TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #71
Exceptionally round the world, the year to come … 2024 in America … China & its seas .... Gaza ... Ukraine ... some resolutions ... and cartoonist Heng has the infant 2024 in an explosive conundrum.
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.
Today, we bring to a close 2023 and our second year of publication… with hopes for a better, more peaceful, still healthy 2024. Welcoming it, as usual, a half day ahead of America, there's Australia…and even earlier, Kiritimati.
Sydney welcomes 2024, three hours after Kiritimati
While our theme for the rest of the year has been to look at the week that was, today let's look at how the world may be looking at the year to come…..
How others see America
Fears for 2024
Not everyone fears the arrival of Donald Trump as president next year, but certainly there are many scattered across the globe who do. Heng Kim Song, who has been drawing his takes on the world for 40 years in Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore's leading daily, turns his crystal ball on the next year and what swims into view for one gypsy fortuneteller and her horrified client.
Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist believes:
Many elections will entrench illiberal rulers. Others will reward the corrupt and incompetent. By far the most important contest, America’s presidential election, will be so poisonous and polarising that it will cast a pall over global politics.
Against a backdrop of conflict, from Ukraine to the Middle East, America’s future direction—and with it the world order American leadership has hitherto underwritten—will be on the line. It will be a nerve-racking and dangerous year.
Nothing will compare to America’s election, either for grim spectacle or potential consequences. It is hard to believe the most likely outcome is a rematch between two old men, both of whom the majority of voters wish were not candidates.
Donald Trump’s very candidacy undermines American democracy. That the Republican Party would nominate a man who tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election dims America as a democratic beacon. A second Trump term would transform America into a loose cannon with isolationist tendencies at a time of grave geopolitical peril. His fondness for strongmen, particularly Mr Putin, suggests that his boast to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours would be at Ukraine’s expense.
Mr Trump may not become the nominee, and if he does, he may well lose. But the odds of a second Trump term are alarmingly high. The consequences could be catastrophic—for democracy and for the world.
But some hope as well….
In Ukraine, where most news on the battlefield and in western capitals, especially Washington, seems to be especially grim going into 2024, the Kyiv Post has a remarkably sunny take:
Recent news from the US has not been good for Ukraine. But the tide may be turning as Americans get fed up with Republicans holding back support for Kyiv….
What will happen next is anyone’s guess. A potential ace in the hole for Ukraine was secured last week when President Biden signed into law the unprecedented $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included a new $300 million authorization for Ukraine….
For Ukraine’s supporters, following months of withering attacks and bad news, it seems that there is reason for hope that things may be getting brighter in Washington. However, this is a presidential election year…so all hopes and promises are subject to change upon political expediency.
In Italy, there is a similar refrain, Massimo Gaggi looking ahead in the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera:
With the prospect of a "Trumpism without Trump" even in the event of The Donald 's defeat in the presidential elections next November. The polarization that afflicts the United States is made up of strengthening extreme positions: it therefore also concerns the left. But, while radicalism among progressives produces disaffection towards the moderate Biden, on the right the Trumpian parliamentarians, now prevalent, are undermining the mechanisms of Congress. The preferred technique is that of blackmail.
In Warsaw, where democracy was only recently restored at the hands of voters, and a new, moderate prime minister has taken over, Maciej Czarnecki worries over 2024 in the leading Polish daily Wyborcza :
Any Supreme Court decision on Trump will set America on fire… Both sides of the political scene argue that the fate of democracy in the country now rests in the hands of the most important American court. A man who repeated and repeats lies about the previous elections and incited his supporters to attack the Congress building has a real chance of being re-elected as the US president. Moreover, he does not even hide the fact that he intends to rule with an iron hand, purge the administration, and engage the prosecutor's office in a vendetta against political opponents.
He resorts to increasingly harsh rhetoric, a few days ago he argued that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the United States, which raises disturbing associations with Nazi rhetoric. It's easy to see why half of America fears his return would mean a shift toward soft authoritarianism. Many people, however, believe that Trump's disqualification will harm democracy.
The Supreme Court hasn't had such an impact on the country's political fate since at least 2000, when it overturned a dispute over a recount in the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
Many commentators argue that the stakes are even higher this time because the events of January 6 and the re-election of the man who led to them put a direct challenge to the heart of American democracy
Elections: Congo and onward ….
On Wednesday, we chronicled the final electoral contests around the global and prepared to herald a record 2024 to come. We had the good fortune to discuss the tour d'horizon to come on Sirius POTUS channel's "The Briefing with Steve Scully," a C-SPAN veteran ….
Though we’re still awaiting a denouement from 2023 in Congo, coming up next week, 2024's first election, an expected coronation in Bangladesh of incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and a continuation of her iron-fisted rule of 15 years….followed a week later by an epiphanal three-way contest for leadership of Taiwan and a sense of just what paths this strategic island might chart with mainland China. Of course, Andelman Unleashed will be fulfilling its pledge to light the way.
How others see the World
China on our mind
China has given a pretty good sense of where it might be headed over the next year, and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post has been chronicling most of Beijing's early moves. The military is clearly at the top of China’s priorities going forward.
First, Beijing named a new defense minister—and for the first time, he's from the navy:
China has named its former navy top commander as its new defence minister, two months after Li Shangfu was removed from the post without explanation.
General Dong Jun, the 62-year-old former commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, will take on the new role, following a decision by the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee….
Li was the first Chinese defence minister to be placed on a US sanctions list – because of arms sales [to] Russia….Dong is not on any US sanctions list….
He served in all major naval divisions in the PLA before becoming the navy’s top commander in 2021. He served in the Northern Sea Fleet, now a regular player in joint drills with the Russian navy; the Eastern Sea Fleet, which focuses on potential conflicts with Japan [and especially with Taiwan]; as well as the Southern Command Theatre, which oversees the South China Sea…. China’s navy has played an important role as the PLA has expanded its diplomatic reach in recent years.
Next, top generals are losing perks and protection:
Nine generals of the People’s Liberation Army, including a number of senior members of the PLA Rocket Force, have been dismissed from China’s top legislature….It gave no reason for the disqualifications.
Those dismissed include five past or serving top commanders of the PLA Rocket Force, a key component of the country’s nuclear arsenal, and a former air force commander….The disqualifications suggest they might face further disciplinary action, as NPC representatives enjoy immunity from arrest or criminal charges.
Finally, there's the South China Sea where it's clear Beijing has no intention of changing course in the coming year:
China warned that it would “respond resolutely” if the Philippines built a permanent structure on a disputed reef in the South China Sea.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Friday that Manila’s plan to establish a permanent base on Second Thomas Shoal—in the Spratly Islands— amounted to “a significant move” that would “seriously infringe on China’s sovereignty”….
The Philippines’ increasingly confrontational stance against China’s “grey-zone” tactics…and its further alignment with the US could keep tensions simmering or even risk an outbreak of serious conflict. The Philippines accused Chinese vessels of firing water cannons and ramming into its ships while China said it was engaged in legitimate “control measures."
Israel…coming home in 2024?
A glimmer of hope in the new year from the Israeli daily Haaretz:
Israel's security establishment is working to enable some residents of the communities near the Gaza border to return to their homes by January, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said.
“Anyone who cannot return home will continue to receive full support from the government,” he added, noting that the Defense Ministry was equally committed to the residents of the north and south…..His ministry “is now working to reach a situation where, as of January 1, some communities near the Gaza border in a range of between four and seven kilometers from the Strip will be able to return to routine, in the shadow of the war.”
But Haaretz also featured a Reuters report that it headlined: "Gaza in 2024: Signs of More Devastation, Open-ended Occupation." The dispatch began:
The war aims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gaza's Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar look unattainable in 2024, and their fight may consign the Palestinian territory to yet more devastation and an open-ended Israeli occupation.
Finally, Haaretz turned to columnist Yonatan Mendel, of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, who suggested, "If Israel aspires to life, it must change it’s approach to the Palestinians…."
We need to strive for a situation in which the Palestinians in Gaza won’t want to dig an attack tunnel to Kibbutz Sufa, and won’t dream of sending incendiary balloons toward Sha’ar Hanegev.
We need to be ready to rethink the warped Israeli policy since the second intifada and particularly over the past 16 years. A political horizon and hope must be offered out of a genuine aim for compromise on all of the issues with the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, or with true representative leadership of the Palestinian people, with the understanding that Hamas is not going to disappear.
Israel will have to climb down from the high and useless tree it has climbed. If it desires life, and not death, it must change its approach to the Palestinian issue, as well as the explanations it will have to provide internally—that this change of strategy is not because we “gave in” to Hamas, but because for the first time, we chose life.
And then there's Ukraine
The Kyiv Post devoted a five-part series to where its country may be going in 2024 and the stakes involved, as Hans Petter Midttun observed:
Ukraine is fighting for its right to exist. Russia is fighting for its great power ambitions, in which the defeat and integration of Ukraine into the Russian Federation is crucial. Having started an unjust and unprovoked war there is no turning back. It has turned friends into enemies. The world sees it as an imperialistic, aggressive, and criminal state. It is either victorious (and a future great power) or defeated (and a pariah state in the international community).
Zelensky talks to his troops
The war is, however, no less fundamental for the West. European security is inevitably linked to an independent, sovereign and complete Ukraine. In the words of [EU foreign minister Josep] Borrel: “If Ukraine loses, we lose.”
We need to acknowledge that Russia will never accept being defeated by Ukraine. Even if the West gets its acts together and provides Ukraine with the tools it needs to evict the Russian Armed Forces, Russia will never accept being defeated by a nation that—in its distorted narrative—“does not exist.”
At best, it would only accept withdrawal from Ukraine if the alternative is to fight a far superior military power and, thereby, risk losing the means that secure the survival of the [Putin] regime and the state.
Whither our planet
While 2023 may have been the warmest year on record for our planet, 2024 may see some relief, or at least a pause. That's the good news from the International Energy Agency. As Le Monde reported:
The planet, which has never been as hot as in 2023, has never consumed so much coal: global demand reached 8.53 billion tons this year….
The European Copernicus Observatory was the first to officially announce that 2023 would be the hottest year measured in the history of records, with for the moment a temperature anomaly of + 1.46 ° C compared to average temperatures of the period 1850-1900….From 2024 global consumption should begin a downward trend.
The problem in assessing where we might be going forward, Le Monde continued, is the "difficulty in issuing forecasts for Russia, the world's fourth largest coal consumer, due to the war in Ukraine. The forecasts for Ukraine are also uncertain."
And then there's our ‘resolutions’ ?
So, Franz Himpsl and Judith Werner writing in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung ask:
How often have you heard the expression “taking stock” in the past few weeks…subtext of the accounting rhetoric: Things have to be better in the future! If we make the right resolutions now, everything will be different!
Well, thank you very much for the tip. As if we weren't already confronted with enough demands for improvement….
So what if we just let go of the big resolutions this year and instead rededicate [ourselves] to burying excessively high expectations and acknowledge that you can't change a lot of things in life in a flash? We can also be a little sad that another year has passed in which we didn't become a rock star or an astronaut, and that this probably won't happen in the coming year either. A moment of happy resignation.
Finally, there’s Heng ….
Bookending our New Year's edition, the brilliant Singapore cartoonist, Heng Kim Song, who draws under the name Heng, imagines the infant 2024 ensnared between two toxic leaders and their explosive priorities.
Heng Kim Song has drawn under the name Heng for Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore's largest daily newspaper, since 1984. He won the first prize organized by the United Nations under ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) and the “Grafica Internazionale Award” at the international festival of political satire in Italy. He is a member of the global, Paris-based collective Cartooning for Peace.
Here’s how Heng imagines himself:
And of course to you, Robert … but perhaps not SO much later … After all, there’s Taiwan in barely two weeks !!
A very happy healthy productive Nrw Year to all
our readers !!!
I live for comments like this … don’t stop … ever !
A very very happy new year !!!