TWTW: The World This Week #135

Through a prism, darkly...Europe, Canada and beyond hone their weapons...Elections 'on' in Canada...Quitting civilization...For our paid: China's warring states period, and our cartoons.

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!

[Updating Greenland below!]

How others see America

Through a prism….darkly

We should really lead off with the Lexington column in The Economist, with the accompanying 'illustration' by David Simons:

Donald Trump is testing more than America's constitution. The country's very idea of itself is under stress.

As with the cuts to foreign aid, to federal staff and to transgender care, this administration is taking a kind of joy in aggression toward vulnerable people that has not been seen in American government for a very long time. Some illegal immigrants have committed horrible crimes, and all, definitionally, have broken the law. Maybe those realities alone would prompt most Americans to enjoy the slickly produced videos tweeted out by the White House showing men being chained by their hands and feet, then shuffling, heads bowed, aboard an aeroplane.

Yet already there are credible reports that some of the recent deportees were not in any gang. Maybe Americans will pause to imagine how these young men feel as they find themselves locked inside El Salvador’s most notorious gang prison, with no way to contact their families. Mr Trump believes this is all good politics. The question confronting America is whether he is right.

The French daily Le Monde was more blunt about how it all played out this week:

Trump and Putin reach a meager agreement

And then points out at least one weak spot Putin seems to have identified most adroitly:

Russia has identified the attractiveness of investment issues for the White House.

Then there's the BBC, which observes that Trump has utterly failed in a core pledge:

Last September, the then US presidential candidate exuded confidence he could bring the war in Ukraine to an early end. "If we win, I think we're going to get it resolved very quickly," he said.

How quickly he meant varied over time. In a TV debate a few days earlier, Trump had promised he would "get it settled before I even become president". This was an escalation on his previous commitment in May 2023 to stop the fighting in the first 24 hours of his presidency.

Trump has now been in office for more than two months and the penny may be beginning to drop in the White House that trying to end a conflict as bitter and complex as this may take time.

In a television interview last weekend, the US president admitted that when he promised to end the war in a day, he was "being a little bit sarcastic". There are many reasons for the slower progress than Team Trump may have anticipated.

First, the president's belief in the power of his personal, one-on-one diplomacy may have been misplaced. He has long believed any international problem can be solved if he sits down with another leader and agrees a deal….

Trump/Putin 2018

Second, the Russian president has made it clear he does not intend to be rushed. Putin showed he was resolutely opposed to the US two-stage strategy of seeking an interim ceasefire before talking about a longer-term settlement. Instead, he said any talks must address what he sees as "the root causes of the war", namely his fears an expanding Nato alliance and the very existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state…

Third, the US strategy of directing its initial focus on Ukraine may have been misjudged. The White House came to the belief that President Zelensky was the obstacle to peace. But the US pressure on Kyiv that led to the now infamous confrontation in the Oval Office consumed time, effort and political capital.

Gérald Herrmann / Switzerland : "Ukraine and the United States agree on a ceasefire"

It also ruptured transatlantic relations, setting Europe and the US at odds, another diplomatic problem that took time to settle. All the while Vladimir Putin sat back and enjoyed the show, biding his time.

Fourth, the sheer complexity of the conflict makes any resolution hard.

But setting aside Ukraine for the moment, there's the fear of a whole lot more to come, as Luis Pablo Beauregard reported in leading pan-Latin American El País:

The measure will leave some 530,000 people, beneficiaries and their immediate family members, without protection against deportation, who will have to self-deport from the country in the coming weeks. Trump had already paused this program , known as humanitarian parole. Now he is eliminating it.

And, not entirely unexpectedly, countries, especially Canada, targeted by Trump are reacting, as Stephen Chase, senior parliamentary reporter for The Globe and Mail of Toronto wrote:

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Friday a relief package for workers and companies hurt by the trade war that U.S. President Donald Trump started and pledged a suite of measures to expedite major infrastructure and resource-extraction projects.

“It’s high time we built things we’ve never imagined, at a speed we’ve never seen,” the prime minister said Friday.”

The aid package includes: waiving the one-week waiting period before collecting employment insurance, allowing workers to collect before they have exhausted severance pay and making it easier to access this support. Ottawa will also temporarily allow companies to defer corporate income tax payments as well as remittances of the goods and services tax and harmonized sales tax.

But the fallout's only beginning. As our SubStack colleagues David Carretta and Christian Spillmann reported from Brussels in their La Matinale Européenne:

Europe rethinks its defense outside the EU and without the Americans

Faced with a Russia that has converted to a war economy to defeat Ukraine and abandoned by the United States because of a president willing to "make a pact" with the enemy, Europe must rethink itself to ensure its defense and security alone. The White Paper presented by the European Commission identifies the efforts to be made, the gaps to be filled, and the funding to be found. But the European Union is no longer the appropriate framework. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz speaks of a "European Defense Community." NATO's European pillar would be more appropriate. Norway, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, members of the Alliance, are more involved in supporting Ukraine and developing Europe's defense than many EU member states. [ed's note: Turkey is a member of NATO but not the EU, which has continuously rebuffed it.] But will NATO survive Trump's second term? The new American administration is signing its death certificate with its threats of entering into conflict with Canada and Denmark, two allies, to satisfy its president's whims.

Money is the sinews of war. The European Union is preparing to significantly increase its defense spending and is looking for ways to finance it. One solution is to bring back to Europe some of the arms purchases made by member states in the United States. Each year, Europeans spend €50 billion on American weapons and equipment, including the F-35 fighter jet. Another measure is to channel some of the European savings placed in the United States into investments in Europe. The figure is significant: €300 billion are invested each year in American stocks….

Emmanuel Macron has sensed the movement and wants to support it. "I asked manufacturers that we can, for systems where we have the best products, approach European states that have become accustomed to buying American," he announced. "Those who buy Patriots should be offered the new-generation Franco-Italian SAMP/T. Those who buy the F-35 should be offered the Rafale. That's how we'll definitely increase the pace," the French president maintained.

The restrictions imposed by the Americans on the use of their weapons and the possibility of preventing their use by buyers have dampened Europeans. Denmark, one of the most Atlanticist EU members, realizes that its F-35 jets could be grounded if the United States tries to seize Greenland by force, as Donald Trump has announced. The same problem applies to the Starlink satellite communications network of billionaire Elon Musk, who has become the US president's closest advisor.

Parenthetically, and unh oh?

UPDATING:

Somehow the White House failed to mention in this Sunday release from the East Wing that Usha’s “delegation” would also include the president’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and energy secretary Chris Wright…and that in addition to dog sledding, they’d be paying a call to an American military base, which led Christian Jensen, editor-in-chief of Politiken, Denmark’s largest daily to observe:

No more polite phrases. No more idle chatter….The fact that the Trump camp itself believes that the Greenlanders would be flattered by the dog sled explanation says everything about the incomprehensible arrogance with which the Americans meet the Greenlanders.

Photo: Nicolai West

Just a thank you, but no thanks.

The roots of all this? As columnist Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, wrote in The Guardian in London:

Out of Putin's war and Trump's treachery, a new Europe is being born.

We now have to confront the US working against us. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appear to share a plan: a Vichy-like regime in Ukraine and a European continent split into spheres of influence, which Russia, the US (and perhaps China) can colonise and prey upon. Most European publics sense this. A critical mass of European leaders gets it too. They are beginning to act.

War in Europe however, and the unreliability of the US as an ally means we have to accept that the post-1945 and the post-1989 Europes are gone. A new Europe is being born, however; and it is easier to say what it is not than what it is. It is not the EU, or not the one we have long taken for granted. The 27-country union is simply not equipped to take decisions with the speed and level of ambition necessary to confront the dramatic, life-or-death, fast-changing geopolitical and security moment its citizens face. Moreover, the EU now includes Trojan horses such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the populist nationalist Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, who are plainly working on behalf of Putin’s Russia and Trump’s US.

This is a new Europe, coordinated by leaders such as Macron, Starmer, the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk. They share threat perceptions and the will to address them. After all, European countries, put together, are among the richest and most powerful in the world. The European Commission, led by von der Leyen, can, will and must play a key supporting role. Saving Ukraine is a necessary condition for securing Europe. Can they succeed? If they can muster a fraction of Winston Churchill’s strategic vision, Volodymyr Zelensky’s courage and Barack Obama’s hope, then, yes, they can.

And then, how're they doin' ??

Federico Rampini in Milan's Corriere della Sera [the boldface is his]:

Donald Trump is creating a lot of problems for himself, as shown by the stock markets and the falling consumer confidence index.

[But] the Democratic Party has not really recovered from its electoral defeat. Although it took almost half the votes on November 5, and Trump's victory was by a modest margin, the state of confusion among the Democrats is much more serious than those numbers suggest. Instead of overcoming its internal divisions, the left seems to have accentuated them. In particular, the most radical wing of the party, instead of being in retreat, maintains considerable visibility and objectively helps Trump with its actions. To quote a joke by conservative (but not Trumpian) analyst Karl Rove, the Republicans are currently winning the race "to be the second worst party."

Piotr Andrusieczko in Warsaw's Wyborcza:

Three years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia is far from achieving its goals on the front. It is trying to compensate for the lack of breakthrough successes with propaganda, which recently received unexpected support from the US president….

Unexpectedly, on March 14, Donald Trump, reporting on the "very good" results of the talks with Vladimir Putin, stated that Ukrainian soldiers were surrounded in the Kursk region and were "in a very bad position and defenseless." He also added that he "called on President Putin to save their lives." The Ukrainian side's corrections, including those of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and even the American intelligence findings indicating that the encirclement had not taken place, were of no avail. The American president has continued to repeat the Kremlin's narrative in recent days.

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Elections 2025: Canada, Romania

Snap time!

No question, it's all about Trump in Canada where the new prime minister is rolling the dice today, Sunday, barely 10 days before a crushing tariff war is about to begin with America. Let the Toronto Star explain:

Mark Carney calls snap federal election for April 28

He had very strong word towards U.S president Donald Trump. “He wants to break us, so America can own us.” He added that Canada can get over the betrayal from the U.S. but has to learn the lessons. Carney says he is asking for a strong mandate with an election for April 28.

Carney led his remarks focusing on the steps his government has taken in what has been just nine days in office. He highlighted the elimination of the carbon tax and capital gains tax increases. He also addressed the new defence deal with Australia for an early warning system in the north.

But then there's his Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre:

Poilievre is hammering the message that Canada is “weak” after a decade of Liberal rule. But notably, he has not said “Canada is broken.” He has dropped that phrase altogether.

Indeed, as Canada's National Post put it:

Poilievre is trying to keep the election about the Liberals, not Donald Trump…In the lead up to Sunday's election call, anxiety and confusion has set in among some Conservatives, including within Poilievre's office.

Soaring Conservative confidence has now been tempered by the departure of Justin Trudeau and the upheaval south of the border, two events that have collapsed Poilievre’s 20-point lead in the polls, with some surveys now suggesting he is trailing Prime Minister Mark Carney.

But a coalition will still be needed to form a government. Stand by!

And a world apart, there's Romania…

Unleashed is working closely with an extraordinary journalist in Romania, assisting in a project involving Andelman's files buried deep within the archives of the Ceausescu-era secret police, the Securitate. However, Gelu Trandafir is unable to divorce himself from today's desperately fraught political context in his nation which holds in thrall the democratic process of this geopolitically strategic corner of Europe—member at once of NATO and the European Union and on the very eastern fringe, bordering the world of Putin and his Russian state. This is Trandafir's latest dispatch from the heart of darkness:

I simply had a long period where I couldn't focus, terribly consumed by what was going on. As I told you, it's a nightmare for Eastern Europe. I remember we were talking in Bucharest about the first new appointments, I was thinking that it can't be very bad given the first mandate. BUT you were absolutely right, it is very serious, and somehow I regret that at the time I didn't seem to share your concern.

Now we've got over the shock, no more naivety, we're mobilizing. Unfortunately, it's quite possible that we won't be at Munich 1938, but more towards August 23, 1939 [Molotov-Ribbentrop or Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact]. But we will overcome.

It is terrible the extent of the LIE—I see it in relation to my country, its propagation, the cynical use of lies. A few days before the famous scene [with Zelensky] in the Oval Office, the major Greek Catholic Archbishop, His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, had given a prophetic address at the Catholic University of America, in which he addressed the problem of a lie, which is now being empowered by new technologies and social networks.

He pointed to the civilizational impact: The obliteration of the idea of objective truth, of the distinction between truth and falsehood has civilizational consequences, he said, it leads to the obliteration of the distinction between right and wrong.

That could lead us back to barbarism. We see terrible things now, unthinkable in Judeo-Christian civilization, when it no longer matters whether you are the victim or the aggressor, and even as a victim, you are accused of starting the war, when if you are weaker you are bullied ... not by the bad guys, but by the ”good” ones, by your friends.

We are all waiting for the next shoe to drop and the candidates for the re-run of the Romanian national elections that Putin is desperate to influence.

How others see the World

Quitting the Francophone world….and civilization to boot?

Unrest along the Sahel and beyond, as Le Monde Afrique reported

Junta-run Mali, which has broken off ties with France, announced Tuesday, March 18, it was quitting an international group of French-speaking countries, a day after its allies Niger and Burkina Faso did the same. "Mali cannot remain a member of an organization whose actions are incompatible with constitutional principles (...) based on the sovereignty of the state," the foreign ministry said in a letter to its French counterpart, referring to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).

Mali was suspended from the organization—a post-colonial entity that resembles the Commonwealth—in August 2020 after a military coup, which toppled its president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. The OIF had called for the release of Keïta, in power since 2013 at the helm of the West African country, which for years has faced a security, political and economic crisis. It had also called for the speedy setting up of a transition government led by civilians.

On Monday, fellow junta-led states Burkina Faso and Niger, which have also turned their backs on former colonial power France while forging ties with Russia, announced their withdrawal from the OIF. The three have also left the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to form their own Sahel confederation.

Meanwhile, Le Monde 's Benjamin Roger reported even more disquietingly:

Women left for dead, with their inert children on their backs or crying beside them. Bodies of men piled like cattle onto a tricycle. Killers, sometimes with knives in their hands, insulting their victims and promising them imminent death...Gruesome videos, posted on social media, were filmed in villages near Solenzo, in western Burkina Faso, on Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11. They are the work of Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP), civilian auxiliaries of the Burkinabe army who have been heavily used by Captain Ibrahim Traoré's junta in the war against jihadist groups since taking power in September 2022.

The death toll from this umpteenth massacre committed by VDPs is difficult to estimate, but according to various local and security sources, it is at least sixty dead, probably more than a hundred.

But is anyone watching?

And then there's Hungary …

…and Trump's favorite European dictator. This week, Prime Minister Viktor Orban celebrated Hungary's "War of Independence," as published this week by one of his puppet newspapers, Magyar Nemzet (for decades a proudly independent voice in Eastern Europe, but no longer):

After today’s celebratory gathering comes the great Easter cleaning. The parasites have survived the winter. We will dismantle the financial machinery that has bought politicians, judges, journalists, pseudo-NGOs, and political activists with corrupt dollars. We will eradicate the entire shadow army. They are our modern-day traitors, Brussels’ minions, who, for money, push the empire’s agenda to the detriment of their homeland. They have been here too long. They have survived too much. They have taken money from too many sources. They have changed sides too many times….We have had enough of them. The spring wind will bring showers, swelling the rivers—let it carry them away… They bear the scarlet letter of shame; their fate is disgrace and contempt. If there is justice—and there is—then there is a special corner in hell waiting for them. We know who you are. No matter how you try to disguise yourselves in new European party attire, your masters are the same, your plans are the same. Your hopes are futile—your fate will be the same as those before you. We will defeat you again. Again and again. 'Because the sword shines brighter than chains'.

As Le Monde columnist and former editor-in-chief Sylvie Kauffmann observed about this pair:

Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been leading the pioneering experiment in "illiberal democracy" for the past 15 years, inspired Donald Trump's team during the 2024 presidential campaign…. [Now] the student has become the master. When it comes to dismantling the democratic model, the second Trump presidency, which began just two months ago, has already moved faster and better than his Hungarian and Polish role models, while attacking the same pillars: the judiciary, the media and universities.

The method, comparable to the war tactic of "carpet bombing," has been spectacular.

And in Hungary, there's the stake now being driven through the heart of gay pride …. As The Guardian's Ashifa Kassam reported:

MPs in Hungary have voted to ban Pride events and allow authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attenders and potentially fine them, in what Amnesty International has described as a “full-frontal attack” on LGBTQ+ people.

As the vote was held, opposition MPs ignited smoke bombs, filling the parliamentary chamber with thick plumes of colourful smoke.

The legislation—the latest by the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and his rightwing populist party to target LGBTQ+ rights—was believed to be the first of its kind in the EU’s recent history, the nationwide ban passing by 136 votes to 27 after it was submitted to parliament one day earlier.

Russia's further tentacles

There's good reason for Europe to fear the reach of Putin's toxic tentacles, as Richard Milne, Nordic and Baltic Correspondent of London's Financial Times has been busy chronicling:

Russian military intelligence was behind a fire at an Ikea store in Vilnius and at least one of the suspects is linked to other sabotage events in eastern Europe, according to prosecutors in Lithuania. Artūras Urbelis, Lithuania’s chief prosecutor for organised crime, said that Russia was linked to the Ikea arson and other incidents through a chain of intermediaries.

“The organisers of these actions are Russia. It is linked to military intelligence, to the security forces,” Urbelis said. Russia is accused of sabotage across Europe by a large number of western intelligence officials after a number of fires, parcel bombs, and acts of vandalism in recent months.

The Lithuanian prosecutor said Ikea was chosen deliberately because the furniture retailer had closed all of its stores in Russia. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the Lithuanian prosecutors’ office had ‘‘confirmed our suspicions’’ that Russian security services were responsible for setting fire to shopping centres in Vilnius and Warsaw. ‘‘Good to know before negotiations. Such is the nature of this state,” he wrote on X.

The officials have said that Russia often pays people, including low-level criminals, to carry out the attacks. A Polish court last month sentenced a Ukrainian man to eight years in prison for planning acts of sabotage and arson on Russia’s behalf.

Polish authorities last week charged a Belarusian with an arson attack on a large DIY store in Warsaw on behalf of Russian intelligence. In the UK, a man last year pleaded guilty to accepting pay from foreign intelligence when setting fire to a Ukrainian-owned business in east London. Keir Giles, senior fellow at Chatham House, described the attacks so far as ‘‘isolated pinpricks’’ but said hybrid warfare by Russia could pose a serious risk.

Just another wacko idea?

Not so fast…just as the official death toll in Gaza has passed the 50,000 more (or more), it seems like some folks are taking the notion of a TrumpWorld Gaza somewhat seriously, if somewhat fruitlessly. As Haaretz reported:

Israel's Security Cabinet has approved the establishment of a "Voluntary Emigration Bureau for Gaza residents interested in relocating to third countries," in line with Israeli and international law, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced. The directorate will operate in coordination with international organizations and other governing bodies according to government instructions and will coordinate the activity of relevant ministries. Katz added that the administration will be bound to Israeli and international law….

Alongside preparations for establishing the transfer directorate in Gaza, reports continue regarding what countries may allegedly accept displaced Gazans. The Egyptian Bureau of Information denied a report that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi announced that his country agreed to temporarily allow half a million Gazans into a city in northern Sinai as part of the Gaza rebuilding process.

The United States and Israel [are reported to have] approached senior government officials in the African polities of Sudan, Somalia and the unrecognized state of Somaliland to discuss the transfer of displaced Gazans into their territory.

According to this report, sources in Sudan said that their country declined offers from the U.S., while official sources in Somalia and Somaliland said they were unaware of attempts to contact them regarding the issue. Somalia later released a statement rejecting any offer that undermines the right of the Palestinian people to live in their homeland.

What’s new on ‘paid’

Now, for our most highly valued, but lightly paid members, we'll conclude with the saga of China's warring states period and some profound lessons very much for today.

And we'll wind up with our great partner Cartooning for Peace and Le Monde delivering a bonus gallery from cartoonists around the world on the end of democratic radio and tutti quanti.