From Munich, new wars with little peace from TrumpWorld...Germany on the cusp of big change...Putin's new bff (hint: not Donald!)...For our paid: Remaking Russia's future...The world cartoons AI.
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.
To emphasize, we cover lots of ground….So, you may not want to read it all, but it's all here for you!
In the words of the master scribe, H.L. Mencken, one of our genuine heroes:
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
How others see America
The great Dutch cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards perhaps captured to perfection the world's horrific vision of today’s America for readers of Le Monde's front page this week:
But leave it to the rival center-right French daily Le Figaro to reflect the mood of the moment in a two-word frontpage headline over its editorial, then detailing the stunningly brutal thoughts of its author Philippe Gélie, deputy editor-in-chief, the paper's Washington bureau chief under Trump 1.0 :
Pax Trumpica
With a simple phone call between two potentates far removed from the front, the war in Ukraine took a major turn. From the hour-and-a-half conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to the reframing of allies by the new American Secretary of Defense, the broad outlines of a future Trumpian “deal” on Ukraine have already been drawn: no return of the invaded territories to Kiev’s fold, no accession to NATO, the transfer to Europe of responsibility for aid and security guarantees, not to mention the “reimbursement” to Washington of 500 billion dollars in mineral wealth.
Donald Trump candidly welcomed his Russian counterpart's "desire for peace ," who rehashed his "powerful campaign slogan: common sense." It was the least polite thing he could do toward someone who immediately offers concessions on Moscow's key objectives. The American has already adopted the Russian's predatory logic, in which the sovereignty of the great powers prevails over that of their neighbors. He has shown himself willing to broaden the dialogue to include security and disarmament issues, as the Kremlin has been demanding for three years, thereby reducing Ukraine to a subordinate dispute.
Will the President of the United States be the one to seal Vladimir Putin's military victory? Donald Trump is the man of simple solutions to complicated problems: peace in Gaza without the Palestinians, and in Kyiv without the Ukrainians. He applied the same method to Afghanistan by signing an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 behind the back of the Kabul government, which was nevertheless supported by Washington. We have seen the result.…Tomorrow, it may be the Pax Trumpica with China, without Taiwan.
In the meantime, the Europeans find themselves in the worst possible position: having no say in the matter but being asked to deal with the consequences on their own. In this case, the choice becomes simple: lay down arms, as the Ukrainians are being asked to do, or thwart the plans of an America that no longer behaves as an ally, but as a hostile power. Ironically, this would be another way of proving him right, at least on one point: true peace can only be obtained "by force".
But it was at the Munich Security Conference that so much of the world's real feelings about America came into the sharpest focus, as the hometown newspaper, Munich's own Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in three curt phrases:
The US Vice President says little about the geopolitical security situation. EU Commission President von der Leyen wants to exempt defense spending from the debt limit. Federal President Steinmeier accuses the USA of "lawlessness."
The on-scene report from the White House print pool reporter, Cat Zakrzewski of the Washington Post perfectly captured the mood in the room as Vance spoke:
The large auditorium was packed, with people standing on two levels of balconies that encircled the room. Attendees also stood on large staircases, which faced VPOTUS.
"In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town,” Vance said to relatively weak applause. Only a handful of people—mostly Republican lawmakers—clapped when he downplayed Russian meddling in elections on social media.
There was a soft laughter after VPOTUS said that Europe could survive criticism from Elon Musk if the United States could survive Greta Thunberg [the militant young Swedish ecologist].
As the speech ended, only a few Republican senators stood to applause. Most attendees remained seated.
Earlier, Zakrzewski was at the photo op when Vance met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte:
As press was escorted out of the room, a reporter asked [Vance] whether Europe should be involved in the peace negotiations among the United States, Russia and Ukraine. “Sure, they should. Of course.”
Really? And all this in the wake of Trump’s mind-spinning 90-minute phoner with Vladimir Putin in which he appeared to give away the store….and what he didn’t give away, his defense secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to complete a day later. And then there was the whole tariff question and just how Trumperica is seeing Europe fit into its vision of the world. Or as the banner headline in the weekend edition of Le Monde put it:
J.D. Vance declares ideological war on Europe
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the American vice president has targeted Europe, without wasting any time on Ukraine. According to him, the greatest threat is "neither Russia nor China," but "renunciation" of some of "the most fundamental" values. The European democracies thus see themselves accused of suffocating innovation, freedom of expression and religious freedom.
"Democracy does not mean that anyone can say anything," the German defense minister replied curtly.
Earlier, J.D. Vance launched an implicit call for an alliance between Germany's right and the extreme right.
That of course is precisely what Germany's center-right leader and most likely the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had ruled out a week before the critical elections that will choose the nation's new ruler. But we’ll get to all that in a moment … stay with us!
Back in Munich, China was very quick to weigh in on its own view of the directions American foreign policy appears to be taking in the new Trump world. As Alyssa Chen and Amber Wang reported for the South China Morning Post:
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressed confidence concerning the outlook for US-China relations but also vowed a resolute response if Beijing faced any “unilateral bullying practice” from Washington.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Wang said that China wishes to build “stable, sound and sustainable” ties with the US.
“Of course, we hope that the US will work in the same direction with us. However, if the US is not willing, if it is bent on suppressing and containing China, then we have no choice but to play along to the end,” he added. “And we will resolutely respond to unilateral bullying practices of the US.”
Saying that the world could not endure a conflict between Washington and Beijing and that the right approach is to “respect each other”, Wang added that any attempts to overturn China’s political system would be “unrealistic”.
So where are we left with Ukraine?
Pretty easy. Trump is rolling out one of his old time standards from his days as an oft-bankrupted real estate developer, otherwise known as blackmail. One reason Vance may have utterly avoided even a nod to Ukraine was that some bitter deal-making was going on behind the scenes. Le Monde set the stage:
Kyiv has given the US a draft of an American-led proposal for review. It would give Washington access to Ukrainian natural resources in exchange for continued US support, a Ukrainian official said Friday.
By Saturday, it was beginning to look like another round of long-ago talks to 'save' Trump's Atlantic City casinos….as Politico Europe reported:
Despite U.S. insistence, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to sign a draft agreement to hand over half of his country’s rare earth minerals to American companies in exchange for military support, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.
“The deal was not signed yet. Sides are discussing the details,” said a Ukrainian official familiar with the negotiations who was granted anonymity to discuss ongoing talks. “Lawyers are working on it. In their draft, the U.S. has described a very complicated way how they want to get 50 percent [of Ukraine’s rare earths].”
Indeed, Trump had already put a price tag on this venal deal:
$500B worth of mineral riches, said Trump [as] the U.S. should get a slice of Ukraine’s vast natural resources as compensation for the hundreds of billions it has spent on helping Kyiv resist Russia's full-scale invasion.
“I told them [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent like $500B worth of rare earth. And they've essentially agreed to do that so at least we don’t feel stupid,” Trump said.
Of course, as with every deal with Trump, the devil is in the details, which of course if he finds out later he doesn’t like, he simply ignores. Oh, and by the way, Zelensky hasn’t "essentially agreed" to anything yet.
And then along came Kellogg, as Victoria Bieliaszyn and Jaroslaw Marczuk reported from Munich for the Polish daily Wyborcza :
Trump's special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, said he does not see representatives of European countries at the table for peace negotiations on Ukraine.
“What we don’t want to do is engage in large group discussions,” Kellogg said… His words indicate that it is the Americans who should take care of Europe's interests. "I am currently in talks with European leaders and collecting their proposals to take them into account," he explained.
Kellogg's statement was met with a cool reception. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, who was present at the meeting with Trump's envoy, said that excluding Europe from the talks would be "politically unacceptable."
For months, both EU leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have stressed that European representatives should be directly involved in the peace talks. The United States sees it differently today. Kellogg announced that regardless of the form the negotiations take, they should include Russia, Ukraine, and the United States as a mediator. The American official pledged to organize negotiations between the parties within six months….
[An eternity and another whole spring and summer of all-out warfare.]
[Meanwhile] Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski announced in Munich that President Emmanuel Macron was calling an extraordinary meeting of European leaders in Paris, allegedly due to Donald Trump's US policy. It is also unclear which European leaders have been invited. Prime Minister Donald Tusk is expected to travel from Poland to the summit.
As Sikorski continued at Munich:
"President Trump has a method of operating which the Russians call razvedka voyem —reconnaissance through battle: You push, and you see what happens, and then you change your position. ... And we need to respond," the Polish minister said.
BUT forget those six months?
That's right….now high level officials are headed to Saudi Arabia for US-Russia talks to end the war. Left out in the cold, the two other concerned parties. Ukraine and Europe….which just last week totted up how much they've thrown in or pledged to that kitty during the war:
Since the start of the war, the EU and our 27 Member States have made available close to $145 billion in financial, military, humanitarian, and refugee assistance.
In addition, in February 2024, European leaders agreed to commit up to $54 billion until 2027 for the Ukraine Facility to support Ukraine's recovery, reconstruction and modernization, as well as its efforts to carry out reforms as part of its accession path to the EU. This will bring our commitments to date to over $174 billion.
But stunningly, it now appears that Ukraine may not be there in Saudi Arabia either—though maybe they will. As an afterthought? As the BBC reported, while hardly clarifying at all:
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to meet Russian officials in Saudi Arabia in the coming days for talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, US officials say. America's top diplomat will be joined by national security adviser Mike Waltz and the US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. US special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg said Washington, Moscow and Kyiv would be involved in talks, but Europe was not invited. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv had not been invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia….
Addressing the Munich conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the creation of an "army of Europe" amid rising concern that Washington may no longer come to the continent's aid.
"We can't rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on issues that threaten it," Zelensky said.
Incidentally for what it's worth, the great Russian analyst Tatyana Stanovaya points out:
Volodymyr Zelensky: Putin does not recognize [him] as a legitimate president.
Or, as Cuban-born Swiss cartoonist RamsésMorales suggests, it's just Trump arriving at Putin's table with Ukraine as the turkey to be carved:
But leave it to the great Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, who has penetrated Putin's mindset and his entourage as have few others:
In two weeks, it will be three years since the war began. And now, the moment has ripened. Putin was never prepared to negotiate with Ukraine—he was always prepared to negotiate with the U.S. about a new world order. And now, it seems, he is returning to the conditions of Fall 2021—when the U.S. is finally ready to discuss his ultimatum...
Meanwhile, there's those looming tariffs
If there's any immediate hope of heading off a trade war across the Atlantic (for openers), it could come sooner rather than later as the EU's trade chief Maroš Šefčovič heads to Washington to stare down the Trump administration. Universal tariffs are due for April. But in Šefčovič's briefcase will be some interesting facts (if anyone in Washington is prepared to pay any attention to those). Just as an example, as Politico.eu laid out:
The EU is one of America’s largest economic partners, with more than €1.5 trillion worth of goods and services traded each year.
The 27-member bloc runs a trade surplus in goods with the United States, which Trump has frequently criticized. However, the U.S. runs a surplus in services; the overall U.S. trade deficit with the EU was a relatively small €48 billion in 2023.
As the European Commission points out, €48 billion is barely 3% of total trade between the two continents. Do you really want to go to war over that? Especially, as the Commission also notes pointedly:
US exports of goods and services to the EU support 2.3 million jobs in the US, and EU firms’ investments in the US employ 3.4 million people.
How many members of Congress are going to be watching those kinds of numbers and their impact back home?
Unsurprisingly, leave it to The Economist to sum up the predicament of Europe, but especially the United States, as deputy editor David Carr explained:
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk prepare to take on the Pentagon, we weigh up whether DOGE will reform it or wreck it. America’s armed forces face a real problem. Not since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and built huge tank formations at the height of the cold war have America’s military vulnerabilities been so glaring. In the killing fields of Ukraine, the United States is being out-innovated by drone designers; in the seas and skies off China’s coast it is losing its ability to deter a blockade or invasion of Taiwan.
Our task on the cover was to get across the importance of reform as well as the risks that it descends into chaos or corruption. We start with the latest in our attempts to depict Mr Trump by showing ever smaller parts of his body. A hand will do—though the Pentagon has been reduced to a tiny steel nut….Our main focus is the technological, industrial and bureaucratic weakness of America’s defence establishment.
America struggles to turn technology into a military advantage. The drones over Ukraine are upgraded every few weeks, a pace that is beyond the Pentagon’s budgeting process, which takes years. American and European jammers in electronic warfare cost two or three times as much as Ukrainian ones but are obsolete. Again, however although the focus on [the Pentagon's] problems with technology is justified, they are just symptoms of a deeper malaise….
It could all go very wrong. If Mr Trump prefers sacking generals for supposedly being “woke” or disloyal, he will bring dysfunction upon the Pentagon. If Mr Musk and his mil-tech brethren use DOGE’s campaign to wreck, or to boost their own power and wealth, they will corrupt it. Their work could not be more important, or more risky.
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Elections 2025: Germany
Down to the wire
Meanwhile talk about risks….the German national are deeply into the campaign's final days before voters go to the polls next Sunday. The center and the extreme right are facing off, while JD Vance weighs in just as Elon Musk has been doing from the get-go, as Andelman Unleashed has written. Süddeutsche Zeitung [SDZ] headlined:
AfD of course is the far-right, neo-Nazi party, Alternative für Deutschland, which Musk embraced from the earliest days of this campaign, giving his wholehearted endorsement to its leader, Alice Weidel.
Now the government of incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz is weighing in. (He is after all hoping, probably in vain, for a victory). As SDZ reported:
The German government has rejected the recommendation of US Vice President JD Vance to cooperate with the AfD. He sees this as one-sided interference in the election campaign, said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit in response to Vance's accusation that the German government is ignoring the will of the people: "It has been a good idea so far not to interfere in the internal affairs of a friendly country."
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made a similar statement at the Munich Security Conference: "The only people who decide the German federal election, as in every democracy, are the German voters."
As for just where we stand with a week to go, DW [Deutsche Welle] sees:
The politicians don't have much time left to convince voters to vote for them. The incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, still believes that his center-left Social Democrats (SPD) will pull ahead and that he will also head the next government.
Given the current poll figures, this does not seem very realistic. In 2021, the SPD won the election with 25.7% of the vote. In the current ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, it is down to 14%, which is one point fewer than the week before.
From February 10 to 12, the pollsters surveyed a representative sample of 1,579 individuals who are eligible to vote. The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian "sister party" Christian Social Union (CSU) have slightly increased their lead in the poll to 32% (+1). The far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) remains in second place at 21%.
Environmentalist Greens, currently in a minority government with the SPD, remain at 14%. The Left Party now polls at 6%—enough for representation in parliament—while the new populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which broke from the Left party in 2024 would fail to cross the 5% threshold at 4.5% as would the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) at 4%.
Still, the polling suggests, most disquietingly, that fully a third of all voters said they were still undecided and 13% said they could change their mind in the coming week. More encouragingly, barely 11% said they'd like to see a government led by the AfD with an extreme-right chancellor.
At the same time, the CDU/CSU party leader Friedrich Merz has said he would under no circumstances lead any government with an AfD member in the cabinet, though he's equally unlikely to serve alongside Scholz.
The AfD right now is, however, the only other single party with enough prospective votes to form a majority with Merz in the Bundestag, which will elect the next chancellor. The SPD and the Greens together might work in alliance with Merz, but ideologically it would be on pretty shaky ground from the bottom up.
In any case, Andelman Unleashed will be watching, as it does for every national election every year.
We're BACK…. A Zooooomversation
On Friday, Andelman Unleashed resumed its Unleashed Zoomversation for all our (lightly) paying subscribers … an hour of exciting conversation, preview of the upcoming edition, hosted by yours truly and with an open mike for all our paying folks! If you're paid up, look for an email with time and a link for next week's edition and get your questions ready!
Meanwhile, below the fold is a link to watch the full zoom from this past Friday, with contributions from Canada, Vermont, North Carolina, New York, California, Ohio, Berlin, and yours truly in Pennsylvania.
How others view the World
Russia has a new bff?
The problem for the Kremlin, with the revolution in Syria and Putin's longtime BFF Bashar al-Assad showing up on his Red Square doorstep, is that there's no reliable Syrian refueling stop for Russian military transports headed to Africa where he continues to plant his flag. Putin’s planes just can't make it all the way from Russa, or even Crimea, let alone Belarus, to the likes of Mali or Niger or Burkina Faso. Now Le Monde Afrique's Frédéric Bobin and Thomas Eydoux report all that's happening and some of the drawbacks….
[Russian] cargo planes, particularly Ilyushins, have continued since December 8 to the [Libyan] bases of Al-Khadim (east of Benghazi) and Al-Juffrah (350 kilometers south of Sirte) at a sustained pace: "An average of four per week," according to a diplomatic source.
Deprived of the Syrian platform, Russian planes now arrive directly from Belarus and, failing to be able to fly over Turkey (approvals are more difficult there), take roundabout routes: the Caspian Sea, Iran, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, the Suez Canal. In short, much longer and more expensive journeys….
An Ilyushin-76, registered in Belarus, for example, took off from Minsk on January 25 before heading south. Spotted by Le Monde thanks to the live aircraft tracking site Flightradar24, the cargo plane continued its route to the Libyan coast, north of Benghazi, before its transponder stopped transmitting.
At the same time, Russia has suffered from the interruption of maritime links between the Syrian port of Tartus and those of Tobruk and Benghazi in eastern Libya, now replaced by long-distance routes from the Baltic Sea.
These new difficulties hinder, without calling into question, the consolidation of the Russian presence in eastern and southern Libya…A Turkish-Russian condominium over Libya is the product of the Battle of Tripoli (2019-2020), which gave rise to a surge in foreign interference.
It is in this context that the rehabilitation of the Maaten Al-Sarra aerodrome, located in the borderlands of south-eastern Libya, 100 kms from Chad and 300 kms from Sudan, has been accelerating in recent weeks….Formerly a base of Muammar Gaddafi's army used during his various wars with Chad, Maaten Al-Sarra had fallen into disuse until recent renovation.
So now the Russians are coming. Or really, they’re already there. As the Institute for the Study of War reported:
Russian cargo vessels have continued to evacuate military assets from the port of Tartus….Satellite imagery from February 14 shows the Russian cargo vessel Baltic Leader and potentially the Admiral Golovko—an Admiral Gorshkov-class frigate—about 250 kilometers south of the coast of southwestern Cyprus.
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