TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #42
Global worries about 2024 continue…America escapes default, but others?...Plastics plastics everywhere…Shangri-La in the balance…a French cartoonist imagines pollution from the view of a single fish
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, explores how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world. Reporting this week and through August from our base in Paris.
How others see America
Profound worries about 2024….
….continue around the world. The leading French daily Le Monde sent its Washington correspondent following Ron DeSantis across Iowa and into Nevada. Piotr Smolar observed that his speech “is delivered in an unaffected voice, even when he talks about his childhood—mother a nurse, father installing boxes measuring television audiences. As if he were reading an assembly manual. Republican sympathizers gathered on Tuesday in an evangelical church west of Des Moines, in the state of Iowa, were, however, satisfied.”
“They witnessed the Florida governor's real campaign debut, after a chaotic virtual launch on Twitter a few days earlier,” Le Monde continued. “Mr. DeSantis allowed himself short breaths to let the audience cheer him on. The applause was heard when he spoke about education. ‘Cultural Marxism’….The governor talked about pornography in the books offered to children, the right of parents to supervise the educational curriculum, by the public, white and rather old…a theme that [Donald Trump] has never prized. ‘Woke ideology.’”
Indeed, following this line, Federico Rampini, writing in the Milan-based daily Corriere della Sera, believes “America is in a crisis of leadership,” and, citing the tumble President Biden took last week at the Air Force Academy graduation, asked in the “US presidential elections, [there are] weak candidates for the free world, but can the two parties replace them?” He then went on to observe, “Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping rejoice in front of the images of Biden tripping and falling….”
And Rampini continued: “From Europe to Japan, every government friendly to America wonders if in January 2025 there will be a sane, valid leader in the White House, faithful to coalitions between democracies….There is the disturbing lead of Donald Trump in the Republican polls. Ron DeSantis, despite the economic successes in the government of Florida, lags behind the former president, whom a large part of the Republican base forgives the horror of the assault on the Capitol.”
Meanwhile, The Times of London is putting its money on Trump as the Republican standard bearer with DeSantis’s popularity plunging just as the former president’s is rising, although as correspondent Alistair Dawber, on the campaign trail in Bluffton, South Carolina, reported, “If [DeSantis] could win the South Carolina primary in February, his campaign would receive a huge boost….[and indeed he] clearly has Trump in his crosshairs.”
Dodging one bullet
“It is now official. After several weeks of political confrontation, Joe Biden promulgated a law on Saturday which eliminates the risk of a default in payment by the United States,” France’s leading financial daily Les Echos sighed with relief as it continued, “Because the issue of this financial confrontation was also very political. Candidate for his re-election, Joe Biden knows that his first handicap is his age, 80 years old. He doubtless hopes that this soap opera on the debt, which has kept the American political and media world spellbound, reinforces an image of a competent and reasonable leader.”
Which is to say, virtually every country whose credit could conceivably come under attack was equally doing its best to suppress a hope that it will avoid this American brinkmanship. “France should not be a European debt leader,” the venerable French politician and President of the Court of Auditors, Pierre Moscovici, told Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.
This after the rating agency left France’s credit rating unchanged at “the high AA level, mainly due to the revision of the government’s budgetary consolidation strategy.” In other words of vote of confidence for President Emmanuel Macron. Of course that’s still a notch below America’s rating of AA+.
Then there was the example of Greece. As Italy’s Corriere della Sera proclaimed, “Greece, from default to record growth: the return of the great sick man of Europe.” And this, as the paper also observed, after the departure of Italy’s technocrat prime minister Mario Draghi, S&P lowered Italy’s credit rating to one level above junk. Last month, with Giorgia Meloni installed as prime minister, it managed to keep that rating, though as Moody’s pointed out, “with a negative outlook.”
How others see the World
Drowning in Plastics
All but unheralded this past week was the meeting at UNESCO headquarters in Paris of some 169 nations gathered for the express, and sadly little-appreciated, yet urgent goal of crafting a treaty to restrict or ban the production or use of plastics. With some 8.3 billion tons of plastics existing in the world—6.3 billion tons of which is trash—the world is literally drowning in plastics. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island largely of plastic floating between Hawaii and California has expanded to twice the size of Texas or triple the entire nation of France, and this is only one of at least five such islands on the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, with 2 million new tons entering the oceans each year.
“Time is running out and it is clear from this week’s negotiations that oil producing countries and the fossil fuel industry will do everything in their power to weaken the treaty and delay the process,” said Graham Forbes, Greenpeace USA’s Global Plastics Campaign leader.
As France 24 put it: “Environmental advocates cautiously welcomed the outcome of five days of U.N. talks in Paris on plastic pollution but expressed concern that the petroleum industry and some governments would water down the eventual treaty. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels. Delegates agreed Friday evening to produce an initial draft before their next meeting in Kenya in November. The committee is charged with developing the first international, legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, on land and at sea. A coalition of ‘high-ambition’ governments led by Norway and Rwanda, along with environmental groups, want to end plastic pollution altogether by 2040 by slashing production and limiting some chemicals used in making plastics.
But a State Department spokesman told Andelman Unleashed this week: “Plastic pollution is a global crisis that transcends boundaries, affecting our natural world and its biodiversity. It comes at the cost of our environment, health, food security, and economies. The United States is working with other countries to develop an ambitious, innovative, and country-driven global agreement that aims to eliminate the release of plastic into the environment by 2040.” The key phrase here, of course, is “country-driven global agreement.” Doesn’t sound much like a binding, global treaty of any kind.
Having suffered through the entire negotiations over COP-21 in France seven years ago, where the United States was adamant that it would not accept a binding treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, again it appears to me that the U.S. is aiming for a non-binding agreement on targets that would be equally ineffective in stemming plastic pollution. As the Jakarta daily The Star put it last week, “Indonesia’s delegation looks set to curb ambitions at an upcoming global forum on plastic pollution amid concern that some of the plans could harm local industries….The United States, Saudi Arabia and other major plastic producers prefer national strategies.” Then The Star concluded, “Ignatius Warsito, chemical, pharmaceutical and textile industries acting director general, said the [Indonesian] government would try to block the proposal for cutting virgin plastic production. ‘How can the world stop or reduce the output of plastic factories while it’s impossible to not use plastic?’ Ignatius said.”
On Friday, 28 Hollywood luminaries including Joaquin Phoenix, Ted Danson, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, William Shatner, signed a joint letter to President Biden saying, “We will never be able to recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis we’ve created—this treaty must cap plastic production, or it will not be successful.” One of the signatories was James Cromwell, whose brilliant character Ewan Roy, brother of Rupert Murdoch-clone Logan Roy, spent years on HBO’s “Succession” confronting Logan on just such issues.
Late Friday, Andelman Unleashed talked with Cromwell via Zoom. “I would really like it if they would see it as a priority,” Cromwell told me. “If they would say okay we'll put a price on plastic, for the buying of a plastic bottle. They'll still just produce them, people will still use them. But there are paper cartons, which work well. There are other alternatives. I know that there are.” [ Indeed, only 10 U.S. states have compulsory bottle taxes: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont. ]
The entire conversation with Cromwell will be featured as this week’s Unleashed Voice on Wednesday.
A crash in India
Much of the world was shocked by the horror of the train crash in India that killed nearly 300 people, attention quickly turning to the causes. “Was it modernized too quickly?” asked the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Anyone who has ever been on a packed Indian train has some idea what happens when two of them crash into each other,” David Pfeifer began his report from Mumbai.
“The images from the air are similar to those of Eschede, the largest train accident in Germany,” SDZ continued. “In India, it is the worst accident of its kind in 20 years. The state railway is a cheap alternative for those who cannot afford inter-city flights, from weekend commuters to day labourers. Only the poorest take the bus. The Coromandel Express, which was known to be traveling at around 100 kilometers per hour, changed rails shortly before the impact and crashed into the container train on the siding. The Coromandel Express pitched up, spun, and then pitched sideways. It is not clear whether it was an accident or whether the switch was set incorrectly.”
India’s is one of the world’s densest rail systems—some 45,000 miles of track, which would circumnavigate the globe at the equator, and then some. But 98% was built under the Raj, or British India, from 1870 to 1930. Accordiing to an American Economic Review study by MIT’s David Donaldson, they are the lifeblood of the sub-continent, tieing together vast reaches of the country out of reach of any other form of transportation, but utterly lethal as well. In 2021 alone, some 16,000 deaths involved the rails.
China on their minds
Much of the world connected with the Indo-Pacific region converged on Singapore where, at Asia’s largest security conference, not surprisingly, China was at the top of the agenda—but particularly the relations of the Xi Jinping government with Washington. The defense ministers of both powers were on hand, but hardly surprisingly, if equally disappointing, neither had anything to say to each other, beyond a simple barely civil handshake.
Jack Lau and Minnie Chang of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that at the “Shangri-La Dialogue, China and the US offer competing security visions for the Asia-Pacific. The Chinese defence minister accuses ‘some countries’ of launching proxy wars and leaving a trail of chaos in their wake. ‘Bloc politics’ will destabilise the region, Li Shangfu says, a day after Lloyd Austin plays up US alliances.”
In a thinly-veiled reference to Beijing’s view of the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Li continued: “Some countries intervene in the internal and regional affairs of other countries, frequently impose unilateral sanctions, threaten to use force, launch colour revolutions and proxy wars everywhere. They then leave after bringing chaos to a region, leaving behind a mess. We must not allow this to be replicated in the Asia-Pacific.”
At the same time, Singapore’s Straits Times quoted that nation’s Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen calling for “the two powers to keep communication channels open. Southeast Asian leaders have firmly maintained they would not take sides amid the worsening US-China strategic rivalry.” The Singapore daily also pointed out a single point of direct contact between the two powers—a secret meeting of the intelligence chiefs of many of these countries including America’s Avril Haines. One official close to Amant Goel, head of India’s overseas intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, observed, “The meeting is an important fixture on the international shadow agenda. Given the range of countries involved, it is not a festival of tradecraft, but rather a way of promoting a deeper understanding of intentions and bottom lines. There is an unspoken code among intelligence services that they can talk when more formal and open diplomacy is harder—it is a very important factor during times of tension.”
And the world still waits….
…for the start of Ukraine’s spring offensive against Russia. But The Sunday Times of London has an exclusive quoting the top foreign affairs advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying, “We still don’t have enough weapons for a counter-offensive against Russia….We need more firepower, and the EU isn’t doing enough on sanctions.” Correspondent Christina Lamb in Kyiv quoted Dr. Ihor Zhovkva: “Russia is trying to deter Ukraine from going on the attack by bombing the capital, which has suffered 24 attacks in the past month, involving more than 400 Iranian Shaheed drones and 114 cruise missiles.”
Lamb concluded: “Ukraine’s air defence system had become more sophisticated, but [Zhovkva] admitted that the pressure was affecting people. ‘If you can’t sleep for seven days, day by day you feel tired and have low morale.’”
Finally, there’s …. Adene
The French artist Adene is horrified by the havoc the tsunami of plastic waste is wreaking on our planet, but especially our oceans. So, as the international colloquium designed to control this horror was winding up somewhat inconclusively in Paris, she imagined its impact on one single fish….
Anne Derenne, the brilliant French illustrator, living in Spain since 2009, who draws under the name of Adene, has a degree in international economy. She publishes regularly in various French magazines and newspapers. Winner of many international prizes, she is a member of the remarkable collective Cartooning for Peace.
Here’s how Adene imagines herself: