TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #70

A mounting fear abroad: Trump as God's chosen … Immigration: Biden's problems … and Macron's 2 quagmires … Where'd all those Chinese students go? … cartoonist Stellina draws Bethlehem

This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, continues on its mission 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 other see America

Just how bad could it get?  Much worse….

America's standing in the world continues to plummet…although, as we shall shortly see, it is not the only world power to suffer such slings and arrows of self-inflicted bad fortune, or simply poor judgment by its leaders.

Still, leave it to The Economist in London to capture some real fears as America begins to spiral into a tumultuous 2024 as never before in its history. Over a clearly sanctified (to many of his acolytes) Donald Trump, there is the headline:

Many Trump supporters believe God has chosen him to rule.

One questionThe Economist poses that’s on so many minds around the globe, especially on the eve of the birth of the Christian savior 2,224 years ago: "Why [do] conservative Christians so avidly support Donald Trump, a man who is more intimately acquainted with the seven deadly sins than the contents of the Bible." And The Economist offers its own answer:

Some chalk it up to Mr Trump’s conservative policies. (He appointed the judges who gave back to the states the power to ban abortion.) Others think they share Mr Trump’s nostalgia for America’s past—an era when white Christians dominated the country. Yet another factor may also have played a role: the belief that Mr Trump was anointed by God to lead the country.

But there's more. Donald Trump is floating on air. As Le Monde's Washington correspondent Piotr Smolar observed:

Donald Trump had a euphoric end to the year. As the Republican primaries approach, which will begin in Iowa on January 15, 2024, the polls showed a triumphant march towards the nomination, barring an unforeseen event. The unexpected event in question happened Tuesday, December 19, by a decision of the Colorado Supreme Court . 

….It is likely to further consolidate the MAGA (Make America Great Again) base around Donald Trump, as did the four series of indictments against him in 2023. Other candidates in the Republican primaries, especially Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, risk being deprived of media air again. Donald Trump stakes his entire political strategy on victimization and a promise of revenge.

From New Delhi, Hindustan Times writer Mallika Soli observes:

 Amid sharp criticism for his rhetoric on immigrants which was likened to Nazi philosophy, former US president Donald Trump said that he's never read Adolf Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf before doubling down on his inflammatory language.

"It's true that they're destroying the blood of our country. That's what they're doing—they're destroying our country," [said] Donald Trump.

But Joe Biden has his own problems

"Trump is at least honest about his hatred of migrants," Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung headlined Fabian Fellmann's dispatch from Washington. "Joe Biden wants to significantly tighten US immigration policy—and is creating a new problem. There's already talk of an 'earthquake.'" Fellmann added:

The US President is struggling to serve the opposing interests in his ragtag electoral alliance. Only a third of those eligible to vote still agree with how much Biden supports Israel in the Gaza war. Young and Muslim Americans in particular are turning away from him because of this.

Now, in the days before Christmas, other important groups are threatening to withdraw their support for Biden….

Instead of expanding legal access to asylum and easing the conditions… Biden is now preparing to tighten migration policy [and] the criteria with which the authorities assess whether a migrant is threatened with life and limb in the country of origin.

Fellmann concludes with an observation from "journalist Pablo Manríquez, who specializes in migration":

I honestly can't imagine why anyone would vote for Joe Biden. Trump is at least honest about the fact that he hates migrants.

Elections: Congo, Serbia, Egypt, Slovakia, Netherlands

Democratic Republic of Congo's incumbent President Felix Tshisekedi has claimed victory for re-election over 18 challengers in the chaotic and already violence-prone elections in Africa's largest nation. But the DRC still does not have an officially sanctioned victor. Results might be tallied before 2024 rolls around.  Or as the great Indian cartoonist, Paresh Nath, member of the Cartooning for Peace collective, drawing for the Dubai daily Khaleej Times, sees it all: 

On Wednesday, Andelman Unleashed  will provide its final compilation this year on the world's last Elections—greater detail on Congo, Egypt, and Serbia as well as renewed fallout from Slovakia. Meanwhile, I offered a look ahead at elections in an even more fraught 2024 in my latest column for CNN Opinion … with a reprise for Laura Coates on her extraordinary Sirius POTUS channel broadcast…..

How others see the World

A Macron in two quagmires

It's really hard to see how a politician as astute and deeply attuned to the sense and sensibilities of his people as France's Emmanuel Macron could have found himself immersed up to his armpits in two most incongruous imbroglios.

First was immigration where, unlike Biden, he managed to force through a parliament where he no longer holds a working majority, a "compromise" immigration bill that really appealed most deeply (and then only barely) to his far-right nemesis Marine Le Pen.

As the leading center-right daily Le Figaro trumpeted on its frontpage:

"Immigration: the law passed, Macronists tear themselves apart," followed by headlines trumpeting: "The majority on the edge of an implosion…The RN [Le Pen's party] savors the success of its trap…The right dictates its law to the government."

And why not. After all, as the Guardian across the Channel was happy to observe with a certain schadenfreude….”the Macron-Le Pen law…

…reduced access to welfare benefits for foreigners, toughened rules for foreign students, introduced migration quotas, made it harder for the children of non-nationals born in France to become French, and ruled that dual nationals sentenced for serious crimes against the police could lose French citizenship….

A key part of the bill was that some social security benefits for foreigners should be conditional on having spent five years in France, or 30 months for those with jobs. 

Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration, far-right National Rally party, said her party would vote in favour of the bill, calling it an “ideological victory”. The far-right MP Edwige Diaz described the bill as “incontestably inspired by Marine Le Pen….”

And Macron's much-respected health minister Aurélien Rousseau offered his resignation in protest.

Lost in the brouhaha was the reality highlighted by the Guardian's Angelique Chrisafis from Paris:

The bill was originally intended to show that Macron could take tough measures on migration while keeping France open to foreign workers who could help the economy in sectors struggling to fill jobs.

Then Europe weighs in

Just as Macron was withering before the crossfire from his erstwhile allies in the French parliament, the European Union reached its own compromise on a migration plan across its 27 member nations. As Jorge Liboreiro explained in Euronews:

At its core, the New Pact on Migration and Asylum is meant to establish predictable, clear-cut norms that bind all member states, regardless of their geographic location and economic weight. The ultimate goal is to find a balance between the responsibility of frontline nations, like Italy, Greece and Spain, which receive the bulk of asylum seekers, and the principle of solidarity that other countries should uphold.

"Migration is a European challenge that requires European solutions," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who had made the reform a top priority for her five-year term. The New Pact "means that Europeans will decide who comes to the EU and who can stay, not the smugglers. It means protecting those in need."

Clearly, France is now firmly arrayed in the more hard-right position on the broad spectrum the EU is now well on the way to codifying.  But in the EU Parliament, Euronews continued:

…the Greens and the Left have already expressed disapproval….And in the European Council, last-minute demands from governments cannot be ruled out, given the extreme sensitivity of the issue. Nevertheless, the approval in the Council will be done by a qualified majority vote, meaning individual countries will not be able to veto. The cycle must conclude before Brussels comes to a total standstill ahead of the next elections to the European Parliament, scheduled for early June.

Andelman Unleashed will be monitoring this whole process, so stand by.

And there was Macron's other misery….

As if migration wasn't enough, Macron chose to weigh in on the side of the embattled giant of French cinema, Gerard Depardieu who continues to spin down the rabbit hole that Unleashed has been chronicling.

As The Times of London correspondent Adam Sage reported from Paris:

President Macron has angered French feminists by declaring himself to be a “great admirer” of Gérard Depardieu, the actor accused of multiple rapes and sexual assaults….Macron’s intervention was a humiliation for Rima Abdul Malak, his culture minister, who said Depardieu had brought “shame” to the country after a documentary was broadcast that featured interviews with two actresses allegedly assaulted by him….

In a television interview, Macron said Depardieu was an “immense actor” and a “genius of his art form” who had “got France, our great authors, our characters known throughout the world." Macron criticized Abdul Malak for opening a disciplinary procedure that she said could strip Depardieu of the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor….“Am I going to start withdrawing the ­Légion d’Honneur when people say things that shock me? I say no.”

In Gaza, who's winning exactly?

The war keeps grinding on. And in Israel, the daily Haaretz suggested just how toxic the war of words has become:

"Israelis need the army spokesman's lies to keep believing we're winning. The whole point of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit is to put lipstick on nonsense. Don't believe it? Remember the euphoria after we hit Hamas' tunnels in Gaza in May 2021."

Haaretz's distinguished political correspondent Chaim Levinson, with a long memory, observed:

Since the fighting in May 2021, an awareness campaign has targeted the Israeli public; they want to convince us that our military is stupendous. Our air force has no equal in the world, and Hamas has suffered a mortal blow. Israelis love that word. Here's another beloved word, deterrence, as in "We've once again achieved deterrence."

…..

Politicians, generals in the reserves and journalists had joined together in propaganda that blew up in our faces on October 7. But we can only blame ourselves….After all, nobody wants to hear that we have a mediocre army whose intelligence corps failed, an army that a terror group brought to its knees.

In Israel, lies are an industry, a commodity much in demand. Anyone who wants to tell the truth is considered part of the depression industry. Leftists, Haaretz, Al Jazeera, sourpusses….It's much more fun to wake up to happy analysts than to doomsaying pundits telling us the IDF is unprepared for the escalation on the way, that we aren't strong the way we'd like to be, that our leaders are somewhere between mediocre and failed. Substance abuse comes with a price. The day the substance runs out is an opportunity for rehab.

And then, where did all those Chinese students go?

To Europe, apparently not the United States.  As the South China Morning Post reports:

The United States has lost its charm, maybe forever, to China’s brightest students

• Worsening political relations, high costs and visa difficulties are seeing students abandon the United States and Britain

• Nations including the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland have seen increases in numbers of Chinese international students as US figures fall

Reporter Dannie Peng adds that in fact it's even worse:

The landscape has changed dramatically. This can be seen in the latest statistics: in 2022, only 7 per cent of all Tsinghua graduates, across both undergraduate and postgraduate students, pursued further studies abroad. Among the 3,197 undergraduate students, 14 per cent chose to study abroad, a sharp contrast to the rate in 2017, when 28 per cent of undergraduates sought overseas education

Finally, there’s Stellina ….

The brilliant Taiwanese cartoonist, Stellina Chen, who draws under the name Stellina, imagines Bethlehem, a centerpiece of the now fraught West Bank territory of Israel, as we approach the holiest of nights, Christmas Eve, under threat of missiles crossing the skies overhead, its gates blockaded to the manger.

Stellina Chen, based in Taipei, Taiwan, who we last had the privilege of featuring November 18, deals with both local politics and international issues. Her work appears frequently in The News Lens/International, Courrier International, Le Monde and France 24 in France, and Le Temps in Switzerland. She is also a member of the extraordinary collective Cartooning for Peace. 

Here’s how Stellina imagines herself: