TWTW: The World This Week #112

War and America's next president … Refugees dispatched 'home'… Auto tariffs rising … Korea's Nobelist … 100 days of Starmer … Paid: Coins in Trevi...and a cavalcade of cartoons on a bleak anniversary.

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. Next week from Paris!

How others see America…& the Middle East

The critical question

We begin this week with a question—unsurprisingly posed by and answered (with a dollop of hope) by London's The Economist:

Will the next president follow Israel into war with Iran?

Kamala Harris is likely to maintain Joe Biden’s awkward policy, while Donald Trump’s belligerent words mask a record of caution.

A red necktie turned on its head…a missile poised to launch…or simply the Washington Monument enrobed by Trump?

Described as "one of a series of briefs about the policy implications of America’s election," The Economist goes on to observe:

Kamala Harris would probably hew to President Joe Biden’s awkward policy: support Israel’s right to defend itself, try to restrain its most dangerous actions, mitigate the humanitarian impact, seek ceasefires and keep alive the idea of Palestinian statehood. Mr Trump suggests that Israel should be given carte blanche. After Iran rained more than 180 ballistic missiles on Israel on October 1^st, Mr Biden urged the Jewish state not to strike at Iran’s oil facilities or its nuclear sites. Mr Trump mocked such caution: “Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”

American presidents of all stripes have said Iran will not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Yet none has bombed Iran’s sites; nor has any given Israel the green light to do so. That is because the costs of further inflaming the region are easy to imagine, and the rewards in terms of setting back Iran’s nuclear programme would be temporary and hard to reckon.

But most frightening:

President Trump or President Harris might give Israel the nod for military action and, in the ensuing mêlée, feel compelled to finish the job or at least help its ally.

But then, there was the question posed by an increasing drumbeat of Israeli media as the Jewish state headed into Yom Kippur, the most sacred date on the Israeli calendar. As Yossi Verter observed in Haaretz:

After His Year of War and Ruin, Netanyahu Won't Be Atoning This Yom Kippur

To the prime minister's base, the widening rift with Washington means strength….

It's insane to think that the U.S. president was literally coerced into speaking with the prime minister after two months of ghosting by the latter. These two months saw the collapse of a hostage deal, the killing of most of Hezbollah's leaders, including its top leader, with the IDF embarking on a ground operation in Lebanon and Iran launching a massive ballistic-missile barrage against Israel.

For Netanyahu's base, this rupture signifies power. Isolation and defiance are supreme values for this crowd. But isolation in wartime is one step from suicide. This doesn't happen at once but step by step, crisis after crisis, until until it's too late to repair the rupture.

But the drumbeat of war only expands. As Le Monde reported:

Middle East war: Israeli army orders residents of southern Lebanon "not to return" to their homes

"The army (...) continues to target Hezbollah positions in or near your villages," wrote Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-speaking spokesman for the Israeli forces, on X.

As depressingly familiar as this sounds from earliest days of the war on Gaza, Le Monde's lead editorial carries the crisis even further and directly into its view of western democracies:

The cowardly abandonment of Lebanon

In their war against Hamas and Hezbollah, the Israeli authorities seem less interested in a ceasefire, which Washington rarely talks about, than in the temptation to reshape the region by force, and by force alone.

Turning immediately to Israel's bombing attack on UN peacekeepers, the editorial continues, describing the nature of this war—no limits, just settling old scores:

Who can be surprised that peacekeepers could be targeted by the Israeli army in southern Lebanon? The shootings that injured two Sri Lankan soldiers on October 11 came after a first incident, two days earlier, during which two Indonesian soldiers had already been injured. The Israeli army denies any intentionality, but these shots come in the middle of an offensive against the Shiite militia Hezbollah for which the army of the Hebrew state seems to set no limits. No one denies Israel the right to defend itself. Hezbollah exposed Lebanon to an adventurism that the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants did not choose in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, when it fired its first rockets into Israeli territory in solidarity with Hamas….

These shots must stop so that tens of thousands of displaced Israelis can return home to northern Israel. But the million displaced Lebanese driven out of the south and who are camping in appalling conditions in a country that was already on a knife edge, politically paralyzed and economically exhausted, have no less right to it.

Meanwhile, Le Monde also reported:

Forty nations that contribute to the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon "strongly condemn recent attacks" on the peacekeepers. "Such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated," said the joint statement and, "reaffirms our full support for UNIFIL's mission and activities, whose principal aim is to bring stabilization and lasting peace in South Lebanon as well as in the Middle East," the statement read.

UNIFIL, which involves about 9,500 troops of some 50 nationalities, is tasked with monitoring a ceasefire that ended a 33-day war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.

In response, Israel’s i24 News broadcast a stunning statement from Netanyahu who demanded:

The time has come to remove UNIFIL from Hezbollah's strongholds and war zones.

The IDF has requested this over and over again, and has been repeatedly refused, a refusal that is clearly intended to give a human shield to Hezbollah terrorists. Your refusal to evacuate UNIFIL soldiers turns them into Hezbollah's hostages.

Meanwhile, Le Parisien newspaper reported:

Emmanuel Macron considered "completely unacceptable" that the UN peacekeepers were "deliberately targeted by the Israeli armed forces. We condemn it. We do not tolerate it and will not tolerate it happening again," said the French president at a summit in Cyprus of the Mediterranean countries of the European Union, whom he "thanked" for having had "a very clear word alongside us on this subject."

The French president also considered that "stopping arms exports" used in Gaza and Lebanon was "the only lever" to end the conflicts. "France has called for a halt to arms exports that are used in these theaters of war. Other leaders here have done the same. We all know that this is the only lever that can put an end to them today," declared Macron.

But as correspondent Tomas Avenarius reported from Beirut for Munich-based Suddeutsche Zeitung, Hezbollah is hardly giving in:

It is as absurd as it is well staged—and it is an outrageous provocation: Muhamed Afif Nabulsi, the media face of Hezbollah for years, sits calmly on the median strip of Imam Khomeini Street, a table with microphones in front of him, and the flags of Hezbollah and Lebanon behind him.

Three or four dozen journalists and cameramen are crowded around him. To the left and right of the wide street there are bombed-out houses; soot-blackened window recesses yawn, and rubble and debris pile up between the ruins. The fact that the Israelis can not only see the Hezbollah man from the air with their ultra-modern drones but can probably even count the buttons on his jet-black shirt—he clearly doesn't care. 

A Hezbollah press conference, in the middle of the Dahieh, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, in the open air—among the ruins of the houses bombed by the Israelis and without any fear of their jets and drones that dominate the skies over Beirut and can hit any target on the ground. What Nabulsi wants to convey to the world is clear: Hezbollah is speaking out—and it is not afraid of its enemy….

His message sounds accordingly: Hezbollah is still there. Despite all the heavy blows, it has reorganized itself "from the top leadership to the soldiers."

Special for the Paid !

Andelman Unleashed has unleashed new, (lightly) paid tiers. Now we'll be offering our Unleashed Mailbox via Zoom….Our paid subscribers can pose questions. We'll answer them via zoom on Fridays, live and archived.

E-mail by midnight Wednesday: daandelman@substack.com

It's just another perk for our cherished, paid members of our Unleashed family … today with a portfolio of cartoons from Cartooning for Peace, and a special feature on the Trevi Fountain …. So do sign up … cheaper than a monthly mocha grande!

This will also help us subscribe to more (expensive!) media across the globe and support great journalism in multiple languages.

How others see the World

Refugees everywhere

A global collective of journalists, Lighthouse Reports, comprising Der Spiegel, El País, NRC, Politico SIRAJ, Etiliaat Roz, L'Espresso, Le Monde, and Alpheratz, has produced an extraordinary investigative report after seven months of work:

The European Union has funded and helped build reception centres for asylum seekers in Turkey, where they are detained in sometimes appalling conditions and returned en masse to their countries of origin, often to Syria and Afghanistan, despite the risks involved.

Taken together, their testimonies sketch out a vast system initially intended to welcome waves of refugees from neighbouring countries in crisis or at war, but which has been transformed over the years into a complex, implacable deportation machine, knowingly supported and financed by the European Union (EU)….

According to Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, appointed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the 2023 general elections marked by the deep economic crisis and anti-refugee rhetoric, “142,000 migrants have been deported in one year, more than all the Frontex [the agency responsible for controlling the external borders of the Schengen area of Europe] countries combined.” 

Turkey also congratulates itself on having undertaken the construction of walls on the borders with Syria (828 kilometres long) and with Iran (173 kilometres).

Back in July, AI Monitor reported on the call between Trump and Turkey's president, both of whom seem to love their anti-immigrant walls:

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised the bravery and unifying messages of former US President Donald Trump after an assassination attempt at a Saturday campaign rally, in one of the few phone calls the former American leader has had with world leaders since the incident.

Erdogan told Trump that his “bravery following the heinous attack is admirable, and that continuing his programs without interruption strengthened democracy,” according to a readout released by the Turkish presidency. 

Erdogan is only one of a host of foreign leaders with whom Trump has kept in touch since leaving office in 2021, especially the seven calls with Vladimir Putin, revealed this week in Bob Woodward's War.

Yet even in Poland, there is a whole lot of angst about migrants that has culminated in terminating any right to asylum there, at least for the moment. Prime Minister Donald Tusk weighed in, as the Warsaw daily Wyborcza reported:

And then there's Iran ….

The Italian daily Corriere della Serra leads with a startling report:

Attempts have been made to decipher a news item reported by Iran International, which states that Iran has reportedly suffered a massive cyberattack. The former secretary of the National Virtual Space Center Abolhassan Firouzabadi is quoted as saying: "The amount of heavy cyberattacks, which have occurred on the three branches of government, the judiciary and parliament, as well as on the nuclear industry, are unprecedented and enormous. During the attacks, a large amount of information was stolen." His statement does not clarify the date of this alleged cyberattack, which could have occurred in the previous days. "Among the targets," Firouzabadi continued, "are also fuel distribution and transportation networks, municipalities and ports." The alert is being raised for Israel's response to Iranian missile attacks.

Just in case, Singapore's Straits Times reported, "Iran has banned pagers and walkie-talkies on all flights, weeks after deadly sabotage attacks in Lebanon which were blamed on Israel."

Auto tariffs rising

On the heels of Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs of 1,000% on Chinese or any other foreign-built automobile, South China Morning Post's Phoebe Zhang reported from Shenzhen:

China has invited an EU team to visit for further talks on the bloc’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, despite the failure of nearly three weeks of negotiations, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. The ministry said that beginning September 20, Chinese and European Union representatives held eight rounds of intense talks over 20 days and made “significant progress” in some areas. “Yet regrettably, the EU has failed to positively respond to matters relating to the core concerns of Chinese and EU industries.”

EU tariffs will be imposed by October 31 for five years, following the closed-door vote of the bloc’s 27 member states. The vote was triggered by an anti-subsidy investigation, which found that Chinese-made EVs were distorting the European market. China’s Ministry of Commerce slammed the decision, saying “China will take all measures to firmly safeguard the interests of Chinese companies”.

And then there's the Nobel Prize….for Literature

To a South Korean woman, Han Kang—a first, certainly, and promptly extolled globally. As Claudia Pineiro exulted for El País:

Reading The Vegetarian was an extraordinary experience, for the prose, the story, the characters, the voices. Powerful and delicate at the same time, reading it moved me. I stole hours of sleep and finished it that same day; it also helped me to learn about the situation of women in South Korea. The fact that the protagonist declared herself a vegetarian was not just a question of food, but rather it was about breaking with the mandates imposed by tradition. Food is a very important ritual for Koreans, so much so that instead of asking how are you, they ask have you eaten?

And then a bit of political digression:

The excellent translation is by Sun-Me Yoon , a South Korean who came to Argentina at the age of 5 and studied at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. The same university that today—allow me to digress—is at risk due to the budget cuts ordered by the president of my country, who is also considering putting economic restrictions on foreigners who, like Sun-Me Yoon, study there.

But then, isn't that what the Nobel for Literature is really all about—experiencing the world in all its lush complexities?

100 days in Britain

Just about everyone's weighing in, none too kindly, about the first 100 days of Britain's first Labor Party prime minister in 14 years, Sir Keir Starmer. But The Guardian may have best summed it up:

Keen to avoid the same mistakes as Tony Blair, who later admitted he wished he had done more early on, this Labour government got off to a hyperactive start after 14 years out in the cold.

But along with all the big decisions, new legislation, foreign trips and attempts to set the political narrative, they have found themselves buffeted by headwinds: not just over donations, but also stories of internal rows at No 10 and, perhaps most significantly, a backlash over the cut to the winter fuel payment.

Across the Channel, not surprisingly, the center-right daily Le Figaro, had an even more caustic take from its writer of 29 years, Arnaud De La Grange:

'This is the worst start to a government in recent history'

The slide is as spectacular as the victory was resounding. One hundred days after his triumphant election, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has seen his star fade. Unpopular measures, controversy over his lifestyle, internal discord in Downing Street,  the setbacks have piled up  for the man who presented himself as the anti-Boris Johnson. And the Labour leader is already looking for a new lease of life….

The slide in the polls is severe. According to a YouGov survey, 63% of Britons now have a negative opinion of the prime minister, with only 27% having a positive opinion of him, his lowest rating since 2021. These figures are all the more troubling given that Labour won a landslide victory in the general election three months ago, taking 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons [as Andelman Unleashed reported on July 6]….

Starmer knows that time is running out, as the British are waiting for results on improving public services, purchasing power and immigration. And, facing him, the Conservative opposition will get into battle order.

Finally, there’s coins in a fountain … & a bleak anniversary…

Ever throw a coin into Rome's majestic Trevi Fountain and make a wish? …. Well now there's a new wrinkle…. read on for our treasured Paid Subscribers!

Who will also find, below, six extraordinary cartoonists…just a sampling of the portfolio assembled by the inestimable collective Cartooning for Peace…marking the first anniversary of Hamas’ invasion of Israel and year one of Israel’s reponse…from France, Belgium, Switzerland, and of course Israel—the extraordinary Kichka….