Elections: debate in US, inauguration in Mexico …an ‘Unleashed’ book …peace in Ukraine, the Middle East? ... farewell Pyrénées … MetOpera's 'Grounded' drone opera …cartoonist Chappatte on Biden’s plea
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. With a host of features and asides.
How others see America
A debate …. gone and then forgotten?
Much of the world did not seem to take very much notice of the vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. Leave it to Anthony Zurcher, North America correspondent for the BBC to put it into perspective:
Will this impact the race?
American political history suggests that vice-presidential debates don’t really matter. In 1988, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen dismantled Republican Dan Quayle. A few months later, Quayle was sworn in as vice-president after his ticket won in a landslide.
It may turn out that this debate is similarly irrelevant to November’s results. Unless there is a last-minute debate announced, however, it will be the last word both parties have on a debate stage before election day.
Walz did no harm to the Democratic ticket and showed some of the Midwestern charm that made him Harris’s choice.
But Vance’s strong performance is likely to buoy Republicans in the days ahead. And the debate’s lasting impact may be to convince members of his party that the Ohio senator—who is only 40—has a future in national conservative politics, given his ability to clearly advance their ideological priorities on the brightest of stages.
Le Monde's Washington correspondent Piotr Smolar, in a story placed on page four following two pages on Israel and Lebanon, came to a similar conclusion:
Civil debate between Vance and Walz ends without a winner
The vice-presidential candidates made efforts to keep the debate civil and found some surprising points of agreement.
Their big speech was expected as a credibility test at the highest political level. Thirty-five days before the American presidential election, JD Vance and Tim Walz, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris' running mates, emerged from the shadows on a CBS set on October 1. During a dense debate, focused on the daily lives of Americans, the senator from Ohio and the governor of Minnesota presented a contrast in style, while trying to appear affable and reassuring. No one stood out. Each returned, satisfied, to their own people, in an ultra-polarized political field, where there are few people left to persuade.
JD Vance was so calculatedly clever and so apparently cunning that they deprived him of naturalness and human density. Tim Walz, for his part, got off to a difficult start. Like a student trapped in his revision cards, wide-eyed, he sometimes seemed obsessed with his thematic arguments, instead of demonstrating the spontaneity for which he is renowned.
Elections 2024: Sheinbaum's off to the races
Her inauguration this week as Mexico's first woman president hardly went unremarked at home in Mexico City and certainly not in Washington. As Politico's National Security Daily put it:
If first impressions mean anything, U.S.-Mexico ties are off to a rocky start under new President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.
The trouble started with the invite list. Mexico’s new president invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to her inauguration, drawing immediate ire from U.S. and European countries (including Ukraine). She also sparked a major row with a key European power after she opted not to invite Spain’s King Felipe VI to the festivities, arguing he should respond to Spanish atrocities during the conquest of the Americas.
And since then, she has vowed to play hardball with the U.S. on issues like migration, trade and the future of bilateral security partnerships. Sheinbaum vowed at her inauguration that she would “always defend the grandeur of Mexico and promote relationships of respect, never of subordination" in her foreign policy.
Among those angered by her inauguration invites to Maduro and Putin (neither of whom ultimately attended) is Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Inviting such international criminals to one’s presidential inauguration is inconsistent with Mexico’s democratic ideals and our shared interest in a secure, prosperous and democratic Western Hemisphere,” he told NatSec Daily.
Mexico is not just one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners and a major hub for U.S. investment, it’s also a critical security partner in the fight against illicit criminal networks and drug cartels.
Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) added:
Ukraine asks Mexico to arrest Russian leader Vladimir Putin if he comes to the inauguration of the new president. This is in the statement of the Embassy of Ukraine in Mexico. Diplomats emphasize that Putin is a war criminal for whom there is an arrest warrant on suspicion of kidnapping and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, issued by the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction Mexico recognizes….The newly elected president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, invited Vladimir Putin to her inauguration.
[He did not show up.]
But President Sheinbaum did hit the ground running, as Carmen Moran Brema of El Pais observed:
Not even an act as traditionally masculine as a military salute has escaped the gestures of equality between the sexes that President Claudia Sheinbaum has offered since taking power on October 1.
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Unleashed Books: ‘Unleashed’
You can’t copyright titles….that’s simply a rule of the road. So, when former long-disgraced British prime minister and Trump bff Boris Johnson chose the title of his new memoir, being pubbed October 10 (England), October 22 (U.S., no doubt to give him time to make his way across the pond for appearances on Truth Social or Fox & Friends or Hannity), how could we be angry?
Instead, we turned our attention to The Telegraph in London for its take, from associate editor Gordon Rayner:
Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump had been president, Boris Johnson suggested, saying the world is a better place when the United States has a strong leader. The former prime minister believes that Trump’s unpredictability would have been enough to persuade Putin not to take the risk of going to war with a sovereign country.
In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph ahead of the publication of his memoir, Unleashed, he said:
“One of the virtues of Trump is his sheer unpredictability. That’s one of the reasons why I look at how he actually behaved on foreign affairs, and I contrast it with what people say about him.
“He expelled 60 Russian spies [after the Salisbury poisonings]. He was much tougher on Syria than the Democrat administrations. He was tougher on the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and then he gave the Ukrainians the Javelin missile.”
“All human institutions require a leader. In the world, America is the leader. And in my view, the world is a happier, more prosperous place when you have a strong America and a strong leader, and when people feel that some sort of order is being maintained.”
Johnson, a former Telegraph columnist, chose to come to our offices in Victoria for his interview, and scans a wall of front pages from our 169-year history looking for his own byline. He is unable to find one, but he does appear, several times, as prime minister. He is dressed smartly in a navy suit and blue tie, but arrives late and looks, as ever, as though he has shaved with a butter knife and without the aid of a mirror.
He is clutching a copy of his 738-page memoir, which is dedicated to his wife, Carrie, and the memory of his mother, Charlotte. But the next page is devoted to a single quote from the film Terminator 2: “Hasta la vista, baby.” He said it in his farewell speech to Parliament, and it translates ‘as see you around.’
Surely there is a not-so-subtle message to the readers that, as Arnold Schwarzenegger also said in that film: “I’ll be back.” So, does he still harbour hopes of returning as PM?
“The late Queen said, ‘Only do things when you think you could be useful,’” he says, in a roundabout way of not saying no. “I think my chances are about as good as being decapitated by a frisbee or reincarnated as an olive.”
That is exactly what he said before he did become prime minister….
His Tories lost dramatically, catastrophically to Labor and as Andelman Unleashed reported on July 6, with their historically overwhelming victory, Keir Starmer was catapulted into No. 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.
But, as Boris Johnson concluded:
“Things might have been different” at this year’s general election if he had still been prime minister.
Instead, Politico Confidential reported from London on the Tories, in the throes this week of choosing a new leader:
A whole generation of British Tories, after 14 years in power, are slowly discovering what life after politics is like.
How others see the World
Ukraine writ large
Leaders from most of the 50 countries including all 32 members of NATO that comprise the Ukraine Defense Contact Group will be converging on Ramstein, Germany on October 12 for their 25th meeting, this time with an appearance by President Volodymyr Zelensky—the first such gathering at the leaders’ level. It’s this group that has approved and implemented the broad range of military assistance to Ukraine from the first days of the Russian invasion.
As the Kyiv Independent reported:
"We will present the victory plan — clear, concrete steps towards a just end to the war. The determination of our partners and the strengthening of Ukraine are what can stop Russian aggression," Zelensky wrote on X.
Zelensky already presented his five-point plan to U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House during his trip to U.S. in late September. He also discussed it with presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as members of Congress.
The plan includes military and diplomatic elements, such as Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, though the full details of the peace framework have not been made public. According to Kyiv, the goal is to bolster Ukraine’s negotiating position and pressure Russia into agreeing to a just peace.
On October 2, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the U.S. had reviewed Ukraine's victory plan and identified "a number of productive steps. The victory plan that Ukraine presented is not just a question of actions that Ukraine would take. It’s a question of actions that other countries around the world would take as well."
This plan would appear to differ substantially from the vague proposals from Donald Trump that he would broker an end to the war as soon as he arrived in office and that sounds a lot like Putin’s own plans.
Although the subject did not come up at all in the Vance-Walz debate on Tuesday, as Angela Stent wrote this week for Brookings:
J.D. Vance has been much more explicitly anti-Ukraine. He has called for an immediate end to assistance and has put forward a peace plan that would involve Ukraine agreeing to demilitarize all the territory currently controlled by Russia and agree to permanent neutrality. He did not say who would control this territory. His plan is similar to that of Putin, who also calls for Ukraine to cede the territory now occupied by Russia and agree never to join NAT
And of course there’s the Middle East
Speaking of peace plans, right now there’s none, except perhaps in the mind of Joe Biden. But then, he has no dogs actually in the fight. And London’s Financial Times was quite explicit:
Netanyahu long ago established what military analysts call “escalation dominance” over whoever sits in the Oval Office—none more so than Joe Biden. No president more than Biden has wanted to disentangle from the Middle East. Yet none, in the wake of Israel’s latest ground incursion into Lebanon and the spectre of a full-blown war with Iran, is likelier to be defined by the region than him.
“Netanyahu knows how to play the Washington game better than most US politicians,” says Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, now columnist for the Haaretz newspaper. “And he has been running rings around Biden.” Even by Netanyahu’s standards, however, the current situation has a House of Cards quality to it. With just a month to go before the US presidential election, what happens in the Middle East could change the outcome on November 5.
Biden admitted he was in discussion with Netanyahu about an Israeli strike on Iran’s oilfields. Iran has in the past signalled that it would retaliate to any such strike with attacks on oil infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Brent price of oil has already risen from $70 a barrel on Monday to $78 by Friday. A new round of strikes could send it hurtling towards $100.
[And this just as we paid, for the first time in years, less than $3 a gallon for gas in Pennsylvania—with our 10 cents/gallon discount at Walmart, that came to $2.95.]
But as the FT concludes:
It is Netanyahu, not Biden, who will decide what happens next. Recent history shows that Israel’s prime minister is unlikely to pay heed to whatever restraint Biden is urging on him in private. “Netanyahu is riding high,” says Marwan al-Muasher, Jordan’s former foreign minister, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He won’t want to do anything to help Harris’s election prospects.”
‘Monday, Monday…can't trust that day’
What would The Mamas and The Papas have said about this October 7—one year after that horrific massacre and turning point in what was still a fragilely stable Middle East.
Remember …. Last Sunday Andelman Unleashed turned to reliable sources suggesting Hashem Safieddine was poised to slip seamlessly into the shoes of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Now he’s dead too. As Haaretz reported:
Sky News Arabia reported on Saturday, citing Israeli security sources, that Hashem Safieddine, identified as the potential successor to Hezbollah's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an airstrike in Beirut overnight into Friday.
Earlier, the Saudi Al-Hadath channel also reported Safieddine's death, along with several newly appointed Hezbollah commanders and Iranian advisors….The Israeli strike targeted a bunker in Beirut where a number of top Hezbollah leaders, including Safieddine, were meeting.
The reality is that for every Hezbollah (or for that matter Hamas) leader who is killed by massive air strikes or targeted attacks, a dozen other individuals remain to step in quickly and perhaps even more virulently.
So, The Times of Israel quickly singled out….
…the man widely regarded as [Nasrallah’s] heir, Hashem Safieddine. As head of the executive council, Safieddine oversees Hezbollah’s political affairs. He also sits on the Jihad Council, which manages the group’s military operations.
Who’s next? The reality is that there will always be someone else waiting in the wings since for many, indeed increasing numbers as air strikes continue to shred families and villages, there will always be new leaders prepared to step up. Hezbollah and Hamas are as much states of mind as military or terrorist organizations. But Amos Harel, for 10 years the military and defense analyst at Haaretz, appeared to hold out a ray of hope:
The IDF's [Israeli Defense Force] actions—at least partly aimed at the group's new leadership— signal that Israel still wishes to force a deal with Hezbollah to end the war, even without completing the search and destroy operations inside Lebanon.
Say farewell …. to the glaciers
There are still 17 glaciers in the Pyrénées mountains straddling the border between France and Spain. That’s down from 100 or more a century and a half ago. But prepared to say bye-bye to the handful that remain. In 10 years, the last of them will have given up the ghost. They've already shrunk by 93% since the mid-19th century and now the last of them are very much on life support….
Le Monde's Audrey Garric reports from the Oulettes de Gaube in the Hautes-Pyrénées:
At the foot of a majestic cirque of rocks in the Hautes-Pyrénées, the Oulettes de Gaube glacier is only a shadow of its former self. The summer of 2022 dealt it a fatal blow, tearing it in two. The lower part is now covered with a mantle of pebbles hiding the ice. You have to move forward on the black mass to catch a glimpse of a blueish reflection, in a crack from which fresh air escapes. The upper part, resting on a rocky bar, is fragmented. From time to time, on this mid-September day, a serac hurtles down the slope, with a dull roar. The former white giant is in agony, like all seventeen glaciers in the Pyrénées.
"It is living its last years, whatever we do," sighs Pierre René, glaciologist and mountain guide, during a scientific outing. With the Moraine association, which he created, he has been following the evolution of the last eleven glaciers on the French side since 2002—six still exist on the Spanish side.
It is impossible not to feel dizzy when faced with these colossi of extreme power and fragility. Monsters that have shaped the landscape over tens of thousands of years and are disintegrating in a few decades under the effect of human activities.
For over a century, the decline has been major: in 1850, the Pyrénées had one hundred glaciers, totaling 23 square kilometers of ice. In 2000, there were only 44 (covering 5 square kilometers), before falling to 17 today (for approximately 1.6 square kilometers). In other words, their surface area has been reduced by 93% since the middle of the 19th century, including 78% over the last twenty-four years. "We have lost more than one glacier per year for twenty years ," summarizes Pierre René.
And what replaces them—what about the forests?
The forests, which cover more than half of the massif, are also suffering the full force of climate change that is much faster than their capacity to adapt. "Heat and droughts encourage pests, which weaken the trees and can end up killing them," says Sébastien Chauvin, director of the Forespir program, a group of French, Spanish and Andorran forestry stakeholders.
Under the effect of a "Mediterraneanization of the Pyrenean climate ," he explains, many broadleaf trees are experiencing an "abnormal" loss of leaves, while the budding (the appearance of buds) of silver firs…
[Still], the death of the glaciers also means the birth of new environments. "A juniper and a St. John's wort. It's incredible!" exclaims a team of botanists studying plants colonizing the margins of the glaciers….Like them, many plants gradually conquer the areas freed by the glacier. “These new spaces may constitute refuges for the future, for species threatened with extinction," enthuses researcher Nadine Sauter.
On condition that these emerging ecosystems are protected to avoid a second extinction.
And then there’s ‘Grounded’
Saturday night, on the eve of the start of my 9th decennium, we were in the front row at the Metropolitan Opera house and watched the extraordinary new opera Grounded unspool before us.
For our paid subscribers, we present here some of these challenges and a clip of some of the more memorable of many moments in this masterwork….
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