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.
[ Apologies for the late post…we were awaiting returns from Sweden's landmark elections! ]
How Others See America
Much of the world's media has been given over over the last week to the passing of the throne of the British commonwealth from Queen Elizabeth II to King Charles III. Since oceans of ink have been devoted to this effort, we'll do our best to dig through to the occasional mentions of the United States in other fields. Still, some abroad were also watching how America reacted…..
Besotted by royalty
"Americans, long besotted by royalty, mourn Britain’s Queen," was how London's Financial Times headlined a report from three of its correspondents in New York and Washington. "Tributes from politicians and ordinary people attest to enduring fondness for monarchy…From the halls of Congress to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and centre court at the US Open — and many lesser stages — Americans have plunged into mourning for a British monarch whose family’s rule they shrugged off with some consequence 246 years ago. [emphasis added!] The reaction to the death of Queen Elizabeth II, aged 96, was sufficiently powerful to prompt a rare outbreak of bipartisanship in Washington, where Republican senator Mitch McConnell led lawmakers from both parties in prayer. It brought an unusual hush to Wall Street, where traders at the New York Stock Exchange bowed their heads for a moment of silence just after 3pm. So, too, did spectators before the US Open women’s semi-final tennis match that evening.”
The War in Ukraine
The French daily Le Monde was especially taken by Secretary of State Antony Blinken's "surprise visit to Ukraine," especially his visit to a children's hospital in Kiev, and his "mention [of] a new tranche of aid of 2.7 billion dollars (2.7 billion euros) for Kyiv and its neighbors in order to deal with Russia. The head of American diplomacy made the trip in secret, for his second visit to Kyiv since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24."
And Germany's Deutsche Welle congratulated itself on finding that "St. Petersburg district councilors accuse Putin of treason." They even petitioned the Duma [Russian parliament] to "remove President Putin from office."
One cannot help but wonder, however, since Nikita Yuferyev has allowed his name and photo to be attached to this petition, not to mention the story, what his future prospects might be.
Remembering 9/11
The Saudi-based English language Arab News paid one of the few international tributes to 9/11, headlining in a barely civil reference just below the latest on the war in Ukraine: "Biden to honor 9/11 victims as shadow of Afghan war looms," then continuing, "the 21st anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks comes a year after Biden ended the long and costly war in Afghanistan that the US and allies launched in response to the terror attacks."
Somewhat more reverentially, Singapore's Straits Times led its homepage on Sunday with the headline, "Sympathy, solidarity as US marks 21st anniversary of 9/11….In a steady rain, President [Biden] approached a wreath of flowers outside the [Pentagon] and placed his hand over his heart."
And then there's the new frontier for electric cars
That's what Le Monde seems to have found, with considerable approval—that in the United States, "the homeland of the gas guzzlers, these big cars with engines stuffed with hydrocarbons, come converging signals, revealing an accelerated electrification of the market....California, the country's largest auto market, has passed regulations that require vehicles sold from 2035 to be all-electric or plug-in hybrids." Of course, for its illustration, Le Monde chose the behemoth of them all.
How Others See the World
Long Live the King
As mentioned above, there have been few dissonant voices among the broad chorus of cheers of for the departure of England's queen and the arrival of its new king. One of those, however, was the German news service Deutsche Welle, where commentator Mark Hallam observed that the queen's "final act was replacing a cheerful moral vacuum with a poser with no panache."
Mark Hallam / DW
As Hallam continued: "Let's just hope that the end was so near earlier this week that Queen Elizabeth II failed to grasp quite how precarious a bind her beloved Britain was in at the hour of her passing. Alas, given the queen's famed knack for perception and reading others, and her acuity even in advanced age, that seems unlikely….The queen appointed [as prime minister] Liz Truss, a woman almost five decades her junior and with all the charisma of a cabbage."
By contrast, France's leading daily Le Monde paid tribute to the deep religious faith of Queen Elizabeth observing "the queen never hid her faith. She regularly read the Bible, said prayers and went to Mass every Sunday, to the point that the whole nation held its breath the few times she was not seen there."
Sweden tacks to starboard
Swedish voters went to the polls on Sunday with huge stakes for their nation and for Europe and the West. As we detailed last week in Andelman Unleashed, the hard-right Swedish Democrats led by 43-year-old Jimmie Åkesson, with its neo-Nazi roots and its leader's pledge to act as a "blow torch" in Swedish politics, was challenging for the nation's leadership the incumbent center-left Social Democrat prime minister Magdalena Andersson who was hoping to extend her party's eight-year rule and retain her own leadership of the nation.
Shortly after midnight in Stockholm, the leading Swedish daily, Svenska Dagbladet headlined "Åkesson: SD can form the basis of a new government," as his team "currently has 176 seats against [Andersson's] 173." At 2 AM in Stockholm, Reuters confirmed this margin with 90% of the vote counted.
This result, not entirely unforeseen, is a deeply feared blow that will resonate across Europe, from west and especially to the east, across the Atlantic as well. And will likely not go unnoticed when Vladimir Putin sits down with Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan later this week. Above all, voters in Italy could well take a cue from Sweden when they go to the polls on September 25 and vote whether to place another Putin crony for leadership of their nation.
A determined Eurosceptic, the anti-immigrant Åkesson stoked fears about his affinity for Putin in a recent radio conversation when he refused to say whom he preferred—Putin or French President Emmanuel Macron. Not long afterwards, Sweden's Defense Minister Peter Hulqvist observed that "as late as a week before the war in Ukraine started, Jimmie Åkesson could not choose between Putin and Biden." Still, it was not clear that Åkesson will actually serve as prime minister. Another member of the right-wing coalition, leader of the so-called Moderate party, Ul Kristersson, may well put himself forward as the actual prime minister. But Åkesson told jubilant supporters at a post-election party, "Our ambition is to sit in the government."
There's always that pesky Iran nuclear accord
Tariq Al-Homayed, former editor-in-chief of the Asharq Al-Awsat daily, wrote in his opinion column, "We have been hearing talk that Iran will cooperate ever since the term of US President Barack Obama. In the region, we have been hearing these remarks since the time of Hashemi and Rafsanjani, and now the Europeans and American administration are repeating them…." And it used an Amjad Rasmi cartoon to illustrate this feeling.
Tariq Al-Homayed continued: "Of course, none of this cooperation has been achieved. But let us talk now of Iran of the past week, not of decades or years….On Wednesday, Albania severed diplomatic ties with Iran after it carried out a cyber-attack against Tirana, prompting condemnation from NATO…..On Friday, prosecutors in Germany announced the largest heroin bust in the country that can be traced back to Iran…..In spite of all the false talk about Iran’s desire to cooperate and negotiate and display some openness, this is Iran in just one week!"
The power grid … a collapse ?
London's Financial Times seemed almost to revel in its revelation that "France sends power alert to UK and Spain after trading error." As correspondents Barney Jopson in Madrid and Sarah White in Paris reported, France "asked them to be ready to send as much electricity as possible after a huge trading error jeopardized French supplies."
The FT reporters elaborated: "The request was triggered by a trading error by one of France’s regional energy providers, which accidentally oversold huge amounts of electricity over a two-day period. The unusual alert added to Europe-wide energy stresses as the region faces its worst power crisis in decades owing to soaring costs driven by Russia’s cutting of gas flows. It also underlined severe strains in France’s power network, which is struggling with an unprecedented number of outages at its nuclear reactors — the linchpin of its generation system."