising great-power rivalry and destructive wars in Europe and the Middle East. Instead of building on the alliances and institutions that have enhanced American power, Mr Trump seems intent on undermining them. That would not only make America less secure, but also accelerate the disintegration of the post-war order that kept the peace for 80 years. ■
The Economist, 6 novembre, article payant
Eagle v Dragon : In some areas of military strength, China has surpassed America
The modernisation of the PLA is proceeding at an extraordinary pace
Extraits :
WHOEVER SUCCEEDS Joe Biden in the White House on January 20th will receive the same simple message from all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies: Russia may be causing mayhem in Europe, but only China has the wherewithal to mount a global challenge. “Beijing is accelerating the development of key capabilities,” said the co-ordinating body for American spooks last year. Those capabilities, it added, are ones that China “believes the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) needs to confront the United States in a large-scale, sustained conflict”.
The PLA is still far from being ready for war with America. China’s official aim is to “modernise” its armed forces by 2035 and make them world-class by 2049. But the PLA has already undergone an extraordinary transformation, from a poorly trained and ill-equipped force two decades ago to a regional power today. The old image of China’s armed forces as focusing on quantity over quality is increasingly outdated. In recent years China has improved the effectiveness of its arms to such an extent that, in some areas, it has already matched or surpassed America.
Any analysis of China’s advantages has to begin with its navy—called the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or the PLAN. It is not just the world’s largest, but also has the newest vessels. Around 70% of Chinese warships were launched after 2010, compared with a quarter of America’s, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-tank in Washington. When it comes to design and material quality, Chinese ships are in many cases comparable to America’s, says the US Office of Naval Intelligence, “and China is quickly closing the gap in any areas of deficiency.”
American warships tend to be larger and better armed, but China is catching up. (…)
China’s air force, called the PLAAF, is on a similar trajectory. Its most advanced warplanes are probably not as state-of-the-art or stealthy as America’s. But having once struggled to develop high-quality jet engines, China now produces ones that are near the calibre of those from NATO countries, argues Brendan Mulvaney of the China Aerospace Studies Institute, a US Air Force think-tank. It is also thought to churn out stealth fighters faster than America does. And the weapons carried by Chinese aircraft have improved dramatically. (…)
The most striking progress by China has come in the area of hypersonic missiles, which fly and manoeuvre at more than five times the speed of sound. Such weapons have forced countries to rethink their defence systems. (…)
Combat effectiveness is not just the sum of individual weapons and technologies. The spectacular failure of Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was at odds with many Western assessments of Russian military prowess, which failed to account for intangible factors. China’s armed forces have their own problems, such as corruption, inadequate logistics and poor integration between the army, navy and air force. China also lacks combat experience, having not fought a war in decades. Simulations held by American officials over the past decade suggest a variety of outcomes remain plausible in any conflict with China.
But that is scant consolation for those watching the PLA’s progress over the past two decades. There are few peacetime precedents for the speed and scale of China’s military modernisation. It has made that journey while barely breaking a fiscal sweat, spending less than 2% of its GDP on the armed forces, compared with more than 3% in America. “We are in a race for military technological superiority with a capable pacing challenge,” argued Frank Kendall, the secretary of the US Air Force, in April. “Our cushion is gone. We are out of time.” ■
Wall Street Journal, 5 novembre, article payant
Kim Jong Un’s Risky Embrace of Russia Is About His Regime’s Survival
Pyongyang’s pact with Moscow comes after disappointment with old methods and the emergence of new military partnerships by Washington, allies
Extraits :
SEOUL—Kim Jong Un tried peace talks and refrained from testing new weapons to shed North Korea’s status as a pariah state. Now he is doubling down on rogue behavior to get what he wants.
By recently sending thousands of troops to the Russian front lines, Kim has opened a new chapter for his cash-strapped regime. The move thrusts the “Hermit Kingdom” into global affairs in a way that it has shunned since the 1950-53 Korean War.
By going all-in on Russia, Kim is forging an unproven—and even more brazen—path to achieve regime security, advance his country’s nuclear program and win economic relief. Seemingly eroded, for now, are the traditional levers of detente with South Korea, nuclear talks with the U.S. and widespread diplomatic support from Europe.
Now, much of Kim’s ambitions hinge on the burgeoning military symbiosis with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In return for the troops, munitions and missiles, Kim has already pocketed Moscow’s protection at the United Nations and an uptick in cross-border trade. Officials from the U.S., South Korea and elsewhere also believe Kim has asked Russia for help to improve North Korea’s top weaponry—much of which is based on Soviet-era systems.
“It’s North Korea 2.0 that Kim is pursuing,” said Paik Woo-yeal, a political science and diplomacy professor at South Korea’s Yonsei University. “Kim is reshaping his strategy of regime survival.”
Kim’s gambit could backfire. (…) But North Korea, in many ways, couldn’t keep repeating the same old approach—and not just because it had failed to yield results. The U.S., Western Europe and its Indo-Pacific allies swung behind combating Chinese aggression, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the weaponization of global supply chains. Those new partnerships could coalesce around the Kim regime’s nuclear threat, too.
Meanwhile, Pyongyang’s traditional foes in Seoul, Washington and Tokyo increased joint military exercises and started sharing missile-tracking data. The U.S. provided deeper input to South Korea on potential American nuclear use in the event of a North Korean attack.
“Kim Jong Un understands that his strategic environment is changing rapidly,” said Evans Revere, a former senior State Department official who focused on Asia. “For Kim, the risks are worth the reward of getting the tools, technologies and the support he will need to survive in the hostile environment he anticipates.” (…)
The embrace of Russia brings geostrategic value to Kim beyond money, energy and technology by diversifying itself away from Chinese support, said Daniel Russel, a former top State Department official for Asia during the Obama administration. Now Beijing runs the risk of driving Kim further into Putin’s arms, should it seek to shape Pyongyang’s behavior or demand restraint, he said.
“Kim has put himself in the driver’s seat and can run something of a bidding war for his favor,” said Russel, now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. (…)
The Economist, 4 novembre, article payant
Global opinion : What the world thinks of Trump, Ukraine and Chinese supremacy
A new poll of 30,000 people worldwide has some surprising results
Extraits :
ON THE EVE of America’s presidential election, many people around the world are waiting on edge. Although non-Americans do not get a vote, the outcome of the election will have ramifications far beyond America’s borders on issues such as international trade, the credibility of Western defence alliances and the rise of China. In order to gauge where public opinion sits, The Economist, working with Globescan, a consulting and polling firm, asked 30,000 people worldwide for their views.
The results show widespread support for a Democratic Party victory in the presidential race but also that a significant cohort of fans of Donald Trump exists outside America. While Ukraine has been squeezed by Russia on the battlefield it still commands widespread support, even in the global south. And last, even as it holds a fraught election, and its might is tested by a new partnership of autocracies, America’s soft power far outstrips that of China, the poll shows. (…)
Over the course of two months Globescan conducted online surveys of 30,000 people in 29 countries, plus one territory, Hong Kong. The surveys covered the major advanced economies and the largest emerging ones, except mainland China. Across this large and heterogeneous audience three questions were asked consistently: which candidate they would like to win the American election in November; whether they would rather see Russia or Ukraine win the war; and whether they would prefer America or China to be the world’s leading power. In each country a representative sample of about 1,000 was contacted in July and August. President Joe Biden withdrew from the race during the initial phase of the exercise, on July 21st; the questions were designed to allow for a candidate switch. (…)
cross all countries an average of 45% of people chose the Democratic Party, whose candidate now is Kamala Harris, while an average of 33% preferred Mr Trump (see chart 1). In Europe the margin was bigger: 55% preferred the Democrats to win against just 26% who chose Mr Trump. Worldwide the Democrats were ahead with both genders and across all educational and income cohorts.
Yet despite his nativist politics there are strong seams of support from Mr Trump around the world. One example is young people. They were almost evenly split. Among those aged 25-34, for example, an average of 40% were in favour of a Democratic president and 38% wanted a Republican one. Across all age groups, Mr Trump came out ahead in one-third of countries or territories including Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Vietnam. Possible explanations include sympathy for strongman rule and anger over the Biden administration’s Middle East policies. (…)
The final question looked at who people want to lead the world; America or China. GlobeScan found remarkably little desire for a China-led order. On average 59% of people said they would prefer America as the world’s leading power if given a choice between it and China, which was picked by just 22% of respondents (see chart 3). Support for America was surprisingly strong in the global south. In India, the world’s most populous country, 79% favoured America, as did majorities in all five of the Latin American states polled. The three countries in Africa that were polled, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, were also pro-American. The sting in the tail was that in one American treaty ally, Turkey, people preferred a Chinese-run world. Once again Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while relying on American military ties to a degree, had populations that wanted Chinese hegemony.
The Economist, 4 novembre, article payant
Dig, baby, dig : China is tightening its grip on the world’s minerals
That is making Western policymakers anxious
Extraits :
To decarbonise the global economy and build the data centres needed for ever smarter artificial-intelligence models, the world will need lots of minerals. China wants first dibs. Last year its companies ploughed roughly $16bn into mines overseas, not including minority investments.
That is the highest figure in a decade, up from less than $5bn the year before (see top chart). (…)
Chinese miners control a large and growing share of the world’s minerals, including about half of nickel and mined lithium, more than two-fifths of cobalt and a fifth of copper. Most of that is dug up abroad (see bottom chart). In the past few years that has led to plenty of hand-wringing but not much meaningful action on the part of Western policymakers. There are signs, though, that is changing. (…)
Some of what China’s mining giants dig up abroad stays there, and even finds its way to Western buyers. CMOC, through its metals-trading arm in Geneva, sells cobalt to companies like Electra Battery Materials Corporation, a Canadian firm that is building a refining facility in Ontario.
A growing share of China’s overseas mining output, though, is woven into the country’s expanding foreign supply chain for products such as batteries, EVs and solar panels. And much of the ore is shipped back home. In the first nine months of this year China imported 12% more copper, 21% more cobalt and 20% more bauxite than it did in the same period last year.
As China’s hold on global mining strengthens, the West—and America in particular—is becoming ever more anxious about its deepening reliance on its strategic rival. America imports more than half the minerals it needs, and China is among its most important suppliers. Politicians eager to boost American manufacturing at home realise that their ambitions may be hampered by a lack of access to the metals all those new factories will require. On the campaign trail Kamala Harris has called for a stockpile of minerals to ensure America’s “economic and national security”, an idea that has won bipartisan support.
A stockpile will not do much to relieve America’s reliance on Chinese minerals. Somewhat more usefully, America and a group of its allies, through the Mineral Security Partnership, are trying to co-ordinate their support for critical-minerals projects around the world. Speeding up the construction of new mines at home would be even better. (…)
As Chinese miners dig faster and farther afield, their grip will only get harder to loosen. ■
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/31/china-is-tightening-its-grip-on-the-worlds-minerals
L’Express, 4 novembre, article payant
Robert A. Manning : “La Corée du Nord pourrait être l’allumette qui déclenche un chaos mondial”
Grand entretien. Selon le chercheur et ex-conseiller au sein du département d’Etat, l’alliance entre la Corée du Nord et la Russie est non seulement inquiétante pour l’Ukraine, mais pour toute la stabilité mondiale, avec un Kim Jong-un qui n’est plus limité par la Chine.
Extraits :
Le déploiement de troupes nord-coréennes sur le territoire russe a été confirmé par l’Otan et le Pentagone. Comment comprenez-vous la stratégie de Kim Jong-un?
Robert A. Manning : L’alliance russo-coréenne qui se dessine ne sort pas de nulle part. Des Nord-Coréens ont travaillé dans l’Extrême-Orient russe pendant plusieurs décennies. En octobre 2023, la Maison-Blanche avait signalé que la Corée du Nord livrait des conteneurs d’armes à la Russie. Et deux mois après la signature d’un nouvel accord de sécurité avec Poutine l’année dernière, Pyongyang a soudainement réussi à lancer un satellite militaire, après une série d’essais infructueux. De nombreux spécialistes estiment que Poutine a fourni à la Corée du Nord l’assistance technologique dont elle avait besoin pour y parvenir. Cette relation se construit donc depuis un certain temps.
Mais ce qui se passe aujourd’hui me semble refléter le profond désarroi de Vladimir Poutine, qui est de plus en plus inquiet que l’Ukraine gagne du terrain en Russie mais ne veut pas d’une mobilisation générale de sa population. Alors il se tourne vers son allié nord-coréen. A quel prix? C’est la question du moment. Poutine est quelqu’un de très transactionnel. Il a donc sans doute offert quelque chose à Kim Jong-un en échange de l’envoi de troupes sur son sol. Cela peut être un coup de pouce à Pyongyang pour développer ses missiles balistiques intercontinentaux [ICBM], ses sous-marins nucléaires ou bien la miniaturisation de ses ogives : quoi qu’il en soit, je pense qu’il s’agit d’une aide importante en termes de technologie militaire. Mais pour tout vous dire, je crois que, quelle que soit la réponse à cette question, il faut regarder au-delà de ce qui se passe en Ukraine pour prendre la mesure de ce qui se passe sous nos yeux.
De quoi voulez-vous parler?
Cela fait trois décennies que j’observe ce qui se passe en Corée du Nord, au sein et en dehors du gouvernement, et je crois pouvoir dire que ce pays menace plus que jamais depuis les années 1950 l’équilibre des pouvoirs en Asie du Nord-Est, et maintenant, également en Europe… Si l’on regarde de près, Pyongyang a opéré trois grands changements stratégiques depuis 2019 (dont le renforcement du soutien de Kim Jong-un à Vladimir Poutine fait partie), qui ont tous des conséquences diplomatiques et géopolitiques majeures.
Tout d’abord, le renforcement qualitatif et quantitatif de son arsenal nucléaire : Kim Jong-un dispose désormais de missiles balistiques intercontinentaux à combustible solide capables d’atteindre la partie continentale des Etats-Unis et d’armes nucléaires tactiques. Depuis l’échec du sommet de Hanoï entre Kim Jong-un et Donald Trump, Pyongyang, qui a toujours poursuivi l’objectif de normaliser ses relations avec les Etats-Unis, a renoncé aux Etats-Unis et choisi d’accélérer drastiquement le développement de son arsenal nucléaire. En conséquence, l’Asie du Nord-Est (Japon, Corée du Sud) est inquiète – les sondages en Corée du Sud montrent que plus de 70 % de l’opinion sont favorables à l’obtention de leurs propres armes nucléaires. Et la crédibilité de la dissuasion nucléaire américaine est remise en question. Washington échangerait-il vraiment Los Angeles contre Séoul?
Il y a ensuite eu l’abandon par Kim Jong-un de l’objectif ancien (soixante-dix ans) de réunification des deux Corées. Depuis plusieurs mois, Kim Jong-un n’a d’ailleurs de cesse d’illustrer le fait que la Corée du Sud est désormais devenue “l’ennemi principal”, notamment en détruisant tous les symboles de cette ambition de réunification et en modifiant la constitution nord-coréenne. C’est un autre motif d’inquiétude : le Nord cherche-t-il à attaquer et à absorber la Corée du Sud?
Ce qui m’amène à évoquer le récent renforcement du soutien de Kim Jong-un à Vladimir Poutine, qui a de nombreuses implications, parmi lesquelles une perte d’influence de la Chine. Plusieurs responsables chinois craignent en effet que le président russe ne nuise à l’influence de Pékin qui représentait, jusqu’ici, 90 % des échanges commerciaux de la Corée du Nord – car désormais, Vladimir Poutine peut leur fournir des céréales et du carburant, ainsi que de la technologie militaire. Au-delà des intérêts commerciaux de la Chine, cela signifie aussi que Pékin perd de son influence, celle de la Corée du Nord, permettant à Kim Jong-un de monter la Russie et la Chine l’une contre l’autre. La somme de tout ceci – accélération nucléaire, désignation de la Corée voisine comme ennemi et nouvelle alliance avec la Russie – a fait voler en éclats les hypothèses qui ont guidé les diplomaties américaine et sud-coréenne au cours des trente dernières années et a plongé la Corée du Nord dans une compétition à somme nulle entre grandes puissances.
Si l’on vous suit, la Corée du Nord serait donc le reflet d’une alliance eurasiatique visant à créer un nouvel ordre mondial?
Oui. Nous sommes actuellement dans un moment d’interrègne entre un ancien ordre qui s’érode et un nouvel ordre à venir dont les contours ne sont pas encore totalement définis – qui plus est, à un moment où l’aggravation de la compétition entre grandes puissances pourrait déboucher, comme en 1914, sur une guerre mondiale. En effet, il est tentant de considérer l’intervention de la Corée du Nord en Ukraine comme analogue à l’intervention des fascistes italiens et allemands dans la guerre civile espagnole, qui était un signe avant-coureur de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Quoi qu’il en soit, ce qui apparaît de plus en plus clairement, pour les raisons que je viens d’évoquer, c’est l’émergence de deux grands axes sous l’impulsion des choix stratégiques de Pyongyang. D’un côté, un bloc composé de la Russie, de la Corée du Nord et de la Chine (même si celle-ci reste méfiante vis-à-vis de Vladimir Poutine). De l’autre, les Etats-Unis, la Corée du Sud et le Japon. Et, quelque part au milieu, on retrouve les pays du Sud global, qui essaient de jouer sur les deux tableaux.
Dans cette perspective, la Corée du Nord pourrait bien être l’allumette qui déclenche un chaos mondial. Pensez que, jusqu’ici, Kim Jong-un était encore limité par les lignes rouges tracées par la Chine. A savoir, même si c’était tacitement sous-entendu, pas de 7e essai nucléaire par Pyongyang – la Corée du Nord est le seul Etat à avoir testé des armes nucléaires au cours de ce siècle. Que se passera-t-il maintenant si Kim Jong-un décide d’aller contre cette idée, que les Chinois s’y opposent, et que Vladimir Poutine se range du côté de Pyongyang? Croyez-moi, le monde est aujourd’hui une poudrière extrêmement instable. Ça n’est d’ailleurs pas moi qui le dis, mais un rapport du Conseil national du renseignement paru en 2023, selon lequel Kim Jong-un envisagera presque certainement des actions coercitives de plus en plus risquées à mesure que la qualité et la quantité de son arsenal de missiles nucléaires et balistiques vont augmenter. (…)
The Economist, 4 novembre, article payant
A very cold war : How to avoid anarchy in Antarctica
All that stands between the status quo and chaos is a fragile treaty
Extraits :
ANTARCTICA IS THE only continent unbloodied by war. For over six decades peace on the frozen land mass has been kept by the Antarctic Treaty, an agreement signed in 1959 at the height of the cold war that established it as a demilitarised scientific preserve. But much like its ice sheet, the system governing Antarctica is in trouble as global warming opens up the possibility of mining virgin resources.
Seven countries, including Britain, Argentina, Australia and Norway, have territorial claims over the Antarctic. The carve-up of the continent reflects the world of the early 1900s: Britain, the naval hegemon at the time, and its former colonies grabbed almost 60%. Norway, whose explorers were first to the South Pole, took a bit less than 20%.
These claims do not reflect today’s geopolitical balance and are rejected by other powers such as China, which feels that it was squeezed out of the original scramble for Antarctica. Nor are they recognised by America and Russia, which both reserve the right to make future claims. The only thing standing between a free-for-all land grab, or even conflict, is the treaty. When it came into force in 1961 it froze all territorial claims and prohibited countries from making new ones. Yet this status quo is now being threatened by a new scramble for the Antarctic. (…)
The best solution would be to modernise the treaty so as to create a new global agreement for managing Antarctica. However, all such amendments require unanimous support, which Russia and China would not provide. The practical alternative is for America and its allies to keep trying to enforce the existing treaty but at the same time to draft and sign an improved set of rules on things like environmental protection and tourism that could provide a better model for the governance of the Antarctic. These would then be ready for all countries to adopt, should polar geopolitics ever thaw. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/31/how-to-avoid-anarchy-in-antarctica
The Economist, 1 novembre, article payant
A column on world affairs : The Telegram: our new guide to a dangerous world
The old order is dying. Our geopolitics columnist will tell you what’s coming next
Extraits :
IN FEBRUARY 1946, in the depths of a Moscow winter, an American diplomat sent a remarkable cable to Washington. On paper, George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” was a reply to a query about the Soviet worldview. In reality, Kennan was proposing a strategy for managing superpower competition—an approach that he later called “containment”. The Soviet Union had no interest in friendship, but did not seek a third world war, Kennan explained. Communist rulers were impervious to the “logic of reason”, but understood the “logic of force” and knew their regime to be weaker than a united West. If Soviet expansionism were countered around the world, then a “general military conflict” could be avoided, until one day the USSR either mellowed or crumbled.
Washington policymakers were struggling to respond to Soviet hostility. Kennan illuminated their choices with unrivalled clarity. The eventual cold war was more militarised than his vision of containment, but he cannily predicted its shape and its ending.
It says a lot that in 2024 it is not hard to meet foreign-policy types nostalgic for the original cold war. True, that four-decade confrontation involved horrors, as both East and West waged proxy wars and propped up loyal tyrants. But there was a simplicity to the contest. One camp promised capitalist plenty, consumer technology and expanding personal freedoms. The other offered a grimmer, greyer socialist utopia of central planning, autarky and jackbooted order. The world offers no such neat choices now.
This article marks the launch of “The Telegram”, The Economist’s new weekly column on geopolitics. This first column draws on interviews with political leaders, ambassadors, business bosses and scholars from Beijing to London, New York and Washington. This is an unsettling, vertiginous moment, as fundamental principles and rules of war are tested to breaking point from Ukraine to Gaza and Sudan. Popular consent for pillars of the post-1945 international order is crumbling. Take the Geneva Convention on Refugees signed in 1951, with its guarantees of asylum for those fleeing conflict or persecution. It could never be agreed today. (…)
It is an exaggeration to claim that globalisation is dying. Chinese exports have set new records this year. But the global economy is fragmenting. Business bosses and investors describe new curbs on trade, technology, capital and data. Such barriers are rising in the name of national security and protecting domestic workers from unfair competition. Whoever wins America’s presidential election on November 5th, its closest trade partners will be asked to further limit dealings with China in key sectors.
Other powers are determined not to choose sides. “Our values are with the US,” says a Latin American diplomat. But his country’s trade with China is booming, and the technology offered by Chinese firms is “better and cheaper”. Nor is the global south in a mood for lectures. Its governments remember when envoys from Western capitals or from bodies such as the IMF told them to open their markets. Yet now that competition from Chinese firms threatens Western corporations, they see America and other advanced economies resorting to tariffs and industrial policies.
This writer will try to make sense of this unhappy, chaotic moment, drawing on successive postings as The Economist’s columnist in Brussels, London, Washington and Beijing. The column will look for patterns and trends. It will report from leaders’ summits and street markets, and explore how global problems are changing local politics and everyday life. (…)
Faced with angry populations, political leaders of all stripes are pledging to put the national interest first. Kennan might have approved. An advocate for realpolitik in its most pitiless form, he scorned democracy, and saw no vital American interest in defending human rights far from home. (…)
This column is not named “Kennan”, then. But a telegram—a concise, timely dispatch, informed by facts on the ground—is a worthy model. The world needs explaining. To work. ■
https://www.economist.com/international/2024/10/31/the-telegram-our-new-guide-to-a-dangerous-world
The Economist, 31 octobre, article payant
Neighbourhood strife : North Korea’s fanatical regime just got scarier
A new missile test, troops to Russia and death sentences for K-pop
Extraits :
THE KAESONG Industrial Complex in North Korea has long symbolised hopes for peace and unity on the Korean peninsula. Opened in 2004, it housed South Korean factories that employed North Korean workers. Joint production trudged along until 2016, when South Korea turned off the lights in response to advances in North Korea’s nuclear programme; subsequent attempts to restart the project faltered. This month Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator, made clear that it has no future by blowing up the roads that connect Kaesong to the south.
The destruction of roads is just one sign of rising tensions on the Korean peninsula. North Korea has strengthened its ties with Russia, dispatching an estimated 11,000 troops to help Vladimir Putin wage war against Ukraine; South Korea fears that Mr Putin will provide sensitive missile or nuclear technology in return. On October 31st, North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time in almost a year, which had its longest flight time yet. It may also conduct a nuclear test around America’s elections next week. Less visibly, but no less ominously, over the past year Mr Kim has reversed decades of official doctrine by declaring that the two Koreas are not a single divided people but rather separate, hostile states. (…)
North Korea’s recent steps have prompted the South to reassess its own posture. Ever fewer South Koreans see themselves in North Koreans: with each passing generation, support for reunification fades (see chart). In a speech this August, Mr Yoon laid out a new policy of his own. While nominally still calling for unification, it makes explicit that it can happen only if the South absorbs the North. Even some South Korean progressives have downgraded their expectations. Lee Jong-seok, who served as minister of unification during the early years of the Kaesong complex’s work, sighs at the prospects of a unified peninsula. “Perhaps my descendants will see it,” he says. “The most important thing for now is not having war.”
Launching an all-out attack would be suicidal for Mr Kim. But he could escalate much further than destroying roads or testing missiles. On Yeonpyeong, a flashpoint island near the maritime border that North Korea shelled in 2010, one resident says they fear a repetition of the day “everything was ablaze”. Since that incident, the North’s military capabilities have grown. “Backed by a growing nuclear arsenal and support of Russia, Kim may feel more comfortable in taking chances,” writes Sydney Seiler, formerly America’s most senior intelligence officer for North Korea. Mr Yoon’s insistence that South Korea will respond to any provocations with force also increases the risk of tit-for-tat moves spiralling out of control. Imagining such a war is all too easy. Imagining lasting peace, by contrast, is becoming harder. ■https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/10/30/north-koreas-fanatical-regime-just-got-scarier
Le monde du XXIe siècle selon les Brics (Le Point, 31 octobre, article payant)
L’ÉDITO DE NICOLAS BAVEREZ. La Chine et la Russie ont réussi le tour de force de transformer le sommet des grands pays émergents en une machine de guerre au service de leur croisade anti-occidentale.
Extraits :
(…) La Chine et la Russie ont réussi le tour de force de transformer l’acronyme inventé au début du siècle par Jim O’Neill, le stratège de Goldman Sachs, afin de vendre des produits d’investissement dans les pays émergents, en une machine de guerre au service de leur croisade anti-occidentale. Au sein d’une mondialisation qui éclate en blocs, ce G20 alternatif représente 41 % de la population mondiale, 26 % de la superficie de la planète, 37 % du PIB, 25 % du pétrole et 50 % des minerais. Il enregistre en 2024-2025 une croissance de 4,5 %, contre 1,7 % pour les pays du G7. Plus de trente États ont en outre fait acte de candidature pour rejoindre les Brics, qui ont acté à Kazan un partenariat avec treize d’entre eux – dont la Turquie, membre de l’Otan !
L’ambition ultime des Brics consiste à fédérer 152 des 193 États de la planète contre la supposée hégémonie occidentale. Le système international basculerait d’une configuration de l’Occident contre le reste du monde à celle du Sud contre ce qui resterait d’Occident. Si les Brics restent hétérogènes, s’ils ne forment pas une alliance stratégique comparable à l’Otan, si leurs intérêts divergent parfois frontalement, à l’image de la Chine et de l’Inde dans l’Himalaya, de la Chine et de la Russie en Asie centrale ou bien de la Russie et de la Turquie en Syrie, leur stratégie produit des résultats et ne doit pas être sous-estimée. (…)
Il est grand temps que les démocraties cessent de se replier sur elles-mêmes et d’être obsédées par leurs pathologies en occultant les maux qui accablent la majeure partie de l’humanité. Il est grand temps qu’elles se réengagent dans les solutions à apporter à l’insécurité alimentaire, énergétique et sanitaire, dans le financement des infrastructures critiques pour le développement et la transition climatique, dans la gestion du surendettement et de la multiplication des défauts au sein des pays émergents. Il est grand temps qu’elles renouent avec les valeurs qui ont fait leur succès, la liberté, la raison critique et le sens de l’universel, aux antipodes du programme protectionniste de Donald Trump qui provoquerait un effondrement du commerce et des paiements mondiaux comparable à celui déclenché par le tarif Smoot-Hawley dans les années 1930.
Raymond Aron rappelait le danger mortel pour la liberté d’une situation où « l’Occident ne sait plus s’il préfère ce qu’il apporte à ce qu’il détruit ». Souhaitons que les démocraties en finissent avec les déconstructeurs et les nihilistes et que revienne le temps des visionnaires et des bâtisseurs.
https://www.lepoint.fr/debats/le-monde-du-xxie-siecle-selon-les-brics-31-10-2024-2574108_2.php
Le quatuor maléfique du « Crink »
L’ÉDITO DE LUC DE BAROCHEZ. L’acronyme anglais pour Chine, Russie, Iran et Corée du Nord désigne une coalition anti-occidentale adepte de la force brute. (Le Point, 30 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Une puissance asiatique envoie des troupes combattre en Europe : l’escalade est gravissime. Il est désormais confirmé que la Corée du Nord, pays pauvre et autarcique mais militairement puissant, a dépêché plusieurs milliers de ses soldats pour appuyer les armées russes dans leur guerre d’agression de l’Ukraine, un pays candidat à l’Union européenne. Pour trouver un précédent historique, il faut remonter huit siècles en arrière, aux invasions mongoles.
Le ministère américain de la Défense estime à 10 000 le nombre d’hommes arrivés en Russie, où ils sont à l’entraînement. Un certain nombre sont déjà déployés autour du saillant de Koursk, conquis cet été par l’Ukraine. Leur participation aux combats ne serait plus qu’une question de temps. Le président Joe Biden a dénoncé une initiative ” très dangereuse” mais mais Washington ne semble avoir aucune parade prête. Quant à l’Europe, sa passivité est affligeante.
Le conflit européen le plus meurtrier depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale est désormais un théâtre où trois puissances asiatiques jouent un rôle majeur, au côté de la Russie. La Corée du Nord, qui livrait déjà obus et missiles en quantité, fournit désormais des troupes au sol ; l’Iran approvisionne Moscou en drones et missiles balistiques ; la Chine aide la Russie à contourner les sanctions occidentales, lui apporte de la technologie de pointe, y compris militaire, et maintient son économie à flot en lui achetant des hydrocarbures.
La coalition ainsi formée modifie en profondeur la dynamique géopolitique mondiale au détriment de l’Europe, des États-Unis et de leurs alliés asiatiques. Les quatre tyrans qui la constituent – Xi Jinping, Vladimir Poutine, Ali Khamenei et Kim Jong-un – sont unis par la conviction que leur heure est venue, face à un Occident riche, puissant mais déclinant. Leur objectif commun : un monde « multipolaire » où les États-Unis et l’Europe seront marginalisés.
Le géopolitologue canadien Peter Van Praagh a forgé l’acronyme « Crink », avec les initiales de leurs noms en anglais, pour désigner leur coalition. Les membres comptent parmi eux trois puissances dotées de l’arme nucléaire et le quatrième, l’Iran, est en voie de les rejoindre. Ils montrent chaque jour qu’ils sont prêts à recourir à la violence, que ce soit contre l’Ukraine, Israël ou les Philippines. (…)
L’entrée en lice de Pyongyang est particulièrement inquiétante. Primo, cette dictature est hautement militarisée (quelque 1,3 million d’hommes sont sous les drapeaux). Secundo, son intervention aide Poutine à s’abstenir de décréter une mobilisation générale, qui serait impopulaire et risquerait donc de déstabiliser son pouvoir. Tertio, la Corée du Nord obtient une aide pour contourner les sanctions onusiennes qui la visent. Quarto, elle se fait payer (les services sud-coréens parlent de 2 000 dollars par mois et par soldat, que Moscou verse dans les caisses de Kim et non pas aux pauvres militaires). Le régime, l’un des plus dictatoriaux du monde, en sort renforcé.
La Russie est encouragée à poursuivre son agression, alors qu’elle ne cesse de grignoter du terrain depuis l’été. La visite de Vladimir Poutine à Pyongyang, le 19 juin, et le « traité pour un partenariat global » qu’il a signé avec Kim à cette occasion, ont été fructueux. La Chine, quant à elle, est de loin le membre le plus puissant du « Crink ». Ses intentions restent floues, cependant. En raison de son poids économique, elle a théoriquement intérêt à la poursuite d’une certaine stabilité internationale. En rejoignant le groupe, elle pourrait simplement chercher à rééquilibrer la géopolitique mondiale en sa faveur. Mais elle pourrait aussi préparer le terrain à une future agression de Taïwan. L’irruption de la Corée du Nord dans le conflit ukrainien ne serait alors qu’une étape dans l’extension mondiale de la guerre.
https://www.lepoint.fr/editos-du-point/le-quatuor-malefique-du-crink-29-10-2024-2573917_32.php
Lydia Polgreen: We’ve Just Had a Glimpse of the World to Come (NYT, Guest Essay, 30 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Last week at a lavish global summit in the Russian city of Kazan, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, once a darling of the West — winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and formerly a staunch ally of the United States — spoke up to heap praise on his host: Vladimir Putin, the bête noire of the rules-based order.
“Allow me to congratulate you on maintaining economic resilience during a difficult period,” Abiy cooed. “This period was not easy for Russia, but under your leadership you have succeeded to maintain the economic resilience which might be exemplary for most of us.”
This might sound to an untrained ear like the kind of empty flattery typically offered at a talking shop of global leaders. But to me, it was a telling bit of theater that hints at the dangerous crossroads at which a world riven by inequality and beset by endless crises finds itself. It was a glimpse of the world to come and how the shifting balance of global power increasingly eludes the West’s grasp.
Abiy is an ambitious nation builder who presides over one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. He is also increasingly at odds with the West, and his mention of Russian resilience in the face of very tough sanctions was a not-so-subtle shot across the bow. Should the West seek to contain Abiy’s aggressive moves in his strategically vital neighborhood, his country has an ally and role model in Putin’s Russia.
Abiy was speaking at the annual summit of the BRICS nations, the largest gathering of world leaders in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The pomp-filled event was meant to project to the West that its attempt at isolating Putin as punishment for his invasion of Ukraine had failed.
Surrounded by the leaders of some three dozen nations, Putin looked like the cat who ate the canary — a man who reportedly has the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, on something close to speed dial and has reportedly had private phone calls with the past and possibly future president of the United States, Donald Trump. The secretary general of the United Nations attended as well, raising eyebrows as he made his first visit to Russia in more than two years. In a news conference at the end of the summit, Putin indulged in some digs at his Western tormentors. (…)
It is, to be sure, a rather motley bunch of countries whose interests are varied and quite often at odds. For some new members and aspirants, like Iran and Venezuela, the attraction is clearly to join and perhaps seek protection within China and Russia’s anti-Western axis. But its original members are divided on what the alliance is for. For a couple of the most powerful among the players, the goal is to hedge, to find advantage in whatever arena you can and to remind the West that you have other options.
For all its talk about creating alternative institutions to those dominated by the West, BRICS has made little progress. Its development bank, meant to compete with the World Bank, is relatively tiny. It is no closer to creating an alternative currency to the dollar, though local currency trades among members are on the rise. (…)
The good news is that there is still time to change the existing order and plenty of important partners willing to engage in that effort. In a few weeks the Group of 20, a club of the world’s biggest economies, will be meeting in Brazil. Many of the leaders who gathered in Kazan will descend on Rio de Janeiro along with other rising powers of the global south, to meet on more even ground with the big powers of the global north.
One leader who won’t be there is Vladimir Putin: He faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, a battered but enduring symbol of the rules-based order and its aspiration, however imperfectly, to build a more just world. It is hard to imagine a more apt moment, in his absence, for the West to seize the opportunity and begin, genuinely, to cede power to the rest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/opinion/brics-summit-russia-west.html
New Vehicles, Face Paint and a 1,200-Foot Fall: The U.S. Army Prepares for War With China
The big and cumbersome Army is trying to transform itself to deploy quickly to Asia, if needed. It is an inherently dangerous business. (NYT, 30 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Early one morning this month, 864 Army paratroopers bundled into C-17 transport planes at a base in Alaska and took off for a Great Power War exercise between three volcanic mountains on Hawaii’s Big Island.
Only 492 made it. Some of the C-17s had trouble with their doors, while others were forced to land early. A few of the parachutists who did make it sprained ankles or suffered head trauma. And one — a 19-year-old private — began to fall quickly when his chute did not open.
Across the field, shouts of “pull your reserve” could be heard before the young private hit the ground and medics ran to treat him. The horrifying scene and its aftermath encapsulate every jumper’s worst nightmare.
But Pvt. Second Class Erik Partida’s 1,200-foot fall was also a stark reality check as the U.S. Army transforms itself, and its hundreds of thousands of young men and women, for yet another war, this one a potential conflict with China.
The Pentagon calls it a Great Power War, and it would be exponentially more dangerous. It would put the world’s two strongest militaries — both of them nuclear superpowers — in direct conflict, possibly drawing in other nuclear adversaries, including North Korea and Russia. U.S. troops would be killed, in numbers that could possibly go beyond the toll from America’s deadliest conflicts.
Such a war would be fought on the ground, at sea, in the air and in space. So the Army is practicing for exactly that.
Forget the Marines, who can get anywhere quickly, because they travel light. Or the Navy, which practically lives in the Pacific. Those services, which featured heavily in the Pacific during World War II, have the planning for a conflict in Asia baked into their DNA.
But now, as the chances of war with China increase, the big and cumbersome Army is trying to transform itself after two decades of fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Unlike the Taliban or other insurgents, China will have satellites that can see troop formations from the sky. The Army must, in essence, learn how to fly under the radar. (…)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/us/politics/us-military-army-china.html
À Kazan, Antonio Guterres brise l’isolement de Poutine sur la scène internationale
En rencontrant le chef d’État sous mandat d’arrêt de la Cour pénale internationale (une agence onusienne), le secrétaire général de l’ONU, Antonio Guterres, apporte une légitimation inespérée au régime russe. (Le Figaro, 25 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Vladimir Poutine n’aurait pas pu rêver mieux ! Lui dont l’Occident prétendait qu’il était isolé sur la scène internationale et acculé par les sanctions économiques, triomphe à Kazan au milieu d’un aréopage composé des plus grandes têtes d’affiche de ce qu’on appelle imparfaitement le « Sud global ». Xi Jinping, Erdogan, Modi, Pezechkian… Ils sont tous là pour célébrer la « victoire » diplomatique du président russe sur l’Occident. Mais la plus belle prise, une « marionnette » pour le théâtre d’ombres du Kremlin selon un diplomate, est arrivée directement de l’ouest. Il s’agit d’Antonio Guterres, le secrétaire général de l’ONU, qui a rencontré Vladimir Poutine en tête à tête jeudi. Au menu : la guerre en Ukraine et le conflit au Proche-Orient. Le régime russe, triomphant, s’est même payé le luxe de communiquer à la place de son illustre invité, annonçant jusqu’au décollage de son avion pour Moscou, à la place de l’organisation. (…)
En se rendant à Kazan, Antonio Guterres rend en effet visite à un président sous mandat d’arrêt, recherché pour crimes de guerre par la Cour pénale internationale (CPI), une institution de l’ONU. Ce n’était pas le cas en avril 2022… Trois ans après que l’ONU ait condamné l’invasion brutale de l’Ukraine et demandé que la Russie cesse immédiatement son agression, alors que le secrétaire général de l’ONU a affirmé que la guerre en Ukraine était « une plaie ouverte au cœur de l’Europe », sa visite à Kazan apparaît comme une légitimation du régime russe. Lui qui dirige une institution censée veiller au respect du droit international et des droits de l’homme contribue ainsi à briser l’isolement de Vladimir Poutine, en lui offrant une reconnaissance inespérée. (…)
Pour le spécialiste ukrainien, la visite du secrétaire général à Kazan affaiblit la crédibilité de l’ONU. « L’impotence de l’ONU n’a jamais été aussi apparente. L’organisation a échoué à prendre une action décisive contre l’agression russe. Guterres a échoué à rétablir le leadership moral qui est crucial dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, donnant ainsi un accord tacite aux régimes tyranniques. Quel est le but de l’ONU si elle ne défend plus les valeurs de paix, de sécurité et de justice ? » (…)
NOUVEL ORDRE MONDIAL: Pascal Bruckner : «Tout atermoiement avec Téhéran sera payé au centuple par nos enfants et nos petits-enfants»
TRIBUNE – Pour le philosophe, l’avenir des démocraties occidentales se joue dans leur attitude de fermeté face à Moscou et Téhéran. Il considère qu’elles ont aujourd’hui une occasion unique de défaire le régime des mollahs. (Le Figaro, 24 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Ils sont quatre plus un : l’Empereur, le Gangster, le Clown et le Turban. Le cinquième est le Duplice. On aura reconnu Xi Jinping, Vladimir Poutine, Kim Jong-un, l’ayatollah Khamenei ainsi que Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Le seul point commun à tous ces leaders est leur haine de l’Occident et leur nostalgie de l’empire. À l’exception du dirigeant de Pyongyang, qui envoie des hommes combattre sur le front ukrainien et voudrait placer toute la péninsule coréenne sous sa tutelle. Or ces quatre plus un – Erdogan, grand négateur du génocide arménien, joue double ou triple jeu, aide l’Ukraine contre Moscou et reste un membre turbulent et incontournable de l’Otan – sont en train de former un nouvel axe militaro-économique destiné à encercler nos démocraties et à en saper les principes.
Leur détestation de ce que nous incarnons, la liberté, l’égalité et le pluralisme, est sans faille. Ils aiment à se présenter comme les défenseurs du « Sud global », nouvelle appellation du tiers-monde de jadis, contre l’impérialisme européen. Et ce par le biais d’une distorsion historique majeure que j’avais analysée dès 2006 (dans La Tyrannie de la pénitence) : faire du colonialisme la malédiction de l’humanité plus que du fascisme ou du stalinisme. Au prix de minimiser la Shoah, un simple épisode comme le sujet colonial en a connu, jadis, « des exterminations à gogo », selon les mots de l’indigéniste et antisémite Houria Bouteldja. (…)
Or cette alliance des brutes connaît aujourd’hui un maillon faible : le régime de Téhéran, miné par la destruction du Hamas, la décapitation du Hezbollah, les sanctions économiques et l’insurrection du peuple iranien contre lui. Il est mûr pour tomber. Il chancelle comme chancelait l’Union soviétique en 1989 avant la chute du mur de Berlin, le 9 novembre. Une attaque conjointe israélo-américaine appuyée par la France, l’Angleterre et les monarchies arabes porterait un coup fatal à ce régime terroriste qui pend les femmes, torture ses opposants, opprime ses minorités, sème la mort dans toute la région, indifférent au sort des Palestiniens qu’il instrumentalise à des fins d’hégémonie. (…)
La vraie difficulté vient des États-Unis eux-mêmes : échaudés par leurs échecs en Afghanistan et en Irak, ils sont devenus profondément isolationnistes. C’est le point commun qui relie Barack Obama à Donald Trump et Joe Biden. « No more boots on the ground », plus de soldats sur le terrain : après le Vietnam, l’Irak et l’Afghanistan, l’opinion publique ne veut plus voir mourir un seul « boy » pour une cause étrangère. (…)
L’occasion d’en finir avec le funeste régime installé à Téhéran depuis 1979 ne pourrait être qu’une décision bipartisane et requiert une audace qui manque chez les démocrates comme chez les républicains alors que le pays est obnubilé par la course électorale. Cette fenêtre stratégique ne se présentera pas de sitôt. Ajoutons que le cancer islamiste qui a gagné la planète, chiites et sunnites confondus, à partir des années 1980, a connu un essor incontestable avec l’ayatollah Khomeyni et donné naissance à ces innombrables métastases que sont al-Qaida, Daech (même s’ils se détestent) et les sectes djihadistes issues des Frères musulmans, eux-mêmes appuyés par Téhéran. Leur haine du grand Satan global, États-Unis, Europe et Israël, est plus forte que les dissensions théologiques entre chiites et sunnites. (…)
Deux nations sauvent aujourd’hui l’honneur du monde démocratique : l’Ukraine et Israël, en proie aux mêmes ennemis puisque Poutine et Khamenei sont liés par un traité d’amitié et que le premier soutient ouvertement le Hamas, le Hezbollah et les talibans. Il faut couper les têtes de l’hydre une à une. Esquiver cette opportunité serait une faute contre la liberté et exposerait les dirigeants occidentaux à un déshonneur durable. Moscou comme Téhéran parient, peut-être à tort, sur la fatigue de l’Europe et des États-Unis.
« La victoire revient à celui qui tient le dernier quart d’heure » (Carl von Clausewitz). Si par malheur l’Iran s’en sortait avec quelques égratignures, si l’Ukraine tombait, faute d’avoir été vraiment secourue par l’Occident, minée par le rouleau compresseur de l’Armée rouge, les répercussions seraient innombrables : Téhéran continuerait à terroriser les pays arabes du Proche-Orient, Égypte comprise, l’Otan s’effondrerait et l’Europe serait menacée dans ses fondements, à la merci de l’ogre russe. Elle deviendrait un sanatorium de luxe, prête à se laisser dépecer pièce à pièce par tous les prédateurs.
Tout atermoiement avec Téhéran, pilier du Kremlin, sera payé au centuple par nos enfants et nos petits-enfants. (…)
Il n’est pire calamité en histoire que l’indécision. Elle signifierait que le monde occidental est faible et peut tomber comme un fruit mûr. La peur doit changer de camp, les démocraties ne peuvent qu’être armées et même surarmées face aux nouveaux ogres. Quelle que soit la forme prise par les représailles, paralysie du système électrique, destruction des infrastructures militaires et nucléaires, élimination ciblée des chefs des gardiens de la révolution, le moment est venu d’en finir avec l’Iran des mollahs. Le dépérissement de ce régime inique constituerait aussi une avancée importante pour travailler à une réconciliation entre Palestiniens et Israéliens. C’est la prudence, « l’art de bien se conduire dans une histoire incertaine » (Aristote), qui commande parfois de saisir la chance historique quand elle se présente.
A study in resilience : How Wagner survived Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death
Its mercenary model is still effective in Africa’s most fragile places (The Economist, 24 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
(…) Wagner’s African stronghold
On Wednesday the United Nations Security Council will discuss the Central African Republic, home to one of the world’s most neglected crises. The main topic will be the fate of the UN’s 14,000-strong peacekeeping force. It arrived in the country a decade ago to quell violence that had nearly descended into genocide. By some measures the mission has been a success: CAR today is more stable, and the national army holds much more territory.
But a large elephant lurks in the room: the Wagner Group. The Russian mercenary outfit arrived in CAR in 2018, ostensibly to train the army. Six years later, it controls lucrative gold and diamond mines and provides round-the-clock protection for the president. A good deal for the regime, no doubt—and for Russia, which has replaced France, the former colonial power, as CAR’s most influential foreign ally. But the risk for the UN is that its peacekeepers find themselves fighting alongside a group accused of war crimes. (…)
How Wagner survived Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death
Nuclear-War Risks Rise Again, Stoked by Global Conflicts
Arms reduction flourished with the Cold War’s end, but now atomic arsenals are growing (WSJ, 23 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
The Cold War’s end promised relief from nuclear nightmares. Long-adversarial governments agreed to eliminate warheads and collaborated to stop the spread of atomic weapons. That promise is now slipping away.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last month touted new rules on using nuclear arms, offering Moscow’s latest signal of readiness to use atomic weapons in its defense. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is expanding. Iran is close to developing usable nuclear weapons, prompting fears of a Middle East arms race.
One of the two critical U.S.-Russian nuclear-arms-control treaties has collapsed. The other, which caps how many nuclear weapons Russia and the U.S. deploy, expires in early 2026. A pledge made by declared atomic powers during the Cold War to strive for disarmament looks less realistic than ever.
Roughly 60 years ago, President John F. Kennedy warned that by 1975 the world could have 15 to 20 nuclear powers. His fears were inflated: there are only nine today.
Still, the global nonproliferation system is in greater peril than at any time since the Cold War, says United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, Director-General Rafael Grossi. The threat of a nuclear confrontation, which a decade ago seemed fanciful, is no longer unimaginable.
“The shared consensus among great powers on the importance of nonproliferation—which was critical to building and sustaining the nonproliferation regime since the 1960s—has eroded,” said Eric Brewer, a former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council, now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank. “I think at a minimum we’re going to end up in a world with more countries that are capable of building nuclear weapons.” (…)
As tensions have grown among the U.S., China and Russia in recent years, the consensus around nonproliferation has frayed. Officials say Iran could be just months away from building a nuclear weapon, and Saudi Arabia has said it would follow suit if that happens. Top officials in South Korea and Turkey have talked about their countries going nuclear.
Russia’s actions since its invasion of Ukraine have raised the first real specter of nuclear-weapons use in decades. The invasion itself represented a violation of terms of a 1994 pact, under which Ukraine handed over Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory to Russia.
Russia has repeatedly pointed to its nuclear weapons as a means of defense, although Western intelligence agencies have detected no real steps to prepare for nuclear use. (…)
Moscow has openly flouted nuclear-related sanctions on North Korea, as part of a growing partnership in which North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has sent millions of artillery rounds to Russia. (…)
China’s nuclear expansion appears to be the most rapid, and Beijing has so far refused negotiations on its plans. The Department of Defense has estimated that China’s current nuclear arsenal of roughly 500 weapons will reach 1,500 by 2035, putting Beijing on a par with Russia and the U.S. The U.K. announced in 2021 a raise in its cap on the number of nuclear weapons. (…)
Matthew Kroenig, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and one of the participants in the Congress’s nuclear strategy review, argues that despite the strains on the global nonproliferation system, the U.S. has the tools to shore it up.
“We focus on the problem children like Iran and North Korea but for the most part, 190 countries are following it,” he said of the NPT. “I do think a lot of it is in our hands…And I think the big one is extended deterrence and can we get our nuclear strategy in order and credibly assure our allies?”
The IAEA’s Grossi is less sanguine. Today’s increasingly tense global environment makes “the attraction of nuclear weapons very strong,” he said last month. “It’s a difficult moment, indeed.”
Nuclear-War Risks Rise Again, Stoked by Global Conflicts – WSJ
Understanding the BRICS Summit
The group, which seeks to rebalance the global order away from the West, will meet on Tuesday. Here’s a primer. (NYT, 22 octobre, quelques articles gratuits / semaine)
Extraits :
Leaders of BRICS, a group of emerging market nations that represent about half of the world’s population, will meet for a high-profile summit on Tuesday, their first since a major expansion last year.
BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. This year, the group has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The members will gather for the three-day conference in Kazan, a city in southwest Russia.
The summit comes at a high-profile moment for BRICS, which sees itself as a counterweight to the West. World leaders will stand side-by-side with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, despite his pariah status in the West.
But there are deep differences between member states, and the bloc has struggled to articulate and define its purpose. (…)
What holds the group together?
It’s not easy to pigeonhole the BRICS. The group includes some countries that are allies, but also some that are antagonists and rivals. Some of the countries are opposed to the United States (Russia, Iran); others are recipients of U.S. military aid (Egypt) and hosts to U.S. military bases (U.A.E.).
Some members are democracies; many are not. Ethiopia is a poor country; China is the world’s second-biggest economy. Some states produce oil and gas; others import their energy.
They do not share a religion or fight the same wars, either — except, perhaps, against each other: Last month, for instance, tensions escalated between Ethiopia and Egypt in a longstanding dispute over a hydroelectric dam on the Nile River.
Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute in Washington, described the BRICS as something like a two-pronged coalition.
He calls one side the “Global East” — China, Russia and, at times, Iran — which are rivals or antagonists of the United States and NATO. Many of the other countries in the bloc fit more comfortably into the category of “Global South.” They tend to be more neutral or outright U.S. allies. (…)
What to Know About the BRICS Summit and the Countries Involved – The New York Times
Launching a currency war in Moscow: Putin’s plan to defeat the dollar
He hopes this week’s BRICS summit will spark a sanctions-busting big bang (The Economist, 21 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, is sure to be cock-a-hoop on October 22nd when he poses for photographs with the leaders of perhaps 24 countries including Narendra Modi of India and Xi Jinping of China at the BRICS summit in Kazan on the Volga river. Last year, when the bloc met in Johannesburg and expanded from five to ten members, Mr Putin had to stay home to avoid being arrested on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This time he will hope to be seen playing a leading role in a rapidly growing club that is challenging the dominance of the Western-led order.
Now in their 15th year together, the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have achieved little. Yet at this summit Mr Putin hopes to give the bloc heft by getting it to build a new global financial-payments system to attack America’s dominance of global finance and shield Russia and its pals from sanctions. “Everyone understands that anyone may face US or other Western sanctions,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said last month. A BRICS payments system would allow “economic operations without being dependent on those that decided to weaponise the dollar and the euro”. This system, which Russia calls “BRICS-Bridge”, is intended to be built within a year and would allow countries to conduct cross-border settlement using digital platforms run by their central banks. Controversially, it may borrow concepts from a different project called mBridge that is part-run by a bastion of the Western-led order, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). (…)
America’s dominance of the global financial system has been a mainstay of the post-war order. It reflects its economic and military heft, but also the fact that dollar-denominated assets such as Treasuries are seen as safe from government confiscation and inflation and are easy to buy and sell. Though central banks have diversified their holdings, including into gold, around 58% of foreign-currency reserves are in dollars (see chart) and the network effects of the dollar put American banks at the centre of the world’s payments systems. Sending money around the globe is a bit like taking a long-haul flight; if two airports are not directly linked, passengers will need to change flights, ideally at a busy hub where lots of other planes connect. In the world of international payments the biggest hub is America, where many of the world’s banks swap foreign currencies from those making payments into dollars and then into the currencies in which the payments are received. (…)
Putin’s plan to defeat the dollar
Going feral : Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos
Russia is enacting a revolutionary plan of sabotage, arson and assassination (The Economist, 14 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
“We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more: dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” said Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counter-intelligence agency, in a rare update on the threat posed by Russia and the GRU, its military-intelligence agency. “The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” he said on October 8th.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a crescendo of aggression, subversion and meddling elsewhere. In particular, Russian sabotage in Europe has grown dramatically. “The risk level has changed,” Vice-Admiral Nils Andreas Stensones, the head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, said in September. “We see acts of sabotage happening in Europe now.” Sir Richard Moore, the chief of MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence agency, put it more bluntly: “Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral, frankly.”
The Kremlin’s mercenaries have squeezed Western rivals out of several African states. Its hackers, Poland’s security services said, have tried to paralyse the country in the political, military, and economic spheres. Its propagandists have pumped disinformation around the world. Its armed forces want to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. Russian foreign policy has long dabbled in chaos. Now it seems to aim at little else. (…)
“What Putin is trying to do is hit us all over the place,” argues Fiona Hill, who previously served in America’s national security council. She compares the strategy to the Oscar winning film: “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. In Africa, for instance, Russia has used mercenaries to supplant French and American influence in the aftermath of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Around 100 advisers from the Africa Corps, a successor to the Wagner Group, arrived in Niger in April. America has been forced to close its last prized base in the country. (…)
Russian disinformation campaigns are hardly new, acknowledges Sergey Radchenko, a historian of Russian foreign policy, pointing to episodes such as the Tanaka memorandum, an alleged Soviet forgery that was used to discredit Japan in 1927. Nor are proxy wars or assassinations a novelty. Soviet troops were already fighting in Yemen, disguised as Egyptians, in the early 1960s, he notes. The KGB’s predecessors and successors have killed many people abroad, from Leon Trotsky to ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko.
The genuinely new part, says Mr Radchenko, “is that whereas previously special operations supported foreign policy, today special operations are foreign policy.” Ten years ago the Kremlin worked with America and Europe to counter Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programme. Such co-operation is now fanciful. “It is as if the Russians no longer feel they have a stake in preserving anything of the post-war international order,” says Mr Radchenko. This period reminds him more of Mao’s nihilistic foreign policy during China’s Cultural Revolution than the Soviet Union’s cold-war thinking, which included periods of pragmatism and caution. Ms Hill puts it another way: “It’s Trotsky over Lenin”.
Mr Putin embraces these ideas. “We are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of World War II,” he said in late 2022. “To cite a classic,” he added, invoking an article by Vladimir Lenin in 1913, “this is a revolutionary situation.” That belief—that the post-war order is rotten and needs rewriting, by force if necessary—also gives Russia common cause with China. “Right now there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” Xi Jinping told Mr Putin last year in Moscow, “and we are the ones driving these changes together.” (…)
This does not mean Russia is an unstoppable. It is increasingly a junior partner to China. Its influence has slipped in some countries, such as Syria. It does not always back up its own proxies—dozens of Wagner fighters were killed in an ambush by Malian rebels, aided by Ukraine, in July. And Russian subversion can be disrupted, says Sir Richard, by “good old-fashioned security and intelligence work” to identify the intelligence officers and criminal proxies behind it. The fact that Russia is increasingly reliant on criminals to carry out these acts, in part because Russian spies have been expelled en masse from Europe, is a sign of desperation. “Russia’s use of proxies further reduces the professionalism of their operations, and—absent diplomatic immunity—increases our disruptive options,” says Mr McCallum.
Russian meddling is intended to put pressure on NATO without provoking a war. “We also have red lines,” says Ms Hill, “and Putin is trying to feel those out.” But if he is truly driven by a revolutionary spirit, convinced that the West is a rotten edifice, that suggests more lines will be crossed in the months and years ahead. ■
Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos (economist.com)
Scale of Chinese Spying Overwhelms Western Governments
Fears of escalation as China’s intelligence-gathering operation looks to consolidate Xi Jinping’s grip on power amid economic slowdown (WSJ, 14 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
LONDON—Beijing is conducting espionage activities on what Western governments say is an unprecedented scale, mobilizing security agencies, private companies and Chinese civilians in its quest to undermine rival states and bolster the country’s economy.
Rarely does a week go by without a warning from a Western intelligence agency about the threat that China presents. (…)
Western spy agencies, unable to contain Beijing’s activity, are raising the alarm publicly, urging businesses and individuals to be on alert in their interactions with China. But given the country is already deeply entwined in the global economy, it is proving a Sisyphean task, said Calder Walton, a national security expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Western governments “are coming to terms with events, in many ways, after the events,” he said. (…)
Chinese leader Xi Jinping since taking power in 2012 has increasingly emphasized the importance of national security, calling on officials and ordinary citizens alike to ward off threats to China’s interests. The result is a sweeping information-gathering effort whose scale and perseverance dwarfs that of Kremlin espionage during the Cold War and has jolted Western spy agencies. (…)
China-backed hackers outnumber all of the FBI’s cyber personnel at least 50 to 1, according to the U.S. agency. One European agency estimates China’s intelligence-gathering and security operations may comprise up to 600,000 people. “China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation, combined,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said earlier this year.
Complicating the West’s response: Unlike with autocracies such as Iran or Russia, trade with China has for decades supported Western economic growth, which in turn underpins the West’s long-term security. Most countries simply can’t afford to slap China with sanctions and throw out its diplomats. “China is different,” says Ken McCallum, the head of the U.K.’s domestic-intelligence agency, MI5.
The malign activity risks intensifying as China’s economic growth slows under Xi’s increasingly authoritarian leadership. (…)
As China becomes more assertive militarily, including increasing support for Russia in its war in Ukraine, its covert action also poses greater threats. Xi has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, the centenary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, according to Western officials. A war over Taiwan could draw China into conflict with the U.S., which is committed to ensuring the democratically self-ruled island can defend itself. (…)
China doesn’t play by the old-school spy rulebooks, intelligence officials say. It doesn’t seem to care if it is caught red-handed and, unlike Russia, it rarely makes efforts to swap its spies when they are arrested.
Another factor hampers a Western intelligence response: It is hard to spy on China. China’s intelligence operations are decentralized, stretching across myriad agencies and private-sector companies. They operate largely autonomously, making the system difficult to penetrate, and their methods appear haphazard, with a mix of both private and state actors seemingly loosely guided by overarching aims laid out by senior officials. China also purged a whole cadre of officials working as U.S. spies a decade ago. (…)
But European security officials say Chinese students and guest scientists also have become a prime conduit for Chinese espionage in the West. In the past, security officials kept a close eye on Chinese researchers who had studied at one of the “Seven Sons of National Defense,” a nickname for top Chinese universities with strong links to the military. Recently, the officials say, spies masquerading as researchers have grown better at hiding their tracks. One example is students who initially enroll in language or literature courses and then switch to quantum computing or other sensitive areas. (…)
MI5 has been touring universities warning them about collaborations with Chinese-backed consultancies or universities, which could inadvertently hand over valuable intellectual property. Spy agencies cannot “disrupt our way out of that challenge,” McCallum, the head of MI5, said recently.
Scale of Chinese Spying Overwhelms Western Governments – WSJ
A sting in the tail : The front line of the tech war is in Asia
The two superpowers are vying for influence. China will not necessarily win (The Economist, 13 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
A technology tussle between the two superpowers is never far away. This week the Wall Street Journal reported a breach of American telecoms networks by a Chinese hacking group known as “Salt Typhoon”, which was seemingly intended to glean knowledge about American wiretapping activities. In both countries, deep mistrust has led to a policy of shunning the other’s digital infrastructure. Uncle Sam bars Huawei, a Chinese firm, from installing its telecoms kit in America; China discourages the sale of Silicon Valley’s servers and cloud-computing products within its borders.
Yet in much of the world American and Chinese infrastructure—the data centres, undersea cables and wires that underpin the internet—sit side by side, as the two countries compete for market share, profits and geopolitical clout. The fiercest contest is in Asia. There the presence of Chinese digital-infrastructure firms is already substantial. Some 18% of all new subsea cables worldwide in the past four years have been built by a single mainland firm, many criss-crossing Asia. Alibaba’s cloud operation is active in nine Asian countries and Huawei has built many mobile networks. (…)
If China came to dominate Asia’s digital infrastructure, the consequences would be profound. (…)
To prevail, America should focus on three priorities. The first is to get tougher with its treaty allies which have become wholly reliant on China, in particular Thailand and the Philippines. The latter is intensifying its military links with America even as its digital infrastructure is vulnerable, which makes little sense. Some countries, such as Pakistan and Cambodia, have ceded digital sovereignty to China and are lost causes.
Second, America should aim to develop an Asian alliance for cyber-security and artificial intelligence. In 2017 Donald Trump abandoned an ambitious regional trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would have governed digital commerce among many other things. Reviving that will be impossible, due to America’s protectionist turn, but a narrower agreement could plausibly be struck with some countries, giving them access to American technology in return for assurances of heightened caution over Chinese security risks.
Last, America’s intelligence agencies could shed more light on Chinese cyber-shenanigans. Public knowledge about the scale of Chinese snooping and hacking is limited. It is time to raise awareness that cheap Chinese digital infrastructure has a sting in its tail. ■
The front line of the tech war is in Asia (economist.com)
Why Is India Soft on Hamas and Hezbollah?
The country has a terror problem of its own, but its leaders haven’t learned to think globally about it. (WSJ, 10 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Ivy League campuses aren’t the only places in the democratic world where people openly cheer for terrorist groups. In India, noisy mobs have taken to the streets to protest Israel’s killing late last month of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Open support for a notorious global terrorist by Islamists and their fellow travelers—both on the streets and on social media—reveals a major weakness in the Indian government’s selective approach to Islamist terrorism. By failing to designate Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist entities, India impairs the global war against terrorism and undermines its own effort to combat Islamist radicalism at home.
Listing Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist groups should be a no-brainer for New Delhi. Both groups espouse hard-line Islamism and have a long history of targeting civilians. India for decades has worked to quell Islamist terrorism fueled by neighboring Pakistan, especially in the Muslim-majority territory of Jammu and Kashmir. As Georgetown University terrorism expert Daniel Byman pointed out in a phone interview, “it’s not in India’s interest to encourage violent resistance when people say Muslim land is being occupied by non-Muslims.”
Why, then, aren’t Hamas and Hezbollah among the dozens of groups India lists as terrorist organizations? For starters, neither group targets India; they’re focused on destroying Israel. And unlike al Qaeda and Islamic State, both of which are deemed terrorist groups by the United Nations—and therefore automatically by India too—Hamas and Hezbollah have thus far avoided a U.N. designation. Mr. Byman says this may be because some governments view them as having a hybrid status: “part terrorist group, part government, part social movement.” But the omission of groups that target the Jewish state from the list of terrorist entities also reveals an obvious U.N. bias. (…)
Then there’s Iran. “If you condemn Hezbollah, Iran would treat it as an unfriendly act,” Krishan Chander Singh, a former Indian ambassador to Iran, said in a phone interview. India traditionally has sought friendly relations with Tehran to maintain access to Central Asia and to balance Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. (…)
Domestic politics is also at play. Between 10% to 15% of India’s 200 million Muslims are Shiite. (…)
Yet the benefits of India’s taking a firm stand against Hamas and Hezbollah would far outweigh any downsides. If India seeks to become a global leader, it needs to start thinking about terrorism in global terms. Hamas and Hezbollah may not target India specifically, but their defeat would undoubtedly set back radical Islam worldwide. India would be among the biggest beneficiaries. (…)
On the domestic political front, India needs to insulate its large Muslim minority from radical currents. Shehla Rashid, the author of a new book about role models for Indian Muslims, said in a phone interview that Indian Shiites “ought to be encouraged to look up to successful members of their community rather than the likes of Nasrallah.” Calling out Hamas and Hezbollah may not guarantee this outcome, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Why Is India Soft on Hamas and Hezbollah? – WSJ
Worst-keg scenario : Could war in the Gulf push oil to $100 a barrel?
Missiles are flying over a region that supplies a third of the world’s crude (The Economist, 8 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
EVER SINCE Hamas’s attacks on Israel a year ago, the biggest fear in oil markets has been that tensions would escalate into a full-blown regional war pitting Israel against Iran, the world’s seventh-largest producer of crude. Until recently both countries seemed keen to avoid it. That explains why, despite war in Gaza and Houthis firing missiles in the Red Sea, initial jitters on oil markets after October 7th last year soon gave way to the low and stable prices that have prevailed for much of this year.
But last week Iran fired around 200 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s pounding of Hizbullah and other Iranian proxies. Now the world is anxiously waiting for Israel’s response. Oil markets are nervous. Last week crude prices rose by 10%, to $78 a barrel, their biggest weekly gain in almost two years (see chart). On October 7th they rose again, before whipsawing. When the last war involving a major petrostate broke out, in Ukraine in 2022, crude surged past $100 a barrel. Could that happen again?
To understand how high prices might go, look first at Israel’s options for retaliation. Were it to strike only military targets, such as missile-launch sites—and Iran responded moderately, in an attempt to defuse the situation—then some of the geopolitical premium boosting oil prices would evaporate. But Israel could choose to escalate by bombing Iran’s civilian infrastructure, oil and gas facilities or nuclear-enrichment sites. Whichever Israel chooses, Iran may feel forced into a robust response, triggering a cycle that ends up turning Iran’s petro-industrial complex, the regime’s lifeline, into a target. So oil assets would not need to come under fire first for global markets to fret. (…)
Even then, the global fallout would probably be contained. Unlike after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the world was pumping oil at full tilt and demand was rebounding after the pandemic, supply today is plentiful and demand sluggish. After a series of production cuts, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, collectively known as OPEC+, have more than 5m bpd in spare capacity—more than enough to make up for the loss of Iranian crude. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates alone have more than 4m bpd in reserve.
They probably wouldn’t wait long before raising output. (…)
Things could get much wilder were Iran to lash out at other countries in the Gulf it sees as supporting Israel. In recent years relationships between Iran and its neighbours have been stabilising: the country formally re-established diplomatic contact with Saudi Arabia in 2023. In recent days officials from Gulf Arab states have met Iranian counterparts in Doha, the Qatari capital, to try to reassure them of their neutrality. Still, with few options available, Iran may seek to target the oil fields of its neighbours—starting perhaps with smaller Gulf states such as Bahrain or Kuwait.
The other tool Iran could use to create global chaos would be to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 30% of the world’s seaborne crude and 20% of its liquid natural gas must pass. That would amount to economic suicide, since it would leave Iran unable not just to ship out any oil and other exports but also to ferry in many imports. (…)
It is hard to guess how the market would respond to such scenarios, if only because Iran’s actions would trigger further reactions from Israel, America and others. America and China, for example, would probably send their navies to reopen the Hormuz Strait. Still, assuming disruptions are big enough to cause shortages of crude that last for a while, then oil prices would probably climb to the point where they curbed appetite for oil, after which they would start falling. Analysts believe such “demand destruction” would occur once crude hit $130 a barrel—roughly the level it peaked at in 2022.
Were oil markets to believe such a scenario even remotely likely, their fears would start to be reflected in the current price. Traders who had bet on prices falling in the near future would be rushing to unwind their positions. Zoom out a little, however, and the recent rise in prices does not look striking, even by the relatively sedate standards of the past 18 months. In late trading on Monday they pushed past $80 a barrel. Last year they averaged $82; in 2022, $100. The one-year-old conflict in the Middle East has confounded many expectations. But for oil prices to reach triple digits again, a lot of things still have to go very, very wrong. ■
Could war in the Gulf push oil to $100 a barrel? (economist.com)
Nicolas Baverez : « Le grand désordre mondial »
CHRONIQUE – Avec les conflits en Ukraine et à Gaza, la période de l’après-guerre froide qui s’étendit de 1989 à 2022 se révèle n’avoir été qu’un nouvel entre-deux-guerres. (Le Figaro, 7 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Deux ans et demi après l’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie et un an après les massacres du 7 octobre perpétrés par le Hamas, le monde a basculé. Les guerres d’Ukraine et de Gaza constituent la matrice du XXIe siècle, comme les conflits de la Révolution et de l’Empire furent celle du XIXe siècle et la Grande Guerre celle du XXe siècle.
Nous restons plongés dans l’âge de l’histoire universelle. Mais elle a basculé de la mondialisation, placée sous le signe de la suppression des frontières économiques, des échanges de données et de l’ouverture des sociétés, vers un système multipolaire – sans réassurance d’une superpuissance -, hétérogène – avec une opposition irréductible des institutions, des mœurs et des systèmes de valeurs – et belliqueux – avec un nombre de conflits armés inégalé depuis 1945.
La nouvelle ère stratégique est dominée par la grande confrontation entre les démocraties et les empires autoritaires, structurés autour de l’alliance entre la Chine et la Russie sur laquelle se greffent l’Iran de l’ayatollah Ali Khamenei, la Turquie de Recep Erdogan, la Corée du Nord de Kim Jong-un ou le Venezuela de Nicolas Maduro. Elle se double d’une opposition entre le Sud et l’Occident en raison du ressentiment lié au passé colonial.
La montée des tensions internationales se traduit par le retour de la guerre de haute intensité et les risques d’escalade qui se manifestent en Ukraine avec l’extension des opérations au territoire russe, au Moyen-Orient avec les échanges de frappes entre Israël – puissance dotée – et l’Iran – pays du seuil -, dans le Pacifique autour de Taïwan, de la mer de Chine du Sud et du chantage nucléaire de la Corée du Nord, en Asie centrale avec l’impitoyable nettoyage ethnique du Haut-Karabakh effectué par l’Azerbaïdjan. (…)
Simultanément, les relations économiques se militarisent, transformant en armes les matières premières critiques, l’alimentation, l’énergie, les données, les monnaies. Le tout sur fond de décomposition du multilatéralisme – symbolisée par la perte de légitimité et l’impuissance chronique de l’ONU -, au moment même où se multiplient les problèmes planétaires liés aux migrations, aux pandémies, aux technologies (IA) ou au dérèglement climatique.
La force triomphe du droit et la violence se libère des institutions, des conventions et des règles qui avaient été mises en place pour la contenir. (…)
Ainsi, 1989 fut, comme 1918, une paix manquée. L’ordre de 1945 est désormais caduc. Les États-Unis n’ont en effet plus ni la volonté ni les moyens de le réassurer. L’Occident, qui l’avait inspiré, semble décadent, cumulant effondrement démographique, stagnation économique, paralysie institutionnelle, crise démocratique et perte de foi dans ses valeurs. Ses principes sont désormais contestés par une majorité de l’humanité : la Chine, puissance ascendante, la Russie et les États révisionnistes, le Sud émergent. (…)
La paix par le droit et le commerce est une grande illusion. La paix par l’empire se réduit à un enfer totalitaire qui annihilerait la dignité et la liberté des hommes. Reste la paix par l’équilibre des puissances. Elle est assurément difficile dans un système multipolaire, hétérogène et volatil. Pourtant, la reconstruction progressive d’un ordre mondial entre les géants du XXIe siècle n’est pas inconcevable, dès lors qu’ils ont des intérêts communs à trouver une réponse aux risques planétaires et à prévenir l’escalade vers une guerre totale qui pourrait annihiler l’humanité. Ceci implique toutefois que les démocraties rétablissent une capacité de dissuasion militaire et technologique vis-à-vis des tyrannies contemporaines et que l’Europe se repense en puissance. Ainsi que le rappelle Stefan Zweig dans Le Monde d’hier : « Mais toute ombre, en dernier lieu, est aussi fille de la lumière et seul celui qui a connu la clarté et les ténèbres, la guerre et la paix, la grandeur et la décadence, a vraiment vécu. »
Nicolas Baverez : « Le grand désordre mondial » (lefigaro.fr)
Moyen-Orient : les Russes et Chinois en soutien de l’Iran
DÉCRYPTAGE – Face aux risques d’un embrasement régional, les deux puissances envisagent avec circonspection un appui à leur partenaire iranien. (Le Figaro, 3 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
Appel à la « retenue » à Moscou, à la « désescalade » à Pékin : après l’attaque d’envergure lancée par Téhéran contre Israël, ces deux interlocuteurs majeurs de la République islamique semblent surtout craindre les risques d’un embrasement régional. La question se pose néanmoins de la nature et de l’ampleur du soutien que pourraient apporter la Russie et la Chine à l’Iran, leur partenaire « naturel » au sein de l’axe antioccidental. Une partition aux accents communs mais que chacun s’apprête à jouer en fonction de ses intérêts particuliers.
La porte-parole de la diplomatie russe, Maria Zakharova, a réagi mardi soir après la pluie de missiles envoyés sur l’État hébreu en affirmant qu’il fallait y voir « l’échec total de l’Administration Biden au Moyen-Orient ». De même, en avril dernier, Moscou s’était refusé à condamner la première attaque massive lancée par Téhéran contre Israël, en invoquant le prétexte que le gouvernement Netanyahou n’a jamais condamné les frappes de drones effectuées par Kiev en Russie. Car pour celle-ci, le prisme ukrainien reste déterminant, au point que les Occidentaux redoutent une coopération accrue entre Moscou et Téhéran dans le domaine du nucléaire, en contrepartie de la fourniture de missiles utilisés par l’armée russe pour contre les Ukrainiens dans le Donbass.
Les Occidentaux ont en effet acquis la certitude que l’Iran a livré récemment plus de deux cents missiles balistiques Fath-360 à la Russie. Et les Américains comme les Britanniques craignent que Moscou, en échange de ces armes d’une portée maximale de 120 kilomètres et dotées d’une ogive de 150 kilogrammes, ait « partagé des secrets nucléaires avec l’Iran », comme le soulignait le mois dernier le quotidien britannique The Guardian . Un tel « accord nucléaire » rapprocherait l’Iran du seuil lui permettant de disposer de l’arme atomique, avait mis en garde Antony Blinken, le secrétaire d’État américain, début septembre. D’autant plus que Téhéran venait d’annoncer le lancement de plusieurs centaines de nouvelles centrifugeuses, dont certaines dans des sites enterrés. (…)
La Chine adopte la même posture, pour des raisons diplomatiques et économiques. Avec cette poussée de fièvre intense au Proche-Orient, Pékin entend soigner son profil de champion de la cause palestinienne auprès du «Sud global », mais sans prendre le risque de s’engager. Vu de Pékin, un embrasement régional serait excessivement coûteux. Très soucieuse de ses approvisionnements énergétiques, la Chine entend également soigner son image de puissance « responsable » et « incontournable » – statut qu’elle s’efforce de conforter avec ses propositions de paix dans le conflit en Ukraine. Il est peu probable, dans ces conditions, qu’elle aille au-delà d’un soutien politique à son partenaire iranien.
Mardi, le numéro un chinois a adressé un message à Vladimir Poutine pour lui faire part de sa volonté de « développer constamment » leur coopération bilatérale, précédemment déjà qualifiée de « sans limite ». Mais ce lyrisme de circonstance – Pékin célébrait ce jour le 75e anniversaire de la fondation de la République populaire – n’augure vraisemblablement pas d’un front commun au Proche-Orient
Moyen-Orient : les Russes et Chinois en soutien de l’Iran (lefigaro.fr)
China’s Patriotic Rhetoric Takes a Violent Turn
‘Hate education’ becomes new buzzword in China after stabbings of foreigners, while online pleas for compassion are stifled (WSJ, 3 octobre, article payant)
Extraits :
China’s Communist Party has for years stoked patriotism in the state media and the country’s classrooms, driving nationalist fervor that at times spun out of control.
Now, three stabbing attacks in four months that targeted Japanese and Americans have exposed a dark side of that campaign, what many in China describe as “hate education.”
In one of the past year’s viral videos, a desk-pounding schoolteacher lectures to her students about China’s “blood feud” with Japan, admonishing them to never forget the atrocities conducted by the Japanese army in World War II. State media praised her, and other teachers reposted her video. (…)
“Hate is inside China’s education” in schools, media and patriotic movies, said Wang Ke, a retired Kobe University professor who has studied nationalism in China and modern Japan. “The Communist Party has been licking historical wounds, consciously not letting it heal.” (…)
As pronounced by leader Xi Jinping, vigilance against the West is a necessity. China’s adversaries “have put more effort into winning the hearts of our youngsters than in anything else,” he said in a newly released speech to a national education conference six years ago.
In recent years, China has revised textbooks used in schools across the country to support Xi’s leadership and his emphasis on national security, alongside sustained themes such as placing support for the Communist Party at the heart of the country’s patriotism.
Lessons in Chinese schools reinforce official positions on topics such as border conflicts with India and Beijing’s proclaimed sovereignty in the South China Sea. (…)
China’s Patriotic Rhetoric Takes a Violent Turn – WSJ
Russia and China Defy the West Deep in the Arctic
The Svalbard archipelago has become a critical steppingstone for projecting power across one of the world’s most sensitive regions (WSJ, 30 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
SVALBARD, Norway—Nestled high above the Arctic Circle, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is home to hundreds of polar bears and boasts prime views of the Northern Lights.
Now the territory of fewer than 3,000 people is emerging as a front line in Russia and China’s attempts to dominate the Arctic’s trade routes and expand their military presence in the region at the expense of the West.
Formally part of Norway, Svalbard—a collection of mountains, glaciers and fjords about the size of West Virginia—has an unusual status. A treaty signed in 1920 granted the Norwegians sovereignty but allowed signatory states, including the Soviet Union, to exploit resources and conduct research.
But in recent years this quirk has provided a way for Moscow and Beijing to strengthen their foothold in the Arctic as tensions with the West worsened over the invasion of Ukraine, unsettling Norway and its allies in NATO. (…)
The competition for Svalbard is emblematic of the intensifying global race for the Arctic. The region contains up to a fifth of the world’s untapped oil and natural-gas reserves, as well as other minerals. As the ice melts, Moscow and Beijing want to use the shorter Northern Sea Route to ship goods via the Arctic, avoiding chokepoints at the Suez Canal and Malacca Strait. (…)
Russia and China Defy the West Deep in the Arctic – WSJ
Macron et le Liban : anatomie d’un fiasco
LA CHRONIQUE DE CHRISTIAN MAKARIAN. Après l’explosion du port de Beyrouth, le président a fait beaucoup de promesses au Liban, un pays « cher à [s]on cœur ». La désillusion est cruelle. (Le Point, 28 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
« Si une voix forte servait à quelque chose, l’âne se ferait construire des palais. » Il est probable qu’Emmanuel Macron n’ait jamais entendu ce vieux proverbe libanais, issu d’une très ancienne sagesse et terriblement approprié à la situation présente. (…)
Depuis Paris, le 19 septembre dernier, Emmanuel Macron s’adresse directement au peuple libanais, dans toutes ses composantes. « Libanaises, Libanais, mes chers amis, une fois encore, je souhaite m’adresser directement à vous. Votre pays est si cher à mon cœur, si cher au cœur de nos compatriotes. Forts de notre longue histoire commune, à chaque épreuve, nous restons à vos côtés, fidèlement et fraternellement. »
La déclaration déplaît souverainement à Benyamin Netanyahou, qui est heurté par l’énumération et le rapprochement effectué par le président français entre tous les partenaires de la région : « Nous agissons au nom de nos valeurs, de notre amitié et de nos sentiments fraternels pour le Liban, déclare Emmanuel Macron. Nous le faisons avec clarté et en disant la vérité à tous : Israéliens, Iraniens, partenaires internationaux et régionaux, dirigeants libanais. »
Mettre dos à dos le régime iranien, qui a pour but affiché et répété de rayer Israël de la carte, et Israël, qui défend sa sécurité même s’il faut dénoncer que cela puisse se faire au prix des souffrances indicibles des civils palestiniens, ne peut pas être reçu comme une forme de neutralité bienveillante à Jérusalem.
(…) la conversation téléphonique qui s’ensuit entre le président français et le Premier ministre israélien se passe mal. Est-ce le but de la diplomatie au cœur d’un conflit aussi passionnel et virulent ? À quoi bon prendre la parole si cela attise d’un côté sans apaiser de l’autre ? (…)
Fort du poids qu’il a acquis grâce aux évolutions démographiques et confessionnelles, le Hezbollah détient les clés du jeu politique libanais. Selon les chiffres de la CIA World Factbook, les chiites forment environ 31,2 % de la population libanaise (5,5 millions), mais leur démographie galopante fait qu’ils dépasseront d’ici peu le nombre de sunnites (31,9 %). Les chrétiens, eux, ne sont plus que 32,4 %.(…)
Ni Bonaparte ni Napoléon III
En volant au secours du Liban, Macron a voulu jouer une carte typiquement française : celle du seul et unique point d’influence, et d’excellence, conservé au Moyen-Orient, partout ailleurs la France a reculé, pour ne pas dire qu’elle essuie un effacement. Désormais puissance secondaire, complètement latéralisée par Netanyahou dans le conflit israélo-palestinien, réduite au silence en Syrie après avoir pratiqué le Bachar must go (« Bachar doit partir ») puis subi le « lâchage » de Barack Obama, pour la France, le Liban était une sorte de dernière chance teintée de sentimentalisme « impérial ».
Le président français, qui caressait une envolée orientaliste, est orphelin d’une cause internationale susceptible de lui conférer une auréole. Au final, ni Bonaparte ni Napoléon III. L’Algérie l’a terriblement déçu, alors qu’il nourrissait beaucoup d’espoir de ce côté-là ; c’est l’autre sujet des plus graves déconvenues. (…)
L’Afrique consacre un repli cinglant de la France, qu’il serait injuste d’attribuer à Macron, mais qu’il lui faudra assumer. L’Europe n’a pas non plus apporté les lauriers qui étaient tant espérés. Quant à la guerre d’Ukraine, elle a donné lieu à une étrange oscillation présidentielle avant que la ligne française ne se rétablisse au prix de déclarations, parfois intempestives, supposées provoquer des électrochocs. À voir.
Emmanuel Macron, ce qui n’est vraisemblablement pas la dernière de ses préoccupations, s’est montré très soucieux de son image personnelle et du chapitre qui lui sera réservé dans les livres d’histoire. Peut-être fallait-il moins y penser.
Macron et le Liban : anatomie d’un fiasco (lepoint.fr)
De l’Ukraine au Moyen-Orient, l’ONU face à son impuissance
ANALYSE – Les guerres d’Ukraine et de Gaza ont servi d’accélérateur à la contestation, par les pays du Sud, de l’ordre international dominé depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale par les Occidentaux. (Le Figaro, 26 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
Rarement une Assemblée générale de l’ONU aura autant révélé ses divisions et son impuissance, voire son incapacité à faire face aux défis qui secouent la gouvernance mondiale. « La majorité des pays du Sud ne soutiennent pas la vision des États-Unis au Moyen-Orient et ne sont pas derrière Israël… Et puis la Chine et la Russie sont en embuscade dans la guerre d’influence mondiale » : Pour son dernier discours devant l’Organisation des Nations unies, Joe Biden a acté la disparition du système international issu de la Seconde Guerre mondiale en même temps qu’il a reconnu l’affaiblissement des États-Unis comme leader de l’ordre mondial.
Le président américain aurait pu prononcer les mêmes mots sur l’Ukraine : l’invasion russe de février 2022 a souligné l’inefficacité de ce qui était jusque-là l’organe de décision le plus important du monde, comme l’échec des États-Unis à imposer leur vision du conflit hors de l’Europe. L’ONU est devenue inaudible sur les grands conflits. Elle a été incapable de prendre des mesures collectives suffisamment efficaces pour arrêter la guerre russe en Ukraine. Elle n’a pas réussi à mettre un terme à la guerre civile au Soudan. Son système de gouvernance a été mis à rude épreuve par les conflits au Moyen-Orient.
Elle oublie parfois ses valeurs. En juin, lors d’une réunion sur l’Afghanistan organisée au Qatar, l’ONU a cédé aux conditions des talibans, qui exigeaient qu’elle se tienne sans les femmes et sans que soit même évoqué leur sort, alors qu’elles sont victimes d’un « apartheid » dans leur pays… Selon l’ONU. L’organisation reste également silencieuse sur le sort des femmes iraniennes. En 1960, de Gaulle raillait le « machin » qui avait succédé à la Société des Nations. Aujourd’hui, les rapides changements de rapports de force dans le monde menacent l’ONU dans ses fondements mêmes.
Miné par les divisions de ses cinq membres permanents, les vainqueurs de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU a systématiquement échoué dans sa capacité à mettre fin aux grands conflits, au point qu’il ressemble aujourd’hui davantage à un théâtre politique où s’affrontent les grandes puissances qu’à un organe de décision. La Chine et la Russie utilisent depuis longtemps leur veto pour protéger leurs intérêts ou régler leurs conflits avec leurs voisins. (…)
De l’Ukraine au Moyen-Orient, l’ONU face à son impuissance (lefigaro.fr)
Africa’s Youngest Elected Leader Wants a New World Order
In his first interview with Western media since becoming president of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye said the United Nations has to change to reflect changing world demographics. (NYT, 26 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye rocketed to international fame last March when he went from prison to president-elect of the West African nation of Senegal in 10 days, becoming the youngest elected leader on the continent.
He carried the hopes of the youngest, fastest-growing population on earth, who saw in him a fresh start, and a break with Africa’s many aging presidents and military rulers. But until now, he has rarely given interviews.
Speaking with The New York Times last week — in his first interview with a Western media outlet — he made the case for a different world order that gives more weight to Africa. (…)
Demographic importance should help determine who holds power at the United Nations, Mr. Faye said, pointing out that by 2050, Africa’s population will likely be nearly 2.5 billion — accounting for an estimated one of every four people on the planet by then.
His remarks came amid growing calls for permanent African representation on the United Nations Security Council. This month, the United States said it would support two permanent seats for African countries. But this is unlikely to happen soon, analysts say, as many other countries are demanding seats and any change requires the assent of all five permanent members with veto power.
Mr. Faye said that the current world order is hurting Africans.
For instance, he said, Africa is hardly responsible for climate change, and yet when emissions from the developed world cause the polar ice caps to melt, “this has repercussions on our shores.” He pointed to Bargny, a town in Senegal plagued by coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels where dozens of homes were recently swept away.
And he railed against the injustice of rich nations continuing to use coal while refusing to finance fossil fuel projects in developing countries. Production recently began at Senegal’s first offshore oil project, and the country is trying to build the infrastructure to convert its gas into electricity. (…)
But six months into their term, young people are still fleeing the country in search of a better life. In the first half of 2024, nearly 20,000 migrants reached the Canary Islands, part of Spain, after crossing by boat from the coast of West Africa, according to the U.N.’s migration agency, an increase of 167 percent from 2023. Dozens of shipwrecks have been recorded.
“People expect them to take measures to tackle the high cost of living and youth unemployment,” said Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese economist, but he said that the country’s leaders were held back by high levels of debt servicing inherited from previous administrations. “There is very little they could do in these areas.” (…) Senegal’s Young President Wants a New World Order – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Gilles Kepel : « L’ordre du monde s’est retourné contre Israël »
Dans « Le Bouleversement du monde. L’après 7 Octobre » (Plon), le politologue Gilles Kepel décrypte le séisme provoqué par les massacres du Hamas. (Le Point, 26 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
Il y a un an, les massacres perpétrés par le Hamas en Israël n’ont pas seulement ouvert un cycle de violences qui continue à faire rage au Proche-Orient, explique dans son nouveau livre le grand spécialiste de l’islam politique Gilles Kepel (Le Bouleversement du monde, l’après 7 Octobre, Plon, 176 p., 15 €). Ce pogrom, et les ondes de choc régionales qui ont suivi, ont aussi marqué une nouvelle étape dans le basculement de l’ordre moral du monde. Dans cette vision wokiste qui gagne du terrain dans nos universités comme dans une partie de l’électorat, le mal absolu n’est plus incarné par le génocide des juifs par les nazis, mais par la colonisation du « Sud » par les puissances du « Nord ». Israël, fondé comme un havre pour les survivants de la Shoah, se retrouve cloué au pilori dans la position du nouveau « génocidaire ». Cette subversion du socle moral de l’ordre international accentue les lignes de faille dans nos sociétés, travaillées par une polarisation inédite autour des deux pôles constitués par l’extrême droite et l’extrême gauche. Entretien. (…)
De quelle manière le 7 Octobre et ses suites ont-ils modifié les lignes géopolitiques mondiales ?
Le 7 Octobre bouleverse notre cadre de compréhension de l’univers géopolitique de l’après-Seconde Guerre mondiale, qui était fondé sur l’horreur du génocide nazi, sur le « plus jamais ça », et dont l’une des conséquences fut la création d’Israël par l’ONU pour fournir un havre aux survivants et aux rescapés. Même la guerre froide opposant les pays communistes au monde capitaliste n’avait pas remis en cause l’horreur du génocide comme fondement de l’altérité monstrueuse. Au contraire, Occidentaux et Soviétiques rivalisaient dans le fait que chacun d’eux avait été le pire ennemi du nazisme. Même avec la remontée en puissance d’une Russie poutinienne hostile à l’Occident, même après l’invasion de l’Ukraine, ce socle posé en 1945 n’était pas fondamentalement contesté. Mais, aujourd’hui, à la suite des bombardements israéliens sur Gaza, qui ont déjà fait plus de 40 000 morts, la notion même de génocide comme fondement moral de l’ordre du monde est retournée contre Israël par un groupe de pays et d’activistes qui se réclament du « Sud global ». Ces acteurs remplacent le génocide nazi, comme archétype de l’horreur absolue, par le « génocide » commis par Israël sur les Palestiniens, présenté comme l’aboutissement et l’exacerbation de l’histoire coloniale. Une opposition verticale Sud-Nord s’est substituée à l’opposition horizontale Est-Ouest ; le colonialisme du Nord est devenu le mal absolu ; les victimes en sont les pays du Sud, qui estiment leur demande de réparation fondée. (…)
Quelles sont les conséquences de ces évolutions pour les pays occidentaux ?
Stigmatisées moralement, nos sociétés occidentales sont renvoyées dans leurs cordes de pays du Nord colonialistes. Elles n’ont plus aucun fondement à se réclamer d’un quelconque magistère, alors qu’elles se percevaient comme porteuses du progrès de l’humanité. (…)
Pourquoi la Palestine est-elle devenue le cri de ralliement de ces activistes anticoloniaux ?
Parce qu’elle est au confluent de plusieurs forces idéologiques : l’extrême gauche d’abord, qui soutient depuis longtemps la résistance palestinienne, puis, à partir du milieu des années 1970, l’islamisme et son énorme capacité de mobilisation. Les gauchistes basculent alors dans la logique de soutien aux islamistes, vus comme porteurs de la lutte contre le capitalisme. Et le facteur nouveau, dans les pays européens, c’est l’irruption dans le champ politique institutionnel d’une forte population musulmane d’origine immigrée. La métamorphose démographique à l’œuvre dans nos sociétés est perçue, d’un côté, comme un « grand remplacement » par l’extrême droite, qui en tire un énorme capital électoral, et, de l’autre, comme une ressource clientéliste par l’extrême gauche. Jean-Luc Mélenchon a axé sa campagne pour les européennes et pour les législatives sur le thème de Gaza, avec Rima Hassan portant un keffieh. Les scores obtenus par les deux extrêmes identitaires témoignent de cette ligne. (…)
Peut-être aussi en Amérique, où Trump, s’il était réélu, le serait en partie grâce à Gaza ?
Aux États-Unis, le rôle ahurissant des grands électeurs fait que le choix que feront les 350 000 Arabes du Michigan, dont nombre d’entre eux sont des chiites d’origine libanaise influencés par le Hezbollah, pourrait être déterminant dans la présidentielle américaine. Il est hallucinant que le Parti de Dieu lié à l’Iran puisse peser, certes parmi d’autres facteurs, dans l’élection de la personnalité la plus puissante du monde. (…)
Gilles Kepel : « L’ordre du monde s’est retourné contre Israël » (lepoint.fr)
An Isolated Netanyahu Resists Pressure to End Conflicts
World leaders at the U.N. are expected to focus on Israel’s fighting in Gaza and Lebanon that they so far have been unable to stop (WSJ, 25 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
International efforts to isolate and punish Israel for its conduct in Gaza and intensifying clashes with Hezbollah are nowhere more evident than at the United Nations, where world leaders gather this week for a General Assembly expected to feature more calls to end the conflict.
The annual meeting in New York will mark the culmination of a nearly yearlong effort to stop the war in Gaza through condemnations, resolutions and legal cases brought before U.N. courts.
And yet, for all the effort, Israel has barely budged.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently refused to end the war to destroy Hamas, which led the assault on Oct. 7 that left 1,200 people, mostly civilians, killed and another 250 taken hostage. Efforts by the U.S. to negotiate a pause in the fighting in Gaza that would see the release of hostages held by Hamas militants are all but dead. And a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah appears closer by the day.
The failures of these efforts underscore the limitations of the U.N., where countries can easily vote for resolutions against Israel’s government without severing diplomatic ties or imposing other consequences on the nation. Israel’s most vocal critics at the U.N. include Arab nations like Jordan, which allowed its airspace to be used to shoot down a massive barrage of missiles and drones by Iran in April. The most reliable flights out of Israel after the state’s own national airline is Emirates, the flagship carrier in the United Arab Emirates. Discussions with Saudi Arabia over normalization with Israel that would include an end to the war have continued for most of the year.
“If you were to make the mistake of confusing the U.N. with the world, then Israel does look enormously isolated,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the U.N. for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “People are using their U.N. appearances to criticize Israel but cover up the fact that they’re not really taking any sort of actions that would penalize Israel.”
U.N. agencies and officials have been at the forefront of criticizing Israel for its war in Gaza, where more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly civilians, according to local health authorities, who don’t specify how many were combatants. The international body has been among the most outspoken on the sweeping humanitarian crisis in Gaza by warning that limitations on aid were likely to cause a famine. (…)
The U.N.’s credibility as an honest broker, however, has been damaged after it emerged that some of the employees in the primary body for distributing aid in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, may have played a role in the Oct. 7 attacks. (…)
The U.S. also has larger ambitions for the Middle East beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer for the New York-based Israel Policy Forum think tank. The U.S. wants to see a coalition of its allies, including Israel and moderate Arab countries, form an alliance to serve as a counterweight to Iran, which will free it up to focus on adversaries like China and Russia.
“Israel falls squarely into the U.S. led bloc,” he said. “If you’re the U.S., even if you’re deeply unsettled about some of the things that Israel is doing in Gaza, you’re not going to enact an arms embargo when you want to see Israel beat back those challenges.” (…)
“The focus will be on Gaza, not Ukraine or even Sudan,” said Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., referencing two other major wars with significant humanitarian consequences. “Many leaders will come and ignore the source of the problem—Oct. 7 and the attacks by Hezbollah.”
Still, this week’s admonishments and backbiting will likely do little in the short term to stop the war.
“I think we’ll see a lot of speeches, a lot of posturing,” said Buttu, the Palestinian lawyer. “And I don’t think we’re going to see anything beyond that.”
An Isolated Netanyahu Resists Pressure to End Conflicts – WSJ
Autocratic alliances : A new “quartet of chaos” threatens America
The rulers of China, Iran, North Korea and Russia are growing worryingly close (The Economist, 23 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, was unusually blunt on a recent visit to Europe: “One of the reasons that [Vladimir] Putin is able to continue this aggression is because of the provision of support from the People’s Republic of China,” he said. China was, he added, “the biggest supplier of machine tools, the biggest supplier of microelectronics, all of which are helping Russia sustain its defence industrial base”. American officials are reluctant to discuss details of what they think Russia is giving its friends, but Kurt Campbell, deputy secretary of state, recently said Russia has provided China with submarine, missile and other military technology. Separately, America says that Iran has been busy sending Russia hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles.
These revelations are examples of the growing military-industrial ties between China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. “We’re almost back to the axis of evil”, says Admiral John Aquilino, the recently-departed head of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, referring to the term applied by George W. Bush, a former president, to Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Others draw parallels with the Axis forces of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and fascist Italy, with worrying conclusions. “Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea…have now been co-operating for a longer time, and in more ways, than…any of the future Axis countries of the 1930s,” warns Philip Zelikow, in the Texas National Security Review, a military and security journal.
The members of this new quartet of chaos—whose ideologies range from Islamism to hardline communism—are riven by distrust, and they have very different visions of the world. Yet they are united by a shared hatred of the American-led order, and are keen to deepen their economic and military-industrial links. Their relationships amount to a kind of “strategic transactionalism,” says an American administration official. That is, the four regimes share a systematic intent to conduct bilateral deals that are in each participant’s narrow self-interest, and sometimes in the collective interest too. (…)
The quartet of autocracies still faces a number of constraints that may limit the extent of its members’ co-operation. One is that their appetite for risk varies. China’s defence industry is big enough to tip the scales in Ukraine, yet the country has held back from providing lethal assistance, not least because doing so would also undermine its ability to present itself as a neutral mediator in world affairs and jeopardise its economic links with the rich world. Russia, Iran and North Korea—pariah states already under sanctions—may have fewer qualms. But even so, Russia seems to have backed down for now from sending anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia, following economic pressure from the Gulf monarchies and possibly China, all of which need stability in the Red Sea for trade. Another constraint is mistrust (…)
Yet despite its limitations, the quartet is already beginning to give the West headaches, and the pain looks likely to intensify. America’s armed forces, organised to fight one major war, are already being forced to make hard choices and accept risky trade-offs over scarce resources. (…)
It could, of course, be far worse: the four autocracies have yet to co-ordinate their nuclear weapons efforts or conduct joint military campaigns. Yet for all their shortcomings and differences the autocracies operate according to a simple shared calculus: the more powerful and troublesome each member becomes, the greater the opportunity the others have to capitalise on chaos. This “distraction dividend”, argues Hal Brands of John Hopkins University, can “multiply the challenges that their members pose individually and collectively.” The risks posed by the quartet’s ever-closer alignment do not need to be vastly exaggerated, nor extrapolated far into the future, to be causes of concern. They are worrying enough as they are. ■
A new “quartet of chaos” threatens America (economist.com)
How Freedom Has Faded on Biden’s Watch
His successor as President will inherit a far more dangerous world. (WSJ, 23 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
President Biden will address the United Nations on Tuesday, in what is likely to be his last big moment on the world stage. A President’s foreign-policy legacy typically outlasts his term, so it’s worth taking a step back and considering the world Mr. Biden will leave his successor.
It is a far more dangerous world than Mr. Biden inherited, and far less congenial for U.S. interests, human freedom and democracy. The latter is tragically ironic since the President has made the global contest between democracy and authoritarians an abiding theme. Authoritarians have advanced on his watch in every part of the world—Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and even the Americas.
• Mr. Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was his single most damaging decision, and it has led to cascading trouble. (…)
• More damaging is the message his withdrawal sent to adversaries about American will and retreat. The credibility of U.S. deterrence collapsed. Mr. Biden tried to appease Vladimir Putin by blessing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and refusing to arm Ukraine. Mr. Putin concluded he could invade Ukraine at limited cost, especially after Mr. Biden blurted out that a “minor incursion” might not elicit the same Western opposition. (…)
• His record in the Middle East is worse. Rather than build on the Abraham Accords he inherited, he tried to ostracize Saudi Arabia and he banned offensive weapons to fight the Houthis. From the start he courted the mullahs in Iran to renew the 2015 nuclear accord that had enriched Iran before Donald Trump withdrew. He refused to enforce oil sanctions, even as Iran spread mayhem through its proxy militias.
he U.S. was caught flat-footed when Hamas, aided by Iran, invaded Israel and massacred 1,200 innocents. His national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had to edit an online version of a Foreign Affairs essay already published boasting that “the region is quieter than it has been for decades.” (…)
Meanwhile, Iran marches undeterred to becoming a nuclear power. (…)
• Mr. Biden’s record in the Asia-Pacific is marginally better, at least diplomatically. He has strengthened U.S. alliances against China, especially with Australia, Japan and the Philippines. (…)
Yet diplomacy hasn’t been matched by hard power. The U.S. isn’t building enough submarines to meet its Aukus commitment and U.S. needs. American bases lack adequate air defenses and long-range missiles to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. State Department foot-stomping hasn’t stopped Chinese harassment of Philippine ships. (…)
• Most ominous is the collaboration of these menacing regional powers into a new anti-Western axis. Iran supplies missiles and drones to Moscow, which may be supplying nuclear know-how to Tehran. China is aiding Moscow, which now joins Beijing in naval maneuvers. North Korea also arms Moscow while being protected by China from United Nations sanctions it once voted for. (…)
All of this and more adds up to the worst decline in world order, and the largest decline in U.S. influence, since the 1930s. (…)
Addressing this gathering storm will be difficult and dangerous. The first task will be restoring U.S. deterrence, which will require more hard power and political will. Whoever wins the White House will have to abandon the failed policies of the Biden years, lest we end up careening into a global conflict with catastrophic consequences.
How Freedom Has Faded on Biden’s Watch – WSJ
UNintended consequences : A UN vote on Palestine underlines America’s weakening clout
Russia and China are riding a surge of support for the Palestinians since the Gaza war started (The Economist, 20 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
“THE RUSSIANS are not the bad guys any more. Now it’s the Americans.” Thus, explains a European diplomat at the UN, the war in Gaza is eclipsing the one in Ukraine. These days many countries are wary of criticising Russia’s aggression. Instead their outrage is directed at Israel and, increasingly, at America for arming and protecting the Jewish state. The accusation of Western double standards, gleefully amplified by Russia and China, resonated across the halls of UN headquarters on September 18th as the General Assembly adopted a far-reaching resolution to exert pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories within a year. It passed with an overwhelming 124 votes in favour to 14 against (and 43 abstentions).
The war is hastening the broader realignment of global forces: America, stretched by multiple crises, is losing its old supremacy. Russia has recovered the military initiative and is determined to disrupt the America-built order. China hopes to refashion it to its liking, convinced of its own inexorable rise. And lesser states seek opportunity in the space created by competition among the big powers.
This new world disorder will be on display as leaders gather in New York this week for the UN’s annual summitry. Much about the talkfest is, inevitably, theatre. The Security Council is increasingly paralysed by the rivalry between the big powers. Even so, the diplomatic battles reflect the shifting power balance of the world beyond, and affect it.
As Hamas battles Israeli troops in the ruins of Gaza, its rival, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which runs a patchwork of autonomous territories in the West Bank, has been waging a diplomatic and legal fight against Israel in international courts and institutions. Doubling as the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the PLO may be weak, corrupt and besieged at home. It is nevertheless advancing abroad in the face of opposition from Israel and America. (…)
By the summer of 2023, as Ukraine’s counter-offensive faltered, support for Ukraine began to fade. Martin Kimani, a recently retired Kenyan ambassador to the UN, now at the Centre on International Co-operation, a think-tank in New York, notes that Russia’s narrative—that the war was provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion—“found a ready ear” among many in the global south, where suspicions of Western imperialism still run deep. The memory of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought charges of hypocrisy. Since the war in Gaza, though, anti-American feeling has intensified. The West stands accused of caring more about carnage inflicted by Russia than by Israel.
On the back foot, Western diplomats these days urge Ukraine not to submit resolutions, fearing they would expose falling support for it. It does not help that Ukraine abstained in a General Assembly vote in May seeking to advance Palestine’s full membership of the UN. Nevertheless, in July Ukraine presented a resolution about the safety of the Russia-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. It passed with 99 votes to nine, but many Arab and Islamic countries abstained. (…)
China plays an altogether different game, often supporting Russia but at times co-operating with the West, for instance on how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). In March it co-sponsored an American resolution on AI; America reciprocated by supporting a Chinese one in July.
At the UN, China stands as a defender of state sovereignty against the intrusions of outsiders, for example, in the use of economic sanctions. It reinterprets human rights as the expectation of economic development, rather than individual liberties; and democracy as equality among states rather than the right of people to choose their leaders. It sees itself as the vanguard of the developing world, where it often finds a receptive audience for its interests-first, values-second approach. “Russia does not mind being seen as a wrecker of the system. China wants to remake it in its own image,” says the diplomat. (…)
The Security Council, complains Mr Guterres, is “stuck in a time warp”. It grants veto powers to five permanent members—the “P5” of America, China, Russia (as heir of the Soviet Union), Britain and France—representing the victors of the second world war. Ten elected members, who lack the power to veto decisions, are selected for two-year stints. As great-power enmity deepens, the number of vetoes has risen. Since the start of 2020 Russia has cast a veto 13 times, America six times and China five times.
The flaws are ever more glaring. There is no permanent seat for India, the world’s most populous country; nor for Japan and Germany which, though not nuclear powers, have larger economies and populations than either Britain or France. America has long supported giving each of these three countries a permanent seat. It has also endorsed a permanent seat for Latin America and the Caribbean, and one for Africa (without specifying which countries should hold them). On September 12th Linda Thomas-Greenfield, America’s ambassador to the UN, went further, saying the US supported the establishment of two permanent African seats, as well as one for small island states, such as Pacific countries, threatened by climate change. Few believe America or any other P5 members want to share power, but America’s move seems calculated to wrong-foot China. (…)A fluid, multipolar international order, says Mr Kimani, is welcomed by many states. “Competition among big powers offers countries many opportunities. What one power will not give you, another might.” That may explain why some at the UN seem to be untroubled by the possible return to power of Donald Trump. But would an increasingly transactional international system with a weakened America really create a more equitable world? Instead, as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza seem to warn, it may be one that is far more chaotic and dangerous for all. ■A UN vote on Palestine underlines America’s weakening clout (economist.com)
Renaissance der Geoökonomie:
Herfried Münkler: Auch für Deutsche ist die Erde nicht flach (FAZ, 19 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
Über mehr als ein halbes Jahrhundert hatte die Geopolitik in Deutschland keinen guten Ruf. Mehr noch, man interessierte sich nicht für sie. Das hatte nicht zuletzt mit der verhängnisvollen Rolle zu tun, die sie in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts für die deutsche Politik gespielt hatte.
Erst hatte der Schwede Rudolf Kjellén, auf den der Begriff Geopolitik zurückgeht, die Lage des Deutschen Reichs als „Einkreisung“ zwischen den Seemächten des Westens und der großen Landmacht Russland im Osten beschrieben und den Deutschen den Weg nach Südosten gewiesen: Um Weltmacht zu sein, sollten sie eine Verbindung Berlin-Bagdad, eine Achse Nordsee-Persischer Golf aufbauen, was dann, neben anderem, in den Ersten Weltkrieg geführt hat. Und danach hat der Geopolitiker Karl Haushofer eine politische Verbindung zwischen Deutschland und der Sowjetunion propagiert, was seinen Niederschlag im Hitler-Stalin-Pakt fand, dem Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs.
Nach 1945 haben die Deutschen das Interesse an der Geopolitik verloren; in praktischer Hinsicht, weil das Land geteilt war und ohnehin keine Weltpolitik betreiben konnte, und in theoretischer Hinsicht, weil die geopolitischen Entscheidungen in Washington und Moskau getroffen wurden und man in Bonn und Ostberlin ohnehin nur nachzuvollziehen hatte, was dort entschieden wurde.
Man war zum Objekt der Geopolitik geworden. Das geopolitische Desinteresse der Deutschen änderte sich nach 1989/90 nicht grundlegend, auch wenn der Historiker Hans-Peter Schwarz von Deutschland als der „Zentralmacht“ eines nicht länger geteilten Europas sprach. Es war ein Begriff, der die neue Rolle des vereinten Deutschlands bezeichnen sollte, aber er berührte die Deutschen nicht weiter, denn man war zunächst mit den sozioökonomischen Problemen der Vereinigung beschäftigt, und danach setzte man auf eine Weltordnung, in der wirtschaftliche Macht die entscheidende Größe war. Das war naheliegend, verfügte Deutschland doch vor allem über wirtschaftliche Macht.
Also beschäftigte man sich eher mit Geoökonomie als mit Geopolitik und setzte auf freie Märkte, wenn es um die Frage ging, von wo die erforderlichen Rohstoffe und Energieträger herkommen sollten, um langlebige und technisch avancierte Produkte herzustellen und sie in alle Welt zu exportieren. (…)
Die Deutschen haben solche Fragen lange von sich ferngehalten, indem sie die Zukunft als eine der globalisierten Wirtschaft ansahen. In ihr sollten politische Zugehörigkeit wie ökonomische Abhängigkeit keine Rolle mehr spielen. (…)
Doch dann kam einiges dazwischen, was den Staaten und ihren Grenzen aufs Neue Gewicht verschaffte: die Migrationsbewegung aus dem globalen Süden in die Länder des wohlhabenden Nordens, die diese überfordert, die Covid-19-Pandemie, deren weltweite Ausbreitung entschleunigt werden musste, um der Impfstoffentwicklung Zeit zu verschaffen; der russische Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine, in dem es – auch – um die Frage geht, ob militärische Eroberungen in Zukunft wieder ein Instrument der Politik sein werden, was in einer regelbasierten und wertgestützten Weltordnung nicht der Fall ist. (…) Putins Angriffskrieg hat das spezifische Gewicht der Machtsorten wieder verändert: Neben die wirtschaftliche ist erneut die militärische Macht als politischer Faktor getreten. Damit sind Geoökonomie und Geopolitik wieder in ein Gleichgewicht gekommen, und das heißt, dass Sie miteinander darum konkurrieren, wer von beiden bei Entscheidungen den Ausschlag gibt. (…)
Herfried Münkler: Deutschland entdeckt Geopolitik und Geoökonomie (faz.net)
U.S. Shrugs as World War III Approaches
A devastating report on global threats and American weakness is met with indifference. (WSJ, 17 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
The news from abroad is chilling. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports from Kyiv that Ukraine is “bleeding out” as its weary soldiers struggle against a numerically superior Russia. The New York Times reports that China is expanding the geographical reach and escalating violence in its campaign to drive Philippine forces from islands and shoals that Beijing illegitimately claims. And Bloomberg reports that Washington officials are fearful that Russia will help Iran cross the finish line in its race for nuclear weapons.
These stories, all from liberal news outlets generally favorable to the Biden administration, tell a tragic and terrifying tale of global failure on the part of the U.S. and its allies. China, Russia and Iran are stepping up their attacks on what remains of the Pax Americana and continue to make gains at the expense of Washington and its allies around the world.
What none of these stories do is connect the dots by analyzing the consequences of repeated American failure on the widely separated fronts of the international contest now taking place. To see what this all means and where it is leading, we must turn to the recently released report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. This panel of eight experts, named by the senior Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees, consulted widely across government, reviewing both public and classified information, and issued a unanimous report that, in a healthy political climate, would be the central topic in national conversation. (…)
U.S. Shrugs as World War III Approaches – WSJ
The dangers of rock claiming : More storms are brewing in the South China Sea
A dangerous new stage in the conflict is beginning (The Economist, Leader, 14 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
Eight years ago China lost a legal battle over its fantastical territorial claims in the South China Sea. An international tribunal ruled they had no basis. China responded by continuing to occupy and fortify reefs and rocks and sometimes preventing fishing and energy development by other countries. Now the confrontation is heating up as Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia challenge China’s claims and aggression in different ways. Broadly speaking, this pushback is welcome. However, it should not be reckless. America should ensure that its ally, the Philippines, treads carefully.
The encounters can be dramatic. On June 17th Chinese coastguards wielded axes as they confronted Philippine sailors resupplying a beached warship that marks the Philippines’ legitimate claim on Second Thomas Shoal. Two weeks ago China rammed a Philippine coastguard cutter on another shoal, tearing a gap in its hull. Such confrontations often go viral on social media, with images of Chinese bullies with water cannons. They also feature in Sino-American diplomatic meetings, suggesting that both sides fear they could escalate out of control. (…)
More storms are brewing in the South China Sea (economist.com)
What Scared Ford’s CEO in China
Jim Farley is changing strategy to combat what he calls an ‘existential threat’ from China’s electric carmakers (WSJ, 14 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
Jim Farley had just returned from China. What the Ford Motor F 0.66%increase; green up pointing triangle chief executive found during the May visit made him anxious: The local automakers were pulling away in the electric-vehicle race.
In an early-morning call with fellow board member John Thornton, an exasperated Farley unloaded.
The Chinese carmakers are moving at light speed, he told Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs executive who spent years as a senior banker in China. They are using artificial intelligence and other tech in cars that is unlike anything available in the U.S. These Chinese EV makers are using a low-cost supply base to undercut the competition on price, offering slick digital features and aggressively expanding to overseas markets.
“John, this is an existential threat,” Farley said.
For years, Tesla was the main source of consternation for auto CEOs trying to tackle a transition to electric vehicles. Now, it is the rapid rise of nimble automakers in China that have rattled executives from Detroit to Germany and Japan. Even Tesla’s Elon Musk recently called the Chinese the “most competitive” carmakers in the world. (…)
What Scared Ford’s CEO in China – WSJ
Western Firms That Flocked to China Are Now Pulling Back
As China’s growth slows and the difficulty of doing business there rises, Western companies have stopped plowing money into the country (WSJ, 12 septembre, article payant)
Extraits :
BEIJING—Many global businesses are pushing China down on their list of investment destinations and consolidating operations in the country, citing slower growth and diminishing profits.
The gloomy investment trend was the focus of twin reports this week from the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
“The risk of doing business in China has gone up in the past few years and at the same time the market is slowing down,” said Eric Zheng, president of the U.S. group. A poll by the U.S. chamber found the percentage of respondents ranking China as their headquarters’ top investment destination fell to the lowest level since the annual survey began 25 years ago. (…)
Among the worst hit have been foreign automakers. South Korea’s Hyundai sold a factory in 2021 and shut down another the following year. This January, Hyundai sold its third Chinese plant to a local company for more than $227 million. Meanwhile, it is expanding in India.
Even so, for companies with the right product, China is still too big to ignore. In cars, it is the world’s largest market by unit sales.
If domestic demand picks up, China will return to becoming a top investment priority for multinationals again, said Allan Gabor, the chair of the American chamber in Shanghai.
“It’s about the economy. The demand side is the bigger factor. Companies are in China, for China,” he said.
Western Firms That Flocked to China Are Now Pulling Back – WSJ
L’amiral Vaujour sur l’état de l’ordre international: «Partout, des seuils de recours à la violence ont été franchis»
ENTRETIEN – Mer de Chine méridionale, mer rouge, Ukraine… Le chef d’état-major de la Marine détaille au Figaro la nouvelle donne des conflits maritimes. (Le Figaro, 5 septembre, article payant)
Extraits:
Ce qu’a dit le général Burkhard est juste : nous sommes confrontés à une dégradation de l’ordre international. Partout dans le monde, des seuils de recours à la violence, que nous n’aurions pas imaginés il y a dix ans, ont été franchis. Qui aurait cru que les houthistes seraient capables de tirer des missiles balistiques contre des navires de commerce en mer Rouge ? Le conflit ukrainien a aussi eu des conséquences extrêmement importantes dans le domaine maritime. La Russie a conservé toutes ses forces sous-marines nucléaires. Lorsque des sous-marins russes opèrent en Atlantique ou passent par la Manche, nous les suivons. En mer de Chine méridionale, les Philippins sont confrontés aux Chinois, qui revendiquent des îlots stratégiques. Pour la première fois, les Américains, qui ont conclu un accord de défense avec Manille, ont proposé d’escorter les navires philippins. Les Chinois regardent jusqu’où les Américains sont prêts à aller face à ces montées de tension… En ce qui concerne les fonds marins, les moyens de nuire aux infrastructures sous-marines existent chez nos compétiteurs. Toutes ces crises testent nos capacités et nos savoir-faire. (…)
The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies
U.S. and its allies consider whether to confront all rivals at once, or seek accommodation with some (WSJ, 24 août, article payant)
Extraits:
The coalescing partnership of autocracies led by China and Russia will impose strategic choices on Western democracies, no matter who wins the U.S. presidential election.
Can the U.S. and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?
And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?
The current moment is uniquely complicated, with multiple crises around the world increasingly interconnected. Bloody wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are showing no signs of abating, Iran is contemplating a military response against Israel, China is engaging in low-level sea clashes with the Philippines and intimidating Taiwan, and North Korea is ramping up provocations against South Korea. (…)
Though still by far the biggest military power, the U.S. is hard-pressed to deal with the world on fire, especially as China keeps growing its military muscle, some strategists warn. While the U.S. and the European nations have moved to increase military production, including at brand-new ammunition plants, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these steps are nowhere near sufficient for the requirements of modern conflict, they say. (…)
European and, to an extent, Asian allies have been comforted by the rhetoric of the Biden-Harris administration. But Trump’s unpredictability and threats while in office also forced European nations to make painful choices, such as increasing investment in defense, that proved to be indispensable once Russia invaded Ukraine. (…)
While China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are all increasingly cooperating in diplomatic, intelligence and military affairs, they still harbor mutual suspicions. And though they agree on the need to remove the U.S. as the pre-eminent world power, their priorities in their own regions don’t always overlap. China so far has declined to provide direct military help to Russia, and the partnership between these autocracies is nowhere near the interoperability and mutual defense commitment of a true alliance like NATO. (…)
The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies – WSJ
The new nuclear threat : Reluctantly, America eyes building more nuclear weapons
The superpower faces more adversaries, new technologies and less-confident allies (The Economist, 20 août, article payant)
Extraits:
The nuclear de-escalation that followed the cold war is over, the Pentagon warned this month. In its place is a new rivalry among nuclear and almost-nuclear powers, some of them paranoid. It is more complex and less predictable than the old, bipolar contest between America and the Soviet Union. That makes it more dangerous.
Facing new nuclear threats will be a test for America, even as its resources are strained and its politics have grown more isolationist. It must reassure allies that its nuclear umbrella still protects them. And, unfortunately, it will have to expand its nuclear arsenal. Falter on either count and this will fuel proliferation among enemies and friends alike, making America and the world less secure.
Evidence of new dangers is everywhere. China is building hundreds of missile silos in its northern deserts. Vladimir Putin blusters about using nuclear weapons and threatens to aim more Russian missiles at Europe. Even as it is poised to launch another conventional attack on Israel, Iran is closer to a bomb than it was five years ago, having reportedly recently made advances in weaponisation, the process of turning enriched uranium into warheads. North Korea says it is “bolstering” its nuclear programme. This week Donald Trump claimed he would build an “Iron Dome” missile shield to protect America. “It just takes one maniac,” he explained.
All this is a big shift. (…)
How should America respond? Arms-control talks have stalled. Russia has suspended its participation in New START, a pact which expires in 2026. China, never much interested in nuclear-risk reduction talks with America, halted them in July. North Korea has spurned offers to talk; Iran is mercurial. It would be unwise to give up on arms control. But if these foes return to the table, they are more likely to negotiate seriously if they know America is in a strong position.
That means America should be prepared to build a larger and more diverse arsenal, once New START expires. Mr Biden’s Pentagon has already begun the pivot, embracing new weapons such as a sea-launched nuclear-armed cruise missile. It is exploring how to “upload” warheads quickly to existing launchers, should Russia and China sprint ahead. A President Trump would probably continue the build-up.
Mutually assured disruption
But a lack of bipartisan agreement over extended deterrence creates uncertainty. Mr Biden has rightly sought to reassure allies by sending more nuclear-capable bombers and submarines to Europe and Asia, and by consulting them more closely, so they understand how weapons might be used and feel confident that America’s promises are not idle.
Mr Trump and some isolationist Republicans may argue that none of this is necessary to protect America. They are wrong. Extended deterrence is both essential and in its narrow self-interest. Counterintuitively, America chooses to make its homeland more vulnerable in order to protect allies thousands of miles away. In so doing, it helps avert destabilising nuclear proliferation. This logic has kept America, and perhaps even its adversaries, safer for 80 years. In a dangerous world, it would be reckless to let America’s nuclear umbrella fray.■
Reluctantly, America eyes building more nuclear weapons (economist.com)
How China thrives in a world of turmoil
The guerrilla tactics of the Long March guide the Communist Party to this day (The Economist, 20 août, article payant)
Extraits:
(…) To a striking extent, today’s Chinese diplomats manoeuvre like Red Army guerrillas, warily avoiding crises that might trap and entangle China, while staging quick, showy wins. China is a superpower with global interests. But it is run by the same Communist Party that survived the Long March by picking battles and staging strategic retreats. Remember that history and China’s opportunism makes more sense. ■
How China thrives in a world of turmoil (economist.com)
Urbanisation : Indian cities are utterly unprepared for what is about to hit them
The urban population is set to double by 2050 (The Economist, 4 août, tribune, article payant)
Extraits:
THE BRITISH, under whose colonial rule Bombay grew from a collection of mosquito-infested islands into a metropolis, called their creation “Urbs Prima in Indis”—the first city in India. So it remains. Home to corporate headquarters, the country’s biggest port, and the film and television industries, Mumbai—as it has been called since 1995—is the richest, densest and most liberal city in the country. It is urban India at its most intense.
It is also the most extreme example of the myriad problems facing all Indian cities. Mumbai has more billionaires than any city in the world barring New York and London, but it also has a greater proportion of people living in slums than any other Indian city. It has been battered in recent weeks by incessant monsoon downpours that, as they do every year, have caused flooding and destroyed roads. Its public transport is bursting at the seams. On average, seven people are killed on the commuter-rail system every day. (…)
The government’s answer is to build more. Projects already under construction include a six-lane highway along the western coast, a series of bridges linking the western suburbs, roughly a dozen metro lines, a new airport, a high-speed rail link and a plan to rehouse the million-odd residents of Dharavi, a giant slum, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars.
Splurging on infrastructure, though necessary, will not be enough. Metro lines and coastal highways were first proposed in the 1960s, when Mumbai’s population was just over 5m. Today that number is estimated at around 20m. It is projected to double by 2050. So is the population of urban India as a whole. “If you think that urbanisation is a problem today…try overlaying another Mumbai on top of this Mumbai,” says Shashi Verma, who oversees technology at London’s transport authority and advises Indian policymakers on a pro bono basis. Preparing for this growth, says Mr Verma, “is not tomorrow’s problem. It’s not even today’s problem. It is actually yesterday’s problem.”
India is far from ready. No one knows how many people live in its cities today. The last census was taken 13 years ago. (…)
In 2022 economists at Kyushu University in Japan found that despite poor conditions and the absence of basic services, slum residents in Mumbai were happier and more satisfied with their lives than rural populations in the city’s hinterlands, owing to higher social trust and better wages. So long as India’s cities offer the hope of a better life, however slim, they will continue to grow—whether they are prepared for it or not. ■
Indian cities are utterly unprepared for what is about to hit them (economist.com)
Going global : Chinese companies are winning the global south
Their expansion abroad holds important lessons for Western incumbents (The Economist, 2 août, article payant)
Extraits:
Since the end of the cold war the rich world’s corporate giants have been the dominant force in global commerce. Today consumers and workers in almost every country are touched in some way by the world-spanning operations of multinational firms from America, Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan. These leviathans are now under threat, as Chinese firms in industries from cars to clothing expand abroad with startling speed. A new commercial contest has begun. Its battleground is neither China nor the rich world, but the fast-growing economies of the global south.
The expansion of Chinese business is taking two forms. One is through globalised supply chains. Greenfield foreign direct investment by Chinese firms tripled last year, to $160bn. Much of that was spent building factories in countries from Malaysia to Morocco. Less noticed is the fact that Chinese firms are also pursuing the 5bn consumers who live in the rest of the developing world. Since 2016, listed Chinese firms have quadrupled their sales in the global south, to $800bn, and now sell more there than in rich countries. For the West, attempting to deal with China’s rise, that holds uncomfortable lessons.
Chinese businesses are looking abroad partly because of slowing economic growth and ferocious competition at home. They are chipping away at the dominance of incumbent multinationals everywhere from Indonesia to Nigeria. (…)
At a time when globalisation is under attack, this holds an important lesson for policymakers: that trade can bring extraordinary benefits. Billions of lives will be enhanced by a wider choice of cheap, innovative and green goods. Transsion’s $100 smartphones mean that some of the world’s poorest people now have at their fingertips all the knowledge and services the internet has to offer. Affordable medical devices will save countless lives. Low-cost climate-friendly technologies make it more likely that developing countries will be able to keep their greenhouse-gas emissions in check even as they get richer and their populations grow. (…)
Another lesson is how costly it is to shelter incumbent Western multinationals from competition. Domestic rivalries mean that Chinese firms, once derided for turning out shoddy copycat products, have mastered the knack of producing goods for low-income consumers in a way that Western companies never did. Chinese firms are now at the cutting-edge of evs and batteries, precisely the sorts of industries rich-world governments coddle at home. The idea that Chinese brands lack global appeal has been shattered by companies such as Shein, a fast-fashion firm. Sales by Chinese companies in the global south have already overtaken those of Japanese multinationals. On current trends, they will pull ahead of European firms and be on par with American ones by 2030. (…)
As in the West, local industries competing with Chinese companies will cite China’s fondness for subsidies and seek special protection. Already, Brazil has introduced tariffs on evs, and some Chinese exports are facing levies in Indonesia. Yet to shut out Chinese products would deprive consumers of the benefits of choice and innovation, and shield unproductive and stagnant local industries from competition. But policymakers should also beware of being too lax. (…)
For decades the West was the world’s fiercest advocate for globalisation. The consequences of its decision to turn inward to shield itself from Chinese competition will take years to become completely clear. But the world is not standing still. Western multinationals have long been the main agents of cross-border trade and investment, and some of the biggest beneficiaries of openness. Today they are surrendering ground in the world’s fastest-growing and most populous markets. China is already reaping the rewards. ■
Chinese companies are winning the global south (economist.com)
China-Kenner Jörg Wuttke: „Unsere Politiker waren lange naiv – viele der Konzernchefs sind es weiterhin“
Jörg Wuttke war den chinesischen Eliten so nah wie kaum ein anderer Deutscher. Jetzt hat er Peking verlassen. Im Gespräch zeichnet er ein düsteres Bild von der Zukunft Chinas. (FAZ 2 août, entretien, article payant)
Extraits:
(…) Ist Xi Jinping Symptom oder Ursache?
Die Partei hat ihn nach den weichen Jahren unter Hu Jintao mit Absicht ausgewählt. Xi war systemtreu und sollte das System stabil halten. Aber sie haben sich in der Preiskategorie vertan. Sie haben nicht geglaubt, dass er das Land so leninistisch macht. Vor seiner Ernennung 2012 hätten sie ihn fast doch noch ausgetauscht. Dann verschwand Xi für zwei Wochen. Das steht für sein politisches Genie. Er hat gesagt: Erklärt der Welt, warum ich aufgebaut wurde, aber nicht Präsident werde. Diese Chuzpe! Xi Jinping ist ein smarter Politiker. Danach hat er Gas gegeben. Ein Ausnahmepolitiker.
Haben Sie ihn mal persönlich getroffen?
Ja, der Mann hat Charisma. Damals war er Vizepräsident. Was mir auffiel: Anders als die anderen Kader schaute er mir in die Augen, hörte zu. Da gab es eine Verbindung. Das war mit Jiang Zemin auch so, ein Populist im positiven Sinne. Mit dem konnte man Spaß haben. (…)
Sie waren jahrzehntelang in China. Welche Erfahrungen sind Ihnen besonders im Gedächtnis geblieben?
Als ich 1982 kam, gab es große Armut, aber auch große Offenheit. Meine Liebe zu China kommt aus den Achtzigerjahren. Dann kam der Schock des Juni 1989. Ich habe vor Ort gesehen, wie eine Regierung auf ihre eigenen Leute schießt. Danach dachte ich: Das war’s, jetzt wird es wieder kommunistisch. Aber als ich 1993 wiederkam, gab es unglaubliches Wachstumspotential. Deng Xiaoping hat den Turbo gesetzt und die Chinesen Chinesen sein lassen. (…)
Was ärgert Sie am deutschen China-Bild am meisten?
Dass wir glauben, dass wir abhängig sind. Wir müssen bei zehn bis zwanzig Produkten etwas tun. Aber wir sind nicht abhängig von China, China ist abhängig von uns: als Markt und Partner. Sie brauchen die Technologie des Westens. Im IT-Bereich fallen sie schon zurück. Dass wir Angst haben, dass China unsere Waschmaschinen abstellt, kann ich nicht nachvollziehen. Das ist übertrieben. Wir können uns nicht abkoppeln. Wir müssen fair und robust mit China umgehen, klare Worte wählen. Wir dürfen nicht die Scholz-Sprache sprechen.
China-Kenner Jörg Wuttke zeichnet ein düsteres Bild der Zukunft des Landes (faz.net)
Chine : le grand bond en arrière vers l’autarcie
Nicolas Bavarez : La politique extérieure de Xi Jinping se retourne contre la Chine, enfermée dans une quadruple impasse : économique, démographique, politique et stratégique (Le Point, 30 juillet, tribune, article payant)
Excerpt:
Le plénum du Comité central du Parti communiste, qui avait été reporté cet automne en raison des divergences autour de la ligne étatiste et maoïste imposée par Xi Jinping, s’est réuni en juillet pour examiner la situation économique de la Chine. Il a validé le primat absolu de la sécurité et la stratégie d’autarcie, prenant le contrepied du choix en faveur du marché et de l’ouverture effectué en 1978 sous l’autorité de Deng Xiaoping.
Au même moment, le net ralentissement de l’économie chinoise a été confirmé. La croissance, officiellement annoncée à 4,7 %, plafonne en réalité en dessous de 3 %. Le secteur technologique est à l’arrêt à la suite de sa reprise en main par le Parti communiste, symbolisée par le traitement de choc réservé à Alibaba et à son fondateur emblématique, Jack Ma. Shanghai, à l’image de Hongkong, n’est plus que l’ombre d’elle-même à la suite de la féroce normalisation réalisée par Pékin lors de l’épidémie de Covid. La consommation, déjà comprimée, recule de 2 %. Le chômage remonte vivement, notamment chez les 12 millions de diplômés par an qui ne trouvent plus d’emploi. Les riches Chinois s’exilent tandis que les capitaux étrangers se retirent massivement du pays face au risque géopolitique majeur que représente Pékin.
Un modèle au bord de l’explosion
Le modèle mercantiliste chinois est ainsi en passe d’exploser. La priorité continue à être donnée à l’investissement plutôt qu’à la consommation, créant de gigantesques surcapacités industrielles massivement subventionnées par l’État central et les gouvernements locaux – en dépit de leur surendettement, qui empêche certains d’entre eux de payer régulièrement leurs fonctionnaires. Du fait de la faiblesse de la demande intérieure, leur production ne peut trouver de débouchés qu’à l’exportation, soutenue par un dumping systématique. D’où d’énormes excédents commerciaux qui ont atteint 99 milliards de dollars en juin. Mais, en submergeant les marchés mondiaux, la Chine provoque une flambée protectionniste en Occident comme dans les pays du Sud. Tous les grands pôles de l’économie mondiale, jusqu’à l’Union européenne, appliquent désormais un principe de découplage vis-à-vis de la Chine et sanctionnent ses pratiques prédatrices, taxant ses produits voire les interdisant, comme envisage de le faire Donald Trump pour les véhicules électriques. (…)
Chine : le grand bond en arrière vers l’autarcie (lepoint.fr)
China’s reserves: Why is Xi Jinping building secret commodity stockpiles?
Vast new holdings of grain, natural gas and oil suggest trouble ahead (The Economist, 25 juillet, article payant)
Extraits :
Over the past two decades China has devoured enormous amounts of raw materials. Its population has grown bigger and richer, requiring more dairy, grain and meat. Its giant industries have been ravenous for energy and metals. In recent years, though, the economy has suffered from political mismanagement and a property crisis. Chinese officials are adamant that they want to shift away from resource-intensive industries. Logic dictates that the country’s appetite for commodities should be shrinking, and shrinking fast.
In reality, the opposite is happening. Last year China’s imports of many basic resources broke records, and imports of all types of commodities surged by 16% in volume terms. They are still rising, up by 6% in the first five months of this year. Given the country’s economic struggles, this does not reflect growing consumption. Instead, China appears to be stockpiling materials at a rapid pace—and at a time when commodities are expensive. Policymakers in Beijing seem to be worried about new geopolitical threats, not least that a new, hawkish American president could seek to choke crucial supply routes to China.
The fear is warranted, for China is dependent on foreign resources. Although the country is the world’s refining centre for many metals, it imports much of the raw material required, ranging from 70% of bauxite to 97% of cobalt. China keeps the lights on thanks to imported energy. It has a lot of coal, but its deposits of other fuels do not match its needs, forcing it to bring in 40% of its natural gas and 70% of its crude oil. China’s dependence is most acute for food. In 2000 almost everything citizens ate was produced at home; today less than two-thirds is. The country imports 85% of the 125m tonnes a year of soyabean it uses to feed its 400m pigs. Its reliance on foreign farmers is near total for coffee, palm oil and some dairy products. (…)
China seems to be readying itself for a more hostile environment. (…)
This stockpiling is worrying Americans, and not just because it could fuel inflation by raising commodity prices. The supplies China is after are exactly those it would need to survive a protracted conflict, perhaps as it blockades Taiwan. “When you juxtapose that against China’s military build-up, it starts to be very concerning,” says Gabriel Collins, a former analyst at America’s defence department. For now, the evidence suggests that Xi Jinping’s hoarding is more likely to be a defensive measure, since it is not yet on a scale required for him to be secure in a hot conflict. American officials must hope that does not change in the years to come.
Why is Xi Jinping building secret commodity stockpiles? (economist.com)
In vielen afrikanischen Ländern, in denen sich Militärs an die Macht putschten, ist Russland aktiv
Private Militärfirmen profitieren von Kriegen und Konflikten. Jetzt verfolgt Russland, durchaus erfolgreich, mit ihnen in Afrika eine «Söldner-Diplomatie» (NZZ, 17 juillet, tribune, article payant)
Extraits :
(…) Russland hat aus den Erfahrungen der USA und anderer Länder gelernt und setzt seit den 2010er Jahren gezielt derartige Firmen ein. Schlagzeilen machte vor allem die oben erwähnte Wagner-Gruppe im Ukraine-Krieg. Aber auch ihre Rolle in Afrika ist von Bedeutung. In vielen afrikanischen Ländern, in denen sich in den letzten Jahren Militärs an die Macht putschten, ist Russland aktiv. Geputscht wurde dort seit 2020 in Burkina Faso, Tschad, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, dem Sudan und São Tomé und Príncipe – in manchen dieser Länder gleich mehrfach.
Es gibt einen direkten Zusammenhang zwischen diesen Militärcoups und Russlands wachsendem Einfluss in der Sahelregion: Die Putschisten suchen militärischen Schutz und Unterstützung. Den erhalten sie von Russland. Dabei tat sich die inzwischen umstrukturierte Wagner-Gruppe (mit dem unter dubiosen Umständen bei einem Flugzeugabsturz ums Leben gekommenen Chef Jewgeni Prigoschin) besonders hervor.
Tausende Wagner-Soldaten kämpften nicht nur in der Ukraine, sondern auch in Syrien. In Afrika stützten sie das Militärregime in Mali und lieferten Waffen, sie bildeten sudanesische Streitkräfte aus und waren mit über tausend Leuten in der Zentralafrikanischen Republik vertreten. Fast ein Jahrzehnt kämpften Wagner-Söldner in Libyen, um den im Osten des Landes herrschenden Khalifa Haftar in seinem Kampf gegen die Regierung in Tripolis zu unterstützen.
In Russland existieren schätzungsweise dreissig grössere Militärfirmen, auf die die russische Regierung zunehmend zurückgreift, zumeist ausserhalb Russlands. Auch die sogenannten grünen Männer, die 2014 auf der Krim auftauchten und in der Ostukraine die Separatisten in der Donezk-Region unterstützten, kann man dieser Kategorie der irregulären Truppen und Militärfirmen zuordnen.
(…) Mit seinem Engagement in Afrika bietet Russland eine Alternative zum Westen und nutzt die antifranzösische, antikoloniale Stimmung. Die brutale französische Kolonialgeschichte im Sahel ist für die Versuche der EU, jetzt ein partnerschaftliches Verhältnis auf Augenhöhe einzugehen, eine Bürde. Nicht ganz zu Unrecht wird den EU-Ländern unterstellt, hauptsächlich ihre Eigeninteressen zu verfolgen, vor allem beim Stopp der Flüchtlinge aus der Region.
Die Position westlicher Staaten ist geschwächt. Frankreich musste seine Truppen aus Burkina Faso, Mali und Niger abziehen. Die USA zogen Truppen aus Niger ab, und auch Tschad droht mit einem Rauswurf. Gleichzeitig steigt die russische Präsenz in der Region. (…)
Jetzt konkurriert auch Russland um Afrikas natürliche Ressourcen und um Einfluss. Aus geopolitischer Sicht sind auch die 54 afrikanischen Stimmen in der Generalversammlung der Uno von Bedeutung.
Private Söldnertruppen – Putin und der Krieg als Geschäft (nzz.ch)
The world cannot ignore the evil network of Russia, Iran, Hamas, and North Korea – opinion
Together, we must face this threat with the full force of our collective resolve. Let us not be caught in the web of evil intentions (The Jerusalem Post, 16 juillet, tribune, opinion, article payant)
Extraits :
In recent months, a disturbing and dangerous alliance is taking shape on the world stage, threatening the stability and security of many countries. This emerging axis – which includes Russia, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and North Korea – represents a convergence of nefarious interests that should alarm us all. As Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, I am forced to emphasize the serious consequences of this network and urge the international community to respond with determination and unity.
The strategic partnership between Russia and Iran has progressed significantly, culminating in an almost final agreement that emphasizes their shared aspirations. This relationship is not just about economic or military cooperation; it is a partnership built on mutual support of violent nonstate actors and regimes that violate international norms.
Iran’s support for Hamas, a terrorist organization threatened by many countries, including Israel and the United States, is a critical component of this network. Russia’s involvement with Iran and groups such as Hamas is particularly troubling.
Moscow consistently seeks to expand its influence in the Middle East, often at the expense of regional stability. By aligning with Iran and tacitly supporting its proxies, Russia is complicit in perpetuating violence and unrest. This is the same Russia that is waging a harsh and brutal war against Ukraine and shows a blatant disregard for international law and human rights.
Moreover, the inclusion of North Korea in this alliance adds another layer of danger.
North Korea’s proliferation and its potential to provide military technology to Iran and Hamas pose a significant threat. Its isolation in the world has not deterred it from engaging in activities that undermine global security, and its connection to this axis of evil actors only increases the risks we face.
This web of evil is not just a theoretical threat; it has tangible and devastating consequences.
In Ukraine, we are witnessing firsthand the horrors of Russian aggression. (…)
The axis of Russia, Iran, Hamas and North Korea must not be ignored – The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)
No business like sow business : The world’s next food superpower
Farming in India should be about profits and productivity, not poverty (The Economist, 16 juillet, article payant)
Extraits :
(…) The question now is whether Mr Chouhan can drive similar progress at the national level. The bjp’s previous, bungled attempts at reform have made large swathes of agricultural policy too toxic for the central government to tinker with. Mr Chouhan also cannot do much about the very big problem of small landholdings (the average Indian farm covers only a bit more than one hectare) and the resultant low rate of mechanisation.
But he could prioritise many other things. About half of Indian farmland has no access to water other than from the sky. India has enough cold storage for only about 10% of its perishable produce; the government reckons that up to 6% of cereals, 12% of vegetables and 15% of fruit are lost after harvest. Most of India’s agricultural exports are raw, unbranded commodities. Less than 10% of food produced in the country gets processed, compared with 30% in Thailand and 70% in Brazil. So tackling patchy irrigation and weak infrastructure, and encouraging higher-value processing, would all be profitable moves. Boosting agricultural output would support overall growth, too (see chart 2).
Some problems could be fixed with the stroke of a pen. Each year India splurges about 2trn rupees on food subsidies and nearly as much again on fertiliser subsidies, but spends just 95bn rupees on agricultural research and development. Spending on research as a share of agricultural gdp is less than 0.7%. The coming ravages of climate change all but demand greater investment: farmers will find it impossible to adapt without scientific breakthroughs.
There are also things that the government should simply stop doing. It regularly intervenes when food prices rise, for example by imposing limits on stock accumulation or by suspending futures markets. It banned exports of wheat in 2022 and most kinds of rice in 2023. All this prevents farmers from making money when prices are high and discourages traders from taking risks. It is mostly the better off who benefit: the poorest 800m Indians get free grain from the government, so changes in its price affect them less.
Mr Kumar, Araku Coffee’s boss, is about to open a second café in Paris. His company is expanding into other commodities. Many of its coffee farmers also grow pepper; the firm is encouraging people working in other parts of India to grow kidney beans and millets. But only the government has the power to truly transform Indian agriculture. The way to do that, says Mr Kumar, “is not loan waivers, it is not subsidies, it is to see how we can create an ecosystem which is conducive” to growth. In other words, to nurture conditions in which a million Arakus can grow. ■
The world’s next food superpower (economist.com)
Sour spot : China’s leaders face miserable economic-growth figures
They are gathering at the “third plenum” to discuss long-term reforms. Reality has intruded (The Economist, 16 juillet, article payant)
Extraits :
(…) Ever since China’s housing slump began in the middle of 2021, economists have worried that the world’s second-biggest economy might follow in the footsteps of Japan, which suffered a lost two decades of deflation after its asset bubbles burst. By some measures, China is a fast follower. Japan did not enter the fifth quarter of its deflationary spell until the end of 1995, over four years after its property market peaked. In Japan the pattern of falling prices persisted, with few interruptions, for another 18 years.
In both Japan then and China today, deflation is a symptom of lacklustre demand. China’s retail sales, for example, grew by only 2% in nominal terms in June, compared with a year earlier. Vehicle sales shrank by more than 6%. The slump in property rumbles on. In particular, the push to finish half-built homes, a government priority, seems to have lost momentum. The amount of floorspace completed by developers in June was almost a third less than a year earlier. (…)
Consumer spending, for example, is chronically weak in China. The reasons include China’s thin social-safety net and its hukou system of household registration, which denies migrant workers equal access to public services in the cities where they work. Both of these structural flaws oblige some of China’s poorest households to scrimp and save for a rainy day, inhibiting one source of consumer spending. If the third plenum credibly signalled faster hukou reform, fatter state pensions and improved health care, it might help lift consumers’ gloomy outlook. (…)
China’s leaders face miserable economic-growth figures (economist.com)
Cable ties : How China and Russia could hobble the internet
The undersea cables that connect the world are becoming military targets (TheEconomist, 15 juillet, article payant)
Extraits :
(…) Western governments have been quietly concerned about the security of undersea cables, which carry most of the world’s internet traffic, for many years. But only recently has the issue come into sharp focus, owing to a series of murky incidents from the Baltic Sea to the Red Sea and a wider realisation that infrastructure, of all sorts, is a target for subversion and sabotage.
Across Europe, Russian spies and their proxies have attacked Ukraine-linked targets, hacking into water utilities, setting fire to warehouses and plotting to strike American military bases in Germany. The fear is that underwater communications could be crippled in a crisis or in wartime, or tapped for secrets in peacetime. And as America and China joust for influence throughout Asia, undersea cables have become a crucial part of their competition.
The problem is not confined to Europe. (…)
Even with better undersea surveillance and more redundancy in routes, the threat is unlikely to abate. Deep-sea cable cutting once required large naval investments. Increasingly capable naval drones are changing that. “The ability to operate at extreme depths may not be the sole preserve of major powers anymore,” says Sidharth Kaushal of rusi, another think-tank. The challenge for smaller powers, he says, will often be identifying the precise route of cables. That can take years of peacetime surveillance. It is no wonder, then, that many Western governments would rather keep such details tightly under wraps. ■
How China and Russia could hobble the internet (economist.com)
Bear-hugging bros : Narendra Modi cuddles up to Vladimir Putin in Moscow
India’s prime minister visited amid fresh Russian atrocities in Ukraine (The Economist, 11 juillet, article payant)
Extraits :
For two and a bit years India has walked a tightrope when it comes to Russia. Indian officials have refused to condemn its invasion of Ukraine, citing a history of close ties with the Kremlin, as well as India’s need for cheap Russian weapons and oil. At the same time, India has tried to avoid Western criticism by consistently calling for peace, and by presenting itself as a trusted partner for the West in its efforts to manage China’s rise.
Up to now this approach has paid off. But it came under unusual scrutiny when India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, visited Moscow from July 8th to 9th—his first trip to Russia since 2019. Mr Modi was filmed bear-hugging Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, before touring his residence in a golf cart, sharing a private dinner and watching a display by performers on horseback.
The timing made the bonhomie all the more striking. While Mr Modi and Mr Putin toasted their friendship and signed a slew of deals, leaders of nato gathered in Washington for a summit that was focused primarily on Ukraine. nato’s partners in the Indo-Pacific—Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand—attended. So did Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. (…)
Narendra Modi cuddles up to Vladimir Putin in Moscow (economist.com)
Demand for uranium is booming. Who is benefiting?
One Central Asian country stands out above the rest (The Economist, 5 juillet, article payant)
Extraits :
The war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas. This has given a boost to nuclear advocates and increased the demand for uranium, the mineral used for nuclear fuel. Global uranium production is projected to reach over 75,000 tonnes by 2030, up from around 65,000 tonnes last year. Uranium prices have multiplied five-fold since 2016, heavily driven by China’s ballooning demand (though they have cooled a bit recently).
Kazakhstan stands to benefit. It is the largest producer and exporter of mined uranium in the world, accounting for 43% of global supply in 2022. That is almost triple the share of Canada, the next-biggest producer. To maintain its position, the country has been rapidly expanding its production capacity, from 796 tonnes a year in 1997 to a projected 31,000 tonnes by 2025. The country now provides 25% of America’s imports of uranium.
(…) Other countries are likely to intensify their fight over Kazakhstan’s resources. Russia is trying to cement its influence by winning a tender to build a nuclear-power plant there (the government will hold a referendum on whether the plant should be built, which is unlikely to be free or fair). Most of Kazakhstan’s oil exports have to go through a pipeline that ends up in Russia, and are shipped from a Russian port. Russia already controls 25% of uranium production in the country.
However, an American ban on uranium enriched in Russia will soon kick in. This may prompt the West to devise more ways to import mined uranium from Kazakhstan directly. Or more exports might go through China instead of Russia. And as high prices persist, other countries may start to produce more, too. ■
Demand for uranium is booming. Who is benefiting? (economist.com)
Geopolitics : The West’s values are important, but so is realism, says Finland’s president (The Economist, Guest Essay, 5 juillet, article payant)
The Global South must be courted, even if that means compromising interests, argues Alexander Stubb
(voir tout l’article dans “Article du jour”)
The West’s values are important, but so is realism, says Finland’s president (economist.com)
Comment la Chine fait désormais la course en tête sur les technologies d’avenir (Le Figaro, 4 juillet, article payant)
Selon une étude australienne, Pékin a pris une longueur d’avance sur 37 des 44 technologies critiques des prochaines années.
Comment la Chine fait désormais la course en tête sur les technologies d’avenir (lefigaro.fr)
Xi Jinping et Vladimir Poutine en Asie centrale pour un sommet en pied de nez à l’Occident (Le Figaro, reportage, 4 juillet, libre accès)
Si la Russie et la Chine s’affichent unis face à l’Occident, ils sont toutefois concurrents sur le plan économique en Asie centrale
The new nationalists : Meet the victors in Africa’s coup belt (The Economist, 4 juillet, article payant)
They are militaristic, nationalistic and keen to cut a deal
Extraits :
The west’s relations with countries in the Sahel seemed to have hit rock bottom in May when Niger ordered America to withdraw its forces by September—having already booted out a French counter-terrorism mission—and welcomed Russian military advisers. Then even this bottom fell out. Last month Niger, which supplies about a quarter of Europe’s uranium, revoked the mining licence of France’s state-owned nuclear fuel company. Many fear the country will now hand over the rights to one of the world’s biggest uranium mines to a Russian state-owned firm.
Niger’s turn against the West comes amid what many in French-speaking west Africa are calling a second “independence”. It is being spurred by a new generation of nationalists who have taken power in former French colonies from Senegal to Chad and the three core countries of the Sahel: Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. They have done so amid strident appeals to sovereignty and autonomy, in language reminiscent of Ahmed Sekou Touré, the first president of independent Guinea, who told Charles de Gaulle in 1958: “Guinea prefers poverty in liberty to riches in slavery”. Several have strengthened ties with Russia. All want a new relationship with the West. “‘Sovereignty’ is the big word in the region these days,” says Ibrahim Yahaya of Crisis Group, a think-tank. “It has become almost like a religious dogma.”
Most prominent among the new nationalists are military leaders from the Sahel trio, where Western forces had been battling jihadists. The wider group includes Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Senegal’s president, and Lieutenant Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, Guinea’s leader since a coup in 2021. “The era of the old Africa is over,” Mr Doumbouya told the un in New York last year. “This is the end of an unbalanced and unjust era where we had no say. It is time to take our proper place.”
The new nationalists portray themselves as the modern embodiments of the anti-colonial struggle. (…)
Meet the victors in Africa’s coup belt (economist.com)
Droits des personnes LGBT+ : l’homophobie est devenue, dans le Sud global, un instrument d’opposition à l’Occident (Le Monde, 29 juin, article payant)
ENQUÊTE : De Moscou à Dakar en passant par Brasilia, les gouvernements multiplient les mesures contre les droits des personnes LGBT+, mettant en avant une protection de leur identité contre des valeurs qui leur seraient imposées par les pays occidentaux.
Extraits :
La manière dont, depuis 2018, la Chine s’en prend régulièrement aux chanteurs de K-pop sud-coréens jugés « efféminés » et porteurs de valeurs occidentales non asiatiques en est un exemple : la question LGBT+ semble aujourd’hui cristalliser le ressentiment à l’égard de l’Occident. Au point que le 16 mai, à Dakar, lors d’un échange consacré aux relations entre l’Afrique et l’Europe, le premier ministre sénégalais, Ousmane Sonko, a mis son interlocuteur – Jean-Luc Mélenchon – en garde : « Les velléités extérieures de nous imposer l’importation de modes de vie et de pensée contraires à nos valeurs risquent de constituer un nouveau casus belli. » Dans son viseur : les minorités LGBT+, largement considérées au Sénégal comme un « phénomène » de dépravation de la société occidentale. Devant un amphithéâtre acquis et un invité médusé, le chef du gouvernement ajoute alors que la défense de ces minorités peut, davantage que les divergences politiques, nourrir un « sentiment antioccidental dans beaucoup de parties du monde ». (…)
Marie-Cécile Naves note elle aussi que l’accusation de néocolonialisme revient de plus en plus souvent en matière de droits LGBT+. « L’invitation occidentale à la tolérance et à mettre fin aux persécutions est perçue chez ces acteurs comme une propagande ou un prosélytisme visant à diffuser l’homosexualité partout dans le monde et à pervertir leur société avec des valeurs exogènes », relève la politiste : de la même manière que les pratiques sexuelles qui lui sont associées sont soupçonnées d’infecter le corps humain, l’homosexualité infecterait le corps social comme une maladie ou un poison et constituerait ainsi une menace pour les identités et les cultures locales. (…)
Pression des islamistes
Au Maroc, où l’homosexualité est depuis 1962 passible de prison, c’est avec l’arrivée au pouvoir du Parti de la justice et du développement (PJD), en 2011, que le discours anti-LGBT+ a pris des allures de manifeste contre les valeurs supposées de l’Occident. En 2016, Abdelilah Benkirane, alors chef du gouvernement, avait ouvertement accusé l’Europe de vouloir « obliger tous les pays à adopter la cause » des homosexuels. Un an après, son ministre des droits de l’homme, Mustapha Ramid, avait qualifié ces derniers de « détritus », arguant que l’homosexualité est « un crime » au Maroc, alors que dans les pays occidentaux, c’est « un droit pour lequel on organise des fêtes ». (…)
Ce cas de figure a un précédent célèbre : l’Ouganda, où le durcissement de la loi contre l’homosexualité, l’une des plus répressives au monde, a entraîné la suspension des financements de la Banque mondiale. Trois mois après l’adoption, en mai 2023, d’un texte qui prévoit de lourdes peines pour les personnes ayant des relations homosexuelles et faisant la « promotion » de l’homosexualité, l’institution de Washington avait annoncé qu’aucun nouveau financement public pour l’Ouganda « ne serait soumis à son conseil d’administration », jusqu’à ce que « l’efficacité de nouvelles mesures soit testée ». (…)
En mettant la pression sur le pays, la Banque mondiale s’expose par ailleurs aux critiques d’ingérence, que, pourtant, ses statuts lui interdisent. « Il est regrettable que la Banque mondiale et d’autres tentent de faire pression pour que nous abandonnions notre foi, notre culture, nos principes et notre souveraineté, en utilisant l’argent », a estimé le président ougandais, Yoweri Museveni. Alors que l’Ouganda est l’un des pays les plus pauvres de la planète, la suspension de l’aide au développement a des conséquences importantes. (…)
Mais pourquoi la rhétorique anti-LGBT+ fonctionne-t-elle si bien pour discréditer un ennemi ? « Les questions d’homosexualité ou de transidentité sont envisagées comme des atteintes à la masculinité traditionnelle, et donc à tout ce qui lui est associé : la force, la puissance, le pouvoir, la respectabilité », analyse Marie-Cécile Naves. Valoriser des masculinités alternatives revient alors à faire preuve de faiblesse – un engrenage perçu comme pouvant mener à la décadence. (…)
Guerre sur le Nil (Le Point, édito, 25 juin, article payant)
Les Européens sont directement concernés par la guerre civile au Soudan, qui fait le lit du terrorisme islamiste et de la migration
Extraits :
Troisième plus grand pays d’Afrique, le Soudan est ravagé, depuis plus d’un an, par une épouvantable guerre civile. L’émissaire spécial américain, Tom Perriello, a évoqué le mois dernier un bilan provisoire de 150 000 morts. La famine qui se propage pourrait, selon des experts, tuer 2 millions de personnes avant la fin de l’été sur une population totale de 50 millions. Il s’agit, à l’évidence, de la plus grave crise humanitaire du moment.
Les Européens préfèrent détourner le regard. Les politiciens comme les opinions publiques se montrent plus préoccupés par la tragédie de Gaza ou la guerre en Ukraine. Ils sont pourtant directement concernés par la descente aux enfers du Soudan, pays qui se trouve à l’intersection de trois régions géopolitiques en crise : le Sahel, le Proche-Orient et la Corne de l’Afrique. (…)
Les secousses géopolitiques parties du Soudan sont susceptibles de déstabiliser toute la région. Les Européens n’ont aucun intérêt à laisser la bande sahélienne, de l’Atlantique à la mer Rouge, devenir une vaste zone de non-droit où s’épanouissent djihadistes et trafiquants. Il y a vingt ans, la crise du Darfour avait suscité une mobilisation mondiale. Aujourd’hui, l’insensibilité l’emporte sur la solidarité. Le secrétaire général de l’ONU, le Portugais Antonio Guterres, s’est rendu à Rafah pour implorer l’ouverture à l’aide humanitaire de la frontière entre l’Égypte et la bande de Gaza. Mais il n’est pas allé à Adré, aux confins du Tchad et du Darfour, où le passage de l’aide vers le Soudan serait au moins aussi urgent. Puissions-nous ne pas avoir à regretter un jour notre indifférence.
Guerre sur le Nil (lepoint.fr)
Global spending on nuclear weapons up 13% in record rise (June 17)
Free access : States are on course to spend $100bn a year, driven by a sharp increase in US defence budgets (The Guardian)
Global spending on nuclear weapons up 13% in record rise | Nuclear weapons | The Guardian
“A second Trump term: from unthinkable to probable” (June 14)
Pay wall :The Economist’s US election model : A second Trump term: from unthinkable to probable – Introducing our 2024 American election forecast model (The Economist, Leader)
Excerpt :
Our statistical forecast, which we launch this week, gives Mr Trump a two-in-three chance of winning in November. This is the same model, plus some refinements, that made Joe Biden a strong favourite to become president in 2020. (…)
How has Mr Trump gone from being cast out by his party to being likelier than not to win another term? (…)
Mr Biden’s approval ratings are among the worst for an American president at the end of his first term. The only thing that makes them respectable is comparing him with Mr Sunak, Justin Trudeau or Emmanuel Macron, whose numbers are even worse. Inflation may be the culprit. Mr Biden would like the election to be about preserving democracy. Swing voters seem to care more about the price of eggs. (…)
Mr Trump is the first former president, and first front-line candidate, to have been convicted in a court. (..)
Most Americans have already decided who will get their vote. Given that Mr Biden has been behind in national polls all year, even if only by a bit, that is deeply worrying. (…)
Mr Biden is running as if he were ahead in this race. He is not.
A second Trump term: from unthinkable to probable (economist.com)
“China has become a scientific superpower” (June 14)
Pay wall :Red moon risen : China has become a scientific superpower – From plant biology to superconductor physics the country is at the cutting edge (The Economist)
Excerpt :
There is little to suggest that the Chinese scientific behemoth will not continue growing stronger. China’s ailing economy may eventually force the ccp to slow spending on research, and if the country were to become completely cut off from the Western science community its research would suffer. But neither of these looks imminent. In 2019 we also asked if research could flourish in an authoritarian system. Perhaps over time its limits will become clear. But for now, and at least for the hard sciences, the answer is that it can thrive. “I think it’d be very unwise to call limits on the Chinese miracle,” says Prof Marginson. “Because it has had no limits up until now.”
China has become a scientific superpower (economist.com)
“In China’s Backyard, America Has Become a Humbler Superpower” (June 13)
Some free articles / week :The United States no longer towers over the Asia-Pacific, dictating terms to its allies. Instead, it’s offering to be a teammate and share responsibilities (NYT, Analysis)
Excerpt :
In interviews with more than 100 current and former officials from the United States and countries across the Indo-Pacific over the past year, many said that the next century was likely to be less dominated by America than the last. No matter who wins the next election or the one after that, they said, the nation responsible for today’s world order has been weakened by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the destabilizing effects of China’s rise on domestic manufacturing and America’s own internal divisions.
The world is changing, too, with more nations strong enough to shape events. And as the United States shares sensitive technology and prioritizes teamwork, many believe they are witnessing both a global reshuffling and an evolution in American power.
For now, they argue, the United States is adapting to a more multipolar world. It is learning to cooperate in ways that many Washington politicians, fixated on American supremacy, do not discuss — with an admission of greater need and more humility. (…)
In China’s Backyard, America Has Become a Humbler Superpower – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
“Pulling back from Europe and the Middle East would improve American engagement where it matters most — in Asia” (June 11)
Some free articles / week :America Isn’t Leading the World Anymore (NYT, Guest Essay)
Excerpt :
The United States now must contend with an aggrieved and unpredictable nuclear peer in Moscow. Worse, China, Iran and North Korea have come closer together to supply Russia’s war effort and resist what they call U.S. global hegemony. This anti-American entente has already proved strong enough to mitigate the effects of Western aid to Ukraine, and it is raising the price of U.S. military dominance. Russia directly borders six countries that the United States is treaty-bound to defend. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is preparing for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The United States is not outmatched, exactly. But it is badly overstretched. (…)
A better approach is available. To reclaim global leadership, the United States should show a suspicious world that it wants to make peace and build resilience, not merely bleed an enemy or back up an ally. That would mean supporting Ukraine but working just as hard to end the war at the negotiating table — along with gradually shifting to a smaller role in NATO and insisting that Europe lead its own defense. Mr. Biden’s recent proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza was laudable, except that it lacked a threat to stop sending arms to Israel if Israel refused.
Pulling back from Europe and the Middle East would improve American engagement where it matters most — in Asia. It would clarify that America’s purpose is not to pursue hegemony, as Beijing’s propaganda alleges, but rather to keep China from establishing an Asian hegemony of its own. From this standpoint, the United States could be a confident leader in the Indo-Pacific even if China continues to rise. China is today far from capable of imposing its will throughout the region, nor would seizing Taiwan, risky in the extreme, enable it to do so.
None of this would be easy, of course. But compare it with the alternative. Leading only a faction of the world turns the United States into a fretful follower. It puts Americans perpetually on the cusp of war in the Middle East, Europe and Asia alike, afraid that losing ground anywhere will set off catastrophe everywhere. The real danger, though, is to stake so much of global security on one country’s willingness to overcommit itself. True leaders know when to make room for others.
Opinion | America Isn’t Leading the World – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Lors d’une nouvelle tournée africaine, Lavrov vilipende «l’Occident» qui veut «imposer son mode de démocratie» (June 7)
Free access : Lors d’une nouvelle tournée africaine, Lavrov vilipende «l’Occident» qui veut «imposer son mode de démocratie» : Après avoir fait étape en Guinée puis au Congo-Brazzaville, le ministre russe des Affaires étrangères doit se rendre au Tchad, autre pays proche de la France (Le Figaro)
“What the left and right get wrong about imperialism” (June 7)
Pay wall : Your land is my land : What the left and right get wrong about imperialism – As accounts from Ukraine and Indonesia show, it is not just a Western sin, but it is a sin (The Economist)
What the left and right get wrong about imperialism (economist.com)
Yuval Noah Harari on how to prevent a new age of imperialism (June 5)
Pay wall : Putin, the West and the rest : Non-Western powers have a stake in bringing peace to Ukraine, argues the historian (The Economist, Guest Essay)
Yuval Noah Harari on how to prevent a new age of imperialism (economist.com)
“The Modi Raj : A triumph for Indian democracy” (June 5)
Pay wall : The Modi Raj : A triumph for Indian democracy – The shock election result will change the country—ultimately for the better (The Economist, Leader)
A triumph for Indian democracy (economist.com)