TWTW: The World This Week #107

The campaign: 2 days til Armageddon … Israel's 2-front war ... Ukraine: warning signs ... Kim in expansion mode... Eiffel Tower in focus ... Swiss cartoonist Chappatte on Macron fishing for talent

In this weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, we continue to explore how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world.

How others see America

Two days til Armageddon

On Tuesday night, the world will be watching as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump face off for what may be their one live showdown before election day, less than two months away. But this weekend, the focus abroad was more on Trump's judicial or criminal future than any interplay between the two candidates.

As the French daily Le Monde reported at the top of its homepage:

Sentencing in Donald Trump's criminal trial for making covert payments to porn star Stormy Daniels has been postponed once again and will not take place before the US presidential election, a New York judge announced on Friday. Sentencing has been pushed back to November 26, while the election, which pits Democratic candidate Kamala Harris against Republican candidate, will take place on November 5….

At the end of a historic trial, the first criminal trial for a former president of the United States, Donald Trump was found guilty at the end of May of 34 offenses of falsifying accounting documents, intended to hide, just before his victory in the 2016 presidential election, a payment of $130,000 to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels….

Donald Trump is facing criminal charges in three other cases, but no other trials will take place before the presidential election. Friday's ruling means that American voters will not know the Republican candidate's sentence when they go to the polls or cast mail-in ballots. In theory, Trump faces a prison sentence in the hush-money case, but many experts say the judge is more likely to hand down an alternative suspended sentence.

In Asia, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post was out within minutes with similar news:

In Warsaw, commentators are watching America’s women. Maciej Czarneck, writing in the Polish daily Wyborcza, believes:

Women will ensure Harris wins. They vote in larger numbers than men and are upset by abortion bans.

This year's elections will go down in history. Choosing a woman for the White House is realistic, because Harris is generating more enthusiasm not only than Biden, but also than Hillary Clinton at this stage of the campaign.

Special for the Paid !

Andelman Unleashed has unleashed new, paid tiers.

Most Fridays, for our (lightly) paid subscribers, we’d ordinarily be offering our Unleashed Conversation via Zoom….

This past Friday, having (exceptionally) opened it up to unpaid subscribers, we had visitors and contributors crossing eight time zones, from NY to Tbilisi !

Here's the video of our campfire of the minds:

\A campfire of the mind

Going forward, it's a special perk for our paid subscribers, so do sign up…it’s cheaper than a monthly mocha grande.

Danger, America !

The Economist of London has found an unparalleled danger in America…and stunningly, it's not Donald Trump. As the magazine explained:

The next time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle.

But the weight of their machines has a cost because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.

Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world.

How others see the World

Israel's two-front war

While any hope of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage exchange seems on deep life support, another and even more toxic reality appears to be setting in. At least that’s the view of Noa Landau in the daily Haaretz :

While the Israeli media this weekend concerned itself, with infinite seriousness, with the mud ball that was allegedly thrown at Itamar Ben-Gvir at the beach, the entire country continued to sink into the real mud, courtesy of the national security minister and his partners: that is, the project of turning the West Bank into Gaza and Gaza into the West Bank.

These are two parallel deep processes that have accelerated greatly since the outbreak of the October 7 war, and its consequences are creating a dangerous reality.

In the West Bank, the war in Gaza has raised the scale of escalation on almost every level: On the Palestinian side, the motivation for violence is growing alongside the increase in arms smuggling. Settler violence is more rampant than ever, under the protection of the far-right government, and the army began to deploy in the West Bank with forces, equipment and intensity that are directly influenced by the fighting in Gaza.

The killing of innocent civilians on a scale that was unimaginable before the war in Gaza has become routine, normalized by what is happening there. And all of this is proceeding alongside the economic oppression that Israel has imposed on the West Bank since October.

Concurrently, in Gaza itself, the Netanyahu government seeks not only to maintain a permanent Israeli military presence but also to introduce military rule.

Ukraine: Warning signs ?

As our most diligent readers may have noticed, we have begun paying quite close attention in recent weeks to the daily maps proffered by the Institute for the Study of War that has been mapping Ukraine's invasion of Russia. And this week, while there is little substantial change over the past week, there have been indications that on two fronts there, Russian forces have begun advancing on Ukrainian positions in the territory they'd seized.

Still, as ISW also observed:

Ukrainian forces continue to target Russian ground lines of communications (GLOCs) and Russian military equipment in near rear areas in Kursk Oblast.

Orban's getting the….shaft?

Remember all that budget-priced oil that Viktor Orban's Hungary has been getting from Vladimir Putin—at a price, of course, called fealty. Well, no honor among thieves.

As Politico.eu reported:

Viktor Orbán is gradually losing his Russian discount. 

For the last two years, Hungary has enjoyed special EU exemptions giving it access to Russian oil at well below market rates. In June, Ukraine [first] put that arrangement in doubt when it blocked Russian energy giant Lukoil from sending products through the country to the EU.

Hungary and Slovakia, another lingering Russian oil importer, swiftly warned that energy shortages loomed for both. They demanded the EU intervene.

In the weeks since, the crude oil has kept flowing….[But] solutions are all pricier for Hungary. That spells trouble for Orbán, who has used the discount to boost profits and suppress domestic fuel prices….The spat comes at a potentially perilous moment for Orbán, who has long defended his cozy relations with the Kremlin as an economic necessity. 

Energy subsidies, affordable fuel and reduced power bills have been a key part of the populist leader’s appeal at home—but a high inflation rate that hit 17.5% last year has caused some voters to reassess.

China's courting Africa

All but lost in the cacophony of Gaza, Ukraine, and Europe's political crises, China's still making quite effective hay in Africa. As C.K. Tan of Nikkei Asia reported, Xi convening the leaders of virtually every major African power, lured by visons of sugar plums….

Chinese President Xi Jinping sought solidarity with Africa, saying both sides had struggled against imperialism and colonialism as he opened a forum with leaders from across the continent.

Hosting a banquet for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing, Xi vowed to achieve modernization with the emerging economies of the so-called Global South, even as many observers expect China to scale back its largess to mitigate debt risks.

"I believe that as long as the over 2.8 billion Chinese and African people work together, we will surely create a brilliant road to modernization and lead the development of the Global South," Xi told attendees including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu.

The forum is one of the world's largest diplomatic gatherings, with representatives from 53 of 54 African countries, Eswatini being the lone exception. For China, it is a crucial opportunity to exert influence through cooperation and aid, particularly as other countries also step up their own engagement with the resource-rich but economically underdeveloped continent….

From 2000 through 2023, Chinese lenders provided loans worth $182.28 billion to 49 African countries and seven regional borrowers. Angola, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya were among the top borrowers.

 Neither the United States nor Europe was anywhere in sight.

But then there's Indonesia ….

… which vowed to 'defend interests of Global South' at its own Africa forum, pledging to aim for $3.5 billion in business deals at a 3-day gathering in Bali, although as Voice of America's Adam Hancock reported from Singapore, "many African countries were not represented, with leaders opting to attend a separate forum in China." Still, as Nikkei Asia reported, the gathering …

…discussed issues ranging from trade, to supply chains, to health care, as the Southeast Asian nation moves to deepen ties with the Global South and play a bigger role in the international community.

"Indonesia is committed to being part of the global solution, defending the interests of the Global South," President Joko told the Indonesia-Africa Forum (IAF). Citing geopolitical tensions and disrupted global supply chains, he warned, "International solidarity is actually declining, the spirit of multilateralism is increasingly being sidelined and fragmentation is widening.

Meanwhile, the Pope's in Indonesia

For his longest foreign trip yet, the centerpiece was his visit to the world's most popular Moslem nation. As correspondent Wong Pei Ting reported for Singapore's Straits Times:

JAKARTA – As he left Indonesia for Papua New Guinea, Pope Francis, 87, left little doubt that he had accomplished a mission he had set out at the onset of his 12-day Asia-Pacific tour. This was to send an unequivocal message that the world rejects those who use religion to wage war, and to urge people of all faiths to build open societies predicated on trust and respect as fellow travelers in search of God.

His message was impactful, not just solely from the strength of his convictions, but also because it struck the same chord as remarks made by outgoing Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and the country’s top imam Nasaruddin Umar.

The Pope did not mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even once in his speeches. But his exhortation was loud and clear: A society has to be built on social justice—the idea that everyone deserves equal access to things like economic opportunities and political rights—and religion is never a reason for close-mindedness or confrontation.

Another Asian superpower?

As if the U.S., Japan, Australian and a host of other democracies near and far didn't have enough to worry about with China continuing its efforts to dominate the South China Sea, along—somewhat quietly, but no less ominously—comes Kim Jong Un. Already avowedly a nuclear power, now Japan's national daily The Mainichi is reporting:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has inspected the site of a planned naval base and emphasized the country's need to expand its naval capabilities. "Now that we are soon to possess large surface warships and submarines which cannot be anchored by the existing facilities for mooring warships, the construction of a naval base for running the latest large warships has become a pressing task," Kim was quoted by the official Korean Central News Agency as saying. The report did not disclose the planned base's location.

North Korean naval power has primarily consisted of small fast-attack vessels partly intended for coastal defense. Kim also stressed the importance of shipbuilding and naval forces to the country, bordered by the sea to the east and west, according to KCNA.

The Telegram channel Asianomics went even further:

During the tour, Kim stressed the need to build a naval port capable of operating weapons systems of the warships and revealed military measures to deploy anti-aircraft and coastal-defence systems for defending the port.

Pretty clear Kim means business. Yet another toxic Red Line in Asia.

And then there’s … the Eiffel Tower

Where, as it turns out, the next major French political battle is already joined—the contest for the mayoralty of Paris.  Say what? 

The Olympic Games ended on Sunday with the Paralympic Marathon and an epic closing ceremony.

But one question seems destined to linger on: how long should the Olympic rings themselves remain plastered on the front of this iconic symbol of all that is French.

The stakes, to hear each side tell it, are enormous and go way beyond those five interlocking circles. The incumbent mayor, Anne Hidalgo—yes the same one who went to the mat famously over bedbugs; a rats infestation and mountains of garbage; polluting SUVs; and yes, the swimmability of the Seine—is already running for re-election in 2026. And she wants to keep her Olympic rings plastered to the front on the iconic French landmark until, well, forever. A symbol of what she is claiming as her stewardship of an entire landmark summer. (A victory to which no end of individuals, beginning with French President Emmanuel Macron, himself no fan of the Socialist mayor, are also laying claim.)

Rachida Dati, the outgoing Minister of Culture, long-standing mayor of the 7^th arrondissement (where the Eiffel tower happens to be located), oh and likely opponent of Hidalgo for the Paris mayoralty, wants those rings gone. And both sides are trotting out their big guns.

The center-right daily Le Figaro invoked the spirit of Gustav Eiffel himself, as channeled through his direct lineal descendants:

"If the rings stay a little longer than the Paralympic Games, why not? We don't see any problem with that ," said Olivier Berthelot-Eiffel, great-great-grandson of Gustave Eiffel. "But the Eiffel Tower is not intended as an advertising antenna…."

A petition has been launched against the permanent retention of the rings on the Change.org platform. "Once the party time is over, our emblematic monument must return to its natural state." 508 signatures have been collected so far. The Eiffel Tower remains, with a few nuances of paint, and apart from the effects of technological developments, the same as the one erected by Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 World's Fair. It has been listed as a historic monument since 1964.

And Rachida Dati took to X to suggest that all she really wanted was a vote by the entire Paris City Council and not simply an edicr from her opponent, the mayor.

She was reacting to Hidalgo's dismissive remarks:

“As mayor of Paris, the decision is mine and I have the agreement of the IOC. So yes, they will stay on the Eiffel Tower.”

Artnet.com elaborated on Hidalgo's plans:

“I want the spirit of celebration to remain,” she added. “I’m delighted that the French have fallen in love with Paris again, after 10 years of bashing and telling us that it [the Olympic Games] was going to be hell.”

She plans to have ArcelorMittal create a more lightweight version of the 95-foot-wide, 45-foot-tall rings, which at 33 tons are too heavy for long-term display. (The city of Paris owns the tower as well as the Société d’Exploitation de la tour Eiffel, the company that manages it.)

But as Eiffel's descendant elaborated in what would seem to be a final word—at least until the International Olympic Committee, which does control the brand, weighs in:

“The Olympic Games change countries every four years. There is no reason why the Eiffel Tower should continue to wear the rings after the Paris Games,” Eiffel's statement continued, arguing that “the façade should be able to continue to serve temporarily to highlight great causes, as it has done regularly in the past,” such as supporting Ukraine during the Russian invasion.

All of Paris will be watching.

Finally, there’s …. Chappatte

Circling back to France and Emmanuel Macron's sustained efforts to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear of this year's Parliamentary elections and search for a new government, Swiss cartoonist Chappatte believes he's captured the very moment … Macron, sleeves rolled to his elbows, reaching into a fishbowl apparently crammed with names of potential prime ministers as he pronounces, "after careful deliberation"….

Patrick Chappatte, who draws under his last name, is the son of a Swiss father and Lebanese mother, was last featured in Andelman Unleashed on August 25 imagining the first Ukrainian tanks entering Russia. Born in 1967 in Karachi, Pakistan, he began working for Swiss newspapers, currently dividing his time between Geneva and Los Angeles. He draws regularly for the Geneva daily Le Temps as well as Zurich’s  Neue Zürcher Zeitung and frequently for Le Monde in Paris. In 2012 he became the first non-American to win the Thomas Nast Award of the Overseas Press Club of America. And with the Le Monde cartoonist Plantu he founded the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.

Here’s how Chappatte imagines himself: